Last week, the  Washington Post audaciously posted a lead editorial that warned about “A threat to First Amendment Rights.”  For the past six months, the Post has been conducting its own assault on the First Amendment, despite a daily masthead that proclaims “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”  Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner has censored editorials and even an editorial cartoon.  As a result, the cartoonist and several prominent editorial writers have resigned from the paper.  Many staffers have left as well, and several hundred thousand subscriptions have been canceled.  Conversely, during Donald Trump’s first campaign for the presidency, the Post wrote a series of six editorials outlining the “clear and present danger of Donald Trump” with no complaints from Bezos or his senior editors.

There was a similar series of events at the Los Angeles Times, whose editor—Patrick Soon-Shiong—is heavily dependent on support from the Trump administration.  Soon-Shiong proclaimed that the paper’s editorial writers were “very left” and that he wanted the paper to be more “middle of the road.”  Bezos and Soon-Shiong are heavily dependent on support from government agencies for the billions of dollars they earn in the fields of satellite technology and medical technology, respectively.  They are particularly intimidated by the pressure the Trump administration and the Federal Communications Commission are placing on such networks as CBS, ABC, NPR, and PBS.

Bezos’s truckling to Trump began in the run up to the November election, when Bezos made the eleventh-hour decision to kill a lead editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president.  Bezos’s publisher and chief executive officer, Will Lewis—one of several toadies appointed by Bezos—said that the paper was returning to its roots of having no endorsements in presidential races, but that was one of the many lies and obfuscations the Post hierarchy has used to defend its policy of censorship.  Several hundred thousand subscribers cancelled their subscriptions, and two senior columnists—Robert Kagan and Michele Norris—resigned.

In the wake of Trump’s electoral victory, Bezos immediately began his campaign to kiss the ring of the next resident of the White House, donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration festivities.  Bezos told the New York Times that Trump was a changed man, “calmer…more confident, more settled.”  Obviously, Trump’s troglodytes, like Trump himself, are capable of willful self-delusion despite all evidence to the contrary.

When the Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, lampooned Bezos’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Donald and Melania, the editor of the editorial page, David Shipley, censored it, claiming in bizarre fashion that it was “duplicative.”  Post cartoonists, such as Herblock and Tom Toles over the years were often “duplicative” of editorials and opeds without raising the hackles of management.  Shipley’s act of censorship was the signal that editorial writers, like the editorial cartoonist, were going to have problems with Jeff Bezos.

In the wake of the Telnaes affair, an important editorial writer, Jennifer Rubin, left the paper, and the media critic Erik Wemple, had a piece killed.  Next to leave was Ruth Marcus, who had been at the Post for four decades and, since the retirement of Linda Greenhouse at the Times, was the most influential writer in the mainstream media on the Supreme Court.  (Marcus has been an apologist for Israel over the years, but her legal writings have been outstanding)  The fact that the publisher killed the Marcus piece was unprecedented; the fact that he refused to meet with Marcus was pusillanimous.

Marcus’s “crime” against the Post was to criticize Bezos’s edict that the editorial pages would focus only on “personal liberties and free markets,” which is a fundamentally libertarian position.  Many of Trump’s oligarchs are, of course, libertarians, who want an end to government regulation, if not government itself.  Many of the think-tanks that support Trump, such as the Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, are essentially libertarian institutes that want to restrict government agencies.  Bezos added that any viewpoints that challenge or oppose the twin pillars of personal liberty and free markets can be “published by others.”  Bezos’s demands are a blatant condescension to the Donald, and a threat to the First Amendment above all.  As New York Times’ columnist David Brooks said, the “opinion section in the Washington Post…does not brook dissent, that’s just not journalism.”

It’s also “not journalism” to reject ads that challenge the editorial position of a particular paper.  In February, an ad from Common Cause and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had a signed contract with the Post at the cost of $115,000, was rejected simply because it asked “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”  Obviously, Bezos’s front-row seat at Trump’s inauguration meant that the pandering to the president would involve every aspect of the publication of the Post.

The conventional wisdom framed the Post over the years as a liberal newspaper, which ignored the conservative luminaries who continue to dominate the editorial pages.  Twenty years ago, it was the conservative work of George Will, the late Michael Gerson, and the late Charles Krauthammer.  Today, it is the conservative writings of George Will, Max Boot, Marc Thiess, and David Ignatius.  Thiess and Ignatius are the mainstream media’s leading apologists for Trump and the Central Intelligence Agency and its covert action, respectively.  Even during the halcyon days of Woodward and Bernstein in the 1970s as well as Ben Bradlee in the 1980s, the Post had a conservative streak that catered to the president, whether Republican or Democratic.

The Post’s support for the lies of the Bush administration to use force against Iraq was particularly appalling with every one of the paper’s editorial and oped writers supporting the war and buying into the disinformation regarding Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.  As recently as March 15th, Marc Thiess was given nearly an entire page to defend the Trump administration’s mugging of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zalensky in the Oval Office last month and Trump’s hugging of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The conservative views of the Post are no threat to our civil society.  The same cannot be said of the censorship at the Post and the pandering to the most dangerous president in the history of the United States.

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There are a multitude of reasons why Donald Trump and his supporters are waging war against colleges and universities.  But among the reasons is a simple one–historically conservative reactionary regimes hate intellectuals.

Trump and his supporters hate higher education for obvious reasons.   Those with college degrees are not his supporters and voted against him in 2024.    Colleges are full of students and professors who vote for Democrats and they have visibly protested  against his policies or  embraced issues such as opposition to Israel’s war against the Palestinians,  support for transgender rights, or DEI in general.  One could argue that Trump’s populism is rooted in what historian Richard Hofstadter labeled “anti-intellectualism” in American life.  Americans generally hate smart people, labeling them as Alabama Governor did as “pointy-headed  intellectuals,” or  in the words of Vice-President Spiro Agnew who lumped them together with the media to call them “An effete core of impudent snobs.”

But there is something here and it is the traditional hatred of intellectuals by  reactionary regimes.  There is a story regarding the trial of Italian Marxist  intellectual  Antonio Gramsci who was part of the opposition party in the parliament to Benito Mussolini and the fascists.  Gramsci was  arrested and at his trial  the prosecution declared: “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.”  Gramsci’s crime was providing the intellectual ideas to challenge the ruling power.  Despite his punishment. His Prison Notebooks were secretly written and disseminated.

Gramsci’s thesis was that the battle against fascism was in part an ideological fight for the hearts and minds of the people.  Battles for power may take place in parliament or in the streets but they are also fought in mass pop culture  as well as in universities and colleges to influence and counter  the propaganda of the ruling class and government.  Controlling intellectuals and what they think and say is part of how the fascists, the nazis, and other authoritarian and reactionary regimes maintain power.

Education and learning are about critical thinking.  It is about subjecting power and dogma to truth.  It is about questioning, challenging, and imagining alternative  realities or unmasking facades.  It  is as philosopher Immanuel Kant declared:  “Dare to Know.”  College is where one learns to reject authority for the sake of authority, to ask “Why not?” in response to “Why?”  It is to reject what is accepted as a matter of fact and suggest that what is traditionally accepted as truth may not be so.  If done right, a liberal arts education is inherently subversive and in the spirit of John Dewey, that task is not to produce the next generation  of  docile uneducated workers, but instead to foster the next generation of democratic citizens.  By its very nature, higher education should produce the antithesis of political passivity and blind obedience.

This is why every  authoritarian  regime seeks to control what people think.  It does that in its  school curriculum and via book bans.  But it also does that in terms of who is hired to teach and what they teach.  It is a battle over indoctrination.  Universities and intellectuals, for Gramsci, lead the charge to counter this battle for hearts and minds.  It should come as no surprise why Trump and many Republicans before him have hated higher education.  Arguing that there are more than two sexes, that gender roles are socially constructed, that perhaps capitalism exploits workers or that  the rich do  not deserve their fortunes, is not what  they want to hear.  Education is not to serve the interests of democracy, self-discovery, or personal enrichment, it is to teach  subservience to the status quo.

Trump’s efforts to eliminate the Department of Education and crackdown on higher education may be intensely personal and vindictive.  But it is also part of a predictable agenda to control and eliminate the intellectual seeds of opposition.

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Check out Ralph Nader on the most recent episode of CounterPunch Radio.

There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.

Start with the once-powerful Bush family dynasty. They despise Trump as he does them. Rich and comfortable George W. Bush is very proud of his Administration’s funding of AIDS medicines saving lives in Africa and elsewhere. Trump, driven by vengeance and megalomania, moved immediately to dismantle this program. Immediate harm commenced to millions of victims in Africa and elsewhere who are reliant on this U.S. assistance (including programs to lessen the health toll on people afflicted by tuberculosis and malaria).

Not a peep from George W. Bush, preoccupied with his landscape painting and perhaps occasional pangs of guilt from his butchery in Iraq. His signal program is going down in flames and he keeps his mouth shut, as he has largely done since the upstart loudmouth Trump ended the Bush family’s power over the Republican Party.

Then there are the Clintons and Obama. They are very rich, and have no political aspirations. Yet, though horrified by what they see Trump doing to the government and its domestic social safety net services they once ruled, mum’s the word.

What are these politicians afraid of as they watch the overthrow of our government and the oncoming police state? Trump, after all, was not elected to become a dictator—declaring war on the American people with his firings and smashing of critical “people’s programs” that benefit liberals and conservatives, red state and blue state residents alike.

Do they fear being discomforted by Trump/Musk unleashing hate and threats against them, and getting tarred by Trump’s tirades and violent incitations? No excuses. Regard for our country must take precedence to help galvanize their own constituencies to resist tyranny and fight for Democracy.

What about Kamala Harris — the hapless loser to Trump in November’s presidential election? She must think she has something to say on behalf of the 75 million people who voted for her or against Trump. Silence! She is perfect bait for Trump’s intimidation tactics. She is afraid to tangle with Trump despite his declining polls, rising inflation, the falling stock market and anti-people budget slashing which is harming her supporters and Trump voters’ economic wellbeing, health and safety.

This phenomenon of going dark is widespread. Regulators and prosecutors who were either fired or quit in advance have not risen to defend their own agencies and departments, if only to elevate the morale of those civil servants remaining behind and under siege.

Why aren’t we hearing from Gary Gensler, former head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), now being dismantled, especially since the SEC is dropping his cases against alleged cryptocurrency crooks?

Why aren’t we hearing much more (she wrote one op-ed) from Samantha Power, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under Biden, whose life-saving agency is literally being illegally closed down, but for pending court challenges?

Why aren’t we hearing from Michael Regan, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Biden about saboteur Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of EPA, who is now giving green lights to lethal polluters and other environmental destructions?

These and many other former government officials all have their own circles – in some cases, millions of people – who need to hear from them.

They can take some courage of the seven former I.R.S. Commissioners — from Republican and Democratic Administrations — who condemned slicing the I.R.S staff in half and aiding and abetting big time tax evasion by the undertaxed super-rich and giant corporations. I am told that they would be eager to testify, should the Democrats in Congress have the energy to hold unofficial hearings as ranking members of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees.

Banding together is one way of reducing the fear factor. After Trump purged the career military at the Pentagon to put his own “yes men” at the top, five former Secretaries of Defense, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, sent a letter to Congress denouncing Trump’s firing of senior military officers and requesting “immediate” House and Senate hearings to “assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.” Not a chance by the GOP majority there. But they could ask the Democrats to hold UNOFFICIAL HEARINGS as ranking members of the Armed Services Committees!

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker can be one of the prime witnesses at these hearings – he has no fear of speaking his mind against the Trumpsters.

On March 6, 2025, the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, put her rare byline on an urgent report titled, “‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.”

She writes: “The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents [one exception is Wesleyan University President Michael Roth] fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.”

To be sure, government employees and other unions are speaking out and suing in federal court. So are national citizen groups like Public Citizen and the Center for Constitutional Rights, though hampered in alerting large audiences by newspapers like the Times rarely reporting their initiatives.

Yes, Ms. Bumiller, pay attention to that aspect of your responsibility. Moreover, the Times’ editorial page (op-ed and editorials) are not adequately reflecting the urgency of her reporting. Nor are her reporters covering the informed outspokenness and actions of civic organizations.

Don’t self-censoring people know that they are helping the Trumpian dread, threat and fear machine get worse? Study Germany and Italy in the nineteen thirties.

The Trump/Musk lawless, cruel, arrogant, dictatorial regime is in our White House. Their police state infrastructure is in place. Silence is complicity!

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Over the course of the last sixteen months, the public sphere has witnessed an assault on rights to free expression and freedom of assembly unlike anything since the Communist witch hunts and Lavender Scare of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.  Not only are government officials at all levels participating in this suppression of basic rights associated with the First Amendment.  University Administrators are imposing censorship directives against students and faculty who have been speaking out against a genocidal onslaught perpetrated by the State of Israel against the Palestinians of Gaza that has been enabled and supported by the U.S. Government.  The source of this military carnage, and the politics of censorship being woven around this assault by Government and university officials, derives from the pervasive influence of Israel and its ideology of Zionism on American politics and cultural life.

What is less understood in this appalling campaign is how Israeli influence, which was formerly restricted to support for the Jewish State in the sphere of American foreign policy, is now recasting domestic politics in the U.S., primarily around First Amendment Rights and the right to assembly.  Paradoxically, where Zionist influence is remaking U.S. domestic politics most profoundly is on American University campuses.  The complicity of University Administrators in this project of censorship is more than disturbing.  These Officials have turned what are supposed to be spaces for the free and open exchange of ideas into surveilled and policed camps of fear and paranoia.  How did this occur?

Since 1967, the U.S. has aligned its foreign policy with that of Israel and its primary goal of suppressing Palestinian rights by means of a brutal apartheid regime and an occupation army.  At that time, what the U.S. saw in Israel was a partner in a common cause linked to the Cold War.  For the U.S., Israel represented a powerful regional proxy capable not only of thwarting Palestinian self-determination, but disciplining those Arab regimes in the region that were aligned with the Soviet Union and supportive of the Palestinian struggle.^[1]  From 1967 to present day, the U.S. has supported its ally with a vast arsenal of military hardware making it the single largest recipient of American military assistance and one the most powerful militaries in the world.  At the same time, the State of Israel helped create a vast apparatus of political support in the U.S. for the Jewish State, anchored by the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

For decades, this lobbying network, which casts its influence over all levels of American life, has successfully bribed and bought almost every single politician in the U.S. Congress and the Executive Branch to do Israel’s bidding.  The result is that there has been virtually no debate in the chambers of the American Government about Israel and its policies, despite the distasteful brutality of its decades-long rule over the Palestinians that the International Court of Justice has declared to be an illegal military occupation.

During the last 16 months, the U.S. single handedly ensured that Israel’s incessant bombardment of Gaza would continue without interruption by sending it weekly shipments of armaments that Israel could in no way produce on its own.  All this ordinance was exported illegally to Israel in violation of America’s own laws about the use of such weaponry with the help of lies about the matter by Antony Blinken.  While all of this is truly sordid, a new element has come into the picture that has played an integral role in what is now playing out on college campuses.

On April 24^th of last year, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu broadcast a speech that was recorded in English specifically for an American audience.^[2]  In it, he assailed the protests on U.S. college campuses against the genocidal assault of his military, stating that “antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities.”  In his tirade, Netanyahu also emphasized the one card that Israel plays whenever it is criticized for its human rights abuses and violations of international law.  Netanyahu likened the protests on campuses to Nazi pogroms in German Universities in the 1930s while labelling protestors as antisemitic bigots and demanded that University officials punish these protestors.  “It has to be stopped,” he intoned.

In this way, the state of Israel, with its perch as a dominant influence in U.S. foreign policy, was now demanding an equally influential voice in American domestic politics involving rights to free expression and rights of assembly.  Although aimed at University officials, Netanyahu’s comments, were also a signal to the various branches of the Israel Lobby to target those university institutions that seemingly failed to stem what he charged were the antisemitic mobs on college campuses.

Some universities such as Columbia in New York, had already heeded the call to defend Israel at all costs.  In November 2023, five months before students even set up a protest encampment at the University, the Administration at Columbia preemptively banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace.  On April 17, 2024, seven months into Israel’s murderous genocide, protestors at Columbia established the Encampment that would inspire a national and even global protest movement.  Less than one week later, dozens of encampments emerged around the country.^[3]  It was at this moment that Netanyahu made his demands to University Administrators with his overt reference to antisemitism and his unmistakable directive to shut down the encampments and discipline those students and faculty involved in these antisemitic Nazi pogroms.  The message certainly reached Israel’s chief genocide enabler, Joseph Biden.  On May 2024, Biden weighed in on the Encampment protests saying “order must prevail” and went on to echo the same kind of rhetoric about antisemitism as his Israeli counterpart.  “There should be no place in any campus, no place in America, for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students” he instructed his American audience. ^[4] One by one, University campuses were violently cleared of these protests in May, 2024 soon after the speeches of Netanyahu and Biden – including my own campus of UCSD where the Chancellor called in 3 police forces on May 6^th to shut down the Encampment and arrest protestors.

What enabled University Administrators to justify these crackdowns while defending their actions was the effort of a consortium of 31 countries known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) to recast the historical definition of antisemitism.   In 2016, the IHRA crafted a definition of antisemitism with seven separate clarifications of its meaning that dealt specifically with Israel.  Numerous organizations spearheaded by Human Rights Watch criticized this definition because it essentially equates criticism of a State (Israel) with the way antisemitism has traditionally been understood which is animus toward Jews and the Jewish people.^[5]

In the U.S., federal agencies now use the IHRA definition of antisemitism to assess compliance with Title VI of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act against discrimination.  What this means for universities is that they can be held accountable for failing to correct violations of Title VI that prohibits discrimination, in this case discrimination against Jews.  The problem is that with the IHRA definition, the meaning of antisemitism has been extended to include criticism of the State of Israel and its policies thereby making an exception of Israel as being above critique.

Administrators thus justified their abrogation of free speech and rights to assembly by decrying Encampment protests as violations of Title VI that protects minority groups from discrimination but in this case, the protection was reserved not for Jews but for Israel.  In this way, University Administrators turned a venerable Civil Rights Era law on its head.  They claimed that the protests against a State committing genocide in Gaza with American support, were bigoted, antisemitic acts, and that campuses had become unsafe for Jewish students and Jewish faculty.  This fictional discourse of antisemitic bigotry against Jews has spread throughout the community of University Administrators and has assumed the form of newly designed restrictions on speech and protest accompanied by firings, suspensions, and the establishment on campuses of a climate of surveillance and fear.

         This massive campaign on college campuses against freedom of expression and rights to assembly has now come into contact with an equally ominous force – the anti-immigrant assault now underway by the current Administration.  This convergence of anti-immigrant and anti-Palestinian vitriol has evolved swiftly with recent events.

Last week, in a bizarre paradox, the U.S. Government announced that it was withholding $400 million from Columbia University for its supposedly hostile antisemitic climate toward Jewish students and faculty.  Despite the University’s brutal crackdown on protestors against the Israeli genocide against the people of Gaza, and despite Columbia’s ongoing crackdown on anti-Israel protest of any kind, such censorship of protest against Israel was apparently not good enough for the Administration and the Zionist networks of lobbyists and donors who dictate policy to both government and universities. ^[6]

One week ago, ICE agents apprehended one of these Columbia protestors, Mahmoud Khalil in what is reminiscent of the illegal renditions under George W. Bush’s war on terror and spirited him to some unnamed prison location in Louisiana.   Columbia officials offered no comment on its own involvement in this appalling violation of the constitutional rights of one of its own students.  Trump himself has weighed in on this shameful apprehension with a boastful missive on his Truth Social page in which he gloats: “Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”  Indeed, this is no idle threat.

Commensurate with the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil, the Department of Education issued a list of 60 University campuses suspected of harboring antisemitic activity.  “Too many universities have tolerated widespread antisemitic harassment and the illegal encampments that paralyzed campus life last year, driving Jewish life and religious expression underground,” said Craig Trainor, Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights for the Department of Education.  Trainor used the occasion to accuse the Biden Administration of “doing little to hold those institutions accountable.”  The truth of the matter, however, is vastly different.  It is the Biden Administration, following the lead of Netanyahu and the State of Israel, that essentially rolled out the red carpet for precisely this kind of lawless suppression of free speech and freedom of assembly to take place. ^[7]

As one of the Universities targeted by the Administration with being a repository of anti-Jewish hate, and as a campus located in San Diego on the border at one of the most critical immigration flashpoints, my own campus of UCSD now finds itself in a perilous predicament.  Students at UCSD established a large and spirited Encampment near the Main Library of the University.  This Encampment was brutally attacked by three different police units on May 6, 2024 and was one of the most noteworthy where both students and faculty were arrested.^[8]

At the same time, with the ongoing threats of deporting immigrants, alongside the boastful swagger of Donald Trump on the ICE abduction of Mahmoud Khalil from Columbia, UCSD is poised at the epicenter of a disturbing convergence of anti-Palestinian and anti-immigrant vitriol.  With its credentials as an Encampment against Israeli genocide and with a strategic location on the Mexican border, my campus may very well witness visits from ICE agents targeting not just DACA students and the like, but those who have protested Israel’s genocide in Gaza.  Indeed, University Administrators throughout the country, including at UCSD, have played a duplicitous role in the calamity now unfolding on campuses with the ICE arrest of this student at Columbia by shamefully discarding the idea of the university as a space of open discussion and debate about issues of the day.  What is to be Done?

It may seem counterintuitive, but the ongoing crackdown on pro-Palestinian protest and the chilling campaign against freedom of speech and assembly, alongside what is now an intensified assault against immigrant rights, is creating a new set of imperatives for protest.  It may very well be time once again to test the water with protests directed both at the protection of immigrant rights, against Israeli genocide, and against the curtailment of our basic rights of free expression and assembly.  The situation at Columbia with the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, and the likelihood of more of these assaults on our rights makes such protest more critical than ever.

Notes.

^[1]  https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/15/343218/

^[2]  https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-likens-us-campus-encampments-by-antisemitic-mobs-to-1930s-nazi-germany/

^[3]  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68906215

^[4]  Steve Holland, “Biden Breaks Silence on College Protest over Gaza Conflict, Reuters,” (May 2, 2024); https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-breaks-silence-college-protests-over-gaza-conflict-2024-05-02/

^[5]  https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/04/04/human-rights-and-other-civil-society-groups-urge-united-nations-respect-human

^[6]  https://theintercept.com/2025/03/08/columbia-trump-funding-gaza-israel/

^[7] Noura Erakat, “The Boomerang Comes Back:  How the U.S.-backed War on Palestine is Expanding Authoritarianism at Home,” Boston Review (February 5, 2025);  https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-boomerang-comes-back/

^[8]  https://www.axios.com/2024/04/27/palestinian-college-protest-arrest-encampment

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He who laughs
Just hasn’t yet received
The terrible news.

– Bertolt Brecht

Terror and anticipation begin the moment iftar ends. That is when the mujahideen knock on doors and search homes. Calls to the General Security prove useless; the response is shocking: “We cannot do anything about them.”

Bullets pierce windows, shattering glass, as threatening voices echo at building entrances. A Kalashnikov barrel searches for a victim.

Wael, an Alawite, moved his child to a Sunni family’s home on another floor to keep him safe. That same night, five armed, bearded men stormed the home of Hussein and Malika, asking if there were any young men inside before ordering the two to leave. Terrified and unable to process the fact that their lives had been spared, Hussein and Malika hurried to their neighbor’s apartment on the second floor. The militants seized their sea-view home and took up residence there.

Ahmed trembled as he stared at his children, his words choked with fear. He ended the call with me, saying they had reached the entrance of his building and that he could no longer continue speaking. Later, he reassured me in a text message that they had not entered.

In the Al-Amara neighborhood, Reem clutched her two daughters, watching the door leading to the black tunnel of death. She said, “I sing to them as I wait. I repeat the same songs over and over.” She choked on her tears and fell silent. She had nothing more to say. Her tear-filled silence spoke louder than the media screens shamelessly spreading lies.

Many individuals have disappeared, their fates unknown. The bleeding corpses in the streets tell stories that may never reach readers or listeners, drowned in a sea of fabricated media narratives designed to mislead public opinion.

Khalil, an intellectual, aimed to send a message about famous Arab TV channels. He explained, “The killers control the narrative, and shaping public discourse. By dominating the screens, they influence the audience, using media coverage to portray their crimes as battles against the regime’s remnants.”

 Video clips surfaced showing Jableh city as a deserted wasteland, just as a foreign jihadist had boasted on social media about his role in turning it into a desert. In another video, he is seen chasing an elderly man with a Kalashnikov, gunning him down while riding a motorcycle like a hunter toying with his prey.

Ali, a high school student, believed he was safe in his village. Walking near his home with a friend, he was caught in a hail of bullets fired from a passing vehicle in a mujahideen convoy. Merhej, on the other hand, was persuaded by his wife to flee Jableh to her family’s home in Hmeimim village. But the killers were waiting there too. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have perished, though documentation is still incomplete, and the final death toll remains uncertain.

Samia wept over the phone: ‘No food, no water, and we can’t leave or even think about opening the door.” She sat in complete darkness with her two sons, one a university student, the other with special needs but fully aware of the fear on his mother’s and brother’s faces. The regime had executed her husband, though the details remained unclear. “Every day is worse than the one before. We go to sleep not knowing if we’ll wake up, and wake up not knowing if we’ll make it through the day, as the Arab classical poet Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri once said. Do you remember when they destroyed his statue in his birthplace, under the pretext that it was an idol? The same people are here to kill us.”

Nearby, Wael heard his female neighbor’s screams as her husband and two sons were executed before her eyes. Everyone heard, but no one could help. No one could do anything.

In a desperate attempt to survive, Ayman, a lawyer, called his Sunni friend: “Come take me to your home.” Ayman sought refuge in a Sunni household, just as Hussein, the agricultural engineer, and Malika, the schoolteacher, took shelter in their Sunni neighbor’s apartment upstairs. Outside, Syrian and foreign jihadists roamed the streets, hunting Alawites, while Alawite and Sunni Syrians came together in a rare display of human solidarity.

Ahmed, his voice weak and uncertain, said, “I now understand the looming presence of death in war. I understand how it comes through shelling, through the sound of mortars, through explosive barrels, or exploding landmines. I see how everything that happened in the north and northeast fueled this killing machine here. We should have been braver in showing solidarity with the Syrians who were being killed since the beginning of the last decade, but we were afraid. We failed to grasp the power of human solidarity with those who were pushed toward extremism. Yet, slaughtering civilians like this is not a solution, it cannot be justified as a retaliation, because the victims are not fighters, or remnants of the old regime as they claim. It is ethnic cleansing.”

Muhsin came to my mind. Fourteen years ago, I attended his funeral in to express my condolences to his parents. He had been doing his military service in Raqqa. As a university graduate, he was supposed to stay in the army for two years, but with the emergency laws in place, there was no promise of being released. In Raqqa, he disappeared without leaving any trace behind. It turned out that ISIS had kidnapped him. His parents waited in vain for any news, until one day someone called to tell them he was dead. His mother, furious, said the regime had never cared to search for her son. “Nobody cared,” she said. “He wasn’t connected, and he didn’t have money.”

Two years later, he miraculously reappeared. When the terrorists had a gun barrel pressed to his head, he found the courage to ask, “How can you kill someone who has memorized the Quran by heart?” The emir ordered them to spare him and had someone bring the Quran to test him, verse by verse. He succeeded, and they let him live.

“Now, people with the same mentality are besieging our homes,” he said, with the same courage he had once shown. “Let’s see what God has written for us. I hope their God will not be my judge; He promised me hell.”

Marwan, overcome with anger, suffered sleepless nights in Angola, constantly checking his phone for updates on his wife, two daughters, and old parents. He directed his fury at Bashar al-Assad, holding him primarily responsible for the carnage. “They are making us pay for crimes we did not commit. We were never the core supporters for the regime, as the opposition factions claim. The true backers of the regime were Iran, Russia, the West, and oil-rich Arab states. They funded and supported al-Assad’s military dictatorship. Even former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright endorsed Bashar al-Assad’s inheritance of his father’s position. We were just ordinary people looking for work. We failed to realize that we were part of the oppressive machine that served the Assads. I understand that now. Existential shocks deepen awareness.” He paused, then, with bitterness, added, “But look at what they are doing! They are killing innocent, powerless people, while the real criminals were spared by the deal that changed the country’s course. Those who committed crimes either settled their status or fled the country to Russia, while the poor and innocent are the ones paying the price.”

Aziz, whose poet friend and his two children were killed before their mother’s eyes, said the murderers are ideologically programmed to commit their crimes. “They see the other as an infidel, a heretic, stripped of any human worth. True, we deserve blame for our lack of solidarity with other Syrians and our failure to speak out. But we were just as afraid of the security apparatus as anyone else, and we never condoned the killing of Syrians. Maybe we erred by not making our voices louder, but many of us stood by our principles with courage and honor. Syrians chanted at the start of the revolution: ‘He who kills his people is a traitor.’ And that is exactly what is happening now. The killers believe they are eliminating infidels and criminals, but in reality, they are slaughtering their own people. I condemn the killing of the General Security’s personnel in the ambush. However, the killers are armed gangs who do not represent us, and we are not responsible for their crimes.”

Ghasan refused to surrender to fear. He had seen this coming. “The regime’s practices for decades inevitably led to this bloodshed. But the real problem lies in culture. Islam in Syria must be reformed and charged with an entirely different cultural vision, where faith remains a personal matter between individuals and their God. The flaw is not only in the Quran but also in what the Algerian scholar and thinker Mohammed Arkoun calls the second text (the interpretations of the Quran that have fueled extremist thought). We need new critical thought to dismantle this deep-rooted culture that turns minds into weapons of extremism. If this does not happen, this massacre will repeat itself.”

Ghasan was not afraid. He believed in the resilience of the Syrian people. “There is a power outage, the water is cut off, and we cannot buy necessities. The only thing that flows uninterrupted is the fear of indiscriminate slaughter, the fear of being killed like an insect, stripped of humanity. The executioner who may enter soon does not know me, does not care about my thoughts, will not even try to know me. To him, I am an infidel, undeserving of life. His mind is fed with narratives that make me worth nothing more than a bullet.”

I could not reach many I wanted to check on. Darkness prevailed, cold gripped the air, and the specter of fear filled the streets, where death squads prowled, committing genocide, looting, and burning homes across the Syrian coast and its countryside.

However, I managed to get in touch with Samar who cried over the phone, saying, “I am not afraid of death, but of this look directed at me, as if I lack a human identity, the look that strips me of my humanity. I have been dehumanized. I have been given an identity that is not mine. I have been burdened with the sins of others. Soon, the fast will end. Our home might be next.”

She continued, “The death squads belong to forces that became official after the dissolution and unification of factions under the Ministry of Defense. At first, we heard that these forces had come to support the General Security’s forces, which had been attacked by remnants of the regime. However, the government-affiliated forces carried out a ‘jihadist raid’ aligned with the traditions of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. They stormed the homes of unarmed civilians, executing children, women, the elderly, and young men in cold blood without even trying to hide it. They filmed the killings with their mobile phones and posted videos on social media boasting of killing the infidels, leaving the bodies scattered in the streets or inside homes, while shouting phrases that stripped the victims of their humanity and further dehumanized them. They vowed to turn cities and towns into deserts. The death squads continue their killing operations under the pretext of fighting the remnants of the regime, while the government’s vague statements aimed to portray the massacres in the coastal areas as retaliation for crimes committed by the remnants of the former regime. This justifies the crimes and encourages more of them. There has been no attempt to stop the killing or force the criminals to withdraw from the cities and the countryside, where genocide is taking place as if under a legal cover.”

I was unable to reach Tareq directly, but he wrote to me, saying that criminals’ patrols are roaming the streets of Jableh, Latakia, Baniyas, Tartous, and the countryside of Masyaf. The zealots storm houses after breaking their fast. Fear engulfs the residents after iftar, which has turned into an appointment with Azrael (the Angel of Death in Islam). After executions, money, jewelry, and cars are looted because the jihadists consider them as booties; any vehicle that cannot be driven or transported is set on fire. Some homes have been occupied and turned into headquarters, such as what happened in the Teachers’ Housing Units in the Mediterranean coastal city of Jableh.

Tareq said that the killings are still ongoing, with people falling dead in the Rumeila neighborhood and other villages, and no serious effort has been made to stop the crimes.

After many desperate attempts, I finally reached Ayham, my old friend. “I escaped death by a hair’s breadth. The emir spared me. They broke into the house, demanded money, electronics, and everything of value. Just as they were about to shoot me, the emir signaled them to stop, saying he wanted to interrogate me. I told him I was ready to embrace their version of religion, to be guided to the right path, and to become a Sunni. I used my extensive knowledge of Islam as a lifeline, a lottery ticket that saved my life and it worked. I escaped, but all my close friends were killed. I am now a Sunni; my change of faith was the only thing that spared my life.”

I managed to reach my old friend Maisa. She was in disbelief over what had happened to their house after the death squads left. Everything of value was stolen, including frozen food, olives, olive oil, nuts, and chinaware. What shocked her the most was that her wedding album had been emptied of all the photographs, their torn pieces scattered on the floor alongside the broken remnants of some paintings.

“You know that Alawi women don’t wear hijab in the coastal region. At my wedding, all of my female friends wore short dresses, some with collars that revealed a bit of skin. But for the fundamentalist intruders, women must wear the veil and live like slaves. Now my memories are erased. They even tore up the photos of me as a baby and a child. They executed me in photographs, leaving no trace of my past life. They didn’t respect the sanctity of personal belongings that give value to our lives. I feel like a stranger in this country now. I no longer belong here. I cannot live with this kind of religious mentality.”

The former communist and poet Anwar, who left Damascus for the coastal area after work opportunities dried up in the capital, told me about hunger, thirst, halted salaries, layoffs, and the growing anger among people. He said the “death squads were sent to silence everyone”. He added that “Syrian officials’ statements in the first and second days of the mass killings showed a clear refusal to condemn the systematic genocide, treating it not as an isolated crime but as a justifiable reaction, an atrocity contextualized in a way that gives it legitimacy. Had the perpetrators been civilians seeking revenge, it might have been understandable. But the fact that these mass killings are being committed by official government forces under the current Ministry of Defense means that the government’s refusal to stop the massacres is effectively a green light for them to continue. The proof is that even as I speak with you, the killing continues in some areas. When the Assad regime fell, we looked to the people who came from the north – who had been portrayed as barbarians by the regime’s propaganda- as kind of solution. But now, after the genocide, it would have been better if they had never come, because, contrary to what Cavafy said in his famous poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”, they will never be a kind of solution.

This article is based on WhatsApp calls and interviews with individuals living in Syria’s coastal region, where the genocide took place, and their lives were threatened. One of them miraculously escaped death.

Osama Esber is a Syrian poet, photographer, and translator currently based in California. He serves as an editor for Salon Syria and the Arabic section of Jadaliyya, as well as an editor for Status audio magazine. His poetry collections include Screens of History (1994), The Accord of Waves (1995), Repeated Sunrise over Exile (2004), and Where He Doesn’t Live (2006). He has also published short story collections such as The Autobiography of Diamonds (1996), Coffee of the Dead (2000), and Rhythms of a Different Time (forthcoming). As a translator, he has rendered into Arabic the works of renowned authors including Salman Rushdie, Raymond Carver, Michael Ondaatje, Bertrand Russell, Toni Morrison, and Noam Chomsky, among others.

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Having declared a national emergency on the first day of his administration, the newly sworn-in American president Donald Trump announced plans to implement tariffs on Canadian goods, countering his own reworked NAFTA/USMCA reciprocal free trade agreement from five years earlier. After weeks of insulting remarks, annexation jokes, and social-media frothing, a 25% tariff came into effect on March 5, which lasted a day before being threatened again for April 2 in another disruptive flip flop, roiling stock markets and setting off a tit-for-tat economic war between two previously friendly nations. The “world’s longest undefended border” just got a whole lot chillier. As the saying goes, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

Citing an imbalance in trade, the United States added fentanyl and illegal immigrants to the mix to justify the national emergency … from Canada. Good fences make good neighbo(u)rs, but the strategy doesn’t wash as with most Trumpian logic. In 2024, the US had a global trade deficit of over $1 trillion, $60 billion with Canada. Excluding subsidized petroleum products, which helps keep American gas prices low, the exchange in goods is almost equal, while the US runs a surplus in services. The amount of drugs and illegals entering the United States from Canada is also minimal. Are these the acts of a rational player or a smokescreen for more uncertainty and a new kind of trampling on the rights and dreams of others?

Whatever the motivation, the economic ramifications of impeded trade between two highly integrated economies are potentially devastating, costing millions of jobs in both countries, especially in the carmaking industry where hundreds of different parts can transit the border many times before a finished vehicle rolls off the factory floor. The cultural, social, and political ramifications are incalculable with many Canadians venting their anger by cancelling trips to the States, booing the American national anthem at sporting events, and enacting “Buy Canadian” or “Anything but American” campaigns. The maker of Jack Daniel’s noted that removing American liquor from Canadian stores is “worse than a tariff.” Echoing the feelings of many anxious compatriots, a former Canadian ambassador to the US stated that relations “may never be the same.”

As a Canadian, I admit to harbouring some anti-American sentiment that comes from growing up next to a giant. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau famously declared that living next to the United States is “like sleeping with an elephant.” A popular saying is “When the US sneezes, Canada catches a cold.” But this is different. Our best friend older brother wants to own us, or at least says he does. Some call it a negotiating tactic. Oh yeah, “your mother wears army boots.” WTF? Is this the level of American diplomacy?

I also admit having grown up admiring the US, both learned and experienced in Canada and abroad. I regularly watched American TV shows – there were 3 Buffalo stations in the Toronto area – puzzling over the subtle differences in our worlds. Hockey teams I played on billeted each other as we played home-and-away games versus teams from Detroit. Many of my heroes are American (the list is very long). But when an American president stakes claim to Canada as his own and openly taunts the prime minister as the governor of the 51st state, it’s no longer geopolitical gamesmanship. American elephantism/exceptionalism has run wild. The US is now as dangerous to Canadians as in the days of cross-border raids during the War of Independence, the 1814 burning of the White House, or “54-40 or fight.”

Canadians get it, probably more than many Americans think. You feel you’ve been pushed around after you helped save the world for democracy in World War II. The country that spent trillions of dollars to beat the Soviet Union to the moon quite literally created the modern world with the transistor, integrated circuit, personal computer, and the Internet. We have you to thank for the car, IBM, and Elvis Presley (but not the telephone, universal health care, or Joni Mitchell). And now we are all ungrateful.

Sorry to suggest how you might feel, but do you really believe Canada threatens your existence with fentanyl and underpaid workers or that international agreements can’t be renegotiated? Go ahead, pull the other one Johnny Appleseed. More likely, the chaos is by design to undermine governance and put even more power in fewer hands. Of course, the facts don’t matter in Trump’s supercritical black hole of imploding nonsense.

Perhaps gangster tactics are needed to forge a successful real estate business in New York City. Self-promotion, barstool bullying, and buying one’s own ghostwritten books en masse to ensure entry on the New York Times book list may be the cost of success in such rarefied skyscraper air, but bullying people is not the mark of anything great. Leader? Statesman? No responsible governmental steward plays games with the lives and livelihoods of hard-working citizens and families. I think Trump has watched too many Times Square reruns of The Godfather. Government is not a business and everything is personal.

Is it fealty you want? Oh Donald. You are so fine. Must everyone kiss the hand? Please tell us your world is more than game-playing, whatever the consequences to others, in the name of a fairytale Golden Age. The conflict-seekers taking advantage of the conflict-averse. The rich stamping on the poor. Prehistoric, medieval, the American Way? Don’t you know Lucy will never hold the ball for good old Charlie Brown?

Is it our minerals – the gold, copper, nickel, and uranium? You could have asked politely and we would have sold more to you at a reasonable price (now surcharged by 25%). Is it 2% GDP spending on NATO, an organization you actively undermine? Do you want to arm the world in what economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls “military Keynesianism” so that others will buy more American weapons, adding to an already bloated death industry and undercutting social spending and diversity?

Do you want Canadians to apologize for “American Woman,” even though New Yorker Lenny Kravitz also covered that classic ‘70s Guess Who hit. In this case, “woman” is a metaphor for the coloured lights that hypnotize. Sorry for the Toronto Blue Jays winning the World Series for the first time on foreign soil in 1992, but Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run in Toronto and Jackie Robinson played his first professional game for the Montreal Royals. Besides, you’ve won the last 30 Stanley Cups. Three decades of Detroit, Tampa Bay, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other amazing American cities lifting the greatest sporting prize ever – even Anaheim’s Disney-owned Ducks – albeit with mostly Canadian players.

Sorry that Superman was co-created by a Canadian. Sorry Margaret Atwood wrote about a Christian patriarchal takeover in the Republic of Gilead, a.k.a. a future USA gone mad. I know Canadians are famously courteous and nice and apologize too much (sorry), but we’re not sorry for any of that. It’s called life. We all know the madness isn’t going to stop, but why didn’t you tell us you wanted to break up? You are like a crazed boyfriend from an Alanis Morissette song. Oh yeah, Americans don’t do irony.

We are sorry for the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965 that knocked out power to most of the eastern seaboard after a transmission line near Niagara Falls tripped. That got fixed and the shared international CANUSE grid is stronger for it. We didn’t cause the largest ever US blackout, however, that crashed the grid for two days in northern Ohio in 2003. Canada was initially blamed, but it was a fallen American tree and software bug. Essentially, reduced public works such as insufficient tree pruning because of too much deregulation. If you don’t pay for services, everything goes to pot (shades of DOGE to come). We’re not sorry for the Texas freeze of 2021. That was Ted Cruz. No it wasn’t, sorry, I lie – see what happens when facts don’t matter?

But don’t worry friends, I doubt Ontario premier Doug Ford will turn off the juice to New York, Michigan, or Minnesota. That’s illegal in winter and dumb. Premier Ford is a conservative, but politics and economic takeovers make strange bedfellows. I am proud that Canadians also encourage friendly civic mindedness by asking everyone to shovel their snow within 24 hours of a snowfall as seen in cutesy government-funded ads: “Be nice, clear your ice.” If you are over 65, the city workers do it for free. Big city homes do come with locks, although some doors are probably still left open as our Michigan neighbour Michael Moore famously noted in Bowling for Columbine. Many Canadians have never seen a gun in their life other than in a police holster.

What is it you really want, Donald? Our lifestyle? We are sorry the US doesn’t live up to world standards when it comes to health, education, and diversity. Or civility. Calling women names is neither presidential nor patriotic to a nation of supposed god-fearing citizens. Your misogyny is beneath even a schoolboy taunt. Nor are community-minded citizens “commies,” “libtards,” and “losers.”

Why are Americans so angry? Breitbart is littered with vile. Ditto the Murdoch-owned New York Post? Clearly one has to watch out for the armed bands of evil squirrels, beavers, and moose amassing on the Canadian border. Dudley Do-Right and Nell Fenwick are readying the furry forces. It may be a constitutionally protected war of words (or paid Russian bots), but who actually thinks this? Is it our stoicism (a.k.a. “socialism” to Americans) nurtured in the depths of yet another endless winter?

Like many Americans, Canadians grew up during the biggest jump in technology since the Industrial Revolution in an age of transistors, space travel, and satellites. Like others, we were left to navigate a vastly different world than that of our parents, both scary and revealing, from relaxed social mores and crazy Cold War posturing to an explosion of artistic expression in a growing technological tyranny. How did we drift so far apart, brother? We are not a coloured square on a Risk board to conquer. It’s not our place to tell other countries what to do, but can you please curb your arrogance?

Sadly, we have to get used to the vindictive game playing, exaggerated outrage, and unpredictable behaviour as Bizarro Trump exports the chaos in his own country abroad. The motive behind his rambling, unsympathetic, and know-it-all posturing may be to undermine governance and increase billionaire wealth even more. Sowing dissent at home is not enough; the US is now encouraging division elsewhere to turn life into permanent crisis, anxiety, and poverty for the wealthy to exploit the fearful. So long fellowship, respect, and diversity; hello more 1% wealth and fewer taxes for the rich. First he took Manhattan, then he tried to take the World. But as Leonard Cohen warned us “there is no beauty to their weapons.”

We can debate the hierarchy of social responsibility: garbage pickup, sanitation, infrastructure, emergencies, policing, tax collecting (sales tax/income tax) and the efficiencies within any public system. But why doesn’t Donald Trump fix his own US health system, education scores, and potholes first? Canada can be an example of how to provide a publicly funded universal health care that both aids and protects workers (thank you Tommy Douglas, number one in a 2004 “Greatest Canadian” newspaper poll). Did you know a tenant can’t be evicted from a Canadian home in winter? Equal pay and a 40-hour work week are the law. The minimum federal wage is $17.30/hour indexed to inflation. As Dylan sang “the money you make can’t buy back your soul.” Or “The first one now will later be last.” That’s from the Bible.

For all his divisiveness at home Trump is uniting the world … against the United States. The governing Liberals were expected to lose the next election, but are now rising in the polls as former banker Mark Carney takes over from the outgoing three-term prime minister Justin Trudeau. In his acceptance speech on March 9, Carney stated, “We didn’t ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves.”

Others are signalling with their “elbows up” in a nod to Mister Hockey, Gordie Howe, who played 25 seasons for the Detroit Red Wings and whose poorly remunerated prowess was instrumental in establishing a hockey labour union. Across Europe, far-right parties are being asked to reconcile their fealty to Trump and his anti-European rhetoric. America First is becoming America Alone as the world unites in opposition against such gauche tribalism.

Degrading or even dismantling an integrated economy won’t happen overnight. The resistance is beginning as citizens rise against the common enemy seeking to rip up long-standing agreements. Deep down, we all know more unites than divides us. Trump’s cruelty has been laid bare from Ukraine to Gaza and from Panama to Greenland. If the politics were any good, there would be no need to bully. Business uncertainty may be the most important last check as investors shun the United States amid a looming Trumpcession. The painted ponies go up and down. No one wants to keep on rockin’ in an un-free American world.

Cruelty will never be a virtue. Trump has tapped into the vengeful apocalyptic Christian war machine, imaging himself at the head of the troops, their blood-wine feet hovering over whoever dares call out the lies, venality, and misogyny. The answered chorus is not to declare “Glory glory Hallelujah” but to call out the wrath as a failed ideal, a misinformed and misguided act of a dying republic. When the abuser claims abuse and the bully cries victim, we know the vintage has spoiled. Conflict is a con, sold by those afraid to understand the meaning of communion and the depth of community.

Trump isn’t responsible for all the nastiness blowing from the south, but he is the mouthpiece, permanently campaigning on a trail of pain while spending other people’s money. For now, the boycotts will grow against Colgate, Coke, Gillette, …, and the United States. We will protest, stand up, and be heard. Because we don’t live in Donald Trump’s angry world. The Toronto singer Jim Cuddy lamented about how “We used to be the best of friends,” but as Montreal Canadiens star goalie Ken Dryden and former member of parliament notes, “Canadians will need to be defiantly Canadian.” I am Canadian. Sorry friends, life is not a game and Donald Trump is nobody’s king.

Michèle White is a Toronto artist and professor emeritus at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U). “The Grapes of Wrath” is part of an ongoing series entitled “Written on the Body.” Her newest work can be viewed on squarespace and Instagram.

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The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) played a pivotal role in shaping a legal system in post-socialist Yugoslavia (later Serbia) which exacerbated homelessness and enabled large corporations, banks, state agencies and public institutions to seize people’s only homes and burden the residents of the war-torn Balkan country with overwhelming debt, public sources reveal. While evidence that the US intended to impoverish and displace the people of Serbia is limited, a rare testimony from a former telecommunications minister offers invaluable insight into Washington’s thinking.

NASCENT NEOLIBERALISM

Beginning in 1992, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) had privatized its housing fund, enabling most citizens to purchase apartments at low cost that were previously ‘socially’ owned — a distinct form of ownership pioneered by the Yugoslav socialist experiment. This led to high homeownership rates across all the former Yugoslav republics, similar to other post-socialist states like Russia and current socialist countries such as China and Vietnam.

In 1999, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), an American regime change instrument operating under the auspices of the national-security state, financed and critically advised a coalition of 19 Serbian opposition organizations (the Democratic Opposition of Serbia – DOS) on the only viable way they could overthrow the bloc around Slobodan Milošević. The US, along with the European Union, has ever since ’’aided’’ pliable governments in implementing gutting neoliberal reforms, with the purported aim of ’’economic stabilization“ , ’’democratic development’’ and other such fanciful catchwords.

A decade of war, sanctions and an illegal NATO bombing campaign preceded the ’’revolution’’ in 2000, in which pro-Western, decidedly neoliberal parties won the elections by a very narrow margin. In the first decade of ’’democratic“ rule private monopolies were formed, social safety nets were shredded and democratic institutions inherited from socialism pulverized, with estimates of people who lost their jobs in Serbia alone reaching hundreds of thousands.

The end goal of this first phase of neoliberalizing the economy (and more broadly, the whole of society) was the wanton destruction of domestic industry through the privatization of socially owned enterprises (SSOEs), which were worker-operated businesses, another staple of Yugoslav socialism. Financially solvent SSOEs were declared bankrupt and sold off for less than the value of their bankruptcy estates, with the bankruptcy process marred by irregularities and corruption. The domestic bourgeoisie would later make billions by consolidating privatized firms into oligopolies and selling them off to foreign capital.

After this came the next phase of “development”– introducing austerity, expanding the debt-based economy and allowing (foreign) capital to pilfer what wealth was left–natural resources and peoples’ homes. This pivot from privatization and deindustrialization to introducing debt slavery and soaring prices of commodities in Serbia coincided with a passing of the torch from the old political elite (DOS), at this point widely hated for it’s overwhelming corruption and haughtiness, to the ruling manager of neoliberalism in Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić and his “Progressive” party. Unlike his predecessors who failed to meet IMF requirements and thus forfeited the help from their “friends” in Washington, Vučić took in every third-rate huckster from the previous regime and disciplined them, centralized political power and provided a “stable investment climate”.

HOMES AS FINANCIAL “INFRASTRUCTURE”

A former Minister of Telecommunications in the short-lived government of 2007-2008, Aleksandra Smiljanić, explainedin an interview with the Party of the Radical Left (PRL) how a representative from a US financial consulting firm foresaw that real estate would act as a means of payment and that frequent evictions would become common judicial practice years before this catastrophe fully materialized.

The American consultant was to advise the ministry on how to sell off the public telecommunications company and the meeting had been arranged by Mlađan Dinkić, the minister of economy at the time. The “advice” was that, after privatizing it, “Telecom” should increase the cost of its services tenfold, so that it could “attract more foreign investors”. Smiljanić was dumbfounded by the suggestion and asked the consultant if he was aware that a lot of her fellow citizens wouldn’t be able to pay such exorbitant prices, especially the elderly.

The reply was that the people of Serbia have “infrastructure” that would act as a means of payment, but Smiljanić, still surprised, insisted on a straight answer. The explanation she got was as sincere as it was brazen – “Well, your country has a lot of homeowners”. Years later, legislative changes would make this a grim reality – families frequently losing their only home because of piled-up bills.

Was this calculation a result of pure professional acumen garnered through years of corporate expertise, or did the consultant know something that the minister didn’t, about the bleak future Serbia was barreling towards?

JUSTICE IS SERVED…DIGITALLY

On March 6th 2001, just a couple of months after the “revolution” in 2000, the governments of Yugoslavia and the US signed an Agreement “concerning economic, technical and related assistance”. This paved the way for USAID to get intimately involved with Serbian statecraft  – “helping” with legislative changes, the reconstruction of public institutions, the economy, etc. One of the agency’s first endeavors was “digitalization” – USAID donated a mountain of old computers to Serbian institutions, especially courts and public prosecutors’ offices. Money was also allocated for the renewal of some court buildings and even the website of parliament bears a USAID stamp at the bottom.

This fits the MO, as has been exhaustively documented in other cases and in different countries, in which the US provides some technical support or funds humanitarian groups, in order to obscure the other nefarious developments they put into play. The good will that this charity temporarily ensured with the general public paved the way for another Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Serbian Ministry of Justice and the US government in 2006 regarding the reformation of the Bankruptcy and Enforcement systems. These processes, which resulted in the new Law on bankruptcy (2009) and Law on Enforcement and Security Interest (2011), were vital. Both legislative changes outsourced public authority and judicial power to private entrepreneurs. The former ensured that what was left of SSOEs was privatized with virtually no transparency, while the latter destroyed basic human rights for poor debtors within the enforcement system.

The work group that drafted the new law on enforcement was composed of lawyers, economists, but also (and very tellingly) – bankers. But before the establishment of the work group, the ministry formed an “expert group” that set the parameters of the new law, which the work group would adopt. Naturally, this group of experts worked closely with USAID, the forerunner of judicial reform in Serbia.

The seemingly carefully crafted framing in the years leading up to the law on enforcement being changed in 2011 was that it would protect “the little creditor”, the masses of people who’ve lost their jobs during privatization, and were owed severance pay and/or dozens of monthly wages. People were led to believe that private entrepreneurship will help speed up the still sluggish court system. This was the prevailing narrative, in no small part thanks to liberal media outlets, which led the charge in bolstering the voices of “professionals” and ignoring dissenting voices, which were too few.

In sharp contrast to what was publicly promised, the new enforcement process heavily favored those who could pay for it, the big, giant and gargantuan creditors. In 2024 alone, thousands of workers from Niš and Prokuplje protested, because they are still owed millions of euros in backpay, despite having positive verdicts from the Constitutional court, the highest judicial body in the country, confirming the validity of their claims (and these are only the people we know about through media reports).

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BAILIFF, AN ENFORCER AND A RACKETEER? 

With parliament officially adopting it in 2011, the new law uprooted the “traditional method” of enforcing court decisions. Whereas enforcers, or bailiffs, were previously directly accountable to the courts which employed them, after 2011 they became self-employed private entrepreneurs working for profit. This policy effectively privatized a part of the judicial system, with bailiffs now being under the vague control of the Ministry of Justice and their own chamber. Bailiffs now get paid for enforcing each legal writ separately, with an untransparent “reward” system for expedient enforcement.

The changes also brought a cruel penalty for poor people – if you can’t pay your debt, a bailiff will sell your property or seize your earnings, and you have to pay them for doing so. These are known as “enforcement costs” and can vary wildly, with some going up to 10,000 euros for trying to enforce a single eviction attempt. These new astronomical fees bloated every transaction, so that the enforcement industry made at least two for every euro transferred from debtor to creditor. Bailiffs are now known to make a million euros in sheer profit annually, in a country where the median monthly wage is around 500 euros.

In actuality, what was created was a “mafia”, cartel, a “state within a state” as attested by a significant portion of the Serbian populace. High-profile debacles involving bailiffs abound, with both sides of the polarized major media machine (government sponsored and western-backed opposition oriented) running stories on bailiffs every month or so. Introducing the profit motive in enforcing court documents opened up the broadest avenues for legalized corruption, with money being the ultimate accelerant of the final part of the judicial process. The more money you had, the more “justice” you could afford.

Forced evictions became commonplace, with homes being sold for meager debts and often auctioned off for 20-30% market value. The opaque “reward” system meant that bailiffs were paid in proportion to the disputed value between debtor and creditor. This meant that enforcing documents pertaining to immovables became a lucrative business model, which in turn meant a surge of forced evictions, often while the evictees were still in a legal battle against the decision which led to their dislodgement.

IF IT AIN’T BROKE…

In 2017, USAID produced an analysis of the price list of the enforcement industry. Their own conclusion was that the system they created might be “unsustainable”, if not for an influx of new cases. The American agency also organized workshops for bailiffs, in which they were taught the art of rhetoric and PR competence, a much needed skill in the industry. USAID even did a public opinion poll asking banks how satisfied they are with the new enforcement process. This should more than suffice as evidence of what the US cares about developing in Serbia – an enforcement system that favor, most of all, banks.

Even with the extensive power and ample autonomy the enforcement industry was entrusted with thanks to the USAID sponsored law, there are plenty of instances in which bailiffs were accused of forgery, embezzlement, bribery and so on. Working hand in glove with banks, huge construction firms, investors and public utility companies, meant that it pays to break the law sometimes. Conveniently, for violations other than criminal offenses, the only place to file a complaint is the chamber of bailiffs and ministry. However, the endless stream of scandals and strong public outrage forced the government to change the law in 2019, again with the help of USAID.

This legislative change was presented as a crackdown on bailiff corruption by government controlled media, but in reality it only made the state of affairs worse for everyone except them. Despite their sheer unpopularity, impunity and rampant rapacity, the government gave them more authority over the police in eviction processes, for example. Bailiffs couldn’t sell property they seize to their friends and relatives anymore, but they still can trade in devalued dwellings, just through thuggish third parties, as has been reported from the ground by activist and citizen journalists. The new regulations also allowed for homes to be auctioned off online, without the “occupants” having a real choice in the matter. This too was portrayed as “greater transparency”.

From a broader perspective, it’s worth pointing out that this kind of brutal enforcement system with privatized entrepreneurial “agents” was established and had major consequences in other European countries, particularly Spain, where hundreds of thousands were forcibly evicted and displaced, with banks repossessing a huge swath of real estate after the crash of 2008 drowned a lot of ordinary people in debt. This in turn gave rise to social movements resisting and blocking eviction attempts all across Europe, including in Serbia, where privatizing a part of the judiciary was one of the preconditions to EU accession.

The post How USAID Makes People Homeless In Serbia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Florida, the “Sunshine State,” once known as a beacon of government transparency, is growing ever darker, and the clouds are spreading throughout the United States.

From March 16-22, 2025, the nation celebrates the 20th anniversary of national Sunshine Week, which originated in Florida, historically home to the most transparent and accountable governments in the country.

Times have changed.

At the University of Florida Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project, my colleagues and I have researched and taught about the freedom of information since 1977. We monitor the state of open, accountable government, and our research findings do not bode well for democracy – in Florida and throughout the U.S.

But first, let’s look back to sunnier days.

Sun rises

Florida enacted its first version of a public records law in 1909, the sixth state to do so. The movement was led by Nebraska in 1866 and Montana in 1895. Florida’s law was repealed in the 1950s and then returned in 1967 as the Sunshine Law.

“Sunshine” was equated with the state’s nickname but also the concept of government transparency – lighting the dark recesses of secrecy. The Sunshine Law also played on a famous quote by former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis that “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

Something unique happened in Florida then. Transparency took hold.

Journalists such as Pete Weitzel at the Miami Herald pushed hard for governments to operate more transparently, building momentum through the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. They and other media groups helped launch, with US$11,000, the Florida Freedom of Information Clearinghouse in 1977 at the University of Florida. The journalism college assigned a professor and grad student to monitor public record denials, open meeting closures and court cases, and to alert newspaper editors to secrecy legislation. This effort created a culture of transparency, including among elected leaders.

Journalists successfully pushed for a constitutional amendmentin the early 1990s, which required transparency across the state and required a two-thirds vote from the state Legislature to adopt exemptions to the law.

Several provisions of Florida public records law stood out:

• Attorney fee-shifting is mandatory. If a citizen is denied government information, sues and prevails, the agency is required to pay the person’s attorney fees. Our research indicates that this is one of the most important elements in public record laws to encourage compliance.

• The definition of a public record is broad, even applying to documents created by a private person or contractor acting on behalf of the government. Applying the law to private actors is unique in the U.S., and even in the world.

• Governing bodies face strict requirements to deliberate in public. Just two officials communicating with each other constitutes an official meeting and must be announced ahead of time, allowing for public attendance. Most states require a quorum, or majority, of the governing body to be considered an official meeting.

The nonprofit Florida First Amendment Foundation was launched in 1985 to promote government transparency and hired its first paid employee, Barbara Petersen, in 1995, to monitor secrecy legislation, train public employees and aid people trying to get information. The organization banded with the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors to create Sunshine Sunday each March to promote the right to know. This event went national in 2005 as Sunshine Week.

All these factors led Florida to become known as the most transparent state in the nation.

Increasing clouds

Fast forward to 2025, and we see an entirely different climate in Florida.

The decline of newspapers has meant fewer reporters pushing for records, fewer editors advocating for transparency, and fewer owners suing government agencies.

Copy charges related to getting public records create barriers for average citizens. Research shows that providing fee waiverswould increase accessibility without significant costs.

Through the years, legislators became emboldened to pass more exemptions to the Florida Sunshine Law – more than 1,100 and growing. Some of those exemptions were focused on protecting personal privacy – for example, in reaction to journalists requesting the autopsy file of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt after his 2001 death.

Fear of terrorists following 9/11 led to a flurry of exemptions, such as hiding records about crop dusters to prevent al-Qaida from hijacking planes to spread anthrax.

Companies profiting from public records sparked another backlash. For example, some companies acquired public mugshots, posted them online and allowed people to have them removed for a price. Some attorneys gamed the fee-shifting provision, submitting public record requests that would be difficult to fulfill, sued immediately and then settled with agencies for thousands of dollars.

Elected leaders turned against transparency, Petersen, who now directs the Florida Center for Government Accountability, told me recently. One of the prominent examples she points to is Gov. Ron DeSantis’ refusal to disclose his travel expense records.

I hear it every week – calls from journalists and others stymied by state and local government agencies. They often cite high copy fees for public records, claims of exemptions and outright ghosting by agencies. One reporter encountered Miami city commissioners sworn in at a private ceremony. Another challenged Tallahassee police refusing to provide information about an officer-involved shooting. A college journalism student was told she had to pay $1,665 for records about Florida dams that could fail and ended up pleading with the government to “free the dam records.”

One of my studies from 2019 indicated that, on average, if you requested a public record in Florida, you would receive it about 39% of the time. That placed the state 31st in the nation, the bottom half.

More recent data from the nonprofit MuckRock reports Florida’s percentage declining – as of February 2025, to 35%.

Bobby Block, current director of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, wrote in February that “There was a time when Florida set the gold standard for open government. … Those days are over.”

Not just Florida

Florida is reflective of a national trend – a secrecy creepspreading throughout the country, culminating in transparency deserts in cities big and small.

The United States is losing its reputation as a leader in open, accountable government. Its federal Freedom of Information Act, often known as FOIA, ranks 78th in strength out of 140 nations, and continuously drops as new countries adopt better laws. An information commissioner from Africa told me a few months ago that he and his colleagues laugh at the United States’ weak FOIA law, referring to it as a “toothless poodle.”

On average, according to our research, if you asked for a public record in America 10 years ago, you would get it about half the time. Now, it’s down to about a third of the time, and just 12% at the federal level.

Even the U.S. Department of Justice’s own statistics show a similar decline in full release of records, and the average response time has nearly doubled over the same period, from 21 to 40 days.

What happens when compliance reaches 0%?

Aside from the ramifications on democracy itself, every American will feel the pain in their pocketbooks and everyday lives.

Studies show that public record laws lead to cleaner drinking water, safer restaurants, better-informed school choice, less corruption, saved tax dollars and a lower chance of sex offenders reoffending.

According to Stanford economist James Hamilton, for every dollar spent on public-records journalism, society benefits $287in saved lives and more efficient government.

Some transparency advocates have raised the alarm on actions taken by the new Trump administration, such as the removal of agency websites, the firing of FOIA staff and the dismantling of the Open Government Federal Advisory Committee.

It is likely these efforts will escalate the secrecy creep and allow it to trickle down to the state and local levels. It is important to note, though, that declining transparency is a long-term trend that transcends any one president or political party. The federal government reached its absolute low in full compliance with FOIA last year, under the Biden administration.

It’s easy to point fingers at one politician, but perhaps wiser to look at the entire system, which many scholars say is broken and should be reimagined.

German sociologist Max Weber posited that secrecy is the natural tendency for bureaucracy if left unchecked. For decades, news companies, particularly in Florida, pushed back against that secrecy through public pressure and litigation.

With that opposing force weakened, if not disappearing, what or who will replace it?

Nonprofit groups have filled some of the gap, and independent online news sites are growing and enforcing public record laws.

But will it be enough? Ultimately, it is up to the citizenry. If the people don’t cherish and demand transparent government, then the politicians certainly won’t, whether in Florida or the rest of the country.

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

The post Secrecy Creep: How the Sun is Setting on Government Transparency in Florida and the Rest of the US appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Florida, the “Sunshine State,” once known as a beacon of government transparency, is growing ever darker, and the clouds are spreading throughout the United States.

From March 16-22, 2025, the nation celebrates the 20th anniversary of national Sunshine Week, which originated in Florida, historically home to the most transparent and accountable governments in the country.

Times have changed.

At the University of Florida Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project, my colleagues and I have researched and taught about the freedom of information since 1977. We monitor the state of open, accountable government, and our research findings do not bode well for democracy – in Florida and throughout the U.S.

But first, let’s look back to sunnier days.

Sun rises

Florida enacted its first version of a public records law in 1909, the sixth state to do so. The movement was led by Nebraska in 1866 and Montana in 1895. Florida’s law was repealed in the 1950s and then returned in 1967 as the Sunshine Law.

“Sunshine” was equated with the state’s nickname but also the concept of government transparency – lighting the dark recesses of secrecy. The Sunshine Law also played on a famous quote by former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis that “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

Something unique happened in Florida then. Transparency took hold.

Journalists such as Pete Weitzel at the Miami Herald pushed hard for governments to operate more transparently, building momentum through the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. They and other media groups helped launch, with US$11,000, the Florida Freedom of Information Clearinghouse in 1977 at the University of Florida. The journalism college assigned a professor and grad student to monitor public record denials, open meeting closures and court cases, and to alert newspaper editors to secrecy legislation. This effort created a culture of transparency, including among elected leaders.

Journalists successfully pushed for a constitutional amendmentin the early 1990s, which required transparency across the state and required a two-thirds vote from the state Legislature to adopt exemptions to the law.

Several provisions of Florida public records law stood out:

• Attorney fee-shifting is mandatory. If a citizen is denied government information, sues and prevails, the agency is required to pay the person’s attorney fees. Our research indicates that this is one of the most important elements in public record laws to encourage compliance.

• The definition of a public record is broad, even applying to documents created by a private person or contractor acting on behalf of the government. Applying the law to private actors is unique in the U.S., and even in the world.

• Governing bodies face strict requirements to deliberate in public. Just two officials communicating with each other constitutes an official meeting and must be announced ahead of time, allowing for public attendance. Most states require a quorum, or majority, of the governing body to be considered an official meeting.

The nonprofit Florida First Amendment Foundation was launched in 1985 to promote government transparency and hired its first paid employee, Barbara Petersen, in 1995, to monitor secrecy legislation, train public employees and aid people trying to get information. The organization banded with the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors to create Sunshine Sunday each March to promote the right to know. This event went national in 2005 as Sunshine Week.

All these factors led Florida to become known as the most transparent state in the nation.

Increasing clouds

Fast forward to 2025, and we see an entirely different climate in Florida.

The decline of newspapers has meant fewer reporters pushing for records, fewer editors advocating for transparency, and fewer owners suing government agencies.

Copy charges related to getting public records create barriers for average citizens. Research shows that providing fee waiverswould increase accessibility without significant costs.

Through the years, legislators became emboldened to pass more exemptions to the Florida Sunshine Law – more than 1,100 and growing. Some of those exemptions were focused on protecting personal privacy – for example, in reaction to journalists requesting the autopsy file of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt after his 2001 death.

Fear of terrorists following 9/11 led to a flurry of exemptions, such as hiding records about crop dusters to prevent al-Qaida from hijacking planes to spread anthrax.

Companies profiting from public records sparked another backlash. For example, some companies acquired public mugshots, posted them online and allowed people to have them removed for a price. Some attorneys gamed the fee-shifting provision, submitting public record requests that would be difficult to fulfill, sued immediately and then settled with agencies for thousands of dollars.

Elected leaders turned against transparency, Petersen, who now directs the Florida Center for Government Accountability, told me recently. One of the prominent examples she points to is Gov. Ron DeSantis’ refusal to disclose his travel expense records.

I hear it every week – calls from journalists and others stymied by state and local government agencies. They often cite high copy fees for public records, claims of exemptions and outright ghosting by agencies. One reporter encountered Miami city commissioners sworn in at a private ceremony. Another challenged Tallahassee police refusing to provide information about an officer-involved shooting. A college journalism student was told she had to pay $1,665 for records about Florida dams that could fail and ended up pleading with the government to “free the dam records.”

One of my studies from 2019 indicated that, on average, if you requested a public record in Florida, you would receive it about 39% of the time. That placed the state 31st in the nation, the bottom half.

More recent data from the nonprofit MuckRock reports Florida’s percentage declining – as of February 2025, to 35%.

Bobby Block, current director of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, wrote in February that “There was a time when Florida set the gold standard for open government. … Those days are over.”

Not just Florida

Florida is reflective of a national trend – a secrecy creepspreading throughout the country, culminating in transparency deserts in cities big and small.

The United States is losing its reputation as a leader in open, accountable government. Its federal Freedom of Information Act, often known as FOIA, ranks 78th in strength out of 140 nations, and continuously drops as new countries adopt better laws. An information commissioner from Africa told me a few months ago that he and his colleagues laugh at the United States’ weak FOIA law, referring to it as a “toothless poodle.”

On average, according to our research, if you asked for a public record in America 10 years ago, you would get it about half the time. Now, it’s down to about a third of the time, and just 12% at the federal level.

Even the U.S. Department of Justice’s own statistics show a similar decline in full release of records, and the average response time has nearly doubled over the same period, from 21 to 40 days.

What happens when compliance reaches 0%?

Aside from the ramifications on democracy itself, every American will feel the pain in their pocketbooks and everyday lives.

Studies show that public record laws lead to cleaner drinking water, safer restaurants, better-informed school choice, less corruption, saved tax dollars and a lower chance of sex offenders reoffending.

According to Stanford economist James Hamilton, for every dollar spent on public-records journalism, society benefits $287in saved lives and more efficient government.

Some transparency advocates have raised the alarm on actions taken by the new Trump administration, such as the removal of agency websites, the firing of FOIA staff and the dismantling of the Open Government Federal Advisory Committee.

It is likely these efforts will escalate the secrecy creep and allow it to trickle down to the state and local levels. It is important to note, though, that declining transparency is a long-term trend that transcends any one president or political party. The federal government reached its absolute low in full compliance with FOIA last year, under the Biden administration.

It’s easy to point fingers at one politician, but perhaps wiser to look at the entire system, which many scholars say is broken and should be reimagined.

German sociologist Max Weber posited that secrecy is the natural tendency for bureaucracy if left unchecked. For decades, news companies, particularly in Florida, pushed back against that secrecy through public pressure and litigation.

With that opposing force weakened, if not disappearing, what or who will replace it?

Nonprofit groups have filled some of the gap, and independent online news sites are growing and enforcing public record laws.

But will it be enough? Ultimately, it is up to the citizenry. If the people don’t cherish and demand transparent government, then the politicians certainly won’t, whether in Florida or the rest of the country.

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

The post Secrecy Creep: How the Sun is Setting on Government Transparency in Florida and the Rest of the US appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The ongoing Israeli military assault on Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank is part of a larger Israeli ethnic cleansing plan, a systematic effort to forcibly displace Palestinians from their homes and erase their historical and national identity. As the world watches in silence, the relentless incursions into these camps—home to some of the most vulnerable Palestinian communities—are reducing entire neighborhoods to rubble, killing civilians, and forcing thousands to flee.

Meanwhile and as Israel wages a brutal genocidal campaign, the Palestinian Authority (PA) stands idly by, unwilling to defend its people. Worse yet, on Monday, March 10, 2025. the PA security forces carried out Israel’s bidding assassinating seasoned Jenin fighter Abdul-Rahman Abu Muna.

The refugee camps of Jenin, Nur Shams, Balata, and others have long been the heart of Palestinian resistance. Housing Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948, and today, they stand as grim reminders of Israel’s original sin—the Nakba. Through generations, the Palestinian camp has become a powerful symbol of Palestinian identity, embodying the deep-rooted longing to Palestine. The camp is not just a physical space—it represents a collective memory, a repository of cultural heritage, and a reminder of the ongoing struggle for self-determination and homeland restoration. Thus, their erasure—much like the destruction of their original villages in 1948 historical Palestine—has become an Israeli obsession aimed at wiping out their existence.

The Israeli war on the camps is not about security. In reality, what is unfolding is a merciless campaign of destruction, aimed at crushing the spirit of Palestinian resistance and making life unbearable for those who dare to remain. Demolishing homes, roads are torn apart, electricity and water supplies are severed, and entire communities are left in ruins. Israel destroys civilian infrastructure, not for military tactical objectives, but purely to make life unbearable for residents, ensuring that even those who survive are left with an unlivable environment. This collective punishment is a blatant war crime under international law.

The ongoing assault on Palestinian refugee camps is not just about military strategy—it is deeply tied to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Endless War for Political Survival. Facing corruption charges and mounting political pressure, Netanyahu has relied on endless war and heightened violence to maintain his fragile coalition of right-wing and racist factions. By escalating attacks on Palestinians, he ensures the continued support of ultranationalist and Jewish racist groups who demand harsher measures against the occupied population. This cycle of aggression is a deliberate strategy to prolong his grip on power at the expense of Palestinian lives.

The core issue is not just the military assaults but the very nature of the Israeli occupation and the hordes of violent settlers who terrorize Palestinian communities with impunity. The expansion of illegal Jewish-only colonies, backed by the Israeli military, has emboldened Jewish supremacists to carry out attacks against Palestinians, including arson, physical assaults, and even outright murder. This settler-colonial project aims to replace Palestinian existence with a network of Jewish-only colonies, erasing any hope for a Palestinian state.

Israel’s strategy of targeting refugee camps is part of this broader policy. The destruction of Jenin camp in 2002 was supposed to end Palestinian resistance, yet it did not. Two decades later, Israel is fighting the progeny of those it murdered more than 20 years ago, repeating the same failed strategy and hoping that this new wave of destruction will achieve what past massacres could not. But history has shown that Palestinian resilience cannot be broken by military force. As in 2002, a new destruction will not erase the Palestinian struggle—it will only fuel the determination of a people who refuse to disappear.

While Israel carries out these atrocities, the Palestinian Authority remains paralyzed, offering nothing but empty words of condemnation. The PA, which was established through the Oslo Accords with the promise of leading Palestinians toward ­­­statehood, has instead become an enforcer of Israeli security serving as an administrative subcontractor rather than a true representative government. Its continued security coordination with Israel, even as refugee camps are emptied of their inhabitants, is nothing short of a betrayal.

At a time when the Palestinian people long for real leadership, the PA has shown itself to be an institution of self-preservation, more concerned with maintaining its own grip on power than resisting a malevolent occupation. It has failed to mobilize international support, and failed to take any meaningful action to stop Israel’s aggression. The reality is clear: the Palestinian Authority is complicit in the suffering of its own people through its inaction and its continued subservience to Israeli dictates. Worse still, the PA refuses to intervene because its leadership is more focused on protecting the privileges and VIP status granted to them under Israeli occupation. Rather than safeguarding Palestinian lives, the PA’s primary concern has become maintaining its elite class’s access to special permits, security arrangements, and economic benefits that Israel doles out to ensure its cooperation.

If the PA continues on this trajectory, it will cease to have any role in shaping the future of Palestine. The people will inevitably turn elsewhere for leadership—whether to civil society organizations, local resistance groups, or new political movements that truly represent their aspirations. The Palestinian cause does not need an institution that stands on the sidelines while its people are ethnically cleansed; it needs a leadership that will fight for its survival and sovereignty.

The Israeli destruction of Palestinian refugee camps is not just a military operation; it is a calculated strategy of population displacement. By forcing thousands to flee, Israel is laying the groundwork for a West Bank emptied of Palestinians, paving the way for further annexation and settlement expansion. This is a slow-motion ethnic cleansing that the Palestinian leadership cannot afford to ignore.

The United Nations, human rights organizations, and the world at large must hold Israel accountable for its crimes and pressure the Palestinian Authority to end its complicity. If the PA continues to stand idly by as its people are being ethnically cleansed, it will descend into irrelevance and its leadership will ultimately fade into the dustbin of history.

The post The Palestinian Authority Descend Into Irrelevance appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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As chants of ‘No ICE, No KKK, No Fascist USA!’ echoed through downtown Manhattan on 10 March 2025, I spoke to a person named Richard who had been marching just ahead of me. He declined to give his last name but was eager to speak his piece.

‘We need to be out in the streets and say “This will not fly. This will not happen on our watch”’, he said.

The state kidnapping and imminent deportation of recently graduated Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil had brought both Richard and me out into those streets.

Khalil was detained by the U.S. government on Saturday, 8 March, at his university-owned residence after returning from an Iftar dinner with his wife, who is a US citizen and eight months pregnant. According to information from the US Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), Khalil was being held in a detention centre in Jena, Louisiana, as of 11 March 2025.

The Palestinian student, born in 1995, was a visible participant throughout 2024 in the Columbia students’ protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As a result, he has now been accused of ‘pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity’ by the president of the United States on the social media platform the latter owns.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s indecency until at least 12 March 2025 but Khalil’s future in the United States beyond that is uncertain.

‘We need to remember what Mahmoud was harassed by Zionists and then arrested by [the Department of Homeland Security] for. It was for protesting Israel’s genocide of his own people, of the Palestinian people,’ Miriam Osman, an organiser with Palestinian Youth Movement, told Al Jazeera. The Department of Homeland Security is the cabinet-level body in the US that houses ICE.

Khalil’s arrest comes amidst an alarming rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States that many link to the US president’s words and actions and land sales in the West Bank by Zionist organizations targeting US citizens.

The Trump administration is attempting to deport Khalil, who graduated from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in December 2024. This is despite the fact that Khalil holds permanent residence in the United States.

According to anonymous government sources cited by the New York Times, he is accused of “presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” an obscure provision in the primary US immigration law that practitioners have not seen used to justify a deportation in living memory.

An hour previous to the march, framed by the austere government buildings that surround downtown New York City’s Federal Plaza, about 1,000 people had gathered for a demonstration.

The numbers in Federal Plaza were not themselves massive by the standards of the past two years of Palestine protests in New York City. But those assembled represented a much larger group of people; over 2 million have signed a petition as of 11 March 2025 to ‘demand the immediate release of Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil from [immigration] detention and a reversal to Columbia University’s protocol permitting [immigration enforcement agents] on campus without a warrant.’

Moreover, the protest brought out a wider swathe of community and movement organisations than many pro-Palestine protests in the New York City area, ranging from anti-Zionist organisations like Palestinian Youth Movement and Jewish Voice for Peace to political groups like ANSWER Coalition and Democratic Socialists of America to local immigrant rights bodies. These groups have been active in the protests that began since October 2023 against the genocide in Gaza. Mahmoud Khalil was part of those protests.

‘The Trump regime… is endangering Jewish people and using the guise of fighting antisemitism to dismantle our Constitutionally protected rights to free speech and dissent’, said Jewish Voice for Peace in a statement on its website.

Numerous speakers at the rally emphasised the need to organise against Zionism and against Trump in daily life. One protester was already living that; she declined to be formally interviewed but said that she had been on her way home from a doctor’s appointment when she learned of the demonstration and felt compelled to attend.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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As Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the cabal of plutocratic billionaires that the President calls his cabinet pursue their self-interested agenda, they are telling Americans that they need to prepare to sacrifice and feel economic pain for the good of society.

Why is it that the least advantaged in our society are always the ones asked to sacrifice for the greater good?

Trump’s speech to Congress foretold economic pain for Americans. Supposedly, tariffs, budget costs, layoffs and the elimination of the already decimated social welfare net will be good for America in the long run. It will require sacrifice by farmers, laborers, people of color, and anyone who buys products or receives services from the government.

Perhaps sacrifice is occasionally necessary. Yet it never seems that the rich are the ones who are asked to sacrifice,

At one time the demand to ask the poor and the middle class to sacrifice was called trickle-down economics under the Reagan administration. Tax cuts for the rich, coupled with a loosening of the regular regulatory system and cuts to the social welfare system would eventually trickle down and benefit all Americans.

Then the call for the poor to sacrifice for the country was called free trade under the Clinton administration. Yet again, the argument was that by opening borders with free trade America would prosper, even though some in manufacturing and among the poor, the working class, and the people of color would have to sacrifice.

Then it was the demand under the Obama administration that people lose their homes so that we could afford to bail out the too big to fail banks.

The result of all those sacrifices were to produce an America with a gap between the rich and poor greater than we’ve seen in American history. It was to produce an America in where nearly one out of six children lived in poverty, where economic mobility has nearly come to a halt, and the American dream of homeownership has become something that only a few can hope for.

Many years ago, philosopher John Rawls wrote his book A Theory of Justice. He argued that disinterested individuals constructing the rules of societal justice would agree to two principles. The first would be like liberty consistent with the same liberty for everybody else. Two, what came to be known as the difference principle, specified that inequalities should be treated as arbitrary unless they work first to the advantage of the least advantaged person in our society.

Rawls’ book was a call for both political liberty and a challenge regarding the economy and social welfare. The challenge was to say inequalities were presumptively impermissible unless one could show that they were first advantageous to those who were poor. Yet in the more than fifty years since his book was published, social policy has gone the other way. It has gone not to presuming inequalities are impermissible, and that the poor should not be to ask to sacrifice first, but that instead the poor should be asked to sacrifice ahead of the rich, ahead of the affluent, and that the inequalities in our society are somehow reflective of some basic principles of justice.

Trump’s declaration that there will be pain for those who can least shoulder it is yet the latest manifestation of a series of social policies over the last half century that have wrecked the ship of American democracy. They are doing damage to the very framework of what has come to knit our society together Somehow it is the belief that making people’s lives miserable will motivate them to work harder, when in fact, making people more secure, economically, socially and politically, is what motivates people to work harder than what makes us all prosper.

In the end, Trump musk and his cabal of billionaires have adopted a modern-day Marie Antoinette view of the world. When Marie Antoinette was once told there was not enough bread to feed the French masses, she remarked: “Let them eat cake.” Perhaps now the adage for Trump fittingly would be: “Let them eat eggs.”

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“I’m going to Saudi Arabia. I made a deal with Saudi Arabia. I’d usually go to the U.K. first. Last time I went to Saudi Arabia they put up $450 billion. I said well, this time they’ve gotten richer, we’ve all gotten older so I said I’ll go if you pay $1 trillion to American companies, meaning the purchase over a four-year period of $ 1 trillion and they’ve agreed to do that. So, I’m going to be going there. I have a great relationship with them, and they’ve been very nice but they’re going to be spending a lot of money to American companies for buying military equipment and a lot of other things.” – President Donald Trump, 7th March 2025.

What is the true importance of the US-Saudi relationship in the global economy? It’s based on the two things that make the economy go round – money and oil.

The United States–Saudi “petrodollar” arrangement has underpinned American economic and military power for nearly five decades. In essence, oil exports from Saudi Arabia (and later OPEC broadly) have been priced in U.S. dollars since the 1974, ensuring a constant global demand for the dollar and U.S. Treasury assets. This monetary system forms the hidden backbone of a web of consequences – from U.S. imperialism and geopolitical maneuvering to environmental degradation and extreme wealth accumulation. Today, roughly 80% of global oil transactions are still conducted in USD, illustrating the petrodollar system’s enduring influence. Below, we analyze the historical origins of the petrodollar, explain how this monetary system became a root cause linking finance to geopolitics and ecological crisis, and discuss proposed alternatives like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that could break the cycle.

Background

In the aftermath of World War II, the Bretton Woods system (1944) established the U.S. dollar as the world’s anchor currency, pegged to gold, which cemented U.S. economic dominance. However, by 1971 the U.S. faced mounting trade deficits and dwindling gold reserves, as countries sought to trade USD for gold they didn’t have, US President Nixon ended dollar convertibility to gold – a move that threatened the dollar’s supremacy. The solution emerged via oil: in 1974, one year after the oil crisis, Washington and Riyadh struck a pivotal deal (kept secret until 2016) that ensured Saudi oil would be priced exclusively in dollars. In return, the U.S. provided military protection and lucrative arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and Saudi leaders would recycle their oil revenues into U.S. Treasuries and American investments. This U.S.–Saudi arrangement laid the foundation of the petrodollar system, firmly tying the world’s most traded commodity (oil) to the American currency.

The timing was crucial. The 1973 oil embargo had quadrupled oil prices from about $3 to $12 a barrel, sparking a global energy crisis. The U.S. sought to tame this “oil weapon” by binding oil exports to the dollar – thereby turning petrodollars into a pillar of U.S. financial might. By the late 1970s, most OPEC producers followed suit in trading oil for USD, and surplus petrodollars were funnelled into Western banks and U.S. debt. This recycling of oil revenues back into American markets propped up U.S. budget deficits and helped finance Cold War expenditures. In effect, oil-exporting nations accepted dollars (often investing them in the US) in exchange for security guarantees and access to American goods and technology. The long-term implications were profound: the dollar became the default currency for global oil trade, bolstering its reserve currency status and enabling the U.S. to maintain economic and military pre-eminence “almost as a matter of course”. This petrodollar order has remained largely intact through the present, anchoring U.S. dominance in the world economy.

2. The Monetary System as the Root Cause

The petrodollar system entrenched the U.S. dollar’s global monetary hegemony, allowing the United States to exert outsized influence without the typical constraints faced by other nations. Because countries worldwide need dollars to buy oil, they hold vast USD reserves and invest in U.S. assets (like Treasury bonds), which funds U.S. deficits and keeps American interest rates lower than they otherwise would be. In practical terms, this means the U.S. can run the printing presses – or more accurately, expand money supply – to finance government spending (military, infrastructure, etc.) without triggering hyperinflation, as the excess dollars are absorbed abroad to settle trade and reserve needs. This unique privilege, often dubbed “exorbitant privilege,” roots many subsequent geopolitical and economic dynamics.

More broadly, the modern money creation process itself is a key structural driver. In most advanced economies, money is created predominantly by private banks issuing loans, not by governments minting cash. About 97% of money in circulation is created by commercial banks when they extend credit (e.g. granting loans), whereas only ~3% is physical cash from central banks. Debt-based money comes with a built-in growth imperative: banks lend money into existence with an obligation to be repaid with interest, meaning total debt continually exceeds the money available to repay it. New loans must constantly be created so borrowers can obtain the funds needed to pay interest on yesterday’s loans. If this expansion falters, the result is a contraction – loan defaults, bankruptcies, and recession – since under our interest-bearing system “an expanding amount of loans are needed to keep the system running smoothly” and avoid a cascading collapse.

Jem Bendell , author of Breaking Together, refers to this phenomenon as the “Monetary Growth Imperative,” wherein the economy “must expand whether society wishes it to or not” just to service the debt overhead. In other words, continual GDP growth is structurally required to sustain the monetary system.

This dynamic has fostered a financialized economy where speculation often outranks production. With easy credit and abundant petrodollars sloshing through global markets, capital tends to chase quick returns via financial instruments rather than long-term productive investment. Private banks, seeking secure profits, create money disproportionately for assets like real estate and stocks (fuelling price bubbles) instead of lending to manufacturing or local businesses. As a result, we see huge asset bubbles that benefit the mega-rich but relatively underfunded productive sectors. The monetary system’s incentives thus tilt toward Wall Street over Main Street – leveraging debt to amplify wealth for those at the top. Additionally, the constant need to avoid contraction pressures governments to prioritize policies that stimulate growth (often measured as rising GDP) above all else, sometimes at the expense of social or environmental considerations. In sum, the petrodollar-reinforced debt-money system creates self-perpetuating cycles: the U.S. can flood the world with dollars to sustain its dominance, and globally the pursuit of dollar profits drives speculative finance and a growth-at-all-costs mentality. This underlies many downstream effects from military interventionism to ecological overshoot.

3. Imperialism and Geopolitics

Control over the international monetary system, anchored by the petrodollar, has directly enabled U.S. imperial reach and the expansion of its military–industrial complex. Since foreign governments must hold dollars, they effectively help finance U.S. deficit spending – including the Pentagon’s budget – by purchasing U.S. treasuries. This recycling of petrodollars allowed America to run “guns and butter” policies (funding warfare and domestic programs simultaneously) without bankrupting itself. Petrodollar inflows have explicitly financed U.S. weapons exports and military aid, especially in the Middle East. For instance, petrodollar-rich Gulf states like Saudi Arabia have spent hundreds of billions on American arms over the years, funnelling their oil proceeds back into U.S. defence contractors. This symbiosis solidified a regional security architecture with the U.S. as the guarantor – protecting friendly oil monarchies in exchange for their loyalty to the dollar system.

The U.S. has likewise used its monetary and military might to suppress challenges to this order. During the Cold War, pan-Arabist and socialist-leaning movements in the Middle East – which aimed to unite Arab states or pursue independent economic policies – were seen as threats to U.S. “vital economic interests” (i.e. access to oil on U.S. terms. The Eisenhower Doctrine (1957) explicitly targeted Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and other Arab nationalists, seeking to fracture Arab unity and keep pro-Western regimes in power. This strategy “sowed divisions within Arab ranks, triggering a fierce Arab Cold War” and undermined any concerted effort by oil-producing nations to chart an autonomous course. Later, when individual leaders attempted to bypass the petrodollar system, they often met harsh reprisals. Notably, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein switched to selling oil in euros in 2000, and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi proposed a gold-backed African currency – moves that preceded U.S.-led military interventions that removed them from power, summed up in the infamous video of Hillary Clinton reacting to Gaddafi’s killing  “We came, we saw, he died”. While many factors were at play in those conflicts, the message was clear: the U.S. would not tolerate challenges to dollar dominance in oil markets.

U.S. alliances in the region further reflect petrodollar geopolitics. Israel’s role as a key American ally (and military foothold) in the Middle East has been heavily financed by U.S. dollars – the U.S. currently has provided Israel with over $250bn since 1959, with unprecedented military-aid being sent to Israel since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, in excess of more than $20bn. This support, partly enabled by America’s fiscal freedom under the petrodollar system, ensures Israel’s qualitative military edge and U.S. influence over the region’s political trajectory. Conversely, oil-rich countries that resist U.S. hegemony (Iran, Venezuela) have been isolated via sanctions that leverage the dollar’s centrality in global finance. More recently, the U.S. has been able to commit extraordinary sums to distant conflicts – for example, Congress approved $175 billion+ in aid to Ukraine since 2022 – with relatively little immediate economic fallout at home. This level of expenditure (unthinkable for most countries) is buoyed by the dollar’s reserve status and the Federal Reserve’s capacity to create money that the world will absorb. In short, the petrodollar-backed monetary order acts as a force multiplier for U.S. imperial strategy: it finances a global network of hundreds of overseas bases and proxy engagements, and it gives Washington a powerful economic weapon (control of dollar-based transactions) to reward allies and punish adversaries. The result is a geopolitical landscape where U.S. military supremacy and currency supremacy reinforce each other, often at the expense of smaller nations’ sovereignty.

In fact, it is the debt-based monetary system that has trapped many developing nations in a cycle of borrowing and export dependency, often enforced by international financial institutions and trade agreements. Under the current system, countries in the Global South are pressured to extract and export commodities (oil, minerals, cash crops) to earn the foreign currency needed to service debts and pay for imports – effectively subsidizing affluent lifestyles elsewhere at the cost of local ecosystems. Indeed, our “debt-based monetary system” creates a built-in incentive for “world export warfare”, where nations must compete for export markets to try to obtain debt-free income. This wealth transfer occurs through different mechanisms, primarily debt and price differentials in international trade resulting in unequal exchange, which, according to a 2022 paper from Hickel et al, between 1990-2015 alone, resulted in a wealth drain from the South totaling $242 trillion, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP.

4. Environmental and Economic Consequences

This debt-fuelled, growth-obsessed petrodollar system has also driven environmental destruction and locked in a fossil-fuel-dependent global economy. The arrangement implicitly incentivizes high oil consumption: oil exporting nations earn dollars and invest in growth, while oil-importing countries need growth to afford expanding energy imports. Consequently, the world’s energy and economic structures have been slow to change. As of 2022, about 80% of global primary energy still comes from fossil fuels, a statistic tied to the petrodollar era’s legacy. There is a well-documented 1:1 coupling between global GDP and global energy use, particularly fossil fuel use . In effect, economic growth has meant burning more oil, gas, and coal, leading to rising carbon emissions. Under the current system, if we “don’t keep the global economy growing by at least 3% per year, it plunges into crisis,” doubling the economy’s size every ~20 years. This exponential growth mandate collides with the reality of a finite planet. It translates into ever-expanding extraction of natural resources and ever-expanding waste (greenhouse gases, pollution), because efficiency improvements alone have not stopped total resource use from climbing, due to Jevon’s paradox and the growth-paradigm.

Critically, the monetary growth imperative undermines efforts to transition to sustainability. As Bendell observes, our debt-based monetary system “does not allow a steady-state economy” – it literally “prevents effective climate change mitigation…without monetary reform” Governments are pressured to maximize short-term GDP (to service debts and maintain employment), often prioritizing elite accumulation through inflating asset prices, destructive economic expansion and consumerism over conservation. The petrodollar system reinforces this by promoting fossil-fuelled development; countries that grow faster (with high energy use) accumulate more dollars, while those that try to curb fossil fuels risk economic stagnation under current metrics. Meanwhile, oil-rich states have had little incentive to diversify away from hydrocarbons as long as oil revenue secures their geopolitical standing. The result is a vicious cycle: debt drives growth, growth drives fossil fuel combustion, and fossil fuels exacerbate climate change and ecological harm. As one commentator put it, “American empire is inextricably linked with fossil fuels, and to mitigate climate change, it must come to an end”. In other words, genuine environmental solutions require confronting the political-economic system that maintains fossil dominance.

The petrodollar link also explains the slow global response to climate change. U.S. policymakers (and other major oil stakeholders) have often been reluctant to fully embrace decarbonization, not only due to oil industry lobbying but because a shift away from oil threatens the basis of the dollar-centric order. A world less dependent on oil could erode the automatic demand for USD, undermining U.S. financial power. Indeed, analysts note that if renewable energy and electrification significantly reduce oil trade in the coming decades, it “could eventually lead to a reduction in petrodollar flows” and weaken the dollar’s global standing. Thus the climate crisis and the petrodollar system are intertwined challenges. The very same debt-growth engine that boosted GDP (and elite wealth) in the 20th century is now pushing the planet toward ecological breakdown, by making perpetual expansion the condition for economic stability. Breaking this cycle is essential not only for environmental reasons but to free economies from what Jason Hickel calls “the logic of endless growth” that defies planetary limits.

5. Alternative Solutions and MMT

Addressing these deeply interlinked issues requires rethinking the monetary system itself. A range of economists and scholars have proposed solutions to remove the growth imperative and make finance serve people and planet rather than the elite few. One approach is to shift from privately controlled, debt-based money creation to democratically managed money that can be directed toward public purposes. Instead of relying on commercial banks to create money (and channel it into speculation or property bubbles), the state could create and spend new money directly into the real economy, funding useful projects like renewable energy, public infrastructure, healthcare, and education. Such a system of sovereign money (sometimes called “green quantitative easing” or public banking) would inject liquidity where it’s needed for social and environmental goals, rather than inflating huge asset bubbles that only benefit the mega-rich. The money supply could grow or contract in a controlled way to meet societal needs, without the destructive necessity of ever-increasing debt. Notably, the proposal is not for the government to print limitless cash, but to replace interest-bearing bank loans with debt-free public spending as the primary way new money enters circulation. This idea harkens back to thinkers like Samir Amin, who advocated “delinking” developing economies from the dictates of Western finance in order to pursue self-determined development. By reclaiming monetary sovereignty – whether through nationalizing credit creation or regional alternatives to the dollar system – countries could invest in long-term prosperity and sustainability without being trapped by dollar-denominated debt and growth-at-any-cost policies.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) offers another lens for solutions, especially for advanced economies like the U.S. and those with their own currencies. MMT economists (e.g. Stephanie Kelton , Fadhel Kaboub فاضل قابوب ) argue that a sovereign government cannot “run out of money” in its own fiat currency the way a household or business can. As Kelton puts it, for a country that issues its own currency, there is never a danger of debt spiralling out of control, because it can always create money to service its obligations. The real limits are not financial but resource-based – inflation will only arise if government spending pushes total demand beyond the economy’s productive capacity (labour, materials, technology). This perspective suggests that scarce funding is not the barrier to tackling issues like poverty, infrastructure, or climate change; what’s needed is political will and careful management of real resources. For example, using an MMT framework, the U.S. or any currency issuing country could finance a Green New Deal – mass investments in clean energy, transit, and green jobs – by issuing currency, without needing to tax or borrow first, as long as idle resources (unemployed labour, etc.) are put to work. Far from causing runaway inflation, such spending would increase productive output and sustainability, and any inflationary pressure can be managed via taxation or other tools. Importantly, MMT also highlights that monetarily sovereign governments don’t need petrodollar recycling or foreign loans to fund themselves; their spending is constrained by what’s available to buy in their own currency, not by foreign exchange. This undercuts the rationale for maintaining structures like the petrodollar – if the U.S. can afford to invest in renewable energy and social programs without Saudi petrodollar recycling, it might reduce the strategic obsession with oil-based dollar supremacy.

Leading voices have emerged to champion these ideas. Economist Fadhel Kaboub, for instance, emphasizes that developing nations can use MMT principles to achieve monetary sovereignty and resilience, rather than depending on IMF loans or dollar reserves. He points to strategies such as building domestic food and energy systems to reduce import dependence and denominating debts in local currency, so that Global South countries can escape the trap of dollar-denominated debt that forces austerity. Jason Hickel, from a “degrowth” and global justice perspective, likewise calls for moving beyond GDP growth as the measure of success and financing a fair economic transformation (especially in the Global South) through public-led investment and technology transfer. Dr. Steve Keen and David Graeber have both called for modern debt-jubilees, to liberate ourselves from this unpayable debt cycle that has dictated and limited human societies for millennia. Their work suggests cancelling odious debts, taxing or expropriating the excess wealth of elites, and redirecting resources toward climate mitigation, adaptation, and human wellbeing – all of which would be easier under a redesigned monetary regime that isn’t predicated on private profit. Even scholars of collapse like Jem Bendell argue that monetary reform is central to any hope of mitigating climate catastrophe; as he bluntly states, without altering how money is created and allocated, societies “will be prevented from effective climate change mitigation” and from adapting to coming disruptions. In summary, these alternative paradigms (sovereign money, MMT, degrowth) converge on a key point: freeing the economy from the tyranny of the petrodollar and debt-driven growth would enable humanity to prioritize ecological stability and equitable development. By reclaiming the monetary commons for public good, we could break the cycle of imperial warfare, environmental exploitation, and elite enrichment that the current system produces.

Conclusion

The U.S.–Saudi petrodollar deal of the 1970s created a self-reinforcing cycle that has shaped global politics, economics, and the environment in far-reaching ways. It tethered the world’s monetary order to fossil fuels and U.S. military might, allowing American elites to amass wealth and power under the guise of “maintaining liquidity” for global trade. The consequences – imperial interventions, entrenched petro-states, financial crises, and climate change – are not isolated problems but different facets of a singular system. Understanding the monetary root cause clarifies why efforts to address issues like endless wars or carbon emissions often hit a wall: the prevailing system is built to expand itself, not to prioritize peace or planetary limits. However, as we have seen, this system is not immutable. History is now at an inflection point where the petrodollar’s dominance is being quietly challenged. China, Russia, and other nations are experimenting with oil trade in other currencies, and U.S. financial sanctions on rivals have spurred talk of de-dollarization. At the same time, the imperative of climate action is pushing the world toward renewable energy, which in the long run will weaken the oil-dollar nexus. These trends suggest that the petrodollar system’s grip may loosen in the coming years.

Yet simply replacing the U.S. dollar with another currency for oil trade would not automatically dissolve the deeper problems – it might just shift the locus of power. The more fundamental change advocated by the thinkers cited above is to redesign how money works and what it serves. By moving to a post-petrodollar era of cooperative monetary policy, debt-free public investment, and truly sustainable economics, it becomes possible to address the interconnected crises at their source. That means breaking the feedback loop of oil, dollars, and weapons, and instead using monetary tools to foster global justice and ecological balance. In conclusion, the petrodollar deal was not just a quirky historical pact – it has been the linchpin of an entire world-system of U.S. hegemony, elite enrichment, and fossil-fuelled growth that turbocharged the ‘great acceleration’ that has pushed the global economy far outside what our planet can sustainably support. Recognizing that the monetary system lies at the root of imperialism and environmental breakdown is the first step toward imagining new systems that prioritize peace, shared prosperity, and a liveable planet. The challenges are immense, but so are the possibilities if money creation and resource allocation are reclaimed for the common good. The downfall of the petrodollar need not be a crisis; it could be an opportunity to chart a different course for both the global economy and Earth’s future.

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Among the Republican voters experiencing buyer’s remorse are more than a few military veterans who chose Trump over Harris by a margin of 65 to 34%, according to some exit polls.

Their shock and dismay surfaced in DC this month during the legislative conference of the reliably conservative and hawkish Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), which has 1.4 million members.

In the run-up to that annual event, VFW national commander Al Lipphardt, urged his members to “march forth” and “engage with lawmakers” to “stop the bleeding” at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) , the VA now faces disruption of its benefit claims handling, healthcare delivery, data security,critical medical research, and stable employment for 100,000 former service members.

The VFW’s resulting Capitol Hill visit on March 4 was not exactly the second coming of the militant march on Washington, in 1932, by 30,000 jobless World War 1 vets. During that confrontation, leaders of the VFW and American Legion provided political cover for Herbert Hoover, the conservative Republican president who ignored veteran unemployment (and, like Trump, championed small government).

Now, the VFW’s condemnation of Trump’s mass firing of vets is such a welcome break with past Veteran Service Organization (VSO) subservience to the White House that even VSO critics are impressed. Iraq war vet and VFW life member Kris Goldsmithcalls it “historic” and “nothing short of extraordinary.”

Bleeding Gets Worse, Not Better

Nevertheless, as Goldsmith argues, it will take a lot more than issuing press statements, presenting hearing testimony, and politely lobbying legislators to stop the further “bleeding” that will result from a VA “reorganization” first reported March 5.

According to an internal memo, Trump’s new VA Secretary Doug Collins intends to cut 80,000 more jobs—contrary to his confirmation hearing testimony before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee (SVAC) on Jan. 21.

On that occasion, the ex-Congressman from Georgia assured his former Capitol Hill colleagues that “we’re not going to sacrifice veterans’ benefits to do a budget.” This helped the right-wing Air Force Reserve chaplain get confirmed, with virtually no SVAC opposition, and by a 77 to 23 Senate vote in his favor.

Despite the leaked document from VA headquarters, President Trump insists that he will still “take good care of our veterans” and wants to keep the total number losing their federal jobs “as small as possible.” Meanwhile, he boasted of “having great success at slimming down our government,” which was a major focus of his State of the Union address.

During that 100-minute rant and ramble, Trump didn’t mention  veterans or Collins even once, despite his various shout-outs to cops, fire-fighters, border patrol officers and other cabinet members.

As part of the Democrats’ response to what Senator Tim Kane calls a “war on veterans,” Kane and others in Trump’s audience brought along guests who served in the military. All were just fired by the VA and other federal agencies, where vets comprise about 30% of the workforce.

When one dismissed Forest Service worker, Iraq war vet Jacob Bushno, approached his Congressman back home for help–he got no response from Mike Bost, the Republican chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Instead, Bushno heard from the office of Senator Tammy Duckworth, the Illinois Democrat and former Army helicopter pilot who became a double amputee when she was shot down in Iraq.

Noting that Republicans like Bost always wrap themselves in the flag, Bushno told The Times that “he hadn’t seen any patriotism out of them since this has been going down.”

“Why Is This Happening to Us?”

This emerging rift between right-wing Republicans and one part of their electoral base can be further deepened through more grassroots activism by veterans and their organizations, VA care givers and their patients, federal worker unions, and even their often  unreliable Democratic allies.

On February 19, there was plenty of blue state outrage on display when members and friends of the Federal Unionists Network (FUN) protested DOGE in rallies from the Left Coast to New York City, where1,000 people gathered in Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square to hear speakers like longtime VA defender, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Outside a Tesla dealership in San Francisco, Army veteran and VA patient Ricardo Ortiz told a crowd of 300 about the struggle of working-class vets to create a healthcare system, based on public provision of care, not for-profit medical treatment. That achievement is now at risk, he warned, because of bi-partisan efforts to privatize the VA-run Veterans Health Administration.

Now many red state victims of the Trump-Musk purge are speaking out as well, taking their personal stories to media outlets and public meetings around the country. Army veteran Nelson Feliz, Sr. lost his job in the first wave of VA lay-offs, which Collins claimed would “not negatively impact VA healthcare, benefits, or beneficiaries.”

“We’ve been betrayed,” Feliz told Channel 2 News in Atlanta. “I was a first sergeant. My job was to take care of troops, making sure they were paid, fed, and slept. Why is this happening to us? I’ve been here too long for this to be happening.”

Both Bushno, the now unemployed National Forest Service worker in Illinois, and Feliz were among the 6,000 vets affected by the dismissal of 20,000 federal workers still in probationary status. In Bushno’s case, he was let go seven days before his one-year probationary period ended, a decision he is appealing. Feliz was fired despite having been a VA employee for more than 12 years!

He recently started a new position but had not completed the required probationary period for that. The “Notice of Termination” he received, via email, stated that “the agency finds, based on your performance, you have not demonstrated that your further employment would be in the public interest.” This and other indiscriminate dismissals have been the subject of an on-going legal challenge by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the progressive veterans’ group, Common Defense, and other plaintiffs.

Town Hall Confrontations

AFGE local union leaders like Rebecca Reinhold, vice-president  of Local 85 at the VA in Leavenworth, Kansas, have been taking the fight directly to Republican members of Congress–when they dare to show up for constituent meetings in their districts. This is already a risky decision, for many, due to growing popular anger about impending Medicaid and/or Medicare cuts.

In Reinhold’s recent video-taped confrontation with U.S. Rep. Mark Alford at a town hall gathering, she reminded Alford that her 1,200 members provide critical services.  “We make sure veterans are cared for from the moment they become a veteran,” she said. “But you want to cut my job.” In response, Alford insisted there would be “appropriate funds for veterans” and that any VA cuts “would not affect services” because ”we’re going to make sure veterans are supported.”

In Oakley, Kansas, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall abruptly ended an already contentious town hall meeting when local resident Chuck Nunn questioned the wisdom of laying off so many veterans. His concern was shared by another member of the crowd who declared, “I’m not a Democrat, but I’m worried about the veterans.” Marshall did not respond to either comment and left the room hurriedly, amid jeers and boos.

In other House member encounters with voters in the southwest recently, it was the same story. Veteran Louis Smith drew approving applause from an East Texas audience when he warned Congressman Pete Sessions that “the guy from South Africa is not doing you any good — he’s hurting you more than he’s helping.”

U.S. Rep Stephanie Bice from Oklahoma heard, during a telephone town hall, from a self-identified Republican and former Army officer, who demanded to know how “some college whiz kids with a computer terminal in Washington, D.C…. have determined that it’s OK to cut veterans benefits?”

“Get Used To It?”

And those skirmishes were before Secretary Collins doubled down on the bad news contained in the leaked memo from his chief of staff, Christopher Syrek, who comes to the VA from KPMG, a corporate consulting firm specializing in out-sourcing strategies.

In a March 5 video statement, Collins pledged his fealty to further elimination of “waste and bureaucracy.” He claimed, of course, that VA healthcare delivery would not be disrupted because no “mission critical positions” would be impacted. “We’ll be making major changes, so get used to it,” he said.

In response, SVAC Ranking Member, Senator Richard Blumenthal,  displayed some buyer’s remorse of his own. He accused Collins of planning job cuts to “roll back the PACT Act”—which expanded health care access to nearly a million post-9/11 veterans–and impeding the agency’s “ability to meet increased demand in order to justify privatizing VA”

Just two months ago, Blumenthal and his fellow veteran on the committee, Ruben Gallego from Arizona, were among the 22 Senate Democrats voting to confirm Collins, along with longtime VA privatization foe Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) As their penance for that misguided display of VA-related bi-partisanship on Capitol Hill, they will hopefully be holding their own town meetings soon to rally their own distressed constituents, who once donned military uniforms but are now feeling very double-crossed by Chaplain Collins.

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As the South Korean Constitutional Court’s impeachment trial of President Yoon Suk Yeol heads toward its finish, a second trial has opened at the Seoul District Court, in which the president is charged with the crime of insurrection. As I reported in January, substantial evidence points to Yoon’s intention to unleash a campaign of mass repression under martial law. Recently, startling new evidence has emerged that paints a much darker picture of Yoon’s plan.

Investigators discovered a notebook kept by former military intelligence chief Roh Sang-won, who is widely regarded as the architect of martial law. The notebook contains instructions that Roh reportedly wrote down as dictated by his fellow conspirator, Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun. There is suspicion that Kim wrote the notes, although handwriting analysis is inconclusive. It is a distinction without a difference in that the two worked closely together at drafting the plan for military rule, and the contents of the notebook represented agreed-upon procedures. Indeed, Kim repeatedly instructed military officers that Roh’s orders were his orders. It was an ongoing collaboration, as Roh visited Kim’s home 22 times from September up through the night martial law was declared. Kim even provided Roh with his chauffeured car to pass through the checkpoint to his residential compound.

Until recently, few details of Roh’s notebook’s contents had been publicly revealed, but South Korean media have now gained access to the entire text. It was known that Martial Law Command had organized two arrest teams to hunt down and seize fourteen prominent people whom Yoon loathed, and bundle them off to a detention center. Among these high-priority targets were former South Korean President Moon Jae-in and the current leader of the opposition Democratic Party, Lee Jae-myung, who is regarded as the main challenger to Yoon. In his martial law speech, Yoon singled out the Democratic Party’s majority in the National Assembly as one of his motivations for imposing military rule.

What the newly disclosed information reveals is that around 500 people and organizations were targets for arrest in the early days of martial law. The intended victims were assigned to categories A through D, signifying the importance assigned to their capture. The arrest list included prominent politicians and lawmakers, as well as Buddhist and Christian religious leaders, entertainment celebrities, judges, trade unionists, police chiefs, various types of officials, and even former South Korean National soccer team coach Cha Bum-geun. Up to 200 media figures were listed for “primary collection” in the first round of abductions.

In addition to named individuals, entire categories of people were identified for repression, so the intended number of victims in the first wave of arrests was likely to be far higher than the reported 500. The targeted organizations included the Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice, Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations, Lawyers for a Democratic Society, “all left-wing judges,” and “left-wing entertainers.” As a welcoming gesture for arrestees, the notebook had a reference to hiring gangster thugs to use their fists “to crush the leftist bastards.”

The goal was to wipe out the opposition. As phrased in Roh’s notebook, once military rule is established, “eliminate the sprouts to eradicate the root” and “continuously cut off the sprouts” to “collapse all leftist forces in preparation for the next presidential election.” The South Korean constitution limits presidents to a single five-year term. Nevertheless, martial law planners envisioned at least three terms for Yoon under military rule, with pre-ordained electoral outcomes in his favor. The elimination of the opposition would see to that.

Martial law planners had a permanent solution in mind for the prisoners, who were to be taken to “collection centers” located on islands in the West Sea and along South Korea’s fortified northern border. Their fate, quite simply, was to be murdered. “It is difficult to avoid investigation when using domestic personnel,” Roh wrote. “We need professionals.” To carry out that task, seven to eight special agents who are “good at shooting and bombing” would be needed. Roh selected a few special forces soldiers and undercover agents for the assignment, who were to be supplemented by contractors, reservists, and volunteers. “Confirmation kill is necessary,” it was emphasized. In other words, no one should survive.

Various methods were contemplated regarding how to “dispose” of the prisoners. One option was to install explosives in the barracks and then blow them up once the prisoners were inside. Another was to attack the barracks with grenades or set them on fire. There was also a plan to sink transport ships taking the abductees to their island destinations. Explosives would be placed in the engine room or hold. Martial law personnel would disembark at Silmido Island, send the ships on their way to Yeonpyeong Island, and then detonate the explosives “at an appropriate location.” Since a transmitter may not be an effective means, it was noted that time bombs were preferred. The explosives would need to be powerful enough to ensure that “no evidence should remain as debris.” Other approaches included an apparent plan to poison food and water or use chemical agents against “an entire prison cell.”

There was a recognized need to “destroy the evidence” after the “killing,” or better yet, misdirect responsibility, under the heading, “taking action in the North.” Among the alternatives mentioned were “outsourcing torpedo attacks,” hiring foreign Chinese contractors to sink the ships, or informally reaching out to North Korea, with the open question of “what to offer the North” in exchange for its participation. What could be more delusional than to imagine that North Korea would be willing to assist the hostile Yoon to murder hundreds or thousands of his opponents? Even more dismaying, considering that the point would be to direct world blame onto the North. A less fanciful option would be to send transport ships over the Northern Limit Line into disputed waters claimed by both Koreas in hopes of “provoking the North to attack,” or failing to elicit a response, then “sinking ships before the North captures them for trespassing, etc.”

Once the martial law regime became fully entrenched, the plan was to formalize ongoing repression with a legal veneer. This would be accomplished by establishing a special investigation headquarters staffed by regular and military police and counterintelligence agents. The organization would be responsible for expediting the arrest and trial of people labeled as leftists. Slated to operate for as long as one year, its mission was to process and sentence prisoners on an industrial scale to “the death penalty or life imprisonment.” The 500 individuals and organizations listed by name would comprise the first batch of victims, to be followed by many more in what was to be an ongoing campaign of mass repression to, as Yoon put it in his martial law speech, “eradicate” his opponents.

Those who attempted to flee or hide would have been systematically hunted down and abducted. A ban on citizens leaving the country was planned to eliminate one avenue for escape. Thought was also given to electronic means for hunting people. The Capital Defense Command contacted ride-sharing companies last August, asking to be granted access to their data in a so-called “wartime situation,” such as identification of customers and real-time tracking location. It should be noted that the Capital Defense Command participated in planning Yoon’s military takeover and played a key role in Yoon’s attack on the National Assembly. One company, Socar, conducted an internal review and rejected the request based on the lack of legal justification. How other ride-sharing companies responded is not publicly known. Whether any agreed to cooperate or not, the result would have likely been the same, as the military could have seized control over electronic tracking capabilities.

Martial Law Command attached great importance to crushing dissent and resistance. The martial law decree outlawed all political parties and activities, rallies, and demonstrations, warning that violators would be punished. It was expected that substantial numbers of ordinary citizens would raise their voices in protest and need to be imprisoned. But where to find room to house them all? From March to May last year, the 7^th Airborne Brigade visited prisons in North Jeolla Province, requesting facility blueprints and permission to film. It is almost certain that other brigades were making similar requests at other prisons throughout South Korea. The information was intended to help plan to “free up space” to imprison thousands of protestors “through a large-scale amnesty” for convicts.

Information control was a key component in planning. The martial law decree issued on the night of December 3 declared, “All media and publications are subject to the control of Martial Law Command.” As a first step, Yoon handed orders to Minister of Security and Public Administration Lee Sang-min, instructing him to block the offices and shut off the power and water at media companies critical of his rule. The action was to be coordinated through the National Police Agency and National Fire Agency. According to the testimony of the commissioner of the latter organization, “Cutting off water and electricity is not something that we can do, so we didn’t take any measures.” Whether he was telling the truth or time had run out before action could be taken before martial law was lifted, had Yoon prevailed, these media outlets were destined to be shut down. With domination imposed over media across the political spectrum, the Korean people would have only been exposed to information provided or vetted by the military.

Yoon’s plan for martial law collapsed when thousands of citizens rushed to the National Assembly to resist efforts by soldiers to block lawmakers from entering the building and voting to lift martial law. Under the constitution, a president must respect the outcome of that vote. Yoon’s response, instead, was to try and organize a second martial law. By then, it was too late for him, as news broadcasts announcing the result of the vote had deflated support among lower levels of the military for his coup. South Korea had evaded disaster by the narrowest of margins, but it is not out of danger yet. In his final speech to the Constitutional Court, Yoon came across as unhinged, soft-pedaling the seriousness of his martial law plan and accusing the opposition and labor unions of working together with North Korea to threaten national security. With that mindset, Yoon seems likely to launch another martial law if the court does not confirm his impeachment.

There is every sign that Yoon believes he can return to active duty as president even if his impeachment is upheld. Imagining that he can be swept back to office by his supporters, Yoon’s public messages have mobilized right-wing extremists to threaten violence on his behalf in the event of his impeachment. Yoon has not been alone in inciting violence. YouTube fanatics are actively whipping up emotions, as is former Defense Minister and martial law planner Kim Yong-hyun, as he issues messages from his prison cell. Kim provided a statement to be read aloud at a recent rally, in which he accused the opposition of colluding with China and North Korea. Kim even supplied chants for the crowd, including a call to punish the constitutional court judges and the message, “The enemy has stolen our president. Let’s rescue him with our own hands.” If Yoon is impeached, powerful forces are bent on returning him to power through violent means. South Korea sits atop a political volcano, with its future balancing on Yoon’s fate.

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Archaeologist and scholar Giorgio Buccellati’s book At the Origins of Politics describes how Mesopotamia’s urban revolution in the late fourth millennium BC shaped a new mentality. The segmentation and specialization of industrial production required written recordkeeping, standardization of weights and measures, and surveying and allocation of land planning. This inherent logic of handicraft production and its related organization of trade and market exchange, especially with the palace and temple institutions, led to new forms of social interaction, with the state and its laws and religion consolidating the new managerial hierarchies.

I met Buccellati in 1994 at the first of what would become a decade-long series of Harvard-based colloquia to compile an economic history of the Bronze Age Near Eastern origins of money and interest, land tenure, and its public obligations. Since these innovations were shaped largely by relations with the temples and palaces, our group started by focusing on just what it meant to be public or private.

It was fairly clear what “privatization” meant, but calling the palace or temples “public” was problematic. Royal price schedules for grain, silver, and other key commodities applied only to transactions with these large institutions, which were corporately distinct from the rest of the economy where prices were free to vary. Hammurabi’s laws focused on the relations between the palatial sector and the family-based economy on the land, which followed its own common law tradition for wergild-like personal offenses and other legal problems not involving the palace. How far beyond the palace did the state extend?

Buccellati’s paper focused on a broader philosophical idea of “public” as referring to the overall system of social and economic organization: “The dichotomy between public and private is coterminous with the origin of the city.”1 As he points out in At the Origins of Politics: “The increased size of the settlements created a critical mass, whereby face-to-face association no longer was possible among each member of the social group.” The relationship was political. “On the etymological level, the terms ‘urbanism’ and ‘politics’ are equivalent, given that they both derive from the word for ‘city’ in Latin and Greek respectively.” His term “state-city” emphasizes the overall political and administrative context.

He views industrialization as the economic dimension of the urban revolution that occurred in the late fourth millennium BC. The scale and social complexity of mining (or trading for metal) and metallurgy, beer-making, and weaving involved increasingly impersonal relationships as industrial organizations created products beyond the ability of individuals to make by themselves. The evolution was from direct personal contact to being part of a long, specialized chain.

Describing this takeoff as the first Axial Age, Buccellati explains how economic and social relations had been transformed over the 50,000-year evolution from small Paleolithic groups to urban industrial production, trade, and property relations. The technology and administration of production transformed the character of labor and what Buccellati calls para-perceptual thought. The moral principles of mutual aid, group solidarity, protection of the needy, and basic rights to means of self-support were retained from pre-urban practice but were administered on the state level.

“The state was never able to eliminate or even ignore the people… political ideology became a way for the leadership to justify itself in front of the base,” bolstered by religious attitudes to popularize an “Ideology of Control… the ideology of command, of leadership not necessarily based on coercive means.” Even in the face of “ever-increasing gaps in prestige and economic ability,” the rhetoric of kingship promoted “a sense of solidarity that transcends the limit of reciprocal face-to-face recognition.”

For the king, the aim was to make “submission not just tolerable but actually desirable.” That enabled Mesopotamian rule to be personal and indeed dynastic. “The king was not just the most powerful private individual; he embodied a distinct organism.” Kings were described as serving heaven, as reflected in Hammurapi’s stele depicting him presenting his laws to the god of justice, Shamash (or in some interpretations, receiving them from Shamash).

“The private model was thus superimposed from scratch on the public one,” merging the state and religion as every new king pointed to his ancestors as if this meant continuity of the law. The principle of kings being hereditary was accepted “without ever being formulated in theoretical terms.”

From Living in a State of Nature to a Stratified Managerial Order

Buccellati describes production as evolving from interpersonal and small scale to institutional and large scale. He describes how Paleolithic hunters and gatherers met their needs by using what they found in nature. They napped flints to make spear points and cutting tools, and wove plant fibers to make clothing, baskets, and other artifacts, but these materials were as they found them. And personal wealth took the form of shells or other objects found in nature. However, the increasing complexity of industrial organization transformed the character of producers in that they ceased to have face-to-face relations with the users of the objects they made. Products evolved increasingly beyond objects found in nature, and also beyond the ability of single individuals to make them as they required chains of transformation via metallurgy and manufacturing.

Although Buccellati does not focus on land tenure, money, and credit in this volume, his analytic schema of the transition from “nature” to man-made institutional structures suggests how land and credit relations evolved along similar lines, from informal and spontaneous to formal and standardized. If there was an archaic relationship with the land, it was for an Indigenous tribe to claim territory as belonging to itself for hunting and gathering and for ceremonial or religious functions.

Most exchange was domestic, taking the form of reciprocal gifts, often of the same food types simply as a means of binding groups together in the spirit of mutual aid. But artifacts were traded among Indigenous communities already in the Ice Age, from one tribal group to another, sometimes passed along over long distances.

Gathering places for such exchange existed already in the Ice Age, often at river crossings or natural meeting points. These would have been seasonal sites, with chieftains responsible for keeping the lunisolar calendar to time when to travel to such spots. If anything, such gathering places were the opposite of the later city that Buccellati describes. The idea was to prevent any one group from dominating others or restricting territorial control. The result was akin to the amphictyonic centers of classical antiquity, neutral zones set aside from political cities and rivalries, with careful equality of participants as a condition for amicable relations.

Deities often were trees, woods, or natural rock formations such as those that survived in Germanic religion into the first millennium of our era, and Japan’s Shinto religion. Lunar and solar deities were part of an astronomical cosmology reflecting the rhythms of nature. By the Bronze Age, gods took on the role of patrons of social authority and justice as urbanization transformed the natural environment.

Technology enabled the production of new shapes and “artifacts that have no analogy in nature.” Mud bricks became standardized to build walls. “Stone is no longer seen as an adaptation of pre-existing forms” but was shaped to produce new building structures. Fire played an important role in controlling the environment, not only to cook food but also to bake mud bricks and harden ceramics, and to refine metal from ores and make alloys such as bronze to produce tools, weapons, and other implements. The potter’s wheel and spindles for weaving were developed, and a managerial class came into being as manufacturing such products required increasingly complex organization, from producers and traders to armies.

The Neolithic agricultural revolution saw the standardization of land, allotted to community members in lots sufficient to support their families, with proportional obligations attached—obliging their holders to serve in the army and provide seasonal corvée labor on communal building projects.

These obligations were what defined land tenure rights. That created a strict relationship with the emerging urban centers that transformed “the village as it existed in prehistory… in the sense of autonomous villages that found an end in themselves. … Agricultural or manufactured production did not have as its end point the village, but rather and especially the urban markets.” Rural villages became part of the city, and local conflicts were settled by traveling urban judges.

Monetization of Exchange Between the Rural and Urban Centers

Money evolved as part of the valuation dimension of exchange. Anthropologists studying surviving Indigenous communities have found that artifacts typically are valued for their rarity or lineage of ownership. In archaic times such objects were often buried with their wearers, having become part of their personal identity. In time, they took a proto-monetary signification of esteem. But it was in southern Mesopotamia that money became formalized as a measure of valuation, simultaneously for domestic agrarian and industrial exchange—mainly for grain and wool—and for foreign trade. In both cases, the palace and temples played a key role. A standardized measure of value was needed for the economy’s own industrial and institutional functioning, not merely for personal decoration and status.

Foreign trade was necessary to obtain raw materials not found in the region’s river-deposited soil. Copper and tin were the key metals that were needed, the alloy of which gave its name to the Bronze Age (3500-1200 BC), but silver was adopted as the main measure of value for palace transactions and those of entrepreneurs, presumably because of its role in religious symbolism. Silver and other commodities were obtained by a mercantile class of entrepreneurs, whose major customers were the palace and temples, which also supplied most of the textiles being exported.

The largest categories of debts and fiscal obligations were inter-sectoral, owed by citizens on the land and mercantile entrepreneurs to the palace sector and its temples. The seasonal character of agriculture made credit necessary to bridge the gap between planting and harvesting, to be paid on the threshing floor when the crop was in. Grain served as the main domestic agrarian measure of value and the medium for paying agrarian debts.

The palace and temples integrated their economic accounts by setting the silver mina and shekel that denominated the value of commodities obtained in foreign trade (and consignments of what was exchanged for them) as equal to corresponding measures of grain, while dividing the relevant measures into 60ths to facilitate the allocation of food and raw materials based on the 30-day administrative month used by the large institutions.

The resulting monetary system of account-keeping for credit and fiscal collection was part of a broader economic context in which standardized weights and measures were used to quantify and calculate the various magnitudes of the inputs required by the large institutions for producing commodities in their workshops, along with the amounts of the charges, fees, and rents payable to the institutions and fiscal collectors.

The surplus grain rent paid to the large institutions supported dependent labor in the weaving and handicraft workshops. Commodities no longer were made by individual craftpersons known to the users, but by many, whose identities were institutional and hence collective and impersonal as far as the buyers or users were concerned. The workforce consisted largely of war widows and orphans, and also slaves captured from the mountains surrounding Mesopotamia. (A typical word for slave was “mountain girl.”)

The textiles woven by this labor were consigned to merchants to act as intermediaries between the large institutions or the growing class of private estate holders and foreign purchasers. Interest charges (usually equal to the original loan value for consignments of five years) served as a means for consigners and backers to obtain their share of the gain that merchants were expected to make on their trade.

Bucellati shows how the urban revolution’s “evolutionary process in motion” to transform society and with it “the very nature of human existence.” The development of writing, for instance, had a deep effect in transforming thought processes, much as the creation of languages had served to “externalize thought.” It enabled the communication of ideas to others without having to rely on memory.

Originally used by the eighth millennium BC to oversee and quantify trade and exchange transactions, it came to be used for accounting and credit, and increasingly to preserve, arrange and order thoughts, public announcements, treaties, poetry, and laws. The written word became a new medium for thought. Buccellati describes this “reification of thought” as part of the “removal from nature.” That was part of the evolving uniformity that spread from the production of commodities to shape the overall social order.

Debt Strains Lead Rulers to Protect Their Economies From Polarizing

Industry and entrepreneurial foreign trade concentrated control and wealth in the hands of managers and “big men.” Their economic gains caused a wealthy class to emerge, initially within the large institutions, with credit being used to pry labor away from palace control. Creditor claims on indebted cultivators accumulated, largely at the institutional level of landholders, merchant-creditors, and also ale-women, whose customers ran up tabs for their beer, to be settled at “payday” on the threshing floor when crops were harvested.

It was inevitable that strains would develop as a result of the rising role of credit and debt relations, especially in times of flooding or crop failure. As rent and other payment arrears and interest charges mounted up, private lending (often by royal or temple officials acting on their own account) became the major initial way to obtain the labor of debtors, by requiring them to work off their debts. That prevented cultivators from performing the stipulated corvée and military service that they owed in exchange for their land tenure rights.

The result was a threefold conflict: first, creditors against debtors; second, creditors against the palace over the appropriation of labor via debt bondage; and third, the assertion of creditor power against traditional communal moral ideas of equity and mutual aid. Archaic communities traditionally sought to minimize economic inequality, perceiving much personal wealth as being achieved by exploiting others, above all by indebting them. By the third millennium, indebted cultivators faced the threat of being disenfranchised, losing their personal freedom and self-support land through foreclosure.

As Buccellati observed in our 1994 colloquium royal protection of homesteaders, canceling the overgrowth of personal debt resulted “more from a concern for the public domain than as a phenomenon of privatization.” Rulers from the third millennium BC onward protected palace claims on the labor of their citizens from being disrupted by debt strains of the type to which subsequent Western civilization has succumbed. Sumerian rulers made sure that these strains would not be permanent because that would have been at the expense of the palace’s own requirements for corvée and military service from agrarian debtors.

Buccellati pertinently notes that three main considerations shaped Near Eastern public laws: “the concept of rules, the sense of justice, [and] the decisive moments in resolving conflict.” Hammurapi’s “code” was simply a collection of judgments, but his andurarum proclamations were enforced by the courts to cancel personal debts (but not mercantile debts), liberate bondservants (but not slaves), and redistribute self-support land (but not townhouses) that had been forfeited to creditors or sold under economic duress. These Clean Slates were the most basic royal administrative acts of Mesopotamian rulers from Sumerian times onward. They were the moral pillar of the state.

The Mesopotamian State Solved the Debt Problem That Western Civilization Has Not

Buccellati sees the transformation of production, economic control, and ways of perceiving and thinking about one’s place in society as progressing toward a geopolitical peak with the Assyrian Empire. What enabled and made this sustained achievement so successful were royal laws to regularly restore economic balance on a system-wide level. Clean Slate proclamations prevented a creditor oligarchy from emerging to rival palace claims on the labor and crop surpluses of citizens on the land. In this respect, the distinction between financial and industrial gain-seeking—and the socially destructive character of usury and creditor self-interest—was recognized already in the third millennium BC in the Hymn to Shamash, the Akkadian god of justice (lines 103-106):

What happens to the loan shark who invests his resources at the (highest) interest rate?
He will lose his purse just as he tries to get the most out of it.
But he who invests in the long term will convert one measure of silver into three.
He pleases Shamash and will enrich his life.2

Buccellati rightly states that “We are the heirs of Mesopotamian perception and political experience.” Modern civilization, however, has retrogressed from the Bronze Age Mesopotamian achievement of avoiding deepening financial and economic imbalance. He notes that modern society defines property as being alienable, but in the West securing property rights always has entailed the “right” to forfeit it to creditors or sell under duress—irreversibly. That has been the case ever since Near Eastern commercial and credit practices were brought to the Aegean and Mediterranean lands in the first millennium BC.

The West has adopted the basic economic practices invented in the fourth and third millennia BC, but not the economically protective measures that rulers took to annul the buildup of creditor claims to reverse the increase in debt bondage and loss of land by debtors. That decontextualization is what in my view makes the West “Western.”

Bronze Age Near Eastern practice was so different from the Western worldview that most modern historians resist recognizing and appreciating the relevance of the region’s takeoff in the fourth and third millennia BC. Indeed, today’s anti-state economic ideology denies that money and industrial enterprise could have been innovated by what Buccellati calls the state, that is, the palatial authority.

This ideology obscures a great question posed for the West: How is it that Near Eastern “divine kingship” achieved what Western democracy has failed to do: check the emergence of a creditor rent-seeking oligarchy, which in classical antiquity would strip the Greek, Italian, and other populations of their means of self-support that had formed the basis of economic liberty for the first 3,000 years of the Mesopotamian takeoff that this book so comprehensively describes.

Notes.

1. Buccellati, Giorgio, “The Role of Socio-Political Factors in the Emergence of ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Domains in Early Mesopotamia,” in Hudson, Michael and Levine, Baruch (eds.), Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass: Peabody Museum [Harvard], 1996):131.

2. In Giorgio Buccellati, “When on High the Heavens…”: Mesopotamian Religion and Spirituality with Reference to the Biblical World (London, 2024):194, citing Reiner, Erica, Your Thwarts in Pieces, Your Mooring Rope Cut: Poetry from Babylonia and Assyria (Ann Arbor, 1985): 68-84, and W.G. Lambert, W.G., Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford, 1960): 122-138.

This text is adapted from Michael Hudson’s foreword to At the Origins of Politics by Giorgio Buccellati, and this excerpt was produced by Human Bridges.

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Why does American society remain so deeply implicated in the enslavement of Black Americans? Slavery was never abolished in the United States, and today it enjoys widespread support among both Republicans and Democrats. Almost 800,000 people are subject to the conditions of prison slavery, but this estimate is almost certainly low, as the lack of reliable data means that it “excludes people confined in local jails or detention centers, juvenile correctional facilities, and immigration detention facilities.” This system, supported and perpetuated by both halves of the ruling class, is an extension of the country’s history of racism and chattel slavery, a way to reinstitute slavery within a legal framework that loudly insists it has been abolished.

The new slavery is a shameful mark on our country’s pretenses to respect for human rights and the dignity of every human being, the latest chapter in a story of race-based hierarchy and domination. When slavery was formally abolished, a major loophole was left in place, one that would help race-based slavery survive to the present day. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, inscribes the Emancipation Proclamation’s abolition of slavery into the country’s supreme source of law, but it does not contemplate a total end to slavery within the nation’s borders. Rather the amendment carves out a fateful exception to the prohibition of slavery:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction [emphasis added].

Slavery is perfectly legal and permissible as long as the enslaved are deemed criminals, which allows prisons to completely dispense with any protections for prison workers. It goes without saying that this exception to the general rule against slavery creates a major incentive to criminalize the mere existence of Black Americans, to use the criminal justice system to create a permanent pool of free labor. If prison slavery is not, on its own, the primary cause of the mass incarceration crisis besieging Black bodies, then billions of dollars’ worth of free labor every year nonetheless remains a powerful force in the service of a racist, two-tier system of “justice.” And indeed this incentive problem has done its work within the American social system, propelling and insulating a system of mass incarceration that recalls and recreates the race-based slavery that so deeply defines the country’s history.

All available evidence shows that the longer one spends in prison, the more likely they are to end up back in the system after they’re back in society. But here is “the great irony of our American criminal justice system.” Today, we imprison huge numbers of people and the prison sentences have grown longer—“thus our system of mass incarceration all but assures high rates of recidivism.” The scale of mass incarceration in the United States is “unparalleled historically” and the shame of the country on the global stage as an egregious violation of accepted human rights. Today, some 2 million people are held in America’s prisons and jails (the majority, about 1.2 million of them, in the prisons), and they live in some of the harshest conditions of abuse and neglect. The data on the country’s sadistic penchant for mass incarceration are startling: in 1972, the rate of imprisonment was about 93 people per 100,000, but by 2009, it was seven times that number, and in the decade between 1985 and 1995, the prison population grew by an average of 8 percentage points every year. Black Americans are highly over-represented in the contemporary prison system; last spring, the Prison Policy Initiative found that “the national incarceration rate of Black people is six times the rate of white people” (emphasis in original). As we shall see, once they are locked up, Black people are far more likely to be subjected to inhumane treatment and even to conditions regarded as torture under international human rights law.

The criminalization of Black existence is a time-honored tradition in the United States. After the formal abolition of slavery, the policing, court, and prison systems have become the primary means through which Black Americans are deprived of their freedom and relegated to second-class political and economic status. Voting in California this past fall saw voters reject Proposition 6, which would have eliminated a provision in the state’s constitution that permits involuntary servitude as punishment of incarcerated people. It would also have prevented the state from continuing to discipline those in prisons who refuse to work. It seems that America’s voters, even in blue states, remain enthusiastic about slavery.

Those enslaved in America’s prisons “are paid very little (between 13 and 52 cents an hour on average)—if at all—and are excluded from the basic rights and protections afforded to most workers.” Many U.S. states offer no compensation at all for work undertaken while in prison. These are the people who do some of the most dangerous and unpleasant work there is, from fighting massive forest fires and processing poultry to disposing of biohazardous waste, often without appropriate safety equipment, having been stripped of even the most minimal legal protections.

Totally captive and vulnerable, American prisoners are subject to a form of super-exploitation—they can be forced to do anything for any or no pay. They have no right to refuse work. But every year they produce more than $11 billion in economic value through the goods they help to manufacture and the services they provide. Those who do refuse to work under these slavery conditions are subject to severe punishment, often torture, as in the case of solidary confinement. The United Nations has said that indefinite or prolonged solitary confinement of longer than 15 days is a form of torture and thus a violation of international law. More than 3 of every 4 prisoners report that refusals to work are met with additional punishments such as “solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap.”

In 2022, the ACLU and the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic released a report detailing the findings of one of the most comprehensive studies of the U.S. prison system to date. Their study gives us one of the clearest pictures we have of the massive human rights crisis ongoing in the country’s prisons, combining a thoroughgoing review of government data with surveys and interviews of over 100 prison workers (in California, Illinois, and Louisiana) and “65 interviews with key stakeholders including experts, formerly incarcerated individuals, representatives of advocacy organizations, academics, and leaders of reentry organizations across the country.” The investigation spanned a period from 2018 to 2022 and involved Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in all 50 states. The study reveals that more than 4 out of 5 enslaved prison laborers work on “general prison maintenance, which subsidizes the cost of our bloated prison system,” meaning that the captive are forced to prop up their own enslavement.

Today, many states require all of their government bodies to purchase things like “furniture, cleaning supplies, printed materials, and uniforms” from the prison system. The ways in which the political class speaks of those enslaved in America’s prisons follows in an unbroken current of racist rhetorical strategies popular throughout the country’s history. The forced labor to which they are subjected is for their own good, instructing and edifying them, providing them a point of access to the superior white, Western mind and its culture. Though it is frequently advanced with the language of dignity and rehabilitation, this rationale is fatally undermined by the best evidence we have from inside the country’s prisons. Prison laborers report that the contemporary slavery to which they are subjected serves in fact to “degrade, dehumanize and further cripple incarcerated workers,” according to Global Human Rights Clinic Fellow and lecturer Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat.

Degradation and dehumanization are fundamental features of this system. In February 2024, both the DOJ Office of the Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office released comprehensive reports on the connected crises of widespread preventable death and continued, pervasive overreliance on solitary confinement. The Inspector General’s report looked at four types of preventable deaths: suicide, homicide, accident, and unknown factors. Over an 8-year period covered by the report, 344 people fell into one of these categories. The report shares its finding that “a combination of recurring policy violations and operational failures contributed to inmate suicides, which accounted for just over half of the 344 inmate deaths we reviewed.” Many of the policy violations and operational failures involved the subject of the GAO report, which was the follow-up on an earlier study that resulted in a number of recommendations. Last year’s report confirmed that the Bureau of Prisons had failed to deliver on “54 of the 87 recommendations from two prior studies on improving restrictive housing practices.” The GAO report also observed the startling racial disparities in the use of restrictive housing. Though they were 38 percent of the total Bureau of Prisons population, Black prisoners were 59 percent of the restrictive housing placements; whites were 58 percent of the total population and 35 percent of these placements. The connection between solitary confinement and the most severe mental health issues is clear in the available data, as more than half of the inmates who committed suicide were in solitary confinement at the time. It is hardly a coincidence that the brutality of this system is today at its worst for Black people in the South. A January 2025 report from the Economic Policy Institute points out that in the South “incarceration rates are the highest, prison wages are lowest, and forced labor arrangements bear the most striking resemblances to past forms of convict leasing and debt peonage.” The report shows that states in the American South “incarcerate people at the highest rates in the world.” If we treated U.S. states as countries for the purposes of the global ranking, 30 of them (plus the U.S. as a country) would find a place at the top of the global incarceration rate list. Only El Salvador tops several Southern states, and only El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan “rank higher or alongside these 30 states” in the world.

Proper maintenance of the prison labor pool has become a major public policy priority, and it is often the rationale for avoiding measurable improvements to prison conditions. As a 2023 note in the Harvard Law Review pointed out, then-Attorney General of California Kamala Harris “met heavy criticism” for advancing this kind of reasoning as a way to fight in court against the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Plata. Against all of the available evidence, California argued that overcrowding was not in fact the source of the constitutional violation. As Justice Kennedy pointed out at oral argument, “Overcrowding is of course always the cause.” While prisoners were sitting in their own feces and dying in record numbers, Harris and her office were insistent that extreme levels of overcrowding in the country’s largest (by population and economy) and richest state should not be directly addressed. California prisoners were commiting suicide at a rate twice that of the national average.

The factual record in the case also clearly demonstrated that alternatives to prison were both more effective at reducing recidivism and less expensive. Harris and her office “filed motions that were condemned by judges and legal experts as obstructionist, bad-faith, and nonsensical, at one point even suggesting that the Supreme Court lacked the jurisdiction to order a reduction in California’s prison population.” For Kamala Harris, as for the rest of the political class, upholding the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment was less important than maintaining a proper stock of slaves to fight fires and perform other brutal and dangerous jobs. The example of California here underscores just how easy it has been for the “progressive” quarters of the U.S. political establishment to forsake the clearest and most egregious constitutional and human rights violations with no real criticism from their supporters. Understanding these contemporary political realities requires that we confront American history.

Very few among white society in the South accepted either their defeat in the war or the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment as the final word on whether Black people were their rightful slaves. Without some system of labor super-exploitation, the entire social order and way of life would be upended. And although this was of course the real demand of abolition, that would not stand. Capital, dependent on free labor, had to find a way to replace the productive capacity of the freed slaves. A tidal wave of new legal and social strictures came in the wake of the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment, calculated to reinstate the second-class status of the Black population and concomitantly the exploitative economic system associated with it. New Black Codes imposed a comprehensive and draconian system of control and punishment for the crime of being Black on Southern soil. A form of racial capitalism continued from the slave economy.

Vagrancy laws were used to drive Southern Blacks both into low or unpaid work or else into the prisons, where slavery remained and remains perfectly legal. A complex new system of convict leasing arose in the place of traditional chattel slavery during reconstruction, with discipline and authority enforce brutally through “gang rapes, beatings and harassment of weaker cons,” through ranks of sub-bosses and “trusty shooters” who could be relied upon to eliminate noncompliant prisoners. W.E.B. Du Bois summarizes this state of affairs in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction: “The whole criminal system came to be used as a method of keeping Negroes at work and intimidating them. Consequently, there began to be a demand for jails and penitentiaries beyond the natural demand due to the rise of crime.” As Du Bois points out, prior to formal emancipation, Southern prisons held comparatively few people, the overwhelming majority of whom were white.

As the celebrated historian Gerald Horne put it, “They linked race and class. It’s not as if our ancestors were brought to these shores because people didn’t like us, because people despised us. They were brought to these shores for profit, to be an unpaid working class.” Contemporary elite discourse in the United States has largely attempted to understand slavery without reference to its class component, as an expression of racial hatred in an economic vacuum. Hubert Harrison wrote similarly that Black Americans “form a group that is more essentially proletarian than any other American group,” “brought here with the very definite understanding that they were to be ruthlessly exploited.”

It is impossible to understand lynching as an accepted cultural spectacle without confronting the question of economic class as the defining aspect of American racism. As even the lowest of the low in white society could partake in the sadistic killing of Black people, this dark ritual buttressed the rigid hierarchical structure of society at the time. Lynchings were the crystallized, concentrated expression of the brutal violence at the heart of the social order, which constructed whiteness in terms of the ability to dispose of Black bodies arbitrarily and at will. This expression of whiteness preempted the possibility of poor whites discovering their class solidarity with enslaved Blacks.

The perpetuation of slavery on American soil gives the lie to the ridiculous, ahistorical idea that the American economic system is something even somewhat like a “free market,” based on robust protection of individual liberty and rights. The capitalist system requires that there be masses of people who can be absorbed into a system of violent, programmatized deprivation. American capitalism continues to be predicated on domination and exploitation, the most severe forms of which still include forms of race-based slavery that, like their antecedents, are treated as legal and legitimate within our class hierarchy.

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I usually try to write a piece weekly, but last week I simply couldn’t find words. Not for lack of them, no, just the opposite. I suffered the presence of a verbal diarrhea absolutely impossible to present in a linear written fashion. And who would want to come across a written piece like that? It sounds like something that should be quarantined; it’s just as nasty and unhinged as it sounds.

It struck me that this is exactly where the current administration wants our head-space to be. They want to continue with a seeming never-ending onslaught of dismal news so it’s impossible to truly attack any one of the factors. They rely on that part of our brain that freezes rather than fights. The sad fact is that it’s been very effective. You’d really never know a coup has taken place if you were to talk to most Americans. They are getting progressively angrier, even in red state strongholds, but you’d be hard pressed to find more than 1 out of 10 who even have an inkling that perhaps a business coup has occurred with Musk, Thiel, Yarvin and Vance at the helm.

It is heartening to see the town halls in red areas exhibit raw anger towards the feckless yes men, however. Republican politicians have brazenly appeared, only to exhibit shock that the locals are restless. The grifter politicians typically howl and leave the meetings early, lest they have to answer for their repugnant behavior. Places like Georgia, Kansas, Idaho—they have all been witness to a growing resentment in these town halls. It’s quite sad that so many individuals in these areas don’t really care about injustice until it hits home, but we will take what we can get.

The demonization of federal workers, the dismantling of the VA, airlines now feeling like a scary way to travel, the shutting down of agricultural subsidy and grants.…..it’s all rolling downhill with accumulating speed. Even the most obtuse are starting to realize they are going to be caught in that snowball. It’s just beginning.

The dismantling of Medicaid will be a real eye opener for the numerous families who have elderly family members in long term care. A majority of this care in America is paid for by Medicaid and if the funding is shut down, untold numbers of family members will likely be booted out of the nursing home. Now the techno-feudalists will be fine with this, of course. They probably think the wimmin-folk can simply stay home and take on the care of these individuals, but of course our economy requires pretty much everyone to work at least one full-time job. I’m not sure who is supposed to take care of elderly family members with dementia in the home, but perhaps this is all just part of the broader eugenics movement that this current crop of oligarchs seems to be so enchanted with. These are the situations that will wake even your most hardcore rural Trump backer, because you see, this will actually affect them. The trick will be keeping these angry people from lashing out at all the wrong people.

Other notable situations that will finally fall on the radar of the traditional “conservatives” in rural areas will be the shock they experience when they try to do a vacation in a National Park this year. Most likely they won’t even be able to get in due to the mass firings of the workers tasked with keeping these natural wonders protected and open for visitors. Of course, the eventual plan will be reopening these places as Grand Canyon Trump Plaza and the cost will be prohibitively large to gain entry. That seems to be the deal—the broligarchs take over and Trump is their leader in name only—but he gets to profit wildly off the federal copper stripping. How about a nice escalator down to the bottom of the canyon with a golf course irrigated by the Colorado? If you think I’m joking, I most certainly am not. Look at the deranged AI Trump put out in regard to his Gaza plans. It’s ludicrous and hideous, and we unfortunately live in a time when both of those characteristics are winning out.

In much the same manner of deconstruction and privatization, they want to make education more expensive and limited for the working class. The public schools are to be defunded and replaced with reactionary Evangelical madrassas style learning. All this will do is to limit our pool of educated individuals. The next great thinker will not obtain the education needed to fulfill their potential. In effect they are making sure their wealthy class is the only one that will be in leadership positions–ever. This creates a class stratification that will only enhance the undeserving nepo-babies. Every accusation is a confession and their railing about DEI is beyond ironic when we see how they are trying to unfairly select only for rich white men. This is them selecting for hemophilia in the Russian Court with these techniques.

I have been considering what one can do in this environment. We all have only so many hours of the day, what with trying to simply exist and all. That said, I do think we can look to history for some ideas on how to proceed. The great anarchist thinkers of the past have given us clear indications what it means to be human and what inherent rights we all need to think of as our baselines. Of course, the word anarchy is pretty much a non-starter to use with the “normies”. We need to pull in vast numbers of individuals who don’t have the ability to parse out the semantics of it all. I think we need to start referring to the basic tenet of mutual aid as the topic and let the word anarchy go. They were able to subvert it and 95% of the population thinks it means trashing things with aggressive abandon. We want the opposite of that, clearly. We need to be as clear eyed as they are in terms of getting what we want and how to go about it.

If we are to think in terms of mutual aid, there are definitely current local groups practicing these behaviors under that term, but they are overwhelmingly leftist college town creations (not that there is anything wrong with that). In this world of disintegrating federal power, it will come down to locals to take care of each other and to build something of worth from the ground up on a much larger scale, however. “Mutual aid” is a great term to even bring in the conservatives. I live in a red state and they are idiotically obsessed with someone getting something for nothing. This is quite ironic because rural areas are typically over-represented in their need for programs like Medicaid that keep their critical access facilities open, but they simply don’t get it. They are all brave yeoman farmers, not taking in any assistance from others (except for all those programs that do keep them afloat). But that said, the concept of mutual assistance is valid, and they will understand it.

I think the Democrats need to be gone of course, they are simply time and money wasters, but something like a Mutual Aid party might be an excellent replacement. Not necessarily to run for office in likely hacked elections, but to make life better on the ground locally for citizens. Unified groups with similar goals……. obviously, again—these ideas are nothing new, but expanding them into population groups who have previously identified as Republican or Democrat certainly is a new direction.

This is just a seed, and we all need to begin to think out what we can do locally to enact these needed changes and to simply help one another during the current very planned out dark times. If we all keep trying to drink in the news from that fire hydrant and slap aimlessly at the terrible policies, we won’t accomplish much of anything, and that is by design. Yes, we can keep fighting them, but the major goal should be working out how we can survive locally. For this reason, it’s going to be up to us to bring the concept of mutual aid to a wider audience and to flesh out what this will look like going forward.

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“Nearly every federal agency in the US government could fall under the scrutiny of DOGE”. With these words on Fox News on February 7th, Donald Trump outlined the scope of DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency – his administration’s planned overhaul of federal institutions, with Elon Musk at its helm. Within days, the administration has moved to consolidate control over key security apparatus, with the Senate confirming former Democrat turned Trump loyalist Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Kash Patel, author of “Government Gangsters,” as FBI director[1]. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy characterized these developments as “the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced certainly since Watergate,” warning of a “billionaire takeover of government.”[2]

Yet this radical transformation of American governance, far from being an impromptu imitative, represents the culmination of nearly a century of meticulously laid groundwork by conservative elites. Drawing from the previously unexplored McCune archives at Columbia University (NY), this investigation reveals how, since the 1930s, a powerful alliance of industrialists, conservative foundations, and far-right ideologues has progressively worked to infiltrate institutions, reshape governmental structures, and neutralize democratic opposition.

Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 marks the culmination of this counter-revolutionary project, with an unprecedented offensive aimed at dismantling the traditional federal administration in favor of a streamlined structure populated by his loyalists. Recent analyses have begun to grapple with this transformation of American governance from different angles. In their February 2025 Foreign Affairs piece “The Path to American Authoritarianism” Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way notably highlight how the Heritage Foundation has invested millions to prepare “an army of up to 54’000 loyalists to fill government positions.”[3] While their analysis astutely identifies mechanisms of state capture, it perhaps underestimates how wealth concentration and corporate influence have historically enabled rather than resisted democratic erosion. Similarly, Mike Brock’s investigation “The Plot Against America” (February 2025) reveals how contemporary tech elites are working to shift power “from democratic institutions to technical systems controlled by a small elite.”[4] Yet these vital contemporary accounts capture only the latest chapter of a much longer historical process, one whose roots stretch back nearly a century.

Wesley McCune’s work provides an indispensable historical record of Trump’s actual counterrevolution effort, through his founding of Group Research Inc. (GRI) in 1962. Prior to establishing GRI, he had served in several government agencies and as assistant to both the Secretary of Agriculture and President Truman (1945-1952). Under his leadership, the GRI compiled the largest documentary collection ever assembled on conservative networks and their funding[5]. These archives expose, through thousands of pages of evidence, how the conservative and fundamentalist Christian right methodically worked to infiltrate institutions, reshape governmental structures, and neutralize democratic opposition – prefiguring with remarkable accuracy the very transformation we are witnessing today[6].

A strategy Decades in the Making

The roots of this counter-revolution can be traced back to the 1930s. In reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, influential industry captains from the banking, chemical, and steel sectors perceived state intervention as an existential threat. Their opposition crystallized around major figures: Alfred P. Sloan (president of General Motors) and Irénée DuPont (Arms and Powder manufacture), who became the principal architects of the “American Liberty League” in August 1934[7]. Their design was unequivocal: they promoted a model, inspired by fascisms in Europe, where the United States would be governed according to a corporatist and non-democratic logic, under the guise of “deregulating” the economy[8].

This vision quickly found concrete expression in an attempted coup that presaged the League’s formal establishment[9]. In his testimony before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee during a secret executive session in New York City on November 20, 1934, General Smedley Butler exposed what became known as the “Business Plot” – a failed conspiracy by wealthy industrialists to overthrow President Roosevelt. The plotters, who ironically styled themselves as a “Society to maintain the Constitution”, had envisioned installing a “Secretary of General Affairs” who would effectively usurp the President’s executive powers under the guise of administrative efficiency[10]. While the coup attempt failed, these same industrialists quickly redirected their efforts toward institutional capture, manifesting their financial power in the creation of numerous foundations aimed at implementing their vision of societal restructuring[11].

The post-war period ushered in an acceleration of this program[12]. A network of entrepreneurial foundations – Mellon, Scaife, Lilly and Richardson, Olin, supported by the DuPont and Koch dynasties – orchestrated an unprecedented effort to undermine the federal state structure, operating under the cover of Cold War anti-communist polices initiated immediately after the war[13]. These foundations established and solely funded dozens of political and research institutes, enabling them to obtain intellectual legitimacy for their political-economic vision[14]. This influence remains pervasive today through these still-active institutions and their successors, as illustrated by Timothy Mellon’s $50 million support to Trump’s Super PAC, revealed by the press in 2024[15].

This design first materialized through the creation of the American Enterprise Association (AEA) in 1943, which would later become the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in 1962. That same year, the AEI spawned one of its key affiliates: the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown University (Washington)[16]. A decade later, the Heritage Foundation (1973) emerged, backed by resources from the J. Coors conglomerate, the Scaife Family Trust, the Noble Foundation, and the John M. Olin Fund.

The far-right John Birch Society (JBS), founded in 1958, served as a catalyst for the radicalization of the conservative base by cultivating populism as an essential ingredient of this long-planned revolution[17]. As historian Matthew Dallek’s work demonstrates, the JBS through its media network and forums led by Fred Schwartz and Clarence Manion (The Manion Forum), would find its contemporary echo in Alex Jones “Infowars” channel, an early Trump supporter. This progression shows how extremism became increasingly mainstream within conservative circles[18]. These networks successfully nurtured and sustained an ultranationalist momentum built on victimhood narratives that aligned with white nationalist and supremacist ideologies. This movement laid the groundwork for what would become the “Moral Majority” in 1979, founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., which achieved a powerful synthesis of conservative political activism and religious fundamentalism in their shared opposition to Democratic progressive policies.

An essential component of this strategy, very early on, involved creating civic institutions capable of shaping future leaders through youth movements. The Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), associated with William F. Buckley and the JBS, established itself as both an ideological training ground and a vector for conservative activism. Operating within cultural institutions, colleges, universities, and public spaces, the YAF conducted numerous campaigns and demonstrations, drawing inspiration from their intellectual mentors Friedrich Hayek and his successor Milton Friedman[19].

From Nixon to Reagan: The Rise of the Conservative Power

The conservative movement’s ascendancy, which would give rise to the New Right, underwent a decisive evolution in the 1960s. While Barry Goldwater (1964) and George Wallace’s (1968) presidential bids failed, it was Richard Nixon, a former Goldwater supporter, who ultimately emerged as the movement’s hope for establishing a bulwark against the left. During this period, conservatives innovated their communication methods, particularly through direct mail techniques, pioneered by Richard Viguerie, former executive secretary of the YAF.

Direct mail became the New Right’s central organizing tool, proving to be a formidable instrument for both mobilization and fundraising. Viguerie deployed it to structure a network of conservative donors and raise funds for multiple organizations: the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), Paul Weyrich’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, and Senator Jesse Helms’ Congressional Club. Prefiguring modern targeting algorithms, this system channeled resources toward emblematic conservative causes: school prayer, campaigns against gay rights and abortion, opposition to progressive cultural policies, and support for armed guerilla movements. In the 1990s and 2000s, these same networks would serve as vectors for attacks against Bill Clinton and later Barack Obama, becoming efficient conduits for spreading conspiracy theories about both presidents.

Under Nixon’s presidency, and with the patronage of his Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, the movement’s key figures steadily infiltrated high offices. Among these key appointments were David Abshire, who would later direct CSIS (1983-1986), William Baroody Jr. who led AEI (1978-1987), and Ed Feulner who headed the Heritage Foundation (1977-2013, then 2017-2018). Mr. Feulner would later join Trump’s transition team in 2016, helping shape the “America First” foreign policy agenda[20].

Following setbacks in direct political action after the Vietnam war policy failures, conservative forces reoriented their approach by strengthening their ideological apparatus. The social context proved propitious: mounting pressure from civil rights and abortion rights movements fostered an effective synthesis between ultraconservative political factions and Christian religious groups, united in their opposition to what they perceived as a “Marxist drift” threatening America’s soul.  This period marked what some observers would later identify as the beginning of parliamentary democracy’s decline in America, though few recognized it at the time.

William J. Baroody, who alongside Milton Friedman had orchestrated Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, became a leading advocate for subordinating democratic processes to capitalist imperatives during this period of social upheaval. The movement achieved its first major success by supporting Ronald Reagan’s bid for the California governorship, which served as both testing ground and steppingstone to the presidency. Joseph Coors, the Heritage Foundation’s principal donor, became Reagan’s personal advisor. Soon after, entire segments of the Californian State bureaucracy were targeted for privatization, beginning with the electricity market – a process that effectively delegated substantial state prerogative to business interests.

This vision of a large-scale culture war found its definitive expression in Baroody’s pivotal address to the Business Council in Virginia in October 1972:

“To the extent that public opinion is hostile to business, one can expect – at minimum – that the public policy climate will make their operation increasingly difficult, and in some cases, compromise their survival. One can go further and assert that, to the extent public opinion is hostile to the institutional framework of a free society, there is then genuine cause for concern about the very viability of that free society.”Adding further: “In this war of the minds of men – and it is an unrelenting war – at stake is the institutional framework of the free society itself.” Baroody concluding: “In brief, America’s free society and economy cannot survive…if you fail to recognize the imperative necessity to begin mustering, in the media and in the Nation’s educational institutions, the necessary resources to counter the propaganda supremacy now held by the adversaries of our free enterprise system – a supremacy I regret to say, all-to-often sponsored and subsidized by the very industries and companies that are under attack.”[21]

Convinced of society’s vulnerability to “internal enemies,” these actors believed businesses must intervene forcefully to shape public opinion in favor of “market freedom”. Simultaneously, New Right conservatives worked to institutionalize surveillance and repression of movements deemed subversive. They built upon the precedent of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), active between 1938 and 1975, where Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had cut their political teeth[22]. After HUAC’s decline, this approach of public tribunals and presumption of guilt continued through the Senate internal Security Subcommittee, amplified by the alarmist rhetoric of pseudo-patriotic movements, such as the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). These organizations systematically cultivated a climate of paranoia regarding communist and Marxist subversion, which would prove instrumental in legitimizing increasingly stringent security and anti-terrorist policies in the public eye – patterns that are being deployed as of this writing in the early days of the new Trump Administration, in the systematic dismantling of so-called diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) programs across federal institutions, including the purging of high-ranking military officials under manufactured pretexts, most notably the dismissal of Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown.

Through expanded direct mail campaigns and sophisticated media strategies, these organizations evolved into vectors of political paranoia promoting conspiracy theories that would help legitimize draconian security and anti-terrorist policies across American society. This deliberately fostered climate of fear facilitated the adoption of the Huston Plan, a sweeping covert program of surveillance, infiltration, harassment, and intimidation targeting political opponents.

Tom Charles Huston, an experienced figure and leader in the YAF, developed this blueprint under Richard Nixon’s aegis. While its exposure during the Watergate scandal (1972-1974) temporarily halted its implementation, it marked an intensification of executive power, with the FBI functioning essentially as a political police force, drawing troubling parallels to the German Gestapo[23]. The unprecedented nature of this development was captured by historian Frank J. Donner who noted that “For the first time in our history a chief executive had expressly authorized a political police structure with a range of powers in conflict not only with established law but with the provision of the Fourth Amendment as well.”[24]

Despite a brief post-Watergate setback, the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations embraced and empowered these organizations, viewing them as vital to their power structure. A telling symbol of this entrenchment emerged when Richard Mellon Scaife secured a position on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (USACPD), overseeing the United States Information Agency (USIA), the body responsible for American strategic communication and propaganda abroad.

Strategic think tanks, particularly the CSIS, emerged as the primary architects of “terrorism” studies, mobilizing public opinion through research that predominantly reflected U.S. strategic interests. Their work proved instrumental in garnering public acceptance for expanded “national security” policies and shaping the judicial framework of the anti-terrorism apparatus. Under Reagan’s two terms (1981-1988), surveillance and control became further institutionalized, notably through Executive Order E.O. 12333 (Dec. 4, 1981), which authorized extensive information gathering and enforcement measures against U.S. citizens deemed antagonistic to national security interests[25].

The Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) functioned both as precursor and prototype for ideological youth movements, emerging despite the haunting memory of Hitler’s Jugend experiment. Over two generations, the YAF methodically prepared the ground for this revolution, claiming to restore moral order[26]. Their campaign exerted mounting pressure on media outlets and academic institutions while challenging the right of free speech. Trump’s campaigns (2016, 2024) benefited substantially from their active support networks.

Over two decades, the conservative movement, guided by its most radical elements, gained momentum through unprecedented support from the US Chamber of Commerce, JBS and American Legion, and an extended network of paramilitary factions – the later proliferating due to continuous U.S. military engagements abroad. Under the banner of the “Moral Majority”, an alliance solidified between the Christian nationalist and libertarian politicians[27]. During a political action seminar in Dallas, Texas, in August 1980, Paul Weyrich articulated their vision: “We are talking about Christianizing America. We are simply talking about spreading the gospel in a political context,” This declaration would find its echo in Trump’s 2016 campaign promise that “Christianity would have power”[28].

Toward the end of Reagan’s presidency, hardliners within the Heritage Foundation grew disillusioned with his failure to fully implement their “institutional reform program” (known as Mandate I and II) and what they saw as his betrayal of their vision to remake America great again. In response, they adopted a more subtle approach: rather than focusing solely on capturing the presidency, they would systematically transform government from within, targeting both lower-level offices and high courts to achieve a fundamental redistribution of power through strategic redistricting.

This transformation accelerated under Newt Gingrich, founder of the “Conservative Opportunity Society” (COS) in 1983, who ascended to Speaker of the House following the Republican takeover of the lower Chamber of Congress in 1994 – their first such victory since the interwar period. In 1989, Gingrich declared before Congress: “Liberals have declared open war against our constitutional system of government.”[29] Yet this accusation masked his own agenda ; he was actively orchestrating precisely what he accused his opponents of doing – launching an all-out assault on democratic institutions, methodically preparing the ground for a leader who would embrace this monumental task, accepting the risk, that had nothing to lose : Donald Trump.

Gingrich emerged as one of Trump’s most steadfast and influential though behind-the-scenes supporters well before his first presidential bid[30]. His 2022 book titled “Defeating Big Government Socialism, Saving America’s Future” reveals the persistence of these long-standing themes: “If the United States loses its patriotic commitment to being a united nation, there is a real danger that our enemies will manipulate and finance radical Marxist factions to tear our country apart and leave us defenseless.”[31] As a historian-turned ideologue, Gingrich serves a vital bridge between the New Right and Trump’s movement, frequently articulating Trump’s positions through his platform on Fox News. Eric Trump acknowledged this role in his preface to Gingrich’s 2017 book about Donald Trump, noting: “Newt was able to perfectly articulate my father’s beliefs.”[32]

Historian Julian E. Zelizer draws a compelling parallel between Gingrich and Joseph McCarthy, observing: “His virulent political style became the echo chamber of the Republican Party.”[33] However, Zelitzer identifies a crucial distinction: while McCarthy was ultimately marginalized for his excesses, Gingrich succeeded in embedding his ideas within mainstream conservative thought. He championed some of the most extreme policies that Trump would later adopt, including the constructing of a wall between Texas and Mexico. More broadly, Gingrich’s ascendance coincided with conservative forces’ readiness to flex their institutional muscle – no longer content to merely defend the system but determined to bring it down.

The Heritage Foundation’s influence extended well beyond U.S. borders. The GRI archives reveal how, beginning in the 1970s, it channeled funds to far-right groups and organizations across Europe that shared its anti-welfare state stance and free-market absolutism. This transnational network encompassed the Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies (IEDSS), the International Freedom Fund Establishment (IFFE), the Hanns Seidel Foundation in Germany, and the Club de l’Horloge in France (renamed “Le Carrefour de l’Horloge” in 2015), which aligned closely with the far-right National Front party[34].

During the first decade of the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) launched September 20, 2001, these networks mobilized their full resources. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) emerged as a particular nexus of hawkish influence, bringing together figures such as Richard Perle, who presided over the quasi-governmental Defense Policy Board; Irving Kristol, the architect of neoconservatism; Michael Ledeen, a former Reagan advisor advocating military action against Iran; and John Bolton, who personified the fusion between hardline conservatives and the neoconservative interventionist agenda[35].

Under George W. Bush’s presidency (2001-2009), the interweaving of business interests, lobbyists, industry-funded think tanks, and the Republican Party reached unprecedented level of complexity[36]. The military sphere became a particularly fertile ground for ideological propaganda. The return of ROTC programs to college campuses, all over the U.S. signaled conservative foundations growing capacity to leverage military education for advancing their worldview and their conviction that democratic institutions had failed. The military’s “Operation Paperback” which distributed books to the troops included many of them from New Right’s rank, such as Mark R. Levin, President of the Legal Foundation, whose “Plunder and Deceit, Big Government’s exploitation of young people and the future” (2015) aspired to generate  a “new civil rights movement, one that will foster liberty and prosperity and cease the exploitation of young people by statist masterminds.”[37]

The emergence and ferment of the Tea Party movement in February 2009 signaled a decisive shift in the conservative takeover of the Republican Party (GOP), exploiting the aftermath of the financial crisis to prepare the way for their chosen standard-bearer, Donald Trump. The governing circles of these foundations identified him as uniquely capable of executing their long-awaited rupture with the established order. Within the movement’s religious base, many viewed his ascendance through a messianic lens, perceiving him as divinely ordained to lead not just America but the World[38].

Trump’s explicit embrace of the “America First” movement’s heritage – characterized by historians as profoundly pro-fascist – came during his landmark speech at the Center for the National Interest (Washington D.C.) on April 27, 2016[39]. While his first term served as a trial run for this new doctrine of integral nationalism, his return to power in January 2025 initiated the fulfilment of long-held ambitions:  rejecting international law, withdrawing from multilateral treaties, and reorienting U.S. foreign policy toward aggressive economic warfare while marginalizing traditional allies.

Project 2025: The institutionalization of an Authoritarian Model

Project 2025, dubbed the “mandate for leadership”, emerged as the blueprint for Trump’s return to power, despite early attempts by some campaign advisers to distance themselves from its extreme implications[40]. This imitative marks the culmination of the conservative counter-revolution[41]. Most appointees to key positions in the new administration maintain direct or indirect ties to the Heritage Foundation and its affiliates[42].

 This “New Mandate”, heir to previous versions from 1980, 1984, and 1988 took concrete form upon Trump’s inauguration last January. His administration, with Elon Musk’s support and advice, has promptly begun purging institutional opposition through mass dismissal of civil servants, wielding existing legal mechanisms to suspend democratic institutions and procedures by simple executive order, neutralizing remaining checks and balances. While ignoring congressional budget prerogatives and judicial independence, the administration has realized McCune’s dire predictions: “The first victims of these measures,” he wrote, “are minorities, union movements, and proponents of multiculturalism.”

The first cornerstone of this transformation centers on the wholesale removal of senior civil servants, replaced by hand-picked loyalists, coupled with the dismantling of agencies and offices dedicated to social services, education, environmental protection, and international aid like USAID – a pillar of U.S. international development policy since its creation under John F. Kennedy, with roots in earlier progressive efforts such as the New Deal and the Marshall Plan (ERP programs). This foundational component manifests through a cascade of recent executive orders targeting federal-level Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (D.E.I.) programs, especially affecting cultural and educational institutions.

Within this comprehensive unfolding offensive, higher education stands as a priority target of the radical right. Trump explicitly declared his intention to “take back” universities from “Marxist maniacs,” while his Vice-President J.D. Vance openly branded them as “enemies”. A position reflecting both his venture capital background and his longstanding alliance with Silicon Valley power brokers, such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk[43]. In echoing Baroody and Gingrich’s martial previous rhetoric, Project 2025 envisions establishing an “American Academy,” marketed as a free and “strictly non-political” online university, funded through dramatic increase in taxes on existing university endowments[44]. This initiative serves a dual purpose: weakening traditional institutions while creating an alternative under strict ideological control.

The second cornerstone of this design implements expansive deportation measures targeting resident aliens labeled as “criminal illegal,” while simultaneously advancing the criminalization of opposition groups. Internal security agencies, particularly Homeland Security’s ICE, established in response of 9/11 and subsequent antiterror policies, are being transformed into auxiliary forces supporting the FBI and CIA, now operating from shared databases powered by algorithms and AI from major U.S. technology companies. In February 2025, ICE launched an unprecedented surveillance program aimed at monitoring “negative sentiment” about the agency across social media platforms, using artificial intelligence to identify and track not just threats but any form of criticism, while collecting extensive personal data on targeted individuals[45].

True to their historical role documented by the GRI, the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Federalist Society continue to provide the intellectual framework and support for these measures[46]. A persistent tension between state control and deregulation remains visible in their arbitration between institutional repression and privatization of state functions. The paradox is striking: these organizations now advocate for forms of political authoritarianism that mirror exactly what they once accused their enemies of promoting.

The systematic implementation of this New Right counter-revolutionary “master plan” follows patterns reminiscent of, especially Nazi Germany between 1934 and 1939. By combining the systematic erosion of checks and balances, criminalizing political opposition, and institutional reorganization based on loyalty criteria according to loyalty criteria, the current administration materializes a model that Wesley McCune identify as an underlying tendency in American society as early as the 1950s.

The fate of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in February 2025 illustrates the apparent contradiction – but the underlying logic of this institutional transformation. Created under Reagan in 1983 and historically supported by the Republican establishment, the organization found itself abruptly cut off from Treasury funds following Elon Musk’s attacks branding it an “evil organization that needs to be dissolved,” The telling silence of traditional Republican figures, including those serving on its board like Senator Todd Young, suggests this dismantling is part of a broader strategy : the intent to transfer traditional American public diplomacy functions to private actors, particularly tech giants[47]. This reconfiguration, far from being a mere “purge” marks a potential transition from institutional soft power to a model where American influence abroad will increasingly be exercised through social media and digital platforms – giving precedence to private corporations over pseudo-government agencies.

The GRI archives holds a Congressional session report from 1953, at the height of McCarthy-era anti-communist fervor, analyzing factors behind fascism’s emergence and its potential presence in the U.S. According to experts at the time, the key factors weren’t those typically highlighted in Western textbooks, but rather the deliberate creation of a “corporatist state” through “social demagogy” capable of gradually subverting republican institutions[48]. A 1965 Group Research Inc. report issued a prescient warning: “One of the most dangerous aspects of fascism is that it advances in small steps, under the pretext of efficiency and reform.”[49]

That same year, historian Richard Hofstadter, in his seminal essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, offered a crucial insight into this dynamic, noting that “a fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy.” He observed how this “paranoid disposition” serves to “mobilize into action chiefly by social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action.” His analysis of what he termed the “pseudo-conservatives”, particularly the Goldwaterites, precisely anticipated the rhetorical and mobilization patterns that would later define Trump’s MAGA movement[50].

A Decisive Turning Point for American Democracy

The possibility of the collapse of democratic institutions results from a long process. From the first organized attempt to seize power by force in 1933, to the current mandate given to E. Musk and his Department of Government efficiency (DOGE), a consistent pattern emerges: the systematic use of private wealth and corporate efficiency models to restructure federal governance, ultimately preparing the ground for oligarchic rule.

The positioning of Russell T. Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a U.S, executive agency responsible for developing the federal budget, overseeing agency performance, and ensuring regulatory and fiscal efficiency, illustrate the uncompromising nature of their strategy. As one of the main “Project 2025” architects, Vought’s statement about federal civil servants reveals their stark worldview: “We want them to wake up in the morning not wanting to go to work because they are increasingly seen as the bad guys.”[51] exemplifying their simplistic division of the world is divided between the “good guys” and “bad apples”.

The designation of loyalists to key security positions further exemplifies this transformation of federal institutions. The Senate’s confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Kash Patel as FBI director demonstrates how personal loyalty has become the primary qualification for leadership roles in critical agencies. Both nominees openly embraced Trump’s vision of a politicized civil service, with Patel’s 2023 memoir “Government Gangsters” explicitly targeting supposed “deep state” opponents and including an appendix listing potential “conspirators” within the executive branch. Their appointments signal a decisive shift toward using federal law enforcement and intelligence capabilities to target political opposition[52].

This echoed Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts’ own words shortly before Trump re-election in July 2024: “We are experiencing the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left permits.”

This revolutionary rhetoric is not new. As early as the 1960s, Murray N. Rothbard, a leading figure of libertarianism, has already laid the groundwork for this radical vision. While the official historiography of the New Right, as presented by Justin Raimondo, tends to portray Rothbard’s approach as a pragmatic evolution beyond Ayn Rand’s romantism, a closer examination reveals a more calculated strategy[53]. Rothbard, who saw himself as an “extreme-rightist,” deliberately sought to co-opt revolutionary language and tactics from the left. His creation of the review “Left and Right” in 1964 and his attempts to infiltrate the antiwar movement were part of a broader strategy to reframe libertarians as “true revolutionaries.” By the 1990s, Rothbard had identified social democracy as the main enemy, more dangerous than communism in his view because it combined socialism with the “appealing virtues of democracy and freedom of inquiry.” This strategic shift prefigured the current assault on democratic institutions under the banner of “liberty”[54].

More than just a resurgence of radical conservatism, 2025 marks the culmination of a strategy methodically constructed over nearly a century. Far from the singular genius-entrepreneur he claims to embody, Trump appears instead as tool of the same Corporate elites that have driven this conservative ascendence since its inception. This is evidenced by oil baron Harold Hamm’s role, CEO of Continental Resources, who orchestrated a billion-dollar fundraising effort from oil magnates supporting Trump’s candidacy – thus perpetuating the historical alliance between the radical libertarian right and corporate tycoons first documented by the GRI in the 1930s[55].

This convergence of traditional conservative networks with tech power brokers has been meticulously detailed in Mike Brock’s recent analysis of the New Right’s technological aspirations. Building on James Pogue’s groundbreaking investigation of the National Conservative Conference (NatCon) and Max Chafkin’s prescient work “The Contrarian” (2021) on Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s pursuit of political power, Brock reveals how Bitcoin and other technological innovations have become vehicles for implementing long-held libertarian ambitions, particularly Friedrich Hayek’s vision of private entities challenging government control of currency[56]. Though extensive reporting on figures like Curtis Yarvin and Balaji Srivasan, these investigations expose how Silicon Valley’s libertarian wing has increasingly aligned with the New Right power structures, advocating what Yarvin terms a “National CEO” model of governance. This technological dimension adds a powerful new vector to the historical conservative project of dismantling democratic institutions, one that promises to accelerate and amplify their longstanding agenda through unprecedented technological capabilities.

Now that technological means, including AI, provide extraordinary opportunities to reshape American society more rapidly and profoundly, we witness an accelerating convergence between the conservative circles, tech giants, and military leaders within a new bold and undisputed military-industrial-technological complex[57].

The accumulated financial and technological resources, combined with the U.S. military might, now fuel renewed hegemonic ambitions, manifesting in territorial claims from the Panama Canal to Greenland, reminiscent of 19^thcentury imperial expansion. A week after Trump unilaterally declared the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be known as The Gulf of America, major search engines had already implemented this change. Yet, when the Associated Pressrefused to adopt the new designation in defense of its editorial independence, the administration’s response was swift: barring its reporters from White House events – a direct challenge to press freedom and clear violation of First Amendment’s right of free speech[58]. Trump’s new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, has been ordered to investigate traditional “liberal” media such as ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and NPR. The Defense Department has thrown such mainstream media outlets as The New York Times, NBC News and NPR out of their work spaces at the Pentagon, replacing them by conservative outlets.

Preserved at Columbia University’s rare books section, the documentary collection assembled by Wesley McCune and his team, provide unique evidence of this transformation, tracking payments and contributions between key actors through a detailed paper trail – particularly valuable now that most of this history has been scrubbed from the websites for institutions like the AEI, Heritage Foundation, and YAF. The fruit of thirty years of meticulous journalistic investigation into ultraconservative networks illuminates, with disturbing accuracy, the mechanisms driving today’s dismantling of democratic institutions.

As democratic societies face this systematic and powerful offensive, some might argue we are merely witnessing the final chapter of parliamentary democracy’s long decline – a process that should have been recognized far earlier. A fundamental question emerges: what forces can still mobilize the resources and energy necessary to counter this systematic and formidable offensive on democratic freedoms, particularly when citizens struggle to see through the carefully constructed narratives that have obscured these actors’ fundamentally anti-democratic intentions, under the guise of a fight for individual liberty? The GRI archives stand as both warning and guide, reminding us that the preservation of democratic governance requires not just vigilance but active engagement with the historical record that exposes the true nature of this decades-long transformation.

Notes.

[1] German Loez and Lyna Bentahar, “Two Loyalists for Trump” in The New York Times, February 12, 2025

[2] “Daily Show”, Democracy Now, 10.02.2025

[3] Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “The Path to American Authoritarism” in Foreign Affairs, February 11, 2025,

[4] Mike Brock, “The Plot Against America, How a dangerous Ideology born from the Libertarian Movement stands Ready to Seize America” on Substack, February 8, 2025.

[5] This archival collection consists of 512 boxes, housed at Columbia University (New York). The inventory is available on the internet Archive: https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_5010936. Below, in the footnotes are references to GRI boxes used for this article.

[6] GRI, box 12

[7] The American Liberty League is an American political organization founded in 1934, whose announced objectives was: “to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to foster free private enterprise.” Heavy contributors to the American Liberty League included the Pitcairn family (Pittsburgh plate Glass), Andrew W. Mellon Associates, Rockefeller Associates, E.F. Associates, William S. Knudsen (General Motors), and the Pew family (Sun Oil Associates). J. Howard Pew, longtime friend and supporter of Robert Welch, who later founded the John Birch Society. Other directors of the league included Al Smith and John J. Raskob.

[8] GRI, box 126, folder fascism

[9] See Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House, New York, Hawthorne Books, 1973.

[10] Ibid. pp. 139, 151, 155

[11] Documents from the GRI archives establish that in November 1937, representatives of Hitler’s regime and seven major American industrialists met to develop agreements for international monopolies “The Nazis have made a fifth column pact with seven influential Americans,” In Fact, no 92, Vol. V, No. 14, July 13, 1942, edited by George Seldes, GRI, box 126, folder fascism

[12] While these arrangements would ultimately be derailed by the war, historian Anthony C. Sutton’s groundbreaking research has extensively documented the persistence of business connections between American industrialists and Nazi Germany well beyond the 1930s. uncovering evidence of technological transfers, financial arrangements, and strategic partnerships, see Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, San Pedro Ca., GSG Publishers, 2002

[13] The Lilly Foundation was established from the pharmaceutical fortune of Eli Lilly, and the Richardson Foundation is based on the Vick Chemical Co, see GRI, box 12, folder AEI.

[14] At the time, the Mellon family controlled the oil company Gulf Oil and the aluminium company Alcoa, as well as the bank of the same name – Mellon Bank ; they alsoheld capital in numerous other companies listed in the Fortune 500 index.

[15] Shane Goldmacher and Theodore Schleifer, “Timothy Mellon, Secretive Donor, Gives $50 Million to Pro-Trump group” in The New York Times, June 20, 2024

[16] The CSIS Center published the proceedings of its first conference, held in January 1962, in the form of a 1,021-pages book titled : National Security : Political, Military, and Economic Strategies for the Decade Ahead.

[17] Harry L. Bradley, chairman of the board of Allen-Bradley Co., was both a trustee of the AEA since 1957 and influential in the forums of the John Birch Society, such as American Opinion.

[18] Matthew Dallek, Birchers, How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, New York, Basic Books, 2022.

[19] GRI, box 161, folder Heritage Foundation. The Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) would later be renamed Young America’s Foundation in 1969, while maitaining its original student branch.

[20] Paul Weyrich in addition to being considered one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation, was also the strategist of the “New Right”. He chaired the “Coalition for America,” an umbrella for all conservative organizations.

[21] Baroody, William J., “The Corporate Role in the Decade ahead.” Remarks presented at The Business Council, Hot Springs, Virginia, October 20, 1972, dans GRI box 12, folder AEI.

[22] Dissolved in 1975, its functions were transferred to the Judicial Committee of the House of Representatives.

[23] Brian Gluck, War at Home, covert action against U.S. activists and what we can do about it, Boston, South End Press, 1989.

[24] Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance, The Aims and Methods of America’s Polticial Intelligence System, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, P.266

[25] GRI, box 47, Business Advisory Council

[26] GRI, box 341, folder YAF

[27] In 1979, The Religious Roundtable formalized the alliance between the leaders of the New Right and those of the Religious Right.

[28] Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the power and the glory, New York, Harper Collins, 2023

[29] Newt Gingrich, Message to Fellow Citizens, on “The Deepest Crisis America Has Ever Faced in Our 200-Year-History,” May 23, 1989, U.S. Congress

[30] In 2023, he published with Joe Gaylord, March to the Majority : The Real Story of the Republican Revolution, New York, Center Street.

[31] A work in which Gingrich, tracing the alleged links between “Wokism” and “Marxism” warns of the disappearance of Christianity in the United States due to the rise of socialists, whom he associates with communists.

[32] Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump, New York, Center Street (Hachette Book Group), 2017.

[33] Julian E. Zelitzer, Burining Down the House, Newt Gingrich and the rise of the New Republican Party, New York, Penguin, 2020, p.302

[34] GRI, box 160. Folder Heritage Foundation 1988-

[35] The AEI board of directors included, among others, figures such as Lee Raymond, Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, and William Stavropoulos, Chairman of Dow Chemical.

[36] John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General from February 2, 2001, to February 3, 2005, is a member of the Council for National Policy (CNP), founded in 1981. The CNP has nearly 500 members, bringing together political figures, business leaders, and conservative activists to discuss political strategy. Historian Journalist Joe Conason describes it as the “Central Committee of the Religious Right,” cited in David Cole, Justice at War, New York Review of Books ed. 2008, p.8

[37] Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit, Big Governement’s exploitation of Young People and the Future, New York, Threshold Editions, 2015.

[38] Mike Hixenbaugh, “evangelical leaders celebrate Trump’s victory as a prophecy fulfilled”, NBC News, 7 novembre 2024 ; see also Tim Alberta, op. cit.

[39] Jason Stanley, Les ressorts du fascisme, Eliot Edition, 2022 (édition anglaise 2018), p.22 ; the Center for the National Interest is a think tank founded by Richard Nixon in 1994.

[40] One of the authors of this political manifest is Donald Devine, who published a book in 2004 titled In Defense of the West, which became a mandatory course textbook in several conservative U.S. Universities.

[41] GRI, box 160, Folder Heritage, see in particular the Group Research Report, “The Right Works on an Agenda for the 1990s,” Vol. 29, No. 2, March-April 1990.

[42] Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, op cit.

[43] Max Chafkin, op. cit.

[44] Patel, Vimal et Sharon Otterman, “Colleges Wonder if They Will be “the Enemy” Under Trump” in The New York Times, November 12, 2024

[45] Sam Biddle, “ICE Wants to Know if You’re Posting Negative Things About it Online”, The Intercept, February 11, 2025.

[46] “Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans for Institutionalizing trumpism” in New York Times, 2024

[47] Kine, Phelim, “Elon Musk’s attacks on a group long backed by GOP prompt Republican Shrugs” in Politico, February 13, 2025

[48] Exerpt from the Congressional Record, Appendix, July 30, 1953 in GRI, box 126, folder fascism

[49] GRI, box 126, folder fascism

[50] Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, New York, Vintage Books, 2008 (1965), p.32, p.39.

[51] Rappeport, Alan, “The Senate confirms Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget.” in The New York Times, February 8, 2025

[52] German Lopez and Lyna Bentahar, op. cit.

[53] Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right, The lost legacy of the conservative movement, Wilmington, Delaware, ISI Books, 2008, pp.251-260.

[54] During this decade Charles and David Koch provided this new brand of libertarianism with their Wealth, financing new insititutes such as the Cato Institute, and many magazines, and Student organizations, such as the Student for a Libertarian Society (SDS).

[55] Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow, “This oil tycoon brings in millions for Trump, and may set his agenda” in The Washington Post, August 13, 2024

[56] James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, where Peter Thiel is placing his biggest Bets” in Vanity Fair, April 20, 2022 ; Max Chafkin, The Contrarian, Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of power, New York Penguin, 2021

[57] Valentine Faure, “Comment la droite tech américaine a pris le pouvoir” in Le Monde, 15.11.2024, sur : https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2024/11/15/comment-la-droite-tech-americaine-a-pris-le-pouvoir_6395657_3210.html

[58] Rhian Lubin, “Trump accused of violating First Amendement after AP reporter barred from event over “Gulf of America’s renaming” in The Independent, February, 12, 2025

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Language matters. Aside from its immediate impact on our perception of great political events, including war, language also defines our understanding of these events throughout history, thereby shaping our relationship with the past, the present, and the future.

As Arab leaders are mobilizing to prevent any attempt to displace the Palestinian population of war-stricken Gaza – and the occupied West Bank for that matter – I couldn’t help but reflect on language: when did we stop referencing the ‘Arab-Israeli conflict,’ and substitute that with the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’?

Aside from the obvious problem that military occupations should not be described as ‘conflicts’ – a neutral term that creates a moral equivalence – the removal of ‘Arabs’ from the ‘conflict’ has greatly worsened matters, not only for Palestinians, but Arabs themselves.

Before we talk about these repercussions, that of swapping words and altering phrases, it is important to dig deeper: when exactly was the term ‘Arab’ removed? And equally important, why was it added in the first place?

The League of Arab States was established in March 1945, over three years before the establishment of Israel. A main cause of that newly found Arab unity was Palestine, then under British colonial ‘mandate.’ Not only did the few independent Arab states understand the centrality of Palestine to their collective security and political identities, but they perceived Palestine as the single most critical issue for all Arab nations – independent or otherwise.

That affinity grew stronger with time, and the Arab League summits always reflected the fact that Arab peoples and governments, despite conflicts, rebellions, upheavals, and divisions, were always united in a singular value: the liberation of Palestine.

The spiritual significance of Palestine grew hand in hand with its political and strategic significance to the Arabs, thus the injection of the religious component to that relationship.

The arson attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in August 1969 was the main catalyst behind the establishment of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) later that year. In 2011, it was renamed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, though Palestine remained the central topic of Muslim dialogue.

Still, the ‘conflict’ remained ‘Arab,’ as Arab countries were the ones who bore the brunt of it, engaged in its wars, suffered its defeats, but also shared its moments of triumph.

The Arab military defeat in June 1967 to the Israeli army, backed by the United States and other powerful western powers, was a watershed moment. Humiliated and angry, Arab nations declared their famous “Three No’s” at the Khartoum Summit in August-September of that same year. All the ‘no’s’ centered on the idea that there will be no peace, negotiations, or recognition of Israel while Palestinians are held captive.

That strong stance, however, didn’t survive the test of time. Disunity among Arab nations rose to the surface, and such terms as Al-‘Am al-Qawmi al-‘Arabi – the Arab national security – often focused on Palestine, splintered into new conceptions surrounding the interests of nation-states.

The Camp David Accords signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979 deepened Arab divisions – and marginalized Palestine further – though, in actuality, it didn’t invent them.

It was around these times that western media, then academia, began coining new terms regarding Palestine. The ‘Arab’ was dropped, in favor of ‘Palestinian’. That simple change was earth-shattering, as Arabs, Palestinians, and people around the world began making new associations with the political discourse pertaining to Palestine. The isolation of Palestine had thus crossed that of physical sieges and military occupation, into the realm of language.

Palestinians fought hard to win their rightful and deserved position as the guardians of their own struggle. Though the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established at the behest of Egypt in the First Arab Summit in Cairo of 1964, Palestinians, under the leadership of Fatah’s Yasser Arafat, were given the helm in 1969.

Five years later, in the Arab Summit in Rabat (1974), the PLO was collectively perceived as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” later to be granted observer status at the United Nations.

Ideally, a truly independent Palestinian leadership needed to be embraced by a collective and unified Arab position, aiding it in the difficult, and often bloody, process of liberation. Events that followed, however, attested to a far less ideal trajectory: Arab and Palestinian divisions weakened the position of both, splintering their energies, resources, and political decisions.

But history is not destined to follow the same pattern. Though historical experiences may appear to replicate themselves, the wheel of history can be channeled to move in the right direction.

Gaza, and the great injustice resulting from the destruction of the Israeli war in the Strip, is once more being a catalyst for Arab dialogue, and, if there is enough will, unity.

Though Palestinians have demonstrated that their sumud – steadfastness – is enough to repel all stratagems aimed at their very destruction, Arab nations must reclaim their position as the first line of solidarity and support for the Palestinian people, not only for the sake of Palestine itself but also for the sake of all Arab nations.

Unity is now key to recentering the just cause of Palestine, so that language may, once more, shift, injecting the ‘Arab’ component as a critical word in a struggle for freedom that should concern all Arab and Muslim nations, and in fact, the whole world.

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Rebuilding from California’s recent wildfires will cost more than a quarter of a trillion dollars — an unprecedented amount. The estimated damage from Hurricane Helene in the Southeast is almost as much, on the order of $250 billion.

Who will pay for that damage? It’s a question plaguing localities around the country as climate change makes these disasters increasingly common.

Some states are landing on a straightforward answer: fossil fuel companies.

The idea is inspired by the “superfunds” used to clean up industrial accidents and toxic waste. The Superfund program goes back to 1980, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). The law fined polluters to finance the clean up of toxic spills.

Thanks to the hard work of groups such as the Vermont Public Interest Research Group and Vermont Natural Resources Council, Vermont recently became the first state to establish a climate superfund in May 2024.

Months later, New York followed suit, again in response to pressure from environmental groups. Both bills require oil and gas companies to pay billions into a fund designated for climate-related cleanup and rebuilding.

Now California is considering a similar law in the wake of its disastrous wildfires. Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey may take up the idea as well.

It’s an idea whose time has come, especially now that states are less able to rely on the federal government. The Trump administration is disabling government agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with major cuts and putting conditions on other aid.

At the recent Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference, Trump aide Ric Grenell unabashedly endorsed “squeezing” California’s federal funds unless they “get rid of the California Coastal Commission.” (Trump apparently hates the commission, the Fresno Bee explains, because it prevents “wealthy people from turning public beaches into private enclaves.”)

Fossil fuel companies — the lead perpetrators of climate disasters — spent more than $450 million to elect their favored candidates, including Trump. In return, Trump has promised to speed up oil and gas permits and stacked his cabinet with oil-friendly executives.

Why should taxpayers have to foot the bill to clean up the destruction wrought by this industry, one of the most profitable the world has ever known? As a spokesperson for New York Governor Kathy Hochul said, “corporate polluters should pay for the wreckage caused by the climate crisis — not every day New Yorkers.”

Not surprisingly, 22 Republican-led states disagree. They’ve sued to block New York’s law and protect oil and gas profits at the expense of ordinary people. They have no answer for the question of who pays for recovery from climate disasters or helps people reeling from one disaster after another.

Fossil fuel companies can think of paying into a climate superfund as the cost of doing business. If they’re in the business of extracting and selling a fuel that destroys the planet, it’s only fair they pay to clean up the damage.

And the public agrees. Data For Progress found more than 80 percent of voters support holding fossil fuel companies responsible for the impact of carbon emissions.

To be fair, a climate superfund is a “downstream” solution to the climate crisis, one that seeks to raise the costs to perpetrators. A climate superfund can pay to rebuild homes, but it cannot replace priceless family heirlooms or undo the trauma of surviving a disaster. Most of all, it cannot bring back lives lost. It is only one tool in a multi-pronged tool box to end the climate crisis.

Upstream solutions centering the prevention of climate change — that is, reducing carbon emissions at their source — must be at the center of our fight if humanity is to survive. But in the meantime, fossil fuel polluters should pay.

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