US striking Houthi positions in Yemen. Image Source: U.S. Air Force – Public Domain

On March 24, the country learned that a group of senior Trump administration officials (including the Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence, among others) accidentally sent classified details of military strikes against Yemen to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic. Since Goldberg broke the story, there has been a steady stream of commentary about “Signalgate,” most adding little but sound and fury. The public discourse about Signalgate reveals something important about American politics—far more important than the incompetence at the center of the scandal. What has rarely been mentioned during the national conversation is the elephant in the room: the United States’ attacks on Yemen violate international law and contribute to one of the world’s most significant humanitarian crises.

The nightmare of the Washington ruling class is that we might finally open our eyes to the real, documented crimes going on in a country most Americans can’t find on a map. It would be difficult to overstate the degree of brutality and suffering that the United States has foisted upon the people of Yemen. And it is impossible to separate the United States’ strategic approach to Yemen from its support of the genocidal onslaught in Palestine. In the first year of the brutally one-sided terror campaign in the Gaza Strip, the U.S. gave billions in arms and other support to Israel, no questions asked. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project:

U.S. spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S operations in the region total at least $22.76 billion and counting. This estimate is conservative; while it includes approved security assistance funding since October 7, 2023, supplemental funding for regional operations, and an estimated additional cost of operations, it does not include any other economic costs.

William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, adds that arms offers during this period (that is, beyond the $17.9 billion in military aid, including items that have yet to be delivered) are worth more than $30 billion. Yemen’s Houthis have harried shipping lanes in response to the U.S.-supported genocide in the Gaza Strip, prompting the Biden administration to re-assign the group to its spurious terror list. Washington has frequently justified its crimes against the people of Yemen by pointing to the threat of Iran, treated as a state sponsor of terror. The first Trump administration, citing a national security emergency created by Tehran, rushed weapons to the Saudis against widespread concerns about the safety of civilians—members of the Trump government were sacked for raising concerns. It is worth asking: what is a state sponsor of terror? As it has been applied to real-world events, the notion itself is incoherent and unintelligible—that is, it is propaganda aimed at confusing and misleading comfortable Americans. To give meaning to this standard requires that we grapple with uncomfortable facts, and particularly after its illegal actions against Palestine and Yemen, the United States must be regarded as the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism.

The U.S. has killed no less than 61 people since it began a new round of strikes on March 15, but its reckless attacks and disregard for civilian life go back more than two decades. The U.S. first began drone operations and airstrikes in Yemen in 2002, causing “significant civilian harm, and no one has been held to account for these actions.” According to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, coalition airstrikes alone have killed almost 20,000 civilians, more than 2,300 of whom were children. At least 4 million people have been forcibly displaced. Today, Yemen is among the world’s poorest and most war-torn countries. We must be clear about what is happening in Yemen, because our media are committed to obscuring the truth: the intentional policy of the United States has been to starve Yemen—and to bomb its people when they cannot be starved to death. When Washington wants to kill massive numbers of innocent people without military action—to make sure they don’t have food, medicine, energy, and the other necessities of life—it uses a global-scale program of economic blockades, rationalized with vague gestures to “terrorism.” For years, the U.S. government has cut Yemen’s people off from the bare minimum necessary to survive, while attacking and destroying critical infrastructure. According to the UN Refugee Agency, over “18.2 million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance and protection services,” with 5 million in conditions of acute food insecurity. About 10 million children in Yemen need humanitarian assistance of some kind. The U.S. supported war and the blockade have created an economic disaster in Yemen. Last summer, a World Bank report stated that in the years between 2015 and 2023, Yemen lost more than half (54 percent) of its real GDP per person, putting most people in the country in dire poverty.

The language around “terrorism” is central to Washington’s attempts to control the narrative and to conjure public support for—or at least public ignorance of—its patently illegal campaign in Yemen. As Phyllis Bennis recently pointed out, the U.S. attacks on Yemen are “always referred to as ‘bombing the Iran-backed Houthi rebels’ to avoid acknowledging that, like in Gaza, the bombs are dropping on civilian infrastructure and civilians already facing devastating hunger.”

Yemen and Palestine have tested the limits of the imperial system—how many innocent women and children can we liquidate before self-absorbed, mindlessly scrolling, Netflix-watching, garbage-eating Americans will bat an eyelash? Lots of them apparently. The Signal story is the perfect apparently anti-Trump narrative for the chattering classes: they need not even pretend to stake out a progressive position contrary to Trump. As legal residents who have broken no law are disappeared from our streets for opposing a genocide in Palestine—fully supported by both wings of the ruling class—the ruling class can focus our attention and loyalties on America’s righteous military mission.

Imperialism is the shared faith of the ruling class because the entire American economic and social system depends on it—the cheap treats that pacify us and hide the true features of the system of production: the land theft, the slave labor, the extraction of natural resources, the oppressive “intellectual property” regime that gives the very ideas themselves to privileged corporate rentiers. If the forever wars are ever questioned, the whole governing ideology and political paradigm are thrown open to scrutiny. And they cannot survive a closer look, because they represent criminal behavior at its most shameless.

Washington’s savagery in Yemen, and the corporate press’s bizarre reaction thereto, points to a deep moral crisis and loss of direction in the United States. We seem to be incapable of confronting the government’s malign influence in the world and its near-constant violations of the most fundamental principles of international law. But we will not understand MAGA fascism as a social and political phenomenon until we see clearly its connection with American empire and its crimes against innocent people, including those of Yemen.

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Upper Tenderloin Historic District. Photograph Source: Smallbones – CC0

“Any city that doesn’t have a Tenderloin isn’t a city at all”

– Herb Caen, longtime San Francisco Chronicle columnist

Few San Francisco neighborhoods have had more ups and downs than the 33-block area still called “The Tenderloin”—a name which derives from the late 19^th century police practice of shaking down local restaurants and butcher shops by taking their best cuts of beef in lieu of cash bribes.

At various periods in its storied past, the Tenderloin has been home to famous brothels, Prohibition-era speakeasies, San Francisco’s first gay bars, well-known hotels and jazz clubs, film companies and recording studies, and professional boxing gyms.

In 1966, trans people hanging out at the all-night Compton’s Cafeteria staged a militant protest against police harassment three years before the more famous LBGTQ uprising at the Stonewall Inn in NYC. During the last decade, the Tenderloin has become better known for its controversial side-walk camping, open-air drug markets, and fentanyl abuse.

The failure of municipal government to deal with those social problems— in a residential neighborhood for working-class families with 3,000 children—contributed to recent electoral defeats of a district attorney, city supervisor, and San Francisco’s second female and African-American mayor.

For the past 45 years, Randy Shaw has been a fixture of the place as co-founder of its Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC). After graduating from law school nearby, Shaw became involved in fights for tenants’ rights and more affordable housing at a time when blue-collar neighborhoods in San Francisco were starting to gentrify.

A Unionized Non-Profit

The THC, which now employs 200 SEIU Local 1021-represented staff members, began to acquire and develop its own network of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) buildings in the Tenderloin, as an alternative to run-down private landlord owned ones.

Today, THC provides subsidized housing and wrap-around services to several thousand of the city’s most needy tenants—who might otherwise be among the social outcasts living in the surrounding streets. Shaw estimates that the Tenderloin has a higher percentage of housing in nonprofit hands than any central city neighborhood in the nation, an arrangement which safeguards its distinctive character as an economically mixed neighborhood that includes many low-income people among its 20,000 residents.

In this second edition to his book, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime, and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco, Shaw recounts how this multi-racial working-class enclave managed to survive, if not always thrive, amid a city dominated by tech industry wealth and privilege.

That history of neighborhood resistance to displacement is also on display at the Tenderloin Museum (TLM). Created ten years ago, with much help from the author, this venue for community-based, historically-inspired cultural programming now operates under the direction of Katie Conry.

In her Forward to Shaw’s book, Conry describes the TLM’s many art shows, special exhibits, theatre productions, walking tours, and other public programs that have drawn 50,000 people to a downtown area many out-of-town visitors (and locals) are told to avoid. On April 11, for example, the THC is hosting a new production of The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot to commemorate that “collective act of resistance” and “the on-going fight for transgender rights.” (For ticket info, see here.)

Community Benefits Agreements

Other Californians fighting gentrification—or trying to make sure its benefits are more equitably shared—will find Shaw’s book to be an invaluable guide to effective activism around housing issues. It illustrates how persistent and creative grassroots organizing can challenge and change urban re-development schemes designed for the few, rather than the many. In too many Left Coast cities, it’s the latter who continue to get pushed out and left behind in the name of “neighborhood improvement.”

A central case study in The Tenderloin is the author’s account of how community residents won a pioneering “community benefits agreement” (CBA) with three powerful hotel chains. In the early 1980s, Hilton, Holiday Inn, and Ramada wanted to build three luxury tourist hotels adjacent to the Tenderloin. Given the city’s pro-development political climate at the time, these hospitality industry giants expected little organized opposition to their plans. Then Mayor Diane Feinstein lauded them for “bringing a renaissance to the area.”

However, as originally unveiled, their blueprint would have transformed nearby residential blocks by “driving up property values, leading to further development, and, ultimately the Tenderloin’s destruction as a low-income residential neighborhood.”

An Organizing Case Study

Among those faced with the prospect of big rent increases and eventual evictions were many senior citizens, recently arrived Asian immigrants, and longtime residents of SRO buildings in dire need of better ownership and management. Fortunately, this low-income, multi-racial population included some residents with “previously unrecognized activist and leadership skills” that were put to good use by campaign organizers, like Shaw, who were assisting their struggle.

During a year-long fight, hundreds of people mobilized to pressure the city Planning Commission to modify the hoteliers’ plans. As Shaw reports, the resulting deal with City Hall created “a national precedent for cities requiring private developers to provide community benefits as a condition of approving their projects.”

Each of the hotels contributed $320,000 per hotel per year for twenty years for low-cost housing development. They also had to sponsor a $4 million federal Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) for the acquisition and renovation of four low-cost Tenderloin SROs. In addition, each hotel had to pay $200,000 for community service projects, and give priority in employment to Tenderloin residents.

Four decades later, community benefits agreements of this sort are not so unusual. But, in the absence of major new federal investment in public housing built with union labor, they are still much needed.

Where tax breaks or rezoning encourages various forms of private development today, the only way to win additional low-income housing units, living wage jobs, local hiring, or preservation of open space for public use is through grassroots campaigning by community-labor coalitions, aided by sympathetic public officials.

Otherwise mayors and city councils under the thumb of developers will simply offer financial incentives with a few strings attached—whether the project involved is a new hotel, casino, shopping center, office building, or luxury apartment building.

Back in the Tenderloin, as Shaw reports in the conclusion to his book, residents in recent years have had to mobilize around basic public safety issues.  Pandemic driven economic distress flooded their neighborhood with tent dwellers, drug dealing, and street crime that added to small business closures, drove tourists away, and made daily life hazardous for longtime residents (except when state and local politicians cleaned things up for high-profile gatherings like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leadership meeting in S.F. two years ago).

Nevertheless, the author ends on an optimistic note (characteristic of organizers): “New restaurants and small businesses are again opening in the Tenderloin. Street and crosswalk changes make the neighborhood among the city’s most walkable. New housing has increased the Tenderloin’s population…”

But, Shaw reminds us, residents of this urban enclave must still fight to achieve “the quality of life common to other San Francisco neighborhoods” while “protecting an ethnically diverse, low-income, and working-class community” with a colorful past and always uncertain future.

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Photograph Source: Oleg Yunakov – CC BY-SA 4.0

Many Americans felt anxious and fearful about the Trump administration long before it assumed power in January. Three months after Trump’s inauguration, that disquiet is no longer simply fueled by recommendations from Project 2025; many of its suggestions have been born out in real-world ways.

Shuttering life-saving programs abroad, firing federal workers without cause, arresting lawful migrants for protesting, and effacing people’s gender identities are just some of the administration’s activities. Many of the president’s Executive Orders are patently illegal and downright cruel.

Things may become much worse.

The word fascism comes up a lot in connection to the current executive, and naturally so do the names Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

In contrast to Germans and Italians of the 1920s and 1930s, it should be obvious that we face far fewer obstacles to oppose encroaching authoritarianism and can do so at less risk to ourselves. Evoking the images of Hitler and Mussolini might create a kind of social paralysis, one that conjures up deep-seated fear that there is nothing one can do to confront an increasingly repressive government.

It is important to consider some of the conditions in Germany and Italy that led to and bolstered those dictatorships and compare them to twenty-first century American politics. The differences are illuminating and oddly heartening.

No Threats from the Left

Conservative political elites in Germany—with the support of high-ranking military figures and powerful businessmen—installed Hitler as Reich Chancellor. He did not enjoy majority support among the population. In Italy, the threat of widespread violence and the backing of rightwing figures propelled Mussolini to power. Italian King Victor Emannuel III signed off on Mussolini’s premiership.  Why did they do that? Because they were fending off the growing influence of leftist parties, as well as the social instability and conflict that resulted from political impasses.

By the “Left,” I mean the aggregate of socialist and communist parties in Germany and Italy. They collectively had many seats in their respective parliaments (the communist party had fewer than the socialist-inspired ones in Germany, though). Socialist and communist party membership in those two countries numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It’s difficult to imagine it today, but during the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, socialism was a real force.

To win concessions from their governments, leftists often successfully shut down or took over factories, public transport, and garbage collection. In the German state of Bavaria, they even started a revolution. In Italy, ordinary workers sometimes took effective control of many of the factories in the country’s industrial north.

The ultra conservative right and upper middle classes in those countries were terrified that their privileges would be taken away, so they sought strongmen who headed paramilitary organizations to stop the leftward drift. Mussolini and Hitler fit the bill. They had the manpower, organization, and notoriety to put a lid on developments and quieten society.

By contrast, the United States has no political left in positions of power. Only about 15, 000 people belong to the organization Communist Party USA. They have not run a presidential candidate in many years. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America stands at about 90,000 people according to its website. In a country of over 340 million, that’s not a remotely threatening number. They don’t have any seats in Congress.

Despite what he calls himself, Senator Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. He is a Social Democrat. In fact, he’s a New Deal FDR Democrat. Of course, he is situated to the left of Trump and his allies in the US Congress, but Bernie is not calling for the abolition of private property or outlawing corporations.

As author and political analyst Gregory Harms has argued in his book No Politics, No Religion?, the center is the left edge of the viable political spectrum in the United States. That was simply not the case in Germany and Italy in the first thirty years of the twentieth century.

In other words, there is no serious leftist threat whatsoever to the interests of the big business community or other dominant institutions either from inside the government or from the streets. There is therefore no motive to silently nod at a strongman to make unlawful arrests, disappear citizens, order extrajudicial executions, or build a network of forced labor camps.

Rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans are two factions of a business party oligarchy. With some exceptions, they generally take the same money from the same people. They are already the establishment and happy with conditions as they stand, even though the Democrats are a bit less happy these days in the wake of a lost election.

 It is highly probable that if President Trump starts costing Wall Street money because, for example, he makes good on his campaign promise to deport an incredibly inexpensive and highly exploitable labor force, or if he attempts to control the military establishment for his own political ends, the show will be over. They will tolerate his reality show-style shenanigans only so far.

Lack of Loyalty in Military Circles

Speaking of the military, Hitler and Mussolini had direct control of their military forces for a long time. Generals and enlisted personnel swore loyalty to Hitler. In Italy, the armed forces swore an oath to the king, but Mussolini was effectively in command. Here, members of the US military swear fealty to the US Constitution.

More importantly, after it lost the first world war, the German military had a serious axe to grind. It wanted to regain its power and prestige after the Treaty of Versailles, which stipulated severe reductions to its size. Hitler endorsed a massive rebuilding of Germany’s army, navy, and air force. Many Germans, including the military establishment, viewed those efforts as ways to amend what they viewed as a set of dishonorable and insulting restrictions on their power and influence.

The US military, however, is in no such comparable position. Far from it. It is the most powerful, well-funded, and technologically equipped military in the world; it needs no radical, outlier advocate. Both establishment political parties, despite their other disputes, usually agree on funding the US military to extravagant and unnecessary degrees.

Also, Hitler and Mussolini were highly decorated war veterans, and that played well among many career military personnel, as well as the paramilitary organizations that they led.

By contrast, Trump was not inducted into the army during the Vietnam War because of bone spurs. Furthermore, his negative remarks about martial sacrifice and his antipathy to being photographed with injured veterans have not gone over well. Consequently, Trump is not popular in military circles, at least if the polling data can be believed. It’s important to note that many high-ranking officers dislike him very much and have said so publicly.

It’s difficult to unleash the US military on its own population when, in addition to a lack of legal obligation to the president as a person, most armed services personnel do not think well of Mr. Trump.

No Interest in Cultivating Mass Popular Support

Improving the material quality of life for citizens was a priority for both fascist regimes for a variety of reasons, not least of which was to increase the dictators’ personal popularity and bolster fascist ideology.

Importantly, Hitler kept and developed educational and healthcare reforms that had been instituted many years before he came to power. Starting in the late nineteenth century, free public education had been the norm. Under the Weimar Republic—the post-World War I government that preceded Hitler—universal health care was available to the German population. Backtracking on or defunding entitlements would have been politically unwise.

As a relatively recent example shows, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s efforts to defund public services for the British population did not go over well. Once people have important benefits, they are not keen to see them taken away, and they remember when politicians attempt to dismantle them. It’s important to recall that in Britain the reaction to Thatcher’s death was often celebratory. Sometimes, people have longer memories than is comfortable for the political establishment.

By contrast, the Trump administration offers comparatively little or nothing. It just abolished the Department of Education and supports greater school privatization. They want to gut public education by “school choice” or “vouchers.” That translates to less access and greater rationing of education by wealth. Both the later and former problems already exist, but Trump’s decisions will likely make them worse.

Trump and the GOP also want to get rid of what’s left of the Affordable Care Act. The Republican budget (not the reconciliation, keep-the-government-running bill that just passed), calls for steep cuts to entities that administer Medicaid and SNAP. Tax cuts for the super-rich and corporations are likely coming soon.

In other words, Trump and the GOP are not interested in providing people with much at all. In fact, they want to reduce already-existing benefits while further enriching the wealthy. How far they can or will go with that is anybody’s guess. The larger point is that this is not the behavior of a government that wants to cultivate mass popular appeal.

In their first several years in power, Hitler and Mussolini’s popularity skyrocketed partially because of greater domestic social support, more public infrastructure programs, and dramatic gains in employment. Trump’s popularity is already declining. It may get a lot worse as his hodgepodge of cuts starts to negatively affect more people.

Trump himself has said many times that he will never receive much more political support than he already has. The polling numbers show he is correct; it’s usually been 60 percent against him and 40 percent of various flavors of favorable. That means he neither requires fealty to himself nor to the party from the direction of the entire population.

Hitler and Mussolini required mass expressions of support, and that always requires coercion. It is impossible for unanimity of feeling among 10 people, much less millions.

Trump’s lack of interest in compelling everyone to love him (he seems to enjoy any attention, good or bad) and no subsequent requirement for public displays of North Korea-style adoration of Dear Leader mean there is no need for physical coercion and knocks on the door at 3:00 am to take away a disobedient neighbor.

Make no mistake. Trump is an authoritarian figure. He loves strongmen, but he does not demand absolute loyalty from all and that spells a different hardwiring than a Hitler or a Mussolini.

We should remember that we are not helpless prisoners of fate or trapped in a cyclical history. The numerous civil liberties we still possess suggest constructive ways forward to deal with the many problems we face.

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Members of the Fifteenth Street Meeting of Friends and the New York Catholic Worker gather for a weekly vigil against the bombing of Yemen in New York City on February 3, 2024. Photo credit: Hideko Otake.

Beginning in March of 2017 and for the following eight years, at 11:00 a.m. on every Saturday morning, a group of New Yorkers has assembled in Manhattan’s Union Square for “the Yemen vigil.” Their largest banner proclaims: “Yemen is Starving.” Other signs say: “Put a human face on war in Yemen,” and “Let Yemen Live.”

Participants in the vigil decry the suffering in Yemen where one of every two children under the age of five is malnourished, “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world.” UNICEF reports that 540,000 Yemeni girls and boys are severely and acutely malnourished, an agonizing, life-threatening condition which weakens immune systems, stunts growth, and can be fatal.

The World Food Program says that a child in Yemen dies once every ten minutes, from preventable causes, including extreme hunger. According to Oxfam, more than 17 million people, almost half of Yemen’s population, face food insecurity, while aerial attacks have decimated much of the critical infrastructure on which its economy depends.

Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-levelTrump Administration officials had discussed real-time planning around these strikes in a group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app. During the past week, Congressional Democrats including U.S. Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries expressed outrage over the Trump Administration’s recklessness, with Jeffries sayingthat what has happened “shocks the conscience.”

President Trump commented that there was “no harm done” in the administration’s use of Signal chats, “because the attack was unbelievably successful.” But the Democrats appear more shocked and outraged by the disclosure of highly secret war plans over Signal than by the actual nature of the attacks, which have killed innocent people, including children.

In fact, U.S. elected officials have seldom commented on the agony Yemen’s children endure as they face starvation and disease. Nor has there been discussion of the inherent illegality of the United States’s bombing campaign against an impoverished country in defense of Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians.

As commentator Mohamad Bazzi writes in The Guardian, “Anyone interested in real accountability for U.S. policy-making should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.”

On Saturday, March 29, participants in the Yemen vigil will distribute flyers with the headline “Yemen in the Crosshairs” that warn of an alarming buildup of U.S. Air Force B2 Spirit stealth bombers landing at the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean.

According to the publication Army Recognition, two aircraft have already landed at Diego Garcia, and two others are currently en route, in a move that may indicate further strikes against Yemen. The B2 Spirit bombers are “uniquely capable of carrying the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bomb designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets … This unusual movement of stealth bombers may indicate preparations for potential strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen or serve as a deterrent message to Iran.”

The Yemen vigil flyer points out that multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs can use their GPS precision guidance system to “layer in” multiple warheads on a precise location, with each “digging” more deeply than the one before it to achieve deeper penetration. “This is considered particularly critical to achieving U.S. and broader Western Bloc objectives of neutralizing the Ansarullah Coalition’s military strength,” reports Military Watch Magazine, “as key Yemeni military and industrial targets are fortified deeply underground.”

Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House from New York don’t seem to care.

A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive website.

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Housing subdivisions, Sarasota County, Florida. Photo: USGS.

On March 15, my wife Harriet and I flew from London to Tampa to begin a three week visit to Florida and Georgia to visit family and friends and meet with community leaders of A2 (Anthropocene Alliance), our environmental non-profit. It was our first return to the U.S. since we moved to Norwich in June 2024 and since the election. The following are excerpts from my travel diary.

March 15 – Mickey at customs

The slow-moving line for passport inspection began on the jet bridge. Were Customs and Border Patrol agents deploying “enhanced vetting” to screen British families headed for Disneyworld? Or were they bent on challenging the citizenship of returning American dissidents? I imagined my meek plaint to CBP: “But officer, I’m from Queens.” After about 30 minutes, an agent trotted down the quarter-mile long cue, shouting, “U.S. passport holders follow me!” (Had I heard a prefatory Achtung?) A few dozen of us followed him into the customs hall where we were directed to a much shorter line and quickly processed by polite agents. For us, this was a welcome instance of America First. For the foreign bods – old folks, parents and kids with Mickey merch – not so much. Did an unlucky few wind up on a flight to El Salvador?

March 16 – Gated communities

“Amber Creek, Talon Preserve, Star Farms, The Isles, Bungalow Walk, Nautique, Esplanade, Silver Oak, Cresswind, Sapphire Point, Emerald Landing, Palm Grove, Lorraine Lakes, Kingfisher Estates, Monterey Palm, The Alcove, Hammock Preserve, Solera, Village Walk, Shellstone, Promenade Estates, Monarch Acres.” (Some of the hundreds of gated communities in Sarasota County, Florida.)

We’re staying with my sister Joan and her husband Barry in their comfortable home in a Sarasota subdivision. As we sat around her granite kitchen island, noshing on chips and guacamole (the Mexican avocados were tariff-priced — three bucks each), we reviewed the latest catastrophes and muted resistance from Democrats. “Any protests here?” I asked. “Bupkes” Joan replied. “Republicans outnumber Democrats in Sarasota County by 2 to 1.”

If you wanted to invent an acquiescent polity, you could hardly improve upon Florida gated communities. They are rarely located in towns or cities, so political governance is at the county level, the tier most remote from the populace. Residents expend their political passions at homeowners’ association meetings where they debate pool temperature, pickle ball accessibility, and lawn maintenance. A Publix supermarket is never more than a 10-minute drive. Restaurants, big box stores, car washes and medical clinics are just as accessible. Beaches may be a little further — the closer to the ocean, the more expensive the home, rising sea levels notwithstanding. For the Sarasota bourgeoisie – many of whom are retired and living off investments — the country beyond their subdivision gates is little seen or noticed. For a few, like my sister and her husband, it’s a threat — but distant, like thunder clouds passing behind Sabal palms.

March 17 – Ducks

Our visits here are always relaxing. Manicured lawns and shrubs, immaculate roads and sidewalks, and nearly identical ranch houses (“villas”), induce in Harriet a preternatural calm. Today, she indulged her favorite vacation activity: she had three naps.

In the late afternoon, we walked along Sandhill Preserve Drive to the pool. It’s temporarily closed because of a broken pump. But the day was still warm and sunny, so we reclined for a while in the chaise lounges, our only company a pair of non-migratory mottled ducks. They sat at first, on the concrete edge of the pool, then jumped in and started to perform. They bowed to each other, pecked at the water, circled, and rose up to display their wings. Then one mounted the other. The act lasted just a few seconds.

“Was that it?”

“I guess so,” Harriet replied. “But they seem pleased with themselves.”

“Do you think they’ll do it again?”

“It doesn’t look like it. Maybe when they were younger,” Harriet said wistfully, “they did it more.”

March 18 – The Uprising of the 20,000

Before cocktails, Barry and I had a conversation about immigration.

“My grandfather came over around 1900 with nothing,” Barry said. “No money, and no papers except what they gave him at Ellis Island. He somehow scraped together enough to open a small candy shop and after that, a children’s clothing store. He was a salesman, like me.”

After a pause, I gave unbidden, a potted disquisition on sales:

“Yours was an ancient and noble calling,” I offered, “simple arbitrage — buy low in one market and sell high in another. Under capitalism, trade expanded. The network of intermediaries grew, and profits accumulated at each nodal point. Today, monopolists control every stage of large enterprises, from production to distribution to consumption. Salesmen in some cases, are missing entirely. Pretty soon, robots will sell to other robots.”

Barry returned us to the present:

“When I hear about the deportation of immigrants today, I’m furious. My grandfather was no different from them. He worked hard and contributed to this country, just like they do!”

Later, I thought some more about Jewish peddlers, circa 1900, and did some online research. In most cases, I learned, they were immigrants who became migrant laborers. They’d schlep from street to street or town to town selling their goods from carts, duffel bags, or suitcases. Sometimes they’d spend the night at the residence of their customers. After getting up in the morning, a salesman might say to his host: “Oh, did I remember to show you last night, the latest shirtwaists from New York?” They sometimes made their best sales that way.

I found a great photograph (below) from the Library of Congress, captioned: “Coat Peddler, Hester Street, New York, c.1910.” (My father, Bertram Eisenman, was born on Hester Street in

1913.) Was the anonymous photographer thinking of Karl Marx’s “law of value,” Chapter 1, Section 2 of Capital?

“Let us take two commodities such as a coat and 10 yards of linen, and let the former be double the value of the latter, so that, if 10 yards of linen = W, the coat = 2W…. Whence this difference in their values? It is owing to the fact that the linen contains only half as much labor as the coat, and consequently, that in the production of the latter, labor power must have been expended during twice the time necessary for the production of the former.”

Unknown photographer, Coat Peddler Hester Street, New York, c. 1910. Library of Congress.

Marx was explaining how in a capitalist economy, labor was embedded in commodities, their value mediated by exchange. That observation enabled another, a few pages later, in a section

of Capital as remarkable for its title as content: “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” Marx wrote that “the social character of labor appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves.” That is, in the process of exchange, commodities appear to take on a life of their own, becoming fetishes or idols, masking the actual circumstances of their manufacture and sale. The two men in the photo, one haggling and the other observing, plus a third visible only by the shadow of his hat, know little about the itinerant salesman’s life and labor. They are unaware that New York was the biggest center for textile production in the country, and that it was powered primarily by immigrants. They knew only the value of the money still in their pockets and price of the fabrics and finished garments weighing down the short Jewish man wearing a coat several sizes too large.

There were some at the time, however, who understood the “social character of labor.” A few months earlier, on November 22, 1909, Clara Lemlich of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union addressed thousands of fellow textile workers, most of them recent immigrants, in Union Square. She spoke in Yiddish: “I am a working girl [arbetn meydl].…and I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms. What we are here for is to decide whether we shall strike or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now!” Lemlich’s resolution was approved, and the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand” began. The strike ushered in a period of labor activism, leading to broader unionization of garment industry workers and improved wages and working conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire a year later, which killed 146 garment workers, most of them women and girls, accelerated the campaign for better wages and safer working conditions.

But successes were short-lived. By the 1930s, liberal trade policy and competition from non-union labor in the U.S. South, punished textile workers and ultimately the industry itself. By the 1970s, American textile manufacturing was diminished in size and significance. Soon, the decline became a collapse. Between 1973 and 2020, the U.S, textile workforce shrunk from about 2.3 million to just 180,000. Today, employment levels are slightly higher, the result of foreign manufacturers, including from China, deploying the same labor arbitrage that U.S. manufacturers did, only in reverse. Where are the Clara Lemlichs of today? A strike by immigrant workers in textiles, agriculture, construction, health care or hospitality would bring the leaders of those industries – and Trump – to their knees!

March 21 – The rich move, the poor migrate

For a long time, Harriet and I wondered what we’d feel when we saw again our old house and garden in Micanopy, Florida. When we finally did, on a sunny, warm, Friday afternoon, we both felt approximately the same thing: nothing, or at most, unfamiliarity and distance . As we struggled to understand our feelings, I thought about a favorite song and short story: “A Cottage for Sale” (1929), by Willard Robison (music) and Larry Conley (lyrics), and “The Swimmer” (1964), by John Cheever.

I’ve always thought the one inspired the other. The song has been covered by almost everybody, including Nat King Cole (1957), Frank Sinatra (1959), and Billy Eckstein (1960). Judy Garland sang it, molto adagio, on her CBS TV show in 1963. Though her show had bad ratings, (it played against “Bonanza”), the critics in New York loved it. Cheever in Westchester probably saw it. The second verse summarizes the song’s subject: the fading of love (or life), the neglect of a garden, and the loss of a home:

The lawn we were proud of
Is waving in hay
Our beautiful garden has
Withered away.
Where we planted roses
The weeds seem to say…
A cottage for sale

Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer, Frank and Eleanor Perry (writer/director), Columbia Pictures, 1968. Screenshot.

Cheever’s story, made into a terrific movie with Burt Lancaster in 1968, is about a man named Neddy Merrill who decides to have an adventure: He’ll travel from his current location – his Friends’ poolside — to his home on the other side of Westchester, but do it by swimming the length of the backyard pools in between, which he calls them “the Lucinda River” after his wife.

As the story progresses, the weather grows cooler, his friends become less welcoming, and Neddy’s strength diminishes. At the end, it’s clear to the reader that Ned and his wife are separated or divorced, and his mind addled. He reaches his house only to find it dark and run-down. “Looking in at the windows, he saw the place was empty.” According to Conley’s lyric:

Through every window
I see your face
But when I reach (the) window
There’s (only) empty space

Seeing our old house through the prism of the song and short story, I began to understand what millions of others have more profoundly – that migration changes your perception. Harriet and I were migrants, though privileged ones to be sure. The rich move while the poor migrate. Moving is every American’s right; migration is something controlled and punished by state. authorities. Think of the extraordinary song by the folk singer and socialist, Sis Cunningham, about displaced families during the Dustbowl and Depression: “How can you keep on movin’ unless you migrate too?” (It was covered decades later by the New Lost City Ramblers and then Ry Cooder.)

Melania Trump and Elon Musk were “illegal migrants” to use the current, crude locution. They obtained American visas, green cards and citizenship it appears, based upon false testimony. But their wealth and power assure they will never be seen as migrants. They simply moved to the U.S. and became great successes, the one by modeling and then marrying a celebrity millionaire who became a presidential billionaire, and the other by a freakish combination of skill, ruthlessness, timing, and government handouts. The millions of people whom they, their family, supporters and staff castigate as “illegals” are obviously “no different from them” as my brother-in-law put it. Immigration can be voluntary or forced. That Americans embrace the former and condemn the latter is a cruelty that disfigures us; it’s a stain on our character that continues to grow.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

We know that Donald Trump is not fit to be sitting in the White House.  He is a dangerously disordered president, and we have observed enough aberrant behavior to fill a psychiatric text book.  We know from his exchanges with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that he has been quick to brandish his “bigger (nuclear) button” that has the unilateral power to kill us all.  And now we know that he is surrounded by a national security team whose members are totally unfit to serve and are willing to lie to an American public and an American Congress that has yet to come to grips with the normalization of Trump’s “no rules” presidency.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has already lied to the press about the nature of the group chat involving war plans, and on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe couldn’t recall any discussions of weaponry or targets, not even generic targets, in their testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.  So don’t expect any accountability as the president and his national security team do their best to vilify an excellent journalist invited to the chat.

We can be thankful that Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic and an outstanding journalist for decades, responded to a call on the messaging app Signal that involved every member of Trump’s national security team, including the vice-president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and leading intelligence and military officials.  We are fortunate that Goldberg, sitting in his car on a Safeway parking lot, took a call that he initially believed to be bogus or simply part of a disinformation campaign.

Goldberg was invited by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who may have intended to invite U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer (JG), who had no more need to be in such a group chat than did the Atlantic’s JG.  Typically, the trade representative would never be part of the Principal’s Committee.  Conversely, Goldberg probably has a better idea of overall U.S. national security than Greer, who is obsessed with tougher export controls and sanctions against China, and little else.

Every government official with a high-level security clearance is inundated with warnings against using personal cell phones in discussing government matters.    Nevertheless, one of the participants in the chat, special envoy Steve Witkoff, was on the call on his cell phone while in Moscow.  Russian intelligence has repeatedly tried to compromise Signal, and Witkoff’s outrageous use of his personal cell phone for any discussion, let alone a discussion of precise military information dealing with the use of force.  The make-up of this particular group suggests that some or all of these members have been using Signal regularly for sensitive discussions.  It is particularly odd that not one individual questioned the presence of a journalist on the chat!

There is no national security information more sensitive that the discussion of war plans, which requires the highest level of operations security.  These discussions must be held in a sensitive and security facility that can be found at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, or throughout the intelligence community.  If an individual cannot be present at such a facility, at the very least he or she must be in a SCIF (a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) to prevent unauthorized physical or electronic access.  The high-level members even travel with their own classified communication systems.

Electronic surveillance and penetration has a long history.  When I was the intelligence advisor to the U.S. delegation at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in 1971-1972, all professional matters were discussed in a SCIF that was flown to Vienna, Austria.  When I was stationed at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1976, I had to keep my office shutters closed because the KGB was targeting embassy windows to gather the signals emanating from the IBM Selectric typewriters that were used in the day.  In my 25 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, I was not permitted to bring a cell phone into the building because of the ease of foreign electronic penetration.

The group of misfits who occupy the highest national security positions that exist in Washington were simply too unwilling on a Saturday morning to travel to a SCIF.  It is highly likely that these Signal chats have been a regular feature of this particular team for the past two months.  We know that Donald Trump has no understanding or appreciation for intelligence security because of the case of the United States of America v. Donald Trump that filed 40 criminal counts related to his removal of sensitive classified materials from the White House to various insecure locations at Mar-A-Lago, including a bathroom, a ballroom, and a utility closet.

In the first months of his first term, Trump revealed a highly sensitive document—obtained from Israeli intelligence—to the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador.  Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State, and led Mossad—Israel’s CIA—to withhold the sharing of sensitive information for a period of time.  A U.S. official stated that Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”  It must be added that some of our best intelligence on foreign terrorism comes from foreign liaison sources, including intelligence sources that can be found in adversarial countries.

Finally, it must be noted that the participating members of the group chat, with the exception of Goldberg, were members of the Principals Committee of the National Security Council, which is the senior interagency forum for consideration and decision making of the most sensitive national security issues.  The NSC was created by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 to advise and assist the president on national security and foreign policy.  The intelligence services in Moscow and Beijing probably cannot believe their new form of access to such decision making.  Unfortunately, nothing will stop Trump from concentrating on his revenge tour and his campaign against the rule of law, not even the mishandling of Washington’s most sensitive intelligence information.

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Author, activist and surrealist Franklin Rosemont speaking at a Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS) conference in Chicago in 2007. Photo: Thomas Good / Next Left Notes. CC BY-SA 4.0

Please give me your attention, I’ll introduce to you
A man that is a credit to “Our Red, White, and Blue;”
His head is made of lumber, and solid as a rock;
He is a common worker and his name is Mr. Block.
And Block he thinks he may
Be President some day.
[And so it came to pass
Block changed his name to Trump
And he wasn’t even asked,
Becoming a complete and total ass.]

Oh, Mr. Block, you were born by mistake,
You take the cake,
You make me ache.
Tie a rock to your block and then jump in the lake,
Kindly to that for Liberty’s sake.

There’s a whole lot of false consciousness running around. How to battle against it?  It’s a matter of public health.  It’s as bad as the measles.  The Wobblies, or members of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) thought that song was essential, and their greatest songster was Joe Hill, and Joe Hill’s best song against false consciousness was Mr. Bloch who also became the main figure in the cartoons of Ernest Riebe.  Mr. Block thinks that doctors and nurses belong to different economic classes.  Same with professors and students; he thinks they’re not in the same boat.  Yet, we’ll all sink or swim together.  Joe Hill was executed in 1915 by the state of Utah (“murdered by the capitalist class,” says the monument in Salt Lake City).  His songs remain a painless vaccination to what ails us.

Why we need song and history just now.  Everyone’s talking about “story” like what story do we tell each other?  History or herstory?  Dig where you stand, the starting point of history from below.   How deep shall we dig?  Here in the Great Lakes, thanks to David Graeber, it’s easy to go back to Kondiaronk.  Or now, to go back to Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009) because he knew we had to dig deep.  He wrote the great biography of Joe Hill.  We need a Joe Hill to write more verses, Mr Block Goes to Palestine, Mr. Block Goes to the Border, &c.  Otherwise, it’s the measles.

Franklin wrote about tons of other things as well, all just as curious, interesting, funny, and needed.  He didn’t like misery at all and, he loved the marvellous.  We have such a book of Franklin Rosemont’s writing, Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture, edited by Abigail Susik and Paul Buhle (Oakland, California:  PM Press, 2025).  It’s totally splendid like a jewellery box of pearls, rubies, saphires, and diamonds.  Some for special occasions, ceremonial, intimate, beautiful, and some world-changing providing a great clearing of the air letting us see clearly or a thaw of the ice a releasing forgotten tales from the campfires or kitchen tables.   It has thirty-five chapters divided in seven parts, namely, Americana and Chicagoana, Comics and Animation, Music and Dance, Labor History, Play and Humor, Ecology, and Reminiscence.  Its playful original prose is infectious.

Abigail Susik writes a fine introduction telling how Franklin along with Paul Buhle “sought fresh possibilities for discovery within everyday life.”  She refers to his “highly idiosyncratic confidence in the persistence of moments of vernacular authenticity.”  C.L.R. James and Herbert Marcuse were their mentors, gurus, accompaniers.

Folkloric, homespun, regional, and lowbrow, his blue collar upbringing, teenage encounters with the Beat generation in San Francisco, prepared him for the possibilities of détournement both de-railing and re-routing.  In the Fifties he read Mad magazine.  After dropping out of high school and hitch-hiking to San Francisco, he returned to study for a time at Roosevelt University in Chicago where he studied with St. Clair Drake.  He joined the Wobs in 1962 taking out his red card, and running over to Michigan to help with the blueberry pickers strike.

This book is essential reading for May Day 2025.  The Haymarket riot of 1886, the subsequent hangings, the round-up of organizers and rebels, led to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward of the following year and later his book Equality.  Rosemont has a wonderful appreciation of both demanding nothing less than a complete transformation of the human condition to full equality.  The story of American socialism influenced Mark Twain, Frank Baum, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Morris, Eugene Debs, and Mme. Blavatsky.  They’re only the beginning of the afterlives of that first May Day of industrial capitalism.

After Haymarket, Franklin explains the terrorist in an essay “A Bomb-Toting, Long-Haired, Wiled-Eyed Fiend: The Image of the Anarchist in Popular Culture.”  When once again this figure, the terrorist, becomes of bogey-man of Mr Block, a lunatic, a communist, dark-skinned villain.  Also a figure of laughter in Buster Keaton, the cartoons, and the comics. Franklin sought out the old timers.  He enjoyed himself.  He lived life and loved well.  He went to Bugs Bunny, Thelonious Monk, André Breton, Paul Garon, and Penelope Rosemont. He was a people’s scholar.

With David Roediger he edited The Haymarket Scrapbook (1986, 2012) which Meridel LeSueur called “a magnificent work of research, memory, and love,” as it is indeed.  As a resource for the annual May Day celebration it should be in easy reach of every student, worker, and immigrant.   In 1983 with his life-long partner and comrade, Penelope, he took over the long-standing Chicago publisher, Charles Kerr.  They continued to synthesize radical political agitation and counter-cultural revolt of the 1960s.

His was the Chicago world of Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel.  His father was a leading typographer and unionist in Chicago, a leader of 1949 newspaper strike, and historian of American labor’s first strike, the Philadelphia typographical strike of 1786.  He named his son, Franklin, after Philadelphia’s most famous printer.  He knew the IWW old-timers, thorough study of IWW documentation.  Thus part of his patrimony included the birth of the republic, and though Franklin would never describe himself in any sense as a republican or as a “citizen” in that bourgeois sense, he drew his authority from the working-class history intrinsic to his surroundings.

He edited a book of the writings and speeches of Isadora Duncan.  He praised Marth Graham.  He wrote another on the Dill Pickle club of Chicago.  His oddest book is surely An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers (2003).  Its “News from Other Nowheres” as he described it referred to that “no place” called from the Greek “utopia.”  Its title points to the central importance that the telephone had in the life of the day.  Instead of an introduction he writes, “’History’ tells us the Black Hawk War ended in 1832.  Why, then, do I see it, hear it, and feel it raging on all sides?”  Why indeed!

Briefly told, the Black Hawk War ended native resistance in the old Northwest.  Black Hawk led the Sauk and Fox indigenous people who had been forced from their homelands back to them in Illinois.  Settlers had to flee to Chicago.  Black Hawk and his allies were defeated at the Battle of Bad Axe.  It is significant for the American history of divide and conquer that fighting for the USA against the native people were both Jefferson Davis, future leader of the confederacy, and Abraham Lincoln, future leader of the Union.  That’s why the Black Hawk War had such a ghostly presence to Franklin Rosemont.

Franklin loved to quote Robin D.G. Kelley, “Now is the time to think like poets, to envision and to make visible a new society, peaceful, cooperative, loving world without poverty and oppression, limited only by our imaginations.”  That’s the problem, namely, how to de-colonize our imaginations?  That’s why writes about Bugs Bunny, the Wobblies, the Blues, and Surrealism.  Painting, song, and music, these have to be the numbers we dial to get an answer from Mr Block.  At first he may say, “wrong number,” but he’ll learn if there are enough of us and we are laughing!  Laughter, that’s the ticket.

“What’s Up, Doc?” asks the ever-friendly Bugs Bunny. He fights the pink-faced pudge named, Elmer Fudd, who plays a greedy gold-digger, greedy for money.  Elmer Fudd’s esemblance to Elon Musk is inescapable if accidental. His main activity is the defense of private property especially his carrot patch. Bugs is a street-wise city kid, a Brooklyn trickster, never at a loss for a flippant remark or legitimate question in an illogical situation.  Bugs Bunny helped form the sardonic attitude of the GIs who went off to fight Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, knowing that they had to watch their backs.  Hence, double V.  Victory over fascists abroad, and racists at home.  Not only did Bugs Bunny out-trick Elmer Fudd in all his capitalist guises, he did so munching a carrot.  This fellow was going to enjoy life even in the midst of disasters.  Rosemont calls him the “veritable symbol of irreducible recalcitrance.”

The brilliant versatility of Mel Blanc’s voice spoke to millions during cartoons on Saturday afternoons at the movies.  The supreme grace of Krazy Kat helped Franklin introduce his “The Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons” which was as thorough, brilliant, and very much as comical as the hard-hitting wobbly songs.  They anticipate photomontage; they’re the beginning of the stickerette.  Some said IWW stood for I Won’t Work, and in truth Franklin thought all would become artists in the new society.

Why music?  It is closest to the heart; straight, no chaser.  Africa, its rhythms, its instruments.  In blues lyrics he finds materialism, eroticism, humor, atheism, passion for freedom, sense of adventure, and alertness to the Marvellous.  Blues is black, blues is popular, blues is song, blues is collective, blues is muscular.  The blues people are alchemists of the word incanting against “the shabby confines of detestable reality.”  He takes the words for this music – blues, jazz, swing, bebop, and reggae – as expressing the full measure of African glory: looking ahead to a non-repressive civilization, harking back to Yoruba trickster tales, to the secret lore of slaves, to the underground railroad or the freedom ship (as Marcus Rediker is teaching us to see), to the loa of Haitian voodoo.

Franklin’s teacher at Roosevelt was St. Clair Drake whose father was from Barbados.  Drake became the friend of Padmore and Nkrumah.  He studied black seamen in Cardiff, Wales, in 1947 and 1948.  It was a coal and steel town like Chicago.  He helped make Franklin cosmopolitan and pan African.  He was a significant mentor, and himself a student radical at Hampton Institute in the 1920s.  Franklin, like Langston Hughes, knows rivers, and the rivers (as we know from Aldo Leopold) flow into the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean from Chicago, via the Great Lakes or the Mississippi.

The Atlantic problem or how the modes of doing things (culture, production, ethnology, reproduction) differs and mixes among the people and creatures of the four continents that form the four corners of that ocean.  Black skin and blue blood, white skin and ocher skin, people the color of the earth:  Africa, Europe, Latin America, Turtle Island:  together they form ‘the Atlantic problem.’  Small wonder that Chicago is one of its centers where solutions are sought.

Abigail Susik introduces the collection with a helpful essay on surrealism with its emergence in Chicago in 1966 with links to Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean.  To find the surreal in nonsurrealist phenomenon, to be able to wander (dérive), to be open to what arrives by chance (disponsibilité).  Drawing on the irrationality of dreams, Franklin propounded the oneiric life.

He learned early to do his own thinking, avoiding the “police-like aspects of literary criticism” and the mature result is original, a marvel, by re-writing it “in service of desire.” He formed his own judgements. Melville makes the cut, thundering “No!” in the land of the dollar.

Franklin loved word-play, puns and palindromes.  The palindrome turns the world of letters forward to back or back to front and the real world upside down or topsy turvy.

Rail at a liar.
Name no one man.
No lemons, no melon.
Rats live on No Evil Star.
Wonders in Italy: Latin is “red’ now.
Deer flee freedom in Oregon?  No, Geronimo, deer feel freed.

If there was one poet who Franklin put up top (well, after Joe Hill of course) that would be T-Bone Slim.  He was a tug-boat captain skilled at tenderly nudging huge ocean liners to their berth.  He does the same with language finding that a shout, a slogan, a koan, or a haiku could nudge continents together.  T-Bone Slim understood the latent content of the age.

“Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack.”  “A stiff without a brother is a ship without a rudder.”  “Half a loaf is better than no loafing at all.”  “Juice is stranger than friction.”  “Civilinsanity.”

Rosemont finds him at the junction between the phonetic cabala and the surrealist image.  T-Bone Slim’s grammar opens up between the lines.  Franklin admires his pamphlets, Power of These Two Hands (1922) or Starving Amidst Too Much (1923).  He was at home on skid row or in the hobo jungle.  Malcontents, dreamers, eccentrics, those ‘touched in the head.’ It is a phrase reminding one of an old attribute of sovereignty, ‘the King’s touch.’  Their disdain for “leaders.”  Their love of nick-names.  Their presence in the harvest drives.

Like Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim was Scandinavian (but Finnish not Swedish) from Ashtabula, Ohio.  His writing radiates slapstick poetic goofiness, vernacular surrealism.  He was a philosopher of the Wobblies, “bringing the sublime and the ridiculous into a compromising proximity.”  “Let us not lose sight of the fact that we are at grips with ‘the noble white man’ that made agony both ingenious and scientific, and relegated life’s possibilities to the select few and life’s ‘garbage’ to the many.”  If his writing seemed scrambled he replied, “so is the capitalist system.  Us great writers must conform with prevailing aggravations.”  “Living in what he termed ‘hoarse and bogey days,’ his confidence in what could be remained boundless: ‘We haven’t seen anything yet.’”

I have thought that experience as a tug-boat captain explains his powerful and gentle way with words.  On second thoughts I think his earliest formation came from his mother, a washerwoman, who took him with her on her rounds, making him used to moving about as well as gaining knowledge of dirty laundry and how folks dress themselves, princes and pauper alike.

In 1966 he went to Paris and met the surrealist, André Breton, hanging out with other surrealists at the café Promenade de Vénus.  “Surrealism” means beyond the real.  “What’s real now once was only imagined,” as Blake said.  “Sur” also means on, as in on top of, or superior to.  “Authentic art goes hand in hand with revolutionary social activity,” the surrealists believed.

He wrote another biography of the French soldier and surrealist Jacques Vaché, Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism (2008).  He loved their doodles, cartoons, drawings, and stickerettes. Their original, demotic thinking, street-wise, owing something to Studs Terkel as well as Nelson Algren.  He had hitch-hiked from Chicago to San Francisco in 1960 homing in on City Lights book store.  One thinks of Franklin at the tail-end of the Beatniks and the beginnings of the radical hippies.

Franklin’s roots were in the press room.  I think of him with Johannes Gutenberg or Marshal McLuhan because their work on print and page understood the medium preceding the digital era.  He liked to draw.  And what a scholar he was!  Really in the tradition of François Villon, independent of institutions of learning, yet foraging among them, wondering and wandering.

He made an exegesis of Karl Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks that brought the Iroquois League quite out of the distant past such that “it glows brightly with the colors of the future.” Once the Iroquois provided help to the settler colonists at the Albany Congress of 1754 in offering their experience with federalism as a way that several may govern as one – federalism.  Now again more than a hundred years later the Iroquois offered a notion of matriarchy, common property, and the long house.

He did this in the midst of the settlement of Marx into American academia.  Not as political economy but as revolutionary imagination.  He was helped by Raya Dunayevskaya and Thelonius Monk.  Originally published in an occasional journal he edited called Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion.  He generously welcomed E.P. Thompson’s huge screed, Poverty of Theory, to this task of recovering the life-long humanism of Karl Marx.

He was a man of the Movement.  Adept at the cut-and-thrust of sectarian in-fighting he avoided the unfeeling but shiny scars that could result.  He learned some of his Marxism from long-time Fred Thompson who in the midst of sectarian bickering would sing out the classic, “Oh, Karl Marx’s whiskers were eighteen inches long,” which could pretty much calm things down.  Rosemont found that “strange birds continue to build their nests in Karl Marx’s beard” and we could easily, in this same spirit, imagine the birds braiding the whiskers into dreads!

He could be as direct as a nail to the noggin of Mr. Block.  Is there a question about what he stood for?  Here is his credo as concise and comprehensive a definition of woke as you could possibly find outside your sleeping bag.  Faites attention, Mr. Block.

“In poetry as in life I am for freedom and against slavery:  for the Indians against the European invaders and the American explorers; for the black insurrections against the white-power structure; for guerrillas against colonial administrators and imperialist armies; for youth against cops, curfews, school, and conscription; for wildcat strikers against bosses and union bureaucrats; for poetry against literature, philosophy, and religion; for mad love against civilized repression and bourgeois marriage; and for the surrealist revolution against complacency, hypocrisy, cowardice, stupidity, exploitation, and oppression.”

With that we join Franklin Rosemont in saying, “Goodbye, Mr. Block,” and hello to May Day Earth Day combined.

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Insults, slurs, nasty comments and contempt for Social Security sprout up everywhere these days in Washington. Although Trump himself insists he will protect the program, his underlings sure hate it, and by extension, the nearly 70 million elders who rely on it; and “rely” is an understatement – for many it’s their sole lifeline. These people voted for Trump in their multitudes. But now they hear from his advisor Elon Musk that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme,” or from billionaire financial services ceo turned commerce secretary Howard Lutnick that only “fraudsters” cash their social security checks. It’s hard not to conclude that these haughty plutocrats want to snatch grandma’s money and leave her destitute.

Of course, this has long been official GOP policy. Just look at what the Republicans want to do to Medicaid. The House passed a bill in January to gut it, even dispensing with the prolonged, mendacious and de rigeur campaign to tar it with fraud. That’s the big lie about Social Security – that it’s riddled with fraud and therefore must be not just trimmed but slashed. I suppose Medicaid, like food stamps, so offends multimillionaire GOP House members that they figured they could dispense with the propaganda campaign and just ravage it.

Besides, all Medicaid recipients are poor, thus easily bullied by the mega-rich. And with its Medicaid bill, the Republican House revealed that it’s full of bullies, who’d like nothing better than to ditch Medicaire, Medicaid, Social Security and of course food stamps, so that the indigent can skip doctor’s visits, ration their chemo and their insulin, eat fewer, smaller meals and sleep under the stars. ‘Cause that’s where all this is heading – dispossessing tens of millions of people and shoving them into the ranks of the homeless.

Add the 70 million Americans on Social Security to the 90 million on Medicaid and you’re looking at 160 million people rendered destitute by snobs like Musk, Lutnick and GOP House leader Mike Johnson. These honchos of the Trump Sanhedrin apparently hate anyone who’s not rich. Lutnick best exemplified this vile disdain in a recent TV interview, where he proclaimed that his 94-year-old mother-in-law wouldn’t mind if she didn’t receive her Social Security check and only loud-mouthed “fraudsters” would grip about that.

Well, I don’t know how wealthy Lutnick’s mother-in-law is, but I’d bet she has a lot more cash on hand than your average Social Security recipient, so it sure would be nice if these Beltway plutocrats would stop bashing Social Security. Trump could snap a leash on them if he wanted, but he hasn’t. Meanwhile lots of us are so grateful he ended the threat of nuclear annihilation via a U.S./Russia blow-up that frankly, that’s rather distracting. Nevertheless, this ferocious combat against the poor’s skimpy sources of sustenance is hard to ignore. Yes, we’re happy we won’t be incinerated in Biden’s insane attack on Russia and we hope there will be no World War III sparked by a U.S. assault on Iran, which could quickly turn radioactive and would bust the global economy. Also on the wish list is a halt to the Gaza carnage, something Trump did once with his ceasefire/hostage deal and could easily do again, if he wants.

But now that the Atomic Apocalypse is off our bingo card and we are permitted to survive, for lots of proles the next question is, how? If aristocrats like Musk and Lutnick keep trashing ordinary peoples’ means of subsistence, are they paving the road to a hell of illness, hunger and destitution for 160 million Americans? That’s not much of a platform for the GOP to run on in two years.

Some weeks back, Musk pronounced Social Security a Ponzi scheme. This is false. It is not investment fraud. It is a government-run insurance annuity; the citizens make a series of payments in return for a stream of income later in life. Insurance annuities are used for retirement planning all the time, and if Musk regards that as fraud, then he not merely slanders Social Security but an entire financial industry. Does he regard a pension as fraud? Because that’s another comparison that Social Security brings to mind. Possibly he considers anything other than a retirement 401k in the stock market as some sort of cheat – a scam against Wall Street, which has lustfully eyed Social Security income since it was first christened by FDR.

As billionaires wage savage class war against the rest of us, where are the Dems? Largely mute, licking their self-inflicted wounds from the Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden fiasco. In fact, any party that could foist a monumental deceit like that presidency on the American people deserves to be demolished, then rebuilt, from the ground up, with new people. But there’s no evidence of such efforts anywhere; the feckless Democrats, after nearly bumbling the world into nuclear Armageddon, under the “leadership” of a ruler who probably would have been happier in an old folks’ home, which they assiduously concealed, those Dems can’t seem to muster the will to rally for the great social programs they invented. Why? Because snotty social climbers who advocated – Biden is Exhibit A – dismantling those programs long ago captured the party. Maybe just skip the Democrats altogether. Time for a new People’s Party.

In a country where, as of 2023, 36.8 million people live in poverty, where 56 percent of Americans cannot afford a $1000 emergency, where 22 percent of tenants spend ALL their income on rent and where even the phony, manipulated, government labor statistics – which don’t count as unemployed the hordes of people who gave up looking for work years ago – reveal that officially almost 7 million people lack employment while nearly 9 million work multiple jobs, in such a country, you would think that politicians with their eyes on the history books would be falling all over themselves to boost social welfare programs. But no. What was once called economic freedom, namely freedom from want, is today merely the freedom to starve and sleep under an overpass.

The infamous truth is that the U.S. is a nation of very few fabulously rich oligarchs who hog all the resources and hundreds of millions of ordinary people struggling to get by. Stealing their skimpy subsistence – and we PAY for our Social Security, it’s not a gift – is not only a way to lose votes, it will earn its promoters the condemnation of history. Trump evidently knows this. But his advisors? That’s another story.

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President Donald Trump promised to unleash mass deportations on immigrants during his presidential campaign. But he has gone much further, with the disappearing of hundreds of Venezuelan nationals from the United States to El Salvador’s notorious gulag. It’s a warning shot—one that has serious consequences for all of us, immigrant or not.

The method and speed of his actions are breathtaking. Over several years, there has been an exodus of millions of Venezuelans from the left wing regime of Hugo Chávez, now overseen by President Nicolás Maduro. The U.S. Congress granted them Temporary Protected Status (TPS), enabling nearly 350,000 Venezuelans to legally reside in the United States.

That designation remained on the government’s books until the beginning of 2025. But, within weeks of Trump’s second-term inauguration in January 2025, he rescinded TPS for Venezuelans, invoked a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act, and immediately dumped three planeloads of Venezuelan mento El Salvador’s prisons for allegedly being gang members.

When an emergency ACLU-led court hearing resulted in U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordering an immediate halt to the deportations, including a demand that the flights be turned around midair, the Trump White House defied the order and pressed ahead. Their justification was that the planes were outside U.S. airspace and, therefore, the order didn’t apply.

This action, only one in an overwhelming series of violent political earthquakes unleashed by the Trump regime, is an intentional test of myriad institutional norms and laws.

First, Trump is making clear that this is no longer about deporting undocumented immigrants and that anyone can be disappeared at any time. His government is going after U.S. citizens of color. It is targeting academicsof color who are working or studying in the country with valid papers, particularly those who are Muslim or seeking justice for Palestine, such as Mahmoud Khalil and Bader Khan Suri. He is also targeting white Europeans and Canadian tourists, artists, and others. The situation is so dire that Germany and the UK have issued travel advisories against the United States.

Second, Trump is using disinformation so willfully and skillfully that he has news media fumbling on fact-checking him, as they take him at face value. He has asserted “pro-Hamas aliens” have infiltrated college campuses—relying on the bipartisan conflation of anti-Israel criticism with antisemitism—and is ominously taking his lead from a Zionist organization that sent him a list of thousands of potential deportees. Indeed, if Nazis—the worst antisemites—are to be found anywhere, it is among Trump supporters.

He has claimed the U.S. is being invaded by a dangerous and violent Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua—it is not. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt outrageously libeled the Venezuelan men who were sent to El Salvador as “rapists, murderers, and gangsters.” But there is no evidence of this, and even if there was, there are due process laws in place to deal with these allegations. Instead, innocent people have been indefinitely disappeared into a prison system known for torture and cruelty—what some have justifiably termed a “concentration camp.”

To add to the confusion about his actions, Trump claimed he didn’t sign the Alien Enemies Act—and why would he sign a 1798 law? But he did invoke it, in writing, on the White House website. This sort of confusion is designed to suck up media resources. For example, the Washington Post printed an entire story about it, wondering, “Did Trump misspeak? Is he trying to deflect responsibility for a decision?”

Trump did the same thing during his first term and many journalists tied themselves into knots attempting to cover his deception. “President Donald Trump lies, but not everything he says is a lie,” said CNN’s Brian Stelter in 2018. That’s like saying, “this man is a rapist but does not rape every woman he encounters.” The obfuscation is the point.

And third, Trump is testing the ability of the courts to stop him from breaking the law. Defying Judge Boasberg’s order to stop the disappearances of Venezuelans into El Salvador’s prisons, Trump violently railed against Boasberg as a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator,” and demanded he be impeached in a social media post. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr issued a rare rebuke denouncing such threats, but it was Roberts’s court that ruled Trump was legally immune from prosecutionfor actions conducted during his presidential terms. As it stands now, the president faces no consequences for defying judicial orders. He has also threatened to sanction law firms for accepting cases challenging his policies.

There is no more apt time to remind us of the poem, “First They Came,” by Martin Niemöller. Today the administration is going after Venezuelans and Palestinians—tomorrow it can be any one of us.

Those Trump supporters who cheered on the president, thinking themselves and their loved ones safe from his hate, now face the deportations of spouses and neighbors.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement even mistakenly detained a pro-Trump naturalized U.S. citizen who voted for the racist president and who then expressed shock that he wasn’t safe from Trump’s white supremacist dragnet.

Progressives warned for years that Trump’s presidency is based on maintaining white power and racial capitalism at all costs in a demographically changing nation. Critics also cautioned Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden against equating anti-Israel rhetoric with antisemitism and against leaning into anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. They advised mainstream corporate media outlets against accepting and disseminating anti-immigrant narratives and social media platforms against spreading racist lies about immigrants.

Had liberal leaders and media outlets unabashedly embraced a multiracial democracy, there would have been a clear delineation between Trump’s Republican Party and the opposition.

Instead, by accepting the dehumanization of Palestinians, Muslims, Latin Americans, South Asians, and Arabs—as though there is a hard line between the humanity of immigrants and citizens—Americans opened the door to undermining all our rights. There is no limit he won’t cross unless forcefully stopped.

One pro-Trump conservative whose organization boasts about successfully pushing for an extremist Supreme Court majority warned, “What’s going to be on the horizon are denaturalization cases,” which means Trump is likely to begin stripping naturalized citizens (like me) of their citizenship. He’s also pursuing an end to birthright citizenship.

The danger of our current political moment is the inevitable outcome of accepting and internalizing dehumanizing narratives about people we deem “others.” Tolerating anti-immigrant cruelty opens the door to all of us being victims of such savagery. No one is immune.

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

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This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity. Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.

The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.

Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is mass starvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets. Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.

Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.

Since Tuesday, when Israel broke the ceasefire with heavy bombing, over 700 Palestinians have been killed, including 200 children. In one 24 hour period 400 Palestinians were killed. This is only the start. No Western power, including the United States, which provides the weapons for the genocide, intends to stop it. The images from Gaza during the nearly sixteen months of incessant attacks were awful. But what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the twentieth century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and leveling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis.

Oct. 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. What we are witnessing is the historical equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were slated to be killed with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later named reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers and fell into a life of immiseration and despair. Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I suspect, in one of the world’s hellholes and forgotten.

“Gaza residents, this is your final warning,” Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz threatened:

The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza and the second Sinwar will completely destroy it. The Air Force strikes against Hamas terrorists were just the first step. It will become much more difficult and you will pay the full price. The evacuation of the population from the combat zones will soon begin again…Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to. The alternative is absolute destruction.

The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was designed to be implemented in three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, would see an end to hostilities. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023 — including women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for upwards of 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children imprisoned by Israel (around 1,900 Palestinian captives have been released by Israel as of March 18). Hamas has released a total of 147 hostages, of whom eight were dead. Israel says there are 59 Israelis still being held by Hamas, 35 of whom Israel believes are deceased.

The Israeli army would pull back from populated areas of Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel would allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.

The second phase, which was expected to be negotiated on the sixteenth day of the ceasefire, would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt. It would surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

The third phase would see negotiations for a permanent end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.

Israel habitually signs agreements, including the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Agreement, with timetables and phases. It gets what it wants — in this case the release of the hostages — in the first phase and then violates subsequent phases. This pattern has never been broken.

Israel refused to honor the second phase of the deal. It blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza two weeks ago, violating the agreement. It also killed at least 137 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire, including nine people, — three of them journalists — when Israeli drones attacked a relief team on March 15 in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza

Israel’s heavy bombing and shelling of Gaza resumed March 18 while most Palestinians were asleep or preparing their suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan. Israel will not stop its attacks now, even if the remaining hostages are freed — Israel’s supposed reason for the resumption of the bombing and siege of Gaza.

The Trump White House is cheering on the slaughter. They attack critics of the genocide as “antisemites” who should be silenced, criminalized or deported while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel.

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the inevitable denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal.

Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued.

That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved. It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilization. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.

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As the world’s top billionaire rummages through the inner workings of its mightiest state, the influence of America’s oligarchs is hard to miss these days. Never before in modern U.S. history has a private citizen wielded as much political clout as Elon Musk.

It is exactly what President Joseph R. Biden warned about in his farewell address, when he proclaimed that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America.”

As if to prove the point, Musk proceeded to launch an unprecedented—and shockingly corrupt—bid to infiltrate the federal government. In short order, he dispatched a bevy of post-pubescent fanboys, newly emerged from their parents’ basements, into the government’s most sensitive computer systems, doing god-knows-what with their access.

The moves have prompted considerable alarm among the commentariat. “Elon Musk is President,” ran a headline in The Atlantic. “The top 1% are no longer just influencing policy from behind the scenes,” Ali Velshi of MSNBC declared, “they are seizing control of the levers of power.” A recent TIME cover depicts Musk sitting behind Trump’s desk in the Oval Office.

According to the emerging consensus, Trump is president in name only, little more than a puppet in the hands of the reactionary tech entrepreneur.

The reality is far different. Musk and his fellow plutocrats are not omnipotent. They are exceptionally vulnerable, in fact.

Having spent the past two decades studying oligarchs in Eastern Europe, I can affirm that we are witnessing something momentous. Only it is not oligarchization; it is authoritarianism.

As political scientist Jeffrey Winters explains, oligarchy can exist under any political regime, whether democratic or authoritarian. The U.S., for its part, is already an oligarchy and has been for more than a century. America’s richest moguls have long defended their vastly disproportionate wealth by exerting undue influence over tax policy and economic regulation. Nothing about that will change with Trump in office.

A New Order

But this hardly means business as usual—either for the oligarchs or the rest of us. The coming move toward authoritarianism will affect everyone, including the super-rich. Yet, far from enjoying a new heyday, they might not like what the emerging regime has in store.

Trump has already gone a long way toward dismantling the checks on his power. The only question is how far he will be able to go. The Putin model of full authoritarianism is almost certainly not attainable. Trump’s megalomaniacal fantasies will stumble upon myriad constraints, including federalism, a vibrant civil society, and his own incompetence, that will block him from forcing all opposition activity underground.

More likely is what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way refer to as “competitive authoritarianism.” Under this arrangement, civil liberties are curbed while the electoral process is rigged to the advantage of incumbents. But the opposition can still take part in elections and threaten the ruling party’s hold on power.

Trump’s first imperative in this regard is the same one faced by any aspiring autocrat: to “capture the referees,” as Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it. This involves placing loyalists in charge of the key state agencies empowered to launch investigations and sanction rule violators. Trump has wasted little time getting to work on this task, appointing MAGA diehards to the Department of Justice, the Treasury, and other agencies. Unfortunately, when it comes to seizing the reins of federal power, there is little that stands in his way.

Once his lickspittles have taken charge, Trump can unleash the full force of the U.S. government against anyone he wants. As a result, actions that were once unfathomable will become very real. Few abuses of executive power will be off limits, from deploying the military against protesters to deporting masses of people without due process. Equally plausible are lawless and arbitrary investigations of his opponents. Among the likely targets are local officials who refuse to “find the votes,” district attorneys who decline to criminalize homelessness, business owners guilty of hiring Black people, and, of course, wealthy plutocrats who draw his ire.

Law, That Curious Relic

America’s oligarchs built their wealth at a time when constitutional rights and legal protections were taken for granted. Their property rights were protected by a system of courts whose decisions everyone, from ordinary citizens to the most powerful officeholders, regarded as sacrosanct.

This edifice was remarkably fragile, however, dependent on norms whose power derived from the collective expectation that they would be followed. If government officials refrained from violating property rights, it was because they presumed the courts would enforce them in rulings everybody expected everyone else to respect.

But if the president decides to ignore these norms, the law loses the very basis of its authority. In the event that Trump defies a Supreme Court ruling, who will force him to comply? His Justice Department sycophants?

The implications for the oligarchs cannot be overstated. Those who remain in Trump’s good graces stand to profit immensely. But those who cross him can lose everything.

The days when their tax burdens were their overriding concern will soon appear quaint. Instead, the oligarchs will be preoccupied with threats to their ownership rights and even the specter of unlawful detention. Scenarios once confined to developing countries, such as targeted intimidation by federal agencies, prosecutions on false charges, and other forms of administrative harassment, will become facts of life in the U.S.

The ultra-rich are used to lobbying for lower taxes. They are rather less accustomed to F.B.I. raids and asset seizures designed to strong-arm them into selling their assets and fleeing abroad. Yet, this is exactly what could befall an oligarch who runs afoul of Trump. The legality of such moves is beside the point; the feds can do more than enough damage before any countervailing orders come down from the courts which, in any case, can be ignored.

Musk’s sway, while extraordinary, is also fleeting. Snatching it away is as easy as slamming the Wendy’s Baconator button on the Resolute Desk.

It is only a matter of time before these two imbecilic, impulsive narcissists come to blows. When that happens, Musk will receive a harsh lesson in the reality of competitive authoritarianism. His immense wealth matters little when up against the guy who can wield the Justice Department as his personal bludgeon. In all likelihood, he will become the subject of multiple criminal probes and be chased out of the country. It is a lesson that will not be lost on his fellow moguls.

History is replete with examples of business tycoons coming to rue their past support for autocrats. Trump’s reign should prove no different. He is the one in charge, not the oligarchs. That is bad news for them—as well as for us.

This hardly means all is lost, however. As I explained in a previous post, the obstacles to authoritarianism in the U.S. are far greater than those faced by other countries that experienced democratic breakdown. America’s civil society, in particular, is unmatched in terms of its resources and depth. If and when it mobilizes effectively, Trump is finished.

But make no mistake; however dangerous Musk’s shenanigans are, Trump is the problem. It is toward him that we must direct our focus and efforts.

This piece first appeared on The Detox.

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Image by Mariia Shalabaieva..

As the world’s top billionaire rummages through the inner workings of its mightiest state, the influence of America’s oligarchs is hard to miss these days. Never before in modern U.S. history has a private citizen wielded as much political clout as Elon Musk.

It is exactly what President Joseph R. Biden warned about in his farewell address, when he proclaimed that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America.”

As if to prove the point, Musk proceeded to launch an unprecedented—and shockingly corrupt—bid to infiltrate the federal government. In short order, he dispatched a bevy of post-pubescent fanboys, newly emerged from their parents’ basements, into the government’s most sensitive computer systems, doing god-knows-what with their access.

The moves have prompted considerable alarm among the commentariat. “Elon Musk is President,” ran a headline in The Atlantic. “The top 1% are no longer just influencing policy from behind the scenes,” Ali Velshi of MSNBC declared, “they are seizing control of the levers of power.” A recent TIME cover depicts Musk sitting behind Trump’s desk in the Oval Office.

According to the emerging consensus, Trump is president in name only, little more than a puppet in the hands of the reactionary tech entrepreneur.

The reality is far different. Musk and his fellow plutocrats are not omnipotent. They are exceptionally vulnerable, in fact.

Having spent the past two decades studying oligarchs in Eastern Europe, I can affirm that we are witnessing something momentous. Only it is not oligarchization; it is authoritarianism.

As political scientist Jeffrey Winters explains, oligarchy can exist under any political regime, whether democratic or authoritarian. The U.S., for its part, is already an oligarchy and has been for more than a century. America’s richest moguls have long defended their vastly disproportionate wealth by exerting undue influence over tax policy and economic regulation. Nothing about that will change with Trump in office.

A New Order

But this hardly means business as usual—either for the oligarchs or the rest of us. The coming move toward authoritarianism will affect everyone, including the super-rich. Yet, far from enjoying a new heyday, they might not like what the emerging regime has in store.

Trump has already gone a long way toward dismantling the checks on his power. The only question is how far he will be able to go. The Putin model of full authoritarianism is almost certainly not attainable. Trump’s megalomaniacal fantasies will stumble upon myriad constraints, including federalism, a vibrant civil society, and his own incompetence, that will block him from forcing all opposition activity underground.

More likely is what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way refer to as “competitive authoritarianism.” Under this arrangement, civil liberties are curbed while the electoral process is rigged to the advantage of incumbents. But the opposition can still take part in elections and threaten the ruling party’s hold on power.

Trump’s first imperative in this regard is the same one faced by any aspiring autocrat: to “capture the referees,” as Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it. This involves placing loyalists in charge of the key state agencies empowered to launch investigations and sanction rule violators. Trump has wasted little time getting to work on this task, appointing MAGA diehards to the Department of Justice, the Treasury, and other agencies. Unfortunately, when it comes to seizing the reins of federal power, there is little that stands in his way.

Once his lickspittles have taken charge, Trump can unleash the full force of the U.S. government against anyone he wants. As a result, actions that were once unfathomable will become very real. Few abuses of executive power will be off limits, from deploying the military against protesters to deporting masses of people without due process. Equally plausible are lawless and arbitrary investigations of his opponents. Among the likely targets are local officials who refuse to “find the votes,” district attorneys who decline to criminalize homelessness, business owners guilty of hiring Black people, and, of course, wealthy plutocrats who draw his ire.

Law, That Curious Relic

America’s oligarchs built their wealth at a time when constitutional rights and legal protections were taken for granted. Their property rights were protected by a system of courts whose decisions everyone, from ordinary citizens to the most powerful officeholders, regarded as sacrosanct.

This edifice was remarkably fragile, however, dependent on norms whose power derived from the collective expectation that they would be followed. If government officials refrained from violating property rights, it was because they presumed the courts would enforce them in rulings everybody expected everyone else to respect.

But if the president decides to ignore these norms, the law loses the very basis of its authority. In the event that Trump defies a Supreme Court ruling, who will force him to comply? His Justice Department sycophants?

The implications for the oligarchs cannot be overstated. Those who remain in Trump’s good graces stand to profit immensely. But those who cross him can lose everything.

The days when their tax burdens were their overriding concern will soon appear quaint. Instead, the oligarchs will be preoccupied with threats to their ownership rights and even the specter of unlawful detention. Scenarios once confined to developing countries, such as targeted intimidation by federal agencies, prosecutions on false charges, and other forms of administrative harassment, will become facts of life in the U.S.

The ultra-rich are used to lobbying for lower taxes. They are rather less accustomed to F.B.I. raids and asset seizures designed to strong-arm them into selling their assets and fleeing abroad. Yet, this is exactly what could befall an oligarch who runs afoul of Trump. The legality of such moves is beside the point; the feds can do more than enough damage before any countervailing orders come down from the courts which, in any case, can be ignored.

Musk’s sway, while extraordinary, is also fleeting. Snatching it away is as easy as slamming the Wendy’s Baconator button on the Resolute Desk.

It is only a matter of time before these two imbecilic, impulsive narcissists come to blows. When that happens, Musk will receive a harsh lesson in the reality of competitive authoritarianism. His immense wealth matters little when up against the guy who can wield the Justice Department as his personal bludgeon. In all likelihood, he will become the subject of multiple criminal probes and be chased out of the country. It is a lesson that will not be lost on his fellow moguls.

History is replete with examples of business tycoons coming to rue their past support for autocrats. Trump’s reign should prove no different. He is the one in charge, not the oligarchs. That is bad news for them—as well as for us.

This hardly means all is lost, however. As I explained in a previous post, the obstacles to authoritarianism in the U.S. are far greater than those faced by other countries that experienced democratic breakdown. America’s civil society, in particular, is unmatched in terms of its resources and depth. If and when it mobilizes effectively, Trump is finished.

But make no mistake; however dangerous Musk’s shenanigans are, Trump is the problem. It is toward him that we must direct our focus and efforts.

This piece first appeared on The Detox.

The post Elon Musk Is Not the Problem appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

We, the veterans of the resistance movements and combat forces of Free France, we call on the young generation to live by, to transmit, the legacy of the Resistance and its ideals. We say to them: Take our place, “Indignez-vous!” [Get angry! or Cry out!].

– Stéphane Hessel

Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

– Howard Zinn

Jeffrey St Clair reminded me that St Paul hated clamour. For him, submission was the great virtue. In Ephesians 4: 31-32 he lumped clamour together with bitterness, wrath, anger, evil speaking, and all malice, as if he were trying to hide outcry, drown out the noise, smother it with all the things we need to clamour against. He was sending out his message in Koine Greek, in an age when clamour was powerful because public speaking and vocal expression were the main forms of social communication. Clamour, in Greek (κραυγή), was a spontaneous outburst or deliberate call for attention. St Paul was no fan of things spontaneous, including sex. As Australian historian Peter Cochrane wrote (personal communication), St Paul also “advanced the abysmal idea that our bodies were ‘vile’ and that sex was an impediment to salvation”. Sex is a clamorous need and, in some languages, “clamour” contains “amour”. This is, of course, anecdotal, but the connections are suggestive because if human bodies are “vile”, he’s not granting them dignity.

After three recent public lectures on human rights, genocide, and politics in general (with quite a lot of young people in the audience on each occasion), I was approached by several under-25s, who didn’t know each other, all wanting to talk more about human rights and what to do. Some came to visit afterwards and it was striking to see how they were all concerned about the same issues, how they expressed disgust at being forced to live in a world where civilisation’s genocides are a routine thing. These intelligent young people feel “tired”, “burnt-out”, “empty” because of the indifference all around them. They’re expressing what Durkheim called anomie (from the Greek anomos “without law, lawless”). This is a situation where expectations flounder, where the social system is broken and lawless, where young people feel worthless, weak, and in deep despair, with a cruel sense of unbelonging because there’s no community. When laws, conventions, promises, and ethics are trashed, there can be no society because there are no shared interests, no empathetic community to embrace those who feel alone.

The upshot of these encounters with young adults is an attempt to form a group where they can be heard and can clamour against the system that’s so impairing their lives as decent, caring people. The group’s still small but it’s early days yet. Ages range from 17 to 92. We held a first meeting with a couple of 50-ish specialists in housing and universal basic income, which are two of the main issues that arose. We older people, are there for support and not to give lessons, and others are willing to consult from various fields if needed. So far, there’s a possibility of a space to meet in one of Barcelona’s cultural institutions. If this doesn’t come off, Clamour could take to the city squares (just as the Indignez-Vous! movement did nearly 15 years ago), and a first public talk by the young people is being programmed for May. Some of them are good writers. They just need places to be published, to shout, to get their indignation heard.

The name Clamour echoes the outrage of Stéphane Hessel whose famous short essay Indignez-Vous! (Time for Outrage!), written when he was 93, inspired the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and the Indignados movement in Spain. Many years earlier, Hessel was involved in writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and he understood very well that, for all its flaws, its suggestion of universal human rights is one of the most radical political ideas ever. It seems that the British and American signatories recognised this too as they wanted to replace “universal” with the non-committal term “international” (and we know how many peoples are excluded by the term “international” today) rights. It was only thanks to Rene Cassin, national commissioner of justice and education in the government of Free France in London in 1941, that the “Universal” Declaration was adopted in the UN on 10 December 1948 by 48 out of 58 member states. The positioning of the adjective is revealing. It qualifies not human rights but the Declaration itself. In a globalised age, anybody can make a “universal” declaration in the hope of reaching everybody. If the word “universal” referred to rights, it would necessarily mean liberty equality, and fraternity for everybody. In a just world, the qualifier “universal” would be redundant because “human” is a universal category. As long as rights aren’t universal, “rights” can only be the privileges of some. And the circle of those some is shrinking fast as wealth is ever more concentrated. To give one obscene example, Elon Musk’s fortune greatly exceeds the GDP of his home country, South Africa (population 64.5+ million).

Seventy-seven years on, we need to clamour for universal human rights in the awareness that, in this age of ecocide, the basic human right to physical existence depends on the right to exist of all life forms in the human habitats on this planet. Perhaps we need a new name, something like a Declaration of Universal Rights on Earth. Ecocide, defined by the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”, is surely something to clamour against because, if the UDHR is the only transversal rights narrative we have, the other side of the coin, ecocide, is the transversal crime that will affect everybody. The billionaires may feel safe in their bunkers with biotech replacing their organs and computers swaddling their minds forever-and-ever-amen, but they’ll be living in a sad world without elephants. It’s up to the rest of us to clamour for the lives of elephants, bees, and the little nesting turtledove that visits my balcony plants every day because all our fates as living creatures are interconnected. But what should we clamour against and for, and how?

The idea of the Barcelona Clamour group is to clamour for the human rights that were promised in the UDHR; for a universal basic income to guarantee the right to material existence for everyone, the basic condition for all the other rights; and to clamour against ecocide, an even worse crime than genocide, which is supposedly “the crime of all crimes”; clamour against billionaires and oligarchs whose antihuman, antilife political-economic systems are the basic cause of all the grief; and against abuses of AI, biotech, and fake news, today’s ideologies and mechanisms of repression. This very general framework is just an attempt to keep in mind the interrelationships in these five areas of concern. The connection between a specific issue like housing doesn’t exist in a vacuum but is connected with wider issues and the basic questions that should always be asked: what?, when?, where?, how?, why?, who?, whom?, and how much? In Spain the average age of emancipation is 30.3 years. Young men and women aren’t allowed to be adults. According to a recent survey, 35+% of young Catalan men and 27% of young women would accept a dictatorship. One respondent expressed the relationship between real-estate violence and antisocial political detachment, or the alienation of anomie, when he replied, “Why would I want democracy if I can’t pay my rent?”

A glance at Gil Duran’s summary of MAGA/Tech authoritarian ideology also illustrates overlaps. The tech allies of government leaders like Trump detest democracy. “They are actively trying to build these weird little dictator cities all over the world…” They want control over governments. They believe in imminent social collapse and are part of the cause of social collapse. They’re mostly rich, white, anti-public males. Governments and elected leaders lie, blatantly and on a tremendous scale, for and with these outrageously rich techno-oligarchs. This means that there is no social contract at government level. So, the only real social contracts can be made in grassroots organisations, large and small. Like Clamour. But clamour is needed everywhere and urgently if we don’t want to live in an anomic world built on lies, where genocide and ecocide are routine (and will therefore get worse).

The signatories to the UDHR promised to respect “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. In Article 25.1 they aver that, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family”. They didn’t offer mechanisms for achieving this but the obvious good start would be a universal basic income, as a human right, which is how it’s defined in Article 1.3 of the Universal Declaration of Emerging Human Rights, Monterrey 2007.

The right to basic income, which assures all individuals, independently of their age, sex, sexual orientation, civil status or employment status, the right to live under worthy material conditions. To such end, the right to an unconditional, regular, monetary income paid by the state and financed by fiscal reforms, is recognised as a right of citizenship, to each resident member of society, independently of their other sources of income, and being adequate to allow them to cover their basic needs.

If this basic right isn’t met, none of the other promises of rights can be honoured.

If, as the Preamble declares, “freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people”, how can the common people enjoy these freedoms if they’re being murdered, starved, and displaced? If “it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law”, how can there be rule of law in political systems based on lies?

Article 1, the one about fraternity, has the beautiful sentiments that, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” It was patently true, even back then in 1948, that human beings aren’t born free and equal, and neither was there any spirit of brotherhood in those Cold War years. The language is masculine and the premise is false. But the baby shouldn’t be thrown out with the bathwater. This was more than hot air. It was a promise, a formally made promise of a friendlier, more sustainable world, a matter of “reason and conscience”. If “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”, then they should be “free and equal in dignity and rights” throughout their lives, every single day.

The broken promise of Article 2—“no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty”—has led, on migrant routes to Spain alone, to the deaths of 10,457 in 2024 alone. One could almost talk about “genocide of the vulnerable”. Data from May 2024 show that over 120 million people have been uprooted from their homes and land due to persecution, violence, war, or human rights abuse. No distinction shall be made. Really? Any Afghan refugee, for example, would beg to differ. And would add that the promise of Article 3, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person”, is also broken, though it could so easily be honoured in great part by introducing a universal basic income (paid for by taxing the rich).

Article 4 proclaims that, “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude”. Yet, about 50 million people are currently living in modern slavery. Evidently, in any decent world, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”, but it’s happening all the time, especially to immigrants, refugees, Indigenous peoples, and the most vulnerable groups everywhere. Refugees have this dreadful status forced on them when their homes, their lands, their livelihoods have been snatched from them and destroyed, even though Article 17.2 assures that, “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”.

Related with this is the fact that when people seek asylum they’ve already been gravely illtreated before the asylum seeker abuse begins, so Article 14.1, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” breaks two promises: about the right to seek asylum and the right to enjoy asylum (from Latin, “place of refuge, sanctuary”, and Greek (asylos) “inviolable, safe from violence”). Broken promises destroy people and destroy social life because they destroy the meaning of words.

In any society based on a social contract, it’s evident that everyone should have “the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”, as Article 6, spells out, while Article 7 rules that, “All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination”. Article 8 enshrines, “the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law”. Article 28 famously refers to the international system: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized”. But if governments are routinely violating their own and international laws, and when national tribunals aren’t “competent” because they’re corrupt, when governments commit or help others to commit genocide, then no person can feel that he or she has the protection of and right to recognition before the law. Governments must be held to account in accordance with their own laws and the covenants they signed. While they don’t honour these promises, there can be no world “order”. We need to clamour for an international system that makes this planet a safer, more friendly place for every single one of its living inhabitants.

Now, when forest guardians and Indigenous peoples are trying to defend their land, sea, rivers, prairies, steppes, mountains, lakes and many other natural formations and, in doing so, are fighting ecocide that is affecting the entire planet and all human beings, and when protesters are being illtreated, arrested, and killed, arbitrarily and everywhere, we’re told by Article 9 that, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”. “Exile” for many people who live in harmony with their habitat, their cosmos, means death. Reading that promise and knowing the reality, which has been pushed to the extreme of genocide (as in West Papua) and general indifference to it, is enough to make one weep. But clamouring is more effective than weeping.

Now that the Silicon Valley techs and billionaires are wielding power everywhere, openly and secretly, with wholesale online attacks like those from the “virtual militia” of the Bolsonaro government’s “hate cabinet”, and countless other manifestations we can’t even know about, the pledge in Article 12—“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation”—is insulting, to put it mildly, when governments themselves are honing their skills in arbitrary interference, in the most damaging ways. “Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks”, we’re told, but when there’s no separation of powers, the law will only give protection to the powerful.

The last straw in all the broken faith is summed up in Article 30. “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein”. This and all the other broken promises mean not just turning a blind eye but intent by governments to commit the crimes they’ve pledged to protect citizens from. Do we really want this autocratic, destructive anomie, the broken promises, broken societies, the “destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth” in the UDHR? “Give a thing and take a thing, an old man’s plaything.” This refrain from my childhood has taken on the meaning of broken promises on a worldwide and very grim murderous scale. The promise of human dignity was given and immediately snatched away. When freedom, justice, and dignity are denied us, the only way of achieving them is fighting for them, clamouring for them. And then we nurture other values like solidarity, ethics, friendship, and respect for all living beings.

Clamour! Clamour! Clamour!

The post Clamour appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

We, the veterans of the resistance movements and combat forces of Free France, we call on the young generation to live by, to transmit, the legacy of the Resistance and its ideals. We say to them: Take our place, “Indignez-vous!” [Get angry! or Cry out!].

– Stéphane Hessel

Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

– Howard Zinn

Jeffrey St Clair reminded me that St Paul hated clamour. For him, submission was the great virtue. In Ephesians 4: 31-32 he lumped clamour together with bitterness, wrath, anger, evil speaking, and all malice, as if he were trying to hide outcry, drown out the noise, smother it with all the things we need to clamour against. He was sending out his message in Koine Greek, in an age when clamour was powerful because public speaking and vocal expression were the main forms of social communication. Clamour, in Greek (κραυγή), was a spontaneous outburst or deliberate call for attention. St Paul was no fan of things spontaneous, including sex. As Australian historian Peter Cochrane wrote (personal communication), St Paul also “advanced the abysmal idea that our bodies were ‘vile’ and that sex was an impediment to salvation”. Sex is a clamorous need and, in some languages, “clamour” contains “amour”. This is, of course, anecdotal, but the connections are suggestive because if human bodies are “vile”, he’s not granting them dignity.

After three recent public lectures on human rights, genocide, and politics in general (with quite a lot of young people in the audience on each occasion), I was approached by several under-25s, who didn’t know each other, all wanting to talk more about human rights and what to do. Some came to visit afterwards and it was striking to see how they were all concerned about the same issues, how they expressed disgust at being forced to live in a world where civilisation’s genocides are a routine thing. These intelligent young people feel “tired”, “burnt-out”, “empty” because of the indifference all around them. They’re expressing what Durkheim called anomie (from the Greek anomos “without law, lawless”). This is a situation where expectations flounder, where the social system is broken and lawless, where young people feel worthless, weak, and in deep despair, with a cruel sense of unbelonging because there’s no community. When laws, conventions, promises, and ethics are trashed, there can be no society because there are no shared interests, no empathetic community to embrace those who feel alone.

The upshot of these encounters with young adults is an attempt to form a group where they can be heard and can clamour against the system that’s so impairing their lives as decent, caring people. The group’s still small but it’s early days yet. Ages range from 17 to 92. We held a first meeting with a couple of 50-ish specialists in housing and universal basic income, which are two of the main issues that arose. We older people, are there for support and not to give lessons, and others are willing to consult from various fields if needed. So far, there’s a possibility of a space to meet in one of Barcelona’s cultural institutions. If this doesn’t come off, Clamour could take to the city squares (just as the Indignez-Vous! movement did nearly 15 years ago), and a first public talk by the young people is being programmed for May. Some of them are good writers. They just need places to be published, to shout, to get their indignation heard.

The name Clamour echoes the outrage of Stéphane Hessel whose famous short essay Indignez-Vous! (Time for Outrage!), written when he was 93, inspired the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and the Indignados movement in Spain. Many years earlier, Hessel was involved in writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and he understood very well that, for all its flaws, its suggestion of universal human rights is one of the most radical political ideas ever. It seems that the British and American signatories recognised this too as they wanted to replace “universal” with the non-committal term “international” (and we know how many peoples are excluded by the term “international” today) rights. It was only thanks to Rene Cassin, national commissioner of justice and education in the government of Free France in London in 1941, that the “Universal” Declaration was adopted in the UN on 10 December 1948 by 48 out of 58 member states. The positioning of the adjective is revealing. It qualifies not human rights but the Declaration itself. In a globalised age, anybody can make a “universal” declaration in the hope of reaching everybody. If the word “universal” referred to rights, it would necessarily mean liberty equality, and fraternity for everybody. In a just world, the qualifier “universal” would be redundant because “human” is a universal category. As long as rights aren’t universal, “rights” can only be the privileges of some. And the circle of those some is shrinking fast as wealth is ever more concentrated. To give one obscene example, Elon Musk’s fortune greatly exceeds the GDP of his home country, South Africa (population 64.5+ million).

Seventy-seven years on, we need to clamour for universal human rights in the awareness that, in this age of ecocide, the basic human right to physical existence depends on the right to exist of all life forms in the human habitats on this planet. Perhaps we need a new name, something like a Declaration of Universal Rights on Earth. Ecocide, defined by the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”, is surely something to clamour against because, if the UDHR is the only transversal rights narrative we have, the other side of the coin, ecocide, is the transversal crime that will affect everybody. The billionaires may feel safe in their bunkers with biotech replacing their organs and computers swaddling their minds forever-and-ever-amen, but they’ll be living in a sad world without elephants. It’s up to the rest of us to clamour for the lives of elephants, bees, and the little nesting turtledove that visits my balcony plants every day because all our fates as living creatures are interconnected. But what should we clamour against and for, and how?

The idea of the Barcelona Clamour group is to clamour for the human rights that were promised in the UDHR; for a universal basic income to guarantee the right to material existence for everyone, the basic condition for all the other rights; and to clamour against ecocide, an even worse crime than genocide, which is supposedly “the crime of all crimes”; clamour against billionaires and oligarchs whose antihuman, antilife political-economic systems are the basic cause of all the grief; and against abuses of AI, biotech, and fake news, today’s ideologies and mechanisms of repression. This very general framework is just an attempt to keep in mind the interrelationships in these five areas of concern. The connection between a specific issue like housing doesn’t exist in a vacuum but is connected with wider issues and the basic questions that should always be asked: what?, when?, where?, how?, why?, who?, whom?, and how much? In Spain the average age of emancipation is 30.3 years. Young men and women aren’t allowed to be adults. According to a recent survey, 35+% of young Catalan men and 27% of young women would accept a dictatorship. One respondent expressed the relationship between real-estate violence and antisocial political detachment, or the alienation of anomie, when he replied, “Why would I want democracy if I can’t pay my rent?”

A glance at Gil Duran’s summary of MAGA/Tech authoritarian ideology also illustrates overlaps. The tech allies of government leaders like Trump detest democracy. “They are actively trying to build these weird little dictator cities all over the world…” They want control over governments. They believe in imminent social collapse and are part of the cause of social collapse. They’re mostly rich, white, anti-public males. Governments and elected leaders lie, blatantly and on a tremendous scale, for and with these outrageously rich techno-oligarchs. This means that there is no social contract at government level. So, the only real social contracts can be made in grassroots organisations, large and small. Like Clamour. But clamour is needed everywhere and urgently if we don’t want to live in an anomic world built on lies, where genocide and ecocide are routine (and will therefore get worse).

The signatories to the UDHR promised to respect “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. In Article 25.1 they aver that, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family”. They didn’t offer mechanisms for achieving this but the obvious good start would be a universal basic income, as a human right, which is how it’s defined in Article 1.3 of the Universal Declaration of Emerging Human Rights, Monterrey 2007.

The right to basic income, which assures all individuals, independently of their age, sex, sexual orientation, civil status or employment status, the right to live under worthy material conditions. To such end, the right to an unconditional, regular, monetary income paid by the state and financed by fiscal reforms, is recognised as a right of citizenship, to each resident member of society, independently of their other sources of income, and being adequate to allow them to cover their basic needs.

If this basic right isn’t met, none of the other promises of rights can be honoured.

If, as the Preamble declares, “freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people”, how can the common people enjoy these freedoms if they’re being murdered, starved, and displaced? If “it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law”, how can there be rule of law in political systems based on lies?

Article 1, the one about fraternity, has the beautiful sentiments that, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” It was patently true, even back then in 1948, that human beings aren’t born free and equal, and neither was there any spirit of brotherhood in those Cold War years. The language is masculine and the premise is false. But the baby shouldn’t be thrown out with the bathwater. This was more than hot air. It was a promise, a formally made promise of a friendlier, more sustainable world, a matter of “reason and conscience”. If “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”, then they should be “free and equal in dignity and rights” throughout their lives, every single day.

The broken promise of Article 2—“no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty”—has led, on migrant routes to Spain alone, to the deaths of 10,457 in 2024 alone. One could almost talk about “genocide of the vulnerable”. Data from May 2024 show that over 120 million people have been uprooted from their homes and land due to persecution, violence, war, or human rights abuse. No distinction shall be made. Really? Any Afghan refugee, for example, would beg to differ. And would add that the promise of Article 3, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person”, is also broken, though it could so easily be honoured in great part by introducing a universal basic income (paid for by taxing the rich).

Article 4 proclaims that, “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude”. Yet, about 50 million people are currently living in modern slavery. Evidently, in any decent world, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”, but it’s happening all the time, especially to immigrants, refugees, Indigenous peoples, and the most vulnerable groups everywhere. Refugees have this dreadful status forced on them when their homes, their lands, their livelihoods have been snatched from them and destroyed, even though Article 17.2 assures that, “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”.

Related with this is the fact that when people seek asylum they’ve already been gravely illtreated before the asylum seeker abuse begins, so Article 14.1, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” breaks two promises: about the right to seek asylum and the right to enjoy asylum (from Latin, “place of refuge, sanctuary”, and Greek (asylos) “inviolable, safe from violence”). Broken promises destroy people and destroy social life because they destroy the meaning of words.

In any society based on a social contract, it’s evident that everyone should have “the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”, as Article 6, spells out, while Article 7 rules that, “All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination”. Article 8 enshrines, “the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law”. Article 28 famously refers to the international system: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized”. But if governments are routinely violating their own and international laws, and when national tribunals aren’t “competent” because they’re corrupt, when governments commit or help others to commit genocide, then no person can feel that he or she has the protection of and right to recognition before the law. Governments must be held to account in accordance with their own laws and the covenants they signed. While they don’t honour these promises, there can be no world “order”. We need to clamour for an international system that makes this planet a safer, more friendly place for every single one of its living inhabitants.

Now, when forest guardians and Indigenous peoples are trying to defend their land, sea, rivers, prairies, steppes, mountains, lakes and many other natural formations and, in doing so, are fighting ecocide that is affecting the entire planet and all human beings, and when protesters are being illtreated, arrested, and killed, arbitrarily and everywhere, we’re told by Article 9 that, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”. “Exile” for many people who live in harmony with their habitat, their cosmos, means death. Reading that promise and knowing the reality, which has been pushed to the extreme of genocide (as in West Papua) and general indifference to it, is enough to make one weep. But clamouring is more effective than weeping.

Now that the Silicon Valley techs and billionaires are wielding power everywhere, openly and secretly, with wholesale online attacks like those from the “virtual militia” of the Bolsonaro government’s “hate cabinet”, and countless other manifestations we can’t even know about, the pledge in Article 12—“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation”—is insulting, to put it mildly, when governments themselves are honing their skills in arbitrary interference, in the most damaging ways. “Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks”, we’re told, but when there’s no separation of powers, the law will only give protection to the powerful.

The last straw in all the broken faith is summed up in Article 30. “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein”. This and all the other broken promises mean not just turning a blind eye but intent by governments to commit the crimes they’ve pledged to protect citizens from. Do we really want this autocratic, destructive anomie, the broken promises, broken societies, the “destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth” in the UDHR? “Give a thing and take a thing, an old man’s plaything.” This refrain from my childhood has taken on the meaning of broken promises on a worldwide and very grim murderous scale. The promise of human dignity was given and immediately snatched away. When freedom, justice, and dignity are denied us, the only way of achieving them is fighting for them, clamouring for them. And then we nurture other values like solidarity, ethics, friendship, and respect for all living beings.

Clamour! Clamour! Clamour!

The post Clamour appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The post LSU Summarily Suspended Me With No Basis: Here’s Why That was Cruel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The post LSU Summarily Suspended Me With No Basis: Here’s Why That was Cruel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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American Art Center, 2. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: “Here are our monsters,” without immediately turning the monsters into pets.

– Jacques Derrida

+ Musk and Trump’s intended Shock and Awe bombardment of the federal government has turned into an Opéra Bouffe of Schlock and Chainsaw.

+ Here is Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Howard (Net worth: $808 million) Lutnick’s message to seniors (whose ranks I have now reluctantly joined) on the gutting of the Social Security Administration: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out your check this month. My mother-in-law, who is 94, wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and will get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming and yelling and complaining.” As a writer who worked for decades as a freelancer, if I were to take my Social Security payments at the age of 65, the check would amount to about $40 a day. Try living on that for a month, never mind two months. The billionaire “economic populists” who are running the country haven’t the faintest clue how most of us live…

+ How many landlords are cool with you delaying your rent payment by a month and then not having enough left in the bank to pay the current rent?

+ Musk or Bust (Your Social Security checks)! Leland Dudek, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, has threatened to shut down the agency in response to a court ruling blocking Elon Musk’s DOGE demolition teams from accessing sensitive taxpayer data.

+ Financial journalist Michael Lewis (The Big Short) talking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on his new book, Who Is Government?:

When people throw around insults at federal bureaucrats, they’re really revealing they don’t know what goes on in federal government. It’s a mind-bendingly complicated place that does lots of different things, some of which they do very well and some less well. When you go in, you realize how hard fraud would be to perpetrate. Waste is different. Waste is more complicated. There are all sorts of inefficiencies that aren’t really the fault of the workers, that’s more the fault of the structure of the system. But you can’t take a federal worker to work and buy them a turkey sandwich. They just won’t take the money. They are watched every which way and they are conditioned to be very careful about what they do financially. If you said Mike, I’d like you to write a story about fraud; I’d much rather look for it in a private company…I worked on Wall Street. A million things happen every day in a Wall Street firm that if it happened in the civil service, it would be a scandal.

+ Even worse, DOGE’s mission is to defund and demolish the government agencies who are investigating fraud on Wall Street, while Trump issues executive orders and waivers removing any oversight for their own corrupt practices and conflicts of interest.

+ As Trump and Musk eviscerate the Federal Trade Commission, Public Citizen compiled a list of the donations made to the Trump campaign by corporations currently under investigation by the FTC…

Corporations currently facing FTC investigations & lawsuits that collectively gave $8,000,000 toward Trump’s inauguration:

Abbott $500K
Adobe $1M
Amazon $1M
Coca-Cola $250K
Meta $1M
Microsoft $1M
OpenAI $1M*
Syngenta $250K
Uber $2M*

*includes CEO donations

+ The Federal Trade Commission has erased from its website all content critical of Amazon, Microsoft, and AI companies published during the Biden administration.

+ This week, DOGE fired a disabled veteran who was working at the VA Medical Center in Salem, Virginia, despite excellent performance ratings. “This has put my wife and I in a terrible place mentally and financially…I’m being told by HR that I have lost everything.” And yet they want to require disabled, chronically ill, and injured people to work in order to qualify for Medicaid.”

+ Christopher Fasano, a former Senior Enforcement Attorney at the Consumer Financial Protection Board, on his firing by DOGE: “It happened on a Tuesday night at about 8:30. I got an email to my personal email address. It said that my skills and abilities did not meet the agency’s needs at that time. And that was it. And after that I was locked out of my computer and locked out of my work phone. And at that point, no longer employed by the CFPB. What really upsets me more than anything else is that all of the consumers I’ve spent my career defending are being left undefended at this moment. The worst companies, companies that Elon Musk runs, will be able to take advantage of them and commit all sorts of financial abuse and crimes.”

+ Illinois Governor JB Pritzker:  “Trump has handed over the reins of power to Elon Musk and his fellow DOGE-bags.”

+ Earlier in the week, Lutnick told CBS News that Trump’s goal is to eliminate taxes for anyone earning less than $150,000 a year. He’s actually raising them for anyone earning less than $360,000 a year…

+ Trump has chosen Crystal Carey as the NLRB’s next general counsel. A former NLRB staffer, Canyon has been working at the union-busting law firm Morgan Lewis, one of whose biggest clients is Amazon.

Fortune reports that “finance leaders are losing faith in the economy, with optimism plummeting 20% since last quarter.”

Goldman Sachs: “Trump won’t lead to a capital markets boom on Wall Street.”

+ According to Bloomberg News, the head of the world’s biggest ocean carrier has said that proposed US fees on Chinese-built ships and the companies that own them could raise container rates by 25% if imposed.

+ The Hippie Pope may be on his deathbed, but he still sees capitalism for what it is.

+ US Treasury Secretary Bessent: “There’s going to be a de-tox period for the economy.”

“De-Tox Period”: A recession generated by Trump’s insane tariffs followed by austerity measures for the 99% and tax cuts for the 1%.

+ An analysis of the House GOP’s budget bill by the Yale Budget Lab shows that it will enable an enormous transfer of wealth from the lowest-income Americans to the richest…

Income Group / Minimum Income / Change in Income

Bottom 20% / $0 /  -%1,125

2nd Quintile / $13,840 / -430

3rd Quintile/ $38,065 / $357

4th Quintile / $67,185 / $1.132

Top 20% / $125,010 / %6,222

Top 10% / $191,360 / $10,085

Top 5% / $272,065 / $16,835

Top 1% / $646,875 / $43,500

Top 0.1% / $3,265,655 / $180,910

+ Trump attacked the “globalist” Wall Street Journal…(though I don’t think “antiquated” is part of his standard 78-word vocabulary.)

+ Consumer confidence in the economy has now hit a 29-month low.

+ Deutsche Bank predicted that the market sell-off would continue for another 6% after steep declines in consumer and corporate confidence.

+ According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the GOP plan will increase the federal debt more than any measure in recent history, including the COVID relief and infrastructure bills.

+ Dark Lord Cheney: “Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter.” They only care about tax cuts and Pentagon spending and will use the deficits they create to justify further slashing federal social welfare spending.

+ According to Goldman Sachs, the recent plunges in the S&P 500 are “consistent with a market that is pricing in more recession risk.”

+++

+ Do you know what’s genuinely “inefficient”? The federal government not collecting income taxes from one of the world’s largest corporations…

+ By contrast, undocumented immigrants paid $59.4 billion in federal income taxes in 2022.

+ Tesla is recalling 48,000 Cybertrucks (one of the ugliest cars ever made) because the roof panels keep falling off while the vehicle is being driven. That’s 7 thousand more Cybertrucks than Tesla has sold (38,965)…

+ Pay of average Tesla worker: $27 an hour.

Musk’s income: $4 million an hour.

+ On the other hand, Musk has lost $120 billion of his personal wealth in the past month. That’s four billion a day or $166,666,666 every hour. Though I’m sure that comes as cold comfort to his underpaid workers.

+ As Tesla’s stock price continues its slide (down 53% since December and 35% in the last month), company insiders have begun dumping their shares:

Board Members / Value of shares sold

Kimbal Musk: $27 million
James Murdoch: $13 million
Robyn Denholm: $75 million
Company CO Vaibhav Taneja: $5 million

+ A poll of more than 100,000 Germans revealed that 94 percent wouldn’t buy a Tesla vehicle.

+ The Chicago Police Department sent about 50 cops to guard a Tesla dealership during an anti-Musk protest. If they’re standing in front of a Tesla showroom, they’re less likely to shoot a black kid walking home from playing hoops on the South Side…

+ After turning the White House driveway into a Tesla showroom, a stunt which seemed only to accelerate the collapse of Tesla’s stock, Trump took to Twitter and threatened to arrest kids who key-scratch Telsas as terrorists and have them thrown into Buekele’s dungeons-for-hire in El Salvador…

But given the cratering sales of Teslas, you’ve got to wonder how many of the arsons have been done by dealers looking to get an insurance payout…assuming the cars didn’t self-immolate as Teslas are prone to do.

+++

+ A six-year-old girl from West Texas became the first child to die in the US of measles in twenty years. The young caught the measles, which led to her contracting pneumonia. She was hospitalized, placed on a ventilator, and died. But in an interview with Bobby Kennedy, Jr.’s old group, Children’s Health Defense [sic], the child’s parents said they didn’t regret their decision not to vaccinate their daughter, saying that God had decided “it was her time” and that she was simply “too good for this Earth.” The girl’s mother warned others, “Don’t do the shots…[the measles] are not as bad as they’re making it out to be.” Is there something worse than the needless death of a six-year-old with a breathing tube stuck down her throat?

+ The girl’s father went even further into the realm of self-justifying fantasy, stating that “measles are good for the body,” fortify the immune system, and prevent cancer in adulthood.

+ According to the CDC, about 200 out of every 1,000 unvaccinated people who contract measles will end up in the hospital, one out of every 20 children who get measles will develop pneumonia, one out of every 1,000 children with measles will develop swelling of the brain (encephalitis). As many as 3 out of every 1000 kids who are sick with measles will die from respiratory or neurological complications.

+ The anti-vaxxers, of course, blamed the girl’s death, not on the parents or their own bogus claims, but on the hospital’s failure to treat the girl with massive doses of Vitamin A, a long-debunked snake oil con pushed by RFK, Jr, and others.

+ Ontario’s Public Health Department reports 470 measles cases since an outbreak began in October, an increase of 120 cases since March 14.

+ UNICEF: “In 2022, there were 941 measles cases throughout the WHO’s European region. In 2023, there were 61,000. In 2024, it was 127,350.”

+ Trump’s pick to run NIH, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, has repeatedly claimed more children had died of flu than COVID. In reality, the American Academia of Pediatricians reported 133 pediatric COVID fatalities by November 2020, while there was only one pediatric influenza death that flu season.

+ “The only infectious disease that the United States accepts more than 10,000 deaths a year from is influenza — or at least it was, until now,” Dr. William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the Washington Post. “We’ve still got considerably more than that with COVID.”

+ In 2024, at least 48,000 Americans died of COVID. By contrast, this year’s flu season, one of the worst in decades, has killed 22,000 Americans.

+ There’s no question that US AID has played a malign role in many operations to enforce US  “soft power” foreign policy against reluctant nations across the last five or six decades. There’s also no question that USAID has provided life-saving medical aid to impoverished countries. The New York Times took a hard look at the potential human cost from the gutting of the Agency’s health care operations and the numbers are appalling…

Potential deaths from the elimination of USAID’s medical and humanitarian assistance programs

AIDS: 1.65 million
Lack lack of vaccines: 500,000
Lack of food: 550,000
Malaria: 290,000
TB.: 310,000

+ Nicholas Kristof:

Elon Musk says that no one has died because he slashed humanitarian aid. I went to South Sudan to check if that’s true. It’s not. Within an hour of starting the interviews, I had the names of a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl who had died because of decisions by wealthy men in Washington.

The visit that moved me the most was to a remote area that used to have no health care, where women routinely died in childbirth. Then, a US-funded maternity clinic opened through UNFPA  in December, and not one woman has died since. I showed up, and people mistakenly thought I was responsible for the clinic. One new mom wanted to name her baby for me, and the village elders thanked me and hailed America’s generosity. What they didn’t know was that Trump/Musk had cut all funding for UNFPA and that, as a result, the maternity clinic will close this month, and women will once again be bleeding to death in the dust.

Here’s a giftlink to my report from ground level about what the shutdown of USAID means.

+ Sophie Cousins writing in the LRB on TB: ‘Tuberculosis is the world’s most deadly infectious disease, killing more than a million people a year and infecting many millions more, even though treatment in the form of antibiotics has existed for seventy years. TB predominantly affects the poor in the Global South. As Paul Farmer wrote in Infections and Inequalities (1999), “the ‘forgotten plague’ was forgotten in large part because it ceased to bother the wealthy.”’

+ I’m reminded of the scene in Ali Abbasi‘s film The Apprentice, where Trump reacts with disgust at learning Roy Cohn’s lover has AIDS and then kicks him out of the Trump-owned hotel where he’d been living…

+ In anticipation that the Trump administration will soon end most research in the field, NIH officials have advised scientists to remove references to mRNA vaccines from their grant applications, even as the vaccines show promise against many forms of cancer.

+++

+ For the second consecutive month, the number of Canadians driving into the US has declined. Last month, it dropped by 23% from the previous. More and more Canadians are avoiding any travel to the US, including layovers at US airports.

+ Does Trump really think Canadians want to spend more than 30 days in this ever-deepening shithole of a country? Even the snowbirds are bypassing the US for more welcoming retreats in Mexico and the Caribbean.

+ In response to Trump’s barrage of threats against Canada, 45% of Canadians now support becoming a member of the European Union, while only 29% oppose doing so.

+ Petty, spiteful and stupid: “The U.S. government is closing the main Canadian access to the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, an iconic building that straddles the border between Quebec and Vermont, according to town and library officials.”

+ Canadian PM Mark Carney: “President Trump claims that Canada isn’t a real country. He wants to break us so America can own us. We will not let that happen. We’re over the shock of the betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves.” Of course, as a central banker, we know who Carney will look out for first.

+ Ian Bremmer: “The world is witnessing a transition from a rules-based system of managed economic integration to one of coerced decoupling.”

+ François Holland, former President of France: “While the American people may still be our friends, the Trump administration is no longer our ally. It marks a fundamental break with the historical relationship between Europe and America. It is unfortunately, however, indisputable.”

+ Trump continues to threaten Greenland with an invasion of US troops, signaling he may intend to make it his very own Grenada: “Denmark is very far away. A boat landed there 200 years ago or something and they say they have rights to it. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think it is, actually …We really need it for national security … Maybe you’ll see more and more soldiers go there.”

+ Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Denmark’s Foreign Minister: “If you look at the NATO treaty, the UN charter or international law, Greenland is not open to annexation.”

+ Trump united all of Greenland’s political parties in a denunciation of his “unacceptable behavior.”

+++

+ Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “The Defense Department doesn’t do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” The US military emits more than 59 million tons of carbon a year, a carbon footprint that’s larger than many industrialized nations.

+ Last year, atmospheric C02 levels reached an 800,000-year high, leading to at least 151 “unprecedented” extreme weather events in 2024.

Two domed solar sensors at the Mauna Loa Observatory, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Public Doman.

+ The Trump administration plans to pull the plug on the Mauna Loa Observatory, one of the world’s most crucial monitoring stations for atmospheric CO2.

+ The global average increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration in 2024 not only set a record at 3.7%, but represented a 25% increase over the previous record.

+ According to an IPSOS poll, climate activism continues to decline even as concerns about climate change increase.

+ A new report by the Boston Consulting Group and Cambridge University (Too Hot to Think Straight, Too Cold to Panic) predicts that by 2100, 13 major climate tipping points will be reached:

Greenland ice sheet collapse (1.5C)
West Antarctic ice sheet collapse (1.5C)
Extinction of tropical coral reefs (1.5C)
Abrupt thawing of permafrost (1.5C)
Barents Sea ice loss (1.6C)
North Atlantic subpolar gyre collapse (1.8C)
Tibetan Plateau snowmelt (2.0C)
West African monsoon shift (2.8C)
East Antarctic subglacial basins collapse (3.0C)
Boreal forest southern dieback (4.0C)
Gulf Stream disruption (4.0C)
Boreal forest northern retreat (4.0C).

+ At the onset of tornado season in the center lanes of tornado alley, the National Weather Service will be without weather balloons. Maybe the Chinese could loan them a couple (as long as the Air Force promises not to shoot them down this time)…

+ A recent study on congestion pricing in NYC (The Short-Run Effect of Congestion Pricing in New York City) documents increased commuter speeds and decreased emissions. The study found “no significant difference between neighborhoods with different incomes.”

+ Bees pollinate 70% of the world’s crops, but their population has dropped by 40% in the U.S. alone since 2006.

+ The Department of Energy estimates AI data centers could consume up to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028, up from just 4.4% in 2023.

+ While South Africa continues to generate 82% of its electricity from fossil fuels (mainly coal), Kenya has made a radical transition. It now generates 88% of its electricity from geothermal, wind, hydro, biofuels, and solar.

+ Javier Blas, energy columnist at Bloomberg News: “A senior executive of an American oil company told me, ‘We thought that Chris Wright, the energy secretary, was “our guy,” someone from the industry. And here in Houston we just realized that Mr. Wright is Trump’s guy. He’s not our guy. He’s going to do what the White House is telling us to do. And if that means $50 oil and bankruptcies in the oil patch, so be it.’”

+ The deglaciation of Glacier National Park is nearly complete: “In 1850, the area that is now Glacier National Park had approximately 80 glaciers; as of 2015, there were 26—all shrinking. In the last decade, 13 of those have broken apart and can no longer technically be considered glaciers.”

+ Paul Hawkins: “When people say we’re going to “fix” the climate … to me, it’s just so emblematic of this profound disconnection between self and other. We don’t have a climate crisis; the climate cannot have a crisis. We are the crisis”.

+ The Chinese EV maker BYD announced this week that its new line of cars can be fully charged in about the same time it takes to refill a gas-engine vehicle at the pump. It takes about 8 hours to fully charge a Tesla at home and up to 30 minutes to fully charge a Tesla at a “super-charging” station on the road…if you can find one.

+ Sandeep Vaheesan, author of Democracy in Power: “China pursues an abundance of tech while the United States opts for an abundance of tech billionaires.”

+ Elon Musk is sending rockets to deliver (and return) scientists to a space station where the kind of experiments being done are similar to the ones his DOGE wrecking crews are defunding back on Earth.

+ With the full backing of the Trump administration, Montana is escalating its vile war on wolves…

+ This week, some shithead in Oregon illegally shot a male breeding-age wolf outside the Cascade Mountains town of Sisters.

+++

+ Trump on Iran: “I’ve written them a letter saying, I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing for them.”

+ Trump White House: “Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon from this point forward as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of Iran.”

+ In the last 15 months, the U.S. Navy has used more missiles for “air defense”  combat operations against the Houthi naval blockade in the Red Sea off the Yemeni coast than it has used in all years since Operation Desert Storm in the 1990s.

+ Before Trump began badgering European nations for “underfunding” their military, the armed forces in Europe had been in steady decline, much to the benefit of world peace and their own socio-economic well-being:

EU

1990: 3.4 million troops
2020: 2 million troops

Germany


1990: 500,000 troops
2020: 195,000 troops

France

1990: 560,000 troops
2020: 320,000 troops

UK

1990: 320,000 troops
2020: 150,000 troops

+ The Kremlin’s foreign policy advisor, Yuri Ushakov, on why Russia rejected Trump’s ceasefire deal that Ukraine had accepted:  “It gives us nothing. It only gives the Ukrainians an opportunity to regroup, gain strength, and continue the same thing.”

+ After the Kremlin rejected the Trump/Zelensky ceasefire plan, Putin and Trump spoke by phone and supposedly hatched out a deal that would legitimize Russia’s seizure of Crimea and an agreement from Russia to stop attacking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which it has down consistently for more than 2 1/2 years, despite Sergey Lavrov’s laughable protestation that Russia has never attacked any energy sites.

+ Only minutes after the White House hailed Trump’s call with Putin as a “movement toward peace,’ Russia attacked Kyiv with drones and airstrikes, and Ukraine responded with attacks on Russian forces.

+ Poland’s President Duda on why he wants nuclear weapons based in Poland: “Russia did not even hesitate when they were relocating their nuclear weapons into Belarus…they didn’t ask anyone’s permission.”

+++

+ “WTF Chuck” Schumer, the leader of Resistance, Inc. in the Senate, folded to Trump last week on the Continuing Resolution he’d vowed to sink only a day earlier. That’s pretty definitive proof Schumer isn’t a Palestinian (according to Trump), after all…

+ Schumer is postponing his book tour amid the angry fallout from Democrats over his decision last week to pass the CR. Statement from Schumer’s office: “Due to security concerns, Senator Schumer’s book events are being rescheduled.” Other than the lobbyists who are prepared to buy anything with his name on it to curry favor with the Senator from Citibank, who even knew Schumer had a book coming until the backlash against him?

+ Perhaps some of the threats are coming from fellow senators. During a meeting before the vote, Sen. Michael Bennet angrily accused the Democratic leadership of having “No strategy, no plan, and no message on this spending bill.”

+ Here are the 10 Democratic senators who voted for the CR: Dick Durbin, Angus King (technically an independent who conferences with the Dems like Sanders), Brian Schatz, Chuck Schumer, Catherine Cortez Masto, Maggie Hassan John Fetterman, Peters, Kristen Gillibrand, Jean Shaheen.

+ Bernie Sanders on the capitulation of the Democratic Party leaders in the Senate:  “In order to pass this legislation, the Republicans needed 60 votes, which meant that they had to have seven votes from Democrats — and they got them. Actually, they got ten votes. That’s sad. That is an absolute dereliction of duty on the part of the Democratic leadership. Nobody in the Senate should have voted for this dangerous bill.”

+ After losing to Trump twice and putting up little resistance to Trump’s agenda, the favorability of the Democratic party has fallen to a new low of 27 percent. And that’s only among registered voters.

+ Chuch Schumer: “Let me state unequivocally: I do not believe Donald Trump is an antisemite. But he all too frequently has created the feeling of safe harbor for far-right elements who unabashedly or in coded language express antisemitic sentiments.”

+ Unequivocally, Chuck? Set aside, for a moment, the Nazi-saluting, German neo-Nazi AfD party-supporting DOGE czar and check out this from Trump’s vice president:

+ Translation: If Germany takes in any more Jews, Roma or Sinti people, homosexuals, deviant Cubist painters, lesbian socialists, door-bell ringing Jehovah’s Witnesses, kids with Downs syndrome, or black jazz musicians, it will destroy itself (for the better)…

+ Although Schumer avers that Trump isn’t an antisemite, he apparently believes that American Jews who oppose Israel’s barbaric treatment of Palestinians are.

+ In its DEI cleansing operation, the Pentagon has erased any mention of the Navajo code talkers and Jackie Robinson’s military career from Department of Defense websites. Jackie was a Republican his entire life. He even testified before HUAC against Paul Robeson, a decision he came to regret deeply. More proof this is about race, not ideology…except, of course, the ideology of race (white supremacy)…

+ Carol Miller, nurse and Green Party activist in northern New Mexico: “Erasing tribal sovereignty, the Code Talkers and putting all BIA facilities on the closure list within a few days is frightening. Magafascists have talked about deporting natives because they aren’t citizens in the Constitution. There is a lot of fear building in Indian Country, much more since last week.’

The Black Lives Matter mural on the road to the White House, as seen by the Planet Labs satellite orbiting overhead. Planet Labs – In Space, We Can Hear Your Screams. CC BY 2.0.

+ Making explicit what’s been implicit all along: Black Lives Don’t Matter to the government, not even in historically black cities like DC, which surrendered to Trump’s demand that it erases all traces of Black Lives Matter Plaza from the two pedestrian blocks of 16th Street, where it created in 2020 to commemorate the George Floyd Protests, which have so aggravated Trump and his MAGA supporters…

+ The Return of Apartheid in America, brought to you by someone who was born under apartheid, whose family got rich from apartheid, and who wants to bring it back to his native South Africa, as well…

+ In her ruling blocking Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military (there are only 4200 who identify as such, less than 0.2 percent of Pentagon personnel), federal Judge Ana Reyes  wrote that the ban was based on little to no evidence and instead was “soaked in animus” and “dripping with pretext.” Reyes concluded her scathing ruling by saying that“the law does not demand that the Court rubber-stamp illogical judgments based on conjecture.”

+ Two days later, Trump ordered the revocation of $175 million in federal grants to his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, for its policies on transgender athletes.

+ Judith Butler: “Trump speaks in the name of science, but…he does so…to insist that God decreed the immutable character of the two sexes and that he, Trump, is decreeing it once more.”

+ Trump’s war on universities: First Gaza, now transgender people. What next, teaching about climate change? Evolution? Slavery? Women’s suffrage? The history of imperialism and colonization?

+ Speaking of education, under a new academic standard, Oklahoma teachers would be required to teach students that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump and have students “identify discrepancies in 2020 election results.”

+ As the Dodgers opened play in Tokyo against the Cubs, with both teams loaded with international talent, MLB baseball buckled to the Jim Crow-era demands of Trump and erased all mention of “diversity” from its website. Will they cancel Jackie Robinson Day (April 15), too?

+ Is it any wonder a Gallup poll of American youth reveals collapsing trust in government, social institutions and their own future…

Confidence in the federal government: 32% (- 20% since 2010)

Confidence in US judicial system: 45% (-20%  since 2010)

Suitable affordable housing in their city: 37% (-25% since 2010)

Satisfaction with freedom in their life: 70% (-20% since 2010)

+++

+ Herbert Marcuse: “Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that of the others, who rely on the technicians as their planners and executors?” I ask myself this every morning when I fire up the Mac (or, possibly, it fires me up.)

+ Earlier this week, Trump ordered a bunch of Biden pardons rescinded because they were signed by an autopen. Now the Presidential autopen has run amuck again, signing the invocation of the Enemies Alien Act without Trump’s knowledge!! Trump: “I don’t know when it was signed ‘cause I didn’t sign it. Other people handled it. But Marco Rubio’s done a great job, and he wanted them out, and we go along with that.”

+ Won’t Shut Up and Won’t Play: The celebrated classical pianist, András Schiff, who lived in NYC for many years, announced this week the cancelation of all performances in the US in 2025/2026, citing a moral obligation to protest the “unprecedented political changes in the United States.”

+ The great mathematician Norbert  Wiener (The Human Use of Human Beings) on the Manhattan Project scientists and the dropping of their monstrous creation on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The pressure to use the bomb, with its full killing power, was not merely great from a patriotic point of view but was quite as great from the point of view of the personal fortunes of people involved in its development. I was acquainted with more than one of these popes and cardinals of applied science, and I knew very well how they underrated aliens of all sorts, particularly those not of the European race.”

+ From Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams: “In 2015, Zuckerberg asked Xi Jinping if he would ‘do him the honor of naming his unborn child.’ Xi refused.”

+ For your “They Just Don’t Write Like That Anymore” collection: Lord Byron to Caroline Lamb, 1812: “You know I have always thought you the cleverest, most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous, fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago.”

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

In Praise of Floods: the Untamed River and the Life It Brings
James C. Scott
(Yale)

Shark: The Illustrated Biography
Daniel Abel and Sophie A. Maycock
(Princeton)

Christopher Hill: the Life of a Radical Historian
Michael Braddick
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Here We Go Crazy
Bob Mould
(Granary)

Consentrik Quartet
Nels Cline
(Blue Note)

Oceanside Countryside
Neil Young
(Reprise)

An Age of Insecurity

“We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity. The fact that we are largely unaware of this is small comfort: few in 1914 predicted the utter collapse of their world and the economic and political catastrophes that followed. Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.”

–Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

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