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Category: United States

  • 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.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 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.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • 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.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 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.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 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.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 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.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • 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.

  • The Pope Has Died, and the Palestinian People Have Lost an Important Advocate

    Pope Francis has died after using his Easter Sunday address to call for peace in Gaza. I don’t know who the cardinals will pick to replace him, but I do know with absolute certainty that there are transnational intelligence operations in the works to make sure they select a more reliable supporter of Israel. They’ve probably been working on it since his health started failing.

    Anyone who’s been reading me for a while knows my attitude toward Roman Catholicism can be described as openly hostile because of my family history with the Church’s sexual abuses under Cardinal Pell, but as far as popes go this one was decent. Francis had been an influential critic of Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza, calling for investigation of genocide allegations and denouncing the bombing of hospitals and the murder of humanitarian workers and civilians. He’d been personally calling the only Catholic parish in Gaza by phone every night during the Israeli onslaught, even as his health deteriorated.

    In other words, he was a PR problem for Israel.

    I hope another compassionate human being is announced as the next leader of the Church, but there are definitely forces pushing for a different outcome right now. There is no shortage terrible men who could be chosen for the position.

    *****


    https://x.com/caitoz/status/1913617746052386854

    *****

    Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman Omer Dostri told Israel’s Channel 12 News on Saturday that a deal with Hamas to release all hostages was a non-starter for the Israeli government, because it would require a commitment to lasting peace.

    “At the moment, there can’t be one deal since Hamas isn’t saying: ‘Come get your hostages and that’s that,’ it’s demanding an end to the war,” Dostri said in the interview.

    This comes as Hamas offers to return all hostages, stop digging tunnels, and put away its weapons in exchange for a permanent ceasefire. This is what Israel is dismissing as unacceptable.

    The Gaza holocaust was never about freeing the hostages. This has been clear ever since Israel began aggressively bombing the place where the hostages are living, and it’s gotten clearer and clearer ever since. Last month Netanyahu made it clear that Israel intends to carry out Trump’s ethnic cleansing plans for the enclave even if Hamas fully surrenders.

    When Washington’s podium people say the “war” in Gaza can end if Hamas releases the hostages and lays down their arms, they are lying. They are lying to ensure that the genocide continues.

    When Israel apologists say “Release the hostages!” in response to criticisms of Israeli atrocities, they are lying. They know this has never had anything to do with hostages. They are lying to help Israel commit more atrocities.

    It was never about the hostages. It was never about Hamas. What it’s really about was obvious from day one: purging Palestinians from Palestinian land. That’s all this has ever been.

    *****

    After executing 15 medical workers in Gaza and getting caught lying about it, the IDF has investigated itself and attributed the massacre to “professional failures” and “operational misunderstandings”, finding no evidence of any violation of its code of ethics.

    It’s crazy to think about how much investigative journalism went into exposing this atrocity only to have Israel go “Yeah turns out we did an oopsie, no further action required, thank you to our allies for the latest shipment of bombs.”

    *****

    The death toll from Trump’s terrorist attack on a Yemen fuel port is now up to 80, with 150 wounded. Again, the US has not even tried to claim this was a military target. They said they targeted this critical civilian infrastructure to hurt the economic interests of the Houthis.

    Those who are truly anti-war don’t support Trump. Those who support Trump aren’t truly anti-war.

    I still get people telling me I need to be nicer to Trump supporters because they’re potential allies in resisting war, which to me is just so silly. What are they even talking about? Trump supporters, per definition, currently support the one person who is most singularly responsible for the horrific acts of war we are seeing in the middle east right now. Telling me they’re my allies is exactly as absurd as telling me Biden supporters were my allies last year would have been, except nobody was ever dumb enough to try to make that argument.

    If you still support Trump in April 2025 after seeing all his monstrous behavior in Gaza and Yemen, then we are on completely opposite sides. You might think you’re on the same side as me because you oppose war in theory, but when the rubber meets the road it turns out you’ll go along with any acts of mass military slaughter no matter how evil so long as they are done by a Republican. We are not allies, we are enemies. You side with the most egregious warmonger in the world right now, and I want your side to fail.

    *****

    People say “It’s the Muslims!” or “It’s the Jews!”

    No, it’s the Americans. The US-centralized empire is responsible for most of our world’s problems.

    It says so much about the strength of the imperial propaganda machine that this isn’t more obvious to more people.

    The post The Pope Has Died, and the Palestinian People Have Lost an Important Advocate first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Harvard Refuses To Comply With Trump Administration

    After Columbia University fully capitulated to the Trump administration’s demands of disciplinary measures against pro-Palestine students and censorship against academic departments, the Trump administration set its sights on other institutions of higher education, one of these being Harvard University. On April 11, Trump officials sent Harvard a similar demand letter to the one Columbia received on March 13. But Harvard’s response to Trump’s demands has been markedly different to Columbia’s – on April 14, Harvard’s President Alan M. Garber issued a bold response: Harvard would “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”

    The post Harvard Refuses To Comply With Trump Administration appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Some Sleepwalk into Autocracy

    I am a whistleblower with a master’s of public policy from Central European University (kicked out of Hungary by Orban’s regime), and I have spent the last several years feverishly trying to blow the whistle about authoritarianism and rising fascism in the U.S. On Christmas Eve in 2023, I wrote a prescient and illustrative letter to civil society abroad as I begged for help on behalf of a marginalized, targeted U.S. activist. When the international civil society employee had a call with me, she explained what human rights are to me, assuming I did not know, and she seemed to think Americans have said rights to such an extent that we could not possibly urgently need the support her organization provides.

    “We don’t help with democratic backsliding,” she said.

    “How bad does it have to get?” I replied.

    I am not angry at the Trump voters who ”chose” Trump when they did not have a choice, as the U.S. has not had enough election integrity for it to matter for years. At best, billionaires gave ordinary voters the illusion of choice, asking them to pick between two right-wing candidates on the menu the oligarchy provided. It is like children being told, “You must wear pants, so do you want the red ones or the blue ones? We bought them both.” I am angry at the careerist civil servants and civil society members who served themselves at society’s expense, leading us to this point instead of preventing it. Almost every time I tried to explain the Orwellian details of U.S. case studies, and the playbook of corruption paving the way for fascism, to supposed experts and members of civil society, I was dismissed or laughed out of “the room where it happens.” Far from helping us, civil society betrayed us.

    Benefiting from the system and becoming one with it—seeking status, fancy titles, and nice salaries, as well as a seat at the politician’s table—precludes the due diligence of protecting the public from the system and the excesses of those politicians. Chris Hedges likes to refer to this gutted and gutless “Liberal Class” as “careerists” and “courtiers” in his books such as Death of the Liberal Class. Many of these “experts” who got interviewed on mainstream media over the past few years still thought “everything is fine” like the dog drinking coffee in the house on fire meme out of excessive privilege, fragile egos, and self-delusion. Other “experts” and members of civil society knew things were bad, but did not want to sound the alarm with accurate urgency because they wanted to keep their rapport with the powers that be such as the morally bankrupt Democratic party (as Chris Hedges calls it). There were powerful people who admitted privately to me that they knew our supposed rights and the constitution do not function in practice, but who feebly justified being two-faced when it was time to face the music. They are, in the worst cases, members of marginalized groups themselves who helped corrupt cronies by misleading people like them into traps set by state-sponsored perpetrators.

    Funding was doled out by billionaires and corporations, and accepted by supposedly independent academia with strings attached, leading partially to the crackdown on speech against the genocide in Palestine. I believe civil society groups and researchers partnered with Big Tech to whitewash AI’s impacts and image, especially when it comes to harms related to journalism. Some civil society groups even operate on behalf of the enemy, redefining victims as perpetrators and perpetrators as victims. As a whistleblower, I found no help for people like me, but I did find organizations helping people who are part of the problem. I attended one Florida-based “whistleblower” organization’s vicariously embarrassing online event two years ago, and concluded they were supporting people who had been justly punished for racism, sexism, and homophobia, not the victims of said people.

    In other situations, I recall civil society members allowing pure egotism and petulance to prevent their receptivity to the truth and willingness to find real solutions. A program coordinator at a legal aid organization got angry when I said they were bringing their programs to the U.S. late and explained how access to justice would not solve the problem of a corrupted and commandeered judiciary. She practically pouted like a child as though the truth was a personal attack, and I received no replies to my follow-up emails even after her boss tried to direct me back to her through LinkedIN. Instead of spending their money and advocacy training on me, perhaps they trained some of the other people in the info-session: A Native American conspiracy theorist supporting anti-trans parents against Child Protective Services intervention for their kids, and an open pedophile trying to conflate being a pedophile with being gay and a victim of unfair state persecution.

    It is telling to me that I am so relieved when someone like Ellie Mystal so much as states the obvious and asks,

    To turn it around back on the people who were telling me for months that the courts would save us, what do you all got now? What’s your plan now? Now that the courts have issued their order and Trump has ignored their orders, what’s plan B because plan A was the courts going to save us, and that was never going to work?

    A few days ago, after trying for seven months to reach one of the most powerful and important people I have ever managed to contact to ask for help fighting fascism, I was dismissed with the worst, most tone-deaf and delusional advice I have ever received in my life which was essentially:

    “Come back to the U.S. and get any job you can find regardless of how houseless it leaves you. Convince people not to believe Trump’s lies, and work your way up into politics.”

    Nevermind that dissidents, LGBTQ+, disabled people, houseless people, etc. are being targeted and will certainly be put into prison camps such as those called for in Project 2025 domestically (not just in El Salvador). Nevermind that I tried everything to organize, and collaborate, and resist, over the last few years, and have worked in advocacy and awareness-raising pro-bono since 2021. Nevermind that there is no such thing as working your way up into politics from the working class under autocratic dictatorships. I should thank this rich, white, boomer member of the establishment for the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and return to stand in front of the firing squad pitch. I know he did not mean it to be arrogant, condescending, negligent, and reprehensible, but it is.

    We are now witnessing the social media and televised version of developing genocide, and while false information and free press concerns make the truth harder for people to discern, the regime is allowing photo journalists in and creating a public spectacle as it gloats about its crimes. I wish everyone in the world could see that photo of bound detainees having their heads shaved and read about how innocent Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist deported to Trump’s torture gulag, called for his mother as he wept with his hair falling all around him. I wish everyone would read ProPublica’s article detailing the experiences of the helpless and morally-conflicted flight attendants on the unmistakable modern version of the trains to the concentration camps.

    I cannot share my 2023 letter here, but I wish I could submit it as a primary source if there is a future museum or archive where people go to see evidence painting a picture of a dark chapter in history they promise to never repeat. It is worth noting that, in 2023, the Holocaust Museum in Mexico even had an exhibit on Trump, playing his dehumanizing quotations about immigrants and vulnerable people on repeat. This time, we won’t be able to say we did not know. People like me who had little power knew, and people who had the most power and authority did not listen, would not help, and did not protect anyone but themselves. Psuedo-experts whose careers rested on fealty knowingly or unknowingly participated in a collective gaslighting of the victims of the broken system and sick society in a cover-up for the increasingly authoritarian and oligarchic state. They dragged us kicking and screaming into autocracy, or threw us under the bus, and I will never forgive them for it.

    The post Some Sleepwalk into Autocracy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Bad Math

    The bombed remains of automobiles with the bombed Federal Building in the background, April 19, 1995.

    Sometimes we see pictures of ourselves from a decade or three back and think, what was going through their head?

    In other circumstances, we don’t have to wonder. We know.

    It happens to writers a lot. It’s often our and stock-in-trade.

    I know exactly what I was thinking after the Oklahoma City bombing thirty years ago today, and it was not popular. But I recorded it in the April 25, 1995 edition of The Shorthorn at the University of Texas-Arlington. And the math sucks. It’s aged much better than the author.

    In the Aftermath

    To terrorize is to dominate or coerce by intimidation, the threat of violence, or the calculated perpetration of destruction, catastrophe, assassination, murder, etc. In the popular mind, terrorism is qualified by additional connotations. People recognize it as a vicious, cold-blooded attack on defenseless civilians or bystanding innocents. Few crimes are judged with such an unchallenged sense of vehement righteousness. Perpetrators of terrorism are hounded with unparalleled sanctimony and fanatic zeal. I read President Clinton’s pledge in the newspaper: “Nobody can hide any place in this country; nobody can hide any place in this world from the terrible consequences of what has been done.”

    Indeed, I think . . . unless they are American.

    Reports of the Oklahoma City bombing shock, enrage, and sadden me, but an ancient adage haunts my conscience: Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.

    For the last four decades, the United States has perpetrated terrorist activities around the world. Our remorseless work in Vietnam, before and during the war, provided a chilling catalogue of American terrorism. The CIA-planned and CIA-executed assassination of the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, evidenced a harrowing propensity for terrorist realpolitik. And the United States has repeatedly installed and/or subsidized puppet dictators around the world who perform terrorist acts on their own constituencies.

    On a subtler level, in cases such as Israel and, until recently, South Africa, we support governments that permit, if not directly sanction, terrorist enterprises against their own indigenous populations, ranging from summary executions to simple violations of the most basic human rights.

    I see tattered infant-victims of the bombing in Oklahoma City and cringe, rueful and angry.

    But my jaw also stiffens as I recall the Guatemalan and El Salvadoran “Death Squads,” the genocidal military wings of regimes we encouraged and assisted in rises to power in Central America.

    In Guatemala, we supported the coup against and eventual overthrow of democratically elected president Jacob Arbenz. The faction we bet on—and invested in—began an incomprehensible reign of terror, decimating over 440 indigenous villages, conducting an estimated 100,000 political killings (more than 40,000 termed “disappearances”), and leaving over 200,000 children orphaned. And our man in Chile, General Augusto Pinochet, upstaged his Guatemalan counterparts, employing tortures that included inserting sabers in vaginas and disemboweling female victims while their families watched.

    And who can forget the “fraidy-Eighties” under Ronnie Reagan?

    No one in Nicaragua can.

    Men, women and children no different than the citizens of Oklahoma City were afraid all the time, and not just over one incident, but several every week. Besides funding and arming the Contras, we also published and distributed a terrorist handbook for their training. The CIA called it a “Freedom Fighters Manual,” but it included, among other things, detailed instructions (with illustrations) for making and utilizing Molotov cocktails.

    And these are just are just a few of the examples where U.S. involvement in terrorist activities actually became public. There were no doubt countless others. In fact, by popular definition, the largest single terrorist atrocity in human history was the allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany in World War II. Although it occurred during wartime, it was a vicious, calculated attack on a virtually defenseless civilian community.

    The second and third largest terrorist atrocities in world history were probably our nuclear strikes in Japan. These incidents pale in comparison to the widespread pogroms of Hitler, Belgium’s King Leopold, and the Catholic Church, but genocide is not a single act or terrorism—it constitutes a regimen of terrorism (of which our nation could be accused of domestically regarding indigenous people and Blacks and also in much of the Third World in general).

    As Americans, we are largely and more recently unaccustomed to displays of first-hand terrorist bloodshed, but, for much of the rest of the world, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. They live with it every day.

    I shudder at the scenes from Oklahoma City; but I also quake at our bloody ignorance. Did we think our acts of terror would never be reciprocated? Or that our fellow citizens were incapable of them?

    Did we really think we could be immune from terrorism after having so long been one of its chief contagions?!

    American terrorism has, however, evolved. Now, it’s openly encouraged and sanctioned by our commander-and-chief.

    The post Bad Math first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Have We Reached a Milestone in Ukraine?

    Secretary of Marco Rubio said today (Friday) that “If it’s not possible to end the war in Ukraine , we need to move on.” Rubio told reporters that the Trump could decide this “in a matter of days…” (NYTimes, 4/18/2025)

    The context: Russia has made its conditions very clear. (1) Ukraine must not join NATO. (2) Ukraine must give up the four oblasts and Crimea. 3) Ukraine must be demilitarized and not pose a military threat to Russia.

    Although to this point Trump been unwilling or unable to do so, he must accept these nonnegotiable conditions and do it against the opposition of European leaders. Or conceivably, he could simply walk away.

    British political analyst Alexander Mercouris reports that European leaders are meeting in Paris to, in their words, achieve a “fair and lasting peace in Ukraine” and for them, this means a “Ukrainian victory.” Even as they voice this objective, reliable reports indicate that Russian recruitment is running at 1,000 per day, which is more than enough to replace lost soldiers. Ukrainian forces are steadily getting smaller and for the first time, external military analysts can foresee the fall of Kiev as a real possibility. Russian forces are making significant gains and Ukrainians are retreating in several areas. Finally, there is no question that Europe lacks the resources to achieve anything in Ukraine.

    Presumably, the US will explain to the Europeans that they’re engaged in a dangerous fantasy and that peace will occur only by accepting the Russian demands (see above). However, the British, French and Danish are considering sending troops to Ukraine via Romania. This will be absolutely unacceptable to Russians but will come as no surprise to them. The few thousand (probably French) soldiers entering Odessa will be annihilated. Here one wonders how long French citizens would tolerate the war if coffins began returning home. (Note: Some of you may recall my earlier post about European and US intervention in the Russian Civil War and how they were expelled. Russian citizens will be reminded once again of Western intentions).

    Given the above, one is forced to wonder why European leaders are doing everything possible to undermine and sabotage any meaningful peace talks? Why are they pursing a doomed policy that’s bankrupting their economies? Why alienate the US and Trump? I don’t have a definitive answer but I suspect that Mercouris is close to one when he speculates that European leaders hate Russia and have come to loathe Donald Trump. They cannot accept that they’ve lost the war and Trump was actually correct. I’ll leave for another day to speculate about what this means for the Democrats and unprincipled “progressives” (think AOC and Bernie Sanders) who gave left cover to US imperialism in its proxy was in Ukraine. In my opinion, they have much to answer for.

    The post Have We Reached a Milestone in Ukraine? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Executive Orders And The Illusion Of Democracy

    In theory, the U.S. Constitution provides for a delicate balance of powers: the president executes the law, Congress writes it, and the judiciary interprets it. But under the stress of national security, this tripartite structure can be undermined by the strategic exploitation of Presidential Actions.

    Of these Presidential Actions: Executive Orders, Presidential Memoranda, and Proclamations were never intended to be instruments of unchecked authority. They are meant to coordinate, not dominate. Yet as Congress stalls and the Supreme Court oscillates between political allegiances, presidents have learned to wield these Presidential Actions not as facilitators of governance, but as instruments of domination in a battlefield where the rule of law is subjugated by the rule of precedent, untethered to the balance of powers.

    The post Executive Orders And The Illusion Of Democracy appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Report: America’s Ten Most Endangered Rivers

    According to the 40th annual America’s Most Endangered Rivers report by American Rivers, half the rivers in the United States contain unsafe pollution levels, with freshwater species becoming extinct faster than land or ocean species.

    The Mississippi River topped the list, with federal flood management changes putting the health of the river at risk, jeopardizing the safety and clean water of those who depend upon it.

    Flooding is the most common and costly natural disaster within the Mississippi River Basin, according to the report. More severe and frequent floods have damaged homes, agriculture and businesses.

    The post Report: America’s Ten Most Endangered Rivers appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Chris Hedges: American Concentration Camps

    Our offshore concentration camps, for now, are in El Salvador and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But don’t expect them to remain there. Once they are normalized, not only for U.S.-deported immigrants and residents, but U.S. citizens, they will migrate to the homeland. It is a very short leap from our prisons, already rife with abuse and mistreatment, to concentration camps, where those held are cut off from the outside world — “disappeared” — denied legal representation and crammed into fetid, overcrowded cells.

    Prisoners in the camps in El Salvador are forced to sleep on the floor or in solitary confinement in the dark. Many suffer from tuberculosis, fungal infections, scabies, severe malnutrition and chronic digestive illnesses.

    The post Chris Hedges: American Concentration Camps appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Democracy or Plutocracy?

    Despite much lofty rhetoric portraying the United States as a democracy (in which the people rule), this nation, in fact, has often resembled a plutocracy (in which the wealthy rule).

    The confusion owes a great deal to the fact that the United States, at its founding, was somewhat more democratic than its contemporaries.  In the eighteenth century, European nations, governed by kings, princes, and other wealthy hereditary elites, usually provided a contrast to the more unruly, less hidebound new nation, where some Americans even had the vote.

    Even so, the overwhelming majority of Americans didn’t have the vote, which was largely confined to property-owning or tax-paying white males―about 6 percent of the U.S. population in 1789.  Women (comprising about 50 percent of the population) were, with very few exceptions, denied voting rights.  And slaves (about 18 percent of the population) lacked both voting rights and citizenship.

    Wealthy Americans maintained firm control of the U.S. and state governments.  The Founding Fathers were rich white men―in many cases, owners of massive plantations dependent upon slave labor.  And the first President of the United States, George Washington, was one of the wealthiest Americans of his time.  Women and slaves had no governing role at all.

    Another reason for the association of the United States with democracy is that, over the course of its history, the country has gradually grown more democratic―although only by overcoming determined opposition from its traditional economic elites.

    During most of the nineteenth century, the struggle for democracy was difficult, indeed.  Although white male suffrage expanded, campaigns for women’s rights and, especially, for the abolition of slavery met fierce resistance.  The wealthy planter class of the South resorted to a bloody Civil War rather than accept limits on slavery―an overplaying of its hand that, ironically, led to slavery’s abolition and voting rights for the former slaves.  And thanks to the postwar enfranchisement of millions of African Americans, Reconstruction governments injected elements of political, economic, and social equality into Southern politics.  Horrified, the old planter elite launched a counter-revolution―a terror campaign spearheaded by the Ku Klux Klan that deprived African Americans of voting rights and public office, while riveting white supremacy into every aspect of Southern life.

    In the North, the rising industrial magnates of the late nineteenth century, deploying the enormous wealth of their giant corporations, fastened their grip on governance during what became known as the Gilded Age.  Enjoying lives of unprecedented opulence and power, corporate titans easily bought the allegiance of politicians or acquired public office themselves.  Indeed, the U.S. Senate became known as a “millionaire’s club.”  Meanwhile, masses of impoverished immigrants, drawn to jobs in the new factories, crowded into big city slums.  Although “Panics” (economic depressions) periodically swept through the nation, producing massive unemployment and hunger, neither the federal nor state governments enacted relief measures.  Instead, most politicians―ignoring widespread poverty, the suppression of Black voting rights, and a growing women’s suffrage campaign―concentrated on serving the new corporate titans by passing pro-corporate legislation.

    With the governments of North and South subservient to the economic elites of the late nineteenth century, radical movements emerged outside the two-party system.  Angry farmers organized the Populist Party to take back the nation from the plutocrats, and for a time enjoyed substantial electoral success.  Bitter strikes and workers’ struggles convulsed the nation.  Perhaps the best known of them, the nationwide Pullman Strike of 1894, was broken only when the federal government stepped in to destroy the American Railway Union and arrest its leaders.

    The pent-up popular outrage at plutocracy finally broke through in the early twentieth century.  Capturing portions of both the Democratic and Republican parties, the Progressive movement succeeded in limiting some of the more flagrant abuses of rule by the wealthy.  Its reforms included the direct election of Senators, a constitutional amendment authorizing a progressive income tax, workers’ rights measures, and a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s right to vote.

    Although World War I and the return of conservative Republican rule in the 1920s undermined the struggle for democracy, it revived dramatically after the onset of the Great Depression and the beginning of the New Deal.  Drawing upon an overwhelming majority in Congress, the Democrats passed legislation sharply raising taxes on the wealthy, establishing the right of workers to union representation, inaugurating massive relief projects, and establishing Social Security, minimum wage laws, maximum hours laws, and other measures designed to serve “forgotten” Americans.  Despite bitter opposition from the Southern elite, even the civil rights issue made an appearance, in the form of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order establishing a Fair Employment Practice Committee.

    These popular egalitarian initiatives were supplemented in the 1960s by major voting rights and other civil rights legislation, immigration reform legislation, Medicare and Medicaid, and measures to reduce poverty, advance educational opportunity, and create public broadcasting.

    Today, of course, we are witnessing a new counter-revolution, led by billionaires like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, to reduce public access to the vote, intimidate their opponents, and, more broadly, return the U.S. government to its earlier role as a guardian of political, economic, and social privilege.  Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in their current barnstorming tour, refer to this program as “Oligarchy” (rule by the few).  And they are correct.  But, more specifically, it is plutocracy (rule by the wealthy), designed to serve the interests of the wealthy.

    Although the United States has never been a thoroughgoing democracy, there are many indications that, over the centuries, it has made significant progress toward that goal.  And the question today is:  Will we scrap that progress and return to the Gilded Age―or worse?

    This is an historic moment―one that provides an opportunity for Americans to defend what Abraham Lincoln lauded as “a government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.”  It would be a shame if Americans abandoned that democratic vision.

    The post Democracy or Plutocracy? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump’s trade war puts America’s AI ambitions at risk

    The global trade war triggered by US President Donald Trump earlier this month shows no signs of ending anytime soon. In recent days, China suspended exports of a wide range of critical minerals that are vital ingredients in everything from electric cars and drones to the semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence servers. Around the…

    The post Trump’s trade war puts America’s AI ambitions at risk appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • CPJ to release report on press freedom 100 days into the Trump administration

    New York, April 15, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) will release a special report examining the state of press freedom and journalist safety in the United States following the first 100 days of the Trump administration. 

    In this special report, CPJ will cover the incidence of targeted attacks against journalists and news organizations, regulatory abuse, and access issues for journalists reporting in the U.S. 

    The report will also examine whether the White House’s actions have created a chilling effect among local journalists around the nation. 

    WHAT: CPJ’s 2025 U.S. special report on the Trump administration’s first 100 days in office

    WHEN: April 30, 2025, 9:30 a.m. EDT/3:30 p.m. CET

    WHERE: www.cpj.org

    ###

    About the Committee to Protect Journalists

    The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide. We defend the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal.

    Note to editors:

    CPJ experts are available to be interviewed in multiple languages about the report’s findings. To request an embargoed copy or interview, please reach out to press@cpj.org.

    Media contact:

    press@cpj.org


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • US lawmakers urge White House to ditch Biden’s AI chip rule

    Seven Republican US senators have sent a letter to US Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, urging him to scrap a Biden administration rule restricting global access to AI chips before it kicks in next month. The letter, signed by senators Pete Ricketts, Tommy Tuberville and Thom Tillis, argues that the AI diffusion rule will damage US…

    The post US lawmakers urge White House to ditch Biden’s AI chip rule appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • CPJ joins legal effort to defend MBN and RFA following Trump executive order

    New York, April 14, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) filed two amicus briefs on Friday, April 11, in response to the Trump administration’s efforts to freeze congressionally-appropriated funds for Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN) and Radio Free Asia (RFA).

    On March 14, the Trump administration signed an executive order gutting the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the parent organization of MBN and RFA. Under U.S. law, the editorial operations of USAGM entities are protected from political interference to ensure editorial independence. 

    USAGM entities operate under an editorial firewall, separating journalists from any elected official in the U.S. The amicus briefs outline how intervention from the Trump administration would destroy RFA and MBN’s editorial independence. 

    “The dismantling of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Asia, whose news outlets report on the reality of highly censored environments in the Middle East and Asia, is a betrayal of the U.S.’s historical commitment to press freedom,” said CPJ Chief Global Affairs Officer Gypsy Guillén Kaiser. “Attacks on the credibility of both outlets leave millions of people without reliable news sources, while endangering the intrepid reporters who report the facts.”

    CPJ research shows at least four journalists and media workers with MBN outlets have been killed in connection with their work, including Abdul-Hussein Khazal, a correspondent for the U.S.-funded television station Al-Hurra who was shot dead in 2005 together with his 3-year-old son in the Iraqi city of Basra, and Tahrir Kadhim Jawad, a camera operator for Al-Hurra who died instantly when a bomb attached to his car exploded while he was on assignment. Bashar Fahmi Kadumi, another journalist for Al-Hurra, has been missing since 2012. 

    CPJ has documented at least 13 journalists and media workers who worked for or contributed to RFA or its regional outlets have been imprisoned in connection with their work since 2008. Five of those remain in prison today, including Shin Daewe in Myanmar and Nguyen Tuong Thuy in Vietnam, both held on anti-state charges.

    In recent weeks, CPJ and RCFP filed amicus briefs about the White House barring AP from covering White House events and legal efforts to protect Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America after Trump’s executive order. 

    ###

    About the Committee to Protect Journalists

    The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide. We defend the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Should Iran Bend Knee to Donald Trump?

    Former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter usually provides excellent analysis of geopolitical events and places them in a morally centered framework. However, in a recent X post, Ritter defends a controversial stance blaming Iran for US and Israeli machinations against Iran.

    Ritter opened, “I have assiduously detailed the nature of the threat perceived by the US that, if unresolved, would necessitate military action, as exclusively revolving around Iran’s nuclear program and, more specifically, that capacity that is excess to its declared peaceful program and, as such, conducive to a nuclear weapons program Iran has admitted is on the threshold of being actualized.”

    Threats perceived by the US. These threats range from North Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, China, and Russia. Question: Which of the aforementioned countries is about to — or ever was about to — attack the US? None. (Al Qaeda is not a country) So why does Ritter imply that military action would be necessitated? Is it a vestige of military indoctrination left over from his time as a marine? In this case, why is Ritter not focused on his own backyard and telling the US to butt out of the Middle East? The US, since it is situated on a continent far removed from Iran, should no more dictate to Iran what its defense posture should be in the region than Iran should dictate what the US’s defense posture should be in the northwestern hemisphere.

    Ritter: “In short, I have argued, the most realistic path forward regarding conflict avoidance would be for Iran to negotiate in good faith regarding the verifiable disposition of its excess nuclear enrichment capability.”

    Ritter places the onus for conflict avoidance on Iran. Why? Is Iran seeking conflict with the US? Is Iran making demands of the US? Is Iran sanctioning the US? Moreover, who gets to decide what is realistic or not? Is what is realistic for the US also realistic for Iran? When determining the path forward, one should be aware of who and what is stirring up conflict. Ritter addresses this when he writes, “Even when Trump alienated Iran with his ‘maximum pressure’ tactics, including an insulting letter to the Supreme Leader that all but eliminated the possibility of direct negotiations between the US and Iran…” But this did not alter Ritter’s stance. Iran must negotiate — again. According to Ritter negotiations are how to solve the crisis, a crisis of the US’s (and Israel’s) making.

    Iran had agreed to a deal — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and Germany — collectively known as the P5+1 — with the participation of the European Union. The JCPOA came into effect in 2016. During the course of the JCPOA, Iran was in compliance with the deal. Nonetheless, Trump pulled the US out of the deal in 2018.

    Backing out of agreements/deals is nothing new for Trump (or for that matter, the US). For example, Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate, the Trans-Pacific Partnership on trade, the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was subsequently renegotiated under Trump to morph into the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, which is now imperilled by the Trump administration’s tariff threats, as is the World Trade Organization that regulates international trade.

    Should Iran, therefore, expect adherence to any future agreement signed with the US?

    Ritter insists that he is promoting a reality-based process providing the only viable path toward peace. Many of those who disagree with Ritter’s assertion are lampooned by him as “the digital mob, comprised of new age philosophers, self-styled ‘peace activists’, and a troll class that opposes anything and everything it doesn’t understand (which is most factually-grounded argument), as well as people I had viewed as fellow travelers on a larger journey of conflict avoidance—podcasters, experts and pundits who did more than simply disagree with me (which is, of course, their right and duty as independent thinkers), traversing into the realm of insults and attacks against my intelligence, integrity and character.”

    Ritter continued, “The US-Iran crisis is grounded in the complexities, niceties and formalities of international law as set forth in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT), which Iran signed in 1970 as a non-nuclear weapons state. The NPT will be at the center of any negotiated settlement.”

    Is it accurate to characterize the crisis as a “US-Iran crisis”? It elides the fact that it is the US imposing a crisis on Iran. More accurately it should be stated as a “US crisis foisted on Iran.”

    Ritter argues, “… the fact remains that this crisis has been triggered by the very capabilities Iran admits to having—stocks of 60% enriched uranium with no link to Iran’s declared peaceful program, and excessive advanced centrifuge-based enrichment capability which leaves Iran days away from possessing sufficient weapons grade high enriched uranium to produce 3-5 nuclear weapons.”

    So, Ritter blames Iran for the crisis. This plays off Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has long accused Iran of seeking nukes. But it ignores the situation in India and Pakistan. Although the relations between the two countries are tense, logic dictates that open warring must be avoided lest it lead to mutual nuclear conflagration. And if Iran dismantles its nuclear program? What happened when Libya dismantled its nuclear program? Destruction by the US-led NATO. As A.B. Abrams wrote, Libya paid the price for

    … having ignored direct warnings from both Tehran and Pyongyang not to pursue such a course [of unilaterally disarming], Libya’s leadership would later admit that disarmament, neglected military modernisation, and trust in Western good will proved to be their greatest mistake–leaving their country near defenceless when Western powers launched their offensive in 2011. (Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power, Clarity Press, 2020: p 296)

    And North Korea has existed with a credible deterrence against any attack on it since it acquired nuclear weapons.

    Relevant background to the current crisis imposed on Iran

    1. The year 1953 is a suitable starting point. It was in this year that the US-UK (CIA and MI6) combined to engineer a coup against the democratically elected Iranian government under prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh had committed the unpardonable sin of nationalizing the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
    1. What to replace the Iranian democracy with? A monarchy. In other words, a dictatorship because monarchs are not elected, they are usually born into power. Thus, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would rule as the shah of Iran for 26 years protected by his secret police, the SAVAK. Eventually, the shah would be overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
    1. In an attempt to force Iran to bend knee to US dictate, the US has imposed sanctions, issued threats, and fomented violence.
    1. Starting sometime after 2010, it is generally agreed among cybersecurity experts and intelligence leaks that the Iranian nuclear program was a target of cyberwarfare by the US and Israel — this in contravention of the United Nations Charter Article 2 (1-4):

    1. The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.

    2. All Members, in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from membership, shall fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the present Charter.

    3. All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

    4. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

    1. The Stuxnet virus caused significant damage to Iran’s nuclear program, particularly at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
    1. Israel and the United States are also accused of being behind the assassinations of several Iranian nuclear scientists over the past decade.
    1. On 3 January 2020, Trump ordered a US drone strike at Baghdad International Airport in Iraq that assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani as well as Soleimani ally Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a top Iraqi militia leader.
    1. On 7 October 7 2023, Hamas launched a resistance attack against Israel’s occupation. Since then, Israel has reportedly conducted several covert and overt strikes targeting Iran and its proxies across the region.
    1. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Iran of seeking nukes for nearly 30 years, long before Iran reached 60% enrichment in 2021. In Netanyahu’s book Fighting Terrorism (1995) he described Iran as a “rogue state” pursuing nukes to destroy Israel. Given that a fanatical, expansionist Zionist map for Israel, the Oded-Yinon plan, draws a Jewish territory that touches on the Iranian frontier, a debilitated Iran is sought by Israel.

     

    Oded Yinon Plan

    Says Ritter, “This crisis isn’t about Israel or Israel’s own undeclared nuclear weapons capability. It is about Iran’s self-declared status as a threshold nuclear weapons state, something prohibited by the NPT. This is what the negotiations will focus on. And hopefully these negotiations will permit the verifiable dismantling of those aspects of its nuclear program the US (and Israel) find to present an existential threat.”

    Why isn’t it about Israel’s nuclear weapons capability? Why does the US and Ritter get to decide which crisis is preeminent?

    It is important to note that US intelligence has long said that no active Iranian nuclear weapon project exists.

    It is also important to note that Arab states have long supported a Middle East Zone Free of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDFZ), particularly nuclear weapons, but Israel and the US oppose it.

    It is also important to note that, in 2021, the U.S. opposed a resolution demanding Israel join the NPT and that the US, in 2018, blocked an Arab-backed IAEA resolution on Israeli nukes. (UN Digital Library. Search: “Middle East WMDFZ”)

    As far as the NPT goes, it must be applied equally to all signatory states. The US as a nuclear-armed nation is bound by Article VI which demands:

    Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.

    Thus, hopefully negotiations will permit the verifiable dismantling of those aspects of the Iranian, US, and Israeli nuclear programs (as well as the nuclear programs of other nuclear-armed nations) that are found to present an existential threat.

    Ritter warns, “Peace is not guaranteed. But war is unless common sense and fact-based logic wins out over the self-important ignorance of the digital mob and their facilitators.”

    A peaceful solution is not achieved by assertions (i.e., not fact-based logic) or by ad hominem. That critics of Ritter’s stance resort to name-calling demeans them, but to respond likewise to one’s critics also taints the respondent.

    Logic dictates that peace is more-or-less guaranteed if UN member states adhere to the United Nations Charter. The US, Iran, and Israel are UN member states. A balanced and peaceful solution is found in the Purposes and Principles as stipulated in Article 1 (1-4) of the UN Charter:

    The Purposes of the United Nations are:

    1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;

    2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;

    3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and

    4. To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

    It seems that only by refusing to abide by one’s obligations laid out the UN Charter and NPT that war looms larger.

    In Ritter’s reality, the US rules the roost against smaller countries. Is such a reality acceptable?

    It stirs up patriotism, but acquiescence is an affront to national dignity. Ritter will likely respond by asking what god is dignity when you are dead. Fair enough. But in the present crisis, if the US were to attack Iran, then whatever last shred of dignity (is there any last shred of dignity left when a country is supporting the genocide of human beings in Palestine?) that American patriots can cling to will have vanished.

    By placing the blame on Iran for a crisis triggered by destabilizing actions of the US and Israel, Ritter asks for Iran to pay for the violent events set in motion by US Israel. If Iran were to cave to Trump’s threats, they would be sacrificing sovereignty, dignity, and self-defense.

    North Korea continues on. Libya is still reeling from the NATO offensive against it. Iran is faced with a choice.

    The Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata knew his choice well: “I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.”

    The post Should Iran Bend Knee to Donald Trump? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.