Photo by Pau Casals

I guess that having 91 criminal indictments to defend, a number of civil lawsuits pending, allegations and judgments of sexual abuse circulating, civil fines close to $500 million to pay, and a presidential campaign to manage isn’t enough to get Donald Trump out of his gilded, canopied bed each morning, so to this to-do list he has added orchestrating one of the largest Wall Street stock swindles perpetrated in recent years, as if his real goal is to star in a new reality show of financial crimes called Other People’s Money.

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The papacy’s role as organizer of the Crusades empowered it to ask for—indeed, to demand—tithes from churches and royal tax assessments from realms ruled by the warlord dynasties it had installed and protected. England’s nobility and clergy pressed for parliamentary reform to block King John and his son Edward III from submitting to Rome’s demands to take on debts to finance its crusading and fights against Germany’s kings. Popes responded by excommunicating reformers and nullifying the Magna Carta again and again during the 13th century.

The Burdensome Reign of King John

John I (1199-1216) was dubbed “Lackland” because, as Henry II’s fourth and youngest son, he was not expected to inherit any land. On becoming his father’s favorite, he was assigned land in Ireland and France, which led to ongoing warfare after his brother Richard I died in 1199. This conflict was financed by loans that John paid by raising taxes on England’s barons, churches, and monasteries. John fought the French for land in 1202, but lost Normandy in 1204. He prepared for renewed war in France by imposing a tallage in 1207; as S.K. Mitchell details in his book on the subject, this was the first such tax for a purpose other than a crusade.

By the 13th century, royal taxes to pay debts were becoming regular, while the papacy made regular demands on European churches for tithes to pay for the Crusades. These levies created rising opposition throughout Christendom, from churches as well as the baronage and the population at large. In 1210, when John imposed an even steeper tallage, many landholders were forced into debt.

John opened a political war on two fronts by insisting on his power of investiture to appoint bishops. When the Archbishop of Canterbury died in 1205, the king sought to appoint his successor. Innocent III consecrated Stephen Langdon as his own candidate, but John barred Stephen from landing in England and started confiscating papal estates. In 1211 the pope sent his envoy, Pandulf Verraccio, to threaten John with excommunication. John backed down and allowed Stephen to take his position, but then collected an estimated 14 percent of church income for his royal budget over the next two years—£100,000, including Peter’s Pence.

Innocent sent Pandulf back to England in May 1213 to insist that John reimburse Rome for the revenue that he had withheld. John capitulated at a ceremony at the Templar church at Dover and reaffirmed the royal tradition of fealty to the pope. As William Lunt details in Financial Relations of the Papacy with England to 1327, John received England and Ireland back in his fiefdom by promising to render one thousand marks annually to Rome over and above the payment of Peter’s Pence, and permitted the pope to deal directly with the principal local collectors without royal intervention.

John soon stopped payments, but Innocent didn’t protest, satisfied with having reinforced the principle of papal rights over his vassal king. In 1220, however, the new pope “Honorius III instructed Pandulf to send the proceeds of the [tallage of a] twentieth, the census [penny poll tax] and Peter’s Pence to Paris for deposit with the Templars and Hospitallers.”1 Royal control of church revenue was lost for good. The contributions that earlier Norman kings had sent to Rome were treated as having set a precedent that the papacy refused to relinquish. The clergy itself balked at complying with papal demands, and churches paid no more in 1273 than they had in 1192.

The barons were less able to engage in such resistance. Historian David Carpenter calculates that their indebtedness to John for unpaid taxes, tallages, and fines rose by 380 percent from 1199 to 1208. And John became notorious for imposing fines on barons who opposed him. That caused rising opposition from landholders—the fight that Richard had sought to avoid. The Exchequer’s records enabled John to find the individuals who owed money and to use royal fiscal claims as a political lever, by either calling in the debts or agreeing to “postpone or pardon them as a form of favor” for barons who did not oppose him.

John’s most unpopular imposition was the scutage fee for knights to buy exemption from military service. Even when there was no actual war, John levied scutage charges eleven times during his 17-year reign, forcing many knights into debt. Rising hostility to John’s campaign in 1214 to reconquer his former holdings in Normandy triggered the First Barons’ War (1215-1217) demanding the Magna Carta in 1215.

Opposition was strongest in the north of England, where barons owed heavy tax debts. As described in J.C. Holt’s classic study The Northeners, they led a march on London, assembling on the banks of the Thames at Runnymede on June 15, 1215. Although the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langdon, helped negotiate a truce based on a “charter of liberties,” a plan for reform between John and the barons that became the Magna Carta, the “rebellion of the king’s debtors” led to a decade-long fight, with the Magna Carta being given its final version under the teenaged Henry III in 1225.

Proto-Democratic Elements of the Magna Carta

There were proto-democratic elements in the Charter, most significantly the attempt to limit the king’s authority to levy taxes without the consent of a committee selected by the barons. The concept of “no taxation without representation” appears in the original Chapter 12: “No scutage or aid is to be levied in our kingdom, save by the common counsel of our kingdom,” and even then, only to ransom the king or for specified family occasions.

The linkage between debt, interest accruals, and land tenure was central to the Charter. Chapter 9 stated that debts should be paid out of movable property (chattels), not land. “Neither we [the king] nor our bailiffs are to seize any land or rent for any debt, for as long as the chattels of the debtor suffice to pay the debt.” Land would be forfeited only as a last resort, when sureties had their own lands threatened with foreclosure. And under the initial version of the Charter, debts were only to be paid after appropriate living expenses had been met, and no interest would accrue until the debtor’s heirs reached maturity.

Elite Interests in the Charter

The Magna Carta typically is depicted as the birth of England’s fight to create democracy. It was indeed an attempt to establish parliamentary restraint on royal spending, but the barons were acting strictly in their own interest. The Charter dealt with breaches by the king, but “no procedure was laid down for dealing with breaches by the barons.” In Chapter 39 they designated themselves as Freemen, meaning anyone who owned land, but that excluded rural villeins and cottagers. Local administration remained corrupt, and the Charter had no provisions to prevent lords from exploiting their sub-tenants, who had no voice in consenting to royal demands for scutages or other aids.

The 13th-century fight was to establish what would become the House of Lords, not the House of Commons. Empowering the nobility against the state was the opposite of the 19th-century drive against the landlord class and its claims for hereditary land rent. What was deemed democratic in Britain’s 1909/10 constitutional crisis was the ruling that the Lords never again could reject a House of Commons revenue act. The Commons had passed a land tax, which the House of Lords blocked. That fight against landlords was the opposite of the barons’ fight against King John.

Notes.

1. William Lunt, “Financial Relations of the Papacy with England to 1327. (Studies in Anglo-Papal Relations during the Middle Ages, I.),” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1939) pp. 597-598 and pp. 58-59.

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Photo by matt mr

Sabah, Libya, is an oasis town at the northern edge of the Sahara Desert. To stand at the edge of the town and look southward into the desert toward Niger is forbidding. The sand stretches past infinity, and if there is a wind, it lifts the sand to cover the sky. Cars come down the road past the al-Baraka Mosque into the town. Some of these cars come from Algeria (although the border is often closed) or from Djebel al-Akakus, the mountains that run along the western edge of Libya. Occasionally, a white Toyota truck filled with men from the Sahel region of Africa and from western Africa makes its way into Sabah. Miraculously, these men have made it across the desert, which is why many of them clamber out of their truck and fall to the ground in desperate prayer. Sabah means “morning” or “promise” in Arabic, which is a fitting word for this town that grips the edge of the massive, growing, and dangerous Sahara.

For the past decade, the United Nations International Organization of Migration (IOM) has collected data on the deaths of migrants. This Missing Migrants Project publishes its numbers each year, and so this April, it has released its latest figures. For the past ten years, the IOM says that 64,371 women, men, and children have died while on the move (half of them have died in the Mediterranean Sea). On average, each year since 2014, 4,000 people have died. However, in 2023, the number rose to 8,000. One in three migrants who flee a conflict zone die on the way to safety. These numbers, however, are grossly deflated, since the IOM simply cannot keep track of what they call “irregular migration.” For instance, the IOM admits, “[S]ome experts believe that more migrants die while crossing the Sahara Desert than in the Mediterranean Sea.”

Sandstorms and Gunmen

Abdel Salam, who runs a small business in the town, pointed out into the distance and said, “In that direction is Toummo,” the Libyan border town with Niger. He sweeps his hands across the landscape and says that in the region between Niger and Algeria is the Salvador Pass, and it is through that gap that drugs, migrants, and weapons move back and forth, a trade that enriches many of the small towns in the area, such as Ubari. With the erosion of the Libyan state since the NATO war in 2011, the border is largely porous and dangerous. It was from here that the al-Qaeda leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar moved his troops from northern Mali into the Fezzan region of Libya in 2013 (he was said to have been killed in Libya in 2015). It is also the area dominated by the al-Qaeda cigarette smugglers, who cart millions of Albanian-made Cleopatra cigarettes across the Sahara into the Sahel (Belmokhtar, for instance, was known as the “Marlboro Man” for his role in this trade). An occasional Toyota truck makes its way toward the city. But many of them vanish into the desert, a victim of the terrifying sandstorms or of kidnappers and thieves. No one can keep track of these disappearances, since no one even knows that they have happened.

Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated Io Capitano (2023) tells the story of two Senegalese boys—Seydou and Moussa—who go from Senegal to Italy through Mali, Niger, and then Libya, where they are incarcerated before they flee across the Mediterranean to Italy in an old boat. Garrone built the story around the accounts of several migrants, including Kouassi Pli Adama Mamadou (from Côte d’Ivoire, now an activist who lives in Caserta, Italy). The film does not shy away from the harsh beauty of the Sahara, which claims the lives of migrants who are not yet seen as migrants by Europe. The focus of the film is on the journey to Europe, although most Africans migrate within the continent (21 million Africans live in countries in which they were not born). Io Capitano ends with a helicopter flying above the ship as it nears the Italian coastline; it has already been pointed out that the film does not acknowledge racist policies that will greet Seydou and Moussa. What is not shown in the film is how European countries have tried to build a fortress in the Sahel region to prevent migration northwards.

Open-Air Tomb

More and more migrants have sought the Niger-Libya route after the fall of the Libyan state in 2011 and the crackdown on the Moroccan-Spanish border at Melilla and Ceuta. A decade ago, the European states turned their attention to this route, trying to build a European “wall” in the Sahara against the migrants. The point was to stop the migrants before they get to the Mediterranean Sea, where they become an embarrassment to Europe. France, leading the way, brought together five of the Sahel states (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) in 2014 to create the G5 Sahel. In 2015, under French pressure, the government of Niger passed Law 2015-36 that criminalized migration through the country. G5 Sahel and the law in Niger came alongside European Union funding to provide surveillance technologies—illegal in Europe—to be used in this band of countries against migrants. In 2016, the United States built the world’s largest drone base in Agadez, Niger, as part of this anti-migrant program. In May 2023, Border Forensics studied the paths of the migrants and found that due to the law in Niger and these other mechanisms the Sahara had become an “open-air tomb.”

Over the past few years, however, all of this has begun to unravel. The coup d’états in Guinea (2021), Mali (2021), Burkina Faso (2022), and Niger (2023) have resulted in the dismantling of G5 Sahel as well as the demand for the removal of French and U.S. troops. In November 2023, the government of Niger revoked Law 2015-36 and freed those who had been accused of being smugglers.

Abdourahamane, a local grandee, stood beside the Grand Mosque in Agadez and talked about the migrants. “The people who come here are our brothers and sisters,” he said. “They come. They rest. They leave. They do not bring us problems.” The mosque, built of clay, bears within it the marks of the desert, but it is not transient. Abdourahamane told me that it goes back to the 16th century, long before modern Europe was born. Many of the migrants come here to get their blessings before they buy sunglasses and head across the desert, hoping that they make it through the sands and find their destiny somewhere across the horizon.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Those who knew the history in terms of the plight of the Palestinians and the details for the creation of the modern Israeli state knew what was going on and what was about to happen late last year. We watched in horror as our news media reported in their always slanted manner, calling murdered children minors, using that vile passive voice in every instance of outright murder. We watched fellow Americans taken in by the very well-documented practice of hasbara and largely shook our fists at the sky while our nation funded the ongoing atrocity.

The clarity in terms of a politician’s zealousness in defense of Israeli genocidal practice lines up very well on a graph compared to his or her AIPAC donations (I’m looking at you, you Fetterman, you absolute lumbering, lurching ghoul). This has always been clear to anyone paying attention. The slinging of the ever-loved “antisemitism” branding has been launched towards anyone, even with temerity, voicing “Maybe it’s not okay to level hospitals and murder kids”. Idiotically, this antisemitism branding has even been used against Jewish individuals speaking out against the ongoing atrocity. They’ve been brutalized and beaten for voicing this humanity in the streets of Israel. But it’s only antisemitism if it’s against Zionism by these ridiculous rules. It’s a very bizarre state of affairs well beyond the average American’s ability to parse out. It’s definitely a level of the surreal that is difficult to comprehend.

Those in power offering platitudes for Israeli state actions know in their hearts why they are doing it, and I can’t imagine it sits well if a person has even 1% of functioning humanity within. It’s most certainly spurred by motivations of self-interest, not because they truly support ongoing genocide. The leaders never were the best of us, and it probably isn’t all that difficult for them to compartmentalize. But they should be aware that in the eye of history, they will most certainly be looked at and paired with the most barbaric, their names mingling with the Himmlers and Goebbels for future descendants. Their children’s children will want to change their surnames; it will carry such shame that they came from such utterly depraved ancestors.

The proof of this genocide is already there for anyone looking. Every phone that has captured the sniping of children, of doctors—the bulldozing effects on bodies….it’s all there, in unthinkable detail. It is certainly not secret or hidden; there are even Telegraph accounts showing these atrocities with accompanying “likes” and jokes in Israel. They truly have succeeded at dehumanizing those just miles away from them.

The PR has been fantastic in other nations, nothing so brazen as “likes” with Palestinian snuff films, but more the weaponizing of guilt that decent individuals feel. It’s the rightful shame of humanity due to what was done to the Jewish populations during the Nazi period. The hasbara PR has performed well– purposeful mucking up of the water. It has led those who wish to never again see such inhumanity to blindly support another genocide—it is stolen valor from holocaust victims and it is being used to victimize a whole new group of individuals.

The average American has been either feeling that support for Israel is mandatory because of the holocaust or is merely hiding behind an ignorance of current events. Life is hard here so they really aren’t paying attention to what happens elsewhere. The irony is that part of why life is hard here is because the resources of the state are being shuffled elsewhere, and the safety net here has been shredded worse than old fishnet stockings. 2,000-pound bombs would fund a lot of healthcare.

CNN continues to frame this as the “Israel-Hamas War” and pre-existing anti-Arab racism has conveniently been there to weaponize with some of the population as well. Xenophobic Americans say things like “they are just a bunch of religious nuts” in terms of any group who is primarily Muslim, but ignore that a murderous theocracy is the one doing the theft of land and murder. Palestinians in many instances opened their homes to refugees in the past only to face betrayal–definitely a situation along the lines of what indigenous peoples faced in the Americas. They helped refugees and settlers, then had their land stolen and their loved ones murdered. When they fought back, they were branded “savages”. It is not even a new story that Israel is peddling. So no, this isn’t the “Israel-Hamas War”. This is more along the lines of ….say, a coveted Southern California climate region with great canal potential (and can serve as an outpost of continued Western hegemony) Murder-Theft situation. A home invasion.

The truth is trickling out now in America, though–one would have to be completely blind or unfathomably evil to continue to support what is going on in Gaza. The beyond tone-deaf manner of the Biden administration hosting an iftar dinner (breaking the fast of the recent Muslim holiday) when a full-scale starvation situation is being created is difficult to fathom. Gaslighting is the fuel they are using to cook the food for that celebration, I would say.

So of course the munitions, the backing needed to complete this genocide—it’s all being supplied by the United States. You don’t get to supply all the needed equipment to murderers and then come to the funeral and pretend to care. That’s definitely serial killer actions, Joe Biden. Perhaps that’s the best analogy for the behavior of the United States government right now. Ted Bundy hugging the murdered girl’s mom by the casket kind of actions. I’d even go so far as to say it’s perhaps worse than a run-of-the-mill unhinged serial killer. I say this because in many ways it is a measured and rationalized support to advance the aims of the military-industrial complex. You know, the great evil warned about by Eisenhower. These people know full well that to advance this, it will be required to clear out an entire group of souls who already live there. This is an evil form of deranged pragmatism that is so skewed that in the end it won’t allow the perpetrators to have anything but continued strife abroad and internal strife as well, since even the most callous and uninvolved Americans are getting pissed about the sheer amount of money being spent on anything and everything but the well being of Americans.

Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American physician, walked out of a White House meeting as a form of protest due to the atrocities he has seen– after handing Biden a letter from a Palestinian orphan begging for it to stop. At least this has made the national news. One hopes that even the more slow-witted begin to question their nation’s unwavering support for murder, maiming and starvation. The knee-jerk “well they have hostages” makes little sense when the number of Palestinian hostages held in Israel is taken into account as well. Desperate people try desperate measures, and people will fight back to free their own people. Not to mention that collective punishment is a war crime. Insane Republican politicians in the US are even saying things like “Palestinian babies may not be innocent’. It’s disgusting, and the immediate, visceral response to that is the correct one. You can’t cage people in an apartheid situation intermittently mixed with ethnic cleansing. It is amazing that our level of humanity (in terms of governmental actions) hasn’t progressed beyond this behavior that would have been at home during the Roman Empire.

The absolute audacity of the World Central Kitchen aid worker murders should clarify even further who the villain is in this story. They don’t want people to be fed. Starvation is the goal. Of course, targeted attacks on intellectuals, healthcare workers, reporters…it’s all been happening with great regularity, but this one is getting a bit more traction in the news cycle. Sadly, it’s probably because some white aid workers got killed. But Israel got its way; the agency has ceased activity in terms of feeding the starving.

The fact that we are facing an unprecedented number of pediatric amputees in this world right now says it all. Every single time you see one of these monstrous political class talking heads making excuses, think what your response would be to sending a bomb down that kills or maims kids– and if that kid lives, keeping food from reaching them until they starve. There is no reality or plane of existence where this is acceptable to perpetrate or abet. Yes, I think we’ve hit a tipping point where even the masterful obfuscation will no longer work. There are more of us who believe this is depravity and those in power need to realize that their serial killer hold on all of us is vanishing.

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Photograph Source: Wafa (Q2915969) – CC BY-SA 3.0

Rarely has the International Court of Justice been so constantly exercised by one topic during a short span of time.  On January 26, the World Court, considering a filing made the previous December by South Africa, accepted Pretoria’s argument that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was applicable to the conflict in so far as Israel was bound to observe it in its military operations against Hamas in Gaza.  (The judges will determine, in due course, whether Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the genocidal threshold.)  By 15-2, the judges noted that “the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is at serious risk of deteriorating further before the Court renders its final judgment.”

At that point 26,000 Palestinians had perished, much of Gaza pummelled into oblivion, and 85% of its 2.3 million residents expelled from their homes.  Measures were therefore required to prevent “real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice will be caused to the rights found by the Court to be plausible, before it gives its final decision.”

Israel was duly ordered to take all possible measures to prevent the commission of acts under Article II of the Genocide Convention; prevent and punish “the direct and public incitement to genocide” against the Gaza populace; permit basic services and humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip; ensure the preservation of, and prevent destruction of, evidence related to acts committed against Gaza’s Palestinians within Articles II and III of the Convention; and report to the ICJ on how Israel was abiding by such provisional measures within a month.  The balance sheet on that score has been uneven at best.

Since then, the slaughter has continued, with the Palestinian death toll now standing at 32,300.  The Israelis have refused to open more land crossings into Gaza, and continue to hamper aid going into the strip, even as they accuse aid agencies and providers of being tardy and dishonest.  Their surly defiance of the United States has seen air drops of uneven, negligible success (the use of air to deliver aid has always been a perilous exercise).  When executed, these have even been lethal to the unsuspecting recipients, with reported cases of parachutes failing to open.

On March 25, the UN Security Council, after three previous failed attempts, passed Resolution 2728, thereby calling for an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan “leading to a lasting sustainable” halt to hostilities, the “immediate and unconditional release of all hostages”, “ensuring humanitarian access to address their medical and other humanitarian needs” and “demands that the parties comply with their obligations under international law in relation to all persons they detain”.

Emphasis was also placed on “the urgent need to expand the flow of humanitarian assistance to and reinforce the protection of civilians in the entire Gaza Strip”.  The resolution further demands that all barriers regarding the provision of humanitarian assistance, in accordance with international humanitarian law be lifted.

Since January, South Africa has been relentless in its efforts to curb Israel’s Gaza enterprise in The Hague.  It called upon the ICJ on February 14, referring to “the developing circumstances in Rafah”, to urgently exercise powers under Article 75 of the Rules of Court.  Israel responded on February 15.  The next day, the ICJ’s Registrar transmitted to the parties the view of the Court that the “perilous situation” in the Gaza Strip, but notably in Rafah, “demands immediate and effective implementation of the provisional measures indicated by the Court in its Order of 26 January 2024”.

Throughout the following month, more legal jostling and communication took place, with Pretoria requesting on March 6 that the ICJ “indicate further provisional measures and/or to modify” those ordered on January 26.  The application was prompted by the “horrific deaths from starvation of Palestinian children, including babies, brought about by Israel’s deliberate acts and omissions … including Israel’s concerted attempts since 26 January 2024 to ensure the defunding of [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and Israel’s attacks on starving Palestinians seeking to access what extremely limited humanitarian assistance Israel permits into Northern Gaza, in particular”.

Israel responded on March 15 to the South African communication, rejecting the claims of starvation arising from deliberate acts and omissions “in the strongest terms”.  The logic of the sketchy rebuttal from Israel was that matters had not materially altered since January 26 to warrant a reconsideration: “the difficult and tragic situation in the Gaza Strip in the last weeks could not be said to materially change the considerations upon which the Court based its original decision concerning provisional measures.”

On March 28, the Court issued a unanimous order modifying the January interim order.  Combing through the ghoulish evidence, the judges noted an updated report from March 18 on food insecurity from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Global Initiative (IPC Global Initiative) stating that “conditions necessary to prevent Famine have not been met and the latest evidence confirms that Famine is imminent in the northern governorates and projected to occur anytime between mid-March and May 2024.”  The UN Children’s Fund had also reported that 31 per cent of children under 2 years of age in the northern Gaza Strip were enduring conditions of “acute malnutrition”.

In the face of this Himalaya of devastation, the Court could only observe “that Palestinians in Gaza are no longer facing a risk of famine, as noted in the Order of 26 January 2024, but that famine is setting in, with at least 31 people, including 27 children, having already died of malnutrition and dehydration”.  There were “unprecedented levels of food insecurity experienced by Palestinians in the Gaza strip over recent weeks, as well as the increasing risks of epidemics.”

Such “grave” conditions granted the Court jurisdiction to modify the January 26 order which no longer fully addressed “the consequences arising from the changes in the situation”.  In view of the “worsening conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, in particular the spread of famine and starvation”, Israel should take “all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full cooperation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance”.

The list of what is needed is also enumerated: food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene, sanitation requirements, and “medical supplies and medical care to Palestinians throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary”.

A less reported aspect of the March 28 order, passed by fifteen votes to one, was that Israel’s military refrain from committing “acts which constitute a violation of any rights of the Palestinians in Gaza as a protected group” under the Genocide Convention “including by preventing, through any action, the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian assistance.”

In this, the Court points to the possible, and increasingly plausible nexus, between starvation, famine and deprivation of necessaries as state policies with the intent to injure and kill members of a protected group.  It is no doubt something that will weigh heavily on the minds of the judges as they continue mulling over the nature of the war in Gaza, which South Africa continues to insist is genocidal in scope and nature.

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Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the stock market, Donald Trump has managed to hack into the National Association of Securities Dealers Automatic Quotation System (aka NASDAQ, an over-the-counter stock exchange) and make it an accomplice to his latest pump-and-dump scheme: hyping worthless assets on Wall Street until he can sell his shares and walk away from the dumpster fire. And while he’s at it, candidate Trump can use a listed company to funnel dark money into either his presidential campaign or his legal entanglements, depending on which squeaky wheel needs the most grease. 

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Here’s the back story:

Until recently Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWIC) was a special purpose acquisition company. Known in the trade as a SPAC, its “special purpose” as a listed company was to raise acquisition funds and then go in search of an idea on which to blow the money. 

SPACs are popular because they have little regulation and fast track access, once they have acquired assets, for trading on a public exchange.

In this case, after raising its $300 million stake, DWIC had only one idea, which was to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the owner of Truth Social, the social media mouthpiece that the former president uses to shout into the void. He started it after Twitter (aka X) closed his account following what Trump called “a beautiful day” (January 6):

In a prospectus, Trump Media boasted:

Truth Social is designed to provide a “Big Tent” alternative to existing social media platforms that are dominated by the big tech monopoly (Twitter and Facebook). While we expect that initial users will be catalyzed by the existing Trump universe, the future of the platform audience lies in being open and inviting to a wide range of ideologies. Content from news and politics to sports, comedy, and entertainment aims to unite independents, liberals, libertarians, and conservatives alike.

In reality, TMTG is a broken radio with one channel tuned 24/7 to the World According to Trump.

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Under the terms of the recent merger, Trump contributed Truth Social—his struggling/tapped out/floundering one-man social media group—to the joint enterprise while DWIC came to party with its $300 million in cash and its NASDAQ listing. The ticker stock symbol was changed to DJT, the initials of someone who shall always be named.

A big reason—besides old-style influence peddling—for DWIC to throw its $300 million at Trump’s dead-on-arrival tech firm is that one of the DWIC investors is Jeff Yass, the so-called richest man in Pennsylvania who directly and indirectly owns 15% of TikTok, that which Democrats’ pending legislation would force its Chinese shareholders to sell. Here Yass is buying a little professional liability insurance for his Chinese partners.

Since the TMTG-DWIC deal went through in mid-March, shares in DJT have soared and are now trading at between $60 and $70 a share, which values Donald Trump’s personal stake (58%) in the combined new company at close to $4 billion, which is a good day’s work considering that Trump put up nothing (other than his tweets) to found Truth Social in 2022.

Presumably, that windfall will come in handy when he has to pay off E. Jean Carroll and Tish James, or when he has to buy loose cigarettes, the currency of choice in most Club Fed prisons.

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According to U.S. law, individuals (Jeff Yass among them) are limited to giving a presidential candidate $3,300 per election cycle, but the magic of merging a $300 million SPAC with Trump’s money-losing TMTG media company is that it allows anyone with a brokerage account to give Donald Trump unlimited amounts of cash—without anyone at the Federal Election Commission asking to inspect the fine print on the contribution checks.

Think about it: Saudi sovereign funds, Russian oligarchs, Sicilian mobsters, Nigerian oil ministers, hedge-funders, private-equity bros, and MAGA-loving billionaires now have a direct, unregulated money pipeline into the presumptive Republican nominee. And the last time we checked, Trump was so short on cash that he was begging the court to reduce the amount he needs to post as a bond to appeal the judgment of Justice Arthur F. Engoron, who ruled that the Trump Organization needs to pay $454 million in restitution for fraud committed against New York state.

In theory (at least according to that text book you read in a class on corporate finance), money invested in open-market DJT shares does not immediately go into his excellency’s shallow pockets or fund more hush-money payments to porn stars. 

But in reality, DJT is nothing more than a special purpose corporation in which investors can buy shares in the former president, the first candidate to list his soul in an initial public offering. 

Let’s hope his presidency can deliver $7 billion in intangible assets to his shareholders (they used to be called voters), because the TMTG media company in which they are nominally investing their money at $60-70 a share is most likely another Trump castle in the air.

+++

Granted, the stock market valuation for TMTG is (as I write) $7.65 billion, but let’s look closer at the current financial statements—although not much is available on Truth Social, other than accumulated loses. 

In the first nine months of 2023, Trump Media reported revenue of about $3.4 million while reporting, according to Fortune, a $49 million loss in the same period, which would have wiped out any capital that the company had accumulated.

When it started broadcasting Trump’s tweets to the world in 2022, Truth Social had about $38 million in liabilities (debt and equity) raised from various Trump campaign stalwarts (but not Trump himself).

According to Reuters, “Truth Social’s early backers include six businessmen outside of the Silicon Valley mainstream — including two executives from an oil company and a gym chain, several Republican donors, a former U.S. ambassador to Portugal and the head of a mail-order fruitcake company.”

It noted that as of October 2023, “Trump had 4.37 million followers on Truth Social…compared to the more than 88 million followers he had on Twitter when the platform permanently suspended him.” 

+++

When panhandling (the fruitcake market?) for clients and investors, Trump Media boasted that it would have 56 million users by 2024 and 81 million by 2026. To date the company has less than 5 million “users”, and it is difficult to see how Trump plans to monetize someone who swipes past one of his crazed posts. As in:

I’m not running to terminate the ACA, AS CROOKED JOE BUDEN DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES ALL THE TIME, I’m running to CLOSE THE BORDER, STOP INFLATION, MAKE OUR ECONOMY GREAT, STRENGTHEN OUR MILITARY, AND MAKE THE ACA, or OBAMACARE, AS IT IS KNOWN, MUCH BETTER, STRONGER, AND FAR LESS EXPENSIVE…

Assuming TMTG does have five million “users”, by the company’s own admission only about a quarter of that number, or 1.25 million, will become paying subscribers. 

According to the company’s economic models, on average such subscribers will spin off $5.56 per head, which means that Trump Media is currently generating average annual revenue of about $6-7 million, not nearly enough to cover the company’s gold-enameled expenses.

Yet the stock market values DJT today at $7 billion, which gives Trump Media an enterprise-to-revenue ratio of about 1,666 times. By comparison, Walmart’s EV/revenue ratio is less than 1 times. In the overall stock market, the average ratio of EV to sales is 3.23 times. We’re in the realm of Dutch tulip pricing.

+++

Why is a stock—with accumulated losses and a capital infusion of only $300 million—now trading at a $7 billion valuation?

I will give you both a technical and political reason for the exaggerated value:

Technically, DJT is what is now called a meme stock—a darling of that network of day traders (sitting in windowless rooms in their grandmother’s basement?) who speculate on anything—cryptocurrencies, stocks, options, pork bellies, Monday Night Football, you name it—that looks vulnerable to price manipulation.

In this case, what has drawn in the meme day traders is the TMTG short position (it has over 10% in what is called “short interest”) and the relatively low percentage of outstanding shares that constitute the DJT “float,” the shares that are not restricted and can be freely traded. Another incentive: Trump’s own shares in the company (58%) cannot be traded for six months, unless he’s given permission by his board. 

Here the meme day traders have “squeezed” the short sellers who are betting (quite sensibly) that Trump Media is a bucket shop with few customers and lots of Trump insider trading, not even worth the cash on its balance sheet.

To sell shares short, traders need to hold physical shares (not easy to find in this illiquid market). Then when they come to close out a position going against them in a rising stock market, the “shorts” can be caught out and “squeezed” to pay exorbitant prices to cover. It is these events that can create a stock price bubble, such as we’re seeing today.

+++

For now, the short-squeezing memes are feasting, but they are benefitting too from Trump godfathers who have a political interest to use DJT as a market drain to funnel money into the presumptive Republican nominee who might otherwise be heading toward a liquidity crisis, if not bankruptcy, and jeopardize electoral success in November.

Trump’s previous grift on his supporters cash was to raise money for PACs and other campaign vehicles, and then to use that bacon to pay his lawyers, court fines, porn stars, and personal expenses. But—to invert Austin Powers—why make millions when you can make billions in “pumping-and-dumping” publicly-traded shares?

Plus by IPO-ing himself, Trump has finally managed to slip the bonds of campaign finance regulation, and in promoting DJT he can raise money from anyone interested in acquiring a stake in his coming presidency or, more likely, predator’s ball (similar to what the American writer Edgar Allan Poe described in his 1842 story “The Masque of the Red Death”). 

It’s unlikely that MAGA supporters in red hats showing up at Iowa rallies with flags have pushed the price of TMTG to a $7 billion valuation (when on paper the company looks worthless), but assume that dark money lobbyists, Republican rounders, PAC middlemen, influence peddlers, and Yass players—both domestic and foreign—are all in the game of “Who Wants Donald to be a Billionaire?”

Sadly, there is no prospectus for such a public offering, but would it not be fitting to see these words printed in a 10-K report: “For sale are fractionalized shares in a forthcoming American presidency, in which investors can directly own a percentage of the chief executive officer, who will run the country according to the wishes of his shareholders.”

+++

How does the DJT story end? Let’s put it this way: it will not be pretty.

If Trump wants to cash in his newfound billions to pay off the likes of Tish James or E. Jean Carroll, he will need the permission of his board of directors, which is the usual collection of Trump placemen, including his pliant son Don Jr. So they will rubber stamp any decision to let Trump get around his six-month “lockup” on selling shares.

But here’s the catch: the moment the basement memes get wind that Trump (a 58% owner) is himself a block seller, they will vanish from their chat rooms and their day trading in the shares, and the DJT price will collapse. My guess would be from around $70 today to under $1, as no model I run for the enterprise makes the company worth even $1 a share—unless it is as a warrant to a political pay off.

Why should a poorly-managed online company that is losing millions annually with just one windbag client—a tired old man on his way to jail, even if it is via the White House—be worth anything? 

+++

The other way that DJT ends, in both farce and tragedy, is when the existing shareholders begin fighting like cats in a bag—unhappy that in exchange for no invested capital (other than some of his nastygram tweets) Trump wound up with 58% of the shares in a $7 billion dollar company and then decided to stiff some of the footmen who brought him to Cinderella’s ball.

We know from the January 6 caper that Trump refused to pay his “personal attorney” Rudolph Giuliani, and I am sure among the angel investors (who put up the seed money for Truth Social) there will be some bitterness when Trump’s forced sale of his shares tanks the company, rendering their stakes worthless.

Keep in mind too that Trump views public companies as vehicles that exist to absorb his debts, not to share his gains, and he will do his best to turn TMTG into a private overdraft checking account. 

Given Trump’s controlling 58% shareholding in DJT, chairmanship of the board filled with yes men and family members, and presidential candidacy, you might well think that regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission would open an inquiry into the propriety of these “pump-and-dump” arrangements, although for the moment the SEC seems to be blessing all this celebrity stockjobbing.

+++

Here’s another hint that all might not be well in TMTG’s capital accounts. A report in Fortune indicated that last year Truth Social incurred interest costs of $37 million, a figure that makes zero sense when trying to analyze the company’s balance sheet (which, as best as I can see, showed little third-party debt in 2023). 

But it may indicate the Trump’s angel investors have used Truth Social promissory notes as a way to drain money from the start up, on the good chance that if it were to fail, their money would be that of a preferential stakeholder, not chump equity holders last in the creditor line.

+++

To the financial press, the $7 billion run-up in the share price of Trump Media is a rags-to-riches story of a down-on-his-luck former president who is being hounded in the courts striking it rich with brilliant market timing and an unshakeable belief in the American dream. 

Instead, all that’s for sale at DJT is out-of-the-money call options on a future Trump presidency—from which he will cash the premiums today. Down the road, investors, voters, and citizens of the republic will be left holding his empty, faux Louis Vuitton bags.

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Protestors hold up signs. Image Credit: Phoebe Moore.

This March, Argentina’s school year began with empty classrooms. The price of learning materials rose by 502 percent over the past year, leaving many children unprepared for the year to come. And the teachers? On strike after President Javier Milei announced deep cuts to their salaries.

There’s something much larger happening here: Workers rights are under attack in an already vastly unequal society. Labor income inequality has been on the decline in many Latin American countries like Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. In Argentina, it’s been on the rise.

Since the 1960s, Argentina has been in an unprecedented period of macroeconomic instability. Stagnating in the lead-up to, and during, the dictatorship years (1976-1983), the country’s economy has reeled from crisis upon crisis — punctuated with the occasional period of recovery and growth. As the decades wore on, public distrust and discontent produced a deep social divide. Argentines call this phenomenon la grieta (“the rift”).

During his successful presidential bid last year, Milei seized upon these conditions. TV personality and self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist, the eccentric economist promised to correct Argentina’s path and make what he called the “political caste” pay for their mismanagement of the country. Wielding a chainsaw while he campaigned, Milei vowed to eliminate state ministries, abolish the central bank, roll back abortion rights, and dollarize the economy.

Now that he’s had a chance to implement his platform, working families — not an elite “political caste” — are footing the bill for his far-right economic project.

In the two months before Milei took office in December, inflation was running between 143 and 161 percent. In February, inflation soared to more than 254 percentand the poverty rate reached 57 percent — the highest in decades.

Argentina’s labor movement has quickly mobilized widespread and effective opposition to his policies. While strikes and protests continue, we can already begin to draw lessons on resisting the far-right’s rise worldwide.

Milei takes a chainsaw to workers’ rights

After taking office on December 10, 2023, Milei acted swiftly. Declaring “There is no alternative to shock,” the president immediately devalued the peso by 50 percent, lifted price controls, and dissolved half of the country’s ministries.

Milei’s government then launched an offensive on workers rights. On December 14, the newly appointed Minister of Security announced a new protest protocol. Consolidating control of Argentina’s security forces and creating a registry for organizations suspected of “instigating” the protocol allowed federal forces to use increased surveillance and violence.

Days later, Milei signed the “Decree of Necessity and Urgency 70/2023.” Dubbed the megadecreto (“mega-decree”) for its sweeping scope — cutting severance pay, weakening collective bargaining rights, deregulating the rental market, and otherwise undermining existing protections — the 366-article document is an unconstitutional abuse of executive powers.

Making matters worse, Milei cut public subsidies on utilities and transportation. Hypocrisy shone through his already vague definition of the “political caste.” As one Argentine told a journalist, “The caste doesn’t take the train nor any form of public transit. We workers and students do.”

Milei’s aggressive measures roused a prompt response from Argentine labor. In late December, the country’s largest unions announced plans for a January 24 general strike — the quickest to be organized under any president since Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983.

Millions join the general strike

Forty-five days after Milei took office, 1.5 million Argentines took to the streets. Workers from all sectors joined the strike: transit, aviation, government, banking, and sanitation, just to name a few.

“Not one step back,” one associated union declared on the day of the strike, “for the unity of the workers movement is essential in protecting the rights we’ve achieved.”

The protesters’ outrage centered on Milei’s Omnibus Bill. The proposed legislation contained sweeping changes to Argentina’s economic and political structure, including the privatization of state-owned companies and an unprecedented expansion of executive powers.

The bill would also codify Milei’s unpopular “mega-decree.”

“[Milei’s ‘mega-decree’] destroys individual rights of workers, collective rights and seeks to eliminate the possibility of union action at a time in which we have great inequality in society” said Héctor Daer, the Secretary General of the General Confederation of Labor. One of the world’s largest unions, the CGT represents roughly two-thirds of Argentina’s unionized workforce.

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Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The converging crises facing our world today shout out the fact that their roots are systemic. Tinkering around the edges won’t solve these problems, because they are embedded in the systems logic itself. The climate crisis is the signature of this. While definite progress has been made in deploying low-carbon energy technologies, overall carbon pollution has continued to increase because of the systemic economic and political assumptions under which dominant institutions operate.

The same is true of the general crisis of ecological overshoot in which climate is a major factor but by no means the whole picture. Scientists led by the Stockholm Resilience Center have been looking at ecological boundaries which mark out the safe space for human civilization and the Earth as a whole. Last September they announced the results of the first-ever evaluation of all 9 processes that preserve stability and resilience. Six boundaries have already been breached including the condition of climate, land, water and the biosphere, as well as overloading of phosphorus and nitrogen, and introduction of novel entities such as microplastics and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. This all suggests, scientists wrote, “that Earth is now well outside the safe operating space for humanity.”

These facts underscore the necessity for transformative change in economic and political systems. Massive resources must be devoted to transforming the basic elements of human society, including how we gain energy and materials to produce goods and services, how we grow our food, how we get around, how we build our buildings, how we deal with waste products. That entails redirection in how we invest capital.

Two significant indicators that our world is not getting it are the dramatic accumulation of wealth upwards and record military spending. Over the past 4 years billionaire wealth in the U.S. alone has shot up 88%, from $2.9 trillion in 2020 to $5.5 trillion today. The top 10, led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, account for $1.4 trillion of that. Globally, as a 2022, the richest 1% owned 46% of world wealth. No doubt that percentage has increased since. Would the planet be going into ecological overshoot if these people were investing in a way that created a resilient future? Obviously, they’re not. Sure, some are putting money into low-carbon technologies and environmental philanthropy, but the overwhelming preponderance of their investments and businesses still propels overshoot. Whatever they are doing does not address the systemic roots of the crisis.

Meanwhile, world militaries gobbled a record $2.2 trillion in 2023, up 9% over 2022, and another record is expected in 2024, the International Institute for Strategic Studies reported. That no doubt is a lowball, since real spending by the largest military power, the U.S., was estimated at $1.5 trillion in 2022, double the nominal budget. All the while wars rage on in Europe, the Mideast and Africa, and direct conflict between great powers is predicted. The frightful words World War III are increasingly on people’s lips.

All this indicates a world desperately in need of transformative change is moving in the diametrically opposite direction. It’s enough to crush hope and leave people who care for the future in despair. Where do you gain leverage to change such an interlocked global system? We need a way to take hold and begin to put a new system in place.

Restoring the commons

The first step is to understand the essence of the systemic transformation that is required. The common thread in our multiple global crises is the elevation of narrow interests over the common good. Certainly, the crisis of ecological overshoot reflects blindness towards our dependence on the planetary commons. For instance, making the atmosphere a dump for fossil fuel pollution while cutting down forests and tearing up soils are major drivers of climate disruption. Increasing global conflict and military expenditures reflect putting national interests over those of the world as a whole, despite the threat of nuclear extermination. The obscene and increasing concentration of the world’s wealth in so few hands screams out the prevalence of private interests over the common good.

Thus, the necessity is to restore the balance in society by rebuilding our sense of the common good, and the institutional frameworks that express it. That is the core of the transformation that is required. Self-interest is a powerful factor in human life, and will remain so. It is a part of human nature. But we also have a strongly cooperative and social side that must be emphasized if we are to navigate our convergent crises.

Over the past 4 or 5 decades, a philosophy known as neoliberalism has prevailed. It is built on a belief that if we each pursue our own self-interest, it will result in optimal results for society. The record has proved this wrong. The crises cited above, ecological overshoot, increased global conflict, and widening disparity of wealth, all testify to the need to restore a sense of the common good and common enterprise.

Neoliberalism has downgraded and denied these necessities and the institutions we have created to promote the public good. The general diminishment of the public sector, with the widespread evasion of just taxation by the wealthy classes, is central to this.

On my home turf of Washington state, we have a poster.  We just lost a billionaire. That world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, just evaded around a quarter-billion dollars in payments under a newly enacted state capital gains tax by moving his legal residence to Florida. This is a man whose Amazon wealth depends on deliveries through public road and aviation infrastructure, and whose computer-based business is built on digital innovation publicly funded during World War II and the Cold War.

Capture of public institutions by private interests is the other aspect of the neoliberal era that makes them so ineffective at dealing with our crises. The fossil fuel industry and allies such as big agriculture and railroads have frustrated sufficient action on climate. The military-industrial complex promotes conflict and war. The wealthy fight just taxation. The list could go on.

The balance to this situation is people power democratically organized to advocate for the common good. That is why we need leverage points where people power can begin to make change, to reinforce existing institutional frameworks and build new ones that promote the common good. We need to build resilient economies that address the imperative to come back within planetary boundaries while meeting basic human needs.

Restoring the common good in place

Inherent in the idea of the common good is community. Restoring the common good and restoring community are one and the same. This directs us to the logical place to begin the process, the communities in which we live. This is where we can begin the work of transformation, of putting new systems in place. Our communities are where we develop the deepest connections and sense of commonality. Our surroundings, the social and natural environments in which we live, are where we can best envision and work for the conditions that promote the common good.

A key insight is that you can’t change everything at once. You have to build a new system within the shell of the old, using elements of the old system that nonetheless embody the changes you want to make. In the case of building the future in place, local and subnational state and provincial governments are vital. These are the institutions charged with maintaining the public sphere, and powerful in crucial areas including transportation, building and zoning codes, public greenspaces, waste management, water supplies, pollution control, and economic development. In many areas they own energy utilities, while private utilities are regulated by state commissions. In other words, local and subnational jurisdictions play central roles in many of those areas requiring transformation. In fact, much of the progress made toward a more sustainable society has been accomplished at these governmental levels.

But we need something more. We need to coalesce a broader political movement with a vision for transformative change, and to reclaim capital flowing out of our communities for investment in public and community-based institutions that address basic human needs. We need a kind of evolutionary revolution that builds the common good, one which makes systemic, transformative changes in specific places, in that way building models and constituencies for changes on broader scales, creating networks that are both horizontal with other places and vertical up to national and global levels.

Many of these concepts go under the rubric of municipalism, a fundamental idea of which is not only leveraging existing governing institutions for change, but also creating a more participatory and inclusive context. This entails creating community assemblies or congresses that draw together diverse groups and movements to create visions for transformative change and build the political power to make them happen.

This strongly suggests that building a future based on the common good, on restoring community in place, begins by drawing together the many organized groups working for specific changes in localities into discussions aimed at coalescing their forces around a common agenda. One can envision stages beginning with conversations among group organizers leading to community congresses that agree on unified platforms and prioritize steps to realize them through work with local governments and civil society. Election of local officials who remain accountable to the will of community congresses, who will work to enact the agenda, is a key element. Many of these actions have already been modeled in places such as Barcelona, where for some years a civic movement made significant gains based on organizing through neighborhood and citywide assemblies. Though the movement there has seen setbacks, it still remains an influential model.

Beyond building a new political base, the key priority is to build a new economic base, one based on peace rather than war, which meets real human needs. That is why the growing movement for public banking is foundational. In the U.S., banking is largely a private enterprise built on bottom-line considerations. An exception is the state bank in North Dakota, a legacy of the populist era. So individuals, businesses and governments keep their money in institutions that send it around the world in search of the greatest profit opportunities, often undermining the interests of their depositors. Banks also have the power to create money, being able to lend beyond their reserves on the calculation most loans will be repaid.

A public banking system would treat money as a public utility, to be invested and created by social, economic and environmental criteria that promote the common good. Public banks created at local and subnational levels could fund public infrastructure, and eliminate interest paid to private banks. They could also fund needed community institutions such as social housing and worker coops. They could focus investments in areas crucial for sustainability at all levels, such as public transit, food production and distribution, clean energy, and materials recycling and recovery. Cities and states could become dynamic actors in building community-based economic institutions that meet needs where the private sector is falling short.

A political strategy for all seasons

Of course, such an agenda will be opposed by the same narrow private interests that obstruct progress at broader levels. Local business interests are powerful, and generally well organized and well funded. That is why we need coherent political movements with their own institutional infrastructures and visions and agendas for transformative change. The place such people power movements have the greatest potential to gain leverage is local areas. And where there are powerful local movements, the ability to move state and provincial governments is greatest. They can also coalesce into bioregional networks that build a new sense of identity and common purpose around place defined by nature.

Obviously, the multiple crises facing us require transformative change at all levels. The interest group politics that maintains a stranglehold on national governments must be dislodged. A new level of international cooperation must be achieved. These are necessities. Local focus allows us to build models that are truly transformative, and networks to spread them more widely and achieve broader gains. Local and regional communities are where people power politics can gain the most traction to begin re-balancing society and politics for community and the common good.

Ultimately, we need a politics for all seasons, one that can address all exigencies, a no-regrets political strategy that prepares for worst case scenarios, within reason, but which will work and provide gains under all scenarios. One which provides effective routes for transformative change through people power organizing. Which begins to re-balance who has power in society, turning around the trend to increased concentration of economic and political power by distributing power more widely. And which effectively addresses our convergent crises by beginning to restore the common good in economy and society.

Many fear, and even consider inevitable, that systemic collapse will be upon us in coming years. Ecologically, in the form of intensifying climate disruption and connected breakdowns of vital systems such as food production. Economically, in the form of a new great depression. Politically, in the form of deepening social conflicts and electoral outcomes that push national unity beyond the breaking point. All this speaks to the need to build strong, resilient communities. A political strategy that builds a future based on the common good beginning in the places where we live can meet this need, and potentially help avert worst case scenarios.

If humanity survives the current age, it will be recalled how we as a species navigated a time of great disruption on multiple levels. Certainly, we will have left a legacy of disrupted climate and ecosystems. We will have experienced consequences that are now unavoidable, but will somehow have avoided total civilizational collapse and nuclear warfare. I believe that when that story is told, it will be one of rediscovery of the common good, building a future based on community, human solidarity and mutual aid. Begining by building the future in place.

This first appeared on The Raven.

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Cybertruck, Tesla.

It seems that there has never been a better time than now to buy an electric vehicle in the United States, especially if you read news headlines and White House press releases. You might be forgiven for thinking that you can actually afford to upgrade your old gas-guzzling sedan with a sleek, new zero-emissions EV. And if you can’t afford one, the various local, state, and federal rebate programs will surely knock thousands off the price tag, right?

Wrong. In order to be able to qualify for the ever-changing and complicated federal $7,500 rebate on EVs, one has to be rich enough to be able to afford to buy a new EV (some used ones qualify but good luck figuring out which one, and then even better luck finding such a car available for purchase). But, in order to qualify for the rebate, one can’t be too rich. If you’re middle-income, like me, you can lease an EV, but then you don’t qualify for the rebate—your leasing company does—and you’re left paying a hefty monthly lease.

News headlines about Tesla slashing its EV prices might still convince you that a new EV is within reach—that is if you don’t mind enriching one of the worst humans on the planet. But Teslas are still among the more expensive cars on the market.

Meanwhile, there are sensationalist headlines about EV sales falling over the past year, so much so that one might be forgiven for thinking that maybe most people wanting an EV already purchased one and demand is simply weakening. Dig past the headlines however, and the news reports all come to the same conclusion: EVs are still unaffordable for the majority of Americans, especially those who simply want to reduce their carbon footprint and their financial expenses at the same time. “Pricing is still very much the biggest barrier to electric vehicles,” according to one research analyst.

A Los Angeles Times report agreed: “Although the cost of building EVs continues to drop, it has yet to reach price parity with conventional gasoline-powered vehicles.” But the paper then bizarrely blamed Americans for the high price tags, saying, “Americans’ preference for larger vehicles necessitates larger, heavier and costlier battery packs, contributing to the high prices.” There was no mention of auto manufacturers spending years aggressively marketing SUVs and other giant gas guzzlers to Americans. Indeed, there is a whole range of EV trucks on the market right now—still out of the grasp of ordinary middle-income Americans looking for an efficient commuter family car.

Too bad these consumers don’t have access to China’s new EV, the BYD Seagull, a car that test drivers in the U.S. are gushing over, and whose price tag begins at a mere $9,698. “That undercuts the average price of an American EV by more than $50,000,” explained Bloomberg. In fact, more than 70 percent of all EVs sold globally are Chinese manufactured. You don’t have to live in China to buy a Chinese EV. You just have to live outside the U.S.

What most headlines aren’t saying overtly and what the Biden administration is also keeping relatively quiet about is that the U.S. is engaging in a fiercely protectionist trade war with China in order to shield American automakers. Forget the TikTok war—it’s Chinese-made EVs that keep U.S. auto CEOs up at night.

To protect them, the Biden administration is fanning the flames of anti-China sentiment and claiming it is worried about “National Security Concerns” over the computer systems of Chinese-made EVs. “China is determined to dominate the future of the auto market, including by using unfair practices,” said Biden in late February. “China’s policies could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security.” The president has even ordered an investigation into China’s so-called smart cars, which most EVs are these days.

But the Biden administration’s climate goals for auto emissions rely on a mass transition to EVs across the nation. Already, it’s behind in ramping up towards its goal of wanting half of all vehicles sold in 2030 to be EVs, likely because most Americans can’t afford them, or can’t access the far-cheaper Chinese-made cars. On top of that, the GOP has now made attacking EVs part of its new culture war. It’s no wonder EVs remain out of reach for most Americans.

Why are Chinese cars so much cheaper, more varied, and just better than American ones? It doesn’t all boil down to the cost of labor as one might imagine. Chinese labor costs are not as low as they used to be. China’s government has simply made EVs a massive priority. An analysis in MIT Technology Review explained, “the government has long played an important role—propping up both the supply of EVs and the demand for them,” and that there have been “generous government subsidies, tax breaks, procurement contracts, and other policy incentives.”

Instead of adopting a similarly aggressive approach to making EVs a priority, the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has created a complex series of tax credits that require all EV materials and labor to be sourced in the U.S.—a goal whose math just doesn’t add up. And, the IRA doesn’t even protect U.S. workers enough. The United Auto Workers (UAW) denounced the IRA on its first anniversary for failing to require fair labor standards in the transition to an EV economy.

Still, UAW did the job itself. Fresh from a major union victory in late 2023 the union won job protections from the three biggest U.S. automakers for workers transitioning into the EV industry.

Our economy relies far too much on cars and most American cities are planned around car-centric living. It’s no wonder that petroleum-powered vehicles are the single largest U.S. source of climate-changing emissions. There are many ways to reduce this source, including redesigning cities to be more walkable, improving the quality and cost of public transportation and train systems, and encouraging bicycle transportation when possible—all of which will take concerted effort, time, and resources.

But the climate clock is ticking fast. After decades of scientists and climate activists sounding the alarm and being ignored, we are only now starting to take baby steps to mitigate climate change and it’s simply not enough. Even when accounting for the mineral extraction needed to make EV batteries, EVs have a far lower carbon footprint than petroleum-based cars and are perhaps the best, most accessible tool we have to quickly reduce our carbon impact.

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

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A characteristic of the hegemonic political and media culture of the United States is the near invisibility of social class as a major determinant of power. Race and gender have finally started to attract attention in the political and media establishments, but social class appears either ignored or silenced. The dominant establishments depict the U.S. as if it is a classless society, where because of ample opportunities and a large degree of social and vertical mobility, it is possible for everyone to rise from the bottom of society to the top. The evidence, however, shows that the United States has social classes (with a social class structure not dissimilar to the ones that exist in most countries on both sides of the North Atlantic, which, incidentally, have more extensive social mobility than in the U.S.). Moreover, there is plenty of evidence that each social class in the U.S. has its own economic, social, and cultural interests, expressed and promoted through their influence over the U.S. political institutions, advancing those policies that increase or reduce, for example, the huge social class health and quality of life inequalities that exist in this country, the largest among developed capitalist countries. Class health inequalities in the U.S. are also larger than race and gender inequalities, a reality that rarely appears in the dominant political and media discourse.

Another reality is that there are not only social classes, but there has also been an increased polarization of the class structure of the U.S. with a growing concentration of economic, political, and social power wielded by the dominant and upper class (known in the U.S. as the corporate class) at the cost of disempowering the popular classes, particularly the working class and the lower echelons of the middle class. What is also interesting (but rarely mentioned in the major media) is that, according to the most detailed study of popular perceptions of class in the U.S., the majority of people in the U.S. are and define themselves as belonging to the working class (for further elaboration of these points, see Vicente Navarro, What is happening in the United States; How social classes influence the political life of the country and its health and quality of life.

International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services, April 51(2), 2021).

The widely reproduced perception that the majority of the working population is middle class, as even President Biden mentioned in his State of the Union address, is inaccurate and is based on a biased survey that asked people to define themselves either as upper, middle, or lower class. The term lower class is derogatory and insulting, and very few people choose to define themselves as lower class. The occupational groups used by the General Social Survey (GSS) give an idea of classes in the U.S.: The corporate class includes corporate owners and managers; the middle class is comprised of professionals and technicians, business middle class and executives, self-employed shopkeepers, craftsmen and artisans; and the working class (the largest social class) includes manual workers, service workers, clerical and sales workers, and farm workers.

HOW THE CURRENT SOCIAL CLASS POWER RELATIONS PRODUCES AND REPRODUCES RACISM IN THE U.S.

As mentioned before, there are other categories of power, such as race and gender, that also have enormous importance in shaping the distribution of power in the U.S. and that are currently the center of attention in health equity circles. I consider these developments extraordinarily positive and necessary. However, not much attention has been given in those same circles to the category of social class, which is regrettable for many reasons. It is impossible, for example, to eliminate racism in the United States without understanding how racism is produced and reproduced in the country and the role it plays in dividing and weakening the working class in the defense of their interests, frequently in conflict with the corporate class. It is not by chance that the most ultra-right-wing parties, who actively promote the interests of the corporate class, also promote the most racist ideologies.

On the other hand, the relationship between the civil rights movement and the labor movement in the U.S. is precisely based on their commonality of interests. It was none other than Martin Luther King who, one week before being assassinated and while he was supporting a worker’s strike, said that the “class conflict was the critical conflict in the U.S.” (cited in, D. J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King; Penguin Books, 1981). Martin Luther King had been extremely critical of many labor laws, such as the profoundly anti-worker “right to work” laws that make it extremely difficult to establish a union. They were adopted in many states in the 1950s to stop the civil and labor rights movements that were growing at that time. In 1961, Martin Luther King defined such legislation as “a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights, to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and the working conditions of everyone. Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer, and there are no civil rights” (cited in Daryl Newman, President of the Detroit AFL-CIO, Remembering the racist history of right to work laws, Portside, February 28, 2024). It shows the enormous power of the corporate class that such a racist and anti-labor law was in place in Michigan (historically one of the most industrialized states) for 60 years until it was finally repealed this year, just a few weeks ago (February 13). Because racism is continuously and fundamentally used to divide the working class, the elimination of racism would benefit most of the population. The overwhelming power of the corporate class is based on the weakness of the working class, facilitated and reproduced by the lack of class solidarity and the existence of racism.

THE ENORMOUS AND URGENT NEED TO ESTABLISH CLASS-BASED ALLIANCES AND COALITIONS

It is because of this reality that there has always been a need for all the groups that are exploited and discriminated against (by race, gender, age, nationality, and other categories) to work together in common cause for the elimination of injustice. This is what occurred in the 1980s with the establishment of the Rainbow Coalition, which was created under the leadership of one of the disciples of Martin Luther King, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, to whom I was health advisor in his 1984 and 1988 campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination. Jesse Jackson ran as the voice of the minorities in 1984 (his slogan was “Our time has come”).

However, after the establishment of the Rainbow Coalition, he ran as the “voice of the working people” of all colors, black, brown, yellow, white, and whatever color, identity, and sensitivities.

The coalition included the civil rights movement, the trade union movement, the feminist movement, and the elderly movement, among others, making proposals to reduce and eliminate injustice and exploitation. An element that facilitated the establishment of such a coalition is that the majority of African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities, women, and the elderly are members of the working class, which also includes those echelons of the middle class that have been proletarianized with the increased dominance of for-profit corporations in sectors, like health and medicine, that were previously non-profit oriented. Therefore, social class became a connecting link among diverse groups.

In this strategy, race, for example, was not replaced by class, but rather, it was enriched by adding the category of class to race. The class solidarity needed by the different components of the coalition to reach their objectives was (and continues to be) incompatible with the existence of racism. In summary, social movements need a coalition that strengthens the possibility of obtaining their goals. This is what the Rainbow Coalition intended in 1988, and it succeeded. It introduced proposals that considerably impacted the country’s political debate. In the health sector, one of their most important proposals was for the establishment of a National Health Program, a universal program that would guarantee access to health care to all citizens and residents in the country in the same way, for example, that Medicare guarantees health care to all the elderly. (In the current terminology, the phrase Medicare for All is a demand for that right to universality.) The impact of Jesse Jackson’s proposals, like the one for a National Health Program, was enormous and mobilized many sectors of the working population. Jesse Jackson almost won the Democratic primary in 1988, shaking up the Democratic Party apparatus that was surprised and afraid of that movement.

THE OVERWHELMING POLITICAL POWER OF THE CORPORATE CLASS IS AN OBSTACLE TO SOLVING SOME OF THE U.S.’S MAJOR HEALTH INEQUITIES.

In the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton prominently included a proposal in his Democratic primary campaign for changes in the health sector, trying to capitalize on the interest in the subject that had been awakened in the late 1980s by the Rainbow Coalition’s advocacy for a National Health Program. He later established a Commission presided over by Hillary Clinton to make proposals to improve access to health care. However, he completely excluded the possibility of establishing a National Health Program, which is why Reverend Jackson, President of the Rainbow Coalition, Dennis Rivera, the President of 1199 SEIU, the most important union of healthcare workers in the U.S., and myself, health advisor to the Rainbow Coalition, went tosee Hillary Clinton to complain about that absence. Reverend Jackson asked that I be included in their Task Force, so for a year, I worked in the White House as part of that Task Force without having any influence. It was clear from the beginning that there was no chance that a National Health Program could even be considered despite being favored by most of the population. A key condition of the White House Task Force was that their proposals needed to be approved by the Senate and the House Health Committees. But many members of those and other especially relevant committees received campaign funding from corporate interests dominant in the health sector (from insurance companies to pharmaceutical companies, among many others) who put profits above human needs. In this context, a National Health Program was not even allowed to be considered. That complete rejection was a clear example of corporate class dominance of the political process. Consequently, the U.S. is one of the few countries on both sides of the North Atlantic that does not guarantee access to health care for citizens or residents.

THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF HEALTH INEQUITY AND THE RISE OF FOR-PROFIT HEALTHCARE IN THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR II

Corporate dominance of the health sector was legally established in the U.S. immediately after World War II. That war was among the few popular wars the U.S. government has ever fought.

It was a war against fascism and Nazism (maximum expressions of classism, racism, and sexism) led by an immensely popular and progressive president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Furthermore, the popular classes played a crucial role in that war. As a consequence, the demands from the majority of the population were very high after the war, with calls for significant changes such as the nationalization of banking and, in the health sector, the establishment of a National Health Program (as happened later on in Canada when the Social

Democratic Party established a universal health care system in a western province where it governed, which was later on expanded to the whole country). In the U.S., the rising demand for change, including in the health sector, frightened the dominant corporate class, which mobilized to stop reforms that would affect their interests. The corporate class, through the Republican party and the right-wing racist members of the Southern Democratic Party, united to pass the Taft-Harley Act (despite President Truman’s veto), which included a measure that weakened the labor movement by outlawing sympathy strikes. In other words, the unions could not function as class agents but were required to limit their organizing to their sectors and places of work. A blue-collar workers union, for example, could not strike in support of a service workers union. This was a way of dividing the working class, disallowing them to work together.

In other words, class solidarity was forbidden. The federal government of the U.S. is one of the few governments among developed democratic countries that prohibits sympathy strikes. In contrast, general strikes that paralyzed the whole economy occurred in several European countries during the tumultuous years of the Great Recession. The enormous power of the corporate class at the expense of the working class (the majority of the population in the U.S.) is one of the major causes of the dramatic underdevelopment of social and health rights in this country. The data clearly shows that on both sides of the North Atlantic, those countries where political parties have been historically rooted in the working class or labor parties, have much better equity and health indicators than those with very weak or no labor parties, like the U.S.Plenty of evidence supports this statement (Vicente Navarro and Leiyu Shi The Political Context of Social Inequalities and Health Inequalities Social Science and Medicine, Vol 52, 2001).

It is important to note that this same law, the Taft-Hartley Act that weakened and undermined the labor movement in the U.S., was also the law that established the regressive and fragmented basis for the funding of health care in the U.S., leading to the inevitable rise of inequities in access to health care. Instead of establishing a National Health Program (as Canada would later), the U.S. federal government promoted employers’ voluntary purchase of private health insurance plans, making people’s access to care dependent on their employer’s willingness and ability to provide coverage. In other words, when a worker is fired, they not only lose their salary but also their (and their family members’) medical care benefits. This form of control over employees is unknown in most other countries on both sides of the North Atlantic. It also explains why the number of working days lost because of strikes in the U.S. is among the lowest.

Not only did the Taft-Hartley Act strengthen the corporate class’s control over the labor force in each workplace, but it also promoted the rapid privatization of healthcare, expanding enormously the for-profit health sector, which became dominant in major areas like insurance and pharmaceuticals, prioritizing the optimization of profits over human needs. The system also became highly inefficient, with enormous administrative costs. Again, it was for the benefit of corporate interests at the expense of most of the population. Thus, the same law that thwarted the labor movement established the foundation for enormous inequities and injustice in the U.S. healthcare system.

Based on all these facts, it should be evident that social class is a critical variable in understanding what has been happening in the U.S. The enormous limitations of social rights and labor rights, as well as the very limited democracy in their representative institutions, are based primarily on the immense power of the corporate class, much greater than in any other major democratic country, and the overwhelming weakness of the working class, the weakest in any major democratic country. The lack of attention to this reality in the political media and academic institutions is precisely a consequence of their dominance by the corporate class.

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