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Category: United States

  • 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.

  • Xi Warns US Will Isolate Itself

    Xi warns US will isolate itself Chinese President Xi Jinping. ©  Ken Ishii – Pool/Getty Images

    The United States risks isolating itself by pursuing unilateral trade restrictions, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned on Friday during a visit of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to Beijing.

    The administration of US President Donald Trump has launched an escalating tariff war with China, imposing a total of 145% in duties on Chinese imports this week. Beijing has retaliated by hiking tariffs on American goods to 125%.

    “There are no winners in the tariff war and standing against the world ultimately results in self-isolation,” Xi said, as cited by Xinhua news agency.

    Xi called on China and the European Union to “jointly resist unilateral bullying” in order to protect their legitimate rights and interests, and uphold international rules and order.

    Global tariff war: Key developments

    The EU, which has been targeted with a 20% tariff by the US, has warned of significant global economic repercussions and has vowed to take countermeasures. Earlier this week, Trump declared a 90-day pause on reciprocal duties for most US trading partners, including the EU, allowing a window for negotiation.

    Brussels has adopted a policy of “de-risking” towards Chinese imports, balancing protective trade measures such as tariffs on electric vehicles with efforts to maintain constructive economic relations.

    The Chinese president also stated that regardless of changes in the external environment, the country would remain steadfast, focused, and would efficiently manage its own affairs.

    “For over seven decades, China’s growth has been fueled by self-reliance and hard work, never depending on favors from others and never backing down in the face of unreasonable suppression,” Xi explained.

    Trump argues that the increased duties are needed to address trade imbalances and stop China from “ripping off the USA.” Earlier this week, he opined that the “proud” Chinese would have to “make a deal at some point.”

    China has slammed Trump’s “abnormally high tariffs” on Chinese products as “unilateral bullying and coercion.” The move by the US president represents “a serious violation of international economic and trade rules, as well as of basic economic laws and common sense,” Beijing stressed.

    The trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies has disrupted global markets, sent oil prices to four-year lows and caused concerns over global supply chains.

    The post Xi Warns US Will Isolate Itself first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Danger in Trump’s Mind

    On 7 April, a Mondoweiss headline ran as “Trump announces surprise Iran talks during Netanyahu meeting.”

    United States president Donald Trump had met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss “Gaza, tariffs, and the alleged nuclear threat of Iran.” As for the latter, Trump said that the US is having direct talks with Iran on nuclear weapons and announced that there would be a “very big meeting” with important officials on April 12.

    Said Trump: “I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious.”

    What is the obvious? If one abhors war and wants to avoid it, then it seems the obvious thing to do is to stop bullying Iran, stop provoking it, and stop issuing threats and engaging in belligerent rhetoric.

    Trump continued: “And the obvious is not something that … we’re going to see if we can avoid it. But it’s getting to be very dangerous territory.”

    Dangerous? How so? Just on Trump’s say-so? One would presume that Iran having nuclear arms is what Trump considers dangerous. If so, then what is the nuclear-armed Israel that Trump openly courts, funds, and fetes compared to Iran whose supreme leader Ali Khamenei issued a never-rescinded fatwa against acquiring nuclear weapons decades ago? How dangerous is Iran, which has avoided war for several decades, in comparison to Israel which is perennially provoking and at war with its neighbors, and is in the midst of a scaled-up genocide? Professor Gideon Polya writes of the “the US-backed, Zionist Israeli mass murder of about 0.6 million Indigenous Palestinian[s]” — a number elided by legacy media. Why has Trump not described Israel as “dangerous”? And why isn’t the US dangerous since it has been constantly at war since its inception, and it is the only country that has used nukes against another nation?

    Trump: “If the talks aren’t successful with Iran …”

    But US nuclear talks with Iran already were successful. The Obama administration already achieved what constitutes a successful nuclear deal with Iran — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — since the deal was agreed to by both sides. It was the Trump administration which scuttled the deal, i.e., reversed a success. So the current situation exists because Trump undermined a previous deal, and the very fact that a deal was reached should be considered a success.

    “… I think Iran is going to be in great danger,” Trump continued. “And I hate to say it, great danger, because they can’t have a nuclear weapon. You know, it’s not a complicated formula. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That’s all there is.”

    That is hardly a compelling argument. Because Trump says so. He may point to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), but the US is also non-compliant with article 6 of the NPT.

    Which nation is dangerous?

    It is Israel and the US that are committing genocide in Gaza; Iran is not committing a genocide. Moreover, if you try to stop the genocide, then Trump will bomb you, civilian housing or not, as is the case in Yemen.

    It is Israel murdering paramedics, covering up its crime, and lying about it.

    It is Trump and Netanyahu’s aggressive moves toward Iran that are dangerous.

    Indeed, an Israeli official said that Netanyahu wants “the Libya model” in Iran, which would require a complete tearing down of Iran’s nuclear program.

    What was the outcome of the Libya model? Libya was disarmed, and the US and its Nato followers destroyed Africa’s wealthiest country, turning it into a dysfunctional state. That is likeliest the result that Israel wants for Iran.

    Is the world to be based on inequality among its nations? If not, then a progressivist principle holds that each nation has an inalienable right to self-defense. One way to avert war is to balance the power. North Korea knows what happened to Libya. It is now nuclear armed and this serves as a deterrent to aggressive nations who might otherwise attack it. Iran knows this as well. Ask yourself: if Iran was nuclear armed would Israel and the US be foolish enough to attack Iran?

    The post Danger in Trump’s Mind first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • R is for Regressive

    If we’re going to divide the voting public into two warring tribes, we should understand what allegiance to each of the major parties actually represents. Here we look at the ‘R’, next the ‘D’.

    History adds clarity and perspective.

    Here is the U.S. Federal Income Tax Rate Schedule from 1963.

    Back then, if your gross income was $4,000 or less, you paid a 20% rate. If your gross income was $400,000 or more, on the earnings over $400,000 you paid a 91% rate. This scaling of tax liability is based on a straightforward, if highly contentious principle. The more you earn, the larger portion of those earnings should go toward the general funding of government and greater good of society. What is tendered in taxes is apportioned by ability to pay.

    Granted, the above chart represents an extreme example of progressive taxation in our history. But it was very typical for almost two decades. The 91% rate was in effect 1946-1951 and 1954-1963. It was only exceeded at the end of WWII, 1944-1945 (94%) and two years in the 50s, 1952-1953 (92%).

    Obviously, this inspired a lot of odium among the wealthy. They claimed such a contrivance is intrinsically flawed. Because we are all just individuals, one person equal to every other in the eyes of God, we all should receive equal treatment. Just because some individuals are cleverer or financially better off than others should not single them out to be penalized or punished. Conservatives insist that tax rates should therefore be regressive – no fancy formulas and sliding scales – as opposed to progressive. We currently have a progressive tax schedule, though not as drastic as in 1944-1963. The range is 10% to a maximum of 37%.

    The most radically regressive counter to progressive taxation schedules proposed by extreme conservatives is the flat tax. We merely calculate how much money is needed and based on that, derive a single percentage, a tax rate applied across the board equally to everyone.

    While it is elegantly simple and seems to smack of common sense, let’s do a simple thought experiment to see how it would play out in the real world.

    For our example, let’s use a fairly modest flat tax rate of 30%.

    Current HHS Poverty Guidelines state that for the 48 contiguous states and District of Columbia, the poverty threshold for a family of four is $30,000. Such a family unit would be required to pay $9,000 in federal taxes, leaving them $21,000 to cover all family living expenses for the year. That would be housing, food, transportation, clothing, utilities, health care, etc. All the necessities for basic subsistence for four people on $21,000. The brutal truth is they would be confronted with a choice between eating and having a roof over their heads. The average rent for the 48 contiguous states and District of Columbia is $1,095 per month. There goes $13,140 for the year. That leaves $5.38 per day to feed each member of the family. I guess if they ate dog food, they could survive. Of course, there would be no money for anything else.

    Mind you, the figures just quoted are regarded by many credible COL sites as ridiculously conservative. One says a family of four needs $70,784 to survive. Another one puts it at $92,989, more than three times the poverty line figure we used as an example.

    Moving on.

    Jeff Bezos’ “annual earnings” is hard to nail down. It’s definitely a lot of money and one site claims it’s $64 billion. At the same time, he sometimes manages to pay little or no taxes. Considering how convoluted his personal finances are, capturing what his “taxable income” might be is like trying to grab grasshoppers in a field at night, blindfolded, using tweezers. For our purposes here, we’ll say the 30% flat tax applies to the whole $64 billion, which comes to $19,200,000,000. Brace yourselves and get out the tissues. I’m fighting my own tears as I report this. This means poor Mr. Bezos would be forced to eke out something resembling a decent life for the year on a mere $44,800,000,000. Of course, if he came up short, he could tap into his $161 billion of personal wealth. You know, to make the credit card payments on time and keep gas in the tank. Incidentally, as an aside, spending a million dollars a day, it would take over 440 years to spend Bezos’ fortune. How long would it take that family of four to go through the after-flat tax $21,000? Three months?

    The obvious point is that debates on political philosophy are non-starters in the real world. Arguing over whether Jeff Bezos deserves to be so rich or not, or whether the Ten Commandments of neoliberal capitalism demand that the ultra-wealthy be handled with kid gloves when it comes to paying taxes, whether grotesque levels of wealth inequality are acceptable, is simply absurd. None of this plays in the real world. We have a country to run and lives to live. We have a nation to cohere and a large complex, highly diverse society to manage and nurture. Divided we fall. Fragmented we fail. The greater good may require the lesser good to be dragged kicking and screaming to embrace compromises which have the greater consensus. Who was it who said “democracy is messy”? The divine right of kings didn’t survive modern societal evolution. What place does the divine right of the rich have in a modern functioning democratic nation? I’m not being facetious. Do we have to enforce sensible, constructive tax policy with a guillotine?

    By the way, there’s method to my madness here.

    I’m focusing here on tax policy and its real-world outcomes, because I think that’s the perfect vehicle for contrasting our nation’s two major political religions: liberal vs. conservative. While recent dramatic shifts on a host of specific issues have caused some confusion as to what these terms precisely mean, they’re still useful in identifying the two main political tribes in the U.S. As they too often say, follow the money. The antithetical ways conservatives and liberals approach tax policy pretty much sums up their respective views on the proper relationship between government and the governed.

    Having said that, I have no intention of attempting to arbitrate the opposing dogmas of sociopathic conservatism and bleeding-heart liberalism. Each is supported by meticulously cherry-picked facts and impeccable illogic. The simple, straightforward truth is that since these antagonistic positions are generated by completely different, totally incompatible premises and mutually exclusive world views, they inevitably arrive at very different places. There is no way to resolve the differences. However, as I hope you’ll discover by the end of this book, that is not to suggest that we as a society must remain mired in confrontation and paralyzed by gridlock.

    Back to reality.

    I’ve been citing “official” numbers in terms of what people are supposed to contribute in taxes. The vast majority of everyday citizens play by the book. The wealthy, despite their sanctimonious virtue signaling and interminable whining about onerous tax burdens, do not.

    With armies of tax consultants and tax code attorneys at their disposal, the rich don’t pay anything close to the official rate. Just look at these four paragons of the neoliberal profit-over-people paradigm.

    The agenda of the super-wealthy is not at all opaque or complicated. They want to keep as much money as they can by paying as little in taxes as possible. This dramatically and negatively impacts all of us. To keep their overall tax burden down, they aggressively cut spending. The list is chilling: Medicare for veterans; funding for schools with low-income students and students with disabilities; funding for pre-school and child care; meager allocations for WIC, i.e. nutrition assistance for women, infants and children; funding for Meals on Wheels which provides nutrition services for seniors; housing choice vouchers for seniors and veterans; funding for NIH, which means delays in cancer and Alzheimer’s research. Still high on the Republican agenda is the longstanding goal of cutting Social Security and Medicare.

    Taking a sledgehammer to initiatives which offer comfort, relief and support, often to the most vulnerable and disadvantaged, appears to liberals as cruel, selfish, inhumane, unconscionable, vicious and diabolically insensitive. Yet – and it pains me to say this – it’s important to acknowledge that for conservatives, it’s none of the above. For them it’s merely being prudent and responsible, only paying for what we can afford. They insist we simply don’t have the money to take care of everyone in need. Of course, conservatives install a big, fat monkey wrench in the machinery. Relentlessly insisting on tax decreases guarantees we are always short on money. And the con doesn’t stop there. Their relentless calls to cut taxes is then given further justification. We’re told that letting the “job creators” keep more of their personal wealth and corporate profits is great for the economy. And a thriving economy eliminates the need for all those expensive social programs. Thus, the less the wealthy pay in taxes, the better off we all are. So the argument goes.

    Quite a web of magical thinking being floated, for sure.

    At the same time, it is powerful, persuasive magical thinking, propagated by well-funded think tanks, promoted by influential economists, reinforced constantly by toadying pundits and the wholly captured media. Understand, this assault on the common good has been underway for over five decades. The focus and hard work of this blitz shows. The wealthy have perfected their game, while the defenders of us everyday citizens have been left scrambling, often bickering among themselves like alley cats, thrown into disarray by getting pointlessly sidetracked – identity politics, though valid and important, is a perfect example of such squandering of energy and time – thus rendered incapable of formulating and agreeing on a coherent alternative vision, based on fairness and respect for the general welfare and common good. Or as with the Democratic Party, would-be reformers have simply been bought out.

    We need a fresh start. We need to look at our situation with fresh eyes.

    This is where the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came in. He was asking the right questions, the tough questions, the necessary questions.

    What kind of country do we want to live in and what do we need to do to make that happen? In a true democracy, the ‘we’ runs the show. Everyone has to give, as well as take. Everyone has to make sacrifices. Everyone has to think in terms of the “everyone”.

    Timeless inspiration helps.

    “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” – John F. Kennedy, 01/20/61

    This is a very tall order, both profound and fragile. Yet, it sounds as fresh and relevant today as it did sixty plus years ago when it was first spoken.

    Though the election is behind us and Kennedy was forced to join the ranks of Donald Trump, we are still presented with the opportunity to meet that challenge.

    RFK Jr’s message couldn’t be more timely or critical for our future. The posturing by both major parties is a deadly pas de deux that’s impoverishing everyday citizens, vanquishing the middle class, destroying the American dream, and further bloating the vast fortunes of the wdes – Republicans and Democrats – in a call for unity and a promise of hope. ealthy. It’s easy to blame just the Republicans for this, but Mr. Kennedy consistently reached out to both sides – Republicans and Democrats – in a call for unity and a promise of hope. [See “An Epistle to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.— DV ed]

    I only hope his enemies – the enemies of “the people” – are paralyzed and incapable of torpedoing what may be our last chance to save America. Time is not on our side.

    R is for regressive.

    R is for rapacious.

    R is for ruthless.

  • This is an excerpt from my book, Electing A Kennedy Congress, a thoroughly misunderstood and maliciously denigrated attempt at restoring our country to a recognizable version of itself, one which aligns with the grossly misleading, totally fabricated image it peddles to its citizens and the world.
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  • A Financial Coup: How the Deep State Is Using Manufactured Crises to Seize Power

    What we’re witnessing is the calculated use of emergency powers to concentrate power in the hands of the president, enrich the Deep State, and dismantle what remains of economic and constitutional safeguards.

    Nearly 250 years after our nation’s founders rebelled over abused property rights, Americans are once again being subjected to taxation without any real representation, all the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little concern for the plight of its citizens.

    Nothing has changed for the better with Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s getting worse by the day.

    Having inherited one of the strongest economies in the world, President Trump—whose credentials as a businessman include multiple failed business ventures, bankruptcies, and a mountain of debt and unpaid bills—has managed to singlehandedly torch the economy with his misguided tariffs and self-serving schemes, which are being carried out without any oversight or checks from Congress.

    Yet it is Congress, not the president, that holds the authority to control government spending.

    This is spelled out in the Appropriations Clause, found in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution, which establishes a rule of law about how the monies paid to the government by the taxpayers are to be governed, and in the Taxing and Spending Clause of Article I, Section 8, Clause 1. In a nutshell, Congress is in charge of accounting for those funds and authorizing how those funds are spent (or not spent).

    The founders intended this regulatory power, referred to as the “power of the purse” (to determine what funds can be spent and what funds can be withheld) to serve as a potent check on any government agency that exceeds its authority, especially the executive branch.

    As law professor Zachary Price observes, “Given how strong this check is, it may not be surprising that presidents have sought ways to get around it.”

    Yet while past presidents have sought to expand their authority under the guise of national emergency declarations, Trump has taken this executive overreach to unprecedented extremes.

    Price explains how various presidents from Obama to Biden to Trump have attempted to subvert that same congressional power to press their own agendas, whether by funding the Affordable Care Act, advancing student debt, or as in Trump’s case, by dismantling and defunding agencies funded by Congress.

    Executive orders and national emergencies have become a favored tool by which presidents attempt to govern unilaterally. As the Brennan Center reports, presidents have access to 150 such emergency powers, which essentially allow them to become limited dictators with greatly enhanced powers upon declaration of an emergency.

    Because the National Emergencies Act does not actually define what constitutes an emergency, presidents have an incredible amount of room to wreak constitutional mischief on the citizenry.

    While presidents on both sides of the aisle have abused these powers, Trump is attempting to test the limits of these emergency powers by declaring a national emergency anytime he wants to sidestep Congress and quickly impose his will on the nation.

    Trump’s liberal use of emergency powers to sidestep the rule of law underscores the danger they pose to our constitutional system of checks and balances.

    Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has used his presidential emergency powers in a multitude of ways in order to mount brazen power grabs thinly disguised as concerns for national security, thereby allowing him to justify tapping into the nation’s natural resources, rounding up and deporting vast numbers of migrants (both documented and undocumented), and imposing duties and tariffs against longtime allies and trade partners.

    Thus far, the Republican-controlled Congress, which has the power to terminate an emergency with a two-thirds vote, has done nothing to rein in Trump’s dictatorial tendencies.

    These unchecked powers aren’t just a threat to the balance of government—they have immediate, devastating consequences for the economy and working Americans.

    Economists fear the ramifications of Trump’s latest national emergency, which he claims will usher in “the golden age of America” through the imposition of heavy tariffs on foreign nations, could push the U.S. and the rest of the world into a major recession by inciting a global trade-war, isolating America economically from the rest of the world, and flat-lining businesses that had expected to boom.

    Fears of a recession are growing stronger by the hour.

    In addition to sabotaging the economy, laying off tens of thousands of federal employees and dismantling those parts of government which serve the interests of working-class Americans, as well as its aging, disabled and homeless populations, Trump and his cabal of billionaire buddies are dismantling the few remaining checks on public and private corruption—fueling corporate greed at every turn.

    This is how the man who promised to drain the swamp continues to mire us in the swamp.

    Meanwhile, taxpayers—whose retirement savings have taken a nosedive—are expected to foot the bill to the tune of tens of millions of dollars for Trump’s frequent golf trips to his own golf courses (he’s also charging exorbitant rates to Secret Service to stay at his properties while protecting him), his multimillion-dollar photo ops at the Super Bowl and the Daytona 500, his desire to redo the White House gardens and build a $100 million ballroom, and his latest demand for a costly military parade in honor of his 79th birthday.

    While President Trump may talk a good game about his plans for making America richer, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the only person he’s making richer—at taxpayer expense—is himself.

    This fiscal insanity, coupled with Trump’s imperialistic and tyrannical ambitions, echoes the very abuses that drove America’s founders to rebel against King George III.

    In other words, the government is still robbing us blind.

    Trump hasn’t reined in the government’s greed—he’s just been using a different playbook to get the same result: beg, borrow or steal, the government wants more of our hard-earned dollars any way it can get it.

    Indeed, Trump, the self-proclaimed “debt king,” has presided over one of the most reckless expansions of government spending in modern history while posturing as a fiscal conservative.

    This isn’t governance. It’s looting—by legislation, debt, and design.

    We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

    This is financial tyranny.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if you have no choice, no voice, and no real say over how your money is used, you’re not free.

    You’re being ruled.

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  • McKinley or Lincoln? Tariffs vs. Greenbacks

    President Trump has repeatedly expressed his admiration for Republican President William McKinley, highlighting his use of tariffs as a model for economic policy. But critics say Trump’s tariffs, which are intended to protect U.S. interests, have instead fueled a stock market nosedive, provoked tit-for-tat tariffs from key partners, risk a broader trade withdrawal, and could increase the federal debt by reducing GDP and tax income.

    The federal debt has reached $36.2 trillion, the annual interest on it is $1.2 trillion, and the projected 2025 budget deficit is $1.9 trillion – meaning $1.9 trillion will be added to the debt this year. It’s an unsustainable debt bubble doomed to pop on its present trajectory.

    The goal of Elon Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) is to reduce the deficit by reducing budget expenditures. But Musk now acknowledges that the DOGE team’s efforts will probably cut expenses by only $1 trillion, not the $2 trillion originally projected. That will leave a nearly $1 trillion deficit that will have to be covered by more borrowing, and the debt tsunami will continue to grow.

    Rather than modeling the economy on McKinley, President Trump might do well to model it on our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, whose debt-free Greenbacks saved the country from a crippling war debt to British-backed bankers, and whose policies laid the foundation for national economic resilience in the coming decades. Just “printing the money” can be and has been done sustainably, by directing the new funds into generating new GDP; and there are compelling historical examples of that approach. In fact, it may be our only way out of the debt crisis. But first a look at the tariff issue.

    Trump Channels McKinley

    Trump said at a 2024 campaign event, “In the 1890s, our country was probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs.” And in his second inaugural address on January 20, 2025, he said, “The great President William McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.”

    That may have been true for certain industries, but it did not actually hold for the broader population. The Tariff Act of 1890, commonly called the McKinley Tariff because it was framed by then Representative William McKinley, raised the average duty on imports to almost 50%. The increase was designed to protect domestic industries and workers from foreign competition, but the 1890s were marked by severe economic instability.

    The Panic of 1893 plunged the U.S. into a depression lasting until 1897. Unemployment soared to 18.4% in 1894, with over 15,000 businesses failing and 74 railroads going bankrupt. The stock market crashed, losing nearly 40% of its value between 1893 and 1894. Far from being the wealthiest era, this period saw widespread hardship that tariffs not only failed to prevent but exacerbated.

    Farmers and factory workers were hit particularly hard. The McKinley Tariff raised the cost of imported goods, squeezing rural and working-class budgets. Farmers faced a deflationary spiral as crop prices plummeted. Real wages for industrial workers stagnated or declined, with purchasing power eroded from high tariffs inflating the prices of consumer goods.

    In the 1860s, President Lincoln issued debt-free money in the form of unbacked U.S. Notes or “Greenbacks;” but new issues of Greenbacks were discontinued in the 1870s, and gold was made the sole backing of currency. The resulting economic distress fueled the Greenback movement, which sought a return to the “lawful money” issued by President Lincoln. The Greenbacks were considered lawful because they were issued directly by the government as provided in the Constitution, rather than by private banks.

    The Greenback Party faded, but its policies were adopted by the Populist Party and were pursued by a grassroots movement called “Coxey’s Army.” It staged the first-ever march on Washington in 1894, seeking a return to the Greenback solution. The march was considered the plot line for the 1900 classic American children’s story, The Wizard of Oz, with the scarecrow as the farmers, the tin man as the factory workers, the lion as William Jennings Bryan, and Dorothy as populist leader Mary Ellen Lease. Like the powerless Wizard, then-President Grover Cleveland turned the marchers away at the gate. (For a fuller history, see my book, The Web of Debt.)

    As with McKinley’s tariffs, President Trump’s tariffs are said by critics to be backfiring, contributing to a dramatic stock market drop and prompting retaliatory tariffs and trade withdrawals from other countries. Economists warn of broader fallout. According to a New York Times analysis on March 9, tariffs and retaliation could slash U.S. GDP growth by a full percentage point in 2025, and households are potentially facing an extra $1,000 annually in costs due to tariff-driven inflation. Internationally, the tariffs have triggered withdrawals and realignments. Reuters highlighted on March 10 that the U.S. stock market had lost $4 trillion in value as recession fears grew, and the S&P 500 lost $1.7 trillion just on April 3.

    The Lincoln Alternative

    Rather than alienating our trading partners and stressing investors and consumers, Trump could take a page from Abraham Lincoln’s playbook. Lincoln wasn’t opposed to tariffs. Campaigning for the Illinois state legislature in 1832, he said, “My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a National Bank, I am in favor of the Internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles.” The tariffs were intended to protect the country’s fledgling industries from foreign competition, but they needed a national bank to provide the credit necessary to flourish.

    President Washington set the model with the First U.S. Bank, which was essentially a national infrastructure and development bank. According to Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s Reports to Congress — the First and Second Reports on Public Credit, the Report on Manufacturing, and the Report on a National Bank — the Bank’s primary purposes were to manage the government’s Revolutionary War debt by turning it into a productive asset, using debt-for-equity swaps to provide capitalization; to issue a uniform national currency; and to provide credit for infrastructure and manufacturing, spurring economic development at a time when capital was scarce.

    The Second U.S. Bank followed that model. But President Andrew Jackson declared war on the Bank, and its charter expired in 1836. During the ensuing “Free Banking Era” (roughly 1837 to 1863), the country was left without a national currency or a national bank. Individual banks chartered by states could issue their own banknotes, usually redeemable in precious metals held in reserve by the issuing bank. It was a chaotic system, with the value of the notes varying according to the distance of the customer from the bank. Distance mattered in case the bank ran out of precious metals in a bank run, a common occurrence.

    Lincoln didn’t get his national bank, but he did sign the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, which stabilized the chaotic money supply with a single currency backed by precious metals and federal securities; and he avoided trapping the country into a crippling debt at exorbitant interest rates by issuing debt-free Greenbacks to fund the Civil War. With this financing, Lincoln’s government not only won the war but funded major infrastructure and development, including completing the transcontinental railroad that connected the country from coast to coast.

    Greenbacks constituted 40% of the national currency in the 1860s. Today, increasing the money supply by 40% would mean adding about $8.8 trillion. Yet this massive money-printing during the Civil War did not lead to hyperinflation. Greenbacks suffered a drop in value as against gold, but according to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwarz in A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, this was not due to printing money. Rather, it was caused by trade imbalances with foreign trading partners on the gold standard. And price inflation abated after the war.

    Today’s Treasury Could Follow Lincoln’s Model

    The most direct way for the present Treasury to solve its debt problem is to follow our first Republican president and issue currency directly. One possibility is to issue trillion dollar coins. The Constitution provides, “Congress shall have the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.” That approach and its constitutionality is detailed here. President Lincoln solved his debt crisis with paper U.S. Notes or Greenbacks, a move that was upheld by the Supreme Court.

    Economists will cry that money printing on a major scale will result in hyperinflation, devaluing the currency and driving up consumer prices. But that did not occur with the Fed’s QE following the 2008-10 Global Financial Crisis, and the inflation objection can be overcome if the new money is used specifically for expenditures on infrastructure and new goods and services. When supply and demand remain in balance, prices remain stable, and the currency can retain its value.

    To economists, “inflation” means an inflated money supply; but “too much money” drives up prices only when “chasing too few goods.” The price of eggs recently doubled, but it wasn’t because the number of customers demanding eggs suddenly doubled. It was because the supply of eggs was radically reduced by the culling of over 20 million egg-laying chickens due to the bird flu scare. The obvious solution is to increase the chicken population. Increase supply to meet demand.

    Some Historical and Contemporary Examples

    China transformed itself from one of the poorest countries in the world to global superpower in only four decades. Where did it get the money? Mainly, it just issued the yuan, as shown in my last article here. The chart in that article from Trading Economics is now behind a paywall, so here I will use the dates and figures that are still publicly visible on their web page. Citing the People’s Bank of China, it states,  “Money Supply M2 in China averaged 93486.82 CNY Billion from 1996 until 2025, reaching an all time high of 320526.31 CNY Billion in February of 2025 and a record low of 5840.10 CNY Billion in January of 1996.” 320526.31 divided by 5840.10 = 54.88, which can be rounded to a factor of 55 or 5500%.

    At the same time, the U.S. money supply increased by only 600% ($3647.9 in Jan. 1996 to $21,671 in Feb. 2025). The U.S. money supply is increased by bank lending, so 600% can be considered an average increase from that source over 29 years. That leaves a 4900% increase in the Chinese money supply from “money printing,” through mechanisms explained in my last article. Despite this dramatic increase in “demand,” price inflation remained relatively stable and was actually lower overall than in the U.S. The new money created new GDP, which shot up along with the money supply.

    In the U.S. from 1930 to 1945, the money supply approximately doubled to finance economic recovery and the war effort. Consumer prices swung from deflation during the Depression to inflation during World War II, but the overall average remained low. The new money was largely injected through loans from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a federal agency that took on the role of an infrastructure bank. The debt to GDP ratio in 1946 reached a high of 121% — as high as in recent years — but it dropped down to a very manageable 31% by 1974, not because the debt was paid down but because GDP increased from the money poured into manufacturing and infrastructure in the 1930s and ‘40s.

    Germany began the 1930s literally bankrupt. New money was injected in the form of a labor-backed currency (“Mefo bills”) issued by the government, directed specifically to manufacturing and infrastructure. MEFO bills allowed billions in military and public-works funding, but inflation did not increase.

    Contrary Examples

    What about the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany in the 1920s, or the Zimbabwe hyperinflation of 2007-09? According to Prof. Michael Hudson, who has studied this issue extensively, “Every hyperinflation in history stems from the foreign exchange markets. It stems from governments trying to throw enough of their currency on the market to pay their foreign debts.” The new money did not go into creating new goods and services. It was used to pay foreign debts in a currency over which the country had no control. This left the domestic currency vulnerable to rampant short selling by speculators, resulting in serious devaluation and hyperinflation.

    Commentators often point to the 2020 COVID-19 payments to consumers — the stimulus checks under the CARES Act and subsequent relief packages — as the culprit driving up prices in the following years. The assumption is that demand outstripped supply purely because people had more cash to spend. Personal disposable income did spike by about 10% in 2020; but in a properly functioning economy, higher demand spurs production. That did not happen in the COVID-19 years because supply could not respond.

    Nearly 100,000 small businesses were closed permanently due to COVID-19 by mid-2021. Meanwhile, global supply chains were clogged. The Los Angeles and Long Beach ports saw container ship wait times jump from days to weeks, while production was crippled by factory shutdowns in Asia along with labor shortages. A 2024 Brookings analysis concluded that “COVID-19 inflation was a supply shock.” Again the remedy is to increase supply along with demand (money).

    How to Ensure that New Money Is Channeled into New GDP

    The economic miracles of China, Germany and the U.S. following the Civil War and Great Depression demonstrate that governments can at least double the money supply—sometimes multiplying it manyfold, as in China — without spiking consumer prices, provided new money fuels infrastructure and production to match money supply growth with GDP growth.

    In China, this is enabled by a sprawling network of over 2,000 publicly-owned banks, in addition to the three federal policy banks including China Development Bank (CDB). The Big Four national banks are predominantly owned by the central government, through entities that sell shares to private investors but retain government control, while thousands of city and rural banks are controlled by local governments at the county level. These institutions channel credit into local projects, amplifying economic output.

    At the national level, China’s three giant policy banks funnel credit into the federal government’s long-range plans for infrastructure and development. This multi-year focus has been called a major advantage of Chinese “command capitalism” over Western “stakeholder capitalism,” in which private companies are required to focus on short-term profits for their stakeholders. However, the United States could form a publicly-owned national infrastructure bank like the CDB with long-range capabilities, on the model of Hamilton’s First U.S. Bank and Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The latter was not actually a depository bank but was a federal agency formed by President Hoover, expanded by Roosevelt’s government into a massive credit-generating machine for infrastructure and manufacturing.

    HR 4052, titled “The National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2023,” is currently before Congress and has 47 co-sponsors. Like Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the bank is designed to be a source of off-budget financing, without adding new costs to the federal budget. For more information, see https://www.nibcoalition.com/.

    At the local level, state-owned infrastructure banks could do something similar. Currently our only state-owned bank is the Bank of North Dakota, but it is a very successful model that  not only funds state infrastructure and development but generates income for the state and acts as a “mini-Fed” for local banks. For more information, see the Public Banking Institute website.

    The U.S. could also issue money directly, as Lincoln did in the 1860s with Greenbacks, and the German government did in the 1930s with Mefo bills, among other examples. The German government avoided speculative exploitation of the funds by issuing Mefo bills as payment for specific industrial output. The British did something similar in the Middle Ages with tally sticks issued as payment for goods and services, a system that lasted over 600 years. Keeping federal payments honest and transparent is possible today with modern IT technology, one of the assigned tasks of the DOGE IT team.The possibilities were framed in an editorial directed against Lincoln’s debt-free Greenbacks, attributed to the 1865 London Times (though not now to be found in its archives):

    If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic during the late war in that country, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.

    Without trade wars or kinetic wars, President Trump is in a position to achieve the vision for which President Lincoln might have taken a bullet, through the time-tested expedients of publicly-issued money and publicly-owned banks.

  • This article was first posted as an original to ScheerPost.com.
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  • White House orders expansion in US government use of AI

    Donald Trump’s Executive Office has ordered federal agencies to name a chief AI officer, develop strategies for expanding their use of artificial intelligence, and to make the purchase of American AI products and services a chief priority. The memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Tuesday (AEST) puts into effect an executive…

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  • Nicaragua’s Opposition Media Welcome Trump’s New Tariffs

    Five countries in Central America, together with the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, have a free trade agreement with Washington, but this didn’t protect them from the punitive tariffs announced on President Trump’s “Liberation Day.”

    A minimum 10 per cent tariff on exports to the US will hit low-income countries throughout the region. But exports from Nicaragua have been saddled with an even higher tariff of 18 per cent. Delighted opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government have blamed it, rather than Trump, for the country receiving this additional penalty. However, simple examination of the figures shows that Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated in the same way as every other country’s.

    Before examining the opposition media’s error-strewn reports, this article first explains the background: how the tariff was set, whether it is legitimate and how US-Nicaragua trade is changing. Then it turns to the opposition’s mistakes and explains how they are using Trump’s actions to bolster their attacks on Nicaragua’s government and people.

    How the tariffs were set

    Trump’s chart of tariffs has two sets of figures for each country: the “tariffs charged to the USA” and the “reciprocal tariffs” to be imposed this month. Bizarrely, the “tariffs charged to the USA” do not relate to actual tariffs charged on US imports. Instead, they are the product of a calculation based on each country’s trade gap with the US. For most countries, the value of these “tariffs charged” has been set at 10 per cent, on the basis that the US has no trade deficit with them, or only a small one. All of these countries (including Nicaragua’s neighbors) are hit with a “reciprocal tariff” of 10 per cent on their exports to the US, from this month onwards, even if they buy more from the US than they sell to it.

    However, a higher “tariff charged” is calculated for countries with which the US is judged to have a bigger trade deficit. For each country, the White House looked up the deficit for its trade with the US in goods for 2024, then divided that by the total value of the country’s exports to the US. Trump, to be “kind”, said he would offer a discount, so halved that figure. The calculation was distilled into a formula.

    For example, these are the figures for China:

    1. Goods trade deficit (exports from the US minus imports): – $291.9 billion
    2. Total goods imported to the US from China: $438.9 billion
    3. A ÷ B = – 0.67, or 67 per cent
    4. Half of this is 34 per cent, the new tariff being applied to China.

    Based on this formula, the small African country of Lesotho was saddled with the highest “reciprocal tariff” of 50 per cent, while several major SE Asian countries were also hit with very high tariffs.

    How Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated

    Nicaragua’s “reciprocal tariff” was calculated in the same way. According to US trade figures, in 2024 US goods exports to Nicaragua were $2.9 billion, while US goods imports from Nicaragua totaled $4.6 billion. The US goods trade deficit with Nicaragua was therefore – $1.7 billion in 2024.

    The calculation was therefore: trade deficit (- $1.7 billion) ÷ imports ($4.6 billion) = – 0.37, or 37 per cent, halved to produce a “reciprocal tariff” of 18 per cent.

    This means that from April 9, there will be a new tax of 18 per cent on Nicaraguan goods sent to the US, payable as a customs duty on their arrival by the company or agency importing the goods.

    How Nicaragua might contest the tariff

    It seems unlikely that Trump will bend to pressure on the tariffs. However, at least in theory, there are three ways in which Nicaragua might argue that the tariff is wrongly imposed:

    1. Nicaragua’s Central Bank shows a smaller trade gap with the US. According to the Central Bank’s figures for 2024, Nicaragua’s exports to the US totaled $3.7 billion, not $4.6 billion, while its imports from the US totaled $2.7 billion, giving a trade gap of $1 billion, not $1.7 billion. On the basis of Trump’s tariff formula, the result should have been a 14 per cent tariff, not 18 per cent, if Nicaragua’s trade figures are correct. (A possible explanation for the difference may be the way that goods, originating in Nicaragua, are processed in other Central American countries before arrival in the US.)
    2. Although most Central American countries import more from the US than they export to it, Costa Rica also has a trade surplus with the US, amounting to $2 billion, bigger than Nicaragua’s, yet it is only being penalized by the standard “reciprocal tariff” (10 per cent).
    3. Most importantly, as the Guatemalan government pointed out, under the CAFTA-DR trade treaty new tariffs are illegal (under both US federal and international law). The treaty prohibits new tariffs or customs duties between the seven member countries. Therefore, all six of the other countries that are parties to CAFTA-DR are entitled to challenge the US for breaching it.

    Action by CAFTA-DR members is complicated by the fact that Nicaragua is not only worst hit by the tariffs but is also a country that the US would like to exclude from the treaty completely, a point picked up below.

    Changing significance of Nicaraguan exports to the US

    Nicaragua’s Central Bank divides its trade figures between “merchandise” and products from free trade zones (principally, apparel). This, as we will see, confused the opposition media. This is the breakdown:

    • Exports of merchandise (e.g. gold, coffee, meat, etc.) totaled $4.2 billion in 2024, with the US accounting for 38.7 per cent of these, or $1.62 billion.
    • Exports from free trade zones were lower ($3.5 billion) but the proportion going to the US was much higher (59 per cent, or £2.08 billion).
    • Of Nicaragua’s total exports, at $7.7 billion, $3.7 billion went to the US (48 per cent).
    • Exports provide 39 per cent of Nicaragua’s annual income or GDP.
    • Exports to the US therefore account for a significant 18 per cent of GDP.

    These figures exclude services, such as tourism and transport, where trade between Nicaragua and the US is roughly in balance (unlike Guatemala and Honduras, with whom the US has a strong trade surplus in services).

    Exports to the US have fallen slowly from over 50 per cent of the total two years ago, as the government looks for other markets. Exports to the Republic of China, for example, were four times higher in 2024 than in 2022, but (at $68 million) are still a small proportion. There are other growing export markets, of which the most notable is Canada (now the second biggest buyer of Nicaraguan merchandise).

    The Nicaraguan government’s response to the tariffs is likely to involve continued efforts to diversify trade and keeping a watchful eye on the effects on different sectors of the economy. Producers of products like coffee and gold may be less affected as they already have diverse markets. On the other hand the apparel sector, which until this month enjoyed zero tariffs on its $2 billion exports to the US, is geared to the US market and might find greater difficulty in mitigating the tariff’s effects.

    Celebration and misinformation in opposition media

    Nicaragua’s opposition media, long financed by the US government, admit that they have been hit by Elon Musk’s cuts. How they are now funded is unclear. However, prominent opposition activists enjoy salaried employment in US universities and think tanks, where they call for sanctions that would hit poor Nicaraguans. Naturally, they welcomed Trump’s announcement.

    Errors in reporting on the tariffs showed opposition journalists’ unfamiliarity with Nicaragua’s economy. Confidencial, in a piece translated and reproduced in the Havana Times, claimed that the tariff imposed on Nicaragua ignored a trade surplus “of $484 million in favor of the US” which “has been growing in recent years.” This completely ignored exports to the US from the free trade zones. The same error was made a day later by Despacho 505.

    According to Confidencial, the reason for the higher tariff on Nicaragua (and on Venezuela, hit with a 15 per cent tariff) was to punish their authoritarian governments. In reality, the higher tariffs on both countries resulted from the application of Trump’s formula, but this deliberate misrepresentation was to be repeated.

    In an “analysis” for Confidencial on April 4, Manuel Orozco painted the 18 per cent tariff as specifically aimed at the Nicaraguan “dictatorship” (again, linking it with Venezuela). Orozco is a former Nicaraguan now living in Washington, working for the Inter-American Dialogue, an NGO funded by the US government and its arms industry. It is most unlikely that he was unaware of how the tariff was calculated; misleading his readers strengthened his argument that the higher tariff was a purely political move.

    Further articles in Despacho 505 and Articulo 66 also blamed political factors without explaining the arithmetic behind the tariff. In La Prensa, activist Felix Maradiaga wrongly remarked that the US accounts for over 60 per cent of Nicaragua’s exports. According to him, the supposed weakness of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government means the country will struggle to cope (he disregards its remarkable resilience in dealing with the much heavier economic consequences of the 2018 coup attempt and the 2020 pandemic).

    Then, also in Confidencial, opposition activist Juan Sebastián Chamorro made the claim that the new tariffs, which of course he welcomes, are entirely compatible with the CAFTA-DR trade treaty. He argued that Washington’s action is justified on grounds of “national security.” This echoes the absurd classification of Nicaragua (during the first Trump administration, continued by Biden) as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

    Opposition media are trying to present the new tariff as the first round of the stronger sanctions on Nicaragua that they have been urging Washington to adopt. They do this regardless of their illegality under the CAFTA-DR trade treaty or wider international law. The possibility of going further – excluding Nicaragua from the treaty – was trailed by Trump’s Latin America envoy, Mauricio Claver-Carone, in January, although he was careful to note the difficulties. But if this were to happen it would delight the opposition even further.

    Obsessed with promoting regime change in Managua, these anti-Sandinista activists disregard the effects of tariffs and trade sanctions on ordinary Nicaraguans. On “Liberation Day” Trump showed his indifference to the millions of people in low-income countries whose livelihoods depend on producing food and other products for export to the US. The likes of Orozco, Maradiaga and Chamorro behave in just the same way.

  • Image credit: Trump on “Liberation Day” [Photo: White House]
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  • America Has Become Anti-American

    Because I live in Japan and post articles which are critical of America, I am often accused of being anti-American. The truth is both counter-intuitive and disturbing.

    I haven’t changed, but America certainly has.

    America has become anti-American!

    The Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. Yet reporters are now being intimidated and threatened with arrest and incarceration. Whistleblowers who try to expose fraud, corruption, and waste in government by making available in public news media forums information of value to American citizens, are likewise harassed and prosecuted.

    The Constitution requires the government to promote the general welfare. Yet the benefits of our economic wealth are accruing to a tiny elite while poverty is still pervasive and the majority of the population scrambles to make ends meet. Among the 34 highly developed nations in the world, America ranks 17th in terms of life satisfaction — happiness — the key factors for its low ranking being massive income inequality and excessively long hours spent on average in the work place. In terms of health care and life expectancy, for the richest country in the world, America ranks abysmally low, with longevity actually declining.

    The Constitution guarantees equal representation of its citizens. Yet, the electoral system has become corrupted by unverifiable e-voting, grotesque gerrymandering of districts, and torrents of money in politics, which only guarantees the voices of average voters will be drowned out and their participation in our democracy marginalized.

    The Constitution guarantees the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure, and right of trial by jury before peers, yet starting in 2001 by using the endless War on Terror as an excuse, patently unconstitutional legislation has been effected — Patriot Acts I and II, FISA, and the NDAA which Obama signed into law on New Years Eve 2011 while America was preoccupied with celebrating the holidays, which have regularly been renewed ever since — now placing every citizen at risk for arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention with no access to legal counsel.

    The Constitution guarantees equality before the law. Yet rich elite white collar criminals wreak havoc on our economy breaking countless laws and go free, while petty crimes by regular citizens — especially people of color — result in harsh and disproportionate prosecution and punishment.

    The Constitution guarantees the right of free speech, including dissent against questionable policies. Yet, we see individuals protesting the cruel, malevolent and systematic killing of Palestinians by Israel, harassed, persecuted, and prosecuted by establishment authorities, who apparently consider the slaughter of between 50,000 and 200,000 mostly innocent Palestinians, including women and children — horrific war crimes which those in power indisputably support — necessary and laudable. U.S. support for this genocide mocks the principles we hold dear and have at least until now defined us as a people.

    The Constitution specifies that the power to wage war is exclusively the responsibility of Congress. Yet the president as Commander-in-Chief as often as not ignores the constitutional limits as well as those contained in the War Powers Act, using the military purely at his own discretion. This wanton abuse of military power results in the unnecessary deaths of our citizens in uniform, while at the same time counter-productively foments enormous animosity and mistrust across much of the planet.

    Our legal framework via the Posse Comitatus Act has long barred the use of the military for law enforcement but vast and sophisticated surveillance by federal security agencies, the militarization of local police forces, and their handshake agreements with federal agencies, puts us all under the iron fist of enforcement agencies like the NSA and operatives of the Pentagon itself.

    I could go on. But that might offend some people.

    Sometimes the truth can be so anti-American.

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  • Timber From Illegal Logging In Amazon Discovered In US, European Markets

    A new investigative report, Tricks, Traders and Trees, by international NGO the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) reveals widespread illegal logging, corruption and fraud in the Brazilian Amazon.

    The investigation traced illegal timber that had originated from five logging sites in Pará state to the United States and European Union, despite laws that prohibit the importing of illegal timber and require due diligence from companies.

    “Our investigation shows how illegal Amazon timber is flooding EU and U.S. markets, fueling unfair competition for legitimate companies despite laws banning the trade in illicit wood.

    The post Timber From Illegal Logging In Amazon Discovered In US, European Markets appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • I Love My Country but…

    This writer recalls back in the mid 80s when I took myself a vacation to Club Med in Martinique. It was discount time, June, so I could afford the week of fun. When I arrived at the facility, man it was a lot hotter than Elmont, Long Island. They placed me in a cottage with a roommate, nice guy from the Philly area, a bit younger than my 35 years. The first night we both were bushed from the trip and the heat. I lay in my bed with the bug net surrounding me. I suddenly realized that the place had no AC, just windows with slots… enough to let ALL the mosquitoes in. Having an enlarged prostate meant at least two or three trips to the john. My initial piss trip allowed me to see who my enemies were- mosquitoes, at least three or four humongous ones, awaited me by the toilet.

    The next morning, after breakfast, I was walking through the grounds when something stung me in my calf. I hobbled to the infirmary to be treated as the lump just grew seemingly like a red cherry. That afternoon I said, “Screw this,” and I checked out immediately. A Mercedes town car picked me up and off I went to the airport. Before that, I called my secretary and arranged to have a taxi pick me up at JFK upon my arrival. A few brief hours later I was hobbling out of the cab and up to my attic apartment. As I entered the hallway, I fell to my knees and literally kissed the carpeted floor. At that moment I vowed to never diss my country again.

    Sadly, my love affair with America only lasted until, 16 years later, the Bush-Cheney Cabal orchestrated their phony war on Iraq. From that point on I realized that I will always be in conflict between my love for what this nation should stand for, and the leaders who I cannot stand. Not enough bug nets to keep their evil away from me.

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  • Why Are HANDS OFF Rallies Supporting NATO?

    We are passionate supporters of all but one of the items on the Hands Off agenda for the April 5 rallies. We couldn’t agree more that the corrupt U.S. government should stop destroying, privatizing, firing, and giving away the post office, schools, land, Social Security, healthcare, environmental protections, and all sorts of essential public services. But we are deeply disturbed to see NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization) on the list of items that we are rallying to protect.

    Many people believe that NATO is a peace-loving, defensive alliance, but the opposite is true. During the past 30 years, NATO has fomented a vast arc of violence stretching from Libya to Afghanistan, leaving villages bombed, infrastructure destroyed, and countless dead.

    Originally formed in opposition to the Soviet Union, NATO not only failed to disband with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it increased from 16 members in 1991 to 32 members today. Despite promises not to expand eastward, it ploughed ahead against the advice of senior, experienced U.S. diplomats who warned that this would inflame tensions with Russia. While Russia bears full responsibility for invading Ukraine,1in violation of the UN Charter, we cannot deny the disastrous role played by NATO in provoking and then prolonging the war in Ukraine. Two years ago, then NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admitted that insisting on NATO membership for Ukraine had brought on the Ukraine war. “[Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders,” he said.

    The inclusion of NATO in the Hands Off list contradicts the basic Hands Off agenda. Right now, at the bidding of President Trump, NATO is openly and aggressively pressuring its member nations to move money from healthcare, retirement funds, and clean energy to weapons and militarism. Watch a video of the Secretary General of NATO publicly telling the European Union to move money from healthcare and retirement to war. It should be clear which side of the Hands Off agenda NATO is on.

    NATO is a destabilizing, law-breaking force for militarization and war provocation. Its existence makes wars, including nuclear wars, more likely. Its hostility toward the few significant militaries in the world that are not among its members fuels arms races and conflicts. The commitment of NATO members to join each others’ wars and NATO’s pursuit of enemies far from the North Atlantic risk global destruction.

    We would be happy to expand the Hands Off demands to international issues, such as Hands Off Palestine or Yemen or Greenland or Panama or Canada. But we do object to including a destructive institution like NATO, an institution that systematically and grossly violates the commitment to settle disputes peacefully contained in the UN Charter. If we are truly committed to human needs and the environment, as well as peace, diplomacy, and the UN Charter, then we should eliminate NATO from the Hands Off agenda.

    We should go beyond that. We should recognize that while many government agencies are being unfairly cut and need to be defended, one enormous agency that makes up over half of federal discretionary spending is being drastically increased and needs to be cut. That is the Pentagon. The U.S. government spends more on war and war preparation than on all other discretionary items combined. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. spends more on militarism than 227 of them combined. Russia and China spend a combined 21% of what the U.S. and its allies spend on war. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. exports more weaponry than 228 of them combined. The U.S. spends more on war per capita than any other nation, except Israel.

    This is not normal or acceptable, or compatible with funding human and environmental needs. NATO has taught people to measure military spending as a percentage of a nation’s economy, as if war were a public service to be maximized. Trump has recently switched from demanding 2% of economies for war to 3%, and then almost immediately to 5%. There’s no logical limit.

    Companies that profit from war, like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, will always push for more military spending. So will NATO. While NATO allies consider Russia their most immediate and direct threat, their long-term adversary is China. The constant search for enemies leads to a vicious cycle of arms races. But there is a different path: the pursuit of disarmament negotiations, the rule of law and global cooperation. If we pursued that path, we could move massive amounts of money away from weapons to invest in addressing the non-optional dangers of climate, disease, and poverty.

    The rational and moral international piece of the Hands Off agenda should be to eliminate both NATO and the voracious militarism that threaten the future of life on this planet.

    NOTE:

    The post Why Are HANDS OFF Rallies Supporting NATO? first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    It is a matter or record:
    * that the current violence in Ukraine began with the US abrogation of a promise not to expand NATO one inch further east in 1990
    *that the Obama administration engineered a coup to overthrow the elected president Yanukovych of Ukraine in 2014, and this precipitated the overwhelming Crimean vote to secede from Ukraine
    * that Donbass oblasts voted also to secede from Ukraine, and that Ukraine began bombing Donbass
    * that German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Francois Hollande signed on as guarantors of the Minsk Accords, which they admitted was to give Ukraine time to militarize and join NATO
    * that US secretary of state Marco Rubio has admitted that it is a proxy war waged against Ukraine
    If this is factually accurate, then to state “Russia bears full responsibility for invading Ukraine” is fallacious. — DV Ed

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Oddities of Trump’s Tariffs

    Liberation Day, as April 2 was described by US President Donald Trump, had all the elements of reality television perversion. It also had a dreamy, aspirational hope: that factories would spring up from rust belt soil in a few months across the United States; that industries would, unmoored from the globe, become vibrant and burgeoning. The world’s largest importer had decided to turn back the tide.

    The imposition of what Trump calls reciprocal tariffs was broadly savage. Over 180 countries fell within their scope. A baseline tariff of 10% was applied on goods imported by the US. Countries were then singled out for being particularly mischievous, in the eyes of the administration, not so much for having their own tariffs on US goods and products so much as having an unsporting surplus. For China, the new rate is 34%. For Vietnam: 46%. Taiwan: 32%. Cambodia, a stunning 49%.

    The malleable rules of reality television intruded with Trump’s chart of countries and tariff rates, as revealed in the White House Rose Garden. (He would have had a bigger chart, but for the wind.) “Reciprocal – that means they do it to us, and we do it to them,” the president ventured to explain. “Can’t get simpler than that.”

    Simple it was, given the rough and ready formula used to arrive at the figures. The Office of the United States Trade Representative offered a rationale: “Reciprocal tariffs are calculated as the tariff rate necessary to balance bilateral trade deficits between the US and each of our trading partners. This calculation assumes that persistent trade deficits are due to a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing. Tariffs work through direct reduction of imports.”

    This, however, did not evidence itself in the final calculations. Central to the approach was a simple examination of trade in goods deficit from 2024, divided by the value of imports. Professing kindness, Trump offered to discount the amount by halving the arrived at figure. To illustrate, the goods trade deficit with China was US$291.9 billion, and total goods imports US$438.9 billion. When divided, the figure arrived is 0.67 or 67%. On being discounted, the final tariff rate is 34%.

    This method seemed to eschew the promised, detailed evaluation that would have accounted for tariff and non-tariff trade barriers, including distortions allegedly caused by currency manipulation, local regulations and laws, and taxes such as value added tax. This is despite theremarks by the Office of the Trade Representative that the rates were calculated taking into account such matters as “[re]gulatory barriers to American products, environmental reviews, differences in consumption tax rates, compliance hurdles and costs, currency manipulation and undervaluation”.

    Theories are being offered for the absurdly high rates being applied to certain poorer countries, notably those in Southeast Asia and Africa. The most logical point is that the applied rates arise because the countries in question are, as economic historian Adam Tooze explains, relatively poor. “The US does not make a lot of goods that are relevant to them to import.” They are hardly likely to redress any trade imbalance by increasing their consumption of goods produced in the US.

    Siwage Dharma Negara of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore assumes there is a lurking strategy at work. “The administration thinks that by targeting these countries, they can target Chinese investment in countries like Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Indonesia. By targeting their products maybe it will affect Chinese exports and the economy.”

    If that is the plan, then it risks doing quite the opposite. In the first instance, American brands have set up factories in a number of states in the region, encouraged by the adoption of the “China plus one” strategy. In line with that approach, manufacturers shifted production from China to alternative countries. Apple, Nike and Samsung Electronics, for instance, have established lucrative operations in Vietnam. Apparel companies such as Gap, Abercrombie, Adidas and Lululemon are reported to source 27 to 47% of their goods from the same country.

    A similar pattern is to be found in Africa, where companies were encouraged to invest on the continent as part of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a trade scheme due to expire in September. The AGOA, in place since 2000, grants eligible sub-Saharan African states duty-free access to the US market for over 1,800 products to complement over 5,000 products deemed eligible under the Generalized System of Preferences program.

    The second likely outcome is pushing these bruised countries into eager Chinese arms. Those in Southeast Asia would, suggests Stephen Olson, former US trade negotiator, gravitate away from Washington. “A closer tilt to China could be the result. It’s hard to have constructive, productive relations with a country that just dropped a ton of bricks on your head.” Ditto Africa, where Beijing already occupies an influential role in trade and investment. The law of unintended consequences looks set to apply.

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  • Yemen Is Acting Responsibly To Stop Genocide; The US Is Bombing Them For It

    The U.S. is bombing Yemen because Yemen is acting, as required by international law, to stop the genocide and unlawful siege in Palestine.

    This is not an editorial opinion. It is a statement of both law and fact.

    Neither of these facts has been featured in the reporting or commentary of Western media corporations, let alone in the statements of perpetrator governments like the U.S.

    Because to perpetrate a genocide in plain sight requires the suppression of the truth and the obscuring of the law.

    But international law is clear.

    The post Yemen Is Acting Responsibly To Stop Genocide; The US Is Bombing Them For It appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • US so-called “Reciprocal” Tariffs Set to Take Effect, Triggering Widespread Opposition, Market Uncertainty

    The new US administration is set to announce its reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday local time, prompting widespread concern and opposition over the uncertainty they could unleash, according to media reports.

    As the date approaches, global financial markets including the US stock market have experienced a rollercoaster ride as investors’ anxiety continues to worsen.

    Asia-Pacific markets were mixed on Wednesday. Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 edged up 0.28 percent higher to close at 35,725.87, and the broader Topix index closed down by 0.43 percent at 2,650.29. Meanwhile, South Korea’s Kospi slipped 0.62 percent to close at 2,505.86 while the Kosdaq declined 0.95 percent to close at 684.85.

    As for European markets, the benchmark STOXX 600 was trading down as of press time.

    US stocks dropped Wednesday as Wall Street braced for the expected rollout of the US tariffs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 333 points, or 0.8 percent. The S&P 500 slid 1 percent, and the Nasdaq Composite pulled back by 1.5 percent, CNBC reported.

    It followed a volatile session on Monday as investors awaited clarity on US President Donald Trump’s tariff rollout. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite posted on Monday their worst quarterly performances since 2022, as uncertainty around the Trump administration’s economic agenda roiled US equity markets in the first quarter of 2025. For the quarter, the S&P 500 slumped 4.6 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite plummeted 10.5 percent, Reuters reported.

    In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.16 percent from 4.23 percent late Monday and from roughly 4.80 percent in January, the AP reported.

    Gold prices on Monday surged above $3,100 per ounce for the first time as concerns around the US tariffs and the potential economic fallout, combined with geopolitical worries, drove a fresh wave of investments into the safe-haven asset. Spot gold prices hit a record high of $3,106.50 per ounce, according to a separate Reuters report.

    Growing backlash‌ 

    The tariff plan has also drawn widespread opposition from the US’ trading partners, with officials from various countries speaking out to safeguard their interests while potentially retaliating if necessary.

    Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged to fight unjustified trade actions, protect Canadian workers and businesses and build Canada’s economy, including through increased trade between Canada and Mexico as he spoke with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Tuesday.

    “With challenging times ahead, Prime Minister Carney and President Sheinbaum emphasized the importance of safeguarding North American competitiveness while respecting the sovereignty of each nation,” Carney’s office said in a statement.

    Other economies have also threatened countermeasures.

    The EU has “a strong plan to retaliate if necessary,” European Commission (EC) President Ursula von der Leyen said on March 20 in a speech, according to the speech released by the EC on Tuesday.

    “Our objective is a negotiated solution. But of course, if need be, we will protect our interests, our people and our companies,” von der Leyen said.

    The sweeping tariff measures adopted by the US will not work because they are built on a flawed assumption and “completely mistaken” diagnosis on its economy, and it wrongly blames global trade for domestic struggles, which will only lead to negative consequences, Pascal Lamy, former Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) told the Global Times in an exclusive interview.

    Sharp tariff hikes can indeed disrupt global value and supply chains, adversely affecting other nations while simultaneously impacting the US itself, Gao Lingyun, an expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

    Experts warned that the tariffs will backfire, disrupting global supply and industrial chains and saddling US businesses and consumers with higher costs.

    Lamy cautioned that the US itself stands to suffer most. “If the US triggers a trade war, it will primarily hurt the US economy by raising prices, driving inflation and likely pushing up interest rates,” Lamy said, adding that this fallout could also trigger pushback from US financial markets and the general public.

    Gao noted that after tariff hikes, domestic US producers often raise prices, leaving consumer welfare unimproved.

    According to Gao, studies indicate that 25 percent tariffs could raise consumer costs by $5,000 to $10,000, exacerbating uncertainty for both the US and global economies. The price of a typical car could rise by between $5,000 to $10,000 “out of the gates” due to the new tariffs, according to a March 31 estimate from Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, CBS News reported.

    Gao pointed to recent market volatility, low consumer confidence and rising recession risks as evidence.

    Goldman Sachs said in a report released on Sunday US local time “We now see a 12-month recession probability of 35 percent [in the US]. The upgrade from our previous 20 percent estimate reflects our lower growth baseline, the sharp recent deterioration in household and business confidence, and statements from White House officials indicating greater willingness to tolerate near-term economic weakness in pursuit of their policies.”

    Tariffs are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can suppress imports of foreign products into the US. On the other hand, tariffs do not offer as many advantages for the development of the US as Washington might imagine, Liu Weidong, a research fellow at the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

    Tariffs fuel inflation and stifle innovation among local firms. Moreover, due to potential retaliation from other countries, US exports can also be affected, and the impacts of tariffs on the US would be mostly negative, Liu said.

    However, former WTO chief Lamy downplayed the tariffs’ potential to reshape global trade, noting that the US accounts for just 15 percent of world imports. “The rest of the international trading system – 85 percent of global imports, involving trade between countries like China, India, Mexico, and Canada – can remain largely unaffected,” he said.

    As for China, Liu said that as the detailed measures have not been disclosed, the specific impacts remain uncertain, though it will likely target specific sectors.

    Regarding China’s response, Liu said that the country is well-prepared, with ample technological, industrial and strategic reserves.

    Chinese authorities, including the Foreign Ministry and the Commerce Ministry, have stated multiple times that trade and tariff wars have no winners and the unilateral imposition of tariffs by the US undermines the multilateral trading system, as well as disrupting normal international trade order.

    China-US trade ties are based on reciprocal interactions. Cooperation will bring about mutual benefit and win-win, and China will definitely take countermeasures in response to arbitrary pressure, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on March 12.

    The post US so-called “Reciprocal” Tariffs Set to Take Effect, Triggering Widespread Opposition, Market Uncertainty first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • NATO is Breaking apart

    On April 2, Reuters headlined “US officials object to European push to buy weapons locally,” which means that Trump’s demand for Europe to increase greatly its ‘defense’ spending is, indeed, part of his plan to keep the boom in the U.S. stock markets going. This needs to be understood in the relevant context:

    Though none of the mainstream press reported the fact in 2017, Trump started his Presidency in 2017 by making the biggest armaments-sale in history: $400 billion in U.S.-made weapons to Saudi Arabia over the next ten years, which would keep the by-far-most profitable segment of the U.S. stock markets — the ‘defense’ sector — booming, and therefore keep American billionaires (whom those corporations benefit enormously in every possible way) continuing to grow their personal fortunes at a much faster clip than the U.S. economy itself grows (which has been quite sluggish — below the global average for all countries); and, this way, the fortunes of billionaires will continue to thrive even if the U.S. economy doesn’t (as has been the case now for at least the past 25 years).

    Right now, Trump is promising to stop America’s apparently ceaseless creation of, and participation (such as in Ukraine) in, foreign wars, but he isn’t reducing — and is instead actually increasing — America’s ‘defense’ (aggression) expenditures while cutting virtually everything else (the federal expenditures that don’t help billionaires); and, in order to do this beyond the 2027 end-date of his $400 billion weapons-sale to the Sauds, he is trying to get America’s colonies (‘allies’), such as Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc., to increase their armaments-purchases from American firms such as Lockheed Martin — the firms whose sales-volumes are especially important to America’s billionaires, the people who control the U.S. Government. This is why he doesn’t want Europeans to grow their own ‘defense’ industries.

    If a European nation will allow foreign (especially American) billionaires to benefit from its sharp increase in armaments-purchases, this won’t hurt ONLY their own domestic billionaires, but it will ALSO be sending those manufacturing jobs to America and thereby boost America’s economy at the expense of the local economy. For Trump to be requesting them to do that is to insult not only that country’s billionaires but also its residents.

    This is not the only reason why NATO might soon break apart. For example: Trump is determined to take Greenland for the U.S. Government — to expand the U.S. to include Greenland. However, polls show that around 85% of Greenlanders are opposed to that, and Trump is also saying that if they won’t willingly comply, then he will do it militarily. Greenland is a Danish colony, and Denmark is a part of NATO. If the U.S. invades Greenland, then how will other countries in NATO feel about that? It would present the U.S. blatantly as aggressor against a NATO member-nation — the very nation that had previously been supposedly their chief protector. What would this do to NATO?

    The U.S. Congress is, according to the U.S. Constitution, supposed to be the ultimate determinant of whether or not U.S. military forces invade another country; but, so far, there has been prevailing silence from Congress about Trump’s threat against Greenlanders and even Danes — not the outrage that would prevail if America were still governed under its Constitution.

    We are entering the twilight zone. Will it turn out to be the end of the U.S. empire — the end of the largest empire in all of world history? It could — especially if Congress remains silent about what has been happening. The longer this silence continues, the deeper into it we are getting.

    This is certainly a weird moment in world history. Of course, ultimately, NATO will end, but the question is when and how. NATO had started on 25 July 1945 as a sentiment and resulting decision by Truman, and was then born in 1949, but is probably near its end now, and the public don’t know it because lots of ‘history’ that has been told in The West is false.

    The post NATO is Breaking apart first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Inspiring Pitch


    Last Friday night, I went out to support a friend’s oldest boys. They had a high school rugby match in Bedford, Texas.

    It was a great evening for it, and it felt good to be back out at the pitch (rugby field). I’d played in college and still held a catalogue of deep and abiding memories of my teammates and the matches we played in, the remembrances a comfort and a reminder of the bonds we forged and still shared.

    It was no minor joy to see a younger generation of ruggers making the game a part of their lives. It’s still not terribly conventional or mainstream, and it goes against many of the prevailing currents in American culture. But, maybe, that’s the point. It’s not football, basketball, baseball or even soccer—in fact, every year, lots of football players show up to play rugby at the high school level, but most only last a day.

    It’s complex and more nuanced. There’s more running in rugby, and no huddles. There’s no alternating series of defense and offense. You’re doing it all at once, nonstop—and without polycarbonate helmets or pads.

    It’s a little much, really. It takes a different type of toughness.

    My friend’s sons’ team was a new, smaller, high school squad, taking the pitch against a giant, multi-school squad from northern Tarrant County. The north Tarrant squad had three times as many players and a lot more experience. And let me clue you in early—the outnumbered squad did not win. They got worked over pretty bad.

    But they never quit. They kept fighting. They kept going. Despite impossible odds and inferior numbers. The first match, they lost 22-10. The second, worse. The third, worse still. But instead of being disappointed, I was inspired. My friend’s sons’ club only had one sub. The north Tarrant squad had fifteen or sixteen, enough players to field more than one side. And they rotated a different side in after every score. My friend’s sons’ squad never left the field.

    I was impressed with their effort, and that would have been enough. But then I saw one of their players on his stomach on the ground between halves. At first, I thought he was stretching. But his knees were beneath him, and his torso suddenly rose upright.

    I noticed he was facing East. I realized he was praying.

    The north Tarrant squad was located on the home side of the pitch and had bleachers. Our squad was located on the visitor side with bleachers, but no access to them. The gates leading to our seating were locked. The praying player had jumped the fence to perform his prayers, probably not wanting to draw attention to himself.

    So, family and friends of our squad were basically on the sideline with the team. It was no big deal. But later I found myself in the proximity of the Muslim player. I struck up a conversation and shared words of encouragement regarding his team’s play. Then, I asked him where his family was from.

    “Palestine,” he replied.

    I immediately wished I hadn’t asked.

    “I have no words,” I said, honestly not knowing what to say. But I kept going. “Especially as an American.”

    Impossible odds. Inferior numbers.

    “I still have family there,” he replied. “It’s hard. Most people don’t even know.”

    I clenched my teeth. I may have said something else, but I can’t remember. There was a silence like glass. We both knew the truth. I offered the young man a drink and an orange from my friend’s ice cooler.

    “I can’t,” he replied.

    “Ramadan,” I said, suddenly recalling.

    “Yes,” he confirmed. “I can’t have anything until this evening.”

    “Of course,” I remarked.

    Soon, he and the squad were back out on the pitch for the last match. The young Muslim played hard and was solid, all on an empty stomach, his lips parched, but his heart full. He never wavered.

    It inspired me in ways I no longer thought I could be inspired.

    As an American, I was still ashamed—but that was simply a luxury. I wasn’t facing impossible odds or superior numbers or hamstrung by limited resources that night in Texas, every day in my country, or for decades in the land of my ancestors.

    Did I mention former President George W. Bush was a rugger in high school and later a standout player at Yale? Very enthusiastic, I hear. From prep school to the presidency—a rugby player. It had to be acknowledged, even if I thought the Bush Administration’s disastrous foreign policy in the early aughts were a precursor to what was happening to my new, young rugby friend’s family in Gaza.

    Lots of folks are upset about our current foreign policy regarding Ukraine; Palestine seems little more than an afterthought.

    Thankfully, however, a much more inspiring, iconic leader also played rugby. He suited up for San Isidro, Ypora and the Atalaya Polo Club. He also founded and edited a rugby magazine called Tackle.

    And that’s what he did for the rest of his short life. He tackled. Aggressively. Especially social injustice and Western imperialism.

    His name was Che Guevara.

    As we clapped our team off at the end of the match, I remembered something. Something Americans seem to constantly, though comfortably, forget.

    There’s nothing heroic about fighting a winning battle, a contest whose outcome is known from the beginning. Real courage comes in fighting battles you can’t win—but knowing you have to fight regardless. Knowing that you have to keep going. Knowing that giving up or quitting is not only wrong, but that it’s not even an option.

    America will probably continue to do a lot of winning.

    But there’s nothing heroic about it.

    The post Inspiring Pitch first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Public Way Underestimate How Much “Their” Government Lies

    In America, lying by the Government is routine because the Government represents not the public but only the wealthiest billionaires who provide most of the money that funds political campaigns. Any candidate who doesn’t represent the megadonor won’t get their money and will therefore be defeated by one who DOES represent the billionaires and NOT the public. Consequently, the winningest political candidates are the best liars, who (get all lof the billionaire money that they need in order to) deceive the most voters the most — and who fulfill on their public campaign promises to the voters the least, and fulfill on their private promises to their billionaire donors the most. This fully explains what the U.S. Government actually does, which is corruption, NOT democracy.

    Though some of the billionaires are Republicans, and some are Democrats, the most important political issues aren’t actually the Republicans-versus-Democrats issues, but instead are the-billionaires-versus-the-public issues, such as is demonstrated in these examples:

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

    On March 5, the Jeff-Bezos-owned Washington Post headlined “GOP must cut Medicaid or Medicare to achieve budget goals, CBO finds: The nonpartisan bookkeeper said there’s no other way to cut $1.5 trillion from the budget over the next decade.” Though the CBO is ‘nonpartisan’ as between the Democratic and Republican Parties, it is (since both are) entirely beholden to America’s billionaires; and, so, that term there is deceptive. What that ‘news’-report is reporting is that the sense of Congress (even including Democrats there) is that a way needs to be found to cut $1.5T from ‘Medicare or Medicaid” (which, since only Medicaid, health care to the poor, is ‘discretionary’, Medicare is not) means cutting Medicaid over the next ten years.

    On March 8, ABC News and Yahoo News headlined “DOGE is searching through Social Security payments looking for fraud.”

    On March 31st, Business Insider and Yahoo News headlined “5 takeaways from Elon Musk’s 100-minute town hall about DOGE and America: ‘It’s costing me a lot to be in this job’,” and reported:

    Elon Musk spoke for roughly 100 minutes on Sunday at a town hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he was campaigning for Brad Schimel, a conservative judge running in the state’s upcoming Supreme Court election.

    The session evolved into a freewheeling discussion on Musk’s thoughts about the future of the US and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as he fielded questions from supporters and bashed Democratic leaders.

    Musk said little about concrete plans for DOGE but gave attendees a glimpse at what he thinks should be cut.

    Here are the top five takeaways from Musk’s town hall.

    Musk gave two attendees $1 million for their support

    Musk said the checks would be made to “spokespersons” at the event, amid concerns that his $1 million lottery would violate Wisconsin state law.

    Musk, who started the event wearing a cheesehead hat, kicked off the talk by handing giant $1 million checks to two supporters.

    Musk had originally offered Wisconsin voters $100 each to sign a petition opposing “activist judges,” and they’d be entered to win a $1 million lottery prize.

    But amid concerns the giveaway would violate state law, Musk later said the payment would be compensation for the winners to be spokespeople at the event.

    Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, tried to block the $1 million lottery, but the state’s Supreme Court declined on Sunday to hear his case.

    Musk’s high-profile campaign stop underscores the importance of the judicial election, set for April 1, for Republicans.

    Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has a 4-3 liberal majority, and one of its left-leaning judges, Ann Walsh Bradley, is set to retire — paving the way for a realignment of the state’s ideological future. The vote is also being hyped as a litmus test for sentiment on the Trump administration’s actions in the last few months.

    On April 2, the New York Times headlined “Liberal Wins Wisconsin Court Race, Despite Musk’s Millions,” and reported that “Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate for a pivotal seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, overcame $25 million in spending from Elon Musk to defeat her conservative opponent. … With over 70 percent of the vote counted on Tuesday evening, Judge Crawford held a lead of roughly 10 points.” So, the candidate of Democratic Party billionaires (such as George Soros) defeated the candidate of Reublican Party billionaires (such as Elon Musk).

    The billionaires control corporate America, and — via their corporations, both profit and nonprofit — they own, and advertise in their media, their corporations; and hire, to write their ‘news’ stories, the reporters that are the best ones to get their candidates elected to public offices. (Other reporters won’t be able to stay long in their media — they’ll fail, just like the candidates the billionaires don’t like will fail.)

    The inevitable result is that because the candidates are constantly lying to the public, the public are constantly being disappointed in the Government. And, since the public aren’t intelligent enough to recognize that the source of all this constant corruption and lying is the billionaires-control over the Government and the press, the public don’t blame the billionaires but instead “the Republicans” or “the Democrats” or “the minorities” or “the immigrants” or whatever. So, they never learn, but instead just stick with whatever their prejudices happen to be. And, of course, the Government officials, and the billionaires who made them so, are publicly calling this “democracy” and privately laughing at it, because they’re in perfect positions to know that it’s just another lie. The problem isn’t that they don’t respect the public, but that they don’t serve the public. In a democracy, the public officials serve the public even if they don’t respect them. It’s their job — regardless of what they think of the public. But in an aristocracy or other kind of dictatorship, serving the public isn’t a Government official’s job. And that’s the way it is in this country — and they need to lie about that, too.

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  • US Bullying in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)

    United States vice president JD Vance traveled to Kalaallit Nunaat (colonial designation: Greenland) to join his wife. He issued a statement that speaks much to the imperialist mindset of the Trump administration:

    I’m going to visit some of our guardians in the Space Force on the northwest coast of Greenland and also just check out what is going on with the security there of Greenland. As you know, it is really important: a lot of other countries have threatened Greenland and threatened to use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States, to threaten Canada and of course to threaten the people of Greenland, so we’re going to check out how things are going there. So speaking for President Trump, we want to reinvigorate the security of the people of Greenland because we think it is important to protecting the security of the entire world. Unfortunately, leaders in both America and in Denmark I think ignored Greenland for far too long. That has been bad for Greenland. That has also been bad for the security of the entire world. We think we can take things in a different direction, so I am going to go check it out.

    Vance says a lot of other countries have threatened Greenland (and Canada and the US). Trump points to Russia and China as threats to Greenland, without any evidence to back it up. It comes across clearly as blatant fearmongering, conjuring up a boogeyman and presenting the US as coming to the rescue.

    Do Greenlanders feel afraid? If Canadians are afraid, it is about the threats the US made against Canadian sovereignty. A poll reveals that Canadians feel angry (57%), betrayed (37%), and anxious (29%) toward the Trump administration.

    However, it is just silly to think Russia and China would risk world opprobrium to take over the world’s largest island, and for what? Resources and commodities that they can get by trading?

    But there is a country that threatens Greenland.

    Trump said to Greenland,

    We strongly support your right to determine your own future. And if you choose, to welcome you into the United States of America. We need Greenland for national security and even international security. We’re working with everybody involved to try and get it. But we need it really for international world security. And I think we are going to get it; one way or the other we are going to get it. [people can be heard laughing and booing] We will keep you safe. We will make you rich …

    Trump is clearly speaking out both sides of his mouth, saying he respects Greenlanders right to self-determination and then making threatening comments that the US “one way or the other we are going to get it.”

    Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen complained that the US is putting “unacceptable pressure” on Greenland and Denmark. During a DR broadcast, she stated, “It is pressure that we will resist.”

    Former Greenland prime minister Múte Egede realizes that the US dream to annex, own, and control Greenland is serious and calls upon allied countries to declare their support for Greenland.

    Jens-Frederik Nielsen who was sworn in as the prime minister of Greenland on Friday, 28 March responded to Trump: “President Trump says that the United States is getting Greenland. Let me be clear: the United States won’t get that. We do not belong to anyone else. We determine our own future.”

    On Saturday, 29 March, Trump responded about the potential use of force to take over Greenland: “I never take military force off the table. But I think there is a good chance that we could do it without military force.”

    Vance and Trump Criticize Denmark

    Vance criticized Denmark: “Denmark has not kept pace and devoted the resources necessary to keep this base, to keep our troops, and in my view, to keep the people of Greenland safe from a lot of very aggressive incursions from Russia, from China and other nations.” Trump echoes that sentiment, saying that the waters around Greenland have “Chinese and Russian ships all over the place” and that the US will handle the situation.

    Has anyone heard of any “very aggressive incursions” by Russia, China and other nations (presumably US-designated enemies, such as Iran and North Korea) into Greenland?

    Trump doubles down: “We need Greenland, very importantly, for international security. We have to have Greenland. It’s not a question of, ‘Do you think we can do without it?’ We can’t.”

    What Does US Investment and Security Look Like for Its Colonies?

    “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance said. “You have underinvested in the people of Greenland, and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful land mass filled with incredible people.”

    Does the US do right by its overseas territories? What about US investment in overseas territories it has previously annexed? About Puerto Rico, Ben Norton wrote, “Poverty is rising in one of the world’s oldest colonies: In Puerto Rico, 41.7% of people, including 57.6% of children, live in poverty. This is nearly four times the US rate. And Puerto Rican workers are getting poorer even while unemployment falls.” The US 2020 Census revealed that Guam has a poverty rate (20.2%) twice that of the US mainland. The same 2020 census indicated, “The percentage of families in poverty for the U.S. Virgin Islands showed a slight increase from 18.3% in 2009 to 18.6% in 2019. The same census reported a decrease for families in poverty in American Samoa; poverty declined to 50.7% in 2019 from 54.4% in 2009. Is this what Greenlanders can look forward to? In comparison, in 2023, the poverty rate in Greenland was 17.4%, as calculated at below 60% of the median equivalized income,1 which is slightly above the EU average of 16.2%. However, the poverty rate in recent years has been on the rise in Greenland.

    And what has US security meant for Puerto Ricans? From 1941 until 2001 the US Navy and US Marine Corps carried out bombing drills on nearby Vieques Island. Starting in 1999, protests drew attention to US militarism in its colonies. The departure of the US Navy “left the island peppered with remnants of undetonated bombs, PFAS chemicals, uranium, mercury, napalm and more. All of which are toxic materials known to have serious effects on human health along with generational impacts on the health of island youth.”

    For Hawaiians? After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the island of Kaho’olawe (known as the Pacific’s Battered Bullseye) became a bombing range for the US until president George HW Bush ordered it shut down in 1990. The bombing was massive, designed to simulate the effects of a nuclear detonation. Huge 500-ton TNT charges created shock waves, vapor clouds, and sent rock and soil high into the sky, and destroyed the island’s only fresh-water aquifer.

    For Micronesians? There is the ignominy of the 67 nuclear tests by the the United States in the Marshall Islands carried out between 1946 and 1958 with its concomitant fallout of radiation and the forced migration of tens of thousands of Marshall Islanders.

    Even Greenland has been affected by the use of nuclear weapons by the US. In 1968, a B-52 bomber carrying four 1.1-megaton bombs crashed on the ice 19 kilometers (12 miles) from Thule, killing one crew member and leaking radioactive plutonium into Greenland’s waters. Reports of cancer and other illnesses surfaced among Danish and Kalaallit Thule Air Base workers.2

    The Pentagon made a risible attempt at concealing the nuclear blunder at that time, even to the extent of one official stating: “I don’t know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you are looking for.”

    Many people, including former Thule Air Base workers and Danish parliamentarians, state that an unexploded American hydrogen bomb also disappeared — serial number 78252. Niels-Jørgen Nehring, head of the state-sponsored DUPI [Danish Institute of International Affairs now called the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)], gave credence to the claim that a lost bomb remained off Thule.

    The US Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base) led to the forced relocation of the Inughuit. Obedient to US dictate, colonial Danish authorities illegally exiled 650 Inuit in May 1953 from Uummannaq, Pituffik, and neighboring locales to a tent community about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north in Qaanaaq, away from their ancestral lands. “They were given four days to abandon a home that had been theirs for almost 4,000 years. They have never been allowed back,” wrote Jørgen Dragsdahl.3 The ethnic cleansing from Thule Air Base was a precursor to the subsequent ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Ilois from the erstwhile pristine coral atoll, Diego Garcia, in the Chagos archipelago by British and American governments to construct one of the largest US military bases outside the US.4

    Insultingly, Greenlanders are also required to clean up the mess left by US military installations. Then US secretary of state Colin Powell rejected US responsibility, saying it had been transferred to Greenland where it would stay.

    What do Greenlanders Want?

    Polling results from 29 January 2025 indicate that 85% of Greenlanders do not want to exchange their present status to become a part of the US. Six percent wish to join the US and 9% are unsure. However, on the question of Greenland independence, if a referendum were held, 56%  would vote in favor, 28% would vote no, and 7% didn’t know how they would vote.

    The US Track Record

    The US has a track record. Trump and his chosen team are operating straight out of the CIA playbook. They will lie and cheat in order to steal the homeland of the Kalaallit. The US has done this many times already. The Chagossians were shipped to Mauritius. The Chamorro continue to strive for self-determination. Palauans finally achieved it, at least partially, by agreeing to a Compact of Free Association with the US which allows the US to operate military bases in Palau and make decisions concerning external security. The Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown in a US corporate coup. Indeed, the continental US is established through the genocide of the Indigenous nations that had inhabited the landmass for millennia before Europeans reached its shores.

    As well, the US has a track record in Greenland. And as the current tariff war adduces, no ally (except, it seems, Israel) can feel secure in its relationship with the US.

    ENDNOTES:

    The post US Bullying in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    The OECD explains this jargon as: “People are classified as poor when their equivalised disposable household income is less than 50% of the median in each country.
    2    See Erik Erngaard, Grønland: I Tusinde År (Lademan Forlagsaktieselskab, 1973), 227.
    3    Jørgen Dragsdahl, “The Danish dilemma,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September/October 2001.
    4    See Charles Judson Harwood Jr., “Diego Garcia: The ‘criminal question’ doctrine,” updated 16 June 2006). See also John Pilger’s documentary Stealing a Nation.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The United States of Tyranny: America Is Becoming a Constitution-Free Zone

    It’s no joke: America is becoming a Constitution-free zone.

    Little by little, our rights are being whittled down in the name of national security.

    Where do you draw the line?

    How much tyranny will Americans tolerate in the name of national security?

    At what point does this slippery slope of power grabs lead to dictatorship?

    Will we let border police trample on the rights of everyone they encounter, including legal residents and citizens? Turn a blind eye when men, women and children are forcibly detained by gangs of plainclothes agents and made to disappear? Will we accept a national ID card that enables the government to target individuals and groups it deems undesirable? Will we tolerate AI-powered surveillance cameras and drones that track us more effectively than they protect us? Will we censor ourselves, fearing that any expression of dissent will mark us as anti-government?

    Will we abandon the constitutional principles our founders fought for? This is the bargain the police state demands of us.

    Take immigration, for example.

    President Trump wants us to believe that the nation’s security is so threatened by illegal immigrants that we should tolerate roving bands of ICE and border patrol agents disregarding the Constitution at every turn.

    But these government agents aren’t just disregarding it—they’re trampling it with the blessing of the man who swore to “preserve, protect and defend” that very same Constitution.

    First Amendment rights to free speech, assembly, and protest. Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Fifth Amendment guarantees of due process. Sixth Amendment protections ensuring a right to legal counsel. Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishments. Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection under the law.

    All of these and more are being imperiously swept aside in the Trump Administration’s pursuit of an America “for Americans and Americans only.”

    Trump has invoked wartime powers under the Alien Enemies Act to justify the expulsion of illegal immigrants, whom Trump has likened to terrorists, killers, criminals, and enemies of the state.

    However, with national security being used as a pretext to strip away rights on a larger scale than just criminals, the individuals targeted by the Trump Administration’s overreach represent a broader cross-section of American society: immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who live and work in the mainland of the United States. (It is estimated that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $97 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, contributing $59.4 billion to the federal government, including payments for federal income tax and federal social insurance such as Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Insurance. In other words, they are paying for entitlement programs for which they do not receive benefits.)

    Individuals whose visas allow them to legally reside in the U.S. are also being rounded up and made to disappear without due process.

    The reports of how these round-ups are being carried out—with ambushes on city streets, in broad daylight, at the hands of masked, plainclothes officers, and without any charges being levied, court hearings or defense attorneys notified—are beyond chilling.

    Some are being targeted based on their nationality. Some are being racially profiled. Some are being classified as criminal based solely on the fact that they have tattoos. Some, like Abrego Garcia, are being mistakenly snatched up and deported to private prisons in foreign countries, beyond the physical reach of U.S. courts.

    As Garcia’s attorney warned, the Trump Administration seems to have adopted the mindset that “the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”

    And then there are the scientists, doctors, academics and students who are being rounded up because at some point they voiced their concerns about the mounting death toll in Palestine.

    With the Trump Administration now equating even the perception of antisemitism as terrorism, that puts anyone in the government crosshairs who even dares to suggest that the killing of civilian women and children in Palestine is wrong.

    For example, Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk wrote an op-ed calling for the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel. That’s all it took for her to be placed on the government’s enemies list, stripped of her visa without warning or notice, surrounded on the street by a small army of masked agents, and whisked out of state to a detention center 1500 miles away without any family or friend knowing her whereabouts.

    These arbitrary roundups and deportations are not just violations of the Fifth Amendment’s due process protections. They also trample the First Amendment’s right to free speech and assembly, particularly for those who speak out against government policies.

    These actions are not limited to just immigrants or perceived enemies—they extend to anyone daring to challenge the status quo. Whether it’s activists, academics, or everyday citizens, being targeted for political expression is an assault on the very essence of free speech.

    In this way, these round-ups represent the beginning of the slippery slope, leading not just to arbitrary detentions and the expansion of private prisons as an extension of the police state but to an eventual authoritarian regime where dissent is suppressed, and constitutional rights are discarded.

    This is not just happening at the southern border.

    These round-ups are increasingly occurring in cities like New York, Boston, and northern Virginia, with many U.S. citizens also being swept up in warrantless searches, surveillance, and overreach from federal and local law enforcement.

    Where once the nation’s border constituted a thin line, it is becoming an ever-thickening zone dominated by authoritarianism and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

    This zone impacts millions of Americans who have never been near a border—citizens who live in everyday places, like urban and suburban areas, yet are subject to government overreach.

    As journalist Todd Miller explains, that expanding border region now extends “100 miles inland around the United States—along the 2,000-mile southern border, the 4,000-mile northern border and both coasts… This ‘border’ region now covers places where two-thirds of the US population (197.4 million people) live… The ‘border’ has by now devoured the full states of Maine and Florida and much of Michigan.”

    Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, or 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

    In this authoritarian reshaping of America, no one is safe, not even in their own homes.

    The government’s ever-expanding, Constitution-free zone translates to greater numbers of Americans being subject to warrantless searches, ID checkpoints, transportation checks, and even surveillance on private property far beyond the boundaries of the borderlands.

    From facial recognition software to mass data collection, surveillance technology is being used to monitor immigrants and ordinary citizens alike who are not suspected of any crime.

    With Trump considering plans to turn a portion of the southern border into an expansive military installation policed by active-duty troops, we’re going to see even more of these assaults on our freedoms. As Trump promised after Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was arrested because of his anti-war activism, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”

    Miller explains:

    “In these vast domains, Homeland Security authorities can institute roving patrols with broad, extra-constitutional powers backed by national security, immigration enforcement and drug interdiction mandates. There, the Border Patrol can set up traffic checkpoints and fly surveillance drones overhead with high-powered cameras and radar that can track your movements. Within twenty-five miles of the international boundary, CBP [Customs and Border Protection] agents can enter a person’s private property without a warrant.”

    Across the nation, local police forces are becoming militarized extensions of federal agencies like CBP and DHS, routinely receiving federal funds and training to act as armed enforcers of national security policies. By the time you add the military into that equation, you’ve got all the necessary ingredients for martial law.

    The CBP, with its more than 60,000 Customs and Border Protection employees, supplemented by the National Guard and the U.S. military, is an arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a national police force imbued with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies.

    Just about every nefarious deed, tactic or thuggish policy advanced by the government today can be traced back to the DHS, its police state mindset, and the billions of dollars it distributes to local police agencies in the form of grants to transform them into extensions of the military.

    As Miller points out, the government has turned the nation’s expanding border regions into “a ripe place to experiment with tearing apart the Constitution, a place where not just undocumented border-crossers, but millions of borderland residents have become the targets of continual surveillance.”

    In much the same way that police across the country have been schooled in the art of sidestepping the Constitution, border agents have nearly unlimited discretion to stop, search, interrogate and arrest anyone they “suspect,” based on arbitrary factors such as:

    • Driving an unusual vehicle.
    • Passengers appearing “suspicious.”
    • Having a dusty or modified car.
    • Avoiding eye contact or looking too long at an officer.

    These arbitrary and broad criteria make it easy for any citizen to be targeted without just cause, turning everyday travel into a potential confrontation with law enforcement. In other words, anything goes when it comes to the police state’s justifications for undermining our rights.

    These troubling developments at the borders are just one part of a broader erosion of constitutional rights that has been underway for decades in the name of national security.

    When we look back at history, we see a consistent pattern of political power grabbing in the name of national security. From the Alien and Sedition Acts to the War on Terror, the price of security is always paid by our freedoms—and each step we take brings us closer to a system where those in power determine the limits of our liberty by using national security as an excuse to curtail fundamental freedoms.

    Fast-forward to the present, and Donald Trump capitalized on this historical pattern by claiming that the only way to keep America safe from dangerous immigrants was to build an expensive border wall, expand the reach of border patrol, and enlist the military to “assist” with border control.

    Continuing this trend, Joe Biden sent thousands of active-duty troops to the southern border, in anticipation of more than 10,000 illegal crossings per day—reinforcing the military presence and fortifying the unchecked power at the border.

    And now Trump is doubling down on everything he and his predecessors have done to fortify this unchecked power.

    This pattern of exploiting national security fears for authoritarian control has continued into the present day with Trump’s immigration crisis becoming a pretext for greater control, a strategy to stoke fear and justify authoritarianism.

    Yet despite the propaganda coming from the White House, the looming problem is not so much that the U.S. is being invaded by hostile forces at the border, but rather that the U.S. Constitution is under assault from within by a power-hungry cabal at the highest levels of power.

    Before long, the only Americans qualified to live freely in Trump’s America will be those who march in lockstep with the Deep State’s dictates, and even absolute compliance is no guarantee of safety.

    It used to be that the Constitution was our only reliable safety net, but that is being systematically dismantled.

    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 government is now the greatest threat to our safety, and there’s no border wall big enough to protect us from these ruffians in our midst.

    The answer to this growing tyranny begins with us—“We the people.”

    The Constitution should not be negotiable. Freedom is not negotiable.

    You want to make America great again? Start by making America free again.

    The post The United States of Tyranny: America Is Becoming a Constitution-Free Zone first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Veterans For Peace Delegation Visits Nicaragua

    Image by Gerry Condon

    In a powerful demonstration of international solidarity, seven members of Veterans For Peace (VFP) visited Nicaragua in mid-to-late March as an official VFP delegation. Veterans from five U.S. states flew to Nicaragua on March 19 for a week-long visit to community clinics, regional colleges, vocational schools, youth groups and mayors in several Nicaraguan cities, including the capital Managua, Matagalpa, Masaya and Ciudad Sandino. The veterans were most impressed to learn that Nicaragua, the third poorest country in the western hemisphere, is providing free, high quality healthcare and education for all its people.

    Delegation participants were VFP vice president Joshua Shurley, VFP Board member Gerry Condon, VFP Communications Director Chris Smiley, At-Large member Alvin Glatkowski, and Daniel Shea, Douglas Ryder and Michael Kramer, presidents of their respective VFP chapters in Portland, Oregon; Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina, and Northern New Jersey.

    The Veterans For Peace delegation had a wonderful exchange with the Juventud Sandinista youth group, young women and men who are dedicated to continuing the Nicaragua’s unique revolution.

    One of the most striking aspects of the trip was the delegation’s visit to a Casa Materna maternity and birthing center in Matagalpa. Nicaragua has reduced maternal mortality rates by 80% since 2007. These centers reflect the government’s dedication to ensuring that every Nicaraguan mother and child has access to life-saving healthcare.

    “What a difference it makes when a government prioritizes the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable,” said Joshua Shurley, vice president of Veterans For Peace. “And what a contrast to the U.S., where things are moving in exactly the opposite direction.”

    Nicaragua Withstands U.S. Sanctions and Hybrid Warfare

    Nicaragua’s achievements are all the more impressive given the brutal economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. Nicaragua’s resilience in the face of this economic warfare is partly a result of its focus on “food sovereignty,” as 90% of the food that Nicaraguans eat is grown in Nicaragua. Also notable is Nicaragua’s commitment to sustainable energy. Over 70% of Nicaragua’s energy needs are met by wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectric.

    Nicaragua has a long history of resisting U.S. imperialism. The delegation was able to visit the home of Nicaragua’s national hero, Augusto Cesar Sandino, who led an army in the 1920s that kicked out the U.S. Marines. Sandino is the namesake of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and the Sandinista Popular Army (EPS), which overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator Somoza in 1979 and fought the U.S.-backed “Contras” throughout the 1980s.

    The Veterans For Peace delegation traveled to sites in Masaya where brutal violence occurred during the U.S.-backed attempted coup in 2018. Western media portrayed these events as a Nicaraguan government crackdown on peaceful protesters. However, the delegation heard a different story from Masaya residents: the so-called “peaceful protesters” were actually violent mobs, a key element of hybrid warfare (aka “color revolution”) funded through shadowy arms of the U.S. intelligence sector.

    “U.S. imperialism has not yet given up on undermining and overthrowing the Sandinista revolution,” said VFP Board member Gerry Condon. “Our job as peace-loving veterans is to tell the truth about the remarkable achievements of the Nicaraguan people.”

    Nicaragua is Ranked Sixth in the World in Gender Equality

    The veterans were highly impressed by Nicaragua’s deep commitment to achieving gender equality. The Nicaraguan Constitution dictates that half of all political parties’ candidates for political office must be women. If a mayor is a man, the vice-mayor must be a woman, and vice versa. The same goes for every government ministry. At the highest level, Nicaragua now has a co-presidency that is filled by a man and a woman. Nicaragua is rated First in gender equality in the Americas, and Sixth in the world.

    As the U.S. continues to grapple with the mounting challenges of authoritarianism, mass deportations, and the dismantling of social services, the Veterans For Peace visit to Nicaragua underscores that solidarity between peoples of different nations can help break through the disinformation promoted by powerful interests and reveal how the struggles of ordinary people are interconnected.

    “We have some serious problems at home in the U.S. – even veterans’ healthcare is under attack,” said Douglas Ryder, a veteran of the U.S. war in Vietnam. “We can learn a lot from Nicaragua’s commitment to take care of all its people, beginning with those most in need.”

    The post Veterans For Peace Delegation Visits Nicaragua first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Secrecy and Virtue Signalling: Another View of Signalgate

    There has been a fascinating, near unanimous condemnation among the cognoscenti about the seemingly careless addition of Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic to the chat chain of Signal by US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Condemnation of the error spans the spectrum from clownish to dangerous. There has been virtually nothing on the importance of such leaks of national security information and the importance they serve in informing the public about what those in power are really up to.

    Rather than appreciate the fact that there was a journalist there to receive information on military operations that might raise a host of concerns (legitimate targeting and the laws of war come to mind), there was a chill of terror coursing through the commentariat and Congress that military secrets and strategy had been compromised. Goldberg himself initially disbelieved it. “I didn’t think it could be real.” He also professed that some messages would not be made public given the risks they posed, conceding that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s communications to the group “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

    This seemingly principled stance ignores the bread-and-butter importance of investigative reporting and activist publishing, which so often relies on classified material received via accident or design. Normally, the one receiving the message is condemned. In this case, Golberg objected to being the recipient, claiming moral high ground in reporting the security lapse. Certain messages of the “Houthi PC small group channel” were only published by The Atlantic to throw cold water on stubborn claims by the White House that classified details had not been shared.

    The supposed diligence on Goldberg’s part to fuss about the cavalier attitude to national security shown by the Trump administration reveals the feeble compromise the Fourth Estate has reached with the national security state. Could it be that WikiLeaks was, like the ghost of Banquo, at this Signal’s feast? Last year’s conviction of the organisation’s founding publisher, Julian Assange, on one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC), might have exerted some force over Goldberg’s considerations. Having been added to the communication chain in error, the defence material could well have imperilled him, with First Amendment considerations on that subject untested.

    As for what the messages revealed, along with the importance of their disclosure, things become clear. Waltz reveals that the killing of a Houthi official necessitated the destruction of a civilian building. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.” Vance replies: “Excellent.”

    As Turse reminds us in The Intercept, this conforms to the practices all too frequently used when bombing the Houthis in Yemen. The United States offered extensive support to the Saudi-led bombing campaign against the Shia group, one that precipitated one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises. That particular aerial campaign rarely heeded specific targeting, laying waste to vital infrastructure and health facilities. Anthropologist Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, also noted in remarks to The Intercept that fifty-three people have perished in the latest US airstrikes, among them five children. “These are just the latest deaths in a long track record of US killing in Yemen, and the research shows that US airstrikes in many countries have a history of killing and traumatizing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc on people’s lives and livelihoods.”

    The appearance of Hillary Clinton in the debate on Signalgate confirmed the importance of such leaks, and why they are treated with pathological loathing. “We’re all shocked – shocked!” she screeched in The New York Times. “What’s worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.” As a person with a hatred of open publishing outlets such as WikiLeaks (her own careless side to security was exposed by the organisation’s publication of emails sent from a private server while she was Secretary of State), the mania is almost understandable.

    Other countries, notably members of the Five Eyes alliance system, are also voicing concern that their valuable secrets are at risk if shared with the Trump administration. Again, the focus there is less on the accountability of officials than the cast iron virtues of secrecy. “When mistakes happen, and sensitive intelligence leaks, lessons must be learned to prevent that from recurring,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stated gravely in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “It’s a serious, serious issue, and all lessons must be taken.”

    Former chief of Canada’s intelligence agency, Richard Fadden, was even more explicit: “Canada needs to think about what this means in practical terms: is the United States prepared to protect our secrets, as we are bound to protect theirs?”

    Signalgate jolted the national security state. Rather than being treated as a valuable revelation about the latest US bombing strategy in Yemen, the obsession has been on keeping a lid on such matters. For the sake of accountability and the public interest, let us hope that the lid on this administration’s activities remains insecure.

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