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After the end of World War II, the U.S. employer class—the capitalists—faced overlapping threats, both domestic and foreign. On the domestic side, a coalition of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), two socialist parties, and a communist party had grown large and powerful during the 1930s Great Depression. Together, they pushed hard and successfully for domestic policies collectively known as the New Deal.

These policies included the establishment of the Social Security system, the unemployment compensation system, the nation’s first minimum wage, and a federal jobs program that employed millions. Along with several other programs, the New Deal represented a leftward shift of state priorities. For the employer class, worse than those spending shifts were the corresponding changes in federal revenue sources.

Sharply raised taxes on (and borrowing from) corporations and the rich funded the New Deal’s massive program for the employees. This reallocated the nation’s income and wealth from the top to the middle and bottom. As against the dominant trickle-down economic policies that were in place before and soon after it, the New Deal represented an experiment in trickle-up economic policies. Once World War II was over, the employer class wanted nothing more than to undo the New Deal, and to bring back trickle-down polices.

A second domestic problem threatened the U.S. economy after 1945: the risk of backsliding into depression. Five years of huge wartime deficit finance finally lifted the U.S. economy out of the 1930s depression. When 1945 put demobilization of troops and redeployment of resources to peacetime production on the agenda, it also provoked fears of a reversion to depression. Leading U.S. politicians and academics, more or less influenced by Keynes’s work, looked urgently to government interventions to prevent that.

The U.S. employer class also perceived foreign threats. Chief among these was the USSR, the wartime ally of the United States. In service to the U.S. employer class, President Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) transformed perceptions about the USSR from a close wartime ally into a fearsome enemy bent on “overthrowing the U.S. by force and violence.” Despite having suffered enormous wartime destruction, the USSR was quickly rebranded by U.S. mainstream politicians, media, business, and academic leaders as an extreme danger. Communists and their “fellow travelers” were notoriously purged by what has ever since been called McCarthyism.

Western European leaders also feared and turned against the USSR as Europe’s eastern countries became the USSR’s postwar socialist allies. These countries also became closer to the USSR as it supported and assisted successful revolutions against an already weakened European colonialism. At the same time, Europe’s employer classes acutely feared their domestic communist parties that were by then strongly entrenched in their anti-Nazi resistance movements and organized labor movements. The 1930s depression strengthened them all (as it had in the United States).

In Europe, labor movements, communist and socialist parties, and many of their supporters mobilized, trained, equipped, funded, and coordinated several anti-fascist resistances. By 1945, that resistance work led to the immense popularity of these parties and movements. Western European employers in each country feared the economic demands their domestic socialists, communists, and labor unions would make. Those demands would be backed by their workers’ domestic political power and gain more support due to the USSR’s geopolitical proximity.

These conditions in the United States and Western Europe resulted in a shared commitment by their capitalist classes, leading to an alliance, which would embrace U.S. dominance—defined as “free-world leadership”—in military matters and in mobilizing resources internationally against the USSR (NATO, IMF, and World Bank). The employer class in each of these countries focused their resources, along with those of their governments, to purge communists, socialists, labor militants, and their supporters as thoroughly as conditions allowed. The actions ranged from imprisonment and deportation to loss of jobs, income, and social influence.

The alliance’s central theme was to declare and wage a Cold War against both the USSR and its “agents” inside the United States and European countries. The purges inside the United States included the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg as Soviet spies. Those actions also entailed loudly favoring (and secret CIA funding) many of Europe’s “pro-Western” politicians and parties, media outlets, and student groups. The U.S.-European alliance added Canada and Japan to their bloc. The U.S. dollar and its global position lubricated everything this alliance was and did.

The central ideological and political problem for the U.S. employer class after 1945 was how to accomplish the undoing of the New Deal and the United States’ wartime alliance with the USSR. The solution it found was a well-coordinated, well-funded campaign featuring cohesive arguments articulated by institutions that could saturate global public opinion. Nothing less than a total turnaround in public opinion and policy would rescue U.S. capitalism from what its employer class saw as an existential crisis.

There lie certain similarities with what Trump faced when he took office in 2025. In both cases, the employer class felt deeply threatened, especially due to the escalation of the political and economic dangers. Today, that class worries about crippling social divisions and tensions. The deepening inequalities of the distributions of income, wealth, and political influence have caused the promised American dream to be out of reach for the majority, which has angered them.

The employer class also fears the deepening indebtedness of its government, its corporate sector, and the majority of households amid the worrisome decline of the nation’s geopolitical position. China’s growth over recent decades positions it as the first serious global economic competitor of the United States in a century (the USSR was too small an economy to ever achieve this status). Among the many consequences of China’s growth, the fading global position of the U.S. dollar ranks high. As in the case of Truman taking power in 1945, Trump’s second term is also defined by heavy cumulated pressures prioritizing breaking from dangerous and declining situations.

The U.S. employer class’s solution in 1945 was to destroy the domestic left and transform the USSR from ally to enemy. Trump’s solution for the employer class is similarly to try to destroy the left but to transform Russia from an enemy to an ally. Despite important differences in time and global conditions—the United States left in 1945 was far more radical than it became later and is now—the similarities here are suggestive. In 1945, employers commenced undoing the New Deal. They eventually succeeded, but only partly. They managed an upward redistributive state, but they had to accept the shift to a regulatory state. Today, Trump seeks to complete burying the New Deal legacy by going further and undoing the regulatory state.

The class politics of Trump carry forward the actions of his predecessors across the last century. The details, not the goals, vary with the circumstances. The transition from the USSR to Russia facilitated Trump’s changed policy stance toward the country. The decline of the United States’ organized labor movement over the last 70 years facilitated Trump’s electoral appeal to the employee class. On the other hand, China’s continuing rise as an economic competitor reinforces the employer class’s worries about its status and security. More deeply, what disturbs the U.S. employer class now is the intertwined decline of the U.S. empire and the U.S. capitalism’s global position.

After 1945, the employer class reasserted its social dominance. It refocused the federal government on the twin tasks of purging supporters of the New Deal from the government, unions, and other social institutions and demonizing and containing the USSR as the evil global enemy. Anti-communism became the main ideological weapon to achieve this. The purge demanded that all those who supported the deal not only denounce communism but also show sympathy to such dogmas as “state interference in the economy” is inefficient, wasteful, and inferior to what private “free” enterprises could and would achieve.

Communists, socialists, unionists, liberals, Democrats, and others associated with the New Deal got purged as believers in bureaucracy, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. At best, they were seen as agents of Moscow’s crusades against democracy and individual liberty. Putting domestic communists first among its targets let the employer class link the domestic purge quickly and seamlessly with the Cold War struggles against the USSR. These actions against communists at home while waging the Cold War abroad aimed to defeat two evils at the same time.

Over the last 80 years, the employer class, directly and through its power over governments, undertook a massive program of ideological change. It made the struggle between more versus less government intervention in the “private enterprise economy” and “the free market” an important issue in economics and public policy. Professional economists debated between Keynesianism and neoclassicism. Moderate politicians rallied around slogans that defined the struggle as being between “meeting people’s needs” versus suffering a “authoritarian bureaucracy.” Extremist politicians called the state evil (often using communist, socialist, liberal, Democrat, and even terrorist as synonyms).

The global “free market” established after 1945 enabled the United States, which became dominant after the wartime destruction of all potential economic rivals (Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Russia, and Italy), to sustain that position through NATO on the one hand and demonizing the USSR on the other. Fighting communism abroad justified sustaining that dominance. Fighting communism at home justified destroying the New Deal coalition and thereby undoing the policy.

Cold War leaders in the United States, representing both major political parties, carried out these policies consistently. The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 report updates and expands them into a plan that Trump’s regime is largely following. That plan targets what little remains of the New Deal: removing “regulatory” state apparatuses. Trump’s regime also accepts implicitly what it denies explicitly: that the U.S. empire and U.S. capitalism are in decline.

Tariffs are the magic bullet to reverse all that and fast. Above all, they are implemented with the hope that they will return manufacturing to the United States. (This was promised by each of the presidents this century, but none of them delivered on it.) The tariffs might, at best, slow the decline, but their political, economic, and ideological costs and the retaliations by many nations will make the magic bullet fail. Much the same happened to many empires earlier that failed to stop their decline with their magic bullets. Tariffs will likely function much like the proposal of “taking back” the Panama Canal or Greenland and loudly squeezing symbolic gains from Canada and Mexico. These plans are aggressive disguises and over-advertised offsets for the painful reality of the declining empire and economy.

It is worth remembering that in all empires, when their rise inevitably turns into decline, those who accumulated the greatest wealth and power use these resources to retain their position. They thereby offload the costs of decline onto the middle and lower classes. The latter suffer more and face the consequences first. Trump’s first budget proposals starkly exhibit this offloading. For most empires, such offloading proves socially divisive and ends very badly.

Recent national election results in Canada and Australia suggest that those classes are beginning to grasp the Trump regime’s larger goals and have voted against politicians seen to be insufficiently opposed to them. Some polls in the United States point in similar directions. Europe’s leaders are worried too. Most of them have been long and deeply complicit with the United States’ goals and methods. Voters may punish them for failure to resist the repeated anti-European policies and attitudes flowing from the Trump regime. European leaders risk voters finding them guilty by association. So many break away from Trump by exaggerating support for Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine and demonizing Russia.

The roots of resistance expand and deepen.

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Photograph Source: Molly Adams – CC BY 2.0

I have long been a fan of universal Medicare. While some time back I thought we could get there fairly quickly, I became a fan of incrementalist approaches as I watched even much smaller changes like the ACA get bogged down in petty politics and industry lobbying. As bizarre as it seems, Trump’s second term makes me more optimistic about a quicker transition.

There are three reasons for my newfound optimism. The first is the public response to the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United HealthCare. I am not going to in any way endorse violent actions against insurance executives, or anyone else in the industry, but the widespread sympathy for Luigi Mangione, shows considerable hostility towards insurance companies. The era where most people liked their insurance company seems to be behind us.

The second has been the ability of Trump to walk all over long-established norms and rules of conduct. It’s true that Trump has a cult following that will literally buy anything he says or does, and a money-man enforcer in the form of Elon Musk.

But a Democratic president elected on a clear agenda for universal Medicare could look to apply similar pressure on congressional holdouts, if they have established their case in the campaign. If people understand the issues and have given a president a clear mandate for universal Medicare, they have some ability to push recalcitrant senators and Congresspeople.

They can also pull a Trump and threaten to withhold important funding for their state or district. Yeah, this is bullshit politics, but when billionaires can buy elections, there is no point in playing nice. And it doesn’t look like the courts will do much to block this, unless they become even more political in applying different standards for Republicans than Democrats.

The third reason is that Trump’s looney tariff-fest shows that people are not as allergic to taxes as has generally been believed. Trump has imposed one of the most massive tax increases in the last half century with his tariffs, likely on the order of $300 billion a year, or $2,200 per household. And it could go much higher. The tariffs have hurt him in the polls and will likely hurt more when they really start to bite, but the reaction is nothing like we might have expected with such a huge tax increase.

Trump’s tax increases are literally for nothing. Yeah, he tells his followers that we will get back good-paying manufacturing jobs, but it’s not likely anyone but his extreme cultists buy that. Does anyone really think workers will get paid $35 an hour, with benefits, sowing together dolls or turning tiny screws in an iPhone?

The other rationale is offsetting the cost of Trump’s big tax cuts to corporations and the rich. This is a priority for Trump’s billionaire backers, but not a huge winner at the kitchen table for most of the country. If Trump can get away with his massive tariff-tax increase, surely raising taxes to provide everyone with good quality healthcare would be politically doable.

There are a million ways to slice and dice both a universal Medicare plan and also the transition, which will pose real problems. However, it is important any plan be comprehensive. That doesn’t mean it has to cover the plastic surgery needed to give people the Mar a Lago look, but it does need to cover areas like dental, vision, and hearing, which are excluded from traditional Medicare.

Dental care is by far the biggest of these three. It has historically been separate from more general healthcare. That may have made sense sixty years ago, when dental care was relatively simple and cheap (dentists filled cavities and pulled teeth). It doesn’t make sense today. We’ll spend close to $200 billion this year, $1,600 per household, on dental care. That’s a lot for people to absorb out of pocket, especially since it is very unevenly distributed, some will have bills coming to many thousands of dollars, while others will pay little or nothing.

Much of the story in having the government pick up the tab for healthcare is getting the money that is currently paid by companies and workers for private health insurance. That will be close to $1.5 trillion this year. Most of it from employers.

This is where the tax would come in. If it takes the form of an employer-side payroll tax it would largely replace the money that employers are now paying to insurance companies. While there are some issues of implementation that are tricky, it is unlikely many workers would be upset if their employer was paying money to the government for insurance rather than a private insurer, especially since the coverage would likely be better than what they are getting now.

It is also important that we take a chainsaw to costs in the industry. As has often been pointed out, our government already pays enough for national health insurance. Federal, state, and local governments will pay more than $8,500 a person this year for healthcare through Medicare, Medicaid and other public programs. This does not even count the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance. By comparison, Germany and the Netherlands both spend around $6,000 per person in total for their healthcare.

Part of the story of reducing costs is easy. We pay $350 billion a year for the administrative costs of private health insurance, more than 25 percent of what they pay out to providers. By contrast, the administrative costs of Medicare are just over 1.0 percent of what it pays out to providers.

There are a number of reasons for these differences, but an obvious one is that the insurers pay their top executives tens of millions a year. By contrast, the top administrators in Medicare get a bit over $200,000 a year. If someone is looking for waste, the excessive pay of insurance company executives is a good place to start.

In addition, the insurers are in business to make a profit for their shareholders, and at least some of them have been doing a good job of that lately. The stock of HCA, the country’s largest insurer, has increased more than fourfold over the last five years.

On top of the money directly paid to the insurers, there are also enormous indirect costs.  Hospitals, doctors’ offices, and other providers have to spend an enormous amount of money hiring staff to deal with the differing rules and forms of various insurers. A recent study found that in 2017 almost a third of our healthcare expenditures went to cover the direct and indirect costs of insurance, almost five times what Canada was spending on a per person basis for its universal Medicare system. Eliminating this waste will get us most of the way toward covering the cost of universal Medicare in the United States.

But there is also enormous waste in what we pay providers. We pay twice as much for most of our healthcare inputs as people in other wealthy countries. The first place to look is prescription drugs. We will spend more than $700 billion this year, $2,200 per person, for drugs and other pharmaceutical products. Other countries spend less than half this amount. If we let drugs be sold in a free market, without patent monopolies, we would likely be spending close to $100 billion a year.

There is a similar story with medical equipment, where we pay far more for everything from MRIs and other scanning equipment to kidney dialysis machines. We also pay our doctors roughly twice as much as doctors in other wealthy countries. (This is much more a story with specialists than family practitioners.) Getting doctors’ pay down to something close to what they receive in Germany and Canada could save around $100 billion a year.

In short, there are ways to squeeze out the savings that would make universal Medicare affordable in the United States. There are obviously tons of things that need to be worked through in the details of a universal Medicare plan, which will matter a lot, but the main thing is to put the idea on the table. The details can be worked out after the fact.

Will a plan for universal Medicare sell politically? That isn’t my area, but I can say that what the Democrats have been selling has not done especially well. They just lost an election to a former reality-TV show host and failed president who had previously tried to overthrow the government. And as Trump has made an unprecedented assault on democracy, the response of its two leaders in Congress was to embark on tours hawking their new ghost-written books.

Perhaps a plan for universal Medicare will scare away billionaires who might otherwise support Democrats. That seems a risk worth taking. The prospect of the party taking and holding power, while offering most people no real change in the system does not seem very promising.

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

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Logo of the NED – CC BY-SA 4.0

The brief freeze and rapid partial reinstatement of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funding in early 2025 helped expose it as a US regime-change tool. Created to rebrand CIA covert operations as “democracy promotion,” the NED channels government funds to opposition groups in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, meddling in their internal affairs.

Regime change on the US agenda

In 2018, Kenneth Wollack bragged to the US Congress that the NED had given political training to 8,000 young Nicaraguans, many of whom were engaged in a failed attempt to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Wollack was praising the “democracy-promotion” work carried out by NED, of which he is now vice-chair. Carl Gershman, then president of the NED and giving evidence, was asked about Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who had been re-elected with an increased majority two years prior. He responded: “Time for him to go.”

Seven years later, Trump took office and it looked as if the NED’s future was endangered. On February 12, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk froze disbursement of its congressionally approved funds. Its activities stopped and its website went blank. On February 24, Richard Grenell, special envoy to Venezuela, declared that “Donald Trump is someone who does not want to make regime changes.”

Washington’s global regime-change operations were immediately impacted and over 2,000 paid US collaborating organizations temporarily defunded. A Biden-appointed judge warned of “potentially catastrophic harm” to (not in her words) US efforts to overturn foreign governments. The howl from the corporate press was deafening. The Associated Press cried: “‘Beacon of freedom’ dims as US initiatives that promote democracy abroad wither.”

However, the pause lasted barely a month. On March 10, funding was largely reinstated.  The NED, which “deeply appreciated” the State Department’s volte face, then made public its current program which, in Latin America and the Caribbean alone, includes over 260 projects costing more than $40 million.

US “soft power”

Created in 1983 under President Ronald Reagan following scandals involving the CIA’s covert funding of foreign interventions, the NED was to shift such operations into a more publicly palatable form under the guise of “democracy promotion.” As Allen Weinstein, NED’s first acting president, infamously admitted in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” In short, NED functions as a “soft power arm” of US foreign policy.

The NED disingenuously operates as a 501(c)(3) private nonprofit foundation. However, it is nearly 100% funded by annual appropriations from the US Congress and governed mainly by Washington officials or ex-officials. In reality, it is an instrument of the US state—and, arguably, of the so-called deep state. But its quasi-private status shields it from many of the disclosure requirements that typically apply to taxpayer-funded agencies.

Hence we encounter verbal gymnastics such as those in its “Duty of Care and Public Disclosure Policies.” That document loftily proclaims: “NED holds itself to high standards of transparency and accountability.” Under a discussion of its “legacy” (with no mention of its CIA pedigree), the NGO boasts: “Transparency has always been central to NED’s identity.”

But it continues, “…transparency for oversight differs significantly from transparency for public consumption.” In other words, it is transparent to the State Department but not to the public. The latter are only offered what it euphemistically calls a “curated public listing of grants” – highly redacted and lacking in specific details.

NED enjoys a number of advantages by operating in the nether region between an accountable US government agency and a private foundation. It offers plausible deniability: the US government can use it to support groups doing its bidding abroad without direct attribution, giving Washington a defense from accusations of interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is also more palatable for foreign institutions to partner with what is ostensibly an NGO, rather than with the US government itself.

The NED can also respond quickly if regime-change initiatives are needed in countries on Washington’s enemy list, circumventing the usual governmental budgeting procedures. And, as illustrated during that congressional presentation in 2018 on Nicaragua, NED’s activities are framed as supporting democracy, human rights, and civil society. It cynically invokes universal liberal values while promoting narrow Yankee geopolitical interests. Thus its programs are sold as altruistic rather than imperial, and earn positive media headlines like the one from the AP cited above.

But a look at NED’s work in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba suggests very much the opposite.

Venezuela

Venezuela had passed an NGO Oversight Law in 2024. Like the US’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, but somewhat less restrictive, the law requires certification of NGOs. As even the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) – an inside-the-beltway promoter of US imperialism with a liberal gloss –  admits: “Many Venezuelan organizations receiving US support have not been public about being funding recipients.”

The pace of Washington’s efforts in Venezuela temporarily slowed with the funding pause, as US-funded proxies had to focus on their own survival. Venezuelan government officials, cheering the pause, viewed the NED’s interference in their internal affairs as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. In contrast, the US-funded leader of the far-right opposition, Maria Corina Machado, begged for international support to make up for the shortfall from Washington.

WOLA bemoaned that the funding freeze allowed the “Maduro government to further delegitimize NGOs” paid by the US. Hundreds of US-funded organizations, they lamented, “now face the grim choice of going underground, relocating abroad, or shutting down operations altogether.”

With the partial reinstatement of funding, now bankrolling at least 39 projects costing $3.4 million, former US senator and present NED board member Mel Martinez praised the NED for its “tremendous presence in Venezuela… supporting the anti-Maduro movement.”

Nicaragua

Leading up to the 2018 coup attempt, the NED had funded 54 projects worth over $4 million. Much of this went to support supposedly “independent” media, in practice little more than propaganda outlets for Nicaragua’s opposition groups. Afterward, the NED-funded online magazine Global Americans revealed that the NED had “laid “the groundwork for insurrection” in Nicaragua.

One of the main beneficiaries, Confidencial, is owned by the Chamorro family, two of whose members later announced intentions to stand in Nicaragua’s 2021 elections. The family received well over $5 million in US government funding, either from the NED or directly from USAID (now absorbed into the State Department). In 2022, Cristiana Chamorro, who handled much of this funding, was found guilty of money laundering. Her eight-year sentence was commuted to house arrest; after a few months she was given asylum in the US.

Of the 22 Nicaragua-related projects which NED has resumed funding, one third sponsor “independent” media. While the recipients’ names are undisclosed, it is almost certain that this funding is either for outlets like Confidencial (now based in Costa Rica), or else is going direct to leading opponents of the Sandinista government to pay for advertisements currently appearing in Twitter and other social media.

Cuba

In Latin America, Cuba is targeted with the highest level of NED spending – $6.6 million covering 46 projects. One stated objective is to create “a more well-informed, critically minded citizenry,” which appears laughable to anyone who has been to Cuba and talked to ordinary people there – generally much better informed about world affairs than a typical US citizen.

Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez criticized the NED’s destabilizing activities, such as financing 54 anti-Cuba organizations since 2017. He advised the US administration to review “how many in that country [the US] have enriched themselves organizing destabilization and terrorism against Cuba with support from that organization.”

Washington not only restored NED funding for attacks on Cuba but, on May 15, added Cuba to the list of countries that “do not fully cooperate with its anti-terrorist efforts.”

The NED: Covert influence in the name of democracy

Anyone with a basic familiarity with the Washington’s workings is likely to be aware of the NED’s covert role. Yet the corporate media – behaving as State Department stenographers and showing no apparent embarrassment – have degenerated to the point where they regularly portray the secretly funded NED outlets as “independent” media serving the targeted countries.

Case in point: Washington Post columnist Max Boot finds it “sickening” that Trump is “trying [to] end US government support for democracy abroad.” He is concerned because astroturf “democracy promotion groups” cannot exist without the flow of US government dollars. He fears the “immense tragedy” of Trump’s executive order to cut off funding (now partially reinstated) for the US Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of the Voice of America, Radio Marti, and other propaganda outlets.

Behind the moralistic appeals to democracy promotion and free press is a defense of the US imperial project to impose itself on countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. Those sanctioned countries, targeted for regime change, need free access to food, fuel, medicines and funding for development. They don’t need to hear US propaganda beamed to them or generated locally by phonily “independent” media.

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Photograph Source: Jaber Jehad Badwan – CC BY-SA 4.0

CAIRO, Egypt — It is 200 miles from where I am in Cairo to the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Parked in the arid sands in the northern Sinai of Egypt are 2,000 trucks filled with sacks of flour, water tanks, canned food, medical supplies, tarps and fuel. The trucks idle under the scorching sun with temperatures climbing into the high 90s.

A few miles away in Gaza, dozens of men, women and children, living in crude tents or damaged buildings amid the rubble, are being butchered daily from bullets, bombs, missile strikes, tank shells, infectious diseases and that most ancient weapon of siege warfare — starvation. One in five people are facing starvation after nearly three months of Israel’s blockade of food and humanitarian aid.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has launched a new offensive that is killing upwards of 100 people a day, has declared that nothing will impede this final assault, named Operation Gideon’s Chariots.

There will be “no way,” Israel will stop the war, he announced, even if the remaining Israeli hostages are returned. Israel is “destroying more and more houses” in Gaza. The Palestinians “have nowhere to return.”

“[The] only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip,” he told lawmakers at a leaked closed-door meeting. “But our main problem is finding countries to take them in.”

The nine-mile border between Egypt and Gaza has become the dividing line between the Global South and the Global North, the demarcation between a world of savage industrial violence and the desperate struggle by those cast aside by the wealthiest nations. It marks the end of a world where humanitarian law, conventions that protect civilians or the most basic and fundamental rights matter. It ushers in a Hobbesian nightmare where the strong crucify the weak, where no atrocity, including genocide, is precluded, where the white race in the Global North reverts to the unrestrained, atavistic savagery and domination that defines colonialism and our centuries long history of pillage and exploitation. We are tumbling backwards in time to our origins, origins that never left us, but origins that were masked by empty promises of democracy, justice and human rights.

The Nazis are the convenient scapegoats for our shared European and American heritage of mass slaughter, as if the genocides we carried out in the Americas, Africa and India did not take place, unimportant footnotes in our collective history.

In fact, genocide is the currency of Western domination.

Between 1490 and 1890, European colonization, including acts of genocide, was responsible for killing as many as 100 million indigenous people, according to the historian David E. Stannard. Since 1950 there have been nearly two dozen genocides, including those in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Rwanda.

The genocide in Gaza is part of a pattern. It is the harbinger of genocides to come, especially as the climate breaks down and hundreds of millions are forced to flee to escape droughts, wildfires, flooding, declining crop yields, failed states and mass death. It is a blood-soaked message from us to the rest of the world: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you.

Gaza puts to rest the lie of human progress, the myth that we are evolving morally. Only the tools change. Where once we clubbed victims to death, or chopped them to pieces with broadswords, today we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee camps, spray families with bullets from militarized drones or pulverize them with tank shells, heavy artillery and missiles.

The 19th century socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, dismissed the belief central to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality. He warned that this absurd positivism is perpetrated by oppressors to disempower the oppressed.

“All atrocities of the victor, the long series of his attacks are coldly transformed into constant, inevitable evolution, like that of nature… But the sequence of human things is not inevitable like that of the universe. It can be changed at any moment.” Blanqui warned.

Scientific and technological advancement, rather than an example of progress, could “become a terrible weapon in the hands of Capital against Work and Thought.”

“For humanity” Blanqui wrote, “is never stationary. It either advances or goes back. Its progressive march leads it to equality. Its regressive march goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.” Further, he wrote, “I am not amongst those who claim that progress can be taken for granted, that humanity cannot go backwards.”

Human history is defined by long periods of cultural barrenness and brutal repression. The fall of the Roman Empire led to immiseration and repression throughout Europe during the Dark Ages, roughly from the sixth through the 13th century. There was a loss of technical knowledge, including how to build and maintain aqueducts. Cultural and intellectual impoverishment led to collective amnesia. The ideas of ancient scholars and artists were blotted out. There was no rebirth until the 14th century and the Renaissance, a development made possible largely by the cultural flourishing of Islam, which, through translating Aristotle into Arabic and other intellectual accomplishments, kept the wisdom of the past from disappearing.

Blanqui knew history’s tragic reverses. He took part in a series of French revolts, including an attempted armed insurrection in May 1839, the 1848 uprising and the Paris Commune — a socialist uprising that controlled France’s capital from March 18 until May 28 in 1871. Workers in cities such as Marseilles and Lyon attempted, but failed, to organize similar communes before the Paris Commune was militarily crushed.

We are entering a new dark age. This dark age uses the modern tools of mass surveillance, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, drones, militarized police, the revoking of due process and civil liberties to inflict the arbitrary rule, incessant wars, insecurity, anarchy and terror that were the common denominators of the Dark Ages.

To trust in the fairy tale of human progress to save us is to become passive before despotic power. Only resistance, defined by mass mobilization, by disrupting the exercise of power, especially against genocide, can save us.

Campaigns of mass killing unleash the feral qualities that lie latent in all humans. The ordered society, with its laws, etiquette, police, prisons and regulations, all forms of coercion, keeps these latent qualities in check. Remove these impediments and humans become, as we see with the Israelis in Gaza, murderous, predatory animals, reveling in the intoxication of destruction, including of women and children. I wish this was conjecture. It is not. It is what I witnessed in every war I covered. Almost no one is immune.

The Belgian monarch King Leopold in the late 19th century occupied the Congo in the name of Western civilization and anti-slavery, but plundered the country, resulting in the death — by disease, starvation and murder — of some 10 million Congolese.

Joseph Conrad captured this dichotomy between who we are and who we say we are in his novel “Heart of Darkness” and his short story “An Outpost of Progress.”

In “An Outpost of Progress,” he tells the story of two European traders, Carlier and Kayerts, who are sent to the Congo. These traders claim to be in Africa to implant European civilization.

The boredom, the stifling routine, and most importantly the lack of all outside constraints, turns the two men into beasts. They trade slaves for ivory. They fight over dwindling food and supplies. Kayerts finally murders his unarmed companion Carlier.

“They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals,” Conrad wrote of Kayerts and Carlier, “whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations — to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.”

The genocide in Gaza has imploded the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It mocks every virtue we claim to uphold, including the right of freedom of expression. It is a testament to our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism. We cannot, having provided billions of dollars in weapons and persecuted those who decry the genocide, make moral claims anymore that will be taken seriously. Our language, from now on, will be the language of violence, the language of genocide, the monstrous howling of the new dark age, one where absolute power, unchecked greed and unmitigated savagery stalks the earth.

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Nicușor Dan and George Simion during their only televised debate, on 8 May 2025.

Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan bested sovereigntist George Simion in Sunday’s Romanian presidential election. Both were anti-systemic candidates of sorts. They were Romania’s established political parties that crumbled over the course of a half-year long electoral contest. Dan, a math Olympiad, once youth anti-corruption activist, and mayor of Bucharest, embodied the idealized self-image of Romania’s youth and thriving urban middle class professionals. Meanwhile, Simion, who at university studied “crimes of communism” and history, leaned toward symbols of national greatness. He called for reuniting independent Moldova (Bessarabia) with Romania, while embracing national and traditional values finding resonance among Romania’s culturally conservative population. He took a majority of both rural voters and of the nearly 1.7 million strong diaspora vote. These latter populations have struggled for decades with no political party championing their interests.

But the real winner of Romania’s May 18, 2025 presidential election was mass psychological pressure. The long election season started in November 2024 with Tik Tok’s algorithmic matches tossed onto Romania’ flammable electoral tinder. Democracy went rogue, escaping the reservation of the country’s long established political coalitions. Panicked, the Romanian government canceled the second round of presidential voting scheduled for December 4th before the upstart “sovereigntist” candidate Călin Georgescu could ignite a full-scale prairie fire laying waste to Romania’s political terrain. With the United States Embassy at its back, Romania’s government announced its canceling of the next round of elections scheduled for December 4th and banned its front-runner candidate. No disinterested observer, Romania hosts a rapidly expanding set of US military bases rapidly becoming a chief NATO forward force on the Black Sea. Thus, it was no surprise that this rip cord was pulled, aborting Romania’s elections and then blamed on (drumroll): Russia. Romania reprised the US’s MSNBC news network narrative that surely Americans in 2016 could not have “elected” the unctuous Donald Trump. America’s elites defaulted to the psychologically comforting narrative that “Russia did it.” In fact, Kremlin social media buys in the US 2016 election amounted to a paltry $100,000 that merely ran retreads of GOP social media memes and ads delivering nothing new to the campaign. No doubt Kremlin “Boris Badenov” operatives in a sort of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Democratic figures such US Senator Adam “Shifty” (rightly dubbed by Trump) Schiff delighted in this narrative that Moscow steered the election result over any introspection that it represented socio-economic turbulence within Romania.

In the case of the US 2016 election, the reality was that Trump out hustled Democrats. Cambridge Analytica (CA) delivered superior data to the Trump campaign, meanwhile Democrats and Hillary Clinton were smugly satisfied that they were “superior” to the horrible TV reality star. Trump brought his one part tent revival, one part Hulk Hogan wrestling match and one part public lynching as Sunday entertainment program, to forgotten parts of Wisconsin eight times during that election that Hillary Clinton deemed unimportant enough to visit Wisconsin even once. And of course, let’s not forget Bernie Sanders, to whom Democrats gave the “et tu Brutus” treatment in both 2016 and 2020 (with Elizabeth Warren being called up from central casting in both elections to play the role of Brutus). This delivered tailwinds helping propel Trump toward both his electoral wins. In short, Trump’s victory was homegrown.

Meanwhile, Romania’s government in November asserted with the blessings of Washington and Brussels, that AI and social media deployed by nefarious interests sought to burn down Romania’s still youthful democracy. While true, this correlation does not necessarily make for causation on why Romania’s Georgescu won the first round of voting. With Biden gone on January 21, 2025 and Trump restored to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the United States government flipped its position on Romania. On February 14th’s Munich Security Pact, U.S. Vice-President, J.D. Vance punctuated the point about Romania’s dubious actions taken on the score of democracy in shutting down its election and banning its most popular candidate for office. His argument, credibly, was that if small social media buys can derail elections, then democracy’s roots in Romania must be shallow. Meanwhile, Romanians were divided on its cancelled elections. For sovereigntists this was about their political voice, agency and government arbitrarily revoking their choice. For other Romanian voters the question was not electoral fairness, but the potential pending loss of US security guarantees and Romania adhering to its political liberal path. Bordering a war zone with what they term the “beast from the east,” many Romanians look to the United States for security. European leaders in the main also backed Romania’s government decision to cancel their second round of voting.

The anti-system nature of Romania’s elections continued this April and May. Candidates of Romania’s established political parties were rejected by voters. The interim social-democrat prime-minister resigned only to be replaced by another interim coming from the liberal center-right ranks. None of the candidates that qualified for the annulled second round in December 2024 were present on the May 18, 2025 final ballot. One candidate was prevented by the Constitutional Court from running, another got less than 3% in the first round of elections on May 4th. Yet, the April-May electoral campaign was spared from the Tik Tok campaigns of the previous November election. The banned sovereigntist Călin Georgescu was now replaced with a candidate one generation his junior. The 38-year-old George Simion who emerged from Romania’s nationalist soccer toughs, the Ultras. A self-declared admirer of all things Donald Trump, Simion sought to “Make Romania Great Again.”

The results of this shuffling of Romania’s electoral terrain in recent months was both surprising yet predictable. The political fights were predictable enough, but the final candidates emerged victorious, surprising. Both finalists came from outside the established national political landscape. Both claimed to be against Romania’s established political parties – one on the populist right, and one a mayor fusing liberal values and local politics. The electoral questions in play mirrored the same East vs West debate present at Romania’s post-communist founding over three decades back. Like a long jazz bee bop solo departing from melody the past many years, Romania this past year “returned to melody” with the questions of will Romania’s future be linked to the East? West? Or somehow exist outside both?

With the elections settled, Romania can be seen as suffering many losses this election. Large segments of society lost trust in the national project of embedding itself within a larger European Union values-based system; traditional political parties’ lost viability and possibly face extinction; trust in institutions to run elections shattered; voters residing within the country distrusting voters working abroad and vice-versa; trust in elections lost to AI algorithms; and the idea elections work in the public interest. But the current wave of anti-systemic currents against liberal democracy has common sources, chiefly economic insecurities and inequalities that are expressions of neoliberalism.

Romanians are merely the most recent nation having knocked the next brick off liberal democracy’s crumbling “Vital Center.” Romania in 1989 was thrust into the then forecasted liberal “end of history” that buried Central and Eastern Europe’s “really existing communism.” But for the “really existing democracies” of the time they themselves were already undergoing (borrowing Karl Polanyi’s term, who incidentally completed his dissertation in Cluj-Napoca, Romania) a “Great Transformation.” After the cataclysms of war, economic collapse and revolutions of the 20th century’s first half, social democracies were created in post-war West (including Japan).  By the 1980s the stable social democratic post WWII orders, however, were being transformed into radical economic liberal orders anchored in the theories of Austrian and “Freshwater” (Chicago, et al.) economics. History leapt backwards, with a return to radical economic liberalism affixing itself as parasite, convincing its host (liberal democracy) that economic liberalism fed democracy rather than feeding off it. While imperfect, capitalism’s roughest corners were blunted and workers enjoying wages commensurate with productivity gains during the post-war embedded liberal compromise As Finland’s post war president Urho Kekkonen characterized this period “The Soviet Union created a workers paradise [long pause], just not in the USSR, but in Finland.”  In short, authoritarianism on behalf of workers to the East, forced capital in the West to behave and create balanced economies enhancing political liberalism and social stability. The high-water mark of this embedded liberalism occurred under US President John F. Kennedy. His chief advisor, Harvard historian Arthur Schlessinger Jr. referenced the American political consensus as the “Vital Center.” While an idealized portrait of the period, this nonetheless was the model the communist Central and Eastern Europe bloc aspired to emulate upon achieving independence starting in 1989. For Romania, Europe’s most Christian country by percent of believers, independence fully arrived on Christmas Day in 1989, with the summary trial and execution of Romania’s Ceausescu ruling married couple. This ensured no counter-revolutionary rescue. The process was not unlike the Bolsheviks elimination of Czarist era Russia’s ruling family, although in this case not extending to, quoting Mick Jagger in 1968, “kill[ing] his ministers, while “Anastasia screamed in vain.” In short, government ministers and Ceausescu’s children were spared.

Rule under Ceausescu evolved from solid economic development in the 1960s, to imposition of  a brutal austerity in the 1980s applauded by the International Monetary Fund (with debt-service payments made on time). This rendered many Romanians poor and embittered.

After 1990’s failed efforts to engage a program of national development for lack of investment capital, along with global manufacturing increasingly turning toward China’s then “reserve army of labor” low-wage labor, Romania embraced neoliberal policies. Ultra-low tax levels kept social services at minimal levels. German manufacturers seeking to outsource auto parts were attracted by Romania’s comparatively low wages. Meanwhile, agriculture lacked investment, while Austrians and others “mined” Romania’s forests for raw timber.

European structural funds modernized some infrastructure and Romania’s impressive human capital (in part resulting from communist-era investments in education) saw IT and other high-value added activities emerge in cities such as Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest that created prosperous middle classes, if not new power elite entrepreneurs. But for many Romanians not winning the genetic lottery of well above-average intelligence and access to opportunities in select urban areas, neoliberalism only offered low-wages, stress and Albert O. Hirschman’s classic formulation of “exit.” The 2008 financial shock rightly fueled democracy’s doubters when shackled by neoliberalism. Since Syriza’s 2015 failure in Greece to reverse neoliberal austerity, Europe’s electorates now seek relief from other quarters absent left policy choices. This opened the door to right-wing populists who promised alternatives in an era where no one else has. Thus, we have reached the moment when, quoting Vladimir Lenin, “when the lower classes [working class] do not want to live the old way and the upper classes cannot carry on in the old way.” Presently, only the populist right gives voice to sovereigntist alternatives, regardless of how viable in practice.

Romania’s election reveals a population under enormous pressure with an institutional system failing to respond to popular demands. The burden of democracy’s unrealized promises, partial loss of autonomy to EU officials in Brussels, neoliberal inequality and economic insecurity, adversity that pushed millions to emigrate, and concerns over war on Romania’s border have all placed “The Weight” on Romanians still seeking someone to “take the load right off me.”

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A stark monument in Hamburg’s courthouse square, near the infamous Dammtor prison. Photo by the author.

I’m married to a German citizen who’s a life-long resident here in Hamburg, and I spent most of the winter and spring in this city of two-million — a far cry from my rural Wisconsin homestead outside a town of 2,000. Not far from our flat is Hamburg’s federal, state and municipal courthouse square, which has a billboard-sized concrete cuboid monument with a blunt, stark, and grim reminder. It reads simply: 1933. The monument is also the site of Dammtor prison where during the terror the Nazi regime conducted 468 executions using the guillotine.

It’s frightening to follow news of repression in the United States, and people here ask why I intend to fly back this month. The short answer is my connection to the rest of my family and friends, my work colleagues, personal identity, the national park system, and the intentional community farmstead that a group of us built with our own hands over the last 36 years.

The prevalence and unpredictable expansion of political persecution is what my friends here and at home are afraid of. They know even high-ranking Republican Party stalwarts like Alaska’s U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski have said publicly, “We are all afraid. I’m oftentimes very anxious about using my voice because retaliation is real.”

This trepidation in high places prompted Sally Quinn to write in the New York Times on May 10, “Washington is …., “Washington is physically, emotionally, psychologically and spirituality permeated with an invisible poison. The emotion all around … is fear. Nobody feels safe.” Perhaps nobody should. Trump said Nov. 17, 2023 in New Hampshire, “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” I wonder if Sally Quinn and I qualify for the “vermin thug” list.

It’s hard to say, since Trump himself could hardly be more thuggish. On his first day in office he demonstrated that his magical thinking can’t find thugs among his radical right storm troopers. He released from prison 1,500 January 6 rioters led by far-right militias, many of whom had been convicted of violently assaulting police officers, injuring 140.

Speaking of thugs with the rightwing website National Pulse, Trump said that immigration was “poisoning the blood of our country” — his Hitlerian dog whistle heard around the world which he would repeat. At an Ohio rally March 16, 2024, he said about immigrants, “I don’t know if you call them people. In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion.” Using his best words, Trump added, “I’ve seen the humanity, and these humanity, these are bad, these are animals, okay?”

Dehumanization and vengeful cruelty

Robert Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, told National Public Radio in 2023 that “dehumanization of political opponents are the bricks that pave the road to political violence.” In view of Charlottesville, January 6, and the pardons of unrepentant paramilitary rioters, that road’s been paved, resurfaced, and upgraded to a speedway.

Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts Univ. graduate student from Turkey was grabbed March 25 in Somerville, Mass. by masked secret agents, shipped off to a Louisiana jail, and held there 7 weeks for signing an opinion piece in the college paper. Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, was abducted without a warrant from his Columbia University housing in New York City by ICE agents March 8 and shipped to jail in Louisiana, although he’s not charged with a crime. Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland sheet metal worker with no criminal record, was mistakenly shipped to El Salvador’s notorious “Center for Terrorism Confinement” or Cecot maximum security mega-prison, in violation of a federal immigration judge’s 2019 order prohibiting the U.S. from returning him to El Salvador, where gangs could “pose a threat to his life.” Garcia is still there.

The Kafkaesque nightmare nature of Trump’s martial law dreams is that neither the U.S. State Department nor the government of El Salvador have even identified the 260 prisoners sent to the giant maximum-security prison, and neither state has provided evidence of the men’s alleged crimes or gang membership. A federal judge’s order forbade the White House from invoking an antique wartime law to justify the deportations, but the flights had already left. The imprisoned men have effectively vanished indefinitely inside a Salvadoran dictator’s police state nihilism, without recourse.

And immigrants aren’t Trump’s only targets. Lydia Polgreen reported May 8 in the New York Times that the president “muses about ejecting U.S. citizens too,” and enacting “the fantasy of expelling every person he deems undesirable.” In January, Trump talked about sending U.S. citizens who are “repeat offenders” to El Salvador’s gulag-for-hire. Repeatedly belaboring his repetitive repetition again and again, Trump said January 27 in Miami, “If they’ve been arrested many, many times, they’re repeat offenders by many numbers.”

He added, “We’re going to get approval, hopefully, to get them the hell out of our country, along with others,” NBC News reported. The next day Trump said in the Oval Office he wanted U.S. citizens convicted of crimes sent to foreign prisons “to get these animals out” of the United States. “If we could get them out of our country, we have other countries that would take them.” In February, El Salvador offered to jail violent U.S. citizen convicts in the “most severe cases,” in addition to the 260 men flown there earlier from the U.S. without due process.

On May 9, White House adviser Stephen Miller said for the cameras, “The Constitution is clear — and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So, it’s an option we’re actively looking at.” Miller mis-quotes the U.S. Constitution to suit his Apartheid agenda. Article VI says, “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby.”

Habeas corpus is the right to challenge your detention in court and threats of its suspension moved Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut to warn, “The slope to despotism can be slippery and quick.” And this is where Trump’s deliberately irrational, secret and rogue police actions, designed to keep opponents off balance, can look and feel like terror. In my work against nuclear weapons and the war system over 4 decades, I’ve been convicted of dozens of nonviolent misdemeanor charges for sit-ins, blockades, and non-payment of fines, and have been sent to 20 county jails and four federal prison camps — including one here in Germany. Within our bands of “repeat offenders,” we call ourselves “nuclear resisters,” but the peace movement’s resistance has never garnered much more than a “pffff” from the police, the masters of war, or the courts that protect them. That’s why I’ll likely be left alone at passport control when I return.

But in view of warrantless, secret police snatching and detention of nonviolent immigrants and students without due process and even in violation of court orders, Sally Quinn’s withering warning gives pause. “The hallmark of this administration is cruelty and sadism, vengefulness carried out with glee.” As if to prove the point, Trump’s richest friend, the Afrikaner Elon Musk, has declared: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Ja voll, Herr Musk! Que the stiff-arm salute.

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Photograph Source: Dan Scavino – Public Domain

There is joy in diplomatic Geneva. The neutral, good offices convenor of Reagan-Gorbachev and Putin–Biden summits is back in the headlines with trade talks between China and the United States. “China–U.S. tariff talks place Swiss diplomacy on centre stage” boasted a local website. But wait, isn’t the trade war between the United States and China a clear violation of international norms codified at the World Trade Organization (WTO)? Is the euphoria over the possibility of averting a global trade war and recession actually undermining internationally accepted principles and institutions of multilateralism such as the WTO based in Geneva?

In a highly anticipated meeting, representatives of the world’s two largest economies met over the May 10 weekend in Geneva to try to avert a global economic slowdown caused by President Trump’s imposition of a minimum 145 percent tariff on all Chinese imports and China’s countermeasure 125 percent import tax on all American imports. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng led the high-level delegations.

No official statement followed the first day of talks, but Trump was optimistic; “A very good meeting today with China, in Switzerland. Many things discussed, much agreed to. A total reset negotiated in a friendly, but constructive, manner,” he posted on Truth Social after Saturday’s seven hour session. Trump added: “We want to see, for the good of both China and the U.S., an opening up of China to American business. GREAT PROGRESS MADE!!!”

The final agreement after Sunday’s meeting said that starting May 14, the U.S. will drop its 145 per cent tariff rate for Chinese imports to 30 per cent, while China agreed to lower its rate from 125 per cent to 10 per cent. Both reductions caused global economic and political relief. In addition, the two sides agreed to set up a joint mechanism focused on “regular and irregular communications related to trade and commercial issues,” China’s international trade representative Li Chenggang said.

But what is this joint mechanism? Where is the WTO? From the Chinese perspective, according to Frederic Koller in a local Geneva newspaper, “China is indeed trying to position itself as the defender of international trade rules and its guarantor, the WTO.” As proof of Chinese support for the WTO, the Chinese delegation invited the head of the WTO, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to a debriefing late Sunday at the Chinese embassy after the bilateral negotiations ended.

The U.S., on the other hand, has been very critical of the WTO. The WTO appeals organ, the Appellate Body, has been blocked since 2016 by the U.S’s refusal to fill remaining vacancies. And the U.S. Trade Representative Greer continued to downplay the multilateral trade institution, saying, “This organization is detached from reality.”

There is no question that Trump’s Liberation Day announcement of tariff increases has caused global economic disruption and political anxiety. U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned about the negative effects of substantial increased tariffs at a recent press briefing; “If the large increases in tariffs that have been announced are sustained, they are likely to generate a rise in inflation, a slowdown in economic growth, and an increase in unemployment,” Powell said.

But in addition to causing economic hardship, Trump’s tariff announcements are a direct violation of the WTO’s fundamental principles. Although the head of the WTO found the talks encouraging – the discussions are “a positive and constructive step towards de-escalation” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said on the eve of the negotiations – she did not comment on the larger questions of the Trump administration following WTO norms.

The United States has undermined the effectiveness of the 166 member organization by challenging WTO rules. Article II of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, the precursor of the WTO) requires “that each member gives effects to its commitments to treat imports no less favourably than its GATT Schedule provides.” If a member country imposes a tariff higher than its bound commitment, it violates Article II. That is exactly what the United States has done.

The first step to resolve a dispute are bilateral consultations. If consultations fail, the complainant country may be allowed to impose retaliatory tariffs or other trade countermeasures after receiving approval from the WTO. That has not been done. Trump announced the tariffs unilaterally. There was no WTO approval. To be noted; The United States, under Trump 1.0, had introduced additional tariffs of 25 per cent on steel and 10 per cent on aluminium products on grounds of ‘national security.’ The WTO ruled against this in multiple cases.

The WTO dispute panel decided that national security exceptions cannot be used arbitrarily and must be linked to real security concerns such as during war or emergencies. The U.S. has appealed this and the result is still pending.

So while there is joy in Geneva because the trade talks are taking place here, the larger question of Trump undermining multilateralism cannot be avoided. The two sides agreed to establish a mechanism for consultation on economic and commercial issues in China, the United States or elsewhere. But that is exactly what the WTO is supposed to do. No final decision about where the consultations will take place has been made.

An American anti-WTO argument was sent to me by Joost Pauwelyn, a former legal adviser to the WTO Secretariat: “The U.S. would argue that they tried to reform the WTO, address unfair trade from China for decades, but the WTO process is hopelessly blocked. The U.S. would say that they had no other choice but to take things in their own hands the way they did in the late 1980s/early 1990s, with U.S. aggressive unilateralism and NAFTA actually pressuring other countries to agree to the WTO’s creation.”

As for a positive WTO role in the future, Pauwelyn, now a professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute, optimistically wrote in the International Economic Law and Policy Blog; “The WTO leadership has a key role to play….a revitalized WTO following a positive outcome on reciprocal tariffs would create the conditions for better international cooperation on these matters too. If this could materialize, instead of chaos for global trade and the death knell of the WTO, Trump’s reciprocal tariff plan could be a boost for WTO reform and the creation of a new, fairer balance in global trade.”

All of the above discussion of tariffs, the role of the WTO and multilateralism is in many ways a tribute to Joseph Nye, who passed away on May 6 at 88. Former professor at Harvard and Dean of the JFK School, Nye was a senior member of the Carter and Clinton administrations. He is best known for coining the phrase “soft power,” the idea that power and influence can come from sources other than military might.

Multilateralism and soft power go hand in hand. Trump’s attacks on USAID, USIP and other American peaceful global outreaches are examples of his disregard for soft power. Unilateral tariff increases are hard power. Bilateral trade negotiations are hard power. Multilateral negotiations within a collective organization such as the WTO are soft power, a necessity in a complex interdependent world, another phrase often used by Professor Nye.

Whether the WTO will come out stronger from Trump’s tariff declarations, as Pauwelyn hopes, remains to be seen. But Trump’s Liberation Day announcements and other unilateral measures remain traumatic shocks to the multilateral system and a determined rejection of Nye’s soft power. Geneva’s joy at hosting the U.S. China trade talks cannot hide that reality.

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Photo by Andrew Valdivia

Wait times at Social Security are longer than ever. It seems Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives are to blame. When asked about the delays, a spokesperson for Lee Dudek, Trump’s then-acting Social Security Commissioner, said that it’s because former President Joe Biden “[advanced] radical DEI and gender ideology over improving service for all Americans.”

Record low staffing at the agency under Biden seems to have played no role. One may also dismiss Trump’s severe service cuts and buyouts. Yet, DEI and other racialized programs are useful because they provide explanations for social maladies.

Trump blamed DEI for a collision between an airplane and army helicopter that killed 67 people last January. When he was asked how he knew DEI was to blame for the crash, Trump responded that it was all crystal clear because, as he put it, “I have common sense.” Everyone should know that hiring people for their melanin but not for their qualifications is at epidemic levels.

That’s why things are so broken.

Common sense says that people are bad. They will get up to all sorts of shenanigans to climb up a rung or two on the social ladder. They will use whatever program, law, loophole, connection, or story to get there. And if they don’t have to work for a thing, then they’ll get it by making others lift the heavy end.

That’s DEI in a nutshell. That’s also welfare, food stamps, and public housing. People are bad and they cheat. They live at the expense of those who work hard and play by the rules.

It’s just common sense.

There is no shortage of people on TV, social media, barstools, or in the US Congress who will tell you that, too. Trump is not only their mouthpiece, but he—and many others—have skillfully manipulated Americans’ economic precarity by serving up people with pretend motivations to blame for real grievances.

They say that “those people” don’t want to work. “They” don’t value the same things as contributors to society. Those who make these assertions engage in a self-flattery that is hard to miss; it’s the rest of the world, especially those who don’t burn so easily at the beach, on whom we should keep a close eye.

The School of Hard Knocks (SHK) taught them about human nature, and they will tell you all about it. An SHK education means that a person doesn’t have to waste time listening to those who know something about their own experiences or that despite different zip codes, people might have something in common.

Here’s a typical example.

I am on a Facebook group about Chicago architecture. A contributor posted a picture of Cabrini-Green, a housing project located in what is now a wealthy area of Chicago. It was named for Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, an Italian immigrant nun who was famous for her work with the poor. The housing complex had a reputation for being a scary, deadly place. It was in the news all the time and for sure had awful problems. Lots of them.

Although some of the original row houses remain, much of the project was torn down many years ago and the property sold to developers. Expensive homes have gone up there and people now go jogging with their dogs.

This is a brief exchange from the comments section of that post and photograph. Curiously, some who never went near the neighborhood know a lot more than people who grew up in the neighborhood.

Victoria (a former resident of Cabrini-Green): I enjoyed living there. Had lots of fun, beautiful memories, good friends.

Robert (responding to Victoria): Really? How many murders did you see and drug deals?

Addis (a former resident of Cabrini-Green, responding to Robert): The media [had] pre-consumed notions perpetuated on us to be portrayed as a bunch of savages … Many families [and] good people [lived there] … a few rotten apples in the bunch.

Bruce (responding to Addis): Dogs were afraid to go in there.

There is more, but you get the idea.

Almost the entire exchange was composed of people who had lived at Cabrini-Green attempting to convince their incredulous interlocutors that the place was not filled with beasts of prey. They explained that they were human beings who lived three-dimensional and even sometimes happy lives in challenging circumstances.

However, some of the Phi Beta Kappa graduates of SHK weren’t having it. Common sense dictated that what the former residents said was false, even the opposite of reality. The more charitable were amazed by the reports that people had fond memories of any kind. A woman named Martha said Victoria’s recollection was “A surprising comment.”

But her surprise should not come as a surprise if we consider the incessant flow of common sense about race and social help programs that are evacuated into TVs, iPhones, and computers every day. People then draw seemingly logical conclusions from these piles of words about human nature as essentially bad, corrupt, and even worse if the humans whose nature is examined ever received public aid.

However, this commonsense narrative does not frequently describe people’s lives. That should matter. As the last of Cabrini-Green’s buildings were demolished, The Chicago Reader interviewed some of its longtime residents, a few of whom lived in the area for decades.

A woman named Margaret Wilson said, “When we came here from the south side in the early 60s, I found it to be a quite interesting and family-oriented community.”

Jazz pianist and three-time Grammy Award winner Ramsey Lewis recollected that when he was “growing up in Cabrini [he] never realized [he] was from … a poor family as far as money was concerned. [W]e were God-fearing, law-abiding people, and that’s how we lived.”

Curtis Mayfield, another Grammy Award-winning musician, reflected on his life experiences, including his years at Cabrini-Green, in an interview shortly before his death. His memories of community bonds and mutual aid were palpable. Mayfield concluded that

“[A]lthough sometimes all the bad things seem to be in a majority, it’s still really a small minority. The majority still has high hopes … and wants to do the right things and be about success stories. The poverty may hold them back, but the dreams are still there.”

Mayfield and so many others long knew what lots of social scientists now say: people are basically good, not bad.

Historian Rutger Bregman, in his book Humankind: A Hopeful History, makes this observation about rich and powerful people who claim to have a monopoly on the allegedly commonsense notion that people are bad: “For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. It implies we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership.”

Bregman cites writer Rebecca Solnit, who claims that those at the top of the pecking order “see all of humanity in their own image.” In other words, many of the most powerful figures in our country reduce ordinary people to the terms of their own corrupt, self-serving, and violent behavior. All-people-are-bad stories justify their control.

Who is making millions on reducing regulations and firing watchdogs?

Who benefits from a form of legalized bribery called lobbying?

Who facilitates violations of international humanitarian law and approves the sale of high-tech weapons that continue to cause the hideous deaths of innocent people in Gaza?

I can tell you who does not engage in that sort of behavior: Anyone who lives in public housing, receives food assistance, lives on Social Security, or had benefited from a Head Start program when they were children.

Decent people are everywhere and knowing that is how we can build a better society.

That’s just common sense.

The post Human Nature: It’s Just Common Sense appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Logan Voss

In the 1983 film War Games, a supercomputer known as WOPR (for War Operation Plan Response) is about to provoke a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but because of the ingenuity of a teenager (played by Matthew Broderick), catastrophe is averted. In the first Terminator film, which was released a year later, a supercomputer called “Skynet” decides to exterminate humanity because it’s perceived as a threat to its existence rather than to protect American nuclear weapons.

Although these films offered audiences grim scenarios of intelligent machines running amok, they were also prophetic. Artificial intelligence (AI) is so commonplace that it’s routinely applied during a simple Google search. That it is also being integrated into military strategies is hardly any surprise. It’s just that we have little understanding of the capacity of these high-tech weapons (those that are now ready for use and those in development). Nor are we prepared for systems that have the capacity to transform warfare forever.

Throughout history, it is human intelligence that uses the technology, not the technology itself, which has won or lost wars. That may change in the future when human intelligence is focused instead on creating systems that are more capable on the battlefield than those of the adversary.

An “Exponential, Insurmountable Surprise”

Artificial intelligence isn’t a technology that can be easily detected, monitored, or banned, as Amir Husain, the founder and CEO of an AI company, SparkCognition, pointed out in an essay for Media News. Integrating AI elements—visual recognition, language analysis, simulation-based prediction, and advanced forms of search—with existing technologies and platforms “can rapidly yield entirely new and unforeseen capabilities.” The result “can create exponential, insurmountable surprise,” Hussain writes.

Advanced technology in warfare is already widespread. The use of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs)—commonly known as drones—in military settings has set off warnings about “killer robots.” What happens when drones are no longer controlled by humans and can execute military missions on their own? These drones aren’t limited to the air; they can operate on the ground or underwater as well. The introduction of AI, effectively giving these weapons the capacity for autonomy, isn’t far off.

Moreover, they’re cheap to produce and cheap to purchase. The Russians are buying drones from Iran for use in their war in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians have been putting together a cottage industry constructing drones of their own against the Russians. The relative ease with which a commercial drone can be converted into one with a military application also blurs the line between commercial and military enterprises. At this point, though, humans are still in charge.

A similar problem can be seen in information-gathering systems that have dual uses, including satellites, manned and unmanned aircraft, ground and undersea radars, and sensors, all of which have both commercial and military applications. AI can process vast amounts of data from all these systems and then discern meaningful patterns, identifying changes that humans might never notice. American forces were stymied to some degree in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because they could not process large amounts of data. Even now, remotely piloted UAVs are using AI for autonomous takeoff, landing, and routine flight. All that’s left for human operators to do is concentrate on tactical decisions, such as selecting attack targets and executing attacks.

AI also allows these systems to operate rapidly, determining actions at speeds that are seldom possible if humans are part of the decision-making process. Until now, decision-making speed has been the most important aspect of warfare. If, however, AI systems go head-to-head against humans, AI will invariably come out ahead. However, the possibility that AI systems eliminate the human factor terrifies people who don’t want to see an apocalyptic scenario on celluloid come to pass in reality.

Automated Versus Autonomous

A distinction needs to be made between the term “autonomous” and the term “automated.” If we are controlling the drone, then the drone is automated. But if the drone is programmed to act on its own initiative, we would say it is autonomous. But does the autonomous weapon describe the actual weapon—i.e., a missile on a drone—or the drone itself? Take, for example, the Global Hawk military UAV (drone). It is automated insofar as it is controlled by an operator on the ground, and yet if it loses communication with the ground, the Golden Hawk can land on its own. Does that make it automated or autonomous? Or is it both?

The most important question is whether the system is safety-critical. Translated, that means whether it has the decision-making capacity to use a weapon against a target without intervention from its human operator. It is possible, for example, for a drone to strike a static military target on its own (such as an enemy military base) but not a human target because of the fear that innocent civilians could be injured or killed as collateral damage. Many countries have already developed drones with real-time imagery capable of acting autonomously in the former instance, but not when it comes to human targets.

Drones aren’t the only weapons that can act autonomously. Military systems are being developed by the U.S., China, and several countries in Europe that can act autonomously in the air, on the ground, in water, and underwater with varying degrees of success.

Several types of autonomous helicopters designed so that a soldier can direct them in the field with a smartphone are in development in the U.S., Europe, and China. Autonomous ground vehicles, such as tanks and transport vehicles, and autonomous underwater vehicles are also in development. In almost all cases, however, the agencies developing these technologies are struggling to make the leap from development to operational implementation.

There are many reasons for the lack of success in bringing these technologies to maturity, including cost and unforeseen technical issues, but equally problematic are organizational and cultural barriers. The U.S. has, for instance, struggled to bring autonomous UAVs to operational status, primarily due to organizational infighting and prioritization in favor of manned aircraft.

The Future Warrior

In the battleground of the future, elite soldiers may rely on a head-up displaythat feeds them a wealth of information that is collected and routed through supercomputers carried in their backpacks using an AI engine. With AI, the data is instantly analyzed, streamlined, and fed back into the head-up display. This is one of many potential scenarios presented by U.S. Defense Department officials. The Pentagon has embraced a relatively simple concept: the “hyper-enabled operator.”

The objective of this concept is to give Special Forces “cognitive overmatch” on the battlefield, or “the ability to dominate the situation by making informed decisions faster than the opponent.” In other words, they will be able to make decisions based on the information they are receiving more rapidly than their enemy. The decision-making model for the military is called the “OODA loop” for “observe, orient, decide, act.” That will come about using computers that register all relevant data and distill them into actionable information through a simple interface like a head-up display.

This display will also offer a “visual environment translation” system designed to convert foreign language inputs into clear English in real time. Known as VITA, the system encompasses both a visual environment translation effort and voice-to-voice translation capabilities. The translation engine will allow the operator to “engage in effective conversations where it was previously impossible.”

VITA, which stands for Versatile Intelligent Translation Assistant, offers users language capabilities in Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese, including Mandarin, a Chinese dialect. Operators could use their smartphones to scan a street in a foreign country, for example, and immediately obtain a translation of street signs in real-time.

Adversary AI Systems

Military experts divide adversarial attacks into four categories: evasion, inference, poisoning, and extraction. These types of attacks are easily accomplished and often don’t require computing skills. An enemy engaged in evasive attacks could attempt to deceive an AI weapon to avoid detection—hiding a cyberattack, for example, or convincing a sensor that a tank is a school bus. This may require the development of a new type of AI camouflage, such as strategic tape placement, that can fool AI.

Inference attacks occur when an adversary acquires information about an AI system that allows evasive techniques. Poisoning attacks target AI systems during training, interfering with access to the datasets used to train military tools—mislabeling images of vehicles to dupe targeting systems, for instance, or manipulating maintenance data designed to classify imminent system failure as a regular operation.

Extraction attacks exploit access to the AI’s interface to learn enough about the AI’s operation to create a parallel model of the system. If AI systems are not secure from unauthorized users, then an adversary’s users could predict decisions made by those systems and use those predictions to their advantage. For instance, they could predict how an AI-controlled unmanned system will respond to specific visual and electromagnetic stimuli and then proceed to alter its route and behavior.

Deceptive attacks have become increasingly common, as illustrated by cases involving image classification algorithms that are deceived into perceiving images that aren’t there, confusing the meaning of images, and mistaking a turtle for a rifle, for instance. Similarly, autonomous vehicles could be forced to swerve into the wrong lane or speed through a stop sign.

In 2019, China announced a new military strategy, Intelligentized Warfare, which utilizes AI. Officials of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army have stated that their forces can overtake the U.S. military by using AI. One of its intentions is to use this high-tech type of warfare to bring Taiwan under its control without waging conventional warfare. However, only a few of the many Chinese studies on intelligentized warfare have focused on replacing guns with AI. On the other hand, Chinese strategists have made no secret of their intention to control the enemy’s will directly.

That would include the U.S. president, members of Congress, combatant commanders, and citizens. “Intelligence dominance”—also known as cognitive warfare or “control of the brain”—is seen as the new battleground in intelligentized warfare, putting AI to a very different use than most American and allied discussions have envisioned. According to the Pentagon’s 2022 report on Chinese military developments, the People’s Liberation Army is being trained and equipped to use AI-enabled sensors and computer networks to “rapidly identify key vulnerabilities in the U.S. operational system and then combine joint forces across domains to launch precision strikes against those vulnerabilities.”

Controlling an adversary’s mind can affect not just someone’s perceptions of their surroundings but, ultimately, their decisions. For the People’s Liberation Army, cognitive warfare is equal to the other domains of conflict, which are air, land, and sea. In that respect, social media is considered a key battlefield.

Russia has also been developing its own AI capacity. As early as 2014, the Russians inaugurated a National Defense Control Center in Moscow, a centralized command post for assessing and responding to global threats. The center was designed to collect information on enemy moves from multiple sources and provide senior officers with guidance on possible responses.

Russia has declared that it will eventually develop an AI system capable of running the world. Russians are already using AI in Ukraine to jam wireless signals connecting Ukrainian drones to the satellites they rely on for navigation, causing the machines to lose their way and plummet to Earth. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MOD) has explored ways in which AI systems can be developed for uncrewed systems for the air, maritime, and ground domains. At the same time, at least in the short term, official policy is predicated on the belief that humans must remain firmly in the loop.

Meanwhile, the Russians are trying to improve UAV capabilities with AI as a mechanism for command, control, and communications. MOD also emphasizes the use of AI for data collection and analysis as a natural evolution from the current “digital” combat technology and systems development.

“Raven Sentry”: AI in the U.S. War in Afghanistan

The use of AI on the battlefield by U.S. intelligence, while brief, showed promising results. “Raven Sentry,” an AI tool launched in 2019 by a team of American intelligence officers (known as the “nerd locker”), with help from Silicon Valley expertise, was intended to forecast insurgent attacks. The initial use of AI came at a time when U.S. bases were closing, troop numbers were falling, and intelligence resources were being diverted. Raven Sentry relied on open-source data.

“We noticed an opportunity presented by the increased number of commercial satellites and the availability of news reports on the Internet, the proliferation of social media postings, and messaging apps with massive membership,” says Col. Thomas Spahr, chief of staff of the Resolute Support J2 intelligence mission in Kabul, Afghanistan, from July 2019 to July 2020.

The AI tool also drew on historical patterns based on insurgent activities in Afghanistan going back 40 years, which encompassed the Soviet occupation of the country in the 1980s. Environmental factors were also considered. “Historically, insurgents attack on certain days of the year or holidays, for example, or during certain weather and illumination conditions,” Spahr notes. He adds, “The beauty of the AI is that it continues to update that template. The machine would learn as it absorbed more data.” Before its demise in 2021 (with the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan), Raven Sentry had demonstrated its feasibility, predicting an insurgent attack with 70 percent accuracy. The AI tool predicted that attacks were more likely to occur when the temperature was above 4 degrees Celsius (or 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit), when lunar illumination was below 30 percent, and when there was no rain. Spahr was satisfied with the results: “We validated that commercially produced, unclassified information can yield predictive intelligence.”

Ukraine as Testing Ground for AI

Ever since the Russian invasion, launched in 2022, Ukraine has become a testing ground for AI in warfare. Outgunned and outmanned, Ukrainian forces have resorted to improvisation, jerry-rigging off-the-shelf devices to transform them into lethal autonomous weapons. The Russian invaders, too, have employed AI, conducting cyberattacks and GPS-jamming systems.

Ukraine’s Saker Scout quadcopters “can find, identify, and attack 64 types of Russian ‘military objects’ on their own.” These drones are designed to operate autonomously, and unlike other drones that Ukrainian forces have deployed, Russia cannot jam them.

By using code found online and hobbyist computers like Raspberry Pi, easily obtained from hardware stores, Ukrainians are able to construct innovative killer robots. Apart from drones, which can be operated with a smartphone, Ukrainians have built a gun turret with autonomous targeting operated with the same controller used by a PlayStation or a tablet. The gun, called Wolly because it bears a resemblance to the Pixar robot WALL-E, can auto-lock on a target up to 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) away and shift between preprogrammed positions to quickly cover a broad area.

The manufacturer is also developing a gun capable of hitting moving targets. It can automatically identify targets as they come over the horizon. The gun targets and aims automatically; all that’s left for the operator to do is press the button and shoot. Many Ukrainian drones, which look like those you can find at Walmart, are called First Person View (FPV) drones. Capable of flying 100 miles per hour, FPV drones have four propellers and a mounted camera that uses wireless to send footage of their flights back to operators. With a bomb on board, an FPV can be converted into a weapon that can take out a tank. They’re cheap, too; one manufacturer, Vyriy, charges $400 each, a small price to pay to disable a tank worth millions of dollars. Vyriy derives its name from a mythical land in Slavic folktales.

If one kamikaze drone is good, dozens of them are better insofar as the greater their number, the greater the chance there is of several reaching their targets. In nature, a swarm of ants behaves as a single living organism, whether the task is collecting food or building a nest. Analogously, a swarm of autonomous drones could act as a single organism—no humans necessary—carrying out a mission regardless of how many are disabled or crash to the ground or whether communication from the ground is disrupted or terminated.

Although humans are still in the “loop,” these weapons could equally be made entirely autonomous. In other words, they could decide which targets to strike without human intervention.

It isn’t as if Ukraine has adopted AI weaponry without any tech experience. In the words of New York Times reporter Paul Mozer, “Ukraine has been a bit of a back office for the global technology industry for a long time.” The country already had a substantial pool of coders and skilled experts who, under emergency conditions, were able to make the transition from civilian uses (such as a dating app) to military purposes. As Mozer reported: “What they’re doing is they’re taking basic code that is around, combining it with some new data from the war, and making it into something entirely different, which is a weapon.”

The reality is, “there’s a lot of cool, exciting stuff happening in the big defense primes,” says P.W. Singer, an author who writes about war and tech. “There’s a lot of cool, exciting stuff happening in the big-tech Silicon Valley companies. There’s a lot of cool, exciting stuff happening in small startups.”

One of those smaller startups is Anduril. After selling the popular virtual reality headset Oculus to Facebook (now Meta), Palmer Luckey, an entrepreneur in his early thirties, went on to found an AI weapons company that is supplying drones to Ukraine. “Ukraine is a very challenging environment to learn in,” he says. “I’ve heard various estimates from the Ukrainians themselves that any given drone typically has a lifespan of about four weeks. The question is, “Can you respond and adapt?” Anduril, named after a sword in The Lord of the Rings, has sold its devices to ten countries, including the U.S.

“I had this belief that the major defense companies didn’t have the right talent or the right incentive structure to invest in things like artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics,” says Luckey. His company’s drone, called ALTIUS, is intended to be fired out of a tube and unfold itself, extending its wings and tail; then, steering with a propeller, it acts like a plane capable of carrying a 30-pound warhead. Luckey believes that his approach will result in more AI weapons being built in less time and at a lower cost than could be achieved by traditional defense contractors like McDonnell Douglas.

Anduril, founded in 2017, is also developing the Dive-LD, a drone that will be used for surveys in littoral and deep water. “It’s an autonomous underwater vehicle that is able to go very, very long distances, dive to a depth of about 6,000 meters (almost 20,000 feet), which is deep enough to go to the bottom of almost any ocean,” says Luckey. Ukraine is already making its own sea drones—essentially jet skis packed with explosives—which have inflicted severe damage on the Russian navy in the Black Sea.

As Anduril’s CEO Brian Schimpf admits, the introduction of Anduril’s drones to Ukraine has yet to produce any significant results, although he believes that will change. Once they’re launched, these drones will not require guidance from an operator on the ground, making it difficult for the Russians to destroy or disable them by jamming their signals.

“The autonomy onboard is really what sets it apart,” Luckey says. “It’s not a remote-controlled plane. There’s a brain on it that is able to look for targets, identify targets, and fly into those targets.” However, for every innovative weapon system the Ukrainians develop, the Russians counter it with a system that renders it useless. “Technologies that worked really well even a few months ago are now constantly having to change,” says Jacquelyn Schneider, who studies military technology as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, “And the big difference I do see is that software changes the rate of change.”

The War in Gaza: Lavender

In their invasion of Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have increasingly relied on a program supported by artificial intelligence to target Hamas operatives, with problematic consequences. According to an April 2024 reportby +972 Magazine (an Israeli-Palestinian publication) and Local Call, a Hebrew language news site, the IDF has been implementing a program known as “Lavender,” whose influence on the military’s operations is so profound that intelligence officials have essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”

Lavender was developed by the elite Unit 8200, which is comparable to the National Security Agency in the U.S. or the Government Communications Headquarters in the UK.

The Israeli government has defended Lavender for its practicality and efficiency. “The Israeli military uses AI to augment the decision-making processes of human operators. This use is in accordance with international humanitarian law, as applied by the modern Armed Forces in many asymmetric wars since September 11, 2001,” says Magda Pacholska, a researcher at the TMC Asser Institute and specialist in the intersection between disruptive technologies and military law.

The data collected to identify militants that were used to develop Lavender comes from the more than 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip, which was under intense surveillance prior to the Gaza invasion in 2023.

The report states that as many as 37,000 Palestinians were designated as suspected militants who were selected as potential targets. Lavender’s kill lists were prepared in advance of the invasion, launched in response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, which left about 1,200 dead and about 250 hostages taken from Israel. A related AI program, which tracked the movements of individuals on the Lavender list, was called “Where’s Daddy?” Sources for the +972 Magazine report said that initially, there was “no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices (of targets) or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.” The officials in charge, these sources said, acted as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions before authorizing a bombing. One intelligence officer who spoke to +972 admitted as much: “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”

It was already known that the Lavender program made errors in 10 percent of the cases, meaning that a fraction of the individuals selected as targets might have had no connection with Hamas or any other militant group. The strikes generally occurred at night while the targeted individuals were more likely to be at home, which posed a risk of killing or wounding their families as well.

A score was created for each individual, ranging from 1 to 100, based on how closely he was linked to the armed wing of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Those with a high score were killed along with their families and neighbors despite the fact that officers reportedly did little to verify the potential targets identified by Lavender, citing “efficiency” reasons. “This is unparalleled, in my memory,” said one intelligence officer who used Lavender, adding that his colleagues had more faith in a “statistical mechanism” than a grieving soldier. “Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”

The IDF had previously used another AI system called “The Gospel,” which was described in a previous investigation by the magazine, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications, to target buildings and structures suspected of harboring militants. “The Gospel” draws on millions of items of data, producing target lists more than 50 times faster than a team of human intelligence officers ever could. It was used to strike 100 targets a day in the first two months of the Gaza fighting, roughly five times more than in a similar conflict there a decade ago. Those structures of political or military significance for Hamas are known as “power targets.”

Weaknesses of AI Weapons

If an AI weapon is autonomous, it needs to have the capacity for accurate perception. That’s to say, if it mistakes a civilian car for a military target, its response rate isn’t relevant. The civilians in the car die regardless. In many cases, of course, AI systems have excelled at perception as AI-powered machines and algorithms have become refined. When, for instance, the Russian military conducted a test of 80 UAVs simultaneously flying over Syrian battlefields with unified visualization, then Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu compared it to a “semi-fantastic film” that revealed all potential targets.

But problems can creep in. In designing an AI weapon, developers first need access to data. Many AI systems are trained using data that has been labeled by an expert system (e.g., labeling scenes that include an air defense battery), usually a human. An AI’s image-processing capability won’t function well when given images that are different from its training set—for example, pictures produced where lighting conditions are poor, that are at an obtuse angle, or that are partially obscured. AI recognition systems don’t understand what the image is; rather, they learn textures and gradients of the image’s pixels. That means that an AI system may correctly recognize a part of an image but not its entirety, which can result in misclassification.

To better defend AI against deceptive images, engineers subject them to “adversarial training.” This involves feeding a classifier adversarial images so it can identify and ignore those that aren’t going to be targeted. Research by Nicolas Papernot, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, shows that a system, even bolstered by adversarial training, may be ineffective if overwhelmed by the sheer number of images. Adversarial images take advantage of a feature found in many AI systems known as “decision boundaries.”

These boundaries are the invisible rules that instruct a system whether it is perceiving a lion or a leopard. The objective would be to create a mental map with lions in one sector and leopards in another. The line dividing these two sectors—the border at which a lion becomes a leopard or leopard a lion—is known as the decision boundary. Jeff Clune, who has also studied adversarial training, remains dubious about such classification systems because they’re too arbitrary.“All you’re doing with these networks is training them to draw lines between clusters of data rather than deeply modeling what it is to be [a] leopard or a lion.”

Large datasets are often labeled by companies that employ manual methods.Obtaining and sharing datasets is a challenge, especially for an organization that prefers to classify data and restrict access to it. A military dataset may contain images produced by thermal-imaging systems, for instance, but unless this dataset is shared with developers, an AI weapon wouldn’t be as effective. For example, AI devices that rely on chatbots limited to hundreds of words might not be able to completely replace a human with a much larger vocabulary.

AI systems are also hampered by their inability to multitask. A human can identify an enemy vehicle, decide on a weapon system to employ against it, predict its path, and then engage the target. An AI system can’t duplicate these steps. At this point, a system trained to identify a T-90 tank most likely would be unable to identify a Chinese Type 99 tank, despite the fact that they are both tanks and both tasks require image recognition. Many researchers are trying to solve this problem by working to enable systems to transfer their learning, but such systems are years away from production.

Predictably, adversaries will try to take advantage of these weaknesses by fooling image recognition engines and sensors. They may also try mounting cyberattacks to evade intrusion detection systems or feed altered data to AI systems that will supply them with false requirements.

U.S. Preparedness

The U.S. Department of Defense has been more partial to contracting for andbuilding hardware than to implementing new technologies. All the same, the Air Force, in cooperation with Boeing, General Atomics, and a company called Kratos, is developing AI-powered drones. The Air Force is also testing pilotless XQ-58A Valkyrie experimental aircraft run by artificial intelligence. This next-generation drone is a prototype for what the Air Force hopes can become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets. The objective is to give human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle. The Valkyrie is not autonomous, however. Although it will use AI and sensors to identify and evaluate enemy threats, it will still be up to pilots to decide whether or not to strike the target.

Pentagon officials may not be deploying autonomous weapons in battle yet, but they are testing and perfecting weapons that will not rely on human intervention. One example is the Army’s Project Convergence. In a test, conducted as part of the project, held in August 2020 at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, the Army used a variety of air- and ground-based sensors to track simulated enemy forces and then process that data using AI-enabled computers at a base in Washington state. Those computers, in turn, issued fire instructions to ground-based artillery at Yuma. “This entire sequence was supposedly accomplished within 20 seconds,” the Congressional Research Service later reported.

In a U.S. program known as the Replicator initiative, the Pentagon said it planned to mass-produce thousands of autonomous drones. However, no official policy has condoned the use of autonomous weapons, which would allow devices to decide whether to strike a target without a human’s approval.

The Navy has an AI equivalent of Project Convergence called “Project Overmatch.” In the words of Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, this is intended “to enable a Navy that swarms the sea, delivering synchronized lethal and nonlethal effects from near-and-far, every axis, and every domain.” Very little has been revealed about the project.

About 7,000 analysts employed by the National Security Agency (NSA) are trying to integrate AI into its operations, according to General Timothy Haugh, who serves as the NSA Director, U.S. Cyber Command Commander, and Chief of the Central Security Service. General Haugh has disclosed that as of 2024, the NSA is engaged in 170 AI projects, of which 10 are considered critical to national security. “Those other 160, we want to create opportunities for people to experiment, leverage, and compliantly use,” he says.

At present, though, AI is still regarded as a supplement to conventional platforms. AI is also envisioned as playing four additional roles: automating planning and strategy; fusing and interpreting signals more efficiently than humans or conventional systems can do; aiding space-based systems, mainly by collecting and synthesizing information to counter hypersonics; and enabling next-generation cyber and information warfare capabilities.

Ethics of AI Use

Although the use of autonomous weapons has been a subject of debate for decades, few observers expect any international deal to establish new regulations, especially as the U.S., China, Israel, Russia, and others race to develop even more advanced weapons. “The geopolitics makes it impossible,” says Alexander Kmentt, Austria’s top negotiator on autonomous weapons at the UN. “These weapons will be used, and they’ll be used in the military arsenal of pretty much everybody.”

Despite such challenges, Human Rights Watch has called for “the urgent negotiation and adoption of a legally binding instrument to prohibit and regulate autonomous weapons systems.” It has launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which the human rights organization says has been joined by more than 270 groups and 70 countries. Even though the controversy has centered around autonomous weapons, Brian Schimpf, CEO of AI drone manufacturer Anduril, has another perspective. He says AI weapons are “not about taking humans out of the loop. I don’t think that’s the right ethical framework. This is really about how we make human decision-makers more effective and more accountable [for] their decisions.”

All the same, autonomous AI weapons are already under development. Aside from the ethics of relying on a weapon to make life-and-death decisions, there is a problem with AI itself. Errors and miscalculations are relatively common. Algorithms underlying the operations of AI systems are capable of making mistakes—“hallucinations”—in which seemingly reasonable results turn out to be entirely illusory. That could have profound implications for deploying AI weapons that operate with deeply flawed instructions undetectable by human operators. In a particularly dystopian scenario, an adversary might substitute robot generals for human ones, forcing the U.S. to do the same, with the result that AI systems may be pitted against one another on the battlefield with unpredictable and possibly catastrophic consequences.

Dr. Elke Schwarz of Queen Mary University of London views the AI weapon dilemma through a theoretical framework that relies on political science and empirical investigations in her consideration of the ethical dimensions of AI in warfare. She believes that the integration of AI-enabled weapon systems facilitates the objectification of human targets, leading to heightened tolerance for collateral damage. In her view, automation can “weaken moral agency among operators of AI-enabled targeting systems, diminishing their capacity for ethical decision-making.” The bias towards autonomous systems may also encourage the defense industry to rush headlong into funding military AI systems, “influencing perceptions of responsible AI use in warfare.” She urges policymakers to take risks into account before it’s too late.

“(T)he effect of AI is much, much more than the machine gun or plane. It is more like the shift from muscle power to machine power in the last Industrial Revolution,” says Peter Singer, a professor at Arizona State University and a strategist and senior fellow at the U.S. think tank New America, who has written extensively about AI and warfare. “I believe that the advent of AI on the software side and its application into robotics on the hardware side is the equivalent of the industrial revolution when we saw mechanization.” This transformation raises new questions “of right and wrong that we weren’t wrestling with before.” He advocates setting “frameworks to govern the use of AI in warfare” that should apply to those people who are working on the design and use.

One of the issues Singer calls “machine permissibility” is what the machine should be allowed to do apart from human control. He calls attention to a second issue “that we’ve never dealt with before,” which is “machine accountability.” “If something happens, who do we hold responsible if it is the machine that takes the action? It’s very easy to understand that with a regular car, it’s harder to understand that with a so-called driverless car.” On the battlefield, would the machine be held responsible if the target was mistaken or if civilians were killed as a result?

This article was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Donald Trump’s first official travel overseas in both his first and second presidential terms centered on the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.  These trips have secured great wealth and investment for the Trump family enterprises that now include a meme cryptocurrency that allows crypto investors in the Gulf to enrich Donald Trump.  The latest and boldest example of the region’s largesse for Trump is the Qatari royal family’s gift of a $400 million luxury jet that could end up with Trump’s presidential foundation when (and if) he leaves the White House.

The Middle East and the Persian Gulf are the center of the Trump organization’s global business empire.  Prior to Trump’s arrival in the Gulf, his  sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, have signed a number of deals in the region, trading on their family name and influence, to enhance the wealth of the Trump family.  Even the prodigal son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has acquired billions  in investment from the Gulf states.  On the eve of Trump’s arrival in the Gulf, Abu Dhabi announced an investment of $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, Trump’s cryptocurrency company, with Trump’s family earning tens of millions of dollars annually on the interest from that investment.

Final returns haven’t been posted from the visit, but the communiques and announcements have thus far indicated that Trump also is pursuing a geopolitical reshaping of the region that could lead to a smaller U.S. military presence in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.  Trump started his visit to the Gulf with a surprise announcement that the United States will lift long-standing sanctions on Syria.  He followed this with an unusual meeting between Trump and Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.  Saudi Arabia has made a $600 billion commitment to invest in the U.S. and, in return, the United States agreed to sell the Saudis an arms package worth nearly $142 billion, one of the largest defense cooperation agreements Washington has made.  Qatar has enhanced its international standing with its high-level diplomacy and discussions with the United States.

Presumably the Saudis and the Qataris in return will press Trump to recognize the needs and rights of Palestinians, which Trump completely ignored in his first term.  In view of Trump’s random acts and unpredictability, the Israelis must be concerned with how far Trump will go in solidifying U.S. relations with the Saudi and Qatari leaders.  If nothing else, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must be concerned with what appear to be early signs of a possible U.S. reshaping of its role and posture in the Middle East and the Gulf.

Trump’s unpredictably is well-established but it is neverthelessIt surprising that his regional meandering is garnering great international attention despite Trump himself having no genuine understanding of the dynamics at work in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf and having appointed the worst and least experienced national security team in the history of the United States.  Trump appears determined to reduce the U.S. military presence in the region, which U.S. presidents have tried and failed to do over the past fifteen years.  Trump announced a ceasefire with the Houthis, which ended U.S.bombing in Yemen; called for an end to sanctions against the new Syrian government, which could lead to the withdrawal of around 1,000 U.S. forces in northeastern Syria; and endorsed a less fractious bilateral relationship with Iran, which could lead to the revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iranian nuclear accords.

Trump may not end U.S. complicity with Israeli militarization, but he has signaled to Prime Minister Netanyahu that U.S. support cannot be taken for granted.  Unlike Trump’s first visit to the region in his first term, he did not include a stopover in Israel.  On route to the region in the second term, Trump announced that he had negotiated the Hamas’ release of the last living American citizen being held hostage, without any discussions with Netanyahu, who was only informed of the deal after the surprise release.  Netanyahu learned of the truce between the United States and the Houthis after the fact as well.

Former Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, a hard-liner, conceded that “It certainly doesn’t look like Netanyahu has Trump’s ear right now—and if he has his ear, he doesn’t have Trump’s heart and mind.” The fact that there are even tentative indications of a possible path to a new nuclear deal with Iran as well as even a limited revival of commercial ties between Iran and the United States must be particularly worrisome to Netanyahu and the right-wing zealots.

Israelis have always expected great support from presidents from the Democratic Party, but they understand that Republican presidents (e.g., Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush Sr.) have been willing to separate themselves from Israeli excesses when necessary.  Democratic presidents have been beholden for support and resources from the Jewish-American community, and for that reason have avoided getting crosswise with Israel.  Netanyahu has exploited this fact for the past three decades, which has frustrated Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden.

The Israelis know that Trump would like to build on the 2020 Abraham Accords from his first term, which comprised a series of bilateral relations that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries.  The Accords did nothing to address the existential problem of Palestine, however, and Trump will not be able to expand the Accords to include Saudi Arabia without paying more attention of the Palestinian problem and the need for some solution.  Trump himself has referred to a solution that addresses the needs of all the parties as the “deal of the century,” which is designed to position himself for consideration of one of his major goals, a Nobel peace prize.

Nevertheless, while Trump pursues his economic and geopolitical deals in the Persian Gulf, one of the greatest tragedies in human history is unfolding as the Israelis pursue a genocidal campaign that is killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians and children, and traumatizing and ruining the lives of more than two million Palestinians who have been running for their lives for the past year and a half.  The fact that the international community has demonstrated no ability to counter Israeli militarism reveals the absence of any global responsibility for this horror as it unfolds.  Even Israeli military officials are acknowledging the fact that starvation is expanding across the Gaza strip, with Palestinian children paying a terrible price.

For the past two months, Israel has made sure that no food, water, medical materials and other essentials can reach the victims of its assault.  Netanyahu has been given a free hand to operate.  Presidents Biden and Trump are responsible for providing the Israeli Defense Forces with the weaponry—including bunker-buster bombs and missiles still being used against hospital complexes—that comprise some of the most deadly war crimes of all.

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Farm in California’s Sacramento River Valley. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair

Former presidential advisor-cum-rightwing podcaster, Steve Bannon, often mentions that discerning the truth of Trump’s policy goals entails focusing on the signal and not the noise.

But doing so has been next to impossible when trying to figure out the rationale behind the administration’s moves in agriculture, which since January, have generated widespread confusion and uncertainty.

Specifically, while Trump publicly proclaims that he stands with farmers, his tariff war with China stands to rob producers of their markets.  Since Trump’s last term, China has already been looking to countries like Brazil for soybeans as the US has proven an unreliable partner.  Adding insult to injury, unexpectedly cancelling government contracts with thousands around the country early in his term placed undue stress on farmers who already have to contend with what extreme weather events throw their way.

Now, with the details of the UK-US trade deal becoming known, the signal – that is, the truth – of the Trump administration’s vision for agriculture is coming into view. To the point, not unlike how US agriculture has been directed for the past few decades, it is becoming clear that this administration will prioritize exports. The problem with this vision is that, even if it generates short-term profits, it endangers our long-term national food security by dangerously further internationalizing our agricultural system.

Consider the praise that US Agriculture Secretary Rollins heaped on the UK-US deal that was made on May 8th, singling out its supposed gains for farmers.

Following the announcement, the Secretary announced a tour that she will take through the United Kingdom to tout the agreement.  While details are still being hashed out, we are told of a promised $5 billion in market access for beef and ethanol.

Contrast that clear messaging – the signal – with how government contracts with farmers were frozen and made subject to administrative review, and the funding for local food programs was slashed.

The contracts were connected with the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which included resources for initiatives like those dealing with soil and water conservation, and supporting local food processing.  Additionally, programs that connected local producers with schools and food banks, for example, the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, had their funding cut in the amount of about $1 billion.

Since February, some of the contracts have been unfrozen if they aligned with the administration’s political objectives (i.e. not promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, DEI).  Despite court orders ruling that all contracts must be honored, if and when the funds will be distributed, remains to be seen.

Overall, the noise surrounding the unfolding contract drama signals to farmers who want to diversify their operations and serve local markets that they should second guess looking to the government for help.

At the same time, Trump has not abandoned all producers.

In fact, amid the commotion about freezing some contracts, Secretary Rollins ok’d billions in direct payments, or bailouts, for growers of commodity crops such as corn.  Thanks to such payments and not any improvements to markets, it is expected that farmers will see their incomes increase when comparing this year with the last.

Taken together, the bailouts along with the freshly inked UK-US trade deal and easing of tariffs on China illustrates how the Trump administration prioritizes export agriculture as the driving force of our country’s farm system.

Such dynamics smack of contradiction, as Trump appears eager to send our food abroad while he’s willing to do whatever to bring manufacturing back to America’s shores in the name of strengthening the national economy.

Still, the deeper problem is with how export promotion makes our food system insecure, subjecting farmers to international political upheavals and economic disruption.

Remember the 1970s, when a grain production crisis prompted sudden demand in the Soviet Union.  Then Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, told farmers to “plant fence row to fence row” and “get big or get out” to profit from the new found export opportunity.

The promise of international markets came – and went.  President Carter’s embargo of grain exports to the Soviet Union in 1980 for that country’s invasion of Afghanistan came as a body blow to the farmers who made commodity exports central to their financial plans.  Farmers then struggled to pay off the debt for the land and machinery that they acquired just a few years before, which with rising gas prices, contributed to the 1980s farm crisis.  Parallels abound now, including the initial effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine increasing fertilizer and gasoline costs, and most recently, the ongoing dynamics of Trump’s trade war with China.

Concerning the UK-US deal, UK imports of ethanol may seem a boon for corn growers.  But without future terms of the deal becoming clear, it is unclear if this is simply a continuation of what the British already import. Similarly, the significance of the slated $250 million in purchases of beef products is of questionable importance, as last year the US exported $1.6 billion to China.  Regardless of the recent 90 day truce in the China-US trade dispute, the remaining 30% tariff would still hurt American farmers.  The Trump administration’s export push will find farmers without markets and in need of more bailouts.

Besides subjecting US farmers’ livelihoods to international uncertainty, the other concern is the lack of concern for the next generation of food producers.  Year after year, the country’s farmers are getting older, with no one stepping up to replace them.  According to the 2022 Agricultural Census, the average farmer is over 58 years old, up over half a year from when the last census was conducted in 2017.  During that same time, we lost nearly 150,000 operations.  Since 2012, over 200,000 farmers have left the industry, representing a 10% decline. Meanwhile, according to the USDA, upwards of 70% of farmland is expected to change hands over the next twenty years.

Export promotion serves a temporary fix, but places farmers at the whims of international politics.  Moreover, it threatens our country’s already economically-pressed farmers, making our country even more dependent on a dwindling number of people for our food, as well as imports. In fact, since 2004, while exports have nearly doubled from $50 billion to $200, our food imports have increased slightly more so.

Trump’s efforts to undo the previous administration’s policies set up our food system for disruption and crisis, subjecting farmers to the uncertainties of international markets and developments elsewhere.  If there is a signal with the noise that Trump is making with our food system, then this is it – farmers better get ready for a volatile next few years and more bailouts, as operations will continue to go under.  Overall, Trump’s nationalist rhetoric amounts to little, as our food system becomes more global, increasingly made vulnerable to dynamics outside our control.

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The mangled and burnt remains of Deris Kogoya, killed by an Indonesian helicopter attack.

On May 6, Deris Kogoya was riding his motorbike when he was executed by an Indonesian rocket, bazooka, or mortar attack from a helicopter near Kelanungin village, Puncak Jaya regency, West Papua. The mangled human remains in the photo had been an eighteen-year-old youth just a few hours earlier. He was with his friend Jemi Walker who was seriously injured, but is being treated by traditional methods in secret because he is afraid of being killed if he goes to a hospital.

What kind of place is this where the lives of young people can be taken from them, leaving a mangled mess of tissue and bone behind, and where a hospital becomes a crime scene? It’s not something that a person in Barcelona, London, Oslo, Canberra, Washington … can even contemplate. What would happen if we were talking about a quiet Parisian Street, or a hospital in Stockholm? That’s a silly question because it’s impossible. These are places of white people. Therefore it can’t happen. I’m talking about something that’s routine in West Papua which, after a fraudulent UN-supervised “Act of Free Choice” in 1969, was formally frogmarched to become part of Indonesia. So, Indonesia is killing its own people? Not exactly. The so-called referendum is an officially blessed screen behind which the Indonesian regime claims its national right to do as it wishes with its “own” people, who aren’t really its own people because they’re Melanesians condemned by underhand United Nations politics to be stripped of their land so it could be annexed by an Asian country that would be friendly to the most destructive forms of resource extraction by its western allies. Well, that’s a cut-to-the-chase way of putting it.

How come almost nobody knows about this? It’s not just because journalists can’t report on what’s happening, or because visitors to West Papua are strictly monitored, or because a UN human rights mission has never happened, even after a petition demanding a real independence referendum signed by 1.8 million West Papuans was delivered to the UN Human Rights chief, Michele Bachelet in 2019. Now that petition, organised in conditions of genocide, was a referendum! The UN, needless to say, expresses “concern”. But a fat lot of use that “concern” is, at least to the West Papuans, though it sounds nicely compassionate in international forums. World leaders express “concern” about Palestine with hands on hearts as their other hands are sending weapons to Israel. For example, Australian Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese (who even balks at recognising that genocide happened in Armenia) has expressed “deep concern” about the “situation” of Palestinians. For him, applying the word “genocide” is “not appropriate”. His foreign minister’s voting record shows where his government’s concern really lies and it’s not with the Palestinians. Anthony Albanese gives even less of a flying fuck about West Papua—and I’m deliberately using the squeamishly called f-word because I can’t think about this in polite terms. Australia is selling lots of weapons and military knowhow to Indonesia and, guess what, it signed the Lombok Treaty for “security cooperation” (when they hear the word security they reach for their gun) in 2006 which shields military cooperation with the deal that there will be no interference or comment on “internal” affairs, or “sovereignty”. This gag order is just one more reason why most people have no idea that a genocide is happening every single day in West Papua.

We’re being taught to live with one genocide that’s blaring out in headlines, accompanying our morning coffee with images of starving children—and yes you can easily count the ribs—or of headless bodies and bodiless heads, the stifled grief of flesh-and-blood humans emitted as “news” without real content or causes. The atrocity-level bar is being raised all the time and we’re being force-fed genocide as our daily bread. Now AI is thinking for us, but that’s OK because thinking might induce us to make moral choices, which we can’t do if we can’t think. The bottom line of this diet of atrocity is racism. Those people dying aren’t like “us” (and the bottom line of “us” is the likes of Trump, Netanyahu and their buddies). We need to relearn the meaning of “us”, a solidary, a communal, a friendly idea. If Deris Kogoya was a white youth who wouldn’t be accused of being a “separatist rebel”, if he was a white boy ripped apart in Idaho, there’d be headlines. But we know from Palestine that headlines make no difference if you’re dark skinned. And that’s because western countries—enriched by a long history of colonial plunder, which also meant removing human beings, mostly dark-skinned human beings who got in the way—are saturated with racist degeneracy at all levels of existence, from microaggressions in everyday situations through to state policy.

Indonesia is doing everything it can to hide its genocide in West Papua, aided and abetted by its western allies with (their own very secret) “security” concerns but that’s no excuse for ordinary people not to know that genocide has been happening there for a very long time. Reporting the murder of Deris Kogoya, the interim president of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), Benny Wenda, writes of his own experience almost fifty years ago:

[The] genocidal military operations in 1977-78, when Indonesian soldiers bombed, tortured and raped their way across the central highlands. Over 11,000 West Papuans were murdered then, including many members of my own family. I was forced to live in the bush for five years while soldiers occupied my village. When I see the image of Deris Kogoya’s mutilated body, it brings me back to those terrible years.

Benny Wenda, then, was also a wounded child who couldn’t be taken to a hospital. It was the same story then too, and it’s kept getting worse. Indonesia’s current president Prabowo Subianto is formally recognised as a war criminal. It’s not difficult to find out about his crimes and guess what he’ll do in the future. Spoiler: more genocide and ecocide in West Papua. It’s not difficult to find out what’s really happening in West Papua and who Indonesia’s outside supporters are and why. You can list them but lists of atrocities get covered with even more filth if they’re published in a moral cesspit. At most, some people hold their noses. Atrocities can be documented and explained in terms of colonial plunder, geopolitical concerns and, what they call security, so Indonesia listed the West Papuan resistance as a “terrorist” organisation. You fight for your life, or maybe you don’t even fight but you get called a terrorist, and that somehow makes their genocide easier because their democratic allies are all opposed to terrorism.

Yet, as well as documenting atrocities, there are other matters to be faced. I can’t stomach living in a world where genocide (with its conjoined twin ecocide), known and not known, is routine. It’s a moral wound and I don’t have words for it because all the old slogans like “never again” are empty. But I still want to ask why the civilised, democratic western culture, child of enlightenment, so proudly held up as a beacon to the world’s people, a civilisation that even came up with a universal human rights declaration, is so indifferent to genocide (of dark-skinned peoples). Learning directly through the cruelty inflicted on them, these are the people who take a moral stance on questions of rights and justice. They learn what they are in their absence. But is such suffering the only way western peoples will even be able to acquire this understanding? International legal scholar and writer Philippe Sands, who has fought many a good fight for justice, recently said in a public lecture in Barcelona that the international legal system is “fucked”. His word. If that is fucked so are we all. Someone told me once that Lévi-Strauss said that racism is more a moral question than a political one. Whether he said it exactly like that or not isn’t the point. He said it in many other ways in his writings.

Some human beings are suffering genocide. The misery of being in that situation (if you’re able to survive) of being unable to escape watching your family, friends, and neighbours being slaughtered must be more than unbearable, because watching them watching it, courtesy of mainstream media outlets, is already unbearable. Deris Kogoya represents millions of people who are treated like trash to be removed. In direct relationship with this, and unbearable in another way because this is being allowed and even encouraged to happen, is the moral crisis that affects everyone, although few people seem to realise it. We should all be weeping for Deris Kogoya, all the murdered people he represents, and what he represents, including general indifference to his death. The international system is fucked. The only way to unfuck it is from the grassroots, from ordinary people who still understand that the only way humans can live in society is ethically.

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Photograph Source: ajay_suresh – CC BY 2.0

Today, it would be nearly impossible to overstate the extent to which justice for the criminal defendant in the U.S. has been compromised by prosecutorial misconduct of the most serious kinds. A growing body of evidence from journalistic investigations, scholarly studies, and reports from civil liberties groups reveals a startling pattern of serious misconduct, lack of transparency and accountability, and politicized and racialized enforcement.

At the center of this system of injustice and impunity is the Department of Justice. Prosecutors, especially in the federal government, wield immense power and exercise broad discretion. In criminal litigation, the government has a host of tools that are unavailable to others and that far overshadow the Bill of Rights in terms of their practical importance to real-world outcomes.

But the immunity shielding the misconduct of prosecutors is extremely strong, meaning that practically speaking there is almost never accountability for prosecutorial misconduct. For example, they have absolute immunity from civil claims for all actions undertaken in their role as advocates. Though they are some of the most powerful and respected people in the legal system, there is almost nothing federal prosecutors can’t get away with under the prevailing system of immunity. Americans accept this patently unjust system mostly unconsciously—that is, because they don’t know and it doesn’t affect them. Indeed, even our liberals rush to the defense of this malignant institution.

The DOJ is arguably alone among federal agencies in its degree of opacity and in its lack of accountability: it is the only federal government body whose inspector general is not permitted to investigate allegations of misconduct by its lawyers—an explicit exception mandated by federal statute. While the DOJ houses an Office of Professional Responsibility, lack of transparency is its official policy, as it “does not include names or personal identifying information in the summaries of its investigations.”

One of the most frequent and persistent themes of the literature of prosecutorial misconduct is the illegal and unethical withholding of exculpatory evidence. Under the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1963 case Brady v. Maryland, the government must share evidence tending to show the innocence of the accused. In Brady, the government intentionally withheld an extrajudicial statement given by a companion of the defendant, in which the companion admitted to the killing at issue in the case. The defendant was sentenced to death.

The Court held “that the suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused upon request violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution.” But today, Brady violations are practically ubiquitous in the system and almost always go unpunished. Many of these violations have cost innocent people decades of their lives, and some defendants have paid the ultimate price, executed for crimes they did not commit, while prosecutors knowingly withheld evidence and committed frauds on the court.

In the “largest-ever examination of Brady violations,” published last year (August 2024) legal scholars at Notre Dame found that such violations are indeed routine, permeating the system. While their study suggests that “a substantial minority” of these violations arise from mistakes of prosecutors acting in good faith, the truth it that the evidence about the intentionality of Brady violations is not well-developed. This is because that question addresses the subjective mental state of violating prosecutors—who, importantly, have been given no reason to comply with the Constitution or to tell the truth. Simply, the evidence discussed in the paper does not show that the pervasive Brady violations we find in criminal cases are the result of prosecutors acting in good faith.

Another of the DOJ’s favorite abuses of power is the national security letter. Using this administrative subpoena process gives the DOJ the power to obtain certain private files without the knowledge or permission of a judge, and it conveniently compels the silence of the recipient of the request. This allows the government to take private records without judicial approval, while forbidding recipients of these demands from speaking out and exposing the practice to sunlight.

But perhaps no aspect of the criminal justice system today better reveals its true character than the plea bargain. The use of coercive tactics to push vulnerable defendants into relenting and accepting unconscionable terms has effectively stripped away all of the Constitution’s prescribed protections for criminal defendants. The use of plea bargaining to escape the challenges of prosecuting and trying cases within constitutional constraints has created a crisis of injustice in our country.

While legal scholars have been inclined to accept the validity of plea bargains as a roughly fair reflection of the outcomes that could have been expected from trials, this position has become increasingly untenable and inconsistent with available evidence. As mandatory sentences and sentencing guidelines proliferated, the use of coercive plea bargaining in criminal matters became even more obviously inimical to the provision of justice.

Writing in 2004, Stephanos Bibas, today a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, argued that the accepted narrative about the role of plea bargaining in the criminal justice process discounted key facts. Bibas saw that our “oversimplified model ignores how structural distortions skew bargaining outcomes,” leaving defendants with virtually no choice but to waive their constitutional rights through plea deals. Bibas observed the presence of “legally irrelevant factors” that nonetheless impact the fairness of punishments doled out under plea agreements.

When you have the power to threaten almost every defendant into pleading guilty, you have the power to preempt the constitutional protections granted to criminal defendants. The trial right, for example, vanishes as a practical matter. This has been standard procedure in the federal govt for decades.

In fiscal year 2022, for example, less than half of one percent of federal criminal defendants were acquitted. According to a report from the American Bar Association, in any given year, over 98 percent of federal criminal cases conclude with a plea agreement. This figure is consistent with the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s 2023 Annual Report, which notes that “the overwhelming majority of sentenced individuals pleaded guilty (97.2%).” DOJ offices aim not only for high conviction rates, but for heavy caseloads, keeping track of the number of defendants per Assistant United States Attorney.

Defendants behave rationally with the hand they are dealt: those who choose trial, despite mounting pressure to opt for a deal, find that most who go to trial are still convicted. Even worse, they receive harsher penalties, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the trial penalty. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers describes the trial penalty as “the massive difference between the sentence criminal defendants typically receives after a plea bargain and the much higher sentence defendants typically receive if they are convicted at trial.”

Given these facts, it is no exaggeration to say that the DOJ is home to some of the very worst lawyers in the country—both in terms of skill and ethics. When nearly every one of your cases ends in a coerced plea deal and you virtually never have to go to trial, it’s safe to say you’re living on easy street. In their heedless lionization of the DOJ, the mainstream “resistance” reveals that it knows very little about the way that our justice system functions—with or without Donald Trump. It is yet another disheartening example of how our politics, across both major teams, is purely vibe-driven, based on how things are coded within the popular conversation. Much of the “resistance” has apparently failed to notice that the prisons do not just fill themselves up on their own. Prosecutors have that job as much or more than cops do. It doesn’t make much sense to criticize the police for racist mass incarceration only to turn around and heap praise on the special, fancy people who have the privilege of not having to carry a weapon; they are no less deploying violence.

One way to understand these phenomena is as necessary aspects of an authoritarian system in need of a way to control those who, in Marx’s terms, have been “made relatively superfluous,” “turned into a relative surplus population.” Under our political and economic system, large segments of the population are effectively closed out of the formal economy. Prosecutors play a crucial role in managing and disciplining such populations on behalf of the state and capital, normalizing abusive relationships of power.

Society would not tolerate such degrees of ethical license, coercion, and patent unfairness in both process and result if it weren’t for the prosecutor’s role. The prosecutor makes the process legitimate, a reputation launderer for the power of the state. He is no less an agency launderer, using a complex, opaque, and expensive administrative process to obscure the crimes being committed against defendants and prisoners. The cachet of the law interposes itself cynically between the actors and their moral responsibility, as an obfuscation. The guidelines and processes that apply within the criminal justice system systematically disadvantage defendants, but they are treated as neutral aspects of the law. This process of normalization has taken the form of the criminalization of Blackness in the United States. Today, this process is evident in the Trump administration’s claims that graduate students and scholars protesting atrocities in the Gaza Strip are supporting terrorism. Or its blanket claims that Hispanic and Latin Americans are connected to gangs.

The criminal justice system constitutes a form of biopolitical management, in which practices originally regarded as exceptional become routine, and the harshest penalties are a mundane everyday matter. The role of the plea bargain is to render all of this “voluntary.” In theory, defendants don’t have to accept any offer, but because almost all cases end in a plea deal, rejecting one must be irrational. In the reframing of demonstrably coercive practices as consensual and producing agreements, the plea system was able to make the mass forfeiture of constitutional rights socially acceptable.

This is how a constitutional system of strong protections becomes an administrative process for shuffling people into long prison sentences right before our eyes. Because this process of administering pleas has become the default means of adjudication, those who perform this function have been able to convert their work into a form of symbolic capital. Prosecutors, particularly AUSAs, occupy positions of unearned status by controlling the criminal plea system. In virtual anonymity, with blanket immunity for the most serious crimes, they have been given the privilege of tending to a system whose disparate impact on Black Americans and poor people has become infamous. The plea bargain system replaces real due process, instead reproducing white supremacy by calling these deals consent.

The way we treat federal prosecutors hints at a fundamental flaw in the American government’s self-conception: from an empirical perspective, its commitment to due process, even at the best of times, is a mere facade, hiding a process of rote administrative steps that pretends to represent robust adherence to constitutional principles and protections for the most vulnerable people in society.

Prosecutors’ pervasive misconduct and subordination of traditional due process with constitutional protections to an administrative process lacking safeguards or accountability has fatally undermined the credibility of the current system. It is no exaggeration to say that the Department of Justice is terrorizing citizens of the United States, having become a tool of injustice and corruption.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Some years back, when Obama was trying to push through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), I was giving a talk on the tentative deal and arguing it was not a good deal. My main objections were to the provisions on patents and other intellectual property issues, but I also felt that its rules on digital commerce appeared to be designed to protect Amazon and Facebook and other Internet behemoths.

While I mostly had a friendly audience, there was a woman from Vietnam who strongly disagreed. She said that her native country stood to have large gains from the TPP and felt it would be a real loss to it if the deal did not go through.

I had to admit that I was not familiar with how the deal would affect Vietnam. I did know the projections, even from supporters of the deal, showed modest gains for the United States, Japan, and most of the other countries in the pact, but I did not know what they showed for Vietnam. I told her I would check on this and get back to her.

When I checked on the projections of gains for Vietnam, I found out that she was correct. They showed very substantial gains for the country. These gains were an order of magnitude larger than the gains projected for the other countries in the pact.

But the reason for Vietnam’s large projected gains had relatively little to do with commitments from the other countries in the TPP. The reason that Vietnam was projected to have large gains is that, unlike the other countries in the TPP, it still had very high tariffs on imports.

The TPP required Vietnam to lower its tariffs against the other countries to near zero. This was why it was projected to have large gains from the TPP.

Of course, Vietnam could lower its own tariffs any day of the week. It did not need the TPP to make this call, although there could be political factors that would make it easier for its government to lower tariffs in the context of a trade deal than would otherwise be the case.

But the point here is that tariffs are a tax that a country imposes on itself. It imposes costs in the same way that a tax on gas or beef imposes costs. Tariffs can also harm trading partners, but that doesn’t change the fact that the main victim is generally the country imposing tariffs.

This is an important point to keep in mind when we evaluate whatever concept of a trade deal with China that Treasury Secretary Bessent puts forward. If we end up with a lower tariff on most items than the 154 percent tax that Trump has currently imposed, this will be good news. If we still end up with a high tariff, which seems likely, that will not be something to celebrate even if our tariff on Chinese products ends up being higher than China’s tariffs on our products.

It is also important to always remember to keep your eyes on the ball. The Trump administration constantly spews total nonsense on just about everything. Last week Attorney General Pam Bondi said that Trump saved between one-third and two-thirds of the country from dying from fentanyl overdoses in his first hundred days in office. She still has not acknowledged this was a mistake.

Anyhow, Trump has invented a national emergency out of thin air on our trade deficit. There is literally no obvious problem in the deficit. There are issues that we can and should be negotiating with China, but insofar as there is some sort of crisis stemming from our trade with China and other countries, it is entirely Trump’s own creation.

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

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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Bb3015 – CC BY-SA 4.0

Patrick Bond sat down with the Media Review Network (Pretoria) to offer insights into the reality behind the rhetoric on Israel. He explains the deep-seated links between the SA elite ruling class and corporate business and how this impacts on SA’s moral stance on Palestine. Prof. Bond also talks about the ecological links in the social justice movement and illuminates why we can no longer separate issues of economic inequality and ecological exploitation.

Mariam Jooma Çarikci: Welcome to the inaugural episode of Critical Currents, the official podcast of the Media Review Network, where analysis meets activism and narratives from the Global South rise to the forefront. I’m your host, Mariam Jooma Çarikci, and in this space we cut through propaganda, challenge dominant discourses, and spotlight stories too often sidelined by mainstream media. In each episode, we’ll be joined by thought leaders, activists, scholars, and journalists who bring clarity to the chaos and help us to connect the dots between geopolitics, media framing, and the lived lives of oppressed communities – from the war zone of Gaza to the boardrooms of BRICS, from Sudan’s shifting sands to South Africa’s policy contradictions. We unpack it all, critically and unapologetically. This is not just commentary; this is resistance through reason. Welcome to Critical Currents.

And today, our first guest – our inaugural guest for our podcast – is Professor Patrick Bond. Professor Bond is a distinguished political economist, public intellectual, and author, and is currently professor at the University of Johannesburg, Department of Sociology. Professor Bond has written extensively on global justice, financialization, climate debt, BRICS, and, of course, subimperialism – which is a topic we are quite interested in today. His seminal works include Elite Transition, Politics of Climate Justice, and BRICS: An Anti-capitalist Critique. He was also a former adviser to former President Mandela’s Reconstruction and Development Program. Professor Bond is known for his sharp critique of neoliberalism and elite state capture, particularly in post-apartheid South Africa. Welcome, Professor Bond. We’re honored to have you on the show.

Patrick Bond: Oh Mariam, thank you. Salam alaikum, and what a great honor. I mean, Media Review Network doing the podcast is a wonderful expansion. I always relied on the analysis, the articles, the letters to the editor – hey, you’ve spent decades keeping us informed. So thanks to the network.

Miriam: Thank you so much indeed. It’s been a long journey – it’s 30 years of the MRN – but we’ve been invigorated by intellectuals like yourself. So today, we’re digging into South Africa’s relations with Israel, the BRICS contradictions, and the role of elites in shaping foreign policy – and, more critically, the climate crisis. Let’s start with the subimperialism and Israel trade question. So, you’ve argued that BRICS states have often reinforced the global capitalist structure rather than resisting them. How do you see South Africa’s – what some would argue – rhetorical solidarity with Palestine squaring with its continued trade with Israel, and looking at the coal issue in particular?

Patrick: Well, thanks. Lots there. I mean, the general ideological problem is one we face all the time: it’s called ‘talk left, walk right.’ That is to say, it’s easy to have a rhetorical anti-Zionism and anti-genocide position, but then, when key people are profiting from it, you kind of wonder – well, how deep is this? Once you scratch the surface. Because the BRICS – all of them – will have some statement about a two-state solution, the need to have a ceasefire. They’ll certainly have rhetoric. And South Africa, to its credit, has gone in two directions: the International Court of Justice, with the International Criminal Court arrest warrant; but also that ICJ determination that there’s a genocide underway. And backing the ICC, is the ‘Hague Group.’

Secondly, that is not just to rely upon judges – at least one of whom, from Uganda, the deputy chair of the ICJ – is very pro-Zionist, so we’re not sure what will happen. And even if it does lead to a good ruling, we know that in Tel Aviv there are two words that they use to describe what happens, and those are: ‘Hague Shmague.’ In other words, they don’t care. So, the other process – the Hague Group – is to say, governments can come together against the United States’ prosecution and persecution of International Criminal Court, with its sanctions and the attempt to delegitimize the ICC, when it has an arrest warrant against Netanyahu and others.

Now, that becomes another point of hypocrisy, because it would be wonderful if that was the, let’s say, template for standing up to Trump. That is, you put a collective together, you have the moral high ground, you stand up for international values – especially against genocide. And then, in that Hague Group declaration, January 31 this year, you say: ‘We will not provide military fuel, and we will not facilitate military fuel.’ That would be wonderful. And if we could expand that spirit, now that the tariffs, now that the climate crisis, the public health, the humanitarian food aid – all of that – is now something I think the G20 here in Johannesburg in November will have to figure out: do we even want the United States in the G20?

But unfortunately, that strength is balanced by a weakness. And the weakness is profiteers. And there are profiteers across the BRICS. And South Africa’s profiteers include an arms merchant who’s a bastion of the Zionist establishment – Ivor Ichikowitz – and he’s had deals with Elbit, deals that supply fascistic governments in Latin America – Ecuador’s army – with not only military vehicles, but Elbit souping them up for communications. And that continues. He’s also – Ichikowitz – supplying the Israeli, well, the Jewish people’s spiritual support, which is tefillin, which is a leather strip that you bind around with a verse from the Torah in a small box on your head. That – that’s what this guy Ivor Ichikowitz, who is an arms merchant and an ANC member, and, as recently as mid-2023, the number one donor to the ANC, as the public records at least have shown. And that means, when the genocide began in October 2023, Ichikowitz was schizophrenic and split. And instead of still supporting the ANC, he has come out very strongly – especially in articles in 2024 and statements the whole time – against South Africa’s support for Palestine.

Now, that’s just one angle – the arms dealing. And then we have Rheinmetall, which is the German company that owns big chunks of Denel, South Africa’s state-owned arms company. Are weapons being made in South Africa – in Somerset West or in Centurion – are they going up to not only to Rheinmetall in Germany, but onward, including to Israel? It’s an open question. We’re not sure. We have a very ineffectual National Conventional Arms Control Committee meant to look this over – and they’re not doing well. There are a few other arms dealers that we’re curious about – the extent to which, certainly historically, Armscor and Israel, and indeed going back to the 1970s nuclear collaboration.

The other big problem, though, is coal – which is very open. Because we can track the coal-bearing ships that go from Richards Bay all the way up to Hadera port, and to some extent Ashdod. At Hadera, there is the Orot Rabin power station. At Ashdod, it’s the Rutenberg station. And those are supplying Israel with about 20% of its grid-based energy. And that’s a very important part of the supply that the Israel Defense Forces would use to prosecute that genocide or to maintain apartheid. And it would therefore be against the International Court of Justice ruling in July – that was actually codified by the United Nations General Assembly in September – that says: don’t do electricity supply or any other goods crucial for the apartheid, the land grabbing of the West Bank too, not just the genocide of Gaza.

So we’ve got a couple of, let’s say, screaming contradictions. And it’s even more embarrassing, I think, for South Africa, because President Ramaphosa used to be the main partner of the main company that sells coal to Israel – both from South Africa, but also from Colombia. And they’ve continued that, even into this year, in spite of the Colombian president telling them not to.

And that company – Glencore – is notorious for bribing African governments. They were not prosecuted for the activities in South Africa, but across the rest of Africa, the prosecutions, including in the US and Britain, have shown that this is a very corrupt company. And they have chosen – particularly because their predecessor, Xstrata, was doing deals with the African Rainbow Minerals chief executive, Patrice Motsepe, who happens to be President Ramaphosa’s brother-in-law.

Now we have found – and a protest in early April confirmed this – 23% of Glencore’s ownership is of the mines in question in Mpumalanga that get the coal out and get them coal over to Israel. That would be profits to Patrice Motsepe, we estimate, out of about a $5 million profit – that is the net income after the costs – for each of the 177,000 tons of coal that are put on the ship and shipped out to Israel, Patrice Motsepe makes about a million dollars. So these are the sorts of, let’s say, contradictions that just scream out, and that we hope more pressure will allow us to resolve – resolve in favor of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel.

Mariam: Wow. That’s – you know, that’s a lot to process. And it definitely raises the question about civil society. So what kind of leverage do we have? Is this about complete elite state capture, where we’ve now become almost enslaved to the political system without any avenue for protest that’s meaningful? Because protests have been going on. But, you know, what is the stumbling block?

Patrick: Yes, I mean, I think we are now looking at – if you’re a genuine anti-imperialist from civil and uncivil society – and you’re interested in Palestinian survival and solidarity, and you’re also interested in the climate catastrophe and interested in future generations’ welfare, which is something that I think obviously go together. We see activists in South Africa embody those in coming to protests against coal with both hats. That is, they don’t want to see coal as it’s combusted – a ton will create more than two tons of CO₂. And when that happens, the crisis, for example, in Palestine is not just the occupation, the genocide, the apartheid, but it’s also going to be a climate catastrophe.

In coming years and decades, we’re going to see much higher temperatures – to the point where it’s impossible to go outside. Also, more extreme weather events and the drying of soils, which I think the Israelis are now encountering, where they planted inappropriate pine trees instead of the local indigenous cedar. And that meant when fires have raged through parts of what had been Palestine – after the Nakba, 1948 – the Israelis planted pine trees, and now those are burning. That’s also because of a climate effect, we can safely say.

I mean, the scientific studies aren’t in yet. And I think if we can understand this Middle East site being, you know, where there’s so much oil and gas – gas offshore Gaza that the Israelis are already trying to figure out how to steal – and the CO₂, but also the methane that comes when you burn not just coal, but now you’re burning gas. And methane is 85 times more potent a greenhouse gas. That means that – what I can again safely predict is – we’re going to see countries like, not just Israel (which had been nearly entirely reliant on coal), shifting to gas because they have their own gas fields.

Likewise, South Africa seems to have gas fields. And the president’s spokesperson, speaking to The New York Times in February, offered those up to U.S. oil companies as a sort of peace deal with Donald Trump, because of the ideological hammering South Africa was getting from this neofascistic Trump regime. It’s very shocking to see The New York Times have this offering when we’ve had more than 100 protests on the beaches – the Indian Ocean and especially the Atlantic Ocean coastline – against offshore oil and gas drilling. And the courts are actually favorable to the activists, saying that companies like Shell, Total – you can’t go ahead. And I just fear that this is one of the issue areas that – if we are not linking Palestine and climate – we’re losing an enormous opportunity.

And one of the opportunities is to talk to others in civil society who are implicated. Let’s be frank. The main coal mining unions – there are three of them – are not yet on board. They will have good rhetoric against the genocide and against Zionism. But when you look at the National Union of Mineworkers, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the latter, NUMSA, the biggest union, historically the most militant socialist union in solidarity with peoples under fire all over the world. But their own mineworkers, working for Glencore, have not stood up yet and said, ‘We’re going to leave that coal in the hole.’ And if it means our jobs are lost, then we also have another route, which is to go to the Just Energy Transition Partnership – which is over 150 billion rands, sitting in the presidency in Pretoria – precisely to help decarbonize. That is, to leave the coal in the hole.

Even South Africa’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) – the offering that South Africa makes to the United Nations for climate control – even that document says we need to have non–fossil fuel development in Mpumalanga. The money is there. The political will isn’t – even in our own ranks – where this inability to link Palestine solidarity with being concerned about climate isn’t quite there yet.

Mariam: So Professor, you’ve definitely raised, you know, numerous issues that allow us to look at our democracy from a different perspective. Because to what extent have we – not just as you say with the rhetoric on Palestine, but also with our substantive concept of democracy – have we just allowed, you know, paper and legalese to define democracy? So I know you’ve written a lot about subimperialism, and particularly you’re critically – critical or post – about it in South Africa. If we could maybe just divert a bit and look at the idea of democracy: how would you characterize South Africa’s current position, and where do you think we need to be?

Patrick: Well, the phrase used by people like Barry Gills and Joel Rocamora and Walden Bello is ‘low-intensity democracy.’ But that’s not to say that in 1994, the victory of one person, one vote, in a unitary state – something that many Palestinians look to as a way to get around the apartheid character of Gaza and the West Bank’s geographical Bantustanization by Israel – and to have a unified project now, is for Palestinians to make that choice about a one-state solution. But certainly, we achieved that one person, one vote, when many thought it was impossible, given the adverse balance of forces. Imperialism loved the apartheid regime – until it was too late. And the apartheid collapsed partly due to internal, obviously political resistance – but also economic contradictions.

And I think if I see, then, the economic way out that the likes of Anglo American Corporation would choose – it was to go up to Zambia, to a game lodge, invited by the Zambian president at the time, Kenneth Kaunda. And this is in 1985. Here in Johannesburg, in August, P.W. Botha had created such incredible friction and volatility and crisis in the financial markets that the international banks pulled out. It was because P.W. Botha gave a speech – the Rubicon Speech. And you know, when I’ve been in Gaza and Ramallah giving talks about this, about the history of BDS – Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions – and showed a little film made by Connie Field about this: standing ovation. Not because of me, but because of this example. And the beauty of saying, through a nonviolent economic strategy that should complement all of our politics and cultural and all the other work we do – yes – that you can find things like the energy Achilles heel of Israel and begin to affect that.

We did that here, but in a way that the big business went to Zambia, met the African National Congress in exile, and began to do a deal that, as you say, left the political economic underpinning of apartheid – like migrant labor and extraction of minerals – kept that intact. The only thing that really has changed – but not to our benefit – is that there’s been some deracialization at the very top. You could think of an Irish coffee – well, maybe you don’t think of it, but you can – it’s a metaphor people have used to say: well, at the bottom of that cup is dark black coffee, and then there’s a layer of white cream, and then you sprinkle on some cinnamon or some chocolate. And that, in a way, is the metaphor as well of Zwelinzima Vavi of the South African Federation of Trade Unions. He puts it: that Irish coffee society is what we’ve been left with.

So that means that, digging deep into the soil, are exploited mineworkers. Marikana was a site where we understood very clearly that the co-owner of the mine, Cyril Ramaphosa, wasn’t the same Cyril who had organized the same mineworkers to fight for justice in the late ‘80s. And indeed, that change – the Black Diamonds emerging to take over coal. And it’s not just Ramaphosa with Shanduka Coal, allied with Glencore, Optimum Mine especially, or Patrice Motsepe, the brother-in-law of Ramaphosa and his African Rainbow Minerals, co-owner of the mines that send the coal to Israel. It’s also a few others that have, in a way, made our discussions about climate so difficult. Because their interests are to continue to dig out the coal and burn it.

The interests of your children, my children, and future generations would be: leave that coal in the hole. And let the next generations decide if they want it – not to burn, that would be crazy, because it creates CO₂ and climate catastrophes – but instead to use for plastics and synthetic materials, or pharmaceutical products, or lubricants, or tarmac, or all sorts of things that we use in daily life that depend on hydrocarbons. But right now, our generation is just burning them.

And I think it’s that inability of our new elite – they have tapped into an imperialist politics that’s both climate denialist (in the case of Donald Trump and the big project of Big Oil and, you know, Big Coal around the world) to avoid making the cuts in emissions. But secondly, it’s with the mainstream of the West – imperialist project of turning the climate catastrophe into a marketing opportunity. To privatize the air through carbon markets and emissions trading. And to deny that there’s any ‘polluter pays.’ That is what we would normally say. If I dump toxic waste on a neighbor, the neighbor says, ‘Well, you’re going to owe me a lot for that.’ And you would pay for, you know, ecological reparations.

But our government – and the West – have in common, and the BRICS do as well, the failure to, let’s say, acknowledge climate debt. To even admit that there was, not just from the U.S. – the main historic polluter – but from the main emitters now, which are, number two, China historically, and Russia, and India, and Brazil and South Africa, a little bit lower on the list. But to actually acknowledge. And I think that’s why the subimperial politics have come out – because there are so many self-interested factors.

A neoliberal financial elite. We have Standard Bank that funds projects all over Africa that promote, for example, in northern Mozambique, TotalEnergies’ extraction of gas against the wishes of local Islamic community – who’ve had an insurgency. And then we’ve seen them in Uganda and Tanzania with the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. And we’ve seen them here funding coal. So Standard is one target of combined forces of activists saying: we don’t want you to be promoting Glencore – as they have in the past – for its coal in South Africa. Nor do we want any coal or fossil fuels to be funded.

Those, to me, are the politics that get you around that problem: talk left, walk right. Where the government has a strong nationalist prestige of winning democracy, but then being co-opted by fossil capital, mining capital – which, frankly, loots the country. If you do a measure of the extraction of the minerals – which I do regularly and contest this with professionals and other scholars – you find that there’s more that’s taken out, for example, under this city, Johannesburg – half the world’s historic gold taken out – and then the reinvestment of the proceeds is inadequate to compensate for that loss of wealth. That is, there’s a net loss of our natural capital. Even when you add the produced capital – machinery, or the built environment – and our educational capital, our human capital, and our financial capital.

You put it all together and it’s less than what we’ve taken out. And that’s the case for all these minerals, including coal. And I hope that we can do those kinds of calculations and ask the likes of Patrice Motsepe and Glencore – this very, very corrupt company, whose number two listing is the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, number one is in London – and to ask them: ‘If you’re looting us, don’t we have a polluter pays responsibility to get reparations?’ I think the reparations we should be demanding from Glencore, Patrice Motsepe, and others who’ve profited from coal to Israel should somehow fund good work for Palestine, first and foremost. So I hope that’s one of the areas where we can say: reparations for the profits you’ve made. And we can count the profits because we know – we can track the ships that are taking them.

Mariam: Yes, certainly. So, of course, this extends to areas like the Congo, and then we talk about Mali. And we’ve seen interesting movements in West Africa with regard to Guinea, Mali, and Niger. But let’s go back to what you were saying now about offering, you know, the prestigious position of being a champion of the oppressed, but at the same time profiting from that. Let’s look at BRICS. So what does it say about BRICS? I mean, we’ve looked to BRICS – when I say ‘we,’ I mean the Global South – as somehow seeing BRICS as an alternative. In your view, where do they stand?

Patrick: Yeah, having studied this very closely – lots of books and articles, dozens and dozens – I certainly would say that the hype about BRICS, and hope for BRICS, leading to ultimately helplessness: from hype to hope to hopelessness, is fairly common once you realize what they’re doing. And it’s so tragic, because there has been hype about de-dollarization, about the abuse of the imperialist financial institutions – the IMF, the World Bank – imperialist trade, the World Trade Organization. And then, when you actually look at the way that the BRICS tap in.

Now, I could start obviously with Israel. Because Russia – as Vladimir Putin estimated – has 2 million Russian citizens that he’s responsible for who live in Israel. They’re some of the most right-wing, pro-genocidal, and IDF-active citizens of Israel. I think there are about 7.2 million Jewish Israelis, and of those, 2 million according to Putin – 1.3 million according to other sources – but you’d regularly find them, you know, as hostages, you find them in the IDF, you find them in the right-wing parties. And then you’ve got Russian coal going there.

Then we could go from Russia to Brazil. Brazil has Petrobras in league with Total to send oil to Israel – and they’re about 9% of the supplies from Brazil. And Brazil has also had a long-standing military relationship with Elbit Systems.

Then we could go to China, which is the biggest – and it’s so tragic that Yahya Sinwar of Hamas is known in his last minutes, his last seconds, because of a drone. And these drones, by and large, are coming from the consumer markets from state-owned companies in China that have been able to flood the world with drones. And Israel is one of the big buyers. And they worry that, okay, maybe there’s some software or there’s some problems. So, they deconstruct the drones, put them back together, and they send these drones in – for surveillance but also for actual attacks. Then you have about $20 billion a year of trade between China and Israel at peak. And the privatization of the Haifa Port and the Ashdod Port – privatization that’s both from the Chinese – a Shanghai state-owned company doing the Bayport, which is a major port for Haifa – and then an Indian company, Adani, which has got the other part of the Haifa Port. And the Indians are supplying lots of military, you know, supplies as well – and workers that have replaced Palestinians.

So then, I think those are the main five BRICS. And we look at ourselves in South Africa as the main supplier of coal – but also of raw diamonds. They come back sometimes processed. And grapes.

So these are the sorts of relationships that mean when you hear ‘two-state solution’ and you hear the calls for ceasefire – well, what pressure is being put on? Like Turkey – when the leader Erdoğan has said, ‘We’re not going to have trade’ – well, it turns out there are a lot of ways that the profiteers in Turkey can go ahead and get their activities continuing into Israel. And I fear that’s what the likes of Ivor Ichikowitz, with his – you admitted – tefillin supplies to the IDF, or deals with Elbit, or this coal supply, or the diamond dealers or the grape dealers… they’re all able to do without a second thought because we haven’t yet got the BDS movement to the point where we’ve embarrassed this government to stop it.

It would be easy to stop. The, you know, the Trade and Industry Minister, Parks Tau, said, ‘We can’t stop the coal trade because of the World Trade Organization non-discrimination clauses.’ But when you see what Donald Trump’s doing with trade, you can just say: forget it. The WTO doesn’t even really have an adjudication panel anymore, because the US sabotaged it. So I don’t think there’s any basis for South Africa – which has the ability to regulate dangerous exports – and the danger of coal going to Israel to fuel a genocide is so obvious. Parks Tau looks like one of those in this government who’s ready to bend over backwards to Donald Trump and do deals with Israel. And it’s, I think in his case, an ideological problem. He’s – you know, he’s drunk the Kool-Aid, as they say. They’ve taken over.

I think those other new BRICS – like, with the exception of Iran – all the others, even Indonesia, the newest one, which has the largest Muslim population – even they have deals. And their new leader had done some time in Jordan and had done some Israeli military deals.

But particularly the UAE and Egypt are very, very close allies. Also Ethiopia. And Ethiopia supplies soldiers into the IDF. And Egypt, of course, subject of a recent protest here at the Pretoria Embassy, because of their failure to open the Rafah border. But also, they generally support Israel when it comes to the big geopolitical arrangements. For example, when Israel and Iran were trading missiles – relatively non-fatal, but a show of force by both sides in 2024 – it was the UAE and Egypt, from the BRICS (Jordan as well), that helped Israel and the US to keep that Iron Dome going.

And so, when you look at all of this – and you look at some of the new BRICS coming in as well – I would say there’s, like, Nigeria. It’s also a partner in the BRICS. But it will also be subject to concern by environmentalists and by pro-Palestine activists in Nigeria – that this is also a major problem. Nigeria is one of the three major African oil suppliers to Israel.

And I hope that’s the basis for us continuing to network critics of the BRICS. Because I do think, by and large, when you look not just at Israel but the multilateral institutions – the World Bank, IMF, WTO – certainly the IMF: when they recapitalize, they need more money, they turn first to the BRICS. The BRICS get more shares in the IMF. By doing so, they push down other countries. Venezuela lost 41%. Even South Africa and Nigeria lost shares – when China, Brazil, India, and Russia – four of the five BRICS – got much greater shares of the IMF in 2015.

And the IMF hasn’t changed. I mean, we are subject to IMF austerity as we speak. Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana is repeatedly being told – like 100 times in three documents – to impose ‘fiscal consolidation.’ So when USAID pulls out its AIDS medicine support – PEPFAR more or less closes – that’s around 8.5 billion rand. And you know, Godongwana looks the other way, because he’s so tied up with Western financial markets.

Speaking of which – I mean, the BRICS Bank as well. It’s the New Development Bank, where here in Sandton we have a branch. But when Russia invaded Ukraine illegally and was subject to financial sanctions, the BRICS bank actually sanctioned its 20% member, Moscow, because the credit rating agencies in New York – Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s – and Janet Yellen, the US finance minister, told the BRICS Bank: you better join us in the sanctions against your own member. Which is quite extraordinary.

And the whole sense that maybe we could get de-dollarization – we could get the financial markets here in Johannesburg, or in São Paulo, or Mumbai, or Shanghai – to stand up and get some alternative to SWIFT, the interbank system. Unfortunately, that was part of the hype and the hope – and ultimately, the helplessness. Even Ebrahim Rasool, when he gave his infamous seminar presentation to MISTRA, the Mapungubwe Institute, basically said: ‘Don’t even talk about it. It will get us punished. Don’t even mention de-dollarization.’

And I must confess, even with Brazil hosting the BRICS, with a progressive leader – Lula – they are frightened. And they’re unwilling to challenge anything, even that probably the worst president for the Third World, Donald Trump, has given, which is dropping out of climate, dropping out of the World Health Organisation, cutting all this medicine and medical support, cutting food to places like Sudan where it’s desperately needed, and wrecking world trade and world finance.

There, to me, is an argument that the BRICS could be anti-imperialists. And South Africa could say to Donald Trump, ‘You obviously have no interest in multilateralism. Why are you in the G20?’ We could make it the G19. Everybody – with maybe two exceptions, Argentina and Italy – everybody else would say, ‘We vote Donald Trump off the G20 island.’ And the G19 in 2026 won’t be held in the U.S., hosted by Trump – maybe in Mexico, hosted by Claudia Sheinbaum. So I would hope that’s the sort of spirit that comes through. But the fact that I’m having to suggest it – and there are very few others in the country who are – shows you that we’re a long way away.

Mariam: Well, certainly. That’s definitely what I wanted to ask you, Doc, in that about the G20 as a missed opportunity. But before we get there, let’s look a little bit to the question of Zionism as racism. Should South Africa push for this revival of the UN 1975 resolution? Because I think the challenge was to accommodate the Oslo Accords, and in order for the Israelis to come on board, that’s how it had to be rescinded. Do you think there’s now a case for it to be put forward again in order to give Israel, you know, a much firmer push in the right direction – against the genocide?

Patrick: Oh yes. I agree with Edward Said’s critique of Oslo, because that was already clear – unfortunately – Yasser Arafat bought into a bad deal. And it was already, with the breaking up of Palestine and the acknowledgment of those borders, a travesty. But then, when you think that ‘Zionism is racism’ – that very clear message that was coming from the majority of UN members – had to be reversed. And now, if you’re anti-Zionist, you can also be accused, in many jurisdictions, officially in the courts, of being anti-Semitic. Which is outrageous. For Palestinians, who are Semitic people, this is an extraordinary abuse of phraseology.

And as someone whose own great-uncle served in the Rote Kapelle in Germany fighting the Nazis, and was caught and executed – he was the leader of that group, Harro Schulze-Boysen – and Jewish members of my academic family had to go to the United States during that period. So these are extraordinary distortions of a reality, when we could have absolute solidarity with Jews who are being oppressed on the one hand, and a critique of Israel coming up in Palestine in the way that it did – and then through theft and dislocation and massive destruction and death.

And there is a group – South African Jews for Palestine – and their allies all over, who are saying that very clearly. It’s outrageous to say that if you’re against the Zionist project of settler colonialism in Palestine, then that makes you anti-Semitic. And I think it’s terribly important to keep contesting that. And certainly, I would welcome a move to say, yeah, ‘Zionism is racism.’

Mariam: Right. And now, talking about the role of social movements, Prof, you’ve now emphasized this power of grassroots mobilization. What role should movements like BDS – which you are very involved in – how should they engage with government in terms of policy? What has been your experience? How have you been received by government?

Patrick: Well, because we have an extremely progressive group in DIRCO – the Department of International Relations and Cooperation – I think there’s no question that the message is getting through. The question is: have we got enough pressure outside to overcome that huge contradiction, where there are people at the very top of our government – the President and his brother-in-law – who’ve had deals with Glencore, the main profiteer from selling fossil fuels to Israel over all these years. How do we do a combination – let’s call it – of the tree-shakers outside and the jam-makers inside? To quote Jesse Jackson, the great U.S. civil rights leader – sort of looking for that division of labor in which the right pressure points are applied.

And there is a tendency – because we have a great tradition in the African National Congress, of winning democracy, and because the former Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor had such courage, with the then Justice Minister, her replacement Ronald Lamola – to go to the International Court of Justice in late 2023. A lot of respect, a lot of prestige, goes with the South African government – and thus, let’s call it, a reticence to be openly critical. But I think being, let’s say, too tolerant – too gentle – with that contradiction, and not bringing it forward means, I think, there’s only been one time, for example, in Parliament, where Al Jama-ah asked the question: why are we still selling coal to Israel? That’s the only time, I think, that on at least this BDS question, we’ve seen a challenge in Parliament.

It just means that the streets have to get hotter. Street heat is desperately needed. And we’ve seen it against Glencore in August 2024, and against Patrice Motsepe’s African Rainbow Minerals – Glencore’s ally – in April 2025. So we need to see much more of it. And the U.S. Consulate is very close to African Rainbow Minerals – literally across the street. Ivor Ichikowitz’s office is right down the road. As we’re speaking now, we have an opportunity because the great Palestinian liberation leader, Leila Khaled, is in a coma – after a life-threatening stroke. And I think, before she passes us, winning the renaming of Sandton Drive – on the one part, Ichikowitz; on the other part, the U.S. Johannesburg Consulate – would be the right sort of tribute. And I think we just need to be up in that space quite a bit more.

Mariam: Prof, finally – are there any books or publications that we should look out for from yourself, or anything that you think our readers and our listeners should delve into?

Patrick: Yes. I think this is a great moment for us to be aware of ideology – soft power. Sometimes, people like myself – trained in Marxist theory – are focusing on what we’ve talked about a lot: material interests, flows of capital, flows of commodities. But actually, there’s a period now of fluidity in ideology.

And the neo-fascist movement – the Zionist movement – has its own new ideology. It’s not new, but it’s a very fresh way of saying: ‘We can work with nationalism.’ The working-class interests of white men in the U.S. or Britain, who support – they call it, by the way, paleo-conservatism or right-wing populist nationalism. And we have to be aware that this is a disease of, let’s say, false consciousness – by workers – that they would support someone like Donald Trump. Or, as has happened now in Britain, the Reform Party.

This is a very, very dangerous problem. We’ve seen it in lots of parts of the Third World – like Brazil, with Bolsonaro; the Philippines with Duterte and now Marcos. And we’ve seen, in a sense, a right-wing Christian evangelism that’s fed into that. And I think, ideologically, we have to be careful. There is a strain of it in South Africa. We see it in the cabinet with Gayton McKenzie. We see it in white business and, you know, BizNews, and especially Rob Hersov. And we see it with xenophobic tendencies in Operation Dudula. So we’d sort of say, well, there’s some xenophobia and isolationism and protectionism that doesn’t speak to this vital spirit of solidarity.

Likewise, the other ruling class ideologies – neoliberalism and neoconservatism – are under threat. They’re changing. They’re becoming less diverse, less tolerant. They’re used to being neoliberal capture of ‘diversity, equity, inclusion’ – so you would find black neoliberals, women neoliberals, gay – you’d find a whole set of, let’s say, neoliberal assimilation. And that is a little bit harder because of the threat from this very fascistic right-wing – the paleocons.

And then, on our left, we have people who would say the BRICS still represent an anti-imperialism. I disagree with them profoundly, but it’s great to have these debates. They’re all good comrades – plenty of them in this country, in major groups like the ANC, the Communist Party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, MK Party, NUMSA, COSATU. You know – major, major leadership of our own political terrain would say the BRICS are an ally; that Russia’s anti-imperialist; China’s socialist – things I completely disagree with.

And then you’ve got Keynesians – those are people who would see global reform and would be hosting some of those in the G20 debates from the left. They don’t have much chance to succeed, but it’s terribly important.

And I think of those, the most important is what we’re doing in Palestine solidarity, climate solidarity, Black Lives Matter solidarity, feminist solidarity, economic justice and debt cancellation. And we could go on and on. All of these grassroots and progressive movements that include some intellectuals – like myself – who can have a little bit of free space to contemplate these links. And we would call that the Global Justice Movement. It’s got, I think, a spirit still that began in the mid-1990s, in a place in Mexico called Chiapas, with the Zapatistas. It peaked in a place called Seattle, when the World Trade Organization was shut down. And we could say, well, the greatest success was getting anti-retroviral medicines, for – we have about 7.8 million South Africans who are living with HIV. And they can get their medicines because we defeated the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s, to get those off of intellectual property – made generically, given out free by the South African government.

That would be the sort of spirit I would look to – to continually inspire us: to decommodify and to deglobalize capital through international solidarity. And I think the social movements of the world, and the labor movements, and the feminist movements, and the Palestine support movements especially – have been exemplary. And I’m hoping the climate movement catches up, because in a way, that’s the greatest threat of all. And in a place where South Africa has so much coal – and that coal is going to Israel to fuel a genocide – it’s an absolute imperative that we all get involved, and bring that to a halt.

Mariam: And I think exactly as you’ve said – the environment is almost the core issue that all the other issues almost rotate around. So if we’re able to then focus on the environment and how it impacts every aspect – economically, politically, socially – then we’d be able to create perhaps a more cohesive global justice network. Because as you’ve said, there are so many different movements, and perhaps finding a common theme around the environment would give it a greater cohesiveness.

Patrick: Yes – so long as it’s not merely an environmental and conservationist movement. It has justice. Because where we’re speaking from – Johannesburg – the most unequal city in the world, based on having been utterly looted, now falling apart in many crucial respects, in the country that’s the most unequal, and the third most contributing to the climate crisis, that is, by emissions per person, per unit of output in the economy. It’s a great place to do this work. And we’re very blessed by all of the different activists – from economic justice, climate justice, and especially justice for Palestinians – that can come together.

Mariam: Thank you so much, Professor Bond. It was such a pleasure to have you, and we hope to host you again – and indeed, to engage on more Critical Currents coming up. We hope to have one every week. And if you’d like to follow us, please do so on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Our website is mediareviewnetwork.com. Thank you so much.

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Movement toward war with China accelerates. The public, focused on troubles currently upending U.S. politics, does not pay much attention to a war on the way for decades. The watershed moment came in 1949 with the victory of China’s socialist revolution. Amid resurgent anticommunism in the United States, accusations flourished of “Who “lost” China.”

Loss in U.S. eyes was in China the dawning of national independence and promise of social change. In 1946, a year after the Japanese war ended, U.S. Marines, allied with Chinese Nationalist forces, the Kuomintang, were fighting the People’s Liberation Army in Northeast China.

The U.S. government that year was delaying the return home of troops who fought against Japan. Soldier Erwin Marquit, participant in “mutinies” opposing the delay, explained that the U.S. wanted to “keep open the option of intervention by U.S. troops … [to support] the determination of imperialist powers to hold on to their colonies and neocolonies,” China being one of these.

These modest intrusions previewed a long era of not-always muted hostility and, eventually, trade relations based on mutual advantage. The defeated Kuomintang and their leader, the opportunistic General Chiang Kai-shek, had decamped to Taiwan, an island China’s government views as a “breakaway province.”

Armed conflict in 1954 and 1958 over small Nationalist-held islands in the Taiwan Strait prompted U.S. military backing for the Nationalist government that in 1958 included the threat of nuclear weapons.

Preparations

U.S. allies in the Western Pacific – Japan and South Korea in the North, Australia and Indonesia in the South, and The Philippines and various islands in between – have long hosted U.S. military installations and/or troop deployments. Nuclear-capable planes and vessels are at the ready. U.S. naval and air force units regularly carry out joint training exercises with the militaries of other nations.

The late journalist and documentarian John Pilger in 2016 commented on evolving U.S. strategies:

“When the United States, the world’s biggest military power, decided that China, the second largest economic power, was a threat to its imperial dominance, two-thirds of US naval forces were transferred to Asia and the Pacific. This was the ‘pivot to Asia’, announced by President Barack Obama in 2011. China, which in the space of a generation had risen from the chaos of Mao Zedong’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ to an economic prosperity that has seen more than 500 million people lifted out of poverty, was suddenly the United States’s new enemy…. [Presently] 400 American bases surround China with ships, missiles and troops.”

Analyst Ben Norton pointed out recently that, “the U.S. military is setting the stage for war on China. … The Pentagon is concentrating its resources in the Asia-Pacific region as it anticipates fighting China in an attempt to exert U.S. control over Taiwan.” Norton was reacting to a leaked Pentagon memo indicating, according to Washington Post, that “potential invasion of Taiwan” would be the “exclusive animating scenario” taking precedence over other potential threats elsewhere, including in Europe.

New reality

Norton suggests that the aggressive trade war launched against China by the two Trump administrations, and backed by President Biden during his tenure in office, represents a major U.S. provocation. According to Jake Werner, director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute, “Trump’s top military and economic advisers are almost without exception committed to confrontation with China.”

He adds that, “In a context of mounting economic pain on both sides, with surging nationalism in both countries becoming a binding force on leaders, both governments are likely to choose more destructive responses to what they regard as provocations from the other side. A single misstep around Taiwan or in the South China Sea could end in catastrophe.

Economic confrontation is only one sign of drift to a war situation. Spending on weapons accelerates. U.S. attitudes shift toward normalization of war. Ideological wanderings produce old and new takes on anticommunism.

Money for weapons

The annual report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, released in April, says that in 2024 the world’s military spending increased by 9.4% in one year to a $2718 billion; it increased 37% between 2015 and 2024.

U.S. military spending in 2024 was $997 billion, up 5.9% in a year and 19% since 2015. For China, the comparable figures are $314 billion, 7.0%, and 59%, respectively; for Russia, $149 billion, 38%, and 100%; for Germany, $88.5 billion, 29% and 89%. The U.S. accounts for 37% of the world’s total military spending; China,12 %; Russia, 5.5%; and Germany, 3.3%. They are the world’s top spenders on arms.

In the United States, competition from new weapons manufacturers threatens the monopoly long enjoyed by five major defense contractors. These receive most of the $311 billion provided in the last U.S. defense budget for research, development, and production of weapons. That amount exceeds all the defense spending of all other countries in the world.

A new species of weapons manufacturer appears with origins in the high-tech industry. Important products are unmanned aircraft and surveillance equipment, each enabled by artificial intelligence.

Professor Michael Klare highlights one of them, California’s Anduril Industries, as providing the “advanced technologies … needed to overpower China and Russia in some future conflict.” Venture capital firms are investing massively. The valuation of Anduril, formed in 2017, now approaches $4.5 billion.

Palmer Luckey, the Anduril head, claims the older defense contractors lack “the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need.” Multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, investor in Anduril and other companies, funded the political campaigns of Vice President J.D. Vance and other MAGA politicians. Klare implies that Theil and his kind exert sufficient influence over government decision-making as to ensure happy times for the new breed of weapon-producers.

Giving up

Waging war looks like a fixture within U.S. politics. Support for war and the military comes easily. Criticism that wars do harm is turned aside. Broadening tolerance of war is now a blight on prospects for meaningful resistance to war against China.

Recent history is not encouraging. After the trauma of the Vietnam War subsided, anti-war resistance in the United States has been unsuccessful in curtailing wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya – and proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza –despite massive destruction in all of them and more dead and wounded than can be accounted for.

Official language testifies to routinization of U.S. military aggression. Defense Secretary Hegseth, visiting at the Army War College in Pennsylvania, started with, “Well, good morning warriors. …We’re doing the work of the American people and the American warfighter. [And] the president said to me, I want you to restore the warrior ethos of our military.”

Hegseth traveled recently in the Pacific region, presumably with war against China on his mind. In the Philippines, he remarked, “I defer to Admiral Paparo and his war plans. Real war plans.” In Guam, he insists, “We are not here to debate or talk about climate change, we are here to prepare for war.” In Tokyo, he spoke of “reorganizing U.S. Forces Japan into a war-fighting headquarters.”

Ben Norton writes that, “In his 2020 book American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, Hegseth vowed that, if Trump could return to the White House and Republicans could take power, “Communist China will fall—and lick its wounds for another two hundred years.”

Ideas as weapons

Proponents and publicists of off-beat ideas have long disturbed U.S. politics. Brandishing fantasies and myths, the Trump administrations have fashioned a new brand of resentment-inspired politics. Even so, familiar ideas continue as motivators, notably anticommunism.

Writing in Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster recently explored ideology contributing to Donald Trump’s hold on to power. Much of it, he reports, derives from California’s Claremont Institute, its office in Washington, and Hillsdale College in Michigan. A leading feature is a kind of anticommunism that targets so-called cultural Marxism. But China and its Communist Party are not immune from condemnation.

Michael Anton is a “senior researcher” at the Claremont Institute and director of policy planning at the State Department. According to Foster, Anton suggested that “China was the primary enemy, while peace should be made with Russia [which] belonged to the same ‘civilizational sect’ as the United States and Europe, ‘in ways that China would never be.’”

Former Claremont Institute president Brian Kennedy, quoted by Foster, notes that, “We are at risk of losing a war today because too few of us know that we are engaged with an enemy, the Chinese Communist Party … that means to destroy us.”

The matter of no ideas comes to the fore. Recognized international law authority Richard Falk, writing on May 6, states that, “I am appalled that the Democratic establishment continues to adopt a posture of total silence with regard to US foreign policy.” Viewing the Democrats as “crudely reducing electoral politics to matters of raising money for electoral campaigns,” he adds that, “I find this turn from ideas to money deeply distressing.”

The Democrats’ posture recalls a 1948 message from Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenburg, a Republican. During congressional debate on President Truman’s Marshall Plan, Vandenburg stated that, “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” This U.S. tradition lapses only occasionally.

Will resistance to war against China end up stronger and more effective than earlier anti-war mobilizations in the post-Vietnam War era? A first step toward resisting would be to build awareness of the reality that war with China may come soon. General knowledge of relevant history would be broadened, with emphasis on how U.S. imperialism works and on its capitalist origins. Anyone standing up for peace and no war ought to be reaching out in solidarity with socialist China.

John Pilger, moralist and exemplary documentarian and reporter, died on December 23, 2023. His 60^th documentary film, The Coming War on China, first appeared in 2016. Pilger’s website states that, “the film investigates the manufacture of a ‘threat’ and the beckoning of a nuclear confrontation.” Please view the film on his website.

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It’s hard to recall, given the unfathomable desperation now stalking Gaza, but for a fleeting moment earlier this year there was joy in the air among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returning to the rubble of their homes in north Gaza. ‘It is a festive day for us, as if we have been resurrected and now are entering paradise,” a young displaced man told Al-Jazeera in late January. ‘him. Most had been displaced repeatedly, pushed from one ‘safe zone’ to another, meagre belongings in tow; many separated from family and loved ones by the relentless bombing; the less fortunate had lost all or most of their families, or returned to the north orphaned, or having had limbs amputated. Hunger and malnutrition was rife.

The relief among Palestinians and the hope around the globe that the end of slaughter might be in sight detonated a crisis in the Israeli government. Ministers from the Zionist settler right resigned from Netanyahu’s cabinet, livid that their genocide was being cut short. Their outrage was intensified by clear indications—in the captive release ceremonies broadcast worldwide—that despite Israel’s relentless bombardment the armed Palestinian resistance remained unvanquished and unbowed.

Netanyahu had come around to ceasefire only reluctantly, and determined early on to sabotage any attempts to extend the pause. Despite Hamas’s offer to exceed what was required of them under terms of the initial exchange, the Israelis refused to engage in negotiations on phase two, which required them ‘to withdraw fully from Gaza and agree to permanently end the war’. It became increasingly clear that although they’d agreed a ceasefire deal under pressure, Netanyahu had never intended to comply.

There were ominous signs confirming this in Israeli provocations around fulfilling their obligations for releasing Palestinian detainees; more significantly, their pullback in Gaza coincided with dramatic intensification of IOF operations in the West Bank. As he has throughout negotiations, Netanyahu introduced new, humiliating conditions that he knew Hamas could not accept. The return to war was sealed when US mediator Steven Witkoff accepted Israel’s ultimatums as the basis for so-called ‘bridging proposals’—in effect, annulling the agreement that he himself had secured just weeks earlier.

The descent back into a war of extermination has been relentless ever since. Lavishly re-supplied by the Trump administration (on an expedited basis) two weeks earlier and supported by UK air power, Israel commenced an intensified bombing campaign in mid-March, killing more than 460 Gazans—overwhelmingly civilians—in the first 24 hours. The bombing—most of it carried out with 2000-pound US-supplied MK-84s—has been continuous, frequently targeting the tents of displaced civilians.

Everywhere the intensified bombing campaign is accompanied by mass starvation: since 2 March, ‘Israel has completely shut all crossings into the enclave, cutting off food, humanitarian aid, and commercial supplies’, in what the UN describes as a ‘deliberate decision to block all aid’ as a form of ‘collective punishment’ aimed at ‘pressuris[ing] Hamas.’ Al-Jazeera reports that at least 57 Palestinians have starved to death under the current blockade, and Euro-Med Monitor warns that ‘escalating famine in Gaza [has] reached catastrophic proportions’. The first two weeks of May saw a ‘sharp rise in adult death rates… alongside alarming levels of child mortality.’

Implementing ‘Trump’s Plan’?

It is in the context of this open withdrawal from any semblance of ceasefire negotiations that the ominous developments of the past week must be considered. The unanimous decision by Netanyahu’s cabinet to implement a new plan of ‘conquest’ to ‘utterly destruct and depopulate’ Gaza could not have been taken without a sense that Washington has its back: indeed the Israeli right repeatedly insist they are only carrying out ‘Trump’s plan’.

Once Trump came out (in his farcical ‘Riviera’ scheme) for the forced displacement of Palestinians, Ha’aretzmilitary analyst Amos Harel observes, ‘you could see how not only the [extremist right], but also Likud ministers and so on, have an excuse’. ‘It’s not us. It’s [the] free world’s leader saying that [so] we have to play along.’ There is a charade being played out here, of course: the Zionist right is keen to cover the impending horror with Washington’s authority, and their incessant flattery is meant to draw Trump into a fait accompli, with potential consequences that, at best, he only dimly grasps.

The deliberate blockading of all food and medical supplies for Gaza and the resumption of war has gone almost completely without comment in state and corporate-owned media in the west: instead they direct their venom at those (like Kneecap or Kehlani) who speak out against genocide. In empowering ICE to round up Palestinian solidarity activists, the Trump administration has set a template for a new round of unprecedented repression: in Germany, especially, but also across Ireland and the UK, Israel’s open abandonment of the ceasefire has been accompanied by the most severe assault on democratic rights in more than a half century.

Given the scale of barbarism unleashed by the Israeli military over the past year and a half (70,000 tons of explosives—‘the equivalent of six Hiroshimas’—bringing destruction ‘unparalleled in the post Second World War World era’), it is difficult to imagine what an ‘intensification’ of operations might look like. More significantly, while renewed slaughter might bring some perverse satisfaction to elements calling for a ‘Shoah in Gaza’, new operations are unlikely to deliver the victory that has so far eluded Netanyahu. For all its enthusiasm for inflicting carnage, and despite massive advantages in numbers and technology, Israel has failed to achieve either of its two key objectives—the return of Israeli captives and the elimination of Hamas. Nothing in the new plan is likely to alter assessments made more than a year ago that despite ‘significant’ tactical successes ‘Israel has already lost the war’ in strategic terms.

Given its colossal military advantages, Israel’s inability to secure a victory is staggering. Buried in the IOF’s declaration of its intent to carry out ‘intensified activity in the Hamas tunnel network’ was the astonishing admission that eighteen months into the war ‘only a quarter’ of them have been ‘fully neutralized’. A former Israeli general conceded that the Palestinian resistance has shown a capacity to retake towns within ‘15 minutes’ of Israeli withdrawals. One leading Israeli newspaper, lauding IOF plans to ‘replicate’ its [partial] success in the south, boasted that the military would now take the war to Hamas—’this time for real’. It’s the farcical equivalent of the unbridled US war machine lamenting, after its defeat in Vietnam, that it had fought the war ‘with one hand tied behind its back’. It would be laughable except for the gruesome toll such self-delusion will inflict on Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s adoption of the new military plans are widely seen in Israeli society as definitive confirmation that the return of Israelis hostages was never a priority, and it is time this canard was driven out of mainstream commentary. Leading IOF commanders have admitted that an intensified military offensive will almost certainly bring the death of any Israelis held in Gaza. ‘In international media,’ Amir Tibon notes in Ha’aretz, ‘government spokespersons frequently cite the hostages as the primary reason for the ongoing war’, but domestically, they ‘[promote] a very different discourse…that treats the hostages as a distraction and a burden’.

By now it is well-established that Hamas was prepared to return all captives more than a year ago, but deals were repeatedly blocked by Netanyahu’s negotiators. Several weeks ago the far right Minister for Finance Bezalel Smotrich admitted publicly that their return was ‘not the most important goal’, and Netanyahu’s supporters are not only ‘directly involved’ in a ‘smearing campaign’ against relatives of hostages deemed ‘traitors’, but regularly post ‘debasing and misogynistic tweets’ against female former hostages. From the standpoint of the Israeli regime this was never a war to ‘free hostages’, but from the outset an opportunist war of extermination against Palestinians.

Zionism, MAGA and US Imperialism

The White House has been keen to project an aura of invincibility around an American military machineretooled around the (apparently novel) objectives of  ‘lethality’ and ‘warfighting’. The projection of military swagger sits uneasily, however,  alongside a deep aversion to being drawn into ‘peripheral’ actions that can’t deliver quick, tangible rewards. While its always challenging to decipher what’s going on in Trump’s erratic mind, or to locate any coherence or consistency in MAGA foreign policy, its broad parameters are clear enough. Having built his base partly out of demoralisation over long-drawn out US debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump aims to wield US military power as a threat to force concessions around the globe, but to deploy it sparingly and concentrate resources for looming confrontation with China.

Until now Trump’s lavish support for Israel’s war of extermination seems to directly contradict this doctrine: Washington has gifted some £12b. in munitions since the inauguration. At the most basic level this is because MAGA is no different in any fundamental way from the Democrats in its embrace of the Israeli exception, but it’s significant also that prominent Trump officials are committed Christian Zionists—Stefanik, Hegseth, Huckabee—with strong ties to settler far right. Netanyahu’s influence among Republicans is obvious, and his government works in close coordination with a Zionist lobby that wields enormous influence. The thinktanks shaping Trump policy for the Middle East are stacked with deranged veterans of the US/Israeli military and intelligence establishments.

Despite the strength of Zionist influence in the MAGA ranks there are signs of increasing tensions, and this has injected a sense of panic for Netanyahu and his circle. These burst into the open in early May with Trump’s removal of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, for having engaged in ‘intense coordination’ with Netanyahu over the possibility of military strikes on Iran, but Waltz’s removal reflected deeper tensions over Trump’s   earlier veto of joint US-Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. On the 6^th, with Ben Gurion Airport still reeling after being hit with ballistic missiles, Trump announced a ceasefire agreement with the Houthis. Israeli analysts called it a ‘reminder that the administration is working to realize its interests even if these do not coincide with the interests of the Israeli government.’

The growing tensions underline an emerging dilemma facing US imperialism in the Middle East— one that this administration is perhaps more exposed to than its predecessor. The recent announcement that armed US mercenary contractors will play a prominent role in overseeing ‘security’ and the distribution of food and other aid to any Palestinians who survive the new Israeli operations raises alarm bells that the US will be drawn into managing occupation. These fears are reinforced by reports that Washington will lead ‘a temporary post-war administration’ in Gaza modelled on the Coalition Provisional Authority the US established in 2003 in Iraq. Such a scenario doesn’t play well among the ‘neo-con bashers’ at the top of MAGA, who will wince at being ‘dragged into an adventure drawn up directly from the Iraq War textbook.’

The other, more serious problem for Trump is that he is about to embark on a major tour of the Middle East ‘shackled with Gaza,’ as one former US diplomat put it. ‘He cannot wish it away,’  Trump is going in search of major financial deals to offset his plummeting domestic standing—the Saudis alone are reportedly poised to invest a trillion dollars in the US economy—but all signs are he is ‘going to be hammered…for what is not happening’ on Gaza, and pressured to force Netanyahu to stand down from launching an intensified new offensive. As an aside, the Gulf rulers are not keen on opening up a new war with Iran that will inevitably destabilise the entire region. Finally, the last few months have shown the limits of Trump’s swagger: he’s been singularly unsuccessful in pressing Egypt or Jordan to sign on to forced displacement: it’s likely that both regimes worry that complicity might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

All of this means that there are no easy options for US imperialism in the region. The hard Zionists who have wielded such immense influence in successive administrations want to give Netanyahu what he wants to carry out his endgame in Gaza and the West Bank, and to extend the war to Iran and perhaps elsewhere. But this comes up increasingly against competing priorities for American capitalism in the region: as one astute analyst put it, its complicity in the destruction of Gaza ‘stands in the way of every policy objective the Trump administration claims to have in the Middle East.’

While it is premature to suggest, as some have done, that we are on the cusp of a historic rupture between the US and Israel, there is no doubt that the problems that their alliance throws up are becoming more and more difficult to contain. Again, while its difficult to gauge whether Trump comprehends any of this, there is little doubt that he ‘holds the power to green-light or halt’ Netanyahu’s plans, and the Israelis seem anxious for the first time in a long time.

Palestine Liberation and the Global Order

As the US-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has observed, the ‘Israeli government is screaming as loudly as it can to anyone who will listen that it plans to expel the Palestinian people from Gaza and exterminate or starve any Palestinians who remain’. The world’s ongoing failure to halt such an openly declared genocide—the great crime of our age—constitutes one of the most shameful chapters in modern history.

On the other hand, the resilience of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in the face of such horror has inspired an unprecedented global mass movement, and exposed for an entire generation the sham of liberal democracy and the moral desolation and hypocrisy of the ‘rules-based international order’. While the long-term fallout from these revelations is impossible to predict, it is clear even now that our world will emerge at the other end of this slaughter fundamentally changed. Almost the entire global establishment is implicated in the great crime of Gaza: we must ensure that in time none of them escapes having to answer for their complicity.

One glaring paradox in all of this is that the actions of a state ostensibly founded as a refuge for victims of the Holocaust have played a critical role in bolstering authoritarianism and giving succour to the gathering forces of an emerging fascist right in our own time. Most remarkable, however, is the way in which Palestine has assumed its role as a beacon of human liberation in every corner of this tired planet. Up against the best-resourced and most powerful armies in the history of the world, the people of Gaza and the West Bank may yet humble the mighty and give aching humanity the new start we so desperately need.

The post Will Trump Greenlight Netanyahu’s Endgame in Gaza? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

Is the Democratic party losing touch with working class voters? It’s hardly a debatable claim anymore. Exit polls from last November’s presidential election reveal that a commanding plurality of voters with incomes under $50,000 – 49%, in fact – voted for Trump, compared to just 48.5% for Harris. That’s an astounding turnaround from Barack Obama in 2008, who commanded 63% of these voters compared to 35% for John McCain. Even in 2012, when Obama’s re-election seemed in doubt for much of the year, the former president rebounded to earn 60% of the low-income vote, compared to 38% for Mitt Romney. Kamala Harris also suffered an unprecedented loss of support among minority voters – Hispanics, African Americans and Asian-Americans – which cost her in the final balloting.

But her historic collapse among the working class alone would have thrown the election to Trump, data shows.

One obvious conclusion?  Democrats need to focus on regaining their lost mantle as the “party of the working class” – the image they projected beginning with FDR and the banner they proudly carried for decades after World War II. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC are all avidly promoting this view. Sanders has been especially vocal in pointing out that the party’s strategy – despite its anti-Big Capital rhetoric – does not explicitly favor working class voters on such issues as expanding healthcare coverage through a “public option” or bolstering union organizing rights. And even where it does – for example – by calling for a “wealth tax” in addition to a more progressive income and higher corporate tax rate – the party, he argues, refuses to lead on these issues, hoping against hope that its public neutering of an openly working class agenda might appease moderates and swing voters, many of them Republican, who are genuinely alarmed at Trump’s excesses.

Harris, despite much early fanfare, failed in the end to mobilize record numbers of Democratic base voters – but she managed to capture just 50% of wavering independents. For the Sanders/AOC faction of the party, this is strong evidence that Democrats should stop talking out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to class politics. Rally the country with a steadfast populism rooted in the unmet economic needs of the vast majority of working class and lower middle class Americans – while pointing the finger at the “billionaire class” that dominates the GOP and that continues to skew tax and regulatory policies in their favor –  and Democrats can win the White House again, their argument goes.

But can they, in fact? Democrats, it seems, don’t just have a political messaging problem anymore. Their messaging problem is rooted in a deeper crisis of the Democratic brand, and that brand crisis is rooted more deeply in what might be called the party’s “demographic” crisis. A growing share of Democratic voters no longer come from traditional working class backgrounds – either in the manufacturing sector, which has declined sharply, or in the newer, more flourishing low-paid service sector. In fact, most of today’s workers no longer identify with traditional working class politics, including strikes, walk-outs and battles over collective bargaining rights. Unionization stands at 32% in the public sector, but just 6% in the private sector, leaving the overall rate at about 11%. Many in the party are keeping this ideological tradition alive, because it’s been so fundamental to the Democratic “brand,” historically, but in a strict sociological sense, the class base of the party has evolved sharply over the past two to three decades.

It’s not just that the old working class has shriveled and the “new” working class is fragmented, and vulnerable to attack; it’s also because so much of the party isn’t even working class anymore.

The exit polls on who dominated the lowest income sector of the electorate are bad enough for Democrats, but consider just how wealthy and affluent a growing share of Democratic voters have become. Currently, nearly two-thirds – about 65 percent – of taxpayer households that earn more than $500,000 per year – in other words, the nation’s top 1%-2% – are located in Democratic Party districts – not Republican ones. Moreover, the 10 richest congressional districts in the country all have Democratic representatives in Congress. Where are they located?  In die hard Blue states like California, New York, New Jersey and Virginia primarily. These upper-class Americans – earning $200,000 annually or more (top 5%, by income) – aren’t necessarily millionaires, though, in fact, a growing share are. Most, however, are the nouveau-riche beneficiaries of tax policies since the Reagan Revolution, people who have invested well – in stocks and real estate, and in estate plans – and thrived. These Democrats, like most voters, including some Republicans, think that extremes of wealth and poverty in America should be narrowed. However, these are not “tax and spend” liberals; in fact, they are likely to reject a wealth tax that cuts into their family assets, including their ability to pass on their wealth to heirs. If they own a small business, they’re also unlikely to support an expansion of union bargaining rights. While supportive of environmental causes, “excessive” regulatory controls on businesses generally worry them.

These upper-income Democrats would like to stay Democratic – they’ve voted that way for years – and they’re certainly hostile to Trump, but unless they continue to receive their own special favor, many might well defect to a “moderate” Republican – Nikki Haley, for example, if she were able to wrest control of the GOP from MAGA.

This shift in the party’s political base  – though not necessarily its declared political agenda, especially at election time – actually started under Bill Clinton in the 1990s.  It’s forgotten now but Clinton came from outside the ranks of the traditional liberal party establishment that had dominated its leadership ranks since FDR.  As the candidate of “Third Way” or “New” Democrats, Clinton called for the party to abandon its age-old working class identity, to support free trade agreements like NAFTA, embrace tax cuts, reject “big” government, crack down on crime and illegal immigration and generally become more open to a wealth-building and social mobility agenda. By 1992, Democrats were desperate to reclaim power and Clinton’s pronounced tack to the right worked – twice. But Clinton’s full-throated embrace of neoliberalism – including a catastrophic deregulation of the banking sector that set the stage for the 2007 crash – also changed not just what the party stood for – but who it actually was.

Clinton’s policies coincided with – and helped accelerate – the decimation of America’s traditional manufacturing-based working class through “deindustrialization,” while accelerating the development of “new” White-collar occupational groups rooted in the burgeoning service sector and a plethora of rapidly expanding technology-based industries. Broadly speaking, the party has since come to be dominated by middle- and upper-middle class professionals, in addition to a growing cadre of small business innovators seeking to grow their companies into vast enterprises. The party’s core base is now among college educated professionals in academia and IT as well as doctors and lawyers, who, along with Hollywood celebrities and Silicon Valley’s leading entrepreneurs, have become some of the party’s biggest donors – and in the media, some of their most vocal influencers.

The ranks of the Democrats’ own “millionaire class” are also expanding rapidly. And believe it or not, many of these new millionaires are emerging from an unlikely place: skilled tradesmen and lower level public sector bureaucrats, everyone from HVAC workers and plumbers – including fledgling entrepreneurs – to firefighters, policemen and unionized workers with pensions (as well as top union leadership). These various sectors – distinct from the old semi-skilled blue-collar working class and in a social caste located far above the country’s lowest-paid workers in service industries and health care – are becoming the most visible face of the Democratic party now, and even many low-level party officials as well as those elected to state and local government increasingly resemble them.

Make no mistake: the GOP is still the biggest representative of the “billionaire” class. But even here, Democrats now have their own proud share. Corporate philanthropists like Warren Buffet, Georg Soros, Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates, all top Democratic donors, are obvious examples, but even many prominent Democratic politicians, including Minnesota’s renegade former Rep. Dean Phillips (whose net worth was $642 million in 2018) and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzger come from the ranks of America’s top 1%. Pritzger is far richer than Trump, and indeed, far richer than many leading GOP donors. He’s worth nearly $4 billion; his wife Mary is worth another $2.5 billion. In fact, he’s the richest governor in the country – by far. The larger Pritzker family – which includes a total of 13 – yes, count’em – billionaires – owns the Hyatt hotel chain, which enjoys an enterprise value of more than $13 billion, with annual revenue approaching $7 billion. Pritzker himself has started several venture capital and investment startups, including the Pritzker Group, where he is managing partner.

What’s the point? It’s this: There’s a real and growing divide inside the Democratic party – but it’s not just an ideological divide, it’s a class divide. Bridging it, if that’s what party reformers want, won’t be easy. Clinton bridged it in the 1990’s because he inherited the economic collapse under George H.W. Bush then presided over a period of unbridled growth and prosperity – so the spoils of wealth could be shared, even as Clnton proceeded to consolidate corporate power. Obama did something similar – with less prodigious results – after the 2007-2008 crash demolished the GOP’s chances of prevailing after Bush 2. There was a real recovery, with steady if modest job growth, and ebullient optimism for America’s future across the board. While real wages continued to decline – just slightly – median household income increased by $2,800, or 5.2 percent, the largest annual increase on record, in fact.

But today’s political conjuncture is vastly different. The nation’s recent economic travails – including a steady decline in real wages – is clearly favoring, for now at least, the GOP. Trump has seized upon this opening, knitting together an unusual alliance of the extreme – and extremely complacent – uber-rich that have always voted Republican with the ranks of the angry and disgruntled working poor. Not all of these workers are the Democratic base voters that stayed loyal under Obama, but have since defected.  Just as critically, a growing share of the so-called “low-propensity” voters that didn’t cast ballots in most recent election cycles have swung sharply behind Trump and MAGA. It’s the combination of those two segments – mostly working class, by education and income – that helped deliver Trump back to the White House, leaving the Democrats in shambles.

The Biden/Harris administration also reflected a cross-class “alliance,” even if its boisterous anti-Trump rhetoric disguised its true nature. But this is a different cross-class alliance, one that bridges the nouveau riche upper class and millionaire class at a tier below the 1% – basically the top 3%-5% – with the more submerged and downtrodden poor. Many of the latter groups are ethnic minorities that are still voting majority Democratic, though in far fewer numbers than before.

The class contradictions inside the Biden administration – bordering on schizophrenia – were apparent from the start, but a compliant media, anxious to create a broad anti-Trump front, never really reported them. One example: Biden’s support for lifting the SALT tax cap – from $10,000 to nearly $80,000 – in his 2021 spending bill. The change gave a huge break to top income earners – more than $125,000 each, to people in the highest tax brackets –  but offered next to nothing – about $15 –to the 90% of middle class income earners that don’t itemize their taxes. Indeed, even former Obama economic advisers Jason Furman and Larry Summers saw Biden’s backroom maneuver as an unjustified “handout” to the rich – and publicly said so. Furman called it “obscene.” Russell Berman, writing in the Atlantic, noted: “Th[is] policy is no minor throw-in or pet project; its cost as a tax expenditure represents a significant portion of the overall bill and undercuts Biden’s goal of reducing inequality by shifting the tax [relief] from the poor and working class toward the wealthy.”

Other examples include Biden’s raising of the subsidies to private health insurance holders from those earning up to $100,000 annually to those earning up to $350,000 annually. And despite promising to promote nationalized health care, Biden offered $42 billion in additional subsidies to private health insurers to help steer people into corporate health plans that typically feature high out-of-pocket costs, routine claim denials and ever rising premiums. Companies and individuals that benefited from these policies aren’t just among the nation’s most affluent – they’re also top Democratic lobbyists and party donors.

Even Biden’s proposal to forgive student loans – which sounded so noble, on its face – would have benefitted higher-income families whose children had amassed the greatest burden of school debt at the nation’s most expensive schools. Households in the top 30% of the earnings distribution were slated to receive two-fifths of all dollars forgiven. Even among those with just $10,000 or $50,000 in debt, higher-income households would have received significantly more loan forgiveness than lower-income households. Is it any wonder that most of the nation’s youth remained largely unimpressed by this policy gesture, and gave Biden and Harris little credit at the polls?

Some pundits and pollsters have suggested that the two parties are close to “changing places” – Democrats favoring the rich, Republicans the poor. That’s far from true. But the recent demographic reversals, which are unmistakable now, do provide a huge image boost to the GOP, which has traditionally been stigmatized as the party of the White “Country Club” elite.  By diversifying their class base –and rebranding themselves as a “multicultural populist working class party” – Republicans have boosted their public image, while the Democrats, by pitching their policies to the affluent, are all but forfeiting the “Good Samaritan” image that stamped the party in the popular imagination for generations.

The fall-out from this incipient realignment has proven devastating for Democrats.  Their favorability rating among voters as a whole has cratered – to 27% – while the GOP’s has climbed upward to 45%. Democrats, even during politically fallow times, traditionally led the GOP in this popularity contest, albeit slightly, while in boom times, they enjoyed a substantial advantage. Neither party is held in exceptionally high esteem, of course, but Republicans are rapidly gaining support – with surges in party registration recorded nearly everywhere – while Democrats are fading fast. And dissatisfaction with the Democrats appears to be growing across the board, from Democrats, Republicans and independents alike.

Let’s be clear: class background and even class status do not necessarily translate into class stand. If they did, there would be no hope for economic redistribution and a semblance of social equality in America. Many of the country’s wealthiest Democrats do support broadly progressive policies, and many support philanthropies that donate heavily to progressive causes. For many, it’s a form of noblesse oblige, and a calculation that a fairer society is also more stable – and can better protect their own class interests over the long haul. Still, it says something about the Democrats that some of their loudest anti-Trump spokespersons – men like Phillips and now, Pritzker –  don’t look anything like working class America. Nancy Pelosi’s net worth is estimated to be between $14 and $24 million, and still higher when her husband’s wealth is included. Even James Clybun, the party’s #3 and its main African-American powerbroker, saw his net worth skyrocket from a paltry $180,000 in 2020 to more than $3 million in 2024 – all of it gained while a Democratic president held office. The party still talks about its allegiance to the common man – and women – but in fact, it reeks of class privilege, with a smug thinly-disguised elitism that has turned off working class voters, leaving them vulnerable to Trump’s calculated overtures.

There is strong evidence that top Democrats – especially members of its wealthy political oligarchy – aren’t that concerned about the fortunes of working class voters – including the party’s traditional blue collar base – as long as the ranks of the affluent keep growing.  Remember when Hillary Clinton in 2016 told West Virginia coal miners to find new jobs, because theirs wouldn’t survive in the new “green” era?  At the time, her remarks were deemed “insensitive” – and Clinton, after watching her poll numbers plummet, walked them back. But she was only stating what many of the party’s poohbahs actually think, and are willing to say in their unguarded moments. Chuck Schumer made a similarly revealing statement on the eve of becoming Senate majority leader that year. Reflecting on the 2016 national Democratic electoral strategy, Schumer said that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” He was wrong, of course. Downplaying the need to galvanize working class voters, she lost the critical swing states. That hasn’t stopped the wealthiest and most entrenched Democratic party oligarchs from peddling this same misguided view – and despite successive defeats, they will likely do so again, if the party grassroots lets them.

What’s becoming abundantly clear – even if Democrats can’t publicly admit it – is that America’s deep and widening class divisions – divisions of income and education, lifestyle, religiosity and other cultural values and reference points – now run right through the heart of their own party, leaving them compromised, and unable to lead. These class divisions are not new – but they’re now more than ever,  more nakedly balanced against the workers that once formed the core base of the party. Democrats, even at the top, used to feel strong pressure to try to accommodate and balance these divisions, but no longer. Can the party, with its current trajectory, survive much longer, politically? If not, should progressives continue to try to reform the Democratic Party from within – by shaming its leaders intro re-embracing its long-lost and largely forgotten past? Or is it time to break away and form a new kind of grassroots populist party, with less allegiance – inevitably – to Clintonian neoliberalism?

A vibrant third-party movement can’t be built overnight – and it may well require the emergence of a new zeitgeist in American society that demands a rejection of the two-party system and more thoroughgoing institutional reform, including the abolition of the Electoral College, which most voters support. Pressure from above to put the populist genie back into the bottle – apparent in 2016 and 2020, when the party forced Sanders & Co. into submission – will surely reassert itself. But will progressives in 2028 agree to go quietly into the night?  Disaffected working class voters are drifting away, seduced by the allure of xenophobic populism, while more affluent Democrats – as fearful of the “socialist-left” as they are of Trump’s MAGA rabble – are turning on Sanders, hoping to silence him  In 2016, Clinton and her supporters looked to the “Bernie Bros” – with whom they’d tangled – to help mobilize support for their candidate – and most, in the end, did. Today, Clinton mastermind James Carville wants to see Sanders and the entire left exiled to political Siberia. A stand-off, indeed a civil war, rooted in the party’s shifting class favoritism – may be inevitable now.

Can either side “win” this deepening class struggle inside the Democratic party?  ‘Tis a fine old conflict – and with the Right resurgent, it’s unlikely to end well for anyone – least of all for the workers that few in the party leadership seem to champion in their souls anymore.

The post ‘Tis a Fine Old Conflict:  The Class Struggle Inside the Democratic Party appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“In the beginning was the word,” John 1:1 commences like Genesis, connecting the God of Israel to the word. And the deliverance of the word is confirmed by the Ten Commandments being physically handed to Moses and the Israelites, legend has it, on Mount Sinai. It was a defining moment in Jewish reverence for words and the law. But much has changed since those Biblical times.

The United Nations General Assembly (GA) asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to give a non-binding advisory opinion on Israel’s obligations to facilitate aid into Palestinian territory. Starting April 28, for one week, diplomats and lawyers from 40 countries and three multilateral organizations argued in the Hague to try to force Israel to allow aid to enter. Once again Israel chose to ignore the ICJ, considered the World Court. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called it “another shameful proceeding” meant to delegitimize Israel.

How to understand Israel’s continuing defiance of international law, including its blockade of aid to Palestinians? Since March 2, 2025, Israel has cut off all supplies to the 2.3 million people still trapped in the Gaza Strip. Stockpiles of food have virtually run out. “It’s about the survival of millions of Palestinians,” Alain Pellet, an advocate for Palestine and an eminent French professor and international lawyer, pleaded before the Court.

The hearings were technical, legal arguments about Israel’s obligations as the occupying power in Gaza and the West Bank and as a member of the United Nations. The precise title of the hearings was “Obligations of Israel in relation to the Presence and Activities of the United Nations, Other International Organizations and Third States in and relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The GA demand for an advisory opinion resulted from the October 2024 Israeli parliament’s vote that prohibits the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from operating in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

U.N. legal counsel Elinor Hammarskjöld said Israel has clear obligations as an occupying force to facilitate aid under international humanitarian law. “These obligations,” she said, “entail allowing all relevant U.N. entities to carry out activities for the benefit of the local population.”

Other experts agreed. “Israel must facilitate full, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian provision to the population of Gaza, including food, water and electricity, and must ensure access to medical care in accordance with international humanitarian law,” Sally Langrish, legal director and advisor at the UK’s foreign office, argued, specifically citing articles 59 and 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that outlines the obligations of an occupying power. “The occupying power must facilitate relief schemes by all means at its disposal,” she added. “This obligation is unconditional.”

Already in July 2024, the ICJ had ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories including the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem was illegal under international law. In an advisory opinion, the Court ordered Israel to end its occupying presence as well as to make reparations for damages done. “This illegality relates to the entirety of the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967,” the court said in a statement.

Not having followed the 2024 ICJ opinion about its occupation, how does Israel now justify not allowing aid into the occupied territories? Israel maintains that UNRWA should not be allowed to function. In January 2024, Israel accused 12 UNRWA workers of involvement in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks. However, a UN investigation of the accusations, published in April 2024, found no evidence of wrongdoing. The report noted that Israel had not responded to requests for names and information or given evidence of any previous concerns about UNRWA. UNRWA has denied these accusations, saying there is “absolutely no ground for a blanket description of ‘the institution as a whole’ being ‘totally infiltrated.’”

My former colleague and former Secretary-General of the Institute of International Law, Marcelo Kohen, representing Jordan, pleaded before the Court that, “Israel’s primary obligation is to respect the Palestinian’s people’s right to self-determination.” That is, Israel should not “hinder the realization of this right, to adopt all necessary and measures to protect the Palestinian civilian population.”  According to Kohen, Israel, cannot obstruct the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, a right confirmed by GA Resolution 78/192 of December 2023.

On the other side, the U.S. argued that “There are serious concerns about UNRWA’s impartiality, including information that Hamas has used UNRWA facilities and that UNRWA staff participated in the 7 October terrorist attack against Israel,” according to Josh Simmons, of the U.S. State Department legal team. “Given these concerns, it is clear that Israel has no obligation to permit UNRWA specifically to provide humanitarian assistance. UNRWA is not the only option for providing humanitarian assistance in Gaza,” he added. Israel boycotted the hearings but submitted written objections. (The U.S. and Hungary were the only countries that supported Israel’s position before the Court.)

What are the constraints on an occupying power? According to a U.S. State Department legal adviser; “An occupational power retains a margin of appreciation concerning which relief schemes to permit. Even if an organisation offering relief is an impartial humanitarian organisation, and even if it is a major actor, occupation law does not compel an occupational power to allow and facilitate that specific actor’s relief operations.”

But Marcelo Kohen and the renown international jurist and legal scholar Georges Abi-Saab refuted this argument in a commentary in EJIL TALK!: “When occupation ceases to be a provisional factual situation and turns into an open-ended political project, the rules of military occupation no longer apply… The protection afforded to the civilian population, the territory, and its resources is then governed – more comprehensively – by other bodies of international law, notably international human rights law, the right to self-determination, and the right to humanitarian assistance, none of which permit derogation in the name of military necessity or the security interests of the occupying power.”

In addition to the legal questions about Israel’s blocking aid and its obligations as an occupying power, there are larger legal and moral questions about Israel’s actions since October 7, 2023. Already in January 2024, The ICJ found it “plausible” that Israel had committed acts that violate the Genocide Convention. The Court’s president, Joan Donoghue, delivered a provisional order that Israel must ensure, “with immediate effect,” that its forces not commit any of the acts prohibited by the Convention. (Just recently, on May 4, 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel, once again, is “on the eve of a forceful entry to Gaza.”)

Furthermore, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against the Israeli Prime Minister on November 21, 2024, for being “Allegedly responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024.”

As far as the United States’ continuing complicity with Israel is concerned, during an early April 2025 drop by to the White House, Netanyahu said; “This was a very productive visit, a very warm visit…” “[W]arm visit” to Washington by someone “Allegedly responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”?

(As a reminder about Trump and respect for the law: He swore on January 20, 2025, “I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” When asked in a recent television interview whether, as president, he needed to “uphold the Constitution of the United States,” Trump replied, “I don’t know.”)

Israel, a self-proclaimed Jewish state, should be an example of respect for the rule of law. Its defiance of the ICJ and ICC, and continuing alliance with the United States’ non-respect for the rule of law is contrary to all the country claims to be as well as contrary to the very foundations of its religious and cultural heritage.

The post Israel’s Continuing Defiance of International Law and Contempt for Palestinian Lives appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Toshiro Mifune in The Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa dir, Toho Films, 1954. Photo the author.

Preface: The big screen

When I was young, movies were big. The Continental Theatre on Austin Street in Forest Hills, Queens, which opened in 1963, was a relatively small movie house, with 300 seats and a screen about 25 feet wide. The Cinemart on Metropolitan Avenue had five times as many seats, and a screen nearly the size of a tennis court. When I saw Saturday Night Fever there in 1977, I flinched with each syncopated strep by John Travolta during the iconic, “Stayin’ Alive” title sequence.

Since moving to Norwich, Harriet and I have made almost weekly pilgrimages to Cinema City, the local art house. As well as new releases, they show classics I’ve seen many times before, mostly on TV or a laptop. Though no theatre seat is as comfortable as your own bed, seeing people, places, and situations larger than life is uniquely pleasurable. Last week, we saw The Seven Samurai (1954), directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film thrilled me when I first saw it in the ‘70s and did again last week in Norwich. It offers lessons in the struggle against Trump and his team of bandits.

Lesson one: “Find hungry samurai.”

In the movie, set in Japan in 1586, poor villagers learn by accident that bandits plan to steal their crop of barley as soon as it’s harvested. Knowing nothing of fighting, they decide to hire some Samurai to protect them. But how will they pay the warriors? Their answer: “Hire hungry Samurai,” and support them with warm beds and rice meals.

The villagers’ first recruit is Kambei, an elder rōnin (displaced or masterless samurai) whose wisdom inspires allegiance. He in turn identifies six other samurai, each of whom has a different, equally admirable trait. The master swordsman Kyūzō, for example, is quiet to the point of taciturnity. He stands at the perimeter of any gathering and his voice is rarely heard. But his acts of skill and daring speak for themselves. The youngest and least experienced samurai, the handsome Katsushirō, models himself after Kyūzō, however his poise is perturbed by his love for Shino, a shy and pretty villager, disguised as a boy for protection.

The seventh samurai, Kikuchiyo, played by the charismatic Toshiro Mifune, is not a samurai at all but a homeless wannabe. His clowning amuses the villagers, but when the battle begins, his fearlessness, inspires them. (Aside: I was so pretentious a teenager that when anybody asked me who was my favorite movie actor, I’d reply “Toshiro Mifune.”) Kikuchiyo is a shifter, a liaison between peasant farmers (that’s his origin) and higher status fighters. After the burial of the first samurai killed by the bandits, Kikuchiyo plants on the tomb a flag painted by fellow fighter, Gorobai. It represents the samurai as circles and Kikuchiyo as a triangle. Below them is the syllable ta in the Hiragana writing system, which represents “rice field” and thus by metonymy, vulnerable peasants. The flag is a symbol of class solidarity between the peasants, the orphaned and placeless Kikuchiyo, and the masterless samurai – all oppose the feudal order that failed to feed or protect them.

Whether in Sengoku era Japan or the contemporary U.S., resistance is born of necessity. Faced with invasion, natural disaster, or economic calamity, people find a way to fight back. But resistance can enable tyranny as much as democracy. Millions of American workers, furious at austerity for the many and largesse for the few, twice rejected capitalist democracy and installed a fascist narcissist as president. They stood mostly silent as he appointed to his cabinet a dirty dozen billionaire bandits including DOGE head, Elon Musk; Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessant; Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick; and Education Secretary, Linda McMahon.

If there is to be a broad-based, democratic resistance, Kurosawa’s film suggests, the “hungry Samurai” who lead it must mobilize desire as well as necessity. The seven samurai offered villagers a future of pride, camaraderie, self-reliance and abundance. In the current U.S., Democratic party and civil society leaders must themselves act like “hungry samurai” providing inspiring images of a future in which education and healthcare are treated as natural rights, work and leisure become rewarding and fulfilling for all, old age is secure, and the natural environment cherished and protected. AOC, Bernie and UAW leader Shawn Fain may be hungry samurai. We need four more and better ones. When the seven call an assembly, we (the poor farmers) need to stand beside them, accept their guidance, and pull together to protect our village from the bandits.

Lesson two: “If you only think of yourself, you’ll only destroy yourself.”

The Seven Samurai instruct that greed and self-interest are useless in a fight, while altruism and collaboration are essential. At the start of the movie, the farmers squabble and turn on each other. As the narrative progresses, they gain skills needed to build fortifications, undertake patrols and sentry duty, and use sharpened bamboo poles for self-defense and even attack. By the end, they are a formidable fighting force able to quickly dismount, trap, and kill any bandits who manage to gallop into the village.

Some of the last scenes in the film show villagers planting rice. They are seen in medium shots as well as close-ups, revealing both the collective nature of the activity, and the villagers’ individual satisfaction. The sequence recalls Soviet films, such as Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line (1929) and Aleksander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) about collective agriculture, but without the Russians’ tendentiousness. Though not usually described as politically radical, The Seven Samurai is indebted to the Marxism Kurosawa learned at the pre-war Proletarian Artists’ League, where the future director enrolled in 1928. Later in life, he wrote:

“There was a fever among young people. They did not know how to use their energies. I would say that almost all the intellectual urban youth in that period were at one time or another Marxists. They were not satisfied with the government and its policies. I was one of them. In reflection, we were also enjoying the thrill of being Marxists.”

The Japanese “Marx boys” [Marukusu bōi] had no shortage of books and magazines to consult, from Kawakami Hajime’s popular Introduction to Marx’s Capital (Shihonron nyūmon, 1919), to the proletarian literature magazines Literary Front (Bungei Sensen) and Battleflag (Senki) which by 1930 had combined circulations of over 50,000. Almost until the invasion of China in 1937, Japan had among the most robust and sophisticated Marxist traditions in the world.

Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai arises from the long history of Japanese Marxist debates over what’s called “the national question”; that is, whether the Meiji Restoration (1868) represented a bourgeois-capitalist transformation of the country that prepared it for socialist revolution; or if the nation, well into the 20^th century, remained economically and politically backward, still semi-feudal. If that was the case, a slower, more deliberate revolutionary strategy was called for. Kurosawa’s film, produced two decades after the political repression of the dictatorial Shōwa era, suggests the former — that even as far back as the 16^th century, peasant consciousness was moving in the direction of collectivism and solidarity.

The Samurai motto, embraced by the villagers, “if you only think of yourself, you’ll only destroy yourself,” recalls Marx’s “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need” from the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). Both propose that selfishness is destructive of the individual and collective, while selflessness assures prosperity for both.

Artist unknown, Enroll in the proletarian Art Academy., 1930. Photographer unknown.

Kurosawa’s politics in Samurai was discreet. The Red purges undertaken by Douglas McArthur and the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers in the immediate post-war years prevented anything else. Commercial viability also mandated understatement. Even the title of the film plays down politics. It reminds us of traditional Japanese Buddhist tales of the seven gods of good fortune, illustrated by Katsushika Hokusai in the early 19^th century.

Katsushika Hokusai, The Seven Gods of Good Fortune, c. 1808-27, Metropolitan Museum (Public domain).

But the film’s lesson about working class solidarity nevertheless brushed against the grain of the emerging era of rapid economic development and self-enrichment. Its message to Americans today is obvious: That in the face of fascist onslaughts against legal and educational institutions, immigrants, women, students and the environment, no one can afford to think only about themselves or their institution – that way lies destruction. “In a battle,” the six samurai tell the seventh, Kikuchiyo, “you never fight individual actions.”

Lessons three: “A samurai must be able to run fast.”

Among the first lessons the elder Kambei imparts to the young Katsushirō is that a good samurai must be able to run fast. The nugget is surprising because we expect samurai to stand their ground and fight, not run away. However, the proposition was quickly validated. When the samurai first entered the village, they were ignored by the farmers, fearful of their vaunted protectors. That’s when Kikuchiyo sounded an alarm by banging on the end of a thick length of bamboo. Were the bandits coming? Everybody started running, including the samurai, who with their speed and acumen, quickly discovered there was no threat. Kikuchiyo simply wanted to focus the community’s attention on the danger they faced and the seven samurai, poised to help protect them.

Later, after the real battle started, running was key to defending the village. The samurai and villagers sprinted from one lookout post to another to warn defenders of the timing and intensity of the next onslaught. Speed was also of the essence during patrols outside their barricades – the samurai had to be able to sprint away from any bandits they spotted and tuck back behind their fortifications. Kurosawa’s movie might have been titled The Seven Speedy Samurai! Protecting yourself by running away means not just saving your own life, but the community that depends on you.

Protesters and demonstrators in the U.S. today face police and private security forces trained to target, arrest and sometimes deport them. That’s why protesters’ best defense in many cases is their feet. If they see police or other security forces massing nearby – sometimes armed with shields, clubs, and zip ties as well as standard issue guns, tasers and handcuffs – they should speedily run away. University expulsion, imprisonment or deportation don’t advance Palestinian statehood, environmental protection, immigrant rights, or the rule of law. Escape allows protesters to fight another day, and build an even bigger coalition, less likely to be targeted by police. The defeat of fascism requires both speed and the force of numbers.

Lesson four: “A good fort needs a gap.”

Like lesson four, lesson three, is counter intuitive. The best forts are impregnable; a gap is a weakness that an enemy can exploit, or as the saying goes, “a chain is no stronger than its weakest link.” But not in all cases: The main element of the samurai’s carefully drawn defensive plan was a barrier around the perimeter of the village composed in some areas of a tight skein of logs, branches and vines, and in others of water deep enough that a horse and rider can’t easily ford. But equally important for the village’s defense is a gap in the barrier, wide enough for two of three horses to pass through, but small enough for defenders to close off with their bodies, swords and bamboo spears. The idea was to let in just a few bandits at a time, close off the opening and then swarm and kill the isolated ones.

The strategy worked brilliantly, even with the heavy rains and rising waters that obscured vision and slowed villagers and samurai during the final battle. After the fighting ended, Kambei crossed off the last of the 40 circles on his tally sheet of bandits. The battle was over, and the village was saved. A similar defensive strategy – absent the swords and sharpened bamboo – can help protect today’s threatened protesters, non-profits and other anti-Trump organizations.

Rallies, campus encampments, and demonstrations today, such as those organized by 50501, need openings in their defenses. A gap encourages police to enter at a single, observable spot, giving protesters a better chance to make their escape through another gap. “Always know your available exits” is among the most important pieces of advice demonstration organizers impart to protesters. A contest between students and police is not a fair fight, and unless getting arrested is a carefully considered tactic, flight is the best response to police calls to disperse, or to the appearance of masses of armed officers. Protesters can always come back!

But the instruction “a good fort needs a gap” is also valuable for organizations not undertaking protests or direct action. The Trump administration’s assault on civil rights, and educational, legal, environmental, and art organizations are so numerous and intrusive, that non-profits and other civil society groups must pick their battles, allowing some bandits to pass through gaps in their defenses, the better to protect the rest of the organization.

In some cases, Trump is his own worst enemy and must be allowed or even encouraged to proceed unhampered. The most obvious example is tariffs. The implementation of broad-based tariffs, especially against China – if they proceed — will increase inflation, decrease consumer spending and reduce business investment. The result will be “stagflation,” the combination of stagnation (low business investment and high unemployment) and inflation, like that which persisted in the mid and late 1970s and doomed the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Such an eventuality will lead to a crushing Republican defeat in the midterms, and the beginning of the end of Trump’s authoritarian rule. Stagflation will also reduce energy use, providing a respite in the rising use of fossil fuels and release of greenhouse gasses. I remember, in the late 1970s, driving across upstate New York and New England, seeing abandoned homes, farms and factories reclaimed by nature. It was both a depressing and wonderful sight; within a decade, development was supercharged and ugliness and waste – worse than ever before — blotted many parts of the landscape.

The goal of any successful Democratic Party must be to seize upon the economic crisis caused by Trump and the Republicans and implement policies that support and protect workers while hobbling multinational corporations – fossil fuel, aerospace, armament, AI, media and financial – that are in the ascendant today. Excess profit taxes are better than tariffs at protecting good paying U.S. jobs; fees charged for every stock, monetary and commodity trade will reduce speculation and unproductive profit seeking; much higher marginal income tax rates will reduce income inequality; a carbon tax (with funds directed for tax rebates to workers and green investment) can reduce the release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants; limiting patent and copyright protection can reduce exploitative, rent-seeking behavior; Medicare for all will lower healthcare costs, reduce illness, and reverse the decline in life expectancy.

Trump and his bandits are running headlong into gaps in the tattered democratic infrastructure. Courts and lawyers are not strong enough to stop them, but villagers and hungry samurai – supported by law — can. That work will require greater effort at organizing and collective action – rallies, boycotts, and strikes — than we have seen so far. The resistance will have to “run fast,” create a “good fort” with a gap, and reject “individual action.” The coming battle – waged without swords or sharpened bamboo poles – will be worth joining and then later watching on a large screen.

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Photo by Kyle Ryan

The mainstream media have examined the governance of Donald Trump over the first term and the hundred days of the second term, using the familiar techniques of bureaucratic politics and the use of mostly anonymous sources.  In this way, the media have examined the politics, policies, and fulsome propaganda of the Trump’s presidency.  But the media for the most part have foresworn or underplayed the central question of Trump’s presidency: Is Donald Trump psychologically fit to be president of the United States and, even more worrying, the commander-in-chief of the most powerful and expensive military forces in the world?  We know the answer to that question and it couldn’t be more worrisome.

The first term produced several books on Trump’s dangerously disordered presidency, including a trenchant one by Trump’s niece, Mary Trump (“Too Much and Never Enough”) that diagnosed Donald Trump’s threat to domestic and international security.  There was sufficient polling by 2018 to indicate that most Americans agreed that Trump was unfit to be president.  The mental health experts who contributed to these works fortunately ignored the so-called ethical principle of the American Psychiatric Association (the Goldwater Rule), which prohibited psychiatrists from diagnosing a public figure they had not personally encountered.  But the erratic behavior of Trump during the 2015-2016 campaign and the first two years of his first term prompted a reassessment and a challenging principle: the duty to warn.  Now it is seven years later, and Trump’s actions and statements have created the highest level of domestic and international anxiety since the end of World War II.

Trump’s malignant narcissism has certainly worsened—his claims that he knows more than anyone else and that only he can fix our problems marked the first term; “I run the country and the world” typifies the second term.  His demonization of his perceived enemies as a result of two congressional impeachments and numerous court cases has become far more threatening.  His treatment of women, minorities, and immigrants point to paranoia as well as a cruel and heartless approach designed to rid the country of migrants and force women and minorities out of the federal work force.  The lack of empathy, of course, accompanies narcissism.

There has been far more damage and destruction in the first hundred days of the second term than there was in the full four years of the first term.  There were moderates in the latter period who seemed prepared to deal with Trump’s paranoia and impulse control that were constantly on display and threatened destructive acts.  There was an unusual level of public criticism from chief of staff John Kelly, secretary of state Rex Tillerson, national security adviser H.R. McMaster, and director of national intelligence Dan Coats.  The criticism by Tillerson and McMaster cost them their jobs.  As retired and active general officers, the criticism by Kelly and McMaster violated the professional military’s duty to never criticize a sitting president.  Economic disasters were avoided because economic advisers such as Gary Cohn and secretary of the treasury Stanley Mnuchin kept certain information from Trump’s purview, even removing documents from the president’s desk in the Oval Office.

The second term already is a greater disaster, as cabinet level appointees such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Director of Homeland Security Kristi Noem embarrass the country and themselves with desperate attempts to demonstrate fealty to their Donald.  Rubio has cancelled the visas of more than 1,500 international students (only to have the courts bring at least a temporary halt to the process).  Noem has flown to El Salvador for a photo opportunity at the CECOT prison in front of the prisoners flown illegally from the United States.  She was smiling and brandishing her $50,000 Rolex watch. There are no limits on the efforts of Trump’s appointees to prostrate themselves for their leader.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is destroying the Department of Justice, and illegally using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants. FBI Director Kash Patel is destroying the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and reassigning experienced agents to participate in the roundup of immigrants.  Lord knows what is happening to Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, where the rumors are frightening in terms of the threat to U.S. national security.  And does anyone really believe that Marco Rubio can lead the Department of State, the National Security Council, what little is left of the Agency for International Development, and the National Archives?  The only certainty is the weakening of U.S. national and international security.

The first hundred days of the second term created crude displays that we could see for ourselves, including the mugging of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the most heroic figure in the international arena, and Trump’s appearance with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a leader in the field of domestic terrorism, that was nauseating to watch.  Vice President J.D. Vance smirked his way through both of these meetings, and even upbraided Zelensky for not thanking the president of the United States for all he had done for Ukraine, which presumably includes interrupting military supplies and military intelligence in a way that led to additional civilian Ukrainian deaths.  Trump even suggested to Bukele that more prisons should be built in El Salvador to accommodate our “homegrown” terrorists, meaning U.S. citizens.

The first hundred days of the second term has been far worse and dangerous than the four years of the first term because America’s putative civic leaders been willing to prostrate themselves to avoid or weaken the abuses and threats of Donald Trump.  Publishers from the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, Jeff Bezos and Dr. Soon- Shiong, who depend on government support in their other endeavors, have altered the news gathering of their papers.  Some of the most prominent and powerful law firms in the country offered tens of millions of dollars to do pro bono legal work for Donald Trump and his family.

University presidents, particularly at Columbia University, bent the knee rather than   challenge or defy Trump’s dictates.  Harvard University is getting much credit for standing up to Trump to protect its tax status, but Harvard’s first instincts were to comply with the White House by removing the two leading officials of its Middle East Institute.  Too many campuses are restricting freedom of speech in order to comply with Trump’s phony campaign against antisemitism, which is in fact a campaign against those who criticize Israel’s genocidal war.

Paul Krugman, a columnist at the New York Times, resigned because Times’ editorial staffers were weakening his columns.  The senior producer at CBS’s 60 Minutes resigned because of similar interference from CBS’s parent company, Paramount Studios; the same thing happened at ABC, where its parent company, Disneyland, caved in to a Trump law suit that should have been fought.

The political destruction and the craven behavior is sadly reminiscent of Germany 1933.  But Hitler removed far fewer civil servants and the like in the beginning because he was motivated by racial policies and not politics.  Hitler initially removed the Jews who he believed were undermining Germany; Trump is targeting a far larger number of perceived enemies who he believed were undermining him.  Think of judges, lawyers, and the members of the so-called “deep state.”  The major incidents in Germany were reported in the international press, but not the German press.  Our own press needs to be more aggressive.

There are obvious reasons for not going too far in comparing Germany and the United States or, for that matter, Hitler and Trump.  Hitler wanted war; Trump doesn’t.  But both are despicable man.  Germans were anxious for good reason as early as 1933.  Americans are anxious in 2025 for reasons not altogether different.  The German people became hostage to Hitler in the 1930s; we cannot let that happen to us in the 2020s.a

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Photo by Stephen Tafra on Unsplash

When President Trump’s cabinet picks trooped up to Capitol Hill earlier this year for Senate confirmation hearings, hardly any boasted about their past union connections. But Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins did.

He helped win broad bipartisan approval for his nomination from a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee (SVAC) that includes Bernie Sanders (I-VT) by mentioning that he belonged to the United Food and Commercial workers, while working for five years at a Georgia grocery store chain.  Said Collins: “I believe that the employees of the VA, whether they’re union or not, are very valuable and I respect that… I get the issue.”

At another point in the hearing, he pledged to “be the biggest cheerleader for every VA employee out there who is getting up every morning, doing it right [and] making sure we are taking care of our veterans.” And during questioning about President Trump’s intention to end remote work arrangements at the agency, Collins acknowledged that “a large portion of the VA workforce is unionized and they’re in contracts” so “we’re going to have to work together to get people back to work.”

Four months later, there’s little evidence of Collins and VA unions working together on anything. Instead, Collins has been an eager implementer of Trump’s attempted cancellation of collective bargaining rights for most VA union members—on the grounds that they’re engaged in “national security work.”

A Broader Exclusion

Trump issued an executive order based on this far-fetched claim in late March. It invoked a provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA), which has long allowed the federal government to exclude intelligence agency and some federal law enforcement personnel from union representation. Under Trump’s sweeping new interpretation of CSRA, two-thirds of the federal workforce, in 18 different agencies, would be ineligible for contract coverage because of national security considerations.

According to recent guidance provided by Trump’s Office of Personnel Management, this clears the way for Trump cabinet members to fire large numbers of employees, as part of their upcoming reduction in force plans, without regard for existing collective bargaining agreements.

The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents other federal workers, secured a preliminary injunction on April 25 against Trump’s executive order, as it applied to its own members in other agencies. Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE). hailed that result as a helpful precedent for “restoring collective bargaining rights that federal employees are guaranteed by law.”

To further weaken labor organizations, federal agencies also ended payroll deduction of union dues in April. VA unions affected by this change include AFGE, the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), National Nurses United (NNU), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its affiliate, the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE).

On behalf of 400,000 of the VA’s 482,000 workers, all five unions have recently sued the Trump Administration over multiple issues, including its mass firing of probationary workers throughout the federal government and attempted dismantling of entire agencies. (This pushback was, of course, perceived to be a “declaration of war on President Trump’s agenda,” as a White House “fact sheet”helpfully explained.)

A Waiver for Some VA Unions?

As more than 120 members of Congress (including Senators who voted to confirm Collins) argued in an April 8 letter to the VA Secretary, Trump’s directive is, thus, “primarily retaliatory in nature”—payback for “unions that have stepped up to defend employees’ rights in the face of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) attacks.”

The letter signers urged Collins “to act quickly and decisively to defend the VA workforce from this Executive Order by requesting a waiver for all Department Employees,” because the EO “cloaks itself in the false cover of ‘national security” and is in “likely violation of the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute (FSLMRS). Under that law, to be exempt from collective bargaining, an agency must demonstrate that its “primary function” involves intelligence, counter-intelligence, investigative, or national security work.

Collins responded with an April 17 notice-posting in the Federal Register, in which he “specifically concurs with the President’s determinations” about who is and is not doing “national security work.” In a move that won’t help the administration’s legal defense of its VA de-unionization effort, Collins signaled that his HR department would continue to deal with local unions affiliated with the Laborers, Machinists, Teamsters, Electrical Workers, Firefighters, American Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees.

None of these labor organizations ever had the “national consultation rights” of the larger AFL-CIO affiliates targeted by Trump because their bargaining units within the VA are small and miscellaneous. But, as Everett Kelley points out, many of their members do the same jobs as AFGE-represented “cemetery workers, house-keepers, cooks, mechanics, nurses, and other health care employees.”

So how, Kelley asks, could some “patriotic public servants” be allowed to keep their contract protections, while others performing equivalent duties—and posing no greater “threat to national security”—were stripped of theirs?

Adapting to New Conditions

While that question gets litigated by AFGE and other VA unions, they must still adapt to workplace conditions even worse than those created by Robert Wilkie, the right-wing Republican who was Trump’s second VA Secretary during his first term. All of them have long operated on the “open shop” basis mandated by federal law. But now workers who voluntarily join and financially support federal unions must switch their dues paying to alternative methods, like AFGE and NNU’s “E-dues”collection systems, because payroll deduction of dues has been discontinued.

The AFL-CIO has tried to help fill any representational void by recruiting and training 1,000 lawyers in 42 states to serve as a Federal Workers Legal Defense Network. This group will provide legal advice and support for individual employees who face adverse action by their agencies, but still retain civil service rights and protections.

Federal workers, newly awakened to the dangers facing them, are also joining the Labor Notes-assisted Federal Unionist Network. FUN is a cross-union network of rank-and-filers who organized a successful “day of action” in February, with what was then minimal support from their respective national unions.

FUN co-founder Colin Smalley, an employee of the Army Corps of Engineers, is among those warning co-workers that federal sector labor relations have reverted, for the time being, to what they were before 1962, when the Kennedy Administration first recognized the right to unionize.

Despite that challenging new/old terrain, “federal workers still have legal protections against retaliation and reprisal for collectively using their workplace rights.” Even in the absence of a union contract, they can “act like a union” by following the advice contained in a new guide prepared by Smalley and posted by the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.

Among its recommended responses, FUN counsels to: “Speak out: get creative with whistle-blowing. A well-scripted ‘march on the boss’ or a petition are great ways to take collective action that’s protected by the Whistleblower Protection Act, so long as they disclose any violation of law, regulation, rule, or policy, or an abuse of authority.”

VA Defenders

On April 16, members of the NNU, which represents 16,000 registered nurses at the VA nationwide, held a protest rally in San Diego against staffing cuts and union contract cancellation—one of many events around the country, involving VA patients, their families, labor and community allies.

“No matter who you cut from the VA, veterans are going to be affected,” warned RN Safiah Dhada. “If you cut housekeeping, nurses will be bagging trash, taking time away from patient care. If you cut supply techs, nurses will need to chase down supplies, delaying care…Our veterans deserve timely care, not delays that negatively impact health outcomes.”

One veteran of struggles against Trump during his first term is Irma Westmoreland, NNU secretary-treasurer and a nurse for 26 years who works at the VA Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia.

She’s optimistic about the outcome of the fight this time around, because “we came out stronger last time.” Nothing that Doug Collins does, she says, “will keep us from doing the things we need to do to represent VA nurses.” But “taken together, all of these actions are aimed at crippling and then privatizing the VA… And only the unions are standing in the way of privatization.”

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