Photo by Edwin Hooper

Interest rates are rising as if this will simply compensate investors for the risk of inflation. The reality is that it will increase the economy’s inability to cope with the breakdown that is already in progress.

How Did the Myth of Interest Rates Rising in Response to Price Inflation Begin?

The moral rationalization is to protect the purchasing power of creditor claims on debtors, as measured by the purchasing power of debt payments over consumer prices.

The pretense is that creditors use their interest to buy goods and services. But already in the 18^th century, critics of debt financing recognized that bondholders recycle most of their money into new loans. When they do spend part of their interest income into the “real” non-financial economy, it is mainly to buy prestige real estate, primarily in major financial centers, and secondly on luxury goods – mainly imported, in Italy in the mid-18^th century, just as today.

By the 19^th century, creditors sought some excuse to justify their interest charges by depicting these as compensation for the risk that they might have to suffer a loss through loan defaults or by a loss of their purchasing power over goods and services as prices rose – and more to the point, over the labor that produced these products.

Austrian economists such as Böhm-Bawerk went so far as to claim that interest was a payment for the “service” of abstaining from consuming their income, but using “time preference” to consume more later. Having to pay interest, thus was depicted as the price of “impatience.” It was as if wage earners (“consumers”) had a choice to abstain from running into debt, lacking prudence. This prompted Marx to quip that the Rothschild bankers must be the most abstinent family in Europe. It was as if there was no financial sector of bankers and bondholders acting independently of the economy of production and consumption.

Raising Interest Rates to Slow Employment and Keep Wages Low

The more recent 20th-century logic is that of Paul Volcker, when he increased interest rates to over 20% at the end of the Carter administration in 1980. He saw wages rising as a result of the Vietnam War’s “guns and butter” fiscal policy, called military Keynesianism in times when the aim is to increase profits, investment and employment. Volcker, formerly a Chase Manhattan banker, wanted to increase unemployment so as to keep wages from rising further. He succeeded in creating a crash as bank interest rates rose to 20%.

That obviously is not the aim of today’s rise in interest rates. But it is the effect. And this is just the opposite of compensating for risk. It sharply increases economic risk throughout the economy, not only for industry and employment but for the financial sector. That is what makes today’s high stock market prices so puzzling, a short-term focus on just riding the wave of rumors floated by the Trump administration about the likelihood of peace restoring the happy status quo ante.

Governments Lower Interest Rates Mainly to Increase Debt-Leveraged Prices for Financial Wealth

The guiding fiction in the idea that rising interest rates will slow price inflation by reducing investment and employment that banks help the industrial economy by creating credit to lend to companies to expand the economy. But that is not what banks do under finance capitalism. They lend against assets already in place and available to be pledged as collateral, for the purpose of buying more real estate, bonds and stocks. The effect of these loans is to inflate asset prices, not consumer prices.

Governments and their central banks may pretend to be lowering interest rates to spur the economy, but the basic reason is to re-inflate prices for financial securities and real estate. That’s the main aim of today’s finance capitalism, after all. Its aim of increasing fortunes by creating debt-leveraged asset-price gains has turned economies into a great Ponzi scheme.

This policy must fail because keeping prices for collateral held by banks and other creditors from falling in price, and thus causing a loss of financialized asset-price gains, requires the economy to take on more and more debt.

Obama’s Bank Bailout and ZIRP Has Left the U.S. Economy Debt-Leveraged

The U.S. Federal Reserve’s response to the 2008 junk-mortgage bank crash is informative for how the government may seek to cope with the coming financial crisis.  Real estate and corporate debt prices were plunging because of defaults on junk mortgages and the web of bad casino bets on financial derivatives. The Obama administration’s response was to inaugurate the Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP). The Federal Reserve rescued the banks from negative equity by loading the banking system – and via it, the financial markets – with low-interest debt leveraging.

The result was the greatest bond market boom in history – but not a boom for industry and labor. A K-shaped U.S. economy saw sharply rising wealth for the One Percent, but the industrial economy has continued to suffer its long decline as wages and industrial profits are being spent on the FIRE sector – Finance, Insurance (including health insurance under the privatized Obamacare) and Real Estate.

Financially engineering the post-2008 asset-price “recovery” for real estate, stocks and bonds has left the economy so highly debt-leveraged that there is little room for an economic downturn caused by interruptions of OPEC’s oil and gas trade. The oil shortage is indeed raising the commodity price levels, but this is not a result of higher employment or wage levels. It is a result of Trump’s war to maintain control of the world’s oil trade in U.S. hands. Iran has responded by saying that if other nations do not act to stop Trump’s attack, Iran will destroy Arab oil production and the whole world will pay the price of being pushed into a prolonged economic depression. And the world has stood by, as if believing that the United States can conquer Iran as it did Venezuela and somehow restore normal relations under U.S. control and avoid world depression.

But Trump is said to be thinking of one last great air strike. Whether or not this occurs, it is now obvious that the effect of world oil shortages and the resulting rise in oil prices will force major industries to shut down throughout the world: chemical producers, fertilizer and mining that depend on sulfuric acid, energy users such as aluminum and glass making, plastics needing naphtha, manufacturing, and course household heating and lighting. Their linkages for production will be interrupted at critical points, forcing them to lay off their employees and shut down because they cannot continue to produce and make profits.

It also means that such companies will not be able to meet their scheduled debt service obligations to their bondholders and bankers, not to speak of stopping their stock buyback programs. That is what happens in a depression.

The result will be not only price deflation, but a deflation of markets and consumer “demand” and a wave of debt defaults. That threatens a transfer of collateral and other property from debtors to creditors, whose problems with collecting may nonetheless leave them with negative equity. So we are back in 2009, but without any opportunity to pile on yet more debt to enable economies to “borrow their way out of debts” that have been taken on for the past 27 years.

Rising Interest Rates are an Untenable Solution to Today’s Imminent Depression

The big question that must be asked is how long the U.S. economy can sustain long-term interest rates of over 5% for Treasury 30-year bonds, 4/6%+ for 10-year bonds, and circa 7% for home mortgage loans. Many loans for commercial real estate and also private equity are soon coming due to be rolled over. How can these debts be refinanced at the rates that are looming? And new construction and property sales will be constrained by the inability of new borrowers to pay the higher carrying charges for homes or other properties.

The government will try to do what it usually does: bail out the financial sector, not the “real” economy, which already is being crucified on a cross of debt. But governments are not moving to protect labor’s wages and living standards, or even their industry’s solvency. Central banks aim to save the financial sector – that is, financialized wealth that has been inflated by debt-leveraging as prices for real estate, stocks and bonds have been bid up on credit. But the Federal Reserve has already been holding an enormous increase in Treasury bonds to finance Trump’s soaring budget deficit. How will voters respond to the administration favoring the wealthiest One Percent while leaving the rest of the economy to suffer?

How Should the West React to Such a Problem If We Lived in an Ideal World?

There is an age-old solution to prevent an economic crisis from resulting from interruptions in harvests, and it is applicable to today’s interruption of the world’s energy trade. But that solution is not one that has become part of Western civilization.

The laws of Hammurabi, c. 1750 BC, typified how Mesopotamia and other West Asian civilization coped with such interruptions in production from the 3^rd through the 1^st millennia BC, restoring economic order for thousands of years. Hammurabi ruled that if the Storm God Adad caused a crop failure as a result of a flood or a drought, the debts that cultivators had run up during the crop year and expected to be paid on the public threshing floor at harvest time would be cancelled. (Many such debts were to the palace and its bureaucracy, so this did not create a revolution by angry creditors. Business debts among merchants were left intact – only grain debts by the disrupted agrarian population were cancelled.)

If these personal debts had not been cancelled, Babylonia’s agrarian population would have been subject to debt bondage to creditors, and to losing their land tenure rights to what would have become an emerging creditor oligarchy.  I have described all this in … And Forgive Them Their Debts” and  Temples of Enterprise.

Such debt cancellations in the face of natural disasters enabled the West Asian economies to avoid the emergence of creditor oligarchies. But Western societies have never had such central rulers, “divine kingship” or Confucian emperors to prevent such oligarchies from gaining control of governments and causing widespread public discontent. As I have described this failure of Western civilization in my Collapse of Antiquity, all government has been by oligarchies (as Aristotle noted), and they invariably fall subject to money-love and wealth addiction that polarizes economies between creditors and debtors, landlords and renters, leading to economic collapse such as that of Rome.

Prospects for Today’s U.S. and Foreign Economies in the Face of the Oil Crisis

Today’s financial markets seem to expect the Federal Reserve to follow its usual knee-jerk reaction to rising consumer prices by raising interest rates. As noted above, this is supposed to slow the economy and create a “reserve army of the unemployed” to keep wages down by causing economic distress. But the U.S. economy is not in a boom or even thriving. It and other economies are already in distress as a result of the looming oil and energy crisis. In addition to companies scaling back their production and commercial real estate and homeowners face real estate mortgages falling due. Rising interest rates will push the cost of refinancing these mortgages and other debts beyond the ability of debtors to pay out of their falling income.

The result threatens to be a vast transfer of property from debtors to creditors. The United States and Western Europe, thus may experience something like Asian countries did in their currency crisis of 1997-1998. That would be a bonanza for vulture funds to sweep in and acquire real estate and companies at distress prices.

Nobody is suggesting a “Babylonian” solution of suspending debt service for economies that are unable to pay on an economy-wide scale. The West’s creditor-oriented legal systems call for a transfer of property ownership as banks and bondholders take over collateral that has been pledged for debt or property that debtors are forced to sell.

Much of this collateral consists of claims of other companies throughout the economy, so the crisis will engulf the entire social and political system. This is what was threatened back in 2008-2009 when the junk-mortgage and bank-fraud crisis led to a collapse in real estate prices. But the economy’s Ponzi Scheme of increasing wealth by debt leveraging by supplying new credit has reached the limit.

We can now see that the long upsweep since 1945 that seemed to be a series of self-correcting business cycles has been a failed finance-capitalist detour from industrial capitalism that has no automatic self-correcting market forces. The solution must come from outside the market system. And that is something that neither academic economics nor the public relations ideology of free markets (meaning unregulated and privatized economies, Thatcher-Reagan style) has closed its eyes to. The future will call for thinking about the unthinkable. It requires recognition that debts that can’t be paid won’t be.

The post The 2026 World Financial Crisis appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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In Bolivia, after weeks of protests against the proposed privatization of indigenous lands, the Rodrigo Paz government is setting the stage for mass repression against political opponents. The president, who calls himself a democratic centrist, has unleashed a systematic campaign of criminalization and stigmatization against Bolivia’s indigenous and popular movements.

What we are witnessing is the deliberate rhetorical construction of an enemy within, designed to legally and politically justify the dismantling of democracy, the Plurinational State, and the rights of indigenous peoples along with them.

From the highest levels of government, there has been a highly coordinated narrative that the protesters are not legitimate, organic, peaceful citizens exercising their constitutional rights, but rather, in rather Orwellian terms, threats to the democratic order and progress.

In an interview at the Casa del Pueblo, Vice Minister of Indigenous Justice and Coordination with Social Movements, Jorge García, laid out the administration’s line with striking candor. He accused the blockade leaders of being “completely radicalized, identified with the movement of Evo Morales,” and claimed they are subsidized by the former president’s political machinery.

García suggested using the State’s legal apparatus to pursue these social movements, which he linked directly to “narcotrafficking.” He accused the MAS of having “kidnapped Bolivia, isolated us from the world so we couldn’t know the truth of what was happening here; they have destroyed Bolivia.”

President Paz himself has dismissed the protesters with contempt. “Under ideological arguments, they want to generate tribune arguments because they have neither sociological nor philosophical density.”

Minister of Public Works Mauricio Zamora has accused the movements of being financed by Evo Morales, who is tied to drug trafficking, saying “the blockades have always brought death and been used for social convulsion.” The Minister of the Presidency, Jose Luis Lupo, has said the protests are used to destabilize Bolivia, faced with a “Black May.”

The Ministry of Productive Development issued statements blaming blockades for price hikes, referring to “so-called protesters,” while painting them as illegitimate. Representatives of the state security apparatus have said they will use “progressive and proportional force,” with rumors they will use live ammunition against blockaders.

Former president Carlos Mesa and right-wing leader Tuto Quiroga have joined the chorus, calling protesters “violent minorities,” with their supporters referring to protesters as “dirty” and “uncivilized” “Indians” — a racial slur that has been lobbed at the indigenous resistance since the colonial era. On social media, thousands of comments label demonstrators “terrorists,” “authoritarians,” “drug traffickers,” “fraudsters,” and a wide range of racist and classist slurs.

The protests, despite the government and right-wing opposition’s best efforts, are not marginal. The tens of thousands of Red Ponchos (an Aymara territorial defense force), the Bolivian Workers’ Union (COB), the Rural Teachers’ Union, mining unions, and indigenous communities from the Amazon (who walked all the way from there to La Paz) are blockading roads across La Paz, El Alto, Cochabamba, and Lake Titicaca. These are the largest protests since the Paz government took power.

The Bolivian Highway Administration (ABC) has reported at least 41 blockade points, paralyzing key routes and cutting access to the Peruvian border, Sucre, Oruro, Potosí, and Santa Cruz. Access to critical supplies have been affected by the blockades.

The government’s response has been swift and brutal. On the morning of May 16, a contingent of 3,500 military police intervened at Río Seco in El Alto with tear gas, riot gear, and rubber bullets, apprehending dozens, including journalists. Some protesters were brutalized by police. On May 18th, the police put up barricades across downtown La Paz, and evacuated key government buildings. I witnessed a standstill attack between the Red Ponchos and security forces at the Judiciary building, one block from the Casa del Pueblo.

Similar operations followed in other areas, a continuation of the repression from days prior, that is almost certain to escalate. One protester nearly lost an eye, while another has reportedly died. Journalists have also been harrassed by police, tear gassed, and pushed out. Over 100 protesters and journalists have been arrested.

The Wiphala, the indigenous flag that symbolizes the Plurnational State and pro-indigenous democracy, has been quietly removed from public spaces, including the Plurinational Assembly and the Casa del Pueblo, the seat of the executive. The government no longer defends the rights of indigenous peoples. Counter-protesters are openly calling the Wiphala a “terrorist symbol,” with some stepping on it in public squares. One group of counter-protesters on May 18th burned the Wiphala in front of indigenous protesters.

Vice President Edmand Lara, a populist anti-corruption crusader and former police officer whom social movements have embraced as an ally (which, according to all accounts, immensely helped Paz win the presidential election last year), issued two powerful statements breaking with Paz. The statements are part of a series of direct rebukes and insults from “Captain Lara” against Paz.

Lara condemned “the indiscriminate use of chemical agents and any action that violates the integrity and fundamental rights of citizens, particularly elderly persons, pregnant women, children and girls.” He exhorted police and armed forces to act with “responsibility, professionalism, and strict adherence to protocols on the rational and proportional use of force.”

He condemned the intimidation of press workers. And he made a direct call to Paz: “Prioritize dialogue and conciliation as fundamental mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of social conflicts.”

Most significantly, Lara invited the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to monitor the situation.

The COB has already stated that protests will not stop, despite the COR El Alto signing a deal with the government and being accused by protesters of selling out. The government has been signing deals with certain social movement factions to get them to defect, in a “divide and conquer” strategy, buying them off while jailing opposition leaders and repressing remaining blocks.

The Paz administration has systematically dismantled the legal and institutional framework that once protected Bolivia’s plurinational democratic character. They have dismantled the Ministry of Justice, and practically annulled the results of the judicial elections from last year. They have jailed former president Luis Arce, taking away his rights to a lawyer and due process.

They have laid the groundwork to go after the COB, student unions, and other socialist organizations. Perhaps most chillingly, they have released the 2019 coup plotters — former interim president Jeanine Áñez and Santa Cruz governor Luis Fernando Camacho — figures convicted for sedition, terrorism, and crimes against humanity for their role in the illegal overthrow of Evo Morales, backed by the United States and the Organization of American States. The coup government employed death squads and the state to target and even kill opposition, while preventing the democratic will from being upheld.

Former indigenous-socialist president Evo Morales himself has issued warnings. In a statement, Morales alleged that the United States ordered the Paz government to execute a military operation, with the support of the DEA and SOUTHCOM, to detain or kill him. Among the architects, he named former right-wing minister Carlos “Zorro” Sánchez Berzaín, who fled to Miami after the 2003 Black October massacre, and Paz’s Vice Minister of Social Defense Ernesto Justiniano, currently in Washington. Justiniano has said “there will be a DEA office in Bolivia” this week.

Meanwhile, Argentina has sent a Hercules aircraft reportedly carrying tear gas and police equipment, disguised as “humanitarian aid” with food and medicine shipments. Milei, who is fighting his own war on democracy at home, has expressed solidarity with Paz, arguing the protesters destabilize Bolivia and block “liberty and progress.”

Bolivia, as does Latin America in its autocratic shift, faces a dark moment in its short democratic history, where indigenous protesters are labeled by the state as illegitimate terrorists, drug-traffickers, and obstacles to progress to be crushed. Soon, with promised U.S. involvement against “narcoterrorism” and support from other Latin American autocracies, that moment may get even darker.

The post Bolivia: Paz Government Using Lawfare Against Protesters, “Terrorists” and “Drug Traffickers” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Cooper with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Photograph Source: U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Michael Ito – Public Domain

Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command whose responsibilities include coordinating attacks on Iran, recently testified at a Senate hearing. Cooper said that when it comes to Iranian civilian deaths caused by US missiles, the United States has done a practically flawless job. The New York Times reported that Cooper suggested: “the US military’s record … had been near perfect.”

According to Admiral Cooper, near perfection apparently translates to an estimated 1,700 civilian deaths in Iran since February 28, when the United States and Israel began an unprovoked war of aggression. Unprovoked military attacks are major crimes under international law. In fact, they are a violation of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter.

That nearly perfect record includes the deaths of about 254 children, 120 of whom (and likely more) were killed on the very first day of the illegal war when a Tomahawk missile slammed into an elementary school. About thirty teachers and parents were also killed.

Closer to home, we are approaching the fourth anniversary this month of a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered. One does not need a law degree to know that shooting up a school is against the law, too.

Would it be remotely acceptable—or sane—to opine that Salvador Ramos, the shooter at Uvalde, would have had a nearly perfect, practically spotless body count to his name if just one or two children were killed? Many legislators certainly don’t fuss over these fine distinctions since they could not have cared less about any number of murdered school children in Texas or Iran, a sentiment that in itself is criminal, but not in any formal legal sense. No, they proceeded in a perfectly legal manner when they resisted calls for substantial gun safety legislation. It also seems to be perfectly acceptable to the US Congress to not restrain a president from unprovoked war making.

After Uvalde, lawmakers instead offered their perfectly usual platitudes and prayers. They also professed their boundless love for the Second Amendment and their seething hatred of the tyranny that would surely arise if even a little of the deadliest ordnance Americans can lay their hands on were ever fenced off from public access. To their credit, however, they didn’t get in front of the TV cameras in the US Senate to say that Ramos, unlike the Trump administration and the Pentagon, exhibited nearly perfect conduct.

Near perfection only applies to those wielding high-tech weapons worth billions of dollars that eviscerate a comparatively small number of innocent people; it of course does not refer to a psychopath with a gun that was purchased at Outback Sports to slaughter a score of children.

Near perfection only applies to polished functionaries dressed in uniforms and business suits, not to some maladjusted, enraged teenager fatally cosplaying Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.

Admiral Cooper said that the school bombing in Iran is under investigation. Just that one, though, not the estimated 22 other schools that were reportedly turned into rubble and ash. He found that number impossible to verify even though it could be. The military also seems uninterested in the bombings of hospitals, clinics, and residential areas. Ignoring those other deaths would preserve a self-described excellent record of avoiding civilian deaths.

Why might the killing of ordinary adults and children in Iran be a nearly perfect illustration of blameless violence?

One reason is that the victims in Iran were not people at all because, as we are told over and over again, they want to hurt us. Those in the media who claim expert knowledge but know nothing about the Middle East and Islam constantly treat us to lectures about how angry Arabs and Persians harbor a blind hatred for us that compels them to seek the West’s destruction. They are beasts who prefer Oriental depots to lord over them, and that sort of evil should be consigned to oblivion. Importantly, we can apparently achieve near perfection in our struggle against them if fatalities hover around some arbitrary number.

By contrast, the children in Uvalde were people. They lived in our country and were Christians, so they were allowed a small measure of pity. Also, there were a lot of victims in that case. More than normal. Those murders fueled tepid outcries and fleeting national grief. That they were tepid and fleeting was shown in what didn’t happen after those 19 funerals: What didn’t happen was a fulsome and broad shouldering of national trauma over the dismembering of small bodies by swarms of bullets. Such home-grown atrocities should have resulted in voters showing many lawmakers the door at the very first electoral opportunity.

But that didn’t happen. In other countries, legislators enact more effective firearm laws after mass shootings, but meaningful change doesn’t happen here; our leadership is able to cultivate perfectly undamaged careers in the aftermath of deaths that they largely ignore. Sometimes, they claim that extinguishing the lives of children is the price of freedom.

We are so accustomed to our culture’s hideous violence that it goes unchecked and, depending on the body count, often passes unnoticed. One would think we haven’t a blemish of violence here at home given lawmakers’ stubborn refusal to address it. However, when lots of child-sized body bags are required, our atomized population starts to pay attention, but it still feels largely powerless to stop what happens on the next block or in the next state. When the public does pay attention, that can be dangerous for planners; frightening people and engendering a sense of helplessness impedes focused attention on officially sanctioned criminality. Barring deflection, attention and anger could otherwise become threatening to those in power.

And forget halfway around the world where, according to some notable government officials like Ron DeSantis, non-people are intent on killing infidels and establishing Sharia law. Unaccountable exported violence stamped with “Made in the USA” comes with a guarantee that the deaths of brown Muslims will be described as perfectly fine, especially when, like here at home, the numbers are relatively small.

Similar to the Uvalde mass shooting, things become uncomfortable when the fatality count sharply rises. For example, the United States has been helping Israel turn Gaza into a wasteland for more than two years. Recent estimates show that nearly 73,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 21,000 children. Americans have expressed increasing opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank to the point that almost 60 percent have considerably negative views of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Interestingly, about the same proportion of Americans believe that gun control laws should be much stricter.

The divide between political elites and the population is vast. The former has no problem with generating a perfect number of victims, just enough so that we do nothing about it. When fatalities increase, they can simply be ignored, or pundits and planners can reach into a deep reservoir of Islamophobia to justify murder. However, that can change because we have power in numbers.

The post A Culture of Violence Finds Its Nearly Perfect Number of Victims appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Thucydides. This is the plaster cast bust currently in exposition of Zurab Tsereteli’s gallery in Moscow. Photograph Source: shakko – CC BY-SA 3.0

History doesn’t repeat itself, but there are relevant analogies in any discussion of historical events, and these can be helpful.  The current tensions in Sino-American relations are reminiscent of both the Peloponnesian rivalry and war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th-century B.C. (as recounted by the Athenian historian Thucydides) and the European rivalry between Germany and Britain in the years before World War I.

Harvard Professor Graham Allison wrote about the example of the Peloponnesian rivalry 11 years ago in a book titled “The Thucydides Trap.”  He argued that Sparta had established regional dominance, and that Athens’ efforts to contest that dominance led to a long war that was labeled the first “forever war.”  In the years before the outbreak of World War I, Britain had used its naval power to establish regional dominance, but Germany’s building up of its own military forces, particularly its naval forces, produced tensions that contributed to the start of the war in 1914.

No one predicted the horror and slaughter of WWI that left Europe in ruins and contributed to the end of the Russian, Ottoman, and the Austro-Hungarian empires.  Four years of war moved Europe from the political center of the global community to a weakened condition that opened the door to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and ultimately to fascism in Germany and Italy.  During a trip to the United States in 2015, Xi said there was no such thing as a “Thucydides Trap” in the world, but that, “should major countries…make the mistake of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.”

These earlier events resemble the current rivalry and tension in Sino-American relations, which find the United States losing international influence and credibility while China is emerging as a serious rival to the U.S. standing as the leading global power.  At the recent summit meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, which featured the U.S. president going to Beijing virtually “hat in hand” to improve bilateral political and economic relations, the Chinese leader lectured Trump about U.S. risk-taking regarding the use of force in general and the posturing over Taiwan in particular.  Xi then reached deep into history, warning Trump about mishandling the Taiwan issue, as that could lead to a greater conflict.

I personally don’t believe that China is about to use military force to solve its Taiwan problem because China is in an advantageous position to prosper from the political and economic environment in the Indo-Pacific region.  China, moreover, must be concerned with the recent successes of Ukraine, Iran, and Hamas against far stronger opponents (Russia, the United States, and Israel) that assumed their wars would be extremely short ones.

And I believe even more strongly that the United States and China are not headed toward a violent confrontation, which would not serve the interests of either nation.  But wars have become such a consistent feature of international relations that the possibility of conflict cannot be dismissed.  The recent examples of futile and costly “endless wars” make it even more pertinent to examine the risks of accidental warfare between the United States and China and to appreciate the possible mishandling of bilateral relations that could lead to war.  The gratuitous propaganda wars pursued by both sides and the absence of a regular strategic dialogue contribute to the tensions and the rivalry.

The national security situation in the United States is particularly worrisome because U.S. personnel and processes that make up the decision-making process are so weak and poorly managed.  Trump has loaded up his national security team with China Hawks who don’t value the importance of diplomacy and dialogue.  The fact that Marco Rubio is both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, and has driven both institutions into the ground, is not reassuring.  The fact that two real estate billionaires without experience or knowledge dominate U.S. diplomatic dealings is risible.  There is not a single expert on China in the Trump firmament.

China, meanwhile, has a very polished and experienced national security team and has been very successful in the Indo-Pacific and the Global South without relying on military force.  It is noteworthy that China has a trade surplus of $1.2 trillion at the same time that the United States has a trade deficit of $1.2 trillion.  China has avoided the kind of absurd adventures that the United States has pursued in wasting blood and treasure in unnecessary wars in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf over the past 25 years.  

U.S. policy makers, politicians, and pundits are too preoccupied with the threats of violent Islamic extremism and the resurgence of Russian power, and have been derelict in ignoring China’s ascendance in all aspects of economic, technological, and military power.  For the past two decades, the United States has assumed it could contain China’s power just as it contained the power of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.  The Soviet Union, however, was never a global power and never possessed strong economic power.  Conversely, the magnitude of China’s power over the years has been rapid and profound.  I don’t believe that Trump, JD Vance, and Rubio understand this fact.

The post Sino-American Relations and the “Thucydides Trap” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

“Arab residents being forced out of Haifa, by the armed Haganah men, April, 1948.” per Haaretz – Public Domain

My grandmother used to keep a rusted iron key in a small wooden box lined with faded velvet. As a child, I thought it was just a broken relic, but every time she held it, her eyes would grow distant. That key, she told me, once opened the front door of their family home that I have never seen in Beir Al Sabaa —  in a neighborhood now erased from every map but the one burned into our memory. When my grandparents were forced to leave in 1948, they carried that key, the clothes on their backs, and the unshakable conviction that they would return in a week or two. Seventy-eight years later, that key still sits in a box, and we are still waiting.

The Nakba — the catastrophe — did not end in 1948. It continued in different forms, deepening Palestinian suffering while also sharpening a new awareness: among Palestinians, yes, but also among a global generation that refuses to unsee what it has witnessed. What we do with that awareness, together, will determine whether this moment becomes a genuine turning point or just another chapter of outrage that fades.

For millions of Palestinians, May 15 is not an abstract date. It is a wound that never closed. The 1948 Nakba was the violent expulsion of over 750,000 people, the destruction of more than 500 villages, and a deliberate campaign of terror designed to erase a society. But as the Palestinian revolutionary writer Ghassan Kanafani taught us through his analysis of the 1936–1939 revolt, the catastrophe did not come out of nowhere. It was prepared by years of colonial manipulation, internal division, and a reliance on outside forces that ultimately betrayed the struggle. The defeat of that revolt, Kanafani argued, was a blueprint for understanding how liberation movements fail — not from a lack of courage, but from a lack of unified strategy, self-reliance, and clear-eyed analysis. It is a lesson that applies not only to Palestinians but to every solidarity movement that wants to be more than a moment of moral feeling.

And the Nakba never stopped. It simply changed uniforms. In September 1993, the Oslo Accords were signed, marketed to a weary people and a hopeful world as the path to peace. Instead, Oslo became a major defeat for the resistance. It fragmented Palestinian territory into zones of control, transformed a liberation movement into a security subcontractor for the occupation, and removed the refugees and the right of return from the negotiating table entirely. As one Arab analyst wrote, “Imposed peace — peace by coercion and criminality — is utterly void, a humiliating surrender.” Oslo was exactly that: an attempt to impose peace through power, to replace national rights with a deal that dissolved the cause into administrative zones. But history proves you cannot bomb collective memory into submission. National rights do not die. Identity cannot be erased by settlement agreements, no matter how many signatures are forced onto them.

Today, the most savage form of the continuing Nakba is unfolding in Gaza. Since October 2023, a genocidal state has been carrying out an all-out war that is nothing less than the accelerated ethnic cleansing of an entire population. Mass killing, deliberate starvation, the annihilation of entire family lines, the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools, and universities — all funded and armed by Western governments. For US taxpayers, this is not a foreign tragedy in which you have no part; it is a crime enabled by your tax dollars, your political institutions, and your silence. The outrage that has poured into the streets around the world is righteous, but outrage alone cannot stop a genocide that is produced by long-standing structures of power. We all — Palestinians and every person who seeks justice — must transform this immense energy of determination and anger into energy that actually changes the world we live in, the world that has so far proven incapable of stopping the slaughter.

This is the hard truth that solidarity must now confront. Many of us have participated in marches, shared infographics, or pressured our representatives, yet the bombs continue to fall. This does not mean our actions are meaningless; it means we have not yet built the kind of sustained, strategic, and disruptive movement required to shift the calculations of empire. Kanafani’s analysis of 1936–1939 is again instructive here. He showed that a revolt can burn brightly and still be crushed if it lacks unified political leadership, independent resources, and a strategy that targets the enemy’s structural vulnerabilities rather than just reacting to its provocations. Solidarity today faces a similar challenge: to move beyond episodic moral expression toward long-term, organized pressure capable of severing the military, economic, and diplomatic arteries that keep the occupation and its genocide on life support.

This means, concretely, that commemorating the Nakba cannot remain an annual ritual of memory alone — whether in a refugee camp or at a rally in a Western capital. Memory is essential; it is the condition of survival for an uprooted people. The keys to the old homes must still be held high. But memory becomes a trap when it substitutes for the hard work of building institutions, knowledge, and strategic campaigns. We need, as another writer urged, to turn the commemoration of the Nakba into a space of collective labor: oral history projects, legal documentation, political education in camps and community centers, and the construction of independent research institutions that can arm the movement with data and strategies that outlast any single news cycle.

This essay is not only for Palestinians. It is for everyone who, over the past months, has filled the streets of London, New York, Sana’a, Johannesburg, and a hundred other cities, outraged by a genocide unfolding in real time. It is for the activist in Chicago who feels their protest has not yet stopped the bombs, and for the taxpayer in Boston beginning to realize that their money is directly funding the destruction of children’s bodies in Gaza. If you have ever asked yourself what more you can do, this is for you.

For supporters of the Palestinian struggle, this means reorienting our solidarity from a posture of pity or guilt to one of partnership and strategic alignment. It means understanding that the right of return is not a metaphor; it is a legal and political demand that must be studied, explained, and advocated for in our own societies. It means challenging the anti-Palestinian frameworks embedded in Western media, academia, and legislation — not just once a year, but as an ongoing campaign. And it means recognizing that the same systems that displace and kill Palestinians are also connected to wars, austerity, and surveillance at home. Our liberation is bound together.

Seventy-eight years of ongoing Nakba have not extinguished the right of return; they have clarified it. And the global uprising of conscience we witnessed in recent months has shown that millions of people are ready to be part of this clarification. What is needed now is not to let that fire dissipate into despair or mere commemoration, but to channel it into the unglamorous, patient, and coordinated work of building political force. As Kanafani insisted, the question is not whether justice is on our side — it is whether we are prepared to organize with the same seriousness as those who deny it.

Notes.

Al-Nakba — “the catastrophe” — refers to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, during which over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced and more than 500 villages destroyed, creating the world’s most protracted refugee crisis.

The 1936–1939 Palestinian revolt was a mass anti-colonial uprising against British rule and Zionist settlement, whose defeat, analyzed in depth by Ghassan Kanafani, revealed strategic weaknesses that would pave the way for the Nakba a decade later.

Citation.

Kanafani, Ghassan. The 1936–39 Revolt in Palestine. (Originally published as Thawrat 1936–1939.

The post The Nakba Never Stopped appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Eleonora Patricola.

Ever since North Korea suffered through the death of its first leader in 1994, a loss magnified by an economic collapse and a devastating famine, outside observers have likened the country to an airplane experiencing a serious malfunction. The major question they posed: in the end, would North Korea experience a soft landing or a catastrophic crash?

Perhaps a reformer would come along — say, a North Korean version of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — who could right the airship of state and guide it toward the runway of reunification with South Korea.

More direly, the North Korean regime could collapse all of a sudden, like the Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989. Those were relatively peaceful affairs, but North Korea’s worst-case scenarios might involve violent power struggles, the return of famine, and a free-for-all scramble for the country’s loose nukes. U.S. analysts have gamed out the consequences of just such a hard landing — and so has the Pentagon with its OPLAN 5029 — and they all add up to a tragedy not only for North Koreans and the region, but also potentially for the United States and the rest of the world.

The North Korean government has, however, defied such scenarios by somehow surviving, while rejecting reunification with the South and turning up its nose at conventional versions of reform. Despite additional challenges — a sustained COVID quarantine, several distinctly hostile governments in South Korea, and a flatlining economy — the regime has so far avoided collapse and, if anything, tightened its control over its population. For the time being at least, the North Korean plane evidently has no intention of landing, much less crashing.

Today, in an improbable plot twist, however, Donald Trump’s United States is starting to seem ever more like an aircraft in distress.

After all, the present pilot of Air America, exhibiting signs of psychosis or perhaps dementia, has begun to dismantle the cockpit under the delusion that it’s his to transform into a ballroom. The crew — and indeed much of the supporting infrastructure on the ground below — has been decimated by budget cuts. The airline itself is fast taking on debt. Many of the passengers are praying for a soft landing and hoping that, if the plane does touch down for a risky layover, they will get a new pilot.

But another fear lurks in the background.  Given the state of the airplane — a malfunctioning altimeter, compromised landing gear — it might not matter who the pilot is anymore. Air America may well be heading for a crash landing regardless of who’s in charge.

Those of us on board, gripping our armrests in terror, are asking ourselves one question above all else: is it too late to avert catastrophe?

Trump’s Totalitarian Tendencies

North Korea has come closer than any country in the modern era to building a totalitarian state. Beginning with the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, its leadership has eliminated all oppositional politics, suppressed virtually all signs of civil society, and tolerated no freedom of the press, speech, or assembly. Nor is there any freedom of religion, unless you count the personality cult attached to the Kim family leadership, which is now in its third generation.

But all totalitarianism is aspirational. The Soviet Union had its dissidents and underground samizdat literature. The Confessing Church movement attempted faith-based resistance to the Nazis. Likewise, the North Korean government’s control over the population is not total, as can be measured by rising levels of private enterprise and covert enthusiasm for South Korean culture.

So, too, are Donald Trump’s totalitarian tendencies aspirational. He would like to achieve total control, but he’s hemmed in by institutional limits. Still, he prefers to bypass Congress with rule by executive decree. He has attempted to control the media, rein in the power of universities, and tilt the electoral playing field to benefit his party. He has aligned himself internationally not with democrats but with autocrats. He has had a particular fondness for authoritarian leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Javier Milei of Argentina who consolidated their power within democracies. But he has also gotten cozy with the likes of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, who doesn’t bother at all with elections.

The most inexplicable friendship Trump developed while in office is certainly with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the founder’s grandson. Having traded escalating threats during part of Trump’s first term in office, the two leaders grew closer after several in-person meetings and a raft of exchanged letters. “I was really being tough,” Trump explained in 2018. “And so was he. And we’d go back and forth. And then we fell in love. OK? No, really.”

Really, the only way to explain such an attraction of opposites — an elected U.S. leader and the North Korean dictator — is to point out that the two distinctly have something in common: their desire for total control. Whether intentionally or not, Trump has applied some of the features of the Kim family playbook to his own governing style. In doing so, he has also damaged, perhaps irreparably, the very idea of America.

Different Beds, Same Dreams

One of the key elements of North Korean politics is the personality cult of the Kim family, which casts a long shadow over the country’s culture. Drawn in part from northern Korea’s earlier Christian heritage — through the development of a trinity of founding figures, the 10 commandments of Kimilsungism, and pervasive themes of sacrifice and redemption — that personality cult has generated so much fervor among many North Koreans that even defectors have spoken of their pride in founder Kim Il Sung and his ideology.

Trump, too, has tried to construct such a personality cult — by placing his name on public buildings (the Kennedy Center), putting his face on U.S. coins (the semiquincentennial dollar), inserting his image in future passports, and planning a golden statue of himself at his presidential library that resembles one of Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. So far, however, outside of the MAGA faithful, his cult seems to have generated little more than ridicule.

Another aspect of Pyongyang’s governance that probably attracts Trump is its overemphasis on the military. North Korea devotes 34% of its gross domestic product to military spending (compared to Russia at 6% and the United States at under 4%). Although it hasn’t launched any wars of its own for more than 75 years, Pyongyang has dispatched thousands of troops to help fight Russia’s war in Ukraine. Since the 1990s, the government has spoken of a songun — military first — doctrine to justify the sacrifices made to maintain a huge standing army, a range of missiles, and a small but significant nuclear arsenal.

Similarly, the prevailing theme of Trump’s second term has been war and military spending. Despite his once-upon-a-time promises not to become involved in “forever wars,” particularly in the Middle East, Trump joined Israel this year in an attack on Iran, a conflict that cost over $11 billion in its first week alone. He has proposed an astonishing $1.5 trillion military budget, an increase of 50% over last year’s already bloated total, and that sum doesn’t even include the costs of the Iran War.

Then there’s Trump’s economic thinking, if you can call it that. He has repudiated the free market orthodoxy of his fellow Republicans to embrace a form of economic nationalism: high tariff walls to reduce trade imbalances, a focus on rebuilding American manufacturing, and the repudiation of international rules of the road (like the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea) in order to drive a dagger into economic globalization. In such respects, Trump’s approach resembles North Korea’s path of import substitution and defiance of the international rule of law.

In North Korea’s case, such an economic strategy has been partly born of necessity, given the economic embargo imposed on it after the Korean War of the early 1950s. Trump, however, is steering the U.S. economy into a tailspin without provocation. If you add together the costs associated with his kamikaze tariffs, the follow-on effects of the Iran War and boosts in military spending, the gutting of government programs investing in the economy, the watering down of environmental regulations, and reductions in government revenue because of tax cuts, Trump is guiding the United States toward the kind of triple whammy that hit North Korea in the 1990s, when environmental disasters and political criminality combined with rising energy prices to bring its manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a virtual halt, while killing an estimated one million people.

But, you might point out, Wall Street is still on an upward ascent. The U.S. economy is still growing, however modestly, and, while U.S. food insecurity is rising, famine isn’t on the horizon. To return to the airplane analogy, the in-flight experience has become more uncomfortable for those who can’t afford business class, but that doesn’t mean a crash is imminent.

Or does it?

A Soft vs. Hard Landing

Whether he is consciously modeling his efforts on North Korea or not, Donald Trump wants to make an indelible imprint on the United States. He aspires to fundamentally change the demographics of the country, the structure of the economy, and the nature of its politics. To do that, he aims to ensure that his MAGA personality cult, his anti-government crusade, and his self-defeating economic policies outlive his own tenure in office. That will certainly require a substantial dismantling of democratic safeguards, given that such policies don’t attract majority support.

In other words, much as Kim Il Sung destroyed anything that could have challenged his authority — the church, the intelligentsia, landowners, rival political factions — Trump has now launched a scorched-earth policy to ensure that his successors can’t undo his damage. If the Democrats regain Congress in November and even the White House in 2028, they will inherit an enormous bill for Trump-era damages (and count on a chorus of Republican voices improbably blaming them for the disaster).

Any incoming reformers will face an uphill battle to convince the public to restore funding for infrastructure, whether green or otherwise. And they will have to deal with a terrifying erosion of faith in government, resulting from the incompetence, lies, and malpractice of the Trump administration. At the international level, U.S. allies will think twice about concluding any deals with this country, given the possibility of another political swing in subsequent elections.

Trump’s tactics, in other words, are designed to make a soft landing ever more difficult. An inveterate gambler, he is betting that his extreme approach will enable Air America to climb into the very stratosphere, even if he is far more likely to force an emergency landing.

Nightmare scenarios have long haunted American consciousness. The sheer size of the U.S. debt —  at nearly $40 trillion, it’s the highest absolute amount in the world — could put the country into receivership if the dollar slips from its status as the global currency. Default could tear apart an already polarized society. Such a hard landing could look like what analysts of North Korea have often predicted for that country.

But North Korea hasn’t collapsed. With its considerable resources, surely the United States, too, can avoid such a scenario.

True, no one is going to make any money at Polymarket predicting the imminent fall of the Kim regime. But North Korea is not exactly following a recipe for long-term success either. Even if it limps along for another decade or two, with leadership passing to Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter, any country that follows its policies of personality cult, autarkic economic policies, massive corruption, military-first approaches, and ruthless suppression of dissent is not likely to prosper over the long term. Just look at how Vladimir Putin has steered Russia into a terrifying nosedive.

Substantial reform could head off such a scenario for the United States. If Trumpism can be likened to a devastating depression (which it could still precipitate), the obvious recourse for any successor would be to embark on an immediate course correction comparable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Whatever it’s called — not a Green New Deal, given the irrational resistance of a large section of the U.S. electorate to anything “green” except greenbacks — such an American renewal plan would need to restructure the U.S. economy to favor the bulk of American workers rather than the current generation of robber barons. Implemented with a much better promotional campaign — led perhaps by future Chief of Reconstruction (and now New York Mayor) Zohran Mamdani — it would link concrete benefits to identifiable government programs and services. It would offer a striking real-life illustration of your tax dollars at work.

Such a reform plan would have to restore trust in government by punishing corruption, enlisting the public as watchdogs, and taxing the super-wealthy into semi-submission. By shifting away from war and aggressive military spending, such a project of renewal would also have to work with partners overseas to promote policies of cooperative prosperity and sustainability in order to restore a measure of trust in U.S. actions globally. Soft landings require soft power, leaving hard power to those determined to crash and burn.

The North Korean case is a reminder that awful policies may not themselves precipitate collapse. Trumpism will not go away simply because it is on the verge of winning multiple Darwin Awards for its counter-evolutionary policies. Having hijacked American democracy, Trump and his cronies are under the impression that they are flying ever upwards, but they have not been blessed with a good sense of direction. Sheer inertia could keep Air America in the air — though with steadily deteriorating conditions on board (as in North Korea). Such a “MAGA ‘til we drop” option would not be much of an improvement over a hard landing.

In 2016, arch-conservative Michael Anton published a piece in the Claremont Review of Books arguing that it was Hillary Clinton and the Democrats who had hijacked America. In “The Flight 93 Election,” Anton imagined that Trump, aided by an energized electorate, could rush the cockpit — just like the passengers on Flight 93, hijacked on September 11, 2001 — and save the country. (It was certainly an infelicitous analogy, given that Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.) Trump’s 2016 victory, however, turned Anton into a dark prophet and vaulted him into the subsequent administration, despite (or because of) the absurdities of his arguments.

In yet another stomach-churning reversal, Anton’s analogy has now finally become all too applicable. Trump has gained the cockpit not once but twice. Having failed to crash Air America the first time around, he seems determined to put his Flight 93 doctrine of heroic self-destruction into practice today. There is no guarantee that a hard landing can be avoided either now or after his departure from office. But this country, its egalitarian ideals, and its democratic traditions (if not much of its dismal history) are certainly worth fighting for.

We’re losing altitude fast. Elections approach.

Let’s roll.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post Is the U.S. Heading Toward a Hard Landing? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Elon Musk in the Oval Office. (Screegrab from White House video posted to YouTube.)

I have no idea how smart or stupid Elon Musk actually is. Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t do IQ testing. But like everyone else in the world, I can evaluate the logic of the things he says. And there ain’t much there.

Apparently, Elon Musk is now babbling something about how we need the government to provide a universal high income because AI will take all the jobs. The idea of universal high income is a contrast with the universal basic income plan that many have put forward, which would ostensibly provide enough money for people to afford basic necessities. Musk is saying that the income provided by a government payment should be enough to support a comfortable standard of living.

This is an interesting idea. If AI really does have the enormous productivity windfall Musk is apparently anticipating, it might be a good thing to do. We can alternatively have much shorter workweeks, longer vacations, and higher pay, but let’s not get too technical.

The bigger question about Elon’s big idea is how he reconciles it with his often–repeated assertion that the U.S. government is going bankrupt. Musk claims that the deficit and debt are so large that the country can’t possibly bear them much longer. He says that we need large cuts to Social Security and Medicare to keep the government solvent.

If it’s not obvious to everyone already, these views are 180 degrees at odds with each other. If we have enough money sitting around to pay people a universal high-income, then we surely have enough money to pay people the Social Security and Medicare benefits they are expecting and paid for. It’s probably also worth mentioning that if we really thought that we need to reduce the deficit, we could tax people like Elon Musk more and/or reduce the size of the government contracts we are giving him.

Anyhow, we have Elon Musk simultaneously saying that we are richer than we can possibly imagine and that we are so poor we can’t pay the basic benefits that tens of millions depend upon to support them in retirement or due to disability. This isn’t the first time Musk has spewed utter nonsense.

Last year, when he was playing DOGE master, he insisted that 20 million dead people were getting Social Security benefits. While one dead person was uncovered, the other 19,999,999 are still free. The claim is utterly absurd on its face.

There surely are a small number of cases where a few checks get sent out after someone dies. These would barely make a dent in the cost of the program. Furthermore, much of the money is later recovered.

Musk also has repeated lunatic claims about millions of non-citizens voting. This claim, which Donald Trump also likes to make, defies common sense at both ends. The overwhelming majority of non-citizens in the country want, first and foremost, to be able to stay here to work and ultimately to gain legal citizenship.

How many of these people would risk everything to cast a vote in an election? In every election, there are tens of millions of citizens who have every right to vote, who decide it’s not worth their time. Elon believes that there are millions of non-citizens who would risk everything to cast an illegal vote?

On the other side, we have had Republicans yelling about non-citizens voting for more than a quarter- century. In all that time, maybe they have found a few dozen non-citizen voters. (There is a larger number, although still very small, who seem to have mistakenly registered. The overwhelming majority of these people never cast a vote.) We know that Trump and his crew are not very sharp, but if there were really millions of non-citizens voting in every election, even they would be competent enough to find ten or twenty thousand.

But getting back to the basic economics, what does Musk think he’s saying when he says the government will go bankrupt? The government prints the currency it spends. There is a story where we could be spending and printing so much money that we get runaway inflation, but we are obviously very far from that now, even with the burst of inflation from Trump’s tariffs and war. And even runaway inflation is not bankruptcy. Does our DOGE master really know that little about government finance?

Anyhow, Musk obviously runs off his mouth to advance whatever goal suits him at the time. Whatever he may think about the world, his comments often make no sense and are frequently contradictory. They do not deserve to be taken seriously.

The famous line, “if you’re so rich, how come you’re not smart,” could have been written for Elon Musk.

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

The post Idiot Speak: Elon Musk’s Plans for Gutting Social Security and a Universal High Income appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Nancy Duran Rodriguez took several pairs of work gloves to Mexico in 2025, intending to hand them out as a goodwill gesture to fellow union workers she met there.

But Duran Rodriguez, a member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 6787 in Burns Harbor, Indiana, discovered that some of her Mexican counterparts lacked even the most basic personal protective equipment to guard against heat, toxins, jagged objects, and other risks on the job.

Grateful workers there saw the gloves as a godsend, not souvenirs.

It’s a sobering reminder of how corporations continue to exploit Mexico’s low wages, poor working conditions, and lax enforcement of labor laws to oppress working families on both sides of the border.

Fortunately, we have an opportunity to change this. The USW, other unions, and our allies are pushing for meaningful improvements to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the trade pact subject to “joint review” and modification by all three countries this summer.

The six-year-old USMCA replaced the disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which emboldened greedy companies to abandon U.S. factories, shift hundreds of thousands of jobs to Mexico, and hollow out our manufacturing communities.

Although it represented a step forward, the USMCA has so far failed to end this race to the bottom. Employers keep ditching America and moving jobs to Mexico. Employers go right on victimizing Mexican workers, who still make a fraction of Americans’ wages and who still fight to form real, independent unions and stay safe on the job, even though the USMCA officially extended protections they never had before.

“They deserve the things we do,” said Duran Rodriguez, noting mill workers there make hundreds less per day doing the same jobs that Local 6787 members perform at the Cleveland-Cliffs complex in Burns Harbor.

“It’s not enough. They’re living day by day, just to be able to make it. It is definitely a struggle. It is something that needs to change,” she said, pointing out that lifting up Mexican workers, a key objective in the USMCA, remains the only way to end offshoring and bring prosperity to workers in all three countries.

Every April, the USW sends a delegation to Lázaro Cárdenas on Mexico’s Pacific coast to build on our decades-long alliance with Los Mineros, the Mexican mine and metal workers union.

After learning about shortages of personal protective equipment in 2025, Duran Rodriguez took only four outfits and filled the rest of her suitcase with gloves to distribute during her return trip with other USW members in April 2026.

These visits build cross-border solidarity, as Duran Rodriguez’s experience showed, and they include many inspiring moments, such as our annual march to remember two striking members of Los Mineros gunned down by police in 2006. Workers began the strike following a coal mine explosion that killed 65 coworkers and exposed the reprehensible disregard for safety in Mexican mines.

“It pumps you up,” Steven Minchuk, an assistant griever and safety trainer for Local 6787, said of the energy unleashed by the marches.

“They never forget,” Minchuk observed of the Mexican workers. “They keep fighting for their rights.”

The impact of worker exploitation touches many aspects of life in Mexico, depriving families not only of the means to support themselves but also to build healthier, more livable communities.

“It’s a whole different world,” observed Minchuk, a former firefighter and fire commissioner who once toured a Mexican fire station and walked away dismayed by what he saw. “The equipment that they had was comparable to ours in the 1960s and 1970s.”

The USMCA portended a hard break with all of this. That’s because the USW and our allies, such as then-U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, successfully fought to include pro-worker provisions in the final version of the agreement.

It required Mexico to pass a law affording workers the right to form the democratic, independent unions needed to negotiate better wages, win safer working conditions, and curb U.S. employers’ appetite for offshoring.

The USMCA also established a Rapid Response Labor Mechanism to investigate retaliation against union activists and punish violators. It set rules to keep other countries, such as China, from sneaking unfairly traded products into the U.S. via sham operations in Mexico.

But Mexico failed to hold up its end of the deal for political, financial, and logistical reasons. Just as disappointing, America and Canada failed to step into the breach and keep progress on track.

Now, as part of the USMCA review process, it’s essential to ramp up enforcement of labor laws in Mexico, to commit more resources to stamping out anti-union harassment and to deter would-be violators with swift, severe penalties.

But the review also needs to go beyond steps to safeguard rights and boost wages. It’s just as important to address Mexico’s lax environmental standards, which draw employers happy to do an end run around the more stringent regulations in America and Canada.

The USW and our allies will spend the next few months pushing officials in all three countries to adopt a more robust, effective USMCA.

Given the high stakes, there’s no breaking our will to see this through. It’s a battle that’s pumping all of us up.

“I believe every worker deserves the same protections, benefits, and dignity,” said Minchuk, noting he has a friend in Mexico who works three jobs to make ends meet. “No one should have to risk their well-being simply to provide for the people they love.”

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute. 

The post Why It’s Essential to Fix the USMCA appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by ダモ リ

A recent report by energy think tank Ember put forward a spot of good news: renewables surpassed one-third of global electricity generation in 2025, surpassing coal power for the first time in a century. Combined, low-carbon sources (renewables, nuclear) grew faster than demand, resulting in a small fall in fossil fuel generation. Solar alone met 75 percent of the increase in global electricity demand.

This was before the war in Iran, which would certainly seem to accelerate the transition. Of course, the Trump administration, through the Department of Defense, is holding back approval for about 165 onshore wind projects in the U.S.- approval is needed to ensure the projects don’t interfere with radar systems and flight paths (ironic a Republican administration using Big Government to stop landowners from using their property), not to mention reimbursing firms to the tune of $2 billion this year for abandoned offshore wind projects, but reports are that Europe, bitten twice in five years by a war related energy crunch, is buying up things like EVs and heat pumps. Even in cloudy Britain, orders for solar panels from Octopus Energy, the UK’s biggest energy firm, have spiked by 50 percent since the war started.

Pakistan has become an epicenter of solar power. After being locked out of the LNG spot market in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine solar increased fivefold from 2.9 percent in 2020 to 32.3 percent in 2025, according to Ember. The government still closed schools for two weeks in March to conserve energy due to the Strait of Hormuz shutdown (though the blow has been softened, LNG is still a big factor), but the trend is undeniable.

It is the same story in Lebanon, where there has been about a tenfold increase in installed solar capacity the past few years, most prominently in rural Lebanon, where it has largely replaced a local diesel economy that was long endemic due to the state’s inability to supply consistent electricity. South Africa, long plagued by brownouts, has gone over 300 days without an interruption to its electricity supply. Coal still dominates the country’s energy production but it’s also the fastest-growing solar market in Africa.

There is plenty to work out as far as equality of access and the future of the grid. In all these places, the solar expansion has been less a result of state planning and more a matter of people understandably taking electricity in their own hands (Lebanon saw state collapse in 2021) but, again, the trend is clear. Solar is expected to remain the cheapest form of energy going forward.

EV sales are also spiking globally, with many developing countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia reaching higher EV sales shares than even the EU average. Norway has reached almost total EV adoption and sales in China are now a majority.

With electricity, it becomes a question of batteries. Solar needs battery storage or backup on the grid (hydro, nuclear, or geothermal). ‘Capacity Factor’ is defined by the percentage of the time an energy source can be expected to be available to the grid in relation to its potential maximum capacity. According to the International Energy Agency, on that mark, solar comes in at roughly 23 percent (wind slightly higher at 34 percent). Storage is still in its early days. Ember’s data shows battery additions in 2025 were enough to shift only about 14 percent of new solar generation.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global lithium-ion battery deployment in 2025 was six times as high as in 2020, with EVs accounting for 70 percent of the total lithium-ion deployment. Energy storage followed at just 15 percent. Portable electronics, which had accounted for nearly half the demand in 2015, fell below five percent.

Given that Chinese companies are dominating EV sales, their main battery of choice, Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP), has exploded in recent years. LFP has a lower price tag (it is also safer, though not as energy dense), and costs fell by 15 percent last year compared with 5 percent for Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC), the second most used battery. LFP accounts for just over half of EV batteries and over 90 percent of energy storage. NMC dominated EV battery production in the 2010s and is still used in plenty of EVs, including longer-range Tesla models and the Chevy Bolt. General Motors is planning to introduce lithium manganese-rich (LMR) battery cells in its largest electric vehicles starting sometime in 2028. Sodium-ion batteries are being explored as an alternative to lithium (lithium is quite abundant but sodium is everywhere- about 1000 times more abundant). Solid-state batteries hold the promise of being safer and far more energy-dense but have been plagued by cracking that causes short circuits.  A majority of consumer electronics still use Lithium Cobalt Oxide (LCO).

LFP has been intriguing in some circles given that they are supposed to be less dependent on problematic materials such as cobalt, most of which comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo where conditions and artisanal child mining have drawn much scrutiny, and nickel, which is nasty to process. More than half the world’s nickel currently comes from Indonesia. In an understandable move toward resource nationalism that we’re bound to see more of, a few years ago, the Indonesian government mandated that all nickel mined in the country must be processed there. As production there has more than doubled in the past few years, waste from the industry,particularly on the island of Sulawesi, has decimated local fishing and deforestation has increased erosion and the risk of flash floods.

While energy has absorbed most of the attention from the Strait of Hormuz shutdown, fertilizer prices haven’t been far behind. Recently, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas endorsed legislation to eliminate import tariffs on phosphate from Morocco. The tariffs were put in place five years ago, set at 19.97 percent (since lowered to 2.1 percent this past January) in response to a domestic fertilizer manufacturer’s complaint about unfair competition from subsidized, low-price imports. The proposed repeal has the backing of all the major farm lobbying groups.

Why Morocco? Because Morocco holds about 70 percent of global phosphate reserves and phosphate is a key ingredient in most fertilizers. Morocco is the world’s second biggest exporter behind only China. Morocco’s government has long been seen as decent, at least by Middle East standards, though King Mohammad VI holds plenty of power, but there is a place called Western Sahara. Back in 1975, as Spain’s colonial government was negotiating a withdrawal from the territory, Morocco moved in. King Hassan II sent 350,000 of his subjects across the border along with thousands of soldiers, against the local Sahrawi resistance. It was a lopsided fight as the Sahrawi numbered somewhere between fifty and one hundred thousand, half of whom fled for makeshift tent cities in Algeria. A low-intensity war burned through the 1980s, with 10,000-20,000 killed, until a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1991 left Morocco with two-thirds of the territory. A pending referendum never came and the UN still labels Western Sahara as a ‘non-self-governing territory in the process of decolonization.’

The occupied territory contains the Bou Craa Mine, which may hold up to 10 percent of Morocco’s phosphate production. The mine features the world’s longest conveyor belt, at 61 miles (large enough to see from space), that ships the mine’s phosphate out to sea. Activists, including Aminatou Haider, a Sahrawi who spent four years blindfolded in a Moroccan jail (she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007), have done a great job in lobbying many importers to boycott phosphate from Bou Craa (but not Morocco proper) but the point is we are a long way from clean supply chains. As we work to decarbonize our frontlines, we cannot overlook the underbelly of the energy transition.

The great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov may not have been completely prescient but he was still insightful when he wrote in 1974:

“Life can multiply until all the phosphorus is gone and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent…We may be able to substitute nuclear power for coal power, and plastics for wood, and yeast for meat, and friendliness for isolation- but for phosphorus there is neither substitute nor replacement.”

Well, at least minimizing single-use plastics would be nice. As for phosphate, it doesn’t appear to be running out any time soon. A few years ago, the U.S. Geological Survey put global phosphate reserves at 300 billion tons, sufficient for more than 1000 years at the current rate of extraction (other surveys have it at centuries’ worth). EV batteries, for now, are hardly putting a dent in phosphate supply.

Of course, there are plenty of other issues. In his book The Devil’s Element: Phosphorous and A World Out of Balance, Dan Egan gives a thorough account of the toxic blooms and dead zones in the world’s waterways. Vaclav Smil points out that the worldwide efficiency of nitrogen fertilizer uptake by crops has actually declined to less than 50 percent- meaning the rest is lost to the environment. This can be improved. Diets can be modified to eat less meat, policies that close agricultural exceptions in environmental regulations and impose taxes that force producers to internalize cost of production currently borne by society writ large would help. Meanwhile, more public funding can go into alternative proteins and scaling up lab-grown meat. We can’t forget that global warming is about more than just electricity. Even at a moment when the profits of Saudi Aramco and BP are sky-high, glimmers of hope are everywhere. There remains much to be done.

The post Sunlight and Extraction: Batteries, Phosphate, and the Contradictions of Decarbonization  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Ben Morea at the International Anti-Authoritarian Meetings of 2023 in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. Photograph Source: Antochkat – CC BY-SA 4.0

In Memory of Ben Morea

On the afternoon of October 10, 1966, six members of Black Mask, a radical anti-arts arts group, marched in front of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) handing out leaflets while two members unraveled a large canvas sign announcing, “MUSEUM CLOSED.”

A handout published in Black Mask 1 (November 1966) read, in part, “A new spirit is rising.  Like the streets of Watts [i.e., August 1965 riot] we burn with revolution. We assault your Gods – We sing of your death. DESTROY THE MUSEUMS – our struggle cannot be hung on walls.” It continued, “Goddamn your culture, your science, your art. … What purpose do they serve? Your mass-murder cannot be concealed. The industrialist, the banker, the bourgeoisie, with their unlimited pretence [sic] and vulgarity, continue to stockpile art while they slaughter humanity.”

In an accompanying press release, the group clarified its concerns:

“This symbolic action is taken at a time when America is on a path of total destruction, and signals the opening of another front in the world-wide struggle against suppression. We seek a total revolution, cultural, as well as social and political – LET THE STRUGGLE BEGIN.”

The demonstrators were offended by MoMA’s exhibition, “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage,” which they felt violated the Dadaist and Surrealists very creative visions.

Museum executives, having been notified by Black Mask about the planned action, informed the police who put up two sawhorses to block the entrance, closing the facility.  According to one account, “a nervous and shifty-eyed mob of plain-clothed and uniformed policemen and newsmen [and] one FBI man with a small Japanese camera” observed the demonstration. As the scholar Conor Hannan notes, “Black Mask’s mock-closure of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) represents the first true meeting of art and social protest within the setting of 1960s New York.”

During the ‘60s, numerous arts groups emerged that expressed strong political beliefs, including the Art Workers Coalition, the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), Black Emergency Cultural Coalition Inc. (BECC) and, most importantly, the Black Arts Movement.

Black Mask was different from the other political arts groups in two important ways. First, it drew its radical sensibilities from the post-WW-I Dada and Surrealist movements, a sensibility shared by groups like the Chicago Surrealists, the Amsterdam Provos, the San Francisco Diggers and the UK’s King Mob.  Second, it drew its theoretical or analytic perspective – i.e., its critique of the capitalist culture industry — from the radical Marxists tradition that included the Frankfurt School (e.g., Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich), the anarchist/ecologist Murray Bookchin (i.e., the concept of “post-scarcity”) and the French Situationist International, particularly Guy Debord (i.e., the concept of “the spectacle”).

At the center of Black Mask was Ben Morea (1941-2026), an abstract painter and vibraphonistwho moved to the East Village in the early ‘60s.  As he later reflected:

“I had been involved in jazz during my drug addiction days. I was a musician and every time I got out of jail I went back around the jazz world and got re-addicted . . . When I finally kicked for the last time . . . they put me in the prison hospital . . . in Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan . . . There was an occupational therapist who befriended me . . . She was an art therapist, so I started painting.”

During this period, he hooked up with the Living Theater and, as he recalled, he “was highly influenced by their ideas despite never being theatrically orientated myself.”  Morea further explained, “they were the first people to put a name to the way I was feeling and leaning philosophically.”  During this period, Morea was introduced to artist Aldo Tambellini (1930-2020) and the radical arts community.

Tambellini, a painter, sculptor and poet who pioneered electronic intermedia, championed a belief that art had to break free from the confines of white-walled galleries.  In ’59, he moved to East 10^th Street and began publishing a radical anti-art-institution mimeographed newsletter, The Screw, bearing the bold slogan, “Artists in an Anonymous Generation Arise.”  The Screw “was created to raise the social consciousness of artists,” Tambellini reflected. “In the newsletter, I voiced my objection to the manipulation I saw in the art establishment which used the artists as a commodity and financial investments rather than cultural entities.”  It included tracks like “Fuck the Tastemaker: Wall Street is making our art, the galleries are making our art … the critics are making our art. WHERE THE HELL IS THE ARTIST?” It challenged the commoditization of art.

Tambellini put his words into action by handing out copies of The Screw at “The Club” (a loft at 39 East 8^th Street), a regular meeting space for New York School artists like Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline.  On July 12, 1962, in an action anticipating Black Mask, he hosted “Event of the Screw” in front of MoMA.  He later reflected:

“There, in front of many artists who attended the “Event,” the media, and law enforcement, I dressed in a black suit and tie with a gold screw tie-clip, [and] read the “Manifesto of the Screw.” The Belltones, a Puerto Rican Trio from my neighborhood, also dressed in suits and ties, accompanied me by singing a cappella the “Song of The Screw” which I composed satirizing the conforming artistic “rules of the game.””

At the gathering, he awarded “Golden Screw Awards” – i.e., hardware screws dipped in gold paint — to museum officials as they entered the building.

In 1962, Tambellini, with Morea, Ron Hahne, Elsa Tambellini and Don Snyder, founded Group Center that sought to find new ways to display non-mainstream art.  The group organized a local, two-week arts festival in association with the Lower East Side Neighborhood Association at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery and, in June 1963, an outdoor sculpture show.

Works by Group Center artists were shown at two galleries: Quantum I, in December ‘64 at the Noah Goldowsky Gallery (1078 Madison Avenue), and Quantum II, in January ‘65 at the AM Sachs Gallery (29 West 57^th Street). Morea turned to black paintings at the time of the Quantum shows. The New York Herald Tribune reported, “Benn Morea wants to show light emanating from darkness.”  Looking deeper, it adds:

“His ‘V-Box, I-Boc’ has two adjoining wall-hanging boxes painted black. Projecting cutout forms in the shape of circles, Vs, and bars jiggle electrically, revealing identical white forms behind. The mechanical device remains subordinate to the pictorial composition. He also shows two black floor boxes, about 30 inches square and one foot high. The top of each box is a black and white oil on paper, placed between two sheets of Lucite illuminated by a lightbulb inside.”

Morea’s paintings were strongly influenced by the work of both Tambellini and Jackson Pollock.

The scholar Nadja Millner–Larsen argues that Tambellini, Morea and others developed Black Zero, a live, mixed-media audiovisual collage that included contribution from jazz musicians (e.g., Bill Dixon), dancers (e.g., Judith Dunn) and writers (e.g., Ismael Reed), among others. It was to bea “community of the arts … [for] those vitally interested in the creative expression of man.”  Going further, they declared:

“We believe that the artistic community has reached a new stage of development. In a mobile society, it is no longer sufficient for the creative individual to remain in isolation. We feel the hunger of a society lost in its own vacuum and rise with an open, active commitment to forward a new spirit for mankind.”

They exhibited at East Village sites, public spaces and traditional galleries. Group Center condemned the commercialization of art as well as museums and galleries as elite institutions that separated the artist from ordinary people.

“His painting was very unusual,” noted Bookchin. “It consisted of vast panels of black. Swirling nebulae. Completely black.”  By 1966, Morea sought out new ways to realize his artistic vision, most notably through direct interventions and the publication of a radical mimeographed broadside, Black Mask.  As the poet Dan Georgakas announced,

“Poetry comes out of the Barrel of a Gun,

“Creative man does not entertain or shock the bourgeoisie. He destroys them!”

The group Black Mask believed in turning radical theory into activist practice.  On February 10, 1967, 25 masked men marched down Wall Street with a sign reading, “WALL ST. IS WAR STREET.”  In a handout, they declared:

“The traders in stocks and bones shriek for New Frontiers—but the coffins return to the Bronx and Harlem. Bull markets of murder deal in a stock exchange of death. Profits rise to the ticker tape of your dead sons. Poison gas RAINS on Vietnam. You cannot plead “WE DID NOT KNOW.” Television brings the flaming villages into the safety of your home. You commit genocide in the name of freedom. BUT YOU TOO ARE THE VICTIMS! If unemployment rises, you are given work, murderous work. If education is inferior, you are taught to kill. If the blacks get restless, they are sent to die. This is Wall Street’s formula for the great society!”

Noting their artistic backgrounds, they insisted: “We are not abandoning the cultural front but rather showing the interrelatedness of the struggle.”

Nevertheless, the group essentially abandon conventional artistic expression and, increasingly, engaged in direct action.  In October ’67, they joined over 100,000 protesters at the March on the Pentagon expressing opposition to the Vietnam War.  Morea and several others broke into the Pentagon and were beaten by U.S. soldiers. “It didn’t bring the world any closer to [betterment],” Morea shrugs. “We didn’t know if they would start shooting! They could have. We really thought they might.”

The next month, the Associated Press reported, “A riotous mob screaming ‘Peace’ battled police for control of Sixth Avenue tonight, as a violent anti-war demonstration against Secretary of State Dean Rusk spread half a mile along the busy midtown thorough-fare.” Rusk was in New York to attend a banquet of the Foreign Policy Association, but Black Mask members threw eggs, rocks and bags of cows’ blood at him as he slipped into the hotel unscathed.

In January ‘68, the group staged a mock-assassination of the poet Kenneth Koch at a poetry reading on St. Marks Place. “Koch was a symbol to us of this totally bourgeois, dandy world,” explained Morea. “We were determined to be outrageous in order to force people to decide where they stood on things.” An accompanying flyer made these views more explicit, charging, “[The] act was more poetic than anything Mr. Koch or his like could have read… We must use the poetic act to destroy poetry (as object/spectacle).”

In February, during the city’s garbage strike, Black Mask collected uncollected trash from the Lower East Side and dumped it into the fountains of Lincoln Center. In an accompanying leaflet, they proclaimed: “WE PROPOSE A CULTURAL EXCHANGE … garbage for garbage.” They held the demonstration the night of the opening of “bourgeois cultural event” and the episode was documented in Garbage, a 16-mm black-&-white film produced by Newsreel, a filmmaking collective founded in New York in 1967.

In the wake of the Paris uprising of May ’68, Black Mask morphed into Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (aka UAW/MF), a name appropriated from Amiri Baraka’s (aka LeRoy Jones) poem, Black People, which in turn refers to a repeatedly shouted command by the Newark, NJ, police at Black residents.

The Motherfuckers grew more aggressive in pushing their political demands.  Two episodes at the Fillmore East concert hall are most illustrative.  They forced the hall’s promoter Bill Graham, to let them use the hall for “Community Nights” on Wednesdays.  But the free concerts were short-lived.  On December 18, 1968, at an MC5 show, a disagreement between the Motherfuckers and Graham led to a standoff, with Graham standing at the front of the theater holding the Motherfuckers off.  A fist fight broke out and one of the Motherfuckers smashed Graham with a chain, breaking his nose.

The radical anti-arts movement reached its worst moment when, on June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, the author of S.C.U.M. Manifesto–an acronym for The Society for Cutting Up Men– and the play, Up Your Ass, walked into Warhol’s Union Square offices of The Factory with two guns and shot him three times; she also shot Mario Amaya, a visiting London gallery owner.  After fleeing the building, she turned herself in to the police.  The shooting caused great controversy and split the emerging second-wave feminist movement. 

Morea later discussed this incident, noting, “Valerie came up there [at Columbia University] and found me and asked ‘What would happen if I shot somebody?’ I said ‘It depends on two things – who you shoot and whether they die or not.’ A week later she shot Andy Warhol.”  He then elaborated:

“After she shot him I wrote a pamphlet supporting her. I may have been the only person who did that publicly. I went up to MOMA and handed it out there. Everybody I met was very negative about it, but, hey, I disliked Andy Warhol immensely and I loved Valerie. I felt she was right in her anger and that he was way more destructive than she was because he was helping to destroy the whole idea of creativity in art.”

Millner–Larsen reframes the incident, arguing that Solanas’s act implemented the Motherfucker’s notion of “’ARMED LOVE.’  To the Motherfucker’s, the shooting was symptomatic, not of a mental break, but of a desperation borne from the restricted economy of a patriarchal art world that systematically denied access to the ‘wretched of the earth.’”

By the late ‘60s, the Motherfuckers morphed into the International Werewolf Conspiracy and then the Family.  “We weren’t really hippies or politicos,” Morea reflected. “We were separate from other groups even though we were part of the wider counterculture. Some people would have placed us as hippies. … We also took a lot of LSD. Even though we were also radicals no one would have mixed us up with the Young Communist League. (laughter)”. Morea was under constant government surveillance and faced increasing legal troubles.  During this period, he was drawn to Native American imagery, championed the notion the native “warrior” and rejected the pacifism promoted by Abbie Hoffman and much of the New Left. Morea believed in, when appropriate, armed struggle. In ’69, he split from New York to the Southwest.

In 1964 and 196, Morea’s works appeared with those of Ad Reinhardt and Louise Nevelson, as well as of Louise Bourgeois and Meredith Monk in New York gallery shows.  In a 2016 review of his works at the White Column gallery in Chelsey, the Times quoted him, “I always painted in a semi-trance.”  Adding, “I just feel like I was able to tap into something powerful, an understanding that we were a speck in the universe.”  He went on to state: “I consider Pop Art capitalist realism and I detest it the same way most aesthetically minded people detest socialist realism.”

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Ron Gochez, Union del Barrio, addresses rally in support of Ethnic Studies teachers at LAUSD’s Downtown Business Magnet (5/14/26). Photo credit: Colin Hernandez.

Censorship Rocks Los Angeles School District–“Teachers Told to Remove Palestine & BLM Flags”

The second largest school district in the country has brought down the hammer on social justice educators following last year’s passage of AB 715, an “antisemitism” bill sponsored by the California Israel lobby and rubber-stamped by its minions in the state legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom.

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) with over 500,000 students has ordered Ethnic Studies and social studies teachers at the Downtown Business Magnet (DBM) to remove Palestinian and Black Lives Matter flags, and undergo teacher training on the use of “neutral terms” to describe sensitive topics, including Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Gaza.

The order from the District’s Office of Student Civil Rights (OSCR) came after Emet Legal Services, contacted by another teacher at DBM, filed a complaint of antisemitism last February objecting to social studies and health teacher Tiffany Do’s display of a Palestinian flag and anti-genocide poster, as well as the wearing of a keffiyeh in class. In its 19-page “Report of Findings,” which Do said was not shared with DBM teachers, the District said the keffiyeh could stay but advocacy posters had to go.

Community rallies in solidarity with Do

At a lively after-school protest (5/16/26) in front of the Downtown Business Magnet, teacher and Union del Barrio organizer Ron Gochez said the District’s edict that teachers remain silent in the face of a US-subsidized genocide was like telling teachers in Nazi Germany to take a neutral stance on the Holocaust.

School psychologist Clemen Avalos also spoke at the rally sponsored by LA Educators for Justice in Palestine, Association of Raza Educators, Union del Barrio, Community Self-Defense Coalition and others. Avalos said, “Palestinian students, Mexican students, students born north or south of the border, Black students, Indigenous students–all of our students deserve the right to learn about the truth about their history, their identity and their culture.”

Ethnic Studies under attack

Avalos’ comments speak to AB 715’s threat to Ethnic Studies as an interdisciplinary study of decolonization that centers stories and struggles of marginalized voices and people of color. The California Department of Education’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) underscores solidarity with the oppressed as a foundational value of Ethnic Studies, a course originally required for high school graduation under 2021 legislation, but now stalled due to zero funding in the state budget. From the start, the Israel lobby–JPAC/Jewish California and the California Legislative Jewish Caucus (LJC) –has objected to the mere mention of Palestine in Ethnic Studies, introducing one bill after another to either restrict Ethnic Studies to domestic issues or otherwise police the discipline’s teachers with AB 715, authored by Assemblymember Rick Chavez-Zbur (D-Santa Monica).

DBM Ethnic Studies and health teacher Do (Tido) told teachers, students, parents and community members gathered in the blistering sunlight in front of the school, “AB 715 is an erasure of marginalized people. The order to remove a Palestinian flag during an active genocide is actually Islamophobic, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian.”

The Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism (IUAPR) is a non-profit of scholars and researchers that encourages victims of anti-Palestinian racism to report incidents to the organization for “education” and “advocacy.” IUAPR defines anti-Palestinian racism as a form of racism that “silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.” Its list of examples of such racism includes “failing to acknowledge Palestinians with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine”… “pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives” … and “defaming Palestinians and their [non-Palestinian] allies with slander such as being inherently anti-semitic.”

Back at the rally

Against a backdrop of teachers holding signs that read “Protect Ethnic Studies” and “Defend Palestinian Voices,” the animated Do addressed an estimated 40 people–including Colin Hernandez, Zbur’s challenger in the June 2nd primary.

“AB 715 weaponizes civil rights advocacy against the people it was meant to protect, so that just the mere existence of a Palestinian flag is now considered antisemitic, but the overreach of AB 715 does not stop with Palestinians,” said Do. The crowd shouted,“That’s right! That’s right!” Do continued, “Under AB 715, the statement “Black Lives Matter” is painted as discriminatory bias. Under AB 715, historical injustices like the theft of Native American land cannot be righted under the banner of “Land Back.”

Since the District began its investigation, Do says she has removed the Palestinian flag, along with the BLM flag, Landback flag and Puerto Rico flag.

Daniel, a member of Roybal Learning Center’s Social Justice Club, said students in the club stand behind Do in their outrage over AB 715’s straitjacket on speech and attack on Ethnic Studies. “From the Nakba to the current genocide, AB 715 is a violation of the First Amendment,” said Daniel, who noted Israel had infiltrated the US government, from the federal to the state level.”

Shared ancestry-Israel lobby cudgel

Following its investigation, the District determined Do’s conduct “subjected students to discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry or ethnic characteristic in violation of the Civil Rights Act.” The report also noted, however, that “Students generally described her classroom environment as open, nonjudgemental, comfortable …”

The charge of discrimination based on “shared ancestry” assumes that all Jews and Israelis identify and support the State of Israel and perceive solidarity with Palestine or a Palestinian flag as antisemitic.

Not everyone agrees.

Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization that features keffiyehs and watermelon caps on its website, argues that both Jewish and Arab peoples have ancient, ancestral, and spiritual ties to the land in West Asia. According to JVP, asserting exclusive Jewish rights to Palestine inevitably leads to displacement of Palestinians and erasure of their connection to the same ancestral land. Thousands of JVP members and supporters–some carrying Palestinian flags– have occupied state capitols, subway stations and lawmakers’ offices to demand the US stop funding what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry have all termed Israel’s genocide in Gaza

Daniel, the student, also challenged the notion that expressing solidarity with Palestine was antisemitic or discriminatory. “A semite is someone who speaks a semitic language, of which includes Arabic,” said Daniel, adding, a semite is not just limited to Jewish people. Being a semite extends to the same people being murdered every day by Israeli bombs. To want Palestinians to live a peaceful life and talking ill of the Israeli government–that is not antisemitic; it is the opposite”

Chilling speech

“Israeli genocide bill”

Educator unions, administrator associations, Jewish Voice for Peace chapters and the ACLU all opposed AB 715 due to concerns over the chilling of instruction and conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism–yet the state legislature approved AB 715 after midnight on 9/13/25, prompting a protester to shout from the Senate balcony, “This is an Israeli genocide censorship bill and you all know it … so this bill is aiding and abetting a genocide that is ongoing. You all have blood on your hands.”

AB 715 establishes a politically-appointed antisemitism coordinator to monitor antisemitism instruction and teacher training beginning with four-year-olds in transitional kindergarten, and follow up on complaints that can be filed anonymously by those not directly harmed by alleged discrimination; in other words an IDF soldier in occupied Palestine could file a complaint against California teachers based on hearsay and demand LAUSD administrators drop what they’re doing to pursue investigations of educators.

The District’s corrective actions, with a June 10th deadline for compliance, include administrative review of all DBM history and social science and Ethnic Studies displays and content; department-wide professional development on addressing sensitive topics;
and implementation of a site-based review process for supplemental instructional materials. According to Do, DBM’s principal has already delivered the mandated professional development, reviewing the corrective actions, including follow-up monitoring to, in the District’s words, “verify continued compliance with nondiscrimination neutrality … “

Such mandates raise the question, “What is neutral language for Israeli slaughter, starvation and torture of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians–for Israel’s obliteration of every school in Gaza and killing of over 200 journalists?” The District’s condemnation of classroom bias also raises the question of whether the District’s repeated description of the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict” reflects a pro-Israel bias. A conflict suggests two equal sides. Israel is a nuclear-armed state controlling over four million Palestinians living under military occupation. The “two sides” are not equal.

The avalanche

The controversy at DBM is not an isolated example of the Israel lobby’s attempt to chill debate over Israel’s colonization of Palestine. The District’s mandates come amid an avalanche of Public Record Requests from Israel supporters seeking copies of hundreds of LAUSD teacher lesson plans, according to one LAUSD high school teacher contacted by the District. In addition, the lobby is asking the Governor to approve $10 million more for the California Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education to deliver Anti-Defamation League curriculum that includes a definition of contemporary antisemitism as demonization of Israel and excludes the Gaza genocide from lesson plans.

As the State and District seek to silence teacher opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, annexation of the West Bank and bombardment of Lebanon and Iran, Gochez suggests that instead of removing Palestinian flags from classrooms, teachers might all post Palestinian flags in a collective act of resistance. Similarly the four teachers at DBM who, according to the District, removed their “Stop Genocide” posters might display them once again, with other teachers at the high school and across the District displaying the same message.

Or imagine faculties and students all wearing keffiyehs in solidarity with Palestine.

Dr. Lupe Carrasco Cardona, an Ethnic Studies adjunct professor and chair of the Association of Raza Educators, seconded the call for solidarity with all educators who “courageously, honorably and respectfully teach young people the truth about what is happening in our world.” Said Cardona, “Education should never be about fear, censorship or intimidation. We cannot accept the banning of books, posters or flags, nor can we accept attacks on academic freedom and the professional integrity of educators.”

The post Censorship Rocks Los Angeles School District–“Teachers Told to Remove Palestine & BLM Flags” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Canada Lynx. Photo: USFWS.

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Council on Wildlife and Fish, and Native Ecosystems Council filed a lawsuit in federal district court against the Custer/Gallatin National Forest to stop them from sacrificing habitat for lynx, grizzly bear, elk and whitebark pine trees just north of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, just north of Yellowstone National Park to subsidize the timber industry. It’s unfortunate to have to take a federal agency to court a third time over this logging project, but federal agencies have to follow the law, just like the rest of us.

The groups first sued to stop the Greater Red Lodge logging project west of Red Lodge, Montana in July 2015 and again 2021. In both cases, the Court ruled that the Forest Service violated the Endangered Species Act because the logging would have harmed Lynx Critical Habitat.

The project, now called Burnt Mountain, is back again and will occur at the same time in the same areas as the Red Lodge Mountain Fuels logging project.

They are effectively a single, landscape-scale logging project that the Forest Service illegally split into two. They were authorized on the same day, announced in the same letter from Beartooth District Ranger Amy Haas and will be offered as part of the same timber sale. Both projects authorize logging, burning, and road-building in the Willow, Nichols, and West Fork Rock Creek watersheds west of Red Lodge. Many of the Burnt Mountain South Units and RLM Project units overlap, adjoin, and, in some cases, interlock like puzzle pieces.

To get around the requirements to protect lynx habitat and actually analyze the effects of logging on wildlife, the Forest Service authorized the logging projects under the Healthy Forest Restoration Act. The Healthy Forest Restoration Act exempts logging projects from the environmental review process generally required for federal actions under the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA, so long as the project is no greater than 3,000 acres, located within the Wildland Urban Interface, and does not present any extraordinary circumstances warranting additional NEPA review.

When the Projects are properly considered as one landscape-scale project, they are 3,211 acres in size, exceeding the limit adopted by Congress for a project exempt from NEPA.

The two logging projects are in the Custer Gallatin National Forest and directly adjacent to the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Area. Together, they would bulldoze 9.5 miles of new logging roads to log almost 2,500 acres over a period of 10 to 15 years. The project also includes clearcutting over 409 acres of mature forests in federally-designated lynx critical habitat and grizzly bear habitat, both of which are listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.

Since this area is federally-designated lynx critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act, the Forest Service has a big problem with their proposal for clearcutting, since clearcuts completely destroy lynx habitat. To get around the legal requirements for maintaining habitat to protect ESA-listed species the agency arbitrarily decided to pretend that a 3,200-acre logging project is instead two completely unrelated logging projects that happen to be right next to each other.

No matter what the problem is, the Forest Service solution is always more logging and bulldozing more logging roads. We can fireproof homes by installing non-flammable roofs and decks and removing most vegetation next to a home – but we cannot fireproof forests. The harsh reality, undeniably proven by all the best available science and certainly backed up by this year’s intense wildfire activity in the West, is that more logging and logging roads not only won’t stop fires, but they inevitably lead to more invasive noxious weeds, dead grizzly bears, and fewer elk and lynx.

Suing the most powerful government in the world is not easy or cheap. Please consider helping the Alliance for the Wild Rockies fight the Trump administration’s plans for clearcutting endangered species habitat in the great Yellowstone Ecosystem. Please also consider supporting Counterpunch for running columns like this.

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United States President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Clarence Mitchell Jr., Patricia Roberts Harris, and other guests at the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965 – Public Domain

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, invalidating a congressional map that included a second majority-Black district in the state, severely weakened a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The case introduces a legal Catch-22 that will make it much more difficult to protect the constitutional rights of minority voters, Black Americans in particular.

The story of this case begins after the 2020 census. Louisiana, where about a third of the people are Black, drew a congressional map with just one majority-Black district out of six. When a previous lawsuit resulted, a federal district court, later affirmed on appeal, held that another majority-Black congressional district should be created under the Supreme Court’s Thornburg v. Gingles test. Faced with the prospect of a court-imposed remedial map, the Louisiana legislature passed Senate Bill 8 (SB8), a map with a second majority-Black district. A group of voters then sued, arguing that this map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander violating the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

In the way it has decided Callais, the Supreme Court has effectively made the Black community’s political loyalties a weapon against their own political representation. In many parts of the country, Black voters are the most cohesive and unified of all voting groups, supporting Democrats strongly and reliably. And because this cohesion is so strong, the Supreme Court has targeted it as a path to the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act. The Court said that because of the relationship between race and political party, particularly in the South, it would be difficult to prove that the people who created a given map intended to discriminate on the basis of race rather than simply seeking a political leg up. Drawing districts based on political party is quite legal. While drawing them based on race isn’t formally legal, the current standards permit states to drown out and divide Black communities and say it’s just politics. This is the nature of the legal trap that voting rights lawyers have to grapple with now.

The historical Section 2 inquiry asked whether there was a lack of opportunity for minority voters as a matter of fact. The question was whether a given districting scheme denied minority voters equal opportunity in practice, rather than requiring proof of discriminatory motive. Decided in 1986, Thornburg v. Gingles stood for the idea that if a white voter bloc consistently defeated the minority-preferred candidate, then the system was effectively diluted, quite regardless of whether the white voting bloc was subjectively driven by racial prejudice or partisan preference. Lack of opportunity in fact was the focus of the legal inquiry. The major conceptual shift from Callais is to introduce a stringent causal requirement around racially polarized voting, where it must be shown to be driven by race alone. If such polarization can be explained in terms of political party, the Court can virtually ignore the race factor. Then the burden is on the challengers to show that race was the predominant motivating factor.

Asking the challenger to extricate race from party membership in this way has effectively taken away racially polarized voting as an object of analysis in Voting Rights Act litigation.

Constitutional law treats racial distinctions as subject to a strict scrutiny test. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling, Louisiana must show that it had a strong basis in evidence for concluding that a race-based map was necessary for compliance with the Voting Rights Act. The Court states that “simply pointing to inter-party racial polarization proves nothing, because ‘a jurisdiction may engage in constitutional political gerrymandering, even if it so happens that the most loyal Democrats happen to be black Democrats and even if the State were conscious of that fact.’” The Court comes up with a definition of racially polarized voting that excludes party-aligned voting, to conclude that there was actually no racially polarized voting going on in Louisiana—and thus no violation of the Voting Rights Act. And no violation means no compelling interest in the use of a racial distinction.

Such a rigging of the legal standards means that the very behavior that once made a community a cognizable “opportunity group” under the Supreme Court’s old Thornburg v. Gingles test will now be the state’s best legal excuse for diluting their political power. Under that standard, a minority group had to show that they vote as a bloc to argue that they deserve an “opportunity district,” in which it is possible for them to elect their preferred candidate. The Court explained the test:

The Court’s definition of the elements of a vote dilution claim is simple and invariable: a court should calculate minority voting strength by assuming that the minority group is concentrated in a single-member district in which it constitutes a voting majority. Where the minority group is not large enough, geographically concentrated enough, or politically cohesive enough for this to be possible, the minority group’s claim fails. Where the minority group meets these requirements, the representatives that it could elect in the hypothetical district or districts in which it constitutes a majority will serve as the measure of its undiluted voting strength.

The current Supreme Court treats such findings of fact very differently, to the point where Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, argued that the majority had created a free pass for state legislatures to discriminate against Black voters. By requiring plaintiffs to produce a hypothetical “alternative map” that would satisfy the state’s partisan goals, the Court is asking challengers to do the impossible and prove a negative. If a discriminating Southern state argues, “We switched the districts of these Black voters because they’re Democrats,” and a court accepts that at face value, then the Voting Rights Act becomes well-nigh impossible to enforce in the South. As Justice Kagan pointed out, in the system created by the law today, there is an incentive for mapmakers to find the most racially polarized data available, using it not to protect those minority voters, but as a weapon for diluting their influence. Justice Kagan argued that this allows states to effect racial discrimination under the guise of purely political advantage.

The current ultra-conservative Supreme Court has been developing this line of thought toward the result in Callais. In a prior case, 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court held that the federal courts have no inherent constitutional power to stop partisan gerrymandering, treating it as a political question that should stay with the political branches. The Court held that plaintiffs must show more than a plausible racial motivation for the map; they have to be able to show that the political party explanation is not the predominant one, but that race is. The Supreme Court allows that a legislature may act for both partisan and racial reasons simultaneously, and thus that even if the partisan explanation is real, plaintiffs can nevertheless prevail in a challenge if race was the predominant factor. Where race and party are so thoroughly intertwined, as in the South, a state legislature could now “crack” or “pack” a Black community and, when challenged, claim that the goal was to target the Democratic vote for dilution, not the Black vote. The practical effect of the Callais decision is to import an intent-like evidentiary standard into a statutory framework that explicitly rejected such standards. Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion in Callais explains this well:

Its supposed “updating” of Gingles overthrows Congress’s decision to make Section 2 liability hinge on an electoral practice’s effects—on how it actually works. The new Callais requirements will effectively insulate any practice, including any districting scheme, said by a State to have any race-neutral justification. That justification can sound in traditional districting criteria, or else can sound in politics and partisanship. As to the latter, the State need do nothing more than announce a partisan gerrymander. Assuming the State has left behind no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive (an almost fanciful prospect), Section 2 will play no role. “Whatever”—whatever—results from the State’s asserted justification is all its minority citizens are entitled to.

As Justice Kagan points out, the Court’s majority ignores the legislative history of the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, which placed the “emphasis on results, not motives.” From an factual, empirical standpoint, this deep entanglement between race and partisan affiliation in many regions means that the achievement of a legally permissible political advantage for Republicans will almost always result in racially disparate impact. The preposterous requirement to produce a map that achieves the exact partisan advantage without also producing a different racial outcome will prove an insurmountable evidentiary bar in many of the most important voting rights cases. The current evidentiary standard is utterly arbitrary. As many legal scholars have observed, following Justice Kagan’s dissent, the hypothetical map requirement shifts the focus from the actual, observable results associated with a given map, reflecting the intent behind the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, to a new effective intent standard that is almost impossible to meet in practice.

When you consider the hurdles together, the future of Black political representation in the U.S. starts to look rather bleak: race has to predominate as a reason for the map, and the challenger has to show it wasn’t just politics, yet the empirical collinearity between race and party is such that producing the kind of evidence the law now demands is almost impossible. In statistical terms, if almost all Democratic voters in a given region are Black, then any map that achieves the state’s partisan goal of cracking or packing the Democratic vote will, just by definition, crack or pack the Black vote. Demanding a map that yields the former without the latter is to demand a statistical anomaly.

The post-Callais structure is thus almost perfectly designed to keep politics maximally white: as a simple statistical matter, when two independent variables, here race and party affiliation, are nearly perfectly correlated, it is mathematically difficult, and indeed often logically incoherent, to isolate which variable predominated as a driver for a specific districting boundary. In many states, the mapmaking legislator could achieve the desired partisan objective using either proxy. Under the current predominance standard, if the mapmaker can claim the objective function was party, the map is a partisan gerrymander, non-justiciable under Rucho v. Common Cause. But if a map is drawn specifically to ensure that the voting rights of a minority group are protected, then the map falls under strict scrutiny, the path to invalidation, because it very explicitly considers race.

By assuming that legislative bodies act in accordance with the Constitution, the Court effectively assigns the residual of the statistical correlation to the lawful category, party politics, unless the plaintiff can produce some smoking gun or an alternative map that isolates the variables, both unlikely. Under the law after Callais, if politics can explain a map, then politics does explain it. In high-collinearity environments, this judicial benefit of the doubt will cover almost the entire evidentiary field, leaving the Voting Rights Act with almost no functional area of operation.

The post On the Untimely Death of the Voting Rights Act appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Trump and Xi in China. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)

Ali Alizadeh: The American readout of the Trump–Xi meeting claims that Xi explicitly agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open, that there must be no tolls, that China opposes the militarisation of the Strait, that China will buy more American oil to reduce its dependence on Hormuz, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. The Chinese readout said almost none of this. It said only that the two leaders exchanged views on the Middle East. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping spent his political capital on Taiwan.

So Iranians watching this tonight are asking: did Xi Jinping just trade Iran for Taiwan? Did our most important strategic partner sell us out at the Great Hall of the People while our cities are under blockade? What actually happened in Beijing today?

Michael Hudson:  If you have listened to Donald Trump and to the American reports of earlier negotiations with Iran and with other countries, there are always two versions. There is the American version, which always reads the same way: the other side has agreed to total surrender to everything the United States has asked for. Then there is the other side, which says, no, we did not say any of those things.

So we are dealing not only with a translation of languages, but a translation of what the words mean. What does it mean for the Strait of Hormuz to be open? From China’s point of view, it means that there will be continued trade — that all countries, the Arab OPEC countries and Iran, will be able to send their ships through the Strait and onward through the Indian Ocean, eastward to China or wherever they are going in Asia.

That is exactly what has happened in the last few days. Chinese ships have been freely going through the Strait of Hormuz. They have been paying the tolls that Iran has said are an absolute precondition for any agreement, because Iran has been attacked unjustly, in violation of the United Nations Security Council rules of war and the rules of international relations. Iran under these rules is justified in receiving reparations. But the United Nations does not have an enforcement system. It does not have any equivalent of a Nuremberg trials commission. It does not have a set of judges who can enforce reparations. So Iran has worked out a pragmatic way of extracting these reparations, and that is to impose tolls on all ships going through the Strait.

That has been discussed and explained very clearly by Iran, and other countries have agreed to these rules. And the issue is not limited to Hormuz alone. What happens when the ships emerge from the Strait and go into the open seas? The United States has been seizing Iranian ships, or threatening to seize them. Most of the ships that are able to go through Hormuz have been turned back, forced to stop from going further. Iran has said: we will send so many that some will get by, because the United States does not have a large enough navy to prevent them all. But the United States is blocking not only Hormuz; it has blocked the ocean outside Hormuz as well. Iran has been trying to send its ships very close to the Pakistani shore, to stay within Pakistani waters and move that way.

But obviously, from Iran’s point of view, and I believe from China’s point of view, this is opening the Strait of Hormuz. It was Donald Trump who made up his wish list. And his wish list is, of course, that Iran would not charge any tolls. But that is one of Iran’s red lines. I think Iran has learned from looking at Russia’s experience in Ukraine that you do not announce a red line and then fail to enforce it. Russia has announced its red lines for what NATO countries can do in support of Ukraine, again and again and again, and NATO has simply ignored them. Iran has said: we are not going to let the United States, Israel and their allies keep pushing on us with salami tactics, a little bit at a time. A red line is a red line.

So when the conference ends, which I gather will be tomorrow, you will read the Chinese report of what happened. I doubt there can be an agreed joint report — there rarely is in these things. There is always the U.S. report for the U.S. press and for American voters, which says that Trump has won a huge victory and has hurt other countries to the benefit of the United States. And then there is the other side, which says all of this is fantasy and that they have stuck to their guns. So you should wait for the Chinese reports to come out, and for the discussion with Chinese diplomats that is going to follow.

AA: Nonetheless, for some people the very fact that Trump is visiting China, that Xi Jinping is welcoming him, and that — apart from China’s insistence on Taiwan — the Chinese are open to flexibility and say they want a good partnership, is troubling. For many, multipolarity was imagined as another Cold War. You were one of the first people to write about multipolarity. Can you explain how China is different from what the Soviet Union was, and why China insists on de-escalating tensions with America and avoiding military confrontation?

MH: Every country in the world except the United States, Israel, Germany, England and France wants to reduce tensions. So of course the host countries that are not among these belligerent nations are going to say we all want to be partners in world peace. They are trying to talk reason: here is a reasonable way to resolve things.

What they are actually doing when they say “we are partners” is laying down the principles of international trade, international investment, international banking and military spending. If you are part of this partnership — meaning agreement to these principles — that is fine. But if you do not agree to these principles, then we are afraid you are not part of this partnership.

So when China and Russia refer to their enemies as “our partners,” as they have done again and again, they are not posing as if they will fight back in a confrontational way. That is not the Asian way of conducting a negotiation. You do not say: we will fight back, you fight and we fight. That is not the way to find any resolution. Of course you are prepared to fight. But of course you say: why don’t we have a peaceful, logical discussion? Here is the kind of world stability that we are going to create.

The United States does not want stability in the world, because stability means the status quo. The United States has continually lost what used to be the American empire. It has lost its trade and balance-of-payments surplus. It has lost its industrial dominance. It has lost its dollar financial dominance. It is now a big debtor. It has been losing almost everything. That is why the U.S. National Security Strategy said, in effect: we are no longer going to support the kind of unified world of equality, multipolarity, free trade and free investment that we supported back in 1945, when we had all the power, when we had most of the world’s gold, when we had the manufacturing and industrial power to help Europe survive. We do not have that anymore.

The only asset that the United States now has to cope with a changing world dynamic is the ability to hurt other countries. It can say: we can disrupt your trade. Trump can impose tariffs to stop your access to the American market. That, of course, will upset your exporters and cause chaos. But if you agree to America’s version of the world — if you agree not to trade with Russia, not to trade with Iran, not to permit Chinese investment in your country — if you obey us and become our political and economic satellites, then you can have access to the U.S. market. Otherwise we are going to disturb your situation.

Donald Trump has said again and again that if blocking trade from the Arab OPEC countries and from Iran creates a world depression, that will benefit the United States, because the United States, he says, is self-sufficient in oil. And right now the United States is making a killing from the rise in world oil prices. American oil and gas companies are selling low-priced American oil and gas at world prices, not at low U.S. prices. Their profits are going up, their stocks are going up, and they are able to benefit from all of this.

So for Trump, the United States wins when the rest of the world goes into crisis — just as happened in 1998 during the Asian currency crisis, when Asian currencies, apart from Malaysia which had capital controls, all declined, and American and international investors could swoop in and pick up Korean, Japanese and other Asian companies at much lower prices than before. The United States policy, as announced in its own strategy, is to create crisis abroad. And Trump has carried that to the logical extreme. We are pirates in the OPEC trade once it comes out of the Strait of Hormuz. We have grabbed the ship. We have confiscated the oil. We have taken it. We can do that. That is a situation that serves the United States.

Now, how on earth can there be any agreement with China on this? I think that by talking about Taiwan, China is saying: we are not going to try to talk about problems that obviously cannot be solved. If we make the centre of our discussion U.S. relations with Taiwan, then anything we discuss dovetails into that. That is their version of a diplomatic Strait of Hormuz.

Take the issue of rare earth exports. The Americans want China to begin selling rare earth exports again to the United States. China has said: we do not want to sell rare earth exports that can be made into armaments. It would be crazy for us to sell you yttrium, gallium and other elements for your military to make into F-35 airplanes, arms and missiles, to sell to Taiwan to attack China. This gets back to what Lenin joked: the capitalists are going to sell us the rope to hang them with. You can imagine what China is saying: we are not going to sell the United States the raw materials it needs to build arms and weapons to sell to its protégés such as Taiwan, to attack us militarily. This is our national defence strategy.

So by saying that Taiwan is the centre of any agreement that comes out of these meetings, China is saying that Taiwan shapes any agreement on international trade, international finance and almost anything else the United States would like to make a topic of discussion.

AA: Today military.com published an article that the Pentagon is rushing to buy 10,000 missiles because Iran has depleted U.S. stockpiles. It is striking that the United States is dependent on China for the manufacture of its weapons. But let me push you on a longer-running debate. I put this question to your colleague Professor Radhika Desai as well: was this war on Iran driven by some rationale of the deep state of the American empire, or of a sector of American capitalism? Or was it forced on America, against American interests, by Israel — was America duped by Netanyahu, as Professor Mearsheimer puts it? As you said, the American stock market has benefited from this war. In your reading, has there been strategising before this war, or is it, as Professor Desai put it, simply a manifestation of America losing its direction and declining rapidly?

MH: Yes, of course there has been strategising. I sat in on such strategising 50 years ago, in 1974, when I worked with Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute. We had repeated meetings with the White House, the State Department, the Treasury and many military officials, and they discussed exactly the strategy against Iran. At that time, I remember Herman Kahn saying: we have got to break Iran into five or more separate sections. The way to begin, he thought, was going to be Balochistan, to break it away. Now the United States is trying to work with the Kurds.

For the last hundred years, the United States has had one paramount umbrella strategy to control the world: to control the world’s oil. I have discussed this in many of the articles I have been writing recently on my website. Every country in the world needs oil and power to run its factories, heat its homes, make chemicals, petrochemicals and plastics, make fertilizer. If we can control the oil trade, then we have the power to hurt any country that does not obey us. We can use that as a lever. We do not have to go to military war with them. We can simply cut off their supply of oil, and that will force them to follow whatever American policy we want.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the Project for the New American Century said, in effect, that the way to control oil was to prevent countries from buying oil from any country we do not control. That is why sanctions were imposed on Iran after the overthrow of the Shah and the rejection of America’s 1953 interference in Iranian politics to take control of the oil industry. That is why the United States destroyed Nord Stream and imposed sanctions to prevent people from buying oil from Russia. That is why the United States destroyed Libya, so that countries could not buy oil from Libya. That is precisely why George W. Bush waged the war against Iraq.

There is always a pretense. The pretense was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The fact is that what Iraq had was oil, and America wanted that oil. So it bombed and destroyed the Iraqi economy, and essentially brought in al-Qaeda and Wahhabi terrorists to support its strategy. The Americans then spread the fight to Syria to grab its oil supplies.

But all along, when they were outlining the countries they were going to conquer throughout the Near East and the Middle East to control Middle Eastern oil, the sequence ended with Iran. Iran was always the final objective. The United States realised it could conquer Libya, Iraq, Syria and other countries, and it could enforce support from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and the Arab countries, because all of these countries’ oil proceeds — in their government funds — were invested in the U.S. bond market and U.S. financial markets. So all along the purpose was to control world oil and be able to control the switch: turning off the electricity, the power, the lighting. It all required conquering Iran, recapturing Iran’s oil industry and reinstalling a military dictatorship — this time more vicious and more effective than the old Shah’s. This is a plan that has been 50 years in the making, refinement and elaboration.

AA:  But many analysts believe that even though such an attack on Iran would have been desirable for Washington, previous presidents avoided it because they thought it was impossible. George W. Bush, who was definitely one of the most warmongering presidents in the White House, refused to attack Iran. So did Donald Trump make a mistake, or do you believe he acted according to the rationale of America’s deep state?

MH: You remember that under George H. W. Bush there was the bloody Iraq war against Iran. A million Iranian soldiers died. The Americans provided the Iraqis with chemical warfare and other illegal means. So they already tried in the 1980s to conquer Iran. It did not work.

Then George W. Bush and the rest of the deep state followed the plan and said: we cannot fight against Iran until we conquer Iraq and Syria and control the rest of the Middle East, so that we have our forces there. We have military bases in the Emirates, military bases in Saudi Arabia, military bases all around Iran, so that we can be in a position to conquer it.

Obviously some military strategists are more optimistic than others. Trump has around him all of the most optimistic neocons. These are the same neocons who were around Dick Cheney when he was vice president under George W. Bush. The same people have been there all along, and they are still there — the same pro-Israel Zionists who believe that the United States and Israel can make a condominium, where the United States uses Israel as its primary military base in the Near East, and uses the Israeli army as the enforcement force, now supplemented by Jolani’s jihadist al-Qaeda army in Syria, in partnership with Israel, to act as America’s client oligarchy and enforcers.

AA: In the last few weeks, you have had a very different narrative from most analysts. While everyone has been looking at missiles, drones and casualties, you have been telling a different story — and I do not think it has been fully registered, even inside Iran. So with your 50 years of work on the American financial system, can you tell our audience what Iran has actually accomplished? The headlines are all about missiles, ceasefire and casualties. But underneath, Iran has effectively closed the Strait, imposed tolls in Chinese renminbi, collapsed OPEC oil exports, brought Gulf monarchies to Washington asking for swap lines, sent gold flowing out of the United States at record rates, and made foreign central banks hold more gold than U.S. Treasuries for the first time since 1996. This is, in your own framework, the unwinding of the system you described in 1972. What exactly has Iran broken, and what has it achieved in these seven weeks of war?

MH: What Iran has achieved is saying: we will not surrender. It has realised that if it does not fight, the United States is going to do just what it said it would do. It is going to have regime change, as it tried to do when it recently killed Iranian leaders. It is going to take over the government. It is going to put in a client oligarchy, just like the Shah. And Iran is saying: we would rather fight than end up becoming a colony, a client dictatorship and a client oligarchy of the United States, which would take over all of our natural resources and oil for itself.

Iran realised that by itself it cannot defeat the United States and its allies in Europe and its allies in other countries such as Japan in the East. It needs the rest of the world to support it. How can it do this? Iran has said: if we cannot export our oil to Asia and to whatever markets we want, then there is not going to be any oil from the Arab OPEC countries or the Middle Eastern OPEC countries exported either. It is the job of other countries — China, Asian countries, Global South countries, even Europe — if you want free trade and access to the oil of this region, you have to include us as part of that oil region. You have to oppose the United States takeover of the Middle East. You have to support our drive to protect our own national security by driving out all American military bases in the Near East, so that we will no longer be threatened. You have to return the money that your banks have stolen from us illegally. You have to drop the sanctions on us.

If you want oil from us or from other countries, you have to permit us to survive. And if you are saying, well, we want oil, and it is okay if America takes Iran over and controls the oil — even if America is going to use this oil as a weapon against us to enforce our agreement with U.S. policy — then Iran says: if you do not care, you had better care, because the cost of not supporting our defence, our independence and our sovereignty is going to be a world depression as bad as the 1930s. Take your choice.

Iran is upping the ante to force the whole world to ask: do you want to permit America simply to grab Iran, to do to Iran what it has just done to Venezuela? To come in and simply grab the oil, and say that all Venezuelan oil exports are to be put into a bank account in Florida under the personal direction of Donald Trump? Trump has said that he wants to appoint the new leader of Iran after regime change. In other words, the Iranian people would have nothing. Iran is saying: if this is your idea of the world — if the rest of the world economy believes that Donald Trump and America should appoint the leaders of every country, and should be able to grab the oil, the mineral resources, the land, the public utilities and anything else they can grab — then quite frankly, to hell with you.

AA:  Let me take you to the framework that made your name in 1972, because I think most Iranians have never had it explained clearly. In Super Imperialism, you described what you call the Treasury-bill standard. The mechanism, as you put it, is that after Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, foreign central banks that accumulated dollars had no choice but to put them in U.S. Treasury bonds. That meant running a trade surplus with America became a forced loan to the U.S. government to finance its wars. You called it a tax on foreigners — taxation without representation.

Walk our audience through how this actually works. And explain something specific: even Iran, a country under 45 years of sanctions and the last 15 years of maximum sanctions, even a country that cannot legally hold U.S. Treasuries — how does the dollar system still extract tribute from Iranians? Is it through petrochemical exports being priced in dollars? Through Gulf neighbours holding reserves on Iran’s behalf? Through dollar-denominated debt? Trace the plumbing for our audience. Show them how the bleeding happens even when you think you have cut the cord.

MH: You are asking a very broad question. I will try to give the outlines, because I have explained it in Super Imperialism.

AA: Let me say why I ask. Many people inside Iran think that because Iran is under sanctions it is outside the global system, and therefore the dollar cannot affect it as much.

MH: Before I get to that, I have to say what it is that Iran is escaping from.

From 1945 to 1950 the United States was in a strong position. By 1950 it had almost 80 per cent of the world’s gold. But then in 1950 and 1951 the Korean War occurred, and beginning with the Korean War the United States balance of payments moved into deficit. The entire U.S. balance-of-payments deficit was from overseas military spending: the military bases it created all over the world, now almost 1,800; and first the war in Korea, and then especially the Vietnam War. The private sector in the United States was just about in balance. The government was running a balance-of-payments surplus apart from the military. But military spending was forcing America to sell its gold to support the dollar’s exchange rate.

By the time of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the American military was spending money in Southeast Asia — Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. These had been French colonies, and the United States was trying to support the French colonial system. The French colonies used French banks. They would take these dollars and send them to the head office in Paris. The banks in Paris would turn the dollars over to the French central bank for French currency, and then the government under General de Gaulle would cash these dollars in for gold. It would buy gold. It did not want dollars; it wanted gold.

Every Friday, when I was Chase Manhattan Bank’s balance-of-payments analyst, we would look at the Federal Reserve statement of how much gold covered the U.S. paper currency — the dollar bills you hold in your pocket. Legally, all U.S. paper currency had to be backed 25 per cent by gold. You could see that U.S. military spending was going to deplete the U.S. gold stock. By 1971 this had reached the limit, and the United States said: we cannot afford to exchange any more dollars for gold. We are closing the gold window.

There was some panic in the U.S. government: what will we do now without gold? What my book Super Imperialism showed was that what seemed to be bad news for America’s empire actually gave America much stronger control of the world financial system than it had before. Because if central banks were no longer able to cash in their dollars for gold, what were they going to spend them on? They were not going to buy U.S. stocks — that was too risky. They were not permitted to buy particular companies in the United States. All they could do was keep their foreign-exchange dollars safe by buying U.S. government bonds.

So all the dollars thrown off by American military spending ended up in the foreign central banks of Europe, Asia and Japan, which lent the money back to the U.S. Treasury by buying Treasury bonds. The balance-of-payments deficit was no longer a constraint. It was a circular flow. Foreign military spending was recycled to finance the domestic American budget deficit.

Then you had the oil fight of 1973 and 1974. After the United States quadrupled its grain prices, OPEC quadrupled its oil prices. Because I was a specialist in the balance of payments, especially of the oil industry — which was my main focus at Chase Manhattan — I had numerous meetings with the State Department and the White House. They made it clear: we have made a deal with Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries. They can charge whatever they want for their oil. All we want is that the export earnings they make are invested in U.S. Treasury securities as their form of saving this money. That was the deal. It required the savings to be in dollars.

What has happened now is a replay of the same dynamic. The U.S. balance of payments, trade position and economic power have declined so much that it is no longer able to rely on this automatic self-financing of the balance of payments that it put in place after 1971. So it has had to ask: how can we hurt other countries if they do not recycle their dollars to the United States? For one thing, we are not going to give them a choice. If a country spends its oil earnings, balance-of-payments earnings or export earnings and does not turn these earnings over to the United States, we are going to close down its financial communication system — the SWIFT bank clearing system, where the debits and credits are worked out and transfers are made between countries.

China has created an alternative system so that countries do not need this. Back in 1971, there was not really another currency in which countries could save their oil-export earnings. Now there is. There is the Chinese currency, and there is gold. Once again, the gold is no longer being supplied by the United States, but you can buy gold in the market. Countries are buying gold because, so far, there is not an alternative artificial currency. To create that, you would need a new kind of international monetary fund, a new kind of central bank or world bank to administer it. The United States would never permit that under IMF rules, because it has veto power in the IMF.

So the only alternatives countries have are gold, Chinese currency, each other’s currencies, or a market basket of different currencies. That is what is occurring today. It means countries no longer have to denominate their oil, mineral exports or industrial exports in dollars. They can denominate them, for instance, in Chinese currency, because China is the most rapidly growing economy in the world. China’s system of socialism with Chinese characteristics — which is basically the same policy that made America rich in the nineteenth century with its industrial protectionism — enables it to be solid. Everybody needs Chinese renminbi in order to buy Chinese exports and attract Chinese investments. So the rest of the world, the BRICS countries and the Global South, are trying to develop an alternative financial and monetary system. That is in the process of being described now, and that is what most of my recent writings have been about.

AA: Here is the central question I want to put to you. You have been writing about multipolarity for many years, but from within Iran the situation is dire and urgent. Even parts of the government think we have been resisting for too long, that the economic situation is critical and that with the continuation of sanctions we are going to have serious trouble. What Professor Hudson, Professor Desai and others promise in terms of multipolarity may come in ten, fifteen, twenty years. But until then we may be crushed internally. Iran experienced very heavy economic riots in early January, which led to thousands of deaths and acted like a kind of false-flag operation for the American attack.

So when you talk about multipolarity, what time frame do you predict for this alternative currency or alternative system to come to the fore? China does not seem to have enough incentive to compete aggressively with the U.S. financial infrastructure, or to offer something parallel to SWIFT or the IMF. China looks like a very patient actor, and that is not good enough for Iran. And second: what would you do if you were Iran in negotiations with America? Would you trade some sanctions relief for what Iran has gained in the Strait of Hormuz and through other achievements in the war?

MH: Regarding the sanctions: China is not really looking at itself as a rival to the United States. It is looking at what kind of trading sphere it wants to create. It wants to be independent of the United States and the whole U.S. system of trade and finance. It wants autonomy for China and for other countries. Multipolarity means countries can pursue their own sovereignty to create their own trade and investment relationships with other countries. That is already occurring.

China and Russia have already realised that they cannot maintain their own military, political and economic independence if the United States conquers Iran and essentially takes over control of the world oil trade, because it will weaponise this oil trade against them. So they have already said that they are going to support Iran to an increasing degree as America requires it.

The question is: what can they do to prevent American sanctions against Iran? The day before Trump visited China, the United States imposed new sanctions on Iranian banks and on any bank in the world dealing with Chinese refiners who were refining Iranian oil. So this is a direct financial attack on China. All China can do is insulate itself from the rest of the U.S.-centred financial system. It is not trying to replace the United States. The United States will always have its dollar. But what China and other countries want is an independent situation.

There is a BRICS meeting right now in India that I am sure is discussing that very thing. But there cannot be a BRICS currency — meaning a common ability to create money that everybody uses — because for that you need a common parliament, and all the countries would have to be the same political entity. That is not possible. What you need to do is create a new kind of international bank. I gather there are discussions behind the scenes. That is what Radhika Desai and I have been talking about for the last year or two.

Long before there is an alternative currency, there can be an alternative trading system. Other countries are insulating their own banks and traders from America’s sanctions, so that they can trade freely with Iran and give Iran the food, raw materials and industrial supplies that it needs. In order for them to work with Iran and help it recover, they have to make themselves immune from America’s ability to impose sanctions on their banking systems. That is exactly what they must be doing right now.

AA: It has struck me that what the Russian government did after the Ukraine war, and what the Chinese government has done over the last fifteen years, looks as though they have read your books and are following some of their insights. Whereas the Iranian government as a whole, I think, has not understood how the global financial system works.

So as a final point I want to take you to December 2025, three months before the war began. The Masoud Pezeshkian government implemented a package of measures: a 50 per cent foreign-exchange devaluation; elimination of the subsidised dollar for food and medicine imports; a public-sector salary cap of 20 per cent while inflation runs at 40 per cent; and a VAT increase. Iran’s current finance minister, Dr. Madanizadeh, is a PhD trained at the University of Chicago — the institution you have spent 50 years describing as the intellectual laboratory of the financialised rentier model. Since 1989, Iran’s downstream petrochemical assets have been quietly privatised to state-linked pension funds and conglomerates that earn in dollars while paying labour in devalued rials.

So my final question is this: how can Iran win the external war against financialised imperialism while losing the internal war to the same model, administered by its own technocrats and ministers? What does Iran need to do internally — to its banking system, its tax system, its oligarchic petrochemical sector — to make the external victory permanent?

MH: Neither Iran nor any other country needs to financialise its pension system. This is crazy. They are taking current revenue that they need, and instead of spending it as part of the production process, they are investing it financially to draw on it later. You do not have to pre-pay. You can do what the Germans did: pay as you go. You can do what Adam Smith suggested: pay as you go.

The University of Chicago says everything should be financialised. An economy does not need industry. You can make money through the financial sector alone. It is all about money creation and finance. But this is crazy.

If Iran believes that it can get rich by emulating the mistakes America has made — if it simply makes deep enough mistakes and impoverishes its economy by turning all its savings into financial investments instead of spending them on production, agriculture and industry — and that somehow then it will get rich, no. It will end up in the same destructive finance capitalism that the United States has.

The whole West has turned away from the dynamic of industrial capitalism that classical political economy outlined in the nineteenth century. You do not want economic rent, because it is not part of the production process. You do not want land rent. You do not want natural-resource rent. You do not want financial rent. All of that is an economic overhead on the economy. You want to minimise the role of the financial sector and make it entirely part of the government sector, as China has done.

If a country has its ministers trained in the United States, they are trained not to understand what money creation and finance are all about. They are trained not to understand the difference between finance capitalism and industrial capitalism.

The post Did Xi Really Trade Iran for Taiwan? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Black bear, Portland Zoo. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

In recent decades, scientists and public health experts have increasingly examined how human interactions with wildlife and ecosystems can contribute to the emergence of infectious diseases. Two human activities that directly contributed to climate change are extensive deforestation and increased livestock farming, which have had devastating effects on the health of both humans and nonhuman animals.

Deforestation deprives many animals of their native habitats, and the few who can adapt are driven into proximity with human-made environments, which also increases the likelihood that a disease will adapt to a new population (from human to nonhuman animal, or vice versa).

Intensified livestock farming traps animals and their waste in a small area, creating an environment for a virus to spread and mutate. Specifically, bird and pig farming involves a high degree of antibiotic use, which helps pathogens become increasingly resistant to antibiotics. This results in infections becoming “difficult or impossible to treat” in human patients.

Zoos—along with circuses, rodeos, and petting zoos—are other examples of human-dominated ecosystems where disease can increase and spread between species. There are many factors in the care of captive animals that increase the likelihood that they will transmit diseases to humans.

Keeping animals locked up causes them stress and contributes to the deterioration of their overall health, making them more vulnerable to disease. Laws and regulations governing captive animals are often inadequate, and even where citations are issued, they can still fail to resolve matters relating to animal welfare and mismanagement. Animals can pass diseases to zookeepers, and, conversely, humans can infect captive animals with diseases they may not otherwise encounter in their natural habitat. They will not have a natural resistance to these diseases.

Finally, zoos are often willing to bolster the illegal wildlife trade to obtain rare species. Not only do poaching and smuggling contribute to the stress, poor health, and untimely death of countless animals, but these criminal acts also threaten the survival of entire species. Humans are one species among many, and our health outcomes are connected to those of nonhuman animals. Their health is our health. It is in our best interests to treat wild animals well and leave them alone so they can thrive in their native habitats.

Captivity and Stress

One reason zoos can be hotbeds for the transmission of diseases is that captive animals can suffer from compromised immune systems due to the confines of captivity, rendering them more susceptible to illnesses.

Captivity is a stressor and can lead to severe psychological and physiological problems. Many animals become stressed and depressed, just as many humans do when institutionally confined. This kind of stress is such a common phenomenon that there is a term for it: zoo-induced psychosis, or zoochosis, a condition in which animals self-soothe by engaging in monotonous, obsessive, and repetitive behaviors—behaviors that they do not exhibit in the wild. These are reminiscent of obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms in humans.

Certain species are more susceptible to stress and early death in captivity. This is especially true of animals with a long lifespan, low reproductive rate, and low predation in the wild. While earlier studies flagged this issue, recent science confirms that Asian elephants in Western zoos remain non-self-sustaining and continue to face high infant mortality and severe welfare challenges. A data review by my organization, In Defense of Animals, found that 75 percent of captive-born elephants in North America die before reaching middle age, and 1 in 4 calves die before their fifth birthday. The mortality rate is so high that zoos cannot breed elephants fast enough to replace those who die. Without restocking from the wild, the North American elephant population would go extinct within 50 years.

Zoos and the Law

Animals have evolved to live in the wild, and confining them to an artificial environment is usually not in their best interest. The bottom line is that zoos and aquariums are profit-making enterprises underpinned by the legally enshrined assumption that we can use animals for our entertainment. The concept of a zoological garden rests on the belief that animals are here to serve us and that their needs are less important than our wants.

In most of the world, there are no laws about how to treat animals in captivity. In some countries, laws governing animal welfare in zoos exist, but they are insufficient and rarely enforced. Generally, an animal’s welfare depends on the adaptability of the species—for example, their ability to live in an environment where they cannot satisfy their instinct to avoid the gaze of humans. Beyond that, animal well-being is a matter of chance that depends on the particular zoo’s ethics, resources, and professional competence.

This system can create serious welfare challenges for captive animals.shou Examples of shocking neglect and maltreatment include the case of Noor Jehan, a teenage African bush elephant who died in a Pakistani zoo in 2023, and the case of the giant pandas Ya Ya and Le Le, who languished for years in the Memphis Zoo. While Le Le tragically passed away before getting the chance to return to China, Ya Ya returned to her homeland in April 2023.

Even when zoos finally close controversial exhibits, they often betray the public trust by merely shuffling animals to other inadequate facilities rather than retiring them to sanctuaries.

In May 2025, after being named the No. 1 Worst Zoo for Elephants for two consecutive years, the Los Angeles Zoo closed its elephant exhibit. However, instead of sending Billy and Tina to a sanctuary, the zoo transferred them to the Tulsa Zoo, a facility that also appeared on the 2025 list of the “10 Worst Zoos for Elephants.” Critics argue that such transfers can cause significant physiological stress and disrupt elephants’ social bonds. Research suggests that moving elephants between facilities may increase the risk of mortality in bulls.

Transfers may also increase the risk of elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus (EEHV), a hemorrhagic disease that is the leading cause of death for captive elephant calves. Chronic stress is believed to contribute to outbreaks among captive elephant populations. Some zoos have instead chosen to retire elephants to accredited sanctuaries. The Oakland Zoo and Louisville Zoo, for example, transferred their remaining elephants to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee after concluding they could no longer meet the animals’ complex needs. Both institutions later received the Path to Progress Award from In Defense of Animals.

Supporters of sanctuary retirement point to elephants such as Lulu, a former San Francisco Zoo elephant who lived for 19 years at the PAWS sanctuary and became the oldest African elephant in North America before her death in 2024.

Animal advocacy groups such as the Nonhuman Rights Project have filed habeas corpus appeals on behalf of captive zoo animals, arguing that highly intelligent species should receive stronger legal protections. In the case of Happy, an Asian elephant held at the Bronx Zoo for more than 40 years, New York’s Court of Appeals ruled that she was not legally entitled to personhood rights.

In January 2026, a Pennsylvania judge issued a habeas corpus order requiring the Pittsburgh Zoo to justify the confinement of its elephants in court. Advocates viewed the ruling as a potentially significant development in legal debates over the rights and welfare of captive animals.

California Condor, Portland Zoo. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Zoonotic Disease

Livestock farms are another acknowledged source of zoonotic outbreaks. Here, the disease may spread through contact between the animals and farm staff, and through environmental pollution, which facilitates transmission to humans. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV), which killed 888 people between mid-2012 and 2022, was transmitted to humans through camels farmed for milk, meat, and sport in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.

Deforestation and climate change destroy wildlife habitats, displacing animals and bringing them closer to humans, increasing the likelihood of spillover events. The Nipah virus outbreak is one example of a spillover event involving habitat loss and intensive farming. As a report titled “Poverty, Health, and Ecosystems: Experience from Asia” states: “In 1997-1998, slash-and-burn deforestation in Kalimantan and Sumatra produced a severe haze that blanketed much of Southeast Asia in the months directly preceding the Nipah virus outbreak. A drought exacerbated the forest fire. This series of events led to an acute reduction in the availability of flowering and fruiting forest trees for foraging by fruit bats.”

Some displaced fruit bats settled in cultivated fruit orchards in parts of Malaysia that contained large pig farms. Pigs who ate swill contaminated by bat droppings were infected with the Nipah virus, which spread to humans through contact with the pigs. In the human population, this outbreak caused 265 cases of acute encephalitis and 105 deaths. The resultant mass killing of pigs to control the spread of the virus also caused the near collapse of the billion-dollar pig farming industry.

In 2021, Sir Alimuddin Zumla, professor of infectious diseases and international health at University College London Medical School, said, “The number of new infectious diseases with epidemic potential has increased nearly four-fold over the past six decades. Since 1980, the number of new outbreaks per year has more than tripled.” This alarming surge occurred in lockstep with the massive growth of industrial agriculture, deforestation, and biodiversity loss.

Reverse Zoonosis

The threat goes both ways: Animals can also get sick from humans. In reverse zoonosis, diseases such as the influenza A virus, herpes simplex 1, measles, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus(MRSA) pass from humans to animals.

An incident of reverse zoonosis occurred at the Bronx Zoo. In April 2020, the zoo announced that one of its tigers tested positive for COVID-19. Later, four more tigers and three African lions also tested positive. Similarly, a zookeeper at a private zoo in Johannesburg transmitted COVID-19 to an exotic puma (July 2020) and three lions (July 2021). One lion developed pneumonia, while the other three cats had mild infections.

Tuberculosis in Zoos

Across zoos in the United States, a dangerous zoonotic disease has long been lurking: tuberculosis (TB), a deadly, highly infectious disease that has long existed in captive populations of African and Asian elephants in zoos and circuses across the U.S. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), TB is one of the top causes of death worldwide, killing millions of people yearly.

While TB is no longer common in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) logged more than 10,000 cases in 2024, marking a fourth consecutive year of rises. Children are not vaccinated against TB, making them particularly susceptible.

While TB remains a rare disease in the U.S., it has long been known as a potentially serious issue in U.S. zoos. Over the years, many people have been infected with the disease. Seven staff members at the Oregon Zoo in Portland were infected with the disease in 2013 during an outbreak among three bull elephants. Elephant infections persisted there into 2019.

In 2019, some staff members tested positive for latent TB at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington. The Saint Louis Zoo in Missouri and the Bronx Zoo in New York City had elephants test positive for the disease in 2011 and 2017, respectively.

The problem may not all be one way: Studies have shown that the causative agent that leads to human infection of TB is also present in elephants, suggesting a reverse zoonosis of the disease from humans to elephants. This raises the possibility that humans could transmit TB infections to captive elephants.

Captive Elephants Are TB Reservoirs

Although captive elephants represent a persistent tuberculosis reservoir, “licensees and registrants who own elephants” are not required by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (the federal body regulating the nation’s zoos) to test elephants for the bacteria.

Even if the tests are required under state laws, these tests, known as “trunk washes,” are difficult to conduct and unreliable. This means zoos may bring the unsuspecting public into contact with infected elephants. That becomes even likelier considering that, according to a 2020 National Geographic report, “an estimated 5 to 6 percent of the nearly 400 elephants in U.S. zoos, sanctuaries, and circuses are infected with TB.” A 2013 study of captive elephants in Malaysia pegged the TB incidence much higher—around 20 percent. So the question becomes, “What is the most accurate method of conducting TB tests in elephants?”

The risk of elephants transmitting TB to humans is more significant among those who work closely with elephants, but research suggests that TB can spread from elephants to humans through the air. Based on this finding, the risk of broader contagion, especially to zoo guests, is possible.

Many zoo exhibits include indoor barns, where visitors and elephants are separated only by bars and a few feet of space. Even more intimate encounters, such as rides or feedings that allow visitors to come into direct physical contact with elephants, are particularly concerning because they all increase the opportunities for TB transmission.

The fact that TB has continued to infect captive elephant populations in the U.S. for decades reveals that zoos cannot provide proper living conditions to prevent the spread of this disease. These concerns support the case that elephants require environments that more closely resemble their natural habitats.

Zoos and the Illegal Wildlife Trade

One aspect of zoos relevant to spillover events is that they are adjacent to, and sometimes complicit in, the international illegal wildlife trade (IWT). In the wake of COVID-19, IWT has been identified as the “most serious form of trafficking” because of the high likelihood of causing future pandemics and epidemics.

According to a 2020 report by the Wildlife Conservation Society, the estimated value of the global IWT ranges from $7 to $23 billion, not accounting for illegal fishing and logging, “which are valued at approximately $30-$100 billion and $23.5 billion respectively.” This makes IWT the fourth most profitable criminal activity in the world, following drug trafficking, human trafficking, and arms trafficking. It is one of the most significant drivers of extinction and biodiversity loss. Notably, it has been established that biodiversity loss is intimately connected to an increasing number of pandemics.

Smuggled animals may end up in live animal markets, such as the one in Wuhan, China, that is known to be the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak. This has had global ramifications. These animals are often killed for meat or body parts that can be used as ornaments or ingredients in scientifically unproven concoctions usually associated with folk medicine. Because of the medicinal value attributed to their meat and scales, pangolins are the world’s most trafficked animal and are hurtling toward extinction.

Some zoos have distanced themselves from the illegal wildlife trade and have publicly denounced this serious environmental crime. In June 2024, for example, the Los Angeles Zoo, in collaboration with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Wildlife Trafficking Alliance, installed a wildlife trafficking display at Los Angeles International Airport, an initiative aimed at reducing demand for illegal wildlife products by educating travelers about the impact of their purchases. In February 2025, Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago joined the Wildlife Confiscations Network, a program led by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums that fights wildlife trafficking and provides urgent care for animals seized at U.S. ports. The zoo has already helped care for hundreds of confiscated animals and has a longstanding relationship with O’Hare International Airport and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

This crucial work is poised to receive vital federal backing. In May 2025, the Wildlife Confiscations Network Act (H.R. 3538) was introduced in Congress to establish and fund this network. Once passed, this legislation will ensure that seized animals receive immediate, high-quality care rather than languishing in transit, turning a voluntary patchwork of aid into a robust, federally supported safety net.

Nevertheless, many trafficked animals do end up in zoos. A zoo in North Sumatra illegally exhibited threatened species without punishment until conservationists brought it to the public’s attention by filing a lawsuit, according to Jacob Phelps, a senior lecturer in conservation governance at Lancaster University, in a 2021 article in the Conversation.

While laws forbid zoos from purchasing illegally traded animals, this does not stop such animals from ending up in accredited zoos. A study focusing on a rare Borneo lizard found that several respected zoological institutions worldwide had acquired specimens of the earless monitor lizard without documentation showing they were obtained legally.

Better protections for wildlife and captive animals can play an important role in reducing the risk of zoonotic diseases for both humans and nonhuman animals.

This article was produced by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The post How Zoos Contribute to Disease Transmission Between Humans and Animals appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Colorized scanning electron micrograph of Ebola virus particles (green) both budding and attached to the surface of infected VERO E6 cells (orange). Image captured and color-enhanced at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Credit: NIAID. 

As I write, news is breaking of at least six Americans exposed to Ebola. I’m no doctor, epidemiologist, or public-health expert, but I have been following closely this latest Ebola outbreak through reports from the WHO, Africa CDC, international news outlets, and disease specialists.

What concentrates the mind is how outbreaks spread, how governments respond, and how political and humanitarian conditions can shape a crisis long before most of the world hears about it.

The current outbreak appears to have begun in Ituri province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. WHO says it was first alerted on 5 May 2026 to a high-mortality illness in Mongbwalu Health Zone. Early testing reportedly failed to detect Ebola because the first laboratory tests came back negative. Further investigation and more detailed testing later confirmed the rarer Bundibugyo strain of the virus on 15 May.

By 16 May, WHO was reporting eight laboratory-confirmed cases, 246 suspected cases, and 80 suspected deaths in Ituri, across at least Bunia, Rwampara, and Mongbwalu health zones. Uganda had also confirmed two imported cases among people who had travelled from the DRC, including one death. WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern—a PHEIC—on 17 May, while making clear that this is not the same as declaring a pandemic.

What struck me personally is that confirmed cases had reached Kampala itself. Kampala is Uganda’s capital, in the south-central part of the country near Lake Victoria, and I was there not that long ago. Even then, it was clear how much pressure the country was under from displacement, migration, and the wider refugee crisis.

One of the reasons Ebola can be difficult to catch early is that it often begins by looking like something far more ordinary: malaria, flu, or another feverish illness. Early symptoms include fatigue, muscle pain, headache, and sore throat. As the disease progresses, patients can develop vomiting, diarrhoea, organ dysfunction, and sometimes internal or external bleeding.

There is also a broader dimension that is hard to ignore. Some people have linked the outbreak to recent cuts in USAID and other international health funding. To be clear, there is no evidence that funding cuts caused Ebola itself. Ebola originates through animal-to-human spillover and then spreads through bodily fluids. But reduced funding can weaken the systems designed to stop outbreaks from escalating once they begin: surveillance networks, laboratories, contact tracing, transport, staffing, protective equipment, and community outreach.

Scientists believe fruit bats are a likely natural reservoir for Ebola viruses, though the virus can infect other mammals too, including monkeys and apes. Human infections often begin through contact with infected animals, such as handling bushmeat, butchering wildlife, or exposure to blood and bodily fluids in forest regions where the virus circulates naturally.

After that, Ebola spreads person-to-person through direct contact with blood, vomit, diarrhoea, saliva, sweat, semen, contaminated bedding, needles, medical equipment, and so on. Ebola is not primarily airborne like Covid or measles. Casual passing contact is usually not enough to spread it.

Where outbreaks become truly dangerous is when healthcare systems start failing. If hospitals lack protective equipment, testing is delayed, contact tracing breaks down, or people avoid treatment centres out of fear or distrust, the virus gains momentum. Conflict and displacement make everything harder. That is one reason eastern Congo has struggled so repeatedly with Ebola outbreaks over the years.

So should the rest of the world be concerned?

Yes.

For Central and East Africa, the concern is genuinely high. Population movement in the region is intense, mining and transport corridors increase transmission risk, and conflict in eastern Congo complicates response efforts. Unlike the Zaire strain, there is currently no licensed vaccine or specific approved treatment for Bundibugyo virus disease.

Globally, the concern is more moderate. Ebola is watched carefully because infected travellers can carry it internationally, and early symptoms can resemble more common illnesses. But Ebola is much harder to spread globally than airborne viruses like influenza or Covid-19. People are usually not infectious until symptoms begin, which makes isolation and contact tracing far more effective.

For Europe and North America, though the US government was in the process of trying to get its US citizens to a safe place for quarantine, the current risk remains low. Imported cases are possible, but sustained community spread is unlikely in countries with strong isolation protocols, infection-control systems, laboratory capacity, and contact-tracing infrastructure.

The deeper concern is less about Ebola suddenly sweeping through Europe or America, and more about whether weakened international surveillance systems make outbreaks harder to detect early enough to stop them regionally.

And Ebola is frightening for good reason. Depending on the strain and access to care, fatality rates can be very high. WHO notes that previous Bundibugyo outbreaks had case fatality rates of around 30% to 50%. During major outbreaks, healthcare systems can effectively collapse. Hospitals become overwhelmed, healthcare workers die, and routine treatment for other diseases breaks down as resources are diverted toward crisis response.

The 2014–16 West Africa epidemic became catastrophic partly because fragile health systems were overwhelmed before international help fully arrived.

At a broader ethical level, outbreaks like this expose something fundamental about how interconnected human beings really are. A virus emerging in a remote forest region can eventually become a regional or global concern. That means global cooperation is not just charity or idealism. It is practical self-interest.

There is also a moral argument—remember those?—that wealthier nations and stronger institutions carry some responsibility to support weaker health systems, scientific research, surveillance networks, and emergency response capacity, because no country is completely insulated from global threats. Isn’t preventing avoidable suffering one of the clearest expressions of human solidarity?

At the same time, of course, experts increasingly worry about the role of public trust. In an outbreak, as we discovered over COVID, trust is not a soft issue. It determines whether people report symptoms, accept isolation, cooperate with contact tracers, allow safe burials, and believe public-health advice. Without trust, even the best technical response in the world can fail.

The post Watching Ebola Return appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Zé Maria. Image courtesy IWL-FI.

The conviction of veteran labor organizer Zé Maria signals a new phase in the legal weaponization of antisemitism — aimed at disciplining militant currents in the labor movement.

The conviction of Brazilian worker of union and political leader José Maria de Almeida is not simply a case of judicial overreach or a dispute over the boundaries of political speech. It marks a new phase in the use of antisemitism law as a weapon against militant currents in the labor movement — particularly those that link working-class struggle to international solidarity with Palestine.

On April 28, a federal court in São Paulo sentenced de Almeida — known as Zé Maria, national president of the Unified Socialist Workers’ Party (PSTU) — to two years in prison for racism. The charge stemmed from a speech he delivered at an October 2023 rally in solidarity with Palestinians, in which he denounced the Israeli state and invoked the slogan “Free Palestine, from the river to the sea.” The complaint, filed by the Israeli Confederation of Brazil (CONIB) and the Israeli Federation of the State of São Paulo (FISESP), argued that such statements constituted antisemitism. The court agreed. (Read the full court ruling here)

Zé Maria is not a marginal figure. He is a veteran of Brazil’s labor struggles. A metalworker, he was first arrested in 1977 for distributing May Day pamphlets under Brazil’s military dictatorship and again in 1980 during the historic ABC region strikes alongside Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He helped found the Workers’ Party (PT) and later broke with it over its accommodation to ruling-class alliances, going on to build the PSTU and the CSP-Conlutas union federation. He represents a current of independent, combative unionism that has consistently opposed both neoliberal restructuring and the political subordination of labor to electoral projects.

That such a figure can now be criminally prosecuted for a speech delivered at a political rally signals a shift in terrain. What is at stake is not simply the policing of rhetoric, but the imposition of new legal limits on the forms of internationalism that sectors of the labor movement are permitted to express.

For American readers, the stakes are immediate. The same legal logic that convicted Zé Maria — rooted in the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism — has been codified in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition, which 47 countries have adopted. The United States has enshrined it by executive order, and the Department of Education now uses it to prosecute discrimination complaints under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. What is happening to Zé Maria in São Paulo is a warning about what is coming for the American left if we do not fight back.

From Dictatorship-Era Militancy to Criminal Court

Zé Maria’s trajectory is inseparable from the history of Brazil’s working-class movement. Born in 1957, he became politically active during the final decades of military rule. His arrests in 1977 and 1980 placed him squarely within the wave of labor militancy that helped destabilize the dictatorship and usher in a new era of working-class organization.

In the early 1980s, he participated in the founding of both the PT and the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), Brazil’s largest union federation. In 1988, he led the Mannesmann strike, during which workers occupied the factory and maintained production under their own management. He served on the CUT’s national board. But by the 1990s, as the PT increasingly oriented toward institutional alliances and governance, Zé Maria broke with the party. He later helped found CSP-Conlutas, a union federation committed to political independence from the state and to linking workplace struggles with broader social and international causes. Today, CSP-Conlutas represents more than 2 million affiliated workers across Brazil.

This trajectory matters for understanding the present case. Zé Maria does not simply represent “the left” in the abstract. He embodies a specific political current within the labor movement — one that insists on independence, militancy, and internationalism.

A Speech Recast as a Crime

The charges focused on statements Zé Maria made at a public rally in solidarity with Palestinians, where he sharply criticized the Israeli state and defended Palestinian resistance. Prosecutors argued that these statements constituted antisemitic racism rather than political critique. The court accepted this argument, convicting him under Brazil’s anti-racism law and sentencing him to two years in an open regime, along with a fine.

The defense argued that his remarks were protected political expression under Brazil’s constitution and pointed to Jewish organizations internationally that hold similar positions. Jewish Voice for Peace, the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world, stated in a June 2025 amicus brief that “anti-Zionism means supporting justice for the Palestinian people, including their right to live in freedom and equality.” These arguments were rejected. In the court’s reasoning, the State of Israel was treated as representative of a “Jewish collectivity,” collapsing the distinction between a political project and a people.

Zé Maria rejected the ruling in unequivocal terms. In a May 1 address, he declared: “This sentence has no basis — historical, political, or legal. It is based on the worn-out arguments that the Zionist movement uses to try to defend the indefensible — the genocide of the Palestinian people — and to try to silence criticism of the racist, colonialist, Zionist State of Israel.”

Writing in Folha de S. Paulo, he clarified the distinction at stake: ” Antisemitism is racism, which I repudiate with all my might. Zionists make up a political movement — Zionism, whose racist and colonialist ideology is the basis of the State of Israel.”

By redefining political criticism of a state as an attack on an ethnic or religious group, the ruling establishes a mechanism through which specific political positions can be recast as forms of racism — and therefore subjected to criminal sanction.

Why Target a Union Leader?

The choice of target is revealing. In recent years, Palestine solidarity has increasingly taken root within organized labor. In Brazil, one of the most consistent expressions of this trend has come from CSP-Conlutas, the independent union federation that Zé Maria helped build after breaking with the PT-aligned CUT.

CSP-Conlutas has positioned itself as an alternative pole within the labor movement: critical of the PT’s alliances with business sectors, opposed to austerity measures, and committed to an internationalist politics that links domestic struggles to global ones. As detailed in a May 2026 profile of Zé Maria, the federation is characterized by its effort to “articulate union struggles with broader social movements.” Its support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and its participation in solidarity initiatives with Gaza are not peripheral stances, but integral to its political orientation.

From this perspective, the prosecution of Zé Maria appears less as an isolated response to a controversial speech than as an attempt to discipline a specific current within the labor movement — one that insists on maintaining political independence and articulating solidarity across borders. By recasting anti-Zionist positions as forms of racism, the legal system creates a mechanism through which such currents can be delegitimized and potentially criminalized.

This dynamic is particularly significant in a context where much of Brazil’s institutional labor leadership remains tied to the governing coalition. Independent federations like CSP-Conlutas — which represents more than 2 million workers — retain the capacity to mobilize opposition and connect workplace struggles to broader political questions. Targeting one of their most prominent leaders sends a clear signal: certain forms of militancy — especially those that extend beyond national boundaries — may now fall outside the limits of legally acceptable politics.

Zé Maria himself has framed the case in collective terms, calling for unity across political differences to build a non-sectarian united front: “I call on everyone, to political and popular organizations, regardless of whether they agree with the PSTU or not, to unite to defend basic things: the democratic right of every citizen to express their opinions.”

The implications extend far beyond any single organization. If positions like his can be treated as criminal offenses, then unions, rank-and-file networks, and social movements that adopt similar stances may face comparable risks. What is at stake is whether the labor movement can continue to articulate an independent internationalism at all.

The Legal Weapon: Antisemitism Frameworks and the IHRA

The broader significance of the case becomes clearer when situated within the growing international use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. While presented as a nonbinding “working definition,” the IHRA framework has increasingly been incorporated into legal and institutional settings, where its accompanying examples — including those that equate certain forms of anti-Zionism with antisemitism — take on practical force.

Forty-seven countries have adopted the IHRA definition in some form. Brazil was one of them under Jair Bolsonaro, who joined the IHRA in 2021. The Lula administration withdrew from the IHRA in July 2025, but the framework has reemerged through judicial interpretation and proposed legislation. Bill 1424/2026, introduced by Congresswoman Tabata Amaral (PSB-SP), would formally codify the IHRA definition and treat the State of Israel as a “Jewish collectivity.” If enacted, activists involved in boycott campaigns could face up to five years in prison.

The irony is unmistakable. In July 2025, Amaral formally questioned the Foreign Ministry about Lula’s IHRA withdrawal. Now she leads the charge to enshrine the same definition Lula rejected.

The IHRA Definition Has Become U.S. Government Policy

In the United States, the same legal framework is now official policy. Since 2019, Executive Order 13899 has directed the Department of Education to consider the IHRA definition when evaluating antisemitic discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — which applies to virtually every public and private university receiving federal funding. The Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2025 (S. 558), currently pending in the Senate, would codify this into law.

A turning point came in March 2025, when Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and Palestinian refugee, was arrested by ICE. Columbia, facing the loss of $400 million in federal funding, formally adopted the IHRA definition in July 2025.

This pattern extends beyond the United States. In Germany, more than twelve thousand “Gaza-related” criminal cases have been opened against activists. In France, a proposed IHRA-based law would criminalize calling for the destruction of a state recognized by France; UN experts condemned the bill in April 2026, stating that “criticism of Israel and Zionism does not constitute antisemitism.”

While the specific legal frameworks differ, the pattern is consistent: political positions associated with solidarity with Palestine are increasingly reframed as forms of extremism or discrimination, enabling their regulation through legal means.

Leading Voices Against the Weaponization of Antisemitism

Criticism of the IHRA framework has come from many quarters — including from its own drafter. Kenneth Stern, who wrote the IHRA working definition, has warned against its use as a regulatory tool, insisting it was intended only for data collection. More than 300 scholars have since developed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021) as an alternative framework, emphasizing that criticism of Israeli state policy and Zionism is not inherently antisemitic. And more than 700 Jewish faculty members have signed statements rejecting the IHRA definition, arguing that “criticism of the state of Israel, the Israeli government, policies of the Israeli government, or Zionist ideology is not — in and of itself — antisemitic.”

Similar critical voices have risen in Latin America. Argentine artist-publisher Dani Zelko has written on dismantling hegemonic Jewish identity in the context of the Palestinian genocide. In Brazil, journalist Breno Altman has argued that anti-Zionism is a political critique, not racism, and that before Zionism, Palestine was one of the safest places for Jews.

U.S. Labor and Academic Opposition to IHRA

American unions and academic associations are not waiting for Zé Maria’s fate to be decided in São Paulo. They have already started fighting back — because they know that what happened to him could happen here.

In New York City, public-sector workers are putting their pension funds on the line. At least four unions have passed divestment resolutions, refusing to let their dues bankroll what they call apartheid and genocide. Local 1113 declared in April 2026 that it “refuses to allow its members’ dues to financially support apartheid, persecution and genocide” and called for divestment from Israeli companies. Local 3005 followed suit in September 2024, with its president stating: “Divesting from genocidal violence is more important than ever.”

The Massachusetts Teachers Association passed a resolution in June 2025 rejecting the IHRA definition outright — arguing it has become a political cudgel to silence pro-Palestinian advocacy. For the MTA, this is a matter of academic freedom and First Amendment rights.

Then there is the AAUP. Under its new president, Todd Wolfson, the organization has embraced a more confrontational posture. That shift is visible in the AAUP’s formal rejection of the IHRA definition. The association has sent letters to the Department of Education opposing its adoption and has listed refusal of the IHRA definition as an explicit demand. In September 2025, the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure argued that the Trump administration has “used antisemitism as a smokescreen” to attack universities. Read the AAUP’s position here.

The most aggressive institutional pushback has come from the California Faculty Association, representing faculty across the 23-campus California State University system. The CFA’s Palestine, Arab, and Muslim (PAM) Caucus has over a hundred members and states flatly that “anti-Zionism is categorically not antisemitism.” In March 2024, the CFA Board joined the National Labor Network for Ceasefire statement. The union’s LA chapter was even earlier, endorsing a ceasefire in November 2023. When Cal Poly Humboldt students were disciplined for pro-Palestine protests, the CFA condemned “police brutality and continued repression”. At the CFA’s 2026 Equity Conference, the union hosted a panel on “detangling antisemitism,” arguing the term “has become so elastic…that it now obscures more than it clarifies.”

Beyond these institutions, two networks are doing real organizing. Labor for Palestine National Network (L4PNN) works inside unions, helping workers distinguish anti-Zionism — a political critique — from antisemitism, racism against Jews. They have produced toolkits for labor activists facing IHRA weaponization. (Find them at Labor for Palestine.)

The Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE) operates on campuses, helping educators fight back through faculty senate resolutions, teach-ins, and legal defense for colleagues targeted by Title VI complaints. CAHE’s annual National Days of Action have involved more than 200 campus actions nationwide.

This is not an academic abstraction. These networks — and unions like the CFA — are building the resistance the moment demands. They know that the legal weaponization of antisemitism is already here. The only question is whether we organize against it now, or wait until it’s our turn in court.

Brazil Labor’s Response — and What Is at Stake

The response from Brazil’s labor movement has been notable for its breadth. On April 29, nine national union centrals — including CUT, Força Sindical, and CSP-Conlutas — issued a joint note condemning the conviction as “a serious attack on freedom of expression and a restriction on international solidarity,” situating it within “a broader context of persecution of voices that denounce what they classify as genocide of the Palestinian people.”

On May 7, the National Federation of Federal Judiciary Workers (Fenajufe) issued a motion of support warning that “political manifestations, especially those linked to international solidarity among peoples, are being criminalized,” calling the ruling “a worrying precedent” for “the entirety of trade union organizations and social movements.”

The Rio de Janeiro State Union of Education Professionals (Sepe-RJ) added: “If today they seek to silence Zé Maria, tomorrow they may try to silence teachers, students, and workers who rise up against injustices.”

These responses reflect a clear understanding of what is at stake. If the legal reasoning applied in this case is generalized, it could reshape the terrain on which unions operate. Positions taken in solidarity with international struggles could expose individuals to legal liability. More broadly, the ability of labor organizations to articulate independent political perspectives could be curtailed through the selective application of criminal law.

Zé Maria has warned explicitly about this trajectory: “If this trend catches on, Zionism will have succeeded in transforming the Brazilian justice system into an instrument for defending the atrocities committed by Israel. And those who dare to criticize the killing could be imprisoned.”

What is at issue, then, is not only the fate of a single union leader, but the future of a particular kind of labor politics — one that seeks to connect workplace struggles with global questions and refuses to confine itself within the limits of state-sanctioned discourse.

International Solidarity Is Needed

Zé Maria’s appeal is pending before the Federal Court of São Paulo (TRF3). Bill 1424/2026 is pending in the Chamber of Deputies. International solidarity can make a difference — especially when it comes from U.S. unions. In the U.S., activist and union organizations can sign the international petition for Zé Maria’s acquittal and, if possible, send solidarity motions from their unions or organizations to internacional@cspconlutas.org.br.

Zé Maria closed his Folha op-ed with a rallying cry that now resonates across borders: “They will not silence us. And Palestine will be free, from the Jordan River to the sea.”

The post Brazil Is Prosecuting a Union Leader for Palestine Solidarity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Cargo ship entering the Columbia River. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

When Trump decided to whack us with his “liberation day” tariffs last April, he assured us that exporters would eat the tariffs, so that consumers didn’t pay higher prices. There was a large body of research that showed otherwise, but Trump insisted that he knew more than the economists.

Trump’s tariffs have been in place for more than a year, and it’s very clear that exporters have not eaten the tariffs, as Trump promised they would. There is some careful research that tries to determine the extent to which the price exporters charge is lower than it otherwise would be, because they were absorbing the tariffs. This research, which controls for factors like pre-existing trends and other variables that could reasonably be expected to affect import prices, finds that well over 90% of the cost of Trump’s tariffs is paid by U.S. corporations or consumers.

But there is a simpler way to get a ballpark number on the impact of the tariffs: just look at import prices. The Bureau of Labor Statistics produces data every month on the price of imports. It looks at the price at the point where imports are brought into the country, that is, before the tariff is applied. If the exporters in China, Mexico, or wherever are bearing the cost of Trump’s tariffs, import prices should have fallen.

In fact, they did not fall, and in the last few months, largely because of Trump’s Iran war, they have been rising rapidly. The year-over-year increase as of April was 2.9%. Import prices had actually been falling in most of 2023 and 2024. The big jump in import prices in 2021 and 2022 is one reason reality fans know that the inflation in those years was the fault of the pandemic and not Joe Biden. Biden’s recovery package didn’t send prices soaring in China, Europe, and Mexico.

Anyhow, the basic story on exporters eating the tariff is completely wrong; import prices went up, not down.

To be clear, the fuller picture is surely more complicated, but when we switch from falling import prices to rising import prices, again, before counting the impact of the tariffs, it’s pretty hard to tell a story that exporters are somehow eating tariffs.

Rising import prices will also feed directly into U.S. inflation. Unless we think that retailers have somehow become benevolent, it is reasonable to assume that most of the higher price being paid at the port will end up in higher consumer prices.

The shift from falling prices in 2024 to a year-over-year import price inflation of 2.9% comes to around a 3.5 percentage point increase. With goods imports equal to roughly 11% of GDP, this would add a bit less than 0.4 percentage points to inflation.

To be fair, we have already seen some of this shift show up at the retail level, and not all of the price increases will necessarily be borne by consumers. Wholesalers and retailers will end up absorbing some of the hit. But if folks are wondering why everything costs more, the fact that exporters did not eat the tariffs is at least part of the story. And Trump’s war makes this worse, because higher gas and energy prices don’t only raise prices here, they raise prices in all the countries from which we import things. Higher import prices is one more item on the Trump war dividend list.

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

The post Import Prices Soar: Trump Says Exporters Too Low IQ to Eat the Tariffs appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Countdown clock on Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City. Photograph Source: Cocu15 – CC BY-SA 4.0

When dealing with the disorganised criminal outfit that is FIFA (the mafia comparison only goes so far), the titan governing body of world football, subpar service and offerings promise to feature.  As gulled fans, corporate clients, media hacks and political worthies seek their place at the Men’s FIFA World Cup being held in the US, Mexico and Canada this June, the feeling of being burgled should not be far from their minds.  A great tournament of fleecing is in the offing.

Take, firstly, the risks for those seeking to enter the United States to see the matches.  Last month, over 120 organisations, among them the American Civil Liberties Union, collectively issued a “travel advisory” tartly warning about “the Trump administration’s violent and abusive immigration crackdown”.  No room for a softening of tone here.  “The administration’s rising authoritarianism and increasing violence pose serious risks to all”.  However, “those from immigrant communities, racial and ethnic policy groups, the LGBTQ+ individuals have been and continue to be disproportionately targeted and affected”.

Elements of the warning are enumerated: the arbitrary denial of entry and risk of arrest, detention and/or deportation of non-US nationals, even those with prior authorisation to enter; selectively onerous restrictions on the entry or nationals, with partial or full restriction of entry on the citizens of 19 countries, including Afghanistan, a number of African states, Iran, Syria and Yemen; and partial restrictions on those from 20 (again, overwhelmingly African states, with the exception of Turkmenistan, Cuba, Antigua and Barbuda).  Certain visa applicants are also subject to social media screening and a search of their electronic devices, while those admitted risk enjoying the warm hospitality of “violent and unconstitutional enforcement, including racial profiling by law enforcement.”  Should you find yourself in the less than commodious surrounds of immigration detention or custody, the “risk of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, and in some cases, death”, could not be ruled out.

Jamil Dakwar, the human rights program director at ACLU, was particularly withering about FIFA’s indifference.  The footballing body had “been paying lip service to human rights while cozying up with the Trump administration, putting millions of people at risk of being harmed and their basic rights violated.”  Paying lip service to human rights is precisely what FIFA, along with that other hegemon of sports administration, the International Olympic Committee, do with habitual ease.  Ditto their response to environmental concerns, the cost of operating events on scale, and the damage done by construction and disruptions inflicted on the unsuspecting host cities.

The warning served to sting the US Travel Association, a non-profit organisation that lobbies and advocates for those in the travel industry.  Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of the body, put the case against the doom and gloom travel advisory: “There are legitimate ways to challenge policies you oppose and harming the livelihoods of American workers and businesses by frightening away visitors isn’t one of them.”  And what of the visitors themselves?

The ticket prices have also proven so high as to engender vertigo and a nervous fiddling of the purse, accompanied by that prod “Is it all worth it?”  The scandalously high costs drew even the brief attention of US President Donald Trump when asked whether he thought it appropriate that the minimum price of admission to the US World Cup opener against Paraguay in Los Angeles on June 12 was US$1,000.  “I did not know that number,” he told the reporter in question.  “I would certainly like to be there, but I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest with you.”

Last November, the New York Post, citing SeatPick as its source, reported that the tournament final scheduled for July 19 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey could end up being one of the most extortionately expensive events in sporting history.  Even prior to releasing the tickets for public sale on December 11, 2025, FIFA was already selling private suits for the final match for a touch under US$200,000.

Prices have also shot up in the resale market.  In February this year, four tickets for the final on FIFA’s resale platform came on the market for just under US$2.3 million apiece.  FIFA president Gianni Infantino, that execrable fawner to authority, saw few problems with such inflation in comments made this month to the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills.  “If some people put on the resale market some ticket for the final at $2m, number one, it doesn’t mean that the tickets cost $2m, and number two, it doesn’t mean that somebody will buy these tickets.”  And if such prices are to be found, blame the lack of regulations in the US regarding the resale of tickets.

Clumsily, Infantino further suggested that the resale value should not detract from the availability of 25% of the group stage tickets, available at a more modestly affordable $300.  As for anyone willing to purchase a ticket for $2m, Infantino promised delivery, from no less a person than himself, of “a hot dog and a Coke”.  What style, what polish.

The resale strategy adopted by FIFA has buccaneering stripes, exemplified by the adoption of dynamic pricing for ticket sales, the first time the men’s tournament has ever witnessed it in its 96-year history.  The American market is there for the steal and Infantino and his cadres are salivating with opportunistic glee.  FIFA, according to Will Leitch of the New York Magazine, controls the resale market, taking a 30% cut on all resale transactions. “Essentially, FIFA and Infantino are artificially inflating the price of tickets on resale markets they own and then claiming the prices are high because of demand that does not seem to exist.”  Tickets were being purposely withheld “in order to create the illusion of scarcity”, something particularly evident in games featuring the United States.

A note of dampening negativity can certainly be found in some camps of punditry keen to scrape the gloss off the FIFA fleecing show.  There are predictions of an undistinguished flop, disgraced by FIFA’s organisational skills and a domestic environment heated by the policies of the Trump administration.  The American Hotel and Lodging Association’s survey of hotels in 11 host cities across the US found, at best, tepid enthusiasm for bookings related to the event.  In Kansas City, host to matches involving Austria, Argentina and the Netherlands, an eye rolling 85% of hotels claimed to be still under-occupied.

Flight sales are also stuttering, which should come as no surprise, given the sharp rise in air travel brought out by the foolish, criminal endeavour known as the US-Israel-Iran War.  The aviation analyst Cirium has provided data that advance bookings for July have fallen by 14% year-on-year.  But for travellers from the UK, writes an optimistic Robert Jackman for The Telegraph, tickets between Heathrow to Dallas for those wishing to see England’s first match can be found at £1,000.  British Airways were offering return tickets to Boston on either side of England’s match against Ghana for a cheaper £656.  Ultimately, it comes down to how willing people are to be fleeced, and how deep their wells of masochism and money are.

The post The Great Fleecing Tournament: Pricing, Problems and the 2026 FIFA World Cup appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Zulfugar Karimov

Around the US, a number of state legislatures have passed, or ar working to pass, various laws which would require people to “verify” their ages such that those under different ages would find themselves excluded from some or all computer and Internet access.

It all started, of course, with Internet pornography. That’s the easiest sector to boost an “it’s for the chillllllllllldren” propaganda campaign for.

It quickly escalated to social media platforms because woke rightists agree with woke leftists that the wrong words constitute violence and must be controlled “for the chillllllllllldren” (they just disagree on which words are the wrong words), and because many parents are willing to hand off their job of supervising their kids to the state, expanding the base of support for government controls.

Because California is the “authoritarian law idea? Hold my beer!” state, governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation last October which requires operating system providers to collect age information on each new user account, and provide an API that lets Internet platforms and app developers access that information so as to exclude users Gavin Newsom doesn’t think should be using those platforms and apps.

It’s almost, but not quite, funny.

It’s almost funny because it won’t take the chillllllllllldren in question more than a few minutes to figure out ways around this kind of thing. “Age verification” laws are, and always have been, political fantasy, as you know yourself if you were ever a 19-year-old college student who used a fake ID to get into a nightclub.

It’s not quite funny because it isn’t, and never was, about “the chillllllllllldren.”

There’s an old and accurate saying in the right to keep and bear arms community: “Gun control isn’t about guns, it’s about control.” Victim disarmament (“gun control”) laws only control the behavior of those who obey laws. Those who don’t care about the government’s background check and waiting period requirements will still get guns. The people who do obey laws? They get to endure the inconvenience and endangerment, all so that politicians feel like their rings have been sufficiently kissed.

Unfortunately, lots of people obey even evil and idiotic laws. Equally unfortunately, the big players in any given industry usually find it easier and cheaper to just comply with, rather than contest, those evil and idiotic laws.

Which means that even though these “age verification” laws won’t be more than a minor inconvenience to the 13-year-old who wants to view porn, gamble, post mean tweets, the average computer user will once again just do as our rulers say, and maybe even convince himself or herself it’s “for the chillllllllllldren.” Society will become generally a little less free and a little more controlled.

All, however, is not lost. In addition to fake IDs for “age verification,” Virtual Private Networks to connect to sites/apps from areas without such laws, etc., one major computer operating system family inherently puts itself beyond the reach of those laws.

That operating system family is called Linux. It comes in hundreds of flavors (“distributions”), most of which are at least as easy to acquire, install, configure, use, and maintain as the bigger players (Microsoft Windows and Apple MacOS). Most “distributions” are built and maintained by communities of volunteers, and many of those communities have already announced they won’t comply with California’s law or others like it.

If you’re not interested in being an obedient serf, give Linux a look. And take a moment to thank the cypherpunks, hacktivists, Linux developers, and other freedom warriors who’ve been fighting — and beating — government control over encryption, cryptocurrency, and everything else for decades now.

The post Computer “Age Verification” is About Political Control, Not Child Safety appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Doğu Tuncer

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently inveighed against the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act during an appearance at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. The New York congresswoman was invited to speak at Martin Luther King Jr.’s former congregation on May 10, at the invitation of Senator Raphael Warnock, the current senior pastor there. Many political observers interpreted this as the unofficial launch of an Ocasio-Cortez presidential campaign.

“This, to me, is someone who is at least thinking seriously about running for president,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie said in a YouTube short. “Not just the language she’s using. Not just leaning into God talk, leaning into religiousity. This is a religious country. It’s a necessary part of running for higher office. But the fact that she’s doing this at a black church in Georgia, knowing full well that key to winning any kind of nomination is at least doing well, doing okay, with black primary voters.”

Animal activists, like myself, who are interested reducing nonhuman suffering and premature death through the political process, should do everything they can to pressure what will likely be a crowded Democratic presidential field to adopt compassionate policy positions. Nonprofit animal groups frequently argue their priorities are nonpartisan. It’s hard to know whether such statements are the result of nonprofit legal requirements, wishful thinking, a fundamental conservatism or all three.

The belief such issues are nonpartisan is simply not true. For example, almost all of the legislators who receive 100-percent ratings on Humane World Action Fund scorecards are Democrats, while almost all of the legislators who receive zero-percent ratings are Republicans. Similarly, most politicians who support cellular agriculture are Democrats, while most who seek to ban it are Republicans. The only state in the country which has banned fur, California, is, of course, run by Democrats.

Yes, President Donald Trump’s administration has moved to limit animal testing. This, however, in my view, is motivated more by an opposition to science and government spending, than a genuine concern for animals. Either way, the number of nonhumans used for vivisection barely registers when compared to the number of animals exploited for food. Most transformative change has been accomplished on a partisan basis. The Democratic Party must be animal activists’ vehicle for change.

We should seek various commitments from presidential candidates, like Ocasio-Cortez. One of the most promising demands would be for a significant infusion of federal funding into cultivated-meat research. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from animal cells, without killing. I hope cellular agriculture will eventually sweep fish trawlers and slaughterhouses into the dustbin of history, but even low adoption rates of cultivated meat would save billions of animals a year.

Ocasio-Cortez might be more open to this than one might expect. After all, in 2021, she went vegetarian for lent, in honor of vegan activist Tommy Raskin, the late son of her colleague Representative Jamie Raskin. Cultivated meat will offer a number of environmental benefits, which fits her climate agenda. Finally, I don’t think it would cost much, politically speaking, to dedicate a comparatively-small amount of public resources to cellular-agriculture development in a much larger funding bill.

For clarity and legitimacy’s sake, animal activists could ask prospective candidates to support the Producing Real Opportunities for Technology and Entrepreneurs Investing in Nutrition (PROTEIN) Act, a bill put forward by Senator Adam Schiff and Representative Julia Brownley, which would allocate more than $500 million toward the research and development of alternative proteins, including cultivated meat. We should pressure Democratic presidential candidates to take more pro-animal positions.

The post The Politics of Cultivated Meat Research appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Pudding River in flood, near Mt. Angel, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

With the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Review Council’s final recommendations finally available, one particular recommendation stands out.  In the section titled, “Shift to Private Market through Depopulation of Existing National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) Policies,” the council recommends establishing a voluntary “take-out” program that would transfer eligible policies to private insurers — similar to what states like Florida and Louisiana call depopulation programs. There is also a recommendation for a flood insurance marketplace, similar to the Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplace, that would allow private insurers an opportunity to offer coverage to consumers before they consider the NFIP.

There are many issues with these recommendations, especially for high-risk states like Florida, where private insurance is more expensive than NFIP policies and risk-averse companies have been pulling out of the state. But one glaring issue with the report is that the council makes no mention of the Community Rating System (CRS) and how a voluntary “take-out” program would affect it.

What is the CRS?

To be covered by an NFIP flood insurance policy, a property must be located in a community participating in the NFIP. Currently, over 22,300 communities across the US participate. CRS, however, is a voluntary incentive program established in 1990 that allows residents in those communities to receive discounted premiums if the community invests in flood mitigation that exceeds NFIP’s minimum requirements. Currently, a little over 1,700 communities across the US have a CRS classification (Figure 1).

Figure 1

CRS discounts reflect the amount of work the community has done in three areas: promoting extensive floodplain management; bolstering the NFIP through mapping and information collection that identify risk and enable accurate actuarial rating; and minimizing or preventing harm to insured property.

Participating communities receive credit points based on their 19 creditable activities across the categories of public information, mapping and regulations, damage reduction activities, and warning and response. Based on the number of activities completed, communities receive a class rating from 1 to 10, with Class 1 communities receiving the largest discount and Class 10 communities receiving no discount (Table 1).

Table 1

Research has found that CRS not only reduces flood losses overall but, in some high-risk Gulf Coast states, participation in the program reduces flood damage by almost 6 percent in Class 5 communities.  Experts have found that despite the high costs to NFIP from severe flood events such as hurricanes, “CRS will become crucial in mitigating damages and will yield greater net benefits to the NFIP.”

So, What is the Problem?

A major component of the CRS is encouraging more NFIP communities to participate, thereby reducing the program’s overall risk. One of the creditable activities is “Assessing flood insurance coverage in the community and implementing a plan to promote flood insurance.” One could interpret this as any kind of flood insurance, private or NFIP. However, private insurers generally ignorecommunity-wide CRS ratings, opting instead to employ their own proprietary risk modeling to price properties on an individual basis. If you live in a low-risk area, that’s great news. In a high-risk area, not so much.

As we featured in our Majority Agenda series of policy briefs, polling shows that Americans want the government to do more to build resilience, not encourage less through privatization. In fact, 64 percent of Americans think the government should provide financial assistance for people in high-risk areas to rebuild after a disaster, which can take the form of FEMA public and individual assistance as well as insurance (Figure 2). If the government wants to lower those costs, that means incentivizing not just homeowners but also communities to undertake mitigation measures.

Figure 2

The vagueness of the FEMA Review Council’s recommendations is concerning. There is a definite throughline in their report that the council and the administration believe states should do more and the federal government should do less. But by putting programs like the NFIP at risk, the path to disaster recovery becomes increasingly fraught for Americans — particularly as broader economic pressures, including rising prices and persistent inflation, continue to squeeze consumers. Increasing insurance costs mean people will forgo coverage entirely, and the purpose of FEMA’s post-disaster individual assistance program is to assist the uninsured and underinsured survivors. In essence, more people will seek government relief for a problem the government has essentially decided it’s not obligated to solve.

Programs that promote mitigation, like the CRS, should be protected, whether that’s through state-level legislation that links private flood insurance to the CRS or by ensuring the NFIP remains adequately funded at the federal level instead of moving toward privatization. After all, if the federal government can spend $30 billion and counting on one war, it can spare some money to help Americans.

This first ran on CEPR.

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Image by Javier Miranda.

Hey, I always suspected that Donald Trump and I, having both grown up in New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s, had something in common. Now, I know just what it is — his boyhood love for the 1950s TV program Victory at Sea. (“Did you ever see ‘Victory at Sea?’ ” he asked reporters in January while talking about the new “Trump class” battleships he wants to build. “What a great thing that is to watch!”) I was similarly fascinated by that prime-time documentary series on World War II when I was a youngster, and I imagine that the two of us were watching it at the very same time in the very same city, both of us possibly with our fathers, on what were undoubtedly black-and-white TVs. Of course, his father built barracks and garden apartments for the Navy during World War II, while my father, at age 35 and unlikely to be drafted, volunteered for the military the day after Pearl Harbor and ended up a major in the U.S. Air Force fighting the Japanese in Burma. (He seemed to have made it back just in time for my birth in July 1944.)

Oh, and there was another difference between us, come to think of it. Only one of us, possibly inspired by that very TV show, has the power to order that a fleet of new battleships — a “golden fleet,” no less (“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built”), including one to be named the USS Defiant — be constructed to fulfill his childhood war-making fantasies. And only one of us has the power as well to fire any Navy secretary, most recently John Phelan, who doesn’t seem to be working hard enough to make the president’s version of Victory at Sea into our global reality. As President Trump put it at one point, “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person.” (Hey, the Trump fleet is going to be a stunner! Count on it!)

And oh (yet again), as it turned out, only one of us would have the power late in life to kidnap Venezuela’s head of state, try to claim Greenland as the property of this country, prepare for a possible future war with Cuba, blow ships out of the water in a never-ending fashion in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, launch staggering numbers of airstrikes in (yes, can you believe it?) Somalia — well, of course you can’t because, with the exception of Dave DeCamp at Antiwar.com, those bombings are barely covered in this country — as well as at one point in Nigeria, launch a genuine war with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz (brilliantly crippling the global economy while he was at it), and… well, count on it, in the next two-plus years of Donald Trump’s America, there will surely be all too many more examples to cite. In truth, it’s probably not even worth trying to imagine what countries might prove to be next for the “President of Peace,” as he’s distinctly unpredictable on such matters (on just about any matter, in fact).

Trump Reigns (But Doesn’t Rain) Supreme

Whew! I’m already out of breath! But who wouldn’t be since we’re all now living in his world? And given what the “peace president” has done so far, the second time around, I suspect that everything I just brought up will be no more than the start of a future list that could prove all too breathtaking — and possibly even planet-breaking. (Yes, I’m out of breath just from writing all of that and I know perfectly well that I haven’t even managed to cover it all.)

Oh, and I’m so sorry! I almost forgot to mention one more Trumpian set of acts of war, undoubtedly by far the most important and devastating of all: those he’s launched against planet Earth itself. I mean, we’re talking about the president who has done his — and this word couldn’t be more appropriate — damnedest to shut down wind farms of any sort, cut solar energy projects, and expand the burning of fossil fuels in just about every way imaginable, including by opening up 1.3 billion acres (no, that is not a misprint!) of U.S. coastal waters to further oil and natural gas drilling.

New York Times reporter Maxine Jocelow caught this Trumpian moment on Planet Earth perfectly in a recent piece on the “triumphant resurgence in Mr. Trump’s Washington” of climate-change denial. She summed up the Trumpian viewpoint this way: “Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by ‘leftist politicians.’ Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless.”

And in its own way, that also sums up “our” president and his crew to a T in their search for Victory (with a capital V) — a word spelled d-e-f-e-a-t in the age of Trump — on Planet Earth. After all, in an address at the U.N. last year, he labeled climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and insisted that, “if you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.” And his White House even released a document labeled “Ending the Green New Scam,” promising that “President Trump is committed to eliminating funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production.”

There really can’t be any question that this president is distinctly intent on nothing less than making war not just on specific nations like Iran, or on ships in the Caribbean Sea, or on anyone in or near the Strait of Hormuz, but on this very planet in every way imaginable.

It should be stunning, in fact, that on planet Earth at this moment such madness quite literally reigns (but unfortunately doesn’t rain) supreme in Washington, D.C., and will do so for (again literally) ever hotter years (at least two and a half of them) to come.

Defeat on Land, at Sea, and Anywhere Else Imaginable

Once upon a time, such wildly futuristic madness would have been left to the most dystopian of science-fiction novels — and undoubtedly not very popular ones at that, since such a plot and such a president would (once upon a time) have seemed far too unrealistic even for fiction. But now, thanks to President Donald J. Trump, the United States of America, in addition to all its other warring acts of recent months, is distinctly at war — and there’s no other adequate word for it — with Planet Earth (at least as a habitable place for future versions of us).

Someday, if anyone is still making TV series (since by then they’ll all undoubtedly be AI-created), I wonder if there will be one that young people, along with their parents, would be able to catch called not Defeat at Sea, but something far larger and more definitive like Defeat on Planet Earth. After all, we now have a president of the United States who seems ready not just to make war on Iran, but on more or less everything.

Hey, when the president’s military crew recently fired — and given what they’re doing to this planet of ours, they’re giving that word new meaning — Secretary of the Navy Phelan, it made perfect sense (at least in the Trumpian version of our world), given that he didn’t seem to be producing that Trumpian fleet in double (triple? quadruple?) time. Hey (again!), it’s strange that Phelan didn’t grasp the situation he was in, since it really wasn’t all that complicated. The only thing the president wanted from him was the most beautiful fleet of Trumpian naval vessels imaginable tomorrow.

And hey (yet again!!), since the president and I have so much in common from our childhoods, let me try to make some predictions about our Trumpian future on this beleaguered planet of ours. Let’s start with the fact — and it is a fact — that, despite everything Trump and crew are trying to do when it comes to destroying green energy in the United States, as the Guardian reported recently, “In March, the U.S. generated more of its electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind than it did via [natural] gas, the first time clean energy has surpassed the planet-heating fossil fuel for a full month nationally, according to data from the Ember thinktank.” (And mind you, despite Donald Trump and crew, 2025 was indeed a record year for green energy growth in this country.)

And yes, green energy production has already become cheaper than new oil and gas production and, even with a president who couldn’t be clearer — “We aren’t allowing any windmills to go up and we don’t want the solar panels. Fossil fuel is the thing that works” — it’s still clear where we humans are headed in energy terms. Just not, of course, fast enough.

No, none of what we’re doing when it comes to clean energy is (as yet) faintly enough. And Trump and crew, while working as hard as they can to launch a thoroughly useless fleet of naval vessels, have also been doing their damnedest to heat this planet to the boiling point. He has literally decided to transform himself into a hell-on-earth president at a moment when renewable energy has beaten out coal as the primary source of energy globally for the first time ever. And, of course, one other thing “our” president has done is to functionally hand over the production and sale of green energy (and the equipment to make it) to that rising power on planet Earth, China, which has already poured hundreds of billions of dollars into such energy development (though it also continues to pour greenhouse gases from coal, natural gas, and oil into the atmosphere in a record fashion).

And don’t forget something else. With their endless nightmarish decisions on green energy and climate change, Trump and crew are, among other things, in the process of all too literally reordering this planet of ours. Though you won’t hear much about it in the media, we are all watching in real time (whether we faintly realize it or not) what not so long ago was the greatest power in history, the United States, turning the future (imperial and otherwise) over to China.

Someday, if any of us are around to see it, we are likely to witness what could prove to be a historic trade-off of great powers. After all, in these years, Donald Trump has put remarkable energy (literally and symbolically) into taking down the planet’s greatest power, the United States. (Of course, if it hadn’t already been heading down, he would never have been elected in the first place.)

And China, while remaining distinctly quiet in this otherwise all-too-loud Trumpian moment, has been building what could prove to be a near-monopolistic control over our planetary future by becoming THE country that produces green energy (or, more importantly, the equipment to make it) for the rest of the planet in a record fashion.

Donald Trump, of course, is distinctly intent on making war on planet Earth (including, by recently making war on Iran, pouring yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere). War, after all, may be the world’s most efficient producer of such gases and the U.S. military, even in peacetime (which, unlike during his first term in office, is no longer Trump time), remains the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases on this planet. In the process, he’s doing his damnedest to take both his country and the planet down with him.

All too sadly, if he’s successful, American children of tomorrow, when they turn on their machines (whatever they may be), could witness not Victory, but Defeat at Sea, on Land, and Anywhere Else You Might Imagine.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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Winged Talon robot built by Hephaistos for Zeus who gifted the giant metal robot to his lover, princess Europa — in Crete. Talon protected Europa and Crete by flying over the island 3 times a day. The bull, right, was Zeus, in the form of a bull. He brought Europa to Crete. Courtesy Numismatic Museum, Athens.

Prologue: ancient and modern uses of technology

There’s a tremendous civilization gap between the robots credited to the Greek god of metallurgy Hephaistos and to the robots of the 21^st century powered by artificial Intelligence. But the idea remains the same. How to imitate the gods. The Greeks had several gods, supreme beings in power, intelligence, beauty and goodness. Hephaistos was one of those gods.

Hephaistos: copper coin, Malaga, Spain, late 3rd century BCE. Courtesy Numismatic Collection, Alpha Bank, Athens, Greece.

Hephaistos was a perfect metallurgist and engineer. S. A. Paipetis, modern scientist and former mechanical engineering professor at the University of Patras, studied the technologies of Hephaistos in the works of Homer. He concluded there was evidence of advanced technologies in the Homeric epics. He calls them “miraculous conceptions… ideas [which] pre-existed in the thoughts of Mycenean Greeks for almost three millennia before their appearance in the modern world” (The Unknown Technology in Homer, Springer, 2010, p. 118).

The reappearance of those advanced technologies in our times serves a different purpose. The public good dominated ancient Greek science and technology. Now it is mostly private interests and money. No wonder the writing and talk about AI is abstract, illogical, political, economic and self-serving.

Corporate chiefs who fund “data centers,” labyrinths floating in billions of gallons of water, don’t exactly care for diminishing water, much less for the future of America, humanity, civilization and the planet. Their sole purpose is the generation of enough electricity to fuel their AI machines.

AI: Not intelligence but military engineering

These AI machines pretend to imitate human voice and even human calculation. And despite the name, Artificial Intelligence, the AI machines are artificial but not intelligent. Intelligence is almost a divine gift of reason and knowledge wrapped by wisdom, justice and the good and the beautiful. These virtues cannot be grafted onto machines.

However, AI machines have the technical and engineering skills of absorbing enormous amounts of “data” from books, reports, videos, podcasts, television interviews and news. They store and regurgitate those mountains of information for answering questions with human voice-like qualities. They also display their linguistic training by translating texts from foreign languages. Their real purpose, however, is war. Their machine nature glows by using satellite data for guiding warplanes, warships, drones and other weapons to be more destructive and lethal.

Propaganda for political control

Corporate owners of AI technologies are well aware of the military dangers of their creations. They never talk about that. But they take the easy way out, that of making money and gaining political influence from their invisible monsters, which they peddle as a welfare achievement. After all, AI is being employed in iPhones, computers, translation and “assistance” it provides to those ignorant or stupid enough to engage in “conversation” with machines or chatboxes. But the overall impact is consequential, especially on the young. These AI machines, said Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, “are going to subsume us.”

Tech executives want Americans to accept them as their lords behind the throne of the “president / unelected monarch.” Nevertheless, they “know that American society is going to turn against them in big ways because they are the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived,” said Leon Wieseltier, editor of the journal Liberties. Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities. There is a huge difference between knowledge and information, and these asinine people have taught our population that all of knowledge can be reduced to the status of information,” Wieseltier said. “Press a button, you got your answer. So the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty — it’s the opposite of what this technology has inculcated.”

True. Dowd and Wieseltier she quotes are denouncing the tech industry for systematic deception and subversion of our democratic civilization, disrupting education from a sophisticated process of learning literature, art, poetry, history, philosophy and science from studying texts and vigorous discussion to a routine mechanical pushing of buttons for easy answers. Such a transition eliminates the complexity, ambiguity, metaphor, satire, satisfaction, pleasure, and beauty of learning. This explains the “warnings” of a few tech executives who even ask the federal government to “regulate” their industry.

Robots, not workers

Yet, at the same time, the industry is doing more with its mechanical invention of man-like robots governed by AI. Companies like Meta already have been firing thousands of workers and replacing them with robots. What if this trend continues? What’s the future of millions of workers? And these workers, in America and other high tech countries, will they stand still while their future disappears in front of their eyes?

The AI owners are politely issuing warnings of this bleak future. Elon Musk, for example, is proposing: “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI / robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.”

Universal High Income is a timely idea. But its supporter, Musk, is a billionaire of billionaires, the antithesis of equity and justice. In the beginning of the second Trump administration, Musk acted like a co-ruler of America. He smashed government agencies supposedly to improve “efficiency,” but in reality, he was crippling government regulation of the industry. Second, he owns an electric car company, but he has been a great supporter of Trump who is saying climate change is a hoax. And third, in his proposal for the government to send monthly checks to workers replaced by robots, he left himself and other billionaires out of a “deal” to help workers. He said nothing about taxing the billionaires to fund their victims. Why not? After all, Musk and his billionaire colleagues make money from the AI monster in the room. They are responsible for the tremendous social upheaval their robots are creating.

With a living monthly stipend to all workers, can we assume no complaints from them? Why should they complain being made into nothing? Staying at home watching television? With all the “free” time in the world.

Epilogue: phasing out AI, nuclear weapons and fossil fuels

It took about 5,000 years for the advanced technologies of ancient Greeks to take the form of robots guided by AI. Only fragments of the written Greek record survived the Christianization of Hellas, barbarian invasions and foreign occupations. Yet the approximate 1 percent that survived triggered the Renaissance among the Arabs in the 8^th century and the more lasting in the 15^th century Italian states of Florence, Venice, Padua, Rome. From the 15^th century till now in the 21^st century, we have had the calamitous 20^th century world wars, the cold war and the continuing strife and wars. In addition, the Greek-based Western civilization has gradually moved away from the lessons of Greek history and civilization. Instead of expanding the inherited virtues and science from the Greeks, Westerners adopted war for problem solving, hence the immersion into fossil fuels for energy and the development of Democritos’ Atomic Theory into the atomic / nuclear bomb.

AI technologies were inevitable. But, regrettably, like fossil fuels they have not served the interest of the people, much less those vital ecological needs of the planet.

Time has come to understand the AI technologies for what they are. They are assistants to making wars more ferocious, thus bringing humanity to the brink. We need to phase them out together with nuclear weapons and fossil fuels.

The post From the Flying Robot Talon to AI Monsters appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Philipp Thelen.

You can learn something about a culture from its origin myth. Like most boys growing up in Southern California, I believed the founding myth of the United States. Coming to a continent with just a few native tribal people, European settlers took control of an almost empty land, letting the few remaining ‘Indians’ have a chance to live on reservations. ‘The land was ours before we were the land’s’: So the poet Robert Frost famously declared in a poem at the inauguration of President J. F. Kennedy. Even if you don’t know the political history, it’s easy to see that there had to be more to this story. Some Germans who sought to create a ‘living room’ for themselves in Central Europe by ethnic cleansing thought that they were emulating the activities of these American pioneers. Like the United States today, the Venetian Republic ruled an empire. And so we can learn something about our situation by considering the origins of the Venetian state.

For this purpose, I have found a well-known book by the French classicist Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (1988) most instructive. When those mythical stories are far-fetched, as are many Homeric stories, it’s hard to know in what sense they were believed. After all, nowadays people who enjoy James Bond films don’t believe that he exists— or even that someone like him could exist. By contrast, the mythical actions of the founders of the Venetian Republic are less surprising and so seem to raise fewer problems. As the endlessly repeated story found in every history of Venice tells, in 826, enterprising Venetian merchants obtained the relics of St. Mark, which were in Islamic Alexandria, where he had been martyred, and brought them to Venice. Mark thus became the Republic’s patron saint. Unlike most Italian cities, Venice is not of Roman origin. Previously, Venice had made do with the relics of lesser saints. Theodore was the original saint for Venice; you can see his statue in the Piazza San Marco. With their array of relics upgraded, the Venetians enlisted a more powerful figure. Thus the Venetian Republic was founded in 826.

This story is prominently shown in the images in San Marco. To be sure, the scholarly histories explain the events in much fuller detail, taking us up to this theft and its aftermath. There were settlers in the lagoon for centuries before 826. And so the whole story of how Venice became the dominant European power is long and complex. Still, even the scholarly accounts repeat this basic claim. When various cities in Northern Italy competed for leadership, the possession of St. Mark’s body gave Venice its dominant role. That’s why today Torcello and the other habitations on the lagoon remain today just small towns.

According to the myth, the Venetians found the right body, took it to San Marco, where it remains, and then, after a long time, they rediscovered it. It’s left, then, to one semi-popular history to raise explicitly obvious questions about this origin story: Marion Kaminski, Art & Architecture. Venice (2000) asks: “How certain was it that the right body had been brought to the lagoon, considering that the Apostle had died 700 years earlier? “ The further miracle is that the saint indicated his final resting place, in the seat of government, not the cathedral when ”the relics became so heavy that they were too much even for several men.” But, she adds, “ these are modern-day doubts, and they would hardly have occurred to a medieval Christian.” I am not sure about the correctness this last point, for medieval Christians were skeptical, at least in some cases, about the belief in relics. And it’s not hard to imagine that some opponent of Venice would raise doubts. You could question this foundation myth without raising general questions about the value of relics.

To question this origin myth would, however, have been a subversive political act. Compare the situation in Naples, where, even when recently there was a communist mayor, the belief in the holy blood of St. Gennario was not tested or even much discussed critically. To question a society’s founding myth is to threaten its political stability. The American story of the Declaration of Independence is, by comparison, a rational story about a free social contract. Still, to point out the ways in which our Founding Fathers dealt with the reality of slavery is, even now, politically awkward, as we see in contemporary debates. One can point out that eventually our country abolished slavery. But it’s not clear that noting this fact resolves the awkward concern about origins. A similar argument can be plausibly made about Venice.

Rationally, questioning whether the relics at St. Marco were those of that saint may seem a bookish point. If these bones were someone else’s, San Marco would not collapse. But in the historical context, dealing with the query was to undermine the very basis of the social order of the Venetian Republic. Could a society be legitimate if it is founded upon theft and deceit? If the ninth-century Venetians got the story of their most prized relic wrong, who knows what other mistakes they could have made? And that, I think, is why, so far as I know, no Venetian raised such critical questions. It was, one historian writes, “the common view that the presence of the saint’s relics guaranteed the survival of the Republic forever.” The founding myth of the Venetian Republic is that it depended upon theft and deceit, in a way that’s surprising to find in a mercantile state. The suggestion that, by covering the relics with pork, the Venetians were able to sneak them past the Muslims says little about the practical intelligence they ascribed to their foes. The American foundation story is, by contrast, a rational, purely human story. But as I said, it too can be criticized. And as we know, questioning origin myths is likely to be unsettling.

Notes:

Dennis Romano, Venice. The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City (2024) is a very full history. See also William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley, 1968) and my “A Renaissance fantasy of the Islamic World: Gentile and Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria, “ Source Volume 28, Number 1 Fall 2008” https://doi.org/10.1086/sou.28.1.23207968

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Communards at an assembly in Merida approve the projects that will appear on the ballot for the communal consult (2025). Photograph by Víctor Hugo Rivera.

“This is a system of ants,” Dulce Esperanza, a member of the Candelaria Heroica Commune in Caracas, Venezuela, explained to me as we sat outside of a voting center in her commune. Bit by bit, Dulce told me, she and her neighbors have built a part of the labor, and love, that has sustained her commune of 5,000 families, carrying out the vision outlined by leader and former president Hugo Chávez two decades ago. Here, communards organize citizens’ assemblies to debate and make decisions about their communities, build and manage productive processes, and, ultimately, create an organizational structure that serves as a fundamental building block of Venezuelan democracy and society.

On March 8, Dulce, a woman with a beaming smile and short, grey hair, was among millions of communards around the country who voted to select which projects in her commune would receive government funding (USD $10,000 per project, with one to two winning projects funded per commune). The communal consults, she explained to me, were started by President Nicolás Maduro in April 2024 and take place approximately every 3 to 4 months to fund the projects selected by members of the community based on their most pressing needs, from improving potable water systems and infrastructure[*] to funding productive mechanisms such as bakeries and textile factories that are operated by the commune (known as Socially Owned Companies, or EPSs). After Maduro presented the 7 Transformations national development strategy in early 2024, each consult has begun to focus on specific elements of that plan – this time, the productive economy (T1) and humane cities (T2). The consults are a dynamic process, with improvements identified and made each time.

There are thousands[†] of communes across Venezuela, which function as a form of self-governance with a vision of ultimately replacing the bourgeois state with a communal one driven by popular power. Socialism, Chávez said, “should not be decreed. It must be… a popular creation of the masses.” Communes are the expression of this creation, “the space from which we will give birth to socialism.” The communal consults have become a fundamental aspect of how this process plays out, a school for how decisions are made at a grassroots level, how to build productive mechanisms that build toward economic independence, and how to allocate resources in alignment with the revolution’s values and strategic thinking while expanding the reach of communes and communal circuits. This school rests on two decades of advances of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, which has dedicated roughly three quarters of the state budget to social spending, eradicated illiteracy, and expanded education at every level, to name a few examples of many – skills that have been put to use by Venezuela’s working class to improve their communities and build a revolution that has been able to outlive the foreign interference that has sought to overthrow it from the onset. As Chávez put it quite frankly in the early years of the revolution, “It is unfair that, despite being a resource-rich country, Venezuela has a population where 70% live in poverty.”

An assembly in Yaracuy, Venezuela, where communards discuss proposals for the upcoming communal consult (December 2024). Photograph by Víctor Hugo Rivera.

The Communes as a School: Self-Governance, Anti-Imperialism, and the New Human Being

Chávez, who was elected in 1998 through popular vote, was aware of the challenge of governing within the confines of a bourgeois state and the inherited structures set up first under colonialism and then under the Venezuelan elite, working hand in hand with the United States. In dialogue with the Venezuelan people and allies such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro, alongside study and a system of trial and error, Chávez would eventually come to see the commune as the core building block – “the cell,” as he called it – of Bolivarian socialism. These communes are made up of smaller communal councils, or “nuclei,” he said, in his metaphor in which the cells and nuclei, together, make up a body, “the new body of the nation.” This model of self-governance gave the working class not only the skills but also the confidence and experience to govern their territory and resources in this “new body.”

Vice Minister of Communes Albanys Montilla explained the importance of this vision today more than ever, as the US has escalated its aggression against Venezuela.[‡] Speaking at one of the thousands of citizens’ assemblies that took place across the country in the lead up to the consult to propose and select projects that would appear on ballot, Albanys told a packed room at a commune in Antímano, Caracas, on February 6:

We are in a very difficult situation. … Even though Maduro isn’t here, we’re still holding the reins in this country. How? In assemblies, deciding where our resources will go, we’re going to carry out the project so that living conditions in the neighborhood and the commune improve. That’s self-governance, isn’t it? Allocating these resources so that we can take matters into our own hands.

Albanys is in her late twenties, a towering figure with a booming voice and a fire that ignites and grounds any room that she is in. The activities of the communes, she explained at the assembly, are a training ground for a country run completely by its people, toward a communal state: “We can apply the same approach we use in our commune to all the resources that come into this country… But to do that, we must remain organized within the commune, showing ourselves, Venezuela, and the world that only the organized people of the territory will provide an answer for ourselves.”

As a part of this exercise, in which the commune is the school to create the “new human being” and the building block to transform society, communards campaigned first for their neighbors to attend the assembly and select the projects, then to garner support for the projects deemed most strategic and turn out the vote on March 8, and finally to plan and implement the projects selected.

Members of the Socialista Luchadores del Comandante Supremo Commune in Altímano, Caracas, suggest and then vote on which seven proposals will appear on the March 8 communal consult ballot, ranked in order of most to least votes received (February 6, 2026). Photograph by Celina della Croce.

At the assemblies, communards identified the most pressing issues in their communities and then voted to determine which had the most support, tallying them in order of most to least popular, with the seven selected projects appearing in that order on the ballot. One communard in Antímano, at the Socialista Luchadores del Comandante Supremo Commune, advocated for cisterns to combat water shortages (T1, productive economy), while another advocated to build a bakery that could generate funds to finance other projects in the commune (T2, humane cities).

In the weeks leading up to the election, communards knocked on doors and handed out leaflets encouraging their neighbors to vote, in many communes campaigning for the projects that had been recommended by the assembly. The day of the election, communards arrived at voting sites as early as 3 AM to set up the space for the day, complete with a sound system to remind neighbors to come out and vote. “It’s an exercise of patience,” Dulce told me at the Candelaria Heroica Commune. Even though there is broad support for the process, some neighbors “don’t open the door. They beat us up – well, not literally, but they don’t like what we’re doing. … Things don’t change overnight.”

Members of a commune in Caracas arrive early to hang up signage and a list of the projects on the ballot. Photograph by Rome Arrieche.

Building a Collective Consciousness

One aspect of this exercise, Dulce explained, is the process of collective, strategic planning that the consults require in order to be effective. “If you don’t think as part of the collective, and you’re focused on your individual self, we’re screwed,” she said. If the project selected focuses on individual rather than collective needs, she continued, “maybe each family ends up with a screw [for their individual repairs], instead of a functioning water system for the community as a whole. … That’s the individualism that we have to keep combating. So, you have to speak from the love that you have for this project, and getting [to where we need to be] is the work of ants. One step, a few steps, you fall, you get up again, you go forward, you go back to the vision [of the project].”

Communards discuss proposals for a communal consult at the Ezequiel Zamora Socialist Agricultural Commune in Amazonas State (November 2025). Photograph by Víctor Hugo Rivera.

This patience and sense of love isn’t just a personal attribute: it’s a core part of the vision of communes. As Chávez outlined in his 2009 address Aló Presidente Teórico 1, one of the core pillars of communes must be a “moral front”: “We’ve been infected by the old values, by selfishness, by capitalism, by the fragmentation of society… they’ve poisoned us, ever since we were children,” he explained. “Wherever we are building the commune… you must start there, from the bottom up, fostering social love and a sense of social duty… We must not merely pay lip service to it; we must begin to build a socialist society.”

Sitting in her living room a few days after the communal consult, Dulce explained to me how she and the commune’s other leaders set up a system to take care of their neighbors, not as charity, not as a side project, but as a core part of what defines them. Many of the people in her building are elderly and living on their own, with their children and grandchildren pushed to migrate as a result of the US-led sanctions regime. In fact, migration increased by up to 706% between 2015 (the year that Barack Obama declared Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat”) and 2021 (the year that United Nations Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan produced a report on the impact of the US-drive sanctions and other unilateral coercive measures in Venezuela). In the same report, Douhan also notes the impact of the mass emigration of professionals in particular – many of them trained by the revolution – with “most public services hav[ing] lost 30 to 50 per cent of their personnel, including many of the most highly qualified workers (such as doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, professors, judges and police officers), resulting in internal disorganization, increased workloads for remaining staff and reduced services and a decline in their quality. Public hospitals report shortages of qualified personnel, with between 50 and 70 per cent of such posts vacant.” With the attack and economic warfare from which the country is still recovering (as demonstrated by the 9%GDP increase in 2025), many retirees can’t afford medicine or are simply have a hard time getting to doctors’ appointments. So, the commune keeps track of the situations of each person in need, with a leader in each building who is familiar with their neighbors’ situations.

Children sit on a tractor at the Cinco Fortalezas Commune in Sucre while their parents show an international brigade how they process sugarcane into panela, an unrefined brown sugar that the commune produces. Photograph by Celina della Croce.

In Guarenas, Miranda, a small city roughly thirty minutes away from Caracas, Heyerde López, a member of the General José Felix Ribas Commune and co-founder of the cultural collective Nativa, echoed Dulce’s conviction and tenderness: “we can’t leave anyone out of this process, whether or not they participate – we have to lead by example.” Heyerde’s commune voted to create and finance a “people’s mobile market” – a mobile grocery truck that would sell food products from different communes. The mobile market seeks not only to generate funds for the commune, but also to build consciousness among communards, increasing trust and engagement along the way.

In the wake of the January 3 bombing, Heyerde and his neighbors explained to me, many people feel angry, humiliated, and at times defeated. When Chávez was kidnapped in a 2002 coup d’état, that time flown to an island within Venezuelan territory by a small faction of the armed forces backed by the US and the country’s elite, masses of people took to the streets and forced his return within two days.[§] Maduro, however, was kidnapped by the US military and taken to a detention center in Brooklyn, New York. They want to fight, but who? The enemy isn’t in office but thousands of miles away with their leader in a detention center guarded by the world’s largest military power, sending constant threats of further bombings and aggression.

At a citizens’ assembly on March 21, convened to make decisions about how to implement the funds for the mobile market, Heyerde explained the political component of the people’s mobile market: “Given how angry people on the street are about the current situation, there has to be a political message. … We need to win people over given the current situation, the discontent and anger people are feeling on the streets, too.” He called this process, of providing a needed service to the commune that is rooted in revolutionary values, consciousness-building, and patience, enamoramiento communal: falling in love with the commune.

Months since the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Combatant[**] Flores, Venezuelans continue to experience a series of forced concessions as US President Donald Trump continues to use the possibility of further violence and intervention to threaten the country’s sovereignty. Yet the widespread sentiment of anger and indignity that this scenario has created is met with one of resolve: “We’re angry, but we’re not just going to sit here with our arms crossed,” another communard told me. Despite decades of attacks, from economic and information warfare to the recent bombing, there is a palpable feeling of the lived memory of what came before the revolution and the feeling of dignity and respect that the majority of the population has gained in the two decades since.[††]

What the Poor Stand to Win or Lose

For Heyerde, like most communards, this project, and his stake in it, is deeply personal. The Bolivarian Revolution not only brought tremendous material gains to a people that had long been pushed to the margins: it also taught them to stand upright, or as Heyerde put it, “It made us the protagonists of our own lives, and it enabled us, the poor, to participate and make decisions about our country.”

Women hang up paper in preparation for an assembly at the Miraflores Socialist Commune in Caracas to select which projects will appear on the communal consult ballot. Photograph by Rome Arrieche.

The revolution has built a collective consciousness among a people who know that they have not suffered from poverty because of laziness or personal defect but because of a capitalist system that relies on poverty in order to function. Heyerde, who was ten years old when Chávez came into office, has lived this experience first-hand. He recalled that his grandmother, at age 65, was one of 1.5 million Venezuelans who learned to read and write through Mission Robinson, a government program that eradicated illiteracy in the country by 2005. She was also one of the two million Venezuelans who has received eye surgery, which prevented her from losing her vision, through Mission Milagro. “We, the poor, didn’t have anything,” he told me. “With Chávez, the children of ‘the nobodies’ could study. [The revolution] gave us access to things that that were limited to people with power before, while the poor had to work ourselves into the ground.” This year, Heyerde, age thirty-seven, enrolled in the International University of Communications (IUCOM), one of the dozens of free, public universities founded since 1999.

Heyerde’s story is not unique. It shows how the participative democracy of the communes is built on the foundation of a revolutionary process that has used the country’s natural wealth not only to lift the population out of poverty but also to provide it with the skills, confidence, and consciousness-building to take planning into their own hands. For instance, state programs under the revolution have:

+ tripled the amount of university graduates.

+ increased the number of those with secondary education by two and a half times.

+ increased healthcare spending by 497% from 1999 to 2007.

+ made tremendous gains in food security, earning the recognition of the FAO for cutting the amount of hunger in half within the first decade of the revolution. (Studies show that there was an increase in daily kilocalories consumed, from 2.26 in 1998 to 3.092 in 2015, and that the growth of children age 7 increased from 119.8 cm in 1998 to 121.7 in 2011, just over a decade later).

+ built and dispersed over five million homes (compared to a mere 595,156 homes built in the ten years before the revolution).

+ distributed 5 million laptops since 2015 to 14 million students across the country (though, as Douhan notes, this program was suspended as a result of the US-driven sanctions, since “the only way to build new laptop computers under the program has been by assembling them from broken ones, as there is no longer any access to spare parts.”

+ incorporated 25 times more elderly people into pension benefits, from 19.6% to 100% of the eligible population.[‡‡]

For Dulce to check the names of each of her neighbors on the vote registry on March 8 and for Heyerde to write the commune’s plans out on the walls of their sala de autogobierno (self-governance room)[§§] requires a level of literacy and social inclusion that has been guaranteed by the revolutionary process. If it were not for the revolution, 2.4 million Venezuelans, many of them today engaged in popular processes such as these, would be illiterate. Over 2 million children – the equivalent of 25% of Venezuela’s schoolchildren – would be excluded from the education system. Malnourishment would be triple what it is today. Women, who have taken on a leading role in the country’s democratic processes, would be far more tied down with domestic care work which is today provided by the state. For all of the criticism Venezuela receives for relying heavily on oil, this wealth – once harbored by the elite and transnational corporations (many headquartered in the US) – has been redirected to benefit the Venezuelan people. Since the onset of the revolution, government plans have identified the need to dismantle the colonial structure that created this oil dependency and taken steps to diversify the economy (a task that has been made notably harder by interventions from the US and Venezuelan opposition since the revolution began).

A member of the Cinco de Marzo Commune in Caracas holds a copy of the Organic Law on the Right of Women to a Life Free of Violence, passed in 2007, and explains the model of communal feminism and its connection to the rights guaranteed by the country’s legal framework. Photograph by Celina della Croce.

Interestingly, the very actors that today decry the reality in Venezuela have been responsible for the dips in social advances throughout the revolution. Though social indicators have advanced since Chávez’s inauguration in 1999 and under President Maduro, setbacks align with the most aggressive series of attacks, from the 2002 coup d’état and 2002–2003 oil strike to the escalation in sanctions and other unilateral coercive measures from 2017. For instance, Ricardo Menéndez points out that “Every time the Venezuelan opposition decides to take action to try to overthrow the Chavista government, there is a spike in the unemployment rate; for example, during the oil sabotage of 2003–2004, the rate rose by almost 20 percentage points.” Furthermore, he says, “we can see that the [Gini] inequality index when we took over the country stood at 0.49 and 0.48, and how it has been falling steadily since the revolution began; in 2018, we reached 0.37, the lowest point. … however, in 2019 and 2020 there was a slight uptick in that figure due to the impact of the [economic] war, which took us to 0.38.” As UN Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan’s report bluntly states:

[S]ectoral sanctions on the oil, gold and mining industries, the economic blockade of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the freezing of Central Bank assets, targeted sanctions imposed on Venezuelan and third-country nationals and companies, and growing overcompliance by banks and third-country companies have… prevented the earning of revenue and the use of resources to maintain and develop infrastructure and social support programs, which has a devastating effect on the country’s entire population, especially – but not only – those living in extreme poverty, women, children, medical workers, persons with disabilities or life-threatening or chronic diseases, and the indigenous population.

The Bolivarian Revolution is not without challenges, both external, in the form of foreign intervention, and internal, as it seeks to dismantle the legacy, or “infection,” as Chávez put it, of what came before it. Yet what is clear is that the “before,” when 70% of the population lived in poverty, is not the answer to Venezuela’s challenges, and that the United States, with a track record of interfering in any sovereign process in which a country seeks to wretch its resources from foreign capital and redirect it to benefit its own people, will not deliver on its promise to “save” the Venezuelan people from its very own grip.

Children play with volleyballs, basketballs, and leftover meeting notes on butcher paper at the Cinco Fortalezas Commune in Sucre, Venezuela. Photograph by Celina della Croce.

As Heyerde told me, “We – the poor – are the ones who have the most to win or lose through this project. Ultimately, it is our project.” It is the Venezuelan people who will struggle through the challenges and contradictions before them to define their own future, as they have time and time again. And it is the Venezuelan people who face the task of enamoramiento, of inviting each of their neighbors to fall in love with the revolution and the promise it holds for the future. This task is one that takes place as the country recovers from years of economic, information, and other forms of hybrid war, as well as direct military aggression. The Venezuelan people are not only ants, marching forward to carry a burden, or social debt, bigger than their individual selves. They are the bricks of a lighthouse that has beaten again and again by the ocean waves yet will not crumble, the particles of light that together hold the power to guide us toward a better future.

Notes.

[*] It is important to note that the communal consults are taking place in the context of a prolonged economic crisis driven by US-imposed sanctions and other unilateral coercive measures (UCMs). These UCMs have blocked the government from the international financial system and caused a severe economic crisis, or, as Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodriguez put it, “the largest economic collapse outside of wartime since 1950.” In terms of the impact on infrastructure, United Nations special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Alena Douhan, reported that as a result of UCMs, by 2021 “only 50 per cent of the [water] system’s distribution units were running because it was impossible to buy spare parts and perform maintenance work, so water had to be distributed in rotation to ensure delivery to all.” In other words, amidst crisis and the country’s gradual economic recovery, consults have given Venezuela’s working class a leading role in identifying, funding, and carrying out implementation for their most pressing needs that were once a given, at the same time building up communards’ skills and confidence for self-governance.

[†] There are approximately 4,100 communes in Venezuela and 1,200 communal circuits, a structure that was created as a way to incorporate smaller communal councils into the consults through a “circuit,” thereby enabling them to access funding until they eventually form a commune.

[‡] In the months leading up to the March 8 communal consult, the US killed over 150 fishermen in a series of missile attacks; bombed Caracas, the capital, on 3 January; kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady (or First Combatant) Cilia Flores; and threatened acting president Delcy Rodriguez and her cabinet with further bombings and implied assassination (with US President Donald Trump warning in a 4 January interview that if Delcy “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro” and stating that “We are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so”).

[§] The slogan cada 11 tiene su 13 – every 11th has its 13th – remains a popular slogan today, referring to 11 April, the day of the coup, and 13 April, the day Chávez was returned to power and the coup failed.

[**] The term “first combatant” has become commonplace in Venezuela to refer to Cilia Flores in lieu of “first lady,” highlighting Flores’s own political accolades and her stature as more than merely the wife of a sitting president. Flores is also a deputy in the national assembly – and was the first woman to become president of the assembly in 2006 – a lawyer, a human rights defender, and has been a political leader since the early years of the revolution.

[††] The phenomenon of collective memory is a fascinating one. Venezuelans who oppose of the government will often cite that things were better “before” – meaning before the revolution. Yet any reputable account shows that before the revolution, the majority of the population was living in abject poverty, as detailed below, and dissent was met with severe repression. For instance, during the 1989 Caracazo, when Venezuelans rose up to protest the economic situation in the country, thousands were gunned down in the streets. A key task of the communes, as Heyerde and Dulce pointed out, is to build a collective consciousness that aligns the interpretation of hardship with the root causes behind it.

[‡‡] Despite the fact that the pension funds received have been severely impacted by the economic crisis, this was not the case in the earlier years of the revolution, and the improved infrastructure nonetheless marks a significant victory in reaching the elderly as the economic situation improves.

[§§] In 2025, President Maduro announced an initiative to support the establishment of a sala de autogobierno (self-governance room) in each of the country’s 5,300 communes and communal circuits, stating that they are “designed as a mechanism to strengthen public participation and promote self-governance within communities, thereby contributing to the development of a more inclusive and effective model of governance.”

The post Communal Consults and Venezuela’s Fight for the Future appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image Miko Guziuk.

One of the great evasions in American immigration politics is that the story begins at the border. The uncomfortable truth is that it begins decades earlier, in countries where the United States undermined democracy, protected corporate interests of influential Americans, funded violent regimes producing the instability that now sends desperate people north. Only by erasing that history can we turn migrants into criminals and ourselves into victims. That history matters because it changes the moral meaning of the border because if we believe migrants are simply arriving from failed countries, then enforcement can look like national self-defense. But if some are fleeing instability that American power produced, then the border becomes the place where the United States immorally converts its own history into someone else’s criminality.

That is the part we are trained not to see, because seeing it would make the flag feel less like a symbol of innocence and more like evidence requiring historical accounting. We tell ourselves the United States is democracy’s guardian, freedom’s defender, the country that protects the right of people to choose their own leaders. But in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Chile and elsewhere, the United States repeatedly undermined or helped destroy democratic movements when democracy threatened corporate profit, Cold War strategy or American dominance. (JUAN GONZALEZ, HARVEST OF EMPIRE 152-154 (2d ed. 2022)). Then, after helping make lawful life impossible in some of those places, we meet the survivors at the border with raids, detention centers, deportations and speeches about law and order.

That is not just a minor contradiction at the margins of American politics, but it is the great evasion in the immigration debate: we destroyed countries then criminalized many of the people fleeing the wreckage and taught ourselves to call that border security.

Donald Trump made this evasion brutally plain when he reportedly referred to non-European nations as “shithole countries” while contrasting them with places like Norway. The insult was obscene, but the deeper obscenity was the historical amnesia underneath it. The phrase invited Americans to look down at broken places without asking who helped break them, to treat migrants as evidence of other nations’ failures rather than as witnesses to our own, and to convert poverty, violence and political collapse into proof that desperate people deserve exclusion instead of recognition.

Consider Guatemala. In 1954, the United States helped overthrow Jacobo Árbenz, a democratically elected president whose land reforms threatened the interests of the United Fruit Company. The CIA backed the coup. The government that followed unleashed decades of terror. Democracy was shattered, unions were suppressed, land was returned to corporate power and tens of thousands died. Generations later, when Guatemalans fled poverty, violence and political instability, Americans were told they were the problem.

Honduras tells a similar story. During the Cold War, the United States treated the country as a staging ground for anti-communist operations, poured military aid into the region, supported violent forces and tolerated or enabled regimes that kidnapped, tortured and killed in the name of fighting communism. Later, when Hondurans fled instability, corruption and violence, the United States did not say, “Some of this is the predictable result of our own imperial conduct.” It said, “Secure the border.”

El Salvador tells it even more brutally. During its civil war, the United States funded and trained forces responsible for extraordinary violence, including the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion that carried out the El Mozote massacre, where civilians were tortured, raped and executed and children were killed. Yet when Salvadorans flee the consequences of that history, they are treated as trespassers rather than as human beings escaping a fire we helped light.

This is the buried truth of the immigration debate: many migrants are not coming from “failed” countries in some morally neutral sense. They are coming from countries that powerful nations, including the United States, helped fail. It is much easier to relegate that truth to the realm of irrelevance, not because we consciously choose denial, but because our minds reflexively protect the stories that make our world feel coherent, pushing aside the intolerable contradiction between America’s democratic self-image and its recurring willingness to undermine democracy abroad when power, profit or strategic advantage require it, and returning us instead to the comforting image of the flag as an unassailable symbol of democracy, freedom and national virtue. (RORY BAHADUR, A CRITICAL RACE APPROACH TO SYSTEMIC INEQUITY, 191-212 (2025)

That truth destroys the moral architecture of the border debate. If immigrants are criminals, invaders or parasites, then cruelty becomes defense. But if many immigrants are people fleeing instability we helped create, then cruelty becomes denial, historical laundering and the punishment of victims for surviving the consequences of our power.

That is why the myth of immigrant criminality matters so much. It does not merely mislead people; it performs moral work. It allows Americans to replace history with fear.

We see this most clearly in the fentanyl narrative. Politicians constantly imply that undocumented migrants are bringing fentanyl across the border and killing American children.

The claim is emotionally potent because it fuses parental terror, racial suspicion and national boundary-making into one story. But the data do not support the narrative. Fentanyl is overwhelmingly seized at legal ports of entry and interior checkpoints, not on illegal migration routes. U.S. citizens are heavily represented among convicted fentanyl traffickers. Border Patrol arrests of people crossing illegally almost never involve fentanyl possession.

Yet the lie survives because it feels right to people who have already been taught to associate brown migrants with danger. The immigrant becomes a container for everything Americans fear: drugs, crime, disorder, demographic change, economic insecurity and national decline. Once that association takes hold, facts become almost irrelevant because evidence does not merely fail to persuade. It feels like an attack on common sense.

The same thing happens with crime. Studies repeatedly show that undocumented immigration is not associated with increased crime, and some research suggests that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. But one horrific crime committed by an immigrant can become a national morality play in which the individual disappears into the category and immigration itself becomes criminal.

White Americans enjoy a privilege denied to migrants and racial outsiders: individuality. When a white man murders, bombs, shoots or terrorizes, he is usually treated as an individual failure, a loner, a troubled man, a monster, a mental-health case or an exception. His race does not become an indictment of the group. His citizenship does not become evidence that citizens are dangerous. No one says that because another white male has committed mass murder, we must close the suburbs. (RORY BAHADUR, A CRITICAL RACE APPROACH TO SYSTEMIC INEQUITY, 116-119 (2025)).

But when the perpetrator is an immigrant, Muslim, Black, Latino or otherwise outside the dominant national imagination, the crime becomes collective. The group is put on trial. The border becomes the solution. Deportation becomes justice. Exclusion becomes common sense. (RORY BAHADUR, A CRITICAL RACE APPROACH TO SYSTEMIC INEQUITY, 116-119 (2025)). The genius of anti-immigrant politics is that it converts American responsibility into American innocence. First, the United States helps destabilize countries through coups, military aid, corporate protection, anti-communist violence, economic pressure or selective indifference. Then, when people flee the resulting instability, American politicians describe their arrival as an invasion. The arsonist becomes the homeowner. The displaced become the threat. The powerful become the victims.

This is why “law and order” language is so morally deceptive in the immigration context. It begins the story at the border, as though the only relevant question is whether a person crossed legally. But history did not begin at the border. It began in boardrooms, embassies, plantations, military training facilities, covert operations and Cold War calculations, when American power decided that democracy in Latin America was acceptable only when it did not interfere with American interests.

To say this is not to claim that every migrant has a legal right to remain in the United States, to deny that governments have borders or to pretend that immigration systems require no rules. It is to insist that rules without history become instruments of moral evasion. A country cannot break societies and then treat the people fleeing those societies as though their suffering is self-created.

The cruelest thing about American immigration politics is not only that it lies about immigrants. It lies about America. It tells us we are merely defending ourselves from foreign disorder, when we have often exported disorder and then punished the people who tried to escape it. It tells us migrants are coming because they disrespect our laws, when many are coming because our power helped make lawful life impossible where they were born.

So perhaps the more honest question is not why people are coming here. It is what we did there.

And perhaps the most honest answer is that America did not merely discover broken countries. In too many places, it helped produce them, profited from them, militarized them, destabilized them, abandoned them and then criminalized the people who ran from the wreckage.

That is not border security. It is empire with a clean conscience.

The post The Immigration Debate Starts Too Late appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

I will be the first to admit that comparing GDP growth across countries is generally a silly exercise. We care about how people are living: can they afford the necessities of life, do they have time to be with family and friends, are they healthy? These are the issues that matter, and they are only loosely related to GDP.

But hey, that’s the game for the big boys and girls in Washington, so let’s play ball! Here’s what real GDP growth looks like in the United States and China since Donald Trump came into the White House.

To briefly explain what these numbers are, this is GDP measured in purchasing power parity terms by the I.M.F. This compares GDP in different countries using the same set of prices for all goods and services. This means that cars, television sets, heart surgery, and haircuts are all priced the same across countries. Naturally, this process is not perfect (the items are not identical), but it does give us a ballpark number.

I then adjusted the numbers for inflation. (The I.M.F. gives the data in nominal terms.) I couldn’t find a proper deflator for international dollars, so I just assumed a 3.0 percent inflation rate. The true number is likely somewhat higher, but this should be close enough.

I then took three-quarters of the growth reported for the period from 2024 to the projected number for 2026. This is because Trump only came into office in January of 2025. That might overstate the growth under Trump slightly, since the economy was growing more rapidly in the second half of 2024 than it has been in the quarters since then.

It also gives both countries credit for the full second quarter, even though we are only halfway through the quarter. Also, these are projections, not actual growth data, but they likely should be close.

The basic story of China’s economy growing by $2.8 trillion, with the US economy growing by a bit less than $1 trillion, should not be surprising. China’s economy is roughly one-third larger than the US economy, and it’s growing 4-5 percent a year, compared with roughly 2.0 percent annually for the US This means both that China is #1 and its margin over the US is increasing.

There’s nothing wrong with being the world’s second-largest economy. Our political leaders should be focused on ensuring people in the United States have good living standards. But if they are looking for something to boast about, they should find something other than being the world’s largest economy.

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

The post Keeping Score: China and the USA appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Louisiana Survived Katrina, Will It Survive the Petrochemical Industry?

21 years after Katrina, one of the deadliest hurricanes ever to strike the United States, Louisianans are facing a whole new kind of storm. Liquefied natural gas facilities are disrupting the ecosystem and displacing residents, and now that the Trump administration has okayed new LNG plants, things could get much worse. Louisianans are calling their neighborhoods “cancer alley”.

LNG terminals receive, process and cool gas to liquid form before large tanker ships take their products to market overseas. Travis Dardar, an Indigenous shrimp fisherman and two-time climate refugee, says the ships are dredging the waterways and threatening his livelihood. “There’s no way fishermen will coexist with this,” he shares. “We seen a 80% drop with one plant.”

He’s the founder of Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage or FISH, a coalition of commercial fishermen in rural Cameron Parish that has now expanded across the coast. I also spoke with General Russel L. Honoré, an army veteran and founder of GreenARMY, an alliance of civic, environmental, and community organizations.

“The destruction that’s coming from the increase in fires and floods and hurricanes and tornadoes, the scientists say it’s related to global warming,” he says. “And what [Trump’s] said to the companies? ‘Go do what you want.’”

As of spring 2026, there are at least 32 LNG facilities under construction or proposed in the U.S. 14 of those are in Louisiana, despite warnings about placing these facilities in a high-risk area that has seen destructive hurricanes even since Katrina. Catch this shocking report on public television and radio this week to learn more about the risks of LNG expansion and what it means for people and the planet. And for our podcast listeners, we’re talking all about unions and building worker power to combat authoritarianism.

The post Life in Cancer Alley, When a Liquified Natural Gas Facility Moves In appeared first on CounterPunch.org.