Prairieland Defendants. Image: Johnson County Sheriff’s Office.

Trump 2.0 has been marked by a barrage of attacks on social movements. A key pillar of this repression has been the use of extreme legal measures against individuals who represent broader progressive sentiments.

Consider Kilmar Ábrego García, the immigrant who resisted his wrongful deportation to El Salvador, or Mahmoud Kahlil, the former Columbia University student and Palestine activist who was one of several pro-Palestine university activists targeted by ICE.

The shocking life sentences against immigrant rights activists who protested an ICE facility in Prairieland, Texas, must be understood as part of this broader strategy in which the administration uses select individuals to pave the way for further attacks on those who have most actively resisted its far-right agenda. But the Prairieland sentences are not just another example of this repressive strategy; they represent an escalation that will have severe implications if not resisted.

What these community members did was participate in a noise demonstration outside of the Prairieland Detention Center, one of the many ICE jails across the country where immigrants are held in dehumanizing, unsafe, and deadly conditions. ICE facilities have been exposed for their inhumane conditions in which imprisoned immigrants, including children, have been psychologically tortured, physically and sexually assaulted, and served spoiled food.

Some of the Prairieland Defendants didn’t even participate directly in the protest. As Jacobin aptly put it:

Meagan sat in her car playing Nintendo, waiting to drive demonstrators home.

Daniel transported a box of magazines.

The DOJ just successfully sentenced them and seven others to 30+ years in prison what they’ve called “justice” against “Antifa terrorists.”

Sufia Khalid, deputy director of the National Security Criminal Defense Center at the Muslim Legal Fund of America, further explained the case on Democracy Now!:

the government in this case sought a novel — first time that this has happened — use of a rarely used statute: the provision of material support to terrorists. And that has not been used in the purely domestic context for this kind of conduct. That statute also does not require any connection to a domestic terrorist organization or any kind of a domestic terrorist organization. When the government sought prosecution under this statute, they sought to seek a very dangerous precedent, that now allows them to target any American engaged in protest that results in even the most minor damage to property, property destruction. Any American can be targeted that way now.

The same administration that bombs girls’ schools in the Middle East and fishing boats in the Caribbean, terrorizes immigrant communities in the United States, and kills those who defend them, such as Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, has the audacity to suggest that these activists are the real perpetrators of violence. ICE and the police who collaborate with them are responsible for the violence. Even Benjamin Song, the one activist who was sentenced to 100 years for firing a gun during the protest, did so only in self-defense, since he reasonably believed police were shooting at the peaceful protesters.

The legal precedent is set. The smear campaign against anti-ICE activists is in full swing. And this is not an isolated case.

A Weaker, More Aggressive Trump

The Prairieland convictions follow several other cases that show how the administration is preparing to carry out more extreme forms of political repression. Just before the Prairieland sentencing, the federal government indicted 15 Minnesotans who participated in the profound solidarity movement in the Twin Cities against Operation Metro Surge.

Then there are the June 10 FBI raids against eight pro-Palestine activists in Michigan who are now facing felony conspiracy charges. The FBI also recently raided an Ohio voting rights organization, and a poll worker in Syracuse shared that she was confronted by DHS agents over social media posts she made criticizing the ICE agent who murdered Renée Good.

These are just a few examples that, together with the Prairieland convictions, show how Trump is using intimidation and trumped-up charges to try to suppress those at the forefront of organizing against the Far Right and for democratic rights. But these escalations come from a position of weakness.

Trump has suffered important defeats. First was the class struggle in Minneapolis, which forced the administration to retreat and which turned people across the United States against Trump’s most extreme attacks on immigrants. This domestic defeat was followed by Iran’s defeat of the United States, in what was the most domestically unpopular war in U.S. history. Disapproval of Trump’s handling of the economy is also growing, fueled in large part by the consequences of the war on Iran. And all this comes ahead of midterm elections with commentators declaring that the Republicans have already lost. This has led to important splits in the MAGA coalition with the high-profile departures of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson.

Trump is a lame-duck president whose high-profile blunders domestically and abroad have sparked outrage. Now sectors of his coalition are, if not ready to jump ship, at least starting to look for the exits. To put it simply: his administration is weak.

Now Is the Time for a Movement in the Streets against Repression

Given Trump’s political weakness, and given the severity of the repression his administration is carrying out, there’s no reason there shouldn’t be more outrage. It’s widely acknowledged by First Amendment advocates and legal experts that the Prairieland sentencing should sound alarm bells about the future of basic democratic rights.

But right now, the focus is midterms. In their typical efforts to direct outrage against the Right out of the streets and into the ballot box, the Democratic Party is leaving the activists under attack out to dry. In this way, the Democratic Party plays a key role in allowing the Right to separate the vanguard of our movements — such as the Prairieland Defendants, the Minnesota 15, and the Michigan 8 — from the broader sectors of society who sympathize with the fights that these activists represent but are more inclined to follow the lead of traditional leaderships connected to the Democrats.

This does not mean a movement against repression isn’t possible. The No Kings marches, for example, have shown that the base of the Democratic Party isn’t content to wait for November to express their opposition to the Far Right. This dynamic of a base prepared to fight, despite the tepid approach of organizations that are looked to for leadership, also has expressions in the labor movement, as was shown by the Labor Notes conference earlier in June.

Millions have mobilized in the streets against Trump’s attacks. Similarly, the rise of DSA as a major player in national politics, with an army of thousands of canvassers, shows how a combination of socialist ideas, anti-imperialism and solidarity with Palestine, hatred of ICE, and hatred of the rich is politicizing more and more people across the country.

And while the immigrant rights movement hasn’t seen anything as profound as the January 23 economic shutdown in Minneapolis, it remains a part of the national political landscape, threatening to spark new expressions of class struggle at any moment, as was shown in the confrontation with ICE at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, and in ICE’s recent decision to sell seven warehouses, in part because of the movement’s work to oppose detention centers.

For the various sectors under attack and that have shown an interest in fighting Trump, it’s necessary to build a resistance to these attacks in the streets, clearly demanding freedom for the Prairieland Defendants and all those imprisoned by ICE, as well as an immediate end to the persecution of the Minnesota 15, the Michigan 8, and all activists under attack.

It’s key that unions take up this fight. We’ve already seen what that could look like. SEIU, for example, has mobilized with force when this administration has attacked its members, from David Huerta to Rümeysa Öztürk. That solidarity and power to mobilize must be deployed to defend all those under attack by Trump, and every union that claims to oppose Trump must do so, using the resources and members they put toward campaigning for Democrats to instead build demonstrations against political repression. The same must be done by the NGOs that routinely use their role in the social movements to direct everyone back into the Democratic Party through electoral campaigns.

DSA, with its more than 100,000 members, its army of canvassers in NYC, and its national spotlight, also has a key role to play in building this fight, but every organization of the Left must join, given that socialists, communists, and anarchists can expect to be targeted by further attacks.

Everyone, however, can play a role in building this much-needed movement. The experience of Minneapolis showed what happens when outrage builds from below and community members organize themselves instead of waiting for specific organizations or political figures to take the lead.

It’s time to act. Confronting and defeating this repression is as possible as it is existential.

The post Sentencing of the Prairieland Defendants Necessitates a Massive Movement Against ICE and Repression appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

LAPD guarding the entrance to the LAPD Rampart Division building. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

What exactly are Americans celebrating this Fourth of July?

Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all people possess inalienable rights, we now live under a government that increasingly behaves as though rights belong to the government to distribute, restrict and revoke as it sees fit.

Freedom has become conditional.

Constitutional rights have become political bargaining chips.

Government now claims the authority to decide which religious beliefs deserve accommodation and which may be excluded—a clear violation of the First Amendment’s warning against both establishing a religion and favoring or disfavoring one religion over another.

It insists that some speakers deserve constitutional protection while others may be censored, surveilled or punished—a violation of the right to free speech.

It proclaims itself the defender of unborn life while dismantling programs that protect the health and welfare of children already born.

It welcomes some immigrants with extraordinary speed while denying others the full measure of due process promised by the Constitution.

It pays lip service to equality under law while dismantling programs designed to ensure equal opportunity and root out discrimination.

It invokes the sanctity of children while narrowing which children may claim the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

It insists that no one is above the law while expanding presidential immunity and removing many of the traditional checks on executive power.

Rights that the Declaration of Independence described as inalienable are increasingly treated as permissions—granted when convenient, withheld when inconvenient, and interpreted according to political priorities rather than constitutional principle.

That is not merely bad policy.

It is a repudiation of the American Revolution, because the Revolution began with one radical claim: freedom is our birthright.

To listen to those in power, however, freedom is a privilege reserved for a select few: the politically favored, the ideologically acceptable, the obedient, the compliant, the useful.

The Declaration of Independence advanced a very different idea: that all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

That was the real revolution.

America’s founders may have disagreed—often grievously and hypocritically—about who qualified as “the people,” but they were united in one essential conviction: our rights do not come from government.

The government exists to serve us.

Government exists to safeguard and protect our inalienable rights—not ration them, redefine them or revoke them.

That distinction matters.

Once government is allowed to decide whose rights count, rights cease to be rights at all.

They become privileges.

And privileges can always be revoked.

For 250 years, Americans have treated the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s birth certificate, but the Declaration was never merely a birth certificate—it was a warning label.

It was written by people who understood that freedom is fragile, power is relentless, and no generation remains free simply because an earlier generation fought for liberty.

It catalogued the abuses of a ruler who had placed himself above the law, treated the people as subjects rather than sovereigns, undermined representative government, obstructed justice, maintained standing armies, imposed surveillance, abused power and waged war against the very people he claimed to govern.

The names have changed. The machinery has changed. The technology has changed.

The danger has not.

That is why the Constitution matters.

The Constitution translated the warnings of the Declaration into law.

Through separated powers, checks and balances, federalism, and a Bill of Rights, the founders sought to bind government down with what Thomas Jefferson called “the chains of the Constitution.”

Yet those constitutional restraints are increasingly being loosened—not by formal amendment, but by precedent, emergency powers, executive practice, bureaucratic discretion and public indifference.

The warnings are no longer theoretical.

Even the judiciary has increasingly become part of that transformation.

Rather than serving as a reliable constitutional brake on concentrated power, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly removed barriers that once restrained the executive branch: presidential immunity, limits on nationwide injunctions, and expanded presidential power to fire independent agency officials.

Each decision may be explained on its own legal reasoning. Together they tell a larger constitutional story: the presidency grows stronger, while the people’s ability to restrain it grows weaker.

The founders would have recognized this danger immediately. They had just fought a revolution against concentrated executive power.

Tyranny today may no longer look like King George III, but it is no less dangerous when it arrives wrapped in the language of national security, public safety, emergency management, border control, religious liberty, law and order, governmental efficiency and executive necessity.

The danger is not simply that government power is expanding. It is that government is claiming the authority to decide who possesses constitutional rights and who does not.

This is how constitutional government is hollowed out.

Not all at once.

Not always with tanks in the streets.

Not always with a formal suspension of the Constitution.

It recedes gradually—emergency by emergency, exception by exception, court ruling by court ruling, executive order by executive order, crisis by crisis.

It disappears when due process becomes optional, habeas corpus is treated as expendable, speech is chilled, surveillance becomes routine, government secrecy expands, religious freedom becomes selective, citizenship becomes negotiable, oversight bodies can be fired at will, and executive power grows while meaningful accountability contracts.

It disappears when “we the people” grow so accustomed to fusion centers, surveillance cameras, geofence warrants, AI-assisted policing, militarized SWAT raids, civil asset forfeiture, government watchlists, facial recognition systems, warrantless tracking, endless wars, executive decrees and perpetual states of emergency that constitutional government becomes little more than a ceremonial ideal.

Every emergency becomes justification for another exception. Every crisis becomes an opportunity to normalize another expansion of authority. Temporary measures become permanent institutions.

This is how you condition a populace to become accustomed to tyranny.

The unfinished work of the American Revolution was never about building a stronger government. It was about preserving a free people capable of restraining their government.

Every generation inherits the Revolution unfinished.

Every generation must decide whether to continue its work—or abandon it.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, freedom does not defend itself.

Thus, the question before us is no longer whether America has reached its 250th birthday. The question is whether Americans still believe what made that birthday worth celebrating in the first place.

Preserving that birthright is our responsibility.

Courts will not always protect liberty. Congress will not always defend its authority. Presidents will rarely surrender power voluntarily.

Which leaves only one remaining guardian of constitutional government: We the people.

The post The Unfinished Revolution: When Rights Become Privileges appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Isaac Jefferson, an enslaved blacksmith at Monticello, photographed in 1845. Tracy W. McGregor Library of American History, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. Public Domain.

The hoopla surrounding the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence seemingly reflects another unfortunate instance of historical amnesia. Whether immersed in the white supremacist narrative promoted by Trump and his enablers or some liberal version of the high mindedness of the Founders, we are being asked to forget the foundational and ongoing tragedies of the United States of America.

As Isabel Wilkerson wrote in the “Afterword” to her brilliant book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent: “We are in an unspoken state of emergency. We have learned that freedom and democracy are not a destination or settled state of being but a fragile proposition, and their preservation is an ever-present duty of each and every one of us who cherishes liberty.”

Moreover, the blinkered vision of our national history remains an impediment to achieving freedom and democracy, let alone celebrating the full context of the liberty promised by “Declaration of Independence.” James Baldwin’s excavation of the “collection of myths to which white Americans cling” in his still resonant 1963 Jeremiad, The Fire Next Time, provides a starting point. Among those myths to which a majority of whites adhere, according to Baldwin, are the following: “that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors…”

In a more recent and compelling work by Eddie Glaude, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, he excoriates our “collective forgetting,” especially as it underscores the continuing racial injustices and inequalities “at the heart of our nation.” Furthermore as racial justice activist Tim Wise observes, “we aren’t to blame for history…either its horrors or its legacy it has left us. But we are responsible for how we bear that legacy and what we make of it in our present.”

So, what is that legacy and what do we make of it in the present? The so-called American experiment was part and parcel of the establishment of settler colonialism in the 16^th and 17^th century – a colonialism that entailed the extermination of Indigenous people and the enslavement of people of African descent. Throughout the colonial period and right up to the War of Independence, violent conflicts ensued as settlers continued to push against Indigenous territory on the frontier.

It is not surprising that the author of the Declaration of Independence, having cited fomenting “insurrection” by “merciless Indian savages” as one of the grievances against King George III would himself become the advocate for merciless policies towards Native Americans. In instructing his Secretary of War in 1807 on the preparations for military engagements against any recalcitrant or resisting Native Americans, Jefferson wrote “that if ever we are constrained to life the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down until that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.

As an enslaver of Black bodies, Jefferson was well aware of the daily tortures endured by the enslaved whether on the auction block or in slave labor camps. While the legal and political documents undergirding the founding of the nation may have obfuscated the violent reality imposed on African Americans, the forms of social and civil death they suffered were rationalized by a racial ideology which according to the historian, Barbara Jean Fields, “supplied the means of explaining slavery to a people whose terrain was a republic founded on radical doctrines of liberty and natural rights.”

Perhaps there is no better revelation of the duplicity in the celebration of “Declaration of Independence,” with its vaunted enunciation of the equality of all, than Frederick Douglass’s famous address in 1852: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.”

The celebration of the Declaration of Independence while Trump perpetuates his corruption and vicious racism and xenophobia could be seen, once again, as “bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.” Added to Trump’s racist and xenophobic agenda are the recent reactionary and white supremacist decisions by the Supreme Court on voting and immigrant rights. To blithely retreat to the backyard barbecue on July 4^th while our national house appears, figuratively, on fire, is another aspect of the ‘collective forgetting” of the past and the turning away of our present political tasks. If there is one excerpt from the Declaration of Independence that should be salvaged as showing the way forward, it is the following passage: “That when any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.”

The post Second Thoughts About Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Ginsberg with his partner, poet Peter Orlovsky, in 1978. Photo: Herbert Rusche. CC BY-SA 3.0

Here we are at the end of a month-long celebration of the life and work of the poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-2026) and I haven’t said a word about his sexual politics, which I described to a friend—who helped launch the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in New York—as “complex.” I know I can’t make up for what I didn’t say and this will definitely not be the last word on the subject. Far from it.

No one recently has written extensively about Ginsberg’s sexual politics, but about 15 years ago, the American writer Edmund White, a force in the LGBTQ community, noted that “Ginsberg bore the traces of the general homosexual oppression of his epoch, but he did more than anyone else of his generation to overcome his gay self-hatred and to take a pro-gay militant stand.” White added that “He was an apostle of tenderness among men.” Perhaps so, but not always as in poems like “Please Master” in which he says, “Fuck me more violent.” 

To say that he did more than anyone else to overcome gay self-hatred is to give him more credit than is due him. What about the rioters at Compton’s in San Francisco in 1966 and at the Stonewall three years later and also what about the thousands of gay men around the US who demanded to be treated with respect and dignity? 

Ginsberg must have known that I wasn’t gay or queer. He never made a pass at me, suggested we have sex or even touched or kissed me, though we were alike in many ways: Jewish and from lefty east coast families, both Columbia College graduates who were at odds with some of the same Cold War liberal anti-communist professors who would not assign any book by Walt Whitman, William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson or Virginia Woolf. And they thought they were free thinkers and intellectuals. When the Sixties came along they wanted their students to be arrested and jailed to teach them a lesson.

The idea of being “fucked in the ass” and screaming “with joy” didn’t and still doesn’t appeal to me, nor does getting “blown” by sailors, both of them sex acts described in Howl. The only kind of fucking that appealed to me in Ginsberg’s world was the kind he described in “America,” where he tells the nation, “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” 

The heterosexual acts in Howl didn’t appeal to me any more than the queer sexual acts when I first read them. Neal Cassady, “the secret hero of the poem,” sweetens “the snatches of a million girls.” That sounds like a macho fantasy and sexual abuse.

Rereading Howl after all these years, it strikes me that the poet positioned himself on a continuum that makes room for many different varieties of sexual experience, both “gay” and “straight” and everything in-between. Perhaps Sonny Barger of the Hells Angels hit the nail right on the head when he apparently said of Ginsberg, “For a guy who wasn’t straight, he was the straightest person I ever met.” He meant that as a compliment. 

A genuine utopian, Ginsberg made and shared more than one picture of heaven. One of them was of a big bed with a small tribe of young people all of them sucking and fucking. In our day and age of sexual repression, along with money making pornography and misogyny, Ginsberg’s idea of sexual paradise looks as subversive as ever. We don’t have to act on it. We probably shouldn’t. But we might imagine a world in which pleasure isn’t punished and the pursuit of happiness in bed and everywhere else is encouraged.

The post The Sexual Politics of Allen Ginsberg  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

House, Knappa, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

People’s negative assessments of the economy continue to be somewhat of a mystery. The recent run-up in gas prices and inflation more generally is unambiguously bad news, but is this the worst economy ever, as some of the consumer confidence measures have been showing recently? Real income for those at the middle and bottom has generally been rising by standard measures, so it seems that we’re missing something, and I’m not sure any of us have figured out what.

My friend, Jared Bernstein, argues that a big part of the story is that consumers are unhappy not just because of inflation, but because prices are high. Implicitly, they expect them to come down and are unhappy that they don’t. I’m not entirely happy with this story, primarily because I remember the 1980s. Back then we had a big surge in inflation in the 1970s, which was brought down by a severe recession (actually two recessions) from 1980 to 1982.

But prices never actually fell; we just got the rate of inflation down from peaks of more than 10% to around 3-4%. And most people seemed happy, or at least they told survey takers they were happy.

I will come back to this issue. I think there might be something to the prices are high complaint, but maybe in a somewhat different way than Jared has laid out. I do think we need to consider the possibility that people don’t see inflation in the same way economists measure it.

I’ll address two areas where I think the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Personal Consumption Expenditure Deflator (PCE) may miss part of the story. Then I will talk a bit more generally about how we measure inflation versus how it might be perceived by consumers.

Fees Charged to Renters

The Guardian had a great investigative piece this week, by Tracie McMillian, about the fees charged to tenants by the real estate management company Greystar. According to the piece, Greystar tacks a wide range of fees for everything from sewage and trash pickup to access to amenities, even to the cost of processing rent payments. According to a study cited in the article, these fees averaged 20% of rents.

Greystar is just one company, but the piece indicates that it manages approximately 1.1 million rental units across the country. That by itself would be more than 2.5% of all rental units. But the piece indicates that these sorts of fees are a common practice among real estate management companies, even if others may not be quite as extreme as Greystar.

In principle, fees should be incorporated in the measure of rents used by the CPI and PCE, but it’s not clear that they would be fully picked up. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) sends a survey taker to people’s doors who ask them about the rent they pay. They are supposed to tell them this includes the various fees, but that fact may not always be clearly conveyed. And in any case, tenants often don’t know of some of these fees, so they wouldn’t be able to tell the survey taker about them even if they did understand the question correctly.

It’s not clear how much of these fees would be missed and how much difference it would make in our measures of inflation, but the two rental components (rent proper and owner’s equivalent rent [OER]for owner-occupied housing) account for just over a third of the weight in the CPI. If we missed 3-4 percentage points of rental inflation in the last five years due to uncounted fees, it would matter for the overall measure of inflation. (The OER index is based on the rent index, so a mismeasurement in the rent index would also affect the OER index.)

This is not the only place where inaccurate prices could affect measured inflation. Last year the Guardian had a piece about how Dollar Stores often charged people more at the checkout counter than the price shown on their shelves. They apparently program their registers to record the prices they want to charge, but they don’t always update the prices on the shelf to reflect increases.

This can leave many people surprised at the checkout counter when they find their bill is considerably more than what they expected to pay. That’s bad news for them, but it’s also a bad story for our measurements of inflation. The BLS price checker is looking at the price on the shelf; they wouldn’t know if the store had programmed a different price in its system.

The Dollar store chains are big on their own, but apparently, other chains also have similar issues, even if not to the same extent as Dollar. While part of the story may be deliberate deception, part of it is simply understaffing. The change in the programmed price can be done in seconds. Changing the price on the shelves can require considerable staff time, especially if items are individually marked. If most of the price changes are upward, the failure to accurately record them will lead to an understatement of inflation.

People Might See Home Insurance in a Different Way than BLS

Most homeowners have home insurance. In fact, banks generally require insurance as a condition for getting a mortgage. According to research from the Dallas Fed, the average homeowner with a mortgage spent $2,700 on home insurance last year, which would come to 2.7% of median family income. That’s up from 2.0% before the pandemic.

Despite the large and rapidly growing (can you say, “climate change?”) amount that homeowners spend on insurance, its weight in the CPI is less than 0.28%, roughly the same weight as household cleaning products. Home insurance has such a low weight is because BLS is only counting the cost of insuring items in the home, treating it as tenants’ insurance, not the cost of insuring the structure itself.

There is a logic to this decision having to do with treating housing as a consumption item rather than an investment. That’s a longer story, but the simple point here is that every homeowner treats what they pay for insurance as money out of their pocket. And that’s the whole premium, not just the part that covers furniture. This would be another reason that our measures of inflation might undercount the inflation people see in their lives.

High Prices and Falling Prices

Picking up on Jared’s point about prices being high, it is worth noting that spending on food has been consistently falling as a share of total spending for many decades. In the 70s food spending was around 13% of total spending. That had fallen to less than 10% by the early 90s, less than 9% by 2010, and in 2020, just before the pandemic, it was just 7.6% of total spending. (These data are taken from the relative importance measures from the CPI.)

Given this longstanding pattern, people might reasonably have expected food to continue to take up a smaller share of their budget. But that has not happened. Food now accounts for roughly 8.3% of the average household’s expenditures. It is understandable that people would be upset about their food budget being a growing burden. And of course, this is a considerably larger share of the budget for people at the bottom and middle of the income distribution than the top.

I have also noted that the index for medical care likely bears little relationship to what people see as the cost of medical care. The index measures change in the cost of specific items, like a particular drug, or a specific procedure, like hip replacement surgery.

Few people would have any idea what these procedures cost. They would know what they pay for their insurance, their co-pays and deductibles, and out-of-pocket expenses. Those would be very indirectly related to the rate of medical inflation shown by the CPI. In a period where the government is cutting back subsidies in programs like the ACA and Medicaid, what households have to pay for their care is almost certainly rising far more rapidly than the CPI measure of medical care inflation.

Is It Really the Worst Economy Ever?

I can agree that our measures of inflation might be missing some price rises, but I still don’t think that can get us the worst economy of the post-World War II era. Unemployment almost hit 10% in 2009, and 11.0% in 1982. Are things really worse today when the unemployment rate is 4.3%?

As many have noted, part of this is the hyper-partisanship of the times. Republicans say things are awful when a Democrat is in the White House and vice versa. It is likely that social media is partly to blame, as it seems to amplify negative stories. (When have you seen good news go viral, other than the Knicks winning?) I’d like to say that extreme inequality is part of the picture, but I don’t have evidence to back that up.

Anyhow, it seems we need to keep putting things on the table for consideration. There is a big disconnect between our standard measures of economic well-being and how people tell us they feel about the economy. There should be some way to explain the difference.

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

The post Why People Say the Economy is Bad: Fees and Insurance appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Statue of Lincoln, Indianapolis. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

A half score and one year ago, the white marble eyes of Abraham Lincoln gazed eastward across the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, overlooking the collateral damage caused to the pool by the heavy construction of the World War II Memorial.

Skies roiled over Washington, DC, during June 2015, one of the wettest Junes on record to date, with thunderstorms, street flooding, hail, tornadoes, and winds that toppled trees. Weathermen forecast which way the wind would blow from the remnants of Tropical Storm Bill, now moving up from Guatemala.

Meanwhile, a six-day heat wave was cresting on the afternoon of the 16^th, the hottest day of the year to date, during the sixth consecutive year that June temperatures trended above normal. Even the Washington Post reported blazing sun at high noon.

Abe’s eyes looked straight through the curved thickness of the WWII Memorial’s Freedom Wall to the side where 4,048 gold-plated stars commemorated American casualties. His eyes then traced with studied regard the elliptical path of the bronze Rope of Unity that bound together 56 pillars representing each of the states and territories that had joined the fight, together.

Sunlight splashed colors from the twin fountains of the Rainbow Pool. Lincoln recalled how the rainbows looked before the waterworks were split apart and surrounded by pillars with their glints of grey that glanced back at him from Kershaw granite, hewn and hauled in from the South Carolina underground. He kept his mind on the math. Add 400,000 American casualties of World War II to 600,000 casualties of the Civil War, and you get a cost of one million American souls.

Lincoln’s republican soul uplifted itself to the memory of Cato’s final hour as dramatized on stage by Addison’s famous play. The ancient senator, with book and sword in hand, drew inspiration from Plato’s reasoning as he turned the sword on himself rather than surrender to Caesar’s dictatorship. A soul could reach for immortality in courageous service to republican ideals such as these.

Lincoln, in his 1859 “Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions” quoted Cato’s soliloquy, yanking the meaning of it straight down to the ground floor. Just as Cato’s soul could express “a pleasing hope—a fond desire—a longing after” immortality, so could the soul of Young America yearn for “territory,” the better to “extend the area of freedom.”

Honest Abe satirized Young America who, he explained, “is anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations and colonies, provided, always, they have land, and have not any liking for his interference. As to those who have no land, and would be glad of help from any quarter, he considers they can afford to wait a few hundred years longer.” Truly, the soul of Young America thrilled to the manifest destiny of real estate, landing the meaning of things a full stop down from what Plato had taught Addison’s Cato.

The lecture of 1859 confessed to other propositions, namely that Johannes Gutenberg’s 1436 invention of moveable-type printing was preceded by Antonio Gonzales’s 1434 “invention of negroes, or, of the present mode of using them.”

Lincoln’s lecture doesn’t consider Socrates’s warning to Phaedrus that writing, of itself, cannot recall truth–a lesson that he could have applied exponentially to printing. Books propagandizing African slavery still get shuffled next to Plato’s dialogues, necessitating one bloody rectification after another.

Meanwhile, Abe maintained his stoic pose for a FaceTime selfie now being shared with an iPhone 6 Plus from the steps of his memorial, at about the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. demanded sufficient funds to fulfill the Emancipation Proclamation. Abe glanced through his Georgia-marble eyes toward the Tidal Basin of West Potomac Park, checking to see that King’s memorial of Hope still kept watch in the heat.

Returning to the sight of splashing light at the Rainbow Pool, Lincoln tried to recall how Phaedrus learned from Socrates the infinite worth of love. The soul’s “longing after” immortality that Plato taught was the yearning that flows from the divine madness of love, a topic also well treated in Addison’s play. Those goosebumps that overcome you when you catch sight of your lover is but your soul’s yearning to grow feathers and fly back to heaven where the soul-stars move together in divine bliss.

Socrates was a skilled stone cutter–a master mason–who knew very well how to cut a granite pillar or a marble block to precise dimensions of sacred geometry. And he could inspire sacred geometries to rise up from within the souls of his students, whether from Phaedrus, Plato himself, or from the most unschooled slave child, as he demonstrated one day to the incredulous slave master Meno.

Some of the lessons that Socrates taught stuck with his students over time. It was Phaedrus who steered a weary drinking party toward a discussion of love’s glories, transforming forever the meaning of the word Symposium. Nor was that party scandalized by the whimsical speech of Aristophanes (which would get the Symposium banned from a Texas university syllabus in 2026).

Other lessons that Socrates taught boomeranged. He tried to get Alcibiades to take seriously the study of justice to no effect whatsoever and was likely held personally responsible for not having effectuated less disastrous learning outcomes. In the end, it was the Persians who dispatched Alcibiades, just as Socrates had tried to warn him would happen if Alcibiades did not take better care of himself.

With the sun blazing over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Abe overheard someone’s iPhone playing the Orson Welles reading of The Allegory of the Cave from The Republic, Book VII, a timeless invitation to inquiry within: Am I living in the cave or out of it? If I’m living in the cave, is it because I have returned, or because I never left? When I lift mine eyes from the reflection of the blazing sun to squint at the sun itself, what part of the allegory am I inviting myself to take in?

After a while, Abraham Lincoln’s eyes begin to drink in the cooling reflections of sunset, dusk, and night. With the moon gone new and dark, the starlight of stately souls resumes its divine and brilliant pageant. Here and there, Old Abe catches the reflection of a falling star. But he keeps his mind on the math.  On a clear night, he never shirks his duty to count each soul reflected in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool until he reaches at least to a million and one.

The post Abe Lincoln’s Reflecting Pool: A Republican Allegory appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Still from Poltergeist.

When something is not working, abandon it.  The policymaker and politician, the latter often inclined to populist temptation and the endless tapping for votes, will decide to make a state of wrongheadedness even worse. The evidence is starting to grow that Australia’s daft delving into the world of regulating a child’s access to social media (the arbitrary limit when social media virginity is shed is 16 years) is falling flat.  Here, we have the continued, easy target that keeps nourishing the blundering, self-pleasuring prefects in Canberra: irresponsible companies with their social media platforms luring children into a cyberworld of harmful content and damaging consequences.  We also have the object of holy salvation: children untouched by the world.  Punish the social media platform (though in small spanks rather than vigorous lashings) or at the very least, convince them to place age-set limits to accounts; spare the unfortunate, ignorant child supposedly incapable of navigating technology they can master in a fraction of the time their parents can.

The process leading to the passing of the legislation was, it should be remembered, also suspect.  With parental certitude and forced caring, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke of saving childhood before the ravaging predations of Silicon Valley.  Miraculously, children would cease being screen gorgers and become fit-as-fiddle athletes, climb trees or play the tuba.  The underlying, somewhat sinister message was that of a moral panic taking hold.  And where such panic exercises itself, the urges to control, monitor and police tend to follow with molesting predictability.   The children become a pretext and, if anything, ought to be ignored.  Hence the conspicuous absence of extensive consultation with youth or their involvement prior to the drafting process.

The resulting Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 (Cth) is not sailing well.  It was the subject of a recent analysis in the medical journal BMJ by researchers from the University of Newcastle.  The observational study of 408 children between the ages of 12 and 17 found that over 85% of the participants “reported using social media platforms subject to the Act at follow-up”.  Between 54-68% reported the use of their own accounts; 66% “reported exposure to platform age verification, most commonly self-declared age (24-39%) or uploading a picture (‘selfie’) (13-27%).”  Instances of circumvention or the use of social media via a private browser (6-11%) were also noted.

While it is easy to loose oneself in the blissful undergrowth of statistical data, the conclusion of the study is telling and, for the righteous in policy, damning: “Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescent under 16 years.”

The academic study adds some dour bulk to the commentary showing the ban to be fatuous and embarrassingly ineffective.  Data provided by the parental monitoring company Qustodio to Crikey in March would not have made pleasant reading to the prohibitionists.  “While TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat all saw a decrease in use by Australians aged 10-15, the majority of teens who had been using social media platforms pre-ban remained on the services afterwards.”

That same month, the tireless Mike Masnick of Techdirt, never missing the chance to excoriate Australia’s buffoonish legislation, suggested that the ban had resulted in something far worse than simple failure.  Fine if it was simply a case of having to do something for the children and failing for want of perfection.  “But that’s not what happened.  The ban didn’t leave things where they were.  It made things actively worse through a mechanism that was entirely predictable.”  The ban entailed “a test of technical sophistication, rather than a test of vulnerability.  The kids who can’t figure out how to get around it – or who don’t have friends or older siblings to help them – are the kids who are already isolated or lack the technical skills to bypass a block.”  The thick and lonely always get it in the neck.

Add to this the utter absence of punitive grit in the enforcement mechanism – so far no fines have been imposed (they can be as high as AU$49.5 million) for a failure of the platforms to comply – and one wonders where the utility of this feat of ineffectualness lies.

What, then, does the government do?  Not to abandon a silly policy to please parents who should know better, or voters unaware about the behaviour of children or, for that matter, social media platforms.  Instead, Albanese tells his fellow parliamentarians on June 25 that there is “more to do” regarding a ban that is “complex”.  His less-than-able Gauleiter, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, far from admitting failure, simply claims a lack of sufficient teeth in enforcing the ban. “I don’t have potent powers,” she lamented to the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this month.

Worried about remarks made by the surly commissioner, Albanese has returned to the theme of control.  “We can’t allow the power that these companies, which are unaccountable, which get massive amounts of … profit and have extraordinary power.  We need to make sure that Australians are in charge of this.”  His proposal: to increase the threshold of financial penalties to AU$99 million. For the PM, it was abundantly “clear big tech are not doing enough to comply with the law – there are still too many children on social media.”  The eSafety commissioner would also be vested with greater powers to compel social media companies to furnish evidence of what had been done to prevent those under 16 years from opening or using an account, including from third parties.

Globally, the desire to hold back youth from perceived corruption, ennui and neuroses at the hands of nasty tech titans is underway.  The Australian PM is pleased, for instance, that 16 countries have also decided to replicate the failing ban, because nothing sells in politics like a moralistic prohibition that doesn’t work.  This has little to do with matronly urges to protect so much as the opportunist’s desire to exploit a situation.  Children are not inherently innocent, charmingly ignorant, and hopelessly impotent as their false defenders assume.  They are more than capable of making decisions and attaining an understanding of sophistication and worth regarding the use of technology.  In time, as is often the case, they will end up teaching that very generation wishing to close doors how to not only open them but understand what’s behind the barrier, however ghastly it might be.

The post Adding to Failure: Amending Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Ballot drop box, Portland, Oregon. Photo: Motoya Nakamura, Multnomah County Elections Division.

On June 2, the US Postal Service proposed a new rule in the Federal Register on standards for handling of mail ballots, with public comment open through July 2. That rule was issued pursuant to an executive order by US president Donald Trump.

While the proposal unambiguously claims that “states would retain full control over who would (or would not) be able to vote by mail in federal election,” US Postmaster General David Steiner, told Congress that in actuality, the organization he runs would refuse to deliver ballots in states which don’t turn over voter data to the federal government.

While a federal judge has already nixed the scheme, it will probably end up working its way to the US Supreme Court.

Even if more courts, possibly including SCOTUS, act to prevent the US Snail from seizing control of elections, it seems to me that the message — “don’t mess with our votes” — isn’t really getting through to the US government.

Examples need to be made, and I think there’s a way to make one: A federal grand jury.

While the usual perception of grand juries is that they indict only those whose indictments are sought by prosecutors — who, in the old saying, “could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich” — there’s nothing to PREVENT such a jury from handing down indictments against whomever, for whatever, they want.

What we need is a grand jury whose members are willing to get together, talk things over, and charge David Steiner and his underlings, per Title 18, Section § 371 of the US Code, with the federal crime of “conspiracy.”

What did Steiner and those who helped him craft and promulgate the rule conspire to do? They conspired to — and have publicly confessed to conspiring to — violate Title 18, Section §1703:

“Whoever, being a Postal Service officer or employee, unlawfully secretes, destroys, detains, delays, or opens any letter, postal card, package, bag, or mail … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”

I’ve got mixed opinions on voting itself (for one thing, I’m not sure it accomplishes much), and strong opinions on mail (the government should get entirely out of the matter and let the private sector handle it), but this particular matter is about rule of law.

Regardless of whether I like the laws, or how they’re made, or who gets to make them, I’m a big supporter of holding the government and its officials to the laws they claim are so important for our “protection.”

This is such a clear-cut case of a government official openly announcing that he’s conspired with others to violate the laws he’s sworn to abide by and enforce that just suing for relief isn’t enough.

David Steiner really needs to spend some time — even if only a few hours between his arrest and a presidential pardon — locked in a small room, wearing an orange coverall, contemplating the gravity of his offenses. That would be good not just for his soul, but for our freedoms.

The post Mail Voting Proposal: Make an Example of Steiner appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Logging on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Most of the West’s perennial wildfire plague is due to human stupidity. But it’s not just the careless people who start the fires, it’s also all the people that voted for politicians who ignored the climate crisis or called it a hoax. The primary risk factor  for increased wildfire vulnerability is hotter, drier forests. Were it not for major election interference by Jeb Bush, and a nakedly partisan Supreme Court, we would have had Al Gore as President, and America might have led the world away from a suicidal leap off the cliff of climate disaster. But at least we were saved from having a “wooden personality” in the White House.

Instead, 26 years later, chasing America’s bumbling descent into psychotic irrationality, much of the world has also thrown in the towel on preserving an inhabitable climate. We have a President who is so malevolently abusive to the environment he is grabbing the planet by the pussy, spending billions bribing companies to sabotage clean energy.

But as long as we have all paid dearly for front row seats to this UFCSC (Ultimate Fighting Climate Stupidity Championships) cage match, let’s take a look at another contender, the US Forest Service. For decades the agency has peddled a fairy tale that Western forests are morbidly dense and unhealthy because they have put out too many fires over the last 90 years, and that’s why we have so many, massive forest fires. Solution? 1.“Fuels reduction treatments” and 2. “Prescribed burns.” The euphemisms are deliberately crafted to make you think our forests are sick, and the Forest Service “doctor” will make house calls to do forest CPR. And for good measure, this medicine will also protect your home in the forest.

This is wildfire management malpractice.

Yes, the agency has a lot of “in-house” research to support their claim.  But the agency lives, eats, and breathes conflict of interest. The agency operates under the umbrella of the US Dept. of Agriculture, which treats forests as a commodity resource. It’s joined at the hip to the logging industry. It promotes lumber and wood products with videos like this that encourage burning wood for heat, the most polluting way to heat a home, and more carbon intensive than using coal. The agency receives funding selling trees to the timber industry. This obvious conflict of interest is institutionalized.

In contrast to agency research, over 40 studies from different countries and independent researchers tell almost the opposite story. In the largest study ever done, the authors concluded forest “thinning,” accelerates and intensifies wildfires. They wrote, “Dense, mature forests tend to burn less…because they have higher canopy cover and more shade, which creates a cooler, more  moist microclimate.” The higher density of trees of all sizes can act as a windbreak, buffering gust-driven flames and limiting flying embers. “Thinning and other activities that remove trees, especially mature trees, reverse those effects, creating hotter, drier, and windier conditions.” Consistent with that research, photographs of the current Cottonwood Fire, the most destructive in Utah history and largest in the nation, suggest the fire is burning right through areas that had been thinned.

Continuing the medical theme, thinning our forests to prevent wildfires makes no more sense than thinning your brain to prevent Alzheimer’s.  It’s just making things worse.

We know of Forest Service employees who have been fired for challenging the agency’s forest thinning orthodoxy. Communications with researchers (including those with PhDs in ecology) in federal agencies and other institutions characterize the differences in conclusions drawn by independent research compared to Forest Service-connected research this way:

1.  The burning and thinning mindset has been institutionalized, and it is difficult to change. It takes a long time to convince people that the strategy is not working.  Employees are reluctant to consider what they have been doing is failing or making it worse.

2.  There is a long-term budget commitment to “active forest management” so land managers want to take advantage of those available funds. Follow the money.

3. Land management agencies (primarily the Forest Service and BLM) want to be perceived as being proactive because the public expects them to do something to put out or prevent fire, to keep their homes safe. Land managers don’t want to be blamed if there is a poor outcome (especially when houses, cabins or other structures burn) which feeds the public’s expectation that something can and should be done.

This is also climate malpractice.

Pre-emptive deforestation is also an obvious climate disaster. Every tree cut down loses its carbon absorption, and every tree burned releases all that carbon into the atmosphere immediately when we can least afford it. We are contemptuous at deforestation of the Amazon knowing the “lungs of the earth” are being mutilated and its climate buffering is being lost.  But when we do the same to American forests, many cheer it on because it’s branded “fuels reduction.”

This is public health malpractice

Smoke from wood burning, whether from a fireplace, wildfire, pizza oven, or prescribed burn, is the most toxic type of pollution the average person ever inhales. New research gives another black eye to the presumptive therapeutics of “prescribed burns.”  On a national scale, 10,000 people die annually from wildfire smoke, but slightly more than that die from prescribed burn smoke.  Per hectare burned, the overall health burden and daily health care costs were found to be nearly five times higher for prescribed burns compared to wildfires. This contradicts claims that human health is being protected by prescribed burns.

The apocalyptic megadrought strangling the life out of the American West, turning our forests into bonfires and smothering us in toxic smoke is not random bad luck, it is the direct and predicted result of decades of human caused greenhouses gases, climate policy failures, and pervasive political propaganda.  And the Forest Service is only making  it worse, blasting us with a firehose of stupidity with their “fuel reduction” solution, ironically adding “fuel to the fire.”

The post Adding Fuel to the Fire: The Forest Service’s Fuel Reduction Strategy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by khalid kwaik.

That title of mine is certainly repetitive of me (me, me), but how can you not be repetitive in the distinctly repeated world of Donald J. Trump (Trumped, Trumped)? I mean, twice already and who really knows what’s to come?

Here’s the question nobody seems to be asking right now, though: What country will Donald Trump attack next? Yes, at the moment, he’s still wildly wound up in his Iran war/truce/peace/or you name it (tomorrow). Yesterday, it was, of course, Venezuela, and next week it might be Cuba or Greenland, or who on (or off) this planet knows where? And I haven’t even mentioned his military’s ongoing bombing runs in Somalia, which are barely noticed in the mainstream media here. And who knows what I’ve forgotten or what to expect in this increasingly bizarre world of ours from the president who swore repeatedly in his third election campaign that he would never, never, never go to… yes, of course, war?

Hey, only the other day, Secretary of War (a title which, of course, couldn’t be blunter in the age of You Know Who) Pete Hegseth warned that “what happens with the future of Cuba is in the hands of the president of the United States and the leadership of Cuba. No matter what, the Department of War is going to be prepared and postured for any possible contingency.”

Ah, yes, any possible contingency except one, of course: victory (which, since the Second World War, just hasn’t been in the American vocabulary) or, for that matter, peace. I mean what could possibly go wrong in a world that now, remarkably enough, has its first trillionaire, Donald Trump’s (sometimes) buddy Elon Musk? (On that, Senator Elizabeth Warren commented all too aptly: “I want to be clear: This is not just some fluke. It is a feature of a rigged economy.”)

What, in fact, could possibly go wrong on such a rigged planet? I’m sure Donald Trump and Elon Musk couldn’t imagine. What could go wrong on a world in which no American president ever seems to realize that wars are simply never to be won by this country, no matter its power and the ever-ballooning size of the Pentagon budget, now possibly heading for — ah, yes, talking about trillionaires! — $1.5 trillion yearly (and, no, that is not a typo), if Donald Trump has anything to say about it? And in Congress, mind you, that’s still referred to as “defense” spending.

What could possibly go wrong when launching a war on Iran, a country that’s slightly less than 6,500 miles from Washington, D.C.? That’s so much less dumb of Donald Trump than Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a disastrous war right on his country’s border with Ukraine. At least, Iran is so far away that you could ask: Whose lives could possibly be disturbed by it (other than Iranians, their neighbors, or of course, anyone who drives a car or a truck that isn’t electric and has had to pay for the gas that hasn’t been making its way through the Strait of Hormuz these days, months, or for all we know years)?

In fact, here’s a suggestion for President Trump: at only 6,500 miles, Iran really shouldn’t be considered quite far enough from Washington to truly, truly count as the world’s best enemy. What about Pakistan instead, since it’s 7,000 miles away? Wouldn’t that make better sense? Especially since, as Zia ur-Rehman of the New York Times reported recently, with the planet heating up as distinctly as it is, one district in southern Pakistan hit a record 124.7 degrees Fahrenheit as May ended. And you (and Donald Trump) know just what that means: ever more Pakistanis will feel that they have to leave their country and head elsewhere and why not head for the United States of America, only 7,000 miles away? So, Donald, how about starting another war there and while you’re at it, as wars do so effectively, pour yet more fossil fuels into the atmosphere, ensuring that Pakistan will indeed get ever hotter (and hotter and hotter) even faster (and faster and faster)?

The post The American Way of War, War, War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From Linus Pauling, Alice Stewart, John Gofman, Karl Morgan and Ernest Sternglass, to Rosalie Bertell, Jay Gould, Steve Wing, Tim Mousseau, Kate Brown and Thomas Mancuso; authoritative scientific warnings have consistently found that official radiation exposure limits are grossly inadequate, dangerously unprotective, and help facilitate the plague of cancer and cancer deaths around the world.

The authors report, “[R]ecent epidemiology findings indicate that these radiation scientists were correct … but by larger margins than we had thought. For example, increased radiogenic risks are routinely ignored, the protections of children and women are not addressed, large dose/risk uncertainties are passed by, internal radiation exposures remain largely unexamined, cardiovascular risks ignored, and the hazards of common radionuclides are systematically minimized.”

Nine of the radiation scientists profiled in the book “observed increased incidences of childhood leukemias and solid cancers near U.S. nuclear facilities,” they note. For example, Dr. Jay M. “Gould often found that cancer and infant mortality rates climbed when reactors were activated, then began to drop when they were closed, a phenomenon he attributed to exposure to small but chronic exposures to radiation from their radioactive releases.”

“Indeed,” the authors report, “a strong pattern of epidemiological evidence indicates increased leukemia and solid cancer risks near all reactors world-wide, not just those in the U.S.”

The most important epidemiology study on chronic low-dose exposures was the German government’s 2008 KiKK study Childhood Cancer in the Vicinity of Nuclear Power Plants.* “This found a 120% increase in leukemias and a 60% increase in all cancers among infants and children under 5 years old living within 5 km of all German NPPs” (nuclear power plants).

“KiKK was a large well-conducted study; its findings were scientifically rigorous; its evidence was particularly strong; and the Germany government’s radiation protection agency (the BfS) which commissioned the study, confirmed its findings.” A BfS-appointed expert group said of it:

“The present study confirms that in Germany there is a correlation between the distance of the home from the nearest NPP [nuclear power plant] at the time of diagnosis and the risk of developing cancer (particularly leukemia) before the 5^th birthday. This study is not able to state which biological risk factors could explain this relationship. Exposure to ionizing radiation was neither measured nor modelled.”

The authors report that, “The risks from NPP emissions to embryos/fetuses in pregnant women living nearby were apparently much larger than currently estimated. For example, [blood-forming] tissues are considerably more radiosensitive in embryos and fetuses than in adults. The combined immaturity of children’s nervous and blood-forming systems makes them particularly vulnerable to chronic radiation exposures from NPPs.”

This highly influential study ⸺ which was followed three years later by the catastrophic Fukushima-Daiichi triple reactor meltdowns in Japan ⸺ moved Germany’s government to phase out all 17 of its NPPs.

Folkers and Fairlie note that official organizations find it difficult to accept that increases in cancer near NPPs may be due to radioactive emissions. The pro-nuclear view is that routine radioactive releases to air and water from NPPs cause human exposures that are too small to explain increased nearby cancers and cancer deaths. Industry and the military assume first, that official risk models are correct, and second, that official dose estimates are not uncertain.

On the contrary, the UK government’s official “Report of the Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters” (CERRIE, 2005) found that “the models used to estimate radiation doses from nuclear plants are now known to be highly uncertain and unreliable.”

In view of evidence of harm presented in The Scientists Who Alerted, the White House’s current push to weaken or eliminate radiation protection standards in the United States amounts to criminal reckless endangerment, and must be stopped.

*German Kikk study: “Childhood Cancer in the Vicinity of Nuclear Power Plants,” P. Kaatsch, et al (2008), International Journal of Cancer, #122; and “Case-control study on childhood cancer in the vicinity of nuclear power plants in Germany 1980 – 2003”, C. Spix, et al (2008), European Journal of Cancer, #44.

The post Scientist’s Warnings Against Radiation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

When the Supreme Court on June 25 cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 Haitians and roughly 6,100 Syrians, it treated the matter as a question of executive authority. Yet the same government warns Americans not to travel to Haiti or Syria because of kidnapping, violence, terrorism, armed conflict, and collapsed security. It can acknowledge danger when those at risk carry U.S. passports, then allow the protection shielding Haitian and Syrian families who have built lives in the United States to be withdrawn, leaving many vulnerable to removal into that danger.

That is not a technical inconsistency. It reveals the governing logic of the Republican immigration agenda. America helps produce or deepen instability abroad, then criminalizes, detains, and expels many of the people who flee its consequences. The border is where this contradiction becomes visible, but it is not where it begins.

No honest argument should claim that the United States causes every migrant’s journey. Haiti’s crisis has Haitian causes. Syria’s catastrophe has Syrian, regional, and international causes. Corrupt elites, armed groups, authoritarian governments, and local political failure matter. But those facts do not absolve Washington. A country that exercises military power, uses sanctions and financial leverage, and helped build a carbon-intensive global economy cannot pretend that displacement begins only when someone reaches the Rio Grande.

The Republican story begins too late. It sees the migrant in a detention cell, at a checkpoint, or before an immigration judge. It does not see the family calculating whether its children can survive another year; the worker pushed out by economic collapse; or the community uprooted by violence, climate shocks, and failed institutions. Once that history is erased, people fleeing insecurity can be recast as the source of insecurity.

Haiti makes the point with unusual force. Washington is not a neutral observer in Haiti’s history: the United States occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, exercising direct control over key financial and security institutions. That past does not explain Haiti’s present catastrophe by itself. It does, however, make the pretense of American innocence untenable. As of March 2026, more than 1.4 million people had been displaced inside Haiti by violence and insecurity. Ending TPS does not restore public safety, curb gang control, or make return humane. It simply transfers risk from the American legal system back to people who have already carried it.

Climate sharpens the same contradiction. The United States remains the largest historical contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, while the harshest costs of the fossil-fuelled global economy fall on societies least equipped to absorb drought, heat, food insecurity, and disasters. Climate change does not mechanically propel every victim across an international border. It does make livelihoods more precarious, compound conflict, and weaken already fragile states. Washington cannot plausibly treat those forced to move as strangers to a crisis it has helped intensify.

Republicans will answer that every sovereign state has the right to enforce its immigration laws. That is true. A functioning immigration system cannot be left to smugglers, informal networks, or permanent legal ambiguity. Temporary protection was not designed as automatic permanent residence. Cities receiving newcomers need housing, schools, health care, and public investment. A left argument that dismisses these concerns as mere prejudice will fail both politically and morally.

But this is not a choice between orderly immigration and open borders. It is a choice between a lawful system that accepts responsibility and a punitive system that treats vulnerability as proof of guilt. When the Court also let the administration revive “metering” at ports of entry, it widened the government’s ability to stop asylum seekers before their claims could be heard. Danger does not vanish when a family is turned away. It is pushed into Mexican border cities, informal camps, and transit states where safety is weaker and American responsibility is easier to deny.

That is externalization, not resolution. The United States does not address the conditions that drive displacement. It moves the human consequences farther away.

The same strategy is now being extended inland. By June 29, ICE had signed 2,045 agreements under its 287(g) program, enlisting state and local agencies across 39 states and two U.S. territories in federal immigration enforcement. The border is no longer only a line at the edge of the country. It appears in traffic stops, workplace disputes, courthouse visits, and routine encounters with police. In that environment, legal status becomes a disciplinary tool: a reminder that demanding rights can carry the risk of detention.

That vulnerability is useful to employers. A worker who fears deportation is less likely to report wage theft, challenge unsafe conditions, organize a union, or refuse abusive schedules. This is the neoliberal logic of migration control: workers are welcome when their labor is profitable, but rendered deportable when they become inconvenient or begin to claim rights, safety, and dignity.

The claim that mass deportation straightforwardly protects American workers also fails on its own terms. In places exposed to intensified ICE activity, the number of both likely undocumented workers and U.S.-born men at work declines. Workers in the same local economy are often complements rather than substitutes: removing one group can cut output, depress demand, and weaken the job base on which others depend. Deportation does not automatically create higher wages or stable jobs. It can instead expand employers’ leverage over everyone who remains.

Democrats cannot escape this indictment. They have often defended detention, deportation, and border militarization through the language of human rights, due process, and orderly governance, while preserving much of the infrastructure that made the present crackdown possible. Republicans have taken that machinery and turned it into a more openly nationalist, punitive, and employer-friendly project. They make the victims of an unequal international order into evidence that the order needs more force.

A different policy would not require abandoning border enforcement. It would require ending the lie that the border marks the beginning and end of America’s responsibility: protecting people who cannot safely return, creating legal pathways that do not depend on desperation, enforcing labor law against employers rather than using deportability as a labor-management tool, and judging sanctions, military partnerships, and climate policy by the displacement they are likely to produce.

Until the United States accepts its global responsibilities, every harder border will reproduce the same cycle: crisis is created or deepened abroad, then its victims are punished at home. Real security requires international solidarity, but it also requires a break with the imperial logic that makes the powerless pay for a disorder they did not make.

The post America Creates the Displacement It Then Punishes appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Rep. Anna Luna (R. Florida) kicks off the MKUltra hearing. Image courtesy House.gov.

As a scholar who spent decades using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and archives studying Cold War CIA operations, it was with great interest that I watched yesterday’s US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearings on “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project.” Because my academic research focuses on the CIA’s use of funding fronts and various specific CIA operations, including its MKUltra program, I was surprised to learn of congressional interest in a program that was terminated over half a century ago.

UKUltra was the code name of a secret CIA program launched after US prisoners of war during the Korean War appeared to be brainwashed, leading the CIA to begin researching the possibilities of “mind control” and a variety of interrogation techniques. Between 1953 and 1973, the CIA used hundreds of witting and unwitting scientists to conduct at least 149 MKUltra subprojects at over 80 institutions, employing hundreds of researchers. Most of this research was unethical, with hideous abuses of research subjects who were often unaware of what was happening to them. This included dosing unsuspecting people with powerful drugs like LSD or potent concentrations of liquefied THC. Other MKUltra-funded research studies followed more conventional protocols, and researchers funded to do the research were often unaware they were conducting research for the CIA. I studied one of these programs, run through a research facility located at the Cornell University Medical School, the Human Ecology Fund, which during the 1950s and 60s funded a variety of seemingly mundane social science research, conducted by unwitting scholars. Some of these research projects studied topics, like cross-cultural stress indicators, that supplied information that would be reused in writing the CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual, and other horrible CIA projects that MKUltra informed.

While there’s lots of wild speculation about MKUltra in popular culture, most of what is known about the program comes from revelations made during the Church Committee Senate Hearings in the mid-1970s, during that brief post-Watergate moment when the dam holding back so many state secrets broke. Most of the CIA’s records on the program were destroyed, though a small cache listing names of MKUltra research projects was later released in response to a FOIA request made by John Marks, a former State Department employee, which provided us with the precious little documentation we now have on the program.

There is scarce new information on MKUltra, so it is surprising to see congressional inquiry over half a century after the program terminated. But as is often the case, these questions about the past have less to do with this horrible past than they do with the horrible present.

In her opening statement, the chair of the Taskforce on Declassification of Federal Secrets, Rep. Anna Luna (R. Florida), made a surprisingly decent statement,

“MKUltra was not a policy failure or an overzealous program that got out of hand. It was a deliberate, systematic governmental operation that subjected American citizens, prisoners, hospital patients, veterans, and ordinary people to LSD electroshock hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture without their knowledge or consent. This went on for 20 years on American soil, funded by American taxpayer dollars and authorized by the very top US intelligence apparatus. And this program, when it did end, the men who ran it did not cooperate with investigators. They did not come forward. They committed another crime. They destroyed evidence.”

Luna explained that as Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms was preparing to leave office in 1973, he ordered the destruction of all CIA MKUltra records. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who directed MKUltra, also destroyed all his records. Luna correctly identified these acts as illegal and as the CIA’s obstruction of justice. Luna stressed that Helms and Gottlieb were never meaningfully pushing for their crimes.

Luna made a special point of stressing that for some projects, regular civilian hospitals were used as research sites, with some experimenting on unsuspecting, unconsenting patients. In a revealing moment, her voice slipped into a eye-rolling-sarcastic-tone as she states “…the program ran for a decade, that we know of…” Her focus on government funded hospital based research did not seem accidental, and the task force’s later clash with one of the three witnesses, seems to indicate there is more to this.

The three witnesses delivering sworn testimony before the committee were Dr. Stephen Kinzer, author of the 2019 book, Poisoner In Chief, which tells the story of Sidney Gottleib, the CIA mad scientist director of MKUltra. Tom O’Neill author of CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, a former senior program director at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As she introduced the witnesses, Luna called all three witnesses “patriots” for their years of research into these CIA crimes.

Dr. Stephen Kinzer testified first. He spoke about the damages of the culture of secrecy and overclassification of documents, explained the details of how MKUltra secretly tried to discover methods of brainwashing and improved interrogation through torturous research, and described Gottlieb as having an unsupervised “license to kill.” Kinzer stressed that it may still be possible to find and release other MKUltra documents that still exist, to unredact existing documents, and to investigate whether some extension of MKUltra exists today using techniques of neuroscience or Artificial Intelligence.

Next, Tom O’Neill testified that CIA officials lied to Congress when they testified in the mid-70s to the Church Committee that MKUltra had been a failure (this is a controversial claim among MKUltra academic scholars, and his single source for this claim is suspect). He recounted his years of research he claims uncovered MKUltra links to Charles Mason and the Manson killings; which remains among MKUltra scholars one of the more controversial claims about the program. O’Neill described documents he discovered claiming MKUltra researchers had discovered methods, using hypnosis and drugs, to implant false memories in subjects, which he described as a “means of gaining the ability to seize control of a person’s perceptions, memories, and ultimately their behavior.”

The final witness was Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, whose statement completely went off script as she slammed the Trump administration and Congress’s defunding of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) research. She had nothing to say about MKUltra. Going rogue, she testified that what is:

“happening to NIH right now is not reform. It is the replacement of scientific judgment with political control. For eighty years, US federal investment in biomedical research produced outcomes that no private market would have funded. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. NIH-funded research on blood pressure, cholesterol, and smoking drove a 56% decline in heart disease between 1950 and 1996. Cancer has been transformed. Treatments for breast, lung, prostate, and childhood cancers, along with immunotherapies that converted previously fatal diagnoses into manageable conditions, are traced directly to NIH research.”

Dr Ginexi described the National Institute of Health’s history of sponsoring lifesaving research that no private profit-driven pharmaceutical company would fund. She called out the administration for its role in killing programs that would have helped manage the bird flu outbreak, Ebola, and hantavirus. She made zero mention of MKUltra. While she was still reading her testimony, Chairwoman Luna interrupted her and told her she had used her allotted time.

Congresswoman Luna’s questions cast a broad fishing net. She asked questions about Operation Naomi, Operation Paperclip–the US operation that brought over 1,600 German and Austrian scientists, most of whom had worked under the Nazis during the war, many of whom were Nazi party members. Luna asked if any Nazis were used in MKUltra. Dr Kinzer confirmed they were, and he described how some of MKUltra researchers extended Nazi experiments. Luna asked questions about the MKUltra personnel’s contacts with individuals reportedly involved in the assassination of JFK. O’Neill’s testimony suggested Jack Ruby could have been subjected to MKUltra.

Representative Eric Burlison (R. Missouri) asked if the CIA was involved in a famous 1951 incident in France (known as the Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning) where 200 people in a village were simultaneously dosed with a powerful hallucinogen by eating bread from a local bakery. Dr Kinzer did not know, but he said he had suspicions and wanted more investigation. Burlison asked about Operation Midnight Climax’s interrogation studies, where unsuspecting US citizens were lured into safehouses by sex workers, where they were dosed with LSD, filmed, and interrogated. When Burlison asked O’Neill if he thought that MKUltra secretly continued after 1973, he replied: “I don’t know. I can’t imagine it didn’t though…I imagine it’s being used. I have no evidence of it being used.”

For the record, as someone who distrusts the CIA and who spent years studying MKUltra. I believe MKUltra died within the agency in the 1960s. It died because it didn’t work. The types of mind control they wanted do not exist. The most effective forms of mind control aren’t found in the science fiction tropes these 1950s and 60s CIA operations experimented with, they’re found in the pages of New York Times, broadcasts of Fox News, MSNBC, and Newsmax, and the hundreds of thousands of human and circuit-boarded bots incessantly posting on social media. Certainly, the CIA continued to do all sorts of horrible things, but beyond generating some “useful” interrogation techniques, MKUltra mostly didn’t pan out because a lot of its ideas were unsound.

Representative Eli Crane (R Arizona) asked Dr. Ginexi if her statements were referring to the administration’s efforts to “reform and rein in the NIH.” But Ginexi corrected Crane, saying her remarks were “about the destruction of the NIH, the cancelation of grants, and the political control of the NIH.” Crane ignored her reply and asked her about the NIH funding of the Wuhan laboratory, a topic about which Dr Ginexi replied she knew nothing. But Crane spotted a soapbox opportunity to speechify about how, for years, we were all told to trust science, then “most of what we were told during COVID was a complete lie, and it wasn’t scientific at all.” Unfazed, Dr. Ginexi replied that,

“the number one thing that I think that we’re doing to destroy trust in American science right now is cancelling clinical trial in the middle of those clinical trials. This does incredible harm to the patients who are receiving experimental treatments and it really destroys the trust that we have in how do we recruit patients for future trials if they are knowing that their trials could just simply be canceled for political reasons.”

Crane did not address her points. He instead tripped down an anti-vaccine rabbit hole. But his rant got audience applause which he took as proof that the American people distrusted the NIH. Which increasingly seemed to be the point of this hearing. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R. Colorado) also made a short speech claiming that COVID was propaganda, and in comments apparently directed at Dr. Ginexi, she blamed America’s response to COVID on governmental agencies that are not responsive to Congress’s questions.

These moments of COVID science bashing and anti-government-funded science grandstanding appear to have revealed why the task force seemed interested in MKUltra a half a century after the fact.

Chairwoman Luna asked Dr Kinzer about the role of USAID in MKUltra projects; speculating that since we know that USAID has been used as CIA cover in the past and ”since part of USAID mission was to administer drugs to the poor and needy populations, would the organization have abused its mandate by poisoning foreign populations or creating dissociative states for interrogation or torture?” Kizner replied that he had no direct knowledge of this, but that during the Cold War, many government agencies conducted covert operations.

Representative Timothy Floyd Burchett (R-Tennessee) asked what the chances are that, with recent technological advances, more advanced MKUltra-like techniques could cause a “loner” to take shots at a president? O’Neill referenced the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on candidate Trump and the killing of Charlie Kirk and said:

“I just hate to speculate, because I don’t know, I have no firsthand knowledge whether those guys were programed through radio waves or through their computer activity. So I would never hazard a guess except to say what I’ve already said that they developed means that we’ve never been told about many, many, years ago and I imagine they’ve evolved to much more effective now.”

Which is an awful lot of speculation for someone who, with zero evidence, hates to speculate.

Not to be outdone in describing a conspiracy theory without any concrete evidence, Representative Burchet interrupted O’Neill to say:

“Don’t you think that they could cast this broad net through these algorithms and other things, and maybe they don’t know the exact person it’s going to affect, but they know what type of person its to affect, and they know it’s going happen. And that way they can…they can’t predict when it’s going to happen, but they think it will happen. And that they can sort of wash their hands of this whole thing and say, well, we didn’t have anything to do with it. But in effect. They really did because they put this out there and they continue to put it out there.”

Dr. Kinzer replied that what Congressman Burchet described sounded like the MLK assassination and the government’s role in creating a climate where he was considered “the most dangerous man in America.” Which might conceivably be generally a reasonable thing to say in a normal discussion, but in a room where people have been freely speculating about mind controlling radio waves, I wouldn’t be confident that they understand that Hoover’s FBI was spreading leaflets and hate mail about MLK that fed a climate of violence.

Finally, at the conclusion of the hearing, when asked if he had anything to add, Dr. Kinzer explained that:

“There’s a reason why conspiracy theories are so widespread in America. It has to do with the disassociation between what we say we are and do, and what we really are and do. This has become more and more clear to more people. Therefore, they’re suspicious of nefarious dealings by the US, and they’re also suspicious of other things that aren’t nefarious at all, but there’s just this mentality that is created by the covert sphere. And that’s what makes people realize that things that used to seem really farfetched, and not so farfetched after all.”

But this was almost an afterthought to an over hour and a half session, where nothing new about MKUltra was learned, and whose purpose for being held over a half century after the program’s demise was never stated, but the attacks on publicly funded research seemed to clarify.

But stated or not, the reasons for this showboating stunt seemed clear. Kinzer, O’Neill, and Ginexi were props in a broader campaign attacking government spending on research; and while Kinzer and O’Neill appeared unconcerned that their hosts were using their testimony to spread their own conspiracy theories about covid, mind control, a certain type of deep state, along with general attacks on publicly funded science; while Dr. Ginexi did not go along with the sham. Dr. Ginexi’s testimony shed more light on what this hearing was about than what her fellow witnesses did, even though she said nothing about MKUltra.

With all the talk from the congressional task force about their concern about MKUltra’s abuse of research subjects (and it there were horrible abuses), they had no answers to Dr. Ginexi’s questions about the harm being done today to members of medical research studies whose treatments were suddenly cancelled due to the federal research cuts they had approved. Never mind that I find it difficult to believe these congressional representatives would oppose using the torture and interrogation techniques developed by MKUltra-sponsored research against enemies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for cleaning house at the CIA. If my regime was in power, I would hold hearings on these and many other CIA crimes. I might even ask some of these same questions to these and other witnesses. I’m all for dismantling the CIA as a covert arm of government; for ending the CIA’s decades of covert actions and ending their role (as Philip Agee put it) as the secret police of American capitalism. But these members of Congress and Trump obviously don’t want any of this. They want as many excuses as possible for Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte to shake things up with agency purges, routing out the old deep state so he can implant the new one, and this hearing was just one more stunt in support of this campaign.

I am thankful that Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi had the courage of her convictions and the presence of mind to appear and give the sworn testimony she did. Her calm and lucid performance helped clarify why this particular committee would choose to delve into this dark chapter of ancient history, and her decision not to harmonize with this thinly veiled attack on the public funding of research was heroic.

The post Congressional MKUltra Hearings as MAGA PSYOP appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo: Michael Slager.

Many years ago, I worked at a motel as a groundskeeper. A woman—I’ll call her Anna—lived there with her children. One of her friends would sometimes come to look after the kids when she had to work or run errands. They had several cats who spent most of their time living in the family’s car since the owner would not allow the felines to stay in the room. Both the people and the cats lived there for months.

Anna was one of thousands of Americans who live in motels. Poor credit histories, high rents, and prohibitively steep upfront costs, such as security deposits, compel many to find alternative long-term lodging that at least has some basic amenities: a kitchenette (or just a microwave) and a shower.

Although weekly rates are higher than renting even modestly priced apartments, there is often little choice. The rooms can be cramped, and they are sometimes run down. Safety can be a concern, and privacy is virtually impossible. Yet, people go to work, send their children to school, and make these places temporary homes.

Out of an approximate 755,000 unhoused people in the United States, there are no reliable estimates for the number who live in motels. I have passed by the one in the picture above (I didn’t work at this particular motel) many times; it’s in the neighborhood where I now live, and it sometimes makes me think of Anna and her family. Her kids would be adults by now, yet another generation calls such places home.

What struck me was the sign someone hung on the second-floor railing. It honors 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed. It’s a sort of birthday card for the country’s approaching semiquincentennial.

Birthdays are supposed to mark milestones and accomplishments. When it comes to national celebrations, the festivities are meant to be a collective, public recognition of something good we have done. Such commemorations can also demonstrate pride in having survived some national crisis.

However, concerning poverty, we are in a continuing crisis that is far from a source of pride. Growing inequality has created conditions that have generated 36 million people who live under the official poverty line. That is roughly 10 million more than the combined number of residents of the top 10 most populous cities in the United States or just under the population of California.

The sign was displayed in a place where people struggle unnecessarily, where children have to deal with obstacles to their growth and development; it is no secret that poverty takes a toll on young minds and bodies. Food insecurity and homelessness have negative effects on physical development, academic achievement, emotional regulation, and social skills.

Most egregious of all is that this state of affairs has been deliberately chosen, not by those living in it, but by those who inhabit stations in life that few can imagine. Many politicians and pundits often manage to convince somewhat better-off Americans that those who live in poverty are to blame, not the legislators themselves and certainly not the donor class, who enjoy unparalleled advantages and access to lawmakers.

They can afford to celebrate America’s birthday in grand style, safe in the belief that they are the better set of people. However, those who indulge in congratulating themselves and each other on their alleged virtues or ask for plaudits in the form of votes, have elected to make the plight of the most vulnerable in our country even worse.

For example, in 2021, the US Congress expanded eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC). As a result of an extra $300 each month for newly qualified households, child poverty in the United States was nearly halved. Republicans, with the help of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, voted against renewing the expansion. Manchin, a multi-millionaire, falsely claimed that there was no means testing to receive the expanded tax credit and reportedly said that beneficiaries would use the money on drugs. In the end, lawmakers returned millions of children to poverty. It was a direct and unequivocal refusal to use the tools at their disposal to alleviate serious hardships.

The United States Congress has also consistently refused to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour. Although 19 states have passed legislation to create a 15-dollar hourly minimum, a nationwide law would lift millions more people out of poverty. Over 800,000 workers, mostly women who labor in the service industry, still try to live on $7.25 an hour, a rate that has not been raised since 2009. Oxfam estimates that a federal wage hike would mean that a quarter of the US workforce would see significant gains in pay.

Legislators also consistently refuse to address privation in indirect ways. For instance, according to Pentagon estimates from May, the Trump administration’s unprovoked and illegal war on Iran had at that time cost nearly 30 billion dollars. The number is likely to be far higher as we approach the nation’s birthday. Budgets showcase priorities, and windfalls for the defense industry are always at the top of the list.

The money we have collectively wasted on unnecessary military conflicts could have been dedicated to poverty alleviation. The funds for the Iran war, for example, could have provided sustainable housing and continued support for everyone currently living in homeless shelters across the United States. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a non-partisan, non-profit organization, it would cost the US government 9.6 billion to find permanent housing for those living in shelters. That figure is roughly one-third of the Pentagon’s May estimates of the Iran war’s cost.

A majority of Americans are dissatisfied with planners’ decisions about how resources are allocated. For example, a Gallup poll shows that only about 30 percent of Americans approve of how wealth is distributed in the United States. Two-thirds believe that wealthy individuals and corporations do not pay their fair share. Polling data has consistently shown that the majority believe poverty reduction programs are generally beneficial and more should be done to help those in need.

However, many lawmakers have no intention of writing legislation that would seriously address issues of poverty and homelessness. Their priorities have demonstrated that they do not share the sentiments of the population. This is nothing new. James Madison, a Founding Father and fourth President of the United States, would likely have been appalled by twenty-first century capitalism, but he argued that it was the government’s obligation to keep majority sentiment at bay, to guard against “those … who secretly sigh for a more equitable distribution of its [the country’s] blessings” and to fight against the notion of “a levelling spirit,” an idea that he feared had already emerged even then.

Today’s leaders are in accord with the architects of a country whose 250th birthday we will soon observe. They also resist the establishment of a direct, participatory democracy that more equally distributes resources to those like Anna and her children.

The post For Millions of Impoverished Americans, an Unhappy National Birthday appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

General Motors headquarters, Detroit. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Earlier this month, Hawaii became the first state in the country to pass legislation aiming to get corporate money out of elections by using the law of business organizations. The groups supporting this innovative approach see it as part of a broader Corporate Power Reset movement. They want to stop artificial entities created by the law “from spending money or contributing anything of value to influence candidate elections or ballot measures.” They say that corporate charters, which are a state-granted special privilege, should not contemplate a right to interfere in electoral politics.

The legal theory is this: corporations are creatures of state law. States create corporate charters and define the powers corporations possess. Rather than directly regulating election spending, proponents argue states can instead rewrite their corporate codes to clarify that corporations were never granted the authority to engage in electoral spending in the first place.

But the real importance of the Hawaii legislation and the Corporate Power Reset movement, as I see it, goes far beyond elections and campaign contributions. It goes to a fact at the heart of our political and economic system: the state is the author of corporate power. And if the corporate form is the product of the state, it is worth asking what other powers and privileges have been concocted by political power on behalf of economic power. This movement therefore invites a much broader and deeper reconsideration of the corporate economy as a whole. If this corporate system and its history were better understood, the billionaire and trillionaire ruling class would no longer be able to take cover under the benign language of liberalism.

Contemporary political conversations talk a lot about the problem of money in politics, but they almost never acknowledge that modern corporate power did not arise from a system of liberal rights and open competition. Even the basic corporate privilege of limited liability is far from a natural right. The state-capital complex is fundamentally a system for the manufacture of asymmetric relationships and material inequalities. The Corporate Power Reset movement restarts a long-running conversation about where power is actually located and encountered. One of the under-discussed features of our system, whatever its name, is the formal state’s delegation of much of the coercive governance of day-to-day life. Americans today most often encounter the power of the state in their relationships with their employers. The power of corporations within this system is not a withdrawal of political power, and it should not be mistaken for one. It is a highly effective obscuring of political power within the language of law.

The corporate form is designed to be anti-competitive, to create special advantages. The origins of the corporation lie in state-created monopolies and in colonial violence and extraction, and the modern corporation arises alongside several other similar legal fictions created to concentrate capital and insulate its holders from liability or accountability to the public. The corporation was born of explicitly anti-liberal and anti-democratic special privilege. Prospective blanket limits on personal liability for the harms you’ve caused others does not seem very “free market.” In fact, this kind of moral hazard undermines the economists’ whole series of rationales for today’s system. Historically, the modern state and the corporation extend through each other’s power, co-creating each other and the world we live in today. The formal state has grown its own power in partnership with corporations, and the corporations’ whole position owes to gifts of common wealth and license from official power.

This binary model itself has never been consistent with events. The state and capital are not two free-floating, independent entities that enter into an agreement; they are historically co-produced, and the whole idea of a clear-cut binary and apparent separation is among the monumental ideological achievements of this system. The idea of political power withdrawing to open a free market is not the story of capitalism. The U.S. government today functions largely as a de facto private organization, designed to extract wealth from the popular masses and to redirect it to an ever-shrinking group at the top. Washington operates more and more openly in this way, as the administrative body of a system designed to concentrate wealth for elite club members, and, as importantly, to corral us for their benefit.

The sociologist Carly Knight asks, “How, then, did the image of the corporation as a ‘creature’ or a ‘creation’ of the state come to be replaced with an understanding of the corporation as a ‘pure creature of the market’?” What relationships are behind the concepts and terms we turn to so uncritically? Many early liberal thinkers looked askance at the corporation as an extension of the power of the state. They noticed the tendency of the corporation, with perpetual succession and limits on personal liability, to reintroduce the structures of aristocracy on behalf of capital. Anti-monopoly activist and writer William Leggett (1801-1839) wrote,

These are our aristocracy, our scrip nobility, our privileged order of charter-mongers and money-changers! Serfs of free America! bow your necks submissively to the yoke, for these exchequer barons have you fully in their power, and resistance now would but make the burden more galling. Do they not boast that they will be represented in the halls of legislation, and that the people cannot help themselves? Do not their servile newspaper mouth-pieces prate of the impolicy of giving an inch to the people, lest they should demand an ell?

Times have changed and we forget what we once knew well. But as we enter a stage in which the true relationship between the state and capital is more apparent, it will be increasingly difficult for polite defenders of the “scrip nobility” to defend this system in the terms of liberal democracy, choice, and the rule of law.

We have entered a “new era of corporate governance,” as the three largest asset management companies are now the largest shareholders in almost 90 percent of the S&P 500. While this position gives them enormous power, the lack of transparency as to their decision-making processes raises once more the question at the heart of the corporate system: given that our corporate economy is an extension of state power and functions in practice as one of our society’s dominant forms of governance, do massive corporations have any duties to the popular masses? The asset management cartel is just one of many examples. Common ownership at such scales has created a structure of governance within the corporate economy that has no historical precedent. We are talking about a problem much bigger than lobbying or campaign donations.

Massive scale requires the state in at least two senses and directions. As we’ve seen, the corporation extends out of the state directly, as it is state power that creates the legal and institutional privileges that make possible accumulation at such massive scales. These are not “natural” market outcomes in any sense; they are entangled with and structured by the state from the beginning. Capital never leaves the state behind. Once corporations achieve these scales, becoming central structural fixtures in society’s rulemaking processes, the state is even more structurally obligated to and intertwined with them. We see this in the “too big to fail” problem. The state has a structural inability to allow the failure of its children, the continuation and stability of which are key to its own fiscal and monetary health.

It is too seldom pointed out in the U.S. how much of the actual governance of society takes place within these sites of outsourced state authority, corporations. It is not even correct to see the co-creation and co-dependence of the state and capital as involving symmetrical relationships that run in opposite directions. The relationship is dynamic and recursive. The state lays the preconditions for the rule of accumulated wealth, and then the interests and desires of capital constrain and shape state action. And this ongoing process further concentrates and entrenches the “private” interests involved, thus further constraining the state. Neither of the two supposed spheres (and notice that the higher up you go, the easier it is to pass back and forth between them) is prior, and neither ever enters a moment of true separation from the other. Even in the case of the formal state’s work, much is conducted by nominally private corporations. And here, too, in its capacity as a buyer, the state creates immense privileges for its favorites. Over the past few years alone, private contractors have received trillions of dollars in public money, much of which has gone to aggressive, illegal wars, causing crises around the world. Today, there are more than two private contractors for every federal government employee, meaning that much of the U.S. government’s work is completed by private corporations that are a black box for the public.

The modern corporation never leaves the place of privilege and protection next to government; it is not subject to the same kinds of competition and resource pressure, because it has rights you don’t have and that are in no way natural to a free and open system of market exchange. But this recursive state-capital dynamic is the defining structural reality of our entire social system. And it is an authoritarian system, not a liberal one, which is why America is so heavily policed, her prisons so overflowing with poor and minority populations our ruling class wants to control. Beyond the domestic frontier, the violence at the core of the corporate system shows itself in the military empire that is necessary to enforce its values and rules. The state-capital complex arose precisely as a technology of global empire and resource extraction. Our form of politics is impossible without empire. Ours is a precariously balanced system of oligarchy and empire, not a liberal democracy.

Within such a system, the law is inverted, turned away from its stated purpose, holding in place a system of power and special privilege. It is the key infrastructure of the violence and injustice of the political and economic system. We have likewise inverted our value system, putting abstractions like the blessed limited liability company above human beings and their communities. We’ve emptied the concepts of their normative justification and placed the dead husk above justice: the government as a criminal cartel, and the law as an instrument of injustice.

We create these abstractions and legal artifacts at first to aid our efforts in the direction of positive social goals. But we have flipped the system and its goals on their head by severing the concepts from their original social justification. Without the critical capacities of earlier liberals, we have taken the corporation to be a self-justifying feature of all free societies, subordinating actual human beings to a fiction. This is how authoritarianism has been able to recreate itself in systems with so many different names and stated ideologies. Despite the insistence that this is what economic freedom looks like, we can see that earlier generations of Americans were correct to fear the corporation system as a path to a new aristocracy.

Thanks is owed to the Corporate Power Reset project for bringing a creative and critical spirit to the question of money in politics. Following their thinking to its conclusion would get us to a deep and fundamental shift in the way we think and talk about power and politics. This kind of critical approach forces a confrontation with the fact that the structural relationship between capital and political power is far from the localized corruption of an otherwise sound liberal society. The relationship between money and politics is the design of the system and its normal operative mode. It is not that political power and wealth left each other at some point and have reintegrated, but that they have always been intertwined and the supposed public-private divide is incomplete to the point of being false.

The post A Hard Reset for Corporate Power appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Madeleine Albright with NATO officers. Photo: Basilio C., Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

“Future presidents will remember, in short, that the (Iran) war was counterproductive on its own terms and came at the expense of every other foreign and domestic priority.  They are also less likely to be taken in by those who cheered this misadventure.  Going forward, their promises of cost-free coercion will sound like what they are: a drumbeat for war.”

– Robert Malley and Stephen Wertheim, “The Iran Debacle Could Be a Gift for America,” New York Times, June 25

“As the war in Iran appears to come to a fragile close, Americans are left to wonder why it has accomplished so little.  How could a middle power like Iran…face down a global superpower….  Put simply: Because the United States attempted to essentially go it alone.”

– Oona A. Hathaway, “You Can’t Be a Superpower Without Allies,” New York Times, June 21, 2026

Lessons learned are supposed to be insights and practical takeaways from past experience.  The guest essays in the New York Times are arguing that such lessons will prevent the repetition of mistakes and lead to continuous improvement when faced with future decisions regarding war and peace.  In making these arguments, the writers—all experienced in issues involving international security—are confident that future U.S. leaders will learn from the terrible decision-making of past U.S. leaders.

But what about the lessons of U.S. wars over the past half century?  What was learned from the Vietnam War that was based on false assumptions regarding the foreign policies of the Soviet Union and China and the domestic policies of Ho Chi Minh?  What was learned from two decades of war against Iraq that was based on lies and deceit?  And what was learned from two decades of war in Afghanistan that achieved U.S. objectives in the first several months, which should have led to an immediate withdrawal?

Hathaway’s lesson regarding fighting wars without allies is particularly obtuse because the United States went to war with the strongest military power in the region—Israel.  Yet, Hathaway maintains that “even the most powerful state in the world is not all that powerful when it decides to act alone.”  Again and again, Hathaway refers to “Trump’s go-it-alone strategy.”  A major lesson from the Iran War should have been the dangers and futility of going to war with Israel as a major ally.  Even Bush I and Bush II knew better than that in going to war against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, respectively, while paying Israel to stay out of the confrontation.

What the New York Times and its guest essayists fail to recognize is the continuing danger of American exceptionalism, which can be traced to the Puritans and their obsession with raising a “godly city upon a hill” for the “eyes of all people are upon us.”  This strand of exceptionalism was written into President Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904 as well as President Barack Obama’s intent to use force against Syria’s deployment of chemical weapons in 2013.  Both Roosevelt and Obama cited the United States as having a “higher moral authority.”

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said it best, often referring to the United States as the “indispensable nation” that had a unique duty to defend global freedom, human dignity, and international alliances.  American intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s became known as “Madeleine’s War.”  “If we have to use force,” she said, “it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation.  We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”

There is no clearer expression of American post-Cold War exceptionalism.  It’s time that we remembered Winston Churchill’s observation, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.”

The post The New York Times on War: The Art of Being Obtuse appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by New York Public Library.

The renowned political theorist Danielle Allen once wrote, “The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us to see that we cannot have freedom without equality.” As the United States commemorates the 250^th anniversary of its independence on July 4, 2026, the Declaration of Independence (1776), the U.S. Constitution (1787) and Northwest Ordinance (1787) link early concepts of imperial power, sovereignty, legitimacy, and interdependence. Combining these three documents is a departure from the historiography that sometimes places American imperialism starting in the nineteenth century and in the context of Westward expansion or U.S. pursuit of places like Alaska (1867) and Hawaii (1898); the latter two in accordance with the “blue water thesis” of imperialism.^[1] I argue that the founding principles of the country were rooted in colonization and imperialism more so than freedom and liberation. In other words, the process of colonization started much earlier than the 1800s.

The U.S. started out as both a republic and an empire in the 1700s. As scholar Greg Grandin recently pointed out, “American freedom was built on endless conquest.” This was evident in its territorial expansion and indigenous dispossession that were built into its early stages. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Thomas Paine in 1776. Paine was a rarity, as the lone progressive Founding Father in that he envisioned domestic liberty and not an empire. His contemporaries, at best, however, saw native people as obstacles and children to be disciplined when they were not steered for diplomatic purposes. At worst, they were to be removed or slaughtered outright. In 1776, the First Report on Canada stated its purpose as a territorial strategy.^[2] Even with the Articles of Confederation (1777) there was acknowledgement of indigenous sovereignty, but at the same time, speculation over the future of “Indian affairs.”^[3]

Historians such as Fr. Francis Paul Prucha, Colin G. Calloway, and Robert J. Williams, Jr., documented the shift in the colonial perspective from strategic ally and brothers in liberty, to children and domestically dependent nations. Native Americans went from equals to those in need of guardianship.^[4] The Treaty of Paris (1783) further undermined Indian sovereignty and legitimacy and allowed indigenous ancestral lands to be transferred without native peoples’ consent. Recent scholarship pays more attention to the Northwest Ordinance, drafted mainly by Manasseh Cutler, Rufus King and Nathan Dane, over the Constitution, and points to the direct expansionist policies it structured culturally through America’s founding documents and strategies.^[5]

The U.S. was also intended to be both a republic and an empire. The Ordinance was used to organize and pacify white settlers and protect their interests from the big planter class. Further, since James Madison favored orderly expansion and feared direct democracy he “used [the Ordinance] as a tool of settler colonial expropriation and violence against indigenous peoples and their homelands. That it served the ends of white supremacy, however, can obscure the fact that much of its essential work was directed at, not on behalf of, white men, specifically to harness and direct the polities they created,” stated historian Jessica Choppin Roney.^[6]

Years prior to the U.S. reach toward Alaska or Hawaii, and writing from Mount Vernon on August 29, 1788, George Washington stated, “The natural, political, and moral circumstances of our nascent empire justify the anticipation. We have an almost unbounded territory whose natural advantages for agriculture & commerce [are] equal [to] those of any on the globe.”^[7] Further, Thomas Jefferson in writing to James Madison from Monticello on April 27, 1809, expressed “I [am] persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self-government…”^[8]

In 1787, Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers No. 1, “To the People of the State of New York: The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the Union, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world…”^[9] In other words, it was clear to Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton in these exchanges that “empire” was an inevitable and desired component of an American grand strategy. These outweighed notions of democracy and republicanism.

In yet another sequence, and writing from Paris on January 25, 1786, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Virginia attorney Archibald Stuart and stated:

Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South is to be peopled. We should take care too not to think [about] it for the interest of that great continent to press too soon on the Spaniards. Those countries cannot be in better hands. My fear is that they are too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them [piece] by [piece]. The navigation of the Mississippi we must have.^[10]

Here, Jefferson’s writing explained the careful maintenance and intent that he was prepared to undertake in structurally extending colonial violence in all directions in coordination with the Northwest Ordinance.

George Washington addressed New York lawyer James Duane on September 7, 1783, from Rocky Hill near Princeton, New Jersey, and said:

At first view, it may seem a little extraneous, when I am called upon to give an opinion upon the terms of a Peace proper to be made with the Indians, that I should go into the formation of New States; but the [Settlement] — of the Western Country and making a Peace with the Indians are so analogous that there can be no definition of the one without involving considerations of the other.

Washington continued:

For I repeat it, again, and I am clear in my opinion, that policy and [economy] point very strongly to the expediency of being upon good terms with the Indians, and the propriety of purchasing their Lands in preference to attempting to drive them by force of arms out of their Country; which as we have already experienced is like driving the Wild Beasts of the Forest which will return to us soon as the pursuit is at an end and fall perhaps on those that are left there; — when the gradual extension of our Settlements will as certainly cause the Savage as the Wolf to retire; both being beasts of prey [though] they differ in shape.^[11]

Washington’s poetics are horrific in its essential unambiguous language driving at paternalism and ownership. Apologists for the First President and Father of the Nation might perceive the letter to be more about diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping when it is mostly written in a way that Aimé Césaire might call decivilizing, dehumanizing, and with attempts in “thingifying” indigenous people.^[12]

In writing from Washington D.C. on November 24, 1801, Thomas Jefferson addressed James Monroe stating:

It is hard to believe that either Great Britain or the Indian proprietors have so disinterested or regard for us as to be willing to relieve us by receiving such a colony themselves; and as much to be doubted whether that race of men could long exist in so rigorous a climate. On our western and southern frontiers, Spain holds an immense country; the occupancy of which however is in the Indian nations; except a few insulated spots possessed by Spanish subjects — It is very questionable indeed whether the Indians would sell? W[hether] Spain would be willing to receive these people?

Jefferson continued:

And it was nearly certain that she would not alienate sovereignty. The same question to ourselves would recur here also, as did in the first case: should we be willing to have such a colony in contact with us? However our present interest may rest drain us within our own limits, it is possible not to look forward to distant times, when are rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not southern continent with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws: nor can we contemplate, with satisfaction, either blot or mixture on that surface.

Jefferson used even more stark and uncompromising language, in his letter to John Adams on June 11, 1812, from Monticello:

The backward will yield and be thrown further back. These will relapse into barbarism & misery, lose numbers by war and want, and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forest, into the stony mountains. They will be conquered however in Canada. the possession of that country secures our women and children for ever from the tomahawk & scalping knife, by removing those who excite them. ^[13]

Jefferson signifies his imperialist perspective and frames the removal and subjugation of Indigenous peoples as necessary for territorial control and the security of settlers. He makes it clear that he believes in racial superiority, the separation of people, and the overall grand imperial project that was based on a structurally and culturally violent law system. He wanted a state that favored an English-speaking Anglo world and prioritized the use of the American liberty project as an expansionary mechanism to set forth a class based ethnic democracy.

Later on in 1823, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams observed that there are “laws of political gravitation” as well as physical gravitation: “just as an apple, severed from its native tree, must fall to the ground, so too would Cuba, forcibly separated from its ‘unnatural’ connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, gravitate inevitably toward the North American union.”^[14] Later that year, President James Monroe, in his annual message to Congress on December 2, articulated the principle of freedom for the American continents from future European colonization. This policy became known as the Monroe Doctrine.^[15]

By 1824, supporters of Andrew Jackson celebrated him as embodying the spirit of the American Revolution; he was running for the presidency as a Democrat, and his campaign slogan was “the glorious principles of ’76.^[16] This was perhaps the beginning of early American populist attempts to undermine elite imperial policies from the right.

Howard Zinn, author of the People’s History of the United States, wrote about American exceptionalism and explained how in 1846, Democrats ardently pushed expansion. The common phrase came from John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review who in 1845 wrote, “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”^[17] The idea of America guided by divine providence dates back to its separation from Great Britain, when John Adams articulated, “It was the will of Heaven that the two countries should be sundered.”^[18]

Leading up to the expansionary policies associated with the Panama Canal’s construction and twentieth and twenty-first century warfare, there were additional annexation projects. This long list of strategic territories included: Louisiana (1803), Florida (1819), Republic of Texas (1845), Mexican Cession (1848), Gadsden Purchase (1853), Alaska (1867), Hawaii (1898), Puerto Rico (1898), and just after Panama, the Virgin Islands (1917). Prior to these all, however, were the early American visions of continental empire, which helps to explain Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” and “America First” philosophy that entails “maximum pressure,” or what Razi Canikligil called Trump’s pursuit of “a neo-imperialist agenda.”^[19] Further, on February 10, 2025, the Financial Times called Trump, Xi, and Putin committed expansionists in a “new age of empire.”

Early American visions of continental empire gave us the imperial politics of the current moment. Along with New World “discovery,” the colonial period, and prolonged chattel slavery, early America led campaigns of Manifest Destiny and an intervention in Mexico. In 1832, the Democratic Party and a wing of the Jacksonians supported expansion of U.S. territory through the annexation of Texas.^[20] Further calls for expansion could be seen in slogans such as “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight,” the 1844 annexationist policy of James K. Polk who wanted the boundary line for Oregon to be drawn at the latitude 54° 40’.^[21] Well before Trump articulated a vision for projecting American renewed regional hard power in the Panama Canal, Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, and stretching to Gaza, were elites of the aristocracy – enslavers and leaders such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Quincy Adams. ^[22] Their private letters help to explain empire and the brutal mindset found in the twenty-first century as we approach America’s 250^th birthday.

Historian Sophia Rosenfeld recently wrote:

What a time to try to commemorate this nation’s founding! Imperialism is back. Militarized federal agents have been massing in cities to root out people deemed unwelcome or disloyal. The president styles himself more as a monarch than a civil servant, from the plans for his new golden ballroom to the parade of courtiers and oligarchs paying him homage. Given this situation, what are the options for narrating the story of the Declaration of Independence 250 years after the fact? Are we left with anything other than irony or tragedy?

The history of the United States from its founding through the early nineteenth century exposes its imperial ambitions.^[23] This was not incidental, but central to the nation’s formation. Ranging from Washington and Jefferson’s letters to the structuring of the Northwest Ordinance, the dispossession and subjugation of indigenous peoples were outlined as necessary for the growth of a continental republic. Early American leaders consistently employed the rhetoric of liberty and the strategies of territorial expansion. They set precedents for later policies of Manifest Destiny and eventual intervention abroad. The Founders set racial hierarchies and shaped the U.S. as inseparable from empire. Therefore, America’s “New Imperialism” in the global south was not new at all. As America reaches its 250^th year, it becomes clear that empire was not a departure from the aspirational democratic ideals of 1776-1787; it was a parallel and continues in the present.

NOTES

1. United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 637 (VII) of 16 December 1952, “Maintenance of the Right of Self-Determination,” U.N. Doc. A/Res/637(VII) (1952). (This resolution countered the notion that imperialism was only conducted overseas). ↑

2. Continental Congress, First Report on the Committee to Digest the Resolutions Respecting Canada and Indian Allies (1776). ↑

3. Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union (1777), National Archives. ↑

4. Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). ↑

5. William Frederick Poole, The Ordinance of 1787 and Dr. Manasseh Cutler as an Agent of its Information (Cambridge, MA: University Press, 1876). ↑

6. Jessica Choppin Roney, “An Expansion of the Same Society: Republican Government and Empire in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History III, no. 1 (June 2024): 15–38. ↑

7. George Washington to Sir Edward Newenham, August 29, 1788, in The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series. ↑

8. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, April 27, 1809, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. ↑

9. Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers, no. 1, in The Federalist, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Penguin Books, 1961). ↑

10. Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, January 25, 1786, Paris, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. ↑

11. George Washington to James Duane, September 7, 1783, Rocky Hill near Princeton, New Jersey, in The Papers of George Washington. ↑

12. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). ↑

13. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 11, 1812, Monticello, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. ↑

14. John Quincy Adams, as quoted in Morrison Samuel Elliott, The Oxford History of the American People, 3 vols., vol. 2 (New York: New American Library, 1972). Adams, a northerner and eventual 6^th president of the United States was the first to ever serve in the post-founding-father-era (after Washington through Monroe). He continued, however, with the mindset of a Virginia planter elite and forged ahead with imperial institutional governance. ↑

15. James Monroe, “Annual Message to Congress,” December 2, 1823. ↑

16. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, 4 vols. (New York: Chelsea House McGraw-Hill, 1971). ↑

17. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). ↑

18. Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams During the American Revolution. ↑

19. Razi Canikligil, “New American Expansionism: Trump’s Manifest Destiny,” Envoy, Spring 2025. ↑

20. Dictionary of American Politics, ed. Edward Conrad Smith and Arnold John Zurcher (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1955). ↑

21. Dictionary of American Politics, ed., 1955). ↑

22. Trump’s Board of Peace Is Dividing Countries in Europe and the Middle East,” Associated Press, January 21, 2026. ↑

23. David Barsamian, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations with Noam Chomsky on the Post-9/11 World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005). ↑

The post America 250 and the Imperial Nation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Trump went on to note Bolton’s involvement with the administration of President George W. Bush where “he created a lot of problems, but he always wanted to kill people in war, and that was okay for me, as long as I didn’t listen to him, which I never did.”  Listening to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu must have been quite something else.

That other commonly shared trait between the two is a rather sketchy approach to handling classified documents.  In October 2025, a grand jury indicted Bolton for the discovery of private journal entries, private notes and assortment of classified material from his time as national security advisor.  Many of the “diary” entries about his daily activities contained, among other things, military plans for adversarial foreign governments, covert US activities in various theatres, and intelligence on adversarial heads of state. This might have stayed buried but for the hacking activities of, as the Department of Justice put it, “a cyber actor believed to be associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran”.  (The hack of Bolton’s personal email account was reported after he left office in September 2019 with one glaring omission: he did not tell the FBI or anyone else in government that the account contained national defence information.)  How fitting in its symmetry that both Bolton and Trump have found themselves bedevilled by the same country of their ire.

The documents in question were sent to two of Bolton’s family members who were not authorised to access, receive or possess the classified material in question.  These were conveyed via non-governmental email accounts and a non-governmental messaging platform yet to be approved for processing classified information.  Copies of the said documents were also kept, without permission, at his Bethesda home.

The list of counts in the indictment proved menacing: eight for transmission and 10 for retaining classified defence information.  On June 26, Bolton entered a guilty plea to one count of retaining national defence information in a federal court in Maryland, thereby resolving all 18 counts. He faces a maximum prison term of 60 months and has agreed to pay a fine of US$2.25 million.  The plea agreement also notes that neither he nor his survivors will be able to collect any annuity or federal retirement pay.

The officials at hand to make the announcement uttered the expected platitudes.  Kelly O. Hayes, US Attorney for the District of Maryland, was in good form in talking about the priority of the attorney’s office as keeping Americans safe and ensuring that “anyone who endangers our national security will be brought to justice.”  Hayden O’Byrne, Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General, spoke of how the case “ought to send a message to other public officials whom the public has entrusted with classified, national defense information.  If you wilfully mishandle these state secrets, the Department of Justice, led by the National Security Division, will investigate and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”

Where to start with such remarks, other than to note the misdeeds of that most highly ranked of officials entrusted with the most sensitive of state secrets, one Donald Trump?  The president’s appallingly lax approach to classified documents has teetered on the criminal.  Such conduct, however, has never been punished.  Following his first presidency, Trump faced a grand jury indictment bristling with 40 felony counts regarding the mishandling of classified documents arising from that term.  The June 8, 2023 indictment against Trump and his alleged co-conspirator Waltine Nauta, who had been stationed as a valet in the White House during the presidency, noted his retention of “hundreds of classified documents” including information on defence and weapons capabilities of the US and foreign countries, US nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the US and its allies to military attack and plans for possible retaliation given that eventuality.  These had been secreted among newspapers, press clippings, letters, notes, cards, photographs and other miscellaneous material in “scores of boxes” which were duly transported to his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.

In July 2024, and just days after an attempt was made on his life, Judge Aileen Cannon granted Trump’s motion to dismiss the case.  He had successfully argued before his own appointee, that most satisfying state of affairs for an accused, that the DOJ’s appointment of special prosecutor Jack Smith violated the Appointments Clause of the US Constitution.  Smith’s prosecution did not accord with “the role of Congress in the appointment of constitutional officers, and the role of Congress in authorizing expenditures by law”.  That role could not “be usurped by the Executive Branch or diffused elsewhere”.

Smith, an appointee of former Attorney General Merrick Garland, initially appealed the decision.  He was subsequently requested to dismiss the case with Trump’s return to the White House, as the DOJ is barred from prosecuting sitting presidents.  In February this year, the same judge granted the president’s request to permanently prevent the release of Smith’s report on Trump’s handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.  The report, comprising two volumes, had been submitted to Garland on January 7, 2025.  In words that said much about the foundering Republic, Judge Cannon thought releasing the second volume of the report regarding the handling of the classified documents would cause “irreparable damage” to the president and “contravene basic notions of fairness and justice.”  It would certainly reveal the sheer slovenliness of the leader of the free world when dealing with matters classified.

As that old idiom goes, the fish rots from the head down, and the second administration has not disappointed with its singular treatment of sensitive security information.  Dare one forget that caricature of carelessness called Signalgate, when then national security advisor Michael Waltz added Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic to a Signal chat chain containing details on forthcoming military strikes on Yemen.  These included sequencing details of the attacks, information about the targets and weapons that would be used.  No counts levelled there, except perhaps that of risible stupidity.  For that mighty achievement, Waltz was made ambassador to the United Nations.

 Trump, currently reigning in a kingdom beyond prosecution, has been splenetic in his attitude to Bolton, whom he accused, most richly, of using classified information in his unflattering account of the Trump administration in The Room Where It Happened.  For Trump, power is an exercise of personal grievance and petty remonstrance.  No slight is undeserving enough of punishment.  Bolton tattled about the room where things happened; he just did not read it very well.  Not so smart after all.

The post Ironic Fates: Bolton, Trump and Mishandling Classified Documents appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Also, it should not be affected much by the spending of the rich. It’s not likely that Elon Musk eats more Big Macs when his wealth increases or he cuts back when SpaceX’s stock plunges.

And to be clear, I’m not saying the rich don’t eat fast food. I’m sure they do. The claim is just that their consumption of fast food is not affected much by changes in their short-term financial situation.

Anyhow, the story the index has been telling us in the last year is not a good one.

After rising at a healthy pace through 2023 (the January number was an upward blip), spending had been largely flat through 2024 and the first half of 2025. It then rose in the summer and peaked at an annual rate of $386.2 billion in September. Since then, it has fallen sharply, hitting $366.8 billion in May, a decline of just over 4.0 percent from its peak.

That would seem to indicate that people are feeling pretty bad about their economic situation. This is consistent with the bad numbers being reported in the consumer confidence indexes.

I’ve had people suggest to me that this decline could be driven by the increased use of Ozempic or related drugs. This would be a positive spin, since it would probably be good for people’s health if they consumed less fast food.

Unfortunately, that does not seem likely to explain this sort of decline. By 2024, 12 percent of the adult population was already taking a GLP-1 drug. The increase in usage did not prevent fast-food consumption from rising rapidly in 2023 and at least staying flat in 2024.

The number of people using these drugs has undoubtedly continued to rise, but probably not by enough to explain the sharp drop in consumption over the last 8 months. The drop in spending is likely giving us bad news about the state of the economy, not good news on public health.

People’s negative assessments of the economy continue to be somewhat of a mystery. The recent run-up in gas prices, and inflation more generally is unambiguously bad news but is this the worst economy ever, as some of the consumer confidence measures have been showing? Real income for those at the middle and bottom has generally been rising by standard measures, so it seems that we’re missing something, and I’m not sure any of us have figured out what.

Anyhow, the fast-food index is telling us what people do and not just what they say. And what they do is telling us that they don’t feel very good about the economy.

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

The post The Fast-Food Spending Index is Falling Fast appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The Boston Tea Party.–Destruction of the Tea in Boston Harbor, December 16, 1773, from the magazine Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, July 16, 1856. (Yale University Art Gallery.)

Two hundred fifty years ago, Americans rejected monarchy. They rejected the idea that power should rest in the hands of one person, one family, or a distant ruling class. Instead, they enshrined an American promise: legitimate power comes from the people.

Our Constitution opens with three words: “We the People.” As the country marks its 250th anniversary, that promise is worth remembering: in America, the people are supposed to be in charge.

Indeed, every day we see neighbors working together to improve their lives, their communities, and the country.

Earlier this year, hundreds of residents of San Marcos, Texas, packed into public meetings with concerns about a new data center. The Caldwell/Hays Examiner, a local paper, summarized the sentiment: “Electricity bills may soon spike while access to clean water diminishes drastically, given the unfathomably giant data center on its way.”

The local government rejected the unpopular project, and similar efforts are taking place across the country. In every place the message is clear: the people who live there, not a distant tech company, should be in charge of the community’s resources.

Rural communities are also taking on Big Ag. For example, Grassroots Organizing of Western Wisconsin brought residents together and passed local safeguards that limit threats from factory farms and support family farmers, clean water, and local infrastructure.

Iowans won a big victory against a global pesticide manufacturer. Knowing their state’s unusually high cancer rates, Iowa Farmers Union mobilized from the bottom up and blocked a law that would have shielded a billion-dollar corporation from accountability.

These patriotic efforts help fulfill the promise of “We the People.” They also show what’s possible when people come together to shape the decisions that affect our lives.

Unfortunately, few Americans feel in control right now. We face an unpredictable economy, cuts to health care, cruel and reckless ICE raids, and attacks on mail-in ballots. Even that recent win in Iowa is in jeopardy — the Supreme Court just shielded the pesticide company from thousands of lawsuits brought by farmers and families who blame Roundup for their cancer.

These are all symptoms of a single disease: a nation where too much power rests with an elite few rather than with ordinary Americans. That’s exactly what researchers at Topos Partnership found. After listening to nearly 5,000 Americans, we heard one idea emerge: the people are supposed to be in charge.

The real story isn’t Democrats versus Republicans, or newcomers versus citizens, or some fabricated clash of civilizations. The real story — the one that unifies and energizes — is about who decides. Do “We the People” govern ourselves, or are we ruled by concentrated power?

Most Americans in our research recognize that the answer to that question is complicated, but also that being reminded of our defining story could help heal a fractured nation. As one moderate Colorado man expressed, “When everyday people don’t feel in charge, it creates anger, frustration, bitterness. But when everyday people feel like they’re having an impact, it creates a sense of belonging.”

When ordinary people organize, mobilize, and refuse to accept the dictates of an elite few, America moves forward. We’ve seen it in workers establishing safer workplaces and the civil rights movement expanding “who counts” in our country. We decided our nation belonged to us — and acted like it.

Let America’s history and recent successes be the inspiration. This July 4, the most patriotic thing we can do is remember whose hands this country is supposed to be in: ours. When we come together, the people are in charge.

The post This July Fourth Celebrate the Idea That the People are Supposed to be in Charge appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

As Americans prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, few are paying attention to a bill moving through Congress that could seriously impinge on our financial independence.

The Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act, H.R. 4766, is slated to make privately issued stablecoins a major component of the U.S. monetary system. Supporters see stablecoins as a way to strengthen the dollar’s global role while creating a vast new market for U.S. Treasury securities. Critics see the rise of programmable private money that can be monitored, frozen, or restricted by its issuers. Banks fear the loss of the deposits that are essential to advancing affordable credit. What appears to be a debate about digital tokens has thus become a battle over the future of banking itself and finance.

Why Stablecoins Matter

Stablecoins are privately issued digital tokens that can circulate on blockchain networks independently of the banking system. They are designed to maintain a stable value, typically one dollar per token. Unlike Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, whose values fluctuate wildly, stablecoins are usually backed by reserve assets such as cash and short-term U.S. Treasury securities.

Their growth has been explosive. The stablecoin market now measures in the hundreds of billions of dollars and continues to expand rapidly. Advocates see them as the next stage in the evolution of money: faster, cheaper, available around the clock, and capable of moving across borders without relying on traditional banking networks.

For users in countries suffering from inflation, currency controls, or banking instability, dollar-denominated stablecoins can function as digital dollar savings accounts. Residents of Argentina, Turkey, Nigeria, and other countries may trust a Treasury-backed dollar token more than their own national currency. In some countries suffering from inflation, merchants quote prices in dollar stablecoins and accept them directly through mobile apps.

The Push from Cryptocurrency Advocates: Ending “Regulation by Enforcement”

The stated goal of the CLARITY Act is to establish a statutory framework that clarifies whether digital assets are securities, commodities, or payment stablecoins. Before this legislation, regulators—primarily the SEC—often applied decades-old laws to modern blockchain technology. Because the rules weren’t explicitly written for crypto, companies would discover they were in violation only when they were served with a lawsuit or a fine.

The most prominent example is SEC vs. Ripple Labs. Ripple launched its XRP token in 2012 and operated for nearly a decade without specific guidance that its token was considered a security. In 2020, the SEC sued Ripple, alleging they had been selling unregistered securities for years. Ripple was forced into years of litigation and hundreds of millions in legal fees to determine if a rule applied to them retroactively.

The CLARITY Act, alongside the GENIUS Act (which focuses on stablecoins), represents a shift from “Regulation by Enforcement” to “Regulation by Guidance,” where firms have a clear rulebook to follow before they launch products rather than waiting for a subpoena to understand their legal status.

The Government’s Interest

The push for passage of the Clarity Act has come not only from crypto advocates but from policymakers, because every stablecoin backed by Treasury securities creates another buyer for U.S. government debt. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has embraced stablecoins as a means of strengthening the dollar’s global role. The Treasury Department projects that the stablecoin market could eventually reach trillions of dollars. If that happens, stablecoin issuers could become some of the largest buyers of Treasury bills in the world, helping to replace losses from those central banks that have been “de-dollarizing” by selling their reserves of U.S. debt.

Another advantage of stablecoins from the government’s perspective is their ability to reassert U.S. monetary sovereignty over the eurodollar market — the massive, offshore market where dollars are created through bank lending without direct oversight from the Fed. This is a complicated subject for a later article, but the bottom line is that by shifting global demand from uncollateralized eurodollar bank promises to tokens backed 1 to 1 by U.S. Treasuries, stablecoins effectively force privately-issued offshore dollars back onto the U.S. government’s balance sheet.

Promise or Threat?

Those are some of the upsides, but stablecoins are not neutral payment tokens. Part 3 of this series discussed Project Hamilton, which showed what a public digital dollar could look like — fast, privacy-protected and democratic. The stablecoin system rising in its place looks very different. It is private, not public; programmable, not cash‑like; surveilled, not anonymous.

Every stablecoin transaction is permanently recorded on a public blockchain. Tokens can be frozen, seized, or destroyed. Users can be blocked. Circle (USDC) maintains a blacklist function and has frozen addresses at the request of law enforcement or at its own discretion. Tether (USDT) has frozen billions of dollars’ worth of tokens across thousands of addresses. PayPal’s PYUSD includes explicit “freeze” and “wipe” functions in its smart‑contract code.

This is the sort of “programmability” that CBDC critics fear – the ability to embed code into the money itself, causing it to execute transactions automatically when specific conditions are met. In fact, stablecoins could potentially be more invasive than a CBDC, since private issuers are not subject to the constitutional obligations imposed on the U.S. government by the 4^th and 5^th Amendments. In a June 23, 2026 podcast, Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, called stablecoins “much more terrifying than CBDCs because you have complete non-accountability.” Private stablecoins operate via private contracts and “terms of service” that often bypass traditional due process. They can embed algorithmic terms that are enforced automatically, without recourse to a court or even a human teller.

A Digital Gold Mine for Issuers

Under the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act), passed in July 2025, stablecoins must be backed 1 to 1 with dollar collateral. That collateral can take various forms, but stablecoin issuers typically maintain their reserves in highly liquid, short-term instruments—primarily 3-month U.S. Treasury Bills—to ensure they can satisfy redemptions quickly. As of June 18, 2026, the 3-month Treasury yield is 3.83% (down from 5%+ in 2024-25).

Stablecoin issuers make huge profits under this arrangement. The issuer sells stablecoins, uses the proceeds to buy Treasuries, and keeps the interest. Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, has achieved a market cap of $120 billion with a staff of only about 50 employees. It reported a record-breaking net profit of $6.2 billion for the full year of 2023, and quarterly profits reaching $4.52 billion in Q1 2024 alone. A significant portion of this income is derived from its massive holdings of U.S. Treasuries, estimated at over $100 billion.

Particularly controversial are the stablecoin and crypto businesses of the president’s own family, and the potential conflicts of interest involved.

Who Should Receive the Interest – Private Middlemen or the Public?

Cornell Law professor Robert Hockett proposes a different model. He suggests that TreasuryDirect accounts could function as digital wallets, allowing individuals to hold Treasury-backed digital dollars directly and receive the Treasury yield themselves rather than through private intermediaries.

It is a promising idea, but it would require major changes to the existing financial architecture to preserve the credit system now managed by the banks. For more on Prof. Hockett’s proposals, see Digital Greenbacks: A Sequenced ‘Treasury Direct’ and ‘Fed Wallet’ Plan for the Democratic Digital Dollar and The Citizens’ Ledger: Digitizing Our Money, Democratizing Our Finance.

The Issue of Yield and Deposit Flight

This is also the major concern of the banking establishment with the pending Clarity Act. A provision allowing stablecoin issuers to pay their customers “rewards,” considered the equivalent of yield or interest, could suck away their deposit base. Issuers collecting nearly 4% interest on their Treasuries could pay rewards of 2% or 3% to investors and easily outcompete banks paying 0.1 or 0.2 percent on deposits. Banking‑industry estimates of potential deposit flight into stablecoin platforms range from $65 billion to over $1 trillion, with some analysts warning that in a fully developed stablecoin system, as much as $6 trillion could migrate out of the banking system.

But wait: if banks can create deposits on their books just by making loans, as the Bank of England has confirmed, why are deposits so important to them?

This is another complicated subject for a follow-up article, but the bottom line is that while a bank can create deposits, it cannot create the “reserves” necessary to transfer the loaned funds out of the bank. Deposits created when a bank makes a loan are a liability of the bank – its promise to pay on demand. What it pays with are reserves, which only the central bank can issue – either as vault cash (coins and dollar bills) or as digital reserves held in a “master account” at the Fed. The reserves are the payment rails for transferring deposits, and the cheapest way for banks to get them is through deposits transferred from other banks.

Deposits are thus considered the lifeblood of banks, and we need banks for our credit requirements. Stablecoin issuers don’t create new dollars or extend credit. They just tokenize existing dollars drawn from chartered banks, invest them in government securities, and keep the interest. Banks are the only institutions that create credit for the real economy.

If deposits leave the banking system, lending capacity shrinks; and the most vulnerable institutions are the community banks that extend credit to local businesses. Megabanks have other ways to acquire cheap reserves, including the repo market and the Fed discount window. Community banks rely heavily on incoming deposits to provide the reserves to move their loans, and they cannot compete with stablecoins in attracting deposits because they have substantially higher costs than issuers working with algorithms in the cloud.

Why We Need the Community Banks That Stablecoins Could Undermine

Richard Werner, Prof. of Economics at the University of Winchester in the UK, argues that community banks are particularly important for economic growth. Large banks prefer large deals with large customers. A banker can spend time arranging a billion dollar transaction for a hedge fund or private equity firm, or spend the same time processing dozens of small loans to local businesses. Small and medium-sized businesses today account for the majority of jobs; and without community banks, they often struggle to get the financing to adopt new technologies and expand production.

Werner points to the German model, where small businesses typically work with local community banks, cooperative banks, and savings banks that lend only within their local areas. Because the bank and its customers share the same economic fortunes, the banks have an incentive to support local productive enterprises. When a business identifies a promising investment opportunity, it can present its plan to a local bank that already knows the company and understands the local economy. Funding decisions can sometimes be made within days, allowing firms to adopt new technologies quickly and remain globally competitive.

The result, he says, is visible in Germany’s remarkable number of “hidden champions”—small and medium-sized firms that nevertheless rank among the top companies in the world within their specialized market niches. Germany’s success, Werner argues, is closely tied to the fact that roughly 80 percent of German banks are small local institutions that lend locally.

Werner extends the same argument to China. After coming to power in 1978, Deng Xiaoping sought to improve economic performance by decentralizing credit allocation. Rather than relying on a handful of central planners to determine where financing should go, China created thousands of local banks, village banks, cooperative banks, and regional institutions. The result was a vast network of local loan officers making lending decisions based on local knowledge. Werner contrasts “five central bankers” making decisions with “five million loan officers” evaluating opportunities throughout the country. He argues that this decentralized approach played a crucial role in China’s sustained high growth and poverty reduction over the following four decades.

The same has been true in the United States, which had a record 30,456 banks in 1921. Today, however, that number has shrunk to only 9,082 insured financial institutions (banks and credit unions). Small banks have had to merge with much larger banks to stay solvent, largely due to higher regulatory costs and the competitive pressure of the megabanks.

Werner observes that bank size also affects where credit is directed. A banking sector dominated by a few large institutions tends to channel credit toward financial speculation and large corporate borrowers. A banking system composed of many small local banks tends to channel newly created money toward productive local enterprises. When credit goes into new technologies, equipment, and productive capacity, the result is to increase output, employment, and sustainable economic growth without triggering inflation.

Werner concludes that if governments want stronger productivity growth, more small-business formation, greater regional prosperity, and less inequality, they need to encourage the creation of local community banks and adopt a lighter regulatory regime for smaller institutions.

Productivity and the Burgeoning Federal Debt

Economic growth is also particularly important for dealing with the federal debt. Stablecoins may help finance the debt, but they do not shrink it. They just fill some of the gap left by the People’s Bank of China and other central banks that have been selling U.S. Treasuries. The unsustainable $1.2 trillion interest tab must still be paid and continues on its exponential upward growth trajectory.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that the U.S. can “grow our way out of the debt” by increasing production and expanding the economy faster than the debt grows. President Trump has similarly argued that economic growth can reduce the relative burden of the national debt, much as occurred after World War II.

The federal debt exceeded 100% of GDP at the end of the war. But the debt burden gradually declined as the economy expanded faster than the debt, shrinking the debt-to-GDP ratio. And for that sort of growth in today’s economy, preserving the viability of community banks is essential.

Currency Backed by Debt or Productivity?

As artificial intelligence and automation replace jobs while dramatically increasing productive capacity, however, policymakers may one day question whether money must be issued against debt at all – or whether some portion of it could be issued directly against the productive capacity of the economy itself.

That is not a new idea. In fact it represents a return to our revolutionary roots. It was how the American colonists broke free of the “British system” that exploited the colonies for the production of commodities. Rather than relying on foreign currencies, the American colonial governments paid for goods and services with paper scrip they issued themselves. When the king banned that practice, the colonists rebelled – and they won.

Abraham Lincoln used the same funding mechanism to avoid usurious interest rates from British-backed banks that would have re-colonized the States by debt. He paid for the Civil War effort and major national infrastructure with government-issued Greenbacks (U.S. Notes).

When these government notes exceeded the production of goods and services, the supply and demand curve was skewed toward price inflation. But in a world of AI abundance, the curve will tilt the other way – toward too little money chasing too many goods and services. In an economy of that sort of unprecedented productivity, the government will need to issue new money just to balance the scales. And this money will need to be paid to the consumers who will buy the products, not only to close the wealth gap but to provide the demand to absorb the hyper-abundant supply.

Thus this series comes full circle, to the need for a “universal high income” or “sovereign wealth dividend” to solve an AI-induced unemployment crisis – and for a government-issued digital currency to fund it, built on the cash-like, privacy-protected model of Project Hamilton and the ECASH Act.

This article was first posted as an original to ScheerPost.com.

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Growing drought and heatwaves are expanding wildfire acreage. Wildfire Tucumcari NM. Photo by George Wuerthner

Most residents of the West are aware that summer days are getting warmer, and nights are not cooling as much as in the past. Climate change is real, whether the current administration wants to acknowledge it or not.

Warming temperatures have extended and intensified wildfire season in the West, where long-term drought has heightened the risk of wildfires. Scientists estimate that human-caused climate change has already doubled the area of forest burned in recent decades, with the amount of land consumed by wildfires in Western states projected to increase by 2 to 6 times by around 2050.

A recent study amplifies these basic conclusions. The study found that heat waves drive up the area burned by wildfires. According to the researchers, this occurred during 2001–2024, during and immediately following heatwaves. Researchers observed a 2.5-fold increase in burned areas in WUS forests since 2001, with ~64% of this increase coinciding with heatwaves. Approximately 15% of the high-heat days accounted for 42% of the acreage charred.

Heatwaves can rapidly dry fine fuels, including easily ignited materials such as grass, leaves, needles, and small branches. Heatwaves also limit overnight humidity recovery, and temperatures often remain high. And rising heated air can increase atmospheric instability, promoting plume-dominated fire behavior and rapid-fire growth.

During the heat waves, the amount of land burned each day was over 50% higher than on cooler days. In some western areas, that increase reached 300%.

Heatwaves increase the vapor deficit, increasing the moisture the atmosphere can absorb, drying out vegetation.

Heatwaves also limit the normal nighttime cooling, permitting fires to burn longer and hotter.

Adding to the potential for larger fires is that lightning storms are more common during heatwaves.

Modeling shows that climate change will continue to transform the Pacific Northwest, with annual average temperatures projected to increase by roughly 4.7°F to 10°F relative to the 1950 to 1999 baseline by 2080.

Promoting fossil fuel burning is likely to increase warming climate. Oil field near Mariposa, California. Photo by George Wuerthner.

What all this suggests is that thinning, prescribed burning, and other so-called solutions are unlikely to be effective in reducing wildfire’s impact on western landscapes.

Of course, the current administration’s efforts to promote fossil fuels will only exacerbate wildfire spread and influence.

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I mean, what can you expect from the man who, if he truly lasts until January 2029, will indeed be the oldest president in American history (although give Joe Biden full credit, he at least came close)? On the first day of Biden’s presidency, in fact, he was 78 years and 61 days old. On Donald Trump’s first day (the second time around), he was 78 years and 220 days old. And to put that in perspective, only two other presidents in our history came even faintly (and I want to emphasize that “faintly”!) close to either of them: Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Eisenhower was 70 years and 98 days old on the last day or his presidency, and Reagan was 77 years and 349 days old on his final day. And don’t think it means nothing that the leadership of what, in this century (and much of the last one), was the greatest power on the face of the Earth (and probably in all of human history), is now aging presidentially in quite such a striking fashion. Sometimes, believe it or not, the most ridiculously symbolic things turn out to have meaning.

And of course, don’t think it was a mistake or purely happenstantial either. The American people had a choice and still went for the oldest person in the room (three times in a row). So, at some deep level, our voters must know (or at least sense) something about what’s happening to this country of ours, especially older voters who (unlike me) significantly favored a Trump presidency. As a great power on this planet of… well, I was going to say “ours,” but these days whether it’s really ours or not couldn’t be more up for grabs.

Nonetheless, it, too, seems to be growing older by the second. Or, thought of another way, while electing essentially the oldest president imaginable a second time, Americans have also supported a man who seems distinctly intent on turning this planet into… well, an old fart of a place that will be hotter than hell and possibly ready for the garbage heap of history.

And let me tell you, when you get into your very late seventies and early eighties, even when your brain is still more or less working, it’s distinctly not the same as it once was. It is indeed easier to get confused and tired out.

But perhaps we Americans — those of us, at least, who voted for Donald Trump the second time around (and, of course, I wasn’t one of them) — are indeed ready for this country to go down, down, down and, thanks to Donald J., ever more weirdly so. I mean, how many of us would celebrate turning 80 with an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on the White House lawn in “an eight-sided cage wrapped in cryptocurrency advertisements”? Not me, I’ll tell you that!

Can there be any question that the 47th president of the United States is a genuinely weird old man? I doubt it. Once upon a time, if you had written a piece about the future presidency of Donald J. Trump, it would have seemed like the most ridiculous satire of all time. Abraham Lincoln and Donald J. Trump? John F. Kennedy and Donald J. Trump? Okay, I won’t go on, but you get the idea, right?

In short, we are now distinctly in an all-too-weird world. And although it’s a term he complains about and blames on other people, we are indeed in a world where “Trump derangement syndrome” seems ever less like a fantasy term. In fact, by now, as Aaron Blake of CNN recently reported, 61% of Americans and even 30% of Republicans believe that President Trump has indeed become “more erratic with age.” And that’s mighty polite of them, don’t you think?

And imagine that this is the very man who now runs (walks, limps, staggers?) the United States of America and, barring a surprise, will do so for the next two and a half years. As far as I’m concerned, that gives the phrase “what a world!” new meaning.

Yes, his version of fighting was recently on the White House lawn, but let’s be clear, he’s also been boxing (okay, in a different sense than on that lawn) in this country and the world in an all too literally striking fashion, including by launching another war against Iran essentially out of the blue, ensuring that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed for weeks, if not months, and that the global economy would be pushed to the very edge of recession, if not — to use a term he brought up recently — a “worldwide depression,” before, in true Trumpian fashion, changing his mind in the face of Iranian opposition and signing a 14-point agreement with that country to (at least theoretically) reopen the Strait of Hormuz, while claiming a “major win” for the United States (not that anyone in this country filling their car with gas or buying groceries would have thought so).

Phew! That was one long sentence, but let’s face it, Donald J. Trump is proving to be a genuinely long haul of a president.

And it doesn’t matter where you look, things are just getting grimmer and stranger by the month. Why, only the other day, the Trump crew redirected $352 million of your tax dollars, previously designated for the Secret Service, to fund the building of Trump’s fantasy White House ballroom. (But of course, what else could they possibly have done when Congress refused to put the necessary money into that crucial building project, which Trump had previously been claiming would be financed by private funders?)

And imagine this: all of that (and undoubtedly so much more to come in this ever-stranger world of ours) has been happening due to the whims of just one old man — Donald J. Trump, who distinctly has our world by the throat. So, yes, let me wish you (just a little late) a truly happy 80th birthday, Donnie! For all we know, in this ever-stranger world of yours (and, ever so sadly, ours, too), you may even have the urge to be president a distinctly unconstitutional third time, so that some distant day, you can dance (and even doze off) in that ballroom of yours. (God save us!)

This piece first appeared on Tom’s Substack.

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A 6 ⁄ 16 More details A wounded Palestinian infant at Al-Shifa Hospital, October 2023. Photo: Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa). CC BY-SA 3.0.

On June 23, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel released one of the most devastating reports ever produced by a UN investigative body on the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Its title is almost unbearable to read: The Essence of Childhood Has Been Destroyed. Behind the title lies an accusation of extraordinary gravity. The Commission concludes that Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children and that these actions amount to genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, alongside war crimes in the occupied West Bank.

The report is not an emotional appeal. It is a painstaking legal document built upon witness testimony, forensic evidence, satellite imagery, military analysis, medical records, and years of documentation. What it presents is not merely another catalogue of civilian casualties. It argues that the killing, maiming, starvation, detention and psychological destruction of Palestinian children cannot be explained as collateral damage. Rather, the Commission concludes that children themselves have become deliberate targets of Israeli military policy. The implications of such a finding reach far beyond Gaza. They raise fundamental questions about the future of international law itself.

A Report of Extraordinary Gravity

The Commission estimates that since October 2023, at least 20,179 Palestinian children have been killed and more than 44,000 injured. Approximately thirty per cent of all Palestinians killed have been children. These figures alone place the Gaza war among the deadliest conflicts for children in modern history. Yet the report’s importance lies not simply in the numbers but in its conclusions regarding intent.

It documents repeated instances in which children were shot by snipers, attacked by drones, struck while seeking food or water, or killed despite posing no military threat – as should have been obvious. It examines the repeated use of high-yield explosives in densely populated civilian areas long after the predictable consequences for children had become undeniable. It details attacks on maternity hospitals, neonatal wards, schools, orphanages and shelters. It also examines the blockade of food, water and medicine, showing how starvation, disease and the collapse of medical services have become instruments of war directed against an entire civilian population whose youngest members are the most vulnerable.

The Commission investigates Israeli detention practices involving Palestinian minors. Children arrested in Gaza and the West Bank describe torture, sexual violence, degrading treatment and disappearance into detention facilities without information being provided to their families. Such abuses, the report concludes, form part of a broader system of collective punishment directed against Palestinian society across generations. The UN Commission report is not novel on this, even though the findings are devastating. They corroborate previous reports by Save the Children (Palestinian Children in Israeli Military Detention Report Increasingly Violent Conditions, 29 February 2024) and, long before this genocidal campaign that began in 2023 by UNICEF (Children in Israeli Military Detention, February 2013). In his recent book, Survivors of the Darkness, the Palestinian journalist Wesam Afifa documents the horrendous violence of the Israeli concentration camps set up for Palestinians, including children.

Perhaps the UN report’s most chilling conclusion is that the destruction extends beyond physical death. Childhood itself has become a battlefield. Psychological trauma, orphanhood, repeated displacement, hunger, interrupted education and permanent disability together amount to what the Commission describes as the destruction of ‘the essence of childhood’.

A Pattern Long Documented

The Commission’s findings did not emerge suddenly. For nearly two years, Palestinian journalists have documented children pulled from collapsed buildings, infants dying in incubators without electricity, families wiped out in airstrikes and children shot while attempting to retrieve food or water. Many of those journalists paid with their own lives. Gaza has become the ‘deadliest conflict ever for journalists’, reported Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. Yet, despite extraordinary danger the journalists continued documenting events that much of the world preferred not to see.

International human rights organisations reached similar conclusions long before this recent UN report. Save the Children repeatedly warned that Gaza had become one of the most dangerous places on earth to be a child. Defence for Children International–Palestine documented repeated shootings of children in circumstances that raised serious questions about military necessity. Human Rights Watch investigated attacks on schools, hospitals and refugee camps. Amnesty International examined repeated strikes that appeared to violate the principles of distinction and proportionality under international humanitarian law. UNICEF repeatedly warned that children were being killed and injured on an unprecedented scale. None of these organisations described isolated accidents. They identified recurring patterns that demanded independent investigation. The new UN report effectively consolidates this vast body of evidence into a single legal assessment.

In January 2024, the International Court of Justice found that South Africa’s case alleging genocide by Israel was plausible and ordered provisional measures requiring Israel to prevent acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, preserve evidence, and facilitate humanitarian assistance. Subsequent orders strengthened these requirements as conditions in Gaza deteriorated. Although the Court has not yet ruled on the merits of the genocide case, it has repeatedly recognised the grave risk faced by the Palestinian population and the continuing obligations imposed upon Israel under international law. The new Commission report provides further evidentiary material that will inevitably shape future legal proceedings.

The Silence of the Israeli State

Perhaps equally striking has been the nature of Israel’s response. Rather than seriously engaging with the evidence assembled by the Commission, Israeli officials once again dismissed the report outright, describing it as politically motivated and fundamentally biased. They rejected its conclusions in their entirety without offering substantive rebuttal of the specific incidents, witness testimony, or forensic evidence presented by investigators. Every state has the right to defend itself against allegations. But serious allegations require serious answers.

If children were not deliberately targeted, the burden rests upon the Israeli authorities to explain why thousands of children have died in circumstances repeatedly documented by journalists, humanitarian organisations, medical personnel, and now a UN Commission of Inquiry. Why have hospitals, maternity wards, schools and refugee shelters been struck again and again? Why have humanitarian convoys repeatedly come under attack? Why have children continued to die even after ceasefire arrangements? Why have military investigations produced so little accountability? Simply repeating accusations of institutional bias cannot substitute for factual explanation. The refusal to engage with evidence has itself become a disturbing feature of this war.

International humanitarian law rests upon the principle that states are accountable for their conduct. Accountability becomes impossible when every investigation is dismissed before its evidence is even examined.

Justice S. Muralidhar and the Duty of the Judge

The findings of the UN Commission also remind us of the importance of judges who understand that the law is not merely a technical instrument but a defence against arbitrary power. Few Indian judges have embodied that principle more consistently than Justice S. Muralidhar, who as UN Commission on Human Rights, chaired this new report’s committee.

Justice Muralidhar earned a reputation over decades as one of India’s most respected constitutional jurists, particularly in cases involving civil liberties, communal violence, and the protection of vulnerable communities. He was one of the principal judicial voices in implementing accountability after the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, insisting that impunity could not become the norm merely because the crimes were politically inconvenient. His commitment to constitutional duty became internationally known during the communal violence in northeast Delhi in February 2020. As hospitals struggled to treat victims trapped by the violence, Justice Muralidhar and Justice Anup J. Bhambhani convened an extraordinary midnight hearing at Justice Muralidhar’s residence. The Delhi High Court ordered the police to ensure the safe passage of the injured to hospitals and directed immediate emergency medical treatment. Later that day, Justice Muralidhar sharply questioned the failure of the Delhi Police to register cases against political leaders whose inflammatory speeches had been widely circulated, reminding the authorities that the country could not permit ‘another 1984’.

Within hours of these hearings, the Government of India notified Justice Muralidhar’s transfer to the Punjab and Haryana High Court, although the recommendation for his transfer had formally been made by the Supreme Court Collegium earlier that month. The timing generated widespread concern among lawyers, retired judges, and civil society organisations, who regarded the episode as raising troubling questions about judicial independence.

Justice Muralidhar’s career illustrates an essential principle of the rule of law. Courts do not exist to ratify the conduct of governments. Their function is to examine evidence without fear or favour, especially when the victims are those with the least political power. The same principle animates the work of the UN Commission of Inquiry. Its conclusions may be contested, but they cannot simply be dismissed because they are politically inconvenient. The proper response to serious evidence is serious engagement. That is the first obligation of any state that claims to respect the rule of law.

The Test Before Humanity

The UN Commission’s report is ultimately not only about Israel or Palestine.

It asks whether the international legal order created after the defeat of European fascism still possesses the moral authority to defend children from organised violence. If more than 20,000 children can be killed while the institutions of international diplomacy continue largely as normal, then the promise embodied in the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child stands gravely diminished. The report will not end the war. It cannot restore the lives already lost. But it establishes a historical record that will become increasingly difficult to erase. Long after governments change and military campaigns conclude, this record will remain. History remembers those who committed atrocities. It also remembers those who looked away.

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Illustration by Paola Bilancieri.

In 1950, the fourth FIFA World Cup was held in Brazil from June 24 to July 16. Brazil became the finalist of its group by defeating Mexico 4–0, crushing Sweden 7–1, and beating Spain 6–1. What happened then could be a lesson for this year’s soccer World Cup, where small country teams are performing with excellence.

Unlike Brazil, Uruguay’s national team, by contrast, showed a different performance. They tied a difficult match 2–2 against Spain after trailing 2–1. Then Uruguay defeated Sweden 3–2, scoring the winning goal just minutes before the end of the match.

The match between a brilliantly performing Brazil and an unconvincing Uruguay would decide the world title. Uruguay, one point behind Brazil, had to win to become world champion. Their rival needed only a draw to lift the coveted trophy.

There was enormous interest in the match despite the consensus among sports journalists and the public that Brazil would be the champion. After all, the Brazilian team had won its previous matches with ease, while Uruguay had only managed a draw with Spain and a hard‑fought win against Sweden. A comparison of previous performances left little doubt about the final result.

On July 16, 1950, Rio de Janeiro was buzzing. An improvised carnival was ready to celebrate Brazil’s triumph over Uruguay. Brazilians completely filled the recently inaugurated Maracanã Stadium. Although the official count was a world‑record 173,850 spectators, unofficial estimates put the number closer to 210,000.

Only a few Uruguayans were present at the match.

The newspaper O Mundo published a special edition with a photograph of the Brazilian team under the caption: “These are the world champions.” Jules Rimet, the former president and creator of the FIFA World Cup, had prepared a speech in Portuguese to congratulate the winners, who were expected to be the Brazilians. The Brazilian Football Confederation had printed 22 gold medals with the names of its players. A song titled “Brazil the Victors” had been composed days before the final match.

Before the match, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Ângelo Mendes de Moraes, addressed the crowd with words aimed at the Brazilian players: “You, players, who in less than a couple of hours will be acclaimed as champions by millions of compatriots, have no rivals in the entire hemisphere.”

With the Brazilian players and the public anticipating victory, Juan López, Uruguay’s coach, told his players that the best way to face the powerful Brazilian team was to play defensively and try not to let them score too many goals. Outside the locker room, Uruguay’s captain, Obdulio Varela, nicknamed “The Black Chief,” told his teammates: “Juan is a good man, but he’s completely wrong.” He added: “Friends, those who watch don’t play. Let the show begin.” And with those memorable words, the players walked onto the field.

The first half ended 0–0. Two minutes into the second half, Brazil scored the first goal. The Brazilians were delirious, and the Maracanã shook violently as thousands of spectators jumped and shouted at the top of their lungs. Brazil was a party.

After the goal, Varela took the ball from the net and slowly—very slowly—walked toward George Reader, the British referee. Speaking to him in Spanish, he questioned the validity of the goal. He spoke at length, forcing the referee to call for an interpreter. The game was halted while the conversation took place. The Brazilian spectators were furious. A Brazilian player spat on him, but Varela remained unmoved.

Varela would later say that his actions were a carefully planned strategy meant to cool down the crowd. Once his mission was accomplished, he turned to his teammates: “Come on, amigos, now is the time to win.” The Uruguayan players, suddenly energized by Varela’s words, now felt they could face the Brazilian Goliath.

Twenty‑one minutes into the second half Uruguay tied the score. Running quickly down the right side, Alcides Ghiggia sent a low cross to Juan Schiaffino, who managed to score. The Maracanã, which until then had been a celebration, suddenly fell silent, a silence “that terrified our players,” Brazilian manager Flavio Costa later said.

A draw would have crowned the Brazilians, but another surprise awaited them. The Uruguayan Ghiggia exchanged passes with Julio Pérez. Ghiggia kept running and fired a deadly shot to score the second goal just 11 minutes before the end of the game. The inconceivable had happened. Brazil had lost the match, and Uruguay became world champion.

The loss of the World Cup had a devastating effect on Brazilians. There were dozens of suicides, and many spectators suffered nervous breakdowns. Rio de Janeiro, which had been all samba before the match, became as silent as an abandoned country church.

Years later, Varela recalled: “There was so much sadness among the fans that I decided to go have a drink with them. I thought the Brazilians were going to kill me when they realized who I was. But I also thought that if I had to die that night, that was my fate. Fortunately, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The Brazilians congratulated me, and we had a few drinks together.”

The next day, Varela refused to be photographed and declined to participate in the celebrations, saying: “My heart is with the people who are suffering.” Upon their return, the Uruguayans were greeted by a country in ecstasy. Everyone was jubilant except one person: Obdulio Varela, the man who had saddened the Brazilians.

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Collection drives for food, clothing, medicine, and other essential goods have sprung up across Venezuela. Here, members of Provincial Trujillo Commune organize donations for families displaced by the earthquake. (Gobernación de Trujillo)

There is no such thing as a purely natural disaster, especially in a country under siege. Likewise, the response to any disaster is always mediated by social, political, and even geopolitical factors. Following the devastating 1812 earthquake that occurred during the independence struggle, Simón Bolívar said: “If nature opposes us, we will fight against it and make it obey us.” Today, this remark can sound jarring—like a strange anti-ecological outburst—but what Bolívar meant was that the strategic project of emancipation must remain in the forefront and guide our actions, even when confronting a natural challenge.

This should be kept in mind when we think about the earthquakes that recently struck Venezuela. The natural fact is straightforward: there was a double movement of the earth, first a magnitude 7.2 tremor followed seconds later by another measuring 7.5. In its wake, the destruction followed along natural fault lines, such as the San Sebastián Fault that runs along the La Guaira coast, but it also spread along imperialist-made ones. Foremost among these were the fractures in the country’s infrastructure, emergency rescue capacity, and health system caused by more than a decade of crippling sanctions.

These sanctions, which still number more than 1000, are not merely words and hostile intentions. Mark Weisbrot’s research at CEPR in Washington estimated that they contributed to some 40,000 excess deaths in just one year. For those unacquainted with the international finance system, the impact of a sanctions regime of this kind may be hard to understand. However, the net result is that every international transaction becomes difficult. Ordinary trade and credit lines collapse, while companies, banks and governments avoid transactions, even when they may be technically legal under the sanctions regime, because they lack certainty and fear future reprisals.

The consequences affect every aspect of disaster preparedness and response. In Venezuela, millions of people began to migrate shortly after the Obama Executive Order was published in 2015, including doctors, medics, civil engineers, and other trained professionals. Heavy rescue equipment became harder to repair because spare parts cannot be imported. Hospitals struggled to replace specialized medical equipment. Public utilities postponed maintenance because financing dried up and suppliers fear secondary sanctions. Even when transactions are technically legal, banks and manufacturers frequently overcomply, refusing to participate and leaving institutions to improvise under conditions of permanent scarcity.

A second set of fault lines was opened by the January 3 imperialist attacks on Venezuela, in which democratically-elected President Nicolás Maduro was kidnapped in a military operation that killed more than one hundred people, and left many more injured and traumatized. Although the Bolivarian Revolution succeeded in retaining political power—essential to any revolutionary process—it lost control over Venezuela’s oil sales and was forced to introduce “reforms” to the country’s highly advanced legislation governing its natural resources, especially oil.

All of this means that the earthquake in Venezuela, heartbreaking by every measure, has been made far more lethal—both in its immediate impact and long-term consequences—by factors directly attributable to U.S. imperialism’s ongoing, multi-level assault on the country and its people. Nearly 1500 deaths have now been officially recorded, and that tragic toll will continue to rise in the days ahead. The overall number of casualties will be felt on many levels, and the struggle to mitigate them through an effective, sovereign, and coordinated response is now a battleground, in which the contradiction with U.S. imperialism is at the center.

Radically Different Responses

When the double earthquake struck, it was experienced as an eerie combination of thunderous sound, prolonged and severe movement of the earth, and an oddly colored sky. One observer described it as “wind without wind.” People screamed and dogs went mad with fear. Entire buildings collapsed into rubble, while cracks opened up in the beach where many had gone to spend the national holiday. Days later people remain trapped beneath the debris. The situation is especially grave in the cities and towns that line the La Guaira coast. On social networks, hundreds of photographs and names circulate as families desperately search for missing loved ones.

In such a situation, it is natural to offer aid without first thinking of one’s own interests. This is precisely what people throughout Venezuela and neighboring countries have done. Acting president Delcy Rodríguez’s government has also responded swiftly and forcefully, deploying the means at its disposal in the people-centered manner that has characterized the Bolivarian Revolution over the last three decades. Alongside this official response, there have been massive spontaneous contributions: motorcycles piled high with supplies streamed toward the affected areas, while volunteers joined the huge, state-led rescue effort, and aid teams from Mexico, Cuba, and Brazil arrived quickly with concrete assistance.

If compassion drives the Venezuelan government’s and the Latin American peoples’ response, the same cannot be said of U.S. imperialism, for which concern for humanity has been displaced by the motives of profit, expropriation, and domination, and which has so often sought to turn the misfortune of others to its own advantage. The day following the earthquake, Secretary of State Marco Rubio coolly announced that the Department of War, SOUTHCOM, and the marines would be central to the U.S. “aid” effort.

We have seen this playbook before. Following Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, the barely disguised Trojan horse of U.S. “humanitarian assistance” arrived in the form of an aircraft carrier and some 20,000 troops on the ground. The consequences of that de facto occupation in the Haitian case included an obvious loss of sovereignty, documented cases of sexual assault and exploitation, and the cholera epidemic brought by the occupying forces.

In the face of imperialism’s designs, the voice of the Venezuelan revolutionary people is united around three demands: the U.S. must lift the sanctions completely, unfreeze all Venezuelan assets, and return President Maduro and Cilia Flores to Venezuela. If these steps are not taken, the U.S. presence looks quite a bit like a simple military occupation—an integral part of the recolonizing ambitions expressed by Donald Trump’s MAGA imperialism, with its grotesque revival of the Monroe Doctrine.

In Caracas, while people wait for their homes to be assessed, people are either going to shelters or camping in the streets. Photo: Andrew Drum.

The Battle over the Narrative

The struggle to defend the Venezuelan people, their future, and their projects in an integral manner is also unfolding as a struggle in the media and the social networks. False and malicious claims are circulating alleging that the government is not responding or that it is blocking relief. At the same time, videos from unrelated disasters, including earthquakes in Turkey, have been passed off as footage from Venezuela, alongside a flood of AI slop. Much of this comes from Maria Corina Machado’s disgruntled opposition that feels left out of the post-January 3 deal-making.

What is true is that the large number of well-meaning drivers attempting to reach La Guaira caused the main highway from Caracas to become congested, temporarily preventing heavy machinery and ambulances from arriving. Likewise, so many people, cars, and motorcycles converged around the rescue sites that the voices of those trapped under the rubble were difficult to hear, hampering rescue efforts. National and international rescue teams asked for space to work. The government responded by setting up a coordination center in the sports complex called Poliedro de Caracas, where civilian aid is collected and sent in trucks to where it may be needed. In the center, people who volunteer are evaluated to determine where they can be most useful.

If the COVID pandemic taught us anything it is that only a state-directed response can be effective. Nongovernment operators and individuals are welcome but need to be part of a coordinated effort that only a sovereign state can lead. The most common Big Lie being deployed now by foreign media is essentially the same one which has always been employed against the Bolivarian Revolution: that a level of state authority comparable to—and likely weaker than—that exercised by governments in the Global North is “authoritarian” whenever it is exercised in a Global South country. Meantime, some argue that there is no government response, opening the path for forceful external intervention.

Revolutionary Preparation

The double earthquake hit a country weakened by sanctions but strengthened by the 27-year-old Bolivarian Revolution that has profoundly shaped all aspects of Venezuelan society. If sanctions have systematically weakened Venezuela’s material infrastructure, the Bolivarian Revolution spent more than two decades cultivating a new social metabolism. Though still in formation, it has already become the country’s greatest source of resilience. Communal councils, communes, the civic-military union, and public housing programs all became part of the country’s capacity to respond collectively to the crisis.

The revolution has consistently strengthened the country’s housing stock. Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela, Hugo Chávez’s housing project initiated in 2011, has produced millions of “dignified homes” all across the country. Most of these buildings, built by a range of Chinese, Brazilian, Belarussian, and Venezuelan firms, have fared well in the earthquake. In the cases where a building was made unliveable—which happened mostly along the coastal fault line—they tended to tilt rather than collapse. Concentrating people in apartment blocks rather than having them dispersed in precarious hillside settlements is also safer, both because of higher construction standards and because it facilitates collective action and the delivery of state assistance.

A second factor is the civilian-military alliance that Chávez promoted. This model, now internalized by the whole population, became the framework for the government’s combined state-and-volunteer response. The civilian-military alliance, which Maduro wisely expanded to include the police, has always been both an institutional arrangement—expressed in the six-million-member militia—and a more widespread political attitude rooted in the class consciousness of civilians and military personnel alike. Its first testing ground was the Vargas tragedy of 1999, precisely where the current hit harder. The civilian-military alliance rose to the occasion then, just as it is doing now.

Finally, it is in the country’s socialist communes that the most far-sighted response is taking shape. Teams from the network called Unión Comunera went to help with rescue efforts in La Guaira. In Caracas’ El Panal Commune, in addition to assessing the condition of the barrio’s buildings, communards set up several collection centers and are creating a shelter for those who have been left houseless by the earthquake.

As in the challenges faced by the food shortages of the mid-2010s, people around the country are turning to communes to collectively solve the medical and existential problems they face and to find a way forward. Given the power of the country’s communal movement and its solid ideological formation, it is possible that the communes could once again become a catalyst for renewed political consciousness. In these difficult times, they may prove decisive in rallying the Venezuelan people around the socialist project, temporarily under the shadow of the January 3 attack.

Years of blockade and imperialist aggression have no doubt left Venezuela materially weaker. Yet the Bolivarian Revolution has produced a new social metabolism that cannot easily be undone: an organized people and a set of institutions capable of responding to crises. If the earthquake has  exposed the country’s vulnerabilities, it also revealed where its real strength lies: in the revolutionary people and in deep-rooted social and institutional transformations.

Unión Comunera Brigade in La Guaira. Photo: Brigada Argentina Permanente.

This first appeared in Monthly Review.

The post Imperialism-Induced Fault Lines: The Venezuelan Earthquake appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Keir Starmer and Donald Trump at Gaza “peace summit” in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. Photo: Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street.

It is one of the most remarkable ways to fall from grace.  Leading British Labour to a deceptively crushing victory over diddling, muddling, decrepit fools.  Asserting a period of stable rule, if not exactly dull then at least reliable after several stints of lunacy under the Conservatives gone to the bad.  But it was not to be.  Sir Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation as Prime Minister on June 22, turned out to be inept in several ways, not being able to communicate well, not being particularly fluent (fudging “hostages” for “sausages”), an appalling lack of judgment (the appointment of the Epstein-soiled Lord Peter Mandelson to the ambassadorial post in Washington), unable to put together that most yearned for thing – a capturing narrative, a glued unity however specious.  Economic growth was the agenda, but where did it go?

What the British voter got, instead, was the July 2024 decision to axe winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners, which was followed by an about turn in May last year.  He retained the policy introduced by the Conservatives in 2017 restricting benefits to the first two children of a family, only to be abandoned in last year’s budget.  To target the rise of Reform, he took rhetorical pickings from its leader, Nigel Farage, and promised a mandatory digital ID card to be stored on mobile phones as proof of a person’s right to work in the UK.  This policy, too, was abandoned.

In foreign affairs, where he was supposedly at greater ease, Starmer proved sickeningly amenable to Israel’s ruthless campaign in Gaza, explicitly approving the withholding of power and water supplies from Palestinian civilians as means of “self-defence”.  The real terrorists, it would seem, were to be found at home, incarnated in the direct action group Palestine Action, which the Starmer government banned, placing it in the same league as ISIS or Boko Haram.  He also seemed to feign ignorance about the ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case commenced by South Africa towards the end of 2023 against Israel, or the issuing of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

Starmer came to power in the aftermath of Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat to Boris Johnson in 2019, after which he went about purging his party of the radical influence left by his predecessor.  Nothing he did suggested he was anything but an establishment creature, whatever his trumpeted credentials as a progressive lawyer respectful of human rights.  Where there was an abuse of power, he was likely to be there to be defending it.  Oliver Eagleton’s cutting biography, The Starmer Project (2022), is relentless on this: Starmer combined “intervention abroad with repression at home”.  As Director of Public Prosecutions, he pursued the hacker Gary McKinnon (Starmer was enraged when then Home Secretary Theresa May halted the extradition to the United States) and the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange while sparing, for instance, the police responsible for killing Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station and frustrating efforts to charge Home Office officials liable for the death of migrant Jimmy Mubenga.

Other works on Starmer do little to stir feelings of sympathy for this apparently decent figure.  Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire of The Times, for instance, offer the devastating Get In (2025).  Starmer, the authors show, became the choice of spear for Morgan McSweeney, the founder of the think tank Labour Together and later Starmer’s Chief of Staff.  That particular man of the shadows had a world view characterised by “a certain fanaticism, paranoia and moral certitude.”  (The slime of the Mandelson affair was ample enough to make McSweeney fall on his sword.)  The purpose of the spear was unambiguous: to target Corbynism on the pretext of combating antisemitism, becoming, effectively, “the great deception”.  Paul Holden’s The Fraud (2025) expands on the theme, exposing McSweeney and Labour Together’s use of undeclared donations to the Electoral Commission from hedge fund managers and pro-Israeli figures to discredit Corbyn.  Throughout, Starmer’s decency remains well concealed.

The victory of Andy Burnham announced, at least for Starmer, the coming of a slaying spirit.  The now former Mayor of Greater Manchester had shown exactly what he thought of his constituency by taking the plunge in the seat of Makerfield, which he won with almost 25,000 votes (55%) to the 15,696 votes for Reform (35% of the share) and 3,111 (7%) votes for the even more rightist Restore.  Much is being made of it: Burnham as knight armed against the reactionary forces of Reform and Restore while restoring Labour’s focus.  But Burnham is old newspaper wrapping, an echo of the Blair years, one who voted for the Iraq War and against an inquiry into its legality but was sure some two decades later to do some politicking in suggesting regret.

The fall of Starmer is also another reminder about how the political context of popularity and demise has changed. Britain, after Brexit, seems to be in the mood of torching its prime ministers, seeking kindling sooner than a leader can find the necessary bearings.  (Seven PMs in a decade is a scorching rate.)  That, at least, is the impression the strategists, focus group apparatchiks and party wallahs give us.  The social media saturated public are fickle and will turn, sampling the next morsel of misinformation, the next tasty bite of disinformation.

A notable pattern in the aftermath of the by-election was an utter disregard to what might be politely called the factual record.  Rumour, gossip, blather and wispy nonsense filtered through the bulletins with wearying force, featuring alleged conversations between Starmer and his wife regarding his future.  Starmer loyalists demonstrated their deathless loyalty by telling the press how the man was feeling over a weekend of anguish.  The press stable had effectively anointed Burnham in advance of any party vote or decision.  Here was an inexorable sense of a position being vacated, its occupant removed, the baton passed on.  And not a single British vote was involved in the process.  Yet another PM dud.  What democracy, and what fine Westminster democracy at that.

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Teamsters President Sean O’Brien. Photo: Ted Merriman. CC BY-SA 4.0

The big news coming out of the Teamsters’ recent convention in Las Vegas is that for the first time in 35 years, there will be no rank-and-file democratic elections for the top officers of the union. The Fearless slate, led by Richard Hooker, failed to get the 5% of the delegates necessary to make it onto the ballot. The Incumbent Sean O’Brien and Fred Zuckerman, “Teamsters United Slate” were elected to office by delegates to the convention.

Popularly known as the “OZ” slate, they secured 96% of the vote. They are the first leaders of Teamsters to be elected without a popular mandate since the 1989 voluntary consent decree between the union and the federal government. The court order mandated changes in the union’s highly undemocratic constitution to provide for one-member-one-vote for convention delegates and International officers. The last Teamster leader elected by convention delegates was Jackie Presser in 1986. He was notoriously corrupt, mobbed-up, and an FBI informant and led the union until his death in 1988. It looks like Teamsters have come full circle.

The Teamsters’ General President Sean O’Brien cast the OZ slate’s reelection as a victory for the union’s rank and file. “This victory belongs to rank-and-file Teamsters. When we were sworn into office four years ago, our leadership team committed to building a bigger, faster, stronger union, and that’s exactly what we’ve done,” O’Brien declared in an official union statement. Yet, convention delegates are disproportionately union officers, staff, and close allies—with bloated and multi-salaries­­­­—where rank-and-file workers are few and far between.

Bloviating claims such as, “The Teamsters is now the most aggressive, effective, and respected labor union on Earth,” according to O’Brien, are in sharp contrast to a union deep in crisis. It must be a great relief for O’Brien and Zuckerman to avoid campaigning, especially at UPS, which has been ravaged by tens of thousands of layoffs and building closures across the country. Adding insult to injury, the Teamsters’ approved buyout program for UPS drivers has been implemented so incompetently that has infuriated many more people than those who took it in order to get out of the hell-hole of UPS.

Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA), inadvertently captured the new reality of the Teamster “democracy,” according to the New York Times:

He received a standing ovation in Las Vegas and opened with a joke about Mr. O’Brien’s resounding victory. “Ninety percent! Those are Putin numbers!” There was some halting laughter. In fact, Mr. O’Brien secured 96 percent of the vote.

The most important reason that the Fearless slate wasn’t able to reach the 5% of the delegates necessary was due to the Teamsters for a Democratic Union’s (TDU) dirty alliance with the O’Brien leadership. The Teamsters is the most pro-Trump of all of the major unions. TDU, since its founding in 1978 heroically supported long-shot candidates in the bleakest of times. This is especially true in the two decades following the federal government’s purge of Ron Carey, the first rank-and-file, democratically elected leader of the Teamsters. Carey led the Great UPS Strike of 1997.

TDU, for example, supported Tom Leedham’s three reform campaigns against the old-guard candidate James Hoffa Jr., the son of the infamous and long-dead leader of the Teamsters. It supported Sandy Pope’s 2011 campaign, the first woman to run for the top spot in the union. She ran as a single candidate for General President in a three-way race. In 2016, TDU supported Fred Zuckerman and Tim Sylvester and the first “Teamsters United” slate; it nearly defeated the incumbent Hoffa. In the 2021 elections, it flipped the other way and made a deal with some of the worst elements of the old guard that split from Hoffa and endorsed a slate led by Sean O’Brien.

O’Brien’s long record of threatening members and the racism and misogyny of his home Local 25, based in Boston, were well documented. TDU claims they have a “coalition” with O’Brien, but the effect has been that there is no independent organization of rank-and-file Teamsters to oppose the union’s alliance with the fascist-aligned Trump administration, along with long list of other vital issues. There was no open discussion or debate of this detrimental alliance between TDU, O’Brien, and Trump at the recent Labor Notes conference, which doesn’t reflect well on the state of the left and the trade unions.

The Fearless slate campaign always faced long odds in its challenge to O’Brien. The death of Fearless slate member, New York Teamster Chris Silvera, the former head of the Teamsters National Black Caucus (TNBC), on his way to the convention, threw a shadow over the convention for his slate. Promises made to the Fearless slate that local union delegates would vote for them didn’t materialize, whether by subtle or not-so-subtle methods. But, TDU’s unrelenting hostility to Fearless played an important role, acting as O’Brien’s whip on any dissent in the union membership.

I spoke to Richard Hooker, the Secretary-Treasurer of Teamsters Local 623 based in Philadelphia, who challenged O’Brien for the top spot in the union, a week after the close of the convention. Richard is the first African-American candidate for the top spot in the Teamsters. He faced the jeers and boos of hostile convention delegates while accepting his nomination. I asked him how he was doing. “Boos don’t bother me. You have to go through it. It doesn’t bother me at all.” Richard told me that the convention had “too many officers.” I asked him what the consequences of such an overwhelming victory for the incumbents. “Unfortunately, our members are going to face the hard truth with this administration.”

Other Teamster convention business included providing speaking opportunities to far-right and pro-Israel politicians. In sharp contrast to the UAW convention that voted to divest the union of Israeli Bonds, the Teamsters had two prominent supporters of the State of Israel speak at their convention: Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Cory Booker (D-NJ). Hawley is also a prominent far-right politician. Sean O’Brien also announced that the union had reached a deal with the Trump administration to end the government oversight of the union, one of the last methods for rooting out corruption, despite its notorious role in ousting Carey from the union, who was later found not guilty in federal court.

Meanwhile, the disgraced former Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer attended the convention and appears to have become part of O’Brien’s entourage. Finally, and most bizarrely, the Teamsters passed a resolution recognizing February 14 as “James R. Hoffa Day” as a paid holiday, the man most responsible for bringing the Mafia into the highest levels of the union, further consolidating the cult-like internal life of the union.

The Long Counterrevolution

Back in 1996, Steve Greenhouse, the New York Times labor reporter, wrote an article called “Teamster Counterrevolution: Why It Nearly Won Election.” Ron Carey won the 1996 election with a majority of the vote against a well-funded campaign led by James P. Hoffa, Jr. Greenhouse saw a lot of the appeal of Hoffa, Jr. in his famous name, a nostalgia for the mythical Teamsters union. He also ran a sophisticated campaign that played on the shortcomings of Carey’s few years in office. Despite the horrid reputation of many of Hoffa’s key supporters, he didn’t promise a restoration of the old order; he promised to “Restore the Power.”

Ken Paff, the director of TDU in 1996 and still a leading figure today, told Greenhouse: ‘’Why is it that in countries that are new to democracy, dictators always try to make a comeback? The people in the counterrevolution don’t like someone trying to take away their power. They control armies; they control people and pensions. They mustered a lot of power and resources to defeat Carey.” The two decades of Hoffa Jr. chipped away at many of the reforms that Carey implemented, but he couldn’t do away with all of them. The Counterrevolution took a lot longer to triumph, but this time around, it was with the vital support of the ex-reformers of TDU.

A full restoration, hopefully, is still not in the cards. While another rank-and-file election is not possible for another five years—and any efforts to abolish them is in all likelihood to fail—but, making it more difficult to run for office is not out of the question. It will certainly be more difficult to challenge the leadership over the next few years. The Teamsters are looking more like the old Teamsters. Jackie Presser would be pleased.

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Pete Hegseth meets with on board the guided-missile destroyer USS Hudner during his visit to Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Feb. 25, 2025. Photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander C. Kubitza, Department of Defense.

Events in Cuba have flown under the radar lately, but big changes are afoot. Noted by PBS June 19 but only belatedly by anybody else, Cuba’s new free-market reforms include 176 measures “to further decentralize Cuba’s state-run economy…[with] more space for private businesses, imports and exports without state intermediation, free hiring of personnel, authorization for private banks and investment by Cubans abroad.” There will even be fast-food chains on the island. If this echoes to you the so-called opening up of Eastern Europe after the Soviet collapse, you’re onto something – namely the corporate blueprint for privatizing a state-run, aka communist, economy. This was not inevitable for Cuba before Donald “Nail the Commies” Trump quite repulsively blockaded the island, but once he did, it arguably became so.

Cuba’s state monopoly on foreign trade and centralized production are now kaput, PBS reports. However, in a happy sign of governmental sanity, “Cuban authorities cautioned that…measures will not be viable if the U.S. does not lift the energy and financial embargo on the island.” So, Mr. Trump: no end to sanctions and the blockade, no free-market “opening up” of Cuba. The blockade will be the key test. Sanctions have been around, doing their insidious damage, forever. But the blockade is Trump’s signature barbarity, and if these reforms don’t inspire enough magnanimity in the Washington despot to end this brutality, this siege, then all bets are off.

You’d think Trump would seize this opportunity to try to freeze the Russians and Chinese out of the Caribbean, and he may: Moscow was the only power in the world that broke the energy blockade. It boldly sent the Anatoly Kolodkin tanker with 730,000 barrels of crude oil that arrived in late March in Matanzas and then later dispatched the Sea Horse, with 200,000 barrels of gas and oil. Russians have long memories. They have not forgotten the horrific Nazi blockade of Leningrad and clearly, with that in mind, were not scared by Washington. They’ve seen worse. And there was nothing the white house could do about this.

 The Kremlin didn’t care, because you can bet its denizens are currently mad as hornets about revelations of over 40 Pentagon biolabs in Ukraine with, likely, Slav targets for their pathogens, as revealed by Tulsi Gabbard when she recently resigned. Rumors of these bio-weapons facilities have percolated through the internet for years, and indeed, some years back, yours truly even watched a video clip of Victoria Nuland confessing to Congress that yes, the U.S. researched pathogens in military biolabs on the Ukraine border with Russia. Was this video an AI fake – all the way back, just a year or two after the start of Moscow’s 2022 invasion? Who knows. Since it appeared, it’s evidently been scrubbed from the internet. So maybe its provenance was sketchy. Or maybe that public admission was just too damn explosive. One thing’s for sure, that clip wasn’t just watched in the U.S. – it was watched in the Kremlin, too. This was before the 2024 Ukrainian intelligence (ahem, CIA-inspired?) assassination of Russian Lieutenant General Igor Kirilov, in charge of investigating these Pentagon biolabs in Ukraine. Maybe Kirilov was just too effective.

Gabbard revealed that the U.S. army worked with “anthrax, avian flu, Ebola, plague and tuberculosis” in these Ukrainian labs, RT reported June 13. According to Tass, around the same time, the Pentagon spent “over $11 million to establish biological laboratories in Ukraine,” and the U.S. firm “Black and Veatch was the main contractor for the project.” And western elites like to dismiss Kremlin leadership as, ho, ho! paranoid. They probably thought the Soviets were paranoid during the Leningrad siege, which murdered and starved to death roughly 1.5 million people or the defense of Stalingrad, which saw the deaths of 1.1 million Russians. I doubt the Kremlin cares who calls it paranoid; it’s sachems know a monstrosity when they see one and they saw it in Trump’s blockade of Cuba. It’s a pity they haven’t turned the same attention to the criminal Israeli blockade of Gaza – but that likely has to do with the 1.5 million-strong Russian diaspora in Israel. Moscow takes care of its own.

China also broke Trump’s Cuban blockade, sending 60,000 tons of rice and over 5000 sets of 2-kilowatt photovoltaic power generation equipment, as part of the collaboration in which it built 55 solar parks for Cuba in 2025, with 37 more projected over the next two years. But still, these substantial acts of solidarity are not enough, so tight is the stranglehold on Cuba from the bully to the north. Per Drop Site News June 23, even Vietnam now assists Cuba “with its recently unprecedented economic overhaul by sharing lessons, strategies and operational frameworks from its 40 years of…(Renewal) reforms, the Vietnam Plus reports.” Drop Site goes on to call what’s happening Cuba’s “deepest economic liberalization since 1959…and using Vietnam’s transition to a market-oriented socialist economy as a model.” Vietnam’s “flexible, market-adaptable State-Owned Enterprises” are critical here.

For socialists and communists everywhere, this bed of thorns raises the question, will Cuba still be socialist when the metamorphosis ends? Exactly how much damage to working people on this island did Donald Trump manage to do – beyond, of course, obvious crimes like killing infants in the NICU by blockading vital energy to run hospitals and so forth. Because clearly, Cuba’s president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, is making these changes under duress. They affect, according to Drop Site June 12: enterprise and markets; decentralization and the state; trade and investment; agriculture and food; fiscal, monetary and social; energy and transport; tourism, commerce and labor. And these reforms have no mere mild effects. For instance, foreign direct investment will be incentivized, land use and wages will be “reformed,” and there will be a “move from subsidizing products to subsidizing people.”

 While it’s easy to carp that these concessions amount to capitulation to the tyranny of the late-stage finance capitalism headquartered in New York City, frankly, I don’t see a lot of wiggle room for Diaz-Canel. He’s clearly making the best of a terrible situation. Trump apparently doesn’t care that his blockade is killing Cubans, because when it comes to Latin America, he is a dictator, egged on by years of nauseating propaganda from outlets like The New York Times about people like Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and by its caricatures of Cuban communist repression; while behind Trump looms a merciless, blood-stained phalanx of finance, real estate, stock market, banking and hedge fund predators. To say nothing of U.S. military might and its agonizing proximity to a tiny island that numerous pentagon bigwigs over the decades have threatened to turn into a parking lot.

Russia has size, resources and nukes. So does China, plus a massive population. Iran has missiles like you wouldn’t believe and an unstoppable esprit de corps. But what do little countries like Vietnam and Cuba have? Not much beyond their ingenuity and their wits. Cuab’s president has no choice but to use those. And as anyone who’s ever survived solely by their wits can tell you, it’s usually touch and go.

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