Photo by Samuele Errico Piccarini

Sometimes when you drive in a certain direction for long enough, something amazing happens. You arrive in just the place that you were heading. It is quite an ability to be able to deny the consequences of straight lines, movement and time. Those who speak of such unavoidable destinations earn names like Cassandra and are very unpopular at parties. This seems to be just such a time in history.

Now this will be the last time I give any lengthy discussion as to how I consider we had multiple waypoints to diverge from this path; at some point this becomes navel-gazing. Looking above your own abdomen is now a quite necessary thing, but I do think a quick glance in the rear-view mirror is necessary to avoid repetitive mistakes. This one last time I’m gonna air it out.

We are dealing with the fruition of so many toxic decisions– so many steps along the way that could have been averted. An accumulation of terrible concessions and outright ignoring of evil. If we don’t like where we are at, we do need to consider how long this has all taken and how many times mitigation might have been possible.

There is a lot of liberal level hatred going on right now towards those they feel are to their left—they consider the current administration to be the fault of those individuals due to their perceived inelasticity in regard to issues such as……. genocide. But this has been going on much longer than recent atrocities—there’s been a very long history of reality being pointed out by leftists and being ignored by liberals.

Many on the left were pointing out that the Democratic Party was dangerous, due to their mendacity and hollow promises. The voicing of this concern was not to enhance the reactionary right but to save any shreds that could keep fascism at bay. The concern was that we would land exactly where we are, whether in this election cycle or the next. It could have happened after any neo-liberal administration, and the left was warning of this very salient fact. And it’s not like the left were magically prescient, no—this is what always happens when a party like the Democrats offer no significant push-back to the rhetoric of the right or any improvement in quality-of-life issues for the masses. It’s almost worse that they dangle improvement, but do not deliver. A portion of the masses will accept and embrace darker, ill-advised options when this occurs. For the left to have been pointing this out was like being on a street corner with a sign proclaiming 2+2=4 and receiving pushback from neo-liberal Democrats saying, “I don’t think you understand how numbers work, it’s simply more sophisticated than you can grasp.”

The Democrats dropped promises in regard to quality of life/wage issues—they did not pursue codification of important social issues even in times of democratic supermajorities—they did not add justices to the Supreme Court when this looked like a necessary option given the psychotic make-up of the current court. This type of behavior delivered us to this very dark place in history we now find ourselves staring at.

The executive order zeal that Trump has exhibited shows how it was probably available in some form many times during Democratic administrations as well. The Democrats had the option to come down with quality-of-life decrees. If the orders were popular but rescinded by Republicans then that would have fallen on them. Their popularity would have taken a nosedive, but things of this nature were not attempted. Biden would put out multiple strings attached “debt relief” that was shut down and did nothing but infuriate those who were tricked into thinking they might have a chance at clawing out of debt servitude. Can you imagine if truly New Deal type program attempts were made? Anything! Drop credit card interest rates allowable and say it’s because the bible is against usury. Let the Republicans play with that fire. Of course, the man from Delaware wouldn’t do that, but I say this to illustrate that there were ways to fight back if the Democrats were remotely who they said they were. If the result of executive orders really did improve lives–even the Trump followers would probably stay shut up about them. If you successfully implemented an order that would alleviate the pain from our healthcare system, can you imagine the unmitigated love you’d receive? From everyone? Look at what happened with the UHC shooter. You had sympathetic people on every side of the aisle over that due to the inherent cruelty of the system. All along the way there have been issues that could bind rather than divide this country. The Democrats simply opted to ignore that. You can say they followed the rules…. but they followed “rules” because they didn’t want to materially change life for the vast majority of Americans. Some of the rules they made up for themselves such as– we have the right to pick our candidates without voter input. That’s quite a rule. It’s such a tragedy because I believe even slight course corrections at pivotal moments could still have changed this nation.

When those on the left brought up options that could earn support and help fellow citizens it was considered to be accomplice behavior aiding the reactionary right. Instead of listening and processing the validity of the concerns, the energy of many liberals was to blame all the wrong people, that is to say the ones who were telling the truth. As I’ve said, there were crucial moments there to stop or slow this slide. One example, of course, would have been to allow an organic primary. But the selection of even a milquetoast social democrat type like Sanders was marketed as a bridge too far and most Democrats eventually swallowed that nonsense up. They were told a candidate like that would never be able to win despite the man having much higher favorable among the right than their handpicked neo-liberal candidates. It was considered to be a mark of maturity to simply acquiesce to “this is how things are” and “we can’t do better”. Quite the motivational stuff, that. Yes, every year gets harder, there’s more homelessness, more suicides, more misery, but we are the adults in the room and you are to accept this as your lot in life. Of course, we end up with fascists. That’s the damn formula for it that history has proven time and time again.

Then we move to a point where full-on genocide isn’t even considered to be a deal breaker with Democrats. When a party falls to that depth, it’s very difficult to see how it can play out in any other manner. Even now, you see liberals gloat in regard to those who didn’t vote at all or voted third party because they couldn’t morally support the Democrats. They say, “are you happy now? Trump wants to move everyone out of Gaza!” As in ha, ha– stupid leftists see how much worse it is with Trump than Biden? Now on this I say you couldn’t have Trump and his son-in-law making Gaza real estate plans without the Biden administration “softening the target”. So, I find that to be a disgusting non-starter. Are we really arguing about how much genocide we should allow?

But………here is where we do get the difference in the parties. And that is in the wholesale dismantling of our government infrastructure currently going on. Again, the liberals would blame the left for this situation when in fact this would not be our reality should the Democratic party have allowed for a natural primary in 2016, 2020 (or hell, even a primary at all in 2024). Those on the left were speaking to history, the inevitable allowance for fascism should relief valves and mitigation not be put in place. You don’t have these situations arise in materially comfortable, at ease societies. And no amount of “this naked emperor has clothes on that were free-trade sourced and hand-sewn by minority lesbians” will change the fact that he is indeed, fucking naked.

But alas, we find ourselves “together’ in that we aren’t fine with the future, the neoliberals and the leftists……..what the world is shaping itself to be is of course simply awful in new and adventurous ways. I would say that the path forward can’t be one of ceding to corporate power, to allowing greasy superficial politicians to convince you to accept situations as egregious as genocide. Our future may look quite different—we may end up with localities having much more power than in the past. We are in uncharted territory, but one thing is for certain and that is we cannot allow pretend opposition to corral our better natures or convince us that in the interest of rationality, we need to forego what we know is decent and correct. Because do not forget, these “rational players”, be it Obama, Clinton, Biden..…. Harris—well, look what their fake opposition has done for us. But they are pretty materially comfortable, aren’t they? Someone said we are in the copper stripping era of the national government. It really won’t affect Biden’s deal with his Hollywood agent.

Moving forward, the greasy political class those types spring from need to be consigned to the dustbin of history. They will bring us nothing but continued misery and a large portion of the masses will look to an authoritarian daddy to fix things. We have actual work to get done. Again, this isn’t new—we didn’t invent this situation. The only way to combat hate, selfishness and inhumanity is the exact opposite of all those things, not pretending, posing and sending out 1,000,000 give me money emails from AOC. This will be my last missive in regard to the Democrats because they are “like a candle in the wind—unreliable” –(thank you fictional Dean Lerner for whatever you were talking about when you delivered that unhinged and delicious line). Time to move on and not repeat such idiocy in the future.

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Photograph Source: 内閣官房内閣広報室 – CC BY 4.0

All presidents bring their own characteristics and governing styles to the White House.  Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the presidency in the most awful of circumstances, was infatuated with himself, taking a LBJ bust to the Vatican to present to the Pope.  Ronald Reagan arrived at the White House so grossly ill informed that a Washington Post reporter remarked that the “task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.”  Reagan’s principal biographer, Lou Cannon, wrote that Reagan “may have been the one president in history of the republic who saw his election as a chance to get some rest.”   George H.W. Bush was particularly nasty during the 1987-1988 campaign, so he had to prove he was really a good guy.  Bush was only the third president in two centuries to be inaugurated  with both houses of Congress in the control of the opposition, so he had to reach out to Democrats.

In our 250 years of history, we have never had to endure as president as ignorant and uncouth as Donald Trump.  His rancid and irredeemable character was unveiled in his second week in the White House when an Army helicopter collided with a commercial airliner over the Potomac River.  The day after the tragedy, Trump blamed the Federal Aviation Authority for hiring disabled people as air traffic controllers, saying they suffered from “intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”

Trump didn’t mention that on his first full day in the White House, he had fired all members of the aviation security advisory committee that had been created in 1989 after the terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland.   Instead of leading and performing the traditional presidential duty of consoler-in-chef, Trump chose to be combative and point the finger of blame.

Trump’s favorite target is the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs throughout the government, particularly in the Pentagon.  In his second day in office, Trump issued an executive order to eliminate DEI programs throughout the federal government.  Trump has falsely accused the Agency for International Development (AID) of funding a DEI musical in Ireland; a “transgender comic book” in Peru; and financing sex changes and “LGTB activism” in Guatemala. As DEI programs are designed to widen the act of hiring to pull in more diverse applicants, Trump’s actions are an expression of his white supremacist agenda.

In taking steps to dismantle AID, Trump froze all foreign aid for 90 days, which endangered the lives of participants in AID trials for new medicines and procedures.  The dismantling of AID, which distributes tens of billions of dollars’ worth of foreign aid annually, assures the spread of disease as well as delays in the development of vaccines and new treatments.  TB alone kills over one million people per year and makes an additional ten million people ill.

As a candidate, Trump pledged to get “transgender insanity the hell out of our schools” and “keep men out of women’s sports.”  On his first full day as president, he signed an executive order barring transgender athletes, thus “restoring biological truth to the federal government.  In doing so, Trump’s bigotry regarding transgender athletes in women’s sports  stopped 10 transgender athletes from competing against more than 530,000 women in the NCAA, which amounts to .000056 of those participating in college athletics.  (Overall, transgender women represent just 0.6 percent of the American population.)

Donald Trump is particularly unusual, applying a style of meanness and mendacity that has worsened in his second term in the White House.  On his second day in office, Trump fired the Coast Guard commandant, Linda Fagan, who was given 60 days to move out of her house at Joint Base Anacostia.  But Trump ordered her to leave her quarters in three hours, leaving the commandant little time to remove all of her personal effects.  What could be more petty and personal?

Trump’s meanness and mendacity over a period of several weeks have violated a congressional law that structured AID as a stand-alone agency; a congressional law that stated 30 days’ notice and “substantive rationale” were needed to remove inspectors general; First Amendment rights that blocked the freezing of domestic grants and other government spending; the Impoundment Control Act that prevents a freeze on most foreign aid; and the ban on birthright citizenship that violates the 14th Amendment.

Trump’s revenge and vengeance campaign has led to the nomination of a number of unqualified and unsavory individuals to important Cabinet posts and senior positions.  One of the worst of them is Anthony Tata, a retired brigadier general, to become undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.  Tata has a history of Islamophobia and other inflammatory comments, once calling former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader.”  Meanwhile, Trump’s revenge campaign against the Department of Justice, FBI, CIA, NSA and the Pentagon continues apace, while uncleared moles in the name of Elon Musk rummage through private and classified personnel files.

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Photograph by Elliot Stoller – CC BY-SA 2.0

How many graduates of Buena Vista Elementary and Lowell High School in San Francisco have become labor book authors?

Probably not many–other than Eric Blanc, whose mother taught in that city’s public school system (and served as union president) and whose father was long active in its central labor council.

Blanc became a teacher himself and drew on that experience when writing his first book, Red State Revolt: The Teachers Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics. It chronicled the 2017-18 uprising in public education in Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, and other states.

Now an assistant professor at Rutgers University, Blanc has just published a more wide-ranging study, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. It grapples with a perennial question facing the labor left—namely, what kind of break with business as usual, within established unions, would help more private sector workers win union recognition, first contracts, and strikes?

A member of DSA, Blanc argues that the current imbalance of power between labor and management in the U.S. can only be changed, for the better, with large-scale, coordinated organizing efforts rooted in the rank-and-file. His most detailed case study focuses on the four-year union recognition drive at Starbucks, one of the biggest restaurant companies in the world, with 380,000 employees and market value of $108 billion.

 In the U.S., that workforce is relatively high-turnover, widely dispersed and fragmented into small, retail store size groups.  The author’s interviews with founders of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU)  take us behind the scenes of an amazingly durable campaign that began when “ten young radicals started salting Buffalo Starbucks stores in early 2021.” (One was Jaz Brisack, now a “practitioner in residence” at the UC Berkeley Labor Center).

“Worker to Worker DNA”

During its early months, SBWU filed almost two representation petitions per day at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This implanted what Blanc calls “worker-to-worker DNA into the entire subsequent trajectory of the campaign.”  Because of its do-it-yourself spirit, the campaign’s initial Labor Board election win rate was a remarkably high 80 percent. According to Blanc, SBWU could not have gained such traction if the organizing had been done in more conventional fashion, with heavy reliance on full-time union staff.

Backed by Workers United/SEIU, SBWU has since helped about 11,000 baristas win bargaining rights at 525 Starbucks stores in 45 states.  SBWU had to develop union majorities, unit by unit and maintain them before, during, and after hotly contested NLRB voting. For two years, SBWU endured what Blanc calls a “scorched earth union busting campaign of unparalleled intensity and breadth,” with an estimated price tag of $250 million.

That effort was orchestrated by Littler Mendelson, a corporate law firm notorious (and often victorious) in the field of “union avoidance. To achieve that management goal at Starbucks, countless workers were harassed, several hundred were fired or suspended for their union activity, and baristas who voted for collective bargaining were illegally denied wage and benefit improvements granted in non-union stores, as an incentive to keep them that way.

Collective action—especially work stoppages—were “key to sustaining momentum and forging solidarity” and keeping the pressure on management, Blanc reports. “In addition to periodic nationwide mobilizations, many Starbucks strikes were begun locally as responses to grievances at their stores.” According to the author, SBWU also “did a great job fighting for and highlighting partial concessions from management secured along the road to a first contract.”

First Contract Fight

That goal suddenly became more achievable in February, 2024, when “Starbucks raised a white flag” and agreed to “begin bargaining in good faith and stop illegally denying equal benefits to unionized workers.” The ensuing talks on a “foundational framework for union contracts” have not so far led to a settlement. If the company’s new CEO, Brian Niccol (who makes $57,000 per hour) changes course–in light of Trump’s hobbling of the NLRB—labor relations at Starbucks could become brutal again, very quickly.

By December, the union disclosed, Starbucks had “yet to bring a comprehensive economic package to the bargaining table,” hundreds of still pending unfair labor practice charges had not been settled, and “$100 million in legal liabilities remain outstanding.”

So SBWU conducted a strike authorization vote in which 98% of the reported participants declared their willingness to walk out, if necessary, “to win fair raises, benefits, and staffing, protest unfair labor practices, and resolve outstanding litigation.”

During Christmas week, according to the union, 5,000 baristas participated in a job action, disrupting operations in 300 stores in 43 states. On January 31, the parties agreed to third-party mediationof their unresolved bargaining dispute.

While this high-profile national fight for a first contract continues, Blanc urges other unions to follow SBWU’s example: Develop and train more rank and file leaders in non-union workplaces, who “can self-organize and train others.” Use digital communication tools like Zoom “to quickly and widely scale up drives across huge spatial divides…so workers can directly coordinate and support each other without relying as much on paid staff and union resources.”

The author also recommends more “salting at strategic targets” since it was the conscious deployment of a “crew of radical salts” whose workplace activity led to the formation of SBWU. And he stresses the importance of seizing opportunities to “spread unionization as widely as possible,” like SBWU did when it was deluged with appeals for organizing help from baristas around the country, after its initial upstate N.Y. breakthroughs.  In short, Blanc argues, “the labor movement needs to finally start acting like a movement again.”

Union Reform Aids Organizing

Blanc’s book also highlights recent union reform victories–within the United Auto Workers (UAW) and NewsGuild/CWA—which led to organizing program improvements. One common denominator of these successful internal election campaigns was “small pockets of newly organized, radicalized young workers [who] played an outsized role.” Their efforts have led to greater rank-and-file engagement in contract campaigns, more frequent strike action, and expanded membership recruitment in both the auto industry and the media.

Given the UAW’s much bigger size, the positive impact of the election of Shawn Fain and other members of Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) to leadership positions, two years ago, is more widely known.  Blanc lauds UAW’s new leadership for internal and external organizing initiatives which “raise expectations, tap into anger at corporate overlords, and show that workers can win big through mass militancy.”

It was no easy task rallying dues-payers understandably “cynical and checked out,” after years of Solidarity House corruption and dysfunction. Yet, during its 2023 contract talks with the Big Three, the UAW’s use of membership education and mobilization, unprecedented bargaining table transparency, and a selective strike strategy produced major gains, after years of divisive and demoralizing concessions. Just a few months later, newly energized and inspired UAW supporters at a non-union Volkswagen plant in Tennessee achieved a major southern organizing breakthrough, with more to come.

 A NewsGuild Shake-Up

The catalyst for a similar organizational shake-up in the 30,000-member NewsGuild was Jon Schleuss winning the union presidency five years ago. As Blanc recounts, his main qualification for national union office was helping to organize the Los Angeles Times, a non-union paper for 135 years. Unlike Fain in the UAW, the 31-year old Schleuss had never been elected or appointed to any union position before, other than a local bargaining committee.

On this own dime, Schleuss went to the NewsGuild’s national convention in 2019 anyway. With backing from three locals, he got himself nominated as a candidate for president in a race everyone assumed was a shoe-in for an incumbent thirty years older and far more experienced than Schleuss.  All Guild officers, headquarters staff, and field reps, along with many local union officials, opposed his candidacy.

Nevertheless, the young journalist proved to be an effective organizer of restive media workers nationwide. During a rare union presidential campaign debate, Schleuss called for “tapping the creativity of our members” in better organized campaigns against newspaper take-overs by hedge-fund owners and others “intent on destroying journalism.” If elected, he pledged to seek more resources from the Guild’s parent organization, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and expand rank-and-file participation in the Guild’s own “Member Organizing Program.”

This MOP draws on four decades of CWA-backed member-based organizing in the public and private sector–using the model favored by Blanc for all unions (ie training and deploying active members, on a “lost-time” or volunteer basis, to recruit non-union workers in the same industry or occupation as their own.)

Strike Activity

During the last five years, the Guild has become what Blanc calls “a powerhouse of new organizing.” Its reform leadership has invested heavily in on-line and in person training of activists who want to get involved in external and internal organizing, contract bargaining, job actions, and strikes. As part of the broader organizing surge that made this possible, nearly 11,000 media workers won bargaining rights in more than 200 new units between 2018 and 2023, according to Blanc. In the last four years, the union has helped workers secure100 first contracts.

By last fall, when Guild members walked out at a legal publication called Law360, it was the union’s 24^th strike of the year. Other targets included Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, The NY Times, Chicago Tribune, and other media outlets, large and small.  In 2023, 36 newsrooms were struck for varying lengths of time. While many of these were quickie strikes, not open ended ones, 100 workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been out for two years, in the longest running strike in the nation.

In We Are The Union, Schleuss recalls when he and other Guild supporters signed up enough co-workers to get an NLRB election at the LA Times seven years ago. Even then, they knew their job was not over. After winning that vote, “we would still have to do everything we could to fix the union—to make it more focused on organizing and more focused on building rank-and-file power.” To keep their spirits up during their difficult contest with management, Times organizing committee members reassured each other that “we have more power than we know.”

In Schleuss’s view, that collective realization is a source of empowerment whether you’re “struggling against an employer who is fighting you every step of the way or you’re a rank-and-filer pushing against deadweight union leadership.” The strength of We Are The Union is Eric Blanc’s inspiring examples of workers overcoming both adversaries.

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“Bosses of the Senate,” by Joseph Keppler, The Puck, January 23, 1889.

We we are living in an extremely dangerous time. Future generations will look back at this moment – what we do right now – and remember whether we had the courage to defend our democracy against the growing threats of oligarchy and authoritarianism. They will remember whether we stood with President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg who in 1863, looking out at a battlefield where thousands died in the struggle against slavery and stated that; “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Do we stand with Lincoln’s vision of America or do we allow this country to move to a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires?

But it’s not just oligarchy that we should be concerned about, and the reality that the three richest people in America now own more wealth than the bottom half of our society – 170 million people. It’s not just that the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider, and that we have more income and wealth inequality today than we’ve ever had.

It is also that we are looking at a rapid movement, under President Trump, toward authoritarianism. More and more power resting in fewer and fewer hands.

Right now, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is attempting to dismantle major agencies of the federal government which are designed to protect the needs of working families and the disadvantaged. These agencies were created by the U.S. Congress and it is Congress’ responsibility to maintain them, reform them or end them. It is not Mr. Musk’s responsibility. What Mr. Musk is doing is patently illegal and unconstitutional – and must be stopped.

Two weeks ago, President Trump attempted to suspend all federal grants and loans – an outrageous and clearly unconstitutional act. As I hope every 6th grader in America knows, under the Constitution and our form of government the president can recommend legislation, he can support legislation, he can veto legislation, but he does not have the power to unilaterally terminate funding passed by Congress. It is Congress, the House and the Senate, who control the purse strings.

But it’s not just Congress that’s under attack. It’s our judiciary.

This weekend, the Vice President, a graduate of Yale Law School, who clerked for a Supreme Court Justice, said that: “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Really? I thought that one of the major functions of the federal courts is to interpret our Constitution and, when appropriate, serve as a check on unconstitutional executive power.

Mr. Musk, meanwhile, has proposed that “the worst 1% of appointed judges be fired every year,” and demanded the impeachment of judges that have blocked him from accessing sensitive Treasury Department files. No doubt, under Mr. Musk’s rule, it will be him and his billionaire friends who determine who the “worst” judges are. And no, Mr. Musk, you don’t impeach judges who rule against you. You may or may not know this, but under the U.S. Constitution, we have a separation of powers, brilliantly crafted by the founding fathers of this country in the 1770s.

So, we are seeing an organized attack on Congress and the courts.

But Trump and his friends aren’t just trying to undermine two of the three pillars of our constitutional government – Congress and the courts. They are also going after the media in a way that we have never seen in the modern history of this country.

Every member of Congress will tell you that people in the media, and media organizations, are not perfect. They, like everyone else, make mistakes every day. But I hope that every member of Congress understands that you cannot have a functioning democracy without an independent press – non-intimidated journalists who can write it and say it the way they see it. And in that regard, I want to remind my colleagues what this president has done in recent months.

President Trump has sued ABC and received a $15 million settlement. He has sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and received a $25 million settlement. He has sued CBS, and its parent company Paramount, is apparently in negotiations over a settlement. He has sued the Des Moines Register, and his FCC is now threatening to investigate PBS and NPR.

In other words, we have a President of the United States who is using his power to go after media in this country who are saying and doing things he doesn’t like. How are we going to have an independent media if journalists are looking over their shoulders, fearful that their reporting will trigger a lawsuit from the most powerful man in the world?

Now is the time to ask a very simple question. What do Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and their fellow billionaires really want? What is their endgame?

And in my view, the answer is not complicated. It is not novel. It is not new. It is what ruling classes throughout history have always wanted and have always believed is theirs by right: more power, more control and more wealth. And they are determined to not allow democracy and the rule of law to get in their way.

For Mr. Musk and his fellow oligarchs, the needs, the concerns, the ideas, the dreams of ordinary people are simply an impediment to what they, the oligarchs, are entitled to. That is what they really believe.

This is not the first time we’ve seen this in our country’s history.

In pre-revolutionary America, before the 1770s, the ruling class of that time governed through a doctrine called the “divine right of kings,” the belief that the King of England was an agent of God, God appointed him, and he was not to be questioned by mere mortals.

In modern times we no longer have the “divine right of kings.” What we NOW have is an ideology being pushed by the oligarchs which says that as very, very wealthy people – often self-made, often the masters of revolutionary new technology and as “high-IQ individuals,” it is THEIR absolute right to rule. In other words, the oligarchs of today are our modern-day kings.

And it is not just power that they want. Despite the incredible wealth they have they want more, and more and more. Their greed has no end. Today, Mr. Musk is worth $402 billion, Mr. Zuckerberg is worth $252 billion and Mr. Bezos is worth $249 billion. With combined wealth of $903 billion, these 3 people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society — 170 million people.

Not surprisingly, since Trump was elected, their wealth has soared. Elon Musk has become $138 billion richer, Zuckerberg has become $49 billion richer and Bezos has become $28 billion richer – since Election Day.

Meanwhile, while the very rich become much richer, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 85 million are uninsured or under-insured, 25% of seniors are trying to survive on $15,000 or less, 800,000 are homeless and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth. And real, inflation adjusted wages for the average American worker have been stagnant for 50 years.

Do you think the oligarchs give a damn about these people? Trust me, they don’t. Musk’s decision to dismember U.S. AID means that tens of thousands of the poorest people around the world will go hungry or die of preventable diseases.

But it’s not just abroad. Here in the United States they’ll soon be going after the healthcare, nutrition, housing, and educational programs that protect the most vulnerable people in our country – all so that Congress can provide huge tax breaks for them and their fellow billionaires. As modern-day kings, who believe they have the absolute right to rule, they will sacrifice, without hesitation, the well-being of working people to protect their privilege.

Further, they will use the enormous media operations they own to deflect attention away from the impact of their policies while they “entertain us to death.” Mr. Musk owns twitter. Mr. Zuckerberg owns Meta – which includes Facebook and Instagram – and Mr. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Further, they and their fellow oligarchs, will continue to spend huge amounts of money to buy politicians in both major political parties.

Bottom line: The oligarchs, with their enormous resources, are waging a war on the working class of this country, and it is a war they are intent on winning.

Now, I am not going to kid you — the problems this country faces right now are serious and they are not easy to solve. The economy is rigged, our campaign finance system is corrupt and we are struggling to control climate change — among many other important issues.

But this is what I do know:

The worst fear that the ruling class in this country has is that Americans — Black, White, Latino, urban and rural, gay and straight, young and old — come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthy few.

Their oligarch’s nightmare is that we will not allow ourselves to be divided up by race, religion, sexual orientation or country of origin and will, together, have the courage to take them on.

Will this struggle be easy? Absolutely not.

And one of the reasons that it will not be easy is that the ruling class of this country will constantly remind you that THEY have all the power. They control the government, they own the media.

But our job right now, in these difficult times, is to not forget the great struggles and sacrifices that millions of people have waged over the several centuries to create a more democratic, just and humane society. Think about what people THEN were saying.

+ Overthrowing the King of England to create a new nation and self-rule. Impossible.

+ Establishing universal suffrage. Impossible.

+ Ending slavery and segregation. Impossible.

+ Granting workers the right to form unions and ending child labor. Impossible.

+ Giving women control over their own bodies. Impossible.

+ Passing legislation to establish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a minimum wage, clean air and water standards. Impossible.

In other word, as Nelson Mandela told us, everything is impossible until it is done.

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Image by Mike Von.

Rise up people and fast. Tyrant Trump and his Musk-driven gangsters are launching a fascistic coup d’état. Much of everything you like about federal/civil service for your health, safety, and economic well-being and protections is being targeted.

To feed Trump’s insatiable vengeance over being prosecuted, being defeated in the 2020 election, or now just being challenged, this megalomaniacal, self-described dictator is harming the lives of tens of millions of Americans in need and millions of Americans who are assisting them.

In his demented lawless arrogance, convicted felon Trump is nullifying the freedoms and protections of the American Revolution (King Donald is today’s King George III), and rejecting the Declaration of Independence (which listed the rights and abuses against the British Tyrant that Trump is shredding and entrenching). He is defiantly violating the U.S. Constitution, its controls over dictatorial government, and its powers exclusively given to Congress.  The Constitution demands that we live under the rule of law, not the rule of one man.

While Trump enjoys Mar-a-Lago and his golfing, Madman Musk, a South African, is literally living in the Executive Office Building next to the White House, with his heel-clicking Musketeers, seven days a week (they brought in sleeping cots) guarded by a large private security detail.

Consider, people, that the world’s richest man, with billions of dollars of federal contracts, is unleashing his henchmen to wreck the daily work of public servants committed to providing critical services that have long and bi-partisan support. Assistance to children, emergency workers, the sick and elderly, public school students, and people ripped off by business crooks. He is firing the federal cops on the corporate crime beat – whether at the FBI, the EPA, or the key Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which Trump/Musk are gutting.

Some headlines: “Laws? What Laws? Trump’s Brazen Grab for Executive Power” by the great reporter Charlie Savage (New York Times, February 6, 2025). Outlaws taking charge, driven by greed for the government’s honeypots of corporate welfare, and near-zero taxes for the rich and big corporations.

Or “Searching for Motive to Musk Team’s Focus on ‘Checkbook’ of U.S.” by Alan Rappeport, February 6, 2025, New York Times.

Or “White House Billionaires Take on the World’s Poorest Kids” by the super-reporter Nicholas Kristof (February 6, 2025. New York Times) shutting down The Agency for International Development’s distribution of AIDS medicines, and crucially stopping U.S. health agencies from countering rising, deadly pandemics in Africa that could come here quickly without U.S. defensive actions abroad. Already the devastating effects on children missing healthcare and food are erupting.

Kristof concludes that all this (and the dollar amounts are very small compared to their benefits) may seem like a game for Trump/Musk, but “… it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.” It is also criminal!

When the forces of law and order reassert themselves, Elon Musk may become known as felon Musk. He is not a properly appointed federal official. He has no authority to send his wrecking crews into one agency after another, demanding private information about Americans, pushing people out, and shutting down operations.

Musk, whose next target is the federal auto safety agency that has been enforcing the safety laws against Tesla and has not surrendered its regulation of self-driving cars (Musk’s next big project). Musk refuses to disclose his sweetheart contracts with the federal agencies nor has he disclosed his tax returns. Demand them.

What is very clear in the first 20 days of Trump’s lawless madness is that he is moving fast for a police state along with deepening the corporate state with and for Big Business. His prime victims are not the vast military budget at the Department of Defense, nor the big budgets of the Spy Agencies or of Musk’s lucrative fiefdom – NASA, the Space Agency. No, like the bullies they are, Trump/Musk are smashing people’s programs.  They hate Medicaid (provided to over 80 million Americans) or the food programs for millions of children.  Crazed Trump is pushing to shut down many clean wind power projects and cut credits to homeowners installing solar panels while booming the omnicidal oil, gas, and coal industries. He wants many more giant exporting natural gas facilities near U.S. ports which could accidentally blow up entire cities.

Musk’s poisoned Tusks have even reached Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Vietnam where mine-clearing efforts have been cut off. These are the U.S.’s Vietnam War era unexploded ordinances and bomblets that have killed tens of thousands of innocent residents, mostly children, in the past fifty years.

The Washington Post headline on February 6th, “Musk Team Taking Over Public Operations” understates the carnage. They are brazenly shutting down agencies, taking down thousands of government websites helpful to all Americans, and telling conscientious civil servants to obey or be driven out.

The Republicans in Congress, to their future shame and guilt, are surrendering their constitutional powers in the very branch of government our Founders assigned to check any rising monarchy in the White House.

The Democrats in the minority are just starting to protest, some in front of shuttered federal buildings. But they have not yet initiated unofficial public hearings in Congress to give voice to the surging anger of Americans (now flooding their switchboards) whose narrow majority of Trump voters are sensing betrayal big time. Demand unofficialhearings now! Federal judges are starting to uphold the violated laws.

The media, itself threatened by Trump’s attacks, censorship, and who knows what is next from this venomous liar (see the Washington Post’s Glen Kessler’s January 26, 2025 piece “The White House’s wildly inaccurate claims about USAID spending” or “Trump’s gusher of misleading economic statistics at Davos”) will cover protests and testimony by people all over the country. The rallies and marches have begun and will only get larger as Trump and Musk sink lower with their tyrannical abuses.

The career military does not relish the reckless buffoon that Trump put over them as Secretary of Defense. American business cannot tolerate the chaos, the uncertainty, the tumult.  Thirty-nine million small businesses are already feeling the oncoming Trump tsunami.

Break with your routine, Americans. It’s your country they are seizing with this burgeoning coup. Take it back fast, is what our original patriots of 1776 would be saying.

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Photograph Source: DanielGoldhorn – CC BY 4.0

The classic coup d’état has guns. Uniformed men run wild seizing government agencies and claiming control over what government does and who government serves.

But in our new cyber age, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder reflected this past week, a coup can unfold without any armed overthrow. We can have “a couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives.”

These young men, operating upon “vague references to orders from on high,” can gain access to basic computer systems and “proceed to grant their Supreme Leader” effective power over just about everything that government does.

The historian Snyder is, of course, describing America’s current reality. He’s calling this reality a coup — and so are defenders of America’s democratic faith.

We aren’t living through “a coup with tanks in the streets and mobs overrunning government offices,” charges former U.S. attorney and current Brennan Center senior fellow Joyce Vance. We’ve living through “a quieter coup, a billionaires’ coup.”

“The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes,” adds in the University of Minnesota Law School’s Will Stancil. “Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse.”

The Musk legions now hacking their way through the nation’s capital, the New York Times reports, have already “inserted themselves” into the databases of 17 federal agencies. These legions include fervent Musk admirers like Akash Bobba, a software engineer less than three years out of high school who once interned with a tech firm chaired by fellow Musk billionaire Peter Thiel.

One by one, the federal agencies that keep the nation running have fallen, with the full blessings of Donald Trump, under Musk’s effective control. Trump, meanwhile, is making headlines about taking over Gaza and Panama, in the process, notes Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, “distracting everyone from the real story — the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”

The Trumpsters, agrees Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, are moving us “into an oligarchic form of society where extraordinary power rests in the hands of a small number of unelected multi-billionaires.”

Elected officials and progressive activists are pushing back in the courts to stop the Musk putsch and scoring some initial victories. One federal judge, for instance, has just blocked Musk’s access to the Treasury Department’s computer payments system. That access, the judge ruled, threatens “irreparable harm” to the personal and financial data of millions of Americans.

But lower-level court rulings may not pass muster with higher-level Trump-appointed judges. Stopping the Musk coup will require a broader popular mobilization, and that push back is indeed building, with protests drawing thousands in locales ranging from downtown Washington to a host of state capitols nationwide.

Our best hope to counter the Musk coup’s billionaire corporate backers — “and their boundless options” to shape “our elections, legislation, and judicial appointments”? That may well be intensified trade union action, suggests a new analysis long-time labor activist Michael Podhorzer, and that action is also building.

Labor’s national voice, the AFL-CIO, has just launched a new campaign, the Department of People Who Work for a Living, to challenge Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency.”

“Government can work for billionaires,” points out AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, “or it can work for working people — but not both.”

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Photograph Source: Dan Scavino – Public Domain

Despite the fallout, there was little that was actually new or shocking about Trump and Netanyahu’s press conference last week. What shocked informed people on all sides of the Palestine issue was Trump’s forthright (if crude, ill-comprehended and oblivious) statement of the truth: that the United States is committed to the Judaization of Palestine and a process of “normalization” between a “greater” Israel and its Arab neighbors that involves a combination of apartheid and physical displacement. All the diplo-speak of Biden and his predecessors that so effectively obfuscated the Americans’ and Israelis’ true policies – gone. Trump is simply incapable of employing the clever phrasing needed to frame racist policies as rational statecraft.

Stepping back from Trump’s crude and stupid remarks, then, we can easily discern the thrust of Israeli/American policy, clear to most of us for years, but is now reaching its culmination in the “normalization” process. This is how it goes:

+ Saudi Arabia, the Jewel in the Crown for completing the Abraham Accords, has conditioned normalization with Israel on a vague, never-to-be-implemented commitment to a “pathway” to a Palestinian state at some indeterminate future date. No details or conditions necessary; for example, would the Palestinian state be territorially contiguous, genuinely sovereign and economically viable? Why spend the political capital to get into problematic details over an eventuality that “everyone knows” (to quote Leonard Cohen) will never materialize? The other Arab states that have already normalized with Israel – Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco – haven’t even made that symbolic demand.

+ Arab government collusion with Netanyahu and Trump (& Biden, this is not just a Republican plan) empowers Israel to define less what the Palestinian Bantustan-“state” would look like (who cares?) and more the expanded Israel they would be normalizing. The parameters are clear: they were set out in detailed maps back in 2020 (see below). “Israel” is defined as the state of Israel in its 1967 borders PLUS its settlements. Israel thus expands to 85% of historic Palestine while the Palestinian “state” is reduced to three enclaves in the West Bank and an uninhabitable Gaza. For “security” reasons Israel also controls the borders (Palestine will not have a border with an Arab country), the airspace and even internal movement between the enclaves. No territorial contiguity, no sovereignty, no economic viability, and no capacity to bring the refugees home. A Palestinian Bantustan within an all-encompassing Israeli apartheid regime.

The fact that the normalization process is nearing its completion explains Israel’s push to ethnically cleanse Area C , the 62% of the West Bank where its settlements are located, and which is planned to be annexed. The most violent Israeli settler youth have been unleashed on Palestinian communities; indeed, they have been recruited into a special IDF unit called Desert Frontier where they join other army units in driving Palestinian farmers and shepherds from their villages and lands. More than 50 rural communities have been abandoned since October 7th; more than 40 new settlement “outposts” established to replace them. All to establish the “facts on the ground” that will then be normalized.

Whether a couple million Gazans are relocated semi-voluntarily or by force, or whether they just rot there under some puppet Palestinian or Arab authority makes no difference. Israel has no strategic interest in Gaza and, a few settlers aside, no interest in integrating it into a Greater Israel. It is marginal and expendable. Israel’s main interest is removing 2.3 million Palestinians from its direct rule, then placing the remaining three million of its West Bank Bantustan under some Palestinian Authority-type subcontractor. Thus a Greater Israel with a Jewish majority of 70-80% covering all of historic Palestine.

+ The only actual condition imposed on Israel by the US and Saudi Arabia for the normalization process to go ahead is industrial quiet, quietizing the Palestinian issue so that it simply drops out of sight. Thus Israel’s intense campaign of pacification, beginning with eliminating Hamas in Gaza, the last bastion of effective resistance, but now spilling over into the West Bank where Israel is “Gaza-fying” the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nablus refugee camps as well as other pockets of resistance. (With, sickeningly, the active support of its collaborationist Palestinian Authority, desperate to “prove” to Israel that it is capable of taking control of Gaza.)

+ Then, with all this in place, normalization. A “Greater” Israel is recognized by Saudi Arabia, much of the Arab and Muslim world and the United States, the Palestinians regulated to “a problem” that demands little more than periodic lip-service. To be sure, this will be sold as the “two-state solution” the international community has long supported, but let’s call it by its real name: two-state apartheid.

Settler colonialism ends not with victory but by being normalized. For normalization means closure. Once an expanded Israel and its apartheid regime is recognized by the international community – if not formally by much of Europe, the BRICS Bloc and the Global South, then certainly de facto, which for Israel is good enough – there is little political space for the Palestinians to continue pushing their cause. Completion of the Abraham Accords represents the greatest threat to the Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba. Opposing it as long as normalization does not mean restoring to the Palestinians their national rights should be our priority.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Meshuggener”

—Yiddish word for “crazy person.”

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.  On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

– H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920.

Donald Trump has occupied the White House for only three weeks, and the term “crazy town,” which former chief of staff John Kelley applied to Trump’s Washington in the first term, is gaining greater credibility and meaning.  According to Bob Woodward’s book “Fear,” Kelly said that Trump was an “idiot.  It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything.  He’s gone off the rails  We’re in Crazytown.  I don’t know why any of us are here.  This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

Kelly can say “I told you so,” because “Crazytown” is back.  There’s Canada as the 51st state; the Gulf of America, which is waiting for the official geographer to change our maps; the possible seizure of the Panama Canal; and of course the purchase of Greenland for U.S. national security.  But the plan to seize and rebuild the Gaza Strip, removing two million Palestinians in order to create the “Riviera of the Middle East,” could not be more bizarre and zany.

On the other hand, what would you expect from three real estate developers: Trump, his special envoy Stephen Witkoff, and his prodigal son-in-law Jared Kushner, who told an audience at Harvard University—his alma mater—about the wonderful development opportunities on the 25 miles of sunset-facing Gaza waterfront.  Add to the list of real estate developers, David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel in his first term, who called the idea “brilliant and out of the box creative and frankly the only solution I’ve heard in 50 years that has the chance of actually changing the dynamics in that troubled part of the world.”

Well, “the world” didn’t exactly react in the way that Friedman opined.  The three key Arab states (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan) that were supposed to support this operation and absorb many or most of the displaced Palestinians immediately rejected the idea.  All three leaders of these states knew that the mere announcement of the idea would contribute to the destabilization of the region, particularly Jordan that already has a Palestinian majority that creates significant political tension.  The Palestinians themselves, who have faced illegal and immoral displacement from the Israelis for the past 75 years and barely survived Israel’s current genocidal campaign, didn’t share Trump’s view regarding the “kindness” of his plan.

Only the right-wing troglodytes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security cabinet and within America’s pro-Israel community endorsed the idea.  Netanyahu, who was given little advance notice of Trump’s plan, was smirking as Trump was speaking, which suggested that even he knew that he was in “Crazytown,”  Between smirks, Netanyahu kept looking over to Ron Dermer, his national security adviser, with a look of disbelief.  After achieving a free hand for his military campaign from the Biden administration, Netanyahu presumably realizes that he currently has a U.S. administration that also will provide “carte blanche” for his policies, although it will require careful handling from time to time.

It took the Trump administration less than 24 hours to try to clean up the international mess that it had created.  White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who is clearly over her head in this position, explained that Egypt and Jordan would only have to take in the Gazan population on a “temporary” basis.  Temporary?  Middle East envoy Witkoff told Trump that it would take decades and dollars to simply remove the rubble that Israel has created in Gaza.  As for the dollars, Trump’s plan for Gaza came on the heels of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which presumably would have been central to any task of a territory that Israel has made uninhabitable.

Leavitt also had to explain that Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. military would be involved in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza did not mean he was “committed to putting boots on the ground.”  Leavitt had all sorts of trouble dealing with the press corps simply because she was explaining a “plan” that had never been discussed at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, or in the intelligence community.  National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who is clearly over his head, referred to the “plan” as “very bold” with “fresh new ideas.”  He didn’t think that it “should be criticized in any way.”

And if this craziness wasn’t sufficiently bizarre and zany, on the very day that the White House was in partial retreat from its plan, it received an email from the Central Intelligence Agency that listed all employees hired over the past two years.  This in itself was not unusual, but the fact it was sent as an unclassified email was a counter-intelligence nightmare.   I can hear the laughter from Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping who foresee better days ahead for their own national security situations vis-a-vis a much diminished United States.

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Photograph Source: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Tyler J. Clements – Public Domain

“We’re shutting it down,” Elon Musk said over the weekend in reference to USAID, the country’s main aid agency, which oversees around $40 billion a year in spending and has been around since the early 1960s. Following two weeks of chaos across the aid industry after the new US administration ordered a 90-day freeze on nearly all foreign assistance, it appears the Trump administration is attempting to move forward with a plan to close the agency and merge its responsibilities with the State Department, though legal challenges are likely.

Speaking Monday afternoon, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was serving as acting administrator for the aid agency. “This is not about ending USAID,” Rubio told the press, rather it was aimed at ensuring “everything they do has to be in alignment with the national interest and the foreign policy of the United States.”

Few countries across the world are as dependent on US foreign assistance as Haiti. Last year, I published a book, Aid State, that details the long-term, damaging political ramifications of foreign assistance in Haiti; how aid circumvented the democratic process, eroded sovereignty, undermined local businesses and government, and served more as a benefit to US special interest groups than to the local population. Simply stopping all aid flows overnight, however, will have significant effects in Haiti. According to US officials, there will be a process for organizations providing humanitarian assistance to request waivers that would allow them to continue operating; but the freeze in spending amounted to a stop work order, halting ongoing programs in their tracks.

Since October 2023 (the beginning of FY2024), USAID has obligated $368 million in contracts and grants for activities in Haiti, according to an analysis of data from USASpending.gov.¹ Many of these awards are for multiyear programs. Coming up with a total figure for the amount of funding impacted by the recent spending freeze is nearly impossible, as it affected monies that had already been disbursed to contractors or grantees. Nevertheless, at a bare minimum — and if no programs were to receive a waiver to continue — the freeze will halt some $330 million in outstanding commitments to ongoing programs.

Much of the debate around the recent Trump administration actions have treated aid as a monolithic thing; either as strictly life-saving and urgent humanitarian assistance, or as nothing more than imperial political interventionism. The reality is more mixed. But, moving USAID under the State Department, as now seems to be the most likely scenario, will only make foreign assistance more political. It is the US doubling down on all the worst parts of the industry.

Local Procurement

Of course, as is the case across the globe, the vast majority of USAID spending goes to organizations or companies not in recipient countries, but right here in the United States. Only 7.6 percent of USAID’s spending for Haiti since October 2023 went directly to local organizations — though a larger percentage does make it to Haitian organizations through subcontracts, there is not detailed information at this level.

The largest Haitian recipient is the SEROvie Foundation, which provides services to at-risk youth, especially regarding the treatment of HIV/AIDS. The organization has been obligated $8.8 million since October 2023, and the funding freeze will halt at least an additional $2.5 million. Though there is a long-term benefit to reducing reliance on foreign assistance for such services, the halt in funding will have a direct effect on people’s lives — including those employed by the organization, adding to the already impossibly difficult employment situation in Haiti.

But not all local procurement is created equally. The freeze will also affect some $1.4 million in funding for Papyrus S.A., a local firm that runs USAID’s Civil Society Strengthening Program — which works with local organizations to increase their capacity to comply with USAID’s stringent funding requirements. CEPR has argued previously that such endeavors are misguided. Foreign assistance should aim to increase the capacity of local organizations to deliver results, not jump through unnecessary hoops. With the possible closing of USAID, the $7.5 million program which began in the fall of 2022 will be rendered moot.

Funding to UN Agencies

Though there was a time when USAID implemented programs directly, over recent decades the organization has largely been outsourced to contractors and grantees. Given the difficulty of humanitarian access in Haiti in recent years, this has meant an increasing reliance on UN agencies that operate in the country. Of the $368 million obligated since the beginning of FY2024, some 40 percent of that has gone directly to the World Food Programme (WFP), UNICEF, the Pan-American Health Organization, the UN Development Program, the UN Population Fund, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In fact, WFP and IOM have been the two largest recipients of USAID funding in recent years. Some of this funding, if cut, will directly affect the Trump administration’s goal of increasing deportations. There is nearly $9 million in undisbursed funds to the IOM for a program aimed at increasing the capacity of Haiti to receive deportees, for example. The IOM also plays a significant role in managing camps for the internally displaced, which now officially hold upward of one million Haitians. The fact that an international entity is providing these services instead of the Haitian government is a real problem, and also a consequence of decades of aid policies that weakened Haiti’s government and outsourced provision of services. But simply ending support for the displaced population is likely to only exacerbate the suffering and encourage even greater migratory flows. Nearly $39 million remains undisbursed for that program.

The WFP is the single largest recipient of USAID funding, having received more than $70 million since the beginning of FY2024. Historically, food assistance has played an instrumental role in undermining local production and decimating Haiti’s farmers — and certain emergency food aid programs, which largely rely on surplus US agricultural commodities, have been exempt from the freeze.

But, unlike most US food assistance, the funding to the WFP includes significant support to local producers. WFP runs a school lunch program in Haiti, which reached nearly half-a-million people last year. In recent years, the share of food purchased locally has increased drastically and the organization aims to reach 100 percent locally procured food by 2028. “The government’s goal is for all the food in schools to be locally produced, and we want to help make that happen,” Wanja Kaaria, WFP’s Haiti country director, recently said.

The Beltway Bandits

As USAID became evermore reliant on contractors and grantees, a new crop of companies grew to fill the void. Beginning in the early 2000s, for-profit development companies largely based inside the Beltway — DC, Maryland, and Virginia — rose to prominence and began capturing an ever-larger share of USAID’s budget. One firm, Chemonics International, received some $1.5 billion globally in FY2024. These firms also dominated the post-quake reconstruction era in Haiti. In the 10 years after the earthquake, firms inside the beltway received more than halfof all Haiti-related spending. Just two firms combined — Chemonics and Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI) — received more than 20 percent.

Early in Obama’s first term, the US launched USAID Forward, an ambitious reform program that aimed to break up big contracts consolidated in the hands of just a few firms, such as Chemonics. In response, these for-profit companies banded together to form the Coalition for International Development Companies (CIDC), which then hired a well-connected lobbyist to advocate against these commonsense reforms aimed at improving the delivery of foreign assistance.

Though — at least in Haiti — there has recently been a greater reliance on UN agencies and other multilateral entities, these beltway bandits remain significant players. DAI is currently operating three different programs in Haiti: one aimed at improving water systems, one focused on reforestation, and another in the agricultural sector. There is nearly $25 million committed, but not yet disbursed, to DAI through these three programs.

Tetra Tech meanwhile, is overseeing a five-year, $24 million program focused on citizen security. There remains nearly $20 million yet to be disbursed. In December 2024, USAID’s largest contractor, Chemonics, received a $25 million contract to implement a program titled “Justice Renewal and Advancement.”

These for-profit entities, however, have an extremely checkered history when it comes to delivering results, while a significant share of the contracts will go directly back to the Beltway in the form of overhead. The CEO of Chemonics, for example, makes an annual salary of $955,000.

Last week, Devex reported that some 3,000 development professionals in the DC-area would likely lose their jobs in the coming weeks.

Political Intervention

Aid is political, whether direct or indirect. And USAID specifically has been a pillar of US soft power for more than 60 years. Aid can have long-term structural political effects, as mentioned previously, but there are also more direct political interventions undertaken through USAID. In 2015, CEPR reported that USAID had given some $100,000 of in-kind support to an overtly political organization supporting then candidate Michel Martelly during the 2010/2011 electoral process in Haiti. USAID also provides funding for elections in Haiti.

In September, USAID gave $1 million to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which manages the “basket fund” for donors to provide funding to the Provisional Electoral Council that will manage the upcoming electoral process (currently scheduled for this fall, it would be the first elections in Haiti since 2016). Though nobody questions the need for elections, foreign financing of Haiti’s electoral processes has contributed to the outsourcing of the country’s democracy and has given foreign powers even greater leverage over the nation’s politics.

USAID also awarded a $17 million grant to the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening, which is composed of three entities: The National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES). Though accounting for just 3 percent of USAID’s spending since FY2024, the work of these entities has traditionally been more overtly political — as the consortium’s name indicates. IRI, for example, played a key role in fomenting opposition to the Aristide government in the early 2000s.

Conclusion

The term “aid” encompasses many different things: humanitarian assistance and development programming, contracts and grants, support to local organizations and multimillion dollar contracts to DC-area firms. There are many parts of the US foreign aid industry that can and should be stopped or significantly reformed. But that doesn’t mean that shutting down USAID, or making its assistance even more overtly political by placing it under the umbrella of the State Department, is going to be a good thing, either in the short or long term. The reality is that, where foreign assistance is least effective, it is largely because it is designed to promote US interests rather than address the needs of those ostensibly on the receiving end. The changes announced by the Trump administration are not likely to truly disrupt US soft power abroad. If anything, it will make political interventionism an even more explicit aim of US foreign assistance.

Notes.

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Photograph Source: DHSgov – Public Domain

President Donald Trump’s decision to delay for 30 days the implementation of tariffs on Mexican products averted higher costs for the legions of football fans gearing up for Superbowl Sunday. As is the ritual now, many pass the day drinking beer or other spirits and gobbling down guacamole and tortilla chips. Mexican suds and avocados are a vital part of this ritualistic day of feast and fun. On Superbowl Sunday and the rest of the year, the U.S. is by far the biggest market for exported Mexican avocados, the primary ingredient of guacamole. 

Cited in the Mexican daily La Jornada, the Association of Avocado Packers and Exporters of Mexico reported about 110,000 tons of avocados, or more than 250 million of the fleshy fruits, were shipped to El Norte during the month of January in anticipation of Superbowl Sunday gluttony. For now,  U.S. guacamole lovers won’t feel pain in their pockets from higher prices resulting from tariffs. 

But the Mexican avocado export business denotes a much deeper problem, an environmental one of far-reaching magnitude. Currently, avocado production in Mexico is the subject of complaints filed by Mexican citizens in the Montreal-based Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC). The CEC is a trinational agency founded as part of the side agreement to the  North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. The CEC was essentially renewed in the 2020 free trade successor ageement to NAFTA approved by the three member governments.  

Overseen by the senior environmental officials of the U.S., Mexico and Canada, CEC staff receive citizen submissions that allege violations of environmental laws of a given member nation. 

If a complaint is not dismissed, CEC staff roll up their sleeves and compile a comprehensive report on the legal and environmental facts of the allegation for approval by the three top environmental officials of the member nations. This factual record is then sent to the government in question. Next step, it is up to that government to take action.  

Since 2023, avocado production has triggered two citizen submissions filed by Mexican citizens in the CEC. The first one is centered on the environmental impacts of avocado cultivation in the southwestern state of Michoacán, which produces an estimated 75 percent of the avocados consummed both in Mexico and abroad.  

In recent decades, vast swaths of the state have been cleared for growing avocado trees. In 2019, the Mexican daily La Jornada reported that 60 percent of the forest cover in four important regions of Michoacán had been cleared of their forests.

According to the latest numbers reported in a recent edition of La Jornada, somewhere between 434,896 and 442,318 acres of avocados are presently cultivated in Michoacán. To visualize that number, imagine avocado trees (instead of pecan trees) covering long belts of land equivalent to more or less to five Elephant Butte Irrrigation Districts, the swath of rich farm land that runs along the Rio Grande south from Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico to the Texas border at Anthony.

Due to brisk demand from U.S. consumers, the volume of avocados exported to the U.S. shot up from 747,000 tons in 2014 to 1,170,000 tons in 2024, according to a private agricultural consulting firm cited  by La Jornada. 

In response to the first citizen complaint, the CEC noted the following:

“In submission SEM-23-002 (Avocado Production in Michoacán), the Submitter asserts that Mexico is failing to protect forests and water resources in Michoacán from environmental impacts and deforestation caused by the continued expansion of avocado plantations. In particular, the Submitter claims that Mexico is failing to uphold provisions of the Mexican Constitution and various federal laws focused on environmental impact assessment, forestry conservation, sustainable development, water quality, climate change and environmental protection.

The Submitter maintains that forests play an important role in providing wildlife habitat, supporting biodiversity, mitigating climate change, conserving soil, filtering water, and recharging aquifers, among other contributions. The Submitter underscores the remarkable growth of the avocado industry in Michoacán in recent decades, positioning it as the main exporter of avocados in the world, most of which are exported to the United States.

The Submitter acknowledges that not all avocado producers have the same type and degree of environmental impacts but asserts that research has shown that the majority of avocado production in Michoacán generates high levels of environmental impacts and that deforestation rates in Michoacán for avocado plantations are among the highest in Mexico and Latin America.”

For security reasons, the CEC withheld the names of the submitter. 

Eyeing Michoacan’s economic success, other Mexican states have jumped on the bandwagon of the so-called green gold bonanza. Newer plantings, for example, have appeared in the neighboring state of Jalisco. And there, too, avocado growing has triggered a citizen complaint to the CEC. Also filed in 2023, the Jalisco submission contends that illegal logging has accompanied the avocado boom. 

In summarizing the submission, the CEC wrote in part:

“The submission alleges that Mexico is failing to effectively enforce procedures for changing land use from forest land to agriculture. The submission maintains that the process established in the law was not followed with regard to an area known as “Los Amoles” in Cuautla, Jalisco, and that people entered the land illegally, cut down trees in this area without authorization, transported the wood, and sold the wood commercially, resulting in deforestation and land use change, as Los Amoles is allegedly being converted to an avocado plantation.

Due to security concerns, confidentiality regarding authorship of the submission was requested.”

Apart from environmental concerns, avocado production especially in Michocan and Jalisco has been a magnet for organized criminal activity. 

In replies to the CEC, Mexico’s federal government urged the dismissal of the citizen complaints, citing dozens of industry inspections, administrative proceedings against alleged violators and modest reforestation programs in affected areas since 2018. 

According to the CEC, the Mexican government also sent information to Montreal reporting the establishment of monocultivar working groups designed to coordinate different agencies in a mission of preventing further forest loss and minimizing “adverse effects on climate, basins, ecosystems, and society that arise from the increased production of high-value cash crops, such as agaves (tequila and mezcal), avocadoes and berries in the State of Jalisco.”

Of course, the big money for agave-based spirits, avocados and berries is in El Norte.

As of 2025, the two avocado-related citizen submissions remain without final disposition in the CEC. As for the CEC itself, the future of the agency will likely be mulled in the trinational jousting over the current U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, set for renegotation in 2026. 

In the big picture, the CEC avocado cases beg fundamental questions related to the U.S.-Mexico relationship, international commerce, U.S. consumer behavior, and the survival of the planet. Are migitation actions too little, too late? When is too much of a good thing too much? Despite the well-known consequences of farm monoculture, why do such agricultural practices not only persist but increase?   

Meantime, it’s a safe bet to assume that guacamole consumption in the U.S. will retain its festive flavor on Superbowl Sunday and beyond. 

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One of the small ironies of the Vietnam era was that people who saw themselves as fervent patriots often sported pins and bumper stickers repudiating the First Amendment. That’s the constitutional amendment, as not everyone seems to know, that protects five key freedoms: speech, religion, the press, assembly, and petition. What did those pins and bumper stickers say? America: Love It or Leave It.

That message was aimed chiefly at critics of the Vietnam War. To tell peace activists to shut up or get out implicitly equated the warmongering policies of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations with “America.” It was a crude rhetorical tactic that was nonetheless effective because it drew strength from undercurrents of nationalism (we must stick together in the face of threats from a hostile world) and U.S. exceptionalism (unlike other countries, our motives are benign; we seek only to do good). As George W. Bush put it years later, you’re either with us or against us.

But if we identify America with the best of our founding principles rather than the worst of government actions, the directive to love-it-or-leave-it appears profoundly un-American.

We have formed our political union based in part on reverence for the idea, embodied in the First Amendment, that we all have a right to speak our minds. What’s more, the freedoms protected by the First Amendment, taken together, are meant to protect expression not only about trivia but about grave matters of policy, and especially so when ordinary people publicly challenge those who have captured the reins of government. Properly respected and put to use, the First Amendment is our best bulwark against tyranny.

Even though the First Amendment has been the law of the land since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, it took nearly two centuries of struggle in the courts and in the streets to achieve the freedom of speech abstractly enshrined by the Amendment. These battles were fought by labor organizers, pacifists, publishers of radical newspapers, advocates for women’s rights, advocates for racial equality, and other political dissidents. If one asks, Who won the right to protest in America?, the correct answer is “protesters.”

Taking this longer view, it’s fair to say that speech in America is freer today than when the nation was young. We have more freedom to speak our minds and more powerful technology to share our thoughts than in generations past, nostalgia for a mythical past and panic about cancel culture notwithstanding. Americans can be rightly proud of this accomplishment. When it comes to support for freedom of speech, the U.S. ranks above most other liberal democracies.

And yet there is a problem. Despite professed belief in the value of free speech, despite the legal codes that protect speech, including speech that greatly disturbs, we have failed to protect it in a crucial policy arena. This failure to live up to our ideals has a name: the Palestine exception. In this arena, as events of the past year have dramatically illustrated, it is as if we have regressed to the mindlessness of love it or leave it, and birthed a shameful new McCarthyism.

The Palestine exception refers to the prohibition of speech critical of Israel, especially of its founding ideology, Zionism, and its ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people. The behaviors, guiding doctrines, and politics of other countries are fair game for criticism. So is the U.S. government and whatever administration is currently in power. Under the First Amendment it is the right of everyone present legally in the U.S. to express such critical views, even if others are made uncomfortable.

But criticize Israel in similar ways and the pushback will be aggressive and institutional. Efforts to stifle this criticism will come not only from predictable quarters—pro-Israel lobbying groups, such as the Anti-Defamation League—but also from institutions that are supposed to protect freedom of speech: universities and branches of government. It is as if a forcefield capable of neutralizing the First Amendment has been erected around Israel. Since October 2023 this virtual forcefield, the Palestine exception, has gained strength and is now getting a further boost from the Trump administration.

This development is more ominous than pseudo-patriotic slogans on pins and bumper stickers. In a recent executive order, “Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” Trump accused the federal government of trampling Americans’ free speech rights and promised to “bring back free speech to America.” But Trump does not mean to end the Palestine exception and ensure that journalists, scholars, and peace activists are fully protected when they call out Israel for practicing apartheid and genocide. Just the opposite.

What Trump wants, of course, is not to protect free speech but, as the executive order also says, to keep government regulators from opposing “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.” Trump and his acolytes would like the freedom to make claims contrary to science and evidence—for example, that climate change is a hoax or vaccines cause autism—without dispute by government-employed experts. The point is to muzzle scientists and other critics, especially anyone supported in part or whole by government, who use their speech rights to refute dangerous nonsense.

At the same time Trump is touting free speech, the Palestine exception is being bolstered by threats to deport anti-genocide protesters who are not U.S. citizens; to withhold federal aid from universities that do not repress pro-Palestinian speech; and to officially embrace a definition of antisemitism that includes criticism of Israel and Zionist ideology. This contradiction between praising free speech and acting to stifle it has not been stumbled into by accident; it is entirely intentional. So it is a misnomer to call it irony. It is more accurately described as a rhetorical smokescreen for authoritarianism.

One thing it can’t be called is American. Being free to speak our minds, to share our thoughts with others, even if others are unsettled by what we say, is part of what defines us as a people. If we want to save this vital piece of our political culture, we can’t allow misleaders to carve out exceptions to free speech—exceptions that shield the powerful and insulate injustice from criticism. We must be free to speak openly about the brutal behavior of all governments, including our own. To do so is to exercise our most essential freedom as Americans, and thereby oppose the un-American tyrants who would try to take it away.

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In Fire Weather, author John Vaillant describes the “Lucretius Problem,” a phenomenon wherein people can have all the information about what is happening yet fail to understand that it is happening. People tend to perceive reality within the confines of what they have already experienced, and struggle to grasp a worst-case scenario even as it unfolds around them. Vaillant, writing about the Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, Canada in 2016, is talking about the increasing destructive potential of fire due to the climate crisis, the fossil fuel extraction industry, and changes in the materials and methods for building towns and cities. But the concept is equally applicable to the devastation being wrought by the new US political regime.

The New York Times, as just one example, used its morning newsletter on 6 February to describe Trump’s first weeks in office as relatively weak, focusing primarily on the walk-backs of tariffs on Canada and Mexico. The newsletter only briefly mentioned the executive orders aimed at eliminating immigrants and trans people, and failed to mention at all that tech bros and incels are gleefully running amok in the corridors of power under (unelected) Elon Musk’s command, gaining unprecedented access to Social Security payment systems, closing agencies and firing federal workers, and, at this point, who even knows what else. As journalist Parker Molloy noted, “If this were happening in any other country, we’d call it what it is: a coup.”

Yet in certain quarters, US exceptionalism persists. Many maintream politicians and pundits are still clinging to the notion that “it can’t happen here,” that the system’s “checks and balances” will prevail, even as the institutions they claim to believe in are being lit on metaphorical fire. These same folks also refuse to take responsibility for building the scaffolding upon which these acts of fascism are taking place, by building and feeding the surveillance, border, deportation, incarceration, and war machines for decades.

Putting aside the liberal “Lucretius Problem,” though, we need to focus on—and exploit—the same failure of imagination of the fascists leading the coup.

As writer John Ganz points out, “Musk’s total idiocy is structural: it goes back to the very origin of the Greek term idiotes, a person who cannot understand the shared political life of the city. These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them.”

We see the same structural idiocy in Israel’s belief that it can bomb, starve, or genocide its way to what it wants in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran. We can also see it in Trump’s arrogant belief that he can buy or invade Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and now Gaza, too, because why not? The Biden administration helped Israel destroy Gaza, now he just needs to get rid of those pesky Palestinian people—and if there’s anything he’s good at it’s getting rid of people; he is flexing his ethnic cleansing muscles already by shipping immigrants off to Guantánamo Bay and perhaps El Salvador’s notoriously brutal mega-prison.

One destructive impulse feeds off the other. Structural idiocy is fueled by lack of consequences. Like the Fort McMurray fire described by John Vaillant, the flames and heat become more intense the more the fire burns. The more Trump, Musk, or Netanyahu can get away with, the more invincible they will believe themselves to be. US support for, and the world’s failure to stop, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians will haunt us here; as Tariq Kenney-Shawa warns, “When children can be sniped at will, when hospitals and journalists are apparently legitimate targets, when a military can posthumously deem their victims ‘terrorists’ with no need for evidence and still receive unconditional funding and support from the defenders of the so-called rules-based international order, then we are all dragged back to a point in our evolution we thought we left in the past.”

The pardoning of the January 6 insurrectionists, too, will haunt us—not only were the consequences for those would-be coup-mongers removed, but they are now trying to go after the people who prosecuted them and seek reparations for their temporary incarceration. It’s like the men who sue for libel after being accused of sexual assault—the message is one of intimidation and dominance: “I am allowed to abuse you, and if you try to stop me, I will ruin your life.” It is a form of sadism, as Judith Butler explains, a celebration of a certain kind of masculinity that “parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeleld as morally repressively ‘wokeism’.”

Cruetly is the mentality of this US political regime. Hate, abuse, humiliation, intimidation, incarceration, and physical violence are the mainstays of the men occupying DC. Built on the crueleties of US empire that have led to this moment, the increasing criminalization of migrants, trans people, and abortion are the devastating beginning of this administration’s onslaught against human life and dignity. It does not seem like the oligarchs taking contro of the country have a line they won’t cross; given that much of their action since taking over the government has been unlawful and unconstititutional, it’s not clear where they will stop or who they will harm or eliminate in their quest for absolute power, power that they perceive to be their own personal Manifest Destiny.

But nothing is inevitable. And as has been demonstrated with Trump’s capitulations in various ways to Canada, Colombia, Mexico, and in relation to the attempt to freeze all federal funding, even things that do occur can be undone, delayed, mitigated, frustrated. Due to their structural idiocy, Musk and Trump and their lackeys do not understand consequnces for their actions. “Their theory of change seems to be that they are going to do stuff and then it will be done,” writes Rebecca Solnit. “Like they’re moving furniture around, like you and I and the trans and immigrant communities and federal workers and Canada and Mexico are just so many sofas and chairs that are going to sit where they place us. Like we’re inanimate objects.” But this, she warns, is a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.

We have the capacity to make fascists feel the consquences of being fascist. We have the capacity to revolt, oppose, slow things down, challenge every order. Many are already engaged in this work, led by immigrant, trans, and Indigenous communities. Teachers in Chicago prevented ICE from entering their school, students in Los Angeles walked out of classrooms to protest detention and deportation, school systems across the country have declared they will not comply with Trump’s anti-trans executive orders, lawmakers and community members are holding hospitals accountable for refusing to provide gender-affirming care, unions have launched a lawsuit to prevent Musk from accessing the Department of Labor.

Mass harm is being done and more is to come. But there is a revolutionary potential to this moment, both within the United States and in terms of US relations with other countries. We can make sure there are consequences for fascism—if we are in solidarity with one another, if we act, if we confront their hate with love for justice and each other.

The last few weeks has given new life to Antonio Gramsci’s quote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” As usual, Gramsci is right. But also, monsters are what we make of them. While their actions are monstrous, the men performing them are human beings. We should be wary of giving them the power of monsters, of affording them mythical, unopposable status. They are men. They can be defeated.

The ways that cultures have told stories about threats taking the form of monsters offers key insights into the consequences of hubris and greed—monsters arising from the diplacement or elimination of Indigenous or Black or communities, or from nuclear weapon explosions; monsters that take root in misogyny or transphobia or racism; monsters that grow from people’s own fears and hatreds only to turn against those that imagined them into existence. There are a myriad of ways that US imperialism and warmaking can be to told through tales of monsters, as so well articulated by W. Scott Poole in Dark Carnivals.

But monsters are many things. Monsters can also be defenders, conscience, resistance. Throughout social and cultural history, many outcasts from mainstream society—including queer, Black, Indigenous, and disabled folks—have been cast as monsters. Our marginalization from mainstream politics and economics has made us leaders in mutual aid, popular education, resilience, art, creativity, and joy. Our struggles for surival are generational. We know there are ebbs and flows to the way we are treated and percieved, and that the only way we win is by fighting back and being in solidarity with each other. Just like the kaiju that rise to take on other monsters that are bent on destroying society, so will we rise and resist again.

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Ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House, US President Donald Trump said Palestinians have “no alternative” but to leave Gaza. When the two leaders met in the oval office, Trump declared that after Palestinians from the Gaza Strip are moved elsewhere, the US will “take over”. The US president also expressed his desire to transform the Israeli-occupied territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

These surrealistic statements were uttered as Palestinians across the Gaza Strip are facing the unprecedented destruction left behind by the Israeli army. Many of those who were displaced and have managed to go back to their homes in the past two weeks found only ruins. According to the United Nations, Israeli army has bombed 90 percent of all housing units in the Gaza Strip, leaving 160,000 units completely destroyed and 276,000 severely or partially damaged.

As the dust settles and images of the extent of the devastation circulate on mainstream media, it has become clear that the genocidal violence Israel unleashed in Gaza was not only used to kill, displace, and destroy, but also to undercut the Palestinian population’s right to remain. And it is precisely the possibility of securing this right that the Trump-Netanyahu duo is now bent on preventing.

Remaining as a right

The right to remain is not formally recognised within the human rights canon and is usually associated with refugees who have fled their country and are permitted to stay in a host country while seeking asylum. It has also been invoked in the context of so-called “urban renewal” projects where largely marginalised and insecurely housed urban residents demand their right to stay in their homes and among their community when faced with pressure from powerful actors pushing for redevelopment and gentrification. The right to remain is particularly urgent in settler-colonial situations where colonisers actively displace the Indigenous population and try to replace them with settlers. From First Nations in North America to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, settlers have used genocidal violence to deny Indigenous people this right.

The right to remain, however, is not merely the right to “stay put”. Rather, to enjoy this right, people must be able to remain within their community and have access to both material and social “infrastructures of existence”, including water and food, hospitals, schools, places of worship and the means of livelihood. Without these infrastructures the right to remain becomes impossible.

Beyond mere physical presence, the right to remain also encompasses the right to maintain the historical and contemporary stories and webs of relations that hold people and communities together in place and time. This is a crucial aspect of this right, since the settler-colonial project not only aims for the physical removal and replacement of Indigenous people, but also seeks to erase Indigenous cultures, histories, and identities as well as any attachments to land. Finally, it cannot be enough to be allowed to remain as an occupied inhabitant within a besieged territory. The right to remain includes the ability of a people to determine their own destiny.

A history of permanent displacement

During the 1948 war, Palestinian cities were depopulated and about 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed, while most of their inhabitants became refugees in neighbouring countries. In total, about 750,000 Palestinians out of a population of 900,000 were displaced from their homes and ancestral lands and were never allowed to return. Since then, displacement or the threat of displacement has been part of the everyday Palestinian experience. Indeed, throughout the West Bank and even within Israel, in places like Umm al Hiran, Palestinian communities continue to be forcibly uprooted and removed from their lands and prevented from returning.

The US-backed Israeli denial of the right to remain in the Gaza Strip is far worse – not only because many communities are made up of refugees and this is their second, third or fourth displacement – but also because displacement has now become a tool of genocide. As early as October 13, 2023, Israel issued a collective evacuation order to 1.1 million Palestinians living north of Wadi Gaza, and, in the following months similar orders were issued time and again, ultimately displacing 90 percent of the Strip’s population.

To be sure, international humanitarian law obligates warring parties to protect civilian populations, which includes allowing them to move from war zones to safe areas. Yet, these provisions are informed by the assumption that populations have a right to remain in their homes and therefore stipulate that evacuees must be allowed to return when the fighting ends, rendering any form of permanent displacement illegal. Population transfer must be temporary and can only be used for protection and humanitarian relief, and not, as Israel has used and Trump’s recent comments reinforce, a “humanitarian camouflage” to cover up the wholesale destruction and undoing of Palestinian spaces.

The right to remain and self-determination

Now that a ceasefire has been declared, displaced Palestinians are able to go back to their homes. Yet, this movement back in no way satisfies their right to remain. This is no coincidence: the ability to remain is precisely what Israel has been aiming to eradicate in 15 months of war.

The razing of hospitals, schools, universities and mosques, shops and street markets, cemeteries, and libraries, alongside the destruction of roads, wells, electricity grids, greenhouses, and fishing vessels, was not only carried out in the service of mass killings and the temporary cleansing of areas of their inhabitants, but also to create a new reality on the ground, particularly in northern Gaza. Thus, it is not just that Palestinian homes have been destroyed but that the very existence of the population will now be compromised for years to come.

This is not a new thing. We have seen throughout history how settlers act to permanently displace and eliminate Indigenous populations from the territories. Learning from these stories we know that financial investment in rebuilding houses and infrastructure will not –in itself– ensure the population’s right to remain. Remaining requires self-determination. To enact their right to remain, Palestinians must finally gain their freedom as a self-determining people. 

Israel has denied Palestinians their right to remain for over 75 years; it is high time to set things straight. Any discussion about the future of Gaza must be guided by the claims and aspirations of the Palestinian people. Promises of reconstruction and economic prosperity by foreign countries are irrelevant unless explicitly tied to Palestinian self-determination. The right to remain can only be guaranteed through decolonisation and Palestinians liberation.

This article first appeared in Al Jazeera English 

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“Shock and Awe,” “Fear and Chaos,” “Carnage”—these are just some of the more typical ways mainstream media have described the mood after Donald Trump’s first few weeks in office. From the latest announcements about removing Palestinians from Gaza and the draconian crackdown on immigrants through pulling the US out of the World Health Organization and freezing USAID and tariffs on trading partners, to declaring that the United States recognizes male and female as the only two genders, these executive orders and declaration impact a dizzying array of seemingly disparate issues.

What is clear is that we are witnessing a notable shift in relations of power in the US: from an era in which “progressive” neoliberalism characterized by deregulation, privatization, and financialized capitalism merged with progressive social agendas, such as diversity, equality and inclusion policies to an authoritarian and even fascist iteration of neoliberalism. This new formation deepens neoliberal policies but simultaneously replaces any progressive veneer with policies that single out and oppress marginalized groups. It also reverses any attempt to prevent climate breakdown, concentrating power in the hands of the executive and a few billionaire elites.

How did we get here?

Commentators have rightly pointed to the failures of the Democratic Party, which for decades has become ever more beholden to big money, abandoning not just the poor and working class along the way but increasingly sections of the middle-class.  For many voters, moreover, the Biden Administration’s complicity in and support for the genocide in Gaza crystallized the moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party, leading to the uncommitted movement, and millions of voters simply staying home on election day.

There is also no doubt that Trump’s return to the Oval Office is about his success in weaponizing the visceral fear, anxiety, anger and resentment of ever-growing groups who feel abandoned by the state and have been increasingly living in precarity. Trump’s victory is due to his ability to frame these people’s grievances as if they overlap with the interests of world’s wealthiest people—the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

The common enemy, voters were told again and again, is the deep state, the swamp in DC and the entire corrupt political system. But while this rhetoric appealed to different groups, it also helped to obscure Trump’s real objectives: to further shrink the state through more deregulation, privatization, and decreasing taxes paid by the wealthy, while providing corporate welfare to all his big donors. Musk might have donated $200 million to the MAGA campaign, but Trump will now ensure that taxpayers’ money will be channelled back to Musk’s coffers multiplying his initial investment several fold. This accounts for Trump’s move to reassert aggressive neoliberal policies, such as rescinding restrictions on oil drilling in Alaska.

Yet, how do we account for millions of voters’ sharp rightward and indeed regressive turn on social issues, a shift that is exemplified by big tech’s current alignment with Trump? After all, Silicon Valley had been at the forefront of “progressive” neoliberalism—particularly on issues relating to gender equality and DEI initiatives.  Just think of the former COO of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 feminist manifesto Lean In, which was a harbinger of a neoliberal feminism, encouraging women to lean in to their careers rather than opt-out of paid employment.

To further cement the bond among his disparate supporters, Trump and MAGA Republicans successfully untethered as well as fomented two powerful historical forces, white supremacy and misogyny. These have always been part of the US’ s cultural fabric but have been attenuated and curtailed by progressive movements and legislation over the past fifty years.

White supremacy and misogyny have helped to further solder the somewhat tenuous bond between the precarious, those who feel abandoned, and the obscenely wealthy. The strategy, in other words, has been to displace and redirect anger and anxiety toward age-old easy scapegoats: immigrants, black and brown people, queer and trans folk, and unruly women and their bodies.

These various strategies have worked extremely well. Trump and his supporters have attacked critical race studies and DEI and replaced them with discourses that have always served authoritarian and fascist governments, such as ethnic nationalism and gender traditionalism.  To be sure, this trend is not new and did not begin with Trump, but these processes have now been given unbridled license under his leadership.

The attack on progressive forces can be seen, for instance, in the mainstreaming of a network of women who call themselves traditional housewives, or “tradwives” for short. Posting on social media, these women present themselves as having been liberated from the corporate rat race. They actively promote a lifestyle that takes pleasure in traditional domestic duties, feminine submissiveness, and wifehood.

The tradwife phenomenon was peripheral just a few years ago. Today, it boasts an array of influencers who have garnered significant media attention. Mainstream media outlets now cover their stories, highlighting these women’s embrace of gender traditionalism and their declarations of liberation from the straightjacket of neoliberal feminism’s ideal of a happy work-family balance.

The horrific irony is that gender traditionalism and ethnic nationalism are coming to stand in for freedom. Tradwives insist on “the joy and freedom that comes from submitting to their husbands” and see themselves as symbolising the ability to throw off the shackles of state regulation and societal restrictions.

It is precisely this convergence of forces—the Democratic Party’s moral and political bankruptcy, the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism and financialisation, the rise of big tech’s influence, and the resurgence and strategic mobilisation of misogynist and ethnic-nationalist rhetoric—that has propelled this shift to an authoritarian-fascist iteration of neoliberalism.

Where do we go from here?

One key lesson from the 2024 elections is that for many US voters—even those who are not die-hard MAGA supporters—upending the unbearable status quo has become paramount, trumping whatever concerns some may have about the unabashed racism and misogyny of the MAGA movement. Many are likely gleeful at the wrecking ball strategy of Trump’s first days in power.

Going forward, the left will have to address people’s desire to destroy the status quo, but also their yearning for a different form of governance, one not created in the image of the corporation.

Another important lesson involves the centrality of tapping into people’s emotions. Addressing the material conditions that have produced precarity and mass grievance may well not be enough. The left will also need to untangle voters’ affective attachments and what they signify so that they can cultivate these powerful forces and reorient them.

Only by learning hard lessons—and before it is too late–will a progressive left bloc be able to regroup and convince US voters to join them in their struggle for a more just and sustainable future.

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Across the Arab world, ordinary citizens stand and watch the United States sliding into the abyss and wonder, what can the Americans be thinking there? Their institutions, packaged once as the envy of the world with a free society and values of compassion and tolerance …  all blowing away in the winds of history, over the edge and gone. The true Semites, of the Middle East, and not of Europe, gape at this catastrophe of so-called “liberal” Western-style democracy, as it is casually sucked into the moral black hole of a tedious television entertainer, a Wrestlemania con-man, with his billionaire henchmen and techno- Utopianists, who now plunder the richest, most powerful nation in the world as its own elites sit back in comfort, waiting to carve up the spoils. It is like watching Leviathan washed up on the beach, being dismantled by efficient, busy sand crabs. As everyone knows, fish rots first from the head.

To watch an American president openly say, while dutifully standing in the White House before the flag of an Israeli occupier, “I do see a long-term ownership position” for the United States in the Gaza Strip, as if he were showing a triplex condo on Central Park to a lesser Saudi prince, strips away the last veil in this long, sordid dance, this burlesque of empire pretending to moral superiority, while waiting for the right moment to deploy the Art of the Deal. “The Riviera of the Middle East,” he robotically intones, ever the salesman, as a grinning, indicted and fugitive Prime Minister looks on, scarcely able to believe what he is hearing, “The U.S. will take over,” and “we’ll own it.” Of course, everyone from the Achaemenids to Rome to Napoleon has liked Arab beaches, but Palestinians stand with the people of Greenland when they say, “Our land is not for sale;” nor do we yield to conquest, it should be clear to everyone by now. Any U.S. position in Gaza would have well-deserved consequences Americans are not prepared to own.

The American President—like so many before him—has a strange habit of talking about Palestinians as if they have no agency in what befalls them, no choice in the matter. And he talks too, as if what has happened to Palestinians and their land is just random political weather: “The Gaza Strip, which has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades,” he drones on, “it’s been very unlucky, an unlucky place for a long time.” In this, he is not so different from each of his predecessors, pretending in his rhetoric that the U.S. and its citizens have not, in fact, been the subsidizing engineers of Palestinian “bad luck”, the architects of their misfortune, but rather that it just happened to them, and the reasons why are simply lost in the mists of time. In fact, the 118th Congress of the American people, under a Democratic president, delivered 85,000 tons of explosives to Israel, which it dropped on the Gazans—all of this paid for by each and every U.S. taxpayer, red state or blue: over 4000 Hellfire missiles; 14,000 MK-84 2000-lb. bombs, which blast a crater fifty feet wide and three stories deep; many thousands of 1000- and 500-pounders; over 17,000 bomber or drone or missile sorties flown. The total tonnage and complete destruction surpasses that of the Allied bombing of major European cities in the Second World War, or the massive “carpet bombing” dumps over Vietnam. By some estimates, 40% of this destruction came by means of ordinary “dumb bombs,” with unexploded munitions now littering Gaza’s rubble-scape. All this industrial-scale murder, made in the USA, directed at a people without airplanes or ships or tanks or air defenses, or even water and food now—one has to ask, has any military force in modern memory ever acted as cowardly and cruelly as Israel has done?

This moral atrocity had bi-partisan support—Democrats and Republicans, hand-in-hand—in case anyone thinks U.S. politicians are no longer capable of cooperating. It will take an estimated fifteen years to clear the debris alone—that is, unless American troops are so foolish as to land bulldozers, dig in, and attempt to make it their forward operating base, earning the scorn of the free world, and generations of resistance. Imperial over-reach is never far from the American mind, which now prattles from the mouth of its criminal leader, plotting crimes in public, with no one to stop him, as his “efficiency” squads dissolve government agencies in the middle of the night.

All the US tax dollars have only bought it well-deserved contempt and hatred on the Arab street, and around the world. No free-thinking human will ever again entertain the fairy-tale of American liberty and justice, the myth of “Pax Americana.” The meaning of the Holocaust has forever been changed. The shape of Zionist intent was visible all along, and ethnic cleansing now has its sales pitch and its salesman, promising, there will be jobs for everyone!

The mass-murder of over 60,000 innocent, mostly women and children; the maiming and terrorizing of almost two million more; the unrelenting destruction of every standing structure in Gaza; the deliberate starvation of its people and intended spread of disease —all of these activities are the lawless acts of war criminals, led by a delusional, convicted criminal, and paid for by Americans who are now in the eighth decade of a fantasy: that the Palestinians should cease to exist. And now the American president proposes further war crimes openly, to a roomful of applause, musing out loud on what a “world class” development will replace Palestinian towns and cities, as if Gaza were one of his failed casino projects in New Jersey, or his sham on-line university. And the captive “free” press, now quaking in fear before its mighty Potentate, blandly airs without comment his psychotic nihilism, as if concepts of international law no longer exist. For this is what America’s willing dispossession of the Palestinians will mean: that law no longer exists.

It is a dark road to go down, disappearing into a forest of un-broken nightmares. Somewhere in that forest, as the path winds on, are familiar, dark American horrors: black citizens lynched from trees; atomic bombs flashing shadow-people on stone; napalm burning a child running down a road; the Capitol swarmed by a deadly mob of angry men and women desperate to safeguard the privilege of skin-tone that they ache for, but do not have and never will.  A nation born from the genocide of five million Native Americans once again chooses genocide, its original sin, inescapable and mutating through time. There can no longer be any ignorance in the American people about Palestine’s tragedy, or the nature of its fight: Israel’s crimes against Palestinians indict America’s failure to act lawfully as a nation, to stand for what is basic and right. The slow-motion eradication since well before 1948 of Palestinian national rights, sovereign lands and now their people themselves has unfolded in plain view for all to see, and none to deny. The “international community” which once “committed” itself to protect the very rights and lives of all Palestinians, now eagerly awaits real estate brochures for beach-front condos—as if its resistance movements would let that happen. But Palestinians wonder, what will the American people do?

As a dear friend and client of 30 plus years …  a Palestinian resistance leader recently said to me in speaking of the American body politic … “If we might give a word of advice to them: beware of the rot of lawlessness that spreads down from the top, from your elites, your oligarchs. Like a cancer, it will devour your rights sooner than it will defeat ours.”

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As we search for ways to resist efforts by President Trump and his surrogates to undermine our democracy and cripple our government, we focus on pillars of our system— Congress, Courts, and Press.  Congress, controlled by Republicans, is demonstrating it is not up to the task.  The media are as confused and uncertain as the rest of us, and the overwhelming power of social media serves to sow confusion.  As a result, many of us are focusing on a major pillar of our system—the rule of law.  We are counting on our federal and state Courts to roll back and restrain Trump’s more outrageous actions.

There is little reason to believe that Trump and his followers will be constrained by the law, however.  The Supreme Court has given Trump himself a get-out-of-jail free card for all official actions he takes as President.  As all orders coming from him to government officials will be considered official, he can not be held liable for any of them—no matter how illegal.  While his subordinates have not been given these free passes and thus are theoretically culpable for their illegal actions, Trump has the ability to pardon them.  So they need not be constrained by the law either.

The reality of our crisis is demonstrated by what is actually taking place within government agencies.  Trump is taking illegal actions and they are been carried out.  He fired 17 or 18 inspectors general, effective immediately.  This is illegal; Congress requires that it must be notified 30 days in advance for the firing of an inspector general, and a cause for this firing must be given.  Neither of these things was done.  By law, all of these individuals should have remained on the job, pending the proper procedures.  One Inspector General challenged the order.  Phyllis Fong, a 22-year veteran of the US Department of Agriculture, said she intended to stay because proper protocols had not been followed.  She was escorted out of the building by security agents.

Trump’s take over of the Justice Department and the FBI makes it even more clear that he will be able to fire anyone and undertake any investigations or actions no matter their legality.  He is firing apolitical federal prosecutors and agents for doing their jobs and participating in legitimate investigations—a violation of civil service protections.  His followers will stock these institutions with their fellow believers and proceed.  Whether or not charges brought by them are ultimately upheld in court is almost irrelevant.  Years of litigation and prosecution will be sufficient to ruin people.

Other frightening actions are unfolding rapidly.  Elon Musk’s surrogates have gotten access to the Treasury Department’s payments system.  This system is responsible for sending out trillions of dollars in payments to individuals and groups, including Social Security payments.  Anyone with control of the system could presumably target their “enemies” and withhold payments to them.  Illegal?  Yes!  So what?  Similar actions have shut down US AID operations around the world, causing large-scale suffering.

The order issued by Trump’s budget office to halt government funding and grants last week was illegal because the president does not have the right to stop payments that have been authorized by Congress.  This order was pulled back after a day of chaos as well as court injunction.  It is not clear what prompted Trump to pull back the order, but probably it was the chaos—not the court order.  Red states were being hit harder than Blue states.  I think it is likely that, in the future, Trump will pay little attention to court orders.  Federal courts have to rely on government institutions to ensure that their orders are carried out.  How can such orders be carried out when Trump controls these institutions?

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Photograph Source: Spc. Brandon C. Dyer – Public Domain

About three score years ago, on a January Sunday afternoon in 1967, some of us gathered in college dorm basement lounges to watch pro football’s historic first “Super Bowl.” A good bit has changed since then — in football and America.

The changes in pro football could hardly be more striking. Today’s players dwarf the size and strength of players back then. National Football League linemen here in the 2020s, for instance, weigh on average well over 300 pounds and stand almost six-and-a-half feet tall. Pro football players of that size simply “didn’t exist” before 1980.

Contemporary players earn much more as well. The first NFL collective bargaining agreement, signed a year after that initial Super Bowl in 1967, set a $10,000 minimum annual salary for veteran players, the equivalent of some $90,000 today. In 2024, NFL players averaged $3.2 million, with a median base pay of $860,000.

But pro football players these days pay a steep price for their paychecks. The average player career now lasts only a little over three years. But the much longer careers of players in positions that don’t face as much physical contact distort that average. Running backs regularly last no more than two years.

Pro football player lives, more significantly, often run markedly shorter than the lives of their generational peers. Those shorter lifespans reflect both the violence of the collisions between today’s much bigger and stronger players and the much longer length of today’s NFL season. Players participating in that first 1967 Super Bowl only competed in 16 games. Players on the 2025 Super Bowl’s Philadelphia Eagles squad will have competed in 21 games once this season’s competition ends.

The contrast between the dawn of the Super Bowl era and today for NFL team owners rates as even starker.

We need a little history here for context. A century ago, in the NFL’s earliest days, ownership of NFL franchises came at a price that even the modestly affluent could easily afford. Tim Mara, a horse-racing bookkeeper, bought the New York Giants in 1925 for $500, the equivalent of less than $9,000 today. In 1933, Art Rooney bought a Pittsburgh NFL franchise for $2,500, about $60,000 today.

By the 1960s, those early owners were sitting pretty, and much richer Americans, like the oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, wanted in on the pro football action. These rich ended up establishing their own pro circuit, the American Football League, and then, in 1966, cut a deal with NFL owners to merge their two leagues. The first fruit of that merger would be the inaugural “Super Bowl” in 1967.

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A painted wall in the center of Mexico City. Photo by Tamara Pearson.

From preparing to send migrants to Guantanamo Bay, to labeling cartels “terrorist organizations,” Trump has been using both language and policies to frame Latin American countries and Latinx migrants in the US, as criminal. Painting the entire region as a source of danger, as the enemy, rather than as a partner, paves the way for coercion, subjugation, and the normalization of human rights violations. It is a path for the US to advance its business interests and nationalism through control rather than the usual pretense of diplomacy and dialogue.

Terrorists and tariffs

In just two weeks, Trump has put Cuba back on the terrorist list, signed an executive order deeming cartels terrorist organizations, with specific reference to those in Mexico that are apparently “flooding” the US with drugs and violence, as well as a couple of others in Venezuela and Central America, and instructed the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare the US naval base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold migrants.

He said there were 30,000 beds there to “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” adding that some migrants are “so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back. So we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo.” The US has previously used the base to hold untried, so-called suspects of terrorism. The Pentagon said it would send “the worst of the worst” — whatever that means, when referring to people who are in life-threatening danger or so exploited or impoverished they had to flee their homeland — to Guantanamo this weekend, but at the time of writing, that didn’t appear to have happened yet.

At the same time, countries that don’t do what Trump wants, including impossible and inhumane requests like stopping all migrants, get threatened with tariffs. When Colombia refused to accept military planes deporting migrants precisely because it criminalizes them, Trump wrote, “We will not allow the Colombian government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the criminals they forced into the US,” then threatened 25% tariffs and a travel ban on Colombian government officials. He also threatened BRICS countries with tariffs if they replace the US dollar as reserve currency, and signed an order Saturday imposing 25% tariffs on Mexico for allegedly not doing enough to stop migrants and drugs from reaching the US.

Reinforcing this control over Latin America, he ordered the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the Gulf of America, and vowedto “take back” the Panama Canal.

Violating refugee and migrants’ rights, in a show of racism

And while coercing Latin America, Trump has also made a big show of deporting Latinxs and denying Latin American migrants entry at the Mexico-US border. In violation of both US and international laws and basic human rights, Trump has suspended the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), and now people can’t request asylum and be interviewed to determine credible fear. However, Trump used an executive order to pass this, even though it requires congressional approval. He also wants to revive Remain in Mexico, though Mexican president Sheinbaum has refused.

He has told quite the story of carrying out “the largest deportation in American history,” but the reality is that deportations are very expensive, and migrants still have to be able to argue their case before a judge first. There is an enormous backlog of cases (3.5 million still open) so Trump’s grand standing — while having real and horrific concrete consequences for mean — isn’t so feasible in practice. In the first few days of his term, his administration deported 600 or so people per day, then reached a thousand. In 2024, Biden deported 270,000 people, an average of 739 per day.

But, these deportations are being talked up by the media and raids are being televised live, in order to put on a show that popularizes the criminalizing of migrants, and demarcates Latinxs and Latin Americans (“illegals” and “criminals”) as the scary enemy. The cameras were ready to photograph people arriving in the Brazilian city of Manaus handcuffed, while agents in New York have been told to be camera-ready for ICE raids there, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem live-tweeted a raid.

She also recently announced that the government revoked a decision to protect some 600,000 Venezuelans from deportation. Trump has been using a very old law, designed for world-war-type scenarios — the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to detain and deport non-citizens without the typical minimum evidence requirements, due process, or right to appeal. That makes these deportations about identity, race, and nationality, rather than about any kind of law breaking. On top of this, we know he rescinded federal guidance that ICE raids shouldn’t take place in sensitive spaces like schools and hospitals, and he expanded express or expedited deportations beyond the border areas and beyond those who had only arrived less than two weeks ago.

Criminalisation in order to subjugate

All this amounts to a systemic dehumanization of the region, in order to lay the ground for increased control and attacks of it, possibly even intervention. It is both a continuation of, and entrenching of the abhorrent treatment by the US towards Latin America, and towards the Global South more broadly— a justification of subjugation.

It is also, of course, a deliberate offensive against those governments that dare, to different extents, be somewhat disobedient of the US and its unreasonable, unfair trade deals, policies, and its transnationals’ extensive exploitation, contamination, and resource robbery. This is not new, with the White House using crippling and cruel sanctions to try to break uncooperative countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. But sometimes that toxicity is cleverly disguised in either fake diplomacy, or excuses about the nature of the governments of those countries (while the US then materially supports genocide). Criminalizing Latin America is a material and ideological strategy for disempowering it, while asserting the US’s so-called superiority, to then use that for later power plays (economic, or with troops) and furthering injustice.

The mainstream media is right by his side, repeating Trump’s use of terms like “illegal migration” without questioning them, and without using terms that are actually technically correct. They are actively contributing to the normalization of racism towards people that are forced to migrate and denied safe routes to do so.

The real criminals (the proponents of racism and sexism, the active destroyers of the planet, the builders and users of bombs, the manufacturers of inequality and poverty) making the oppressed out to be criminals, is a narrative and program that has been employed ad nauseam. The perpetrators of violence put that characteristic onto their victims. The colonized somehow become the invaders. Rather than US imperialism culturally, economically, and politically dominating Latin America — including its backing of recent right-wing coups, it is Latin American migrants who are depicted as “invading” the US.

The story is upside-down and must be countered. Offensives like this can also often lead to increased organizing and activism. It is possible that attacks all over the place could bring the recipients of such attacks (from Latinxs and Palestinians through to women and trans and non-binary people, workers, and environmental activists) closer together, with a common basis for more united struggles and deeper solidarity.

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Image by Max Böhme.

It didn’t take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to Donald Trump’s reelection. On November 6th, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement,” explained the GEO Group’s executive chair, George Zoley, “and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” In other words, the “largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history” was going to be a moneymaker.

As it happens, that Bloomberg piece was a rarity, offering a glimpse of immigration enforcement that doesn’t normally get the attention it deserves by focusing on the border-industrial complex. The article’s tone, however, suggested that there will be a sharp break between the border policies of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Its essential assumption: that Biden adored open borders, while Trump, the demagogue, is on his way to executing a profitable clampdown on them.

In a recent article, “The Progressive Case against Immigration,” journalist Lee Fang caricatured just such a spectrum, ranging from people with “Refugees Welcome” yard signs to staunch supporters of mass deportation. He argued that Democrats should embrace border enforcement and “make a case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking.” This, he suggested, would allow the party to “reconnect with its blue-collar roots.” Fang’s was one of many post-election articles making similar points — namely, that the Democrats’ stance on free movement across the border cost them the election.

But what if the Biden administration, instead of opposing mass deportation, had proactively helped construct its very infrastructure? What if, in reality, there weren’t two distinctly opposed and bickering visions of border security, but two allied versions of it? What if we started paying attention to the budgets where the money is spent on the border-industrial complex, which tell quite a different story than the one we’ve come to expect?

In fact, during President Biden’s four years in office, he gave 40 contracts worth more than $2 billion to the same GEO Group (and its associated companies) whose stocks spiked with Trump’s election. Under those contracts, the company was to maintain and expand the U.S. immigrant detention system, while providing ankle bracelets for monitoring people on house arrest.

And that, in fact, offers but a glimpse of Biden’s tenure as — yes! — the biggest contractor (so far) for border and immigration enforcement in U.S. history. During his four years in office, Biden’s administration issued and administered 21,713 border enforcement contracts, worth $32.3 billion, far more than any previous president, including his predecessor Donald Trump, who had spent a mere — and that, of course, is a joke — $20.9 billion from 2017 to 2020 on the same issue.

In other words, Biden left office as the king of border contracts, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, since he received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from top border-industry companies during the 2020 election campaign. And in addition to such contributions, the companies of that complex wield power by lobbying for ever bigger border budgets, while maintaining perennial public/private revolving doors.

In other words, Joe Biden helped build up Trump’s border-and-deportation arsenal. His administration’s top contract, worth $1.2 billion, went to Deployed Resources, a company based in Rome, New York. It’s constructing processing and detention centers in the borderlands from California to Texas. Those included “soft-sided facilities,” or tent detention camps, where unauthorized foreigners might be incarcerated when Trump conducts his promised roundups.

The second company on the list, with a more than $800 million contract (issued under Trump in 2018, but maintained in the Biden years), was Classic Air Charter, an outfit that facilitates deportation flights for the human-rights-violating ICE Air. Now that Trump has declared a national emergency on the border and has called for military deployment to establish, as he puts it, “operational control of the border,” his people will discover that there are already many tools in his proverbial enforcement box. Far from a stark cutoff and change, the present power transition will undoubtedly prove to be more of a handoff — and to put that in context, just note that such a bipartisan relay race at the border has been going on for decades.

The Bipartisan Border Consensus

In early 2024, I was waiting in a car at the DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona, when a white, nondescript bus pulled up in the lane next to me. We were at the beginning of the fourth year of Biden’s presidency. Even though he had come into office promising more humane border policies, the enforcement apparatus hadn’t changed much, if at all. On either side of that port of entry were rust-colored, 20-foot-high border walls made of bollards and draped with coiling razor wire, which stretched to the horizon in both directions, about 700 miles in total along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In Nogales, the wall itself was a distinctly bipartisan effort, built during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Here, Trump’s legacy was adding concertina wire that, in 2021, the city’s mayor pleaded with Biden to take down (to no avail).

There were also sturdy surveillance posts along the border, courtesy of a contract with military monolith General Dynamics. In them, cameras stared over the border wall into Mexico like dozens of voyeurs. Border Patrol agents in green-striped trucks were also stationed at various points along the wall, constantly eyeing Mexico. And mind you, this represented just the first layer of a surveillance infrastructure that extended up to 100 miles into the U.S. interior and included yet more towers with sophisticated camera systems (like the 50 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona constructed by the Israeli company Elbit Systems), underground motion sensors, immigration checkpoints with license-plate readers, and sometimes even facial recognition cameras. And don’t forget the regular inspection overflights by drones, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft.

The command-and-control centers, which follow the feeds of that digital, virtual, expansive border wall in a room full of monitors, gave the appropriate Hollywood war-movie feel to the scene, one that makes the Trump “invasion” rhetoric seem almost real.

From my idling car, I watched several disheveled families get off that bus. Clearly disoriented, they lined up in front of a large steel gate with thick bars, where two blue-uniformed Mexican officials waited. The children looked especially scared. A young one — maybe three years old — jumped into her mother’s arms and hugged her tightly. The scene was emotional. Just because I happened to be there at that moment, I witnessed one of many deportations that would happen that day. Those families were among the more than four million deported and expelled during the Biden years, a mass expulsion that has largely gone undiscussed.

About a year later, on January 20th, Donald Trump stood in the U.S. Capitol building giving his inaugural speech and assuring that crowded room full of officials, politicians, and billionaires that he had a “mandate” and that “America’s decline” was over. He received a standing ovation for saying that he would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” adding, “All illegal entry will be halted. And we’ll begin the process of sending millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” He would, he insisted, “repel the disastrous invasion of our country.”

Implied, as in 2016 when he declared that he was going to build a border wall that already existed, was that Trump would take charge of a supposedly “open border” and finally deal with it. Of course, he gave no credence to the massive border infrastructure he was inheriting.

Back in Nogales, a year earlier, I watched Mexican officials open up that heavy gate and formally finish the deportation process on those families. I was already surrounded by decades of infrastructure, part of more than $400 billion of investment since 1994, when border deterrence began under the Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper. Those 30 years had seen the most massive expansion of the border and immigration apparatus the United States had ever experienced.

The border budget, $1.5 billion in 1994 under the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has risen incrementally every year since then. It was turbocharged after 9/11 by the creation of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), whose combined budget in 2024 exceeded $30 billion for the first time. Not only were the Biden administration’s contracts larger than those of its predecessors, but its budget power grew, too. The 2024 budget was more than $5 billion higher than the 2020 budget, the last year of Trump’s first term in office. Since 2008, ICE and CBP have issued 118,457 contracts, or about 14 a day.

As I watched that family somberly walk back into Mexico, the child still in her mother’s embrace, it was yet another reminder of just how farcical the open-borders narrative has been. In reality, Donald Trump is inheriting the most fortified border in American history, increasingly run by private corporations, and he’s about to use all the power at his disposal to make it more so.

“Is He Going to Be Like Obama?”

Fisherman Gerardo Delgado’s blue boat is rocking as we talk on a drying-up, possibly dying lake in central Chihuahua, Mexico. He shows me his meager catch that day in a single orange, plastic container. He shelled out far more money for gas than those fish would ever earn him at the market.

“You’re losing money?” I ask.

“Every day,” he replies.

It wasn’t always like this. He points to his community, El Toro, that’s now on a hill overlooking the lake — except that hill wasn’t supposed to be there. Once upon a time, El Toro had been right on the lakeshore. Now, the lake has receded so much that the shore is remarkably far away.

Two years earlier, Delgado told me, his town ran out of water and his sisters, experiencing the beginning of what was about to be a full-on catastrophe, left for the United States. Now, more than half of the families in El Toro have departed as well.

Another fisherman, Alonso Montañes tells me they are witnessing an “ecocide.” As we travel along the lake, you can see how far the water has receded. It hasn’t rained for months, not even during the summer rainy season. And no rain is forecast again until July or August, if at all.

On shore, the farmers are in crisis and I realize I’m in the middle of a climate disaster, a moment in which — for me — climate change went from the abstract and futuristic to something raw, real, and now. There hasn’t been a mega-drought of this intensity for decades. While I’m there, the sun continues to burn, scorchingly, and it’s far hotter than it should be in December.

The lake is also a reservoir from which farmers would normally receive irrigation water. I asked every farmer I met what he or she was going to do. Their responses, though different, were tinged with fear. Many were clearly considering migrating north.

“But what about Trump?” asked a farmer named Miguel under the drying up pecan trees in the orchard where he worked. At the inauguration, Trump said, “As commander and chief I have no other choice but to protect our country from threats and invasions, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. We are going to do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

What came to mind when I saw that inauguration was a 2003 Pentagon climate assessment in which the authors claimed that the United States would have to build “defensive fortresses” to stop “unwanted, starving migrants” from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. The Pentagon begins planning for future battlefields 25 years in advance and its assessments now invariably include the worst scenarios for climate change (even if Donald Trump doesn’t admit that the phenomenon exists). One non-Pentagon assessment states that the lack of water in places like Chihuahua in northern Mexico is a potential “threat multiplier.” The threat to the United States, however, is not the drought but what people will do because of it.

“Is he going to be like Obama?” Miguel asked about Trump. Indeed, Barack Obama was president when Miguel was in the United States, working in agriculture in northern New Mexico. Though he wasn’t deported, he remembers living in fear of a ramping-up deportation machine under the 44th president. As I listened to Miguel talk about the drought and the border, that 2003 Pentagon assessment seemed far less hyperbolic and far more like a prophecy.

Now, according to forecasts for the homeland and border-control markets, climate change is a factor spurring the industry’s rapid growth. After all, future projections for people on the move, thanks to an increasingly overheating planet, are quite astronomical and the homeland security market, whoever may be president, is now poised to reach nearly $1 trillion by the 2030s.

It’s now an open secret that Trump’s invasion and deportation spiels, as well as his plans to move thousands of U.S. military personnel to the border, have not only proved popular with his large constituency but also with private prison companies like GEO Group and others building the present and future nightmarish infrastructure for a world of deportation. They have proven no less popular with the Democrats themselves.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

FASCISM: Fascism is  a populist political philosophy that exalts the nation and often race above the individual.  It is associated with a centralized autocratic government and a far-right authoritarian and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a authoritarian leader.  Fascist movements emphasize extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of the “dear leader” and the nation over the individual.

The 21st century is witnessing a resurgence of fascism or neofascism in the global community.  Currently, the leaders of Russia, China, India, Argentina, Hungary and Bulgaria conform to a fascist model.  The leaders of these countries are contemptuous of electoral as well as political and cultural liberalism.  For the first time in its 250-year history, the United States has an ultra-nationalist and authoritarian leader in Donald J. Trump, who exhibits many of the dangerous attributes of fascism.

The most authoritative figures in the Trump administration conform to the ideas and ideals of fascism.  Trump’s choices to serve as his vice president (J.D. Vance); director of the Office of Management and Budget (Russell Vought); secretary of defense (Pete Hegseth); director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Kash Patel); deputy chief of staff (Stephen Miller), and Attorney General (Pam Bondi) fit that description.  They have declared their fealty to their “dear leader” in the White House.  As Chris Lehmann noted in “The Nation” last month, they are the “fixers and fascists in the 47th president’s orbit.”

In less than two weeks, Trump himself has taken actions that can only be described as authoritarian—steps that will advance his personal and political power at the expense of the rule of law and America’s democracy.  On the two most recent Friday nights, Trump has emulated Richard Nixon’s Saturday night massacre in 1973 by firing 18 Inspectors General and then 30 federal prosecutors who worked on the January 6th Capitol riot cases over the past four years.  Trump also revoked security clearance for 51 signers of a letter suggesting that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop could be Russian misinformation.

The Department of Justice ordered the firing of eight FBI executives and began an investigation of thousands of FBI officials who worked on the January 6th uprising.  All of these steps were taken without regard for the laws that protect these officials from such summary actions.  When asked about the firing of the IGs, which ignored the legal requirement to provide 30-day notice to the Congress as well as the appropriate cause for such action, deputy chief of staff Miller explained that the Trump administration doesn’t recognize the legality of the laws.

There have been additional steps that have raised alarms throughout the nation, and have transformed American society.  Trump’s call for ending birthright citizenship, which is recognized in the Constitution, would mark a major change in U.S. immigration policy.  His pardon of the 1,600 rioters from January 6th never specified the criteria that were used in evaluating the various cases.  Trump’s threat to investigate the “entire Biden crime family” was unprecedented and tore a page out  of the fascist playbooks of such countries as Russia and China.  These threats led Biden to issue pardons to his immediate family as well as to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who Trump once insinuated would be subject to the death penalty for committing “treason.”

Although Trump’s inaugural address supported a “colorblind” and “merit-based” society, his order to federal agencies to purge the concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion was an act of white supremacy that targeted civil rights protections for civil servants and government contractors.  In a classic display of meanness, Trump blamed the tragic air collision over the Potomac River last week that took 67 lives on “diversity hiring” at the Federal Aviation Administration.

In less than two weeks, Trump has taken comprehensive steps to weaponize and politicize the key departments and agencies of government, particularly the judicial and national security components.  Executive orders have ignored federal law and judicial rulings in order to challenge the so-called “deep state,” and to reverse existing policy on immigration, the environment, and diversity.  Trump froze federal hiring, exempting only the military and “positions related to immigration.”  He restored a category of federal workers known as Schedule F in order to eliminate job protections for civil servants, and offered buyouts to nearly the entire federal work force of 2.3 million men and women.

Meanwhile, the so-called guardrails of our democracy are folding their tents and succumbing to Trump’s pressure.  In recent weeks, Paul Krugman of the New York Times; Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post; and Jim Acosta and Chuck Todd of CNN have resigned their positions because of institutional pressure to tone down or avoid criticism of Donald Trump.  Powerful industries are dropping their DEI programs because of Trump’s intimidation.  Two networks (ABC and CBS) are settling law suits in Trump’s favor because their institutional backers (Disneyland and Paramount, respectively) want to avoid antagonizing Trump.  Too many Democrats in the Senate are voting to confirm Trump’s cabinet choices, no matter how unqualified or unsavory they are.  The major players in the technology arena were particularly pathetic, rushing to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee and kiss the ring.  Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman of Meta, is particularly pathetic in this regard.

This is sadly reminiscent of Germany in 1933, when the titans of industry and the media believed that they could handle Adolf Hitler simply by catering to his whims.  By the middle of the year, the democracy of the Weimar Republic had been transformed into the police state of the Third Reich.  In just two weeks, the Trump administration has been dynamic and fast-moving and, as a result, the so-called guardrails of our democracy have been weakened and submissive.

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Ronald Reagan meeting with Jack Abramoff and Norquist in connection with the College Republican National Committee in 1981 – Public Domain

No, the emails aren’t from a Nigerian prince, but whoever is writing them seems to use the same style, cajoling and repetition. The sad thing is, these aren’t from some poor guy in an internet cafe circa the 2000s, no–these emails have been pummeling the inboxes of federal workers from their own government. These workers have had their email inboxes flooded with bizarre imperatives to basically go away. They’ve been insulted in the emails, being encouraged to leave and find “higher productivity” jobs in the private sector. They’ve had carrots dangled in front of them, saying they can take a second job or go on awesome vacations. They’ve been demoralized, and most are likely very confused, of course, by design. What we have here is the Grover Norquist quote coming to life, the: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it in the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” For those too young to have heard this, the quote is from one of the OG architects of this current bile-filled situation. It’s always been their fervent desire to implement this bathtub murder–they’ve been patient and have all the plans in place. Now they are in the stage where they’ve drawn up the water, telling you they have some nice lavender bath bombs and beckon you through the steam.

Of course, Grover Norquist types still have good versus bad government notions. They will never try to drown the missing dollars of the defense budget. You are only “federal bad” if you are someone like a physical therapist at the VA working with the mangled bodies of veterans–or someone working to keep food safe for consumption. You are incredibly “federal bad” if you were serving in some manner to keep illness counted and mitigated. You are “federal good” if you are a part of the massive military, ICE, or a teenager with a cross married to an old man, spouting nonsense for a federal paycheck. I think you understand. And, of course, it is crazy-making. That’s baked in and a very real part of how this is all designed to work. The few of us still trying to follow the blitzkrieg that is the real-time attempt to remake the entire government are probably in the minority. Mainly, it’s chaos and confusion to the vast populace, and this is often what causes a brain to simply shut down. It’s too much and we aren’t wired for it. It’s the plan, to bring in so much rapid damaging change that it will be near impossible to stop. It seems the goal of the broligarchy is to reshape all of it in some fashion that they seem to believe will become their new utopia (but of course, almost everyone else’s BAD PLACE).

There is talk from individuals like Zuckerberg that workplaces need to become more masculine. It’s bizarre and telling that they embrace a philosophy like this. Though I disagree with what these formulaic masculine/feminine dumbed-down versions of reality try to say, I’ll look at this from what I imagine their perspective is as far as “masculine energy”. They seem to embrace a notion that all is about power and forcing change on others, rather than any type of collaborative energies. Rape versus love societal normalization. They seem to believe that there is an inherent inefficiency in taking in all opinions, in adjustments for others that may be outside what they consider the mainstream (of course that means them). Where would humans be if we all adapted this kind of thinking? Right where we are, I guess, barreling towards catastrophe.

The very real consequence of this shift to the Zuckerberg masculine is destruction, death, and misery. He implied that encouraging this energy would save businesses, but I’d say the embrace of this “energy” over the last couple thousand years is very much what is wrong with us. Enormous time spans with humans in small collaborative groups was sustainable, but this regimented and unequal world is the thing that has careened us towards oblivion. Yes, yes, let’s lean into that during this time of crisis.

What are the moments you’ve celebrated in your life—the ones that touched your heart and made life worth living? I’m guessing for the vast number of individuals, it was a moment that would touch on what these damaged men (and accomplice women) call “feminine energy.” Obviously, it could have been a moment of decency and empathy from a man or woman—it’s the concept of this collaborative and kind energy and what they seem to want to demonize. These types are using the terms masculine energy and feminine to define something very warped, something that speaks to their inability to live in a shared world.  All they know is conquest and theft; they have convinced themselves that it is the pinnacle when in fact it has always been the lowest of behavior. They consider empathy to be a weakness, but how much more difficult is it to use the frontal lobe rather than the amygdala–the fear-based region of the brain? It is much easier to steal than to share, to lord over with authoritarianism than to win support through collaboration. They rebrand what really is mental weakness as superiority, and they slap the label “masculine” on it. It’s as pathetic as Zuckerberg’s new look, an artificial edifice that reeks of insecurity and Axe body spray.

That said, they are obviously the ones in power; that sickening worldview is very efficient at creating open-air prisons and taking over equitable societies through the ages. The energy of the natural world– they would say the “feminine” has not been successful at countering this disease. This has been exhibited over and over whether it was expecting a mutual agreement to be honored (say in the form of treaties with Native Americans) or other failings of the reciprocal world. They are liars above all else—others operating in good faith with them fail. It is said that those who are not malignant narcissists have difficulty understanding their behavior because the wiring in those individuals is so vastly different. I don’t know that it’s wiring differences, as much as it is giving the reins to your inner child and that child is Joffrey Baratheon. It is difficult to fathom those who truly enjoy causing misery. For most of us, being in control of the world and its vast resources would mean little if we did it at the cost of humanity. And it is impossible to negotiate with these types as they don’t respect anyone else as having the same rights they do. It’s an extremely toxic worldview and can have no other endpoint than destruction of all that makes life worthwhile.

As far as this masculine/feminine thing–it is difficult to define; I find our language so lacking when the energy of inclusion, nurturing and belonging becomes “feminine energy”. We do need a new term. Most likely the broligarchy would just call it “weak”. But the moments that count, when someone truly understands you, when you perhaps felt alone and someone stepped in made you feel seen, heard and protected—this is the kind of energy these types are against. Feeling safe, whether as a child in the care of someone who loves you and would do anything for you—that’s truly the powerful energy they want to be rid of. We aren’t to look down the road as stewards for our descendants; we are to scramble and clutch for belongings like deranged psychopaths in their image. We are not to feel secure (it’s better to have your workforce scared and compliant in their view, not a willing member of a just society). It is a philosophy created in retrograde, that is, an individual who has a deep loathing of others who show empathy looks for a worldview with no reciprocities, one of top-down authoritarianism. It’s as if Jeffrey Dahmer stumbled upon an entire community supportive of cannibalism and its celebration. Yes, he’d probably really have liked that group and would have gladly paid the monthly dues to join. It feels great to have your pathologies turned into virtues.

The keys are in the hands of individuals looking for an excuse in regard to their own internal hollowness. In the same way that it is more difficult to use your frontal lobe than the amygdala, it is more difficult to look at internal shortcomings and to address them than to proclaim and embrace a worldview that it’s all dog-eat-dog. I think there might even be a simmering jealousy of those not infected with the “hungry ghost” that can never be satisfied, so a perverse need to punish may stem from that. And the rest of us are to pay for that rot that seems to very much infect those “masculine” types–those who do not place worth with true human connection, but instead value standing on top of the rubble pile they created.

There is so much less safety in a world like this, so much more hatred. If it truly was a philosophy that believed less government is good, then there would be some sort of consistency. They would have the same aversion to the bloated military that they do free school lunch programs. The fact that they hate one and celebrate the other tells you all you need to know about these types. It’s a death cult.

So of course they are wholeheartedly demonizing the federal workers at this time. Much like Reagan did with the air traffic controllers, how teachers began to be treated after privatization became the goal, how healthcare workers were treated during the pandemic……….in short, they try to drive a wedge among those of us who all should be allies. Billionaires are marketed as exemplary citizens; a nurse’s aide at the VA is the scourge of society.

One interesting thing I’ve come across in trying to parse out the philosophy of this Business-Plot-Come -to-Fruition is that they seem to consider city-states to be an excellent form of government. These smaller entities can work more in line with their idea of states working as corporations. Everything stems from that idea that top-down, it all needs to be private and what they consider nimble. They love private schools, gated communities, tiny principalities with their own rules……..often with the right to be racist, sexist or any other ist they enjoy. But overall, they want it all to be like a myriad of corporations, slipping into a locality as they see fit to extract resources in the most “efficient” manner. No common good, simply commerce and extraction. Of course, they will need to keep the military to enforce their notions of masculine energy and conquest, but they seem to have a soft spot for fluid locales they can swing in and out of, taking advantage of the best tax breaks etc. I am hoping this leaves an opening for some areas to simply slip out of the noose during this chaos. Places like California who contribute more to the federal economy than they get back might consider simply walking backwards like Homer in the bushes. But seriously, this craziness will not be efficient in the long run, and I don’t think it’s illogical to consider a fracturing of the US might take place, whatever that might end up meaning.

It’s a cliché, but I’m sure that perhaps Sun Tzu might have a book or something about maneuvering in times of chaos. If that guy ever got published, that is. Even smaller areas like left leaning cities might be able to find a modicum of independence if they are annoying enough to try to manage. We have to look for hope– what’s the alternative? I think of places like New Orleans that have so little in common with the rest of their state. The ample money they take in from visitors gets funneled to places that decide the Ten Commandments should be on their school walls……on the walls that is, not actually obeyed by those in power. This is just one notion I think of when I try to consider what might happen in the setting of this truly abhorrent time. Managing a bag of cats might be disruptive to the end goal for them, however.  Can a city or state do an Irish Goodbye to the US government when things get more unhinged? They are creating true chaos; I certainly hope individuals of good intent are looking for ways to benefit others in this situation and looking for exit strategies. The current state of affairs is a dead-end.

But back to the government emails. They seem to be trying to coerce individuals into taking what the establishment media without context call buy-outs. It looks to be more like a Twitter level trick—that of demoralization, and carrot dangling, making people think they can leave and still be paid something. It all sounds like making a deal with a leprechaun or the jinn. Basically, do not do it. They are bad faith actors. Also they are forcing individuals who worked from home to come back to offices. This is another threat to get staff to just go away, and if they don’t leave, well it can artificially pump up that commercial real estate. So, layers of motivations on their part, all bad.

Sadly, some of this shit behavior will probably start to work. Erosion and death by a hundred cuts. Those who take any “deal” will likely be screwed, just like the Twitter workers were when Musk took over. The staff remaining will have more difficult jobs and will leave by attrition until yes, Grover and company can start strangling. As an aside, isn’t that a wild red flag for your branded worldview when you invoke that you need to strangle anyone? I mean, I think that’s a fair sign that you’ve lost your way as a human, right? You are wildly wealthy with power and security, but you wax poetic about bathtub strangling? Nothing more throbbing with masculine energy than strangling someone, I guess.

I have massive respect for those who will continue to fight this onslaught they are facing. If you want to hear from some brave, good people check out the federal government workers subreddit. It’s incredible to observe what they are going through and to hear from those the current administration would consider ineffective bloat. They sound like some stoic, principled individuals who have been doing a lot of heavy lifting for us all in various positions. An energy of decency and dignity. I don’t think you put a label on it like masculine or feminine. I’d say that type of energy is life-affirming and reciprocal, in short, what will be needed if we are going to make it as a species.

At this point, though, we do have to realize we are stuck on the path with grade-A psychopaths. We need to be furtively darting our eyes in every direction like a character in a bad movie, looking for workarounds, escape paths and allies. In short, we need to fight the Bathtub Stranglers and all the chaos and hate they bring with them.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

For the past quarter century, ever since 2001, presidents of the United States inaugurate their terms not with bottles of champagne but with drone and missile strikes. Donald Trump followed the rhythm. Not long after he ascended to the chair in the Oval Office, he sent off missiles against ISIS fighters “hiding in caves” – as he put it on social media – in the Golis mountains in northeast Somalia. No civilians were killed, said Trump. They always say that.

Trump’s first missile strike of this presidency reminded me of Barack Obama’s first missile strike, only three days after the Nobel Peace Prize winner was sworn in as the president of the United States in 2009. In the morning of January 23, CIA director Michael Hayden told Obama that they were ready to strike high-level al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in northern Pakistan. Obama did not object. At 830pm, local time, a drone flew over Karez Kot in Ziraki village, Waziristan. The people on the ground heard it. They called the drones bhungana, that which sounds like a buzzing bee. Three Hellfire missiles were fired remotely, and they smashed into some homes. Fifteen people died in that attack.

One of the missiles went through the wall of a home and exploded in the drawing room of the house. Inside that room sat a group of family members who were celebrating before one of the young men – Aizazur Rehman Qureshi (age 21) – was to leave for the United Arab Emirates. The drone strike killed him. It also killed two men, Mohammed Khalil and Mansoor Rehman, leaving their fourteen children without a father. Their nephew, Faheem Qureshi (age 7), felt his face on fire, and ran out of the room (he lost an eye). Not one of the men and boys in the room had a connection to either al-Qaeda or to the Taliban. They were hard working people, one of the men had been a worker in the UAE and on his return, his nephew was preparing to go and help the family by working in the Gulf. Now, a hasty decision by the CIA left the family distraught. The US government never apologised for the attack and did not compensate the family.

In 2012, Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman published Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency. If I were Obama, I would like this book. It is sympathetic to him. After that drone strike, Klaidman points out, “Obama was understandably disturbed.” The next day, a person who was there in the Situation Room told Klaidman, Obama walked in but “you could tell from his body language that he was not a happy man.” Apparently, this was the spur for Obama to learn about the CIA’s “signature strikes” (when the US government felt it could kill anyone who looked like a terrorist) and “crowd killing” (when it was acceptable to kill civilians in a crowd if a “high value target” was also there). Obama said that he did not like this that he was unhappy that there might be women and children in the crowd. But, as Klaidman writes, “Obama relented – for the time being.” In fact, the “time being” seems to have extended through the two terms of his presidency. What differentiated Obama from Bush before him and Trump afterwards was merely his hesitancy. His actions were the same.

In 2010, Obama’s team developed the Disposition Matrix or the “kill list” and the procedures to activate the use of strikes to kill or capture “high value targets.” The chain of decision making for this kill list did not include any sense that the men on the list could have been accidentally placed there or that they would get a chance to defend themselves from the CIA’s accusations in a court of law. In other words, there was no judicial review. In 2011, this should have raised eyebrows when these procedures led to the assassination of several US citizens in Yemen (first Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, and then – in a separate drone strike – his sixteen-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki); in 2017, the US government killed al-Awlaki’s eight-year-old daughter, Nawar al-Awlaki. All three were US citizens, who should have been afforded some US constitutional protections even if the US disregards international law. None was available to them.

In 2012, the film Ghaddar (Traitor) has a popular song sung by Rahim Shah called Shaba Tabhi Oka (Come on Destroy Everything). The film is in Pashto, the language of northern Pakistan and large parts of Afghanistan. It is also the language of those who died in Obama’s 2009 drone strike. In the song sequence, two lovers, played by the popular actors Arbaaz Khan and Sobia Khan, dance and sing with the culture of drones and bombs now associated with love. “Look at me, bomb my heart,” says Sobia Khan, while the refrain runs, “come on, destroy everything.”

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Photograph Source: Vice President – Public Domain

Donald Trump’s re-election marks not just a political turning point but the ascendance of a corpse-like order, a nation stiffening under the weight of its own decay. His second coming is less a victory than a death march, a spectral procession of hollow men in red ties and stiff gaits—zombies with ice in their veins. Videos of Trump dancing evoke images of  him moving in a style that is jerky, lifeless, as if his body resents rhythm itself. A wooden plank with a painted sneer, twitching to the anthem of reaction, soulless and mean. No body on fire here. no slow bend toward desire, no trace of the supple grace that lives in a world still capable of love. Instead, the image signals the aesthetic of a new order of crudely celebrated as the manosphere—puffed-up bodies, drunk on steroids and grievance, exuding the acrid scent of sweat and power.

This is the culture that Trumpism has wrought: stripped of tenderness, of improvisation, of joy. Gone is the world I knew as a working-class kid, where music spilled into the streets, where voices—aching, defiant, untamed—set bodies in motion. Etta James wailing, Billie Holiday lingering on the edge of heartbreak, Nina Simone playing the piano like she was conjuring a storm. Little Anthony and the Imperials harmonizing into the night. This was a world of movement, of bodies ignited by something more than rage—by love, longing, the exquisite pain of feeling too much.

But in the America of Trump 2025, the only bodies that matter are those that march in unison, rigid and obedient. His regime, unbound by law or morality, has reconfigured the machinery of the state into an instrument of vengeance. The January 6th insurrectionists walk free, hailed as patriots. Federal agencies are gutted, purged of dissent. Civil rights protections are erased with the stroke of a pen. Universities, once imperfect sanctuaries of critical thought, are being remade into white Christian indoctrination centers. And in an act of breathtaking cruelty, thousands of immigrants await detention in Guantánamo Bay, that purgatorial space of empire where justice goes to die.

This is not simply the return of authoritarianism; it is its evolution—leaner, more technologically adept, more deeply enmeshed in the fabric of corporate and digital power. Trump does not rule alone. He is merely the frontman for a brutalizing oligarchy that has abandoned even the pretense of democracy. The billionaire class—those slick architects of social media monopolies, the digital overlords of surveillance capitalism—have found their perfect vehicle in his shamelessness. Spoiled boys in men’s bodies giving Nazi salutes, orgasmic over their new found power. This is the oligarchy of fools now kissing the ring of the grifter immune for his past and future crimes. Unfettered capitalism has reached its final stage, where wealth no longer hides its contempt for the masses but wears it like a badge.

The spectacle of political theater has become the defining element of Trump’s aesthetic. It has morphed into what Susan Sontag called “fascinating fascism,” a form of power that “thrives on gestures of provocation.” It glamorizes unbridled authority, indulges in the pleasure of humiliation, and expresses outright contempt for “all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.” This is not mere political performance—it is the spectacle of domination, staged as both entertainment and ideology. In this fascist aesthetic, power is not simply wielded but flaunted, paraded in grotesque excess—an orchestrated display of cruelty, intoxicated by its own illusions of national rebirth. This revival is not new; it is modeled on the white supremacist legacy of the Confederacy, draped in the symbols of its past and resurrected as a blueprint for the future. Meanwhile, the legacy press registers the horror but too often stops short of critically interrogating or denouncing it. But this is more than the pornography of power; it is an excremental spectacle—a celebration of misery, violence, and death itself.

Former President Biden, in his farewell speech, warned of the creeping shadow of oligarchy, yet he dared not name the truth: that his own party, with its bloodless embrace of neoliberalism, helped forge the conditions for Trump’s resurrection. This is not simply the triumph of reactionary forces but the consequence of a culture that has surrendered to its own worst instincts—one that has forsaken solidarity for spectacle, justice for cruelty, hope for managed decline.

And so we are left with this: staggering inequality, a militarized state, the slow and methodical unmaking of democracy. The new oligarchs scorn the very notion of the public good. They mock reason, erase history, and demand that the government sever itself from any lingering obligation to care. They speak the language of the market, where everything—including life itself—is merely another commodity to be traded, exploited, discarded. Trump and his sycophants are the walking dead. They have blood in their mouths and anti-freeze in their bodies. The rhythm they embrace is one of stiff soldiers playing in military parades.

But I remember another rhythm, another cadence, one that refuses to die—symptomatic of another time when politics seemed possible as a force for justice, equality, and hope. As a shoeshine boy working Black clubs in Providence, RI.in the fifties, I remember Etta James, her voice raw and thunderous, shattering the quiet. I remember the bodies in motion, defiant and free. In her music, in her story, in the way she broke down racial and musical barriers, there was a fire that no amount of repression could smother. Etta James never bought into the whitewashing of history. She was a border-crosser, refusing to be contained, her music too powerful to be tamed by an industry that sought to erase the rough edges of Black artistry. She carried with her the weight of struggle and the possibility of something beyond survival—of love, of dignity, of a world where music could still touch the soul rather than serve as corporate wallpaper.

Even in her later years, when she sang Fool That I Am at the Newport Jazz Festival or in Toronto when I saw her a few years before she died, her voice carried the same intensity, the same unapologetic passion. But the world she sang into had changed. When Barack Obama was elected, it was not Etta but Beyoncé who sang At Last at his inauguration. It was a gesture that wounded Etta deeply—a reminder that the world she had shaped had turned away from her, preferring a polished version of history over the raw, defiant reality she represented. The same forces that had once feared her power now erased her legacy in favor of something more palatable, more marketable.

This is the fate of all radical voices in a society bent on forgetting. Whether in politics, education, or culture, the forces of erasure work tirelessly to neutralize history, to sand down the edges of struggle, to replace resistance with spectacle. Trumpism is only the most grotesque expression of this impulse, but it is not the only one. The neoliberal university, the corporate music industry, the political establishment—they all participate in the politics of forgetting.

And yet, something lingers. A voice that will not be silenced, a rhythm that refuses to be stilled. In this age of zombie politics, where bodies are reduced to instruments of control and obedience, there is still a memory of movement, of improvisation, of freedom. And as long as we remember—through music, through writing, through acts of defiance—the fire cannot be extinguished. Memory rescues and that is why is has become so dangerous in the age of Trump.

I first heard Etta James in a cramped basement apartment at a party with my Black high school teammates. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. At the Catholic Youth Organization dances I had attended, white-washed music reigned—Pat Boone instead of Little Richard, the Beach Boys instead of Little Anthony. Nuns patrolled the floor, ensuring that no one got too close, warning us to leave room for the Blessed Virgin Mary. Desire was something to be policed. Bodies were to be contained.

But in that smoke-filled apartment, everything was different. Bodies pressed together, laughing, flirting, moving with a kind of freedom I had never known. And in the background was Etta James, her husky voice breaking through the noise, filling the room with something raw and undeniable. She transformed the body from an object of discipline into a site of joy, creativity, and resistance. I danced without moving my feet, unlearning the rigid postures imposed on me and stepping into a different kind of world—one where solidarity and social justice were stitched into the fabric of music, movement, and feeling. A moment not of nostalgia, but one that reminds me of the power of passion, the body in flight, anger transformed into a collective song of struggle. A moment that fueled a culture of resistance. A moment to come, hopefully sooner than later.

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Photograph Source: The Trump White House – Public Domain

In the wake of Donald Trump’s first week as President, the Democrats opposing him are reported to be stunned, paralyzed, and intimidated. According to Peter Baker of the New York Times (Jan. 26, 2025), they have been shocked and rendered passive by “norm-shattering, democracy-defying assertions of personal power that defy the courts, the Congress, and the ethical lines that constrained past presidents.”

Well . . . yes and no. Yes, many of Trump’s executive orders stretch or overturn existing political norms. Yes, they are meant to augment his power. They are certainly impulsive, vindictive, and cruel. But no, these activities do not “defy democracy.”  They are what often happens when a strongly led political movement attempts to alter the way an existing system operates.

Establishment liberals like Baker portray the President as a megalomaniac narcissist who wants to be King. Even though there is truth in this depiction, it oversimplifies a far more complex reality. Focusing exclusively on Trump’s personal failings distracts attention from the systemic sources of his power and the need to change that system.

Consider Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal changed or overthrew a host of established norms, including limited federal power over the economy, state supremacy in matters of labor relations, health, and welfare, weak executive agencies with little discretion, presidential deference to Congress and the courts, the sanctity of individual labor contracts, and more. His opponents called him a norm-breaker and an authoritarian, and comparing his actions with those of earlier presidents, they had a point. But they missed a more important point: significant changes in an existing system almost always involve altering old norms and augmenting the power of new leaders. Although called an authoritarian and a socialist, F.D.R. redefined democracy rather than ending it and (for better and for worse) saved American capitalism.

What about Trump?  Obviously, the greedy, impulsive, narrow-minded president is no Roosevelt.  Peter Baker accuses him of wanting to increase his personal power, and he certainly does. But this characterization ignores the fact that every “imperial” president from F.D.R. to Joe Biden has increased the Chief Executive’s discretionary power, augmenting an authority that is simultaneously personal and official  If you don’t understand that the CEO of an empire is an emperor, you will attribute his actions purely to power-lust. But for the most part, the man who currently occupies the White House is simply doing nakedly what previous presidents have done with more protective coverage.  Moralizing about his personal failings does nothing to close any of America’s 700 foreign military bases or to reduce the super-profits of the military-industrial fat cats.  It is system-analysis and system-change that we need, not liberal posturing.

System-change and mass movements

Anti-Trumpers need to learn to think less in terms of the President’s cartoon villainy and more in terms of broken systems and the mass movements that challenge them. The American system, I’m sorry to say, IS broken and has been for some time. Its failure to satisfy working people’s expectations for a better and happier life is what kept millions of them from voting Democratic in 2024. The Trump administration’s principal vice is not that it seeks systemic change, but that its analysis is intellectually bankrupt, the changes it proposes are misconceived, and the policies it has already begun to implement will almost certainly make things worse.

At present, the U.S. politicians who think in terms of systems and mass movements for change are almost all right-wing ideologues like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and the denizens of think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. Their philosophy, now being turned into executive orders and legislation, sees government itself (the “administrative state”) as the chief obstacle to economic, social, and personal development. According to them, the solution to problems of vanishing economic opportunity, social decay, and endemic violence is to liberate the power of the oligarchs. Unfettered capitalism led by billionaire industrialists like Elon Musk will produce a new American “golden age.”

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump pretended to be ignorant of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, but, clearly, its program of right-wing system change is now driving the MAGA bus. The key to Trump’s electoral victory was his success in organizing what Marxists call a “rotten bloc” – a cross-class coalition of giant capitalists, small businesspeople, and workers. Since deregulating the economy, crippling welfare programs, and slashing taxes on the rich are all obvious forms of class warfare, the Trumpers’ key need was to find some way to win discontented lower-class people to their banner. The answer was “America First” – an ideology designed to convince workers and retirees that their class interests and identities are irrelevant in a bonded ethno-national community that privileges and protects them. “However tough things may seem right now,” MAGA leaders tell their followers, “you are members of a Chosen Nation and masters on the global stage. Trust us — enriching the nation’s business elite will enrich you as well.”

A crucial feature of this appeal is that it splits the working class into two groups: workers in newer industries associated with technology and public services, many of whom are college-educated and urbanized, and workers in older manufacturing and retailing industries who are mostly high school graduates living in smaller towns and cities and in rural areas. Members of the first group tend to be slightly better paid than the second and like to think of themselves as a white-collar or “professional” middle class, but the vast majority are financially insecure, non-unionized workers with liberal cultural commitments. Even so, members of the older industrial group feel deprived relative to high-tech and service workers and are vulnerable to MAGA allegations that the latter are members of a government-dependent “elite.”

Trump and his movement have been quick to take advantage of this disunity among working people and the Democrats’ failure to heal the split.  So long as the division is defined in terms of competing cultural values and identity group interests, it remains unhealed and serves as a reliable source of MAGA power. No wonder that the Right’s answer to “identity politics” has been . . . identity politics!  Changing this dynamic requires a Leftist perspective that considers all working people, whatever their industrial and cultural base, members of a single social class. The name of the game is to redesign the system to provide all of them, collectively, with greater wealth, opportunity, purpose, and respect.

Where is the Leftist Project 2025?

The question that Democrats and other anti-Trumpers need to answer is this: what is your equivalent of Project 2025?  This suggests a series of other questions that sorely need answering.  For example: What are effective solutions to structural problems such as the wild increase in socioeconomic inequality, the vicious effects of global climate change, the skyrocketing costs of housing and other necessities, and the diversion of resources needed for civilian development to a trillion-dollar military budget?

Clearly, mild reforms like raising the minimum wage will not solve systemic problems of this scale. But to the extent that Trump’s opponents accept the self-censorship caused by political taboos like the taboos against economic planning, workers’ control, and any other reforms smacking of socialism, they disable themselves from providing credible solutions.

In the recent election, for example, MAGA demagogues succeeded in making illegal immigration topic # 1. Taboo-ridden Democrats were unwilling and unable to argue that socioeconomic planning can help us construct a humane and enforceable immigration system – one that could protect the jobs and incomes of native workers, relieve strained welfare systems, and help overcome our chronic labor shortage. All they could do was moralize about America as a nation of immigrants – an attractive vision, but not to low-wage workers living in underfunded communities and forced to compete for jobs and living space with desperate new arrivals.

In a similar way, the failure to offer solutions to systemic problems prevents many progressives from dealing successfully with crucial cultural, psychological, and spiritual issues exploited by the Right. What do anti-Trumpers have to say about the plague of loneliness that afflicts so many of us, the instability of American families, the explosion of drug addiction, or the difficulty of satisfying imperative needs for security, identity, self-esteem, and moral purpose? Again, although the issues may be defined as personal, the solutions – if they are to be effective – will involve transforming current systems.

The current wave of MAGA attacks on “woke” consciousness and institutions of affirmative action makes this clear. They clearly pose the question of how best to secure social and economic justice for people formerly marginalized because of their race, gender, or sexual preference. The answer, it seems to me, will not be simply to restore pre-existing DEI programs that implicitly force identity groups to compete for scarce resources.  Our aim should be to eliminate these system-generated scarcities – to supply a rich array of good jobs, rewarding educational opportunities, and comfortable living places for everyone. The goal is realizable, but it remains a utopian dream so long as we accept the current norms and taboos of an oligarchical profit system.

A concluding Biblical note

Under Trump and his pet ideologues Republicans have moved toward a more systemic approach to cultural and political policies. Why don’t anti-Trumpers make a similar shift but do it far better by identifying the system’s real problem – not the “Deep State” so much as “Deep Capital” – and proposing real solutions?

One reason is the conservatism of many Democrats – their unwillingness to recognize the failures and limitations of oligarchical capitalism, an imperialist foreign policy, and a winner-take-all political system that restricts people’s participation largely to electioneering and interest-group lobbying.  But there is another reason, too: an assumption often accepted that thinking in terms of systems and system-change exonerates bad people and relieves them of responsibility for their sins.

Some readers of this essay, for example, will very likely accuse me of “apologizing” for Trump by emphasizing the American system’s failures. I have no intention of justifying the Orange One’s intellectual or moral failings, which are many. But focusing on them to the extent of obscuring the social system’s role in generating injustice and violence mis-states the situation and makes it impossible to prevent later abuses.

Consider an original tale of abuses: the Cain and Abel story told in the book of Genesis. Cain clearly commits a sin by murdering his brother. God warns him in advance not to get carried away by jealous rage against Abel, but he doesn’t listen; he has a will of his own and he bloodily misuses it. Yet what provoked Cain’s jealousy was a systemic factor – the unequal treatment of the brothers. For reasons that remain unclear (although generations of rabbis tried vainly to identify them) God had accepted Abel’s sacrifice and rejected his. Along with Cain’s angry and disobedient nature, a system of parental favoritism was responsible for the subsequent violence.

Understanding this systemic context has implications for violence prevention; altering the “favored child” dynamic is one way to make a sibling rivalry less lethal. The context doesn’t absolve Cain of his sin, of course – nor does this existence of an oligarchical, profit- and power-obsessed American empire absolve Mr. Trump for his.  But without appreciating the system’s role in generating problems, one can’t offer credible solutions.

It is possible – and necessary – to move beyond liberal moralism and into the realm of systemic solutions. Rather than focus exclusively on Trump’s villainy or accept the kleptocratic nationalism of MAGA, we can describe the institutions that betray American working people and offer practical methods of transforming them. Doing this will take hard work, imagination, and the courage to reject political taboos, but without a Leftist alternative to Project 2025, people in pain will turn even more desperately to the Right.  Rosa Luxemburg’s famous description of the alternatives seems as apt now as ever: either we will have some form of socialism or we will have barbarism.

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