As deadly storms rip through the Caribbean, a new United Nations report delivers a sobering warning: the world is failing to prepare for the climate it has already created.
UNEP’s Adaptation Gap Report 2025, aptly titled Running on Empty, finds that developing nations will need between US$310 and 365 billion annually by 2035 to cope with intensifying climate impacts. Yet, international public finance for adaptation fell to just US$26 billion in 2023, down from US$28 billion the previous year. The result: only one-twelfth of what’s needed is being delivered.
This gap is not an abstract number. It’s visible in the wreckage of homes, farms, and economies across our region. Last week, Hurricane Melissa, the strongest-ever storm to hit Jamaica, tore through the Caribbean, leaving destruction equivalent to nearly 30% of the island’s GDP. With at least 75 lives lost and damages exceeding US$50 billion, Melissa is not just another storm; it is a case study in the cost of global inaction.
A rapid attribution study found that climate change made Melissa four times more likely and increased its wind speeds by 7%, raising damages by around 12%. For Haiti, Jamaica, and other small island developing states (SIDS), such storms bring unbearable losses eroding livelihoods, tourism revenues, and vital infrastructure. These countries contribute the least to global emissions yet bear the highest costs.
The pattern repeats globally. This year’s monsoon floods in Pakistan displaced seven million people and destroyed thousands of homes. Whether in South Asia or the Caribbean, the message is clear: the failure to invest in adaptation is costing lives.
Adaptation is not a distant goal; it is an urgent necessity. It means building stronger flood defenses, adopting climate-smart agriculture, and developing social protection systems that safeguard the most vulnerable. Research by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) shows that every US$1 invested early in resilience saves more than US$5 in avoided losses. Yet, the world continues to spend far more on disaster relief than on prevention.
This failure is not just wasteful—it is self-defeating. Every dollar delayed multiplies the human and economic toll. In Haiti, where communities are already grappling with political instability, weak infrastructure, and high poverty, each storm magnifies vulnerabilities. The Caribbean, with its densely populated coastal areas and economies heavily dependent on tourism and agriculture, cannot afford to treat adaptation as optional.
At COP29 in Baku, governments pledged through the Baku to Belém Roadmap to mobilize US$1.3 trillion by 2035, including at least US$300 billion annually for developing nations. On paper, this looks ambitious. In reality, it falls far short of what is needed. Adjusted for inflation, adaptation costs could reach US$440–520 billion per year by 2035, and the US$300 billion target covers both mitigation and adaptation, with no separate adaptation goal yet defined.
Adaptation finance was meant to help nations prepare for rising seas, harsher droughts, and lethal floods. Yet, when those funds don’t arrive, countries are forced to borrow. In 2023, 59 least developed countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) paid US$37 billion to service their debts and received only US$32 billion in climate finance. These aren’t productive investments but emergency debts taken just to rebuild what has already been lost.
This is the new face of global inequality: countries that contributed least to the crisis are being made to pay twice—first through climate impacts, and then through debt. And while the rhetoric of “resilience” fills summit halls, the financial architecture remains rigged against the Global South. Only 15% of adaptation finance in recent years has been delivered as grants; the rest comes as loans. For every dollar of “climate support,” developing nations are paying back many more in interest.
The moral and economic absurdity is staggering. The IIED estimates that every US$1 invested in early adaptation saves at least US$5 in avoided losses. Yet the international community continues to treat resilience as an afterthought, not a necessity. Meanwhile, the Loss and Damage Fund—announced with much fanfare at COP28—remains largely empty, starved by the same rich countries that have pumped trillions into fossil fuel subsidies and corporate bailouts.
There are three urgent steps the global community must take to avert this collapse.
First, adaptation finance must be non-debt-creating. Grants, not loans, should form the backbone of resilience funding. Climate disasters are not development failures—they are external shocks imposed on vulnerable economies by centuries of industrial pollution. To charge interest on survival is an act of climate injustice.
Second, global lending must be reformed. Multilateral development banks and the IMF should integrate climate vulnerability into debt assessments and offer automatic debt suspension clauses in the wake of major disasters. The current model—where countries borrow at high rates to rebuild while creditors profit—is morally bankrupt.
Third, regional adaptation cooperation must be strengthened. From MENA’s shared drought resilience to South Asia’s early warning systems, collective investment in adaptation can deliver massive social and economic dividends. Regional funds, backed by concessional finance and local expertise, can bypass the bottlenecks of global bureaucracy.
Adaptation is not charity. It is reparative justice and economic common sense. Without it, the world’s poorest will be forced to rebuild the same roads, schools, and homes after every storm, each time at a higher cost. The Global South cannot be asked to “resilience its way” out of a crisis created by others while sinking deeper into debt.
If climate justice means anything, it must start by freeing the Global South from paying twice, once for emissions it didn’t cause, and again to survive them.
As deadly storms rip through the Caribbean, a new United Nations report delivers a sobering warning: the world is failing to prepare for the climate it has already created.
UNEP’s Adaptation Gap Report 2025, aptly titled Running on Empty, finds that developing nations will need between US$310 and 365 billion annually by 2035 to cope with intensifying climate impacts. Yet, international public finance for adaptation fell to just US$26 billion in 2023, down from US$28 billion the previous year. The result: only one-twelfth of what’s needed is being delivered.
This gap is not an abstract number. It’s visible in the wreckage of homes, farms, and economies across our region. Last week, Hurricane Melissa, the strongest-ever storm to hit Jamaica, tore through the Caribbean, leaving destruction equivalent to nearly 30% of the island’s GDP. With at least 75 lives lost and damages exceeding US$50 billion, Melissa is not just another storm; it is a case study in the cost of global inaction.
A rapid attribution study found that climate change made Melissa four times more likely and increased its wind speeds by 7%, raising damages by around 12%. For Haiti, Jamaica, and other small island developing states (SIDS), such storms bring unbearable losses eroding livelihoods, tourism revenues, and vital infrastructure. These countries contribute the least to global emissions yet bear the highest costs.
The pattern repeats globally. This year’s monsoon floods in Pakistan displaced seven million people and destroyed thousands of homes. Whether in South Asia or the Caribbean, the message is clear: the failure to invest in adaptation is costing lives.
Adaptation is not a distant goal; it is an urgent necessity. It means building stronger flood defenses, adopting climate-smart agriculture, and developing social protection systems that safeguard the most vulnerable. Research by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) shows that every US$1 invested early in resilience saves more than US$5 in avoided losses. Yet, the world continues to spend far more on disaster relief than on prevention.
This failure is not just wasteful—it is self-defeating. Every dollar delayed multiplies the human and economic toll. In Haiti, where communities are already grappling with political instability, weak infrastructure, and high poverty, each storm magnifies vulnerabilities. The Caribbean, with its densely populated coastal areas and economies heavily dependent on tourism and agriculture, cannot afford to treat adaptation as optional.
At COP29 in Baku, governments pledged through the Baku to Belém Roadmap to mobilize US$1.3 trillion by 2035, including at least US$300 billion annually for developing nations. On paper, this looks ambitious. In reality, it falls far short of what is needed. Adjusted for inflation, adaptation costs could reach US$440–520 billion per year by 2035, and the US$300 billion target covers both mitigation and adaptation, with no separate adaptation goal yet defined.
Adaptation finance was meant to help nations prepare for rising seas, harsher droughts, and lethal floods. Yet, when those funds don’t arrive, countries are forced to borrow. In 2023, 59 least developed countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) paid US$37 billion to service their debts and received only US$32 billion in climate finance. These aren’t productive investments but emergency debts taken just to rebuild what has already been lost.
This is the new face of global inequality: countries that contributed least to the crisis are being made to pay twice—first through climate impacts, and then through debt. And while the rhetoric of “resilience” fills summit halls, the financial architecture remains rigged against the Global South. Only 15% of adaptation finance in recent years has been delivered as grants; the rest comes as loans. For every dollar of “climate support,” developing nations are paying back many more in interest.
The moral and economic absurdity is staggering. The IIED estimates that every US$1 invested in early adaptation saves at least US$5 in avoided losses. Yet the international community continues to treat resilience as an afterthought, not a necessity. Meanwhile, the Loss and Damage Fund—announced with much fanfare at COP28—remains largely empty, starved by the same rich countries that have pumped trillions into fossil fuel subsidies and corporate bailouts.
There are three urgent steps the global community must take to avert this collapse.
First, adaptation finance must be non-debt-creating. Grants, not loans, should form the backbone of resilience funding. Climate disasters are not development failures—they are external shocks imposed on vulnerable economies by centuries of industrial pollution. To charge interest on survival is an act of climate injustice.
Second, global lending must be reformed. Multilateral development banks and the IMF should integrate climate vulnerability into debt assessments and offer automatic debt suspension clauses in the wake of major disasters. The current model—where countries borrow at high rates to rebuild while creditors profit—is morally bankrupt.
Third, regional adaptation cooperation must be strengthened. From MENA’s shared drought resilience to South Asia’s early warning systems, collective investment in adaptation can deliver massive social and economic dividends. Regional funds, backed by concessional finance and local expertise, can bypass the bottlenecks of global bureaucracy.
Adaptation is not charity. It is reparative justice and economic common sense. Without it, the world’s poorest will be forced to rebuild the same roads, schools, and homes after every storm, each time at a higher cost. The Global South cannot be asked to “resilience its way” out of a crisis created by others while sinking deeper into debt.
If climate justice means anything, it must start by freeing the Global South from paying twice, once for emissions it didn’t cause, and again to survive them.
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.
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 foryears.
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 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.
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 foryears.
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.
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 21st 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 21st 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.
Dick Cheney speaking at the AIPAC Policy Conference in 2006. Photo: White House.
The poor sometimes object to being governed badly. The rich always object to being governed at all.
– G.K. Chesterton
+ Dick Cheney told the deadliest lie in American history: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” He paid no price for orchestrating this still-unfolding catastrophe and upon his death was celebrated by political elites and the mainstream press as a “patriot” and “devoted public servant.”
+ Democratic Party leaders like the Clintons, who have scorned Mamdani, have heaped praise on Dick Cheney. And they wonder why they poll worse than Trump…
+ The bipartisan whitewashing of Dick Cheney is as much of a perversion of US history as Trump’s eliding any mention of the horrors of slavery, the internment of Japanese-Americans and the genocide against the indigenous population of the US from national parks and museums.
+ As Andrew Cockburn reports in his scathing obituary for Cheney, the Yale dropout and former electrical lineman from Wyoming once discounted ethical and legal concerns about torturing people by waterboarding them until they nearly drown as a mere “dunk in the water.”
+ Trump isn’t smart, but he possesses shrewd, if crude, political instincts. He knew that Cheney was the dead-eyed face of a war most Americans had long ago turned against. Unlike Kamala Harris, a political illiterate, who doomed her faltering and aimless campaign by refusing to condemn the genocide in Gaza and aligning herself with the most ruthless and unrepentant neocon of them all, Dick Cheney.
As a “devoted public servant,” Cheney helped steal an election, shot a man in the face and covered it up, lied the US into a war, set up a black ops unit inside the White House to run kidnappings and torture sessions, authorized mass surveillance of Americans, and steered long-term no-bid contracts to his former corporation, which is was still deeply invested in…
+ Biden has always considered himself an “institutionalist,” which is another way of saying a member of the elite political class that runs the permanent government. As such, Biden and Cheney circled in the same orbit for nearly 50 years, more often in synchronous alignment than not. When Cheney needed help, Biden was usually there to give it. In 2001 and 2002, when Cheney wanted the Authorization for Military Force (AUMF) and the PATRIOT Act sped through Congress, Biden was there for him. When Cheney wanted to go to war in Iraq, Biden helped to stifle Democratic resistance in the Senate and push it through. When Obama briefly considered pursuing charges against some Bush officials, Biden advised against it. This is what Biden means when he praises Cheney’s devotion to “public service,” though he was well-compensated for his “sacrifices.”Cheney’s compensation package from Halliburton: $12.5 million in salary, $18 million in stock options, retirement $20 million, deferred compensation $2.4 million, bonuses $1.45 million. Total $54.5 million.
+ Clinton’s affinity for Cheney can be explained by the fact that Clinton transformed the Democratic Party into an interventionist neoliberal operation much like the Republican machine that Cheney played such a key role in engineering and fine-tuning from his time in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush I White Houses. What Clinton calls Cheney’s “sense of duty” included having his Deputy Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, out a CIA officer (Valerie Plame) in retaliation for her husband (Joe Wilson) writing that the Niger yellowcake story promoted by Cheney to justify invading Iraq was a hoax.
+ This kind of bi-partisan garbage is a big reason why we ended up where we are: The Democrats ran three presidential candidates who voted for Cheney’s manufactured war on Iraq and then, when Obama, who opposed the war, had a chance to hold Cheney, brashly asserted the unitary power of the vice presidency, and his repellant crew accountable, he appointed Iraq war supporters to be his VP and run the State and “War” Departments and then shrugged it all off with: “I guess we tortured some folks.”
+ “Impact” = 4.5 million deaths in the Forever Wars Cheney instigated.
+ ABC’s Jonathan Karl provides a prime example of the courtier press at work, just as two decades earlier Tim Russert, who Alexander Cockburn described as being “always there with his watering can to fertilize myths useful to the system,” nodded his head as Cheney told America on Meet the Press that “US troops would be greeted [by Iraqis] as liberators.”
+ Back in 2000, Al Gore–the man who first invoked Willie Horton against Mike Dukakis–was so desperate to find something similar to fling at George W. Bush that he actually put Newt Gingrich in a campaign ad to attest that “Dick Cheney is even more conservative than I am.” (As Cockburn and I revealed in our biography of Gore, Gingrich and Gore had been pals in the 80s, when the two young southern guns considered themselves the leading “futurists” in Congress.)
+ One of the worst after-effects of Trump’s radioactive personality is that he is so reviled by many Americans that he has softened the reputation of one of the most evil and destructive figures in American history: Dick Cheney.
+ I often think about the fact that Cheney received a heart transplant that could have gone to someone who wasn’t a war criminal, a liar about matters of life and mass death and a traitor to the US Constitution…
+ Erin Ryan: “Now that Dick Cheney is dead, I can finally re-register as an organ donor.”
+++
+ Some quotes from Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech (the full-text can be read here), which began by quoting Eugene Debs, later referenced Nehru and showed no signs of retreat.
“Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall—your struggle is ours, too.”
“New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant.”
“I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life, but let tonight be the final time I utter his name.”
“Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.”
“We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.”
“I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”
+ Here, in sum, is the advice of the New York Times’s editorial board gave to the victorious Zohran Mamdani: Renounce everything you campaigned on and become Michael Bloomberg…
+ Mamdani won 33% of the Jewish vote in New York City, which is remarkable given the high-pitched histrionics for the last five months…
+ The allegation, which always seemed ludicrous to me, that Mamdani couldn’t appeal to Black voters proved specious…
+ The New York Post, which has slimed Mamdani for months, knows how to sell papers. And this one’s bound to sell out and end up on refrigerators from Harlem to Bedford-Stuy…
+ The GOP has been calling neoliberal Democrats, like Clinton, Obama and Harris, Marxists, for so long that when a real middle-of-the-road Marxist finally got elected, the charge that he’s a Marxist lost most of its political sting.
+ CNN: Hakeem Jeffries was asked this morning if you’re the future of the democratic party. He said no.
Mamdani: Good to know.
CNN: Do you have a response?
Mamdani: No. I’m focused on the next two days.
CNN: Do you think you’re the future of the Democratic Party?
Mamdani: I don’t dare predict the future. That’s why I’m out here canvassing…
+ After smearing Mamdani for “dishonest” campaign promises, April Spanberger, the Democrat just elected Governor of Virginia, told CNN that perhaps Mamdani “should join the Democratic Party.” He is, of course, already a member of the Democratic Party and had won his party’s primary. If this is the kind of “intelligence” Spanberger was providing during her years in the CIA, it’s no wonder the US kept wading deeper and deeper into the quagmire of its own making in the Middle East…
+ Leave it to Mayor PeteBot to bury the lede so deeply it isn’t even mentioned…
+ Asked about Republican attacks on Mamdani, Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Dingell sniffed: “I’m going to focus on the election of Abigail Spanberger, who is clearly a moderate, as is Mikie Sherrill. Both women who had strong military and national intelligence backgrounds…” The Democrats are basically the party of drones and mass surveillance, the true inheritors of Dick Cheney’s legacy.
+ Jonathan Schwarz: “National Democrats must not look at Mamdani and make the mistake of nominating more young, energetic candidates who people like.”
+ Al Franken: “I voted for Mamdani. I like him. He was the first to jump on affordability and the rest of the country kind of followed him. This city needs to get more affordable for people.”
+ Trump struggling to explain Mamdani’s victory: “They have this new word called ‘affordability.’” If this keeps up, Trump’s vocabulary will top 1,000 words any day now.
+ For the right candidates, the class politics that can be asserted over this demographic alone should work everywhere: 1 in 4 New Yorkers live in poverty, while another 1 in 24 New Yorkers are millionaires. Do the math.
+ A Message from the Boys: NBC News exit polling of young men (18-29) in VA, NJ and NYC.
Surprise! Looks like they’re not all misogynistic, protein powder snorting, trad-wife seeking incels after all!
+ FOX on the New Jersey governor’s race, which the GOP believed they were going to win: “The reason for their vote, those who said that they wanted to oppose the sitting president, 71% of them. So this is really what led to the outcome tonight.”
+ Owen Winter, The Economist:
In our polling with YouGov, since the start of his second term, Donald Trump’s net approval has fallen 17 points among white Americans (+17 to -1), 28 points among Hispanic Americans (-9 to -37) and 38 points among black Americans (-36 to -74).
+ Trump’s Job Approval Among 18-29 Year Olds (% Change from Feb 4, 2025):
Disapprove: 75% (+38)
Approve: 20% (-22)
YouGov / Oct 27, 2025
+ Trump to 60 Minutes: “I think I’m a much better-looking person than Mamdani, right?” From the perspective of snapping turtles in heat?
+ Has this been scheduled yet? Time? Network? Better fire up the TiVo (See below.)
+++
+ On October 10, ICE launched an armed raid on the West Town neighborhood of Chicago and began abducting landscapers as they worked on lawns. Soon, car horns began sounding up and down the block, as residents warned people that ICE had invaded their neighborhood. Local residents began pouring into the street, shouting at the masked officers to “get the hell out.”
Finally, the ICE raiders were chased back into their cars. As one of the ICE vehicles sped away from the angry crowd and down the 1600 block of West Hubbard, it crashed into a car driven by Dayanne Figueroa, who was driving to get coffee before going to work.
Almost immediately after the collision, the ICE agents spilled out of their unmarked car with their guns drawn and pointed at Figueroa, who is a US citizen. ICE agents forced open her door, grabbed her by the legs and yanked her from the car. Then they dragged Figueroa to a red minivan, stuffed her inside and drove off, as someone in the crowd yelled: “You hit her! We have it on video!”
The agents never identified themselves or presented a warrant for her arrest. They left her car in the middle of the street, the keys still in the ignition. Figueroa was held in an ICE facility for several hours without being told why she had been abducted or being allowed to call a lawyer or her family. She was released several hours later without any charges being filed. DHS later blamed Figueroa for the entire incident.
+ Around 6:30 in the morning on October 30, as ICE agents were interrogating a driver they’d pulled over in Ontario, California, Carlos Jijminez, who lived just down the block in a mobile home park, pulled up near them in his car and warned them that they were near a school bus stop and that children would soon be gathering in the area. Instead of taking Jiminez’s advice, a masked ICE agent responded by first pointing his pepper spray at Jiminez and then opening fire on his car, hitting the 25-year-old father of three in the back. The bullet lodged in his right shoulder.
ICE eventually arrested Jimenez and charged him with assault on a federal officer. The ICE agent who shot Jimenez claimed that when Jimenez put his car in reverse to return home, the officer feared that he was going to run him over.
Jimenez’s lawyer, Cynthia Santiago, told the LA Times: “He was telling them, ‘Excuse me. Can you guys please, you know, please wrap this up.’ And immediately, the masked agent pulls out a gun and exchanges some words. He’s also shaking his pepper spray. He’s in fear, and Carlos’s trying to get out of the situation.”
This was the second shooting of civilians by ICE officers in California in the past 10 days. Last week, ICE agents fired at Carlitos Ricardo Arias in South Los Angeles, whose car had been boxed in. Aris was struck in the elbow and a deputy federal marshal was hit by a ricocheted stray bullet. Again, ICE agents claimed that Arias was trying to run them over, even though his car could barely move.
+ 60 Minutes: “Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?”
Trump: “No. I think they haven’t gone far enough.”
Not far enough? How about deporting a young woman and her child back into the arms of the man who brutally abused her?
+ Last summer, Carmen’s husband came home drunk, again. He began pounding and kicking on the door, threatening to kill her if she didn’t let him in. Her young son stood next to her, trembling in fear. She called the cops and soon got a restraining order against him. Both Carmen and her husband were undocumented. A few months later, he broke the terms of the restraining order, entered the house and savagely beat her.
Carmen (whose last name has been redacted for her safety) cooperated fully with the police and immigration officials to have her husband arrested and deported. She was advised to apply for a U-Visa, which allows crime victims to reside and work legally in the US. But this June, when Carmen went for her scheduled immigration check-in, she was detained by federal agents. After spending two months in detention, she and her 8-year-old son were put on a plane and deported to her home country, where he brutal husband was awaiting her arrival.
+ Last Monday, Berenice Garcia-Hernandez was at home in Gresham, Oregon, when she learned from a Facebook post that ICE agents had gathered at a nearby Chick-fil-A. The person who made the post said they were too frightened to take photos of the ICE vehicles, so Garcia-Hernandez got into her fiancé’s car, which carried government license plates, drove to Chick-fil-A, ordered a lemonade at the drive-thru window and began taking photos of the license plates of the immigration agents’ cars.
After seeing her take the photos, the ICE officers followed Garcia-Hernandez as she drove away. When she stopped at a traffic light, one agent got out of his vehicle and started recording her on a camera. He refused to identify himself. When the light turned green, the 25-year-old Garcia-Hernandez pulled away. After a couple of blocks, she hit another traffic light and came to a stop. That’s when the ICE agents hit their flashing police lights and surrounded her car. One agent broke open the window of the passenger door and dragged her out of the car. She was cuffed and taken to the ICE detention facility in South Portland. One of the agents told her she “was in so much trouble.”
Garcia-Hernandez is a US citizen. It is not illegal to photograph federal agents or their cars and license plates. She was held for seven hours without charges. ICE confiscated her cell phone and her engagement ring, which, a week later, they had yet to return.
+ Still, she remains undaunted. “I think that we should continue to use our voices and continue to warn others about what’s happening because it is not OK how our people, our community, is being treated,” she told The Oregonian. “And me as a U.S. Citizen, I ended up being treated this way just because I was taking pictures and videos of (them) to warn the community. They were mad because they were getting exposed.”
+ On October 25, ICE arrested Rev. James Eliud Ngahu Mwangi on his way home from work at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and sent him to the ICE detention prison in Conroe, Texas, where he has been held ever since. A native of Kenya, Mwangi is an Episcopal priest and has a permit to live and work in the US. DHS has refused to say why Mwangi was arrested and jailed. “The Episcopal Diocese of Texas stands firmly for justice, dignity and compassion for every person,” C. Andrew Doyle, the Bishop of Texas, said in a statement. “This priest has served both the church and the state of Texas faithfully. We are praying for his safety, for his family’s peace of mind, and for fair and humane treatment as this case moves forward.”
+ Charging that federal government officials lied during their sworn depositions and that the use of violence by immigration agents in Chicago “shocks the conscience,” Federal Judge Sara Ellis has issued a sweeping injunction against the use of force by ICE and Border Patrol during its “Operation Midway Blitz” raids in Chicago. Ellis said from the bench: “I find the government’s evidence to simply not be credible.” She emphasized that the accounts of numerous Border Patrol agents on what took place before they deployed tear gas on protesters to be undermined and contradicted by audio and visual recordings of the encounters. She zeroed in on the false testimony of self-aggrandizing Border Patrol commander Dan Bovino, who she tersely noted “admitted that he lied about whether a rock hit him before he deployed tear gas at Little Village.”
+ “Mommy, mommy, Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” This was the reaction of a two-year-old girl in Chicago after being doused with tear gas by immigration agents as she played in a public park.
+ Internal federal figures show that the number of individuals in ICE detention centers reached 66,000 this week, a new high. ICE’s detainee population has increased by nearly 70% since January. ICE now has enough detention beds to hold 70,000 detainees at once, up from its 41,500-bed capacity at the beginning of the year. The number of beds is expected to increase dramatically next year, when ICE receives $45 billion to expand detention levels.
Trump’s deportation Czar Thomas Homan: “Others are in the country illegally but may not have a criminal history, but guess what? They’re coming too. ICE is no longer turning a blind eye to illegal aliens in this country.”
In response to ICE’s refusal to allow detained Catholic migrants in the Chicago area to receive the Eucharist, Pope Leo from the Southside called on President Trump and Vice President Vance to respect the dignity and religious liberty of migrants in the United States: “The authorities must allow pastoral workers to assist with the needs of these people. Many times they have been separated from their families and no one knows what happens.”
+ More than 100 federal judges have now shot down the Trump administration’s policy to jail nearly everyone facing deportation, including 12 judges appointed by Trump. Just two judges have sided with ICE.
+ Last month, the FBI issued a bulletin to law enforcement agencies across the country warning that criminals posing as US immigration officers have carried out robberies, kidnappings and sexual assaults in several states.
+ When Russell Hott, director of ICE’s Chicago Field Office, was asked in a deposition in a federal lawsuit challenging ICE’s use of force whether he believed it was unconstitutional to arrest people for expressing their opposition to ICE’s Midway Blitz, Hott answered, “No.” Meanwhile, Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino testified that he “has instructed his officers to arrest protesters who make hyperbolic statements in the heat of political demonstrations.”
+++
+ CNBC reporter on the October jobs numbers: “This one was a doozy. The most job cuts for any October in more than two decades, going back to 2003. Companies announced about 153,000 job cuts last month, which was almost triple the number during the same month last year.”
+ In 2015, the 10 richest people on Earth had a combined net worth of around $557 billion. Today, the ten richest people have more than $2.4 trillion.
+ In its report on inequality in America, Oxfam warns the gap is about to widen even further, given that in 2027 the top 0.1% will see their taxes fall by around $311,000, while the lowest earners, including those making less than $15,000, will see tax increases.
+ According to Oxfam, over 40% of the U.S. population—including 48.9% of its children—is considered poor or low income. An economy that’s the envy of the world!
+ Craig Fuller, CEO of Freightwaves, to CNBC:
We should be worried. Certain portions of the goods economy are collapsing right now. Year-over-year trucking volume is down 17%. When you look at the industrial sectors, we’re down 30% year-over-year, which is Great Financial Crisis levels of concern.
+ Bloomberg reported that US factory activity fell in October, marking an eighth straight month of decline, “driven by a pullback in production and tepid demand.”
+ Starwood Capital’s billionaire CEO Barry Sternlicht was brought on to CNBC to gripe about Mamdani:
We have a big office here ourselves … but the team in New York is for the first time saying maybe we should leave … The unions have to be more accommodative on their work laws and the wages and everything else.”
As always, the working-class must compromise to appease the super-rich.
+ With growing signs the AI bubble may be about to burst, taking the economy down with it, Open AI’s Sam Altman calls for a pre-bailout “ When something gets sufficiently huge … the federal government is kind of the insurer of last resort, as we’ve seen in various financial crises … given the magnitude of what I expect AI’s economic impact to look like, I do think the government ends up as the insurer of last resort.” Marxism for billionaires who go bust!
Average gas price at the pump January 2025: $3.11 per gallon
Average gas price at the pump this week: $3.079 per gallon
(Source: AAA)
+ Thomas Piketty on the shriveling of public assets: In recent decades, the public share of total assets has declined. Net public assets (i.e., assets minus liabilities) in major European countries have fallen to just above zero (from 20-30% in 1978), while private assets have risen to >6 times GDP.
+ Trump on the cost of a Thanksgiving meal at Walmart: “I don’t know if they care about that in Saudi Arabia, but here it means a lot. We got the princess here from Saudi Arabia. She’s got a lot of cash.”
+ New Mexico is the first state to offer free child care to all residents. Under the new program, all families, regardless of income, can get their child care fees covered.
+ On Monday, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens ordered an immediate pause on residential evictions and water shutoffs as the federal lapse in SNAP funds takes effect.
+++
+ Obviously, not “our” people, so no cause for alarm…
+ Since 1997, there’s been a 2.7% decline in annual rainfall in the US, while extreme flooding events have dramatically increased, according to new research from AccuWeather.
+ According to a study by researchers at the World Inequality Lab, the wealthiest 1 percent of the global population accounts for 15% of all emissions attributed to consumers, but when their carbon footprint is measured by the assets they own, their share jumps up to about 40 percent.
+ A new paper published in Energy Research and Social Science found that the 2022 energy crisis drove record global profits for fossil fuel companies: “We estimate that globally, the net income in publicly-listed oil and gas companies alone reached $916 billion in 2022, with the US the biggest beneficiary, with claims on $301 billion, more than US investments of $267 billion investment in low-carbon energy economy that year.” Half of profits went to the top 1 percent, mainly through stock ownership.
+ CNBC: I could see a Democratic president declaring a climate emergency to tax countries with high CO2 emissions. Does that concern you at all what Democrats might do with this type of tariff power?
Scott Bessent: I would question whether there’s a climate emergency. It’s all been proven wrong.
+ Elon Musk, disputing Trump’s assertion that solar energy is “a scam to make your country fail”: “Just with solar alone, China can, in 18 months, produce enough solar panels to power all the electricity of the United States.”
+ Though fossil fuels still dominate, the percentage of the planet’s energy derived from fossil fuels edged down again in 2024 and is now at the lowest level since the 1960s.
+ Since April 13, 2025, Nepal has recorded 4,597 weather/climate-related disaster incidents nationwide. A total of 335 people have died, 41 are missing, and 1,264 have been injured, according to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority.
Lyndi Stone, a principal corporate counsel for Microsoft, on the problem with siting data centers:
Nobody really wants a data center in their backyard, I don’t want a data center in my backyard…. Data centers, once they’re operational, don’t bring a lot of jobs.
+++
+ In a sobering investigation by the the indispensable StatNews into the chaotic condition of the FDA under RKJ, Jr and Vinay Prashad, where the atmosphere is described as “rife with mistrust and paranoia,” an FDA staffer told reporter Lizzy Lawrence: “In the current FDA environment, it is impossible for dedicated career FDA staff to responsibly regulate new products, conduct groundbreaking research, and manage FDA’s resources on behalf of the American public. The situation is not salvageable.”
The story quotes an intimidating email sent by Prasad to George Tidmarsh, the head of the FDA’s CDER Division, who was recently placed on administrative leave for not being deferential enough to a Southern California health care executive. Prasad:
Let me be clear. If you continue to choose not to do what I tell you. I will spend all of my political capital get [sic] you fired. Do not take people from my team. When I ask you to ask the reviewers a question you will do so.
+ Americans waste nearly $400 million in food each year.
+ Mehmet Oz: “We thought it was 125 million pounds. Our estimate is Americans will lose 135 billion pounds by the midterms.” Yeah, that tends to happen when you put 46 million Americans on a starvation diet.
+ Pfizer’s antiviral drug Paxlovid costs $15 to make. It retails for $1500.
+++
+ As 46 million people are about to lose their access to food, Trump decided to hold a Great Gatsby-themed party celebrating their exuberant excesses (or what Ezra Klein calls “abundance”) in his private club at Mar-a-Lago.
+ Not sure Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker and the other flappers did it like this, which makes me wonder whether there will be pole dancing at the new White House ballroom…
+ One more scene from Trump’s Gatsby Party: This one’s for you, Franklin Graham!
+ Odds Trump has read The Great Gatsby: 1 in 10,000.
+ F. Scott Fitzgerald: “There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…”
+ Meanwhile, back at the White House, Trump’s remodeling of the Lincoln Bathroom at the White House, proves once again that the wealthier you are, the worse aesthetic taste you’re likely to possess and inflict on others. In this case, the marble-encased bathroom looks like you’d be taking a crap in a tomb. Check out the gold trash can. No bathroom is complete without one…See Freud (on “filthy lucre” and “the shitter of ducats.”
We know that the gold which the devil gives his paramours turns into excrement after his departure, and the devil is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed unconscious instinctual life. We also know about the superstition which connects the finding of treasure with defecation, and everyone is familiar with the figure of the “shitter of ducats” (Dukatenscheisser). Indeed, even according to ancient Babylonian doctrine, gold is “the feces of Hell.” Thus in following the usage of language, neurosis, here as elsewhere, is taking words in their original, significant sense, and where it appears to be using a word figuratively, it is usually simply restoring its old meaning.
From “Brown Gold,” from “Character and Anal Erotism.”.
+++
+ An ebullient Lindsey Graham ranting at the Republican Jewish Coalition about Trump the Bomber: “I feel good about the Republican Party and where we’re going as a nation. We’re killing all the right people and we’re cutting your taxes. Trump is my favorite president. We’ve run out of bombs. We” didn’t run out of bombs during World War II.”
+ From AS Dillingham’s essay for the LRB, Murder at Sea:
Over the last month, the US government has launched at least eleven strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. The Trump administration has claimed, without providing evidence, that the boats were transporting illegal drugs. The strikes have killed at least 57 people. These are summary executions without trial. Amnesty International has called it a “murder spree”.
+ Trump: “Every time we hit a narco-trafficking vessel, we save 25,000 lives.”
There have been at least 16 strikes on alleged “drug boats” (none of them capable of reaching the US) in the Caribbean and Pacific, which would mean that Trump has “saved” 400,000 lives–a figure that is six times more than the total number of drug overdose deaths last year.
But Venezuela doesn’t produce the drug that Trump is talking about: fentanyl, most of which comes into the US from Mexico or Canada. Pentagon officials told Congress last week that they’ve “not recovered fentanyl in any of these cases. It’s all been cocaine.”
+ Latest update on Trump the Isolationist: Bomb Iran, lob cruise missiles at the Houthis, declare war on LA, Chicago, and Portland, sink fishing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, threaten Nigeria and now prepare to invade Mexico? “US troops in Mexico would mainly use drone strikes to hit drug labs and cartel members… the administration plans to maintain secrecy around it and not publicize actions associated with it.”
+ Trump is threatening a “fast, vicious and sweet” attack on…Nigeria.
+ Trump: ”Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. The United States cannot stand by while such atrocities are happening there, and in numerous other Countries. We stand ready, willing, and able to save our Great Christian Population around the World!”
Onward Christian, drones,
Buzzing off to war,
With bombs from Boeing
to drop on Natives from afar.
Trump, the royal master
Points to the heart of darkness
Watch the MAGA banners soar!
But he’ll stay in his gilded ballroom
His bone spurs are sore.
Q: “Would you support U.S. Troops going into Nigeria?”
Sen. Tuberville: “You bet I would. It wouldn’t be like going into Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran. This would be helping innocent people.”
+ “Mistah, Kurtz. He dead.”
+ Nobel “Peace” Prize Laureate María Corina Machado insists that Maduro rigged the 2020 US elections against Donald Trump!
+ 60 Minutes: “What does that mean — ‘send more than the National Guard?”
Trump: “Well, if you had to send in the Army or the Marines, I’d do that in a heartbeat. We have a thing called the Insurrection Act. I could use that immediately and no judge can even challenge you on that. If I wanted to, I could.”
+ Trump also vowed this week to intervene in Israel’s prosecution of Netanyahu: Trump on Netanyahu:
I don’t think they treat him very well. He’s under trial for some things. We’ll be involved in that to help him out a little bit because I think it’s very unfair.
+ Interesting back-and-forth between Trump’s Solicitor General and Justice Gorsuch on whether Trump can seize the Constitutional power to impose tariffs from Congress…
Gorsuch: “The President has inherent authority over tariffs in wartime; does he have inherent authority over tariffs in peacetime?”
U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer: “No.”
Gorsuch: “What’s the reason to accept the notion that Congress can hand off the power to declare war to the president?”
Sauer: “Well, we don’t contend that.”
Gorsuch: “You do, you say it’s unreviewable…you’ve backed off that position?”
Sauer: “Maybe that’s fair to say.”
Gorsuch: “Could the president impose a 50% tariff on gas-powered cars and auto parts to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat from abroad of climate change?”
Sauer: “This administration would say it’s a hoax.”
Gorsuch: “I’m sure you would.”
+ It looks like Nancy Pelosi will stop at 85 and not attempt to go for the full Di-Fi…
Reporter: “Do you have a statement on Nancy Pelosi’s retirement?”
Trump: “I think she’s an evil woman. I’m glad she’s retiring. I think she, uh, did the country a great service by retiring. She was a tremendous liability for the country. And I thought she was an evil woman who did a poor job to cost the country a lot of damages and in reputation. I thought she was terrible.”
Misogynistic invective, aimed at someone who outfoxed him numerous times, aside, why couldn’t one high-ranking Democrat say something similar about Cheney, instead of mourning his death as if he were an American Chou En-Lai, instead of the malevolent miscreant he was?
+++
+ Here’s the full transcript of Trump’s 60 Minutes interview, in which Norah O’Donnell–allegedly Bari Weiss’s new favorite to anchor CBS News– throws him 90 minutes of softballs, which he awkwardly flails at, of which they aired 28 minutes…
+ 60 Minutes chose not to air this part of the interview with Trump. Wonder why?:
And, actually, 60 Minutes paid me a lotta money. And you don’t have to put this on, because I don’t wanna embarrass you, and I’m sure you’re not– you have a great– I think you have a great, new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman [Bari Weiss] that’s leading your whole enterprise is a great– from what I know. I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person. But 60 Minutes was forced to pay me– a lot of money because they took her answer out that was so bad, it was election-changing, two nights before the election.
+ 60 Minutes: Changpeng Zhao pled guilty in 2023 to violating anti–money laundering laws. Why did you pardon him?
Trump: Okay, are you ready? I don’t know who he is.
A day after this aired, a reporter as House Speaker Mike Johnson the obvious question: Last week, you were very critical of Biden’s use of the autopen & pardons. But Trump admitted on 60 Minutes to not knowing that he pardoned a crypto billionaire who pleaded guilty to money laundering. Does that also concern you?
Johnson: “I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t see the interview. I’m not sure.”
+++
+ Re-reading Gatsby for about the 20th time after Trump’s bacchanalia last week and jotted down this gem in my Moleskine: “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.” Libraries are, of course, one of the last refuges for the houseless, the lonely, the abandoned in a grinding economic machine that has left them behind.
+ Day after day, the same stories, told over and over again, more and more incoherently, like some perverse remix of a senile Sheharazade…Trump:
The only thing I got from the UN was a blank teleprompter. Remember, I went up there, princess. I’m looking at the teleprompters and I have all my friends sitting out there. 158 leaders, some in beautiful silk white robes, others in bad shirts, bad ties, and some in beautiful shirts and ties, but they’re all the leaders. I’m looking at the teleprompter, stone cold blank. They did it on purpose. It wasn’t a great feeling. I’m trying to walk slowly because I see it’s not working. They did it on purpose, but it worked out okay. Not great.
+ Seth Harp, author of the compelling investigation into drug trafficking and impunity among special forces units, The Fort Bragg Cartel: “Typical psych profile of a tech oligarch: Born rich but with below average intelligence. Anxious, anhedonic, antisocial, disagreeable, humorless, disliked by others. Bland on the surface, but driven by an implacable mania and shrewd aptitude for making money. Entirely amoral.”
+ Trump: “Thank goodness for TiVo or something thereof. Right? TiVo. We love TiVo. We love TiVo. One of the greatest inventions in history.” (Does anyone still use TiVo? Unlikely, since TiVo is defunct: “TiVo is a discontinued line of digital video recorders developed and marketed by Xperi and introduced in 1999.”)
+ At one of their early live gigs together, Jackson Browne introduced Warren Zevon as “the Ernest Hemingway of the 12-string guitar.” Zevon replied: “No, Jackson — the Charles Bronson of the 12-string guitar.’”
+ Jennifer Lawrence on filming a nude scene for Die My Love, while pregnant: “I was pregnant. What was I gonna do? Like, not eat? I was working 15 hours a day. Like, I was just tired. Yeah, it felt really freeing. I remember like, them sending over a close-up of like, cellulite being like: “Do you want us to touch this up?” and I was like, “No! That’s an ass.”
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a ‘biological’ need.”
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 50th 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Has Donald Trump’s sharp rebuke of Israel in his October 23 Time Magazine interview fundamentally changed the calculus in the Middle East? His comments immediately sparked two opposing views: for some, his position represents the clear demarcation of a genuine shift in US foreign policy; for others, it is nothing more than a political ploy designed to claw back credibility lost by the US during two years of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Regarding the end of the recent Gaza genocide, Trump claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “had to stop because the world was going to stop him,” adding, “you know, I could see what was happening … And Israel was becoming very unpopular.” With these words, Trump signaled his view that the systematic extermination of Palestinians in Gaza had pushed Israel to an inevitable point of isolation that even the US could no longer indefinitely hold back.
This is the crux of his message, repeated in his stark warning to Netanyahu: “Bibi, you can’t fight the world … The world’s against you. And Israel is a very small place compared to the world.” This may appear to be an obvious fact, yet considering the history of US — and, by extension, Western — blind support, Israel has always felt much larger than its own size. Indeed, Israel’s perceived power has historically been defined by the unconditional backing of the United States.
But, according to Trump’s claim, the US no longer perceives itself as the unconditional vanguard for Israel. He points to a new global power dynamic, noting, “There are a lot of powers out there, okay, powers outside of the region,” whose influence has made Washington’s traditional protective role unsustainable. This newfound realization is most evident when Trump addresses Israel’s desire to illegally annex the occupied Palestinian West Bank. He is now ready to take action, using unprecedented language: The annexation “won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. It will not happen. Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”
Such a phrase is unprecedented in the history of US-Israeli relations. Yet, this defiance could easily be dismissed as Trumpian showmanship — bold statements that rarely translate into coherent policy. During his second term, Trump called for an end to the war but did little to stop it, expressing sympathy toward Gazans while still supplying Israel with weapons. His contradictions make it difficult to distinguish conviction from performance.
The significance of Trump’s unprecedented warning is amplified by the sheer timing. The Time interview was made available on the same day that the Israeli parliament (Knesset) approved two bills that would apply Israeli law to the occupied West Bank, paving the way for the full, illegal annexation of the occupied territory. This provocative vote occurred while US Vice-President JD Vance was still in Tel Aviv. On his way out of the country, Vance launched a virulent attack on the Israeli government, describing the vote as “weird” and “a very stupid political stunt,” one which he took as an “insult.”
Those cautious of any supposed US shift are justified in their cynicism. There is little evidence that Washington is changing course. The unconditional support throughout the genocide is irrefutable proof of its commitment to Israel. The long trajectory of US backing, from before Israel’s founding to today, strongly suggests that a sudden pivot is highly unlikely. So, if this is not a fundamental shift, what is actually happening here?
Though the “unbreakable bond” remains, the balance of power has shifted. Israel has alternated between being the privileged client state and, through its lobby, the driver of the regional agenda. The war exposed Israel’s weaknesses and restored the old dynamic — the US as savior, dictating priorities. Beyond the annual $3.8 billion in military aid, Washington approved an additional $26 billion to sustain Israel’s economy and wars. When Israel failed to meet its military goals in Gaza, the US intervened with the ‘Gaza deal’, producing a shaky ceasefire that let Israel pursue its objectives by other means.
The result is a reversal of roles: Trump became more popular in Israel than Netanyahu, resurrecting the image of the US as the decisive power. The apparent clash between the two countries is less about values than about control — who steers Israel’s ship, Tel Aviv or Washington. The strong American rhetoric suggests awareness of its renewed leverage, but leverage alone is not policy.
This remains far from a genuine change of course. The US insists on managing the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict through its own political priorities, fundamentally aligned with Israel’s. By ignoring international law — the only source of balance and objectivity — Washington ensures that the roadmap to the region’s future, despite occasional disagreements, remains entirely in US-Israeli hands..
Such policies will fail to bring peace or justice and will inevitably reignite the same cycle of Israeli violence. While bombing has temporarily slowed in Gaza, violence is already surging in the occupied West Bank.
A just and lasting peace cannot be wrought through the whims of US administrations, through endless wars, or through uncommitted statements about non-annexation. True peace requires genuine accountability, sustained international pressure, sanctions, and the rigorous enforcement of international law. Only when the world continues to fight Netanyahu — and the self-destructive policies he represents — will a new genocide be averted and a just peace finally be achieved.
Porcupine Caribou Herd in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Photo: Fish and Wildlife Service.
On October 23, the Trump administration launched fresh attacks on three iconic wildlands in Alaska, places that Wilderness Watch, our members and supporters, and our conservation allies have fought to safeguard for decades.
These places, which teem with native wildlife, are the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Izembek Wilderness, and the areas near and through Gates of the Arctic National Preserve threatened by the Ambler Mining Road construction.
Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain
The 1.56 million-acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been a target for oil and gas development ever since the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) failed to provide much needed and deserved wilderness protection. The wild coastal plain is the birthing grounds of the fabled 200,000-member Porcupine caribou herd, relied upon for subsistence living by the Gwich’in native people, and provides critical habitat for polar bears, migratory birds, and other native wildlife.
In 2017, Trump signed a tax bill that required two lease sales in the coastal plain. The second sale did not attract one single bidder, and the Biden administration later suspended and cancelled leases from the first sale. On October 23, the Trump administration announced that it will hold an oil and gas lease sale in the coastal plain this winter, and would reinstate seven cancelled oil leases from the previous sale that had been acquired by the State of Alaska.
Izembek Wilderness
Izembic Wilderness. Photo: Kristine Sowl, US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Located near the tip of the Alaska Peninsula in southwest Alaska, the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, over 95 percent of which is designated as the 308,000-acre Izembek Wilderness, is a remote stretch of land where a quarter-million migratory birds—including virtually the world’s entire population of Pacific black brant—congregate each fall. Nearly 7,000 caribou make their annual trek into the Wilderness where they overwinter, and hundreds of sea otters swim with their young in the Izembek Lagoon, occasionally in the vicinity of migrating orcas, gray whales, minke whales, and Steller sea lions. Massive brown bears—as many as nine per mile—lumber through wilderness streams during peak summer salmon runs.
For years, the native village of King Cove has demanded to build a road through the heart of the Izembek Wilderness to access a year-round airstrip at Cold Bay. Initially the access was to transport seafood from the now-shuttered Peter Pan seafood plant in King Cove. In recent years that demand has morphed into access for emergency medical evacuations, despite a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers analysis that showed that non-road alternatives for transportation would be more reliable, less expensive, and would not harm Izembek and its wildlife.
Last month, the Trump administration announced that it had finalized a land exchange with King Cove to delete lands from the Izembek Wilderness so that the road could be constructed, and the land patents have already been exchanged. The Izembek Wilderness will lose 490 acres of land through which the road corridor would be built in exchange for 1,739 acres of King Cove Corporation lands outside of the Refuge.
Ambler Road
Gates of the Arctic National Park. Photo: Paxson Woelber.
The 211-mile Ambler Road has been proposed to reach the mining claims of a private Canadian mining company south of the Brooks Range. If built, the Ambler Road would stretch west from the Dalton Highway—the Haul Road leading to the Prudhoe Bay oil field on the North Slope—to the mining claims. Along the way, this “road to ruin” would cross Gates of the Arctic National Preserve and the Kobuk Wild and Scenic River, both ecologically significant public lands that make up part of the largest remaining wild, roadless area in the entire nation.
The Ambler Road also would cross nearly 3,000 streams, 11 major rivers, major caribou migration routes, and would bisect a wide swath of the southern Brooks Range, home to numerous Athabaskan and Iñupiat villages, as well as grizzly bears, wolves, and Dall sheep. If built, the Ambler Road would undoubtedly lead to more use and motorized intrusions into the National Preserve and nearby Wildernesses. Road noise, dust, and vehicle headlights would further degrade the area’s wild character.
The Biden administration ruled against building the Ambler Road after the first Trump administration approved it. On October 23, Trump’s Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, reissued right-of-way permits for the 211-mile road.
What Happens Next?
While these Trump actions are certainly potentially catastrophic for these three iconic Alaska wildlands and their wildlife, the story is not yet over. Litigation may well slow or stall these decisions, including several active, related cases we’re currently involved with that address oil and gas leases in the Arctic Refuge.
Wilderness Watch and our allies will continue to fight to protect the priceless areas, and we thank our terrific members and supporters who have sent in literally tens of thousands of comments over the past years in order to protect these incredible wild places and their critters. Stay tuned!
CounterPunch went online just in time for Clinton’s war on Serbia. Clinton’s war was premeditated; our transit to the World Wide Web was reluctant, at best. Alexander Cockburn’s relationship with computers was hostile. Mine was indifferent. I surfed the web, like anyone else, but had no idea how it would be useful for us. At the time, CounterPunch was a 6-page newsletter that we published fortnightly. We called it “fortnightly” because the word had a nice ring to it and no one was precisely sure how many days or even weeks a fortnight encompassed. But if we ran pieces online, who would pay to receive our newsletter? We remained stubbornly committed to print and our 5,000 or so subscribers. Where will the web be when the electromagnetic pulse wipes the slate clean?
The fact that we even had a domain name we owed entirely to the foresight of one of our tech-savvy donors, who told me that even though we were both too dumb to realize it now, we’d thank him for it one day. He reserved the CounterPunch domain in 1997. We didn’t start using it for another year when the cruise missiles started shattering the night in Belgrade. The war went on for 78 days and nights, roughly four fortnights. The web allowed us to cover Clinton’s war in real time. Cockburn said he was willing to try it as an “experiment,” fully expecting it to fail. He had just one condition: that he never had to learn how to post a piece. Thus management of the CounterPunch website fell into my hands by default. I used a primitive software program called Pagemill for the first few years and it looked primitive, like scribblings by Cy Twombley. There was no time to take any classes or seminars. “Just get it up as fast as you can, Jeffrey,” Cockburn said. “And no complaints.” I knew nothing then about HTML, hyperlinks, analytics or even how to load a photo. I still don’t know much. I’d loved my archaic Pagemill program. It was web design for simpletons. I threw a tantrum the day I was forced to give it up for the damnable Dreamweaver, which was far too complex for my sophomoric skill set.
Nevertheless, people came. Came by the thousands and then the 10s of thousands. They came from all over the world: Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, Iceland, South Korea, and India. By the 2000 presidential elections, CounterPunch had gone global. Even so, we had no idea how to make the website pay for itself or to help support CounterPunch. For years, we didn’t have a shopping cart or any way to take credit card orders or sell subscriptions online. We simply asked people to mail in a check to the office in Petrolia. In a couple of years, our readership had grown from 5,000 print subscribers to 150,000 viewers a day on the website.
But the funding base had remained pretty much the same. We were supported by our subscribers and by the extra money we raised from hitting them up once a year through a direct mail letter usually sent in November. Alex enjoyed writing the letters.
Cockburn, St. Clair and the Great Bear of the Mattole.
Cockburn told me once, he thought he could have enjoyed a great career in advertising or public relations, a fantasy fed by our friend and counselor Ben Sonnenberg, the longtime editor of Grand Street, whose father nearly invented the seductive art of public relations. And they were successful. Or successful enough to keep us afloat, though the coffers had usually been drained to a shallow tidepool by the time October rolled around.
Alex told me once that he was good at raising money because he’d spent so much time avoiding debt collectors. He said he learned the finer points of this art from his father, Claud, who like most writers of radical journalism lived close to the margin most of his life. It was from Claud that Alex inherited some of his favorite phrases: “the wolf at the door,” “pony up,” “begging bowl.” (Of course, Alex loved all canids, wild and domestic, and would have gladly left out a shank from one of his pal Greg Smith’s lambs for any wolf on the prowl.) We used to joke about Alex’s six phone lines, one for each creditor. He also had a different accent for each creditor, once pretending to be his brother Patrick, who was reporting on the siege of Mosul at the time. Listening to these calls was hearing a master at work, like a character from one of his favorite novels, The Charmer by Patrick Hamilton.
In those days, the CounterPunch staff was so small we could all squeeze into Alex’s Valiant, when it would start. After Ken Silverstein left for greener pastures, it was largely down to Alex, Becky Grant and me. We worked 11 months out of the year, taking August off, and a weeklong holiday during Christmas usually highlighted by a New Year’s Eve party at Alex’s house along the Mattole River. Those years can seem idyllic in hindsight. We worked hard and drank harder, often hard cider brewed by Alex and CounterPunch’s board chair Joe Paff. Still, we were fairly productive by almost any standard. We wrote three books together in four years, two of them (Whiteout and our scathing biography of Al Gore) were substantial works requiring months of research. We both wrote a column a week separately and one together (Nature and Politics). We wrote most of the copy for CounterPunch, 10 to 12 stories a month. We both had weekly radio shows, Alex in South Africa and mine on KBOO in Portland. We both wrote for the Anderson Valley Advertiserand occasional pieces for New Left Review, The Progressive, the New Statesman, and City Pages. I wrote for the Village Voice and In These Times and Alex had a bi-monthly column in The Nation. But CounterPunch was home base. It’s the journal that we felt the closest to and saved our best writing for.
Cockburn “dialing for dollars” in my office/garage in 1998.
Sometimes the bank accounts would evaporate even earlier. On September 11, 2001, for example. I was jolted from bed by an early morning wake-up call from Cockburn. “Jeffrey, turn on your TV and describe what you see.” He hadn’t paid his cable bill and they’d shut off his service. I spent the next several hours narrating the fall of the Twin Towers, the crash at the Pentagon, the panicky peregrinations of George W. Bush and Cheney’s tightening grip on the throat of the Republic. Our lives as journalists changed profoundly that day as well. From September 11 onward, we published nearly every day of the week, week after week, month after month, year after year. At first, we ran only two or three stories a day. (And to fill in those blank hours on the clock, we insanely decided to start a book publishing venture!) Now we publish 12 to 14 each day and 40 to 45 every Friday for our Weekend Edition. We were online for good, like it or not. No vacations, no holidays, no sick days. The web, we soon found out, waits for no one.
We were online, but we still had no idea how to make our web-based journalism pay for itself. We tried running Google Ads for a few months, but got banned for what Google imperiously declared was “clicker fraud,” even though we hadn’t been the culprits. Apparently, some over-enthusiastic CounterPuncher had repeatedly clicked on Google text links, for which we received a return of a nickel a click. We think it was a CounterPuncher. Of course, it might have been Alex’s cockatiel, Percy, who in addition to whistling the Internationale, took a fancy to Cockburn’s keyboard, battering it with his beak four or five times a day. At the time, a close friend of ours was dating a top Google lawyer, who to prove his devotion to her swore that he would have the ban reversed. He failed. She dumped him. But the verdict of the corporate algorithm is absolute. It tolerates no appeals.
Alex, a Luddite to the core, believed that every new feature of the cyber world was an evil manifestation to be shunned, shamed and exorcized. Thus he continued to refer to CounterPunch as a “Twitter-free Zone” for nearly a year after Nathaniel had set up the CounterPunch Twitter account, which now has more than 65,000 followers. No one had the heart to tell him the news.
Early on we tried writing a few grant proposals, but never got one we actually applied for-our position on Israel proving fatal to our aspirations for funding. It’s just as well. We weren’t going to dance to any master’s tune or be constrained by anyone else’s ideological strings. We weren’t going to saddle ourselves with ads, either. Partly this was owing to my own incompetence. I had no idea how to use Flash or any of the other plug-ins that ad companies demanded we deploy. But we also both deplored the way online ads intruded on our own reading experiences and didn’t want to inflict that on our readers, if we could help it. And so far, so good.
In the end, we’ve largely depended on the kindness of our readers to survive. And, though there have been some close calls, this simple and direct approach of appealing to those who know us best hasn’t failed in 30 years. Not yet, anyway. After Alex died, a woman approached me at the funeral and said rather smugly, “Well, I guess this is the end of CounterPunch.” I was angered at her remark and Alex would have been, too. This woman was part of the Nation magazine’s delegation to the funeral. My irritation with her was only partly about how dismissive she was concerning my own contribution to CounterPunch, which had been substantial even before Ken’s departure.
It stemmed more from the flippant disregard for our writers and tens of thousands of readers. CounterPunch was no longer merely a platform for our voices. It was now the home base for hundreds of different writers from across the country and around the globe. I checked this morning. Since going online, we’ve published more than 6,000 different writers. CounterPunch belongs to them, as much as it does to us. Still, Mrs. MoneyBags was right about one thing. We were more broke than we’d ever been the week that Alex died. But we published the day Alex died, the day he was buried and every day since. The readers came through, again and again and again.
We’ve grown in the 11 years since Alex passed. The online readership is probably twice what it was in August 2012. We’re publishing more pieces each week and adding new writers every day. The website has been completely revamped by Andrew Nofsinger into a more efficient and flexible WordPress design that even a Luddite like me can’t screw up too badly. It even works on smartphones, where the analytics say nearly half of the site’s visitors read CounterPunch. To keep up, our staff (still tiny by most standards) has doubled in size, from three to seven: Becky, Deva and Nichole in the business office, me, Josh and Nathaniel on the editorial side, and Andrew helming the website.
The CounterPunch team (Chelsea, Deva, Josh, Andrew, Becky and Nichole) on the “Don’t Jump Bridge” over the Pacific Highway in Oregon City. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
That means our costs have more than doubled. What didn’t double, however, were the number of print magazine subscribers who used to be the primary funders of CounterPunch. Everywhere, print was in decline, even here at CounterPunch. Then COVID hit, the printers shut down, Louis DeJoy took over the Post Office so magazines sent by mail were arriving later than ever, if they arrived at all. So we made the cruel decision to kill the magazine and now we’re dependent solely on the community of online readers who utilize CounterPunch for free: no clickbait, no ads, no paywalls.
I remember a conversation Alex and I had on the night before the last fundraiser we did together in October 2011. He was sick then, sicker than any of us knew, but not showing it. He was impish, excited and anxious, as he always was this time of year.
“Are you ready for another shot in the dark, Jeffrey?” he asked.
“What if we fail this time?”
“Well, we can always do something else.”
“Do we know how to do anything else?”
“Of course, we do. We know how to make cider, go trout-fishing and listen to Chuck Berry. What more do we need?”
And now another Fall Fund Drive has rolled around and the old wolf, perhaps loping past the spirit of Cockburn in the pepperwood grove in the Mattole Valley, is back at our door. We humbly put forth our begging bowl, confident that CounterPunchers will once again pony up…
Kingston buzzed with feverish preparations and anxious alerts in the days before Melissa, a powerful Category 5 hurricane, made landfall earlier this week on the island of Jamaica. Supermarkets and hardware stores endured the crush of customers scrambling to stockpile water, food, and other supplies while residents boarded up windows and cut away vulnerable branches from hulking mango trees.
Even for a Caribbean capital city that is no stranger to the perennial threat of hurricanes, the alarming forecasts about Melissa’s steady approach and certain intensification put communities across the city on edge. Throughout the island, which has had its share of impacts from deadly tropical weather, including Hurricane Beryl just last year, there was a palpable feeling that Melissa might be a different kind of storm.
“All we can do is try to be prepared,” said Kevin, a local handyman who lives in Portmore, an urban center on Kingston’s outskirts. “We can only do so much to get ready for it. The rest is in God’s hands.”
Melissa made weather history as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes to ever make landfall. As it moved into Jamaica’s southwestern coast, the storm’s 185-mph sustained winds and sub-900 barometric pressure left meteorologists in awe and Jamaicans under the dark howling shadow of a monster churning over their heads. Yet, as horrifying as Melissa’s fury was this week, its destructive strength follows a pattern that has become all too unsurprising on a planet subjected to entirely preventable climate chaos.
“This is actually a complete catastrophe, and it’s really quite terrifying,” Jamaican-British climate activist Mikaela Loach told Democracy Now! “And it also makes me quite angry that it doesn’t have to be this way. This has been caused by the climate crisis, by fossil fuel companies. I think it’s important that we’re not just devastated and sad about this, but also that we are angry and direct that anger towards the people who are responsible.”
While Hurricane Melissa may be called a natural disaster, the conditions that make super storms like Melissa possible are anything but natural. As Loach and just about every climate scientist on Earth point out, the unprecedented warmth of ocean waters act like fuel for tropical cyclones, supercharging them to the point that Melissa was able to double its wind speeds in under 24 hours. Such rapid hurricane intensification is almost unheard of and is the result of unnaturally warm seawater that extends deep below the surface – water temperatures that are themselves directly linked to the fossil fuel industry and an economic system built around its carbon emissions.
That system, rooted in the exploitation of natural resources and labor in the name of corporate profits, also requires grotesque levels of inequality, which could be seen both before and after Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica.
It was, of course, the wealthiest of communities that enjoyed the means and resources to prepare and weather the storm. From the gated communities of New Kingston where residents quickly summoned workers to close their built-in storm shutters and fuel up generator tanks to the high-end hotels and office buildings outfitted with hurricane-proof glass, there stood one end of Jamaican society girding for Melissa’s wrath. On the other end, representing a much larger portion of the Jamaican people, were the poor and working-class communities with far fewer means to prepare for the tempest. From Kingston and beyond, this included thousands of Jamaicans living in ramshackle housing, with corrugated tin roofs that turned into propeller blades thrown into the air by 130-mph wind gusts. It included the fishing villages of Port Royal and other coastal areas, scrambling to shore up boats and flee inland away from the devastating storm surge. It included the shanty neighborhoods on the edge of waterways and canals, prone to severe flooding, as well as hillside hamlets perched along the steep slopes of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains that were swept away by dangerous landslides. Then there are the many rural areas that are likely to remain without power and communications for many weeks, along with the farming communities whose crops have been wiped out by the storm.
All of these people were placed in the path of a storm whose destructive power was exacerbated by the climate emergency of the corporate elite and wealthy nations whose profit-obsessed industries have turbocharged the Caribbean’s hurricane season.
Just a few days removed from Melissa’s torrent of deadly rainfall and winds, the extent of damage and fatalities are yet to be known. In the western parishes of the island where the eyewall of Melissa came ashore, entire communities have been cut off from civilization, unreachable by destroyed telecommunications networks and roads that have been washed away. Many of these communities, lying near the southern coast from 60 to 120 miles west of Kingston, are dealing with widespread structural failure, including flattened homes and roofs sheared off many buildings. In addition to relief operations being mobilized by the Jamaican government, efforts are under way among residents on the east side of the island to gather and transport donated supplies to communities that bore the brunt of Melissa. And the urgency is building for those communities as the shock and hunger have set in, along with reports of looting, i.e., acts of basic human survival. While staying alive in the coming days and weeks is the preoccupation for survivors in these hard-hit areas, the daunting months of clean-up and rebuilding ahead compounds the crippling hardship they are carrying right now.
Back in Kingston, the economic and infrastructural disparities seen in the lead-up to the storm persist in its aftermath. While more than 70 percent of the island remains without electricity, some of the wealthiest parts of Kingston – those that were armed with generators and thus suffered less than a few hours or minutes without lights in their homes – seem to be among the first communities with restored grid power. On the other hand, many neighborhoods within the poorer sections of Kingston continue to have no power and, in many cases, no running water.
Such is the nature of capitalism and its attendant regime of climate disasters, bringing the devastation of extreme weather patterns – induced by the excessive greenhouse gas emissions of rich nations – upon the people of smaller nations who are the least responsible for global climate changes. The disparate impacts are felt on a global scale and at the local level among classes within affected regions.
Disasters like Hurricane Melissa have historically been used by business interests to remake entire cities into free-market dystopias, displacing poorer communities to make way for investment opportunities. The market vultures of what author and activist Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism may soon be circling Jamaica, poised to prey upon the storm’s victims and profit from the wreckage.
In fact, climate capitalists are already watching post-Melissa Jamaica as a test case for bond markets. The Jamaican government was recently issued a $150-million “catastrophe bond” which appears set for a full payout to partially cover rebuilding efforts. These bonds may offer a temporary solution for climate-vulnerable countries but, as property insurers have increasingly pulled out of high-risk areas in the path of extreme weather and natural disasters, it seems likely that U.S. and European investors will become more reluctant to buy in to catastrophe bonds for hurricane-prone areas like Jamaica as such disasters inevitably become more common. In any event, the damage from Melissa will total far more than $150 million and Jamaica will need to take on more debt from global financial institutions to rebuild roads and infrastructure. This includes the more standard World Bank loans which have traditionally kept countries like Jamaica under the neocolonial boot of wealthy nations, with loans conditioned on exploitative trade policies, privatization, and gutted public services within poorer, indebted countries.
So, while Jamaica and Hurricane Melissa fade from headlines over the next week or so, the destructive forces of capitalism and Mother Nature’s vengeance will continue to collide over the island.
In the wake of two years of the globally broadcast extermination of the people of Palestine, three distinct tracks of international response have emerged. One is grounded in justice, international law, human rights, and accountability. Two others are dedicated to impunity, the continued subjugation of the victims, and the normalization of the perpetrator regime.
In the diplomatic struggle that has ensued, the justice track is under sustained attack. Left to their own devices, most states — the directly complicit and the timid alike — will undoubtedly take the easy way out, opting for impunity and normalization. But a growing people’s movement from across the globe is mobilized to demand justice.
A Textbook Genocide
The roots of the genocide in Palestine run deep, through a century of racist colonization, the Nakba of 1947-1948, eight decades of apartheid, 58 years of brutal occupation, and generations of persecution.
Now, for the past two years, the world has watched in horror as the Israeli regime planned, announced, perpetrated, and celebrated the accelerated genocide of the Palestinian people. Adding to the horror of this historic atrocity has been the ruthless complicity of so many governments, media corporations, weapons and tech companies, and Israel proxy groups planted among the populations of the West.
The unprecedented nature of this genocide has been driven home by so many terrifying “firsts.”
The first live-streamed genocide, witnessed by millions around the world. The first hi-tech genocide, perpetrated with state-of-the-art weapons systems, killer drones, autonomous weapons, surveillance technologies, and artificial intelligence. And the first globalized genocide, perpetrated with the direct and enthusiastic participation of so many governments (foremost among them the U.S., U.K., and Germany), and the active complicity so many corporations and organizations across the globe. Zionist repression has extended far beyond the shores of Palestine, with complicit Western institutions using state power to oppress and silence all who dare to speak out against the genocide and their governments’ complicity in it.
At the same time, in just two years, the Israeli regime has shattered record after bloody record for the murder of several categories of protected persons, including medical personnel, journalists, aid workers, UN staff, and children, as well as one of the highest civilian casualty rates ever recorded.
And it has achieved the dubious distinction of creating the widest global consensus on the perpetration of the crime of genocide ever recorded, with declarations of genocide issued by the UN’s Commission of Inquiry, its independent human rights rapporteurs, leading international human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, leading Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, the leading association of genocide scholars, and international lawyers across the world.
This is quintessential genocide, its genocidal intent declared out loud by Israeli leaders from the start, followed by a horrific catalogue of genocidal acts carried out with a violence as ruthless as it is systematic. Neighborhood after neighborhood, town after town, hospital after hospital, school after school, shelter after shelter, church after church, mosque after mosque, field after field, food store after food store.
Two years of siege, blocking aid, food, water, medicine, fuel, and every essential of human life. A chain of massacres, mass abductions, torture camps, sexual violence, intentionally imposed disease and starvation. Palestinian toddlers shot by snipers for sport. Palestinian captives tortured to death. Gaza reduced to a moonscape.
The Justice Track
So blatant were its crimes that within months of the launch of its genocidal onslaught, the Israeli regime was on trial for genocide in the World Court (ICJ) and its leaders were indicted for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Indeed, experts had sounded the genocide alarm already in October of 2023. And since then, human rights monitors have collected volumes of evidence.
Even as complicit states worked to buttress the impunity of the Israeli regime, the global public demand for accountability grew ever louder. It would ultimately compel the government of South Africa to brings it historic ICJ case against the regime under the United Nations Genocide Convention in December of 2023. The Court found the allegations of genocide plausible in January of 2024 and issued what would be the first of a series of provisional measures binding on the Israeli regime. Months later, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity.
In July of 2024, the ICJ would also issue a landmark advisory opinion concluding that Israel was committing apartheid and racial segregation, that all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza are unlawfully occupied, that Israel must remove all settlements, settlers, soldiers, and occupation infrastructure, dismantle the apartheid wall in the West Bank, provide reparations to the Palestinians, and allow all those forced out to return home. The Court said that all states have a legal obligation not to recognize or assist the occupation and are obliged to help to bring an end to Israel’s occupation and other violations. And it found that all states must end all treaty relations with Israel that relate to the Palestinian territories, cease all economic, trade, and investment relations connected to the occupied territories.
Importantly, the Court rejected arguments by the U.S. and other Western governments that sought to claim that the Court should defer to post-Oslo negotiations between the occupier and the occupied, and to the politics of the Security Council, rather than the application of international law. The Court, in rejecting these claims, declared that such negotiations and agreements do not and cannot trump the rights of the Palestinians and the obligations of Israel under international human rights and humanitarian law. The Court found first that, in any event, the parties have to exercise any powers and responsibilities under those agreements with due regard for the norms and principles of international law.
Invoking article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Court then put the matter to rest for good, reminding states that, as a matter of law, “the protected population ‘shall not be deprived’ of the benefits of the Convention ‘by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the Occupying Power.’”
“For this reason,” the Court continued, “the Oslo Accords cannot be understood to detract from Israel’s obligations under the pertinent rules of international law applicable in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” With the bang of a gavel, the Court had ended decades of Israeli legal exceptionalism and launched a process for the dismantling of the Western constructed Israeli wall of impunity.
In the meantime, at the United Nations, international human rights investigators were issuing their own findings of Israeli regime apartheid and genocide. The UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine issued a series of powerful reportsdocumenting these crimes, followed by further reports from the UN’s thematic human rights rapporteurs, and, ultimately a UN-mandated Commission of Inquiry.
Outside the UN, international human rights organizations, as well as those in Palestine and Israel, joined the global consensus, as did prominent international lawyers and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, sealing the global consensus on genocide in Palestine.
Thereafter, the findings of the judicial and expert bodies of the international system finally broke through to the political bodies of the UN. On September 18, 2024, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a dramatic resolution effectively codifying the findings of the ICJ, declaring the occupation and apartheid unlawful, demanding an end to the entire occupation and the assault on Gaza, and setting a one-year deadline for Israeli compliance, after which the UNGA promised further measures.
For the first time in decades, the stage was set for real Israel regime accountability.
Global civil society activists, led by representatives of Palestinian civil society, seized on the unprecedented opportunity of the one-year deadline (violated entirely by the Israeli regime) to formulate an agenda for Israeli accountability and Palestinian protection. They developed a plan for adoption in the UNGA at the end of the deadline that would use the extraordinary power of the Assembly under the Uniting for Peace process to circumvent the U.S. veto in the Security Council and mandate concrete measures for accountability and protection.
This would include a UNGA call for sanctions, a military embargo, the rejection of the credentials of the Israeli regime, the establishment of a criminal tribunal, the reactivation of the UN’s anti-apartheid mechanisms, and the mandating of a UN protection force to protect civilians, ensure humanitarian aid, preserve evidence of Israeli crimes, and facilitate reconstruction. Importantly, the protection force would be mandated on the basis of Palestinian consent, with no Chapter 7 power to impose itself against the will of the indigenous people, thus obviating fears of a proxy occupation.
The initiative was subsequently embraced by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who, in his speech before the 80th Session of the UNGA, promised to introduce the proposal, as a draft resolution was prepared and diplomatic action proceeded to secure other co-sponsors.
The French-Saudi Track
But the unprecedented possibility for Israeli accountability presented by the UNGA resolution and deadline was not lost on Israel’s allies either, who worked feverishly to forestall any possibility of such accountability coming into force.
The tactics they adopted had become all too familiar during the decades of Oslo: divert attention away from accountability under international law and into a loose political process and the promise of a possible Palestinian state at some point in the future; compel Palestinians to negotiate for their rights with their oppressor; and work to normalize the Israeli regime as it consolidates its conquest of Palestine.
In sum, the true focus of these initiatives is not on saving Palestine, but rather on saving Israel and Zionism, even in the wake of a genocide.
French President Emannuel Macron made the intentions of his initiative clear in a letter to his Israeli regime counterpart in September of 2025. In it, he openly brags about his efforts in France to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism in order to punish dissent to his pro-Israel rule, and then tells Netanyahu that his actions at the UN (including recognizing an unarmed Palestinian Bantustan) are meant “to transform the military gains Israel has achieved on regional fronts into a lasting political victory, to the benefit of its security and prosperity…to [secure] Israel’s …full regional integration in the Middle East…its normalization…[and] the end of Hamas.”
In other words, the French-Saudi proposal is not about holding the regime accountable for its genocide and aggression in the region, but rather to shore up the Zionist project in Western Asia, to consolidate its unlawful gains, and to normalize it on the international stage.
The final product of the French-Saudi proposal was the New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, endorsed by the UNGA in September of 2025, just eight days before the expiration of the deadline for Israeli compliance set by Assembly. Notably, the declaration mentions neither the genocide nor the crime of apartheid and contains no accountability measures for the Israeli regime whatsoever. It was, in effect, a last-minute defensive maneuver to preserve the wall of Israeli impunity that the West had so carefully built up over eight decades.
In essence, the declaration reads like a blueprint for the further entrenching of the unjust status quo that existed before October of 2023, but with some extra rewards for Israel, and an amorphous promise of a limited Palestinian state somewhere down the road. Indeed, it promises to advance normalization and regional cooperation for Israel on trade, infrastructure, energy, and security. Ignoring justice and accountability altogether, the declaration instead dedicates itself to “peace, security, and stability,” reduces the genocide in Gaza to an armed conflict in which both sides are at fault, and declares yet another political process toward a “two-state solution” as the only way forward. Ignoring the U.S. role as a co-perpetrator in the genocide, it explicitly supports the role of the U.S. as a mediator (alongside Egypt and Qatar).
While it demands that Hamas free all Israeli captives, it only provides for the “exchange” of some Palestinian captives. And in flagrant disregard for the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, it purports to impose its own governance framework, with the Palestinian Authority (with “international support”) to be in charge of all Palestinian territory, and Hamas to be excluded from governance in Gaza. Eventual elections would be open only to those committed to respect the PLO (and therefore the PA) political platform.
Palestinian resistance groups defending their land and people against occupation, apartheid, and genocide are to be disarmed under the plan, while the Israeli perpetrator regime faces no such disarmament, and any eventual Palestinian state is itself envisaged by the plan to be a disarmed and defenseless entity. In other provisions, the plan would promote “deradicalization,” a dangerous concept born of the so-called “global war on terrorism,” in which populations are subjected to propaganda programmes (and often punitive measures) designed to discourage resistance to foreign domination and abusive regimes — despite the fact that such resistance is a right under international law.
The plan also proposes the deployment of troops to Palestine under a “stabilization mission” to be mandated by the UN Security Council. While the mandate of the mission would include civilian protection and security guarantees for Palestine, it would also be responsible for transferring “internal security responsibilities” to the security forces of the Palestinian Authority, disarming all other factions, providing “border security” (i.e., ensure no Palestinians escape from the Gaza cage), and for guaranteeing security for the (hyper-armed, nuclear capable, and thoroughly militarized) Israeli regime.
In other words, the mission would keep an eye on all Palestinian resistance and guarantee the impunity of the Israeli regime.
The Trump Track
Following up on his earlier King Leopold-esque promise to “own Gaza” and to build a colonized Riviera on the bones of its genocided population, Trump announced his 20-point plan at the end of September.
In the long-standing tradition of Western imperial arrogance in Palestine dating back to Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration, Trump’s 20 points were not negotiated with the Palestinians before he issued them. Indeed, Palestinians were not consulted or involved in their drafting. Rather, in a blatant act of 21st Century gunboat diplomacy, they were presented as a unilateral dictate from the U.S.-Israel axis, accompanied by violent threats of total destruction if they were not accepted.
The document was the product of an international rogue’s gallery of characters — which, in addition to genocide-complicit Trump and ICC-indicted fugitive Netanyahu, included notorious figures like Iraq war criminal Tony Blair and Trump’s billionaire son-in-law (and family friend of Netanyahu) Jared Kushner. The group did consult some of its complicit Arab and Muslim allies, but they subsequently complained that the document had been changed in fundamental ways by Trump and Netanyahu after their endorsement.
Netanyahu, who was allowed to make last-minute changes to the text before issuance, then stood with Trump to say he agreed to it — but within hours, was publicly renouncing elements of the plan and pledging that there would never be a Palestinian state, and that Israeli soldiers would not leave Gaza.
To be clear, this is not a peace plan or a plan for ending the Israel Palestine conflict. It provides no promise of Palestinian liberation, no restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people, and no guarantee of Palestinian statehood and self-determination. Instead, it provides a vague and hyper-qualified reference to “conditions” that “may emerge” sometime in the future, if Gaza re-development advances, and if the PA reforms to the satisfaction of the U.S. imperial overlords. Outrageously, the plan concludes with the U.S. arrogating to itself the role of mediator between Palestine and its Israeli occupier for any future political settlement, which would guarantee many more horrific decades of Palestinian persecution as they are forced to negotiate for their rights with their oppressor and that oppressor’s chief sponsor.
Tellingly, the 20 points contain not a word about the genocide, about apartheid, or about root causes. There is to be no accountability for the perpetrators. No redress for the victims. And the plan promises not the deradicalization of the regime perpetrating genocide, but rather of the Palestinian victims of that genocide. It is directed at ensuring that the exterminated people of Gaza “pose no threat” to its neighbors, with no guarantee that the Israeli regime, the perpetrator of the genocide, the occupier of three Arab nations, and the author of serial aggression against half a dozen neighboring countries and a spate of transnational assassinations will pose no threat. Palestinian security forces will be vetted by the U.S.-led stabilization force. There will be no such vetting of Israeli forces, the ranks of which are rife with perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
The roots of this plan in Trump’s earlier threat to “own Gaza” and to exploit a “Gaza Riveria,” are revealed in the text itself. Under Trump’s new plan, Gaza will be ruled by a colonial body headed by Donald Trump himself, with another prominent place on the body held by disgraced UK politician Tony Blair. The body, in typical Trumpian style, is dubbed “The Board of Peace.”
This body would set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza (through the “Trump Economic Development Plan”), positioning it to control all resources coming in from Gulf and European donors, with no oversight. The possibility of staggering levels of corruption would seem self-evident. The unchecked external control, extraction, and exploitation of Palestine’s economic resources would be inevitable. And note that there is no mention of Israel’s international legal obligations to provide compensation and reparations for the damage it has inflicted on Gaza.
While the plan usurps Palestinian agency by controlling Palestinian resources and designating Palestinian leaders, it also purports to exclude some Palestinians from the right to be involved in the governance of their own country. The role of Hamas, for example, should be a matter for Hamas and the Palestinian people to decide. Under this plan, Hamas is to be excluded not by decision of the Palestinian people, but rather by dictate from the U.S., which has decreed that Hamas (“and other factions”) will not have any role in the governance of Gaza, “directly, indirectly, or in any form.”
And in other provisions, the resistance is to be entirely disarmed, and its military infrastructure destroyed. Notably, the plan also provides for the destruction of Gaza’s tunnels, which have been essential not only for the defense of the territory, but also for the critical movement of persons and goods during the many unlawful Israeli sieges on the territory.
Reminiscent of the Eight Nation Invasion of China in 1900, the plan even proposes a multinational proxy occupation force led by the U.S. with the participation of “Arab and international partners” that will “stabilize” Gaza, impose “internal security,” secure the borders (i.e., ensure the continued caging of the Palestinians), and prevent the Palestinians from rearming, leaving them defenseless against Israeli aggression.
The plan provides no expectation of a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, only the possibility of a phased redeployment to the margins of Gaza and the maintenance of an Israeli “security perimeter” to remain indefinitely inside Gaza. And any partial withdrawal of Israeli regime forces that may occur is to be based on as yet undefined “standards, milestones, and time frames” that are linked to the disarming of Palestinians, and that will be determined by the U.S., by the stabilization force headed by the U.S., and by the Israeli forces that are armed, funded, and supported by the U.S. — yet another indicator of the proxy occupation nature of the plan.
While the plan provides for a significant increase in aid to the survivors of the genocide in Gaza, that aid is (unlawfully) conditioned on the acceptance by Hamas of Trump’s terms — and even then, aid quantities would be limited by the terms of the previous ceasefire of January 19, 2025. Similarly, opening of the Rafah crossing is to be subject to the same mechanism implemented under the January agreement, and thus will be still subject to continued restrictions. And it provides for the possible denial of humanitarian aid to certain areas of Gaza if Hamas is deemed to have delayed the process.
Where key details are scarce in the plan, there is also reason for worry, given that the document explicitly cites Trump’s 2020 peace plan (as well as the French-Saudi proposal described above) as part of the basis for subsequent stages in the process. Readers will recall that the 2020 plan included the further expansion of Israeli territory, the annexation of much of the West Bank, the renunciation of all Palestinian legal claims against Israel, the exclusion of Palestine from East Jerusalem, and the creation of an archipelago of Palestinian Bantustans surrounded by Israeli settlements, borders, and walls.
Even the more concrete elements of the plan are heavily weighted in favor of the Israeli perpetrator and against the besieged and persecuted Palestinian people.
For example, the release of all Israeli captives (of whom there are only a few dozen) is to take place within 72 hours. The release of Palestinian captives unlawfully held by Israel (of whom there are some 11,000) on the other hand, will only include a small proportion of those held at some unspecified time after all Israelis are returned. In all, less than 2,000 of the 11,000 Palestinian captives held by Israel are to be released.
Similarly, the remains of approximately 25 Israeli captives are thought to be held in Gaza, while the remains of some 2,000 deceased Palestinians are held by the Israeli regime. While the Trump plan stipulates the release of all Israeli remains, it only provides for the release of a portion of the Palestinian remains.
And some potentially positive provisions of the document are undercut by contradictory provisions elsewhere in the document.
For example, the document promises a ceasefire, amnesty, and safe passage for Hamas members; a commitment that no one will be forced to leave Gaza and that those who wish to leave will be free to do so and to return; that Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza; and that aid will flow through the UN and Red Crescent without interference.
However, while committing to the free flow of aid, it elsewhere implicitly imposes restrictions on aid. While promising no Israeli occupation, it also implies that Israeli regime forces will remain in Gaza indefinitely. And vague wording leaves unclear whether the essential role of UNRWA (which the U.S. and Israel have falsely claimed is associated with Hamas) will be allowed, and whether the genocide-complicit role of the perfidious GHF scheme (which the U.S. falsely claims is not associated with the Israeli regime) will be allowed to continue.
In parts, the Trump plan itself is unlawful. The conditioning of humanitarian aid, implicit threats of collective punishment if Hamas does not agree, the explicit denial of Palestinian self-determination, restrictions on political rights, the requirement that Palestinians negotiate for their inalienable human rights with their oppressors, and the failure to seek accountability for Israeli crimes including genocide, are all breaches of the international legal obligations of the United States.
For its part, Hamas seized on the practical and implementable elements of the first phase of the plan (ceasefire, exchange of captives, etc.) for negotiation while refusing to surrender the cause of Palestine or to submit to the remainder of the document. Hamas said that the rest of the issues in the document were to be “discussed within a comprehensive Palestinian national framework, in which Hamas will be included and will contribute with full responsibility.”
And the outright rejection of the plan by representatives of Palestinian civil society demonstrates the dignified steadfastness of Palestinian society in struggling for their freedom, even in the darkest of times.
The Struggle Continues
As this goes to press, moves are underway to effectively merge the French-Saudi plan with the Trump plan, and to have it blessed in the UN Security Council. But the colonial machinations of Trump, Macron, and others cannot obscure the fundamental reality confronting the world today: a single colonial regime planted in the heart of Western Asia is perpetrating apartheid, genocide, belligerent occupation, and serial aggression across the region and corrupting governments and institutions far beyond.
The unprecedented, Western-sponsored impunity of that regime is undercutting the very sustainability of international law, trampling on human rights, and jeopardizing peace and security across the region. Finally holding that regime accountable remains a vital, even existential imperative for the world.
In the meantime, for a people enduring genocide, any ceasefire is to be celebrated. But few are under the illusion that this ceasefire means a definitive end to the genocide, or the beginning of Palestinian freedom. No sustainable peace can be built on the weak foundation of Trump’s vanity and greed, Macron’s colonial nostalgia, or Netanyahu’s deceit and racist brutality.
Only justice can provide that foundation. And among the three tracks discussed in this article, only one travels toward justice.
Palestinian society has pointed the way, the UN human rights mechanisms, the ICJ, and the landmark UNGA resolution of September 2024 have joined the cause, and the world has risen up in solidarity. Now more than ever, that solidarity must be sustained, multiplied, and acted upon. The Israeli regime, its co-perpetrators in Washington, its proxies across the West, complicit governments, media companies that have supported the genocide, and corporations that have profited from it must all be held accountable if justice is to be done.
Normalization of the Israeli regime and its crimes must end. Genocide must be a red line. And Palestine must be free.
In the wake of two years of the globally broadcast extermination of the people of Palestine, three distinct tracks of international response have emerged. One is grounded in justice, international law, human rights, and accountability. Two others are dedicated to impunity, the continued subjugation of the victims, and the normalization of the perpetrator regime.
In the diplomatic struggle that has ensued, the justice track is under sustained attack. Left to their own devices, most states — the directly complicit and the timid alike — will undoubtedly take the easy way out, opting for impunity and normalization. But a growing people’s movement from across the globe is mobilized to demand justice.
A Textbook Genocide
The roots of the genocide in Palestine run deep, through a century of racist colonization, the Nakba of 1947-1948, eight decades of apartheid, 58 years of brutal occupation, and generations of persecution.
Now, for the past two years, the world has watched in horror as the Israeli regime planned, announced, perpetrated, and celebrated the accelerated genocide of the Palestinian people. Adding to the horror of this historic atrocity has been the ruthless complicity of so many governments, media corporations, weapons and tech companies, and Israel proxy groups planted among the populations of the West.
The unprecedented nature of this genocide has been driven home by so many terrifying “firsts.”
The first live-streamed genocide, witnessed by millions around the world. The first hi-tech genocide, perpetrated with state-of-the-art weapons systems, killer drones, autonomous weapons, surveillance technologies, and artificial intelligence. And the first globalized genocide, perpetrated with the direct and enthusiastic participation of so many governments (foremost among them the U.S., U.K., and Germany), and the active complicity so many corporations and organizations across the globe. Zionist repression has extended far beyond the shores of Palestine, with complicit Western institutions using state power to oppress and silence all who dare to speak out against the genocide and their governments’ complicity in it.
At the same time, in just two years, the Israeli regime has shattered record after bloody record for the murder of several categories of protected persons, including medical personnel, journalists, aid workers, UN staff, and children, as well as one of the highest civilian casualty rates ever recorded.
And it has achieved the dubious distinction of creating the widest global consensus on the perpetration of the crime of genocide ever recorded, with declarations of genocide issued by the UN’s Commission of Inquiry, its independent human rights rapporteurs, leading international human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, leading Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, the leading association of genocide scholars, and international lawyers across the world.
This is quintessential genocide, its genocidal intent declared out loud by Israeli leaders from the start, followed by a horrific catalogue of genocidal acts carried out with a violence as ruthless as it is systematic. Neighborhood after neighborhood, town after town, hospital after hospital, school after school, shelter after shelter, church after church, mosque after mosque, field after field, food store after food store.
Two years of siege, blocking aid, food, water, medicine, fuel, and every essential of human life. A chain of massacres, mass abductions, torture camps, sexual violence, intentionally imposed disease and starvation. Palestinian toddlers shot by snipers for sport. Palestinian captives tortured to death. Gaza reduced to a moonscape.
The Justice Track
So blatant were its crimes that within months of the launch of its genocidal onslaught, the Israeli regime was on trial for genocide in the World Court (ICJ) and its leaders were indicted for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Indeed, experts had sounded the genocide alarm already in October of 2023. And since then, human rights monitors have collected volumes of evidence.
Even as complicit states worked to buttress the impunity of the Israeli regime, the global public demand for accountability grew ever louder. It would ultimately compel the government of South Africa to brings it historic ICJ case against the regime under the United Nations Genocide Convention in December of 2023. The Court found the allegations of genocide plausible in January of 2024 and issued what would be the first of a series of provisional measures binding on the Israeli regime. Months later, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity.
In July of 2024, the ICJ would also issue a landmark advisory opinion concluding that Israel was committing apartheid and racial segregation, that all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza are unlawfully occupied, that Israel must remove all settlements, settlers, soldiers, and occupation infrastructure, dismantle the apartheid wall in the West Bank, provide reparations to the Palestinians, and allow all those forced out to return home. The Court said that all states have a legal obligation not to recognize or assist the occupation and are obliged to help to bring an end to Israel’s occupation and other violations. And it found that all states must end all treaty relations with Israel that relate to the Palestinian territories, cease all economic, trade, and investment relations connected to the occupied territories.
Importantly, the Court rejected arguments by the U.S. and other Western governments that sought to claim that the Court should defer to post-Oslo negotiations between the occupier and the occupied, and to the politics of the Security Council, rather than the application of international law. The Court, in rejecting these claims, declared that such negotiations and agreements do not and cannot trump the rights of the Palestinians and the obligations of Israel under international human rights and humanitarian law. The Court found first that, in any event, the parties have to exercise any powers and responsibilities under those agreements with due regard for the norms and principles of international law.
Invoking article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Court then put the matter to rest for good, reminding states that, as a matter of law, “the protected population ‘shall not be deprived’ of the benefits of the Convention ‘by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the Occupying Power.’”
“For this reason,” the Court continued, “the Oslo Accords cannot be understood to detract from Israel’s obligations under the pertinent rules of international law applicable in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” With the bang of a gavel, the Court had ended decades of Israeli legal exceptionalism and launched a process for the dismantling of the Western constructed Israeli wall of impunity.
In the meantime, at the United Nations, international human rights investigators were issuing their own findings of Israeli regime apartheid and genocide. The UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine issued a series of powerful reportsdocumenting these crimes, followed by further reports from the UN’s thematic human rights rapporteurs, and, ultimately a UN-mandated Commission of Inquiry.
Outside the UN, international human rights organizations, as well as those in Palestine and Israel, joined the global consensus, as did prominent international lawyers and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, sealing the global consensus on genocide in Palestine.
Thereafter, the findings of the judicial and expert bodies of the international system finally broke through to the political bodies of the UN. On September 18, 2024, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a dramatic resolution effectively codifying the findings of the ICJ, declaring the occupation and apartheid unlawful, demanding an end to the entire occupation and the assault on Gaza, and setting a one-year deadline for Israeli compliance, after which the UNGA promised further measures.
For the first time in decades, the stage was set for real Israel regime accountability.
Global civil society activists, led by representatives of Palestinian civil society, seized on the unprecedented opportunity of the one-year deadline (violated entirely by the Israeli regime) to formulate an agenda for Israeli accountability and Palestinian protection. They developed a plan for adoption in the UNGA at the end of the deadline that would use the extraordinary power of the Assembly under the Uniting for Peace process to circumvent the U.S. veto in the Security Council and mandate concrete measures for accountability and protection.
This would include a UNGA call for sanctions, a military embargo, the rejection of the credentials of the Israeli regime, the establishment of a criminal tribunal, the reactivation of the UN’s anti-apartheid mechanisms, and the mandating of a UN protection force to protect civilians, ensure humanitarian aid, preserve evidence of Israeli crimes, and facilitate reconstruction. Importantly, the protection force would be mandated on the basis of Palestinian consent, with no Chapter 7 power to impose itself against the will of the indigenous people, thus obviating fears of a proxy occupation.
The initiative was subsequently embraced by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who, in his speech before the 80th Session of the UNGA, promised to introduce the proposal, as a draft resolution was prepared and diplomatic action proceeded to secure other co-sponsors.
The French-Saudi Track
But the unprecedented possibility for Israeli accountability presented by the UNGA resolution and deadline was not lost on Israel’s allies either, who worked feverishly to forestall any possibility of such accountability coming into force.
The tactics they adopted had become all too familiar during the decades of Oslo: divert attention away from accountability under international law and into a loose political process and the promise of a possible Palestinian state at some point in the future; compel Palestinians to negotiate for their rights with their oppressor; and work to normalize the Israeli regime as it consolidates its conquest of Palestine.
In sum, the true focus of these initiatives is not on saving Palestine, but rather on saving Israel and Zionism, even in the wake of a genocide.
French President Emannuel Macron made the intentions of his initiative clear in a letter to his Israeli regime counterpart in September of 2025. In it, he openly brags about his efforts in France to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism in order to punish dissent to his pro-Israel rule, and then tells Netanyahu that his actions at the UN (including recognizing an unarmed Palestinian Bantustan) are meant “to transform the military gains Israel has achieved on regional fronts into a lasting political victory, to the benefit of its security and prosperity…to [secure] Israel’s …full regional integration in the Middle East…its normalization…[and] the end of Hamas.”
In other words, the French-Saudi proposal is not about holding the regime accountable for its genocide and aggression in the region, but rather to shore up the Zionist project in Western Asia, to consolidate its unlawful gains, and to normalize it on the international stage.
The final product of the French-Saudi proposal was the New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, endorsed by the UNGA in September of 2025, just eight days before the expiration of the deadline for Israeli compliance set by Assembly. Notably, the declaration mentions neither the genocide nor the crime of apartheid and contains no accountability measures for the Israeli regime whatsoever. It was, in effect, a last-minute defensive maneuver to preserve the wall of Israeli impunity that the West had so carefully built up over eight decades.
In essence, the declaration reads like a blueprint for the further entrenching of the unjust status quo that existed before October of 2023, but with some extra rewards for Israel, and an amorphous promise of a limited Palestinian state somewhere down the road. Indeed, it promises to advance normalization and regional cooperation for Israel on trade, infrastructure, energy, and security. Ignoring justice and accountability altogether, the declaration instead dedicates itself to “peace, security, and stability,” reduces the genocide in Gaza to an armed conflict in which both sides are at fault, and declares yet another political process toward a “two-state solution” as the only way forward. Ignoring the U.S. role as a co-perpetrator in the genocide, it explicitly supports the role of the U.S. as a mediator (alongside Egypt and Qatar).
While it demands that Hamas free all Israeli captives, it only provides for the “exchange” of some Palestinian captives. And in flagrant disregard for the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, it purports to impose its own governance framework, with the Palestinian Authority (with “international support”) to be in charge of all Palestinian territory, and Hamas to be excluded from governance in Gaza. Eventual elections would be open only to those committed to respect the PLO (and therefore the PA) political platform.
Palestinian resistance groups defending their land and people against occupation, apartheid, and genocide are to be disarmed under the plan, while the Israeli perpetrator regime faces no such disarmament, and any eventual Palestinian state is itself envisaged by the plan to be a disarmed and defenseless entity. In other provisions, the plan would promote “deradicalization,” a dangerous concept born of the so-called “global war on terrorism,” in which populations are subjected to propaganda programmes (and often punitive measures) designed to discourage resistance to foreign domination and abusive regimes — despite the fact that such resistance is a right under international law.
The plan also proposes the deployment of troops to Palestine under a “stabilization mission” to be mandated by the UN Security Council. While the mandate of the mission would include civilian protection and security guarantees for Palestine, it would also be responsible for transferring “internal security responsibilities” to the security forces of the Palestinian Authority, disarming all other factions, providing “border security” (i.e., ensure no Palestinians escape from the Gaza cage), and for guaranteeing security for the (hyper-armed, nuclear capable, and thoroughly militarized) Israeli regime.
In other words, the mission would keep an eye on all Palestinian resistance and guarantee the impunity of the Israeli regime.
The Trump Track
Following up on his earlier King Leopold-esque promise to “own Gaza” and to build a colonized Riviera on the bones of its genocided population, Trump announced his 20-point plan at the end of September.
In the long-standing tradition of Western imperial arrogance in Palestine dating back to Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration, Trump’s 20 points were not negotiated with the Palestinians before he issued them. Indeed, Palestinians were not consulted or involved in their drafting. Rather, in a blatant act of 21st Century gunboat diplomacy, they were presented as a unilateral dictate from the U.S.-Israel axis, accompanied by violent threats of total destruction if they were not accepted.
The document was the product of an international rogue’s gallery of characters — which, in addition to genocide-complicit Trump and ICC-indicted fugitive Netanyahu, included notorious figures like Iraq war criminal Tony Blair and Trump’s billionaire son-in-law (and family friend of Netanyahu) Jared Kushner. The group did consult some of its complicit Arab and Muslim allies, but they subsequently complained that the document had been changed in fundamental ways by Trump and Netanyahu after their endorsement.
Netanyahu, who was allowed to make last-minute changes to the text before issuance, then stood with Trump to say he agreed to it — but within hours, was publicly renouncing elements of the plan and pledging that there would never be a Palestinian state, and that Israeli soldiers would not leave Gaza.
To be clear, this is not a peace plan or a plan for ending the Israel Palestine conflict. It provides no promise of Palestinian liberation, no restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people, and no guarantee of Palestinian statehood and self-determination. Instead, it provides a vague and hyper-qualified reference to “conditions” that “may emerge” sometime in the future, if Gaza re-development advances, and if the PA reforms to the satisfaction of the U.S. imperial overlords. Outrageously, the plan concludes with the U.S. arrogating to itself the role of mediator between Palestine and its Israeli occupier for any future political settlement, which would guarantee many more horrific decades of Palestinian persecution as they are forced to negotiate for their rights with their oppressor and that oppressor’s chief sponsor.
Tellingly, the 20 points contain not a word about the genocide, about apartheid, or about root causes. There is to be no accountability for the perpetrators. No redress for the victims. And the plan promises not the deradicalization of the regime perpetrating genocide, but rather of the Palestinian victims of that genocide. It is directed at ensuring that the exterminated people of Gaza “pose no threat” to its neighbors, with no guarantee that the Israeli regime, the perpetrator of the genocide, the occupier of three Arab nations, and the author of serial aggression against half a dozen neighboring countries and a spate of transnational assassinations will pose no threat. Palestinian security forces will be vetted by the U.S.-led stabilization force. There will be no such vetting of Israeli forces, the ranks of which are rife with perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
The roots of this plan in Trump’s earlier threat to “own Gaza” and to exploit a “Gaza Riveria,” are revealed in the text itself. Under Trump’s new plan, Gaza will be ruled by a colonial body headed by Donald Trump himself, with another prominent place on the body held by disgraced UK politician Tony Blair. The body, in typical Trumpian style, is dubbed “The Board of Peace.”
This body would set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza (through the “Trump Economic Development Plan”), positioning it to control all resources coming in from Gulf and European donors, with no oversight. The possibility of staggering levels of corruption would seem self-evident. The unchecked external control, extraction, and exploitation of Palestine’s economic resources would be inevitable. And note that there is no mention of Israel’s international legal obligations to provide compensation and reparations for the damage it has inflicted on Gaza.
While the plan usurps Palestinian agency by controlling Palestinian resources and designating Palestinian leaders, it also purports to exclude some Palestinians from the right to be involved in the governance of their own country. The role of Hamas, for example, should be a matter for Hamas and the Palestinian people to decide. Under this plan, Hamas is to be excluded not by decision of the Palestinian people, but rather by dictate from the U.S., which has decreed that Hamas (“and other factions”) will not have any role in the governance of Gaza, “directly, indirectly, or in any form.”
And in other provisions, the resistance is to be entirely disarmed, and its military infrastructure destroyed. Notably, the plan also provides for the destruction of Gaza’s tunnels, which have been essential not only for the defense of the territory, but also for the critical movement of persons and goods during the many unlawful Israeli sieges on the territory.
Reminiscent of the Eight Nation Invasion of China in 1900, the plan even proposes a multinational proxy occupation force led by the U.S. with the participation of “Arab and international partners” that will “stabilize” Gaza, impose “internal security,” secure the borders (i.e., ensure the continued caging of the Palestinians), and prevent the Palestinians from rearming, leaving them defenseless against Israeli aggression.
The plan provides no expectation of a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, only the possibility of a phased redeployment to the margins of Gaza and the maintenance of an Israeli “security perimeter” to remain indefinitely inside Gaza. And any partial withdrawal of Israeli regime forces that may occur is to be based on as yet undefined “standards, milestones, and time frames” that are linked to the disarming of Palestinians, and that will be determined by the U.S., by the stabilization force headed by the U.S., and by the Israeli forces that are armed, funded, and supported by the U.S. — yet another indicator of the proxy occupation nature of the plan.
While the plan provides for a significant increase in aid to the survivors of the genocide in Gaza, that aid is (unlawfully) conditioned on the acceptance by Hamas of Trump’s terms — and even then, aid quantities would be limited by the terms of the previous ceasefire of January 19, 2025. Similarly, opening of the Rafah crossing is to be subject to the same mechanism implemented under the January agreement, and thus will be still subject to continued restrictions. And it provides for the possible denial of humanitarian aid to certain areas of Gaza if Hamas is deemed to have delayed the process.
Where key details are scarce in the plan, there is also reason for worry, given that the document explicitly cites Trump’s 2020 peace plan (as well as the French-Saudi proposal described above) as part of the basis for subsequent stages in the process. Readers will recall that the 2020 plan included the further expansion of Israeli territory, the annexation of much of the West Bank, the renunciation of all Palestinian legal claims against Israel, the exclusion of Palestine from East Jerusalem, and the creation of an archipelago of Palestinian Bantustans surrounded by Israeli settlements, borders, and walls.
Even the more concrete elements of the plan are heavily weighted in favor of the Israeli perpetrator and against the besieged and persecuted Palestinian people.
For example, the release of all Israeli captives (of whom there are only a few dozen) is to take place within 72 hours. The release of Palestinian captives unlawfully held by Israel (of whom there are some 11,000) on the other hand, will only include a small proportion of those held at some unspecified time after all Israelis are returned. In all, less than 2,000 of the 11,000 Palestinian captives held by Israel are to be released.
Similarly, the remains of approximately 25 Israeli captives are thought to be held in Gaza, while the remains of some 2,000 deceased Palestinians are held by the Israeli regime. While the Trump plan stipulates the release of all Israeli remains, it only provides for the release of a portion of the Palestinian remains.
And some potentially positive provisions of the document are undercut by contradictory provisions elsewhere in the document.
For example, the document promises a ceasefire, amnesty, and safe passage for Hamas members; a commitment that no one will be forced to leave Gaza and that those who wish to leave will be free to do so and to return; that Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza; and that aid will flow through the UN and Red Crescent without interference.
However, while committing to the free flow of aid, it elsewhere implicitly imposes restrictions on aid. While promising no Israeli occupation, it also implies that Israeli regime forces will remain in Gaza indefinitely. And vague wording leaves unclear whether the essential role of UNRWA (which the U.S. and Israel have falsely claimed is associated with Hamas) will be allowed, and whether the genocide-complicit role of the perfidious GHF scheme (which the U.S. falsely claims is not associated with the Israeli regime) will be allowed to continue.
In parts, the Trump plan itself is unlawful. The conditioning of humanitarian aid, implicit threats of collective punishment if Hamas does not agree, the explicit denial of Palestinian self-determination, restrictions on political rights, the requirement that Palestinians negotiate for their inalienable human rights with their oppressors, and the failure to seek accountability for Israeli crimes including genocide, are all breaches of the international legal obligations of the United States.
For its part, Hamas seized on the practical and implementable elements of the first phase of the plan (ceasefire, exchange of captives, etc.) for negotiation while refusing to surrender the cause of Palestine or to submit to the remainder of the document. Hamas said that the rest of the issues in the document were to be “discussed within a comprehensive Palestinian national framework, in which Hamas will be included and will contribute with full responsibility.”
And the outright rejection of the plan by representatives of Palestinian civil society demonstrates the dignified steadfastness of Palestinian society in struggling for their freedom, even in the darkest of times.
The Struggle Continues
As this goes to press, moves are underway to effectively merge the French-Saudi plan with the Trump plan, and to have it blessed in the UN Security Council. But the colonial machinations of Trump, Macron, and others cannot obscure the fundamental reality confronting the world today: a single colonial regime planted in the heart of Western Asia is perpetrating apartheid, genocide, belligerent occupation, and serial aggression across the region and corrupting governments and institutions far beyond.
The unprecedented, Western-sponsored impunity of that regime is undercutting the very sustainability of international law, trampling on human rights, and jeopardizing peace and security across the region. Finally holding that regime accountable remains a vital, even existential imperative for the world.
In the meantime, for a people enduring genocide, any ceasefire is to be celebrated. But few are under the illusion that this ceasefire means a definitive end to the genocide, or the beginning of Palestinian freedom. No sustainable peace can be built on the weak foundation of Trump’s vanity and greed, Macron’s colonial nostalgia, or Netanyahu’s deceit and racist brutality.
Only justice can provide that foundation. And among the three tracks discussed in this article, only one travels toward justice.
Palestinian society has pointed the way, the UN human rights mechanisms, the ICJ, and the landmark UNGA resolution of September 2024 have joined the cause, and the world has risen up in solidarity. Now more than ever, that solidarity must be sustained, multiplied, and acted upon. The Israeli regime, its co-perpetrators in Washington, its proxies across the West, complicit governments, media companies that have supported the genocide, and corporations that have profited from it must all be held accountable if justice is to be done.
Normalization of the Israeli regime and its crimes must end. Genocide must be a red line. And Palestine must be free.
Vince Ray‘s cover art (detail) for The Damned’s Grave Disorder, Nitro Records, 2001.
They who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.
– John Milton
+ On October 17, Phillip Brown, a 33-year-old Black man, was driving his Dodge Caravan SUV down Benning Road in Northeast DC to get milk for his three young kids when a Metropolitan police car pulled up behind him. Like many vans, Brown’s had tinted windows and the cops used this as a pretext to tail the Dodge when it changed lanes. The police alerted federal authorities that they were following Brown. The federal agents, who now occupied much of DC as part of Trump’s scheme to flood the city with armed federal forces, took over the pursuit and eventually tried to pull Brown over. When Brown stopped, the bumper of his Dodge accidentally nudged a car in front of him. Moments later, a Homeland Security agent fired at least four shots at Brown’s car. Two bullets hit the driver’s side window. And two bullets struck the passenger seat. It’s a miracle none of the shots hit Brown.
Bullet holes in the driver’s side window of Phillip Brown’s Dodge. Photo: E. Paige White and Bernadette Armand.
The agent later claimed that Brown was planning to flee the scene and made a “deliberate attempt to run them down.” How did he know this? Because Brown allegedly revved the engine of his van.
Brown was pulled from the car, cuffed, taken to the DC jail and charged with felonious assault on an officer and fleeing arrest. But when the incident report was filed, the document contained no mention of the shooting. The night before his first court hearing, Brown was approached by federal prosecutors outside the presence of his lawyers with a plea deal that would reduce the charges to misdemeanor reckless driving, but he had to agree to the deal then or they would rescind the offer, a transparent attempt to cover up the shooting. Brown refused and the next day told his lawyers about the irregular, if not illegal, ex parte visit by the prosecutors and detailed circumstances of the shooting, which his legal team had known nothing about. Brown’s lawyers had not been given body cam footage of the incident, for reasons that are now obvious.
When the glaring omission of the shooting was brought up in court during Brown’s defense attorney’s questioning of the DC cop who wrote the report, Officer Jason Sterling testified that he’d been told by a superior officer not to memorialize the shooting in an official court document. Sterling also disputed the Homeland Security officer’s version of events, saying that none of the federal agents or cops on the scene were standing in front of Brown’s Dodge or at risk of being run over. All the shots hit the side of Brown’s car, not the front. After the hearing, the judge dismissed the charges against Brown, who, it should be noted, was unarmed at the time of the shooting.
Usually, all cops have to do to justify shooting someone is to claim, “I feared for my life.” And as far as we know, the trigger-happy DHS agent who shot at Phillip Brown and lied about the circumstances of the shooting is still patrolling DC’s streets, tasked with pulling over and harassing anyone he deems suspicious, as part of Trump’s made-for-memes operation to Make America Safe Again. Safe for whom?
+ The mother of Nathan Griffin, the manager of the Laugh Factory in Chicago, on watching her son being arrested by federal immigration agents for “interfering” with a raid: “My son was kidnapped by Border Patrol in front of my eyes. For those of you who don’t know, I was in Chicago visiting my son and he was kidnapped by Border Patrol in front of my eyes. When I think of going out the door in the morning, I don’t want to…Because I do not want to encounter the SUV, the screams, the crying and the horrific things that I saw before I was pulled into the fray when somebody tried to kidnap my son.”
+ An immigration agent in Addison, Illinois, who was wearing an American flag mask, smashed a woman’s car window while her terrorized children sat in the vehicle…
+ ICE has stopped publishing its monthly data on arrests and removals by criminality.
+ Franz Schoening, Commander of the Portland Police Department, testified that on October 18, federal immigration officers attacked protesters with crowd control munitions, not in response to any violence by the protesters but because another federal officer accidentally shot tear gas onto the roof of the ICE facility.
+ Sen. Dick Durbin: “The Trump Administration isn’t targeting the worst of the worst. Their immigration raids are going after churches and Halloween parades. What a farce.”
+ 50% of new ICE recruits failed an open-book test after taking a course on Immigration and the Fourth Amendment.
+ This pervasive constitutional ignorance might seem like a grave disorder for a law enforcement agency, but under the current dispensation, it is likely a prerequisite for the position. The Trump administration doesn’t want its ICE agents hesitating to cuff a 6-year-old or tear gas a teacher trying to shield her student because it might violate some civil right or another. That would be wussy and woke.
+ Arrests of migrants apprehended at the US-Mexico border by federal immigration agents increased 83% from July to September, meaning that desperate people are still coming despite Trump’s violent mass deportation operation.
+ Six months ago, 47 people, including nine kids, were abducted by ICE in Hays County, Texas. Since then, County Judge Ruben Becerra has been trying to get answers about why they were detained and where they are being held, but DHS has ignored all of his queries. Judge Becerrq told Pro Publica: “We’re not told why they took them, and we’re not told where they took them. By definition, that’s a kidnapping.”
+ According to a new lawsuit, federal immigration agents in Chicago pointed a pepper ball gun and a real gun at Chris Gentry, a US combat veteran who was legally standing on the sidewalk during a protest against ICE. The agent who held the real gun aimed it at Gentry and said, “Bang, bang. You’re dead liberal.”
+ Talia Soglin, the Chicago Tribune: “In government propaganda videos, the Feds boast of going after ‘the worst of the worst.’ In reality, every day, masked agents are fanning out and hitting the easiest targets they can: day laborers, gig workers, tamale ladies.”
+ You’re walking across the parking lot toward Walmart to spend some of your hard-earned money and keep the commodities circulating, when two armed masked men accost you and demand to know where you were born. Just another day in the Land of the Free.
+ On Wednesday, the Trump administration was forced to admit that it violated a federal judge’s order barring National Guard troops from entering Portland. Oregon National Guard troops remained on the grounds of the ICE building in South Portland hours after a federal judge issued a Temporary Restraining Order banning the Trump administration from deploying state troops into the city. “After Your Honor’s (temporary restraining order), they were still at the building, yes,” said Justice Department Attorney Jean Lin, before a hearing on the legality of Trump’s order to send national guard troops from Oregon, California and Texas into Portland to crack down on protesters.
+ This open defiance of federal court orders seems to be in keeping with Trump’s views that he is immune from any legal restraints…
+ Trump on invoking the Insurrection Act: “If I want to enact a certain act.. I’d be allowed to do that, you understand that — the courts wouldn’t get involved, nobody would get involved. And I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — I could send anybody I wanted.”
+ ICE is transferring $10 billion to the Navy to build tent concentration camps to hold up to 10,000 people in detention at a time. These would be the largest such camps since the Clinton-era migrant camp at Guantanamo. (So many wretched precedents set by Clinton.)
+ In a court hearing on Tuesday, Federal Judge Sara Ellis warned Border Control commander Gregory Bovino that federal immigration agents in Chicago are regularly violating her Temporary Restraining Order banning DHS from using tear gas on journalists and non-violent protesters:
They don’t have to like what you’re doing. And that’s okay. That’s what democracy is. They can say they don’t like what you’re doing, they don’t like how you’re enforcing the laws — that they wish you would leave Chicago and take the agents with you. They can say that, and that’s fine. But they can’t get tear-gassed for it.
+ Local residents in McCook, Nebraska, are suing to keep ICE from turning the Work Ethic Camp into a detention prison for people swept up in Trump’s immigration raids. I don’t know, “Work Ethic Camp” sounds a lot like “Arbeit Mach Frei,” to me…
+ JD Vance claims that it’s “totally reasonable and acceptable” for people to object to living next door to people who speak a different language. (The first language of the 8th president of the USA, Martin van Buren, was Dutch, which he often spoke at him, including when that home was in the White House.)
+ Didn’t expect the meme-makers at DHS to be fans of Masculin-Femine and recognize that we’re all: Les enfants de Marx et Coca-Cola!
+ Is that Mexican Coke or the kidney-ravaging American swill? I guess on Bobby Kennedy knows
+++
+ Snuff films used to be illegal. Now they’re distributed by the War Department and are what the Manosphere watches instead of porn.
+ Reporter: “Why not ask Congress to declare war on cartels?”
Trump: “We’re not going to ask for a declaration of war. We’re just going to kill people who are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them, you know. They’re going to be, like, dead. Okay?”
+ Once again, Obama set the precedent for Trump. The Intercept uncovered two reports from the Obama era that called for “more direct military action” against drug cartels and one report called for “kinetic” strikes on cartel leaders (ie, assassinations).
+ This story of the Trump people trying to convince Maduro’s pilot to secretly fly the Venezuelan president to the US for arrest reads like one of E. Howard Hunt’s spy capers and is about as absurd as some of the plots against Castro: “A U.S. agent tried to flip Nicolás Maduro’s pilot — offering riches if he secretly flew Venezuela’s leader into U.S. custody.”
+ Reuters: “U.S. military officials involved with President Donald Trump’s expanding operations in Latin America have been asked to sign non-disclosure agreements.” NDAs are private contracts imposed on top of the existing laws and regulations governing disclosure of sensitive or classified information.
+ Venezuela doesn’t show up oncein the fentanyl section of Trump’s own 2025 DEA National Drug Threat Assessment and briefly appears only to highlight TDA as low-level street traffickers who specialize in human trafficking.
+ The decline in fentanyl seizures began more than a year and a half before Trump took office. From 2023 to 2025, fentanyl seizures declined by 57%, including a 46% percent decline in 2024.
+ Trump: “The thing I can tell you right now, it’s very hard to find any floating vessel right now on the Pacific or in the Gulf. I would like to call it by its official name, the Gulf of America. Another little triumph of the Trump administration.” Shutting down maritime traffic in the Gulf of Trump and the Pacific Ocean doesn’t sound like a great idea…
+ To justify his war on the “ocean drugs,” Trump keeps saying 300 million people died of drug overdoses last year (the population of the US is 370 million). But there were only 62 million deaths globally from ODs, many, if not most, from prescription drugs. If Trump’s claim were true, you’d expect the traffic on I-205 would be less gnarly.
+ Admiral Alvin Halsey left his post as head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command after a fractious meeting with War Lord Pete Hegseth over the illegal strikes on Caribbean boats.Since then, the U.S. has moved closer to war in Venezuela, with Trump vowing that the next step will be strikes against “cartels” on land.
+ Amount of cocaine that actually transits Venezuela? (10-13%). Amount of US-bound fentanyl that comes through Venezuela? (None)
+ Rand Paul: “When you kill someone, if you’re not in a declared war, you really need to know someone’s name at least. You have to accuse them of something. You have to present evidence. So all of these people have been blown up without any evidence of a crime.”
+ Trump: “Somebody came up with the word ‘cartel.’ I won’t tell you who that person was, but you gotta lot of bad people in the cartels.”
Cartel: 1550s, “a written challenge, letter of defiance,” from French cartel (16c.), from Italian cartello “placard,” diminutive of carta “card”). It came to mean “written agreement between states at war” (1690s), for the exchange of prisoners or some other mutual advantage, then “a written agreement between challengers” of any sort (1889). The sense of “a commercial trust, an association of industrialists” is from 1900, via German Kartell, which is from French. The older U.S. term for that is trust (n.). The usual German name for them was Interessengemeinschaft, abbreviated IG, as in Farben.
David Adler: “Somehow, the United States of America has found a way to combine two of its greatest foreign policy failures — the Iraq War and the War on Drugs — into a single regime change narrative…. and sell it again to the mainstream media.”
+++
+ Bari Weiss re-programming pogram begins at CBS News with the departure of Evening News co-anchor, John Dickerson.
+ Weiss wants Fox’s Brett Baier to anchor CBS News…
+ Bari the Gatekeeper: CBS News was the only network news program that failed to cover Trump’s pardon of crypto fraudster Changpeng Zhao and his ties to the Trump family’s own crypto scheme.
+ In the last two weeks, Washington Post editorials have endorsed policies in which Post owner Jeff Bezos has a financial or corporate interest without noting the potential conflict of interest.
+ Alex Jones’s InfoWars is now a member of the official Pentagon press pool…
+ JFK told the French writer Andre Malraux in 1962 that “without television he would have no means of reaching the American people except through a press which is controlled by conservative capitalists.”
+++
+ Karoline Leavitt: “Right now, the President’s priority is the White House ballroom.”
+ Here are the people and corporations who financed the destruction of the East Wing…
Altria Group
Amazon
Apple
Booz Allen Hamilton
Caterpillar
Coinbase
Comcast
José and Emilia Fanjul
Hard Rock International
Google
HP
Lockheed Martin
Meta
Micron Technology
Microsoft
NextEra Energy
Palantir Technologies
Ripple
Reynolds American
T-Mobile
Tether America
Union Pacific Railroad
Adelson Family Foundation
Stefan E. Brodie
Betty Wold Johnson Foundation
Charles and Marissa Cascarilla
Edward and Shari Glazer
Harold Hamm
Benjamin Leon Jr.
The Lutnick family
The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation
Stephen A. Schwarzman
Konstantin Sokolov
Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher
Paolo Tiramani
Cameron Winklevoss
Tyler Winklevoss
Albert Speer’s model of “Germania,” Hitler’s planned redesign of Berlin, with the “Great Dome” of the Volkshalle at one end of the avenue leading to the Brandenburg Gate.
+ Hitler was obsessed with building his “Volkshalle” (People’s Hall/ballroom for the Nazi elite and their corporate conspirators: IG Farben, Bayer, Volkswagen, IBM (Dehomag subsidiary), BMW, BASF, Krupp, Ford, Coca-Cola, GM, IT&T, Chase, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Bank of England, US Federal Reserve, to name a few). This was his top priority, even as the Red Army drove the Wehrmacht into retreat and Berliners quietly griped:“We have no bacon, no fat, no eggs, but Hitler has his Reich Chancellery!”
+ Stephen Miller:
The scandal is how Democrats and the left scarred the landscape of our country with grotesque so-called modern art that celebrates ugliness … very importantly, President Trump is making sure it’s in the neoclassical design around which our nation’s architecture has long been directed.
+ This is a remarkably faithful echo of the Nazis’ campaign against “degenerate” modern art (which Hermann Göring secretly snatched up at every opportunity for his personal enjoyment and profit.)
+++
+ Trump: “The ranchers are so happy for what I’ve done. I saved them. I don’t think you’d have any beef in this country if I didn’t do that. So we’re very proud of that.”
The ranchers are not so happy with what he’s done…
Rancher 1: “90% of the cattle ranchers are Trump voters, but we have to call him on and say no, we don’t agree… We don’t think the government should be manipulating markets. We need to be able to make a living ranching.”
Rancher 2: “Trump’s got it just all wrong. First, he created tariffs. Farmers are taking on higher costs. Then he starts a trade war with China. China stopped buying US soybeans, leaving bins full and farmers going bankrupt. And now, Trump’s going to not only give Argentina $40 billion, now he turns around and says, ‘I want to buy their beef.’ It’s a betrayal.”
+ National Cattleman’s Beef Association: “The reality is that ranchers’ success is driven by their own hard work,” it stated. “America’s cattlemen and women operate in one of the most competitive marketplaces in the world. U.S. cattle producers are proud to provide the safest, highest-quality beef on earth. We simply ask that the government not undercut them by importing more Argentinian beef in order to manipulate prices…Cattlemen and women cannot stand behind President Trump while he undercuts the future of family farmers and ranchers by importing Argentinian beef.”
+ In fact, they may even prefer wolves to Trump: “75% of rural residents in states with gray wolf populations support continuing federal protection, and 79% of people who strongly or very strongly identify as a farmer or rancher support doing so as well. Additionally, three out of every four respondents who identified as politically conservative support continuing protection.”
+ RFK, Jr. brain worms for all!
+ Soybean farmer Caleb Ragland: “US agriculture is facing significant challenges. Commodity prices are down nearly 50%, and farm production costs continue to skyrocket. For soybean farmers, the loss of our largest export market due to trade retaliation by China has made financial problems even worse. High production cost and market losses mean soybean farmers are expected to face a loss of around $109 an acre for this year’s crop.”
+ Reporter: American farmers have really suffered from Trump’s trade war. Do you see any light at the end of the tunnel?
Scott Bessent: In case you don’t know it, I’m actually a soybean farmer, so I have felt this pain too.
+ The fewer soybeans Bessent (Net Worth: $600 million) sells, the bigger his tax write-off…
+++
+ JD Vance now refers to Gaza as “Israeli soil.”
Reporter: Mr. Vice President, about the Turkish role—it’s concerning for Israelis. Turkey has supported Hamas. What role will they have? Will they have troops on the ground in Gaza?
Vance: That’s up to the Israelis. We think everybody has a role to play—financial, reconstruction, or communication. We’re not going to force anything on our Israeli friends when it comes to “foreign troops on their soil,” but we do think there’s a constructive role for the Turks, and frankly, they’ve already played one.
+ Rep. Ro Khanna: “I don’t mind telling you this, for the longest time, the Progressive Caucus had these rules prohibiting you from taking a position on Israel and Gaza…I don’t even know, technically, whether we’ve gotten rid of that rule or not.”
+ Trump: “We have peace in the Middle East for the first time ever. We made a deal with Hamas that they’re gonna be very good, they’re gonna behave, they’re gonna be nice, and if they’re not, we’re gonna go and eradicate them if we have to. They’ll be eradicated.”
+ Under the alleged Trump-brokered ceasefire, more than 20 Palestinians are still being killed on average each day in Gaza.
+ Of course, the ceasefire deal always only applied to Palestinians: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders “immediate, powerful” strikes in Gaza after accusing Hamas of violating the ceasefire deal…
+ The real world precedent for Trump’s shit-bombing meme…Israel spraying Palestinian houses and protesters with sewage…
+ More than 300 writers, scholars and public figures – including almost 150 past New York Times contributors – have committed to refusing to write for the paper’s Opinion section until our the paper 1) addresses it’s anti-Palestinian bias, 2) retracts the widely debunked investigation “Screams Without Words.” and 3) and calls for a U.S. arms embargo of Israel.
+ According to IDF records,279 soldiers attempted to take their own lives between January 2024 and July 2025.
+ A US colonel who investigated Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s 2022 killing by an Israeli soldier determined it was intentional, but his boss undermined that conclusion so as not to antagonize the Israelis.
+ C’mon, Bernie, has there ever been a government in Israel (right- or left-wing, whatever that really means) that hasn’t done “horrific things to the Palestinian people?”
+ 972 magazine on Israel’s “Project Nimbus” deal with Google and Amazon: “The first prohibits Google and Amazon from restricting how Israel uses their products…. The second obliges the companies to secretly notify Israel if a court orders them to hand over the country’s data stored on their cloud platforms.”
+ Biden’s NatSec spokesman John Kirby, the administration’s leading Israeli apologist and genocide denier for 16 months, has been named director of the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, a white paper mill founded by David Axelrod.
+++
+ The wealth of the world’s 10 richest people increased by more than $500 billion this year, largely driven by the bubble in AI stocks. This week alone, the wealth of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang swelled by $17 billion, as Nvidia became the first company valued at more than $5 trillion. Huang’s personal wealth is now estimated at $174 billion.
+ Trump in Seoul: “We should have the lowest interest rates of any country, because without us, there are no other countries really.”
+ Nothing says economic populism quite like tax breaks for people who buy private jets and their own car washes for their Porsches…
+ Internal documents reveal that Amazon plans to automate 75 percent of its workforce, replacing more than 500,000 jobs with robots. They’re the IG Farben of Late Capitalism.
+ Shari Jablonowski, SNAP recipient: “I usually have my mother over for Thanksgiving, and I don’t even know how I’m gonna do that. There’s no way I can afford a turkey. I’m worried that me and my family could go hungry. I can’t afford all the bills in this house. I’m just totally screwed.”
+ Joel Berg, Hunger Free America: “If the SNAP program shuts down, we’ll have the most mass hunger suffering we’ve had since the Great Depression.”
+ Before the shutdown, the Trump administration cut $500 million in deliveries to food banks across the country, including more than 27 million pounds of chicken, 2 million gallons of milk, 10 million pounds of dried fruit and 67 million eggs that never arrived. The food went to waste instead.
+ WalletHub survey:“More than 2 in 3 people think inflation is a bigger issue than the job market right now.”
+ China has become the world’s largest car exporter (5.7 million a year), outpacing Japan, Mexico, Germany, South Korea and the US.
+ On the other hand, an estimated 1.73 million vehicles were repossessed in the US last year, the most since 2009.
+++
+ Kids and disgraced mayors say the craziest things….Eric Adams: “New York can’t be Europe folks… That is why I am here today to endorse Andrew Cuomo.”
+ Andrew Cuomo, talking to conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg last week:
“God forbid, another 9/11—can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” Cuomo asks.
“He’d be cheering,” Rosenberg says.
Cuomo takes a breath, then snickers, before saying: “That’s another problem.”
+ Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, in an open letter backing Cuomo: “One shudders to think of the sort of people Mamdani would bring into his administration. How many of Mamdani’steam have ripped down hostage posters, or worse?” Ripping down posters? That IS terrifying!
+ Sen. Liz Krueger campaigning with Mamdani:“I am a Jew and a Zionist, and I want to make it very clear: this man is not an antisemite…I don’t understand why everyone seems to be focused on this one issue.”
+ More evidence of the political sophistication of Hakeem Jeffries…
Reporter: “Why have you refused to endorse Mamdani?”
Hakeem Jeffries: “I have not refused to endorse; I have refused to articulate my position.”
+ One big reason why Mamdani continues to connect with NYC residents, even amid the manufactured hysteria slandering his campaign: The average rent in New York City is $3,811, making the income required for rent to be affordable in the city at $152,440. This figure is $91,140 above the median wage.
+ Moshik Temkin: “Completely ignored in the madness of this mayoral campaign in NYC is the fact that Mamdani already defeated Cuomo in the primary and he IS the Democratic candidate. If Cuomo had won and Mamdani then decided to run as an independent, establishment Democrats would lose their minds.”
+ This is the Joe Lieberman precedent, who was defeated in a 2006primary by Ned Lamont, ran as an independent with GOP and conservative Democratic support and won…
+++
+ Steve Bannon: “Well, he’s gonna get a third term. Trump is gonna be president in ‘28 and people ought to just get accommodated with that. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan and President Trump will be the president in ‘28.”
+ George Pollack at Signum Global Advisors has presented the most likely scenario for how Trump will move to secure a third term, despite it being explicitly prohibited by the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution…Trump runs as, say, JD Vance’s vice presidential candidate. Then, after the election, Vance steps down and Trump assumes control. The main obstacle here is the 12th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who is not eligible to become president from serving as Vice President. However, Pollack argues that the
pro-Trump voices could try to argue that the ‘eligibility criteria’ referred to in the 12th Amendment include only the factors at the time the amendment was passed (in 1804)–…namely age, citizenship, places of birth (as opposed to the number of terms, which was only implemented thereafter, in 1951, as part of the 22nd Amendment.)
+ If Trump gets one, it’s unlikely to be because he, or his presidential running mate, won the popular vote… In the Economist’s tracking poll, Trump’s net approval rating has hit a new low of -18, which is even worse than any point in his first term, including after the Trump-inspired riots of January 6, 2021. But his approval rating among people under 30 is a merciless -43%.
+ Reporter: Senator, is it constitutional for President Trump to run for a third term?
Sen. Tommy Tuberville: If you read the Constitution, it says it’s not, BUT he says he has some different circumstances that he might be able to go around the Constitution.
Reporter: But you’re open to it?
Tuberville: Well, there’s going to have to be an evaluation… Don’t ever close a book on President Trump.
+ More Tuberville, because, as the immortal Jacqueline Susanne wrote, once is not enough: I ruffled some feathers a few weeks back when I came to the Senate floor and said that thegreatest national security threat facing the country is radical Islam and Sharia law.
+ NYT: “Since siding with Barack Obama twice, Iowa has become a stronghold for Mr. Trump. Yet perhaps no state has struggled more with his economic policies. During the first quarter of 2025, Iowa’s GDP dropped by 6.1 percent, more than any other state aside from neighboring Nebraska.”
+ Apparently, calls to “tax the rich” are now evidence of anti-Semitism, reversing the precedent of the past 100 years that cited calls to “tax the rich” as evidence of Jewish Bolshevism…
+++
+ With his customary perverse sense of timing, Trump posted this rubbish on the same day one of the most powerful hurricanes in the history of the Atlantic Ocean trashed Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba, killing dozens, perhaps hundreds, and took direct aim at the Bahamas…
+ Luke de Noronha on Hurricane Melissa’s ferocious landfall in Jamaica: ‘Shana texted me: ‘I can hear trees breaking and zinc flying. The wind sounds like it’s talking.’ On the videos people sent, it sounded more like screeching. Chris: ‘An almond tree broke in half next door. It was three storeys high.’”
+ Amitav Ghosh on Earth after the climate apocalypse: “The notion of anticipatory ruination has implications that extend far beyond Bangladesh: in a sense, it has now become a plan for the future of the entire planet.”
+ As Trump calls for a halt to solar installations, Texas has forged ahead. In the last five years, electricity demand on the Texas grid (ERCOT) has grown by 20 percent. But emissions have fallen by 7% over the same period. Why? Because according to the Energy Information Agency, nearly all of the demand has been met by renewables: wind, batteries and, especially, solar.
+ According to a survey by the University of Chicago, only 52% of Americans believe in human-caused climate change, a drop from 55% in 2017. Belief among Democrats has fallen 5 points since then, while belief among Republicans has grown by 9 points and, among Independents, by 16 points. (42 percent of young Republicans now believe in anthropogenic warming, logging only slightly behind the rest of the country.)
+ North Dakota is the only state in the US that has seen its electricity prices fall since 2019. Could that be because in the last six years, the Flickertail State has seen:
– Solar generation increased by 425%
– Wind generation increased by 34%
– Coal generation fell by 8%
+ Carbon reduction plans submitted to the UN by more than 60 countries would reduce global emissions by a mere 10 percent, far below the goals set in the Paris Climate Accords or needed to slow runaway climate change.
+ A Lawrence Livermore / Berkeley study estimates that about 40 percent of California’s electricity price increase over the last five years was due to wildfire-related costs.
+ 20,000: number of whales killed by ship strikes each year.
+ From a recent study in Nature on The Global Biomass of Mammals Since 1850:
According to our estimates, in the 1850s, the combined biomass of wild mammals was ≈200 Mt (million tonnes), roughly equal to that of humanity and its domesticated mammals at that time. Since then, human and domesticated mammal populations have grown rapidly, reaching their current combined biomass of ≈1100 Mt. During the same period, the total biomass of wild mammals decreased by more than 2-fold. We estimate that, despite a moderate increase in the recent decades, the global biomass of wild marine mammals has declined by ≈70% since the 1850s.
+ A new report by Survival International identified at least 196 uncontacted Indigenous groups in 10 countries, primarily in the South American nations sharing the Amazon rainforest. The report estimates these tribes could be “wiped out” within 10 years. Nearly 65% of the tribes face threats from logging, about 40% from mining and around 20% from agribusiness.
+++
+ From Sotomayor’s prophetic dissent in the Alabama death by nitrogen gas asphyxiation case…
+ A couple of hours after Sotomayor’s scathing dissent was published, Alabama conducted the most prolonged state execution on record. A witness described Anthony Boyd, who proclaimed his innocence to the end, gasping for air more than 225 times before his heart stopped beating.
Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s leader, likes to say that shooting is in America’s blood: it’s what Americans have always done, with the right to own guns “granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright”. But as Frank Smyth points out in his new history of the NRA, the organisation was actually founded because a group of Union Army veterans were dismayed by how few Americans actually knew how to shoot, particularly compared with Europeans.
+ Trump on the Bill of Rights…”It might say that, but…”
NBC News: The 5th Amendment says everyone deserves due process.
Trump: It might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials.
+ Trump wants to shake down the federal government for $230 million for investigating his crimes and out of office. Many states, especially Trump states, cap restitution for wrongful convictions at $2 million.
+ Ryan Goodman, law professor at New York University, on 60 Minutes: “We found over 35 cases in which the judges have specifically said what the government is providing…false information. It might be intentionally false information, including false sworn declarations time and again.”
+ Police officers handcuffed what they believed to be a 16-year-old student armed with a gun at his Baltimore County high school based on an AI system telling them so. It turned out the student had a Doritos bag, not a firearm, and the AI apparently confused the two. The kid’s lucky he wasn’t shot…
+ Yes, they’re still arresting people for pot possession. LOTS of people: The FBI released data showing that more than 200,000 people were arrested for cannabis offenses in 2024. Nearly 90% of them were for possession. And that number is likely a significant undercount, as many jurisdictions don’t share their data with the Bureau.
+ The White House ordered the Justice Department to place two federal prosecutors on leave after they filed a sentencing memo seeking 27 months in prison for a pardoned January 6 rioter who brought illegal guns and ammunition to Obama’s house in 2023.In the filing, the prosecutors described the J6 riot as being carried out by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters.”
+ In a country gone crazy, this is one of the craziest stories yet, by the great investigative reporter Liliana Segura: A Tennessee sheriff named Nick Weems, who posted about a vigil for Charlie Kirk, ordered the arrest of Larry Bushart Jr., himself a former police officer, who posted memes mocking Kirk and the vigil. Bushart’s been held on $2 million bail ever since.
+ Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent: “Charlie’s death is like a domestic 9/11. We are going to…follow the money.” Excuse my ignorance, but wasn’t 9/11 a “domestic 9/11”? The Patriot Act sure hit home.
+Micah Beckwith, the Christian Nationalist Lt. Governor of Indiana:
We are a Christian nation, but we are increasingly becoming a non-Christian people. So, a Christian government, a Christian value system, the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Decalogue, Leviticus 19, Blackstone’s common law, was taken right from scripture; our founders drew right from that to create this system of government. All based on the Judeo-Christian ethic. So, someone like an Ilhan Omar is welcome to be here legally, but that does not mean she has a right to change the foundation of this nation, which the Supreme Court just ruled in the Kennedy case that “long-standing historical tradition is the constitutional precedent.” So what’s the long-standing historical tradition of America? It’s Christian values. It was not rooted in Islam. It was not rooted in socialism or Marxism. It was rooted in Christianity, the Judeo-Christian ethic and capitalism. And so when a socialist/Marxist like Mamdani tries to force his values on to New York, I would say no, you’re not welcome to do that because the long-standing tradition is constitutional, because what you’re bringing is something new. You’re trying to remove the foundations.”
+ Images of Hammurabi, Lycurgus, Solon, Gaius, Papinian and, yes, Suleiman are engraved on the US Capitol as some of the non-Judeo-Christian “lawgivers” who inspired the legal theories of the architects of the US system of jurisprudence.
+++
+ A week after the pardon of crypto fraudster Changpeng Zhao, his company, BinanceUSA is promoting a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Finance, the Trump-family crypto outfit.
+ Trump Org’s income in the first half of 2024 was $51 million. In the first half of 2025, it skyrocketed to $864 million. The Trump cartel has already made hundreds of millions of dollars abroad, much of it coming from the United Arab Emirates. The Trump family has at least nine deals with ties to the UAE, including five licensing agreements and three cryptocurrency deals that alone are expected to yield around $500 million in 2025.
+ Don Jr.’s company was just “awarded” the largest drone motor contract by the Pentagon…
+ Trump’s “Golden Dome” ballistic missile defense project will likely take at least a decade (maybe two) to complete, cost more than a trillion dollars, and still won’t work.
+ “I’m the speaker and the president,” Mr. Trump has joked about his puppet, Mike Johnson. Of course, Johnson probably ate it up, excited by any attention he gets from Trump, even (and, perhaps especially, given the masochistic psychopathology of sycophancy) when the attention is meant to degrade and humiliate.
+ The man with a .138 lifetime batting average (62 points below the Mendoza line of futility at the plate), who wants gambling addict Pete Rose inducted into the Hall of Fame, claims the World Series has been fixed by the Mafia and the Democrats.
+ Trump’s own ties to the Mafia in NYC and Atlantic City bear renewed scrutiny.
+ From Andy Kroll’s profile of Russ Vought, the Shadow President: “‘If you’re watching television and the words ‘woke and weaponized’ come out of a politician’s mouth, you can know that this is coming … from the strategies we’re putting out,’ Vought boasted in a recording obtained by ProPublica.”
+ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s 2022 congressional campaign neglected to pay off any of its outstanding debt of over $326,000 last quarter. The debt includes more than $210,000 in refunds for illegal campaign donations that exceeded the individual contribution limit. I remember when getting the “money out of politics” seemed like a realistic goal, or at least something seriously talked about. Seems like geological epochs ago….
+ Washington Post of the capitulation of large law firms to Trump: “Large firms represented plaintiffs in 15 percent of cases challenging Trump executive orders between the start of his term in January and mid-September, compared with roughly 75 percent of cases during a comparable period in Trump’s first term, The Post found. The analysis examined civil complaints and court records from the legal research website CourtListener mentioning Trump and the term “executive order” for each time period.”
+ Edward Luce writing in the Financial Times: “Such is their fear of jail, bankruptcy or reprisal, that most people I spoke to insisted on anonymity. This was in spite of the fact that many also said Trump would only be restrained by people standing up to him.”
+++
+ Trump continues to treat a basic cognitive test as if it were the MCATs: “They have Jasmine Crockett – a low-IQ person. AOC is low IQ. Have her pass the exams I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. They’re cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump. The first couple of questions are easy — a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe … ” This prattle wouldn’t have made the cut for a scene on VEEP.
+ Low IQ person is Trump’s version of the N-word…
+ A 2020 study published in the medical journal Women’s Health Issues showed that expanding Medicaid lowers maternal mortality by about 7 deaths per 100,000 births. The national average is currently about 13 deaths per 100,000 births.
+ Trump on his mysterious MRI at Walter Reed: “I did. I got an MRI. It was perfect.I gave you the full results. We had an MRI, and the machine, you know, the whole thing, and it was perfect. I think they gave you a very conclusive – nobody has ever given you reports like I gave you. And if I didn’t think it was going to be good, either, I would let you know negatively; I wouldn’t run. I’d do something. But the doctor said some of the best reports for the age, some of the best reports they’ve ever seen.”
+ The latest Covid vaccine study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine shows:
– 29% lower risk of COVID-related ER visits
– 39% lower risk of hospitalization
– 64% lower risk of death
+ I don’t know who would take medical advice from this nitwit. While adults are free to do what they want to their own bodies (unless they’re women in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia or trans people in 27 states), this dangerous nonsense shouldn’t be inflicted on infants and toddlers…
+ Following Trump’s know-nothing post, Texas filed suit against the makers of Tylenol, alleging the companies hid the drug’s links to autism, “links” that even RFK doesn’t quite endorse: “The causative association between Tylenol given in pregnancy in the perinatal periods is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism.”
+ Speaking of the TradRight’s views of women, here’s Mollie Hemingway, editor of The Federalist, on Fox News: “The base of the Democrat Party really has become angry women and women who are angry tend to be very mean to other women who are smarter or prettier or more successful or braver than they are.”
+ MAGA pastor Josh Webbon has an even more degraded and unfiltered take on the state of American women:
Women are atrocious today. They are…they are immodest. They’re whores. They’re dumb, right, literally intellectually unintelligent. They are shallow. They are deceitful. They are wicked. They are vile. They vote for trannies. I’m not making it up. It is a forty-five, objectively, forty-five-point difference between young men and young women today. A forty-five-point difference. Women are radical progressives.
+++
+ As a counter to this filth, meet the new leader of the Poblacht na hÉireann…
+ Catherine Connolly won the highest share of 1st preference votes in any Irish presidential election
+ Newly elected (in a landslide) Irish President Catherine Connolly: “History did not begin on October 7. It’s important to point out the history of the many atrocities committed by the Israeli regime. Western countries should have no say about Hamas. They should stop the genocide. Hamas is part of the fabric of the Palestinian people. Israel is acting as a terrorist state; they have gone absolutely out of control.”
+ The Daily Mail is experiencing a bit of a freak-out over the landslide victory of Catherine Connolly…
+++
+ Trump on Reagan, Version 1: “I’m a huge fan of Ronald Reagan, but he was bad on trade. Very bad on trade.”
+ Trump on Canadian ad featuring Reagan, Version 2: “They cheated on a commercial. Ronald Reagan loved tariffs and they said he didn’t. And I guess it was AI or something. They cheated badly. Canada got caught cheating on a commercial. Can you believe it?”
+ Reagan on tariffs: didn’t love them, not AI, no cheating:
+ The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: “The MAGA crowd likes to dismiss Ronald Reagan as irrelevant today, but apparently he still matters to President Trump. How else to explain Mr. Trump’s tantrum against Canada after the province of Ontario invoked the Gipper on trade in a television ad?…
+++
The devastating opening paragraph of Becca Rothfeld’s blistering review of Biden’s former press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s atrocious, self-flattering account of her inept tenure in the Biden White House…
+ The Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka has been banned from entering the United States. The petulant Trump State Department revoked the visa of the Nigerian writer this week. Though no reason for the travel ban has been given, it likely stems from Soykina’s comparison after the 2016 election of Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. The 91-year-old Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966, said:
It’s not about me. I’m not really interested in going back to the United States. But a principle is involved. Human beings deserve to be treated decently wherever they are.
+ Mehdi Hasan at the DC No Kings protest: “Two of Trump’s three wives were immigrants, proving yet again that immigrants will do the jobs that Americans are not willing to do!”
+ Speaking of the No Kings rallies, what about a prohibition on Queens (Elizabeth, Isabella, Catherine and Victoria) and aspirant Queens (Meir, Gandhi, Thatcher, Merkel, Hillary)? They’ve proved to be just as authoritarian and bloodthirsty as the Rexes. Catherine the Great “owned” 500,000 humans and had absolute control over several million more. She once gave 100,000 serfs away in a single day and regularly doled them out to her lovers as gifts for satisfactory sexual performances. Even Denis Diderot, her tutor in matters of law and humane government, couldn’t persuade her to free them.
+ This is an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1948), where I’ve replaced “anti-semite” with “fascist” since I think it applies equally and because Sartre, himself, equated fascism with anti-semitism in the Europe of the 30s and 40s. It certainly resonates with our own predicament.
Never believe that fascists are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The fascists have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse, for by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
+ MAGA deep thinker (he smokes a pipe) Joshua Haymes posted a video a few weeks back in which he urged his fellow Christian nationalists to start defending the institution of slavery. According to Haymes, Biblical scripture proves that “it is not inherently evil to own another human being.”
+ Jacob Silverman, author of the scorching new book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, on the week in Trumplandia:
Donald Trump is demolishing part of the White House, launching artillery shells over California highways to intimidate protesters, and AI fantasizing about shitting on the American people. Just describing current events, not thundering metaphors.
+ Fox News’ Steve Doocy bragged about Trump being a “strongman”, based on his appearances on pro-wrestling shows in the 80s: “If you want a leader who is strong, that is what Donald Trump exudes. You go back in the history of WWE and Donald Trump, back in the 80s, was a regular participant… They just went on Bluesky, and they are a really compelling strongman image.”
+ Here’s some manly man talk from the strongman Prez:
That was the swimming pool where Jackie would say, I hear women inside. Are women inside? Quite famous, I’m not saying anything, this is part of the movie. The secret service, no, ma’am, there are no women inside. I’m sorry, ma’am, you have to move along. But I hear women inside. No, ma’am, you have to move along.
+ E. Jean Carroll on Donald Trump: “I don’t understand how people can be afraid of a fat elderly man who wears apricot makeup, his hair done up like Tippi Hedren in The Birds.”
+ Karl Sharro: “I’m surprised to learn this week that French and British museums consider theft wrong.”
+ Herbie Hancock on the remarkable Jack DeJohnette, who died this week at 78:
I first met Jack when he was about 20. I brought him on as a bass player, not realizing he was usually hired as a drummer, but I already had a one. I learned Jack really wanted to be a piano player. He always played the drums with a pianist’s sense of melody, color, and harmony.
+ Richard Beck on Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, a noir called Shadow Ticket: “One detects a writer who has finally lost patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious consequences of their own country’s actions.”
Don’t the sun look angry through the trees? Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves?
“Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.”
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House is more than just a serious renovation; it is a metaphor for his dismantling of traditional American governance and institutions. The East Wing, part of the 123-year-old symbol of American history – “the people’s house” – is being altered without the consent of the people, just as Trump has disregarded long-standing laws and traditions. Trump unilaterally decided that part of the White House had to go, just as he has decided that many American institutions have to go. Trump’s “renovation” is a declaration of contempt for the very architecture – literal and constitutional – of democracy. Framed as constructive destructive, his actions are destructive destruction.
The early twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter emphasized the importance of creative destruction for the success of capitalism. “[T]he fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, [and] the new forms of industrial organisation that capitalist enterprise creates,” Schumpeter wrote. Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, summarized the modern version: “Embrace change. Envision what could be, challenge the status quo, and drive creative destruction.”
What happens if there is nothing “new” in creative destruction? What happens if destruction becomes an end in itself, when there is only destructive destruction?
There is no question that DJT is a destroyer. Consider the separation of powers. He has appointed intensely loyal followers to key legal positions, often ordering them to act contrary to legal precedent. Over forty prosecutors have been fired and flimsy charges have targeted political opponents, including the Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, and California Senator Adam Schiff. Trump is destroying the separation of powers and the objective rule of law.
His economic policies follow the same pattern. Tariffs on foreign goods have alienated traditional allies and undermined the multilateral trade system created at Bretton Woods after World War II with significant consequences for small and medium-sized American companies. Similarly, domestic initiatives like the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” threaten health care for millions of Americans without a meaningful replacement or safety net. Attacks on the education system, the Department of Education and foreign aid further illustrate dismantling without replacement, leaving millions vulnerable domestically and internationally.
One could argue that there have been previous alterations to the White House so that that changes to the East Wing were not without precedent. Politically, one could also argue that America’s governance was also dramatically transformed by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
However, for a short answer, Adam Gopnik noted in The New Yorker, “The act of [the East Wing’s] destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat.”
There is a very thin line between creative destruction and destructive destruction. How does one distinguish between creative destruction and destructive destruction?
Creative destruction is the dismantling of old structures or methods to make way for new systems, innovation or growth. Destructive destruction involves dismantling without meaningful replacement or improvement. It is often driven by ego or arbitrary power.
How can one judge what Trump is doing? The answers are process and long-term planning. In demolishing the East Wing, Trump did not consult the key institutions such as the National Capital Planning Commission, the Commission of Fine Arts, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, or the Society of Architectural Historians. When President Truman had the floors of the White House rebuilt, he created a commission with senators and congressmen to oversee the use of taxpayer’s money. Trump never went through the legal review process and taxpayers are in no way engaged.
Ben Rhodes summarized Trump’s behavior succinctly in the New YorkTimes; “For Mr. Trump, the common thread weaving together so much of what he does — at home and abroad — is power. Whether he is seeking a cease-fire in Gaza or Ukraine, bombing boats off the coast of Venezuela or deploying troops to American cities, the desired result is his personal aggrandizement and the empowerment of his presidency.”
In addition to process, creative destruction involves foresight and long-term planning exemplified by the Allied powers during World War II. The Yalta, Potsdam, and Bretton Woods Conferences established what the political, economic and territorial situation would look like after the war. The Allies planned not only how to win, but also how to shape the future, including the United Nations.
In contrast, Benjamin Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza, with American complicity, and the Trump Peace Plan are ad hoc, improvised processes with no planning for the future. Too many questions remain regarding Gaza’s governance and reconstruction. Where is the transition roadmap? Remember Trump’s boasting about making Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East”? Now we question whether the reconstruction of Gaza will even begin before Hamas disarms. There is no equivalent to a Marshall Plan or a structured post-war transition. Israel’s policies, with American complicity, constitute destructive destruction.
The differences between creative and destructive destruction are not linguistic games. Trump’s frequently uses the language to “reinvent” government and policy and the rhetoric of creative destruction, In fact, his policies are too often disruptive destruction without constructive outcomes.
Creative destruction can be a force for creativity, innovation and improvement, Trump’s destructive destruction leaves nothing but ruin with no progress, no hope for renewal, only chaos masquerading as spectacle. Trump the destroyer leaves wreckage in his wake. No gold-gilded ballroom or Oval Office can change that reality.
A New York City woman wearing a navy blue polka-dot dress has gone viral for her defiant resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during a raid in lower Manhattan on October 21, 2025.
Appearing as though she was on her way from work—the woman wore a navy blue blazer and brown shoes and carried a large handbag—the “polka-dot dress woman” as she’s being called, took a powerful stand in the middle of the street. With a military tank rolling toward her, she stopped and flipped off ICE agents with both hands.
She appeared unafraid. She pushed back physically as ICE agents attempted to bully her and others. Her face, hands, and body exuded rage and resistance.
The aggressive noncompliance of the polka-dot dress woman and her fellow protesters is precisely what our dangerous march toward fascism calls for.
There are countless incarnations of such resistance in New York City, Washington, D.C., Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and elsewhere. These resisters are refusing to go gently into the night of fascist dictatorship. They are fearlessly facing off against President Donald Trump’s deployments of immigration agents, National Guard, and other federal law enforcement and military personnel, and are refusing to accept the crushing of dissent, demographic diversity, and democracy itself.
One such activist is Leonardo Martinez, a volunteer and lead organizer with VC Defensa, an immigrant defense group and rapid response network based in Ventura County, California, who found himself on the receiving end of ICE violence on October 16, 2025.
While in the midst of community patrols, Martinez, who is a U.S. citizen, followed ICE agents in Oxnard driving an SUV. It was a routine action for volunteers like him who have been nonviolently confronting and intimidating federal agents away from their communities. But this time, the ICE agents seemed to have had enough. Street-level and dash cam videos show their SUV ramming violently into the side of Martinez’s pickup truck on a relatively empty street.
“I was definitely shocked when they initially hit me because the industrial area that we were in did not have a lot of traffic,” said Martinez. His quick thinking likely kept him safe. “Once they aggressively hit me, I knew that if I pulled over in the moment, that they were going to drag me out and beat me up.”
Instead of getting out of his truck, he continued driving for a few minutes—with the SUV following him—toward downtown Oxnard, where he knew there would be more street and foot traffic. At first, the ICE agents claimed Martinez hit them—not knowing there was video footage. After being arrested, Martinez’s wrists and ankles were handcuffed, but he demanded medical attention to document his injuries. After a stop at a hospital, he was eventually taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles and was later released.
“We’ve kind of already practiced a lot of these scenarios in real life and troubleshooted and figured things out,” said Martinez. His fellow VC Defensa activists quickly located him and posted the now-viral video footage of his truck being hit. The incident has drawn attention and admiration for the work of a highly effective organization that boasts 700 highly trained volunteers like Martinez.
Such sophisticated organizing is evident all over the nation. In Chicago, where ICE agents terrorized children in a military-style raid involving rappelling down from a Black Hawk helicopter to arrest adults and children in an apartment complex, similarly militant and organized activism has taken root. Like Ventura County’s VC Defensa, Chicago’s Patrulla Popular or People’s Patrol consists of organized volunteers who warn community members when ICE agents appear and help document ensuing abuses.
The Chicago activists use car horns or scream at agents while recording them on their phones. Now, brightly colored plastic whistles have become a formidable weapon in the nonviolent anti-ICE arsenal. Community patrollers are encouraged to whistle loudly when ICE agents are present. The city’s anti-ICE resistance includes teachers, delivery drivers, and even children.
In Portland, Oregon, activists have been protesting outside the local ICE detention center for months, wearing inflatable animal costumes—an effective way to inspire media attention and highlight the absurdity of Trump’s claims of the city being “war-ravaged.” Even ICE officials have been forced to address the costumes, with one Homeland Security official calling the protest “a bizarre effort to obstruct ICE law enforcement.”
In San Francisco, which Trump announced would be the next site of a massive military deployment, organizers braced themselves with training and rapid response plans. The call for federal law enforcement appears to have come from one of the Bay Area’s Trump-supporting tech billionaires, Marc Benioff. It’s wealthy elites like him who have fueled skyrocketing inequality in the San Francisco area and then complain about a scourge of unhoused people.
Eventually Trump, making clear exactly who he works for, called off the surge after conversing with his billionaire buddies.
The president is facing militant and organized opposition to his anti-immigrant war everywhere he turns. It’s a testament to the mixed-status immigrant communities that have infused American cities with their rich cultures, cuisines, and traditions, becoming an integral part of their functioning.
Women like the polka-dot dress lady are on the frontlines of this battle. According to VC Defensa’s Martinez, “It’s incredible how many mothers we have in this organization [who] take the lead on so many of the projects and are some of the most dedicated people that we have.”
Just days before ICE agents rammed his truck, they cornered a woman volunteer who was observing them. “They all got out with their guns drawn,” said Martinez, and “started banging on the window, boxed her in, and then after she didn’t open up for them, and didn’t do anything, they ended up getting back in their car and leaving.”
A Los Angeles area tech worker calling herself Kim showed up to the “No Kings” gathering on October 18 wearing an “ICE out of LA” T-shirt. She explained that as a “Chicana, second-generation American,” she was at the march “supporting immigrant communities across the board, not only the Latino community, but all immigrants because as we also know through history that’s what made this country.”
According to Kim, “we’re showing [Trump] we’re not afraid to stand up for our rights, stand up and defend our country.”
It’s clear that Trump is not going after “criminals” given that the vast majorityof people arrested by ICE either have no criminal record or have pending charges—in other words, they’re innocent until proven guilty. Further, ICE has arrested and detained nearly 200 U.S. citizens during the first nine months of Trump’s second presidency.
It would be easy for people to fold, to go about their business, keep their heads down, and not get involved. But, far too many are speaking up, pushing back, putting their bodies and lives on the line in the face of ICE deployment, as Trump enacts his agenda.
Such mass resistance is the answer to staving off full-blown fascist authoritarianism, especially when taken together with mass shows of force at organized, coordinated gatherings such as the latest “No Kings” protests that drew an estimated 7 million people. Anti-Trump protests are also spreadingto parts of the nation known as pro-Trump strongholds, and overall protest activity is at an all-time high, comparable to the historic racial justice protestsin summer 2020.
The icons of the movement who are trying to wrest control of the nation from fascist forces are everyday people, sometimes nameless, whose bravery and audacity are infectious. May the polka-dot dress woman inspire legions as she goes down in history as a symbol of necessary rage.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
It’s one of the most rousing calls to conscience to come out of the 20th century. I’m thinking of Martin Niemöller’s “First they came for the communists.”
You know how it goes. It begins, “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.” And it ends, “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
It’s a powerful statement, and you’ll see it on T-shirts and posters and placards at demonstrations. But when you actually look at our history, it’s not just that good people didn’t speak out. It’s that many Americans threw other Americans under the bus.
The story of the Danish king who wore a yellow star in solidarity with Jewish Danes during World War II, is apocryphal. It never happened. So too, while our cultural memory about the McCarthy era romances the refuseniks, hundreds of Americans did comply with the Red Scare, identifying colleagues or associates as communists to protect themselves or preserve their careers. The Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy reports that of the more than 500 people who were called to testify in front of Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, only about 100 invoked the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer questions on self-incrimination grounds. The rest went along.
This phenomenon was even more pronounced before HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), which paralleled McCarthy’s Senate investigations. The “Hollywood Ten” refused to testify, but Elia Kazan wasn’t alone in supplying the committee with lists of colleagues who had supposedly suspect ties. Their cooperation frequently allowed them to continue working in the film industry, while those who refused were blacklisted for years.
So too, in our time, when the press and the pundits, and the politicians, and the courts have come for the abortion providers, the anti-zionists, the teachers of critical race theory, and the non-conforming queers, many didn’t just stay silent. They actively participated in creating suspicion around those people and their principles.
Citing electoral calculus and political pragmatism, liberal “compromises” on abortion law, dating back to Roe v. Wade, contributed to the erosion of reproductive autonomy well before the 2022 Dobbs decision. After 2021, laws restricting “race-conscious instruction” spread to 45 states meeting minimal resistance.
LGBTQ rights have always been dispensable — depending on the political climate. Today, trans Americans, even kids, are isolated, afraid and at the nation’s highest risk for suicide.
Not just silence, but liberal “appeasement” of the Right has brought us here.
Now Donald Trump and his mob are trying to vilify “Antifa”, an entity that he thinks exists but really doesn’t. Are we going to allow “anti-fascist” to be made suspect?
Innumerable signs held by countless Americans at No Kings protests suggest it won’t be easy. From the older women carrying versions of “Auntie Fa’s cookies don’t crumble for kings” to the green-clad members of Amphifa (Amphibians Against Fascism), to the 76-year-old who walked in Washington, D.C., with a straightforward “I am Antifa” sign. When someone comes for the anti-fascists, the odds are that some will say, “Antifa is us.” But how many? Others will always seek refuge in cowardice and caving. Our history is brimming with both.
This first appeared on Laura Flanders’ Substack page.
Theodore Roosevelt, an advocate of ‘big stick diplomacy’, viewed Latin America as the United States’ backyard – a place where it could intervene at will. At the slightest threat to American interests, he would send in the marines – to Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Cuba. In 1903 Washington sponsored a separatist movement in Panama, then a province of Colombia, to secure control of the future canal. Three years later, having been lauded for mediating in the Russo-Japanese war, Roosevelt received the Nobel peace prize.
General George C Marshall was US army chief of staff in the second world war and approved the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When he became secretary of state in 1947, he set about containing Soviet influence. In Italy, he orchestrated one of the first interventions of the cold war: covertly funding the Christian Democrats, disseminating false information, mobilising Italian-American celebrities (Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Rocky Graziano) and the mafia. A month before Italy’s April 1948 election, he publicly warned that if the communists won, the country would be excluded from the European reconstruction programme – the famous Marshall Plan. In 1953 the general too was honoured in Oslo.
Henry Kissinger, national security advisor from 1969 to 1975, was another enthusiast for destabilisation. ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,’ he said of Chile in June 1970, where the socialist leader Salvador Allende looked set to win the presidency. When Allende was indeed elected, Kissinger saw only one solution: a military coup, ‘but through Chilean sources and with a low posture’. Allende was overthrown in September 1973 and replaced by a bloody dictatorship. Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize a month later for signing a ceasefire with Vietnam after having set all Indochina ablaze.
Barack Obama had merely lent tepid support to a coup against Honduran president Manuel Zelaya when he too received the honour in October 2009, shortly after arriving in the White House. But he soon gave his predecessors a run for their money, bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, and expanding a programme of extrajudicial executions – often based on mere suspicion and far from any declared theatre of war – in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.
Donald Trump did therefore have legitimate hopes of receiving the 2025 prize. He too has deployed troops in the Caribbean. He too has practised blackmail via US aid, threatening to choke Argentina financially if Javier Milei lost the election. He too makes free use of (increasingly less) targeted assassinations in the name of combatting terrorism – as when he justified the killing at sea of Venezuelan citizens, whom he accused without evidence of drug trafficking. And he too plans coups against recalcitrant governments, as in Venezuela, where he authorised the CIA to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro.
But it wasn’t enough. The Norwegian committee instead picked María Corina Machado, a far-right Venezuelan opposition figure who has for 25 years called for foreign intervention against her own country, and who, soon after the Nobel announcement, congratulated Binyamin Netanyahu for his actions in Gaza. Trump quelled his disappointment by launching a fresh crusade – this time against Colombia. He’s burnishing his CV for the 2026 prize.
For 50 years, the Nobel committee has rejected the candidacies of dissidents from the Western world. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have worked for peace in a different way from Machado. But they possess one unforgivable flaw: they expose our own dirty secrets.
On 26 October, Caroline Willemen of Médecins Sans Frontières stated that Israel continues to use the need for humanitarian aid in Gaza as “means of pressure”. “The humanitarian situation in Gaza has not improved significantly”, she told the press, “as water and shelter shortages persist and hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in tents as winter approaches”. Israel’s armed forces have now annexed more than half of Gaza’s land and are dumping vast amounts of debris into that zone, turning it into a mountain of garbage. To move the rubble without experts and equipment is very dangerous, as about ten to twelve percent of the Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza have not exploded.
“Every Gazan person is now living in a horrific, unmapped minefield”, said Nick Orr of Humanity and Inclusion, a non-governmental organisation at work in Palestine. “The UXO [Unexploded Ordnance] is everywhere. On the ground, in the rubble, under the ground, everywhere”. As Palestinians dig through the hills of concrete, they risk triggering a dormant bomb —creating more casualties of the Israeli genocide.
Over the past two years, Israel has dropped at least 200,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza, a tonnage equivalent to thirteen atom bombs of the scale dropped on Hiroshima by the United States on 6 August 1945. This is unimaginable, particularly given the fact that Palestinians have no air defence systems, no air force and no ability to defend themselves from high-altitude and drone bombing or to strike back in any comparable way. Genocides are, by their nature, asymmetrical. But to describe these past two years as asymmetrical is obscene: this was one-directional violence, the Goliath-like Israelis using their immense advantages against the David-like Palestinian resistance.
The opaqueness of official arms transfers means we have no precise idea how much of this tonnage came to Israel from its major suppliers during the war: the United States, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. However, we have enough evidence to know that most of the bombs came from the United States, with smaller supplies from the other countries. A new report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, entitled Gaza Genocide: a collective crime (20 October 2025), makes it indisputably clear that the countries supplying Israel with military equipment, or assisting it in any way —including through diplomatic support— are utterly complicit in the genocide.
In other words, the obligation to abide by the UN Convention on Genocide is not discretionary; the duty to do what they can to stop the genocide is mandatory. The participation makes them wholly culpable. The report notes that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza makes this “an internationally enabled crime”.
The level of complicity is extraordinary. Take the case of the United Kingdom, whose Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is a human rights lawyer and indeed wrote the textbook on European human rights law (1999). On 6 August 2025, Matt Kennard told Palestine Deep Dive about how UK military aircraft left RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and escorted an unidentified plane over Gaza. Six days later, Iain Overton at UK Declassified revealed that amongst these planes was an RAF Shadow R1 surveillance plane flying alongside a Beechcraft Super King Air 350 owned by the Sierra Nevada Corporation (from the United States) with a call sign CROOK 11. What were these aircraft doing? Who had sanctioned them this work? Who is CROOK 11?
In December 2024, Starmer told troops at RAF Akrotiri: “There’s a lot of different work that goes on. I’m also aware that some, or quite a bit, of what goes on here can’t necessarily be talked about all of the time…We can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here…because although we’re not saying it to the whole world for reasons that are obvious to you”. The obvious reason is that this is a genocide, and the UK is complicit, so they cannot talk about it.
The record for the United States is even more ghastly. One paragraph from the Special Rapporteur’s report is damning enough:
Since October 2023, the US has transferred 742 consignments of “arms and ammunition” (HS Code 93) and approved tens of billions in new sales. The Biden and Trump Administrations reduced transparency, accelerated transfers through repeated emergency approvals, facilitated Israeli access to US weapons stockpile held abroad, and authorised hundreds of sales just below the amount requiring congressional approval. The US has deployed military aircraft, special forces and surveillance drones to Israel, with US surveillance purportedly being used to target Hamas, including in the first raid on Al Shifa hospital.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) filed a warrant for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. Based on this recent UN report, the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, should be obliged to file warrants against Rishi Sunak, Starmer, Olaf Scholz, Friedrich Merz, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump —at a minimum. Anything less makes a mockery of the rules-based international system, namely the United Nations Charter.
Reimagining Palestinian sovereignty through civilizational identity rather than rigid borders
For decades, the world has watched a tragic cycle repeat itself in Palestine and Israel: violence, Western-led “peace processes” that go nowhere, followed by more violence. We are told the conflict is a hopelessly complex clash between two nationalisms. But the problem is not complexity—it is power. Palestinians are struggling against a settler-colonial project determined to displace them. The real problem is the misguided framework we use to understand this so-called “conflict” and peace itself. This framework, conceptually rooted in rigid borders and committed to short-term negotiations, obscures the deeper question: how can a people continue to live, govern, and sustain their culture under imperialist occupation?
The Western nation-state model—a fortress with set borders and a single dominant national identity—is not just failing to solve this conflict; it is the engine that perpetuates it. To find a way forward, we must look beyond this model. One useful lens comes from the Global South: the Chinese concept of minzu jiefang or “national liberation.” In its original context during the Mao period, minzu jiefang “took as its focus the plight of minzu [nations] which had been conquered and were unjustly dominated by others, and implied that all minzu were deserving of sovereignty and dignity. Interestingly, the forces dominating those minzu who were struggling for liberation were not typically figured as ‘oppressor minzu’, but rather as a political force – imperialism. There should be, this concept implies, some measure of equality among minzu such that no minzu should be oppressed or exploited by these outside forces” (Thomas, pp. 133-134). Here, I use minzu jiefang as inspiration to imagine a stateless people whose shared culture, history, and ethics form the foundation of their nationhood and their right to national sovereignty, self-determination and dignity. The plight of Palestinians is the plight of a nation that has been conquered and is unjustly dominated by a Western imperialist outpost. Its struggle, including the suicide bombings in the Second Intifada and the October 7, 2023, attack, is a struggle for national liberation.
This Minzu jiefang-inspired framework encourages us to see nations not as static borders, but as living, evolving civilizations. It reminds us that belonging isn’t defined by having the correct paperwork or enclosing walls, but by participating in a shared project of history, ethics, and culture—a perspective that reframes what sovereignty can mean outside of statehood.
First, we must be clear as to why the standard Western state-based “solutions” that have been entertained for Israel and Palestine are non-starters and are doomed to fail by design. Engaging in any type of negotiations that promise a one-state or two-states as the reward at the end of successful negotiations is patently absurd. More accurately, it’s a diversion ensuring Israel’s control over the conquered Palestinian land and peoples in perpetuity—or as long as the so-called international community believes the farce that Israel is genuinely committed to peace and ending the conquest.
A one-state solution is unacceptable to Israel because, in a single state from the river to the sea, the Palestinians would outnumber Jews—approximately 7.6 million Palestinians vs. 7.2 million Jews—meaning the state would no longer be a “Jewish State” in its current ethno-state form enshrined in its constitution (2018).
A two-state solution is equally unpalatable because Israel covets the land of a potential Palestine. It seeks control over East Jerusalem which it sees as home to Judaism’s holiest sites: the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and the ancient City of David. It views the West Bank, with sites like Hebron and Shiloh, as its biblical inheritance. And as Jared Kushner brazenly revealed – this should not have come as a surprise – the Gaza Strip is seen by some opportunistic imperialist actors as “very valuable” waterfront property to be cleared of Palestinian people and developed.
A biblical justification, of course, is a flimsy basis for modern political claims. Religious texts cannot substitute for political legitimacy and international law. The Bible, while a foundational spiritual text, is not a real estate deed. Even if its ancient histories could be verified, this would not erase the rights of the Palestinian people who have lived on and belonged to that land for centuries.
The Westphalian nation-state says, “You belong if you were born within these lines on the map or have the correct paperwork.” It is exclusive, rigid, and territorial. A minzu jiefang-inspired framework offers a different vision: a nation as a civilizational project, not a fixed administrative unit. Belonging is based on participation in shared culture, history, and ethics. Political organization becomes an ongoing project of civilizational continuity, rather than a static structure defended by borders. In this view, the land itself is inseparable from the people who shape and inhabit it, much as a river and its banks form a single living system.
We see echoes of this principle in global movements granting legal personhood to rivers—from New Zealand’s Whanganui River to Colombia’s Atrato River. These initiatives recognize that humans and the natural world are interconnected. Similarly, this framework recognizes that people and their land form an inseparable whole. Our legal and ethical systems have shown agility in protecting corporate interests (“corporate personhood”) and natural entities, yet they fail to recognize the inherent rights of a stateless people whose civilization predates modern states. A minzu jiefang-inspired framework contends that these rights should be the foundation of any just negotiation and solution.
Applied to Palestine, this framework changes everything. Palestinians are a sovereign civilizational entity from the start. Statehood becomes a step within a framework that respects their culture, history, and ethics, rather than a reward after prolonged negotiations. Current talks are mostly performative, revolve around tactical bargains—e.g., hostages for ceasefires, disarmament for aid—and historically the agreements emerging from them are breached before the news has a chance to reach global media audiences. A minzu jiefang-inspired approach elevates the discussion to civilizational rights, prioritizing Palestinian self-determination, cultural continuity, and political expression. Key agendas in this diagnostically superior approach and ensuing negotiations would include the Right of Return and the Right to Remain, ensuring the people can sustain and reconstitute their national life; Cultural Sovereignty, protecting heritage, memory, and social structures and institutions; and Legitimate Representation, creating a protected political process for Palestinians to unify, select negotiators, and shape solutions. By centering civilizational identity, negotiations would focus on the long-term survival and flourishing of Palestinian society.
The current model is not broken—it works as designed. It empowers recognized states and global imperialism while facilitating systemic injustice for conquered and dominated peoples. Under its auspices, Israel can claim it is fighting a “war of self-defense” against a non-state actor it illegally occupies, while asserting there is “no partner for peace” and actively undermining Palestinian political unity. Recognizing Palestinians’ civilizational rights to sovereignty and dignity and their armed resistance as a national liberation struggle removes this excuse. The partner for peace is the people themselves, and responsibility for peace falls squarely on the occupying power and its imperialist enablers who themselves are “enabled” by the Israel Lobby.
A minzu jiefang-inspired approach is agnostic about final political arrangements—one state, two states, or a confederation. Its goal is the restoration of Palestinian sovereignty, self-determination and dignity. By centering the people’s rights, it allows creative, just solutions to emerge organically.
The land is not a fortress to conquer. It is a river—a living, flowing civilization. Peace will not come from drawing borders on the map or externally imposed “solutions” aligned with imperialist interests, but from recognizing Palestinians as a people with inherent rights and a continuous civilizational identity. The most powerful mechanism for change is this paradigm shift itself. When journalists stop framing resistance as “terrorism” and correctly contextualize it as an anti-colonial struggle, when scholars and policymakers stop debating possible “borders” and start debating “responsibilities to a civilization,” the ground beneath the occupation will crumble. Our task is to make this framework inescapable—in classrooms, in newsrooms, and in diplomatic corridors—until the world can no longer see the 100-year-old conflict and the ongoing genocide through any other lens. Only by changing the framework can we hope to move toward peace and just solutions. Recognizing Palestinians as a living, flowing civilization is not a theoretical exercise—it is a moral and practical imperative, offering a path to justice that lines on the map and externally imposed solutions have repeatedly failed to provide, by design. We should not require more evidence to see that they are, and have always been, nothing more than a disingenuous exercise.
Thomas, Saul. 2022. “Minzu.” In Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South, edited by Dilip M. Menon, 127-141. New York, NY: Routledge.
“The days of stupidity” are alive and well in the USA after the Department of the Interior cancelled a Nevada solar farm slated to become the world’s largest. The 185-square-mile, 6.2-GW Esmeralda 7 solar and battery storage installation would have powered almost two million homes, but was unceremoniously dumped according to President Donald Trump’s wishes as indicated in his typical Truth Social style. Not only is Trump’s post full of lies about energy costs, such policy is casting a dark shadow over the economic future of the USA.
In the early 1980s, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory director Roland Hulstrom calculated that a 10,000 square-mile photovoltaic (PV) solar farm could power the entire US grid. Spread across existing rooftops – factories, warehouses, parking lots, and over 100 million American homes – the impact would be marginal. Colorado School of Mines professor John Fanchi made a similar calculation in 2004 for wind power: 12.7 million 4-MW turbines spread over 50,700 1-GW farms could power the entire globe.
A 2008 Scientific American cover story, “A Grand Plan for Solar Energy,” outlined how the US could free itself from foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 using solar power: “The energy in sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption for a year.”
In a 2012 New York Times op-ed, “Solar Panels for Every Home,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted that solar panel prices had dropped 80% in five years and could generate electricity at or below grid prices in 20 states, succinctly stating “We have the technology. The economics make sense. All we need is the political will.” Today, solar power provides unmatched cheap electricity across 50 states.
So what happened? Slow to ramp up as in the short-tail of any revolution, solar is now the world’s fastest growing energy sector, providing a record 600 GW or 70% of new energy capacity across the globe in 2024. Why turn the lights off of a successful made-in-America technology first demonstrated as a 6%-efficient “solar energy battery” in 1954 at Bell Labs? By 2030, more than half of all electrical power will come from the sun.
Money is the obvious reason as in Big Oil’s stranglehold on a petroleum-run world that gobbles up over 80 million barrels per day, subsidized to the tune of trillions of dollars a year. No surprise natural gas exports permits were fast-tracked, offshore oil-drilling leases increased, and electric-vehicle tax credits axed soon after Trump’s 2024 inauguration. No surprise he constantly derides the green competition.
Presumed “creeping socialism” is another reason. If consumers can power their own homes and cars, who needs to buy oil? Home solar for all means a loss of top-down utility control as “prosumers” buy and sell to each other, borrowing electrons from neighbours as easily as a cup of sugar with savings downloaded directly via phone app.
China’s dominance is also a concern, now the number-one manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles as well the supplier of rare-earth metals needed in today’s magnet-powered motors. Included in the transition to renewables is a growing transfer of political power from West to East.
Today, energy generation costs are cheapest for onshore wind at $37/MWh followed by utility PV at $38/MWh, while nuclear power is almost four times as expensive. Coal power has become so unprofitable that a bid to buy 167 million tons of coal at under 1 cent/ton was rejected.
Integrated battery energy storage systems to reduce the “dark doldrums” (down-sun time and wind lull) are also on the rise, while “intermittency firming” is improving. Expanded microgrids, home storage, and virtual power plants are also a threat to American dominance and the entire oil-run economy. The real scam is lying about a growing green economy, raising energy prices, and discouraging investment.
Nor is solar destroying farmers. Just the opposite as solar and wind provide farmers with a guaranteed income (“double cropping” or “agrivoltaics”) in the always uncertain agricultural sector, made more uncertain by tariff-driven losses as US silos remain full of unsold produce.
Is it worry over change, NIMBYism, or something as simple as the wrath of Donald Trump after planning authorities declined to stop a wind farm near one of his loss-making Scottish golf courses? Or a modern-day Don Quixote railing against non-existent giant adversaries in a fit of anti-science madness?
Stupidity has a formidable American pedigree, from circus showman P.T. Barnum’s “There’s a sucker born every minute” to author and social critic H.L. Mencken’s “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American consumer.” George Orwell also didn’t see much intelligence in the “governing classes” as he wrote about belching chimneys, stinking slums, and organized poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier, his scathing exposé on the ugliness of industrialization in the coalfields of northern England. Orwell also warned about the folly of starting a civil war amid rising authoritarianism, tyranny, and misinformation.
As with any maturing technology, there are challenges ahead, such as improving grid resilience, interconnectivity, and security, same as in the time of the early electrical pioneers Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Samuel Insull, when less than 1% of the American population was grid-tied.
Who could imagine 130 years after the first electrons were sent 22 miles from Niagara Falls to Buffalo, a US president would try to stop the sun from shining and the wind from blowing? You might as well proclaim gravity a lie.
We should be stopping planet-destroying global warming, armed conflict, and cyber attacks, not hindering the roll-out of a proven clean, green, and sustainable energy technology. Stupid is as stupid does.
Photograph Source: Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken – CC BY-SA 4.0
In the nine years since its founding in 2016, La France Insoumise (LFI) has become the leading left formation in France, with its current parliamentary representation at 71, ahead of the traditional parties of the left, the Socialist Party and Communist Party. The personality most identified with it is Jean Luc Melenchon, who has run for president three times, the last time in 2022, when he gathered 21.9 percent of the votes, finishing third after second-placer Marine Le Pen of National Rally and Emmanuel Macron. La France Insoumise describes its orientation as democratic socialist and ecosocialist.
The following is a composite interview. When he visited Paris in July 2025, Walden Bello interviewed some of the leaders of LFI, including Nadege Abomangoli, vice president of the National Assembly; Aurelie Trouve, chairwoman of the Economic Affairs Committee of the Assembly; and members of parliament Arnaud Le Gall, Aurelien Tache, and Aurelien Saintoul. This was followed in September 2025 by an email interview with LFI leader Jean Luc Melenchon (JLM).
The Crisis of Macronism
Walden Bello: Can you give your assessment of the current political situation in France?
La France Insoumise: In terms of the strategic situation, we are at the end of Macronism. The Macronists are very divided and in their desperation, they’re allying with the far right.
Let’s begin by pointing out that last year, when the National Rally won the European Parliament elections, Macron was willing to make a deal with them. He was going to appoint a prime minister from the National Rally. That was the plan.
That did not happen. But even if it did not, the reality is that, Macronism has already absorbed much of the ideology and slogans of the far right. The Macronists are in an alliance with the far right in the current government. The Republicans, the traditional right-wing party, is already, more than ever, positioned alongside the far right. The new head of this party, a man named Bruno Retailleau, is now minister of the interior, and therefore of the police. In a meeting, he said, “Down with the veil.” As you know, this a slogan of the far right. Also, as you probably know, during the colonial war in Algeria, the French colonial community, also shouted, “Down with the veil,” targeting Muslim women. So this is something very old but at the same time very worrisome given the current situation. Islamophobia represents a very real threat insofar as it provides the ideological glue of all the right-wing forces in our country.
Popular Protests and the Left
WB: What are the key challenges facing the left at this point?
Jean Luc Melenchon : The capitalists are getting behind the far right. Do you know why? Because there is intense social mobilization against the decisions stemming from the neoliberal program. There is a pre-revolutionary atmosphere in France, by the admission of analysts who are themselves favorable to those in power.In fact, all over the world, for many years now, there have been revolutionary situations. We call these events “citizen revolutions.” In my book Now the People, I try to analyze them, including the conditions that produce them. This situation is what has worried Macron and the establishment.
In France, there was a movement of the yellow jackets. In the beginning, the traditional left did not support them. They said the yellow jackets were fascists. It was only 10 days after it began that the left, the trade unions, and the alter-globalization movement made a declaration saying we support them. What was happening was that a new line of conflict was emerging: not left versus right, but the oligarchy versus the people.
As you know there were mass protests that took place in 2005 and 2023. The character of the two protests were different. Those in 2005 took place in the suburbs of big cities. Those in 2023 were in smaller cities as well. They were very young people. Some sociologists said the 2005 and 2023 protests had the same causes, but we think the 2023 protests were different. The people participating in them were very young, and they felt very deeply what they were against, including the right of the police to kill them, the license to kill, especially young Arab men.
There was no spokesperson, but it was clear what it was against. It was a reaction to an extra-judicial execution. And the polarization was sharper in 2023, partly because of social media. There was this outpouring of anger from the right in reaction to the protests, with some people expressing that it was right for the police to kill these young Arab and Black men.
Capitalism and Racism
WB: Were the protests in 2023 linked as well to economic issues?
LFI: Yes, they were, and we pointed out that the events were caused by neoliberal policies.
These were people’s responses to neoliberalism’s impact on their concrete existence. All the other parties called them riots. We did not. The term used was very important for us. Those who are the victims of racism must also be seen as the victims of capitalism. They are the people who are also totally exploited by capitalism. So, contrary to the position of the head of the Communist Party and some in the Socialist Party, you cannot separate the fight against racism from the fight against capitalism.
We need to stress this, that racism is not just a moral issue. It is linked to economics. For instance, they say that we only have so much wealth to share, and sharing it with migrants will disadvantage our own people. So, this serves to divide people. You start with migrants, then you say the poor white people must also be excluded, and so on. So, the Macronists are trying to to normalize this division promoted by the far right. They find it desirable to frame it this way. That’s what they’ve started to do in Mayotte, to destroy the rights of migrants, and after Mayotte, they’ll bring this idea to France. So, Mayotte and other overseas territories of France are serving as laboratories. But there are also such efforts in many places, like the suburbs around Marseilles, where the National Rally, Marine Le Pen’s party, exercises some influence. They are creating many states of exception. For instance, there is now a bill, put forward by the National Rally, to put any arrested foreigner in jail for at least 200 days if he has been previously convicted and sentenced. That is a clear violation of basic rights: you cannot put anyone in jail if he has not been convicted and sentenced. Eighty-five percent of new laws in one year are sponsored or supported by the National Rally.
We’d like to add that we’re also trying to create a new anti-racism. One problem we have faced is that in the past, anti-racism was weaponized by the Socialists when they were in power to go after their enemies. So, people are now very, very suspicious of anti-racism, especially if those espousing it are leaders who are white men with political agendas.
We’re also combattng new forms of racism, like the allegation that non-white people are infiltrating society and government to get to high positions, and they’re doing it through special advantages provided by government. This is strange because in the past, their criticism was that Muslims don’t want to integrate. But now, when some non-white people get to high positions, like Comrade Nadege, who’s vice president of the National Assembly, they say it’s because of special benefits they enjoy.
WB: So, from what I can gather from what you’re saying, you don’t think other sections of the left are sympathetic with or really understand the plight of the migrants?
LFI: Yes, but this is not new for the communist leaders because 40 years ago, they already said there was a problem with immigrants. But our differences with the Communist Party go beyond just the labelling of protests as riots, but to different visions of society. It comes down to who are part of the people, and this is something that evolves with time. The Communist Party is dead because it is stuck with an obsolete view of who the ”revolutionary people” are. The working class has evolved so that Arabs and other non-white communities are now the majority in many sectors of the working class. You can see this in the hospitals, where even the majority of doctors are not white. So, it is very important to fight against racism, because if you don’t, you allow the people and the working class to be divided.
The Divided Left
WB: Shifting to a related topic, can you tell me what is the state of the left in France?
LFI: You can say that without France Insoumise there would no longer be a viable left in France. There are, of course, other parties, like the Socialist Party. But the Socialist Party does not confront the many challenges in the country. They do not fight racism, as strongly as they should. Specifically, the Socialist Party is divided. They have no agenda, they have no program. And the only question for them is to know how to win elected seats and whether they should ally with LFI or not. It is a difficult situation, but we must move forward even if we are accused of divisiveness. In terms of the strategic situation, we confront Macronism, which is very divided because it’s the end of Macronism, and there’s the far right. Of course, as in many other countries, you have the media, which is dominated by billionaires who very much favor a victory of the far right.
WB: So, when you are talking about the Socialists, are you saying they do not want an alliance with LFI?
LFI: The Socialists are divided into two groups. One group does not want an alliance with us under any circumstances. The other group does not want an alliance but would accept it in certain situations. However, they are focused on getting support from voters who support Macron in the next elections, and since they think an alliance would alienate these voters, these people don’t want an alliance with us at the moment. But they do not ask themselves whether voters would continue to vote for them in the second round of the elections. Their strategy is typical of the desire to place the people back under the authority of the petit bourgeoisie out of fear of the far right.
For us, the Socialists’ pursuit of the Macronist voters is an illusion, since the supporters of Macron are mainly conservatives and would not support socialists or social democrats, even if some of the media lump the Socialists and the Macronists in the same bloc. But given their project, the Socialists try their best to distinguish themselves from us. For instance, when it comes to the situation in Gaza, they still don’t want to use the word “genocide.” Then they say we are supporting Hamas and terrorism. What more can the far right ask for? It’s a gift to them. The established right party, the Republicans, have, in fact, asked for a parliamentary inquiry on our alleged links to terrorist groups. We are facing a true demonization. They have this label for us, calling us “Islamo-Marxist.” These people use these labels to frighten people and to divide them in the face of the crisis of neoliberalism. But for now, they are the most discredited when it comes to public opinion. Their opportunism disgusts ordinary people.
The Divided Center and the Divided Right
WB: There will be presidential elections in 2027 and general elections in 2029. Do you think the left will be able to unite to effectively contest these elections?
LFI : In other circumstances, things would be favorable for the left. The Macronists are very divided. If you look at those who voted for Macron in 2017 and those who did in 2023, you see a big difference. In 2017, his votes came mainly from older, centrist voters. In 2023, they came from younger voters who can be described not so much as centrists but as people interested in modernizing conservatism. You no longer have anyone who can unite these two groups. Macron is prohibited by law from running again. It is now clear that Macronism was a one-shot phenomenon. Most Macronists are now for allying with the far right, as we said earlier.
As for the right and far right, they are also divided. There’s Bruno Retailleau, the leader of the Republicans, the traditional conservative party. Then there’s the National Rally of Marine Le Pen. Because she has been convicted of embezzlement along with other leaders of her party, she has been banned from running for public office. Her protégé, Jordan Bardella, will be running in her stead. But Bardella is not credible, he has a low cultural level, is very young, quite lazy, and is very inexperienced compared to Retailleau, who’s served in many positions and who’s been spouting the same rhetoric for the last 40 years. Between Bardella and Retailleau, Big Capital would likely favor Retailleau.
As we said earlier, in other circumstances, the situation would be favorable to the left. We’re open to talking with the Socialists, but the Socialists are pursuing the Macronists, which, as we said earlier, is an illusion, since the Macronists would rather side with the far right. The Greens, Socialists, and Communists are talking about an electoral alliance among themselves, and the only thing that unites them is to avoid talking to France Insoumise. But given the fact that each of them is just interested in increasing their number of seats, which can only come at the expense of the others, these talks won’t get very far.
Collectivism: La France Insoumise’s Program and Vision
WB: Assuming you, Comrade Melenchon, run for president in 2027, what would be the key elements of your program?
JLM : Yes, there will be an Insoumise candidacy. We will have a candidate to carry our program “L’Avenir en commun” (The Future in Common). The program comes from society itself: associations, trade unions, collectives, scientists. There are 831 measures to build a New France, breaking with the capitalist order. These measures are constantly updated, costed, and detailed in program booklets. They propose to start from the needs of society itself, to bring forth a new people.
To break with neoliberal mistreatment and move away from productivism, we will establish the “green rule:” not to take from nature more than it is capable of regenerating by itself. We propose to protect the commons and what we call the rights of the species. The right to silence, to healthy food, to breathe clean air and to drink water that does not poison. These measures are at the heart of our program, to profoundly transform society and build harmony among human beings and with nature. They also have a concrete application to guide the economy, replacing market logics with those of ecological planning. This method will make it possible to implement major projects in housing, energy, agriculture, and industry. Thousands of jobs will be created.
“L’Avenir en commun,” our program, is also a break with the government’s action plan and the presidential monarchy. That is why we will move to the Sixth Republic, with measures allowing popular intervention such as the recall referendum for any elected official or the citizens’ initiative referendum. In recent years, our country has been marked by powerful expressions of the authoritarianism of the Fifth Republic, as was the case with the raising of the retirement age to 64, without a vote in the National Assembly and despite a historic popular mobilization in our country’s history. We will restore retirement at 60, so that everyone can regain control over their free time.
WB: Comrade Melenchon, can you describe the kind of socialism that you propose for France?
JLM : I prefer to speak of collectivism. It is not only about resolving the social question, but also about addressing the question of the general human interest and the rights of living beings, which form a systemic collective.
We observe the emergence of a new world: an urban people, organized in networks. This new France already exists in itself, its people defined by their conflict of interest with the oligarchy. The latter has appropriated the collective networks on which daily life depends. We believe this world is coming to an end, and that only two outcomes are possible: collectivism or the law of the strongest.
Take the case of climate change, which is inevitable and irreversible. How do we rebound, how do we propose collectivist solutions? The choice of individualism, of the law of the strongest, means letting thousands of people be poisoned by forever chemicals just to keep the money cycle turning. It means failing to plan to prevent mega-fires from burning everything, because the budgets for Canadair planes have been cut.
The law of the strongest is expressed when there is no longer a logic of collective progress in France. When one in two French people is obese or overweight, when infant mortality has been rising for 10 years, when one in four mothers raises her children alone. When the fortunes of billionaires have doubled since Macron became president.
Collectivism is not a utopia but a necessity. Understanding the moment means taking reality with us, making ourselves masters of the situation. The dead end of the capitalist system can be good news, an opportunity to paralyze it, to push it to its limits. Each and every one of us is responsible for the outcome we will give to this rupture.
A comprehensive analysis of UN data and scientific studies reveals that the environmental damage from recent conflicts will impact the region’s health and stability for generations.
The human cost of war is measured in lives lost and families displaced. However, a growing body of evidence from international organizations points to another, more enduring casualty: the environment. From the rubble-strewn landscape of Gaza to the fire-scorched lands of Lebanon and the industrial sites of Iran, military actions are unleashing long-term ecological disasters that poison the land, water, and air, threatening the foundation of life itself long after the fighting stops.
Gaza: An Unprecedented Environmental Collapse
In the Gaza Strip, the scale of environmental damage is so severe that experts are describing it as unprecedented.
A Toxic Tide of Rubble: The conflict has generated an estimated 50 to 61 million tons of debris, much of which contains hazardous materials like asbestos, unexploded ordnance, and human remains. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warns that clearing this rubble could take up to 14 years and poses a severe risk of contaminating soil and groundwater.
Systemic Water Contamination: The destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure has led to a catastrophic water crisis. With 85% of water facilities inoperable, over 100,000 cubic meters of raw or poorly treated sewage are being discharged into the Mediterranean Sea every day, polluting the coastline and the aquifer. This has left over 90% of Gaza’s water unfit for human consumption, creating a breeding ground for waterborne diseases.
Deliberate Destruction of Agriculture: Satellite data shows that the conflict has destroyed or damaged approximately 80% of Gaza’s tree cover, including thousands of olive trees, and over two-thirds of its cropland. This systematic destruction of farmland and orchards has not only wiped out food sovereignty but also stripped the land of its natural defenses against desertification.
A Massive Climate Footprint: The climate cost of the war is substantial. A study shared with The Guardian found that the long-term carbon footprint of the first 15 months of the conflict, including future reconstruction, could exceed 31 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent—more than the annual emissions of many individual countries.
A Regional Pattern of Environmental Damage
The environmental devastation wrought by conflict is a silent, enduring crisis that extends far beyond the headlines from Gaza. A chilling pattern of ecological degradation is emerging across the region, where military actions are triggering environmental catastrophes that will poison the land, air, and water for generations. This is not merely collateral damage; it is a form of ecocide that undermines the very foundations of life and recovery.
Lebanon: A Landscape Scorched and Poisoned: Israeli military operations have inflicted profound ecological wounds on Lebanon. The use of incendiary weapons, including documented white phosphorus munitions, has transformed southern Lebanon into a tinderbox. Satellite imagery reveals a staggering 10,800 hectares reduced to ash in 2024 alone—an area four times the size of Beirut. This isn’t just burned land; it is the deliberate incineration of prime farmland and ancient forests, crippling local food security and biodiversity. The crisis extends to the sea: a single attack on the Jiyeh power plant in July 2024 resulted in a 10,000-ton oil spill, creating a suffocating marine disaster that threatens the entire Mediterranean coastline. The land is scorched, and the sea is poisoned.
Syria: The Obliteration of Natural Heritage and the Specter of Permanent Contamination: In Syria, the environmental cost is measured in both total loss and lasting peril. The Quneitra Governorate reported the “complete destruction” of the Kodna Forest, a 40-year-old natural treasure spanning 186 hectares. The calculated environmental damages exceed $100 million, but the true loss of a restored ecosystem is incalculable. Even more alarmingly, inspectors discovered traces of anthropogenic uranium at a bombed site—a finding that points to the use of controversial munitions and raises the terrifying prospect of long-term radiological and chemical contamination, rendering the area uninhabitable for decades.
Iran: A Short War with Long-Term Climatic and Radiological Consequences: The 2025 conflict in Iran, though brief, demonstrated how quickly modern warfare can pollute the global commons. Precision strikes on industrial sites like oil refineries and a gas depot in Tehran unleashed an environmental onslaught, spewing an estimated 47,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases and nearly 579,000 kg of toxic particulates into the atmosphere—directly contributing to climate change and regional health crises. Most critically, attacks on nuclear facilities at Natanz and Fordo forced the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to issue urgent warnings about potential radiological disasters. This gambit risked a catastrophe that could have crossed international borders, turning a regional conflict into a global environmental and public health emergency.
Legal Reckoning and a Long Road to Recovery
The systematic nature of the environmental destruction has led to calls for legal accountability. Research groups and Palestinian environmental organizations have called for the Israeli government to be investigated for the Rome Statute war crime of ecocide, which prohibits “widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment“.
Recovery, however, will be a monumental task. A joint World Bank, UN, and EU assessment estimated that rebuilding Gaza would cost $53.2 billion over the next decade, with a significant portion needed for environmental recovery and restoring water and sanitation systems. As one expert starkly put it, the scale of destruction is such that Gaza’s environment may have been pushed to a point where it can no longer sustain life.
The relentless conflicts scarring the Middle East are forging a silent, intergenerational crisis of environmental collapse that will long outlive the immediate violence, with comprehensive UN data and scientific studies revealing a region being systematically poisoned. The scale of destruction in Gaza is unprecedented, generating over 50 million tons of toxic rubble and destroying water systems and 80% of the agricultural land, creating a landscape experts fear may no longer sustain life. This pattern of ecocide is mirrored region-wide: in Lebanon, incendiary weapons and a major oil spill have scorched earth and choked the coastline; in Syria, ancient forests are obliterated and traces of anthropogenic uranium hint at permanent radiological contamination; and even brief conflicts, like the strikes on Iran’s industrial and nuclear sites, have spewed toxic particulates and risked global radiological disasters. The systematic nature of this damage has prompted calls for war crimes investigations for ecocide, while the staggering $53 billion price tag for Gaza’s recovery underscores that the true, enduring cost of modern warfare is a poisoned ecosystem that undermines any foundation for future peace and stability for generations to come.
It is striking that many people feel the need to claim that Donald Trump has some coherent economic plan for the country. It’s understandable that Trump’s team likes to pretend that his random ramblings and angry acts of revenge are all part of some grand strategy, but why would anyone not on his payroll play along with this obvious absurdity?
To anyone paying attention, it should be pretty clear that Donald Trump is clueless about the economy. Just to take an obvious example to make the point: Trump has repeatedly promised to lower drug prices by 800, 900, or even 1,500 percent. As he rightly says, no one thought it was possible.
It wouldn’t be a big deal that he got confused once or twice and forgot that you can’t lower prices by more than 100 percent, unless you envision drug companies paying people to use their drugs. But Trump has done this repeatedly, over many months.
This tells us two things. First, he really doesn’t have even a basic understanding of arithmetic and percentages. That would be bad in and of itself. After all the president is sometimes directly negotiating deals and it would be bad if he agreed to something and then had to call back his negotiating partner and tell them he didn’t understand what he had agreed to.
But the other issue is even more serious. Surely people like Treasury Secretary Bessent and Kevin Hassett, Trump’s National Economic Advisor, understand percentages. But apparently, they are too scared of Trump to explain how they work. Instead, they let him go out week after week and make a fool of himself by making nonsensical promises on lowering drug prices.
This fact is crucial if we are trying to assess whether Trump has a coherent economic strategy. The point is he is obviously confused about many things when it comes to the economy. He seems to think that other countries pay tariffs and send the U.S. checks. He also seems to think that wind and solar power are very expensive sources of energy. And he seems to think that the economy was collapsing when he took office.
All of these claims are 180 degrees at odds with reality, but it is extremely unlikely that his aides would be able to correct him on these or other absurd views that Trump seems to hold. Given how out of touch Trump is with reality and the inability of his aides to correct him on anything, why would anyone think that he has a coherent economic strategy?
As many of us have pointed out, even most hardcore free traders will concede tariffs can serve a useful purpose. They can be used strategically to build up important industries. This is what Biden tried to do when he used tariffs, along with subsidies and regulatory changes, to promote domestic production of advanced computer chips, electric vehicles, batteries, and wind and solar and other forms of clean energy.
But what is the coherence in a tariff policy when some of the highest tariffs, like Trump’s 50 percent tariff on imported steel, are reserved for intermediate goods that are inputs for other manufacturing industries? How does it make sense to impose an extra 10 percentage point tariff on imports from Canada because Trump didn’t like a television ad they ran during the World Series? And India got whacked with a tariff of 50 percent on its exports because its president would not support Trump’s drive to get a Nobel Peace Prize.
Anyone trying to weave together these and other tariff decisions by Trump, along with many other economic decisions he has made since taking office, is really stretching if they think they can find anything coherent. It is bad for the country and the world that policy in the United States is being determined by a man child who has no idea what he is doing beyond stuffing his pockets, but that is the reality.
There may be a market for thoughtful pieces describing the grand Trump strategy in major intellectual outlets, but that is yet one more example of market failure. There ain’t nothing there.
President Trump is rattling his saber against Colombian President Gustavo Petro to punish him for accusing the U.S. government of murdering Venezuelan fishermen.Trump has boasted of the killings by the U.S. military but claims all the targets were drug smugglers. Trump has threatened to suspend all U.S. government handouts for the Colombian government.Trumpwarned that Petro that he “better close up” cocaine production“or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.”
Tapping his own psychiatric expertise, Trump proclaimed that Colombia has “the worst president they’ve ever had – a lunatic with serious mental problems.”
Is anyone in the Trump White House aware of the long history of U.S. failure in that part of the world? In 1989, President George H.W. Bush warned Colombian drug dealers that they were “no match for an angry America.” But Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer despite billions of dollars of U.S. government anti-drug aid to the Colombian government.
The Clinton administration made Colombia its top target in its international war on drugs. Clinton drug warriors deluged the Colombian government with U.S. tax dollars to deluge Colombia with toxic spray.The New York Times reported that U.S.-financedplanes repeatedly sprayed pesticides onto schoolchildren, making many of them ill.Colombian environmental minister Juan Mayr publicly declared in 1999 that the crop spraying program has been a failure and warned, “We can’t permanently fumigate the country.”
As I wrote in the American Spectator in 1999:“Colombia has received almost a billion dollars of anti-narcotics aid since 1990. Coca production is skyrocketing–doubling since 1996 and, according to the General Accounting Office, expected to increase another 50 percent in the next two years. Colombia now supplies roughly three-quarters of the heroin and almost all the cocaine consumed in the United States.”
The Clinton administration responded to the failure of its drug war by championing a far more destructive solution. As I noted in the Las Vegas Review Journal, Clinton officials “intensely pressured the Colombian government to allow a much more toxic chemical (tebuthiuron, known as SPIKE 20) to be dumpedacross the land, which would permit the planes to fly at much higher altitudes, Kosovo-style. Environmentalists warned that SPIKE 20 could poison ground water and permanently ruin the land for agriculture. Even as the Clinton administration decreed clean-air standards severely curtailing Americans’ exposure to chemicals that pose little or no health threat, it sought to deluge a foreign land with a toxic chemical in a way that would be forbidden in the United States.” Dow Chemical, the product’s inventor, protested strongly that SPIKE 20 was not safe for use in the Andes and surrounding areas. Didn’t matter.
Colombia at that time was wracked by a civil war – a fight between a corrupt government and corrupt leftist guerillas. The Dallas Morning News noted reports that “tens of millions of taxpayer dollars are going into covert operations across southern Colombia employing, among others, U.S. Special Forces, former Green Berets, Gulf War veterans and even a few figures from covert CIA-backed operations in Central America during the 1980’s.”
Like Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan boats, Clinton’s aid for Colombia was lawless. Congress in 1996 prohibited any U.S. foreign aid to military organizations with a penchant for atrocities. The Colombian army had a poor human rights record but almost nobody in Congress gave a damn.Democrats winked at illicit conduct by their president and Republicans didn’t care about any crimes committed in the name of eradicating drugs.
In a Baltimore Sun piece in June 2000, I observed, “The war on drugs is as unwinnable in Colombia as it is in the hills of Kentucky, where natives continue growing marijuana despite endless raids by police and the National Guard.” I whacked the Clinton administration for “bumbling into a civil war.” Colombia’s ambassador to the U.S. vehemently attacked my piece, claiming that the Clinton administration aid package was carefully targeted to “strengthen law enforcement institutions and help protect human rights.” Alas, U.S. aid was diverted to “carry out spying operations and smear campaigns against Supreme Court justices,” the Washington Post reported, crippling the nation’s judiciary.
At the same time that the Clinton administration was sacrificing the health of Colombian children in its quixotic anti-drug crusade, top U.S. antidrug officials made a mockery of the entire mission.Laurie Hiett, the wife of Colonel James Hiett, the top U.S. military commander in Colombia, exploited U.S. embassy diplomatic pouches to ship 15 pounds of heroin and cocaine to New York.She pocketed tens of thousands of dollars in narcotic profits.After she was caught and convicted, she received far more lenient treatment than most drug offenders – only five years in prison, “the same sentence a small-time dealer would get if he were caught with five grams of crack in his pocket,” I noted in Playboy.Her husband – ridiculed as the “Coke Colonel” in the New York Post – received only six months in prison for laundering drug proceeds and concealing his wife’s crimes. Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, explained the double standard: “If Colonel Hiett had been Mr. Hiett, he would have been charged with conspiracy to traffic in more than a kilogram of heroin, with a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years. He would possibly face life without parole… Mr. Hiett would, at a minimum, have been charged with aiding and abetting his wife’s money laundering, facing 20 years.”
Most drug warriors pretended either that the Hiett case had never happened or that it didn’t matter. Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey shrugged off the scandal: “What a tragedy…. There are 3.6 million chronic cocaine addicts in America and every one of them produces that kind of criminality and tragedy.”
“But when any of those 3.6 million is caught, they don’t get coddled,” as I wrote in Playboy.
Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election did not entitle him to micromanage every acre of land in this hemisphere.The U.S. drug war has dismally failed in Colombia for more than a third of a century.There is no excuse for Trump or any other U.S. government official to burn U.S. tax dollars by perpetuating Colombian pratfalls.
** An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute
+ Six months ago, 47 people, including nine kids, were abducted by ICE in Hays County, Texas. Since then, County Judge Ruben Becerra has been trying to get answers about why they were detained and where they are being held, but DHS has ignored all of his queries. Judge Becerrq told 
