Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

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Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., talks to reporters at an election night watch party for Donald Trump, Nov. 5, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Photo: Alex Brandon | AP)

Marco Rubio: From ‘perfect little puppet’ to most dangerous man alive
By Alan MacLeod (Posted Jan 06, 2025)

Originally published: MintPress News on December 2, 2025 (more by MintPress News) |

With the appointment of Marco Rubio to the post of Secretary of State, the Trump administration has elevated one of the most pro-war extremists ever to serve in the cabinet of the United States of America.In this article, MintPress highlights Rubio’s history as one of the most reliable warmongering voices in Washington, an individual who has led or supported many of America’s most aggressive foreign policy decisions, including military interventions, coups, and sanctions.

Trump, who promises to be the “most pro-Israel president ever,” has picked a cabinet replete with neoconservative, pro-war voices. Rubio, however, may be the most belligerent of all of them, and his ascension to the most powerful position in Trump’s team does not bode well for the world.

SANCTIONING CHINA, THE WORLD
Of all the situations to trigger a global nuclear war, a confrontation with Beijing appears among the most likely. The U.S. has constructed a network of over 300 military bases encircling China—another nuclear-armed state. Rubio is doing more than almost anyone to make that doomsday scenario an eventuality. He has made clear that he supports Taiwanese independence, breaking more than a half-century of official U.S. policy in the process. His “Taiwan Peace Through Strength Act” promotes direct military collaboration between the U.S. and Taiwan and calls for increased arms spending on the island.

Rubio was also one of the faces of the 2014 Hong Kong protest movement, a U.S.-backed attempt to wrest the island city from Chinese influence. He invited the movement’s leaders to Washington, D.C., and attempted to introduce legislation to force the United States into supporting Hong Kong’s independence.

At home, he has led the clampdown on Chinese businesses such as Huawei and has spearheaded a movement to uncover and stamp out China’s supposed undue influence over American media and educational institutions.

Unsurprisingly, then, the former Florida senator also supports a trade war and sanctions against China and, indeed, much of the world, including Russia, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Iran.

Unilateral sanctions, of course, are illegal under international law. However, Rubio believes the United States can and should use its economic might to crush countries resisting Washington’s dictates. The waning power of the dollar as the global reserve currency, though, makes this increasingly difficult. As Rubio lamented on Fox News last year, Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, signed a comprehensive trade agreement with China whereby goods and services would be paid for in local currencies rather than the dollar:

They’re creating a secondary economy in the world, totally independent of the United States. We won’t have to talk sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar, that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.

GENOCIDE DENIER
Rubio has strongly supported Israel in its campaign against its neighbors. “Israel takes extraordinary steps to avoid civilian losses,” he said during a solidarity visit to Tel Aviv earlier this year, adding that the problem is that its enemies “don’t value human life.”

“Israel has consistently sought peace with the Palestinians… Israelis rightfully living in their historic homeland are not the impediment to peace; the Palestinians are,” he wrote in a letter to his predecessor, Antony Blinken.

When asked by activists from peace group CODEPINK whether he supports an end to Israeli atrocities, he answered in the negative, stating,

On the contrary. I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals.

NARCO RUBIO
Hailing from the notoriously conservative Cuban-American community in Florida, Latin American policy has always been among Rubio’s chief interests. Described as the unofficial “Secretary of State for Latin America” during Trump’s first term, he will undoubtedly hold enormous influence over U.S. policy in the region in the years to come. This is bad news for the people of Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Venezuela, all of whom have watched as Rubio supported coup attempts against their countries. In 2019, for example, he went as far as directly tweeting images of the capture, death and bloody assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi at Nicolás Maduro during an ongoing U.S.-backed coup against the Venezuelan president.

https://x.com/MiamiHerald/status/109980 ... F288757%2F

Rubio has always favored a more aggressive, punitive approach to Cuba. Last year, for example, he introduced legislation to ensure that Cuba would remain on the U.S. State Sponsor of Terrorism List, offering no evidence of the island’s supposed support for such groups.

A right-wing conservative Christian, Rubio has also made well known his contempt for much less radical Latin American leaders, such as Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Brazil’s Lula da Silva. On the other hand, he has openly embraced far-right presidents, like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro (in power between 2019 and 2023) and Argentina’s Javier Milei.

Rubio has attempted to link Maduro with the organized drug trade, insisting, with little evidence, that the Venezuelan leader is a narcotics kingpin. On this issue, he appears to be living in a glasshouse; his own brother-in-law is a cocaine drug lord. Orlando Cicilia spent 12 years in a Florida prison for crimes related to the smuggling and distribution of cocaine. Rubio enjoys a very close relationship with Cicilia and, after the latter’s release from prison, used his political position to pressure a Florida regulator to grant him a real estate license. Across much of Latin America, the new Secretary of State is known as “Narco Rubio.”

NEOCON WARMONGER
A consummate Washington insider, Rubio cheerled the U.S. action in Libya that led to Gaddafi’s execution and the country being turned into a failed state replete with open-air slave markets. He also supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, condemning Biden for his pullout from Kabul in 2021. In addition, he helped Saudi Arabia in its genocide against Yemen while expressing outrage over alleged Houthi human rights abuses, minuscule in comparison with the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed genocide.

Studies by Brown University have shown that America’s post-9/11 wars have killed at least 4.5 million people and displaced at least 37 million more. One of the most shocking stories arising from the Global War on Terror is the torture camp at Guantánamo Bay. By the mid-2010s, the facility was causing such negative publicity for the U.S. that the Obama administration was reportedly considering shutting it down. Rubio, however, was enthusiastic in his support for the center, promising to reopen it if elected president.

He also supported the dramatic expansion of the surveillance state into American life, voting to continue the practice of collecting vast amounts of data on ordinary American citizens, and has effectively argued that First Amendment protections should not be applied to anti-Israel campus protestors.

SHELDON ADELSON’S “PERFECT LITTLE PUPPET”
Few in 2016 would have predicted Rubio’s rise to become arguably the most powerful man in Trump’s cabinet. The Floridian was once one of Trump’s fiercest critics, describing him as a fraud when the two were battling for the Republican Presidential nomination. “I think it is time to unmask [Trump] for what he is,” he said during a campaign speech in Oklahoma City, adding:

He’s trying to take over the conservative movement even though he’s not a conservative, but more importantly, he’s a con. I mean, he’s a conman who is taking advantage of people’s fears and anxieties about the future, portraying himself as some sort of strong guy. He’s not a strong guy.

Trump was, if anything, even more scathing towards Rubio, stating that “[Pro-Israel billioniare] Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!”

One of Adelson’s key issues is stopping the rise of clean, renewable energy, and in that, he found an ally in Rubio, who consistently denied the reality of man-made climate change, stating that there was “no scientific evidence” to back up the theory. Funded by big money donations from the oil and gas industries, he even voted against legislation protecting low-lying cities such as Miami from severe weather events.

Since their public spat, Trump has clearly buried the hatchet with both Rubio and Adelson. The latter’s widow, Miriam, contributed a gigantic $100 million to Trump’s recent presidential run, becoming his biggest donor in the process. Clearly, then, both Trump and Rubio are willing to make major concessions in the pursuit of power. However, given Rubio’s track record, his appointment as Secretary of State does not bode well for either America or the rest of the world.

https://mronline.org/2025/01/06/marco-r ... man-alive/

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DOGE: Nations Aren’t Corporations and ‘Efficiency’ Means Austerity
Posted on January 7, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. It is disappointing but predictable to see many of the Democratic Party aligned groups dedicate themselves to “fighting Trump” without concentrating their efforts on targets that pose high risks to many American citizens and have obvious vulnerabilities. I would put DOGE top of that list. Broad-based program and spending whackage, which is what the DOGE perps have vowed to do, would disrupt the lives of many.


DOGE would seem ripe for legal challenge. Just a couple of examples: The initiative, as described so far, is not properly constituted. You can’t have randos acting as if they were Federal officers or employees. Impoundment, as in refusing to make expenditures authorized by Congress, is also illegal. See this explainer for details.

So while I am very grateful to Rob Urie for taking up this topic, the lack of a sense of urgency in publicizing the destructive intent of DOGE, let alone opposing it, says a lot about what the priorities within the Democratic Party really are.

I do have one quibble with Rob’s analysis. He implies that the bailouts of financial firms could have been expected to generate inflation. That is erroneous. The bailouts were of the form of super low interest rates (which goose asset values but are not net fiscal spending) and QE, which is an asset swap designed to lower longer-term interest rates and again is not “printing money”. Banks got TARP loans on extremely concessionary terms which they did pay back.

It was later admitted by no less than Larry Summers that the stimulus package should have been bigger than $1 trillion to adequately offset the deflationary impact of falls in asset values, most of all residential real estate, but $1 trillion was seen as politically unacceptable (by who? the deficit monster?) and so the outlay was smaller.

By Robert Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack

Apparently unbeknownst to my Republican friends, the effort to cut ‘government waste’ has a long, bipartisan, history in the US. While Republicans point to Ronald Reagan as the original budget chide, the Federal budget deficit doubled under Reagan (graph below). It was Democrat Bill Clinton who last ‘balanced the budget,’ a feat that was rapidly followed by a deep and lasting recession. And Joe Biden dedicated his career to cutting Social Security, Medicare and Veteran’s benefits.


Graph: despite his rhetoric, Ronald Reagan was unable to make meaningful headway in ‘resolving’ the Federal budget deficit. The deficit was larger when Mr. Reagan left office than when he entered. It was Bill Clinton who achieved a brief surplus, just before the US economy entered a deep and lasting recession. That Clinton isn’t a hero of the Reaganites is significantly explained by Republicans having no knowledge of this history. Source: cato.org.

Over the years, US Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, Obama, Biden, and now Trump, have all paid fealty to the canard of ‘living within our means.’ Note the partisan bias in this list of names: there is none. Bill Clinton even hallucinated an entire ‘market’ theory of fiscal austerity, the ‘bond vigilantes,’ suggesting that God, via markets, is deeply concerned about American fiscal probity.

The term ‘efficiency’ reeks of moral fiber, of rectitude, of a capacity to do basic budgetary arithmetic. It appeals to Max Weber’s Protestant ethos of capitalism, to modesty, thrift, and decency toward the world. However, as with the inexorable logic of arithmetic, what is counted is a matter of what gets counted, and not ‘the math’ per se. When bodies start to pile up from this policy or that, the social violence soon enough becomes difficult to contain.

Through siloed discourse, few political conservatives know that Barack Obama structured his signature program, the ACA (Affordable Care Act, Obamacare), using the same capitalist principles that Elon Musk is currently espousing. Mr. Obama’s goal was to make the American healthcare system better by making it ‘more capitalist.’ With health insurers currently in the news for denying legitimate claims at rates suggestive of looting, the ACA is indeed capitalist. One’s view on whether this is a good thing likely depends on whether one is an insurer, or the insured.

What ‘efficiency’ has meant in the case of the ACA is that executive compensation has been raised through health insurers denying legitimate claims— nearly without restraint. The rollout of the ACA has been accompanied by a catastrophic rise in ‘excess deaths,’ of Americans dying from preventable causes that wouldn’t have if the ACA ‘worked.’ That Democrats consider the program a success suggests that making executives rich by killing large numbers of Americans was their intent.



Graph: compared against a benchmark of life expectancy data for peer nations, the graph illustrates relative life expectancy in the US to be below that of peer-nations in 1980, the year that Ronald Reagan was elected. The decline continued after 1980. Americans currently live five fewer years than the citizens of peer nations. Throughout history, governments have been toppled for less egregious outcomes. But none of the architects of the current system are being held to account for this catastrophe. Source: healthsystemtracker.org.

In practice, capitalist efficiency is treated as an optimization problem dependent upon a chosen goal. If efficiency means getting more from less, the question becomes: more of what? While the concept of efficiency implies a physical optimization, e.g. producing four toaster ovens using the same quantum of inputs previously used to produce three toaster ovens, in practice, the capitalist goal is to maximize corporate profits, a monetary measure. And here is where it becomes political.

Suddenly the problems of physical optimization, of optimizing around physical constraints, is broadened to include capitalist social organization in its method. If a five-percent rate of profit can be earned from producing toaster ovens, but a ten-percent return is expected from buying a stock index fund, the optimal solution based on the goal of maximizing profits is to stop making toaster ovens and invest the proceeds in the stock index fund.

However, if every manufacturer of toaster ovens does this, toaster ovens will soon be hard to come by and stock prices overvalued. Further, selling off the assets of a toaster oven manufacturer to raise the money needed to buy the stock index fund is expensive, cumbersome, and time consuming. And if enough manufacturers follow this strategy, the market for toaster oven manufacturing equipment will be flooded and prices will plummet.

The question then is: how does the common-sense view of efficiency as frugality, as producing as much as one can within the limits of what one has, shift to the realm of social relations where frictions and the set of available opportunities are both changeable and moveable? The ‘innovation’ of money renders liquid, or transactable, the social aspects of economic production in a way that physical quanta will never be.

The pushback against DOGE here isn’t reflexive. Many Americans likely share the view that much of what the Federal government does shouldn’t be done. For instance, why are the FBI and CIA interfering in US elections? Why is the US funding and arming Israel? Ukraine? Why is the Federal government militarizing the police by producing military ‘surplus’ to supply them with? And why is oligarchy the only choice on the ballot?



Graph: the US has the highest ‘defense’ expenditures in the world by several multiples. If capitalism is efficient, why isn’t the US spending less on defense than non-capitalist countries? The answer: that through supporting 800 US military bases abroad, we buy a lot more of it, begs the question, why? For three centuries Fortress America, being sandwiched between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, has meant that the US should spend far less on its defense than other nations. But the opposite has been the case. Source: statista.com.

In terms of national accounts, one person’s ‘waste’ (e.g. Pentagon budget) is another person’s paycheck. What this means is that 1) budget battles produce winners and losers and 2) the gains go to the winners, and not to ‘the nation.’ And Elon Musk is a poster child for dependence on Federal handouts. Not only do ‘his’ companies receive direct transfers from the Federal government (link below), but much of Musk’s wealth comes from two Federal bailouts of Wall Street.

Historically, austerity policies have found industrialists arguing that Federal subsidies to nominally private enterprises (such as Tesla and SpaceX) are ‘efficient,’ while social spending is ‘waste.’ This view is based in / on the web of related theories that constitute capitalist economics. As with earlier efforts, fans of austerity leap from local examples to global conclusions without apparently understanding that the economic logic doesn’t tie to the political conclusions drawn.

Soon after entering office, Ronald Reagan cut taxes and social spending while increasing military spending. Assessments of the policy are complicated by Paul Volcker’s, Jimmy Carter’s Chair of the Federal Reserve, effort to strangle the economy with sky-high interest rates. What Reagan did manage to prove was John Maynard Keynes’ theory that increasing Federal spending in an economic downturn (military Keynesianism) would boost the economy (top graph in this piece).



Graph: within the terms of his own economic program, Ronald Reagan’s policies of cutting taxes while increasing Federal defense spending significantly ‘worsened’ the Federal budget deficit. This is partly due to the fact that the theory that cutting taxes increases government revenues (‘Laffer curve’) was never scaled because it is an ideological argument, not empirical. The similar terms being laid out by Trump in the present— a wider war in the Middle East while Federal domestic expenditures are cut, will yield similar results. The point: deferring to Reagan’s actual policy results is a loser for supporters of DOGE. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Note: this is not how Reagan and his supporters explained their results. The theory that cutting both taxes and social spending raises economic output was born. However, this conclusion is roughly analogous to writing a review of the play at which Abraham Lincoln was assassinated without mentioning the assassination. The facts come in pieces here. Cutting taxes and social spending work in opposite directions economically, not the same.

The theory that cutting taxes boosts economic output has empirical support, but not for the reasons that proponents claim. Cutting taxes boosts consumption, depending on the ‘propensity to consume,’ by leaving more money in the hands of consumers, and not by shifting economic production from government to ‘private’ enterprise. By analogy, Medicare is more ‘efficient’ than private health insurance in terms of both managing costs and producing good health outcomes. Medicare is a program of the Federal government. The point: the question of ‘efficiency’ isn’t answered by ‘government versus capital’ framing.

(MMT— Modern Monetary Theory, has a very different explanation of the relationship between taxes and economic output that readers with an interest would do well to acquaint themselves with).

This distinction is important because the result of DOGE, to the extent there is any, will be to privatize government functions for the benefit of oligarchs and Wall Street. For instance, NASA, the space agency of the US, has essentially outsourced the US space program to Elon Musk (and Jeff Bezos) under the theory that they can run it more efficiently than NASA can. But basic arithmetic argues against this theory.

Private enterprise must earn a rate of profit that the Federal government doesn’t in order to legitimate the social distribution of income and wealth. If the rate of profit is, say, 6%, this is 6% more that ‘private’ providers must earn to break even with Federal results. The US DoD (Department of Defense) actually offers ‘cost-plus contracts’ to guarantee private military contractors a rate of profit.

So, which is more efficient, for the Federal government to produce military equipment itself, to pay contractors to do so with a guaranteed rate of profit, or to put the question to ‘markets?’ There is no generic answer to the question. Each instance requires defining the intended outcome and estimating costs and methods. With the experience of Medicare in hand, there is no generic guarantee that the private solution is the most ‘efficient.’

The private health insurance ‘solution’ inflicted on the US has produced the worst outcomes amongst peer nations (see graph of life expectancy above) by a margin so wide that it should disprove the fantasy of capitalist efficiency from this moment forward. That Americans don’t know how bad these outcomes are suggests that the powers that be do know how bad they are. There is no benefit for Democrats from making these results known. And the only ‘private’ solution for Republicans (more capitalism) will produce even worse results than the Democrats have achieved.



Chart: airlines are considered here because they were amongst the first industries to have their public purpose shifted from transporting people to earning profits. When Jimmy Carter began deregulating transportation infrastructure in the late 1970s, the measure of industry efficiency was the number of people transported safely from one place to another. In this way, shifting the metric of concern from people to profits was political. With the current ratio of CEO-to-worker pay of 268:1, firms could instantly increase their ‘efficiency’ by firing their C-suites and replacing them with lower cost alternatives. Source: multiple.

Reagan’s economic thesis, tied to capitalist theory, had it that Federal spending is wasteful because of incentives. Question: why would private enterprise be more efficient than government? Both are structured hierarchically, meaning that they feature executives giving direction to the workers ‘below’ them. The capitalist theory is that ‘incentives’ motivate better outcomes. So, why not give incentives to government workers? Wouldn’t doing so ‘equalize’ them with private industry?

Giving Federal workers performance bonuses has actually been tried. Some Federal workers receive performance bonuses equal to up to 10% of base pay. But the real bonuses are paid when regulators and legislators leave government to take jobs with the corporations that they formerly regulated. These ‘revolving door’ jobs are limited to senior managers, suggesting a fungible, class-based, economy separate from the experience of, and outside of the purview of, rank-and-file workers.

Ironically, of sorts, coincident with this ‘revolution’ in economic understanding that people require incentives to give their employment their all has been a five-decade-long effort to reduce the economic incentives paid to labor (graph below). The result: it now takes two working adults to earn what one working adult earned (in inflation-adjusted dollars) a generation ago, leaving no one to raise children or maintain the household.



Graph: how can Western economists proclaim the importance of financial incentives to capitalist production when they don’t apply to 90% of American workers? The average variable, or incentive, pay in the US in 2024 was 9.6%. But this conflates the experience of executives earning 400% of their base pay in bonuses with workers receiving 3%. Source: inequality.org.

Another question to ask: what type of behavior does incentive pay motivate? Brian Thompson, the recently deceased CEO of United Healthcare, was paid large bonuses to kill ‘his’ customers by denying their legitimate insurance claims. The point: in the case of United Healthcare, capitalist ‘incentives’ legitimated the killing of thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of the firm’s ‘customers.’ So, why isn’t health insurer efficiency measured in life hours saved (graph below) rather than corporate profits?

Do incentives work in terms of big picture efficiency? In 2014, the year that the ACA was implemented, Americans lived 3.5 fewer years than did the citizens of peer nations. In 2022— eight years later, we live five fewer years than do the citizens of peer nations. Health insurance industry profits rose, executive compensation increased, and Americans have died at rates only seem in history in full-blown societal collapses (chart below). So no, the ACA goal of raising executive compensation has produced worse health outcomes, not better.



Chart: despite the ACA having been implemented six years before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the US had the worst mortality rate amongst peer nations by several multiples. With the arrival of the Omicron variant of Covid-19, fifty-percent again more Americans died under Biden over a similar time period than died under Trump. This point is made because Biden recently shoveled hundreds of millions more in Federal largesse into the health insurers, apparently as compensation for killing more Americans than all US wars combined have. Source: healthsystemtracker.org.

The point here is likely different than imagined. The point is that economic ‘efficiency’ depends on what the chosen objective is. If raising health insurance industry profits and executive compensation was / is the objective, then the ACA is an inspiring success. Government works! If the objective was to improve health outcomes for the people, this has not occurred. (Send me your evidence. I’m glad to debate this). But neither objective was handed down from God. Either is a social choice.

Early evidence for this conclusion can be found in the Republican debate over h-1b visas. Tesla employs about a thousand h-1b visa holders. Elon Musk is the Grand Poobah of Tesla. Musk maintains that the program allows Tesla to import skilled workers. However, as with the ACA and the health insurance industry, there is a history of large, industrial employers and contracting firms using the h-1b program to steal wages from workers. The point: when left to employers, robbing employees and customers enters quickly as an option.

My Republican friends argue that the ACA is ‘communist’ or ‘communistic’ without considering that if this is true of healthcare spending, it is also true of military spending. What they mean is that the ACA provides undeserving people with something for nothing. With the evidence from United Healthcare in hand, health insurance on which 30% – 40% of claims go unpaid is a lottery ticket, not insurance. The beneficiaries of the ACA are, again, health insurers and their executives. The proof: ‘excess’ deaths are through the roof, along with health insurer profits and executive compensation.



Graph: while the group represented in the graph is relatively narrow, white males between the ages of 45 – 64, the results are broadly representative of American political economy. Following the onset of the Great Recession in late 2008 or thereabouts, Federal bailouts revived the economic fortunes of the urban bourgeois. This, as the not-connected who live outside of Wall Street and Silicon Valley were left to their own devices. As mortality rates for the newly bailed-out urbanites were plummeting, they rose for every other segment of the population. The link provides details for the broader population. Source: nih.org

From Reagan forward the Pentagon budget has been a rallying point for demands for government ‘efficiency,’ if not quite in the way currently imagined. The point of confusion appears to be the units of concern, ‘individuals,’ versus ‘the nation.’ This can be rectified easily enough by putting military spending in terms of individual benefit. The per capita (person) Pentagon budget for 2024 is a tad over $2,200. This means that for a family of four, Mom, Dad and two kids, the annual Federal outlay for the Pentagon is $8,800.

Conceiving the Pentagon in the same way that the ACA is, as Federal outlays paid per individual for their own personal benefit, finds that $2,200 per person per year is paid. Recall, the ACA benefit, to the extent there is any, isn’t ‘paid’ to individuals. It is paid to health insurers, much as the Pentagon budget is distributed to MIC suppliers and contractors, not to citizens. Question: why would someone who is undeserving of healthcare be deserving of national defense?

Further, the US hasn’t ‘won’ a war since WWII. And in that case, it was the Russians (Soviets) who won WWII. If efficiency at the Pentagon is graded by how many wars the US has won since WWII, the grade is F. What then is the correct measure of ‘efficiency’ when it comes to national defense? The number of wars won? The destructive power created per dollar spent. The political state of the West? The answer depends on one’s interests. So. What are Trump’s / Musk’s interests with respect to the Pentagon? SpaceX? The US?

The mutual disdain that the political parties in the US are able to generate and maintain is a product of the differentiated material realities that are supported by differentiated discourses (graph above). When the US entered economic crisis around 2008, bailouts of the malefactors were quickly organized, leading those whose livelihoods were tied to Wall Street to quick recovery. The heavily subsidized US tech industry also quickly recovered. But this hasn’t been the case for the other 80% – 90% of Americans (graph above).

The analogy of the Federal budget to either a corporate or family budget is flawed for very basic reasons. The Federal government has the legal authority to create money. Corporations and households don’t. For example, should a family want to buy a car, it can pay for the car from savings or borrow the money to buy it. What it cannot legally do is ‘print’ the money needed to buy the car. The same is true, with some differences, for state and local governments and corporations.

My Republican friends argue that ‘money printing’ is in all cases counterproductive. But the actual risk of inflation is contextual—it depends on resource constraints, not simply on economic demand. Barack Obama ‘printed’ somewhere around $19 trillion USD to bail out Wall Street in 2009. But most of this was never drawn down, meaning that it never entered the economy. Deflation was the problem that Obama / Ben Bernanke were trying to solve, not inflation. The point: even in the face of large-scale ‘money printing,’ inflation was restrained from 2009 – 2020.

Had Mr. Obama’s ‘stimulus’ and bailouts been inflationary is the sense of causing a rise in the price of a broad basket of goods and services, my Republican friends might have a point. But in fact, what was proved (chart below) is that large amounts of money can be added to a depressed economy without inflation taking hold. This was a fundamental insight of economist John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression. And it provided the theoretical justification for the Depression-era spending that eventually pulled the US out of the Great Depression.



Graph: despite the trillions in Federal largesse that Barack Obama delivered to Wall Street, inflation as measured by CPI was only 1.46% per year over Mr. Obama’s two terms. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Donald Trump clearly understood this when he promoted his $2.3 trillion pandemic relief program in 2020. Trump’s (and Biden’s) economic stimulus is widely blamed for the inflation that followed. However, corporate profits rose in lockstep with the rise in prices, meaning that producers were charging customers for price increases that they were not experiencing. Add this to health insurers killing their customers to earn larger bonuses and the social practice of capitalism is brought into the light.

For those who missed it, US Presidents have been promoting government ‘efficiency’ for five decades now. The result of those earlier efforts is the current state of the US. While ‘entrepreneurial’ spirits are applied to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Mr. Trump was born rich and Elon Musk owes almost all of his fortune to fortunate timing. Musk took Tesla public in 2010, just as Mr. Obama was doing everything in his power to raise stock prices. And Mr. Trump’s ‘pandemic relief’ is more accurately described as the ‘save the stock market Act of 2020.’



Graph: as a group, American billionaires have been the largest beneficiaries of Federal largesse in recent decades. Thanks in large measure to Federal contracts and Donald Trump’s Pandemic Relief bill, Elon Musk’s personal fortune grew twelve fold between 2017 and 2023. Should Musk’s percentage change in wealth impress, that Musk had less wealth in 2017 than the others (denominator effect) helps explain the difference. Source: americansfortaxfairness.org.

Recall that within capitalist explanations of income and wealth, skill and hard work are fundamental. In contrast, the wealth of American billionaires doubled after Donald Trump put his pandemic relief bill forward in 2020. How did the already rich in 2020 get already rich? They were already rich from when Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street in 2008. From 2008 – today, the best guarantee of getting richer has been to already be rich. This represents a rigged game, not returns to skill and hard work.

Partisan political frames detract from understanding American political economy. The current Republican conceit that Elon Musk is a radical here to shake up a moribund system misses that every President over the last five decades has made a similar pitch. And while economic predictions are notoriously difficult to get right, this is a guarantee: should DOGE get up and running, the rich will be made richer and the rest of us poorer. This isn’t because Trump and Musk are evil or singularly self-interested. It will because this is how the American economy has been set up to operate.

The people running the US continue to make the worst decisions in the history of bad decisions—for the rest of us. For themselves, the free money keeps on flowing. S&L Crisis? The rich got bailed out. GFC (global financial crisis)? The rich got bailed out. Stock market down because of the pandemic? The rich got bailed out. In each case ‘we’ were told that it was ‘the system’ that was being bailed out. But somehow the money always landed in the pockets of the looters, not the looted. The US is out of time to get this right. In the parlance of the age: sad.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... erity.html

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How does Trump plan to carry out mass deportations?

From expanding migrant detention, punishing sanctuary cities, and ending birthright citizenship, Trump’s plans are shaping up to be increasingly drastic

January 06, 2025 by Natalia Marques


Immigrants in California protest in early December (Photo: NDLON)

US President-elect Donald Trump has pledged that on “day one” of his presidency, he will launch the largest program of mass deportations in US history. Trump has promised to expel between 15 to 20 million people. According to the Pew Research Center, there were around 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the US in 2022—and Trump promises to deport nearly twice that number. Many worry that Trump’s promises of expulsions on such a mass scale would see millions of immigrants, with or without documents, kicked out of the country each year.

How will Trump unleash mass deportations?
“Getting them out will be a bloody story,” Trump threatened at a September campaign rally. Trump has promised to deport not only those he labels as “criminals,” but also “people outside of criminals,” as he said during a “Meet the Press” interview, in which he elaborated neither on which crimes he was including nor what exactly he meant by those “outside of criminals.” Trump as well as those closest to him have promised to radically change a variety of immigration agencies, policies, and programs within the country in order to make his draconian mass deportation plans possible.

“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Stephen Miller, responsible for some of Trump’s most racist anti-immigrant policies in his first term, told the New York Times in an interview in November of 2023. Miller is set to serve as Trump’s homeland security advisor and deputy chief of staff for policy in his second term. Miller told the Times that Trump would attempt to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, a program secured during Barack Obama’s administration through mass struggle by immigrant youth who entered the country as children, called “dreamers.” The DACA program allows some immigrants who on June 15 of 2012 were physically present in the US and had entered the country as children to avoid deportation.

He also will seek to limit immigration by invoking Title 42, which was used to expel migrants during the pandemic by framing immigration as a threat to public health. The incoming administration will address its infrastructural capacity deficit by building “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers,” essentially camps, for migrants awaiting deportation. Trump’s team has announced that these vastly expanded migrant detention centers will be located outside major cities with large migrant populations.

Trump also has said he will use the Alien Enemies Act of 1789, one of the oldest laws on the books in the United States, which was intended to allow the president to deport non-citizens considered “enemies” of the US during wartime. “I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil,” said Trump at a campaign rally in California. Trump has promised to use the act to initiate an effort he calls “Operation Aurora,” after the Colorado town that many on the right-wing claim is being taken over by Venezuelan gangs, despite Aurora city officials and residents disputing this claim.

Trump has also said he would end birthright citizenship, which has been enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution for over a century. The 14th Amendment states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Trump has claimed that children of so-called “illegal” immigrants should not be granted citizenship, although any attempts to repeal birthright citizenship could be subject to Supreme Court challenge.

Trump’s incoming administration could also target sanctuary cities and states, in which city and state officials within more left-leaning areas have pledged to resist federal attempts at mass deportations. In such “sanctuary” jurisdictions, local officials or governors declare that they will limit or deny their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement efforts. The city of Los Angeles, for example, passed an ordinance that bars the collection or sharing of a person’s immigration status in relation to carrying out immigration related arrest or deportation—with the new exception in the investigation, arrest, and detention of immigrants previously convicted of aggravated felonies. Some states, such as Tennessee, Iowa, and California, have enacted legislation related to their sanctuary policies.

States that have promised to push back against Trump’s second term plans include California, Illinois, New Mexico, and Arizona. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has said, for example, that his office is preparing for “a full frontal assault on our immigrant communities.”

“We are ready to file,” Bonta said, referring to a potential lawsuit challenging Trump’s immigration policy. “We have been thinking about and preparing and readying ourselves for the possibility of this moment for months,” Bonta said about the incoming Trump administration.

During his first term, Trump targeted cities that refused to cooperate with federal anti-migrant efforts during his first term, including New York City, Chicago, and Seattle. For his second term, Trump and his incoming administration have floated the possibilities of withholding funds from sanctuary cities as well as prosecuting those who attempt to impede federal immigration enforcement. Trump’s appointed “border tsar” Thomas Homan (who was given a Presidential Rank Award by Barack Obama for his successful regime of deportations under the former Democratic president) has pledged to slash federal funding to states who choose not to cooperate with Trump’s deportation plans.

Mass deportations could hurt all workers
Mass deportations and anti-immigrant policies have been framed by Trump and the Republican Party as good for US-born workers. The Republican Party platform’s promise to “seal the border” and “stop the migrant invasion” ends with a promise to “put American Workers first.”

However, research has found that mass deportations could hurt US-born and immigrant workers alike. Because immigrant workers are often the most exploited in the US economy, they tend to take the most dangerous and low-paying jobs in a given industry, which are essential to keep certain businesses running and in turn create the most attractive jobs that US-born workers tend to take. The contribution of immigrant workers to the household service industry makes it easier for many US-born workers who hire them to work outside of the home. Almost 6% of unauthorized immigrants are housekeepers, construction workers, and cooks, as compared to 2% of authorized immigrant workers and 1% of US-born workers.

Immigrant workers also contribute to local demand for goods and services.

Rhetoric against immigrant workers often claims that they do not pay taxes and are otherwise a drain on public resources. However, data shows that the opposite is true: a study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that in a given year, someone born outside of the US and their dependents pay on average USD 1,300 more in federal taxes than they receive in federal benefits. Additionally, immigrants in their lifetime pay USD 237,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits from federal, state, and local governments.

Immigrant workers fight back
Despite facing draconian threats to their communities, immigrant workers remain determined to fight back. Some organizers, such as those affiliated with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), have promoted slogans such as “solo el pueblo salva al pueblo” (only the people will save the people).

According to Marco Castillo, the board president of Red de Pueblos Transnacionales, a grassroots network of immigrant groups in New York City, “I don’t think we’re going to be seeing big visible collaborations [between migrant communities and] local authorities, and this is because seems like the Trump administration has been able to bend many local authorities in his favor under the promise of funds.”

As a result, Castillo predicts that immigrant communities organizing to face mass deportations will need to turn to each other. “Communities will organize among peers, and in our case, Indigenous immigrant communities will organize with other Indigenous immigrant communities to protect their own neighborhoods, and to monitor the presence of ICE or other federal agencies, as well as to identify allies in our communities that can support us in preventing and reacting.”

Castillo, who has organized with Indigenous and rural communities in Mexico, Central America, and the US for over 21 years, also highlights the necessity of communities of immigrant workers banding together with US-born workers. According to Castillo, both US-born and immigrant workers “need to see that we are in the same situation, and a threat to immigrants is a threat to all the working class.”

“We need to see beyond this anti-immigrant rhetoric that it’s just intending to divide us under the idea that immigrants are taking jobs from non-immigrants,” Castillo said. “In reality, the US is displacing people from communities in the [Global] South that would much rather stay and be workers in their own communities. Just like folks in the US.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/06/ ... ortations/

Mexico prepares its consulates in the US to face Trump’s mass deportations

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum reaffirms support for migrants amid Trump’s deportation plans, and proposes a regional summit to address the causes of immigration.

January 06, 2025 by Miguel A. Romero


People at Mexican Consulate in March, 2018. (Photo: Mexican Consulate of Chicago).

In a morning press conference last week, President Claudia Sheinbaum reaffirmed her commitment to the Mexican migrant community in the United States and expressed her disagreement with the mass deportation policies planned by President-elect Donald Trump. The president announced that next week she will meet with the diplomatic and consular corps to instruct them to reinforce their commitment to their fellow countrymen in the neighboring country to the north. “I want to ask for all their time, dedication, and humanism to care for our brothers and sisters living in the United States,” said Sheinbaum.

Regarding the mass deportations that Donald Trump promised to carry out upon his arrival to the White House, the president stressed that the Mexican government “does not agree” with the policy and added that, in the event that these threats of deportations materialize, Mexico will be prepared to receive the Mexican nationals and attend to them with dignity and respect.

In turn, the president expressed her willingness to collaborate with the United States to facilitate the return of migrants of other nationalities to their countries of origin, but emphasized that the incoming Trump administration will be asked to take them directly to their countries. “We are not in favor of these deportations, but if they happen, we will receive Mexicans, and we will ask the United States that migrants who are not from Mexico be taken to their countries of origin, and if not, we can collaborate,” Sheinbaum pointed out.

Furthermore, the President thanked Mexican migrants for their solidarity and highlighted that in the year 2024, the record for receiving remittances from the United States was broken.

Regarding the growing number of deportations from Canada, Sheinbaum informed that both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior are already aware of the situation and pointed out that since the beginning of the so-called Fourth Transformation, protocols have been established to care for deported migrants, which include orientation services and resources for those who wish to return to their communities of origin.

Finally, the President emphasized that contrary to what conservative sectors insist, “migrants do not bring violence ‘ and that ’migration is a phenomenon that responds to necessity, not criminality.” She affirmed that the migration phenomenon is characterized by the mobilization of people in search of better living conditions for themselves and their families, something they cannot obtain in their places of origin due to the lack of opportunities.

Felipe Ángeles Airport receives majority of deportations in 2024
According to the National Institute of Migration (INM), between January and November 2024, 570 Mexican nationals have been returned from the United States per day. This figure is slightly lower than the 588 daily repatriations during 2023.

The 18,168 Mexican nationals who were deported in 2024 were sent to five airports. 87% of them were returned through Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA), which received 15,976 repatriations.

Summit of Latin American and Caribbean ministers on migration proposed
Since the beginning of the so-called Fourth Transformation, the Mexican Government has sought to promote a strategy to address immigration from a humanist perspective, paying attention to the causes that give rise to this phenomenon with the implementation of development cooperation programs, such as Sembrando Vida and Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro, which are currently being implemented in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and Cuba.

The National Migration Institute has announced a 76% reduction in the flow of migrants that reach the border of the US and Mexico in 2024, based on containment strategies and support for migrant caravans.

In this context, President Claudia Sheinbaum has launched a proposal alongside Honduran President Xiomara Castro, for a meeting of the foreign ministers of Latin American and Caribbean countries in January 2025 to address the issue of migration in light of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. This summit proposes to follow up on the conference on migration issues held in October 2023 in Palenque, Chiapas, which was attended by representatives of more than a dozen countries in the region.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/06/ ... ortations/

Honduras threatens to close US military bases over Trump’s anti-immigration agenda

As incoming President Trump threatens mass deportations, Honduran President Xiomara Castro warns of reconsidering military ties with the US.

January 06, 2025 by Pablo Meriguet


Honduran President Xiomara Castro giving a press conference in November 2024. Photo: Xiomara Castro / X

Honduran President Xiomara Castro said in a national broadcast, “Faced with a hostile attitude of massive expulsion of our brothers, we would have to consider a change in our policies of cooperation with the United States, especially in the military field, in which without paying a penny for decades they maintain military bases in our territory that in this case would lose all reason to exist in Honduras”.

Honduras is home to one of the largest US military bases in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Enrique Soto Cano air base, also known as Palmerola. About 1,500 US military personnel are stationed at the air base shared with the Honduran Air Force.

The Joint Task Force – Bravo of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) operates out of Palmerola. SOUTHCOM is the military command of the US Army that operates in all of Central and South America. The Soto Cano base is a key geopolitical and military position for the US, having historically served as the base of its operations in Central America during the 1980s, during which left-wing guerrilla groups in several countries in the region were fighting against US-backed dictatorships.

Castro’s words constitute the first clear diplomatic response to the threats Trump made against immigrants on the campaign trail and in the weeks since his electoral victory. The President-elect has pledged to deploy the military, utilizing wartime statutes and the collaboration of right-wing governors, to deport millions of people during his term.

Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda extends beyond domestic policies
The President-elect has threatened Canada and Mexico with a 25% tariff until the number of migrants and drugs entering the United States decreases. Additionally, he warned of a 10% tariff on imported Chinese goods, accusing China of failing to curb the production of precursor chemicals needed to make drugs like fentanyl. Earlier on the campaign trail, the President-elect had promised to impose a 60% tariff on China in addition to ending their trading status as a most-favored nation.

The three countries threatened with tariffs have criticized Trump’s assertions. However, Xiomara Castro is the only president who has concretely explained what will happen if the president-elect executes his agenda.

According to the Honduran Vice Chancellor, Tony Garcia, if the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan comes to fruition, close to 250,000 Hondurans could be deported in 2025 alone.

Castro leads regional collaboration ahead of Trump’s incoming administration
As President pro tempore of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), Castro has called for an urgent meeting of foreign ministers to address the challenge of migration amid the start of the Trump administration. The Honduran president has emphasized the importance of holding the meeting in collaboration with Mexico, whose President, Claudia Sheinbaum, has had several public rebuttals to Trump’s comments regarding migration and drug trafficking.

In addition, Castro explained that the meeting will consider new ways to support Haiti, a country experiencing a serious economic and social crisis, and develop mechanisms to help Cuba, which is also going through a complex economic crisis due to the economic embargo imposed by the United States more than 60 years ago. Both of these countries have experienced waves of migration as they’ve grappled with these broader national crises.

“We will be convening a meeting of foreign ministers for the month of January to address the issue of migration, support the sister republic of Haiti, and express our solidarity with the people and government of Cuba,” said the President of Honduras.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/06/ ... on-agenda/

******

Trump Tries to Block Publication of Prosecutor Smith’s Report on Classified Documents


X/ @RobotecAvi

January 7, 2025 Hour: 9:04 am

His lawyers sent a letter to Attorney General Garland to prevent the report from being released before January 20.

On Monday night, Donald Trump’s lawyers requested that the Department of Justice block the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report regarding the improper handling of classified documents in 2021.

Lawyers for Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira asked Judge Aileen Cannon to prevent the publication of the report, which was expected to be released before Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

Both men, who worked for Trump and pleaded not guilty to charges related to obstruction, argue that Smith lacks the authority to release the report because the case had already been dismissed by Cannon, who had ruled that Smith’s appointment was illegal.

The Department of Justice had charged Trump in Florida over the mishandling of classified documents following his presidency. Cannon dismissed the case in July, and later, an appeals court threw out the case against Trump.


The attorneys asked the judge to hold a hearing and issue a response to their motion before Friday. Additionally, Trump’s legal team sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland with the same request to prevent Smith from releasing the document.

Trump’s lawyers stated they had reviewed a draft of the report over the weekend, which they described as a “politically motivated attack” by the special counsel against Trump. They also called on Garland to remove Smith from his position.

Justice Department regulations require the special counsel’s office to submit a confidential report to Garland, who has the discretion to decide whether to make it public.

Meanwhile, on Monday, a state judge in Manhattan rejected Trump’s latest attempt to delay his sentencing on 34 felony charges, keeping the hearing scheduled for Friday.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/trump-tr ... documents/

[blindpig]

Oh Canada!
January 8, 13:19



Canadian authorities claim that they will not allow Trump to annex Canada to the United States.
But we will see...

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9598867.html

Google Translator

******



Goals behind Trump’s tariffs: cut taxes on rich & escalate new cold war on China
By Ben Norton (Posted Jan 08, 2025)

Originally published: Geopolitical Economy Report on January 4, 2025 (more by Geopolitical Economy Report) |

Donald Trump cited billionaire egghead venture capitalist Marc Andreessen to advocate for high tariffs. Trump argued that tariffs will magically replace the income tax and pay off U.S. public debt (which is more than 120% of GDP). This is utterly false, and mathematically absurd.


For Trump, tariffs are just another convenient excuse to cut taxes on the rich–which will in fact increase the U.S. deficit, and therefore public debt.

Thanks to Trump’s tax cuts during his first term, the richest billionaire families in the U.S. paid a lower effective tax rate than the bottom half of households in the country. Meanwhile, US federal deficits increased from 3.4% of GDP in 2017 to 4.6% of GDP in 2019 (before the deficit blew out to 14.7% of GDP in 2020, due to the necessary stimulus measures during the pandemic).

As Trump continues to reduce taxes on fellow oligarchs, tariffs will decidedly not make up for the lost revenue. A study by the Wharton School, the elite business school of the University of Pennsylvania, estimated that Trump’s economic policies will increase the U.S. deficit by $5.8 trillion over the next decade.

Nevertheless, the sudden interest in tariffs shown by U.S. billionaires is about much more than just taxes; what it is really about is industrial hegemony and economic dominance.
Here is the actual history, which oligarchs like Trump and Andreessen don’t know:

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States used tariffs as a form of infant industry protection, to build up its domestic manufacturing capabilities, following the dirigiste ideas of Alexander Hamilton.

Every advanced economy got its start through protectionism (including Great Britain, France, Japan, South Korea, etc.). The state needed to protect infant industries during the initial industrial “catch-up” period, because it is very difficult for a developing economy to compete with a dominant economic power that already has an established industrial base that benefits from economies of scale.

By the 1940s, the U.S. became the dominant industrial power on Earth, especially after World War Two destroyed its competitors in Europe. In 1946, US net exports were 3.2% of GDP; then, in 1947, they were 4.3% of GDP. This was a peak the U.S. would never see again. (US net exports have been negative without exception since 1976, as the U.S. has run the largest consistent current account deficits ever seen in history, which have only been possible to balance due to the fact that the U.S. prints the global reserve currency, and can thus sell more and more Treasury securities and other financial assets to foreign holders of dollars.)
In the 1940s, U.S. industry no longer had significant competition, so Washington lifted tariffs and began to preach “free trade”. This benefited the U.S., because at that time it had a large surplus, and insufficient domestic demand, so by imposing “free trade” (often forcibly), it could open new markets for its exports.

The U.S. wasn’t concerned about losing local market share to a foreign manufacturer, because there weren’t any left at the top of the value chain. So U.S. companies could dominate both foreign and domestic markets.

What the United States did was not unique; the British empire did the exact same thing in the mid 19th century. After the UK established industrial dominance, it repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, moved away from strict protectionism, and began to impose “free trade” on its colonies. (This history was detailed by economist Ha-Joon Chang in his groundbreaking book Kicking Away the Ladder.)

However, something happened in the 21st century that changed everything: the People’s Republic of China carried out the most remarkable campaign of economic development in history.

By 2016, China overtook the United States as the largest economy on Earth (when GDP is measured at purchasing power parity, according to IMF data).



Even more importantly, China rapidly industrialized and established itself as the “world’s sole manufacturing superpower”, responsible for 35% of global gross production.



Meanwhile, the U.S. lost its industrial hegemony, due to the deindustrialization and financialization of its economy in the neoliberal era. The U.S. capitalist class decided it would much rather be the banker of the world rather than the factory of the world, because creating parasitic financial and tech oligopolies that use monopolistic market control and intellectual property to extract rents is much more profitable than actually making things.

Just 10% of U.S. GDP consists of manufacturing. More than double, 21%, is made up by the FIRE sector: finance, insurance, and real estate.



Today, U.S. companies can no longer compete with Chinese firms. So what is the response of the U.S. government, which is the representative of U.S. monopoly capital? It has abandoned the “free trade” ideology it had spent decades imposing on the world, and has instead returned to its old strident protectionism.

During his first administration, Trump launched a trade war on China. But this is totally bipartisan (as is the case with almost all U.S. wars). Joe Biden has continued Trump’s trade and tech war on China, imposing even more tariffs.

Demagogues such as Trump like to scapegoat China for the problems that were caused by U.S. oligarchs like him and Andreessen, who got much, much, much richer thanks to the deindustrialization and correspondent financialization of the U.S. economy.

Now they think tariffs are the panacea that will fix everything. But they won’t, because the U.S. industrial base has seriously eroded, and that can’t be rebuilt quickly; it takes many years.

Even more importantly, billionaire oligarchs on Wall Street–who are close friends and allies of Trump, Andreessen, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Elon Musk–will fight tooth and nail against a significant devaluation of the dollar, which would be needed to re-industrialize, reduce production costs, and disincentive imports. Financial speculators want a strong dollar, to keep inflating the biggest bubble in the history of U.S. capital markets.

So the logical result of this is that Trump will use tariffs not truly to re-industrialize, but rather for two main reasons: one, to justify cutting taxes even further on the rich (thereby increasing U.S. public debt, which will be pointed to to demand neoliberal austerity and slashes to social spending); and two, to escalate the new cold war on China, which is a bipartisan gift to the Military-Industrial Complex that will only distract from the domestic problems caused by the U.S. ruling class and externalize the blame.

https://mronline.org/2025/01/08/goals-b ... -on-china/

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The mysterious ways of Donald J. Trump

Last night’s and this morning’s lead stories on the BBC and CNN focused on the latest public statement by Donald Trump that he does not exclude use of military force or economic pressure to take back American control of the Panama Canal and to take possession of Greenland over objections from fellow NATO member Denmark, to whom the world’s biggest island belongs. He claimed that both acquisitions were necessary to further American economic security.

A moment later in these same broadcasts, we are told about Trump’s expressing his ‘understanding’ of Russian concerns over expansion of NATO to Ukraine going back to 2008 and his rebuke to Joe Biden for having restored the issue of NATO membership during his presidency and pursued it to spite Moscow. The news presenters also point to Trump’s revised timetable for ending the conflict in Ukraine from the 24 hours he claimed during his electoral campaign to a period of six months set out today.

The two broadcasters do not link these seemingly unrelated declarations of guiding policy for the incoming Trump administration. As for interpretation, their best effort is to say that Trump, after all, is not the isolationist they had feared him to be. No, he is an expansionist, after all. Meanwhile, by contrast, Trump’s attempt to understand Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is said to show continuity given his supposed sympathy for the Russian dictator that goes back to his first term in office.

Let us try to make sense of it all, if we assume that strategic logic is to be found in the thinking processes of Donald Trump. I freely admit that this assumption is risky.

This exercise must be viewed in the context of the general confusion both in mainstream and in alternative media over Trump’s nominations to fill the top defense, intelligence and foreign policy posts in his administration. Pre-election Trump was, as before the 2016 election, the man who would purge the government of the Neocons who were in control of policy for two decades. The result in 2017 and throughout his first term in office was instead a further entrenchment of Deep State policies that undid all of Trump’s pre-electoral promises. The departure of Victoria Nuland from the State Department, which occurred before he took office four years ago, proved to be only temporary, while her policies in defense of American global hegemony were perpetuated by others in the interim. Today, looking over the names of most Trump nominees for Senate confirmation, we find that nearly all are promoters of America, the world policeman, which is precisely what 52% of Americans voted against on 5 November 2024.

How can the circle be squared? I have given the task my best effort by suggesting that Trump is practicing the old rule ‘keep your enemies closest to yourself.’ Some of my colleagues suggest that there still will be many visible opponents to downsizing America’s global footprint who remain outside of Trump’s control and who may create problems implementing his intended policies of withdrawing the country from ‘forever wars.’ I only can say that we must sit and wait to see what were his intentions behind his appointments and whether his logic prevails.

So it is with his latest statements about Greenland and the Panama Canal, on the one hand, and about the Russia-Ukraine war on the other. The logic I see is that a bellicose stand on produced-to-order conflicts that can be solved at little cost to Washington, the proverbial kicking ass that Ronald Reagan practiced to great effect, is intended to provide cover for what otherwise would look like a humiliating defeat for Washington should it cut military aid to Kiev and stand by passively while the Kremlin imposes capitulation on the Zelensky regime.

Indeed, from the statement in response to Trump issued by the Prime Minister of Denmark, it would appear that he has already won that contest without having to send an aircraft carrier detachment to the Jutland coast: she said that it is up to the people of Greenland to decide their future. Up to the 56,000 inhabitants to decide their own future, given that Trump can offer them riches beyond their imagination to get their consent at the ballot box?

In closing, I note that one reader of these pages has written to me asking what the Russian talk shows are saying about Trump’s plans for Greenland and for the Panama Canal. To this I respond that Russia is ‘out to lunch.’

The fact is that Russians celebrate two New Years today as they always did: both on 31 December by the Gregorian calendar used in the West and in most of the world and on 13 January per the Julian calendar still used by the Russian Orthodox Church. During these two weeks, all of the leading television news presenters and talk shows are on holiday and Russian state broadcasters offer instead vintage Soviet films or newly released blockbuster films and the like for family entertainment. When regular news programming returns next week, I have little doubt that the expert panelists on air will be talking at length about the latest peculiar policy declarations of Donald J. Trump, and I will try to bring to your attention what sense they make of it all in Moscow.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2025/01/08/ ... d-j-trump/

Funny guy, that Gilbert...In the run-up to the election he was bullish about Trump, that the Orange Man was going to roll back liberal globalism in all it's forms. Now, like quite a few others, he ain't so sure. His 'best effort' is nothing but hopium, hoping Trump doesn't make a complete fool of him.

Trump's only 'logic' is gratifying his ego and wealth. Surrounding himself with sycophants, other billionaires and people considered 'beautiful'(by corporate standards) is the main thing. This electoral win has unhinged him more than ever, the vicious, insane and impossible bucket list he's set for himself is bound to drag him down with derision as one after the other fails or proves unfeasible. Which of course will set off another round of manic pronouncements. which might be amusing were it not that every half-assed attempt at making good on his promises is bound to bring tragic results for the working class and the planet we subsist upon.

[blindpig]

Daily routine on the day of the capture of Ottawa
January 8, 19:18



Donald Trump's daily routine.

France and Germany said the US can't just annex Greenland.
The French Foreign Ministry said the EU won't let the US annex Greenland.
Elon Musk said Trudeau is a girl and doesn't decide anything in Canada anymore.
In fact, there is a precedent for redrawing the borders of countries within NATO - Cyprus.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9599734.html

Google Translator

******

To Avoid Fighting Large Conflicts Trump Is Creating Smaller Ones

Yesterday, during a media event, president-elect Donald Trump held one of his typical ramblings (video, transcript) which jump from issue to issue without any connecting lines.

It was mostly about his plans for his upcoming reign. He promised more tax relief for the rich, repelling environmental regulations and an increase in oil and gas production.

But what caught the minds of most observers were his ideas on foreign policy.

Trump is rejecting to further raise conflicts with the most obvious 'enemies' - Russia, China and Iran. He is instead diverting the public by providing new targets - Canada, Greenland and Panama.

Trump said that he understood the position of Russia with regards to NATO membership of Ukraine. He thus seems to be genuinely intended to end that conflict:

We're going to have to settle some big problems that are going on right now. We're going to have to settle up with Russia, Ukraine -- that's a disaster. I look at numbers every week. ... So, we'll have to get that one straightened out too. That's a tough one, much tougher than it would have been before it started, I can tell you that.
and:

So, you know, a big part of the problem was Russia for many, many years, long before Putin, said, you could never have NATO involved with Ukraine. Now they've said that -- that's been like written in stone. And somewhere along the line Biden said no, they should be able to join NATO. Well, then Russia has somebody right on their doorstep and I could understand their feeling about that.
But there were a lot of mistakes made in that negotiation. And when I heard the way that Biden was negotiating, I said you're going to end up in a war and it turned out to be a very bad war. And it could escalate -- that war could escalate to be much worse than it is right now.

Well, my view is that it was always understood. In fact, I believe that they had a deal and then Biden broke it. They had a deal which would have been a satisfactory deal to Ukraine and everybody else. But that Biden said, no, you have to be able to join NATO.

He goes on to pressure NATO countries to pay more money to the U.S. weapon industry. But it does not feel like he is willing to do a deal - more money in exchange for continuing the war in Ukraine. It is just his usual way of pressuring allies.

Trump is then asked when he will meet Putin:

Well, I can't tell you that, but I know that Putin would like to meet. I don't think it's appropriate that I meet until after the 20th, which I hate because every day people are being -- many, many young people are being killed, soldiers. You know, the land is very flat and the hundreds of thousands of soldiers from each -- many hundreds of thousands from each side are dead and they're laying in fields all over the place, nobody to even collect, there's landmines all over, it's a disaster.
...
I hope to have -- six months. ... No, I would think -- I hope long before six months. Look, Russia is losing a lot of young people and so is Ukraine and it should have never been started. That's a war that should have never happened. I guarantee you, if I were president that war would have never happened.
Continuing that war seems to be really off the table for Trump - at least for now. That he is openly recognizing Russia's strategic concern - Ukraine in NATO - gives me some hope that he will find a way to solve the conflict.

During his talk Trump did not mention China at all even as a main competitor or even an 'enemy'. China only comes up in the context of the Panama canal (more on that below.)

Trump also rejected to talk about Iran:

Q: The last time you were here, you were asked a question about the US possibly launching a preemptive strike on Iran. You said you wouldn't answer that question.
Trump: And I said I don't talk about -- it's a military strategy. ... Look, it's a military strategy and I'm not answering your questions on military strategy. All right. One more. Brian, go ahead. Brian.

Trump has thereby rejected the three potential conflicts, with Russia, China and Iran, that were long leading the headlines. He likely perceives that there is nothing to win in these.

But as he has to provide some fodder for the media as well as for his MAGA followers he is instead coming up with new conflicts which might even turn out to be winnable.

Why not take Canada and integrate it into the U.S. itself? Let's take Greenland from Denmark to better position the U.S. in the Arctic - or recapture the Panama Canal:

The Panama Canal is a disgrace, what took place at the Panama Canal. Jimmy Carter gave it to them for $1 and they were supposed to treat us well.
...
We gave it away for a dollar, but the deal was that they have to treat us fairly. They don't treat us fairly. They charge more for our ships than they charge for ships of other countries. They charge more for our navy than they charge for navies of other countries.
They laugh at us because they think we're stupid, but we're not stupid anymore. So the Panama Canal is under discussion with them right now. They violated every aspect of the agreement and they've morally violated it also. And they want our help because it's leaking and not in good repair and they want us to give $3 billion to help fix it. I said, well, why don't you get the money from China, because China is basically taking it over.

China is at both ends of the Panama Canal. China is running the Panama Canal and they come to see this Biden, this guy who should never have been allowed even to run for president. Of course, she shouldn't have either because that never happened. I had to beat two people, not one. But they want $3 billion to fix the Panama Canal that's run by China and makes a lot of money, China.

One of the most profitable structures ever built, because you have ships lined up back to Florida, frankly, and they just keep going through. And the numbers are staggering $0.5 million to $1 million a ship. And they took it away from us, meaning we gave it to him for a dollar, but not going to happen. What they've done to us, they've charged us -- they've overcharged our ships, overcharged our navy and then when they need repair money, they come to the United States to put it up, we get nothing.

Most of Trump's claims are false. The charges to pass the canal depend on a ship's size, not on its nationality. China isn't running the canal but has rented port space on each side of it. The biggest problem with the canal is the lack of freshwater needed to run it. It is restricting the numbers of ships that can pass through.

But anyway - like ready made conflicts over Canada and Greenland it is a great theme to divert attention from other conflicts.

It reminds of Ronald Reagan who created minor conflicts, like in Grenada, to be free to make deals with the Soviet 'evil empire' Union.

As Gilbert Doctorow remarks:

The logic I see is that a bellicose stand on produced-to-order conflicts that can be solved at little cost to Washington, the proverbial kicking ass that Ronald Reagan practiced to great effect, is intended to provide cover for what otherwise would look like a humiliating defeat for Washington should it cut military aid to Kiev and stand by passively while the Kremlin imposes capitulation on the Zelensky regime.

Dean Baker is making a similar, but larger point:

Dean Baker @DeanBaker13 - 18:31 UTC · Jan 7, 2025
Trump's pretty clever, he decided that it would be too difficult to confront ostensible U.S. enemies like Russia, China, or North Korea so he's decided to confront allies like Denmark and Canada. It's very MAGA!

Trump wants to avoid the larger potential conflicts as they are too difficult to manage and win. He is instead creating his own small conflicts right next to the U.S. backyard.

It is a nice trick and it may even see some success.

Panama will probably agree to some canal rebates or to a priority for U.S. ships. Canada may concede on trade issues. And the EU, which didn't even protest when the U.S. blew up its main energy supply, may well hand over Greenland without even making a fuzz about it.

All three potential wins which would be welcome by MAGA.

Posted by b on January 8, 2025 at 14:31 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/01/t ... .html#more

OK, there is a logic there, but can it be sustained? I find it hard to believe that Denmark would give up Greenland, but perhaps serious bribery would work. Annexing Canada is out of the question. Panama Canal, well mebbe an opening bid for a more preferential deal, but if he goes military I think a people's war this time. The big question is whether Trump can muster the discipline to keep his mouth shut when it would be beneficial to him. Pretty damn unlikely.

******

The False Concept of Populism and the Challenges facing the Left: A Conjunctural Analysis of Politics in the North Atlantic

Over the past 15 years, the term populism has widely been used to refer to political forces that seem to challenge the neoliberal consensus, but do these forces truly represent a break from neoliberalism?

17 December 2024



The art in this dossier, created by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, playfully highlights the fragility of the current political order. Each collage illustrates different forces that are attempting to either uphold or destabilise the pillars of western hegemony and the neoliberal consensus. Together, they point to the necessity of toppling these pillars and planting new seeds for a socialist future.

Over the course of the past fifteen years, the concept of populism has made a remarkable comeback. In Europe and North America, the term is used to describe political forces that are outside the neoliberal consensus of political life. For almost fifty years, neoliberal political forces have promoted the idea that they will be the managers of the capitalist system, and that even when there is a change of government there will be no real change in the neoliberal consensus. In the 1990s, the neoliberal consensus was known as the Washington Consensus, at which time it referred to a set of free market policy prescriptions considered to be the standard reform package promoted for developing countries. Today, the term needs to be broadened to include a few key aspects, such as the need to accept capitalism as eternal, shrink the aspects of the state that provide social welfare and regulate business, expand the repressive apparatus of the state to prevent any challenge to the status quo, and acknowledge the centrality of the United States as the leader of the world system.

Already in the 1970s and 1980s, the parties that used to be social democratic (the left) and traditionally conservative (the right) had started to drift into the neoliberal pact. Upholding this new consensus frayed the traditional divisions among these groups and created the possibility for a technocratic future. These neoliberal forces, in other words, were not rooted in one party but in several parties, each of which was committed – despite their origins – to the terms of the neoliberal pact. For example, in the United States, the Democratic and Republican parties fully came to this neoliberal consensus in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Across Europe, the differences between the social democrats and the Christian democrats became moot as they too adopted the neoliberal consensus as their own.

During the Third Great Depression, triggered in 2006 by the mortgage crisis in the United States and continuing into the present, new formations began to appear that challenged the neoliberal consensus and stood outside the neoliberal centre. These political forces, whether from the far right of a special type or of the North Atlantic electoral left, began to be called ‘populist’.1
Though the term populist has, generally speaking, been used in a way that is misleading and vague since the nineteenth century, in political science it most often refers to anti-establishment politics. According to this definition, if the establishment today is the neoliberal centre, then certainly any challenge to it will be populist. This dossier attempts to provide a more accurate definition of the term and draw clear lines between the neoliberal pact, the far right of a special type, and the North Atlantic electoral left.



The Far Right of a Special Type
The first appearance of the term populism in our time was when forces of the far right of a special type began to appear across Europe, particularly in eastern Europe. An early example of this sort of political tendency emerged in Poland with the Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS), which was founded in 2001 by twin brothers Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński and then became the largest party in the country in the 2005 general election. The orientation of PiS was towards the Catholic Church and economic intervention by the state, a move in both directions – social and economic – against the kind of neoliberal consensus of the European Union (which had rooted itself in social liberalism, economic deregulation, and open markets). Eventually, the Kaczyński twins occupied prominent positions in public office, with Lech becoming the mayor of Warsaw (2002–2005) and then president of Poland (2005–2010) and his brother Jarosław serving as his prime minister (2006–2007). What had transpired in Poland rapidly spread through Hungary with Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party, which formed in 1988 initially as a centre-left force before drifting to the neoliberal centre and eventually moving to a socially conservative Hungarian nationalism, and through Austria, where Jörg Haider transformed the Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ) from its centrist posture to an anti-immigrant and socially conservative nationalism between 1986 and 2000.

This new phenomenon eventually spread across the rest of Europe, from Matteo Salvini’s Lega Party (Lega per Salvini Premier, LSP) in Italy to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement national, RN) in France. These parties came together in the European Parliament and then separated into different political groups, such as the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (since 2009), Europe of Nations and Freedom (2015–2019), Identity and Democracy (2019–2024), and Patriots for Europe (since 2024), as well as Europe of Sovereign Nations (since 2024). This coming together and then breaking apart suggests both a general unanimity of opinion amongst these far-right parties of a special type, which differ in their approach to the European project (and the European Union) and to issues of social conservatism. What distinguished them from the neoliberal pact was principally their overt social conservatism, their commitment to some forms of economic nationalism, and their rhetorical scepticism about the European project.

However, once these political parties came into power, they did not break fundamentally with the neoliberal consensus, since most of them continued to adopt the policies of business deregulation, social austerity, and a commitment to the European market. These parties did not adopt strong policies of economic protectionism and social welfare in the European Parliament or in their own domestic parliaments, nor did they follow the British Eurosceptics into their own version of Brexit. When the European bureaucrats introduced new laws aimed at integrating the European market and addressing the need for more balanced budget policies, the parties of the far right of a special type went along willingly. If they claimed not to follow the neoliberal economic consensus, they certainly did not break with the Atlantic security arrangements that subordinated Europe to the overall policy agenda set by the United States since the end of World War II. Despite their occasional doubts about the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), most of the countries governed by the far right of a special type had a comfortable role in the alliance. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, FdI) is a case in point.

In 2024, when Washington insisted that European countries spend at least 2% of their GDP on their militaries and contribute more towards NATO, 23 of NATO’s 32 members pledged to reach or exceed that target (compared to just three members in 2014).2
When the US wanted European countries to decrease economic ties with China in 2019 and when they wanted the Europeans to condemn Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the European states, led by the far right, largely accepted these orders. In fact, in many European countries the far right of a special type went into alliance with neoliberal forces to form governments or absorbed former neoliberal politicians into their ranks. There was no real difference between these forces, at least when it came to economic and security policy. The major exception is Hungary’s Orbán, whose 2024 presidency of the Council of the European Union has been marked by an attempt to halt the conflict in Ukraine and to prevent the expansion of NATO. The Orbán exception, however, has not impacted groups such as Meloni’s FdI or Alice Weidel’s Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD), which have shown an unwavering commitment to NATO and its policies.

Why was the far right of a special type considered to be populist, given that it did not rupture with the neoliberal consensus? The neoliberal consensus drew an important distinction as having emerged out of and being committed to liberalism, whereas the far right of a special type was decidedly ‘anti-liberal’. This far right broke from social liberalism and from forms of mainstream libertarianism with their strongly conservative religiosity (anti-abortion, anti-feminism, homophobia, and transphobia) and overall traditionalism (their rootedness in the patriarchal nuclear family and in the Church, which transposed into a belief in the strong male leader in society). Yet, very little distinguished this far right of a special type from the neoliberal consensus in other illiberal aspects (including empowering security forces and attempts to curtail freedom of speech). The term ‘populist’ was used to distinguish this new right from liberals, whose liberalism, however, was no longer of a classic sort (freedom of speech and association) but was more clearly a liberalism of lifestyle and social choices for the middle class. The term ‘populist’ was, therefore, more of an election slogan than a serious category of political differentiation.

The clearest example of this form of electoral sloganeering can be seen in the United States. A close look at the political records of the Democratic and Republican parties shows a strong proximity of purpose and action. Though the two parties exhibit different styles and social choices, very little divides them when it comes to the neoliberal consensus – despite the rhetoric of economic nationalism that has now come to define the Republican Party, particularly under the leadership of Donald Trump. With the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘fascist’ highly charged on either side, it is beneficial for the Republicans to call the Democrats ‘liberals’ (which they have made a synonym for communist) and for the Democrats to call the Republicans, particularly Trump, ‘fascists’. This terminology allows each side to drive an electoral agenda, but neither term – used in this highly charged way – scientifically explains the political field to which they refer.

The word ‘fascist’ has taken on a moral charge, which is useful for electoral purposes, but not to properly understand the far right of a special type. This far right has not appeared, as fascism did a hundred years ago, to defeat working-class struggles and the communist movement, nor does it have any problem with the formal institutions of democracy. Both the Italian and German fascists wanted to suspend democratic and electoral systems and use the entire repressive apparatus of the state to decimate the workers’ movement and the communist institutions. No such threat currently faces capitalism in its Atlantic core. Rather than appear as a bulwark for capitalism against the forces of socialism, the far right of a special type appears to defend capitalism against its cannibalisation by the neoliberal pact and to ensure that capitalist institutions have a mass base amongst a population that has been disoriented by the impact of the Third Great Depression. This far right threatens to grab the economy by the throat and make it cough out jobs, but it cannot really force this to happen. The fact that the parties of the far right of a special type mention the crisis and do not deny it – as the parties of the neoliberal consensus do – is sufficient to garner support among enough people who at least see their pain being mirrored in the speeches of far-right politicians. That these parties do not act to change the actual conditions of everyday life will eventually be a burden for this political tendency, but not yet.

Because the neoliberal pact has so fully developed the state’s repressive apparatus in order to discipline the outraged population, the far right of a special type can use the legal repressive apparatus to do its work for it; it does need to create an illegal force to do its bidding. It is true that the far right of a special type continues to use homeopathic doses of violence to demoralise the left and the workers’ movement, but it also knows that if it unleashes too much violence, this will turn the middle class against it and perhaps lead sections of the middle class into the arms of the left. This far right of a special type speaks in the name of the people, but it does not build policies that help the people.

The Third Great Depression and the North Atlantic Electoral Left
In the early years of the Third Great Depression, a new kind of left-wing process began to assert itself on both sides of the Atlantic.3
In 2015, Jeremy Corbyn (born 1949), a long-time member of parliament for Islington North, contested and won the leadership of the Labour Party, and Senator Bernie Sanders (born 1941), a democratic socialist from Vermont, sought the Democratic Party presidential nomination for the 2016 US elections. Both the Labour Party and the Democratic Party have become illustrations of the forced march of social democratic politics to the neoliberal pact. Tony Blair’s insistence that the Labour Party cut Clause IV of its constitution (for mass nationalisation, or ‘common ownership’ of private industry) and his commitment to weaken union power within the party mirrored Bill Clinton’s emergence as the leader of the Democratic Party through the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council, which erased any influence that unions and social movements had enjoyed within the party structure up to that point. By the time the Third Depression set in, neither the Labour Party nor the Democratic Party had the institutional space to properly debate a way out of the neoliberal pact. Sanders’ campaign brought the debate to a party that refused to take him seriously, while Corbyn’s leadership was constantly sabotaged by the neoliberal alliance within the Labour Party that saw to it that he not only lost the leadership but was ejected from the party on spurious grounds. The experience of Sanders and Corbyn underlined the fact that both parties, and any internal instruments for debate, had been completely absorbed by the neoliberal pact; a departure toward anything outside that consensus would simply not be permitted. In the aftermath of Sanders’ defeat in the presidential primary and Corbyn’s removal from his post as party leader, there was no lasting mass formation left – only residues in the form of the Democratic Socialists of America and the UK’s Momentum.

In other parts of Europe, politicians who had been part of establishment parties built large electoral instruments to the left of the neoliberal consensus: Syriza in Greece (2012), Podemos in Spain (2014), and La France insoumise in France (2016). These attempts at electoral power soon became known as ‘left-wing populism’, especially in 2015, when Syriza won power in the Greek elections and Podemos made gains in the regional and federal elections in Spain. Each of these formations was built around singular leaders: Alexis Tsipras (born 1974), who led Synaspismós or ‘Coalition’ into the Syriza (From the Roots) alliance; Pablo Iglesias (born 1978), who led Podemos (We Can); and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (born 1951), who left the Socialist Party and then formed La France insoumise (France Unbowed) out of a coalition of left and green forces. Syriza and Podemos, unlike La France insoumise, shot into the political firmament like meteors but then sputtered out as credible alternatives to neoliberalism. These two formations were rooted less in ideological clarity than in an electoral opportunity delivered to them by the rapid decline of living standards in Greece and Spain during the early years of the Third Great Depression. Without this clarity, they collapsed before the muscular certainties of the neoliberal centre in the European Union (EU). Neither Syriza nor Podemos could produce a firm political line that would oppose the austerity regime of the European Central Bank (ECB). La France insoumise did not go into government, so it did not suffer the same fate; it is, however, likely that had Mélenchon prevailed in the 2017 presidential election (he came fourth with 19.6% of the vote), his government would have floundered before the EU bureaucrats in Brussels and the ECB financiers in Frankfurt.4

Each of these political formations emerged out of large-scale protest movements: the UK’s National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts in 2010; the US’s Occupy Wall Street in 2011; Greece’s Indignant Citizens Movement in 2011; Spain’s 15-M Movement and the Indignados or ‘the Outraged’ in 2011; and France’s anti-austerity worker strikes in 2011, which morphed into the NuitDebout (Night on Our Feet) in 2016. The electoralism of the fronts that emerged to some extent captured the energy of these disparate movements, but they were unable to drive forward their political demands – nor did the movements dissolve into these electoral formations. For example, the strong anti-EU sentiment among the Indignados did not carry over to Syriza or Podemos; meanwhile, La France insoumise did not initiate the Mouvement des gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests Movement) in 2018, a protest movement that broke through the left-right divide in France. Studies of those who joined the Yellow Vests’ protests showed that about a fifth were close to the far right of a special type and just under a fifth were close to La France insoumise, but only a negligible section had any faith in the neoliberal centre represented by President Emmanuel Macron.5
These mass protest movements wanted a decisive break from the politics of the neoliberal centre, which imposed austerity on the working class and sections of the professional middle class in these countries. However, the political formations that emerged did not have the ideological clarity or the political strength to break from the neoliberal consensus.

Part of the electoral hesitation comes from the tendency of bourgeois liberal democracy to favour the middle class in the form of its electoral systems. Election day in most countries of the North Atlantic is not a holiday and, in most, voting is not compulsory. There is also an interesting religious divide regarding voting day: most countries that emerge from a Catholic tradition vote on Sunday, which is not the case for countries in the Protestant tradition. Furthermore, in almost no country is public transport free on election day. The lack of a holiday and free transport, as well as other barriers, make it difficult for the working class to vote in large numbers. This contributes to a large abstention rate amongst the working class (the natural base for socialists), hovering around 30% in Europe and 40% in the US in national elections over the past decades. Furthermore, there tends to be less voter participation in countries that have high rates of inequality and a larger percentage of the workforce in the fishing and agricultural sectors. Conversely, in countries that have higher average wages and more workers in the service sector, there is more voter participation.6
Since there are higher rates of abstention amongst the working class, there is a tendency for any political formation – particularly one that is against austerity but not necessarily for a working-class agenda – to build a programme aimed at the suffering middle class and lower middle classes, which face serious challenges of precarity and clash with the traditions of their society. These issues began to define left formations in the North Atlantic that were rooted more in electoralism than in the longer-term culture of building working-class power.



The Category of ‘Populism’
The neoliberal pact created several conditions that paved the way for the rise of both the far right of a special type and of the North Atlantic left in its electoral incarnation. A brief assessment of these conditions will allow us to better understand the intimate relationship between the far right of a special type and the neoliberal pact, as well as the weakness of the North Atlantic left in its ability to break with neoliberalism:

The Third Great Depression. Because of the economic policies that favoured finance capital and that enforced the privatisation, commodification, and deregulation of the economy, there has been no exit from the credit crunch of 2006–2007 and no ability to grow the economies of the North Atlantic. Unwilling to contest the oligopolist power of finance and tech billionaires’ grip on society, the neoliberal pact enforced permanent austerity on the working class and the lower middle class. Precarious jobs with no future or possibility of career advancement became widespread, and the uberisation of working-class jobs became commonplace (especially in the service sector). Such working conditions weakened trade unions, which meant that pillars of the working class as a class began to disappear (such as trade union halls, community centres, and public institutions for study and healthcare). Between insecure working hours and shifts as well as the disappearance of the old institutions of the working class, combined with the arrival of the digital landscape for entertainment, a deep atomisation of the population set in. A working class without the means to build its own institutions has great difficulty articulating its views in a complex, modern society, and, with the media increasingly monopolised and dominated by the neoliberal consensus, the views of the working class that did get articulated found no space in that mediascape.
The technocracy. Free from the challenge of genuine working-class politics, the neoliberal consensus began to erect the idea of technocracy as the ideal form of government. Regardless of election results, the neoliberal pact found a way to maintain their governments in power despite the lowered voting numbers and the fractured mandates. In some cases, such as in Italy, where there is a widely used term for this kind of government – governo dei tecnici (government of technocrats) – this has happened many times over the decades, most recently with Mario Draghi’s government of 2021–2022, and it has happened in France with the government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier starting in 2024. Traditional social democrats, who do not support austerity, have often been brought into coalition with the technocrats of the neoliberal pact to keep out the far right. In fact, such technocratic governments prepare the terrain for the rise of the far right of a special type since they delegitimise governmental institutions and democratic processes in the eyes of the working class and the lower end of the middle class. The experts that are brought into government are made up entirely of upper middle-class professionals loyal to neoliberal ideology. The journey of the traditional right and social democrats to form the neoliberal pact marked a departure from a mass politics to a politics of elitism. Theirs is a technocracy that is the opposite of a democracy, but which nonetheless uses the trappings of liberal democracy to exercise power. That is what has largely led to the defenestration of the democratic spirit.
The technocratic solution. For at least a generation, from the early 1990s to the start of the Third Great Depression in 2006–2007, the governments of the neoliberal pact refused to allow any policy debate that strayed outside their consensus. Mass participation in solving society’s problems was simply not allowed. During the worst of the financial and credit crisis, and during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, mass public action to salve the effects of both events was nowhere to be seen in the North Atlantic. The message was to isolate at home until the technocrats came up with a vaccine, an option largely only available to the upper and middle classes, whose professional profile in many cases allowed for remote work. Meanwhile, in parts of the Global South such as Kerala (India), Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, and China, millions of volunteers – mostly from their respective communist parties – went from door to door to ensure that people who could not leave had all that they needed.7
When the slogan ‘social distancing’ became commonplace, the communist Chief Minister of Kerala Pinarayi Vijayan challenged it with a better slogan: ‘physical distance, social unity’.8
This social fabric is unavailable in most parts of the North Atlantic, where the population has come to rely upon the state or the private sector to deliver goods and services. The demobilisation of the population, which is another way to say the break-up of communities that had been rooted in the working class, became apparent during the pandemic. Part of the reason that there is less engagement in volunteerism and public service in Europe and the United States is that the population – faced with precarious working conditions and the austerity-driven difficulties of managing everyday life – largely relies on the idea the state – run by the technocrats and the private sector – will provide them with goods and services.
No words for the working class. In the 1990s, the language of class slowly vanished from public discourse in the Atlantic. In place of an overt class politics in social democratic spaces – and in many cases even in further left spaces – a binary was established between the language of class (seen as anachronistic) and the language of identity (which became the primary driving force for many social movements). This is a false binary, since various forms of class and identity were central to most political formations that emerged in the nineteenth century, which manifested itself, for instance, in struggles around national self-determination, minority rights, and women’s emancipation. Creating a binary between class and identity served to set aside the language of class, which was replaced in the social democratic remainder by a concern for inequality and allowed identity politics or the politics of recognition to become the main form of address in this neoliberal environment. When the far right of a special type appeared twenty years ago, it seemed to disrupt this binary: identity politics were key to the far right, which sought to enact a series of reversals through a culture war on family and women’s rights, but this far right also presumed to speak to the working class and the lower middle class by claiming that these sectors had been ignored by ‘globalists’. The far right built new coalitions that included sections of the population that had abstained from voting in the past but whose numbers were considerable and could sway any election.9
This became clear with the rapid ascent of Donald Trump within the Republican Party, which he transformed, through this newly acquired base, into a party of the far right of a special type. It is because of this rhetorical pivot to the working class and the lower middle class that observers began to label these political forces as ‘populist’.
Pseudo-break from neoliberalism. The devastation of the neoliberal landscape provided the parties of the far right of a special type with the opportunity to argue that the neoliberal pact of permanent austerity had failed and that they would be the instrument of the abandoned populations. This far right made a pseudo-break with the neoliberal consensus, at least rhetorically, by reviving an older language of economic nationalism and putting itself on the side of the ‘people’ and against the ‘elites’.10
This far right drew on the language of anti-austerity to create a narrative that claimed that a robust anti-immigrant line would set the national economy back on course, since, it argued (against all facts), it was austerity that had generated a neoliberal pro-immigrant policy. This was a malicious use of the anti-austerity argument, but it did draw in a new constituency of precarious working-class voters, and it did propose a departure from the kind of globalisation agenda driven by neoliberals. In practice, however, the far right of a special type was not prepared to affect any real rupture from the neoliberal consensus.
The term ‘populist’ – as used to describe the far right of a special type – is sufficient if it merely refers to a possible post-neoliberal politics that could cater to ‘the people’. But the concept is insufficient if it implies the possibility of a necessary rupture from the neoliberal consensus. The far right of a special type is theatrical with its anti-neoliberalism but unwilling to act on these gestures.



The Historicism of the Left
The left is made up of a variety of historical forces that are in motion within each different context to advance certain important principles, such as the convictions that:

1.capitalism is unable to solve the problems it has created and reproduced.
2.socialism is the necessary antidote to the blockage of history by capitalism.

The varieties of the left do not overlap with the forces of the far right of a special type, which are rooted in the capitalist system and deeply anti-communist and which emerge out of the most hideous sections of the right wing. To use the same category of populism to describe the left and the far right of a special type is a malicious political tactic used to delegitimise the left. The specific conjuncture in which the North Atlantic left has had to operate requires empirical and theoretical clarity.

The North Atlantic left – both the electoral and the non-electoral varieties – inherited significant challenges:

1.The left in crisis. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the North Atlantic electoral left went into a serious crisis. This led to various outcomes, including the demise of the Italian Communist Party in February 1991, one of the largest communist parties in the region. This crisis impacted both the communist left as well as the various sectarian groups inspired by Leon Trotsky and by anarchism. Few parties could withstand the pressure of anti-communist triumphalism or the surrender and disintegration of the trade union movement. The left’s weakness was rooted in its lack of ideological clarity about its role in society, its habits of sectarianism that could not sustain themselves in a context without the Soviet Union, and the departure of large number of cadres who no longer felt a compelling reason to be involved in a movement for socialism when it appeared as if socialism was no longer on the horizon. Nonetheless, a number of communist parties weathered the storm of the post-1991 period, such as the French Communist Party (PCF), the Greek Communist Party (KKE), the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), and the Communist Party of Britain (CPB). In Germany, sections of communists and left social democrats came together in 2007 to create Die Linke (The Left), which drifted away from the class struggle but birthed the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht in 2024 (The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance). Meanwhile, the German Communist Party (DKP) and its youth wing remain a small but effective force, and the Belgian Workers’ Party (PTB) advanced significantly after 2008 through a ‘renewal’ process that allowed it to be both a mass electoral party and a cadre party. In Italy, the collapse of the large Communist Party (PCI) left shards of memory in the Rete dei Comunisti (Network of Communists), established in 1988, and in the younger Potere al Popolo! (Power to the People!), both small in the face of the far right of a special type. In many of these countries, the left has maintained a presence in parliament but has not been able – on its own – to rupture the neoliberal consensus.

2.Defending the system. During the period of the neoliberal consensus, the social democrats of the North Atlantic drifted further from their liberal commitment to social welfare and relief, not only abandoning their historical mission but accepting further cuts on behalf of the wealthy and against the working class and the lower middle class. It is because of this abandonment by the social democrats that the left had to take on both the mission of defending social welfare and fighting to build the independent power of the working class to transcend the system, playing a complicated and confusing role of defending the welfare aspects of the system while fighting to transform it. Defending welfare was essential to provide relief to a working class that was being damaged by the neoliberal austerity regime. However, this did mean that the energies of the left, by and large, had to be shifted from an agenda of transformation to an agenda of defending the welfare side of the capitalist system. The North Atlantic electoral left came from an authentically anti-austerity political position but could only go so far as to promote social welfare policies to repair the broken state institutions that serviced the working class and lower middle class.

3.The pitfalls of coalitions. Increasingly, the old divisions between the various kinds of lefts have begun to fade away and there is a new tendency towards unities in struggles and in electoral blocs. This was apparent in France when La France insoumise and the French Communist Party (PCF) went into an alliance for the 2024 parliamentary elections and when the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) worked with Podemos and then later with Sumar (Add Up), formed in 2022. These histories of alliance building go back a long way, as illustrated by the Portuguese Communist Party’s participation in electoral platforms such as the United Peoples Alliance (1978–1987) and the Unitary Democratic Coalition (1987 to present). The difficulty in these coalitions has been the tendency for various left parties and social movements (from ecological groups to social justice groups) to drive the agenda of the coalition rather than assert the importance of fighting to transcend the present system. The role of social movements – vital in mobilising large numbers of people on different platforms and for different issues – has nonetheless been shaped by a non-governmental organisation logic of partial politics rather than an anti-capitalist framework, and, equally, by the weight of identity politics that abandons socialist politics and draws the platforms of these unities into liberalism. While these unities in action are important, in many cases they are premised on the left having to leave its most important principles at the door.

4.The revival of anti-communism. The deep roots of Cold War anti-communism remain alive and well on both sides of the North Atlantic, deployed as weapons to bludgeon anyone who tries to revive a discussion even along social democratic lines – such as to expand social welfare. The neoliberal centre and the far right of a special type are united in their commitment to the Cold War era military build-up and the wars against national liberation struggles. For instance, as the North Atlantic left made gains in society with its commitment to end the US-Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, Cold War anti-communist forms of attack were revived to discipline anyone who stood for peace and against war, with the full weight falling on the left. That the far right of a special type is intimately linked to the neoliberal consensus on the use of Western military force is indicative of its proximity to the established systems of power. The left’s break with the NATO mindset puts it in a unique position regarding the political field in the Western states.

Closing Remarks
With Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency in January 2025, the far right of a special type has been emboldened across the North Atlantic. Several initiatives to coordinate the far right’s politics, such as Steve Bannon’s The Movement (founded in 2017) and the Madrid Forum (founded in 2020), have already created the foundation for joint actions across the Atlantic. But despite the jubilation, the contradictions set in place by the neoliberal pact will not allow the far right of a special type to act in a truly populist manner against the institutions of neoliberalism. For instance, despite widespread distress caused by the war in Ukraine and the dangers of escalation, it is unlikely that the far right of a special type will be able to settle into a normal relationship with Russia, and even more unlikely that it will be able to disrupt the Atlantic security arrangements rooted in NATO. The far right of a special type routinely overpromises, particularly when it comes to issues of economic misery. Neither its anti-immigration policies nor its tariff policies will increase the economic opportunities for the majority, particularly if these sharpen the break with countries in Asia, such as China and India. The eventual failure of the far right of a special type will provide a tremendous opportunity for the left – so long as the left is prepared to take up the charge.

Notes
1For more on the ‘far right of a special type’, see Vijay Prashad, ‘Ten Theses on the Far Right of a Special Type: The Thirty-Third Newsletter (2024)’, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 15 August 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... cial-type/.

2Fenella McGerty, ‘NATO Defence Spending: A Bumper Year’, International Institute for Security Studies, 8 July 2024, https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/mi ... mper-year/.

3For more on the Third Great Depression, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The World in Economic Depression: A Marxist Analysis of Crisis, notebook no. 4, 10 October 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-n ... ic-crisis/.

4Statista Research Department, ‘Final Results in the First and Second Round of the French Presidential Election of 2017’, Statista, accessed 26 November 2024, https://www.statista.com/statistics/887 ... n-results/.

5‘Les Gilets jaunes: la partie émergée de la crise sociale française ?’ [The Yellow Vests: The Tip of the Iceberg in France’s Social Crisis?], Institut Montaigne and Elabe, 20 March 2019, https://www.institutmontaigne.org/expre ... -francaise.

6Luciana Maruta, ‘The Non-Voter Time Bomb’, European Data Journalism Network, accessed 26 November 2024, https://www.europeandatajournalism.eu/t ... time-bomb/; US Elections Project, ‘National Turnout Rates 1789-Present’, accessed 27 November 2024, https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present.

7For more on how socialist states responded to the pandemic, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, CoronaShock and Socialism, studies on CoronaShock no. 3, 8 July 2020, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-3 ... socialism/.

8Vinaya Raghavan, ‘“Physical Distance, Social Unity”: How India’s Red State Got on Top of Coronavirus’, Tribune, 15 April 2020, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/04/physic ... oronavirus.

9C. Bozonnet, C. Bordenet, L. Iribarnegaray, C. Guillou, and C. Lesueur, ‘Why is Jordan Bardella so popular among young French voters?’, Le Monde, 9 June 2024, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/campus/articl ... hatgpt.com#.

10Vijay Prashad, ‘Swimming in Mud in the Fifth Circle of Hell: The Forty-Sixth Newsletter (2024)’, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 14 November 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... ght-trump/.

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0

https://thetricontinental.org/the-false ... -atlantic/

One thing I'd disagree with is the disappearance of the word 'class', specifically 'working class'. Never saw the term growing up.(I'm 70) It was all 'middle class', there were a few rich and a few poor but most all of us were middle class. This was truly one of the great achievements of the Cold War Red Scare mindfuck. Cause 'working class' is commie talk, see? And from my perch the term didn't return to the mass media(to some degree) until the early years of this century when history had ended and there was no threat in it.

I questioned this early on as I could see that Beaver Cleaver and that father who knew best lived in a very different world from the one I did. Closest I got to that life was the Christmas train garden. Where did people live like that? How was it those daddys went to work dressed in a suit?

No doubt I was and am an outlier, but at scale it worked like a charm.

There's been a lot of back and forth over the years about just who is the core of Trump's support. There are of course a significant portion(but not a plurality) of the rich, other than the ideologues these mostly attached to home country means of production, particularly the extractive industries. But the people filling those rallies were the bottom rung of the middle class: independent tradesmen(and women!), small business, small franchise owners and the like. People who have got a very small piece of the pie and if not desperate are adamant not to lose it and to hell with anyone whom they perceive obstructing them.

Hello Georgi Dimitrov...

[blindpig]

January 10, 2025 by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
Trump unveils the Greater America project


U.S. President-elect Donald Trump addressing a press conference, Mar-a-Lago, Florida, January 7, 2025

On Tuesday, at a press conference at his Florida mansion, President-elect Donald Trump took his gloves off, after showing monumental patience in the face of the shenanigans by the lame duck president Joe Biden and his inner circle to “do an Obama” on him for a second time by setting the compass for his new term in the White House starting January 20.

Trump tore into Biden and his team (“sick groups of people”) and signalled he’s had enough of their so-called “transfer of power.” The proverbial last straw was the clumsy attempt by Biden Administration to release special counsel Jack Smith’s “final report” on the federal investigation into Trump, which has no other purpose than serving to humiliate him.

By the way, Biden has rewarded Smith, an obscure lawyer, for his dog-like loyalty to the master by nominating him for a cushy four-year term as chief prosecutor for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, investigating war crimes in the Kosovo War.

Apparently, Smith, in deference to Biden’s wishes, strove to condemn Trump as a national security risk and a renegade who subverted the constitution while as president! Biden’s bizarre attempt to defame Trump just 11 days before he is due to be sworn into as president won’t work. Simply put, Trump’s phenomenal victory in the Nov. 5 election is the new reality.

The sordid drama casts Biden Administration in very poor light and discredits the entire transfer of power. So much for the decadent politics in the US and the highly toxic polarisation between the Democrats and Republicans.

However, Biden Administration is only following the footfalls of Barack Obama who in the lame duck period following Trump’s sensational election victory in November 2015 concocted a crisis in diplomatic relations with Russia and fuelled the preposterous “Russia collusion” hypothesis manufactured by the intelligence agencies of the UK and the US, alleging that Trump was beholden to the Kremlin (which has since been exposed as political witch hunt) that virtually hobbled Trump’s entire presidency and culminated in two impeachment trials.

Trump is returning to the White House in an angry, embittered mood. At the press conference, he targeted the FBI and referred to his deliberate choice of Kash Patel as FBI director. Trump is obsessed with the FBI raid on his residence in Florida purportedly searching for top secret documents that jeopardised national security, including in his wife’s bedroom furniture for undergarments! No doubt, retribution is at hand.

On the policy front, Trump made it abundantly clear that he intends to discard Biden’s energy / environment /climate change policies as well as on immigration.

However, what hogs the media headlines is Trump’s explosive remarks on the US taking control of Panama Canal and Greenland with military action, if need be. In reply to a direct question whether he would rule out using “military or economic coercion,” Trump responded, “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two, but I can say this: We need them for economic security.”

He warned that if Denmark resisted the US takeover of Greenland (an autonomous territory of Denmark), he will impose steep tariffs.

Trump disclosed that he intends to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, “which has a beautiful ring. That covers a lot of territory, the Gulf of America — what a beautiful name. And it’s appropriate.”

But what takes the breath away is that his past remarks about Canada joining the US as its 51st state have become increasingly serious. Trump threatened Canada with “economic force” and pointed finger at the US’ bilateral trade deficit. “Why are we supporting a country $200 billion plus a year,” he asked.

Meanwhile, talking about NATO, Trump proposed that the contribution by the alliance’s member countries should be scaled up to 5% of GDP on defence instead of the existing 2% spending milestone. He warned that the US will not protect “delinquents”.

Other points of interest are:

Trump eschewed any criticism of Russia in the Ukraine war, and instead alluded to the genesis of the conflict being NATO’s eastward expansion toward Russian borders, and remarked at one point, “I could understand their (Russian) feelings in the matter.”
Trump was evasive about current US deployment in Syria, saying it’s a matter of “military strategy.” Equally, he pinned hopes on Turkish President Recep Erdogan showing restraint in attacking the Kurds (who are aligned with the US in Syria).
Trump threatened Hamas with dire consequences unless all hostages are released before his inaugural on Jan. 20. (“If those hostages aren’t back… by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East — and it will not be good for Hamas and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out. I don’t have to say more anymore, but that’s what it is.”)
Trump avoided any critical remarks regarding China or Iran.
Europeans who are already nervous about the Trump presidency will see in the remarks a certain detachment. He was business-like on NATO and faulted the alliance’s reckless expansion to Russia’s doorstep. He counts on cutting a deal with President Putin. The European Union has cause to worry. (See my blog Ukraine war turns into absurdist fiction, Indian Punchline, January 7, 2024)

Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada — Trump’s prioritisation of US control of Western Hemisphere (and the hugely strategic Barents Sea) to perpetuate its hegemonic clout as global power is self-evident. At no point he referred to the Indo-Pacific.

That said, the really stunning thing is that both Canada and Denmark are founding members of NATO, but Trump couldn’t care less. He is planning to annex one member country and threatening the other’s territorial integrity. And they cannot even invoke Article V of the NATO Charter in self-defence.

On the other hand, the impossibility of getting NATO countries to accept his demand for a whopping 150% hike in the contributions to the alliance’s budget at such a juncture when their economies are in crisis may also give him the perfect excuse to neglect NATO — effectively consigning the archaic alliance to oblivion.

In fact, in the first circle of his foreign-policy strategy — the Arctic region, Western Hemisphere and the Middle East — Trump has no use of NATO. In that enterprise, he goes alone — a lone wolf.

No doubt, the Greater America project is Trump’s consuming passion and it is integral to his MAGA movement (“Make America Great Again”). His repudiation of Biden’s 11th hour move to block drilling America’s coastal oil in a vast space of 625 million acres of the US ocean is expected to make America by far the biggest oil producing country on the planet.

At the same time, the Greater America project is a 21st century Munroe Doctrine whose security and economic implications for China and Russia are apparent, although they will be hard-pressed to challenge it. Trump has buried the “rules-based order.”

If he succeeds, the US will simply outstrip Russia in sheer population and land mass and match or even exceed its resource base. Evidently, Trump has no interest in multipolarity or multi alignment — concepts that foreign policy wonks are animatedly discussing to define a new world order. Associated Press called this whole territorial annexation menu “a new imperialist agenda,” while for the CNN, it signified a “push for American expansionism” and “imperialistic land grabs.”

Moscow and Beijing will not disagree with that characterisation by mainstream American media, but will, nonetheless, take note that Trump’s agenda is possibly precedent-setting. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, after all.

https://www.indianpunchline.com/trump-u ... a-project/

****

Transcript of ‘Judging Freedom,’ 9 January edition
Transcript submitted by a reader

Napolitano: 0:32
Hi there, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, January 9th, 2025. Professor Gilbert Doctorow joins us now. Professor Doctorow, thank you for your time. Thank you for all of your time in 2024. It’s all very, very helpful. And it’s a privilege for me to be able to pick your brain. And thank you, of course, for joining us today. And I hope we can continue our weekly get-togethers like this in 2025.

You have written an interesting piece on, for better or for worse, President-elect Trump’s musings about expanding the size of the United States. Not going to ask you about the Panama Canal or the Gulf of Mexico or Canada, but I will ask you about Greenland. How do you suppose the Kremlin would react if the United States moved seriously, either by economic or military or some political means, to acquire an enormous piece of real estate that is not that far from the Russian mainland?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 1:45
I don’t think the Russians are going to be too surprised or excited. I don’t think they’re going to take any change in policy with respect to the States. Frankly, it’s difficult to judge what the opinion of the Kremlin is or of the chattering classes in Russia, because Russia is in the midst of the two-week winter break which runs from December 31st, our New Year’s, to January 13th, their New Year’s, what they call the old New Year’s, according to the Russian Orthodox Church calendar. And during this time, all commentators, most of the hosts of the premier news programs, they’re all on vacation. Therefore, as to the regular news briefs, they have limited their commentary to what we say, what is being said on Western media, the kind of shock that a news organization like CNN expressed when they were reviewing Trump’s latest remarks.

Napolitano: 2:51
Well, you have a handle on the Kremlin’s thinking, more so than almost any American that I know of. How do you think they would react if we wake up some morning and find out, and I’m going to expand the question, that the US has taken control by force of the Panama Canal and by some other means of Greenland? I’m mainly concerned about Greenland, because if you look at the North Pole, you will see the proximity between Greenland and Russia.

Doctorow:
I would rather move, back away, from the way the Greenland issue is being covered by our media, And that is all media, mainstream and alternative. The attention has been to what is in Greenland. It’s been to what Greenland will mean 30 years from now, when the polar ice cap melts, and what this means for American activity, future activity in the Arctic region, what threats it poses or doesn’t to Russian navigation. These are the issues that we see discussed in our newspapers.

3:53
It’s all very fine, but I think it has nothing whatever to do with what President Trump is doing now. I don’t think this man is terribly concerned about anything that could or would happen 30 years from now. His mind is much more focused on what’s going to happen in his lifespan and during his time in power. And for that, we have to take a step back and say that this man– who was generally viewed by mainstream people, by his opponents, as being superficial, transactional, unable to deal with foreign policy issues in a mature way– he is putting something forward which is not the least bit frivolous for today and tomorrow, not for 30 years perspective.

4:43
And what I mean is: he has been advised clearly at what President Reagan did in a similar situation to what he is facing now with the Ukraine war. In October 1983, President Reagan was faced with a very unpleasant fact of 140 plus American soldiers having been blown to bits in Lebanon by a Hezbollah attack on the barracks where they and French soldiers were based in a peacekeeping mission. Two days later, he invaded Granada.

5:15
That is the message from the Reagan administration that Mr. Trump is employing now. He is preparing to throw Ukraine under the bus, and he doesn’t want to be held accountable for it, because he wants the whole thing to diminish in importance compared to the American takeover of Greenland.

Napolitano:
Okay. So is the compensation for throwing Ukraine under the bus the acquisition of Greenland, the acquisition of the Panama Canal, or an invasion of Iran? Something must be done because of the mentality of the people in Washington, D.C. to compensate for and remove the public attention from what will be a humiliating loss in Ukraine. I think you agree with that.

Doctorow:
That is summing it up very precisely. That is what’s going on right now.

Napolitano:
And what do you think he’ll do? Colonel Macgregor thinks it’s the invasion of Ukraine. You’re suggesting something a little bit more benign and probably not military, but who knows, with respect to Greenland and Panama.

Doctorow: 6:25
I don’t see any need for him to use military muscle on Greenland. If you pay attention closely to what the Danish prime minister said yesterday when asked about this whole case in the press, she said, well, it is up, Greenland’s future is up to Greenlanders. Now, that’s as much as saying that she’s given up. She has no intention of facing down Trump and the United States over this or creating a scandal within NATO. When you consider who exactly are the Greenlanders, They are 56,000 people in that vast territory. Don’t you think it would be quite easy to buy them all off?

Napolitano:
I’m sure it would be, and that’s probably a mirror of Trump’s thinking, but how would Putin react to the ability of Trump to put offensive weaponry as cold as it is up there, and maybe cold is an understatement, it’s inside the Arctic Circle, aimed at Russia?

Doctorow:
I don’t see any basis for Putin to complain. It’s been discussed openly in Russian media that they are prepared to make the so-called medium-range Oreshnik an intercontinental ballistic missile. They will simply position it in the Russian Far East. So that would be nothing more– so if Mr. Trump wants to take, wants to eventually place missiles in northern Greenland, it is only, would be a counter move to what the Russians can achieve in the next few months if they want to.

Napolitano: 8:10
When do you think the Kremlin expects the special military operation in Ukraine to be over? And it will end either when President Zelensky leaves or the Ukrainian military collapses or President Putin says “We’ve achieved our goals.” I mean, I don’t know how it’s going to end, but when do you think the Kremlin expects it to end?

Doctorow:
Well, during 19, during 2025, that’s for sure. Whether it will reach a critical stage before the inauguration is the only open question. We have very little time remaining, and the Russians still are several weeks away from capturing Pokrovsk, which is discussed as the major logistics hub supporting the whole Ukrainian front in Donbas. Once they capture Pokrovsk, then it will be really a straight line to the Dnieper River, and possibly it could be so overwhelming for the Ukrainian forces that they capitulate.

That is a possibility, I wouldn’t call it a probability, but a possibility. Failing that, now that Mr. Trump has moved his timeline from a 24-hour solution to a six-month solution, it’s entirely thinkable that the Russians will devastate the Ukrainian army and solve the problem for Mr. Trump.

(More...)

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2025/01/10/ ... y-edition/

******

Looting The 'Allies'

With regards to Trump attempting to land grab Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, Agit Papadakis offers some interesting observation:

The Bozo [Trump] Doctrine, the Bibi [Netanyahoo] Doctrine, and the Tayyip [Erdogan] Doctrine, are all converging on a new post-Westphalian world disorder of imperialism gone nuts.
For the cucked vassals of the old order this means either grow a pair and resist or lose every shred of sovereignty, dignity, and material comfort you have left. Cucks like the EU, Australia, Japan, South Korea and wounded weak states like Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq are all suffering the torment of being raped and ravaged by powerful rogue states.

Bozo didn't lose a minute to join the melée. He looked at the economic train wreck he was inheriting and decided it was now or never to hoist the Jolly Roger over his big but old and rusty military machine and what's left of the once mighty dollar's hegemony.

His first victims would be the weak and cucked vassals who poured their sorry excuse for a military and their treasure into the Ukraine black hole. Bozo knows that his unfurling of the black banner will automatically dissolve those BS "alliances" with weak vassals that were never but a frilly negligée concealing America's naked imperialism, as revealed by the the lonely squeak of the French chihuahua protesting Bozo's Greenland grab and threatening to resist.

The cucked chihuahuas of the Rules Based Order are suddenly up against Judgement Day, naked and defenseless between two raging behemoths, Amerisrael and Russia, while an even bigger and scarier one, China, looms over everybody else.

It's the 19th century with nukes and hypersonics and space jets, which would normally be followed by the world wars of the 20th. But with 21st century speed, it shouldn't take longer than a decade if that.

Agit's rant refers to a 'based' thread 'On American expansionism' by Russians With Attitude:


The incoming administration seems to have a more realistic image of the state of American hegemonial decline and wants to take proactive steps to try to counteract and reverse it, breathing new life into the American Global Empire.
...
The world that existed in 1991-2022 does not exist anymore. It's not coming back. You can just invade your neighbor. You can just fire missiles at international shipping lanes. You can just threaten to annex members of your military alliance. “You can just do things”, as the techbros like to say. The mirage of a post-historical order that only has to be policed from time to time but is never seriously challenged has disappeared. What did you think canceling the End of History meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
...
America's vassals WILL have to confront this state of things and make hard decisions about their future. This means reckoning with their geopolitical impotence and either embracing dependency with open eyes or seeking pathways to autonomy that will inevitably involve risk, sacrifice, and a recalibration of their national priorities.
The era of coasting on borrowed security and ideological rhetoric is over. What lies ahead is a world where historical agency must be reclaimed or forever relinquished, and for many, the question may not be whether they are ready to make that leap, but whether they even remember how. America has now understood this -- and is mentally preparing to switch back to the cold logic that comes with actual History. The times, they are a-changin'.

The unilateral moment has ended. Russia, India and China have become too rich and too powerful to be looted. U.S. vassals are now by far the easier target.

Trump's ideas of taking from the 'allies' is not knew. The U.S. plundering of its vassals has been ongoing for some time.

The instigation of the war in Ukraine can be interpreted as a large U.S. looting operation of its European 'allies'.

Biden was also quite successful when he blew up Nord Stream. (This was btw the second time the U.S. destroyed a Russia to Germany pipeline. An analytical book available on the first incident in 1982 has been written by Anthony Blinken! )

The weaklings in the German and EU government did not even dare protest. They instead condemned their people to pay horrendous prices for U.S. fracking gas. On top of that they were pressed to buy U.S. weapons to feed the war in Ukraine.

Things did not go as well as planned with the war in Ukraine but the U.S. is still winning from it.

Posted by b on January 10, 2025 at 15:49 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/01/l ... .html#more

******

Well, Lying and Self-Aggrandizing ...

... it already is.


US President-elect Donald Trump said on Thursday that a meeting was being set up between him and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “He wants to meet, and we are setting it up,” Trump said before a meeting with Republican governors in his Mar-a-Lago golf club in Palm Beach, Florida, according to Reuters. He did not specify when the meeting would take place.

Well, Kremlin reacted promptly.


Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Moscow “had received no requests” for a Trump-Putin meeting. “It makes sense, of course, to wait until [Trump] takes office,” Peskov said.

So, Trump is "setting it up" in his imagination, not understanding that Putin and Russia do not operate within these types of frameworks. I guess being NYC real estate shyster is not a good background for statesmanship (as Trump's first term demonstrated so aptly), which Donald mistook for showmanship.

http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2025/01 ... izing.html

******



If They Don’t Believe They’re Enemies, Why Should You?

If these guys don’t buy into the story that they are on opposite sides of a ferocious battle of existential importance between two wildly different ideologies, then why should you?

Caitlin Johnstone
January 10, 2025

❖

Trump and Obama were seen happily chatting and laughing together at the funeral for Jimmy Carter. If these guys don’t buy into the story that they are on opposite sides of a ferocious battle of existential importance between two wildly different ideologies, then why should you?


❖

I saw Alex Jones proclaiming on Twitter that “Elon Musk just took down the New World order!”

One of the dumbest psyops in history is this idiotic faux populist faction being marketed to rightists which claims that a brave revolutionary movement is being led against the establishment by a plucky band of billionaires, defense contractors, Zionists, and DC swamp monsters.

❖

Trump says he’s “the best friend that Israel ever had.” Anyone who still believes this asshole presents a threat to the establishment is a drooling moron who deserves to have their feelings hurt.

MAGA support for Israel invalidates damn near everything MAGA supposedly stands for. They shriek about antisemitism while denouncing woke identity politics and the weaponization of racism allegations, they want to shovel money into Israel while mocking Biden for funding Ukraine, they shout “America first” while prioritizing the interests of a foreign government on the other side of the planet, they claim to despise the mainstream media while swallowing every MSM propaganda lie about Gaza right down their throats with zero gag reflex, and they claim to want to end the wars while backing a country that cannot exist without nonstop war.

These contradictions are possible because these people do not have any real values and don’t actually stand for anything; they’re just mindless, bootlicking sheep who think whatever the right wing pundits tell them to think.

❖

Western critics of Israel tend to fall into two categories: those who believe the western empire supports Israel because the western empire is evil, and those who believe the west is naturally good but has become corrupted by Israel. I find the latter group ridiculous and baby-brained.

(More...)

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/01 ... hould-you/

[blindpig]

Daniel Davis: Donald Trump’s Ukraine ‘One Day’ Peace Plan Just Smashed Into Reality
January 11, 2025
By Daniel Davis, 1945, 12/31/24

Daniel L. Davis is a four-time combat veteran, retired Army Lt.Col. at Defense Priorities and host of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive show on YouTube.

Donald Trump has been clear since the early part of his presidential campaign that he would end the Ukraine war “in one day.”

He has been even more emphatic about seeking a negotiated settlement since winning the election.

But now, barely three weeks before assuming office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has publicly put the kibosh on the plan advocated by Trump’s Special Envoy to Ukraine and Russia, retired General Kieth Kellogg.

What does that rejection signal for the likely ending of the Russia-Ukraine War?

The Ukraine War Headed Into 2025: What Happens Now?

Short answer: it’s not suitable for Kyiv – but even that ‘ugly’ deal is better than the alternative: continuing to fight until the Ukrainian Army suffers an outright military defeat in the field.

Here’s the sober truth: too few in the West (and especially in Washington) are still unable or unwilling to contemplate: the war is already lost for Ukraine, and there is nothing militarily that can be done to avert that outcome now. The best that can be done for the Ukrainian side is to conclude the war on the best of the ugly terms Trump can muster for Ukraine.

It is crucial Gen. Kellogg and Trump, along with his entire national security team, understand the ground-truth realities of this war before entering negotiations.

Thus far, they have not.

According to an analysis of the Kellogg Plan, Trump would seek to force Russia to the negotiation table by a series of carrots and sticks, starting with a ceasefire and then negotiations to end the fighting.

Key to the Kellogg plan is to postpone the thorny issue of NATO membership for Ukraine by a decade or more and the “concession” of allowing Russia to keep the territories it possesses upon the assumption of negotiations.

It would also offer a series of bilateral security guarantees for Ukraine and keep pressure on Russia by continuing to provide military aid to Ukraine until a deal is reached. British advocates have also offered U.K. troops as possible peacekeepers to patrol the final deal.

However, there is a significant problem with these plans: they assume the Russians would submit to such pressures and agree to the concessions.

They will almost certainly do neither.

Russia Response to the Ukraine Peace Plan: Bad News

On Monday, Lavrov rejected some of the key provisions, saying the Russians “are certainly not satisfied with the proposals sounding on behalf of representatives of the president-elect’s team.”

Last week, Lavrov said any talk of a ceasefire was a “path to nowhere” and that the Russian side would not consider one. What they would consider, he said, is what Putin declared on June 14th when he said the war could end if several key conditions were met.

These include the complete surrender of the four oblasts Russia annexed in 2022, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, the declaration of no NATO membership ever for Ukraine, and security guarantees for Russia. Putin has said he is not interested in a ceasefire because he claims NATO would merely use the time to re-arm and retrain Ukraine’s Army and resume the fighting.

Further, an examination of the battle map shows significant portions of those four oblasts still under Ukrainian control. To reach a deal under Russia’s position, Ukraine would have to give up significant swaths of its territory that it had not lost to Russia.

That means to end the war on diplomatic terms the Russians say they would accept, Trump would have to agree to a deal that surrenders even more Ukrainian territory and publicly state Ukraine will never be admitted to NATO – both highly emotional issues that presently no one in the West or Ukraine will contemplate. Here’s the massive problem for Trump and Ukraine: these aren’t ‘maximalist’ desires on Russia’s part; they’re entry points for discussions.

Suppose Trump doesn’t agree to these terms. In that case, the Russians will simply continue the war, slowly destroying the Ukrainian Armed Forces, until eventually they capture by force of arms what they’re seeking to obtain by negotiations. Russia can militarily accomplish these objectives, even if at a very high price. And that’s what the Trump team must understand. Putin doesn’t have to negotiate. He can seize what they want by force, and there’s nothing Trump or Zelensky can do to stop them.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/01/dan ... o-reality/

*******

Trump tramples on Danish doormat with threat to annex Greenland

January 10, 2025

Trump’s trampling on Denmark’s sovereignty – and by extension, the European Union’s – is a brutal demonstration.

With friends like that, who needs enemies? Thus Denmark finds out how dispensable it is regarding the geopolitical ambitions of the United States, its supposed “strongest ally.”

President-elect Donald Trump is like a cat among pigeons. Neighboring countries, allies and NATO members are all in a flap over his recent remarks about the United States forcibly annexing their territories.

The former real estate tycoon who takes office in the White House for the second time on January 20 is setting out his presidential agenda like a property acquisition spree. He wants to absorb Canada as the 51st state, take back control of the Panama Canal, rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, and annex Greenland, which is part of Denmark.

It is easy to dismiss the incoming Republican president’s talk as bravado and outsized ego. He has a propensity for hyperbole especially when promoting his abilities. Trump has talked about bringing peace to Ukraine “within 24 hours”. He has also previously referred to himself as a “business genius”. During his first administration, he talked up brokering “the deal of the century” between Arabs and Israelis only for that initiative to end up in the disaster of genocide in Gaza and aggression towards Lebanon.

So, Trump’s rhetoric about acquiring new territories for the United States is probably best not taken too literally. It is whimsical and highly speculative. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev called it “cosmic stupidity” whose real intention is to serve as a distraction.

Distraction from what? Geopolitical analyst Gilbert Doctorow reckons Trump and his advisors are deliberately stirring up wild talk about annexation to divert international attention from the debacle in Ukraine. The U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is an unmitigated disaster for Washington and its allies. The Kiev regime is facing a military collapse as Russian forces make rapid advances to finish this three-year war.

Trump knows that the U.S. has to extricate itself from the debacle by agreeing to Russia’s terms. Hence the seeming wild-eyed talk by Trump of taking over Canada and snatching Greenland from Denmark. It may not happen but the desire for new properties has certainly grabbed the world’s headlines.

Nevertheless, there is a sneaking suspicion that Trump may be serious about expropriating Greenland. At his press conference in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, this week when he presented his Monroe 2.0 doctrine, he mentioned that the U.S. has had its eyes on Greenland for several years. In other words, it is not merely Trump’s personal initiative.

He called the Arctic island – the world’s largest non-continental island – a vital U.S. national security interest. In particular, Trump referred to Russian and Chinese interests growing in the Arctic region and that the U.S. should muscle in. Climate change is creating new waterways and access to abundant natural resources in the Arctic. Russia as the largest national presence in the region has of course legitimate and lucrative claims.

On the same day that Trump was laying out his territorial wish-list, his son Donald Jr flew to Greenland in a private capacity for a publicity stunt. The younger Trump was not greeted by any officials in Nuuk, the capital, but it was obvious that the “welcoming party” of Greenlanders was a set-up.

Meanwhile, back at the freewheeling press conference in Florida, Trump said: “People don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to Greenland, but if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security.”

The soon-to-be 47th president did not rule out the use of military force to seize the territory.

Danish and European politicians reacted skittishly like pigeons seeing a cat stalking their coop. Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen affected an air of defiance, saying, “Greenland is not for sale”. Germany and France limply warned that European sovereignty was inviolable and that Trump could not alter borders unilaterally. There was even talk about the EU invoking a common defense pact to protect Danish territory. And what about NATO’s mutual defense pact? Will NATO members defend Denmark from the de facto NATO leader, the U.S.?

Trump may be unhinged and arrogant. But one thing that is valuable about his style – inadvertently at least – is that he is exposing the rank hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the United States and its NATO allies.

For three years, the U.S. and NATO have unleashed a bloodbath in Ukraine that risks turning into a nuclear World War Three – all on the supposed sacred altar of defending Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders from alleged Russian aggression.

Then along comes Trump and he is threatening supposed allies with annexing their territories.

The absurdity of it exposes the fraudulence of Western claims about upholding international law and respect for borders. What makes it all the more absurd is the new American president is brazenly advertising his aggression and contempt for “allies” for whom the U.S. claims to be a protector.

In a recent series of articles, Ron Ridenour has scorned Denmark for its abject servility to the U.S. Ridenour points out that only last year, Danish premier Frederiksen signed a “defense cooperation agreement” with the U.S., declaring the latter to be Denmark’s strongest ally.

Denmark has become one of the most pro-U.S., and hawkish members of NATO. It was among the first to supply F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.

How ridiculous that NATO members are now more threatened by the United States than they have been claiming about Russia.

Trump’s trampling on Denmark’s sovereignty – and by extension, the European Union’s – is a brutal demonstration. Act like a doormat, then be treated like a doormat.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... greenland/

*******

Mexican President Responds to Trump’s ‘Gulf of America’ Proposal
January 10, 2025


Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum displays a 17th-century world map showing "America Mexicana" -- pushing back at Donald Trump. Photo: Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo/X

Claudia Sheinbaum has suggested renaming the US as ‘Mexican America’

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has hit back at US President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the ‘Gulf of America’.

Sheinbaum suggested that the US revert to a historic name for the territory – ‘America Mexicana’ or ‘Mexican America’. She made the comment standing in front of a 17th-century world map alongside former Culture Secretary Jose Alfonso Suarez del Real at a press briefing on Wednesday.

She was referring to Trump’s pledge earlier this week to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the ‘Gulf of America’, because it has a “beautiful ring” and is “appropriate.”

“Why don’t we call it America Mexicana. It sounds pretty, no? Isn’t that true?” Sheinbaum said. She pointed to a 1607 map displayed onstage, which showed an early image of the territory of North America that is now the US, Mexico, and part of Canada.

“The fact is that Mexican America is recognized since the 17th century… as the name for the whole northern part of the (American) continent,” Suarez del Real said, as he demonstrated the area on the European map commissioned for the Amsterdam-based Dutch East India Company in the early 17th century.

Trump floated the idea of changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico, which stretches from Florida to Cancun, Mexico, at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday as part of a broader expansionist plan, including a potential takeover of Greenland. Trump said he would not rule out military or economic steps to acquire the Danish-controlled territory.

He cast doubt on Denmark’s legal right to the island, saying “they should give it up” because it is an “absolute necessity” for US national security. The president-elect also did not rule out the possibility of using military force to regain control of the Panama Canal, which, according to him, was built for the US military and is “vital to our country.”

He also reiterated his threat to impose “very serious tariffs on Mexico and Canada” over illegal border crossings and drug trafficking.

Responding to Trump’s plans to slap 25% tariffs on Mexican imports, Sheinbaum earlier warned that Mexico would retaliate, arguing that the penalties would do nothing to stop the flow of migrants or drugs bound for the US, but would only cause inflation and unemployment in both countries.

https://orinocotribune.com/mexican-pres ... -proposal/

Ya know that getting trolled by a woman will doubly piss Trump off.

[blindpig]

Crimean scenario for Greenland
January 12, 17:08



Crimean scenario for Greenland

"We don't want to be Danes, we don't want to be Americans, we want to be Greenlanders" (c) Prime Minister of Greenland.

By the way, few people thought that Greenland's special status as part of Denmark makes it possible to implement the Crimean scenario.
Crimea was an autonomous region within Ukraine and left it on the basis of a referendum based on the Crimean constitution. Between the referendum on leaving Ukraine and Crimea's acceptance into Russia, Crimea was for some time a de facto independent state, which, on the basis of self-determination of the people, asked to become part of Russia.

Now apply this scenario to Greenland. Greenland holds a referendum on leaving Denmark, citing its special legal status as part of Denmark. It becomes an independent state. And after that, it can ask to become part of the United States. As an independent state.

Thus, implementing the Crimean scenario.

"You do understand what you've done, right?" (c)

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9607183.html

Google Translator

Trump hasn’t even taken office yet and he’s already promising total war

Lorenzo Maria Pacini

January 11, 2025

Remember the Donald Trump in his first presidential term, who had not started any new wars? Don’t worry, it’s just a bad memory.

Remember the Donald Trump in his first presidential term, who had not started any new wars? Don’t worry, it’s just a bad memory. The America of 2025 is going back to conquest.

A bad habit that never goes away

For a few days (really for a few days) the whole world had really believed that Donald Trump, by winning the election, would lead the world into an era of peace and prosperity, entering into relationship, not competition, with the other countries of the emerging multipolar world; there were even those who had believed that the U.S. government would return to dealing with the problems of Americans, which are by no means few and which demand solutions with some urgency if they are to avoid internal structural collapse; there were also those who had theorized a kind of “liberation” from globalism and its discards, bringing true politics back to the center and ensuring a rebirth of American geopolitics and international relations.

Sorry to disappoint all the well-wishers: Trump is a president of the United States of America and, as such, it appears that he wants to do what all American presidents have done to date, namely the war of global conquest.

Trump has not yet taken office in the White House and he has already threatened to destroy Iran, conquer Canada, expropriate Greenland and exploit land in the Arctic Circle, take Taiwan from China, annex Panama and change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, all while intimating Europe to raise military spending and imposing sanctions toward the East.

Meanwhile, his most trusted collaborator (or his master) Elon Musk is planning not only the transition to mass transhumanism but also the replacement of anyone who opposes U.S. government hegemony, both at home and abroad. All sweetened by concessions on freedom of the press and expression on his personal social media, making people believe that this is real freedom, when in fact it is an interactive colored cage.

Nothing short of a masterpiece.

Make America Mexico Again

It’s a matter of perspective.

Americans, the real ones, are not the Americans who came from the Old World, who were an accumulation of criminal outcasts sent away from overflowing prisons. The continent was not even called “America,” but cancel culture is something that started long before the advent of today’s globalism and the British, oops, Americans, really like it. Real Americans have been exterminated or decimated and locked up in reservations like endangered beasts. No one has asked them how they feel about “making America great again.” I wonder why…

Same with the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump would like to see become the Gulf of America. Geographically, is he proposing the disappearance or annexation of Mexico? He has not yet let us know via his personal Truth newsroom, but we have no doubt that doubt will soon be removed.

Brilliant in this regard was Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s response to Trump at a press conference last Wednesday: “Of course, the Gulf of Mexico is recognized by the United Nations, but why don’t we call it Mexican America? Since 1607, Apatzingán’s constitution was that of Mexican America. So let’s call it Mexican America. And the Gulf of Mexico, well, since 1607, it’s also internationally recognized,” and he added, ”I think President Trump was misinformed yesterday, with all due respect, because I think he was told that Felipe Calderón and García Luna still ruled in Mexico, but no, the people rule in Mexico.”

It would be interesting if Mexicans made the -legitimate- claims to get their “American” territories back, since they were there long before the British settlers. A pertinent motto could be Make America Mexico Again, as noted by journalist friend Pepe Escobar.

Teasing the Red Dragon

China and the United States could face a large-scale crisis in bilateral relations and the threat of military conflict , says a report by the Institute for World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences (available from RIA Novosti).

The report’s authors point out that if by the end of the year Trump becomes convinced that economic pressure on China is unnecessary, he may try to up the ante by using the Taiwan issue.

A few days ago, Trump did not nominate neocon Elbridge Colby, China warrior, undersecretary of defense under neocon Pete Hegseth, Iran warrior.

Colby is one of the most deranged pro-war neocons, often mistaken as anti-interventionist for opposing wars with Russia and Iran, but only because he believes all efforts and resources should be spent on war with China.

He supports separatism in China’s island province of Taiwan, calling on the country’s administration to spend more on U.S. weapons and insists that chip maker TSMC should be destroyed rather than fall into the hands of “China” (Taiwan is also recognized by the U.S. as China).

Trump ran on a platform of drastic change, but he has built an administration committed to the iron continuity of the star-spangled imperialist expansionist agenda.

Teasing China continues to be one of the most passionate pastimes for the blond president, who already in 2016, under his first presidency, tightened his grip on the China issue in no small measure.

In this regard, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in his year-end interview with TASS said, “We do not speculate about the plans of the future U.S. administration; this is the work of political scientists. If we assess the overall situation in the region, it continues to deteriorate. The United States and its satellites declare their commitment to the principle of ‘one China,’ but insist on maintaining the status quo, which implies maintaining the current situation indefinitely.” And he added, “Meanwhile, the Americans take provocative actions in the Taiwan Strait, supply weapons to Taipei and develop a quasi-political dialogue with the country’s authorities. All this together undoubtedly contributes to the growth of separatist sentiments. These methods are very similar to those used in the past by the Americans to establish an anti-Russian foothold in Ukraine.”

Whether the U.S. will really be able to sustain a conventional conflict with China, we do not know exactly, but what is certain is that China has no intention of yielding under any circumstances to the Chinese unity doctrine and will not back down in the face of U.S. arrogance.

Iran giving no peace

Similarly is the case with Iran, a real thorn in the side for the Washington administration.

It is the only region in the Middle East that has remained outside U.S. control. There are no U.S.-based banks, no U.S. military bases, and no protection of U.S. political interest. In short, the “kingdom of evil.” Add to that the fact that they are anti-Zionist as well, and there you have the devil himself.

Trump cannot afford to disrupt the development of the Greater Israel project and the reconstruction of the Third Temple, for which he has long promoted the Abrahamic Accords.

Speaking to Fox News’ Mark Levin, Mike Waltz, the next U.S. national security adviser, claimed that “terrorists” have “infiltrated our borders” and stated that “[ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas] did not get the memo that the Biden administration decided the war on terror was over.” Waltz stressed that the Trump administration intends to “ensure the right posture abroad from a national security perspective.”

As part of a “broader, mid-term effort,” he discussed plans for an intergovernmental initiative to counter “radicalization” by monitoring “mosques, individuals, universities, professors-and you name it-that pose a threat to the United States and are radicalizing individuals to harm the United States.” In particular, he warned against individuals on student visas who engage in protests or radicalize others, stressing that they will be quickly deported.

He then added that the Trump administration plans to implement a complete philosophical and national security shift regarding Middle East policy, arguing that “the problems in the Middle East largely come from Tehran, not Tel Aviv.” Needless to say, he reiterated the administration’s commitment to support Israel. The administration’s priorities include aligning Israel with the Gulf Arab states to counter Iran, restoring maximum economic pressure on Iran and stopping the sale of Iranian oil.

In Waltz’s words, Trump’s enthusiasm for making “historic strides” in reducing long-standing conflicts in the Middle East, describing them as “getting smaller” through strategic diplomacy, comes through a relentless attack on the Houthis, whose decimation is part of the American agenda.

Touch me anything but my hegemony

Because, at the end of the day, the point is always the same: the rules-based order cannot be challenged. Those who do, sooner or later must be neutralized.

This is how Trump is ready to unleash global war and then lay the blame on a long series of scapegoats already identified in the international political bestiary. Of course, wherever possible, only proxy wars will be promoted, because it is always better to have someone else do the dirty work.

Facts in hand, thinking of Trump as a savior is misleading: he wants to save his interests and those of imperialist America, certainly not multipolar peace and a new world order.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... total-war/

[blindpig]

The Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) Lacks Legal Structure and Promised Transparency
Posted on January 12, 2025 by Lambert Strether
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

“A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.” –Milgrim, Spook Country (William Gibson)

Of all the strange creatures engendered during the interregnum between Trump’s election and his inauguration, the strangest of all must be DOGE[1] (the Department of Government Efficiency): Nobody (including Grok) seems to know what it is! I’m not entirely clear what that means for “keeping” The Republic, but it can’t mean anything good, as I will discuss briefly in the Conclusion to the post.

DOGE’s origin story begins on August 19, on the campaign trail:

Asked if he would consider naming Musk to an advisory role or cabinet job, Trump said he would. “He’s a very smart guy. I certainly would, if he would do it, I certainly would. He’s a brilliant guy,” Trump said.

Elon[2] responded with the following AI slop post:

Elon Musk
@elonmusk
·
Follow
I am willing to serve

Trump vollyed back on September 5:

Speaking at the Economic Club of New York on Sept. 5, Trump restated his support for the digital asset [sic] industry.

Trump said that, if elected, he would eliminate a minimum of ten old regulations for one new regulation… Trump went on to thank Tesla CEO Elon Musk for his endorsement adding, “I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government, making recommendations for drastic reforms.”… “Elon, because he is not very busy, has agreed to head that task force. If he has the time he’s a good one to do it and he has agreed to do it.”

To which Elon responded:

Elon Musk
@elonmusk
·
Follow
I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises.

No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.


(It’s worth noting that at its inception, some considered the DOGE proposal a jape, since it boosted the DOGE coin, Elon’s favorite cryptocurrency.)

And here is the official announcement, on November 12:

President-elect Donald Trump named tech billionaire Elon Musk and conservative activist Vivek Ramaswamy[3] on Tuesday to head up a new Department of Government Efficiency, fulfilling a campaign pledge to give Musk sweeping oversight of government spending.

Trump said Tuesday that the new department would exist ‘outside of Government,’ giving advice to those in the White House about overhauling federal agencies. The arrangement would also be likely to allow Musk and Ramaswamy to continue working in the private sector and serve without Senate approval.

(A “department” that exists “outside of Government” is a lot like a fish that swims “outside of water.”)

Finally, on November 20, Elon and Ramaswamy jointly penned an Opinion column in the Wall Street Journal, “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government, which is well worth a read, but their plans are outside the scope of this post.

Rather, I will first show DOGE’s extremely ill-defined nature, as shown by media coverage; then I will look at actions undertaken by DOGE; I will then ask Grok — who better placed to “know”? — under what authority such actions can be taken; and then conclude.

DOGE’s Ill-Defined Nature, As Shown by Press Coverage

In this section, I have curated — artisanally, I hasten to add — links to articles in which the press struggles to name what sort of enity DOGE is, from November 12 up to the present.

11/12/2024, WaPo: “a new commission”; 11/12/2024, WaPo: ” a new government spending commission; 11/12/2024, The Hill, “an advisory group”; 11/13/2024, Vox: “presidential advisory commission or task force”; 11/13/2024, MSNBC, “quasi-governmental group”; 11/13/2024, Fortune: “a newly created entity ….not a real department”; 11/13/2024, CBT News: “the department will operate outside of traditional government structures”; 11/14/2024, Independent, “the new office”; 11/14/2024, The Register: “a commission in everything but name”; 11/14/2024, CBS: “not an official government department”; 11/21/2024, Associated Press: “nascent organization”; 11/22/2025, Politico: “an advisory commission outside government”; 11/24/2024, WaPo: “an advisory panel”; 12/5/2025, Roll Call, “unofficial advisory panel”; 12/5/2024, Daily Mail: “agency”; 12/6/2024, Fortune: “advisory board”; 12/6/2024, Gibson Dunn: “an entity”; 12/6/2024, CNN: “advisory board”; 1/6/2025, Forbes: “an advisory commission”; 1/7/2025, Scientific American: “more an advisory group, really”; 1/7/2025, The Hill: “mythological… pure legal fiction”; 1/8/2025, CBS: “group… not an official federal department”; 1/8/2025, FOX: “a blue-ribbon committee”; 1/9/2025, NBC: “budget-cutting effort”; 1/9/2025, Common Dreams: “so-called Department”; 1/9/2025, CNBC: “a new advisory body”; 1/10/2025, Daily Mail: “a private entity”; 1/10/2025, Reuters: “the department”; 1/10/2024, @doge_eth_gov: ” a community run project and is no way associated with any government agency”; and 1/11/2025, Decrypt: “a new U.S. government initiative.”

And the following take DOGE’s nature as entirely unproblematic, and simply use the acronym: 12/24/2024, Daily Mail; 1/3/2024, Responsible Statecraft; 1/7/2025, Cato Institute; 1/10/2025, The New Republic.

However, I would submit that a term with as much slop as shown here cannot be treated as unproblematic: A “group,” for example, commonly refers to an NGO, whichi is not the same as a commission, and a commission is not the same as the much more informal panel.

So, as I said in the introduction: Nobody knows what DOGE is. In consequence, nobody knows what authorities DOGE has, or why.

Current Actions Undertaken by DOGE

Despite its ill-defined nature, the Senate has already set up a DOGE caucus under Jodi Ernst, and the House has set up subcommittee headed by Marjorie Taylor Green. More interestingly, or problematically, DOGE is hiring:

On its X account Monday, DOGE announced it is currently recruiting a “very small number” of full-time salaried software and info security engineers. The account also posted on Dec. 27 that it plans to hire for full-time human resources, IT and finance positions.

“If interested, please DM us a few bullet points demonstrating exceptional ability, and your cell phone number,” the post reads.

DOGE also has office space:

The newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) already has 50 employees working in Washington, D.C., sources confirmed to the Washington Post.

Working out of SpaceX’s offices, the new employees are already hard at work examining different areas to lessen federal spending.

DOGE is also sending out peronnel to interview Federal officials:

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s aides with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have spoken with staffers at more than a dozen federal agencies to begin preliminary interviews, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

The agencies include the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services, the newspaper said, citing four people familiar with the matter.

… Musk and Ramaswamy have stepped up hiring for DOGE, with more than 50 staffers already started working out of the offices of SpaceX, which Musk owns, The Washington Post reported. DOGE aims to have close to 100 staffers in place by Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, according to the report.

Well and good. But under what authority does an “entity” like DOGE cut a payroll check, or sign an agreement for the use of office space?[4] To find out, I asked Elon’s slave pet AI, Grok[5].

What Elon Musk’s Grok Says About Elon Musk’s DOGE

Because Grok is so very prolix, I have edited down the exchanges. The full transcript is in Appendix C.

Is DOGE (the Department of Governmental Efficiency) a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization?

According to posts on X, it appears that DOGE, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, is not currently structured as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Recent discussions indicate that there was consideration by top officials to incorporate DOGE as an external entity or nonprofit, but it seems unlikely at this point. Therefore, based on the available information, DOGE does not hold the status of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

How is DOGE structured?

The structure of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appears to be quite fluid and not fully formalized as of January 2025.

Does DOGE have a payroll?

DOGE did not have a payroll in its early stages, as it sought volunteers willing to work without compensation.

As of early January 2025, DOGE is beginning to establish a payroll for a “very small number” of full-time salaried positions, but specifics on how extensive this payroll will be or the compensation details are not clear from the available sources.

Who signs DOGE’s payroll checks?

Based on the information available, the specifics regarding who signs the payroll checks for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are not explicitly detailed.

Who authorized DOGE to use SpaceX office space? If there is a rental agreement, who signed it on DOGE’s behalf?

The authorization for DOGE to use SpaceX office space can be inferred from the context….

Is DOGE subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA)

Based on the available information, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as structured, is indeed subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).

* * *
Grok’s output agrees with my own reading (listed in the previous section). So what we have here is an entity — whose agents are swanning about Washington, DC, interviewing civil servants — that is not a non-profit, at best has a “fluid” structure, emits paychecks signed by a person or persons unknown, and which occupies office space whose owner can be at best “inferred.” Doesn’t that seem a little odd?

Conclusion

As we might expect, Elon pledged “maximum transparency” in his new DOGE role, so it comes as no surprise that there’s no transparency at all, as shown by Grok’s answers to my questions. So no wonder CREW is suing… well, they can’t sue DOGE, because nobody knows what DOGE is, but they have sued DOGE’s potential interlocutors:

In December 2024, CREW requested records from 62 government agencies, agency components, and agency inspectors general pertaining to any communications that Musk, Ramaswamy, or other individuals reportedly involved in DOGE, Antonio Gracias, William (Bill) McGinley and Steve Davis, had with agency employees, as well as any communications between the agencies and any individuals acting on on their behalves. The requests also seek records pertaining to anyone who has an association with DOGE or the so-called “Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency” Caucus, a group established within Congress which plans to collaborate with DOGE. The agencies CREW requested records from include the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, FEMA, the EPA, the FDA, the IRS and others.

Only Congress has the authority to create a new federal agency, and it is unclear what ethics and transparency standards, if any, Musk, Ramaswamy and others affiliated with DOGE are being held to.

Note that if indeed DOGE is subject to FACA, as Grok claims it is (and mega-law firm Gibson-Dunn agrees) then there are standards to which DOGE must adhere, and is not. We looked at FACA extensively in our investigations of CDC’s HICPAC. In particular:

The Federal Advisory Committee Act requires advisory committees to make available for public inspection written advisory committee documents, including pre-decisional materials such as drafts, working papers and studies.

So I and many others would very much like to see the “pre-decisional materials” that DOGE created before its agents fanned out across the Federal government.

Here, however, is what I found most worrisome. Under what authority is DOGE renting office space, signing payroll checks, and interviewing civil servants? Certainly no institutional authority, as we have seen. The only kind of authority under which DOGE is operating, then, is “charismatic authority,” defined as follows[6]:

Charismatic authority is one of the classifications of authority that make up sociologist Max Weber’s tripartite classification of authority, alongside traditional authority and rational-legal authority.

Charismatic authority was defined by Weber as: “resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him.”

The personal qualities of the individual are central to the concept of charismatic authority and it is the individual’s real or perceived elevation above ‘normal’ people that fuels other peoples’ acceptance of their authority. Some commentators suggest that narcissism is a core trait in charismatic leaders.

Charismatic authority is an interesting case because its success is not reliant on external formal structures or norms, as is the case with the other two forms of authority. Because of this, power structures that rely on charismatic leaders to succeed may dissolve should the leader die or leave

In other words, DOGE is able to do what it does based on the charismatic authority of one man: Elon.

History should teach us to be very leery of extra-Constitutional entities, parallel to existing institutions, and driven by the charismatic authority of a single individual. That’s dangerously close to fuhrerprinzip, and even if Trump straightens out Elon’s DOGE mess with one of the the 100+ executive orders he’s going to roll out on his first day in office, DOGE as it is today has already set a terrible, terrible precedent.

NOTES

[1] Not the DOGE Inc. to be found in Dun and Bradsteet, doing business as Spring Garden Flower Shop in San Antonio, TX.

[2] I’m going to call Elon Musk “Elon,” even though my usual practice would be “Musk,” because Elon’s all over my timeline like a cheap suit.

[3] Ramaswamy criticized the deplorable aspects of American culture on December 28:

Vivek Ramaswamy
@VivekGRamaswamy
·
Follow
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if… Show more

Since then, he’s been curiously silent, presumably because Susie Wiles gagged him.

[4] And who gets sued if some hapless pedestrian gets run over by a DOGE staffer?

[5] I fully expect much of the text emitted by Grok to be proven false, but I want to get it on the record. I also assume that anything in Grok pertaining to Elon’s interest is likely to be gamed.

[6] Readers, I apologize for not finding the original Weber, but I’m tickled to find this material on a human resources site.

APPENDIX A The DOGE Memecoin



APPENDIX B “DOGE” in Context

The memecoin, hence presumably the entity, is pronounced “/doʊdʒ/,” like the Venetian head of state, and not “doggy” (which is odd, since the avatar of the coin was a Shiba Inu dog). With that license, readers may choose to see the following artwork as a progression:

Corno ducale, c. 1675-1699, as worn by the Doge of Venice.
Hand-made by the nuns of the Convent of S. Zaccaria.

A new one was presented to the Doge every Easter Monday, after a procession from San Marco to the convent.

(V&A, London)


Claude Monet
@artistmonet

The Doge's Palace (Le Palais ducal), 1908


Dr. Peter Paul Rubens
Aug 27, 2024
@PP_Rubens

Doge Andrea Gritti, 1540, by Titian. One of the 2 greatest Doge portraits, the other being of course Bellini's Loredan. But it's Titian's day today.


2/2 The other great Doge portrait: Leonardo Loredan by Giovanni Bellini, ca. 1501. Just so you know.


The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero https://wikiart.org/en/eugene-delacroix ... liero-1826



APPENDIX C Grok Transcript on DOGE

Is DOGE (the Department of Governmental Efficiency) a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization?

1 post

25 web pages

According to posts on X, it appears that DOGE, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, is not currently structured as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Recent discussions indicate that there was consideration by top officials to incorporate DOGE as an external entity or nonprofit, but it seems unlikely at this point. Therefore, based on the available information, DOGE does not hold the status of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

How is DOGE structured?

15 posts

25 web pages

The structure of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appears to be quite fluid and not fully formalized as of January 2025. Here's what is known based on available information:

Non-Governmental Structure: DOGE is explicitly described as being outside the official government structure. It's not an agency, commission, or a government entity with legal authority. Instead, it operates as an advisory or lobbying group aimed at influencing government spending and efficiency.

Leadership: DOGE is led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, with involvement from other billionaires and tech executives. These individuals are intended to take on unofficial roles within various federal agencies to push for cost-cutting measures. The recruitment for DOGE positions includes a call for volunteers who are not federal employees or officials.

Operational Secrecy: There's an emphasis on secrecy in DOGE's operations, with much of the communication being conducted through encrypted messaging apps like Signal to prevent leaks.

Advisory Role: DOGE's primary function is to provide recommendations on cutting wasteful spending rather than having direct authority over government expenditures. This advisory role is aimed at influencing policy without the formal powers of government agencies.

Potential Legal and Structural Ambiguities: There are concerns about how DOGE navigates conflicts of interest and transparency laws like the Federal Advisory Committee Act, suggesting that it might try to operate in a manner that avoids these regulations, possibly by not incorporating as a formal entity.

Public Perception and Critique: Some posts on X suggest skepticism or criticism regarding DOGE's structure and motives, with labels like "billionaires' lobbying grift" and concerns about privatization motives.

In summary, DOGE's structure is informal, advisory, and outside traditional government frameworks, with a focus on influencing government efficiency through recommendations rather than having legal authority to enact changes. Its exact operational details remain somewhat opaque, reflecting its non-official status within the government.

Does DOGE have a payroll?

15 posts

25 web pages

Based on the information available, the structure of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) regarding payroll is ambiguous and has seen some evolution:

Initial Statements: Initially, it was stated by Elon Musk on X that employees at DOGE would not be compensated, with the work described as "tedious," making "lots of enemies," and having "zero" compensation. This was intended to be a volunteer position for those interested in cost-cutting within the government.

Recent Developments: By January 2025, there are indications that DOGE has started recruiting for full-time, salaried positions. This includes roles in software engineering, information security engineering, HR, IT, and finance. However, details about the number of these positions or the salary structure remain sparse.

Public Perception: Posts on X reflect a mix of skepticism, support, and confusion about DOGE's payroll. Some users express doubt about its efficiency due to the initial zero-compensation model, while others see the move to salaried positions as a sign of DOGE becoming more structured.

Given this information:

DOGE did not have a payroll in its early stages, as it sought volunteers willing to work without compensation.

As of early January 2025, DOGE is beginning to establish a payroll for a "very small number" of full-time salaried positions, but specifics on how extensive this payroll will be or the compensation details are not clear from the available sources.

Therefore, while DOGE initially operated without a payroll, it appears they are now moving towards having one for certain roles, though the scope and details are still not fully defined.

Who signs DOGE's payroll checks?

1 post

25 web pages

Share your location for improved accuracy.

Based on the information available, the specifics regarding who signs the payroll checks for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are not explicitly detailed. However, given the context:

DOGE's Initial Structure: Initially, DOGE was described as a volunteer-based organization with no payroll, as indicated by statements from Elon Musk where he mentioned that the work would be uncompensated.

Transition to Paid Positions: By January 2025, there are indications that DOGE has moved towards establishing a payroll for a "very small number" of salaried positions. This transition suggests that some form of administrative or financial management has been set up, possibly under the guidance or direct involvement of Musk and Ramaswamy, who are leading the organization.

Potential Signatories: Given that DOGE is not a traditional government entity but rather an advisory group with influential figures like Musk and Ramaswamy at the helm, it's plausible that one or both of these individuals, or someone directly appointed by them, would have the authority to sign payroll checks. However, this is speculative based on the lack of direct information.

Public Speculation: Posts on X express a mix of curiosity and skepticism about the operational details of DOGE, including its financial management, but there's no specific mention of who signs the payroll checks.

From this, we can infer:

No definitive answer exists in the public domain about who exactly signs DOGE's payroll checks.

The most likely scenario is that it would be someone with significant authority within DOGE, potentially Musk or Ramaswamy themselves or an appointed financial officer, given their leadership roles and the nature of DOGE as an external advisory body.

Therefore, without explicit confirmation, the identity of who signs DOGE's payroll checks remains undetermined from the available information.

Who authorized DOGE to use SpaceX office space? If there is a rental agreement, who signed it on DOGE's behalf?

4 posts

25 web pages

The authorization for DOGE to use SpaceX office space can be inferred from the context:

Implicit Authorization: Elon Musk, being the CEO of SpaceX and a co-leader of DOGE alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, would likely have the authority to decide on the use of SpaceX's office space for DOGE. Given his dual roles, he could authorize this use without formal agreements.

Rental Agreement: There's no explicit mention of a formal rental agreement in the available sources. However, if one exists:

Signatory on Behalf of DOGE: Since DOGE is led by Musk and Ramaswamy, either of them would be the most probable signatories on any potential rental agreement. Given Musk's ownership of SpaceX and his role in DOGE, he would be the logical choice to sign on behalf of DOGE if a formal agreement were necessary.

In conclusion:

Authorization: Elon Musk, due to his roles in both organizations.

Signatory on DOGE's Behalf: If a formal agreement exists, it would most likely be signed by Elon Musk, but there's no direct evidence of such an agreement in the provided information.

Is DOGE subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA)

25 web pages

Based on the available information, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as structured, is indeed subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). Here's how this conclusion is reached:

Definition and Criteria: FACA applies to any "committee, board, commission, council, conference, panel, task force, or other similar group" that includes at least one non-governmental member, established or utilized to provide advice or recommendations to the President or one or more agencies or officers of the Federal Government. DOGE fits this description as it is an advisory body led by non-federal members (Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy) aiming to provide recommendations on government efficiency, spending, and operations.

Legal Precedents and Expert Opinions: Various sources and experts, including Jason Arnold, an associate professor of political science, and legal analyses from organizations like Public Citizen, have indicated that DOGE's operations align with the requirements of FACA. They argue that DOGE, though not a formal government department, functions as an advisory committee which, under FACA, must adhere to transparency, public involvement, and reporting requirements.

Public Statements and Actions: Elon Musk has stated on X that DOGE's actions would be "maximum transparent," which aligns with FACA's requirements for transparency. However, there are also indications that DOGE might attempt to operate in ways that could be seen as avoiding some FACA obligations, like by functioning informally or emphasizing individual rather than collective advice. Despite these tactics, if DOGE meets the criteria for what constitutes a Federal Advisory Committee, it would still be subject to FACA.

Legal Challenges and Compliance: Historical examples and legal opinions suggest that even if an entity like DOGE tries to bypass FACA by not formally declaring itself as an advisory committee, courts can still rule that it must comply with FACA if its operations resemble those of a committee established to advise the government.

In conclusion, given the nature of DOGE's operations, its purpose, and its leadership by non-federal members to provide advice to the federal government, it is subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The exact compliance might be subject to legal scrutiny, but the core activities of DOGE as described fall within FACA's jurisdiction.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... rency.html

We should also consider the American slang term, 'dodge', as in scam.

Musk, Meloni, and the AfD: Trump’s Plan for Reorganizing EU Vassals Comes into Focus
Posted on January 13, 2025 by Conor Gallagher

There are once again proclamations that the political tide in Europe is turning against the empire, part of an anti-globalist wave toppling governments in Austria and Germany, and even reaching across the Atlantic to sweep away the likes of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

I’ve lost count how many times I’ve read this prediction. Evidence cited this time in Europe is the collapse of the Austrian government and possible ascendance of the “right wing, pro-Putin” Herbert Kickl, setbacks for the globalists in Croatia elections, as well as billionaire Trump sidekick Elon Musk’s boosting of the Alternative for Germany.

The fact that European voters are increasingly choosing candidates that are opposed to Project Ukraine and favor better ties with Russia is surely a good sign. A Musk and Trump spotlight could also make it more difficult for the EU and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to use “tools” to browbeat governments into submission on the question of Russia or encourage national governments like that of Romania to cancel elections when a candidate favoring better ties with Moscow unexpectedly comes out on top.

And yet one key question remains: will we see a marked difference in the vassalage to the US or simply more of an alignment with the incoming Trump administration?

I’m not sure the anti-globalist label applies all that well to the political parties making waves in Europe, which are not, after all, opposed to global capital, transatlanticism, or the EU.

They are largely a response to the Europe-wide economic downturn driven largely by the disastrous war against Russia. And years of rising immigration combined with low economic growth and austerity have predictably led to improved polling for candidates who are opposed, in theory, to immigration.

They are not all that concerned with neoliberalism, oligarchy, transnational capital, or even militarism. They are also not challenging the fact that Europe is reliant on Washington economically, militarily, and for energy.

And so what does that mean for the citizens of Europe?

For clues let’s look at one of these “anti-globalists” who has been in power for a few years already. She reportedly has Trump’s — and Musk’s — ear and is therefore Politico’s most powerful European politician for 2025. Her response to such a designation?

“…as Spiderman would say, with great power comes great responsibility.”

The Melonization of Europe

Meloni was recently feted at Mar-a-Lago: (...)

And there’s now a belief that she’s entered the emperor’s inner circle:



What does Meloni’s welcoming into the emperor’s inner circle signify for Europe? Let’s take a brief look at her record.

Meloni encapsulates the European nationalist upstarts in recent years who have quickly abandoned their rebel bona fides in order to be welcomed into the halls of power. The Sweden Democrats and Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in The Netherlands are not dissimilar. In the latter case, the Dutch government of which Wilders party is the largest member continues to do Washington’s bidding against China even though it means running Europe’s most valuable tech company into the ground. Even France’s Marine Le Pen was heading down the Meloni path taking a more pro-NATO line before being sidelined by Macron maneuvers.

Meloni followed in the footsteps of her predecessor, unelected former Goldman Sachs executive and European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, in her support for Project Ukraine. Draghi was an early architect of the economic war against Moscow and grand plans to turn Italy into an energy hub. Both have failed despite Meloni’s best efforts to carry them forward. The ensuing inflation and destruction of industry have had predictable results and continue a long, ugly trend for Italy:

`

Of course, most European workers have started to experience the same over the past three years. The Meloni government carries on with its tepid support for Project Ukraine despite the opposition from the Italian public:



Nevertheless, following her visit to Mar-a-Lago, Meloni had the following to say about the war:

“I have always maintained that the only way to force Russia to sit at the negotiating table was to construct a difficult situation” on the ground, she said. Trump’s first presidency showed he has the ability to “mix diplomacy and deterrence,” she added, predicting it will be the same this time around. Abandoning Ukraine at this point, she said, “would be an error.”

That doesn’t inspire confidence about finding an agreement with Moscow, although it’s unclear how much Meloni’s views represent Trump’s thinking.

If that’s the line she’s pushing, however, she’s not all that different from the Macrons, Starmers, Scholzs, and Trudeas, albeit with different branding. And Meloni is like them in more ways than just on Ukraine.

While her and her government are decidedly “anti-woke” and champion “family values”, they also spend a considerable amount of time working to depict WWII-era Italian fascists as victims of commie anti-Italian racism, blame immigrants for Italy’s woes while still bringing in enough to supply cheap labor, and continue the strip mining of Italy. Last year the Meloni government sold off the fixed-line network of Telecom Italia to New York-based private equity firm KKR, which includes former CIA director David Petraeus as a partner. Elsewhere “Italy Is For Sale,” with tens of billions worth of privatizations planned for the state rail company Ferrovie dello Stato, Poste Italiane, Monte dei Paschi bank and energy giant Eni. The firesale is necessitated by more tax cuts for the wealthy, as well as more than billions of euros Rome has burned through in order to address the loss of pipeline gas from Russia, which includes buying more US LNG.

A lot to like there from the perspective of a US oligarch. So it’s easy to see why Trump, Meloni and Musk get on so well — even if there are indeed some differences on Ukraine but no doubt Trump will be calling the shots there.

As a reward for being a dutiful subject, Italy is getting a major SpaceX deal. In return the “nationalist” Meloni only has to surrender more of Italy’s sovereignty.. Musk’s company will be providing security services, including encryption services, to the Italian public sector.

So it would appear that despite all the talk about anti-globalists coming to power in a Europe that Team Trump supposedly wants to extricate itself from, a few things remain the same: the king’s court in Washington expects dutiful subjects in Europe, and in return they might receive rewards.

Musk and the AfD

Musk is also bestowing gifts upon the Alternative for Germany (AfD), encouraging Germans to vote for the party. On its face it might seem a strange turn for an AfD that purportedly favors reclaiming German sovereignty from the EU and NATO to accept assistance from the world’s richest man who happens to also be well-connected with US spooks. Then again, the AfD received its seed money from a reclusive billionaire descendant of prominent Nazis so maybe it’s what one would expect.

While the current political class in Berlin has run the country into the ground and its efforts to silence the AfD, shame its voters, and keep it from power by any means necessary are undemocratic, I view Musk’s sudden involvement not as a victory for Germany, but as an effort to bring the AfD into the US/NATO fold.

That shouldn’t be that difficult. Aside from the AfD’s stated hesitancy about serving American interests — the embrace of Musk might signal a willingness to be flexible there — there really isn’t much difference between the AfD and the European “center” anymore. Last week’s audio livestream alongside party co-leader Alice Weidel on X included an alarming — and telling — ignorance about the history of fascism and communism:

Elon Musk and Alice Weidel (of the far-right German AfD party) put their brains together for a discussion:

Weidel: “The National Socialists (Nazis) were socialist. Adolf Hitler was a socialist.”

Musk: “Yeah, they nationalized industries like crazy.”

Under Musk and Weidel’s telling, the Meloni government’s selling off state-owned industry to American private equity is a noble undertaking as it’s apparently the opposite of what Hitler would do. No doubt, Germany should follow Meloni’s lead.

Musk and Weidel are propagating a historical view that fits right in with Atlanticists who have been so busy for so long trying to equate WWII-era Nazism and communism. While originally more of a fringe view, it started to go more mainstream in 2008 when the European Parliament adopted a resolution establishing August 23 as the “European Day of Remembrance for the victims of Stalinism and Nazism” — effectively equating the two Also called Black Ribbon Day, the US in 2019 adopted a resolution to observe the date.

The same year, the European Parliament went even further and adopted a resolution “on the importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe.” It proclaims that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was responsible for World War II, and consequently that Soviet Russia is as guilty of the war as Nazi Germany.

No matter that the pact, from the Soviet perspective, was agreed to in order to buy itself time seeing as Poland, France and other European states refused to ally with the USSR. If anyone should share more of the blame it would be the West, which preferred Nazism to communism and hoped Hitler would turn the Nazi war machine against the Soviet Union, which he of course did, resulting in 25 million Russian deaths.

Even the nowadays-Russophobic Guardian published an opinion piece by Seumas Milne back in 2009 that admitted this:

…the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar “enslavement” of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial. It is certainly not a mistake that could have been made by the Auschwitz survivors liberated by the Red Army in 1945.

The real meaning of the attempt to equate Nazi genocide with Soviet repression is clearest in the Baltic republics, where collaboration with SS death squads and direct participation in the mass murder of Jews was at its most extreme, and politicians are at pains to turn perpetrators into victims. Veterans of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS now parade through Riga, Vilnius’s Museum of Genocide Victims barely mentions the 200,000 Lithuanian Jews murdered in the Holocaust and Estonian parliamentarians honour those who served the Third Reich as “fighters for independence”.

Most repulsively of all, while rehabilitating convicted Nazi war criminals, the state prosecutor in Lithuania – a member of the EU and Nato – last year opened a war crimes investigation into four Lithuanian Jewish resistance veterans who fought with Soviet partisans: a case only abandoned for lack of evidence. As Efraim Zuroff, veteran Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, puts it: “People need to wake up to what is going on. This attempt to create a false symmetry between communism and the Nazi genocide is aimed at covering up these countries’ participation in mass murder.”

So with Weidel and Musk’s history lesson we see yet again that there isn’t much light between the “center” and the “far right” except the latter is at least willing to consider good relations with present-day Russia so as to not harm their own economic interests. Trump might be willing to allow that. Elsewhere, they are both in agreement on the broad outlines of militarism and neoliberalism.

Let’s not forget there is another upstart party in Germany who, like the AfD, is also labeled a populist Putin stooge. Its leader has had pie slammed in her face, fake blood thrown on her and is widely derided in the media for opposing the deployment of US medium range missiles in Germany and Berlin’s subservience to Washington. And yet the world’s richest man is not offering Sahra Wagenknecht a helping hand.

Is that because her party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) doesn’t have a small core of supporters who are neo Nazis or because her economic policies would favor the working class over the likes of Musk — or both?

Despite all the media efforts to lump Wagenknecht and the AfD together as Kremlin-controlled, anti-democratic far-right threats, the parties are largely polar opposites. Just a few examples:

BSW proposes a fairer tax system that benefits the working class, such as the demand for an excess profits tax in the industrial sector. The AfD wants to slash taxes across the board, including those that are progressive and serve to redistribute wealth, such as the inheritance tax
BSW believes in global warming and wants to continue to take climate action but work to soften the economic blow to the working class. The AfD rejects climate science. In its EU election manifesto, it says that the “claim of a threat through human-made climate change” is “CO2 hysterics,” and it would do away with climate laws that reduce prosperity and freedoms.
BSW wants to strengthen the social safety net. The AfD stresses the limits of the state’s role.

A German government supported by and run for the interests of a strong working class coalition wouldn’t have to worry about the likes of Musk. Of course Germany wouldn’t be in the position it is in at all because it wouldn’t have been bought off by Americans, but it is now in position of living by the US oligarchs and largely dying by the US oligarchs. As of now, the next German government looks likely to be headed by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is again not that far apart from the AfD — likely to finish second in the February election although probably not strong enough to force its way into a coalition government — aside from the formers belligerence towards Russia and devotion to NATO.

The Musk embrace of the AfD is potentially part of a “suggestion” from the US that the CDU consider forming a coalition with the AfD. If that’s the case, Weidel and company might owe a few favors.

You’d think European anti-globalists and nationalists would be turning and running from the US and the likes of Musk or at least working like mad to find ways to counter American influence. And yet through one of the most magical witches’ brews ever concocted — some combination of bribes, threats, short-sighted self interest, and propaganda — the European political class clings to what is hollowing out their countries.

Perhaps this time it results in a welcome end to Project Ukraine, but the line of thinking that Trump will come in and some new alignment of Orban, Fico, the real Meloni, and company will bring better days seems like wishful thinking at best.

It’s more likely that putative nationalists like Meloni and company are able to rebrand Europe’s vassalage and neoliberalism as some sort of victory against the grating virtue signalling of the Davos cabal while continuing to assist the US in the plundering of Europe.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... focus.html

******

Buying Greenland: Trump’s Arctic manoeuvres
Originally published: Counterfire on January 11, 2025 by Chris Bambery (more by Counterfire) | (Posted Jan 13, 2025)

You might think Donald Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. could buy Greenland from Denmark is just bonkers.

In December he said U.S ownership of Greenland was ‘an absolute necessity.’ On Tuesday when he was asked at a press conference whether he would rule out using ‘military or economic coercion’ to take over both Greenland and Panama—which Trump has also said he wants the U.S. to own—the president-elect responded: ‘No, I can’t assure you on either of those two, but I can say this: We need them for economic security.’

It’s not the first time Trump has mooted this idea. Back in 2019, during his previous term in office, he said his administration was considering buying Greenland from Denmark and that the proposal was ‘strategically interesting.’

On the same day, Trump Senior addressed that press conference, Donald Trump Jr jetted into Greenland, saying his visit was ‘a little bit of fun,’ and that ‘as an outdoorsman, I’m excited to stop into Greenland for this week.’ He handed out baseball caps with ‘Make Greenland Great Again’ emblazoned on them.

Trump threatened economic sanctions against Denmark if it refused to sell, stating that the U.S., ‘would tariff Denmark at a very high level.’ Turning to Canada, Trump said he would not rule out using ‘economic force’ to turn into a state within the U.S!

Crazy stuff? Well, find yourself a globe, locate the North Pole and look at which countries border the Arctic Circle. Russia has the longest stretch of coastline, but the others are the U.S., Canada, Denmark (Greenland is autonomous but Copenhagen controls defence and foreign-policy matters), Norway, Sweden and Finland—all those six are of course Nato members, the last two having just joined, ditching neutrality in the wake of the Russo-Ukraine war.



Then think climate change. The sea routes go through the Barents Sea, the currently frozen channel potentially linking the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Barents Straits. Going the other way, there is a potential sea-lane from the Pacific, through the Arctic Sea and down the coast of Greenland to the eastern seaboard of North America. These sea lanes, if ever navigable, would cut big distances off current trade routes and would be of huge economic and strategic importance.

Climate change means the permanent icecap is retreating. Trump is very aware that Greenland has reserves of oil and gas, as well as the rare-earth metals which are in high demand for the electric cars and wind turbines of the green transition, as well as for manufacturing military equipment.

The broadcaster CNN spoke to Klaus Dodds, professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, who pointed out that China currently dominates global rare-earth production and is threatening to restrict the export of critical minerals and associated technologies, ahead of Trump’s inauguration. Dodds explained: ‘There is no question at all that Trump and his advisers are very concerned about the stranglehold that China appears to have… I think Greenland is really about keeping China out.’ That fits with Trump’s emphasis on China being the major threat rather than Russia, and that rivalry must be the central plank of U.S. foreign policy.

Greenland is also of huge military importance to the United States. After Denmark was occupied by the Nazis during the Second World War, American forces moved into Greenland on the basis of an agreement with the Danish ambassador to Washington. The island was vital to keeping the Atlantic sea lanes, on which Britain depended, open and, when the U.S. joined the war, to the huge military build-up in Britain prior to the June 1944 invasion of Normandy.

After the war ended, the Truman administration refused Danish demands to leave. It offered to buy the property, but it was rejected. After the formation of Nato in 1949, Copenhagen agreed a treaty allowing U.S. military bases there—very much on the front line of the Cold War with the then Soviet Union.

The Thule Air Base, established in 1952, hosted Strategic Air Command bomber and reconnaissance aircraft, interceptors and Nike nuclear-tipped surface-to-air missiles. The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System was based there in 1961, and Greenland still remains key to early warning radar systems.

Thule was site of one of the worst nuclear accidents, in 1968, when a cabin fire broke out in a B-52G bomber carrying four thermonuclear gravity bombs. It crash landed onto the frozen sea. It’s likely three nuclear weapons exploded on impact. The fourth was never accounted for.

Thule was transferred to the U.S. Space Force in 2020 and renamed the Pituffik Space Base three years afterwards. It is central to U.S. space and missile warning systems, is home to the most northern naval harbour in the world and, since 2023, is also home to U.S. fighter detachments. The Pentagon, however, fears that Russia has a far greater military presence in the Arctic and wishes to significantly boost its presence there.

The idea of buying Greenland is not quite so mad if you know your history. The U.S. has considered doing so in 1867, 1910, 1946, and 2019. These instances came to nothing, but the Danes were open to business in 1917 when they sold Washington the Danish West Indies, now the Virgin Islands, for $25 million ($600 million in today’s terms).

Of course, the U.S. has bought other territories. Fifteen current U.S. states running from the Gulf of Mexico (which Trump wishes to rename) to the border with Canada were obtained via the Louisiana Purchase, when Napoleon sold this vast territory. Alaska was bought in 1867 from Tsarist Russia. So, Trump is following in a long tradition.

His attitude towards Denmark reflects his detestation of Nato—believing it gives the Europeans a free ride in matters of defence. That must be causing worries in the European chancelleries. It will mean Starmer in the UK will toady up to him even more than he does already.

Trump will be bequeathed a war in Ukraine which Kyiv is almost certain to lose. That will be viewed as a major setback for the U.S. The new president will be looking at how he can reassert U.S. military dominance.

For Trump, the main enemy is not Putin. He promised in his election campaign to end the Ukraine war, but if all he is offering Putin is a ceasefire that’s not an offer likely to be accepted. Putin will want recognition of Russian occupation of eastern Ukraine and a guarantee Ukraine will never join Nato at a minimum. It’s hard to see Washington accepting that short of a complete Ukrainian collapse (which is not off the agenda).

The war in Ukraine has driven Moscow and Beijing closer and Russia is giving China access to the Arctic. Trump’s threats to Panama—he wants to reinstate U.S. control of the Panama Canal—reflects his belief that the Chinese are building up a presence there and across Latin America.

Newsweek revealed that, last month, a letter from a senior State Department official to Congress said U.S. diplomats are seeking to counter the ambitions of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Arctic. Naz Durakoğlu, an Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Legislative Affairs, wrote that U.S. diplomats have ‘strong concerns about PRC behaviour in the Arctic, to include the PRC’s scientific research in the region—research that could be used for future military operations.’

Durakoğlu wrote to a bipartisan Congressional committee that scrutinises the activities of the Communist Party of China (CCP) warning that there was ‘increasing frequency and complexity of PRC activity in the region,’ creating defence and security challenges for the U.S. as China made increased efforts to garner influence.

Once more return to your globe. It’s obvious that whoever controls Greenland controls a huge military asset. The island is on the front line in a new cold war between West and East.

But what of the 50,000 plus people of Greenland, the majority Inuit. They are opposed to mining and the exploitation of oil and gas because it would destroy their way of life and the ecology of the island. Increasingly they are demanding independence from Denmark.

We should support the right of Greenland to self-determination. I feel it’s unlikely they would opt to sell themselves to Washington. After all Trump sounds and acts like a nineteenth-century imperialist.

https://mronline.org/2025/01/13/buying-greenland/

[blindpig]

Trump is cutting the last threads of the tattered cloth of ‘the rules-based international order’
Originally published: Pearls and Irritations on January 13, 2025 by Eugene Doyle (more by Pearls and Irritations) (Posted Jan 14, 2025)

What do Panama, Canada and Greenland have in common? Could Donald Trump be getting the U.S. back to brass tacks, to a core strategy of dominating the Western Hemisphere? Possibly, and he may be blowing away the fraudulent rhetoric about rules-based international order, territorial integrity, international law and the crusade to expand democracies.

Trump said last week that the U.S. is prepared to use military force to assert control over Panama and Greenland.

“We need Greenland for national security purposes. People don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it but even if they do they should give it up because I’m talking about protecting the free world,” he said.

The world’s largest island is bigger than France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, and Belgium combined. It’s literally bigger than Texas (300% bigger)—and the U.S. wants it.

Think about that. The U.S. may pose a greater risk to the territorial integrity of the European Union than the Russians do. If they get antsy with the U.S., Trump will “tariff them”.

The Danes, like the rest of Europe, are frightened of the U.S. In response to Trump’s Greenland gambit, Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen timidly said this week that Denmark was “open to a dialogue with the Americans on how we can co-operate, possibly even more closely than we already do, to ensure that American ambitions are fulfilled”.

To ensure American ambitions are fulfilled. And this was the country that gave us the Vikings. If Ragnar Lodbrok, Eric Bloodaxe or Bjorn Ironside had been around when Donald Trump Junior swooped into Nuuk for his photo op this week, his skull would have been used as a drinking tankard for a blót sumbl feast that same evening.

Top independent strategists have for years despaired of the strategic brainlessness of U.S. foreign policy—the Midas Touch in reverse, as Professor Mearsheimer calls it. Wherever they went–from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza–Americans embroiled themselves in conflicts of little strategic worth and left behind piles of bodies, millions of implacable enemies and a litany of failures.

Trump’s rough wooing of Canada to become the 51st state, and his threat to use military force to seize both Greenland and the Canal, speak to a back-to-basics focus for American imperialism—a shift in U.S. policy that will bring it closer to its core strategic interests.

That’s quite appropriate for a man who counts President Teddy Roosevelt (1901-09) as a role model. There is a whiff of the Rough Rider (Roosevelt’s cavalry which kicked over the Spaniards in Cuba in 1898) about Trump’s recent utterances.

Outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York you could see a magnificent statue of Teddy Roosevelt, cowboy kerchief around his neck, six-shooter hanging off his hip, astride a proud steed with two bare-chested Noble Savages, an African and an American Indian, walking on either side of the great white man. I particularly like the slightly punkish metal spikes sticking out of his hair to stop birds shitting on his head. After 82 years, the city finally woke up to the fact that this was a racist, colonialist trope and took the statue down in 2021.

It is ironic that just four years after doing so, an even bigger monument to Roosevelt is going up: Trump redux is lifting entire passages out of the Roosevelt playbook.

Roosevelt greatly increased the influence and interests of the United States, building on the recent seizures of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba and Guam. He wanted to Make America Great and to do so he would “speak softly and carry a big stick”.

Big stick diplomacy–the willingness to use the military–was increasingly unleashed to assert U.S. hegemony and business interests. General Smedley D Butler, author of War is a Racket, spent his entire 33-year career (1898-1931) enforcing the rules as defined by Theodore Roosevelt and his successors. Smedley eventually realised he was fighting as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism”. Like thousands of Marines he fought for the U.S. in countries up and down the Americas, Caribbean and Asia, including Cuba (1898), Venezuela, Panama, Dominican Republic, Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and China.

Roosevelt’s greatest legacy was the building of the Panama Canal. The U.S. intervened militarily in Panama to drive out the Colombians and “liberate” Panama so it could build the Canal. He said that the people of Panama rebelled against Colombia “literally as one man”—to which a senator retorted,

Yes, and the one man was Roosevelt!

Is history repeating itself—as tragedy or comedy? If Trump’s threats all sound either nuts or 19th century, it’s because it is both those things—which doesn’t mean they won’t happen.

Here’s where it gets interesting. I think Trump has a very good point for a number of reasons (clue: none of them relate to international law or respect for the sovereignty of nations). Greenland has a ton of energy, fishing and mineral resources the Americans would love to lay their hands on. The Arctic maritime routes are slowly opening and if you look at a map of the Arctic you’ll realise the U.S. has very little real estate, to use Trumpspeak, up there and Russia has a vast amount.

The third reason is equally important: incorporating Canada and Greenland into the U.S. would give the country an enormous boost at a time when it is slipping behind China in all critical areas.

According to the IMF, the Chinese have already overtaken the U.S. in share of global GDP based on purchasing power parity (19%-15%). By 2035 this gap will likely explode out to 25% to 14% in Beijing’s favour. How should the U.S. respond? Its current China containment strategy of sanctions, tariffs and threats is failing as China’s manufacturing and tech sectors greatly outperform the U.S. Military planners say the U.S. would almost certainly lose a conventional war against China over Taiwan; the U.S. is already losing its proxy war in Ukraine. A course correction seems inevitable.

Trump is cutting the last threads of the tattered cloth of “the rules-based international order”, the self-serving system that touted international law as long as it didn’t apply to the U.S. and its allies. The Canadians, the Danes, the Panamanians and the rest of us should wake up to reality and see we are objects, we are mere things to the Americans, not allies with some deeply shared “values”. Trump is refreshingly candid: he wants stuff and he’s prepared to dispense with the preachy posturing that we got with Blinken and Biden. America is not your friend.

https://mronline.org/2025/01/14/trump-i ... nal-order/

******

Trump’s Statements on the Panama Canal: An Attempt to Revive an Unwanted Past for Panamanians
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 13, 2025
Roman A. Atencio


An effigy of President-elect Donald Trump is set on fire during a demonstration marking Martyrs’ Day, a national day of mourning to honor the 21 Panamanians who were killed during the January 1964 anti-American riots over sovereignty of the Panama Canal Zone, in Panama City, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Agustin Herrera)

Panama marks Martyrs’ Day amid Trump threats to retake control of Panama Canal

The recent statements by the President-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, that he will seek to regain control of the Canal if the fees that our country charges American ships for transiting through this waterway, which he called a vital national asset of the United States, are not reduced, have generated a wave of rejection reactions both in the general population and in members of the government. But for Panamanians, these are more. There is a long history between both countries, which has left Panamanians with deep scars that they do not want to repeat.

Trump’s words touched on a very delicate point in the life and history of Panamanians, managing to unite a population, fragmented by internal political discussions, in a proclamation of homogeneous patriotic vindication and on a very delicate date, since this December 31, 2024, marks 25 years since the recovery of the route at Panamanian hands. In addition, the date is very close to two other days of national mourning, caused by the United States: The invasion on December 21, 1989, and the day of the martyrs on January 9, 1964.

Let me give some context about how important the second date, Martyrs’ Day, is for Panamanians: A people’s movement demanded the presence of the Panamanian flag in the territory known as the Canal Zone, the strip of land around the Canal, which we had ceded to the United States in perpetuity through the Hay-Bunau Varilla Treaty in 1903. The day is called Martyrs’ Day because of the death of some 22 protesters. When they tried to raise the flag, a confrontation started by the Americans, who began to sing the United States anthem and to reject the presence of the Panamanians, causing the Panamanian flag to end up in pieces on the ground. This event helped in the negotiation of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties.

The history of relations between the United States and Panama in the last century is full of shady moments that have left their mark on the minds of Panamanians, which is why these statements generated a general rejection almost instantly and an immediate response from the government and various national associations.

The first to make statements was President José Raúl Mulino, who said that “Every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent areas belongs to Panama and will continue to do so.” Former presidents, former Canal administrators and opposition parties also expressed their opinions, who also highlighted its efficient administration and shouted, “we are sovereign.” The local media, with dozens of opinion columns every day, had texts with the same sentiment. Business associations also described the statements as an “attempt at foreign interference” and the Chamber of Shipping recalled that the Canal is “an inalienable heritage of the Panamanian nation.”

Panama Canal administrator Ricuarte Vásquez Morales also expressed his opinion, focused on responding to Trump’s demands: “Giving preferential treatment to American ships passing through the Panama Canal would violate the neutrality treaty, international law and lead to chaos. The rules are the rules and there are no exceptions,” said the administrator of the interoceanic waterway.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Javier Martínez-Acha, stressed that the Panama Canal has always been characterized by providing a service to global maritime trade and not taking part or being an active part in any type of conflict. “The only hands that control the Canal are Panamanian, and that will continue to be the case. We are a country open to dialogue, investments and good relations, but with the clear motto that the country comes first.”The foreign minister said that Panama is fully willing to cooperate and maintain the good relations it has had throughout history with the United States.

Trump’s words may persuade the American electorate that elected him, but for this humble author and the public opinion both in Panama and internationally, it is clear that what is happening is the decline of absolute American power from the unipolar world that emerged after the disappearance of the former Soviet Union, to the multipolar tripod that we have today, in the face of the emergence and strengthening of new powers and international organizations such as BRICS and the rapid economic rise of China, who by the way is also accused by the American president of being the one who really “controls” the Canal.

While it is not possible to determine whether Trump’s statements will become a reality or are a distraction to hide other issues or a nationalist speech to satisfy his voters, the Panamanian population is simply not able to imagine at this point in history the resurgence of the colonialist ideas against which they fought throughout the 20th century, considered as a matter of national dignity and sovereignty. The proposal to recover, even by force, has been rejected and has caused concern about political stability and the relationship between Panama and the United States. As for the idea of retaking control of the Canal, although it has no legal basis, it must be considered from the geopolitical background of the relations between the United States and China, where probably the real objective is to reduce the influence of the Chinese government in the country.

References:

https://www.tvn-2.com/nacionales/donald ... 72025.html
https://www.tvn-2.com/nacionales/nuevas ... 71847.html
https://www.laestrella.com.pa/mundo/las ... HI10091042

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/01/ ... namanians/

Annexation Redux: Trump’s Expansionist Threats Unmask Longstanding Policy
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 13, 2025


Homes are lit after sunset with mountains and water in the background.Homes are illuminated after sunset in Tasiilaq, Greenland.

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen a buzz in the corporate media about President-elect Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric on annexation.

As Trump approaches his second term in office, he has ramped up his talk about territorial expansion. His rhetoric has thus far targeted Canada, Mexico, Panama, and, most prominently, Greenland.

Trump undoubtedly represents a sector of the U.S. ruling class that believes in more overt and public U.S. domination of the Western Hemisphere. That said, it should be made clear that the U.S. ruling class has had its eyes and hands on all the places Trump targeted for decades.

Trump’s language marks a bit of an increase in intensity, but the policies he talks about aren’t exactly fresh objectives for the U.S. ruling class. Since the early 19th century, the United States has maintained a consistent policy of expanding its interests, whether it be economically, territorially, or militarily.

During the colonial period, the U.S. used a settler movement driven by manifest destiny propaganda to expand West into Indigenous and Mexican land. Eventually, the military backed that settler movement. Parasitic ruling class families, such as the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers, followed the settler and military expansion with massive investments in the stolen land.

The wealth plundered from the manifest destiny period (colonization) allowed the U.S. to take steps toward becoming an imperial power. It is in this form, the imperialist form, that the U.S. has spread its fingers around the world. Donald Trump simply aims to maintain that policy. This rhetoric is a minor unmasking of reality. The history of Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland bears out this point.


U.S. King in North America

After World War II, the U.S. asserted itself as the dominant imperialist power after the widespread destruction in Europe and East Asia. As part of its newfound hegemony, the U.S. began exercising increased economic and diplomatic power against its neighbors.

In many ways, Canada has been a territory of the U.S. for decades. The two countries’ economies, particularly their supply chains, are completely integrated. Billions of dollars in goods and services and hundreds of thousands of people cross the U.S.-Canadian border every year.

However, all this business is done on terms set by the United States through the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, now rebranded as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. On top of economic control, the United States military and diplomatic agendas are almost always matched by Canada.

The Canadian military joined the U.S. military in its wars on Korea, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. In fact, the militaries work so closely that Canadian military brass floated the idea of complete integration into the U.S. military in 2017. Even in the current period, Canada has followed the United States’ example, pumping $9 billion into NATO’s war in Ukraine.

For as much influence the U.S. has exercised in Canada, it pales in comparison to the ravages of imperialism enacted upon Mexico and its people. U.S. dominance over Mexico began with the theft of over 55% of Mexico’s territory in 1848, not including Texas. At the end of its provoked war against Mexico, the U.S. asserted horrendous terms on Mexico through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

In the 20th century, Mexico was held hostage by U.S. corporations that operated maquiladoras in the northern provinces and paid no taxes to the Mexican government. These same mega corporations scuttle any attempt in Mexico to empower workers or maintain Mexico’s resources for the Mexican people.

As bad as NAFTA was for Canada, it was far worse for Mexico. NAFTA completely eliminated Mexican tariffs on imported U.S. goods, allowing U.S. corporations to flood Mexico with consumer goods.

In terms of security and foreign policy, the Mexican government has long been forced to adhere to U.S. provocations against other Latin American countries. Further, the U.S. has forced Mexico to spend billions on a futile “war on drugs.” U.S. imperialism has used the leverage of foreign aid money and IMF loans as a trump card over any potential Mexican attempts to nationalize its resources or assert independence from the U.S.

All this is to say, Trump’s rhetoric isn’t a new escalation against neighbors and allies. It is simply the U.S. ruling class demanding more in tribute payments from countries that it already dominates.

Panama intervention: nothing new

The government of Panama has long been forced to serve U.S. interests regarding the administration and control of the Panama Canal. After the initial construction of the canal finished in 1903, the Panamanian government at the time, under severe diplomatic pressure, signed a treaty giving control of the Panama Canal to the U.S. in perpetuity. The U.S. exercised complete control of the Panama Canal Zone until 1979, when President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty transferring control of the Canal to Panama.

At the time, the entire right-wing establishment condemned Carter’s move and has condemned his decision to this day. Just 12 years later, the U.S. invaded Panama to reassert its influence. The U.S. military murdered thousands of people and left tens of thousands homeless. However, its goals were achieved, and it has maintained a strong presence in Panama to this very day.

Greenland: rhetoric vs. reality

2019 was the first time Donald Trump raised a possible annexation or purchase of Greenland. However, this was not the first time the U.S. had discussed the possibility of acquiring Greenland from Denmark.



Greenland has long been a target of interest for the U.S. imperialists. The U.S. government has attempted to acquire Greenland four times: in 1867, 1910, 1946, and 2019. Although the imperialists’ reasons for desiring Greenland have changed since its first proposal in 1867, they have always revolved around capitalist economic interests and control of the Western Hemisphere.
It is important to note that Trump’s rants about Greenland should not be viewed as a violation of Denmark’s sovereignty but as a violation of the already colonized people of Greenland. The vast majority of Greenland’s population are Inuit, not Danish. Denmark violated the Inuit peoples’ right to self-determination when it seized Greenland. The United States’ desire to control Greenland is about its own interests, not a conflict with Denmark, which is considered the most pro-U.S. member of the European Union.

In the mid-19th century, the U.S. feared an attack from a stronger European country; thus, it sought Greenland as a potential strategic point of naval defense. In 1910, Greenland was a pawn in the United States’ attempt to take control of the lucrative “Danish West Indies.” Eventually, the U.S. was successful and purchased what is now called the “U.S. Virgin Islands” in 1917.

Nonetheless, the U.S. never gave up on Greenland. In 1946, the U.S. military was behind another major push to purchase Greenland. This proposal came after five years of U.S. military rule in Greenland during World War II. The U.S. military invaded Greenland after Denmark fell to Nazi Germany in 1941, stating that it aimed to protect Greenland from German aggression. In reality, the U.S. reason for invading in 1941 was the same as its reason for the purchase proposal in 1946: to establish a strong U.S.-led NATO jump-off point for an attack against the Soviet Union.

Even though the U.S. never formally acquired Greenland, it has maintained a significant military presence there since 1951. So, why is Trump focused on Greenland now? Well, some of the reasons are the same as they always have been. Greenland serves as a strategic military point against Russia for naval and air forces. However, the ruling class’ interest in Greenland goes far beyond military dominance. Greenland has two massive deposits of rare earth elements that are used to enhance various types of electronics, ranging from military equipment to domestic telecommunications.

For decades, the U.S. has depended on China to import rare earth elements. Considering the escalating trade war against China, this is no longer acceptable. Trump wants to ensure access to Greenland’s minerals and deny Chinese investment in those same minerals. The complete annexation of Greenland would undoubtedly achieve that end to some extent. However, Trump doesn’t need to invade or purchase Greenland to achieve this.

It is far more likely that Trump is using this rhetoric to leverage a deal with Denmark that ensures the U.S. mining industry’s access to Greenland’s rare earth minerals and that China will be cut out completely. Nonetheless, the result is the same: the U.S. imperialists tightening their already strong grip on the Western hemisphere economically and strategically.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/01/ ... ng-policy/

******

Extremist Israeli settler leaders invited as 'special guests' to Trump inauguration

Jewish settlers believe incoming President Trump will help them illegally annex the occupied West Bank

News Desk

JAN 13, 2025


(Photo credit: Samaria Regional Council)

A delegation of extremist Israeli Jewish settler leaders has been invited to participate in US President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next Monday in Washington, Israel Hayom reported on 13 January.

The delegation comprises Yesha Council chairman and Benjamin Regional Council Head Israel Ganz, Oranit Council Head Or Piron-Zomer, Yesha Council CEO Omer Rahamim, and Samaria Regional Council Head Yossi Dagan.

The group will attend the inauguration as official guests and will hold meetings with incoming administration officials and leaders from the US Jewish and evangelical Christian communities. A similar delegation attended Trump’s 2017 inauguration.

“Our objective is to strengthen existing connections and forge new ones. Washington’s attention is elsewhere at present. Trump is focused on Greenland sovereignty matters, not Israel’s concerns in Judea and Samaria. Timing is crucial. We must proceed strategically and appropriately,” a council official told the Hebrew newspaper.

The Yesha Council and other regional authorities that oversee illegal settlement activity in the occupied West Bank – which they call Judea and Samaria – “have devoted considerable resources to cultivating relationships with Republican Party leadership in recent years,” Israel Hayom added.

Ganz and Dagan have worked closely with senior Republican officials, including organizing tours of the occupied West Bank for party officials.


The Israeli settler movement enjoys strong influence in the US Republican Party and with President-elect Trump. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his settler supporters often compare Trump to the Biblical Persian King Cyrus, who helped the Jews return from Babylon to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple.

During his first presidential term, Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syria Golan Heights. Israel has been illegally occupying the Golan since 1967 and occupied additional land there immediately after the fall of the Syrian government last month.

Jewish settler leaders anticipate that Trump will help them achieve their goal of annexing the West Bank, which Israel also occupied illegally in 1967, and forcibly expelling its indigenous Palestinian population.

The expectation extends in part from a $100 million donation to his campaign from US-Israeli billionaire Mariam Adelson.

Dagan, who is close with Trump and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, told Israel Hayom, “Years of relationship-building with our newly elected American friends have created this pivotal opportunity for Israel, particularly its government, to achieve significant advances in strengthening our presence in the Land of Israel.”


https://thecradle.co/articles/extremist ... auguration

Sanctions - Trump's Only Old/New Iran Policies

I had missed this Friday news item on Iran:

Trump's Ukraine envoy says world must reinstate 'maximum pressure' on Iran

PARIS, Jan 11 (Reuters) - The world must return to a policy of "maximum pressure" against Iran to turn it into a more democratic country, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's incoming Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg told an Iranian opposition event in Paris on Saturday.
Trump has vowed to return to the policy he pursued in his previous term that sought to wreck Iran's economy to force the country to negotiate a deal on its nuclear programme, ballistic missile programme and regional activities.

"These pressures are not just kinetic, just not military force, but they must be economic and diplomatic as well", Retired Lieutenant-General Kellogg, who is set to serve as Trump's special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, told the audience at Paris-based Iranian opposition group National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

He said there was an opportunity "to change Iran for the better" but that this opportunity would not last forever.

"We must exploit the weakness we now see. The hope is there, so must too be the action."

I wonder how official this is. Is Kellogg, who is supposed to be Trump's envoy for Ukraine, speaking for the future Trump administration?

The Iranian 'opposition event' in Paris was by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), also known as the terrorist organization MEK. It had fought on the side of Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war and was later involved in several high casualty terror incidents in Iran.

The MEK has a cult like structure. It is, at least in parts, financed by the U.S. and Israel. It regularly 'invites' former western officials to rant against Iran at its events while paying them generous speaking fees.

Kellogg seems to be one their regular well paid 'guests':

Kellogg has previously spoken at NCRI events, most recently in November, but his presence in Paris, even if in a personal capacity, suggests the group has the ear of the new U.S. administration. He postponed a trip to European capitals earlier this month until after Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20.
...
Incoming U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also spoken at NCRI events in the past. The group has repeatedly called for the fall of the existing Iranian authorities, although it is unclear how much support it has within Iran.

The MEK has zero support in Iran.

I doubt claims that Iran is strong. But I also doubt claims that Iran is weak. It is a big country with lots of resources and a large population of well educated people.

Kellogg, like many, seems to underestimate what Iran can do.

His sentence, 'these pressures are not just kinetic, just not military force, but they must be economic and diplomatic as well', is a bit weird. What are the kinetic pressures the U.S. is putting on Iran? I do not see any of significance and if there were any 'kinetic pressure' Iran would certainly pressure back. Its position in the Persian Gulf would make painful.

Kellogg should know this. It also notable that Kellogg has previously criticized Trump's former national security advisor John Bolton for trying to instigate a war with Iran.

Thus his rant in front of the MEK looks unserious to me. I also doubt that his speaking for the incoming Trump administration.

We don't know yet what policies with regards to Iran the incoming Trump administration will really pursue.

It is obvious that Israel's Netanyahoo wants the U.S. to launch a war against Iran. Trump is dully aware of that. Three days ago he posted a video of a talk Jeffrey Sachs had given at Cambridge Union. Within the clip Trump posted Sachs clearly states that it was Netanyahoo who had dragged and is dragging the U.S. into wars in the Middle East.

Trump posting that video was clearly a warning to Netanyahoo to play games with such stuff. I therefore doubt that Trump wants to do anything 'kinetic' to Iran.

Sanctions? - Yes! - 'Maximum pressure'? - Yes!

Well ... so what?

The Islamic Republic has been under sanctions since its very inception. They have hindered its growth but have never made it concede to whatever the U.S. demanded.

Iran is also a part of BRICS and has well developed economic relations with China and Russia. On Friday Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian will be in Moscow where he will sign a new comprehensive partnership pact with Russia which is said to also cover military aspects of the relation.

It will help Iran to become even more sanctions proved.

Posted by b on January 13, 2025 at 17:45 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/01/s ... .html#more

[blindpig]

I’m gonna MAGA you, baby

Pepe Escobar

January 14, 2025

No wonder Trump had to come up with a seductive, but still fraught with danger, larger than life psy op to imperatively change the narrative.

It’s the greatest show on earth – unleashing a double bill of New Paradigm and Manifest Destiny on crack. We are the greatest. We will rock you – in every sense. We will crush you. We will take whatever we want because we can.

And if you wanna walk away from the U.S. dollar, we will destroy you. BRICS, we’re coming to get ya.

Trump 2.0 – a mix of professional wrestling and MMA played in a giant planetary cage – is in da house starting next Monday.

Trump 2.0 aims to be on the driving seat on the global financial system; on control of the world’s oil trade and LNG supply; and on strategic media platforms. Trump 2.0 is gearing up to be an extended exercise in the capacity to hurt The Other. Any Other. Hostile takeovers – and blood on the tracks. That’s how we “negotiate”.

Under Trump 2.0, global tech infrastructure must run on U.S. software, not just on the profit front but also on the spy front. AI data chips must be American only. AI data centers must be controlled by America only.

“Free trade” and “globalization”? That’s for losers. Welcome to neo-imperial, techno-feudal mercantilism – powered by U.S. tech supremacy.

Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has named a few of the targets ahead: Greenland; Canada; assorted cartels; the Arctic; the Gulf of “America”; oil and gas; rare earth minerals. All in the name of strengthening “national security”.

A key plank: total control of the “Western Hemisphere”. Monroe Doctrine 2.0 – actually the Donroe Doctrine. America First, Last and Always.

Why the chessboard needs to be rejigged

Well, let’s delve a bit on pesky material imperatives. The Empire of Chaos faces a humongous debt, owed to usual suspect loan sharks, that may only be – partially – repaid by selected export surpluses. That would imply re-industrialization – a long, costly affair – and securing smooth military supply chains.

Where the resource base will be for this Sisyphean task? Washington simply cannot rely on Chinese exports and rare earths. The chessboard needs to be rejigged – with trade and tech unified under U.S. unilateral, monopoly control.

Plan A, so far, was to simultaneously confront Russia and China: the two top BRICS, and key vectors of Eurasia integration. China’s strategy, since the start of the millennium, has been to trade resources for infrastructure, developing Global South markets as China itself keeps developing.

Russia’s strategy has been to help nations recover their sovereignty; actually helping nations to help themselves on the sustainable development front.

Plan A against the concerted geoeconomic and geostrategic strategies of the Russia-China strategic partnership miserably failed. What has been attempted by the ghastly, exiting U.S. administration generated serial, massive blowbacks.

So it’s time for Plan B: Looting the allies. They are already dominated chihuahuas anyway. The – exploitation – show must go on. And there are plenty of chihuahuas available to be exploited.

Canada has loads of fresh water plus oil and mining wealth. The Canadian business class in fact has always dreamed of deep integration with the Empire of Chaos.

Trump 2.0 and his team have been careful not to name names. When it comes to the Arctic as a crucial, evolving battlefield, there may be a vague allusion to the Northwest Passage. But never a mention of what really matters; the Northern Sea Route – the Russian denomination; the Chinese call it the Arctic Silk Road. That’s one of the key connectivity corridors of the future.

The Northern Sea Route encompasses at least 15% of the world’s unexplored oil and 30% of the world’s unexplored natural gas. Greenland is smack in the middle of this New Great Game – capable of supplying years of uranium, as much oil as Alaska (bought from Russia in 1867), plus rare earths – not to mention providing useful real state for missile defense and offense.

Washington has been trying to grab Greenland from Denmark since 1946. There’s a deal with Copenhagen in place guaranteeing military control – mostly naval. Now Greenland is being revamped as the ideal U.S. entry point into the Arctic Great Game against Russia.

At the St. Petersburg forum last June, I had the privilege to follow an exceptional round table on the Northern Sea Route: that’s an integral part of Russia’s 21st century development project, focused on commercial navigation – “We need more icebreakers!” – and bound to surpass Suez and Gibraltar in the near future.

Slightly over 50,000 Greenland residents – which already enjoy autonomy, especially vis a vis the EU – would more than accept a full Danish exit; Copenhagen actually abandoned them since 1951. Greenlanders will love to profit from vast U.S. investments.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went straight to the point: “The first step is to listen to the Greenlanders” – comparing it to how Russia listened to the residents of Crimea, Donbass and Novorossiya vis a vis Kiev.

What Trump 2.0 actually wants from Greenland is crystal clear: total militarization; privileged access to rare earths; and commercially excluding Russia and Chinese companies.

Chinese military expert Yu Chun noted that “soon, the long-desired ‘golden waterway’ of the Arctic Ocean is expected to open, allowing ships to traverse the Pacific Ocean and sail along the northern coasts of North America and Eurasia into the Atlantic Ocean.”

As the Northern Sea Route is “a key element of Sino-Russian cooperation”, it’s inevitable that the U.S.’s “strategic vision is to prevent the establishment of a ‘golden waterway’ between China, Russia, and Europe by controlling Greenland.”

Freak out in the chihuahua front

On the wider chihuahua front, activity is frantic. Assorted Davos/ Deep State-linked elites across NATOstan – from Europe to Canada – are in the process of being replaced by new, Trump 2.0-affiliated elites.

That’s indissociably linked to the Looting the Allies strategy: the further destruction of the vassal EU economy to strengthen the heart of the Empire.

In Germany, the Afd’s Alice Weidel – pragmatic, intellectually capable – offers a quite intriguing perspective. She is stressing on the record that Germany needs to restart importing raw materials and cheap natural gas – let’s reopen Nord Stream – from Russia.

That opens the tantalizing possibility that Trump and his factotum Elon Musk fully realize that Germany is worthless to the U.S. as a de-industrialized backwater – even under the overall framework of a hardcore neoliberal asset stripping offensive. Of course Trump 2.0 will extract a hefty price for Germans to get a revitalized nation back.

Trump 2.0 at least holds the – dubious – merit of a relatively realistic reading of the chessboard; Russia, India, China – the Primakov triangle – as well as Iran have become too powerful to be looted. So the next best option is Plunder the Chihuahuas. The blowing up of Nord Stream as ordered by the Biden crime family – as detailed by Sy Hersh – was a gleaming starter.

The future of NATO in the Great America project is now up for grabs. Gotta pay up – or else: contribution of each member nation should go up to 5% of GDP instead of the current 2%.

Talk about a 150% price hike. Incidentally, Trump so far has not even muttered the nonsensical expression “Indo-Pacific”. For all practical purposes, Trump is telling NATO to take a hike.

In the event of a double NATOstan annexation of Canada and Greenland, the U.S. may be even able to match Russia’s resource base. Arguably that’s the key rationale for unleashing this New Great Game. Forget “multipolarity”. BRICS, take note.

The most intriguing side plot is, of course, Elon Musk. Trump badly needs Musk’s massive social media/propaganda digital megaphone. Simultaneously, on the chihuahua front, the platinum sidekick wants to profit from a Europe capable of assessing enough energy, raw materials and loads of consumers with solid purchasing power.

The facts on the ground already spell out the “rules-based international order” being replaced in a flash by a no-rules international disorder. After all, international law has already been abolished by the Empire of Chaos itself (that’s bipartisan) – when it comes to illegal, unilateral sanctions, theft of financial assets or legitimization of genocide and head-chopping “moderate rebels”.

Trump 2.0 will be nothing but enforcing a de facto phenomenon: a post-historical disorder. End of History – that was always for suckers.

All of this incendiary chain of events is on a roll essentially because of one single reason: the Empire of Chaos lost the proxy war in Ukraine. What remains to be discussed is the modality of the surrender. So it’s no wonder Trump had to come up with a seductive, but still fraught with danger, larger than life psy op to imperatively change the narrative.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... -you-baby/

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Verbatim.

Which also explains how desperate Trump is for his own reasons. Yes, this is all about this "meeting" with Putin.


Конечно, даже подготовка к переговорам как таковым еще не началась. «Существуют определенные контакты между Вашингтоном и Москвой и по линии военных, и по дипломатической линии, но это скорее контакты технического уровня. Политического диалога или диалога на высшем уровне как не было, так и нет», – заявил пресс-секретарь российского президента Дмитрий Песков.

Translation: Of course, even preparations for negotiations as such have not yet begun. "There are certain contacts between Washington and Moscow, both military and diplomatic, but these are more technical contacts. There has been and still is no political dialogue or dialogue at the highest level," said Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of the Russian president.

This soap opera continues on the US side unabated, which is driven by Trump's intent to deal with China. For Trump 404 is not a priority, while Russia will talk only with the US. Europe is not invited--simple as that.

http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2025/01/verbatim.html

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Trump’s HUD Secretary and Our Reverse Robin Hood Housing System
Posted on January 15, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Trump’s success in creating the appearance that he will break a lot of china means there’s a lot of alarm about high profile threatened changes, from ones that have some odds of happening (the appointment of Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary) to one that are much less probable (a purchase or annexation of Greenland, a peace deal for Ukraine with Russia). All the furor has resulted in a lot of important Trump plans getting less attention than they warrant. One, as the piece below explains, is housing policy.

Here, Trump seems likely to preserve a lot of the status quo….not surprisingly, the worst elements from an income-inequality perspective.

By Fran Quigley, who directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law. Originally published at Common Dreams

Donald Trump has nominated former Texas state representative Scott Turner as his secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the $70 billion federal agency that administers rental assistance and public housing programs, enforces fair housing laws, and provides community development grants to local communities.

Other Trump cabinet nominees, like potential Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have attracted attention for the ways they may shift the traditional priorities of the agencies they would lead. Turner has flown under the radar.

Perhaps that is because dramatic changes to HUD would need congressional approval, which was denied when Trump tried to slash the department during his first administration. Or maybe it is because, in many respects, Turner does not seem inclined to significantly alter U.S. housing policies.

That is not a good thing.

A Trump-Turner housing agenda appears destined to continue the worst aspects of our nation’s approach to affordable housing: a relentless diversion to the already-wealthy of resources supposedly designated for the housing needs of the poor.

This reverse Robin Hood approach to U.S. housing began in the 1970’s, when the Nixon administration and Congress began switching our affordable housing investment away from public housing to subsidizing for-profit landlords. Now, we fund wealthy landlords, often corporate landlords, via direct payments such as the Housing Choice Voucher program and Project-Based Section 8 program, in return for the for-profit landlords temporarily housing low-income tenants. 558F Low-Income Housing Tax Credits are designed to provide a tax shelter for wealthy investors.

This profit-soaked combination costs taxpayers six times more each year than public housing does. But public housing is far more efficient, for the simple reason that it bypasses private profits. Public housing is also hugely successful in providing high-quality, low-cost housing when there is adequate investment in maintenance and upkeep.

That is why other nations, who have far less homelessness, evictions, and housing-insecure people than we do, prioritize public housing. They divert little if any government support to for-profit landlords. And it is why U.S. for-profit landlords have been pushing for generations to block U.S. public housing from the funds it needs to ensure safety and keep up maintenance. The resulting deterioration of U.S. public housing undercuts competition for private landlords and creates a narrative justifying the delivery of housing dollars to the private sector.

A Subsidy for Gentrification

But those privatized programs are deeply flawed. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit often leads to rents higher than poor families can afford. The program known as LIHTC has been characterized by housing researchers as “a better-than-nothing gimmick that helps the poor by rewarding the rich.” Even that characterization is too generous for some legislators, who call LIHTC “legalized theft of government assets.”

Similarly, project-based Section 8 housing directs government dollars to for-profit landlords as payment for low-income tenants’ rent. But, like LIHTC, the program allows those landlords to convert their buildings to market-rate rentals after they use the government subsidies to pay off their debt on the properties. By contrast, public housing provides affordable housing in perpetuity.

There is even less lasting impact coming from the largest low-income housing program in the country, Housing Choice Vouchers. We provide a full $30 billion per year in voucher payments to landlords, often large corporate landlords, but those landlords can end their involvement at the end of each tenant’s lease, leaving the low-income renter without housing. It is another low-risk high-yield arrangement for the wealthy and raw deal for the poor: little wonder that theProject 2025 blueprint drafted by Trump supporters champions vouchers even as it slams other HUD programs.

As for likely HUD Secretary Turner, he is most associated with yet another housing giveaway to the rich. During Trump’s first administration, Turner served as executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, which focused on promoting opportunity zones, a program created by Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The program rewards the wealthy’s investment in economically distressed areas—opportunity zones—with huge tax breaks. But investigations by ProPublica and Congress show that the definition of what areas count as opportunity zones is far too broad, and the guidelines for who benefits from the investments are far too loose. As a result, money invested in expensive hotels, high-rent apartment buildings, and even luxury condominiums as a superyacht marina escapes taxation. Politically connected billionaires lobby for the land where they develop to be designated an opportunity zone, then rake in the benefits.

The Brookings Institution says opportunity zones operate as a subsidy for gentrification. “The direct tax benefits of opportunity zones will flow overwhelmingly to wealthy investors,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says. “But the tax break might not do much to help low-income communities, and it could even harm some current residents of such communities.” < So, despite the relative quiet around Scott Turner’s nomination, we know some important things about him. We know that he champions opportunity zones as an addition to the already abundant tax benefits the U.S. showers on landlords and real estate investors. And we know that he is a fierce critic of anti-poverty programs, as he has made multiple public statements about government assistance being harmful and even disastrous.

But we also know that the likely next HUD secretary is concerned about that alleged harm only when assistance is provided to the poor. The wealthy can count on Trump and Turner to keep the pipeline of government housing money wide open and flowing their way.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... ystem.html

U.S. Sanctions on China’s Oil Firms Are Just the Beginning Under Trump
Posted on January 15, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. For your delectation, yet another piece from diehard neocon Simon Watkins. If nothing else, he’s a useful of indictor of a hawkish flavor or orthodox thinking. And he sometimes has good information tidbits. This piece starts with the Biden Administration latest sanctions on Chinese military concerns, which included the key oil player China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s international oil trading arm. It continues with the notion that the Trump Administration will try to derail the burgeoning economic relationship between China and Gulf States.

Hopefully readers can filter out the noise of Watkins’ jingoism for the signal of where Trump policies on China are headed.

By Simon Watkins, a former senior FX trader and salesman, financial journalist, and best-selling author. He was Head of Forex Institutional Sales and Trading for Credit Lyonnais, and later Director of Forex at Bank of Montreal. He was then Head of Weekly Publications and Chief Writer for Business Monitor International, Head of Fuel Oil Products for Platts, and Global Managing Editor of Research for Renaissance Capital in Moscow. Originally published at OilPrice.com

Among the swathe of Chinese entities last week placed by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) on a blacklist of firms believed to be supporting Beijing’s military were several from its energy sector. Most notable of all, perhaps, were the China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s (CNOOC) international oil trading arm and the COSCO Shipping Corporation. As the DOD blacklist focuses on companies deemed a threat to U.S. national security, it should not surprise anyone that such Chinese firms are now on it.

As highlighted by OilPrice.com back in the first presidency of Donald Trump, a sea-change had already emerged in China’s political and economic organisational structure following Xi Jinping’s assumption to the role of General Secretary of the Communist Party in November 2012, and then to President in March 2013.

A key element of this was the increasingly pivotal role of the Communist Party in all main areas of economic and commercial management in the country. This aligned with Xi’s statement that: “Government, military, civilian, and academic, east, west, south, north, and centre, the [Communist] Party leads everything.” In practical terms, this meant that from that point board directors and company executives — including those in the energy sector — were under the standing instruction to ‘execute the will of the Party’.

And as China expert Jonathan Fenby exclusively told OilPrice.com at the time: “This political-economic nexus is set to bring growing divergence from the U.S. as part of the wider agenda of the ‘national strengthening’ being pursued by Xi Jinping.” He added: “Beijing is shifting from being an economic adversary to the U.S. to a geopolitical alternative and this could result in a step change in the nature of the confrontation between the two countries.”

President-elect Trump has long seen China as at minimum an ‘adversary’ rather than as a ‘competitor’ as President Joe Biden did, and this has not changed, according to senior sources in his first and current presidential team exclusively spoken to by OilPrice.com. Given the metamorphosis in the degree of interconnectivity in China’s political, economic and military elements during Xi’s rise in 2012/2013, Trump’s view appears well-founded. Even more so in one of Beijing’s national priority areas of securing its energy needs to power future economic growth. This is turn is used to expand its allied territories under the umbrella of the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI), which in turn was always eventually aimed at enabling China to establish itself as a viable superpower alternative to the U.S., as analysed in full in my latest book on the new global oil market order.

A taste of what was to come for the world’s greatest repository of oil and gas – the Middle East – came in December 2022 when former key ally of the U.S., Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, hosted a series of meetings in Riyadh between President Xi and the leaders of countries in the Arab League. This expanded upon all the key themes stated in January of that year when senior officials from the Chinese government met with foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

The basic theme was to forge a “deeper strategic cooperation in a region where U.S. dominance is showing signs of retreat” — in this instance centred on the signing of a China-GCC Free Trade Agreement. The new pact pledged cooperation in just about everything a country does, including finance and investment, innovation, science and technology, aerospace, oil, gas, and renewable energy, and language and culture.

Following the signing of these all-consuming cooperation agreements, Xi then identified two priority areas that he believed should be addressed as quickly as possible: first, transitioning to using the Chinese renminbi currency in oil and gas deals done between the Arab League countries and China; and second, bringing nuclear technology to targeted countries, beginning with Saudi Arabia.

On the first of these, China has also long been acutely aware that as the largest annual gross crude oil importer in the world since 2017 it is subject to the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy tangentially through the oil pricing mechanism of the U.S. dollar. This view of the greenback as a weapon was reinforced after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the accompanying U.S.-led sanctions that followed, the most severe of which was exclusion from use of the U.S. dollar. As the former executive vice-president of the Bank of China, Zhang Yanling, suggested in a speech in April 2022, China should help the world “get rid of the dollar hegemony sooner rather than later.”

The second of Xi’s announced priorities at that time caused equal consternation in Washington, as it followed the discovery by U.S. intelligence agencies that Saudi Arabia was manufacturing its own ballistic missiles with the help of China. Even more concerning was that the same intelligence agencies also found that China had been building a secret military facility in and around the UAE port of Khalifa.

The subsequent advance of China’s influence across the Middle East via the mechanism of the BRI and other levers had, in the zero-sum game of superpower supremacy, marginalised the influence of the U.S. and its allies in the former key cooperative states of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It had also cemented existing opposition to it in Iran, Iraq, and Oman, among others, as detailed in full in my latest book on the new global oil market order.

Crucially for Trump’s second term as president that begins on 20 January, China has yet to fully recover economically from its disastrous three years of Covid, which is constraining its ability to reach the finish line in the superpower race. As a senior source who works closely with the new presidential team exclusively told OilPrice.com recently: “China’s finances are failing [with struggling economic growth], Russia’s military has failed [in Ukraine and Syria], Iran’s proxies have been incapacitated [Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis et al], North Korea is on the sidelines, and now Trump is back.”

The White House’s 2017 ‘National Security Strategy’ document and the DOD’s 2018 ‘National Defense Strategy’ analysis both echoed Trump’s personal view that China had “for decades…expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others,” and was “undermining the international order from within the system by exploiting its benefits while simultaneously undercutting its principles and ‘rules of the road’”.

Some of Trump’s major early initiatives in his first presidential term were also aimed at curtailing China’s burgeoning global influence by going after its ability to finance them. Wide-ranging tariffs were introduced in 2018 that covered around 13% of the value of the U.S.’s Chinese imports the year before. And sanctions were imposed on China’s telecommunications giant Huawei for its alleged connection to espionage activities and for alleged violations of sanctions against Iran.

National security implications with much broader geopolitical ramifications, then, were at the centre of these actions undertaken by the U.S., just as they were with last week’s actions against CNOOC’s international oil trading arm and the COSCO Shipping Corporation. An additional element was the vulnerability of the U.S. and its allies to breaks in the supply chain from China’s side, which Washington realised could be weaponised by Beijing in times of crisis.

Consequently, it is highly likely that a quickly-scalable ladder of consequences – tariffs, sanctions, and other measures – will be used on China and its allies for perceived breaches of what Trump’s new Presidential Administration deems acceptable policies with relation to the U.S. and its own allies. This will be an integral part of a broader new initiative to “put Beijing back in its box”, as the Washington source told OilPrice.com, and neutering the threat from its ‘Axis of Upheaval’ into the bargain.

With effective control over the Senate, House of Representatives, and Supreme Court, Trump’s new government is unlikely to encounter any significant problem in imposing both tariffs and sanctions virtually at will against any country it wants. Aside from having already stated his intention of imposing tariffs on various countries, including China, Trump has also addressed Beijing’s desire to replace the U.S. dollar, stating at the beginning of December that any moves to do so by any of the ‘BRICS’ group of countries would be met with the immediate imposition of 100% tariffs on their goods and services. The BRICS group currently comprises Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, while Saudi Arabia said in January last year that it was ‘still considering’ the matter.

The promise of what will happen to any other country embarking on such a course of action is implicit in the statement, and Trump’s follow-up Tweet: “The idea that the BRICS countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... trump.html

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PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Predictable Capitulation of Tulsi Gabbard
January 15, 2025

By professing support for Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after opposing it for years, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence has just told America it’s the same old imperium after all.


Former U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard in 2022 at an event hosted by Young Americans for Liberty in Kissimmee, Florida. (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

Well, Tulsi Gabbard now says she is all for the unconstitutional law that permits the national security state to surveil Americans without obtaining legal warrants beforehand — a law Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence has previously and vigorously pledged to repeal.

As President-elect Trump’s inauguration approaches and his cabinet appointments will be confirmed or rejected in Senate hearings, Gabbard’s in-your-face betrayal of public trust ought to focus our minds very sharply and very fast. Some of these minds, I will say straightaway, have drifted far from reality since Trump began announcing his nominees. This was especially so in the case of Gabbard.

As soon as Trump proposed Gabbard as his DNI, the shared expectation in some quarters, most of whose inhabitants I respect, was that she would — singlehandedly, I gathered from the commentaries — bring the hydra-headed monster euphemistically called “the intelligence community” under some semblance of political-civilian control.

And now this: Professing support for Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after opposing it for years, Gabbard seems to have shocked a lot of people. Reading this in the large, she has just told America it’s the same old imperium after all.

Shall we join to sing “Up, Up, and Away” now that all the beautiful balloons have fallen to Earth and the world’s not a nicer place and doesn’t wear a nicer face?

Until her stunning volte-face last weekend, Gabbard had been single-mindedly steadfast in her opposition to many FISA provisions, notably but not only Section 702. A lot of people, I among them, put this among the most significant positions Gabbard, the former congresswoman, had taken on any policy question.

Warrantless Wiretapping


President George W. Bush, surrounded members of his Cabinet and of Congress, signs the FISA Amendments Act on July 10, 2008, in the Rose Garden at the White House. (U.S. National Archives, no known copyright restrictions)

FISA was passed in its original version in 1978. It was amended at various times in subsequent years, and heavily after the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Section 702 was written into the act in 2008 in response to media revelations (from whistleblower Ed Snowden) that the National Security Agency was surveilling Americans without first obtaining warrants from the FISA Court, which adjudicates corruptly and in secret.

Logically enough, in adding Section 702 to the surveillance act Congress simply made what was previously illegal legal. In a trice, what had been a breach of the Fourth Amendment was written into law — in the name of the Fourth Amendment, of course.

You had to admire Gabbard for all the noise she made about Section 702 during her years in Congress as a Democrat from Hawaii. She voted against reauthorization on several occasions. In 2020 she co-sponsored a bill with Thomas Massie, a Republican and an ardent constitutionalist from Kentucky, to repeal not only the post–Sept. 11 FISA Amendments Act, but the whole of the egregious Patriot Act.

Gabbard quoted Ben Franklin and laid into the intelligence apparatus for “not [being] transparent or honest with the American people or even Congress about what they’ve been doing.” Among much else, the bill she co-sponsored made retaliation against whistleblowers illegal and banned the National Security Agency’s use of the “back doors” the NSA was using to gain access to computers, telephones, televisions and who knew what else.

The Protect Our Civil Liberties Act did not pass, needless to say. But it was a carefully researched, serious piece of legislation.

Then, long story short, came Trump’s tap on Gabbard’s shoulder. She seemed an obvious choice for a President-elect determined to prevent the Deep State — the Central Intelligence Agency and the rest of the national security apparatus — from subverting his second term as it had his first.

It does not look now as if Gabbard will perform this service for Donald Trump even if she wins Senate confirmation when her nomination comes up for review. And at this writing her political fate remains a question.

Surprise, Surprise

The press I am reading from Washington indicates that Gabbard has little chance of winning any Democrat’s support for her nomination, so thoroughly and disgracefully has the party allied with intel since the old Russiagate days. On the Republican side, they have made it plain that Gabbard’s stance on Section 702 of the FISA laws is more or less make-or-break: insofar as she can become DNI or sent back to the wilderness.

Gabbard has been working the corridors on Capitol Hill for weeks, the Washington press corps reports. Given it was clear all along what she would have to say to win over sufficient Republican senators, her capitulation on a question she has owned these past five years cannot be taken as so sudden as it may seem. Oddly, it is a surprise and no surprise all at once.


National Security Agency headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland. (NSA, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Gabbard chose a minor web publication, Punchbowl News, to drop her bomb. Section 702 “must be safeguarded to protect our nation while ensuring the civil liberties of Americans,” she said in an exclusive interview published last Friday.

“If confirmed as DNI, I will uphold Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights while maintaining vital national security tools like Section 702 to ensure the safety and freedom of the American people.”

Jeez. John Brennan or James Clapper would not have put it much differently.

A date for Gabbard’s confirmation hearings is not yet set — a curious circumstance, it seems to me. But given how abjectly she has pressed her forehead to the Senate’s marble floor, my money is she will be named the new DNI.

Things will get very Biblical if I turn out to be right. Gabbard will have betrayed herself and a great many others, she will have her 30 pieces of silver, and then she will hang herself — this if she even glances in the direction of her previous agenda.

Anyone who could not see this coming was not looking carefully enough.

There are only three fates available for people who go to Washington with the forlorn intention of turning an imperium incapable of change in another direction:

The imperial seat either eats you alive, it sends you home, or you leave of your own volition with your principles intact. Gabbard seemed to be one of these last for a time; now she is in the first category.

I look at Trump’s proposed cabinet, a pitiful bunch, Zionists all, who will accomplish nothing interesting when the second Trump regime begins doing business, and my mind focuses on a simple question: Where is the left in all of this?

As the Gabbard surrender reminds me, there is not a single voice of any consequence that can be called anti-imperial — how anachronistic a term is this? — or speaks seriously of the kind of radical domestic transformation that is all America has time for at this late hour.

I do not mean the authentic left, I should add. The left worthy of the name succumbed long ago to suppression operations, post–Vietnam propaganda, and death by fratricide. Lately there are the subversions of the identitarian juveniles.

I mean “the left” in quotation marks, what passes for the left in the American context. Gene McCarthy, any of the Kennedys, McGovern: Not even these kinds of figures can survive in Washington now, where the only party, as the late Steve Cohen used to say, is the War Party.

People with good minds, heads on their shoulders, are marooned on the edges of their seats hoping for the best out of someone such as Tulsi Gabbard — a figure who has done some good things but who, as is now evident, has no sound political principles, no intellectual discipline, anything that is not negotiable.

Up, up, and away: At least, best outcome, we will all forget about balloons and focus our minds on what truly needs doing, at, as I say, this late hour.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/15/p ... i-gabbard/

As soon as she hopped on the Trump Train I knew she was a grifter. All Trump's nominees are, though some like Little Marco are rabid ideologues too.

NSA HQ brings to mind Herbert's original description of Harkonnen Castle.