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Category: United States

  • Why the Republican Party Is Trying to Cut Healthcare to the Poor

    On May 7, the AP headlined “House GOP backing off some Medicaid cuts as report shows millions of people would lose health care,” and reported:

    House Republicans appear to be backing off some, but not all, of the steep reductions to the Medicaid program as part of their big tax breaks bill, as they run into resistance from more centrist GOP lawmakers opposed to ending nearly-free health care coverage for their constituents back home.

    This is as a new report out Wednesday from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that millions of Americans would lose Medicaid coverage under the various proposals being circulated by Republicans as cost-saving measures. House Republicans are scrounging to come up with as much as $1.5 trillion in cuts across federal government health, food stamp and other programs, to offset the revenue lost for some $4.5 trillion in tax breaks.

    “Under each of those options, Medicaid enrollment would decrease and the number of people without health insurance would increase,” the CBO report said.

    The Republican President Donald Trump presented to Congress on May 2 his proposed federal budget for 2026.

    On May 2nd the U.S. White House — which has made clear that it’s beating the drums for war against China — headlined “Office of Management and Budget Releases the President’s Fiscal Year 2026 Skinny Budget” and reported that “The Budget, which reduces non-defense discretionary by $163 billion or 23 percent from the 2025 enacted level, guts a weaponized deep state while providing historic increases for defense and border security. … Defense spending would increase by 13 percent, and appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security would increase by nearly 65 percent, to ensure that our military and other agencies repelling the invasion of our border have the resources they need to complete the mission.” His budget “guts a weaponized deep state while providing historic increases for defense and border security,” and health care for the poor is part of that “weaponized deep state” he is referring to, which Republicans say must be cut in order to provide these “historic increases for defense and border security.”

    All of those increases would go towards paying the suppliers (such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc.) to the enormously militarized police-state, at the very same time that the health, education, and welfare, of the voters, will be reduced by $165 billion or 23% below the current level.

    Here are some more details regarding what that “weaponized deep state” (to use the White House’s phrase for it) consists of:

    The White House’s May 2 “Major Discretionary Funding Changes” says that:

    For Defense spending [ONLY the Defense Department, NOT including the approximately $700 billion yearly of annual U.S. military spending that is being paid out from OTHER federal Departments], the President proposes an increase of 13 percent to $1.01 trillion for FY 2026; for Homeland Security, the Budget commits a historic $175 billion investment to, at long last, fully secure our border. Under the proposal, a portion of these increases — at least $325 billion assumed in the budget resolution recently agreed to by the Congress — would be provided through reconciliation, to ensure that our military and other agencies repelling the invasion of our border have the resources needed to complete the mission. This mandatory supplement to discretionary spending would enable the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, among others, to clean up the mess President Trump inherited from the prior administration and harden the border and other defenses to protect America from foreign invasion.

    Therefore, approximately $1.7T of total military spending is being sought by Trump (including the 13% increase to the Defense Department), while he is proposing to cut all other discretionary spending (which had previously constituted the other 47% of all U.S. Government annually appropriated federal spending (and which was previously around $800B per year) to be cut down now by $165B to around $635B total, or about 37% of all annually appropriated federal spending. Only the +13% for the Pentagon, and the +65% for the Department of Homeland Security, are increased, while everything else is getting cut drastically in order to make those increases possible.

    So, while around $1.7T will be going to the military, only around $635B will be going to pay all of the other discretionary spending (including any non-military portion of the DHS). That will cut the percentage of the Government’s discretionary spending on non-military purposes down from its prior approximately 47% of the federal budget, down to approximately 37% of all of the Government’s discretionary spending.

    Medicaid — health care to the poor — is on their chopping block so that the Defense Department portion of that $1.7T military cost that the U.S. Government will be paying in 2026 will be increased by 13% (and so that any non-military portion of the 65% increase to the DHS will also be paid).

    Looking further at WHAT is being cut the most, the White House document shows that the only part of the Department of Education that will be increased — by $60 million — is “Charter Schools,” the part that privatizes public-school education, which is the part that billionaires want to increase (since their hedge funds etc. will be owning much of it). Meanwhile, Title 1 and K-12 federal spending will be reduced by $4.535 billion; and the program to incentivize colleges to “to engage with low-income students and increase access” will be cut by $1.579 B.

    The Department of Health and Human Services will cut $4.035 from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), $1.970B from the Refugee and Unaccompanied Alien Children Program, $1.732B from AIDS and financial-assistance health programs, $3.588B from CDC and Prevention programs, $17.965B from NIH, $1.065B from programs working with addicts to help them reduce their addictions.

    The Environmental Protection Agency will be cut $2.460B for Clean and Drinking Water State Revolving Loan Funds, and under a billion dollars each for such programs as the Hazardous Substance Superfund.

    The Department of Housing and Urban Development will be cut by $26.718B that goes to programs for the poor.

    The Treasury Department will be cut by $2.488B for the IRS.

    The National Science Foundation will be cut by $3.479B and by an additional $1.130B for “Broadening Participation.”

    Most of the other cuts will be below a billion dollars.

    Are these massive reallocations away from programs to the needy (and from some other areas such as scientific research), into instead the military and border security, reflections of the public’s will in a democracy?

    On February 26, I reported that:

    On February 14, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling,” and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

    An important point to be made here is that both #s 4&5, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid, are “discretionary federal spending” (i.e., controlled by the annual appropriations that get voted into law each year), whereas #s 1&2 (Social Security and Medicare) are “mandatory federal spending” (i.e., NOT controlled by Congress and the President). So, Trump and the Republicans are going after the poor because they CAN; they can’t (at least as-of YET) reduce or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. However, by now, it is crystal clear that Trump’s Presidency will be an enormous boon to America’s billionaires, and an enormous bane to the nation’s poor. The aristocratic ideology has always been: to get rid of poverty, we must get rid of the poor — work them so hard they will go away (let them seek ‘refugee’ status SOMEWHERE ELSE).

    Trump is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies).

    Therefore, the Republicans’ effort to cut health care to the poor is merely a part of their overall effort to cut Governmental help to the nation’s poor; and all of this is being done in order to increase federal purchases of armaments from corporations such as Lockheed Martin, who make all or most of their profits only by selling to the U.S. Government and to its allied Governments.

    However, on many levels, the greatest amount of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and sheer corruption, is actually in the only federal Department that has never been audited: the Defense Department. This means that Republicans are reallocating from the neediest to the greediest. (NOTE: I have equal contempt for both of America’s political Parties, but this reallocation is specifically a Republican specialty. So, this isn’t merely a matter of opinion. It is a historical fact.)

    The post Why the Republican Party Is Trying to Cut Healthcare to the Poor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump to rescind and replace Biden-era AI chip export curbs

    US President Donald Trump’s administration plans to rescind and modify a Biden-era rule that curbed the export of sophisticated AI chips, a spokeswoman for the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday. The regulation was aimed at further restricting AI chip and technology exports, dividing up the world to keep advanced computing power in the United…

    The post Trump to rescind and replace Biden-era AI chip export curbs appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Expulsion and Occupation: Israel’s Proposed Gaza Plan

    Killing civilians wholesale, starving them to convince those unaffected to change course, and shepherding whole populations like livestock into conditions of further misery would all qualify as heinous crimes in international law.  When it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza, this approach is seen as necessary politics, unalloyed by the restraints of humanitarianism.  When confronted with these harsh realities on the ground, unequivocal denials follow: This is not happening in Gaza; no one is starving. And if that were the case, blame those misguided savages in Hamas.

    As the conflict chugs along in pools of blood and bountiful gore, the confused shape of Israel’s intentions continues in all its glorious nebulousness.  Pretend moderation clouds murderous desire.  There is no sense that those unfortunate Israeli hostages captured by Hamas in its assault on October 7, 2023, matter anymore, being merely decorative for the imminent slaughter.  There is even less sense that Hamas will be cleansed and removed from the strip, however attractive this idea continues to be.

    Such evident limits have not discouraged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, who have decided that more force, that old province of the unimaginative, is the answer.  According to the PM, the cabinet had agreed on a “forceful operation” to eliminate Hamas and salvage what is left of the hostage situation.

    A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, Brigadier-General Effie Defrin, has explained on Israeli radio that the offensive will apparently ensure the return of the hostages.  What follows will be “the collapse of the Hamas regime, its defeat, its submission”.  Anywhere up to two million Palestinian civilians in Gaza will be herded into the ruins of the south.  Humanitarian aid will be arranged by the Israeli forces to be possibly distributed through approved contractors.

    The IDF chief of staff, Lt. General Eyal Zamir, confirmed that the approved plan will involve “the capture of the Strip and holding the territories, moving the Gazan population south for its defence, denying Hamas the ability to distribute humanitarian supplies, and powerful attacks against Hamas.”

    Within the Israeli cabinet, ethnocentric and religious fires burn with bright fanaticism.  The Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich remains a figure who ignores floral subtlety in favour of the blood-stained sledgehammer.  He remains that coherent link between cruel lawmaking and baffling violence.  “Within a few months,” he boasts, “we will be able to declare that we have won.  Gaza will be totally destroyed.”  With pompous certitude, he also claimed that the next six months would see Hamas cease to exist.

    Such opinions, expressed at the “Settlements Conference” organised by the Makor Rishon newspaper in Ofra, a West Bank settlement, give a sense of the flavour.  Palestinians are to be “concentrated” on land located between the Egyptian border and the arbitrarily designated Morag Corridor.  As with any potential abuser keen to violate his vulnerable charges while justifying it, Smotrich tried to impress with the idea that this was a “humanitarian” zone that would be free of “Hamas and terrorism”.

    The program here is clear in its chilling crudeness.  Expulsion, relocation, transfer.  These are the words famously used to move on populations of a sizeable number in history, often at enormous cost.  That this should involve lawmakers of the Jewish state adds a stunning, if perverse, poignancy to this.  They, the moved on in history, the expelled and the condemned wanderers, shall expel others and condemn them in turn.  Smotrich also points the finger at desperation and hopelessness, the biting incentives that propel migration.  The Palestinians will feel blessed in their banishment.  “They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

    Impossible to ignore in Smotrich’s steaming bile against the Palestinians is the broader view that no Palestinian state can arise, necessitating urgent, preventative poisoning.  In addition to the eventual depopulation of Gaza, plans to reconstitute the contours of the West Bank, ensuring that Israeli and Palestinian traffic are separated to enable building and construction for settlements as a prelude to annexation, are to be implemented.

    The issue of twisting and mangling humanitarian aid in favour of Israel’s territorial lust has raised some tart commentary.  A statement from the Humanitarian Country Team of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a forum led by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), does not shy away from the realities on the ground.  All supplies, including those vital to survival, have been blocked for nine weeks.  Bakeries and community kitchens have closed, while warehouses are empty.  Hunger, notably among children, is rampant.  Israel’s plan, as presented, “will mean that large parts of Gaza, including the less mobile and most vulnerable people, will continue to go without supplies.”

    The UN Secretary General and the Emergency Relief Coordinator have confirmed that they will not cooperate in the scheme, as it “does not adhere to the global humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality.”

    The foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany have made the same point.  Despite all being solid allies of Israel, they have warned that violations of international law are taking place.  “Humanitarian aid must never be used as a political tool and a Palestinian territory must not be reduced nor subjected to any demographic change”.

    To date, a promise lingers that the offensive will only commence once US President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar takes place.  But no ongoing savaging of Gaza with some crude effort at occupation will solve the historical vortex that continues to drag the Jewish state to risk and oblivion.

    The post Expulsion and Occupation: Israel’s Proposed Gaza Plan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Martial Law Disguised as Law and Order: The Oldest Trick in the Authoritarian Playbook

    “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”—James Madison

    We are being frog-marched into tyranny at the end of a loaded gun. Or rather, hundreds of thousands of loaded guns.

    Let’s not mince words: President Trump’s April 28 executive order is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: martial law masquerading as law and order.

    Officially titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” this order is a “heil Hitler” wrapped in the goosestepping, despotic trappings of national security.

    Don’t be fooled by Trump’s tough-on-crime rhetoric, cloaked in patriotic language and the promise of safety.

    This is the language of every strongman who’s ever ruled by force.

    The White House claims the order will “empower state and local law enforcement to relentlessly pursue criminals and protect American communities.” But under this administration, “criminal” increasingly includes anyone who dares to exercise their constitutional rights.

    The order doesn’t merely expand policing—it institutionalizes repression.

    It sets us squarely on the road to martial law.

    If allowed to stand, Trump’s executive order completes our shift from a nation of laws, where even the least among us had the right to due process, to a nation of enforcers: vigilantes with badges who treat “we the people” as suspects and subordinates.

    Without invoking the Insurrection Act or deploying active-duty military forces, Trump has accelerated the transformation of domestic police into his own paramilitary force.

    With the stroke of his presidential pen, he has laid the groundwork for a stealth version of martial law by:

    • Expanding police powers and legal protections;
    • Authorizing the DOJ to defend officers accused of civil rights violations;
    • Increasing the transfer of military equipment to local police;
    • Shielding law enforcement from judicial oversight;
    • Prioritizing law enforcement protection over civil liberties;
    • Embedding DHS and federal agents more deeply into local policing.

    All of this has occurred without congressional debate, judicial review, or constitutional scrutiny.

    For years, we have watched as the government transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military: outfitted with military hardware and trained in battlefield tactics.

    However, this executive order goes one step further—it creates not just a de facto standing army but Trump’s own army: loyal not to the Constitution or the people but to the president.

    This is the very danger the Founders feared: a militarized police force answerable to a powerful executive, operating outside the bounds of the law.

    This is martial law without a declaration.

    Today, law enforcement is equipped like the military, trained in battlefield tactics, and given broad discretion over who to target and how to respond. But these are not soldiers bound by the laws of war. They are civilian enforcers, wielding unchecked power with minimal oversight.

    And they are everywhere.

    Armored vehicles on neighborhood streets. Flashbang raids on family homes. Riot police in small towns. SWAT-style teams deployed by federal agencies. Drones overhead. Mass surveillance below.

    We are fast approaching a reality where constitutional rights exist in name only.

    In practice, we are ruled by a quasi-military bureaucracy empowered to:

    • Detain without trial;
    • Punish political dissent;
    • Seize property under civil asset forfeiture;
    • Classify critics as extremists or terrorists;
    • Conduct mass surveillance on the populace;
    • Raid homes in the name of “public safety”;
    • Use deadly force at the slightest provocation.

    In other words, we’ve got freedom in name only.

    It’s the same scenario nationwide: in big cities and small towns alike, militarized “warrior” cops—hyped up on power—ride roughshod over individual rights by exercising almost absolute discretion over who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

    This nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence has already ensured that unarmed Americans—many of them mentally ill, elderly, disabled, or simply noncompliant—will continue to die at the hands of militarized police.

    From individuals shot for holding garden hoses to those killed after calling 911 for help, these tragedies underscore a chilling truth: in a police state, the only truly “safe” person is one who offers no resistance at all.

    These killings are the inevitable result of a system that rewards vigilante aggression by warrior cops and punishes accountability.

    These so-called warrior cops, trained to act as judge, jury, and executioner, increasingly outnumber those who still honor their oath to uphold the Constitution and serve the public.

    Now, under the cover of executive orders and nationalist rhetoric, that warrior mentality is being redirected toward a more dangerous mission: silencing political dissent.

    Emboldened by Trump’s call to reopen Alcatraz and target so-called “homegrown” threats, these foot soldiers of the police state are no longer going to be tasked with enforcing the law—they will be deployed to enforce political obedience.

    This is not a theory. It is a reality unfolding before our eyes.

    We are living in a creeping state of undeclared martial law.

    The militarization of police and federal agencies over recent decades has only accelerated the timeline toward authoritarianism.

    This is how freedom ends—not with a loud decree, but with the quiet, calculated erosion of every principle we once held sacred.

    We’ve come full circle—from resisting British redcoats to submitting to American forces with the same disdain for liberty.

    Our constitutional foundation is crumbling, and with it, any illusion that those in power still serve the public good.

    For its part, Congress has abdicated its role as a constitutional check on executive power, passing sweeping authorizations with little scrutiny and failing to rein in executive overreach. The courts, too, have in the past sanctioned many of these abuses in the name of national security, public order, or qualified immunity. Instead of acting as constitutional safeguards, these institutions have largely become rubber stamps.

    Indeed, the president, Congress, the courts, and the police have come to embody the very abuse the Founders fought to resist. Only now are the courts beginning to show glimmers of allegiance to the Constitution.

    This is not about partisanship. This is about power without restraint.

    As tempting as it is to place full blame on Trump for this full-throttle shift into martial law, he is not the architect of this police state. He is its most shameless enabler—a useful frontman for the Deep State in its ongoing war on the American people.

    As we warned in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we are sliding fast down a slippery slope to a Constitution-free America.

    We ignore these signs at our peril.

    The post Martial Law Disguised as Law and Order: The Oldest Trick in the Authoritarian Playbook first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Escalating Think Tanks


    On 2 May Foreign Affairs published an article, “Will China Escalate?: Despite Short-Term Stability, the Risk of Military Crisis Is Rising,” by Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP).

    There are many claims made in the article by Tony Zhao who seemingly looks at China, a 5000-year old Asian civilization, through a western lens (similar to the western-centric analysis made by John Mearsheimer).

    Zhao asserts that Beijing views itself vis-à-vis the United States as in a “strategic stalemate.”

    Comment: What exactly is meant by stalemate? And what statement emerging from Beijing attests to it viewing itself as in a stalemate? The chess metaphor applied to China is a cultural faux pas, as the popular strategizing board game the Chinese play is weiqi (go in English). Draws/stalemates are not a weiqi strategy and are rare.

    Zhao: “Trump’s early second-term actions have strengthened Beijing’s conviction that the United States is accelerating its own decline, bringing a new era of parity ever closer.”

    Comment: It is not just Beijing’s conviction. There are plenty of reputable economics/financial experts warning of a US economic decline (see Michael Hudson, Richard Wolff, Yanis Varoufakis, Peter Schiff, Ellen Brown, Sean Foo, Jeffrey Sachs, etc) as well as military experts speaking to a drop off in US military superiority (see Andrei Martyanov, colonel Douglas Macgregor, Scott Ritter, etc).

    Economic data reveal that the US has been overtaken by China on real GDP/PPP, and economic indicators point to the US potentially heading into recession with a -0.3% growth in Q1 2025, while China’s growth in Q1 2025 was 5.4%.

    Zhao warns that the current stalemate may not last and that over the next four years the “risk of a military crisis will likely rise as the two countries increasingly test each other’s resolve.”

    Comment: It is obvious how the US is testing China’s resolve. But how exactly is it that China is testing the US’ resolve — other than as a defensive response to US machinations? Zhao does not give any examples of this. Vague, unsubstantiated statements should be greeted with extreme skepticism, and such statements speak to a writer’s professionalism and credibility.

    Zhao: “The risk of a U.S.-Chinese military crisis could sharply escalate if Beijing further closes the capability gap with Washington and perceives international indifference to Taiwan’s status, grows frustrated with nonmilitary efforts to unite Taiwan with China, and foresees more pro-Taiwan leadership in Washington and Taipei.”

    Comment: The logic behind this sentence is perplexing. Is Zhao suggesting that China should maintain a capability gap so that it is inferior to the US? Furthermore, there is no international indifference to Taiwan’s status. As of June 2024, 183 countries have established diplomatic relations with China under the One China Principle, which acknowledges Taiwan as an inalienable part of China. Depicting China as “frustrated” is contrary to the longstanding stoic image that China usually projects. Xi Jinping is definitively not a fulminating, blustering politician as is commonly found in Washington. As for military efforts to “unite Taiwan with China,” the famous Chinese military strategist Sunzi (Sun Tzu) wrote in The Art of War (Chapter III- “Attack by Stratagem”): “In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.”

    Zhao does admit, “Beijing has shown similarly little inclination to initiate near-term military conflict, even over issues of core national interest such as Taiwan.” He obviates this by following up with: “This restraint, however, has been underwritten by a military buildup, spanning conventional and nuclear forces, that Chinese officials see as critical to shifting the balance of power with the United States.”

    Comment: The Chinese military build-up is, arguably, a necessity given the belligerence of the US toward whichever nation does not adhere to its demands. That Taiwan has a form of de facto independence is attributable to the US inserting its 7th Fleet into a Chinese civil war to protect the losing KMT side from the Communist forces (see William Blum, “1. China 1945 to 1960s” in Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II). Moreover, the US has been unfaithful in its adherence to the One China Policy that it effectively ratified in the 1972 Shanghai Communique.

    Zhao: “[China’s] seemingly contradictory surges in economic and diplomatic outreach and its military muscle flexing, evident in high-profile drills near Australia and Japan in February, are, in China’s view, actions characteristic of the great power it believes it has become.”

    Comment: There have been no official reports of China conducting military drills near Australia in February 2025. The live-fire drills were held in international waters, 150 nautical miles far beyond Australia’s territorial waters. The Global Times noted the Chinese drills were “fully in accordance with international law and customary practices” and they were “completely different with the Australian military aircraft’s intrusion into China’s airspace” — a serious violation of international law. As for the “high profile drills … near Japan in February,” a web search only revealed China carrying out drills in the Gulf of Tonkin and off Taiwan’s southwest coast. Japanese media noted the drills off Taiwan, none near Japan.

    Zhao: “For its part, the Trump administration is beefing up the United States’ military deterrent against China amid growing concerns about Beijing’s aggressive actions in Asia.”

    Comment: This is farcical. How is it that China whose military spending is effectively 52% of US military spending would cause the US to increase its deterrence? (see table below) What are China’s “aggressive actions”? Backwards logic and unsubstantiated allegations.


    Chinese and US military spending compared Source: CEPR, 17 Dec 2024

    Zhao: “Senior Defense Department officials aren’t fully aligned on the importance of Taiwan to U.S. strategy. Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, for example, has said that ‘Americans could survive without it’ and is pushing instead to thwart China’s broader regional dominance.”

    Comment: What is the importance of Taiwan to the US besides as part of a military containment zone? Does the US’ military encirclement of China convey peaceful intent? Also, what evidence is there that China wants to dominate outside its borders? China rejects hegemony and seeks win-win relationships.

    Zhao writes of “the ratcheting up of tensions sparked by the trade war …”

    Comment: Which actor is primarily responsible for ratcheting up tensions? Which actor started the tariffing? This information is important and relevant and needs to be identified and conveyed to the reader

    *****

    It is clear who is the aggressor. China is not ringing the US with military bases. China is not stoking Hawaiian separatist sentiment from the continental US. Are Chinese warships plying US waters?

    Foreign Affairs is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is a think tank and publisher described as an “influential ruling class organization” whose members come predominantly from the corporate business community which finances the CFR.

    Zhao is listed as a senior fellow at the CEIP, which was ranked as the world’s number one think tank in 2019. Imagine that: such ill-thought-out journalism from a high-ranking think-tank fellow.

    The post Escalating Think Tanks first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Non-explosive Iranian Bomb

    The non-existent Iranian bomb has lesser importance to the existing bombs that threaten the world. United States (US) demands that Iran promise to halt pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile developments distract from the real intent of US actions — deter other nations from establishing more friendly relations with Iran and prevent them from gaining a correct perspective on the causes of the Middle East crises.

    The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) created a potential for extensive political, economic, and social engagements of the international community with Iran. The investments would lead to attachments, friendships, and alliances and initiate a revitalized, prosperous, and stronger Iran. A new perspective of Iran could yield a revised perspective of a violent, unstable, and disturbed Middle East. Israel and Saudi Arabia would finally receive attention as participants in bringing chaos to the Arab region. Economies committed to Iran’s progress and allied with its interests could bring pressure on Israel and Saudi Arabia to change their destructive behaviors.

    Because arguments with Iran could have been approached in a less provocative and insinuating manner, the previous demands were meant to provoke and insinuate. Assuredly, the US wants Iran to eschew nuclear and ballistic weapons, but the provocative approach indicated other purposes — alienate Iran, destroy its military capability, and bring Tehran to collapse and submission. For what reasons? Accomplishing the far-reaching goals will not affect the average American, lessen US defense needs, or diminish the continuous battering of the helpless faces of the Middle East. The strategy mostly pleased Israel and Saudi Arabia, who engineered it, share major responsibility for the Middle East turmoil, and consistently try to use mighty America to subdue the principal antagonist to their malicious activities. During the 2016 presidential campaign, contender Donald Trump said, “Many nations, including allies, ripped off the US.” President Donald Trump has verified that statement.

    Noting the history of US promises to leaders of other nations – give up your aggressive attitudes and you will benefit – the US promises make the Ayatollahs skeptical. The US reneged on the JCPOA, sent Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to the World Court and eventual death (although his personal compromises were the key to the Dayton Accords that ended the Yugoslavian conflict), directly assisted NATO in the overthrow of subdued Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, pulverized Iraq after sanctions could not drive that nation to total ruin, rejected the Iranian pledge of $560 million worth of assistance to Afghanistan at the Tokyo donors’ conference in January 2002, and, according to the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Dobbins, disregarded Iran’s “decisive role in persuading the Northern Alliance delegation to compromise its demands of wanting 60 percent of the portfolios in an interim government.” Tehran has always sensed it is in a no-win situation. Regardless of its decisions and directions, the U.S. intends to pulverize the centuries old Persian lands.

    If the US honestly wants to have Iran promise never to pursue nuclear and ballistic missile weapons, it will approach the issues with a simple question, “What will it take for you (Iran) never to pursue these weapons?” Assuredly, the response will include provisions for the US to withdraw support from a despotic Saudi Kingdom in its oppression of minorities and opposition and propose that the US eliminate financial, military and cooperative support to Israel’s theft of Palestinian lands, oppressive conditions imposed on Palestinians, daily killings of Palestinian people, and expansionist plans. The correct question soliciting a formative response and leading to decisive US actions resolves two situations and benefits the US — fear of Iran developing weapons of mass destruction is relieved and the Middle East is pointed in a direction that achieves justice, peace, and stability for its peoples.

    Despite the August 2018 report from Trump’s U.S. Department of State’s Iran Action group, which “chronicle Iran’s destructive activities,” and consists of everything from most minor to most major, from unsubstantiated to retaliatory, from the present time to before the discovery of dirt, Iranians will not rebel in sufficient numbers against their own repressive state until they note the end of hypocritical support by western powers of other repressive states. Halting international terrorism, ameliorating the Middle East violence, and preventing any nation from establishing hegemony in the Arab world starts with Trump confronting Israel and Saudi Arabia, two nations whose records of injustice, aggression, oppression, and violation of human rights exceed that of the oppressive Iran regime.

    Otherwise, it will occur on a Sunday morning; always occurs in the early hours on the day of rest. It will come with a roar greater than the sum of all shrieks and screams ever uttered by humankind, rip across fields and cities, and burn through the flesh of a part of the world’s population.

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  • The US-Ukraine Minerals Deal

    The agreement between Washington and Kyiv to create an investment fund to search for rare earth minerals has been seen as something of a turn by the Trump administration.  From hectoring and mocking the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before the cameras on his visit to the US capital two months ago, President Donald Trump had apparently softened.  It was easy to forget that the minerals deal was already on the negotiating table and would have been reached but for Zelensky’s fateful and ill-tempered ambush.  Dreams of accessing Ukrainian reserves of such elements as graphite, titanium and lithium were never going to dissipate.

    Details remain somewhat sketchy, but the agreement supposedly sets out a sharing of revenues in a manner satisfactory to the parties while floating, if only tentatively, the prospect of renewed military assistance.  That assistance, however, would count as US investment in the fund.  According to the White House, the US Treasury Department and US International Development Finance Corporation will work with Kyiv “to finalize governance and advance this important partnership”, one that ensures the US “an economic stake in securing a free, peaceful, and sovereign future for Ukraine.”

    In its current form, the agreement supposedly leaves it to Ukraine to determine what to extract in terms of the minerals and where this extraction is to take place.  A statement from the US Treasury Department also declared that, “No state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”

    Ukraine’s Minister of Economy, Yulia Svyrydenko, stated that the subsoil remained within the domain of Kyiv’s ownership, while the fund would be “structured” on an equal basis “jointly managed by Ukraine and the United States” and financed by “new licenses in the field of critical materials, oil and gas – generated after the Fund is created”.  Neither party would “hold a dominant vote – a reflection of equal partnership between our two nations.”

    The minister also revealed that privatisation processes and managing state-owned companies would not be altered by the arrangements.  “Companies such as Ukrnafta and Energoatom will stay in state ownership.”  There would also be no question of debt obligations owed by Kyiv to Washington.

    That this remains a “joint” venture is always bound to raise some suspicions, and nothing can conceal the predatory nature of an arrangement that permits US corporations and firms access to the critical resources of another country.  For his part, Trump fantasised in a phone call to a town hall on the NewsNation network that the latest venture would yield “much more in theory than the $350 billion” worth of aid he insists the Biden administration furnished Kyiv with.

    Svyrydenko chose to see the Reconstruction Investment Fund as one that would “attract global investment into our country” while still maintaining Ukrainian autonomy.  Representative Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the House of Foreign Affairs Committee, thought otherwise, calling it “Donald Trump’s extortion of Ukraine deal”.  Instead of focusing on the large, rather belligerent fly in the ointment – Russian President Vladimir Putin – the US president had “demonstrated nothing but weakness” towards Moscow.

    The war mongering wing of the Democrats were also in full throated voice.  To make such arrangements in the absence of assured military support to Kyiv made the measure vacuous.  “Right now,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said on MSNBC television, “all indications are that Donald Trump’s policy is to hand Ukraine to Vladimir Putin, and in that case, this agreement isn’t worth the paper that it’s written on.”

    On a certain level, Murphy has a point.  Trump’s firmness in holding to the bargain is often capricious.  In September 2017, he reached an agreement with the then Afghan president Ashraf Ghani to permit US companies to develop Afghanistan’s rare earth minerals.  Having spent 16 years in Afghanistan up to that point, ways of recouping some of the costs of Washington’s involvement were being considered.  It was agreed, went a White House statement sounding all too familiar, “that such initiatives would help American companies develop minerals critical to national security while growing Afghanistan’s economy and creating new jobs in both countries, therefore defraying some of the costs of United States assistance as Afghans become more reliant.”

    Ghani’s precarious puppet regime was ultimately sidelined in favour of direct negotiations with the Taliban that eventually culminated in their return to power, leaving the way open for US withdrawal and a termination of any grand plans for mineral extraction.

    A coterie of foreign policy analysts abounded with glowing statements at this supposedly impressive feat of Ukrainian diplomacy.  Shelby Magid, deputy director of the Atlantic Council think tank’s Eurasia Centre, thought it put Kyiv “in their strongest position yet with Washington since Trump took office”.  Ukraine had withstood “tremendous pressure” to accept poorer proposals, showing “that it is not just a junior partner that has to roll over and accept a bad deal”.

    Time and logistics remain significant obstacles to the realisation of the agreement.  As Ukraine’s former minister of economic development and current head of Kyiv school of economics Tymofiy Mylovanov told the BBC, “These resources aren’t in a port or warehouse; they must be developed.”  Svyrydenko had to also ruefully concede that vast resources of mineral deposits existed in territory occupied by Russian forces.  There are also issues with unexploded mines.  Any challenge to the global rare earth elements (REEs) market, currently dominated by China (60% share of production of raw materials; 85% share of global processing output; and 90% manufacturing share of rare earth magnets), will be long in coming.

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  • Finding the Spectacular in the Society of the Spectacle

    The internet and computers have been a boon to essayists like Edward Curtin (and me!). He/you/we can publish at online sites (DissidentVoice.org is a favorite for us) and then publish our screeds in book form if we are prolific and eloquent enough. Curtin was a philosophy/social theory professor at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. This collection of Curtin’s articles, At the Lost and Found (2025), is a case in point. There are some fine ones; certainly, his introduction and the opening ones are challenging postmodern forays for the uninitiated, yet still readable. His students were very lucky.

    As Trump-Musk take a hatchet to American higher education, I marvel at the thought that there are hundreds if not thousands of Curtins (maybe not as good) across the vast US, most at small liberal arts colleges, all in love with words and wisdom, all teaching their students lovingly, urging them to THINK. That is surely the beauty of America, the promise to take the world’s poor and reviled and give them the chance to be someone, do something worthwhile.

    Curtin, from his earliest memories, saw that conventional life was a provocation because it hid more than it revealed; that it harbored secrets that could not be exposed or else the make-believe nature of normal life would collapse like a cardboard set. Like everyone, I was ushered onto this Shakespearean stage and have acted out many roles assigned to me, but always with the inner consciousness that something was amiss. Everyone seemed to be playing someone, but who was the player? Is the role playing us? Are we marionettes in some pipe dream, and is there an author behind it? God? The devil? Capitalism?

    Curtin’s postmodern credo comes from Thoreau: We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. There are no neutral observers.

    His goal: to oppose these scoundrels and their ilk who kill and wage endless wars against innocents around the world, in a way that will delight and last a little while.

    Writing as music

    Curtin admits he is obsessed with words. That they play him. He, in turn, uses them to produce both astute political analyses and art in luminescent words and sentences that pulsate. I think of them as intertwined lovers. AI is taking capitalism to its Faustian apotheosis, to mechanize us all, to eliminate passion and will. Reduce thought to dead words. Curtin compares his writing to composing, hoping to leave a fresh song in your heart, something to help you see the pageant of our lives in more than just dead words.

    In The End of the Speed Limit on the Highway to Nowhere, he compares us to Sisyphus but without the illusion of ascent, merely going in a circle, returning to the same grey reality of the freedom-to-choose-what-is-always-the-same, seen as a mediated, rootless reality that is no reality at all. Yes, you can fly anywhere in the world (if you are part of SWIFT), but you will find the same McDonald’s and box stores, more or less the same sandy beaches, and souvenirs made in China. Fake diversity. Fake news, to quote our fake king-of-the-world.

    We are flooded with unneeded techno ‘miracles’, but without roots we are swept away by them, our mediated reality providing no signposts for where we are headed, no warnings of pitfalls that threaten our real Reality and us, allowing us to pause, to take a stand. Root in Latin is radix, i.e., radical, which today means extreme, as if we unconsciously mold our thinking to beware of rootedness in our rootless world, where having roots is suspect, even reactionary. We celebrated rootlessness, the dream of travel, and escape as the best experience. How many of us live/die where we were born?

    How language betrays us! Betray as in reveal and subvert. Curtin calls himself a contrarian and relishes contronyms (e.g., betray, fast, sanction, wear, weather, wind up). I’m big on antonyms that our mediated reality turns into identities, e.g., war = peace, progress = regress, bad = good. We see how language reveals much about our muddled thinking, storing clues from the past, and warning us of our illusions.

    Guy Debord begins The Society of the Spectacle with a tongue-in-cheek parody of Marx’s opening of Kapital: In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Like Marx’s commodities, spectacles are ‘use values’, but even more removed from the consumer than bubble gum or a sports car, as they happen only in your mind, illusion pure and simple, reality so artfully mediated that you pay your money, enjoy, and blissfully forget and move on to the next instalment.

    No Virgil to guide us

    Today’s ‘great reset’ just may succeed because we have lost the most important roots, our spirituality, buried beneath a heap of commodity-spectacles. Walking through the forest to the genuinely spectacular Taughannock Falls, Curtin gloomily ponders the massacre of Iroquois two centuries ago and asks: Is there any place on this blood-soaked earth where a semi-conscious person can rest easy?

    He sees our descent into our current Hell/abyss as starting with Reagan, enshrining illusion in the White House, his assigning communism to the trash heap of history, his attack on social welfare, and his ignorance of the environment. All the presidents since have been variations on his MAGA—even Clinton and Obama credit Reagan as their inspiration. Reagan certainly helped collapse the Soviet Union, but he turned the US into a one-party state, taking his lead from the moribund communists.

    And we accept it, as we are trapped in a simulacrum reality, a closed system, a solipsism.

    We have no Virgil to guide us through Hell and set us on the road to enlightenment. Wait! We have AI to do that for us. Our worship of the machine is such that as the machine ‘matures’, we have let it take our place, to think for us, even to simulate emotions, speaking as if emoting. The Turing test. The machine’s goal is Darwinian, too: survival of the fittest. Unless we rediscover the miracle of life, root ourselves in a genuine experience of Reality, take back control from the machine, and even ban or dismantle it where it is harmful.

    Curtin is a postmodernist, drawing inspiration from the French Debord and Baudrillard. And looks to Joyce for a way forward. In The Contronymal Cage, he quotes Joyce on the language of Joyce’s English-born Jesuit dean of studies, who speaks a different English from that of the Irish rebel. We must take control of our language, be conscious of where it came from, its roots, and how it is used to keep us trapped now in a simulacrum hyperreality, as language constitutes reality as much as it describes it.

    Red pill time

    There is no ‘heppi end’ to the stories we weave (or rather that weave us) in the Matrix. Poetry is an escape route, unashamedly subjective, rebellious, and questioning. Another way is the essay, as Curtin knows well, and Edward Said, who argued that his nation, Palestine, is a narrative; that we must tell our stories of distorted reality and oppression to escape the Matrix and root ourselves in unmediated Reality. Throw off Blake’s ‘mind-forged manacles’. Recognize that life is not a dead mechanism but is conscious, that we are part of a conscious universe, not as Sisyphus repeating his tortured, pointless circle of unreality, but as Dante, guided in his spiritual quest by the great minds of the past, teaching us to distinguish the devil from God.

    What about virtual reality? It sounds ominous, blurring the line between reality and fantasy, but not if we are aware. That goes for all techno miracles. And I for one would much prefer to take a virtual reality trip to visit Mecca in the 7th c than to squash Nature with a huge carbon footprint just to say ‘Kilroy was here’ in a dystopian 21st c Mecca. We can use technology wisely, even reject it if it destroys Nature, undermines society, and kills my soul.

    Though raised a Christian, and admiring Jesus, King, Romero, and all those who have died trying to make peace and justice a reality, Curtin is a secular humanist, not looking to traditional religions for answers to ‘why?’ today. He bemoans our loss of spirituality but doesn’t urge Christians to revive their faith, as I suspect he sees it threadbare. That’s where I point my finger. We need faith! That vacuum in my life led me to Islam as the only faith that is still alive, meaningful in a meaningless late capitalism.

    Islam was supposedly backward compared to the progressive West. But looking back now, I would suggest we would be much better off if the age of technology had arrived much more slowly, with a spiritual quest still the goal. The West lost its ailing Catholic spirituality with the Protestant Reformation, as it embraced capitalism and became a false spirituality, a materialism masquerading as spirituality, a treacherous inversion of our most fundamental, radical truth. Islam is slowly breaking its shackles, inflicted by the ‘progressive’ capitalist imperialist countries, which occupied Muslim lands, did the usual rape-and-pillage, and even attempted to erase millions of Muslims in Palestine, stealing their land, their spiritual heritage, which is rooted in the Real. Islam does not need Debord or Baudrillard to tell us that our reality is an illusion, that the ‘modern’ world has lost its soul, that the truth lies in the ‘backward’ world, the precapitalist, spirit-based civilizations. Islam’s immunity to ‘progress’ is its saving grace, as it answers our need for meaning in life, which is timeless, technologyless.

    Beware the counterinitiations

    René Guénon is the 20th-century thinker who first deconstructed the embrace of modernism in The Crisis of the Modern World (1927). He converted to Islam in the 1930s and embraced a traditional lifestyle, rejecting for the most part the illusory technology of the 20th century for ‘spiritual technologies’, even as our capitalist/ socialist societies pushed ahead to carry out greater and greater monstrosities. We have lost our highest faculty, intellectual intuition, i.e., direct apperception or gnosis. We have lost the very possibility of spiritual realization. The Soviet secular spirituality was the first to collapse, and Russia has returned to its Christian Orthodoxy roots, i.e., there is an exit ramp ‘back to the future’.

    Gueon coined the term ‘counterinitiation’, movements that are spiritual doppelgangers that mimic authentic spirituality. Protestantism’s embrace of capitalism is the greatest such ruse, which explains the thousands of evangelical sects all claiming to be true. Now you can fashion your own spirituality with a dash of tarot, yoga, and mindfulness. No! We must rediscover the wisdom of traditional religions, which have been discarded on our highway to nowhere. We need a great cosmic reset. Curtin sees himself as a contrarian, infatuated with contronyms. Language is a powerful repository of wisdom, embedded in great literature, especially poetry. But he doesn’t go the extra mile.

    Without a love, not just of words, but of spirituality, sacred words, essays like Curtin’s just depress me. In Hindu lore, we are in the declining period of civilization, known as the Kali Yuga (the Age of Darkness). It began with the rise of agriculture in 3000 BC, which unmoored us from our spiritual roots, embracing money, private property, and slavery. Three thousand years is a long nightmare, but it is also the necessary precursor to renewal, the cosmic reset.

    The Arts (I like to use caps for the ‘Real thing’) is our avenue for spiritual truths. Our screeds help us see the world in 4d (virtual reality a gimmicky version of this serious path), connect us with our Real environment, not the phony mediated environment of consumer capitalism. As for sacred vs profane, no, no! Everything is sacred, alive, to be connected with meaningfully, loved/hated. There is no neutral observer. I write with passion, or my writing is dead. And as for mindless rituals. No, no! The ritual of prayer is an active form of knowledge, a path to participate in eternal truths, our metaphysical roadmap, showing us the exit ramp from our highway to know-where. (Don’t you love language?)

    JFK and 9/11 litmus tests

    Curtin includes a long article about JFK. The Life and Public Assassination of John F Kennedy, one on JFK and Dulles, and The Assassination and Mrs. Paine. His great courage in the face of an assassination he expected can inspire us to oppose the systemic forces of evil that control the United States and are leading the world into the abyss. And one on Bob Dylan (‘our Emerson’) and his 2020 song about the assassination Murder Most Foul (thank you, Hamlet), whose lyrics about the conspiracy are ignored or mocked by our doppelganger media. Neither Dylan nor Walberg is going ‘gentle into that good night’, to quote Bob’s model and namesake Dylan Thomas.

    I like Curtin sharing personal experiences. There aren’t any independent, neutral observers or observations. He’s not dogmatic. A 9/11 essay at the Berkshire Edge (not included, a shame as the litmus test these days is where you stand on that elephant-in-the-room) dismisses the official story, assumes a conspiracy of the elite directed by the CIA. As for charges of Israel and Mossad, he’s skeptical both here and on JFK, arguing the CIA is too powerful to let that happen ‘outside the box’. I would point to many instances from the King David Hotel in 1948 to many, many assassinations of Palestinian — any — leaders it doesn’t like (Arafat and hundreds of guerrilla leaders). There is an unspoken hit list always in the creation, much like Ukraine’s Myrotvorets. No group, official or unofficial, comes near to Israel. Bin Laden, eat your heart out.

    Personally (remember, no neutral writers!), I think only Israeli terrorists are cynical and smart enough to do such a thing, using Saudi youth as patsies. Funny, Jews have been the world’s leading terrorists since Israel was created, and are exonerated, pointing the finger at the Muslim victims, defending themselves as the real terrorists. Curtin’s mild dissidence/apostasy went unpunished, except for a few comments ridiculing him as another conspiracy nut. I suspect he would have been treated much more severely if he had labeled Israelis, i.e., secular Jewish fanatics, as the perpetrators of JFK’s murder and/or 9/11.

    My sense is that Americans are too spooked, too afraid to point the finger at Israel as the villain-in-chief in the world today, largely responsible for our descent into Hell. US-Israel is tattooed on American minds. A spiritual mark of Cain in our dystopia, making sure we are ready for the mental gas chamber. Are tattoos removable? It’s very hard, painful, and leaves a scar. But, hey!, purging yourself of society’s inhumanity is worth it. Down with tattoos! They are haram in Islam with good reason. Our only identity needed to live a good life is identifying with God, trying to perfect ourselves, and getting as close to Him (not ‘him’) as possible. The world and our special place in it are the only proof we need of who we are and where we’re going.

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  • Trump’s Spy on Your Neighbors Initiatives Creating Climate of Fear

    Neighbors fingering neighbors and workers spying on workers is as American as bacon and eggs and toddlers shooting themselves with guns left around the house by their parents. In the early 2000s, the Bush Administration called it Operation TIPS, a spy-on-your-neighbors scheme aimed at reporting “suspicious” behavior. Now, the Trump administration is encouraging people to report on suspected undocumented immigrants in their neighborhoods. And, workers at various government agencies are being urged to report any activities that they might consider “anti-Christian.”

    What could possibly go wrong with Ameri-snitchers running around their communities?

    Don’t like your neighbor’s dog running through your yard? Call ICE. Don’t want to pay for work an immigrant just performed for you? Call ICE. Co-worker not religious or patriotic enough? Call the government’s anti-Christian bias hotline!

    Calling ICE on Your Neighbors

    In January, Tom Homan, appointed by Trump to oversee deportation efforts, announced plans for a government hotline where individuals can report undocumented immigrants in their communities. Homan stated, “I’m hoping people start calling ICE and reporting because we have millions of people in this country that can be force multipliers for us if they just call us with information.”

    “Experts warn government-inspired informing can devolve into corrupt acts and score-settling,” Forbes’ Stuart Anderson reported. “Businesses are likely to become targets during the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Given the nature of bureaucracies, officials will assign a top priority to generating large numbers of arrests without concern for collateral impacts.”

    Trump’s Anti-Christian Grievance Hotline

    For decades, prominent Religious Right leaders have complained about anti-Christian bias. In early February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.

    Politico’s Robbie Gramer and Nahal Toosi recently reported that “The [State Department] … will work with an administration-wide task force to collect information ‘involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration’ and will collect examples of anti-Christian bias through anonymous employee report forms. … Some State Department officials reacted to the cable with shock and alarm, saying that even if well-intentioned, it is based on the flawed premise that the department harbors anti-Christian bias to begin with, and warning it could create a culture of fear.”

    “The instructions are clear,” Daily Kos’ Alex Samuels recently pointed out. “Give names, dates, and locations of the alleged bias, with a task force set to meet on April 22 to review the ‘evidence.’ The goal? To collect examples of religious discrimination under the Biden administration, because nothing says “freedom of religion” quite like your coworkers quietly documenting your every move for a federal task force.”

    According to the Guardian:

    One example of the ‘bias’ the department wants reported includes ‘mistreatment for opposing displays of flags, banners or other paraphernalia’ – a thinly veiled reference to Pride flags displayed at US embassies under the previous administration. The cable also specifically points to ‘policies related to preferred personal pronouns’ as potentially discriminatory against religious employees.

    George W. Bush’s Operation TIPS

    In early March  2002, professional sidekick Ed McMahon (look up Johnny Carson) introduced Attorney General John Ashcroft to an enthusiastic audience of representatives from more than 300 Neighborhood Watch groups meeting in Washington, D.C. Ashcroft unveiled an expanded mission for the Neighborhood Watch Program, announcing a grant of $1.9 million in federal funds to help the National Sheriffs’ Association double the number of participant groups to 15,000 nationwide.

    According to the government’s web page at citizencorps.gov/watch.html, “Community residents will be provided with information which will enable them to recognize signs of potential terrorist activity, and to know how to report that activity, making these residents a critical element in the detection, prevention, and disruption of terrorism.” Under the supervision of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), “Terrorism prevention” was intended to become the “routine mission” of the Neighborhood Watch Program, the web site pointed out.

    The new thrust of Neighborhood Watch is just part of the Bush Administration’s plan to set up a whole network of citizen snitches. In August, for instance, it will unveil a new Justice Department initiative called Operation TIPS, which stands for Terrorist Information and Prevention System.

    Operation TIPS “will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity,” says the citizencorps.gov web site. Involving one million workers in ten cities during the pilot stage, Operation TIPS will be “a national reporting system…. Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free number is readily available.”

    Encouraging people to skulk around their neighborhoods in search of immigrants, and at government workplaces hunting anti-Christian bias is a totally anti-American undertaking. Trump’s policies could easily lead to abuse and misuse, including racial profiling, false reports and personal vendettas. It could also foster fear and mistrust within communities.

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  • Home Invasions on the Rise: Constitution-Free Policing in Trump’s America

    One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle.
    —James Otis, Revolutionary War activist, on the Writs of Assistance, 1761

    What the Founders rebelled against—armed government agents invading homes without cause—we are now being told to accept in the so-called name of law and order.

    Imagine it: it’s the middle of the night. Your neighborhood is asleep. Suddenly, your front door is splintered by battering rams. Shadowy figures flood your home, screaming orders, pointing guns, threatening violence. You and your children are dragged out into the night—barefoot, in your underwear, in the rain.

    Your home is torn apart, your valuables seized, and your sense of safety demolished.

    But this isn’t a robbery by lawless criminals.

    This is what terror policing looks like in Trump’s America: raids by night, flashbangs at dawn, mistaken identities, and shattered lives.

    On April 24, 2025, in Oklahoma City, 20 heavily armed federal agents from ICE, the FBI, and DHS kicked in the door of a home where a woman and her three daughters—all American citizens—were sleeping. They were forced out of bed at gunpoint and made to wait in the rain while agents ransacked the house, confiscating their belongings.

    It was the wrong house and the wrong family.

    There were no apologies. No compensation. No accountability.

    This is the new face of American policing, and it’s about to get so much worse thanks to President Trump’s latest executive order, which aims to eliminate federal oversight and empower local law enforcement to act with impunity.

    Titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” the executive order announced on April 28, 2025, removes restraints on police power, offers enhanced federal protections for officers accused of misconduct, expands access to military-grade equipment, and nullifies key oversight provisions from prior reform efforts.

    Trump’s supporters have long praised his efforts to deregulate business and government under the slogan of “no handcuffs.” But when that logic is applied to law enforcement, the result isn’t freedom—it’s unchecked power.

    What it really means is no restraints on police power, while the rest of us are left with fewer rights, less recourse, and a constitution increasingly ignored behind the barrel of a gun.

    This isn’t just a political shift. It’s a constitutional unraveling that hands law enforcement a blank check: more weapons, more power, and fewer consequences.

    The result is not safety; it’s state-sanctioned violence.

    It’s a future in which no home is safe, no knock is required, and no officer is ever held accountable.

    That future is already here.

    We’ve entered an era in which federal agents can destroy your home, traumatize your family, and violate the Fourth Amendment with impunity. And the courts have said: that’s just how it works.

    These rulings reflect a growing doctrine of unaccountability enshrined by the courts and now supercharged by the Trump administration.

    Trump wants to give police even more immunity, ushering in a new era of police brutality, lawlessness, and the reckless deployment of lethal force on unarmed civilians.

    This is how the rights of ordinary Americans get trampled under the boots of unchecked power.

    There was a time in America when a person’s home was a sanctuary, protected by the Fourth Amendment from unlawful searches and seizures.

    That promise is dead.

    We have returned to the era of the King’s Writ—blanket search powers once used by British soldiers to invade colonial homes without cause. As James Otis warned in 1761, such writs “annihilate the privilege” of privacy and due process, allowing agents of the state to enter homes “when they please.”

    Trump’s new executive order revives this tyranny in modern form: armored vehicles, night raids, no-knock warrants, federal immunity. It empowers police to act without restraint, and it rewards those who brutalize with impunity.

    Even more alarming, the order sets the stage for future legislation that could effectively codify qualified immunity into federal law, making it nearly impossible for victims of police violence to sue.

    This is how constitutional protections are dismantled—not in one dramatic blow, but in a thousand raids, a thousand broken doors, a thousand courts that look the other way.

    Let’s not pretend we’re safe. Who will protect us from the police when the police have become the law unto themselves?

    The war on the American people is no longer metaphorical.

    Government agents can now kick in your door without warning, shoot your dog, point a gun at your children, and suffer no legal consequences—so long as they claim it was a “reasonable” mistake. They are judge, jury, and executioner.

    With Trump’s new order, the architecture of a police state is no longer theoretical. It is being built in real time. It is being normalized.

    Nowhere is this threat more visible than in the unholy alliance between ICE and militarized police forces, a convergence of two of the most dangerous arms of the modern security state.

    Together, they’ve created a government apparatus that acts first and justifies itself later, if at all. And it runs counter to everything the Bill of Rights was designed to prevent: punishment without trial, surveillance without suspicion, and power without accountability.

    When ICE agents armed with military-grade equipment conduct predawn raids alongside SWAT teams, with little to no accountability, the result is not public safety. It is state terror. And it’s exactly the kind of unchecked power the Constitution was written to prevent.

    The Constitution is intended to serve as a shield, particularly the Fourth Amendment, which safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures. But in this new reality, the government has nullified that shield.

    All of America is fast becoming a Constitution-free zone.

    The Founders were aware of the dangers of unchecked power. That’s why they gave us the Fourth Amendment. But rights are only as strong as the public’s willingness to defend them.

    If we allow the government to turn our homes into war zones—if we continue to reward police for lawless raids, ignore the courts for rubber-stamping abuse, and cheer political leaders who promise “no more handcuffs”—we will lose the last refuge of freedom: the right to be left alone.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the Constitution cannot protect you if the government no longer follows it—and if the courts no longer enforce it.

    The knock may never come again. Just the crash of a door. The sound of boots. And the silence that follows.

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  • Hurricane Helene Survivor Reacts To Trump Administration Aid Response

    On April 25, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein announced that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under the Trump administration had approved a USD 1.4 billion grant for post-Hurricane Helene rebuilding efforts.

    Last year, hurricanes Helene and Milton devastated some of the most impoverished regions of the US, leaving behind billions of dollars in damages and resulting in hundreds of deaths.

    “This is great news for western North Carolina,” said Governor Josh Stein in a statement. “I thank the Trump Administration for moving quickly to approve this plan so we can get busy rebuilding people’s homes.”

    The post Hurricane Helene Survivor Reacts To Trump Administration Aid Response appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Iran Can Save the Tumbling Trump

    The man who behaves as if he is saving the world cannot save himself. He is tumbling fast, but, if he seizes the moment, he can recreate himself and gain an exalted place in history — Trump triumphant, if Iran permits.

    In his first term, Trump left the White House with the country in a state of physical, mental, social, political, and economic shock — a COVID-19 epidemic, economy in shambles, nation divided, an insurrection impeded, and two congressional attempts at having him removed from office. With this enviable record, maybe not all his fault, he asserted he had made the destroyed America “Great again.” Historians disagree.

    The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey surveyed 525 historians and political science scholars. Abraham Lincoln topped the list, with Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Washington, Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson rounding out the top five.

    The results of a poll released on Presidents Day weekend rank Biden as the 14th greatest president in American history, coming in ahead of the likes of Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and Ulysses S. Grant. His predecessor and likely Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, found himself in dead last at 45th on the list.

    Donald Trump rates lowest (10.92), behind James Buchanan (16.71), Andrew Johnson (21.56), Franklin Pierce (24.6), William Henry Harrison (26.01), and Warren Harding (27.76). Barack Obama has risen nine places (from #16 to #7), as has Ulysses S. Grant (from #26 to #17), while Andrew Jackson has fallen 12 places (from #9 to #21) and Calvin Coolidge has dropped 7 spots (from #27 to #34).

    After successor and predecessor Joe Biden managed to end the COVID-19 epidemic and revive the economy, while keeping the country divided, the dead last Trump entered his second term by announcing he is going to make the United States greater. Tariffs, which many prominent economists and Wall Street analysts say will cause a RECESSION, will revive the industrial base. Peace and stability will return to the Slavic nations and to the peoples of the Middle East. The dead last man is quoted as having said, “But it (Ukraine/Russian conflict) is a very easy negotiation to take place. I will have it solved within one day, a peace between them.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio now suggests “the U.S. might soon back away from negotiations altogether without more progress.”

    The most grievous faux pas in Trump’s jumbled policies is his repudiation of The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an agreement promoted by the Obama administration, which limited the Iranian nuclear program in return for sanctions relief and other provisions. The agreement was finalized on 14 July 2015, between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council together with the European Union.

    For 13 years, Iran agreed to eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium, cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%, and reduce by about two-thirds the number of its gas centrifuges.

    For 15 years, Iran agreed to enrich uranium only up to 3.67% and not to build heavy-water facilities.

    For 10 years, uranium enrichment would be limited to a single facility using first-generation centrifuges. Other facilities would be converted to avoid proliferation risks. IAEA would have regular access to all Iranian nuclear facilities to monitor compliance. In return for verifiably abiding by those provisions, Iran would receive relief from U.S., European Union, and United Nations S.C. nuclear-related sanctions.

    To President Donald J. Trump “the Iran Deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States ever entered.” He inaugurated the PROTECTING AMERICA FROM A BAD DEAL, terminating the United States’ participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran and re-imposing sanctions lifted under the deal. Misinformation, exaggerations, and wild predictions steered America from A GREAT DEAL into a BAD FUTURE.

    • President Trump is terminating United States participation in the JCPOA, as it failed to protect America’s national security interests.
    • The JCPOA enriched the Iranian regime and enabled its malign behavior, while at best delaying its ability to pursue nuclear weapons and allowing it to preserve nuclear research and development.
    • The re-imposed sanctions will target critical sectors of Iran’s economy, such as its energy, petrochemical, and financial sectors.
    • United States withdrawal from the JCPOA will pressure the Iranian regime to alter its course of malign activities and ensure that Iranian bad acts are no longer rewarded. As a result, both Iran and its regional proxies will be put on notice. As importantly, this step will help ensure global funds stop flowing towards illicit terrorist and nuclear activities.
    • Intelligence recently released by Israel provides compelling details about Iran’s past secret efforts to develop nuclear weapons, which it lied about for years.
    • The intelligence further demonstrates that the Iranian regime did not come clean about its nuclear weapons activity, and that it entered the JCPOA in bad faith.
    • The JCPOA failed to deal with the threat of Iran’s missile program and did not include a strong enough mechanism for inspections and verification.
    • The JCPOA foolishly gave the Iranian regime a windfall of cash and access to the international financial system for trade and investment.
    • *Instead of using the money from the JCPOA to support the Iranian people at home, the regime has instead funded a military buildup and continues to fund its terrorist proxies, such as Hizballah and Hamas.

    Because of Trump’s decision to leave the JCPOA, everything the JCPOA managed to prevent has been encouraged. The Islamic State has ballistic missiles, drones, anti-ballistic missiles, and uranium stock at 60 percent enrichment, close to having material for a nuclear bomb.

    WASHINGTON, Feb 28 (Reuters) – Iran could make enough fissile for one nuclear bomb in “about 12 days,” a top U.S. Defense Department official said on Tuesday, down from the estimated one year it would have taken while the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was in effect.

    Trump’s efforts have been counterproductive and his fast fall into oblivion might be hastened in the renewed nuclear discussions, except, wait, he can be resurrected. By playing his cards right, not the way he told Ukraine President Zelensky is playing the cards, he can rise faster than a SpaceX starship and vault himself into a page of glorious history ─ Trump can rid the world of the nuclear menace ─ Iran can help Trump to achieve nuclear disarmament. Unlikely, but doable.

    The only reason for Iran having a nuclear weapons program is to neutralize Israel’s nuclear armaments. The Ayatollahs will definitely halt their program if assured Israel surrenders its weapons, that is, if Israel has deliverable weapons to surrender. This is a fair trade and one that Trump, who covets a Nobel Prize, might entertain. Think of it, and he will ─ Donald J. Trump, 45th and 47th presidents of the United States was responsible for halting nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and for eventually reducing the nuclear threat throughout the world. Much to deliberate, much to cajole, much to administrate, and much to admire. What is the alternative — much to bomb, much to kill, much to destroy, and much for history to scorn.

    Israel will not approve, and will kick, squirm, and threaten. Without the United States support and an entire world from Tierra del Fuego to Siberia allied with the proposition, Israel will receive an offer it cannot refuse. The bitter man will smile again. His hateful disposition hid the real Trump, the man who wants to be loved by all.

    The post Iran Can Save the Tumbling Trump first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Is Trump Closer to Walking Away from Ukraine?

    It appears that what many of us predicted about Ukraine may be coming to pass. Last Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared on the CBS program Face the Nation. In response to a question about Ukraine from Margaret Brennan, Lavrov said,“Trump is probably the only leader on earth to address the root causes that got us into this war and wants to rectify it.” Further, he said, “The President of the United States, and rightly so, believes that we are moving in the right direction.” He added that some matters need to be “fine tuned.”

    On Friday, Trump’s trusted envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Moscow for talks with Putin. Does this mean that the endgame is in sight, that Trump will finally extricate the US from Ukraine? We know that in a single day, Trump can voice indisputable truths, including that if Zelensky continues on his present path “he could lose his entire country.” And when asked what concessions Russia has made, Trump replied that “Russia isn’t taking the entire country.” However, we also know that only hours later Trump might prattle on and prevaricate about negotiations while evading the truth that the US and the collective West have already lost the war. It’s axiomatic that losers in a war do not dictate the peace terms so it’s telling that here we have a case where the delusional losers, with the exception of Trump, are still trying to prolong the war. In the US, opponents of a peace settlement include the MIC, neocons, Democrats, Lindsey Graham Republicans and members of his own team like Kellogg and Rubio.

    In any event, a reality-based analysis suggests that there is no deal to be had for Trump, no final settlement is within reach. Geopolitical analyst Larry Johnson is correct in asserting that, “Trump is playing a game of strip poker but he’s butt ass naked with no more cards to play.” The longer he dithers in exiting, the more likely he’ll be seen as a bluffing buffoon, all hat and no cowboy. Given this reality, sooner rather than later, Trump will walk away and simply say, “We made our best offer so now we’re getting out.” I suspect that Putin will understand this is about Trump saving face.

    What will happen when Trump pulls the plug on the Ukraine Project? The vaunted “Coalition of Willing,” which once numbered 27, is now down to 3: Britain, France and Germany. I once thought that Macron was semi-serious about putting French “peacekeeper” boots on the ground in Ukraine but the absence of a US security guarantee renders that avenue inoperable. Further, this would be a bridge too far for the public to tolerate and the massive protests it would ignite would be political suicide for Macron.

    The outcome for Ukraine is obvious: It will be decided on the battlefield where the Russian army is much stronger than it was in 2021. By all accounts, Russia is breaking through Ukrainian defenses across the board. On Saturday, Russian commander, Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov said that Russian forces had taken the last village that Ukrainian troops had held in Kursk. Gerasimov also said that 76,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed or wounded in the Kursk region. When the mud season ends in a few weeks, we can expect a major Russian assault and the absorption of more territory.

    For Ukraine, the war is unsustainable. How long the Kiev regime lasts is impossible to predict but six to eight months is a plausible guess. The fanatical ultra-nationalist elements (Neo-Nazis/Azov/Bandera Battalion elements) will fight a rear guard action with support from Europe but eventual collapse is inevitable. Subsequently, I would expect Russia to control events in Ukraine, commencing with denazification. The country will never be allowed to pose a military threat to Russia.

    The hubris of those provoking and continuing to cheer on this proxy war is diabolical and they did and do so in full knowledge that Russia would see it as an existential threat. In addition to all the horrific consequences that have preceded it, they are now responsible for the wholly preventable deaths to follow, the majority of which will be ever younger Ukrainian soldiers.

    European leaders who warned that the Russians would advance to the English Channel will continue shouting “Russia, Russia, Russia!” British political analyst Alexander Mercouris is certainly correct in suggesting that “European unity is now built entirely around hostility toward Putin, toward Russia,” even if that means sacrificing Ukraine. Thus we can expect Europe to press forward with rearmament at the expense of a working class that’s already experiencing increasing immiseration.

    Here in the United States, all the usual suspects, including some on the putative left, will vilify Trump for “cutting and running” on Ukraine. Sadly, I believe that we’re a long way from the point that our heavily propagandized fellow citizens grasp how they’ve been had, lied to about Ukraine by the ruling class and their servile mass media outlets. The next deception on the horizon is the “China threat” and the need to challenge and confront this dangerous duplicity could not be more urgent.

    The post Is Trump Closer to Walking Away from Ukraine? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • ICE Contracts Avelo Airlines to Fly Deportees

    Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

    Avelo Airlines has entered into a controversial agreement with US immigration authorities to operate deportation flights, sparking protests from coast to coast. Activists, legal organizations, and local communities are mobilizing against the carrier’s role in deportations. The controversy reflects a broader reckoning with the US’s long and bipartisan history of immigration enforcement.

    Ultra-low budget airline flies gamblers, Hillary Clinton, and now deportees

    Avelo Airlines started off flying gamblers in 1989 as Casino Express. Rebranded in 2005 as Xtra Airlines, it provided air transport for the Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign among other ventures. Current CEO and former United Airlines CFO Andrew Levy acquired the carrier in 2021, renamed it Avelo, and expanded from charter flights to low-cost commercial operations.

    Following its California launch on a Burbank-Santa Rosa route, Avelo developed a hub at Tweed New Haven Airport in Connecticut. Avelo continued to expand destinations, most notably with its recent agreement to make federal deportation flights from Arizona starting in May. The “long-term charter” arrangement for the budget airline headquartered in Houston, TX, is with the US Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration Control and Enforcement Agency (ICE).

    Chilling realities of ICE deportation flights

    Research by the advocacy group Witness at the Border tracks ICE flights. Costly military deportation flights have largely been discontinued, leaving the dirty work to charter carriers such as Avelo.

    An exposé by ProPublica revealed appalling conditions on ICE deportation flights by a similar charter carrier, GlobalX. The report states: “Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.

    Leaving aside the issue of human decency, the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) “90-second” rule for accomplishing a full evacuation from an aircraft is impossible to achieve with passengers in chains.

    Private security guards and an ICE officer accompany these ICE Air flights and are the only ones allowed to interact with the deportees, including even talking to them. But only the professional flight attendants, who are FAA certified, are trained in how to evacuate passengers in an emergency.

    So if a plane crashes on the runway, ProPublica cautions, the rules are for the flight attendants to leave the aircraft for safety and abandon the shackled prisoners. Unfortunately, this grim scenario is not hypothetical.

    Snoopy’s airport

    On April 26, protesters lined the entrance to what locals affectionately call Snoopy’s airport. The Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport, named after the late cartoonist who lived in Sonoma County, is an Avelo Airlines hub. The Democratic Party-aligned Indivisible called the “profiting from pain” protest at the California wine country airport against Avelo’s plan to carry out deportation flights.

    One protester flew an upside-down US flag, a signal of “dire distress in instances of extreme danger,” according to the US Flag Code. A sign proclaimed: “planes to El Salvador are just like trains to Auschwitz – a prison without due process is a concentration camp.”

    “Boycott Avelo,” was the message on one young woman’s sign that implored, “travel should bring families together, not tear them apart.”

    An Immigrant Legal Resource Center activist passed out wallet-sized “red cards” at the demonstration. She reported that nearly a thousand northern Californians have taken their training in recent weeks to defend their friends and neighbors who, regardless of immigration status, have certain rights and protections under the US Constitution.

    At the grassroots level, communities are organizing and resisting. The North Bay Rapid Response Network hotline for reporting immigration enforcement activities dispatches trained legal observers and provides legal defense and support to affected individuals and families. Other resources include VIDAS, Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, Legal Aid of Sonoma County, and Sonoma Immigrant Services.

    Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, New Haven Airport, CT, April 17. (Photo by Henry Lowendorf)

    New Haven no-fly zone

    Blowback against the nativist anti-immigrant wind was also evident across the continent in New Haven, CT. This Avelo Airlines hub city along with the state capital, Hartford, are both designated sanctuary cities. The state of Connecticut itself has also enacted measures limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

    These politics reflect the demographics of urban Connecticut, which are now largely Latino and African American. Non-Hispanic whites, using Census Bureau terminology, are an urban minority.

    According to local organizer Henry Lowendorf with the US Peace Council, the vast majority in New Haven are “adamantly opposed to the airline massively violating human rights with no judicial process and dumping people in a concentration camp in El Salvador.”

    Over 200 protested Avelo Airlines on April 17 for the second Tuesday in a row, responding to a call by Unidad Latina en Acción, the Semilla Collective, and others. Led by immigrant rights activists, speakers included local and state officials. Even US Senator Richard Blumenthal spoke out against Trump’s immigration outrages.

    Avelo currently benefits from a Connecticut state exemption from fuel taxes, which subsidizes its hub operations in New Haven. The pressure is on for Avelo to either cancel the deportations or pay the fuel levy.

    The state Attorney General William Tong demanded that Avelo confirm that they will not operate deportation flights from Connecticut. But the airline has refused the AG’s request to make public their secret contract with the Homeland Security.

    The continuity of US deportation policy

    Aside from the heated rhetoric, the New York Times reports “deportations haven’t surged under Trump” although he has taken “new and unusual measures.” These have included deporting people to third countries far from their origins and invoking the eighteenth century wartime Alien Enemies Act.

    The NYT concludes that deportations “fall short” from being the threatened mass exodus and, in fact, “look largely similar” to what was accomplished by Joe Biden. Despite all the drama and an initial surge of arrests, the pace of deportations under Trump has been slower than under Biden.

    Barack Obama still retains the title of “deporter in chief” with 3.2 million individuals expelled. And Joe Biden still holds the recordfor the most expulsions by a US president in a single year if migrant removals under the Title 42 Covid-era public health provision are included (technically “expulsions” but not “deportations”).

    Going forward, however, we can rest assured that Trump will try to beat those records. Lost in the mainstream discourse on the migrant controversy is the reality that US policy, such as sanctions, are a major factor driving migration to the US. This takes place in the context of the largest immigration surge into the US ever, eclipsing the “great immigration boom” of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

    Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

    Protests expand to other Avelo cities

    A petition is circulating with some 35,000 signatures to-date demanding cessation of the Avelo deportation flights. According to the petition, a leaked memo discloses that Avelo’s decision to enter the deportation business was financially motivated to offset other losses.

    Boycott Avelo protests have expanded to other destinations served by the airline, including Rochester NY, Burbank CA, Daytona Beach FL, Eugene OR, and Wilmington DE. The campaign against Avelo is growing – locally, regionally, and nationally.

    As the sign at the boycott Avelo protest in Santa Rosa reminds us: “immigration makes America great!”


    The author at the Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26.

    The post ICE Contracts Avelo Airlines to Fly Deportees first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Will Trump Keep Flouting Constitution and Courts?

    When President Donald Trump declared at mid-month he had no power to return an innocent man —Kilmar Abrego Garcia—that his staff mistakenly dispatched to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), one of the arguments used was non-interference in a foreign country’s affairs. The other was that once someone has crossed the border, U.S. courts “cannot grant relief.”

    The Supreme Court’s  unanimous ruling April 10, however, supported a lower court’s order that the Trump regime must facilitate Garcia’s “release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”  And to report “the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” Part of that ruling, added by three justices , was providing Garcia with the U.S. Constitution’s due-process right to determine his innocence by trial. They dismissed Trump’s legal team’s two arguments as “plainly wrong.”

    Added to the mix was El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, visiting Trump, who chimed in to state he didn’t “have the power to return him to the United States.” A preposterous claim for a dictator.

    Such Trump-type arguments also fly in the face of presidential precedents set in American history, beginning with George Washington  in dealing with the Barbary pirates in the 1790s off the North African coast. They would capture merchant ships carrying American goods and imprison the crews unless “tributes” were paid by the young U.S. government.  Washington had learned his lesson. So early in his second term, he sent a three-man diplomatic delegation to negotiate tribute amounts to Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli to successfully free 83 American sailors. Such bribery certainly was presidential interference in foreign-country affairs. In different ways, it still is.

    How does that differ in principle from U.S. interference in foreign countries and Trump paying a $6 million tribute  to Bukele to imprison 238 men , mostly Venezuelans , all denied due process about gang membership? He plans to send more, even U.S. citizens .

    A legal reprise of the Garcia case reveals why he never should have been among those—also denied due process—thus, illegally flown to El Salvador imprisonment.

    Kilmar Abrego Garcia was never a gang member in his native El Salvador or the U.S. In sworn testimony and documentary evidence given to a Maryland federal court, he and his family were constantly targeted for extortion by a Barrio-18 gang in El Salvador because of their successful food business in Los Nogales. When its leaders tried to recruit Kilmer’s older brother, the family sent him to relatives in Maryland and to eventual U.S. citizenship. When the gang then demanded their 16-year-old Kilmar or they would harm the entire family. They paid up—but sent him to the Maryland family to seek asylum from that gang.

    Garcia was never in trouble in either country. He began working in construction with an eye to eventually joining the sheet-metal industry as a journeyman and joining its union. He was 24 when he decided to change jobs and in 2019 went to Home Depot seeking one. So did three suspects of MS-13 membership. The county police swooped in and collared all four, but in fairness never included Garcia in the arrest records.

    Meantime, Garcia married a citizen with two children and a third on the way. His wife sued the government about the false arrest. The judge did heavy interrogation about criminal conditions in Nogales as justification for Garcia’s fears for his life from Barrio-18 retaliation. Strong evidence convinced the judge to bar his removal to El Salvador “due to a credible fear of persecution.”

    The lawsuit triggered ICE’s attention, however. Its agents seized and detained Garcia for weeks to deport him through the “removal” procedure, but were stymied by the previous judge’s protection ruling. By that time, he applied for asylum and did the annual check-ins with immigration officials.

    Interestingly in the Garcia case, for all the remarks about non-interference in El Salvador’s affairs, in April 2017 when Trump  was just inaugurated as president, he wangled the release from Egypt’s dictator president Abduel-Fattah el-Sissi’s of an Egyptian-born woman who became an American. She did three years of “confinement” on bogus charges of child abuse at her charity agency before finally being acquitted. Trump seemingly taking credit for her release, grandly chartered a U.S plane to Cairo to bring her home. A year later he was triumphant about winning release of three Americans  from North Korea.

    Yet it was sour grapes from him in December 2022 when President Joe Biden wrested  national women’s basketball star Brittney Griner  in a prisoner exchange from a nine-year sentence in Russia for carrying a cannabis compound into the country. Or in August 2024 when Biden succeeded in getting three Americans—one was a Wall Street Journal reporter—released from Russia in another prisoner exchange.

    Trump insinuated on his social media that cash  had been exchanged by Biden and added: “Our ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us!”

    In other words, Trump was certainly well aware that foreign interventions for prisoners is nothing new to American presidents using either cash or President Teddy Roosevelt ‘s foreign policy of “speak softly, but carry a big stick,”

    The Supreme Court’s  April 7 unanimous ruling that the Trump’s administration had to get Garcia’s release from El Salvador has been awakening the public about the laws protecting us individually and the three separate powers of Constitutional government. That Congress, not presidents, make the laws. The Supreme Court determines their constitutionality, and the president must “faithfully” carry out its orders.

    In its handling of this case, the high court ruled that Trump’s administration must:  “comply with its obligation to provide Abrego Garcia with due process of law, including notice and an opportunity to be heard, in any future proceedings. It must also comply with its obligations under the Convention Against Torture.” The court mainly agreed with a previous U.S. District court ruling that the government must “facilitate” Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador. That judge had ordered Trump’s legal team to report daily about their progress.

    The only news about Garcia, has been from the U.S. embassy  in El Salvador which on April 12 reported: “…Garcia is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center….He is alive and secure in that facility.”

    Now, unlike Washington’s Day, the 1997 federal Leahy Law  forbids using taxpayer revenue for “assistance to foreign security forces that have credible allegations of human rights such as torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, or rape.” A State Department report of 2023 cited El Salvador prisons’ for guards’ regular beatings of inmates and electric shock treatments, and other abuses.

    Upon learning Trump’s people had done nothing about Garcia by April 15, that district judge ordered four of his officials “to provide documentation and answer questions under oath about what steps they had done to comply” with her previous order by April 28. Penalty for non-compliance would be a contempt of court ruling and fines or imprisonment. A Trump pardon would add yet another charge in impeachment proceedings and this time an ouster by a Senate trial.

    Ignoring the rulings supporting Garcia’s Constitutional due-process rights and the power of the courts’ branch of government, Trump’s plan is more of the same—for all American citizens who also would be denied those rights. After all, he urged Bukele to build five more mega-prisons  (capacity: 40,000 ) to house them. He obviously expects American taxpayers to foot the bills for construction, staff salaries, and maintenance.

    Moreover, his counterterrorism adviser  just announced that supporters of Garcia were aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists” and, thus, committing a federal crime?

    That, of course, would include Supreme Court members, the judges involved in the Garcia opinions, his Maryland Senator, several House members —and eventually all who support Constitutional rights such as due-process trials in this country.

    Since then, yet another instance of wrongful seizure for the El Salvador prison has come to light about a 20-year-old Venezuelan brought into the U.S. as a child. A Maryland federal judge’s opinion  on this asylum lawsuit was that it violated “a legally binding, court-approved settlement last year of a lawsuit against the summary deportation of migrants who arrive as children.”

    On Inauguration day, Trump swore to obey the oath of office —“and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Unless a new Amendment is passed to limit due process to U.S. citizens or to delete it, that right is included for all residents of this country illegal or not. But his towering rage  at due-process appeared in late April both on his social media page and the next day in a White House press conference. It furnishes prime evidence for another impeachment—and this time a Senate trial for his ouster. Or, as in the case of former president Nixon facing that fate, key Republicans march to the Oval Office and successfully demand Trump resign.

    Said he on record about the 21 million illegals he intends to deport:

    “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take…200 years.” His false assumption is, of course, that in future all those kidnapped and dispatched to his five taxpayer-funded El Salvador prisons—including his political enemies—are “violent criminals and terrorists.”

    Fortunately, the 4th District Appeals court just agreed unanimously to quash an emergency appeal by his administration against the contempt of court rulings for not returning the kidnapped and given due-process rights. The longtime (1983) Reagan-appointed judge, Harvie Wilkinson III, wrote the court’s ringing opinion about Trump’s snatching Garcia without those due-process rights. It also sets precedent to protect those Trump regards as “home-grown” enemies:

    “It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

    The post Will Trump Keep Flouting Constitution and Courts? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • How to Avoid Trade Wars – and World War Three

    Not a day goes by without a new shock to Americans and our neighbors around the world from the Trump administration. On April 22, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) downgraded its forecasts for global growth in 2025, from 3.3% to 2.8%, and warned that no country will feel the pain more than the United States. Trump’s policies are expected to drag U.S. growth down from 2.7% to 1.8%.

    It’s now clear to the whole world that China is the main target of Trump’s trade wars. The U.S. has slapped massive tariffs—up to 245%—on Chinese goods. China hit back with 125% tariffs of its own and refuses even to negotiate until U.S. tariffs are lifted.

    Ever since President Obama announced a U.S. “pivot to Asia” in 2011, both U.S. political parties have seen China as the main global competitor, or even as a target for U.S. military force. China is now encircled by a staggering 100,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan, South Korea and Guam (plus 73,000 in Hawaii and 415,000 on the U.S. West coast) and enough nuclear and conventional weapons to completely destroy China, and the rest of us along with it.

    To put the trade war between the U.S. and China in context, we need to take a step back and look at their relative economic strength and international trading relations with other countries. There are two ways to measure a country’s economy: nominal GDP (based only on currency exchange rates) and “purchasing power parity” (PPP), which adjusts for the real cost of goods and services. PPP is now the preferred method for economists at the IMF and OECD.

    Measured by PPP, China overtook the U.S. as the largest economy in the world in 2016. Today, its economy is 33% larger than America’s—$40.7 trillion compared to $30.5 trillion.

    And China isn’t alone. The U.S. is just 14.7% of the world economy, while China is 19.7%. The EU makes up another 14.1%, while India, Russia, Brazil, Japan, and the rest of the world account for the other 51.5%. The world is now multipolar, whether Washington likes it or not.

    So when Malaysia’s trade minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz was asked whether he’d side with China or the U.S., his answer was clear: “We can’t choose—and we won’t.” Trump would like to adopt President Bush’s “You’re either with us or with the terrorists” posture, but that makes no sense when China and the U.S. together account for only 34% of the global economy.

    China saw this coming. As a result of Trump’s trade war with China during his first term in office, it turned to new markets across Asia, Africa, and Latin America through its Belt and Road Initiative. Southeast Asia is now China’s biggest export market. It no longer depends on American soybeans—it grows more of its own and buys most of the rest from Brazil, cutting the U.S. share of that market by half.

    Meanwhile, many Americans cling to the idea that military power makes up for shrinking economic clout. Yes, the U.S. outspends the next ten militaries combined—but it hasn’t won a major war since 1945. From Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the U.S. has spent trillions, killed millions, and suffered humiliating defeats.

    Today in Ukraine, Russia is grinding down U.S.-backed forces in a brutal war of attrition, producing more shells than the U.S. and its allies can at a fraction of our cost. The U.S.’s bloated, for-profit arms industry can’t keep up, and our trillion dollar military budget is crowding out new investments in education, healthcare and civilian infrastructure on which our economic future depends.

    None of this should be a surprise. Historian Paul Kennedy saw it coming in his 1987 classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Every dominant empire, from Spain to Britain to Russia, eventually confronted relative decline as the tides of economic history moved on and it had to find a new place in a world it no longer dominated. Military overextension and overspending always accelerated the fall.

    “It has been a common dilemma facing previous ‘number one’ countries that even as their relative economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes out productive investment…,” Kennedy wrote.

    He found that no society remains permanently ahead of all others, but that the loss of empire is not the end of the road for former great powers, who can often find new, prosperous positions in a world they no longer dominate. Even the total destruction suffered by Germany and Japan in the Second World War, which ended their imperial ambitions, was also a new beginning, as they turned their considerable skills and resources from weapons development to peaceful civilian production, and soon produced the best cars and consumer electronics in the world.

    Paul Kennedy reminded Americans that the decline in U.S. leadership “is relative not absolute, and is therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust sensibly to the newer world order…”

    And that is exactly how our leaders have failed us. Instead of judiciously adapting to America’s relative decline and carving out a new place for the United States in the emerging multipolar world, they doubled down—on wars, on threats, on the fantasy of endless dominance. Under the influence of the neocons, Democrats and Republicans alike have marched America into one disaster after another, in a vain effort to defy the economic tides by which all great powers rise and fall.

    Since 1987, against all the historical evidence, seven U.S. presidents, Democrats and Republicans, have blindly subscribed to the simplistic notion peddled by the neocons that the United States can halt or reverse the tides of economic history by the threat and use of military force.

    Trump and his team are no exception. They know the old policies have failed. They know radically different policies are needed. Yet they keep playing from the same broken record—economic coercion, threats, wars, proxy wars, and now genocide—violating international law and exhausting the goodwill of our friends and neighbors around the world.

    The stakes couldn’t be higher. It took the two most deadly and destructive wars in human history to put an end to the British Empire and the age of European colonialism.

    In a nuclear-armed world, another great-power war wouldn’t just be catastrophic—it would very likely be final. If the U.S. keeps trying to bully its way back to the top, we could all lose everything.

    The future instead demands a peaceful transition to international cooperation in a multipolar world. This is not a question of politics, right or left, or of being pro- or anti-American. It’s about whether humanity has any future at all.

    The post How to Avoid Trade Wars – and World War Three first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Fuels Organized Crime In Latin America With Illegal Weapons

    The Trump administration’s designation of drug cartels as “terrorists” has opened the door to direct military intervention in Latin America. However, behind this security narrative lies an uncomfortable reality: most of the weapons that fuel organized crime violence come from the United States.

    The US government, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, issued an Executive Order designating Mexican and regional drug cartels as “terrorists”. With this, the White House and the Pentagon build the framework of justification for self-enabling drone and missile warfare attacks on the sovereign territories of Latin America.

    The post US Fuels Organized Crime In Latin America With Illegal Weapons appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • United?

    Will the ascendancy of factionalism and authoritarian rule in America be its final undoing?

    “The United States of America!”

    Doesn’t saying it just make your heart leap for joy?

    I start hearing the national anthem play in my head, see the rockets red glare bursting in air, the American flag waving majestically over the capital skyline.

    But I started wondering the other day: What exactly does the ‘united’ stand for?

    I know, originally and technically it refers to the unity of the individual states. But it has taken on the more expansive meaning for us individual citizens. It suggests that we are united as a people, as a society, as a national identity.

    Which prompts us to ask: What exactly during these contentious, deeply divisive, tragically troubled times does it mean?

    ‘United’ would seem to imply Unity. Agreement. Fellowship. Consensus. Harmony.

    Does that sound like contemporary America to you?

    Here are some big questions:

    Are we united by a sense of national purpose?

    Are we united by a belief in our destiny and place in history?

    Are we united by confidence in our superiority?

    Are we united in our belief in American exceptionalism?

    Are we united in our desire for empire?

    Are we united by a love for our fellow Americans?

    Are we united by our patriotism and sense of duty?

    Or are we united by our indifference?

    Are we united by our faith in the American Dream?

    Or are we united by our pessimism?

    Our cynicism?

    How about some systemic issues:

    Are we united in our faith in capitalism?

    Are we united in the trust of our government?

    Are we united in our belief in American democracy?

    Are we united by a trust in God?

    A system of shared values?

    An ethos?

    Are we united by our sense of self-determination?

    Or are we united by our sense of helplessness?

    Our vulnerability and fatalism?

    Our surrender?

    How about some very specific issues:

    Are we united in our love of guns?

    Are we united by our freedom of speech?

    Are we united by our disdain for socialism?

    Are we united by the War on Terror?

    Are we united by our hatred of Muslims?

    Are we united in our hatred for Russia? China?

    Then there’s the purely psychological component:

    Are we united by love?

    Or are we united by hate?

    Are we united by courage?

    Bravado?

    Self-respect?

    Or are we united by fear?

    Are we united by our optimism?

    Or are we united by our despair?

    Our desperation?

    Our doubt?

    Here I believe is a really important question: Where does the rugged individualism which we see as the hallmark of a true American fit in?

    How can we be united if we each have our own priorities and agenda?

    Maybe we’re not united at all.

    Maybe it’s all an illusion.

    Maybe the United States of America is more like United Airlines, or United Van Lines. Catchy name but it doesn’t really allude to any real or even imagined unity.

    And speaking of huge corporations, maybe we are united as customers, shareholders and employees of the vast corporations which seem to run everything these days. We are the biologic modules of a sprawling corporate Gaia, united in our service to interlocking clusters of entrepreneurial entities.

    Less abstract and more the stuff of day-to-day living:

    Are we united by the automobile?

    Are we united by television?

    Are we united by smartphones?

    Are we united by the internet?

    Holiday sales?

    Shopping?

    Football?

    Which makes me wonder: Maybe we’re just a bunch of lonely people who need to feel like we belong to something.

    Or maybe not.

    The post United? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Rachel.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Trump Meets Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni

    Donald Trump’s mental quirks recall a character in the novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa ─ an eccentric scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho writes serials that become more bizarre and parallel his descent into madness. From early press conferences until today, the U.S. president has exhibited increased megalomania, increased recitation of falsehoods, and more snarling revenge at anyone who contradicts him. His appearances are reality television, imaginative narrations that only he believes are real.

    The press conference after his meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni revealed the extent of his descent into a chaotic state ─ he hardly knew she was there.

    Usually, the press conference that occurs after a meeting between two “heads of state” concentrates on the results of the discussion between the two executives. The U.S. president may field most of the questions, but a healthy, alert, and empathetic executive makes certain that the foreign minster is also addressed and is given equal time to reply to questions. Not with Trump; he continually answered questions, while Giorgia Meloni sat quietly aside until an Italian correspondent asked a question of the Italian Prime Minister. Trump unashamedly lied and insulted people in Ms. Meloni’s presence; displaying characteristics that shock foreign dignitaries and embarrass the American people.

    A question on price rises from a CNN reporter stirred Trump into his act. After berating the reporter with an abusive remark, “if you were truthful, which you are not,” Mr. Veracity casually stated, “I learned that gasoline hit $1.98 in some states.” Knowing that the lowest charge in my area is about $3.30/gallon, I hastened to ask Gemini to tell me the state with the lowest gas price. Answer: Mississippi at $2.53/gallon and national average at $3.34/gallon. Mr. Veracity continued with his audacious remarks, careless statements, and mathematical ignorance.

    “When I came into office they hit me with the price of eggs. Fake news like you, you’re fake. Eggs had gone up 87 percent and we did an unbelievable job and eggs are now down 92 percent.” Medium sized eggs had a price tag of $5-$6/dozen, which by Trump’s figures would now be about 40 cents to 55 cents for a dozen, a price from 50 years ago.

    “Tariffs are making us rich, losing trillions and now we are making money, taking in billions of dollars. I took in more than 700 billions of dollars from China.” The economic whiz still does not know that the importer pays the tariff and always increases the price and passes the duty charge on to the consumer. (Note: In rare cases, over a long time, tariffs may increase the value of the currency and indirectly lower the price the importer pays for the merchandise. In this case the importer might not raise the price. This rarity has not happened.) Nobody asked how he (personally) “took in more than 700 billions of dollars from China,” when the total income from tariffs was only $80B in 2019 and not all were duties on goods from China.

    Trump’s obsession with Joe Biden grows and grows. “We’re getting criminals out of this country who Biden allowed to enter. Hundreds of thousands of criminals and murders, drug dealers. Opened jails all over the world and they came here. Biden did that.” The disturbing fixation on Biden continued.

    “When Biden came in, oil went through the roof. That is what caused the problem. If Biden were in power, oil would be 7 or 8 dollars/gallon.“ Not only does former U.S. President, Joe Biden, have the keys to the jails in Latin America, he controls OPEC and determines the price of oil. Seems Trump’s mental gymnastics confused the price of oil with the price of gasoline.

    All Biden’s administration was good at was “stealing elections.” No need to be concerned, now, “We have a real president who understands what it is all about. I had the strongest economy by far.”

    In Donald Trump’s world, the meager GDP growth during his term in office represented the best U.S. economy of all time. COVID-19 in the year 2020 reduced the average GDP, but the other years did not show spectacular growth.

    Bill Clinton 1993–2001 4.0%
    George W. Bush 2001–2009 2.4%
    Barack Obama 2009–2017 2.3%
    Donald Trump 2017–2021 2.3% (2.46% in 2017, 2.97% in 2018 2.47% in 2019)
    Joe Biden 2021–2025 3.2%

    Driven by animosity and never by charity, the “liar-in-chief” ridiculed federal laws, created an unnecessary upheaval in the financial community, undermined an agency that gains credibility by having a neutral appearance, and insulted an independent agency’s leader who was not there to defend himself.

    In response to a question regarding Federal Reserve actions, Trump replied:

    I don’t think he (Federal Reserve Chairperson Jerome Hayden “Jay” Powell) is doing the job, too late, always too late…. If I ask Powell to leave, he’ll be out of there, real fast….Only things gone up are interest rates because they are playing politics; Federal Reserve are not smart people.

    “Didn’t you nominate him,” asked a press member. “I can’t complain because we had the greatest economy,” the wise man answered.

    Trump later retracted his remark of having the capability of firing Powell, who, by a previous Supreme Court decision ─ the 1935 Humphrey’s Executor decision from the Supreme Court, finding the president cannot fire leaders of independent federal agencies over policy disagreements ─ challenged Trump’s statement. He could not retract the obvious attempt to force an independent agency to behave as if dependent upon him and to have the public lose faith in the agency that regulates the money supply and has its name on all currency.

    After disposing of the people that most annoy him, Trump turned to the nation that most annoys him ─ Iran ─ with his biggest whopper, deciphered by anyone who can read. “I terminated the Iran deal and you can see they haven’t been able to do anything.” Yes, it is true, Iran has not been able to do “anything”; they have been able to do “everything.”

    Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, claiming “it failed to curtail Iran’s missile program and regional influence.” Formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 agreement reached between Iran and the major world powers prevented the Islamic State from developing the centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Imposing restrictions on its nuclear activities and allowing international inspections of the nuclear facilities froze Iran’s nuclear activities for ten years

    The treaty would have expired in 2025 and been either renegotiated or Iran could re-start its nuclear activities. After JCPOA was scrapped, Iran developed a massive number of ballistic missiles, increased its regional influence, allied with Russia and China, and enriched trace amounts of uranium to nearly weapons-grade levels. Iran has done everything that Trump claimed he would prevent. In the year 2025, they were not starting from scratch but, due to Donald Trump, were nearly finished having atomic weapons. Added benefits ─ Iran is able to negotiate with increased leverage and does not have to give up anything ─ let the powers bomb the facilities and suffer a little destruction in the process.

    The serial mendacities, self-aggrandizements, character assassinations, and petty resentments, where Trump elevates himself by judging and demeaning others, type him as slightly deranged. His relation to the eccentric scriptwriter in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel made its complete appearance, with Pedro Camacho Trump showing he had gone berserk by vilifying an admired and deceased president. The real life Pedro Camacho Trump recited the most sickening, psychopathic, and unhinged statement ever uttered in normal society: “Carter died a happy man, know why, because he was not the worst president, Joe Biden was.”

    The men in white would have done the nation a favor by hauling the soon-to-be ex-president away to his preferred rest home ─ Mar-a-Lago. Hm, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wore white for the occasion.

    The post Trump Meets Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Trump’s Mass Deportation Operation Escalates With Workplace Raids

    On Monday, April 21, US Customs and Border Protection raided Vermont’s largest dairy farm, detaining eight immigrant workers in the largest immigration raid in the state’s recent history. The next day, ten workers at a Home Depot in Pomona, California were arrested by immigration authorities.

    Workers across the country are bracing for the possibility that many of their coworkers may fall victim to sudden kidnappings by federal agents in the name of carrying out Trump’s agenda of mass deportations. In a country where undocumented workers perform many of the most essential functions in the nation’s economy, escalating immigration raids could have enormous ripple effects.

    The post Trump’s Mass Deportation Operation Escalates With Workplace Raids appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • How a President Becomes a Dictator

    130 executive orders in under 100 days.

    Sweeping powers claimed in the name of “security” and “efficiency.”

    One president acting as lawmaker, enforcer, and judge.

    No debate. No oversight. No limits.

    This is how the Constitution dies—not with a coup, but with a pen.

    The Unitary Executive Theory is no longer a theory—it’s the architecture of a dictatorship in motion.

    Where past presidents have used executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements to circumvent Congress or sidestep the rule of law, President Trump is using executive orders to advance his “unitary executive theory” of governance, which is a thinly disguised excuse for a government by fiat.

    In other words, these executive orders are the mechanism by which we finally arrive at a full-blown dictatorship.

    America’s founders established a system of checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power in any single branch. To this end, the Constitution establishes three separate but equal branches of government: the legislative branch, which makes the law; the executive branch, which enforces the law; and the judicial branch, which interprets the law.

    And yet, despite this carefully balanced structure, we now find ourselves in a place the founders warned against.

    Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat, the president has no unilateral authority to operate outside the Constitution’s system of checks and balances—no matter how urgent the crisis or how well-meaning the intentions.

    This is what government by fiat looks like.

    Where Congress was once the nation’s lawmaking body, its role is now being eclipsed by a deluge of executive directives—each one issued without public debate, legislative compromise, or judicial review.

    These executive orders aren’t mere administrative housekeeping. They represent a radical shift in how power is exercised in America, bypassing democratic institutions in favor of unilateral command. From trade and immigration to surveillance, speech regulation, and policing, the president is claiming broad powers that traditionally reside with the legislative and judicial branches.

    Some orders invoke national security to disrupt global markets. Others attempt to override congressional control over tariffs, fast-track weapons exports, or alter long-standing public protections through regulatory rollbacks. A few go even further—flirting with ideological loyalty tests for citizenship, chilling dissent through financial coercion, and expanding surveillance in ways that undermine due process and privacy.

    Yet here’s where these actions run into constitutional peril: they redefine executive authority in ways that bypass the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution. They centralize decision-making in the White House, sideline the legislative process, and reduce the judiciary to an afterthought—if not an outright obstacle.

    Each of these directives, taken individually, might seem technocratic or temporary. But taken together, they reveal the architecture of a parallel legal order—one in which the president acts as lawmaker, enforcer, and judge. That is not how a constitutional republic operates. That is how a dictatorship begins.

    Each of these orders marks another breach in the constitutional levee, eroding the rule of law and centralizing unchecked authority in the executive.

    This is not merely policy by another name—it is the construction of a parallel legal order, where the president acts as lawmaker, enforcer, and judge—the very state of tyranny our founders sought to prevent.

    This legal theory—the so-called Unitary Executive—is not new. But under this administration, it has metastasized into something far more dangerous: a doctrine of presidential infallibility.

    What began as a constitutional interpretation that the president controls the executive branch has morphed into an ideological justification for unchecked power.

    Under this theory, all executive agencies, decisions, and even enforcement priorities bend entirely to the will of the president—obliterating the idea of an independent bureaucracy or impartial governance.

    The result? An imperial presidency cloaked in legalism.

    Historically, every creeping dictatorship has followed this pattern: first, undermine the legislative process; then, centralize enforcement powers; finally, subjugate the judiciary or render it irrelevant. America is following that roadmap, one executive order at a time.

    Even Supreme Court justices and legal scholars who once defended broad executive authority are beginning to voice concern.

    Yet the real danger of the Unitary Executive Theory is not simply that it concentrates power in the hands of the president—it’s that it does so by ignoring the rest of the Constitution.

    Respect for the Constitution means obeying it even when it’s inconvenient to do so.

    We’re watching the collapse of constitutional constraints not through tanks in the streets, but through policy memos drafted in the West Wing.

    No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes. Even the most principled policies can be twisted to serve illegitimate ends once power and profit enter the equation.

    The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

    We are approaching critical mass.

    The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it doesn’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen.

    What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

    In effect, you will disappear.

    Our freedoms are already being made to disappear.

    This is how tyranny arrives: not with a constitutional amendment, but with a series of executive orders; not with a military coup, but with a legal memo; not with martial law, but with bureaucratic obedience and public indifference.

    A government that rules by fiat, outside of constitutional checks and balances, is not a republic. It is a dictatorship in everything but name.

    If freedom is to survive this constitutional crisis, We the People must reclaim our role as the ultimate check on government power.

    That means holding every branch of government accountable to the rule of law. It means demanding that Congress do its job—not merely as a rubber stamp or partisan enabler, but as a coequal branch with the courage to rein in executive abuses.

    It means insisting that the courts serve justice, not politics.

    And it means refusing to normalize rule by decree, no matter who sits in the Oval Office.

    There is no freedom without limits on power.

    There is no Constitution if it can be ignored by those who swear to uphold it.

    The presidency was never meant to be a throne. The Constitution was never meant to be optional. And the people were never meant to be silent.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the time to speak out is now.

    As our revolutionary forefathers learned the hard way, once freedom is lost, it is rarely regained without a fight.

     

    The post How a President Becomes a Dictator first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • China Condemns US For Imposing Tariffs On Haiti Amid Worsening Crisis

    “While claiming to support the Haitian people, [the United States] has significantly cut foreign aid and continued to deport Haitian immigrants under the pretext of national priorities, just when Haiti urgently needs support,” Geng Shuang, China’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations (UN), said on Monday, April 21, at the Security Council.

    “What is even more shocking is that … they also recently extended their so-called 10% basic tariff to Haiti, one of the least developed countries in the world,” the Chinese ambassador continued.

    Geng said China is deeply concerned about the “worsening crisis in Haiti and the rampant gang violence, the near collapse of the state and the desperate situation of the people.”

    The post China Condemns US For Imposing Tariffs On Haiti Amid Worsening Crisis appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Ending the US Dollar’s Exorbitant Privilege

    Has the love, or even more so the fixation, gone with the US dollar, that all cushioning reserve currency that has shown itself unimpeachable for decades?  A curious event teasing and ruffling currency watchers and financiers is becoming a pattern: the US dollar is being sold off, suggesting it has lost its princely shine.  To this can also be added the sale of US Treasuries.

    Even before the global imposition of Donald Trump’s tariff-driven bonanza and his public bruising of Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, the world’s dominant currency was already being moved on.  Since 2014, the Chinese and Russian central banks have tried to move out of US Treasury holdings, preferring the magic of gold.  In 2022, the latter went so far as to link its currency, the ruble, to gold.

    For all that, something far more dramatic would be needed to upset the status of the dollar, and certainly the authority of its “exorbitant privilege”, to use that apt term coined in the 1960s by the then French Minister of Finance, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.  Only “serious economic and financial mismanagement by the United States”, proposed economics professor Barry Eichengreen in 2010, “could precipitate flight from the dollar.”

    In the autumn leading to the 2024 presidential election, there was little to suggest any such flight.  The dollar had markedly appreciated, boosted by the statistical astrology of US economic growth.  This continued after Trump’s victory in November.  The promise of a vigorous tariff policy, one potentially inflationary, also charmed investors keen to make greater returns from their dollars, assuming a raise of interest rates by the Federal Reserve.

    The tariff policy well and truly arrived on “Liberation Day” (April 2), proving to be erratic, arbitrarily derived and often economically illiterate in application.  The precipitated fall of the greenback shocked the currency pundits.  “For several years, the market’s been buying this US growth story, the US stock market’s been outperforming other stock markets, and suddenly you had economists thinking tariffs would push the US into recession,” remarks Jane Foley, head of foreign exchange (FX) strategy at Rabobank.  Additionally, the tariff regime has encouraged countries with current account surpluses denoted in US assets to consider returning them back to domestic markets, something that will further weaken the dollar.

    Trump has also lost patience with Powell, petulantly ventilating on Truth Social that the Federal Reserve chair impose pre-emptive cuts to interest rates, given the White House’s own assessment that the US faces no inflation.  There would be, declared Trump in a post, a “SLOWING of the economy unless Mr. Too Late, a major loser, lowers interest rates, NOW.”  While Europe continued to lower its rates, Powell had proved himself slow on the draw, “except when it came to the Election period when he lowered in order to help Sleepy Joe Biden, later Kamala, get elected.”

    In the angry mist, the President floated the possibility that the central banker might be removed.  His “termination” could not “come fast enough.”  He also charged his advisors to distribute poisoned packages of speculation as to what he intended to do with the recalcitrant Powell.  White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett obliged, telling reporters that, “The President and his team will continue to study that matter [of removing Powell].”

    Then, in true seesaw fashion, the President claimed the opposite of what he meant, a move that also sent the market into another galloping spree.  “I have no intention of firing him,” Trump told reporters on April 22. “I would like to see him be a little more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates.”

    In the tumult of it all, investors are scouring other havens, shunning the status quo and traditional sensibility of the dollar.  The Japanese yen and Swiss franc are returning to favour.  As is the euro.  While an economist’s word should never be taken as gospel, chief currency analyst at ForexLive, Adam Button offers his view: “The market wants to invest in the fastest growing places, and the US administration is showing that it is not trying to maximize growth, or they have a different idea about how to get there.  And I think that’s rattled the market.”

    Curious events are unfolding as a result of Trump’s carnivalesque approach to trade and markets.  While the value of the greenback has fallen, the returns from 10-year US government bonds have risen.  This is the sort of thing common in new, emerging markets, where capital is susceptible to flight amidst conditions of volatility. In the US, this is the fifth time it has happened in three decades.  Even with the rise in bond yields, the dollar’s slide has not been arrested.

    For the easily panicked, a particular safe haven – and one already identified by central bankers and investors – is gold.  With US government debt no longer attractive for traders, the yellow metal has outperformed most major assets with its giddying rise.  Having passed $US3,500-an-ounce on April 22, the favouring of gold is merely one aspect of a market narrative that has turned the Trump Tariff Wall into the Selling of America.

    Crystal ball gazing is a mug’s game in economics, but countries wishing to see the defanging of dollar diplomacy and greenback bullying long used by Washington to maintain power will see flashes of opportunity.  The dollar’s privilege may no longer be exorbitant.

    The post Ending the US Dollar’s Exorbitant Privilege first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Behind Trump’s Wishful Thinking On ‘Reindustrialization’

    In the 1950s, when Japan and much of Europe was in ruins, the U.S. accounted for 50% of the world’s global production. By the 1960s, this was 35%, declining to 25% by the 1980s. By 2025, the U.S. share of global production had fallen to 12% as production grew elsewhere. (itif.org, Feb. 18)

    The capitalist class in the U.S. has grown frantic about this reversal. Its focus is on China, and it blames China for its spectacular level of modern industrial development. In advanced technology manufacturing the future is clear: China holds 45% of the global share to 11% for the U.S. Higher levels of production need a high-tech infrastructure to move what is produced to global markets. 

    The post Behind Trump’s Wishful Thinking On ‘Reindustrialization’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • For a Veterans March on Washington

    In May 1932, jobless WWI veterans organized a group called the a march on Washington. 43,000 demonstrators including 17,000 veterans their families, and affiliated groups gathered to demand to demand compensation from the Federal Government for their sacrifices in World War 1. That march and it’s suppression by the military was a key factor in the overturning of a deeply reactionary Republican Administration and the onset of the New Deal.

    In this same month of May 2025, plans are being made in Washington for a military parade by Donald Trump for his birthday on June 14, honoring himself. All this is occurring in the face of his planned cut of 72,000 employees in the Veterans Administration to improve “efficiency” on an agency with an already existing reputation for taking forever to process disability claims that are vital to the health of our veterans.

    This is also occurring at a time when over 30,000 US war veterans are homeless and when nearly 26% of active-duty service members are considered food insecure, and about 15% rely on food stamps or food banks to help support their families.

    It’s well past time that the United States government to put less care about it’s patrons at Lockheed Martin and more care into their soldiers and veterans. It’s time to build for a new Veterans March on Washington on June 14 to counter this military parade honoring this aspiring dictator, and this is the best way to defeat him.

    This is not just a moral question alone but a tactical one as well. The crux of Trump or any would-be dictator in history succeeding is based on the support of their rank and file soldiers and these are the same troops that are being grossly underpaid, exploited and expendable in the pursuit of the reckless dreams of our “fearless leader”.

    Trump has openly declared that he intends to use military force against political dissent in this nation and the question of whether these same exploited soldiers are ready to pull the trigger is pivotal as to whether he succeeds or fails. They will have to choose on whether or not to stand down and uphold the US Constitution. The stark choice will be to to either resist or to follow the path of least resistance.

    All of our efforts against Trump cannot and will not succeed unless and until we put the issues facing our troops and veterans front and center and June 14 is the day to do it.

    The post For a Veterans March on Washington first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gabe Ignetti.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Close the US Military Bases in Asia

    President Donald Trump is again loudly complaining that the US military bases in Asia are too costly for the US to bear.  As part of the new round of tariff negotiations with Japan and Korea, Trump is calling on Japan and Korea to pay for stationing the US troops.  Here’s a much better idea: close the bases and return the US servicemen to the US.

    Trump implies that the US is providing a great service to Japan and Korea by stationing 50,000 troops in Japan and nearly 30,000 in Korea.  Yet these countries do not need the US to defend themselves.  They are wealthy and can certainly provide their own defense.  Far more importantly, diplomacy can ensure the peace in northeast Asia far more effectively and far less expensively than US troops.

    The US acts as if Japan needs to be defended against China.  Let’s have a look.  During the past 1,000 years, during which time China was the region’s dominant power for all but the last 150 years, how many times did China attempt to invade Japan?  If you answered zero, you are correct.  China did not attempt to invade Japan on a single occasion.

    You might quibble.  What about the two attempts in 1274 and 1281, roughly 750 years ago? It’s true that when the Mongols temporarily ruled China between 1271 and 1368, the Mongols twice sent expeditionary fleets to invade Japan, and both times were defeated by a combination of typhoons (known in Japanese lore as the Kamikaze winds) and by Japanese coastal defenses.

    Japan, on the other hand, made several attempts to attack or conquer China.  In 1592, the arrogant and erratic Japanese military leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched an invasion of Korea with the goal of conquering Ming China.  He did not get far, dying in 1598 without even having subdued Korea.  In 1894-5, Japan invaded and defeated China in the Sino-Japanese war, taking Taiwan as a Japanese colony.  In 1931, Japan invaded northeast China (Manchuria) and created the Japanese colony of Manchukuo.  In 1937,  Japan invaded China, starting World War II in the Pacific region.

    Nobody thinks that Japan is going to invade China today, and there is no rhyme, reason, or historical precedent to believe that China is going to invade Japan.  Japan has no need for the US military bases to protect itself from China.

    The same is true of China and Korea.  During the past 1,000 years, China never invaded Korea, except on one occasion: when the US threatened China.  China entered the war in late 1950 on the side of North Korea to fight the US troops advancing northward towards the Chinese border.  At the time, US General Douglas MacArthur recklessly recommended attacking China with atomic bombs.  MacArthur also proposed to support Chinese nationalist forces, then based in Taiwan, to invade the Chinese mainland. President Harry Truman, thank God, rejected MacArthur’s recommendations.

    South Korea needs deterrence against North Korea, to be sure, but that would be achieved far more effectively and credibly through a regional security system including China, Japan, Russia, North Korea, South Korea, than through the presence of the US, which has repeatedly stoked North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and military build-up, not diminished it.

    In fact, the US military bases in East Asia are really for the US projection of power, not for the defense of Japan or Korea.  This is even more reason why they should be removed.  Though the US claims that its bases in East Asia are defensive, they are understandably viewed by China and North Korea as a direct threat – for example, by creating the possibility of a decapitation strike, and by dangerously lowering the response times for China and North Korea to a US provocation or some kind of misunderstanding.  Russia vociferously opposed NATO in Ukraine for the same justifiable reasons.  NATO has frequently intervened in US-backed regime-change operations and has placed missile systems dangerously close to Russia.

    Indeed, just as Russia feared, NATO has actively participated in the Ukraine War, providing armaments, strategy, intelligence, and even programming and tracking for missile strikes deep inside of Russia.

    Note that Trump is currently obsessed with two small port facilities in Panama owned by a Hong Kong company, claiming that China is threatening US security (!), and wants the facilities sold to an American buyer.  The US on the other hand surrounds China not with two tiny port facilities but with major US military bases in Japan, South Korea, Guam, the Philippines, and the Indian Ocean near to China’s international sea lanes.

    The best strategy for the superpowers is to stay out of each other’s lanes.  China and Russia should not open military bases in the Western Hemisphere, to put it mildly.  The last time that was tried, when the Soviet Union placed nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, the world nearly ended in nuclear annihilation.  (See Martin Sherwin’s remarkable book, Gambling with Armageddon for the shocking details on how close the world came to nuclear Armageddon).  Neither China nor Russia shows the slightest inclination to do so today, despite all of the provocations of facing US bases in their own neighborhoods.

    Trump is looking for ways to save money – an excellent idea given that the US federal budget is hemorrhaging $2 trillion dollars a year, more than 6% of US GDP.  Closing the US overseas military bases would be an excellent place to start.

    Trump even seemed to point that way at the start of his second term, but the Congressional Republicans have called for increases, not decreases, in military spending.  Yet with America’s 750 or so overseas military bases in around 80 countries, it’s high time to close these bases, pocket the saving, and return to diplomacy.  Getting the host countries to pay for something that doesn’t help them or the US is a huge drain of time, diplomacy, and resources, both for the US and the host countries.

    The US should make a basic deal with China, Russia, and other powers.  “You keep your military bases out of our neighborhood, and we’ll keep our military bases out of yours.” Basic reciprocity among the major powers would save trillions of dollars of military outlays over the coming decade and, more importantly, would push the Doomsday Clock back from 89 seconds to nuclear Armageddon.

    • First published at Other News.
    The post Close the US Military Bases in Asia first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jeffrey Sachs.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Forever Wars May be over, but Trump is No Peacemaker

    The new guard of kleptocrats are seeking quick deals on Gaza and Ukraine, not because they want peace but because they’ve found a better way to make themselves even richer.

    Anyone trying to make sense of the Trump administration’s policy towards Gaza should have a thumping headache by now.

    Initially, US President Donald Trump called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the tiny territory wrecked by Israel over the past year and a half, so that he could build the “Riviera of the Middle East” on the crushed bodies of Gaza’s children.

    He followed up last week with an explicitly genocidal threat addressed to “the people of Gaza” – all two million-plus of them. They would be “DEAD” if the Israeli hostages held by Hamas were not quickly released – a decision over which Gaza’s population has precisely no control.

    To make this extermination threat more credible, his administration has expedited the transfer of an extra $4bn worth of US weapons to Israel, bypassing Congressional approval.

    Those arms include more of the 2,000lb bombs sent by the Biden administration, which turned Gaza into a “demolition site“, as Trump himself called it.

    The White House also nodded through Israel’s reimposition of a blockade that has once again choked off food, water and fuel to the enclave – further evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent.

    But while all this was going on, Trump also dispatched to the region a special envoy, Adam Boehler, to negotiate the release of the few dozen Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.

    He was given permission to break with more than 30 years of US foreign policy and meet directly with Hamas, long designated a terrorist organisation by Washington.

    ‘Pretty nice guys’

    The meeting reportedly took place without Israel’s knowledge.

    One Israeli official observed: “You can’t announce that this organisation [Hamas] needs to be eliminated and destroyed, and give Israel full backing to do it, and at the same time conduct secret and intimate contacts with the group.”

    In an interview with CNN at the weekend, Boehler remarked of Hamas: “They don’t have horns growing out of their head. They’re actually guys like us. They’re pretty nice guys.”

    Then, in another unprecedented move, Boehler gave interviews to Israeli TV channels to speak directly to the Israeli public – apparently to prevent Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from misrepresenting the content of his talks with Hamas.

    In one interview, Boehler said Hamas had proposed a five to 10-year truce with Israel. During that period, Hamas would be expected to “lay down its arms” and forgo political power in Gaza. He the proposal as “not a bad first offer”.

    In another, he referred to Palestinian prisoners as “hostages”.

    His approach left Israel quietly seething but unable to say much for fear of antagonising Trump.

    ‘No agent of Israel’

    In parallel, Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff – who reportedly laid down the law early on to Netanyahu by ordering him to attend a meeting on the Sabbath – headed to Doha this week to try to restore a ceasefire deal he had previously negotiated.

    He appears determined to push Israel into honouring the second phase of that agreement, which requires the Israeli army to withdraw from Gaza and halt its war on the enclave. That would pave the way for a third phase, in which Gaza is reconstructed.

    Witkoff’s terms, according to reports, are that Hamas agrees to demilitarise and its fighters leave the enclave.

    Israel is deeply opposed to a second phase. It wants to stick with phase one, in which it finishes swapping the remaining Israeli captives held by Hamas for some of the many thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli torture camps.

    The idea is that, once completed, Israel will be free to restart the slaughter.

    Boehler reinforced Witkoff’s message, saying the White House hoped to “jump-start” talks and that the US was not “an agent of Israel” – implicitly acknowledging that, for many decades, it has very much looked like one.

    Trump indicated a change of heart himself on Wednesday, telling reporters at the White House: “Nobody will expel the Palestinians.”

    Sword of retribution

    Apparently confounding Boehler’s claim that the US is able to make its own decisions about the Middle East, Trump was reported on Thursday to have removed him from dealing with the hostages issue following Israeli objections.

    Meanwhile, Trump noisily shredded First Amendment protections on political speech, specifically in relation to Israel.

    He signed an executive order empowering US authorities to arrest and deport visa holders protesting Israel’s year-and-a-half-long slaughter in Gaza – or what the world’s highest court is investigating as a “plausible” genocide.

    That quickly resulted in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last spring’s student protests at New York’s Columbia University – one of the most high-profile of dozens of protracted demonstrations on US campuses last year, which were often met with police violence.

    The Department of Homeland Security accused Khalil of “activities” – namely, campus protests – supposedly “aligned to Hamas”. These demonstrations, it alleged, threatened “US national security”.

     

    “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump wrote on social media, declaring that his administration would be coming after anyone “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”. Axios reported last week that Secretary of State Marco Rubio planned to use AI to search through foreign students’ social media accounts for signs of “terrorist” sympathies.

    These developments formalise Washington’s working assumption that any opposition to Israel’s killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children should be equated with terrorism – a view increasingly shared, it seems, by UK and European authorities.

    In concert, the White House announced that it was cancelling some $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University over its “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”.

    Confusingly, the university administration was among the most hardline in calling in police to crush the protests against the genocide. But the financial cuts had the intended effect, with Columbia announcing on Thursday it would inflict stringent punishments, including expulsions and degree revocations, on students and graduates who had taken part in a campus sit-in last year.

    Some 60 other institutions have reportedly received letters warning that they are in danger of funding cuts if they do not “protect Jewish students” – a reference to those who cheerlead Israel’s war crimes.

    That will come at a heavy price for other students, including many Jewish students, who have been exercising their constitutional right to criticise Israel’s crimes.

    A sword of retribution now hangs over every single publicly funded centre of higher learning in the US: crush any sign of opposition to Israel’s destruction of Gaza, or face dire financial consequences.

    ‘Baffling rhetoric’

    Does any of this amount to a clear strategy? Does it make any sense?

    These mixed messages fit a pattern with the Trump administration. Its wider strategy is, as Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied territories, calls it: psychological overwhelming.

    “Hitting us every day with XXL [extra-extra large] doses of baffling rhetoric and erratic policies serves to ‘control the script’, distracting and disorienting us, normalising the absurd, all while disrupting global stability (and consolidating US control).”

    The White House is doing something similar over Ukraine.

    It is now talking directly to Russia, shutting the door on Nato membership for Ukraine, publicly humiliating Ukraine’s president, while also threatening more sanctions and tariffs on Moscow unless it agrees to a rapid ceasefire.

    The Trump administration’s goal is to normalise its inconsistencies, hypocrisies, lies and misdirections so they become entirely unremarkable.

    Opposition to its will – a will that can change from day to day, or week to week – will be treated as treasonous. The only safe response in such circumstances is acquiescence, passivity and silence.

    In the tumultuous political landscape Trump has created, the one constant – our North Star – is the western media’s uncritical cheerleading of the West’s war industries.

    Consider the Biden administration. The media’s harshest condemnation came not over the destruction Washington wrought on Afghanistan during its 20-year occupation, but for ending the war – a war that had left the country in ruins and the official enemy, the Taliban, stronger than ever.

    Contrast that with the media’s resolutely muted response to Biden’s 15 months of arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In doing so, the media eagerly cast aside their supposed humanitarian concerns, including their ritualistic nods to the post-Second World War global order and international law.

    Similarly, the media have been openly critical of Trump’s overtures to Russia over Ukraine, siding with European leaders who insist the war must continue to the bitter end – regardless of how much higher the death toll of Ukrainians and Russians climbs as a result.

    And predictably, the media have gone out of their way to accommodate Trump’s Israel-supporting, openly genocidal rhetoric and actions towards Gaza.

    It was astonishing to watch outlets that regularly portray Trump as a threat to democracy contort themselves to whitewash his explicit call to exterminate “the people of Gaza” should the hostages not be immediately released. Instead, they mendaciously suggested he was referring only to Hamas leadership.

    It is not just Trump and his team who are well practised in the dark arts of deception.

    Illegitimacy trap

    While the Trump administration may be playing fast and loose with Washington’s political culture, it is largely adhering to the West’s traditional script on Israel and Palestine.

    Witkoff and Boehler are deploying a well-worn strategy, binding the Palestinians into what could be called an illegitimacy trap. Damned if you do; damned if you don’t.

    Whatever Palestinians choose – and however much they are dispossessed and brutalised – it is they, and anyone who supports them, who are cast as the villains. The criminals. The oppressors. The Jew-haters. The terrorists.

    This applies not only to Hamas but also to the accommodationists of Fatah.

    Faced with relentless dispossession through decades of Israeli colonisation, Palestinian factions have responded in the two main ways available to them.

    One is to adopt the course enshrined in international law as the right of all occupied peoples: armed resistance. This is the path Hamas has taken as it governs the concentration camp that is Gaza.

    Every US administration, including the current one, however, has conditioned any talks about statehood on Palestinians renouncing armed resistance from the outset, dismissing their right in international law as terrorism.

    For that reason, until now, Hamas has always been excluded from negotiations. The talks that have taken place – over its head – have operated on the assumption that Hamas must be disarmed before Israel is expected to make any concessions.

    Hamas must relinquish its weapons voluntarily – against an opponent armed to the teeth, whose bad faith in negotiations is legendary – or it will be forcibly disarmed by Israel or its rival, Fatah.

    In other words, peace with Israel is premised on civil war for Palestinians.

    That appears to be the course the Trump administration will pursue. For now, it is demanding that Hamas “demilitarise” voluntarily. When that fails, Hamas will find itself back at square one.

    Endless accommodation

    Faced with Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza, Hamas has precisely no incentive to disarm.

    In fact, it has a further disincentive. Its rivals in Fatah are all too visibly caught in their own, even more fatal, illegitimacy trap.

    Mahmoud Abbas’s faction, which heads the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, has chosen the alternative to armed resistance: diplomacy and endless political accommodation.

    The problem is that Israel has never shown the slightest interest in granting the Palestinians – even Fatah’s “moderates” – a state.

    Even during the so-called apex of peacemaking – the Oslo Accords of the 1990s – Palestinian statehood was never mentioned.

    Oslo was simply a nebulous process in which Israel was supposed to gradually withdraw from the occupied territories as Palestinian leaders took responsibility for maintaining “security” – meaning, in practice, Israel’s security.

    In short, the Oslo concept of “peace” was little different from the catastrophic status quo in Gaza before the genocide began.

    During its so-called disengagement in 2005, Israel pulled its soldiers back to a fortified cordon, and from there controlled all movement and trade in and out of the enclave.

    In the vacated space, Israel allowed only a glorified local authority, running the schools, emptying the bins and acting as a security contractor for Israel against those not ready to accept this as their permanent fate.

    Hamas refused to play ball.

    Abbas’s PA, on the other hand, accepted this kind of model for its series of cantons across the West Bank – on the assumption that obedience would eventually pay dividends.

    It hasn’t. Now Israel is gearing up to formally annex most of the West Bank, backed by the Trump administration. Behind the scenes, the White House is finagling support from the Gulf states.

    Fatah cannot extricate itself any more than Hamas from the illegitimacy trap set for it by Washington and Europe.

    Clinging to the old order

    Paradoxically, critics in Washington – backed by the media and European elites – dismiss Trump’s moves on Ukraine as appeasement of a supposedly resurgent Russian imperialism, rather than as peacemaking.

    These same critics are equally discomfited by the Trump administration’s meetings with Hamas.

    All of this breaks with the decades-old Washington consensus, which dictates who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, who are the law enforcers and who are the terrorists.

    In typical fashion, Trump is disrupting these former certainties.

    The reassuring, knee-jerk response is to take one side or another. Either Trump is a mould-breaker, remaking a dysfunctional world order. Or he is a fascist-in-the-making, who will hasten the collapse of the established world order, bringing it crashing down on our heads.

    The truth is he is both.

    There is a consistency to Trump’s approach to both Ukraine and Gaza – despite the apparent contradiction. In both he appears determined to bring to an end a failing status quo. In the former, he wants an end to war and destruction by forcing Ukraine’s surrender; in the latter, he wants the running sore of a Palestinian concentration camp gone by forcibly emptying it of its inhabitants.

    This new consistency replaces an older one, in which Washington’s elite perpetuated forever wars against painted devils that justified the siphoning of national wealth into the coffers of the war industries on which that elite’s wealth depended.

    The pretexts for those forever wars had become so threadbare, and so destabilising in a world of ever-depleting resources, that the elites behind those wars were utterly discredited.

    The far-right, most especially Trump, is riding that wave of disillusionment. And its success stems precisely from this rule-breaking, by presenting itself as a new broom sweeping away the old guard of corporate war-makers.

    As the Bidens, Starmers, Macrons, and Von der Leyens sink deeper into the mire, the more desperately they cling to a crumbling system. Trump’s disruption works against them.

    Feathering their nests

    But the new guard is no more invested in peace than the old, as Gaza makes clear. It is simply looking for new ways to do business – new deals that still siphon national wealth away from ordinary people and into the pockets of billionaires.

    Trump would rather strike lucrative deals with Russia’s Vladimir Putin over resources – in both Russia and Ukraine – than sink more money into a futile war that locks up the region’s vast potential profits.

    And he would rather put an end to Gaza’s decades-long status as a no-go zone, a holding centre for Palestinians, when it could instead be transformed into a playground for the rich, its vast offshore gas reserves finally exploited.

    The new guard of kleptocrats is less interested in forever wars – not because they have any love for peace, but because they believe they’ve found a better way to make themselves even richer.

    This newfound openness to “doing things differently” has an appeal, especially after decades of the same cynical elites waging the same cynical wars.

    But make no mistake: the fundamentals remain unchanged. The rich are still looking out for themselves. They are still feathering their own nests, not yours. They still see the world as their plaything, where lesser humans – you and me – are expendable.

    If he can, Trump will end the war in Ukraine by cutting a money-making deal, over Kyiv’s head, with Russia.

    If he can, Trump will end the slaughter in Gaza by striking a deal with Israel and the Gulf states, over the heads of Hamas and Fatah, to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland.

    And if he can get away with it, Trump is ready for something else, too. He’s prepared to break heads at home to ensure his critics can’t stop him and his billionaire pals from getting their way.

    The post The Forever Wars May be over, but Trump is No Peacemaker first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Those Chinese Peasants

    Some would posit, “If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything.”

    US president Donald Trump is not beholden to that epithet and neither is his vice-president JD “I don’t like China” Vance.

    Previously, in January 2018, Trump was criticized for referring to Haiti and African countries as “shithole countries.”

    On 8 April 2025, Trump took pleasure in describing countries purportedly cowering at the prospect of US tariffs being levied on them:

    These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are, they are dying to make a deal. Please, please sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything sir.

    The same lack of respectful discourse is followed by Vance. At a meeting in the White House on 28 February 2025, Volodomyr Zelenskyy found himself attacked on two sides. However unsavoury a character Zelenskyy is, and however improper his remarks might have been when he was at the White House, he was a guest. And the attack, in particular by Vance, on a guest was unbecoming.

    In March, Vance complained about Chinese oligarchs. Now it is Chinese peasants:

    We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.

    Decidedly, it was a boorish comment from the vice-president. China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian was not impressed:

    It is surprising and sad to hear such ignorant and impolite words from this vice president.

    Is Vance merely revealing his ignorance as well as rudeness? Is there any truth to the depiction Vance proffers on China?

    Today’s Chinese “peasants”

    China has eliminated extreme poverty. The US Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) and official poverty data report 5.3% of Americans (around 17.5 million people) as living in “deep poverty” (with incomes below 50% of the federal poverty line) (source: Census.gov – Poverty Tables [Table B-1, B-2]).

    An end to extreme poverty posits an end to homelessness. In the US, homelessness is rising in recent years. Ecofact.org reports:

    There were 771,480 people recorded as homeless in 2024 — or about 23 per 10,000 people. This represented an increase of over 18% relative to the numbers recorded in 2023. The data show that  36 percent of the homeless were unsheltered — that is, they lived in places not considered fit for human habitation …

    Chinese peasants live in the world’s largest economy expressed as GDP (PPP). Chinese peasants put up a space station on their own. Cars produced by Chinese peasants are dominating the world market. And Chinese peasants have developed (Chinese tech is stolen according to Vance) flying cars for the markets, when the markets are ready. These peasants are great at innovating and manufacturing: Comac C919 narrow-body airliner, Long March rockets, 30-satellite Beidou positioning system, molten salt thorium reactors, HarmonyOS, 5.5G, 3nm chips, robotics, AI, hypersonic weapons, etc, etc.

    And pertinently for peasants, China’s agricultural sector is undergoing significant transformation through technological innovation, while in the US, farmers are worried about China’s retaliatory tariffs.

    Many Americans, if presented the choice, might well opt for Chinese peasant status.

    The post Those Chinese Peasants first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump Massacres Yemenis so Israel can Massacre Palestinians

    On April 17, US airstrikes on Yemen killed 74 people and injured 171 in a dangerous escalation of US President Donald Trump’s war against the poorest country in the Middle East. A resident of the area around Yemen’s Ras Issa fuel port told Chinese media that “among the victims were employees, truck drivers, contracted workers, and civilian trainees of the port,” and “rescue teams recovering bodies and extinguishing fires were also targeted in [US] subsequent strikes.”

    Trump’s attack targeted Ras Issa a vital lifeline connecting the isolated, bombarded country to outside supply shipments. For its part, the US administration claimed that the bombing intended to prevent Iranian fuel from reaching “the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists” in order to “deprive them of illegal revenue that has funded Houthi efforts to terrorize the entire region for over 10 years.”

    While it is US policy to delegitimize Ansar Allah (also known as “the Houthis”) as “Iran-backed terrorists,” in fact, 80 percent of Yemenis live under the Sanaa-based Supreme Political Council led by Ansar Allah, making them Yemen’s de facto government. They have a huge degree of public support, as evidenced by the regular protests of tens of even hundreds of thousands of Yemenis opposing US aggression and supporting Ansar Allah’s armed support for Palestinian liberation.

    Ansar Allah survived eight years of Saudi-led attacks on Yemen, a war of aggression (backed militarily and diplomatically by governments of the US, Canada, and Europe) that levelled civilian infrastructure and killed almost 400,000 Yemenis. Trump’s bombings will not destroy the vilified “Houthi rebels,” but that is not their goal. What Washington wants is to force Yemen to withdraw its armed support for Palestinians resisting Israel’s genocide.

    After Israel launched its onslaught against Gaza in October 2023, Yemen imposed a blockade on Red Sea shipping to Israel. As Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza reached genocidal proportions, Yemen launched drone and missile attacks against Israeli targets. From the beginning, Ansar Allah was very forthright: they stated that the attacks on Red Sea ships and Israeli targets would stop once Israel ceased its genocidal assault on Gaza. During the Gaza ceasefire of January 19 to March 18, 2025, Ansar Allah did cease its military actions in the Red Sea (even as Israel violated the ceasefire 962 times), clearly demonstrating the connection between Israel’s genocide and Yemeni military activity.

    US efforts to paint the Yemenis as puppets of Iran, mindless terrorists, and maritime pirates are part of a concerted effort by Washington to obfuscate the just, defensive, and humanitarian motivations behind Ansar Allah’s actions. The recent phase of US attacks on Yemen began in January 2024 under former president Joe Biden, and these bombings received logistical support from, among other countries, Canada and the United Kingdom. After coming to office, Trump intensified the US war on Yemen. Since March, his attacks have killed more than 50 Yemenis, not counting the recent bombardment of civilians at the Ras Issa port. Reportedly, his administration is mulling a ground invasion of Yemen.

    One must always keep in mind why America is upping its attacks on the Yemeni people. It is because Yemen is trying to prevent Israel, an outpost of US power in the Middle East, from carrying out a genocide. That’s it. International and humanitarian law mean nothing to Washington. US efforts to paint Ansar Allah as illegitimate, criminal, or aggressors are transparent attempts to rhetorically discredit a regional resistance movement in order to make the massacre of Yemenis palatable to Western audiences.

    In the US empire’s eyes, the reason Yemenis need to be massacred is obvious: they are opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Trump is massacring Yemenis so that Israel can continue massacring Palestinians. It really is that simple.

    The post Trump Massacres Yemenis so Israel can Massacre Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Close Military Bases, Not Embassies

    The Trump clowns are planning to close U.S. embassies in Africa.

    Good riddance, right?

    Wrong.

    They still plan to work on “coordinated counterterrorism operations” and “strategic extraction and trade of critical natural resources.”

    They also still plan to maintain U.S. military bases across the continent. They’re shutting down all kinds of offices, but not Africom.

    In U.S. culture and media, where it’s one’s duty to pretend that the military budget and everything that goes with it does not exist, one could hardly be blamed for thinking that the closure of embassies actually meant a full departure.

    And one could hardly be blamed for thinking this a positive development. Those embassies have steadily been transformed over the decades into weapons dealerships, military sidekicks, and dens of spies. (The CIA may yet point out to Trump how many embassy employees are CIA and make him an offer he can’t refuse.) It’s hard sometimes to imagine other functions. In fact, in U.S. culture, withdrawing the U.S. military from a place is usually called “isolationism” as if militarism were the only way to interact with people. But that’s the one thing that’s not ending in Africa or anywhere else.

    The U.S. government is cutting off all sorts of aid, but not what it calls “military aid” or “defense aid” — meaning the U.S. military giving money and training to other countries’ militaries (never mind all the trainees who do coups). Go here, pick a year, and click on “Department of Defense.”

    Most of Africa has been loaded up with U.S.-made weapons, and there’s been no indication of a halt to that (despite the planned closure of the dealerships). Go here and scroll back through the years.

    The blue countries below are the ones without U.S. troops:

    The red countries below have had U.S. wars or military interventions over the past 80 years:

    The red countries below are under illegal U.S. sanctions:

    Maintaining the militarism but dropping even the pretense of anything else is not progress.

    Ways to relate to people other than through mass slaughter include cooperation on environment, healthcare, migration, and international law; and actual aid. Such approaches can be perverted into “soft power” and used for ulterior purposes. Eliminating them is asking for trouble, for hostility, for misunderstanding, for incapacity to handle any conflict through anything other than bombs and missiles. As everywhere else on Earth, the people of Africa have no widespread interest in competing with Donald Trump’s greedy business interests, but do have an interest in peace.

  • First published at World BEYOND War.
    • The post Close Military Bases, Not Embassies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.