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

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

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 04, 2025 3:48 pm

Trump: Fast and Furious
February 2, 2025

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US President Donald Trump presents an executive order during the inaugural parade. US January 20, 2025. Photo: Reuters/Carlos Barria.

By Atilio Boron – Jan 22, 2025

Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the signals he sent from the moment of his inauguration (which continued late into the night at the unexpected press conference that took place in the Oval Office) were tinged with an alarming mixture of arrogance and overconfidence. If anyone still doubts that the United States is the center of an empire, the show put on by the New York tycoon dispels all doubts. But the radical nature of his proposals and his verbiage express, better than anything else, the harsh reality that US imperialism is experiencing an inexorable decline.

This is not a subject that the hegemonic media and the parties of the ruling plutocracy usually talk about, except in hermetic conclaves when the imperial administrators cannot lie to each other. They know that the great world chessboard, to use Zbigniew Brzezinski’s graphic image, has changed and that with the illusion of eternal unipolarity that would characterize the entire 21st century—“the American Century”—vanished, what remains is the laborious construction of a damage limitation strategy to preserve something of the once uncontested hegemony in an international arena characterized by the insurgence of new players in global economy and politics.

Trump’s campaign slogan since 2016, MAGA, reveals this need for the United States to be great again, a tacit confession that, even though it is still an enormously important actor—especially in the military arena—it no longer has the omnipotence it had in the past. China, the main commercial or financial partner of almost one hundred and fifty countries, is undoubtedly the power that sets the pace of the world economy and the planet’s industrial workshop. Russia has risen from the ashes and the almost twenty thousand unilateral coercive measures taken by Washington, especially after the outbreak of war with Ukraine, have had a paradoxical effect: its economy is the fastest growing in Europe, well above Germany, France and the United Kingdom. And, even more importantly, Moscow said goodbye to Europe, producing, together with China and India, its partners in the BRICS, a significant reorientation of the world economy. The original BRICS, not counting the new countries that have recently joined, already surpass the G7 countries in terms of economic output and the projections for the next five years are even more encouraging. Trump plans to fight them with tariffs and duties, but that will only deepen inflationary pressures within the United States.

In this new terrain, where Trump has made all kinds of threats, the White House will also have to deal with the technological backwardness of its country, especially in relation to the formidable progress of China in the broad field of computing, robotics and the so-called “computer sciences,” a topic that was underlined in the memorable speech that Jimmy Carter gave at the Sunday school of the Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, in April 2021. He said that “in the 242 years of its existence, the United States has only been at peace for 16 years. Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with someone? None.” And he concluded: “we have wasted some 3 trillion dollars on military spending instead of investing it, as China did, in technological and scientific developments, and that is why they have taken the lead.”

The obsession with China had clear repercussions for Latin America and the Caribbean. The threat to take back the Panama Canal for the United States because “we gave it to Panama and not to China” reveals a lack of knowledge of the current reality and of the long negotiations that culminated in the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which guaranteed the neutrality of that waterway but also Panamanian control of the Canal. The attempt to sanction countries and ships that operate in the Peruvian mega-port of Chancay, built by the Chinese and operated by a Chinese state-owned company, Cosco Shipping, in association with a Peruvian company linked to mining, is another example of this.

China’s commercial projection in the Arctic, as well as Russia’s military one, precipitated the claim to buy Greenland, which was responded to with an undignified response, due to its groveling, by the Danish government. More serious has been the insinuation that he would designate the Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations, which according to US legislation (in violation of international law) arrogates the extraterritoriality of its jurisdiction and could give rise to an armed attack on Mexican territory. Or the desire to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and militarize the southern border, which would cause a severe economic crisis in states such as California and Texas, to name just two, and a humanitarian crisis of major proportions on both sides of the Rio Grande.

The word “invasion” used to describe the entry of migrants, and his description of them as “criminals, drug traffickers and rapists” reveal the profile of a xenophobic and racist character, as well as a misogynist, homophobic and deeply authoritarian one. He already showed this face of his character in his first term, but then he had an environment that partly moderated these aggressive impulses. Not today. Marco Rubio is a man consumed by his hatred of Cuba and its revolution, just like Mauricio Claver-Carone. His cabinet is dominated by hawks, the hucksters of the military-industrial complex, financial crooks and diehard supporters of Zionism. It was no coincidence that at the ceremony at the One Arena there was a delegation of relatives of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. On the other hand, there was absolutely no one representing the more than fifty thousand deaths caused by the genocide unleashed by the Israeli government. Finally, in his immediate circle of advisors and officials, there are thirteen billionaires, starting with Elon Musk, an admirer of the German neo-Nazi party who just yesterday saluted the crowd with a Hitler salute. There is no precedent for such a significant downgrade in the history of the US democracy.

There was a striking silence regarding Cuba and Venezuela, although it was clear that one of the first decisions he would make as soon as he was sworn in as president would be to reintroduce the largest of the Antilles to the list of countries that sponsor terrorism, an unspeakable infamy only understandable in the light of the bicentennial US aspiration to take over the island of Cuba. Regarding Venezuela, he said that the United States does not need the South American country’s oil because they, US nationals, have even more oil and are going to extract and export it. There he will have several problems because there are six states, including California and New York, where fracking is banned.



In an arrogant tone he said he is not worried about Latin America because he made the crude error of saying that “they need us, but we don’t need them,” so he expects their governments to accept whatever Washington decides without question. In short, there would be many more issues to analyze in a bombastic, foundational (“today is Liberation Day,” he said), warmongering speech, where he proudly announced that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change and also from the World Health Organization (WHO). You don’t have to be a fortune teller to predict that as soon as he has to move from words to deeds, the obstacles he will encounter in that change [of approach] will be formidable, both inside and, above all, outside the United States because, despite the conservative right and the colonized spirits that abound in Latin America, the structure of world power has changed and that transition, now complete, is irreversible.

Trump can continue to make his threats and continue with his denial of climate change while a dreadful fire destroys part of Los Angeles, which should force Trump and the techno-feudal barons who accompany him to seriously reflect on climate change. But they won’t. We must prepare for very hard times, not only in Latin America and the Caribbean; but all over the world.

(Atilio Boron Blog)

https://orinocotribune.com/trump-fast-and-furious/

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Under The Dome Simpsons

In major expansion of U.S. nuclear buildup, Trump orders construction of nationwide missile defense system
Originally published: Defend Democracy Press on January 29, 2025 by Andre Damon (more by Defend Democracy Press) | (Posted Feb 03, 2025)

On Monday, President Donald Trump ordered the construction of a new missile defense system covering the United States, the latest move in a years-long drive spanning multiple administrations to massively expand U.S. nuclear capabilities.

Speaking later on Monday, Trump said he would “immediately begin the construction of a state-of-the-art Iron Dome missile defense shield.”

Trump added,

We’re going to ensure that we have the most lethal fighting force in the world.

The executive order “directs implementation of a next-generation missile defense shield for the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missile, and other next-generation aerial attacks.”

Despite the terminology, nuclear missile defense systems are inherently offensive, not defensive in character. The purpose is to facilitate nuclear first strikes by allowing the country building the shield to carry out a nuclear attack on another nuclear-armed nation, then shoot down the nuclear missiles that are sent in response to the attack.

The announcement comes amid the stated threats by Trump—in addition to continuing the U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and escalating the military buildup against China—to seize the Panama Canal and Greenland, a territory of NATO member Denmark, through military force. Trump has also threatened to wage war against Mexico and turn Canada into an American state, transforming North America into a battlefield.

The executive order signed by Trump is titled “The Iron Dome for America,” referencing the Israeli Iron Dome missile defense system, which has enabled Israel to attack most of its neighbors—including Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Iran—over the past year, while suffering only limited damage from counterattacks.

The United States is 40 times larger than Israel, and any missile defense system covering the whole of the United States would cost, at minimum, hundreds of billions of dollars—a figure fully in keeping with the multi-trillion-dollar nuclear modernization program that has been underway for years.

Commenting on the scale of the plan, The Wall Street Journal wrote approvingly:

None of this will be cheap, and Mr. Trump will have to seek much more than the $10 billion or so a year that the U.S. now spends on missile defense. He’ll also need champions in the Pentagon and Congress to push it through a bureaucracy that would prefer to spend on other things.

The implication, as the Journal indicates, is that the allocation of resources for this military buildup will entail massive cuts to domestic social spending.

The order instructs Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to submit to the White House within 60 days a “reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield.”

It envisions a program for the “Defense of the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.”

The program would be vast in scale, deploying a new array of sensors for tracking missiles as well as the “development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors.”

Trump’s threats to use the American military to carry out his annexationist foreign policy has triggered alarms in Europe. Robert Brieger, chairman of the European Union Military Committee, the bloc’s highest military body, told the German newspaper Die Welt that the EU should deploy military forces to Greenland. “That would send a strong signal,” Brieger said.

Meanwhile, Denmark has announced the allocation of over one billion euros to expand its defenses in the Arctic region, including Greenland. “We must face the fact that there are serious challenges regarding security and defense in the Arctic and North Atlantic,” said Troels Lund Poulsen, the country’s defense minister, on Monday.

Trump’s missile defense program is only the latest move in a massive expansion of U.S. nuclear forces, initiated under the Obama administration, in what U.S. military planners call the “second nuclear age.”

Last October, the New York Times published a feature story, based on over 100 interviews, analyzing a secret plan dedicated to “making America nuclear again” through the creation of a “modern arsenal for a volatile new nuclear age.”

“If you don’t live where the submarines are welded or the missile silos are dug, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t know it’s happening,” the Times wrote.

The federal government has said little about the plan in public, outside of congressional hearings and strategy papers, or the vast amount being spent. There has been no significant debate. The billion-dollar programs move under the radar.

The plan for the “second nuclear age” transcends administrations. The semi-secret nuclear modernization plan, first conceptualized in 2010 under Obama and initiated at scale in 2014, continued and accelerated under Trump and Biden, and is to be further escalated in the second Trump administration.

Against the backdrop of Trump’s proposal to build a new missile defense system for the United States, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons, warned that the world’s risk of nuclear destruction is the greatest it has ever been.

The Bulletin wrote that “in 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe… Consequently, we now move the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to catastrophe.”

The organization warned:

The countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilization. The nuclear arms control process is collapsing, and high-level contacts among nuclear powers are totally inadequate given the danger at hand. Alarmingly, it is no longer unusual for countries without nuclear weapons to consider developing arsenals of their own—actions that would undermine longstanding nonproliferation efforts and increase the ways in which nuclear war could start.

Manpreet Sethi, PhD, speaking for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, warned that the U.S. “seems inclined to expand its nuclear arsenal and adopt a posture that reinforces the belief that ‘limited’ use of nuclear weapons can be managed. Such misplaced confidence could have us stumble into a nuclear war.”

In a detailed annual review of the US’s nuclear forces, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned that “The United States has embarked on a wide-ranging nuclear modernization program that will ultimately see every nuclear delivery system replaced with newer versions over the coming decades.”

It concluded:

Based on the Congressional Budget Office’s 2017 estimate, the effort will cost $1.2 trillion (Congressional Budget Office 2017). Notably, although the estimate accounts for inflation, other estimates forecast that the total cost will be closer to $1.7 trillion (Arms Control Association 2017). Whatever the actual price tag will be, historical trends and chronic delays to the modernization program indicate that it is likely to increase over time.

The massive buildup of the nuclear arsenal over the past decade has now been put in the hands of Trump, whose targets for nuclear coercion include not only the former Soviet Union, China and the former colonial world, but also Washington’s imperialist rivals, against whom he has threatened to use the American military.

https://mronline.org/2025/02/03/in-majo ... se-system/

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The US Mafia Boss Lashes Out At His Made Men
Roger Boyd
Feb 03, 2025

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The beginning of the end of any mafia boss is when his made men start to question his power, and when he starts to distrust and lash out against those made men. He thinks that he is disciplining those made men and keeping them in line, but he has crossed a line into insulting them and making them question his temperament and decision making. That’s when the made men start looking to make alternative arrangements, while they carefully back away from the mafia boss. One day he finds that he has a lot less made men on his side than he thought he had.

The US in its relative decline had a number of paths to take (i) retrenchment and national renewal (ii) retrenchment and controlled decline (iii) extract value from the vassals to try to renew the imperial heartland (iv) attempt to undermine the development of China and defeat Russia (v) some version of WW3.

1.The profiteering, rentier and extractive US oligarchy that is the product of five decades of neoliberalism utterly blocks a national renewal that would require them to give up so much of their power and profit. The same with a general retrenchment.

2.Retrenchment would negatively affect both the security state and the ability of the US oligarchy to profiteer and exploit across the world. It would also directly clash with the US oligarchy+courtier class view of themselves as the elite of a civilizational-supremacist project; as would a consciously controlled decline.

3.This is the path chosen by the Trump administration

4.This was the previous path chosen by the US oligarchy and it has failed spectacularly. Russia is stronger after three years of war, and has already taken over half of the vast resources of Ukraine to add to its own vast resources. It will take much more. China is overtaking the West across the technological board, and is only accelerating away with its vastly superior political-economic development model. The allied combination of Russia and China is greater than the sum of their parts. ASEAN, India etc. refuse to take sides and are happy to enjoy the growth and development that trade with Russia and China brings. Iran and North Korea find themselves more and more aligned with Russia and China.

5.With nuclear weapons wars will only ever be of a limited nature and through the use of third parties, unless an utter mad man inhabits the White House.

It is hard at the best of times to trigger a truly nationalistic response within the Canadian populace, but what I observe as Trump tariffs and insults Canada is a wave of nationalism across this nation. This wave may also very well destroy the political hopes of Canada’s Trump, Pierre Polievre, as the Liberals jettison the past-his-sell-by-date Trudeau and quite possibly select the central banker Carney. The same nationalist wave is certainly also evident within the Mexican leadership. There will be no quick rollover as with Colombia and Panama, and the relationship between the US and its two neighbouring nations is being damaged for good. And Europe stands by knowing that they are next. Trump has even attacked a UK that runs a trade deficit with the US, but facts do not seem to be a major input to Trump’s decision making nor his ridiculous public statements.

To add to the foreign picture of the US as descending into banana-republic levels of oligarchic dominance, corruption and incompetence we have the lunatic Musk and his little band of helpers causing utter chaos within the core of the US state apparatus. We may celebrate the neutering of the regime-change agent USAID, but this is just a drive-by impact of chaos within the US state apparatus. This is utter music to the ears of the Russian and Chinese leadership, as the rest of the world comes to grips with a US that has become an utterly abusive narcissist both through its policies and the actual personage of the US President. To simply appear as sane, reasonable and agreement-capable is to shine like a bright light against the darkness, corruption and sheer unpredictability of US foreign policy. With a US soft power that was already deeply undermined by the unconditional support of the Zionist genocide now being thoroughly torn asunder. Any manager of US brands abroad can only be in anguish as the US President destroys what is left of brand USA. Tesla already had a huge target on its back after the Musk Nazi Brand Suicide, and Musk’s close alignment with the new bully Trump can only further turn the Tesla brand into a negative.

The Imperial Mafia Boss is now displaying its weakness to the made men, and to the members of the other gangs who can see the internal chaos within the Westerns. The other gangs will be watching for those Westerns gang members who are looking to hedge their bets and will be welcoming to their approaches. The Decline of the West has moved into a new stage, where the imperial core starts to trigger the collapse of its empire through its own selfish and short-sighted actions. But that is all it can do when it is now fully dominated by a profiteering, rentier, short-sighted, delusional and ever-greedy oligarchy.

With his delay of the Mexican sanctions for a month in response to a purely public affairs response by Mexico, Trump has shown even greater unpredictability and weakness. His use of the “nuclear-option” of tariffs for such a small gain shows a very bad card player. Now what can he do with a Canada that is in no way a major source of fentanyl or illegal immigrants, and has been a very loyal vassal for years? And what about even his domestic credibility? Flailing around needlessly is not an effective imperial management strategy. And now Canada has offered a few extra promises and got a one month delay. What a joke.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/the-us ... out-at-his

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Why anti-imperialists and anti-war people should welcome Trump’s “FAFO diplomacy”

Finian Cunningham

February 3, 2025

Ron Ridenour, a veteran anti-imperialist activist and writer, says he is happy to see Donald Trump as the US President. But not for any positive reasons about Trump as a politician or his administration. Ridenour has contempt for the 47th president (and many of his White House predecessors.)

[youtube]https//youtu.be/1pF20HrH6FM[/youtube]

Trump’s bullying foreign policy could be coined as FAFO diplomacy: “F..ck around and find out”.

Ridenour, the author of the book The Russian Peace Threat, believes that Trump is “good” in that he is exposing the charade of American claims about democracy and “protecting its allies” of the so-called “free world.”

Trump is so reckless and unhinged he is exploding the myths about Western allies and supposed Western values of democracy and respect for international law.

The claims about US and Western virtues are so absurd. In the eight decades since the Second World War, the United States and its allies have waged more wars than any other nation – and yet they dare to call Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and so on, “threats” to global security.

Ridenour refers to the latest debacle (among many) of Trump demanding the acquisition of Greenland territory under the control of the United States. His threat to take the Arctic island by force, if necessary, from has-been European colonial power Denmark is throwing the whole transatlantic alliance between the US and Europe into utter uproar and chaos.

In so doing, Trump is, unbeknownst to himself, accelerating the downfall of the US-led Western order, says Ridenour. That order was always about the imperialist dominance of a minority of privileged nations over the majority. Out of that dominance were born endless wars, conflicts, degradation, and poverty.

Trump is no different in terms of being another arrogant imperialist president who thinks the United States has an exceptional right to dominate. But what makes him different is the unvarnished and bombastic style that blows away the charade of the “benevolent” US power and its Western allies.

Kicking ass as Trump is doing is raw imperialist thuggery which is showing up the reality of US foreign policy and its supposed Western allies as nothing more than pathetic lackeys.

Trump is unintentionally but very effectively showing the real nature of US brute power and also showing the craven nature of European governments as abject lackeys that are servile to US power rather than representing the democratic needs of their people.

Sooner or later, American and European working people must realize the illegitimacy of their rulers and the rotten, war-driven system of capitalist exploitation – and hence fight to organize better societies and a better world of peace, justice, and genuine development.

Ridenour maintains that the new multipolar order promised by the BRICS nations of the Global South (the world’s majority) led by Russia and China, and others is offering a historic challenge to the corrupt Western order.

According to Ridenour, the new US president is the first one in a long while who is brutally undiplomatic about American power and how it relates to the rest of the world. That brutal reality makes the Western order and NATO untenable and unsustainable. That is why veteran anti-imperialist campaigner Ron Ridenour is cheering Trump on to do his worst. Out of chaos and disaster may arise a new politics of resistance to make a better world.

The first order of business is to clear away the lies and false pretenses of Western democracy and virtue. Trump is such a wrecking ball, he is hastening the process. There may be a lot of disturbance, hardships and pain ahead, but at least out of the chaos unleashed by Trump something good may arise if people know what is at stake and what they have to fight for.

Trump bombastically declares he is Making America Great Again. More like it, he is hastening a revolution without even realizing it, one where billionaire oligarchs like him are eventually taken down.

That’s if Trump is not taken out by the US Deep State, who may view him as too reckless and an unbearable threat to the American empire and its hegemonic global racket.

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

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2.2 billion gallons of water flowed out of California reservoirs because of Trump’s order to open dams
By Ella Nilsen, CNN
Published 6:50 PM EST, Mon February 3, 2025

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Lake Kaweah, a reservoir formed by the Terminus Dam, in Lemon Cove, California, in 2022 during a period of drought and low water levels. Bing Guan/Bloomberg/Getty Images
CNN

The US Army Corps of Engineers opened two dams on Friday in Central California and let roughly 2.2 billion gallons of water flow out of reservoirs, after President Donald Trump ordered the release with the misguided intent to send water to fire-ravaged Southern California.

Trump celebrated the move in posts to Truth Social post on Friday and Sunday, declaring, “the water is flowing in California,” and adding the water was “heading to farmers throughout the State, and to Los Angeles.”

There are two major problems, water experts said: The newly released water will not flow to Los Angeles, and it is being wasted by being released during the wet winter season.

“They were holding extra water in those reservoirs because of the risk that it would be a dry summer,” said Heather Cooley, director of research for California water policy organization the Pacific Institute. “This puts agriculture at risk of insufficient water during the summer months.”

On Friday, Trump posted that 1.6 billion gallons was being released adding that “in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons.”

About 2.2 billion gallons were released from Friday to Sunday, local water districts said in a statement released Monday. That water was discharged into the dry lakebed of Tulare Lake, according to a letter from Sen. Alex Padilla to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

“Downstream entities used these releases for limited irrigation demand and groundwater recharge,” the statement said.

CHICO, CALIFORNIA - JULY 30: The Park Fire burns through the night on July 30, 2024 near Chico, California. The Park Fire is now the fifth largest wildfire in California history, growing to 385,064 acres with 14 precent contained. The fire was started by arson on July 24 and grew to more than 70,000 acres in the first 24 hours. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
Related article
Why do arsonists set fires? The reasons are sometimes dark and surprising

“This release is extremely concerning,” Cooley said. “It’s providing zero benefit and putting California farmers at risk of water supply constraints in the coming months.”

California Department of Water Resources director Karla Nemeth told reporters that there was little coordination between federal officials and the state and local water managers for the Army Corps releases at the Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success.

“These reservoirs were federal reservoirs, and the state of California was not part of the decision making in this instance,” Nemeth said. “We traditionally have a high degree of coordination at the operational level, which really wasn’t a part of this decision.”

California’s State Water project supplies water from Northern California to Southern California, including to Los Angeles. Los Angeles’ water supply comes partly from state reservoirs and partly from the Colorado River.

But Los Angeles’ water sources are completely separated from the water system that Lake Kaweah and Lake Success supply. That water system flows into the agriculture-heavy Central Valley — where large farms grow nuts, citrus and grasses for animal feed, among other crops. The water-stressed region is heavily reliant on groundwater and winter precipitation stored in state reservoirs to irrigate crops.

The US Army Corps of Engineers and the White House did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

https://us.cnn.com/2025/02/03/climate/t ... index.html

The arrogance of ignorance on full display. Most ignorant people are so through no fault of their own but Donny chose to squander the opportunities available to him cunningly banking on the reality that the mega-rich largely make their own reality and can always hire an answer when their 'gut feelings' and 'common sense' fail to.

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In Related News ...

... water is wet, the fire is hot, and Trump Admin has no clue what is going on. Neither does Pentagon and CIA.

Feb 3 (Reuters) - U.S. shipments of weapons into Ukraine were briefly paused in recent days before resuming over the weekend as the Trump administration debated its policy towards Kyiv, according to four people briefed on the matter. Shipments restarted after the White House pulled back on its initial assessment to stop all aid to Ukraine, two of the sources said. There are factions inside the administration that are at odds over the extent to which the U.S. should continue to aid Kyiv's war effort with weapons from U.S. stocks, said one of the people, a U.S. official.

How many times--it is all about the US trying to prove itself which it never was and could never be--a serious continental warfare power. I will repeat (again)--the Army which venerates Patton as a serious military leader--it is long overdue for studying real warfare.

http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2025/02 ... -news.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 05, 2025 3:48 pm

Protest movement grows against Trump’s ICE raids

Mass protests have been held in cities across the United States against the Trump administration’s mass deportation drive

February 03, 2025 by Peoples Dispatch

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Protest against ICE raids in Atlanta, Georgia. Photo: PSL Atlanta

True to his promise, weeks into Trump’s second administration, the Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) has increased raids against immigrant communities across the United States. While Trump has framed his mass deportation efforts as a way to deport “criminal aliens”, i.e. undocumented people accused or convicted of criminal offenses, reports show that many who have been arrested by federal immigration officials are not accused of any crime.

The raids which have resulted in around 800-1,000 daily arrests have been met with strong backlash from people across the country who accuse the Trump administration of criminalizing migrants and violating their fundamental rights.

ICE’s claims do not match up with reality
To support its claims, ICE has been sharing the “results” of its massive operation on social media platforms, claiming that ICE agents have deported “The Worst First” including people accused of being members of gangs like Tren de Aragua and MS-13, or accused of criminal offenses such as firearm possession, drug possession, homicide, and sexual abuse.

However, these cases in no way account for the majority of the 800–1,000 daily arrests that ICE has been making in the last week. For example, according to an NBC News report which looked into ICE statistics from Sunday, January 26, ICE made 1,179 arrests that day, which is significantly over the agency’s official number of 956 arrests. However, according to NBC News, only around 613 of the total arrests were considered “criminal arrests”. The remaining 566 people arrested on that day by ICE, around 47%, were only detained due to their undocumented status, according to the report. All of those detained are held in ICE detention facilities and could be deported at a later date.

Immigration authorities themselves have stated that it is possible that immigrants not accused of any crimes, but with varying forms of immigration status, could be swept up in ICE’s mass arrest and deportation efforts, called “collateral arrests”.

Notably, having undocumented status is a civil offense, not a criminal one. However, it is considered a crime in the US for an undocumented immigrant who was previously deported to re-enter the US without documentation for a second time. ICE reports on their operations over the past week indicate that many of those detained were “guilty” of re-entering the US without documentation.

Raids continue and stoke fear in communities
High-profile ICE raids continue throughout the country and have included targeted house visits and workplace raids. Raids which in some cases may only be targeting one individual, often involve multiple agents not only from ICE, but also other federal and sometimes local law enforcement agencies.

In the case of a workplace raid on a car wash in Philadelphia, ICE agents had reportedly visited a neighboring car dealership several times in the previous weeks asking probing questions and on the day of the raid, ordered it to close while the raid was carried out, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. On January 28, over a dozen ICE agents descended on the car wash and detained seven immigrant workers, including 46-year-old Oscar Guerrero who had been living in the US since 1998. His 21-year-old son who was born in the US, also works at the car wash and witnessed his father being taken away in handcuffs.

The prospect of ICE raids has caused significant fear among immigrant communities. Some public schools in Denver with a large number of students from migrant families have reported a decline in attendance in the past week.

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security recently announced that areas previously considered “sensitive” and off-limits to immigration raids, namely schools, churches, and hospitals, are now fair game for enforcement. “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” said a DHS spokesperson. “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”

Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, who had previously served a similar role under former president Barack Obama for which he was given the “Presidential Rank Award”, argued in favor of immigration authorities accessing formerly “sensitive” sites for enforcement. “It’s not like we’re walking in and arresting everybody in the building, so the institution shouldn’t be afraid. The criminal alien should be afraid,” Homan said.

Homan has expressed wishes that immigrants would self-deport, or leave the country out of fear of being detained by ICE. “It’d be wiser for people that are in the country illegally to simply go home and come back the right way. Absolutely,” Homan said.

Immigration is not a crime!
As Trump’s administration escalates ICE raids, the movement to defend immigrant communities has grown. In the past few days, mass mobilizations against the draconian immigration measures have sprung up around the country, cities in border states such as California, Arizona, Texas, and cities with large immigrant populations such as Atlanta, Georgia, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Seattle, Washington.

HAPPENING NOW: Thousands shut down Downtown Los Angeles for Día Sin Inmigrantes!

Today marks day 2 of massive demonstrations in LA against Trump and ICE. pic.twitter.com/JAisby1uLa

— Party for Socialism and Liberation (@pslnational) February 3, 2025


In Pflugerville, Texas, a rally took place on February 1 outside of a building that is reported to be an unmarked ICE facility. Demonstrators held signs reading “shame on you ICE” and “ICE is not welcome here.” In Los Angeles, California, ten thousand people marched against mass deportations, shutting down freeway traffic.

TODAY: Thousands filled the streets in Dallas, protesting the mass deportations by ICE. pic.twitter.com/9P5STSiGve

— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) February 3, 2025


“We’re out here to show that the people aren’t scared,” said Estevan Hernandez, an organizer in Atlanta with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which helped organize a demonstration of thousands in Dekalb Country, Georgia on Saturday against Trump’s mass deportation policies. “We’re going to stand up, build this movement, and fight back.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/02/03/ ... ice-raids/

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Tankus and Kelton on Musk’s DOGE Seizing Treasury’s Payments Chokepoint. But Where Are The Lawyers?
Posted on February 3, 2025 by Lambert Strether
By Lambert Strehter of Corrente.

“Stupid? Shit, no, he was smart as hell.” The Finn stubbed his cigarette out in a cracked ceramic Campari ashtray. “Just a total fuck-up, was all.” –William Gibson, Count Zero

Readers will be familiar with friend-of-the-blog Nathan Tankus and non-mainstream economist extraordinaire Stephanie Kelton from the MMT wars. If you’re not, you should be (Tankus’s blog; Kelton’s). Both have now entered the fray over DOGE (Elon’s Dangerous Oligarchs Grab Everything “Department of Government Efficiency” (quotes in the executive order that gave it horrid birth, since it’s not really a department).

Both Tankus and Kelton have advanced the story in way that our mainstream press seems unable to do; I will look at Tankus first, then Kelton. I will then undertake the thankless task of ascertaining DOGE’s current status; it’s now a “temporary organization,” a piece of organizational jujitsu, which renders most, but not all, of the current lawsuits against DOGE moot. I will then present a brief fact set drawn from the current more-heat-than-light DOGE dogpiles — the Lutherans, USAID — before presenting a little blue sky thinking on future legal and political attacks on DOGE (given that lawfare what Democrats seem to be best at). If I am lucky, some readers will find the blue sky thinking helpful, as with HICPAC. Finally, I will not be covering Elon’s rampage through Twitter’s innards, suggestive though it may be for the course of DOGE, or the corruption of Silicon Valley’s “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” culture, or Elon’s extremely young team of Peter Thiel-adjacent blood bags programmers. Perhaps another time! (Adding, this might get a bit long. Sorry!)

Tankus: Elon Musk Wants to Get Operational Control of the Treasury’s Payment System. This Could Not Possibly Be More Dangerous

Setting the scene:

It’s now not just the “legal plumbing,” it’s the payments plumbing too. This is now also the closest thing we’ve ever had to a payment system constitutional crisis.

So what happened? According to reporting on Friday — first at the Washington Post and then in more detail from CNN as well as the New York Times — the Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury David Lebryk[1] has been put on paid administrative leave and plans to resign after refusing to give Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) access to the operational details of the Treasury’s payment system and the data it processes. In particular, Musk’s DOGE team has been asking for what the New York Times reporting refers to as “source code information” since December and has been rebuffed. The CNN reporting specifically states that they were inquiring about the technical ability to stop payments.

David Lebryk has been an employee at the United States Treasury since 1989 and has been Fiscal Assistant Treasury Secretary since 2014, which is the highest position a civil service employee can reach; everyone above him is a political appointee. Donald Trump named Lebryk acting Treasury Secretary while his nominee Scott Bessent went through the nominations process….

Lebryk being put on paid administrative leave reportedly happened after he requested and got a meeting with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, fresh from his confirmation by the Senate. Bessent’s full willingness to cooperate with DOGE’s desire to access the operational aspects of the Treasury’s payment system, even to the point of overruling Lebryk, is an extremely shocking development. It implies a level of willingness to serve Trump’s interests that has not previously been understood by Congress, Wall Street, or corporate America at-large.

However, this is consistent with internal conversations among those in the president’s orbit. I can exclusively report here for the first time that Scott Bessent was advised that what Donald Trump wanted in a Treasury Secretary was a person who would have the credibility Steve Mnuchin had with Wall Street but who would be loyal to Trump above all other considerations, according to two sources familiar with the situation. This included, but was not limited to, unconditionally agreeing to work with whomever Trump sent over to the Treasury Department and helping go after Donald Trump’s enemies. In the context of Bessent’s actions this week, and what Elon Musk and DOGE want from the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, these commitments take on a dark new meaning.

The danger is also not in the near future, it is here. Follow up reporting from the New York Times Saturday evening in an article straightforwardly informed readers in its headline that ‘Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Full Access to Treasury’s Payments System.’…. For reasons I will go into below, I do believe that it is the case that Musk and his team are not yet near having ‘operational capabilities.’ The key word is ‘yet.’


Operationally, in short form, agencies approve payments; the Bureau of the Fiscal Service cuts the checks. This architecture leads to the the key point:

Without political control of the payment’s heart, the Trump administration and Elon Musk must chase down every agency and bend it to their will. They are in the process of doing that, but bureaucrats can notionally continue to respect the law and resist their efforts. They are helped in this effort by court injunctions they can point to. This is bureaucratic trench warfare. But if Musk and Trump can reach into the choke point, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, they could possibly not need agency cooperation. They can just impound agency payments themselves. They could also possibly stop paying federal employees they have forced on paid administrative leave, coercing them to resign. These possibilities are what every Treasury expert I’ve talked to instantly thought of the moment they read the Washington Post reporting and are incredibly alarmed about.

There’s much, much more to the Tankus post (the word “COBOL” appears frequently going forward), and I urge you to read it in full, but seeing the Bureau of the Fiscal Service as the chokepoint Elon and his tech bros which to seize is the key point politically and instruc

Kelton: Will the Ratings Agencies React to the Breakdown in Governance?

Setting the scene:

Under the Constitution, once Congress appropriates funding for various programs—be it Social Security, Medicaid, the Inflation Reduction Act, or Meals on Wheels—it is up to the executive branch (the U.S. Treasury and the White House) to faithfully execute the law. As I wrote for Newsweek last week, no one—not Elon Musk or President Trump—has the legal authority to delay or cancel appropriations once they have been enacted into law. Any default would violate the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

But that clearly doesn’t matter to President Trump and his team, who have already demonstrated a willingness to ignore the law. As evidence, look no further than the the administration’s attempt to claim sweeping powers to impound spending via executive order just last last week.


The key point:

So what happens if DOGE gains operational control and decides to start picking and choosing which government commitments to honor?… Alarm bells should be ringing from on high, and I can’t help but wonder whether the ratings agencies—Fitch, Moody’s, and Standard and Poor’s—are going to weigh in.1 The last time there was this much chaos and uncertainty (after the January 6 insurrection and debt ceiling shenanigans), Fitch downgraded its rating on US government debt from AAA to AA+, highlighting concerns about a ‘steady deterioration in [America’s] standards of governance.’ It’s hard to see how they can look through this moment….[E]ven if the Treasury continues to pay interest and principal to bondholders without interruption, seizing control of the payment system and arbitrarily defaulting on other commitments would surely demonstrate a further ‘deterioration in the standards of governance.’ It’s time to acknowledge the unprecedented breach of protocol, the brazen disregard for the rule of law, and the elevated risk of default. NOTE I’m not suggesting that a downgrade would cause investors to sour on US Treasuries and force the administration to back down. It’s more about acknowledging the breakdown in governance and the elevated risk of voluntary defaults across the spectrum of government obligations.

Kelton’s article, too, is worth reading in full.

DOGE is a “Temporary Organization”

Last year — whoopsie, sorry, 22 days ago — I wrote that “The Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) Lacks Legal Structure and Promised Transparency“; back then, a Federal advisory committee seemed the best fit for what DOGE was, or at least how it was acting, which meant it was subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). A week later, President Trump’s Executive Order “THE PRESIDENT’S “DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY”” (quotes in the original (it’s not a department)) came out:

Sec. 3. DOGE Structure. (a) Reorganization and Renaming of the United States Digital Service. The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President.

(b) Establishment of a Temporary Organization. There shall be a USDS Administrator established in the Executive Office of the President who shall report to the White House Chief of Staff. There is further established within USDS, in accordance with section 3161 of title 5, United States Code, a temporary organization known as “the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization”. The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall be headed by the USDS Administrator and shall be dedicated to advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda. The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization shall terminate on July 4, 2026.


Writes Wired:

A former USDS employee who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity called the repurposing of the Digital Service an “A+ bureaucratic jiu-jitsu move.”

And so it is. First, DOGE not a federal executive department, so it doesn’t need Congressional approval. Second, a temporary organization has a lot fewer of those pesky regulatory requirements than an advisory committee does. Lexology lists a lot of attack surfaces that lawyers, jailhouse and otherwise, can cross off their lists:

The structure evades lots of oversight…. For example:

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): FOIA applies to federal agencies as defined in 5 U.S.C. § 551, which excludes the Executive Office of the President and its components. Since DOGE operates within the Executive Office, it is generally not subject to FOIA.

Administrative Procedure Act (APA): The APA governs federal agencies’ rulemaking and adjudication processes. Entities within the Executive Office of the President that solely advise and assist the President are exempt from the APA. DOGE’s advisory role likely places it outside the scope of the APA.

Open Meetings Requirements: The Sunshine Act mandates open meetings for federal agencies headed by a collegial body. Since DOGE is led by an administrator rather than a multimember body, this act does not apply.

Federal Register Publications: Agencies must publish certain information in the Federal Register. However, components of the Executive Office of the President that solely advise and assist the President are typically exempt from these requirements. DOGE is not obligated to publish its findings or recommendations in the Federal Register.

Annual Federal Appropriations: DOGE’s activities depend on funding through annual appropriations. The implementation of its initiatives is subject to the availability of appropriated funds, as stated in the executive order.

Other Legal Limitations: DOGE must operate within the bounds of existing laws and regulations. The executive order specifies that its provisions should not impair or affect the authority granted by law to executive departments or agencies, nor the functions of the Office of Management and Budget. Implementation is subject to the availability of appropriations and applicable law.


(Attack surfaces remain, and we’ll go into some of them below.)

Status of Current DOGE Cases

From Just Security’s litigation tracker, these are the DOGE cases:

1.Public Citizen Inc et al v. Donald J. Trump and Office of Management and Budget (D.D.C.)
2.Jerald Lentini, Joshua Erlich, and National Security Counselors v. Department of Government Efficiency, Office of Management and Budget, Office of Personnel Management, Executive Office of the President, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Russell Vought, Scott Kupor, and Donald Trump (D.D.C.)
3.American Public Health Association et al v. Office of Management and Budget, Acting Director of the Office of
4.Management and Budget, and the Department of Government Efficiency (D.D.C.)


The first three are FACA cases and the fourth is FOIA. Neither FACA nor FOIA apply to temporary organizations in the executive department.[2]

Sidebar: Fact Set

Despite all the hue and cry, DOGE’s case for enormous amounts of fraud that can only be rooted out via handing them control over the nation’s 1.27-billion-yearly-payment facility is strikingly weak (not least because the Treasury has existing anti-fraud facilties for the agencies to use[3]). For now, relax and enjoy the stupid, but I will use these cases below to present possible attack surfaces.

Terrorists. Elon writes:

Image

Does Elon think we are little children of six? How could we be funding Al Qaeda and the Taliban if we didn’t cut them checks? (More seriously, Tankus describes the architecture; the agencies vet the payees. Seemingly, Elon doesn’t know this; at best, he’s got his future, political goal confused with how payments work now.)

The Lutherans:


General Mike Flynn
@GenFlynn
·
Follow
Now it’s the “Lutheran” faith (this use of “religion” as a money laundering operation must end):

Lutheran Family Services and affiliated organizations receive massive amounts of taxpayer dollars, and the numbers speak for themselves. These funds, total BILLIONS of American

Image

We’ll leave the question of how the Lutherans stuff all that cash into their hot dishes for another day; suffice to say that a spreadsheet is no evidence at all of fraud; the numbers “speak for themselves” only to the extremely credulous. Here let me note some extremely coverage, from Bloomberg of all places:

“The corruption and waste is being rooted out in real-time,” Musk posted on X, saying officials reporting to his so-called Department of Government Efficiency are “rapidly shutting down” payments to a Lutheran charity.

DOGE is a “temporary organization.” How do genuine government “officials” report to it? As for “rapidly shutting down,” I guess we’ll have to see[4].

USAID. This is quite a volatile situation. From Yahoo News:

Staffers of the U.S. Agency for International Development were instructed to stay out of the agency’s Washington headquarters, and yellow police tape and officers blocked the agency’s lobby on Monday, after billionaire Elon Musk announced President Donald Trump had agreed with him to shut the agency.

USAID staffers also said more than 600 additional employees had reported being locked out of the agency’s computer systems overnight. Those still in the system received emails saying that “at the direction of Agency leadership” the headquarters building “will be closed to Agency personnel on Monday, Feb. 3.” The agency’s website vanished Saturday without explanation.


On the coverage, note the lack of agency in “instructed by.” Note the weird agency in “Elon Musk announced President Donald Trump….” The cops block the lobby because Elon said something? Really? Meanwhile, the Democrats bestir themselves:

Image
Members of Congress attempt to enter USAID

Yes, the Democrats rush to defend the cover story-generating portion of the intelligence community’s premier color revolutions fomenter. Hilarity ensues. That said, USAID is an agency established by Congress; Elon can’t just abolish it.

Possible DOGE Attack Surfaces

Enforce “Access”: Previously reputable Treasury Secretary Bessent seems not to have sold his entire soul:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has signed off on a plan to give access to the payment system to a team led by Tom Krause, the CEO of Cloud Software Group, who is now working for the Treasury Department and serves as a liaison to Musk’s DOGE group that operates out of the United States Digital Service. One person familiar with the effort said Krause’s role will be subject to safeguards that would not allow any ability to make changes to the system and that no one outside Treasury would have access.

“The secretary’s approval was contingent on it being essentially a read-only operation,”[5] the person said.


Fine, but anybody who takes Elon’s word on this, or the word of any of his minions, should go talk to the SEC. Ron Wyden’s sternly worded letter to Bessent was in fact quite weak:

Please describe what information security measures and other operational security steps will be taken to ensure that providing officials associated with Elon Musk or DOGE such access does not result in hackers and foreign spies breaching or otherwise gaining access to the Fiscal Service’s payment systems

First, he gave Bessent a week to respond. Why not a day? Second, the issue [lambert pounds head on desk] isn’t Chinese spies and hackers; it’s DOGE itself.

The Democrats should find somebody who actually wants to govern, and make sure that Treasury data is not changed. Maybe some clever lawyer could craft an injunction.

Privacy Violations. From Privacy Act of 1974, as amended, 5 U.S.C. § 552a:

(b) CONDITIONS OF DISCLOSURE.—No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains, unless disclosure of the record would be—

(1) to those officers and employees of the agency which maintains the record who have a need for the record in the performance of their duties; (2) required under section 552 of this title;

(3) for a routine use as defined in subsection (a)(7) of this section and described under subsection (e)(4)(D) of this section;

(4) to the Bureau of the Census for purposes of planning or carrying out a census or survey or related activity pursuant to the provisions of title 13;

(5) to a recipient who has provided the agency with advance adequate written assurance that the record will be used solely as a statistical research or reporting record, and the record is to be transferred in a form that is not individually identifiable;

(6) to the National Archives and Records Administration as a record which has sufficient historical or other value to warrant its continued preservation by the United States Government, or for evaluation by the Archivist of the United States or the designee of the Archivist to determine whether the record has such value;

(7) to another agency or to an instrumentality of any governmental jurisdiction within or under the control of the United States for a civil or criminal law enforcement activity if the activity is authorized by law, and if the head of the agency or instrumentality has made a written request to the agency which maintains the record specifying the particular portion desired and the law enforcement activity for which the record is sought;

(8) to a person pursuant to a showing of compelling circumstances affecting the health or safety of an individual if upon such disclosure notification is transmitted to the last known address of such individual;

(9) to either House of Congress, or, to the extent of matter within its jurisdiction, any committee or subcommittee thereof, any joint committee of Congress or subcommittee of any such joint committee;

(10) to the Comptroller General, or any of his authorized representatives, in the course of the performance of the duties of the Government Accountability Office;

(11) pursuant to the order of a court of competent jurisdiction; or

(12) to a consumer reporting agency in accordance with section 3711(e) of title 31.


IANAL, but if Flynn’s Lutheran spreadsheet data is Fiscal Service data, both he and the DOGE goon who supplied it broke the law, because none of those exemptions cover the case. Perhaps some clever lawyer could write another injunction.

Security Violations. Trump’s executive order establishing DOGE reads:

USDS shall adhere to rigorous data protection standards.

What does that even mean? Surely there’s some sort of standard here? Does “rigorous,” for example, mean the same baseline as Fiscal Services? Lower? Higher? I assume lower, because otherwise why not just say “the same as Fiscal Services”? Perhaps some aggressive Democrat could find out.

Impersonating Federal Officer

I think this is an edge case, but I keep hearing about full-time Federal employees being fired or interfered with in the performance of their duties by DOGE goons, when DOGE is a temporary organization. That seems odd in itself, but if the goon is a volunteer — as many DOGE types have been said to be — I’d be even more surprised if they can do that.

Elon’s Role, and His Conflicts

First, I’m having a hard time fitting Elon into the temporary organization org chart. What exactly is Elon’s role? Is he, for example, a one-man advisory committee, and hence subject to FACA? Some clever lawyer should find out.

Second, when asked if the US Budget should go “on the blockchain,” Elon answered “yes.” I have it on good authority that this a really bad idea, but Elon’s putative software expertise aside, that makes him massively conflicted, since his blockchain holdings would go soar if this stupid idea is legimated by the State MR SUBLIMINAL Oh, libertarians. How could you… I suppose that one could categorize that outcome as “honest graft,” were that not such a new experience for Silicon Valley. Obviously a political question, and maybe some social media-savvy Democrat could go on the Twitter — why aren’t they doing that already? — and have it out with Elon. “Do you view your bitcoin holdings as honest graft, and if not, why not?” Could be fun!

Conclusion

“Th-th-that’s all, folks!” I wonder what tomorrow will bring!

NOTES

[1] Of Lebryk, Tankus writes: “Lebryk, who first joined the Treasury Department in 1989 and slowly worked his way up until he was its highest ranking non-political appointee, is clearly the person on earth who understands this IT apparatus the best. Having known his equivalents on far smaller and less important scales in other legacy IT systems, I can tell you that there are certainly things about this IT system that he knows and no one else does.” That’s an institutional problem, since it means Lebryk shouldn’t be going up in small planes or, for that matter, crossing the street. And speculating freely, this makes me wonder if Lebryk knows any back doors. Musical interlude.

[2] Of these cases, Brookings says “Soon after Trump assumed office, numerous lawsuits were filed aiming to shut down the DOGE initiative for violations of transparency rules related to governmental advisory entities. These lawsuits target the broader DOGE initiative rather than the specific executive order issued on January 20th, 2025.” I think that tranlstes to “these cases are moot” (assuming that the Trump administration has avoided being really sloppy, and moved all its efforts under the temporary organization).

[3] Is it possible the Silicon Valley tech bros running DOGE — itself named after a scamming coin — are projecting?

[4] I do understand that NGOs are Republican targets (and frankly they’d be doing the Democrat Party a favor by taking them down, since they’re a key element in keeping a genuine left divided and powerless). However, the numbers do not speak for themselves.

[5] CRUD is an acronym for CREATE, READ, UPDATE, and DELETE, the four basic operations of persistent storage as for the Fiscal Services data (though I don’t know the COBOL terms). I understand “access” to mean READ, meaning that changing Fiscal Services Data, via CREATE, READ, or UPDATE, is not possible. I do not, however, know the meaning of “access” in law.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... wyers.html

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Come on, Donald, it’s just a game! A comment on Trump’s attack to BRICS

Lorenzo Maria Pacini

February 4, 2025

Donald Trump takes the path of trade war by attacking the BRICS currency, but the rules of the international game are no longer those dictated by the United States.

Donald Trump takes the path of trade war by attacking the BRICS currency, but the rules of the international game are no longer those dictated by the United States.

The rules of the game have changed

There is no doubt about it: a flying start. Of what he promised on the campaign trail, the Potus has so far delivered only on what he had arranged to sit comfortably in the White House: cleanup among the intelligence leadership, repositioning of strategic figures to run Congress and the Supreme Court so that he does not have too many obstacles to govern, a few of his trusted cronies to handle foreign policy in hostility to Iran and China, a few former business cronies to administer the failures of industry and real estate. Everything else, however, is disregarded day after day.

It was to be expected – and indeed it is curious that so many were caught up in the psychedelic furor when there was already enough information concluded to see how it would go – because Trump is a businessman, he knows well how to build success, namely by eliminating from his path all opponents and enemies, one by one. A true American cowboy.

That’s how he immediately got back on his high horse with Russia, intimating strange unilateral solutions for Ukraine – and proving once again that this is a conflict wanted and managed by the United States – only to realize that the winner’s train no longer runs on the rails of the Mississippi, but on the Silk Road and the Trans-Siberian Railway.

He well thought it was also the case to provoke China over Taiwan-as he promised from the beginning of the election campaign-and ended up with the embarrassment of China’s new People’s AI, DeepSeek, pulled out like a rabbit out of a hat right at the end of the Washington show, something that stunned everyone, especially President Musk’s entourage, er, no, Trump, who had invested for years in the trusted Pretoria collaborator hoping to win the tech battle, and instead found himself, once again, with a surprise move by the other players.

But you see, dear Donald, it’s only a game! Be a little more sporting.

Instead, no. Trump has decided in one fell swoop to attack all the BRICS. Not just China, just Iran, just Russia, no, all the BRICS. Convenience package. Total war, after all, is always on sale. He did so with a post on X, employing rhetoric that is almost laughable: “The idea that the BRICS countries are trying to move away from the dollar, while we stand by, has survived. We will ask these seemingly hostile countries to pledge not to create a new BRICS currency and not to support any other currency that replaces the powerful U.S. dollar, otherwise they will face 100 percent tariffs and will have to say goodbye to sales in the wonderful U.S. economy They can go find another stinking nation. There is no way the BRICS will replace the U.S. dollar in international trade, or anywhere else, and any Pars who try to do so would have to say goodbye to America!”

The passive-aggressive style of Trumpian deterrence hints at the realization that things are no longer as they were in 2017. America is no longer the Hegemon that can decide the fate of humanity. This Trump is realizing. The do-gooder solicitation toward adversaries and enemies is just yet another confirmation of a fact that is now self-evident.

The trade war cannot wait

It is clear that Trump’s move is by no means accidental. At the beginning of this, his second term, with ambitions to make America great again as it once was, he must confront the great trade gap that has been created. He has reiterated threats to Canada and Mexico, with tariffs at 25 percent as a deterrent to uncontrolled immigration, drugs, medicines and subsidies provided.

The BRICS might perceive Trump’s move as direct pressure and a threat to their economic sovereignty: this can only accelerate the de-dollarization process, introducing retaliatory tariffs against U.S. products so as to hit farmers and industrialists. At that point, Trump would respond with tariff increases. All of this would hurt the U.S. economy. The rest of the world has already proven that it can cope, that it can circumvent sanctions and that it can even technologically outpace the primacy of the dollar.

Such a situation is not at all desirable for Wall Street, which suffers from fluctuating markets. Instability resulting from the reduction in the capitalization of large companies, particularly those linked to China, and the objective difficulty in meeting consumer needs for domestic demand would lead the U.S. to a worsening of the low-profile civil war that has been going on for years.

Even in the face of a BRICS currency slowdown, however, the reformatting of the global market will not stop.

However, one should not make the mistake of looking at the finger when the moon is behind it. What BRICS has already done is much more than a single currency: they have changed the global market.

Washington is throwing a tantrum because it has fallen behind, but it won’t do much good. In a sense, the deterrence wielded overbearingly for years is coming back. This process was predictable-at least geopolitically and economically-because the structures on which American liberalism is based are like bombs on a timer, ready to explode in the system’s decline phase.

The words issued by Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peshkov, regarding Trump’s statements arouse some suspicion: “At this point we should remember the words of our president, which are much more important and significant for us. The fact is that BRICS is not talking about creating a common currency and has never done so. BRICS is talking about creating new joint investment platforms that will enable joint investments in third countries,” a position that also fits with the line taken by India.

Whether indeed the BRICS Pay project has been passed or put on hold, we will find out shortly. We know for sure that the Brazilian presidency will not follow the same pace as the Russian one, posing quite a few obstacles to the continuation of the work begun in 2024. The balance with U.S. soft power in South America will be crucial.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... -to-brics/
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Trump Wants US to Take Over & Ethnically Cleanse Gaza
February 4, 2025

The president stunningly said Gaza should become a U.S. territory, and be turned into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” minus 1.8 million Palestinians. Hamas will have something to say about that, reports Joe Lauria.

Image
Netanyahu and Trump at the White House on Tuesday. (White House/YouTube)

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

U.S. President Donald Trump has said that the United States should become party to a major crime against humanity by expelling 1.8 million people from their land in the Gaza Strip as it becomes a territory of the United States.

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday at a press conference with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We’ll own it and be responsible” for the territory, Trump said, which would be turned into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump did not explain under what legal authority the Israeli occupied territory of Gaza could become the territory of the United States. It is not legally Israel’s territory to give away to anyone, but international law has rarely impeded Israel, or the United States.

Trump failed to mention that Hamas, which still controls Gaza, would have to be defeated first, something Israel has failed to do.

Trump said the U.S. would “level the site, get rid of the destroyed buildings, create an economic development and supply an unlimited number of jobs and housing for the people of the area.”

Trump did not define who the “people of the area” are going be who get new housing in a rebuilt Gaza, but said people from all over the world would live there. In the meantime he said he expected as many as 1.8 million Palestinians to be removed permanently. “I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza,” Trump said in the Oval Office next to a beaming Netanyahu.

“They live like they’re living in hell,” he said. “Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative.”

Hamas’ Answer

Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, indeed offered an alternative: “What is needed is the end of the occupation and the aggression against our people, not expelling them from their land,” he said in a statement.

Abu Zuhri called Trump’s shocking proposal “a recipe for creating chaos and tension in the region. Our people in Gaza will not allow for these plans to come to pass.”

Any authority trying to force the population out of Gaza would have to contend with the still armed and trained militias of Hamas and other militant groups. The U.S. would almost certainly have to go to war with Hamas in order to make Gaza a U.S. territory.

It does not seem Trump and his people have fully thought out the implications of U.S. ground troops trying to defeat Hamas to take over Gaza, when Israel has failed to do that in 15 months of unrestrained attacks.

Asked by a reporter whether the U.S. would send troops to Gaza to “secure the security vacuum,” rather than the real task, to takeover the territory, Trump said, “We’ll do what’s necessary, if it’s necessary we’ll do that. We are going to take over that piece, and we’re going to develop it.”

Netanyahu told the press conference that he’s committed to militarily defeating Hamas, so one can be certain the ceasefire will not last.

Israel’s real aim in the war is doing exactly what Trump is proposing, removing the Palestinian population from Gaza. For Netanyahu’s and members of his radical cabinet who have expressed genocidal intent, this is the chance they have been waiting for, to fulfill Israeli Founding Father David Ben Gurion’s promise of an ethnically cleansed Gaza (and West Bank) to create Greater Israel.

“I think it is something that could change history,” Netanyahu said of Trump’s proposed takeover of Gaza, “and it is worthwhile really pursuing this avenue.”

West Bank Coming



Asked by an Israeli reporter if he supported “Israeli sovereignty” over “Samaria, which many believe is the Biblical homeland of the Jewish,” otherwise known as the West Bank, Trump said, “Well, we are discussing that with many of your representatives … who do like that idea, but we haven’t take a position on it yet. We will be making an announcement on that specific topic over the next four weeks.”

If the U.S. runs Gaza for Israel, the West Bank would be the final piece of controlling all of historic Palestine — from the river to the sea.

Despite their already firm rejection, Trump said in the end Jordan and Egypt will not refuse to take in the Palestinians. “They won’t say no to me,” Trump said.

Something ‘Spectacular’

Without naming them, he said other countries have come forward to take in the population. Trump also said wealthy nations in the region, an obvious reference to the Gulf monarchies, could pay for the new “location.” In reaction, Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry put out a statement at 4 am local time calling for a Palestinian state.

“It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn’t want to return [to Gaza],” he said, trying to couch his proposal as great humanitarianism on his part. He called for something “spectacular” for the “wonderful” Palestinian people, something the “entire Middle East” would be proud of — proud of ethnic cleansing.

“If we can get a beautiful area to resettle people permanently, with nice homes and where they can be happy and not be shot at, not be killed, not be knifed to death … I would think that they would be thrilled,” he said. “I see a long-term [U.S.] ownership position.”

Trump left no doubt that this would be the permanent, forced relocation of 1.8 million people in clear violation of international humanitarian law.

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention “prohibits the forced transfer of protected people out of or into occupied territory” and customary international law considers involuntary population transfers to be illegal.

Dayan’s Prediction

Image
Israeli army in Gaza in 1956. (National Library of Israel/Wikimedia Commons)

Palestinians living in Gaza are descendants of an earlier crime of ethnic cleansing at the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

In what can be seen as a prediction of the Oct. 7, 2003 Hamas breakout and attack on Israel, Moshe Dayan, one of Israel’s other Founding Fathers, predicted in 1956:

“What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. … We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house. . . . Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.”

It is unlikely Dayan could have foreseen a U.S. president who wanted to finish Israel’s job for them.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/04/t ... anse-gaza/

******

Trump Commits to Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza
Posted on February 5, 2025 by Yves Smith

Trump is delivering and then some on his commitment to be a better friend to Israel than even the Biden Administration was, which is a tall order. Recall that Blinken came to be regularly described as Netanyahu’s lawyer.

Many thought that Trump was simply throwing bouquets at Israel when he repeated the Blinken demand, that had been firmly, even fiercely, rejected by Egypt and, Jordan, that it enable Israel’s ethnic cleansing and accept what were then over 2 million Gazans. After Trump’s recent statement, the Arab League also voiced opposition. Forcibly displacing Palestinians into Jordan and Egypt would destabilize both governments and experts have said it would probably lead to their fall.

When challenged that both countries had already said no, Trump insisted the displacement would proceed. And he is going ahead. From Larry Johnson:

Trump announced tonight he wants to take over Gaza:

The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous, unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. Do a real job, do something different. Just can’t go back. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for 100 years.

Trump also insisted that the Palestinians will be relocated to a third country (unspecified) and will not have a right to return. This was scripted. You can see Trump is reading from a note card. Trump claims he has talked this over with Arab leaders in the region and that they are in favor of the deal. That is a lie.

Powerful Arab nations rejected President Trump’s suggestion to relocate Palestiniansfrom Gaza to neighboring Egypt and Jordan.

Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League released a joint statement rejecting any plans to move Palestinians out of their territories in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.


Johnson, who had earlier thought the Trump talk of evicting the Gazans was bluster, now believes that Trump has gotten Netanyahu to agree to not further attacks on Iran as he tries to work out a bargain. Putting US forces in Gaza might also be intended to force Netanyahu to continue the ceasefire. But as Johnson stressed, “Any hope that Trump will help the Palestinians was dashed today.”

Some other hot takes:


Brian Krassenstein

@krassenstein
·
Follow
BREAKING: During his meeting with Netanyahu, Trump just said he wants to remove 1.7 MILLION Palestinians from GAZA and send them to Egypt, Jordan, or other countries.

This is ethnic cleansing. No wonder he just pulled the U.S. from the UN Human Rights Council. This is a crime…


Chris Murphy 🟧

@ChrisMurphyCT
·
Follow
I have news for you - we aren’t taking over Gaza.

But the media and the chattering class will focus on it for a few days and Trump will have succeeded in distracting everyone from the real story - the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.
8:00 PM · Feb 4, 2025


Dan Cohen
@dancohen3000
·
Follow
Trump can fantasize about taking over Gaza all he wants. The Palestinian resistance will ensure that his plans fail, just like they did to Israel, no matter the cost. Gaza may be destroyed, but the resistance’s confidence is at an all time high. After the last 15 months, only a


I would not be optimistic that this pronouncement is Canada/Mexico tariffs 2.0. The Israel lobby will expect Trump to deliver.



I am taking the liberty of posting a new Alon Mizrahi post in full, given that he states that his aim is to get his message out to as many people around the world as quickly as possible. As you can see, he believes that time is of the essence if there is to be any hope of saving the Palestinians.

Frederick Douglass would concur with Mizrahi on the importance of a concrete demand, here, that governments sever all ties with Israel:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

For those new to Mizrahi, please see his About page. Consider taking a gander though his posts. For instance, this one, Pilot Cult: The White Supremacy Behind Israel’s Ill-Fated Iran Strategy, delivered on its provocative headline.

By Alon Mizrahi, a publicist, thinker, and Israeli in exile. Originally published at his Substack

Resist *now*: this is how YOU disrupt and prevent the final catastrophe of the Palestinian people


Hey everybody, as Trump takes office and this new phase of the Palestinian genocide is beginning, we need to start thinking what we’re doing wrong. Why we’re not achieving any strategic goal or advancing anywhere as a movement of people who are for humanity and for Palestine. And in this video, I’m gonna talk about what we’re doing wrong and how to write it, how to make it better. So I really want as many people as possible to watch this and understand and internalize this. So please, this one, share it with as many friends relatives, people who are part of this movement and want the Palestinian people to survive this. This is the key.

We want the Palestinians to survive Trump and Netanyahu. And if we don’t act now in a strategic, sustained manner, we may fail and we can’t afford to fail. We can’t afford to fail. This is critical. What I’m going to talk about is critical. So listen carefully and share it with everyone who is involved in this struggle.

What we lack, what the pro-Palestinian movement lacks is a clear demand. This is the first thing we are lacking. There is no demand being made by any part of this big group of people. No clear demand. Second thing is coordination. There is no coordination. Protests and groups do their thing in their own way
local small places, but they are not coordinated. So it cannot become a bigger struggle, bigger movement. I’m not going to talk about the coordination today. I am going to talk about the demand. But this goes directly to the heart of what we’re doing and what we want to achieve. So offline, we are disconnected. scattered and disconnected.

I’m not gonna get into it now, but this is enough for this video. Online, we are scattered and disconnected in our attention. We are being distracted by bits and pieces of information and innuendo. We are focusing and dedicating time and energy To two things, especially with Trump, refuting what Trump says and rebuking what Trump says.

And this may give short-term satisfaction, but strategically it’s a waste of time and energy because it gets us nowhere. It accomplishes nothing. Don’t waste time and energy on rebuking and refuting Trump. He said this about Mexico, but this is not right. He said this about Canada, but let us tell you what the truth really is.

All of this is a waste of time. This is liberal opposition. We need to be radical. We need to be radical now. to be political and to give life to our agenda, to your agenda. We need to do two things. One is focus our messaging on what our opponent is doing and not what they’re saying.

And we need to focus our efforts at disrupting our opponent’s agenda. not chasing whatever he says any moment. He has Twitter and all his people have Twitter and they can say any stupid, ridiculous thing any minute. This is not what we should be focusing our attention on. We should be doing something else entirely.

We should be focusing on what he’s doing and how we disrupt it. It should be crystal clear by now that Trump intends to allow Israel to carry out a once and for all solution to the Palestinian problem. We know this, and this is what we should be focused on globally, all of us.

Our mission is to interrupt and disrupt this, make it impossible for them to do it. How do we do that? How do we do that? So here is my task for each and every one of us, any one of you, wherever you’re watching this. Whether you’re from Singapore or anywhere, if you’re in Cairo, if you’re in Melbourne,
if you’re in Paris, we all have the same task, which I’m defining right now. What we need to do, what you need to do, any group of activists, anywhere, everywhere, is demanding This is the demand. Listen carefully. We need to demand our government, your government, wherever you are,
to commit unequivocally and publicly to cutting all ties with the state of Israel if Israel pursues the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Do you get this? This is our demand that we should be making.

Everywhere. Everywhere. We should go. You should go. This is your main goal now. This is your main goal now. Believe me.

Go to your representative. And if you’re a journalist, make this, address this question, this demand at your representatives and at your government. And demand that they commit in a very clear and unequivocal way to sever all ties with the state of Israel, if Israel pursues, follows, tries to accomplish the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This is a demand.

This is a demand. All ties, meaning academic, diplomatic, economic. All ties. All ties. And this is the demand we should be making and we should be making it now. We should be making it now. We should be making this demand of our governments. All governments. All governments in all countries, wherever you are.
This is what you should be demanding now. This is what you should be demanding now. This is disrupting Trump and Netanyahu now. Now, before the Holocaust, before the ethnic cleansing. And making this demand is your right as a citizen and a person. This is your right.

Don’t waste your time on making jokes on Twitter about how stupid and deranged Trump is. We know he’s stupid and deranged. We know what you should be doing. Your job is to not allow them to accomplish their plans. This is your job. This is your responsibility. This is your task. This is what you should be focusing.

Now, now, don’t wait a single day. We haven’t a single day to spare in this struggle. Netanyahu is in Washington now. They are making their plans now. Next week, they are going to start carrying them out. And this is for all countries. If you’re Chinese, ask your government this. if you’re Russian, if you’re Egyptian, if you’re Spanish, if you’re Australian, if you’re Dutch, wherever you are, whatever your identity, you need to address your government this, thus, this way, like this. Are you going to sever all ties with the state of Israel if it is trying to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people?

Simple, this is my demand as a citizen, as a human being, as a person. Make it clear that this is your demand. Make it clear that this is your demand. Forget about Trump’s tweets and idiocy. This is his tactic of keeping you off balance and forever not on point, not political.

This should be a unifying, unified, single strategy for the near-time future. We need to make the whole world aware of Israel’s and the US’s plan to ethnically cleanse and potentially kill the Palestinian people. We are seeing what’s going on in the West Bank. This is not only Gaza. We need to make this
understanding, stance, demand, clear everywhere on this planet. And we have the power to do it. We have internet connection. We have press conferences. We can do it. We can make this present. We can talk about it and we can make this demand and it will become part of the political landscape. We have to force them

We have to force the political landscape to have this point. And we have to do it now. We have to do it right this minute. Right this minute. This is the critical, urgent mission that all of us have.

Demand your government to take actual steps. Demand it. Don’t ask it. Don’t ask for it. Demand it. Demand your government or your state if you’re in the U.S. It is your right as an American citizen not to be part of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Don’t listen to what anyone says. This is your right as a human being.

So demand it from your state. Demand it from California. Sever all ties with the state of Israel if it tries to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Demand it from Yom municipality. Demand it from Madrid and Rome and Istanbul. Make a demand. Make it now.

Silence is complicity.

And not making a demand and not being politically alive and aware and active now is being directly involved and supportive of the Palestinian genocide. So make this demand and make it now. Thank you.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... -gaza.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 06, 2025 4:20 pm

With his pronouncements concerning Gaza on top of everything else I'm starting to wonder if Trump's mental faculties are on a par with Genocide Joe.

Trump’s Proposal to Expel Gazans is Incomprehensible: Lula Da Silva

Image
U.S. President Donald Trump, Feb. 5, 2025. X/ @NayaBharatNewsX

February 5, 2025 Hour: 8:58 am

Self-determination is a fundamental principle and must be protected by all States, UN Commissioner Türk said.
On Wednesday, Brazilian President Lula da Silva called U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to displace Palestinians from the Gaza Strip “incomprehensible.”

“It makes no sense for the president of the United States to meet with the prime minister of Israel and say that they are going to recover and occupy Gaza… and where are the Palestinians going? Where are they going to live?” said the Brazilian leader.

Lula questioned whether the United States, with its position of “incentivizing” Israel, is the most appropriate country to “take care of Gaza” and maintained that it is the Palestinians who should do so, after Trump stated that his country “will take control” of the territory.

The Brazilian president pointed to the need to send aid to repair “everything that was destroyed” during the Israeli Army offensive and allow the population of Gaza to “live with dignity.” Lula insisted that what the inhabitants of the Strip suffered during a conflict, in which over 40,000 Palestinians have died, amounts to “genocide.”

Gaza pertence ao povo palestino, não a Trump! O presidente Lula foi claro ao condenar a proposta absurda do ex-presidente dos EUA de assumir o controle do território, ignorando o direito à autodeterminação da Palestina. + pic.twitter.com/XqaQV5RXIm

— Jandira Feghali 🇧🇷🚩 (@jandira_feghali) February 5, 2025


The text reads: “Gaza belongs to the Palestinian people, not to Trump!” President Lula was clear in condemning the absurd proposal of the former US president to take control of the territory, ignoring Palestine’s right to self-determination.”
On Wednesday, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk also responded to President Trump’s proposal to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to other countries by recalling that “any deportation or forced transfer of people from an occupied territory is strictly prohibited.”

“International law is very clear, self-determination is a fundamental principle and must be protected by all States, as the International Court of Justice has recently underlined,” Türk said.

“The suffering of the people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and in Israel has been unbearable, we must enter a new phase to ensure peace and security for Palestinians and Israelis on the basis of dignity and equality,” he added and insisted on continuing with the successive phases of the current ceasefire, in order to free all hostages and prisoners arbitrarily detained, “and end the war to rebuild Gaza with full respect for international humanitarian law and human rights.”

https://www.telesurenglish.net/trumps-p ... -da-silva/

*****

The Mass Deportation Handoff, Biden to Trump
Posted on February 5, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This post by border Todd Miller corrects widespread misperceptions about what he calls the deportation industrial complex. The militarization of the southern border, including its infamous wall, goes back to the Bush era. Biden increased spending on deportation infrastructure by more than 50% compared to the level in the first Trump term; Miller called Biden “the king of border contracts.” Biden also refused to remove concertina wire installed by Trump, ignoring the requests of the mayor of Nogales.

Towards the close of the piece, Miller turns to a seldom-mentioned driver of emigration to the US: climate change. Many farmers and fishermen are not longer able to eke out a living due to water shortages and scorching temperatures.

So even though Trump’s enthusiasm for harsh treatment of illegal immigrants verges on blood lust, it’s not as if substantively Biden or Obama were all that much nicer.

By Todd Miller. Originally published at TomDispatch

It didn’t take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to Donald Trump’s reelection. On November 6th, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement,” explained the GEO Group’s executive chair, George Zoley, “and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” In other words, the “largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history” was going to be a moneymaker.

As it happens, that Bloomberg piece was a rarity, offering a glimpse of immigration enforcement that doesn’t normally get the attention it deserves by focusing on the border-industrial complex. The article’s tone, however, suggested that there will be a sharp break between the border policies of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Its essential assumption: that Biden adored open borders, while Trump, the demagogue, is on his way to executing a profitable clampdown on them.

In a recent article, “The Progressive Case against Immigration,” journalist Lee Fang caricatured just such a spectrum, ranging from people with “Refugees Welcome” yard signs to staunch supporters of mass deportation. He argued that Democrats should embrace border enforcement and “make a case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking.” This, he suggested, would allow the party to “reconnect with its blue-collar roots.” Fang’s was one of many post-election articles making similar points — namely, that the Democrats’ stance on free movement across the border cost them the election.

But what if the Biden administration, instead of opposing mass deportation, had proactively helped construct its very infrastructure? What if, in reality, there weren’t two distinctly opposed and bickering visions of border security, but two allied versions of it? What if we started paying attention to the budgets where the money is spent on the border-industrial complex, which tell quite a different story than the one we’ve come to expect?

In fact, during President Biden’s four years in office, he gave 40 contracts worth more than $2 billion to the same GEO Group (and its associated companies) whose stocks spiked with Trump’s election. Under those contracts, the company was to maintain and expand the U.S. immigrant detention system, while providing ankle bracelets for monitoring people on house arrest.

And that, in fact, offers but a glimpse of Biden’s tenure as — yes! — the biggest contractor (so far) for border and immigration enforcement in U.S. history. During his four years in office, Biden’s administration issued and administered 21,713 border enforcement contracts, worth $32.3 billion, far more than any previous president, including his predecessor Donald Trump, who had spent a mere — and that, of course, is a joke — $20.9 billion from 2017 to 2020 on the same issue.

In other words, Biden left office as the king of border contracts, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, since he received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from top border-industry companies during the 2020 election campaign. And in addition to such contributions, the companies of that complex wield power by lobbying for ever bigger border budgets, while maintaining perennial public/private revolving doors.

In other words, Joe Biden helped build up Trump’s border-and-deportation arsenal. His administration’s top contract, worth $1.2 billion, went to Deployed Resources, a company based in Rome, New York. It’s constructing processing and detention centers in the borderlands from California to Texas. Those included “soft-sided facilities,” or tent detention camps, where unauthorized foreigners might be incarcerated when Trump conducts his promised roundups.

The second company on the list, with a more than $800 million contract (issued under Trump in 2018, but maintained in the Biden years), was Classic Air Charter, an outfit that facilitates deportation flights for the human-rights-violating ICE Air. Now that Trump has declared a national emergency on the border and has called for military deployment to establish, as he puts it, “operational control of the border,” his people will discover that there are already many tools in his proverbial enforcement box. Far from a stark cutoff and change, the present power transition will undoubtedly prove to be more of a handoff — and to put that in context, just note that such a bipartisan relay race at the border has been going on for decades.

The Bipartisan Border Consensus

In early 2024, I was waiting in a car at the DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona, when a white, nondescript bus pulled up in the lane next to me. We were at the beginning of the fourth year of Biden’s presidency. Even though he had come into office promising more humane border policies, the enforcement apparatus hadn’t changed much, if at all. On either side of that port of entry were rust-colored, 20-foot-high border walls made of bollards and draped with coiling razor wire, which stretched to the horizon in both directions, about 700 miles in total along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In Nogales, the wall itself was a distinctly bipartisan effort, built during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Here, Trump’s legacy was adding concertina wire that, in 2021, the city’s mayor pleaded with Biden to take down (to no avail).

There were also sturdy surveillance posts along the border, courtesy of a contract with military monolith General Dynamics. In them, cameras stared over the border wall into Mexico like dozens of voyeurs. Border Patrol agents in green-striped trucks were also stationed at various points along the wall, constantly eyeing Mexico. And mind you, this represented just the first layer of a surveillance infrastructure that extended up to 100 miles into the U.S. interior and included yet more towers with sophisticated camera systems (like the 50 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona constructed by the Israeli company Elbit Systems), underground motion sensors, immigration checkpoints with license-plate readers, and sometimes even facial recognition cameras. And don’t forget the regular inspection overflights by drones, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft.

The command-and-control centers, which follow the feeds of that digital, virtual, expansive border wall in a room full of monitors, gave the appropriate Hollywood war-movie feel to the scene, one that makes the Trump “invasion” rhetoric seem almost real.

From my idling car, I watched several disheveled families get off that bus. Clearly disoriented, they lined up in front of a large steel gate with thick bars, where two blue-uniformed Mexican officials waited. The children looked especially scared. A young one — maybe three years old — jumped into her mother’s arms and hugged her tightly. The scene was emotional. Just because I happened to be there at that moment, I witnessed one of many deportations that would happen that day. Those families were among the more than four million deported and expelled during the Biden years, a mass expulsion that has largely gone undiscussed.

About a year later, on January 20th, Donald Trump stood in the U.S. Capitol building giving his inaugural speech and assuring that crowded room full of officials, politicians, and billionaires that he had a “mandate” and that “America’s decline” was over. He received a standing ovation for saying that he would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” adding, “All illegal entry will be halted. And we’ll begin the process of sending millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” He would, he insisted, “repel the disastrous invasion of our country.”

Implied, as in 2016 when he declared that he was going to build a border wall that already existed, was that Trump would take charge of a supposedly “open border” and finally deal with it. Of course, he gave no credence to the massive border infrastructure he was inheriting.

Back in Nogales, a year earlier, I watched Mexican officials open up that heavy gate and formally finish the deportation process on those families. I was already surrounded by decades of infrastructure, part of more than $400 billion of investment since 1994, when border deterrence began under the Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper. Those 30 years had seen the most massive expansion of the border and immigration apparatus the United States had ever experienced.

The border budget, $1.5 billion in 1994 under the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has risen incrementally every year since then. It was turbocharged after 9/11 by the creation of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), whose combined budget in 2024 exceeded $30 billion for the first time. Not only were the Biden administration’s contracts larger than those of its predecessors, but its budget power grew, too. The 2024 budget was more than $5 billion higher than the 2020 budget, the last year of Trump’s first term in office. Since 2008, ICE and CBP have issued 118,457 contracts, or about 14 a day.

As I watched that family somberly walk back into Mexico, the child still in her mother’s embrace, it was yet another reminder of just how farcical the open-borders narrative has been. In reality, Donald Trump is inheriting the most fortified border in American history, increasingly run by private corporations, and he’s about to use all the power at his disposal to make it more so.

“Is He Going to Be Like Obama?”

Fisherman Gerardo Delgado’s blue boat is rocking as we talk on a drying-up, possibly dying lake in central Chihuahua, Mexico. He shows me his meager catch that day in a single orange, plastic container. He shelled out far more money for gas than those fish would ever earn him at the market.

“You’re losing money?” I ask.

“Every day,” he replies.

It wasn’t always like this. He points to his community, El Toro, that’s now on a hill overlooking the lake — except that hill wasn’t supposed to be there. Once upon a time, El Toro had been right on the lakeshore. Now, the lake has receded so much that the shore is remarkably far away.

Two years earlier, Delgado told me, his town ran out of water and his sisters, experiencing the beginning of what was about to be a full-on catastrophe, left for the United States. Now, more than half of the families in El Toro have departed as well.

Another fisherman, Alonso Montañes tells me they are witnessing an “ecocide.” As we travel along the lake, you can see how far the water has receded. It hasn’t rained for months, not even during the summer rainy season. And no rain is forecast again until July or August, if at all.

On shore, the farmers are in crisis and I realize I’m in the middle of a climate disaster, a moment in which — for me — climate change went from the abstract and futuristic to something raw, real, and now. There hasn’t been a mega-drought of this intensity for decades. While I’m there, the sun continues to burn, scorchingly, and it’s far hotter than it should be in December.

The lake is also a reservoir from which farmers would normally receive irrigation water. I asked every farmer I met what he or she was going to do. Their responses, though different, were tinged with fear. Many were clearly considering migrating north.

“But what about Trump?” asked a farmer named Miguel under the drying up pecan trees in the orchard where he worked. At the inauguration, Trump said, “As commander and chief I have no other choice but to protect our country from threats and invasions, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. We are going to do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

What came to mind when I saw that inauguration was a 2003 Pentagon climate assessment in which the authors claimed that the United States would have to build “defensive fortresses” to stop “unwanted, starving migrants” from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. The Pentagon begins planning for future battlefields 25 years in advance and its assessments now invariably include the worst scenarios for climate change (even if Donald Trump doesn’t admit that the phenomenon exists). One non-Pentagon assessment states that the lack of water in places like Chihuahua in northern Mexico is a potential “threat multiplier.” The threat to the United States, however, is not the drought but what people will do because of it.

“Is he going to be like Obama?” Miguel asked about Trump. Indeed, Barack Obama was president when Miguel was in the United States, working in agriculture in northern New Mexico. Though he wasn’t deported, he remembers living in fear of a ramping-up deportation machine under the 44th president. As I listened to Miguel talk about the drought and the border, that 2003 Pentagon assessment seemed far less hyperbolic and far more like a prophecy.

Now, according to forecasts for the homeland and border-control markets, climate change is a factor spurring the industry’s rapid growth. After all, future projections for people on the move, thanks to an increasingly overheating planet, are quite astronomical and the homeland security market, whoever may be president, is now poised to reach nearly $1 trillion by the 2030s.

It’s now an open secret that Trump’s invasion and deportation spiels, as well as his plans to move thousands of U.S. military personnel to the border, have not only proved popular with his large constituency but also with private prison companies like GEO Group and others building the present and future nightmarish infrastructure for a world of deportation. They have proven no less popular with the Democrats themselves.

Copyright 2025 Todd Miller

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... trump.html

Does Trump’s Attempted “Dismantling” of Spook-Infested, Regime Change Agency USAID Herald a New Foreign Policy Era?
Posted on February 5, 2025 by Conor Gallagher

Many are celebrating how the Trump administration sent the “Department of Government Efficiency” grim reaper after the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Some believe it is a blow to US meddling and regime change efforts that frequently lead to instability and conflict across the globe. Others are doing a happy dance because they say USAID was wasteful spending on a whole range of items, including liberal-DEI projects around the world.

Could they both end up being disappointed? As Lambert pointed out in his Monday post, “USAID is an agency established by Congress; Elon can’t just abolish it.” And it looks like the Trump team doesn’t intend to abolish it but rather rehouse and rebrand it.

Let’s first take a look at what’s going on with USAID before turning to any potential larger implications for US foreign policy.

President John F. Kennedy created USAID using an executive order in 1961, and Congress passed the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, codifying USAID as an independent agency. According to Politico, it has more than 9,000 people on staff serving in more than 100 countries, and “the secretary [of state] technically has authority over USAID’s funding, and the two institutions are lumped together in congressional appropriations. But generally, USAID operates without much micro-managing from the State Department…”

In defense of USAID many point to the funds that USAID provides for global programs like vaccination efforts, but we also know that even those are sometimes used as cover for other clandestine activities, such as the CIA effort to track down Osama bin Laden using USAID and Save the Children hepatitis B vaccination campaign in Pakistan. The blowback from the CIA involvement set back vaccination efforts across Pakistan and West Asia and likely led to polio outbreaks across the region. Lee Fang also details how the agency provides backdoor ways for the American government to finance propaganda against American citizens.

The fact is we don’t how often the CIA is using USAID programs to further whatever schemes it has cooked up, but it is clear that whatever USAID’s original intentions and whatever good work it might do in the world, it is also a vehicle for the empire to control, subvert, and orchestrate color revolutions against foreign governments. Here’s a quick breakdown on USAID’s recent role in spreading US influence (and chaos and death) in Eastern Europe:

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is has an annual budget of over $27 billion. Its stated mission is to “provide economic, development, and humanitarian assistance worldwide.” However, in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states, USAID’s activities… pic.twitter.com/yJF1SD0mtA

— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) February 3, 2025


The agency has therefore helped contribute to countless deaths from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to Latin America and Southeast Asia. I think we can conclude that USAID, while it may offer some worthwhile programs that actually help people, is also a front for the intelligence community’s destabilization efforts which are a scourge on the planet, and it would be the world’s gain to see it dismantled.

Naturally, the Democrats are opposed. They finally roused themselves after Musk said President Trump had agreed to shut USAID down. We haven’t heard a peep about the assault on the National Labor Relations Board, but Democrats are choosing the USAID hill to fight on:


Senator @ChrisMurphyCT‘s arguments against cuts to USAID:
– USAID “supports freedom fighters everywhere in this world”
– “USAID chases China around the world”
– “USAID fights terrorist groups all across this world” pic.twitter.com/JusT1vn2uP

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) February 3, 2025



Will they be able to find the time to defend USAID while also staying on their other messages like war with Iran:


House Dem leader Hakeem Jeffries:

“Sinwar is gone. Sinwar is gone. And Hamas is on the run… and Iran is at one of its weakest points in decades.

“We can’t take our foot off the gas pedal until Iran is brought to its knees — for the good of the world.“ pic.twitter.com/MvvfwQrn2u

— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) February 2, 2025



And defending the “good” billionaires:

Democratic Party’s newly elected Chair, Ken Martin: “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”pic.twitter.com/oNdCet0NNB

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) February 1, 2025



While some legal experts saying an act of Congress is needed to “dismantle” USAID because it was codified as an independent agency by the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, dismantling USAID isn’t exactly what the Trump administration is doing. From Politico:

Two incoming Trump administration officials familiar with the matter said the president’s team is exploring subsuming the agency into the State Department…One current and one former USAID official said the agency is deliberating on whether to fully transfer its financial management system for all its awards, known as the Phoenix program, under the State Department to better streamline the two agencies’ parallel work on foreign aid…

“This idea has been floated by nearly every administration since USAID was established by Congress in 1998,” said Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I’m supportive of efforts to reform and restructure the agency in a way that better serves U.S. national security interests and will look for ways to do just that.”

That’s neocon Risch who’s fond of the “Russia is a gas station masquerading as country” line and whose donors include Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman, so good to know he and his benefactors are on board.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday that he is acting administrator of the USAID, which might signify that the State Department is going to be taking a more hands-on approach to the agency. Rubio added in a letter to lawmakers that he is delegating authority to Pete Marocco, a Trump appointee who served at USAID in the president’s first term. More from CNN:

Rubio, in a letter to the heads of Congress’ committees on foreign affairs and appropriations Monday, said he had authorized Marocco “to begin the process of engaging in a review and potential reorganization of USAID’s activities to maximize efficiency and align operations with the national interest.”

“The Department of State and other pertinent entities will be consulting with Congress and the appropriate committees to reorganize and absorb certain bureaus, offices, and missions of USAID,” he wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by CNN.

“USAID may move, reorganize, and integrate certain missions, bureaus, and offices into the Department of State, and the remainder of the Agency may be abolished consistent with applicable law,” he wrote.

What will it look like bureaucratically when the legal dust settles? Project 2025 offers one possible outcome, as Politico describes:

There are multiple ways to let the State Department exert greater control over USAID without necessarily formally dismantling the latter.

One option the administration could pursue is having the USAID administrator also serve as the State Department’s director of foreign assistance. The person who holds the latter role has traditionally worked closely with USAID, and the idea of merging or dual-hatting the positions is suggested in Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation vision authored by many who now work for Trump.

Why Is Trump Going After USAID and Does It Herald a Change in US Foreign Policy?

Mark Ames provides maybe the simplest and most plausible explanation, especially when we consider the above rumblings about folding USAID into the State Department:


Trump’s takedown of USAID, like much of his 2nd term, motivated by vengeance for the Russiagate hoax. The left-liberal-center spectrum that drove Russiagate for 4 years has since forgotten about it, but for MAGA Russiagate is red hot live & a great mobilizer. Reap what you sow. https://t.co/HdWKQGqytq

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) February 2, 2025



Many believe that the changes to USAID herald a new day in US foreign policy. For example, Arnaud Bertrand wrote the following:


It’s becoming clearer and clearer that we’re looking at a seismic shift in the US’s relationship with the world, between:

1) The US dismantling its foreign interference apparatuses (like USAID 👇)
2) Marco Rubio stating that we’re now in a multipolar world with “multi-great… https://t.co/C0z7JwIIif

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) February 2, 2025


While all that would certainly be welcome, here are some reasons to be doubtful.

First, look at what they’re saying. From CNN describing what amounts to a rebranding:

Speaking to the press in El Salvador, Rubio said the “functions of USAID” must align with US foreign policy and that it is “a completely unresponsive agency.”

When asked about the arguments that USAID’s work is vital to national security and promoting US interests, Rubio said, “There are things that USAID, that we do through USAID, that we should continue to do, and we will continue to do.”

“This is not about ending the programs that USAID does, per se,” he said.

This looks more like an attempt to bring under control rogue agencies that were hostile to Trump during his first term in office.

Simultaneously, it could signify a change in recipients of US aid. Here’s Trump on Monday:

“We just want to do the right thing. It’s something that should have been done a long time ago. Went crazy during the Biden administration. They went totally crazy what they were doing and the money they were giving to people that shouldn’t be getting,” Trump said in the Oval Office.

…Pressed about his support for USAID during his first term in office, Trump said he loved the “concept” but not the execution of the agency’s mission.

“They turn out to be radical left lunatics. And the concept of it is good, but it’s all about the people,” he said.

So aid is likely to continue to new recipients abroad once the bureaucracy at home is sorted. I wrote the following back in November and think it still stands:

To be clear, the following is not an argument that Trump represents a unique threat. If anything, his warranted quest for revenge against certain neocon factions and Blob outfits could produce net positives. On the other hand, he is the product of our plutocrat-controlled capitalist system just as Biden, Trump I, and Obama before him. And so short of overhauling the system, the question becomes how will it make use of the Trump administration at this time?

Let’s remember that it was mere months ago that Silicon Valley was largely aligned with the Biden Administration. How quickly things can change.

Tech, finance, government, and Israel are set to be aligned again under Trump, as they are with most every administration. Maybe one difference between Biden and Trump is that we switch out the extreme identity politics for the more old-fashioned religious fanatics:


And, sure enough, Hegseth has 2 Crusader tattoos: a Jerusalem Cross, the symbol of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem on his chest, & “Deus Vult” the Crusaders’ theological cri de coeur (“God wills it”) on his bicep.

“Deus Vult” means God mandated Crusaders’ violence. 13/ pic.twitter.com/kAGwqjToyE

— Matthew D. Taylor (@TaylorMatthewD) November 13, 2024



So in Europe, for example, rather than a Biden administration chummy with Ursula von der Leyen, Olaf Scholz, and Emmanuel Macron we get a Trump administration reorienting all levers of foreign policy towards the likes of Giorgia Meloni, the Alternative for Germany, and other putative nationalists who will be loyal to Trump and 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 oligarchs in the plundering of Europe.

The objective is still American primacy and expansion for American capital.

Any change in marketing is more likely an indication that the plutocrats and their think tanks believe the “woke” empire reached its sell-by-date, and it’s time to rebrand.

More than an acceptance of multipolarity, this is probably more a reflection of disappointment with some of the returns from the Biden administration — especially on the Russia collapse bet. So while the plutocrats might be forced to accept that running an unwinnable proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is stupid strategy, which it is (as well as a human tragedy), and Trump is tasked with getting out of the mess, that doesn’t herald a seachange in how US plutocrats view the world.

Indeed, the Trump administration’s argument seems to be that it has a better way to increase American oligarchs’ returns: pick fights you can win, control shipping lanes, increase plunder of vassals, and perhaps target those members of BRICS that are weaker than Russia and China.

Second, it would be quite the shock if Elon “we will coup whoever we want” Musk is suddenly the champion of the US imperialism victims. And the talking points are bogus historical revisionism:


I wish. Actually USAID is the agent of CIA soft power. https://t.co/9tMLQFzgdL

— Margaret Kimberley (@freedomrideblog) February 2, 2025


In reality the agency was about spreading freedom for American capital to plunder other nations and took aim at any Marxists trying to prevent such pillaging. And millions of Communists were killed by CIA-backed regimes during Cold War conflicts across the world.

Whatever programs USAID continues with under its new State Department guidance, it’s probably a safe bet it’ll still be working for the likes of Musk and his pals and will continue to try and help coup (almost) everyone they want.

I guess we’ll see. I would love to be wrong.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... olicy.html

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Trump Wants To Take Over Gaza, Announces 500,000 Dead

The king of Israel (with a red alpha tie) visited his vassal state in America where real-estate developer Donald Trump (blue beta tie) pushed the chair for his leader and offered him to cleanse the Palestinian population from all land the Zionists desire to take.

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Via AP:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday suggested that displaced Palestinians in Gaza be permanently resettled outside the war-torn territory and proposed the U.S. take “ownership” in redeveloping the area into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
...
The provocative comments came as talks are ramping up this week with the promise of surging humanitarian aid and reconstruction supplies to help the people of Gaza recover after more than 15 months of devastating conflict. Now Trump wants to push roughly 1.8 million people to leave the land they have called home and claim it for the U.S., perhaps with American troops.
“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Trump said at an evening news conference with Netanyahu by his side.


The internationally acknowledged Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics' count of the population of Gaza in 2023 was 2,226,544. Trump wants to remove all Palestinians from Gaza and gives their number as 1.7 or 1.8 million:

Reporter: How many people are you thinking need to leave Gaza?
Trump: “All of them. Probably a million seven, maybe a million eight. They’ll be settled in areas where they can live a beautiful life.” (video)


This is an acknowledgement, by the president of the United States, that the genocidal Zionists have murdered up to 500,000 people in Gaza.

Despite that toll few in Gaza would move voluntarily:

Gazan residents generally want to stay on their land.
Trump did not specify where the new land for Gazans might be found, although he made his comments after repeating his desire for Egypt and Jordan to take in Gaza’s residents. Nor did he appear to grapple with the many Gazan residents who would not want to depart their home territory, nor with the practicalities of potentially forcing them to leave it.

“I do see a long-term ownership position, and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East, and maybe the entire Middle East,” Trump said.

Asked if U.S. troops would be deployed to take over Gaza, Trump said that “we’ll do what’s necessary. … We’ll take it over and develop it.”

Netanyahu said that he was open to the idea.


The plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is not new at all:

Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi - 23:37 UTC · Feb 4, 2025
This has been Israel’s dream for decades

Israel’s NSC Director Eiland in a cable from 2004 leaked by Wikileaks said Gaza ‘is a huge concentration camp’ and that Israel’s solution would be to expel the Palestinians of Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Desert


The plan has bi-partisan U.S. support:

Harry Sisson @harryjsisson - 1:44 UTC · Oct 11, 2023
Amazing: President Biden is working on a plan with other countries that would allow civilians to safely leave Gaza and cross the border into Egypt. This is great news. President Biden is making sure that innocent people don’t die due to the actions of Hamas. That’s leadership.


It is a real estate developer's dream:

Robin Monotti @robinmonotti - 23:47 UTC · May 8, 2024

GAZA 2035: A NEW SMART 15 MINUTE CITY BUILT ON THE MASS GRAVES OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN: New plans in Israeli media reveal what Israel want to do with Gaza post genocide and land theft. The dystopian vision for the Gaza Strip is being currently approved by the Netanyahu government. Link below.


The long planned for and now announced final ethnic cleansing of Gaza would be in breach of a long list of international laws and conventions.

There is no agreement on where the Palestinian people would move to. Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and other countries in the region have rejected the resettlement of any Palestinians to their land. The Foreign Ministry of Saudi Arabia issued a length statement against it at 4:00 am local time(!):

The Foreign Ministry affirms that Saudi Arabia’s position on the establishment of a Palestinian state is firm and unwavering. HRH Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister clearly and unequivocally reaffirmed this stance.
The leaders of those countries know that this would not be the end of the story:

These displacement plans do not end with Gaza. The West Bank, where Israel is escalating military operations, is considered by many right-wing extremists in Israel to be the real prize, and Jordan the preferred destination for Palestinians living there.

Still Trump may think he can win from this. As M.K. Bhadrakumar analyses:

Trump used the expression “take over” of Gaza Strip. He didn’t elaborate. Trump and Witkoff are two master-builders and they visualise the seamless potential of killing many birds with a single shot —

first and foremost, strengthening Israel’s security through the ethnic cleansing and resettlement in Gaza;
two, restoration of Israel’s regional dominance in the region in a medium and long term perspective;
three, a solution to the intractable Palestinian problem;
four, rendering obsolete the various outlandish ideas like “two-state solution”;
five, burial of the very notion of a Palestinian state;
six, Israel’s regional integration through Abraham Accords;
and, above all, massive business spin-off for American companies for decades to come out of the development of the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
...


Prima facie, Netanyahu lured Trump into a trap by enticing him with a seductive scenario of massive lucrative business in Gaza’s reconstruction. Trump’s imagination is running riot, completely disconnected from ground realities. Such naïveté is fraught with real danger of blowing up on his face sooner rather than later and turn into an albatross for his presidency. This has all the making of a quagmire for the Trump administration.
Should Trump pursue this policy it will come to define his presidency. It may well become his Vietnam.

Posted by b on February 5, 2025 at 14:50 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/02/t ... .html#more
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 07, 2025 3:37 pm

TRUMP THE GENOCIDALIST ATTACKS ON THE NORTHERN FRONT

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by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

Holding hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, US President Donald Trump has adopted genocide as his personal method for destroying the Arabs of Palestine.

“Really very unlucky”, Trump declared the Palestinians have been for being the wrong people in the wrong place. “Being in its presence just has not been good and it should not go through a process of rebuilding and occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it and lived there and died there and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly bad luck. This can be paid for by neighbouring countries of great wealth.”

Trump is proposing genocide as it has been defined since the Germans attempted it against the Rusians and the Jews. Since 1948 the crime has been defined in Article II of the Geneva Convention.

“The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it…create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area … do a real job, do something different.” This has been tagged Trump and his family’s plan for the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

In parallel, Trump is proposing to do the same “job” to the 57,000 people of Greenland, expanding the island as a US mining, property development, and military base for attacking Russia’s Arctic sea route for oil and gas exports to Asia. Once the US ally in the US war against Russia, Canada is facing a similar combination of Trump threats, including the extinction of Canadian sovereignty and identity.

This is the big stick which Chris Cook discusses today on Gorilla Radio.

Listen to the podcast by clicking here at Minute 31:00. https://gradio.substack.com/p/gorilla-r ... k-andy-04e

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Source: https://gradio.substack.com/p/gorilla-r ... k-andy-04e

For the US and NATO warfighting strategy in the Arctic we discussed, click for the background. https://johnhelmer.net/due-north-trumps ... greenland/

Here is the start of the resistance of the Greenlanders:

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Source: https://www.euractiv.com/

For the story of Norwegian Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling’s wartime collaboration with Germany, read this.

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Quisling is at left. Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

Trump’s proposal to remove the Arabs from Palestine to Saudi Arabia repeats the scheme of President Franklin Roosevelt of February 1945. That was on the prompting and scripting of the White House advisers, David Niles (Neyhus), Benjamin Cohen, Samuel Rosenman, Israel Sieff, and Max Lowenthal. For that story, read The Jackals’ Wedding.

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On board the USS Quincy on February 14, 1943, President Roosevelt meeting King Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud (ibn Saud) with Colonel William Eddy interpreting. Roosevelt had already announced in the US: “Palestine should be for the Jews and no Arabs should be in it.”

https://johnhelmer.net/trump-the-genoci ... ern-front/

I recall that the king replied to Roosevelt something to the effect, 'It is normal for the losing country in a war to give up territory. Why should Arabs give up territory?'

Indeed, should have given the Jews the Rhineland instead. But that would have put a kink in the anti-communist crusade...

******

Trump and Musk ‘close’ USAID
February 5, 2025 Juana Carrasco Martín

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Havana, Feb. 4 — The “gibberish” was formed in Washington. The couple of the moment, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, closed USAID — the United States Agency for International Development, — one of the arms that mask US interventionism in the world, one of the claws of the CIA and other intelligence services to obtain information about other countries and influence their internal and external policies, a tentacle of the State Department to foment dissidence that leads to “regime change” when it is provided, in short: a driving force behind US positions on the world stage.

Musk, the tsar of governmental efficiency at the head of the department created especially for the purpose of bringing order to the administrative institutions of the State and even probably privatizing it, had for days been criticizing the agency on his powerful networks and, although it may seem unheard of to you, he went so far as to describe it as “a radical left-wing psychological political operation”, which is impossible to prove and very difficult to believe even for the most naive earthling, but that is of no importance for the absolute power enthroned in the White House.

In any case, on Sunday, after signing an executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump followed the rhyme and told reporters that USAID had been run “by radical crazies, we will get them out and then we will make a decision”.

USAID is being dismantled by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). With a single stroke of the pen, the police closed its doors and put up yellow tape to prevent employees from accessing the facility, its website was disconnected, as were the accounts of hundreds of its employees and hundreds of fired contractors.

The AP news agency even said that senior USAID officials — the “candorosos” John Voorhees, director of security, and deputy director Brian McGills — were escorted out of the building after blocking DOGE’s access to secure systems and refusing to hand over classified material. But the almighty DOGE accessed it, including intelligence reports, which is something else. They were unaware that Musk had passed sentence: USAID is a criminal organization and it is “time for it to die”.

The Democrats came to the defense of USAID, created in 1961. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said late last week that any attempt to dissolve USAID would be “illegal and contrary to our national interests,” but Trump made it clear to him that he would not require an act of Congress to eliminate it. “I don’t think so. Not when it comes to fraud. There is fraud. These people are crazy. And if it’s fraud, we wouldn’t have a congressional act, and I’m not sure we would have one anyway.”

Senator Andy Kim (Democrat-New Jersey), who was one of the agency’s soldiers, came out quickly to defend it: “Its vindictive way of trying to shut down USAID sends signals to the whole world that we are a nation at war with itself,” and sends a message to adversaries that “the United States is distracted and divided.” “Distracted, I don’t know, but divided, yes.”

However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tempered the situation when he announced his appointment of the acting director of USAID: “There are many functions of USAID that will continue, that will be part of US foreign policy, but they have to be aligned with US foreign policy.” If you didn’t understand, the translation is easy, the policy spearheaded by the Trump-Musk duo, and of which Rubio is a devalued underling, has as its ultimate goal “making America — read it carefully: the United States — great again.”

So far they have not spoken, or I have not read anything about USAID’s close coordination with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the spearhead and front for the spy services that works with non-governmental organizations, nor how their alliance with the Pentagon will turn out, where some of their manuals recognize their role in so-called counterinsurgency and nation-pacification operations.

Considering the services provided, I would venture to say that we will soon see the same old boy, with almost identical aims, perhaps with a different name, remodeled and more efficient, to guarantee the hegemony of the USA against an emerging world ready for multipolarity.

For now, a couple of well-intentioned questions: Will they or won’t they leave the budget of more than 50 billion dollars to the whatever-it’s-called, to be fished out of the swamp? Will the generous contributions to the organizations of the anti-Cuban mafia lobby in Florida flow again and with them the allowances to their low level employees in Cuba?

Source: Juventud Rebelde, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... ose-usaid/

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USAID Will Continue Regime Change Ops on Behalf of CIA – Former US Marine
February 5, 2025

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Supporters of the opposition on Maidan Square in Kiev during the clashes between protesters and the police, Feb 19, 2014. Photo: Andrey Stenin/Sputnik.

USAID’s controversial activities – along with its partnerships with George Soros’ Open Society and similar entities – have been exposed in recent years by alternative journalists, making them increasingly difficult for the public to ignore, former US Marine Brian Berletic tells Sputnik.

Berletic suggests that has created the need for a rebranding aimed at protecting and streamlining the organization’s work.

He believes the ongoing reform seeks to “create a left-right and liberal-conservative divide in response to growing bipartisan opposition to US interference abroad.”

“By claiming these organizations are ‘bad’ because they are ‘liberal,’ the Trump administration can rebrand it as ‘conservative’ an ‘America first,’ bringing at least part of the American population back on board to support it and its activities,” Berletic explains.

The pundit emphasizes that the USAID’s coup-plotting will continue, either under the auspices of other agencies or Geroge Soros’ global network of NGOs.

“Whether this regime change takes place under USAID, is transferred back to the CIA – which originally carried out the activities USAID assumed upon its creation – or the US begins depending more on private foundations including Open Society, the main point to understand is that it will continue nonetheless,” Berletic says.

He notes the US makes no secret of its plans to continue regime change operations against Iran, Venezuela and possibly even Panama.

The White House “isn’t even talking about the actual subject of foreign interference as an issue of USAID’s activities, and instead is complaining about wasteful programs connected to political wedge issues like ‘DEI’ [diversity, equity, and inclusion],” he says.

https://orinocotribune.com/usaid-will-c ... us-marine/

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Michael Hudson: Trump’s Tariffs Could Cause Huge Global Crisis
Posted on February 5, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Even though Trump has put a pause on tariffs against Mexico and Canada, his tariff increase against China is still on. And more generally, Trump has repeatedly described his intent to use tariffs to create what he depicts as a new golden age. So he’s likely to keep trying to deploy tariffs as a preferred tool, both due to his undue fondness for threat display, and to advance his long-term economic vision.

Michael Hudson and Ben Norton discussed Trump’s economic plans, particularly tariffs, focusing on their internal contradictions and the potential to create an international debt crisis.

By Ben Norton. Originally published at Global Political Economy


(Introduction)

BEN NORTON: Donald Trump is threatening to impose tariffs on countries all around the world, including the top three trading partners of the United States: Canada, Mexico, and China.

DONALD TRUMP: The word “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the dictionary — more beautiful than “love”, more beautiful than “respect”. No, less beautiful than “religion”, no. Right? I don’t want to get into that argument. But the word “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the dictionary, remember that. It’s going to make our country, it’s going to make our country rich.

BEN NORTON: Now, Trump says he’s doing this because he wants to reduce the trade deficit that the US has with the rest of the world.

However, there’s a major contradiction in Donald Trump’s economic policy, because he also wants to maintain the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

And Trump has threatened other countries, especially countries in BRICS, that are trying to de-dollarize. Trump has said that if countries de-dollarize, he will put 100% tariffs on them.

DONALD TRUMP: We will keep the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. And it is currently under major siege. Many countries are leaving the dollar.

They’re not going to leave the dollar with me. I’ll say, “You leave the dollar, you’re not doing business with the United States, because we’re going to put 100% tariff on your goods”.




I’m very much a traditionalist. I like staying with the dollar. You know that from when I was there. Make the dollar the choice. I hate when countries go off the dollar. I would not allow countries to go off the dollar.

BEN NORTON: So what Trump’s trying to do is have his cake and eat it too, because this is a contradictory policy. Trump wants to reduce the US trade deficit, but he also wants to maintain the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

The problem is that if Trump wants other countries to continue using the US dollar in international trade and finance, the US has to run a deficit, so other countries can get access to those dollars. If Trump wants to use tariffs to reduce the US trade deficit, it means that other countries will not be able to get the dollars that they need in order to use the dollar in international trade and finance.

So these very contradictory policies that Trump is trying to maintain could have severe repercussions on the global economy. And today, I had the pleasure of speaking with the award-winning economist Michael Hudson, who has warned that if Trump imposes high tariffs on countries like, for instance, Canada and Mexico, their currencies will fall significantly against the US dollar, which will mean that they will not be able to pay off the debt that these countries have denominated in US dollars.

This could cause a global debt crisis, as countries around the world can’t get the dollars they need to pay off their debts.

Here are a few highlights from my discussion with the economist Michael Hudson. And after I will go straight to the interview.

MICHAEL HUDSON: To Trump, a win-win is a loss, because a win-win means some other country also wins, not only you, the United States. And if some other country also wins, that means the United States has not grabbed everything there is to grab, and Trump wants to grab everything that is available, the entire economic surplus.



Here, again, you have one of the features that makes the United States an exceptional country. And Trump is making use of that exceptional characteristic of the United States.

The United States can do what no other country does. It can it can threaten to hurt other countries if they don’t do what the United States wants. It can bomb them. It can engage in regime change, through the National Endowment for Democracy Democracy and USAID.

It can hurt other countries. Other countries don’t have a foreign policy anything like that.



What Trump realizes is normally you don’t need military force to subjugate and colonize another economy. You can use financial warfare, and you can use trade warfare, and that’s “peaceful”.

You don’t need, to mobilize American troops to invade a country. Vietnam showed you can’t do that anymore.

You can simply use trade and financial sanctions. That’s what he’s trying to do.



That’s America’s strong point. It’s not that it’s going to use the hydrogen bomb. It can wreck world trade, wreck world finance, and try to force the kind of economic relationship that Trump and the deep state wants.

And Trump has made it clear that America has to be the winner in any kind of trade agreement that it makes with any other country.



If American companies are unable to export to China, then their profits will be down, and they will lack the money to engage in the research and development they need to keep up with the technology that the rest of the world is doing.

And so the result is that Trump’s policy is deliciously self-defeating for US policy. It will mean inflation. It won’t mean more industrialization.

(Full transcript at link.)

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... risis.html

ICE Faking News: Games Search Engines to Make Mass Deportations Appear Way More Massive Than They Are
Posted on February 6, 2025 by Yves Smith

The gleeful thuggery that ICE deploys in its mass deportation efforts is degrading, not just to the evacuees and Americans generally. And as we’ll soon see, ICE has been playing Internet games to make its migrant-rousting seem vastly more pervasive than it is, no doubt to try to scare as many as possible into self-deporting.

The New York Times recently reported that the US has 1.4 million undocumented immigrants who have received final deportation orders and are not complying, consistent with other accounts. It should not be controversial to remove them. An additional 655,000 have been criminally convicted or charged. The “or charged” part matters, since anyone on US soil has due process rights. But ICE is taking the position that merely having been arrested and not having a visa is sufficient grounds for deportation. And the image suggests the Times believes ICE can make possession, here incarceration, into 9/10th of the law.

Image

1.4 million to >2.1 million does not strike me as “few”. So why does the New York Times use that word? Because the 2 million ballpark figure is well below recent estimates that 14 million US residents are in “without legal status” or temporary waiver category, and thus represents the number the Trump Administration wants booted.

But in reality, in addition to members of the PMC who want to keep their cheap picked berries and compliant nannies and yardmen, many businessmen are loath to give up low wage, no bargaining leverage immigrant laborers. So the Administration has incentives to look as ferocious and as omnipresent as possible, in part because even getting that 2 million gone will be awfully hard. So getting credit for more serves them well.

And that is what ICE is doing! In a neat bit of reporting, the Guardian caught out widespread insertions of metadata into old articles describing deportation raids to make them look current. Although the sources could not prove whodunit, given how systematic this effort was, it’s hard to think it was not an official undertaking. From the Guardian in US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations:

News of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include “ICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation”, “New Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens”, and in Wisconsin, “ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens”.

But a closer look at these Ice reports tells a different story.

That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008.

All the archived Ice press releases soaring to the top of Google search results were marked with the same timestamp and read: “Updated: 01/24/2025”.


The story then describes how the immigration lawyer, who had noticed ole ICE old raids coming at the top of searches, and then started systematic queries like “ICE raid Nebraska” and plotting the results on a map. She regularly found results that showed in the search results as 1/24/2025, when the actual report was from long ago.

And all were ICE press releases.

As the Guardian explained:

After dealing with all of the outdated Ice press releases, the immigration lawyer called up her tech expert friend to help get to the bottom of what was going on.

The tech expert, who likewise spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said she was initially skeptical that anything unusual was happening….

She then started a forensic examination of Ice’s web pages by inspecting the front-end code to look for clues.

What was interesting, she said, was that Ice had marked all of these press releases as old. The agency displayed a message at the top of every page the Guardian reviewed noting it contained “archived content” that was “from a previous administration or is otherwise outdated”.

But when the tech expert looked at the code of these online press releases, she saw a new element had been added – a time stamp. “Every article was updated on the 24th, which was causing the Google SEO to interpret that as a recently updated article, and therefore rank it higher,” she said.

To exhaust all possibilities, the tech expert did the same test with several other government agencies. She crosschecked with the websites of the Department of Labor, Department of Defense, Department of the Interior and Veteran’s Affairs and found no evidence of new time stamps.

“[With Ice] these are old articles that are now appearing at the top of the Google and Bing search results as recent headlines, where no other government agency is doing this,” she said. “As someone in tech, I would interpret that as an intentional play to get more clicks, essentially on these misleading headlines.”


Not only did these bogus updates initially freak out the immigration lawyer, and no doubt, lots of already-nervous immigrants by making the raids appear far more extensive than they are, they also serve to crowd out reports of deportation setbacks:

CBS reports that ICE is releasing hundreds of people arrested in the mass deportation theater of the first couple weeks of the Trump admin. I hate to say that "I told you so" but… I told you so, and I told you so, and I told you so, and I told you so. pic.twitter.com/1OojhozqbU

— David J. Bier (@David_J_Bier) February 5, 2025


There have now been four days of anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, as well as in Denver and some Texas cities. With all of the Trump envelop-pushing, they don’t seem to be getting more than local-media-level attention. But this campaign is far from over. And contra Trump. Cate Blanchette, as Elizabeth I, once intoned: “I do not like wars. They have uncertain outcomes.” But one certainty is Trump will declare victory irrespective of actual results.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... y-are.html

*****

The greatest (geo-political) showman’s “inside out” political solution

Alastair Crooke

February 6, 2025

Putin hinted this week that the Ukraine conflict could end in weeks, so Trump may not have a long wait.

How to do the impossible? America is instinctively an expansionist power, needing new fields to conquer; new financial horizons to master and to exploit. The U.S. is built that way. Always was.

But – if you are Trump, wanting to withdraw from wars on the empire’s periphery, yet nonetheless wanting too, to cast a shiny image of a muscular America expanding and leading global politics and finance – how to do it?

Well, President Trump – ever the showman – has a solution. Disdain the now-discredited intellectual ideology of muscular American global hegemony; suggest rather, that these earlier ‘forever wars’ should never really have been ‘our wars’; and, as Alon Mizrahi has advanced and suggested, set about re-colonising that which was already colonised: Canada; Greenland; Panama – and Europe too, of course.

America thus will be bigger; Trump will act with decisive muscularity (i.e. as in Colombia); make a big ‘show’ of things, but at the same time, shrink the mainstream U.S. security interest to centre on the Western Hemisphere. As Trump keeps observing, Americans live in the ‘western hemisphere’, not in the Middle East or elsewhere.

Trump thus attempts to detach from the American expansionist war periphery – ‘the outside’ – to proclaim that the ‘inside’ (i.e. the western hemisphere’s sphere), has become bigger and is unquestionably American. And that is what matters.

It is a big shift, yet it has the virtue of beginning to be recognized by many Americans as a more accurate reflection of reality. America’s instinct remains expansionary (that doesn’t change), but many Americans advocate a focus on American domestic needs, and its ‘near neighbourhood’.

Mizrahi calls this inside-out adjustment ‘self-cannibalisation’: Europe is part of the western sphere of interest.Indeed, ‘Europe’ regards itself as its progenitor, yet the Trump team has set about re-colonising it – albeit in a Trump vein.

Robert Cooper, a senior British diplomat sent to Brussels, famously in 2002 coined the term liberal imperialism as Europe’s new purpose. It was to be imperialism of soft-power. Yet, still Cooper couldn’t quite let go of European ‘old empire orientalism’, writing:

“The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves however, we keep the law: But when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle”.

Cooper’s world-view was influential in the thinking of Tony Blair, as well as in the development of European Security and Defence Policy.

The EU élite however, began optimistically to see itself as having top-table (real) ‘empire’ status (global clout),based on its regulatory control of a market of 400 million consumers. It didn’t work. The EU had adopted the Obama stratagem that promised a ‘mind control’ framework which asserts that reality can be ‘created’ through managed narrative.

Europeans were never properly told that an EU trans-national empire implied (and required) the relinquishment of their sovereign parliamentary decision-making. They imagined, rather, that they were joining a free-trade area. Instead, they were being taken to an EU identity through stealth and the careful management of a confected EU ‘reality’.

That European liberal empire aspiration – in the wake of the Trump cultural assault in Davos – looks very passé. The atmospherics hint rather at the passage from one cultural zeitgeist to another.

Elon Musk seems to be tasked with tipping Germany and Britain out from the old worldview and into the new. This is important for the Trump agenda, as these two states are the primary agitators for war to sustain a global – rather than a western hemisphere – primacy. Europe’s decision-making failures over the last years, however, makes Europe an obvious target to a President determined on radical cultural change.

There is precedent for Trump’s Inside-Out ploy: Old Rome too, withdrew from its peripheral imperial provinces to concentrate on its core, when distant wars drained too many resources at the centre, and its army was being outmatched in the Field. Rome would never openly admit to the retreat.

Which takes us back to today’s ‘radical Inside-Out solution’: It seems to consist of ‘go like a demented whirlwind’ domestically – which is what matters most to his base – and, in the international sphere, project confusion and unpredictability. Continue repeating the ancient régime’s ideological shibboleths and counter-factual statistics, but then brace it up with occasional contrarian throw-away comments (such as saying in reference to the Gaza ceasefire that it is ‘their [Israel’s] war’, and that Israel’s interests may not always be those of the U.S., and, seemingly as an aside – that Putin may have already made up his mind ‘not to make a deal’ on Ukraine).

Dissing Putin as a loser in Ukraine perhaps was more addressed to the U.S. Senate and its ongoing confirmation hearings. Trump made these comments days before Tulsi Gabbard faces Senate hearings. Gabbard already is criticised by U.S. ‘hawks’ for allegedly holding ‘pro-Putin’ sentiments, as well as being subjected to a media slur campaign by the deep state.

Was Trump’s apparent disrespect toward Putin and Russia (which caused anger in Russia) said primarily for the ears of U.S. Senators? (The Senate is home to some of the most ardent ‘never-Trumpers’).

And were Trump’s egregious comments about ‘cleansing’ Gaza’s Palestinians to Egypt or Jordan (co-ordinated with Netanyahu, according to an Israeli Minister) intended primarily for the ears of the Israeli Right? According to that Minister, the issue of encouraging voluntary Palestinian migration is now back on the agenda, just as the Right-wing parties have long wanted – and many in Netanyahu’s Likud had hoped. Music to their ears.

Was it then a Trumpian pre-emptive move, designed to save Netanyahu’s government from imminent collapse over the ceasefire’s second-stage, and the threat of a walk-out by his Right Wing contingent? Was Trump’s target audience in this case then Ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich?

Trump pointedly confuses us – by never making it clear to which audience he is addressing his ruminations at any one time.

Is there nonetheless some substance sedimented within Trump’s comment that any Palestinian state must be resolved ‘in some other way’ than the Two-State formula? Maybe. We should not discount Trump’s strong leanings towards Israel.

Netanyahu faces harsh criticism for mis-handling both the Gaza and Lebanese ceasefires. He has been guilty of promising one thing to one party and the opposite to the other (an old vice): He has promised the Right a return to war in Gaza, yet committed to the unequivocal end to war in the actual ceasefire agreement. In Lebanon, Israel was committed to withdrawal by 26 January on the one hand, yet its military is still there, provoking a human wave of Lebanese returning to the south, hoping to reclaim their homes.

Consequently, Netanyahu at this juncture is utterly dependent on Trump. The PM’s wiles will not be enough to get him off the hooks: Trump has him where he wants him. Trump will get ceasefires, and will tell Netanyahu,no attack on Iran (at least until Trump has explored the possibility of a deal with Tehran).

With Putin and with Russia, the opposite is the case. Trump there has no leverage (the favourite word in Washington). He has no leverage for four reasons:

Firstly, since Russia steadfastly refuses the idea of any compromise that “boils down to freezing the conflict along the line of engagement, that will give time to the U.S. and NATO to rearm the remnants of the Ukrainian army – and then start a new round of hostilities”.

Secondly, because Moscow’s conditions for ending the war will prove to be unacceptable to Washington, as they would not be susceptible to being presented as an American ‘win’.

Thirdly, because Russia holds the clear military advantage: Ukraine is about to lose this war. Major Ukrainian strongholds are now being taken by Russian forces without resistance. This ultimately will lead to a cascade effect. Ukraine may cease to exist if serious negotiations do not take place before summer, the head of the Ukrainian Military Intelligence Kyrylo Budanov recently warned.

But fourthly, because history is not reflected at all in the word leverage. When peoples who occupy the same geography have different and often irreconcilable versions of history, the western transactional ‘split the power spectrum’ simply doesn’t work. The opposed sides will not be moved – unless some solution recognises and takes account of their history.

The U.S. needs to always to ‘win’. So does Trump understand that the ineluctable dynamics of this war militate against presenting any transactional outcome as a clear ‘win’ for the U.S.? Of course he does (or will do, when professionally briefed by his team).

The logic of the Ukraine situation, to be blunt, suggests that President Putin should quietly advise President Trump to walk away from the Ukraine conflict – to avoid taking ownership of a western débacle.

Putin hinted this week that the Ukraine conflict could end in weeks, so Trump may not have a long wait.

Should Trump want a ‘win’ (highly likely), then he should be steered by Putin’s many hints: Intermediate missile deployments by both parties are creating heightened risk and ‘cry out’ for a new limitation agreement. Trump could say that he saved us all from WW3 – and there could be more than a grain of truth to it.

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

Unlikely, too hard to spin as a win for a man who cannot bear the thought of ever losing.

******

February 7, 2025 by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
Trump revives ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran but adds a message on US-Iran deal

Image
US President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum ‘reimposing maximum pressure on Iran’, White House, Feb. 4, 2025
France’s distinguished former career diplomat Sylvie Bermann, wrote an op-ed recently in the leading financial paper Les Echos that a new chapter of ‘transactional geopolitics’ has begun with Donald Trump.

Extremely unlikely events can be expected, metaphorically called ‘black swans’. The so-called ‘black swan theory’ characterises events that come as a surprise, have a major effect, but can be rationalised only after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.

One may say, on February 4 morning, a black swan appeared in the White House, even as President Donald Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) restoring “maximum pressure” on Iran, denying that country “all paths to a nuclear weapon” and outlining a tough policy posture toward Tehran.

Later in the day, a White House Fact Sheet detailed that NSPM establishes the following truism:

“Iran should be denied a nuclear weapon and intercontinental ballistic missiles”;
“Iran’s terrorist network should be neutralised”; and,
“Iran’s aggressive development of missiles, as well as other asymmetric and conventional weapons capabilities, should be countered.”

The black swan’s appearance was intriguing. On the eve of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrival in DC (later on Tuesday), Jerusalem Post had written:

“The Trump administration is in the process of formulating its Iran policy, and Netanyahu’s visit at this early stage in the president’s second term affords him a golden opportunity to give his input. And Iran remains Israel’s number one threat and problem…

“While his (Trump’s) administration still seeks to contain Iran’s regional influence and prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon, there have been early signs of shifts in tone and priorities.

“These shifts may reflect internal divisions within the administration – between Iran hawks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and isolationists like Vice President JD Vance, who said in October: “Our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran… this is where smart diplomacy really matters.”

At any rate, Trump decided to sign the NSPM without waiting for Netanyahu’s “input.” Equally, Marco Rubio was conspicuous by his absence in Trump’s team for the talks with Netanyahu. And Vice-President Vance not only assisted Trump at the talks but the president made it a point to ostentatiously convey his appreciation by hailing him in public view, in the presence of Netanyahu and his entourage, which was striking.

And the mother of all surprises was that the NSPM document as such studiously avoided any threat of war against Iran. Trump avoids anti-Iran rhetoric lately, which used to be a running feature of his first term as president. Although a mercurial personality, Trump is not tweaking, either, the complex web of unwritten ground rules and norms of conduct that kept the four decades-old US-Iran standoff from turning into military confrontation ( something which, of course, neither side wants).

Meanwhile, all indications are that Trump senses that the Iran question has transformed as Tehran’s deterrent capability began surging in recent years, and is no longer a ‘stand-alone’ challenge for the US, as the external environment too has changed phenomenally and works in Tehran’s favour since the Ukraine war began.

For instance, Russia and Iran are in a quasi-alliance today. That said, Russia is also a stakeholder in nuclear non-proliferation and also has a congruence of interests with the US that Iran abides by the NPT. Again, the China-brokered Iran-Saudi rapprochement has dramatically changed the alignments in the region both bilaterally as well as regionally. Simply put, containment of Iran has become an obsolete strategy.

Even otherwise, a sense of proportions is always necessary to assess the US-Iran tensions. Therefore, Trump’s remarks on Tuesday after signing the executive order on NSPM need to be properly understood. Suffice to say, It was a carefully choreographed performance by Trump, caught on camera, and one of those rarest of rare occasions, speaking with an eye on the prompter — rather unusual for Trump who is famous for his stream of consciousness.

Trump spoke calmly in a measured tone — even sombre tone. He noted stoically, “This is what everybody told me to sign and I signed. It is very tough on Iran. The Iran situation — hopefully, we don’t have to do very much.

“We will see whether we can arrange to work out a deal with Iran and everybody can live together. Maybe it is possible, maybe it is not possible.”

Trump continued: “So, I am signing this and am unhappy to do it. But I really have not so much choice because we have to be strong and firm. And I hope that it does not have to be used in any great measure at all.

“We could have a Middle East and a world in total peace. Right now, we don’t have that. I like to have peace all over the world but now you have the world blowing up.”

Trump repeated, “I am signing this but, hopefully, it will be a document which will be important but hardly has to be used.”

When asked by a journalist what kind of a deal is envisaged with Iran, Trump replied, “We will see. They (cannot) have a nuclear weapon. With me, it is simple: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. We don’t want to be tough on Iran…This (deal) could have been done long ago.”

When asked about alleged Iranian plots to assassinate him, Trump reacted, “They (Iranians) have not done that. That will be a terrible thing to do. Not because of me, but they will be obliterated… I have left instructions. If they do it, they will get obliterated. There won’t be anything left. If anything like that happens (from any quarter), there will be total obliteration of that state — not only Iran…

Trump concluded, “So, I am signing this. It is a very powerful document, but hopefully, I will not have to use it.”

In essence, Trump conveyed a nuanced message to Tehran before Netanyahu’s arrival that he has an independent line of thinking regardless of what the hotheads in Tel Aviv might be saying. And that is to work for a deal through smart diplomacy — the JD Vance line.

Trump understands that the Masoud Pezeshkian government also seeks dialogue and negotiations. Trump does not believe that Iran is on a course to develop nuclear weapons, no matter the decade-old propaganda by the pro-Israel interest groups to malign Iran.

Tehran has rich experience in ‘smart diplomacy’. Quite obviously, the NSPM document is for record, given the reality of a powerful pro-Israel lobby in the US which also happens to be a core constituency in the American political system, including within the Republican Party. With his remarks, Trump endeavoured a soft landing for NSPM on the diplomatic arena.

Tehran will grasp Trump’s nuanced message of ‘transactional geopolitics’. Iranian officials have welcomed Trump’s remark that he is willing to work out a deal. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in a message on X on Wednesday: “In addition to being one of the committed parties to the NPT and other global non-proliferation treaties, Iran has already explicitly declared that ‘Iran will not seek to produce or acquire nuclear weapons under any circumstances’.” [Emphasis added.]

Araghchi proposed as conclusion: “Obtaining practical guarantees that Iran will not attain nuclear weapons is not difficult, provided that, in return, concrete assurances are given to effectively end hostile actions against Iran—including economic pressures and sanctions.”

Tehran has taken note that Trump did not rule out a meeting with Pezeshkian. When asked about Trump’s remark, the government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani told reporters at a press conference in Tehran on Wednesday, “Our international issues have been founded upon the principles of dignity, wisdom and expediency. All issues, specifically relations with other countries, are being pursued on the basis of these three principles.”

In effect, decoding the highly refined Persian idiom, Iran has responded positively to Trump’s estimation that a deal is possible and signalled flexibility, moderation and pragmatism on its part. The AP has picked up the trend and US government-funded PBS lost no time to flash the news.

The region too has been quick to sense the shift of tectonic plates. In an interview with Fox News, Trump’s favourite channel, Qatari foreign ministry has promptly offered to play a mediatory role between Washington and Tehran.



https://www.indianpunchline.com/trump-r ... iran-deal/
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 08, 2025 4:10 pm

Let Us Find Our Lost Diamonds: The Sixth Newsletter (2025)

Since returning to office, Trump has made clear his intentions of ushering in a new Golden Age of imperialism. With NATO at his disposal, what will this new hyper-imperialism mean for the rest of the world?

6 February 2025

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Umar Rashid (United States), I was dreaming when I wrote this. Forgive me if I go astray. The song of the four companions begins in the Sahel in the presence of the marabouts. Pandora comes from the north. The Harmattan approaches and beckon the storms and wars to come, 1799, 2023.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Donald Trump returned to the White House with a loud thump. His staff threw executive order upon executive order on his desk, which he signed with a flourish and then got on the phone to bark orders at the Danes and the Panamanians and the Colombians, demanding this, that, and the other thing, that thing, this thing, the things that he feels that the United States deserves.

In Trump’s history, the US once had a Golden Age. He is now the symbol of its anxiety. His slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, does not disguise the worry about its collapse: Make it great again, he says, because it no longer is great, and it should be great, and I will make it great. His followers know that at least he has been honest in his assessment of the decline. Many of them can feel it in their bank accounts, too depleted to feed their families, and they can see it in the crumbled infrastructure that surrounds them. Crystal methamphetamine and fentanyl numb the ugly pain while the new songs of the United States bemoan the uncertainty, how even their ‘dreams are wearing thin’. A passenger jet collides with an army helicopter, and Trump ascends to the podium of the White House pressroom and blames the accident on diversity hirings. Geniuses need to be at the air traffic control computer, he says. But the man who was at the desk that night was doing the job of two because of ruthless cuts that began decades earlier, with Ronald Reagan’s 1981 union decertification of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organisation (PATCO). It was Reagan who first introduced the world to Trump’s slogan, ‘make America great again’.

Reality is ugly. It is far easier to indulge in fantasy. Trump is the magician that wields that fantasy. Everything has deteriorated – not because of the attack on trade unions, the austerity that followed, or the rise of the tech bros whose share of the social surplus is outrageous and who have been on tax strike for decades. Trump’s fantasy is incoherent. How else could Trump have elevated Elon Musk, the symbol of the decline, to be the agent of transformation for a new Golden Age?

Image
Chéri Chérin (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Le chemin de l’exil (The Path to Exile), 2004.

There is madness, yes. But imperialism has always been tinged with madness. Hundreds of millions of people from the Americas to China have been either killed or subdued so that a small part of the world – the North Atlantic – could enrich itself. That is madness. And it worked. It continues to work, to some extent. The neocolonial structure of capitalism remains intact. When a country in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Pacific Islands tries to assert its sovereignty, it is defenestrated. Coups, assassinations, sanctions, theft of wealth – these are just a few of the instruments used to damage any attempt at sovereignty. And this neocolonial structure is maintained because of the international division of humanity: some people continue to think that they are superior to others. In our Tricontinental study Hyper-Imperialism, we showed that North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Plus countries account for over 74% of global military spending. While China accounts for 10% and Russia 3%, we nonetheless hear that it is China and Russia that are the threats, rather than NATO, which, led by the United States, is in fact the most dangerous institution in the world. NATO has destroyed entire countries (Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya, for instance) and now cavalierly threatens wars against countries that have nuclear weapons (China and Russia). Trump screams into the wind:

We want the Panama Canal.
We want Greenland.
We want to call it the Gulf of America.


Why should these demands come as a surprise? Panama was part of the Republic of Gran Colombia from 1821, when the region – under the leadership of Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) – broke from the Spanish Empire. Interest in building a canal through the isthmus of Panama to shorten the maritime routes between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and bypass the long journey around South America developed in the early 20th century, decades after Gran Colombia dissolved roughly into what is now Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. In 1903, intrigue by France and the United States, and an intervention by the US Navy, led to the secession of Panama from Colombia. The new Panamanian government gave the United States the Panama Canal Zone, which meant full control of the isthmus from 1903 to 1999, when the US ‘returned’ the canal to Panamanian jurisdiction. Bear in mind that in 1989, when their former CIA asset Manuel Noriega no longer pleased them, the US invaded Panama, seized Noriega, and incarcerated him in Miami, Florida, before releasing him to die in Panama City in 2017. The current president of Panama, José Raúl Mulino, first entered the government during the administration of Guillermo Endara, who was sworn in on a US military base in 1989 as Noriega was taken to Florida. These men are intimately familiar with the proprietary way the United States looks at their land. It is not merely Trump who ‘wants’ the Panama Canal; it is the entire history of the US treatment of Latin America – from the Monroe Doctrine to today – congealed in a phrase: we want the Panama Canal.

Memory is fragile. It is shaped repeatedly by half-truths and evasions. Beneath the surface reality of events lie deeper structures that influence how we see things. Old colonial ideas of Western benevolence and native savagery burst onto the surface at the time of interpretation.

Image
Hafidh Al-Droubi (Iraq), Cubist Coffeehouse, 1975.

In 2004, a year after the United States and its allies began a war of aggression against Iraq, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was interviewed by Owen Bennett-Jones of the BBC. Part of that conversation was about the war on Iraq:

Owen Bennett-Jones (OBJ): So, you don’t think there was legal authority for the war?
Kofi Annan (KA): I have stated clearly that it was not in conformity with the Security Council, with the UN Charter.
OBJ: It was illegal?
KA: Yes, if you wish.
OBJ: It was illegal?
KA: Yes, I have indicated it is not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view and from the Charter point of view, it was illegal.


If the war was illegal, a war of aggression, then there should have been consequences. That was supposed to have been the purpose of the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945–46. The excess deaths due to that war are now easily above a million people, with millions more negatively impacted by the destruction of infrastructure. If it were treated as a war of aggression, would its architects (George W. Bush and Tony Blair) be able to tour the world with their thousand-dollar smiles and their fancy bespoke suits? They neither faced International Criminal Court warrants, nor did their countries get taken to the International Court of Justice to face a hearing. Bush faced Muntadhar al-Zaidi’s shoes in 2008 when he went to Baghdad while Blair in the Iraq War Inquiry in 2012 was surprised by David Lawley-Wakelin, who stepped from behind a curtain and said, ‘This man should be arrested for war crimes’. Neither did the shoes hit Bush, nor was Blair arrested. Now, Blair has transformed himself into a peacemaker and Bush has shaped himself into an elder statesman.

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Tetsuya Fukushima (Japan), Untitled (a red circle), 2015.

In Justice Robert Jackson’s three-hour opening statement at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945, he said:

Civilisation asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions, and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will, in all countries, may have ‘leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the law’.

The line Justice Jackson quoted is from Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Old Issue’ (1899), which was widely read in the 1940s. Two years before Jackson’s opening statement, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill quoted from the same poem in his Harvard University speech to make the point that there are, he said, ‘common conceptions of what is right and decent’ that endowed humans with ‘a stern sentiment of impartial justice… or as Kipling put it: “Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law”’. Churchill’s conception of what was ‘right and decent’ is summarised in his view, two decades prior, when, dealing with the Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq, he wrote that he was ‘strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes’.

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Zubeida Agha (Pakistan), Urban Landscape, 1982.

It would be worthwhile to shift emphasis from Nuremberg, which is relatively well known, to the lesser-known war crimes trials in Tokyo. There, the tribunal decided to punish military leaders whose troops committed atrocities. General Tomoyuki Yamashita commanded the Fourteenth Army Group of the Imperial Japanese Army, which operated largely in the Philippines. After he surrendered, General Yamashita was accused of permitting his troops to commit atrocities against civilians and prisoners of war. He was executed on 23 February 1946. Nobody claimed that General Yamashita personally inflicted pain on anyone: he was charged with ‘command liability’. In 1970, the lead military prosecutor at Nuremberg, Telford Taylor, reflected that ‘there was no charge that General Yamashita had approved, much less ordered these barbarities, and no evidence that he knew of them other than the inference that he must have because of their extent’. He was hung because, as the Tokyo tribunal noted, General Yamashita ‘failed to provide effective control of his troops as required by the circumstances’. Taylor wrote these words in his book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, now long forgotten, in which he made the case not only to prosecute US politicians and generals, but also US aviators who bombed civilian targets in northern Vietnam because they participated in the Nuremberg era crime of ‘aggressive warfare’.

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Mohammed al-Hawajri (Gaza, Occupied Palestine Territory), Untitled, from the series Été au Gaza (Summertime in Gaza), 2017.

In mid-January, Declassified UK’s Alex Morris confronted Israeli General Oded Basyuk on his way to meet with the UK’s Ministry of Defence and the Royal United Services Institute. General Basyuk has overseen the genocide of Palestinians and is being investigated for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Yet, there he was on the streets of London on his way to meet the UK’s high officials in the military. ICC warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were set aside by Poland and the United States, grinding the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals into the dust. Sadly, the United Nations Principles to Combat Impunity (2005) are not legally binding.

Blood will flow down the avenues in some parts of the world. Champagne will fill the glasses in others.

In 1965, during the war between India and Pakistan, Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote a poem called ‘Blackout’:

Since our lights were extinguished
I have been searching for a way to see;
my eyes are lost, God knows where.

You who know me, tell me who I am,
who is a friend, and who an enemy.
A murderous river has been unleashed
into my veins; hatred beats in it.

Be patient; a flash of lightning will come
from another horizon like the white hand
of Moses with my eyes, my lost diamonds.


Let us find our lost diamonds.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... perialism/

******

“The Art of the Deal” is a book Trump needs to finally read

Martin Jay

February 7, 2025

What Trump wants more than any other U.S. president is immediate impact, Martin Jay writes.

The recent announcement by Trump that he is going to hit the EU, Canada, China and even Russia with tariffs is worrying, not least of all because we now have a president in the White House who not only doesn’t understand economics but also underestimates his frenemies – especially Russia.

It’s as though Trump wants to improve upon his first term as president, almost as though he regrets not being more bellicose and confrontational with anyone – even allies – who won’t agree with his unique world views and odd individual style as U.S. president.

What Trump wants more than any other U.S. president is immediate impact. He needs a radical change to hit the front pages in his first month in office to correspond with the somewhat absurd statements that he made in the months leading up to the elections in December. Unfortunately this explains and justifies where the confrontation is coming from.

In the case of Russia, it’s certainly possible that at some point he listened to his advisers who made it clear that a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia is highly unlikely and so the claim for a deal – or even a ceasefire – “within 24 hours” makes him look foolish. This could explain his first comments directed at President Putin which were seen as veiled threats and hardly an offer of peace to resolve Ukraine. This has certainly shocked some quarters of Moscow but Putin is patient. He knows Trump tends to have a bark which is worse than his bite and is prone to chest beating. Making threats is also part of who Trump is and his standard negotiating method.

The best Trump can hope for is that Russia, China and even the EU simply allows him the media moment but that they, in turn, don’t react. For the EU, for example, to react with counter tariffs would be a catastrophe for U.S. companies and the blowback might seriously take the wind out of Trump’s sails in his first year. Yes blue colour workers in Ohio and Texas want him to kicks some “ass” around the world and “make America great again”. But they also want to keep their jobs.

Trump doesn’t really have the communications skills required to negotiate with nations. He only has the threatening sound bite. And most world leaders know this. What he hates is silence. Like those who work in radio, silence is the thing to fear. With Russia, he didn’t get the super fast response he wanted when in the last days of the Biden administration he met with Zelensky. Perhaps he thought his personality alone would forge a peace deal there and then, with a call over the telephone with Putin and so now Trump in desperate mode is what we are left with.

Russia should heed this. Putin could well take advantage of this panicky moment and present himself as the peace broker between Trump and all these Global South countries that he seems to want to beat into submission. But does Trump even understand economics? The recent threats he made to BRICS countries if they chose to dump the dollar is alarming particularly as it comes from the position of weakness rather than strength.

For us to understand where all this is heading we need to understand the philosophy which drives Trump’s negotiating technique, which is not really a technique at all, more of a psychotic weakness akin typically to someone who is used to bullying – or as Prof. David Honig of Indiana University describes it “distributive bargaining”.

“Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser” he explains. “It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and you’re fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trump’s world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves the more he wins”.

There is a problem though with Trump’s own “Art of the Deal” style. “There is no defined end to the negotiation and there is no simple winner and loser” he warns. “There are always more pies to be baked. Further, negotiations aren’t binary. One of the risks of distributive bargaining is bad will. In a one-time distributive bargain, e.g. negotiating with the cabinet maker in your casino about whether you’re going to pay his whole bill or demand a discount, you don’t have to worry about your ongoing credibility or the next deal. If you do that to the cabinet maker, you can bet he won’t agree to do the cabinets in your next casino, and you’re going to have to find another cabinet maker.

Given this diagnosis, if Trump goes ahead with his threats, he will find quite quickly that the U.S. around the world is isolated with a devastating impact on the U.S. economy as not only will Trump harm his own people in the business community, but he will drive his customers around the world into the arms of Russia, China and India and other BRICS countries.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... ally-read/

******

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Gaza ceasefire in jeopardy as Trump casts doubt on phase two and three
Originally published: Middle East Eye on February 5, 2025 by Rayhan Uddin (more by Middle East Eye) | (Posted Feb 06, 2025)

U.S. President Donald Trump has cast doubt on whether the ceasefire deal in Gaza will reach the second stage, while his Middle East envoy has ruled out reaching stage three in its current conception.

During a press conference on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump told reporters:

I can’t tell you whether or not the ceasefire will hold.

We’ve done, I think, a very masterful job. We weren’t helped very much by the Biden administration. I can tell you that. But we’ve gotten quite a few hostages out.


He said that more Israeli captives would be released, but “we’re dealing with very complex people and we are going to see whether or not it holds”.

The Israeli premier described the deal as a “temporary ceasefire” during the conference, and said Israel could not leave Hamas to “continue the battle to destroy Israel”.

Netanyahu said that it was not possible to “talk about peace” while a “toxic murderous organisation is left standing”, stating that it would be like attempting to make peace in Europe after the Second World War while “the Nazi regime was left standing and the Nazi army was left standing”.

Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’ politburo, told MEE on Wednesday:

We demand the mediators, especially the United States, oblige the [Israeli] occupation to implement the ceasefire agreement in its three stages without procrastination or manipulation.

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Naim said that Hamas was committed to the deal, “as long as the occupation commits to it”.

“Any manipulation in implementing the agreement may cause it to collapse,” he added.

The first stage of the deal, which officially began on 19 January, involves the exchange of Israeli captives and Palestinian detainees, the return of internally displaced Palestinians to northern Gaza, and the retreat of Israeli troops to a perimeter area.

The second phase of the deal, which was expected to begin 42 days after the beginning of the truce, would see all Israeli captives released in return for a total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

That phase has yet to be discussed thoroughly, though a Hamas official said on Tuesday that contact and negotiations for the second phase had begun, without providing further details.

The third stage of the ceasefire, if agreed, would involve a plan on the governance of post-war Gaza and a three- to five-year reconstruction project overseen by international actors.

Trump says U.S. will ‘own’ Gaza
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff has said that the third stage, as things currently stood, could not be reached.

“Part of the problem is that it wasn’t such a wonderful agreement that was first signed, that was not dictated by the Trump administration. We had nothing to do with it,” Witkoff told reporters on Tuesday.

We were able to get to the right place on [phase] one. We’re hopeful we’ll get to the right place on [stage] two.

And what me and the national security advisor are identifying, which, by the way President Trump identified, is that [stage] three can’t go the way that agreement talks about, which is a five-year programme.

Witkoff said that it was “physically impossible” for Palestinians to return to Gaza within five years due to the level of destruction.

It is unfair to have explained to Palestinians that they might be back in five years. That’s just preposterous.

He stated that Trump’s comments in which he said he would “clean out” Gaza was part of a “long range plan” to make the enclave habitable.

During the conference with Netanyahu, Trump doubled down on his plans to forcibly displace Palestinians from the enclave, adding that the U.S. would “take over” the enclave and “own it”.

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site,” Trump said.

If it’s necessary, we’ll do that, we’re going to take over that piece, we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.

Netanyahu said that Trump’s idea was worth paying attention to, and “something that could change history”.

The plan has been criticised by leaders around the world, including from Spain, France and China.

Naim told MEE that Trump’s plans were “a crime against humanity, and a reinforcement of the law of the jungle at the international level”.

He said Hamas considered Trump to be interfering “in a topic which should not be of his concern”.

The senior official added that while Gaza was in need of reconstruction following Israel’s war, the problem was not “the presence of the Palestinian people on their land”, but in Israel’s “stifling siege of the Gaza Strip for more than 17 years with American support”.

“We demand urgent regional and international action to put an end to these malicious plans because any attempts to implement such plans will destabilise security in the region and beyond,” Naim said.

https://mronline.org/2025/02/06/gaza-ce ... and-three/

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President Donald Trump (right) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands following a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on February 4, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY IMAGES/TRUTHOUT)

Trump issues sanctions on Iran, threatens to “obliterate” it if he’s killed
Originally published: Truthout on February 6, 2025 by Sharon Zhang (more by Truthout) | (Posted Feb 07, 2025)

President Donald Trump issued a threat for Iran to be “obliterated” this week as his administration imposed sanctions on Iranian oil-affiliated groups and individuals as part of his supposed campaign of “maximum pressure” on the country.

Trump told reporters on Tuesday that, if he were assassinated by Iran, he has instructed his administration to attack the country.

“I’ve left instructions if they do it, they get obliterated, there won’t be anything left,” he said.

Biden should have said that, but he never did.

The president made this threat—which is not actionable, as he would no longer be president—as he signed an executive order to apply pressure to Iran, calling for “maximum economic pressure” on the country, including sanctions. It also calls for a deal preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon—six years after Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal that had placed limits on the country’s nuclear program.

Notably, though the executive order frames Trump’s plan as a way to “restore” pressure against Iran, President Joe Biden had been just as hawkish against Tehran. Biden issued hundreds of sanctions on Iran and affiliated groups in his term, including sanctions issued just weeks before the Democrat left office.

https://mronline.org/2025/02/07/trump-i ... es-killed/

*****

Trump has a special hatred for Africa and people of African descent
February 8, 2025 Stephen Millies

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In this photo provided by U.S. Africa Command, the U.S. military is launching airstrikes against Somalia on Saturday, Feb. 1, 2025.

Within the first three weeks of his second presidential administration, Trump’s crimes have included:

*Fascist round-ups of immigrant workers, with hundreds being deported in military aircraft while being shackled. Trump is setting up a concentration camp for immigrants in Guantánamo on land stolen from Cuba.
*Trump launched a storm of anti-trans attacks, radically removing trans people’s rights, banning gender identity from all official documents such as passports, banning transgender women and girls from participating in women’s sports, and restricting or even eliminating gender-affirming care.
*Menaced Colombia with a trade war when Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro protested the mistreatment of Colombian immigrants.
*Trump is seeking to take over Greenland, annex Canada, and is threatening to invade Panama. Thousands of U.S. troops have been sent to the Mexican border. Trump has ridiculously ordered renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
*Now, Trump wants to seize Gaza and kick out two million Palestinians who have survived 15 months of genocide.
*Yet, with all of his attacks on Latin America and Palestine, the first country that Trump bombed was the African country of Somalia.

Trump has a special hatred for Africa and all Black people. He wants to turn back the clock to the days of undisguised white supremacy.

On his second day in office, Trump rescinded President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order banning discrimination in hiring by the federal government and its private contractors. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah has rightfully called Trump’s campaign against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), an effort at resegregation.

Trump’s attendance at the Super Bowl depends on the message “End Racism” being removed from the end zone.

Darren Beattie — Trump’s pick to be the State Department’s Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs — is an open bigot.

Beattie wrote on X: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

The apartheid connection

Donald Trump’s entire life as the offspring of a real estate mogul has been coated with bigotry. Trump and his daddy were sued by the U.S. government in 1973 for refusing to rent to Black people.

Trump took out full-page newspaper ads when five innocent Black and Latinx youths were framed for assault in the 1989 “Central Park” case. Trump has never apologized, even though the Exonerated Five were freed after years in jail and compensated.

One of the five, Yusef Salaam, has been elected to the New York City Council.

On Feb. 3, Trump condemned South Africa for a law that has taken small amounts of land from whites. Thirty years after the fall of apartheid, whites still control 70% of land in South Africa, all of it stolen from Africans.

Trump whined on his Truth Social account that “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.” The term “certain classes” means white settlers.

Trump is now suspending all U.S. aid to South Africa, most of which funds HIV/AIDS prevention efforts. That’s as genocidal as the U.S.-made bombs that killed thousands in Gaza.

Fox News and all fascists call any efforts at land justice in South Africa to be “White Genocide.” During Trump’s first administration, two pro-apartheid white farmers from South Africa — Kallie Kriel and Ernst Roets — met with National Security Advisor John Bolton.

Kriel and Roets also met with United States Agency for International Development (USAID) officials. This shows how this agency, which is being shut down by the Trump regime, was about U.S. domination, not helping people.

Elon Musk — Donald Trump’s virtual co-president — is the son of an apartheid-era emerald mine owner. Musk also attacked the land law, as did Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Vice President JD Vance’s mentor is the billionaire Peter Thiel, who was brought up under apartheid. Thiel’s millions in campaign contributions were vital in electing Vance as a U.S. Senator from Ohio.

Alongside Trump’s attacks on immigrants, Palestinians, and Black people are his vicious attacks on transgender people. Bigotry hurts all poor and working people.

Trump & Co. want to return to the days before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which helped smash open colonial rule. Millions of people need to come out in the streets — as we did during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 — to stop this fascist regime.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... n-descent/

It is very doubtful that Trump's assault on USAID has anything to do with that orgs regime change operations or other nefarious undertakings. Rather, it is this. Anti-imperialists cheering Trump for this might think again....The color-revolution biz will simply be quietly transferred to another agency.

******

Who is Elon Musk really?

Is it possible to be hailed as ‘the world’s richest man’ and also be ‘a rebel’ and a ‘friend of the people’?
Proletarian writers

Friday 7 February 2025

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It is a part of bourgeois myth-making that the names of exploiters who are well-known are almost always those whose elevation to the level of the super-rich was made during their own lifetimes, while those who simply inherit their vast fortunes tend to live their parasitic lives out of the public eye. But what is less well understood is that none of these ‘rags to riches’ billionaires started life in the ranks of the proletariat. They are all privately educated and had access to family capital and connections which enabled them to take advantage of opportunities and put their businesses on the only footing that would enable rapid growth: the ability to employ the labour-power of others.

Its public image is something that the bourgeoisie has had to take increasingly seriously over the course of the last 150 years. As workers gained literacy and the capitalists had to concede them the right to vote, the ruling class needed to maintain an image of itself that could be marketed to workers.

The capitalists want the working class to believe in the heroic nature of their overlords, in their benevolence, and their innately innovative nature. In presenting themselves this way, they hope to legitimise in the minds of the workers their enslavement, via the wages system, to capital.

In previous generations, the ruling class maintained a more patrician demeanour, still distant from the working class but defining itself by its stern religiosity and publicising its ‘good works’. As the 20th century progressed, however, under the pressure of egalitarian ideas that spread as a result of the victories of socialism, the ruling class in the USA felt the need to change this image; to be more ‘relatable’.

From the point of view of the US propaganda system, this made complete sense. A central plank of bourgeois ideology in the USA has long been the notion that the any proletarian can work his way into the ruling class through sheer hard graft. The capitalists might be wealthier than ever, but since the 1960s a certain number of them have attempted to weave themselves a ‘rebel’ image; of their opposition to an ‘establishment’ from which they were excluded.

Such characters have included the likes of Richard Branson, Bill Gates and (for the Twitter age) a certain Elon Reeve Musk. It is notable that all these well-known names from the ranks of the exploiters are men whose elevation to the level of the super-rich was made during their own lifetimes. Unlike those who simply inherit their vast fortunes and whose names are rarely publicised.

Musk and co came not from rags, but from affluence. But while their original position in the bourgeois class had been relatively lowly, they each found themselves in a position to win the battle of competition in a new field of business (personal computing for Bill Gates, internet shopping for Jeff Bezos etc) and thus arrived in the elite ranks of the monopolists.

Throughout his career, Elon Musk has proven to be an adept self-promoter, and has taken great care to cultivate the image of being more a scientist and adventurer than a businessman. Indeed, Musk has frequently defended his acquisition of vast wealth by asserting that he only wants such accumulation in order to spur innovation in space exploration and the human conquest of distant planets.

But behind the constructed image, Musk’s real position is that of a man whose fortune is heavily dependent on government largesse – particularly from the US Department of Defence. He is an integral part of the US imperialist war machine, and his ‘libertarian’ politics, Twitter rants and ‘rebel’ stylings are merely a disguise behind which profits from decaying and blood-soaked imperialism pour into his pockets.

Rags to untold riches?
How does one get to be the ‘richest man on earth’? Is it hard work, gumption and a ‘can do’ attitude? Or might being born into a bourgeois family be the key component for those who wish to become enormously wealthy? In the case of the man who is said to be the ‘world’s richest man’, the latter certainly applies.

According to a story run by Bloomberg news, Elon Musk has an estimated net worth of $436bn. This did not come from thin air and graft, however. Musk was born into a relatively wealthy family, with his father Errol owning half an emerald mining operation in Zambia.

Elon has repeatedly denied this and tried to paint his origins as being much humbler – a typical trick played by those members of the bourgeoisie who want to claim a ‘rags to riches’ backstory. Young Elon began to accumulate his own fortune in the late 1990s when the online bank he cofounded (named X) merged with another company (Confinity) to form Paypal, the now widely used online wallet system.

Musk cashed out of Paypal when it was acquired by Ebay for $176m. This fortune enabled him to found the Tesla car company and Space X, which now jointly operates the US space programme with Nasa.

According to a report in the New York Times, Musk has federal government contracts worth at least $15.4bn. The two largest of these are with the Department of Defence ($3.6bn) and Nasa ($11.8bn) alongside other smaller contacts from the Department of Homeland Security. Clearly, he is profiting greatly from the wars of aggression waged by US imperialism.

Space X’s Starlink satellite system has been integral to Nato’s war on Russia, relied on by the Ukrainian army for battlefield communications and internet access. Realising that the Ukraine war is unpopular with many Americans, Musk has periodically made critical comments about it – but without Starlink, Nato’s communication systems in Ukraine (including its missile targeting) would be severely hampered.

‘Free Speech’ and populism
When Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, he posed for a while as a free speech advocate. But this was nothing more than another example of his personal brand-building. In fact, he doesn’t ‘own’ the platform (now rebranded as X) but is the single largest shareholder with around ten percent of the stock.

The Musk-led takeover of Twitter was partly financed via $13bn in loans from Wall Street banks, which explains why the new management has been desperately trying to monetise the platform in order to keep it looking like a viable business. If it remains a loss maker, those who hold the debt may lose confidence and look to offload it.

In recent months, Musk has taken an overtly political turn by backing and funding Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Previously, he has backed the Argentine ‘anarcho-capitalist’ Javier Milei and is now supporting Alice Weidel, leader of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, in the upcoming German federal election.

Musk’s political moves are much more about defending his business interests than they are about any embrace of ‘Trumpism’, which is a deliberately amorphous, shapeshifting phenomenon. This was revealed quite starkly when Musk was embroiled in a recent row with Trump’s supporters regarding the issue of H1B visas in the USA.

This particular visa programme brings skilled workers into the USA whom Trump had committed to getting rid of, only to turn around and defend the programme after winning the election. Musk ran into trouble after being a little too open about where his class interests lie, commenting that his businesses were reliant upon bringing in workers from India and elsewhere to fill skills gaps in the US workforce.

Musk thus revealed a certain truth that Trump’s anti-immigration messaging had studiously avoided –that the immigration system is designed to suit the requirements of the capitalist class. If immigration is high, that is (in part) because there is a demand for cheaper labour from the likes of Elon Musk, as well as being a reflection of the destabilisation visited upon so many countries by imperialist military and economic warfare.

Musk unwittingly revealed the calculation that lies behind ruling-class promotion of ‘right-wing populism’: the capitalists’ need to divert working-class anger over deteriorating living conditions into avenues that are harmless to their system. Immigration is the issue that they traditionally turn to in order to do this, but this strategy comes with a certain amount of risk given that the capitalists need migrant workers and that their hypocrisy in declaiming against immigrants is always in danger of being exposed.

While Musk’s cartoonish political deceptions can be effective at times, especially given his enormous reach via Twitter, when the mask slips workers are all too liable to realise that their interests are not aligned with his after all.

In recent weeks, Musk has actively intervened in British bourgeois politics by exploiting the various grooming scandals that have come to light over the past decade. After the damage done to him by the visa row, he (or his promotion team) clearly felt the need to re-establish his bona fides with the US reactionaries, and what better way to do that than by exploiting a scandal in another country?

In so doing, he gave a huge publicity boost to that reactionary agitator and agent of the British bourgeoisie Steven Yaxley Lennon (aka ‘Tommy Robinson’), claiming (as Lennon also claims) to be interested in protecting working-class girls from abuse. This ‘concern’ raised more than an eyebrow amongst those who are aware that Musk was an associate of deceased paedophile (and intelligence asset) Jeffrey Epstein and his partner in crime Ghislaine Maxwell.

American independent journalist Whitney Webb has chronicled Musk’s extensive ties to the Epstein network, even after his initial conviction for sex offences in 2008. Musk’s apparent concern for working-class girls who are exploited by groups of criminal men apparently did not stop him from mixing in Epstein’s circle.

The truth about Elon Musk’s life and business dealings is thus very far away from his ‘rebel’ persona. He made his money as part of the dotcom bubble and managed to be one of the winners who were left standing when that bubble burst in 2000. Far from being an ‘outsider’ or being somehow opposed to the US state machine, Musk is intertwined with it through extensive contracts that he holds through multiple arms of the US government.

He is a representative of the US bourgeoisie who might enjoy basking in the limelight and playacting the part of the rebel, but in reality is totally dependent on the strength of US imperialism for his profits.

Musk is a profiteer whose riches come at the cost of the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, and his class position explains why he is also a rabid supporter of the US imperialism in the middle east, in particular of the US-backed Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon.

As with any member of the ruling class, what we need to know is not what he says about himself, or what fake controversies are stirred up around his alleged personality and politics, but how he makes his money.

https://thecommunists.org/2025/02/07/ne ... elon-musk/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 09, 2025 6:55 pm

Trump freezes aid to South Africa over controversial land law, claiming discrimination against White farmers
By Eve Brennan and Alejandra Jaramillo, CNN
Published 11:08 AM EST, Sat February 8, 2025

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US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, DC, on January 30, 2025. Oliver Contreras/AFP/Getty Images
CNN

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday aimed at freezing assistance to South Africa over a controversial law that allows the government to seize farmland from ethnic minorities — namely White farmers — without compensation, as well as the country’s stance against Israel and its war in Gaza.

Trump said in the order the United States would no longer support South Africa with foreign aid if such policies, which he claims highlight a “shocking disregard for its citizens” and amount to “human rights violations,” continue, ordering US agencies to stop providing any aid to South Africa unless deemed necessary.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has previously denied that South African authorities were “confiscating land” and said his country was looking forward to working with the Trump administration “over our land reform policy.”


Trump’s order also directs the United States to assist Afrikaners — an ethnic group descended from European settlers — who are fleeing South Africa due to discrimination, including helping them resettle through refugee programs.

“It is the policy of the United States that, as long as South Africa continues these unjust and immoral practices that harm our Nation, the United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa; and the United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation,” read the order.

South Africa’s foreign ministry called the order a “great concern” and said it “(lacked) factual accuracy and fails to recognize South Africa’s profound and painful history of colonialism and apartheid,” adding that the move seemed “to be a campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation.”

“It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship,” the foreign ministry added in a statement Saturday.

President Cyril Ramaphosa speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 21, 2025.
Related article
South African president and Elon Musk discuss ‘misinformation’ after Trump aid threat

In the past, racist policies forcefully removed Black and non-White South Africans from land for White people to use. There has been a land redistribution and restitution provision in the country’s constitution since South Africa emerged from its apartheid era and held its first democratic elections in 1994.

Unemployment and poverty, however, remain acute among Black South Africans, who make up around 80% of the population, yet own a fraction of the land. In January, Ramaphosa signed a bill into law that sets forth new guidelines for land expropriation, including enabling the government to expropriate land without compensation in some cases.

According to the US Foreign Assistance website, the country said it would send nearly $440 million in assistance to South Africa in 2023, including more than $270 million just from the Agency for International Development (USAID).

The executive order comes as the Trump administration has already frozen almost all foreign assistance and made moves to dismantle USAID.

Trump also said in his order that South Africa had taken an aggressive stance against the United States and its allies through its position on Israel and reinvigorating ties with Iran.

South Africa accused Israel of committing genocide in an unprecedented case at the United Nations’ top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It said Israel’s leadership was “intent on destroying the Palestinians in Gaza” and called for the court to order a halt to Israel’s military campaign in the enclave.

Trump has previously said he would halt funding until there was a full investigation into allegations that “South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of people very badly,” without citing evidence.

Ramaphosa also spoke to Trump’s “first buddy” and South African-born Elon Musk earlier this week “on issues of misinformation and distortions about South Africa,” emphasizing South Africa’s constitutionally embedded values of the respect for the rule of law, justice, fairness and equality,” a government statement at the time read.

During his annual state of the nation address, Ramaphosa said South Africa “will not be deterred.”

“We are, as South Africans, a resilient people, and we will not be bullied,” he said.

https://us.cnn.com/2025/02/08/africa/tr ... index.html

Ya don't need what passes for left analysis to understand where the prez is coming from... A racist from the gitgo, now teamed up with the Boer Musk he jumps one shark after another. Immigration, Gaza, now this...But I know what's coming down the pipe, send Black Americans 'back' to Africa, mebbe a 'buy-out' deal. Make America White Again...

*****

Marco Rubio fails in his diplomatic debut
7 Feb 2025 , 3:33 pm .

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Marco Rubio starts off on the wrong foot, making huge mistakes in his first tour as Secretary of State (Photo: Reuters)

Marco Rubio, head of the US State Department, has taken office amid pressure and difficulties. And his first tour as head of US diplomacy has shown how difficult it is for him to meet expectations – both personal and political.

First of all, it is appropriate to point out the characteristics of the Cuban-American's appointment. This official is considered a promising son of the American bureaucratic apparatus and, now, his political future is at stake in a context where the MAGA factors — adverse to the institutional Republican hawks — are much stronger than in Donald Trump's first government.

It is also necessary to consider that the president has a marked tendency towards the periodic and frequent replacement of key officials in his administration, unlike other presidents. In his first administration, Trump had three secretaries of state, six defense ministers, six national security secretaries and four chiefs of staff.

First tour; first failure
Rubio's debut as Secretary of State was not what was expected. It could be said that his diplomatic deployment got off to a bad start.

Following a visit to Panama, where he met with the president of that country, José Raúl Mulino, the State Department announced that "U.S. government vessels can now transit the Panama Canal without charging fees, which means savings of millions of dollars a year."

From that moment on, the former senator from Florida believed he had obtained an inaugural victory that would guarantee him a first congratulation from Trump, given that the canal, supposedly commercially and operationally inclined towards China, is among his agenda items at the moment. It was also a way to balance the playing field with Grenell, who is monopolizing the Republican's attention after his meeting with President Nicolás Maduro at the end of January.

The adrenaline rush was short-lived. The announcement was met with a strong response from the Panamanian government. Mulino accused the United States of spreading false information about an alleged agreement that would allow American ships to transit the Panama Canal free of charge.

The president explained that on Wednesday he had said the opposite to the US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to whom he explained that no country can be exempted from the fees for transiting through the bioceanic passage. "It is a constitutional limitation," said the Panamanian Head of State.

"I'm really surprised because they're making an important, institutional statement by the entity that governs US foreign policy based on a falsehood. And that's intolerable," he added, alluding directly to the person in charge of US foreign policy.

Rubio replied: "I'm not confused about Panama, we had conversations, I thought there were some strong first steps, we have expectations that we made clear in those conversations," the Cuban-American said, looking clearly ridiculed.

In the face of the disaster generated by this dissent, the one-to-one channel between leaders was activated . The Panamanian confirmed on Thursday that he would speak directly with Trump on this issue.

The American confirmed the contact. "I think we will speak with Panama on Friday. Essentially, they have committed to certain things, but I am not happy with it," he said.

The American president clearly disavowed his Secretary, in the style of "if you want something to go well, do it yourself."

Rubio, evidently, failed to go too far in his "pressure" on Mulino to claim a quick diplomatic victory. His anxiety to stand out and prove himself capable and efficient in front of Trump has worked against him, and ended up aggravating the bilateral crisis between Panama City and Washington.

The tycoon has had to come out and collect the glass after his key foreign policy official failed in the task entrusted to him.

Pulling the Fire Alarm: Damage Control
In the face of catastrophe, the only thing left to do was to flee forward. As they say in Venezuela: "Fake madness" or "act like Willie Mays," a proverb equivalent to pretending to be crazy, whose origin lies in the masterful participation of the heroic American baseball player in the 1955 Caribbean Series - he played for Puerto Rico - when in his last turns at bat, after frequently failing at the beginning, he recorded an impressive streak in his last turns.

However, unlike the Alabama baseball player, Marco Rubio does not have a Hall of Fame in store for him at the end of his career.

During his stop in Guatemala, Rubio tried to overcome this. And, as if nothing had happened, he tried to sell his tour as a success after the Central American government headed by Bernardo Arévalo accepted deportees. An unnecessary show of display with which, surely, he intended to overshadow the misstep with Mulino.

However, there is nothing extraordinary about Guatemala receiving deportees. The migration agreements between the Central American country and the United States have been fully operational and deportations are routine.

VENEZUELA TO THE RESCUE?
The bragging in Guatemala and his meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, in which an immigration agreement was made official to transfer deported criminals from the United States to the prisons of the Central American country, did not seem to be enough to revive the idea of ​​a successful debut.

Given this, his topic of reference (Venezuela) could guarantee him greater buzz in the press.

Rubio took advantage of a press conference during his visit to the Dominican Republic to repeat the hackneyed argument against the country, accusing it of collaborating with "terrorism."

However, perhaps a little betrayed by his subconscious, perhaps a little wanting to avoid a possible claim from Trump, the Secretary said: "I don't think there will be a change in those countries between now and December." The statement represented a deep emotional blow to the extremist wing of the opposition, since it is a confirmation that the main sponsor of the change of regime is more concerned with maintaining his position than with the "cause of freedom."

Trump, according to the Financial Times , considers the opposition "losers." Rubio knows that an open position in support of María Corina Machado and Edmundo González is unfeasible, but he spares no effort in trying to reorient the Venezuelan issue towards the most urgent concerns of the American president.

On the other hand, according to some Panamanian media, the former PUD candidate, Edmundo González, traveled from Peru to the Central American country, where he supposedly met in secret with Rubio "for 30 minutes ." But, when the unconfirmed meeting was revealed, new questions arose.

One of them is: Why was the meeting not announced publicly, if it actually happened?

And if it was "secret", under what criteria was it allowed to be leaked to the press?

Obviously, the answers lie in Trump's assessment, but that does not entirely clear up the issue. If the meeting did indeed take place, it would imply a disavowal and a second major diplomatic error for Rubio during his tour. Given this possibility, the game of appearances had to continue.

In the Dominican Republic, the former senator from Florida announced the confiscation — a euphemism for “theft” — of a Venezuelan aircraft that had been held in that country since last year. Obviously, Rubio must also respond to the pressures coming from the extremist sector, which demand a firmer stance and guarantee that Trump turns to “maximum pressure” 2.0. Since this is not possible, for now, Rubio has put together an artificial economic coup, framed within the sanctions against the country, to calm anxieties and, at the same time, obtain a consolation prize in the face of Grenell’s advance and in the face of the mistakes made.

At the end of his tour on Thursday, Trump did not speak positively of the official nor did he praise his "achievements." On the contrary, it will be Trump himself who will have to finish the work he left unfinished in Panama. In addition, he has appointed Rubio as interim administrator of USAID, an institution that he has defended for years and which means facing its own contradictions.

The only relevant US government official to attend the tour was Rubio himself .

"I think it was such an impactful visit that there was an earthquake, the first earthquake I have ever experienced in my life," he said.

Rubio has started off on the wrong foot, failing in his debut and being restricted from moving forward with regime change in Venezuela, while he is forced to betray his War Hawk approach to forcibly enter the MAGA epistemology, with the aim of gaining his boss's trust. It seems that a possible storm is brewing, with the characteristic you are fired that Trump loves to pronounce.

Marco Rubio appears to be following the same path as Rex Tillerson. We'll soon find out.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/ma ... iplomatico

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 10, 2025 4:16 pm

I’m Committed to Buying and Owning Gaza: Donald Trump

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Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (L) and U.S. President Donald Trump (R). X/ @The_NewArab

February 10, 2025 Hour: 9:32 am

Turkish President Erdogan reacted to his proposal on Gaza, saying that it was ‘not worth’ talking about.

On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump said that he is “committed to buying and owning Gaza”, and that the United States may let other nations in the Middle East rebuild the war-torn enclave.

“I’m committed to buying and owning Gaza. As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it, other people may do it, through our auspices. But we’re committed to owning it, taking it, and making sure that Hamas doesn’t move back,” Trump said.

Last week at the White House alongside visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump proposed “long-term ownership” of Gaza by the United States. His proposal has stirred widespread criticism and is opposed by several Arab nations as well as U.S. allies in Europe.

On Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacted to Trump’s proposal on Gaza, saying that it was “not worth” talking about. “The Israeli administration has more insidious plans in mind instead of making the ceasefire permanent,” he said this before travelling to Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan.


“The proposals of the new U.S. administration regarding Gaza have no aspects worthy of our consideration or discussion,” Erdogan pointed out.

The Turkish president, who was accused in recent days by the opposition of not having reacted to Trump’s statements on Gaza, said that his ideas are “useless compromises, useless efforts.”

“No one has the power to expel Gazans from their eternal homeland of thousands of years. Palestine belongs to the Palestinians. Despite all the attacks by Israel, the people of Gaza will continue to protect their land and stand firm. In our upcoming speech in Malaysia, we will share what needs to be done for Gaza,” the Turkish leader stated, without giving further details.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/im-commi ... aza-trump/

******

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Photo illustration by Thomas Gaulkin (source photographs: Scott Olson/Getty, Kremlin, KCNA)

The national missile defense fantasy—again
Originally published: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on February 4, 2025 by Joe Cirincione (more by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) | (Posted Feb 07, 2025)

National missile defense advocates live in a world of magic and make-believe. Fantasy replaces science, assertions replace facts, and cartoon weapons replace real capabilities.

This enduring fantasy, however, has real-world consequences.

President Donald Trump’s pledge last week to build “a next-generation missile defense shield” that would “defeat any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland [with] space-based interceptors” has provoked a predictable reaction. Russia blasted Trump’s plan, detailed in his new executive order, “The Iron Dome for America.”

But no magic shield is going to protect the United States against nuclear attack.

An idea that never dies. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Friday of Trump’s plan that “it directly envisages a significant strengthening of the American nuclear arsenal and means for conducting combat operations in space, including the development and deployment of space-based interception systems.”

“We consider this as another confirmation of the U.S. focus on turning space into an arena of armed confrontation… and the deployment of weapons there,” Zakharova added.

The Russian reaction could scuttle Trump’s stated desire to negotiate limits on nuclear weapons. If so, it would repeat the role strategic defenses have played in the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. Efforts to build national defenses always trigger efforts to overcome them with more missiles and other counter-measures—the well-known security dilemma.

Despite all the formidable technical and geopolitical evidence against such schemes, however, “faith in national missile defense never dies,” Washington Post columnist Max Boot observes.

It is no coincidence that Trump’s new order is lifted almost entirely from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 wish list. In the 1980s, the group championed President Ronald Reagan’s original dream to “put in space a shield that missiles could not penetrate—a shield that could protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from rain,” as he told a 1986 high school graduating class.

“Like Israel’s highly effective system of the same name, President Trump’s Iron Dome will provide an impenetrable defense for the American people that will bring peace through strength,” Heritage Foundation fellow Victoria Coates said. It “will fulfill President Reagan’s vision for the Strategic Defense Initiative laid out some four decades ago,” she added.

Doomed to fail. Trump’s executive order is a jumble of false claims and imaginary solutions. It begins by declaring that the risk of a missile attack “remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.” That would surprise most experts on existential risks. The climate crisis, the threat of new pandemics, artificial intelligence, and crippling cyber attacks are all at least as likely catastrophic events as nuclear weapons delivered by other means. But threat inflation has always been a key part of efforts to justify urgent action and massive investment.

Trump claims that “over the past 40 years, rather than lessening, the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex.” Despite being utter nonsense, this claim has gone largely unchallenged.

While it is true that new technologies have increased the lethality of missiles, the missile threat to the United States has decreased dramatically. Arms control treaties and the collapse of the Soviet Union slashed the number of nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed missiles threatening the United States.

In 1985, the Soviet Union deployed 2,345 land-based and submarine-based missiles carrying over 9,300 nuclear warheads. That was the threat Reagan hoped to render “impotent and obsolete” with his missile shield.

Thanks to negotiated agreements, today’s Russia fields only 521 missiles, carrying 2,236 warheads. China’s land-based nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching the United States have increased from around 20 in 1985 to some 135 today (carrying 238 warheads) and perhaps 72 single-warhead submarine-based missiles. In sum, the United States today faces roughly one-fifth the number of enemy missiles compared to 40 years ago and one-quarter of the nuclear warheads (728 vs. 2,365 missiles and 2,546 vs. 9,320 warheads). That is still a very dangerous threat but by no means a greater one.

Where arms control succeeded, missile defense technology failed.

None of the scores of systems developed by Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and its successor organizations have ever come close to providing the imaginary shield that Reagan promised. National missile defenses did not work then. They do not work now. They will likely never work.

Costly delirium. As Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat of Michigan, put it when chairing the extensive Government Operations Committee investigation into SDI in 1991,

Over the past eight years, the administration has been remarkably successful in convincing Congress to give it billions for SDI. But the program has proved remarkably unsuccessful in producing much of anything. SDI has pulled a reverse Rumpelstiltskin—it has spun gold into straw.

I was Conyers’ chief congressional investigator for those hearings. I conducted oversight over SDI since the very first testimonies to Congress in 1984. Then, too, officials promised an impenetrable shield. They delivered boondoggles.

“Money was poured into these exotic weapons projects that were later abandoned,” Conyers said.

$1 billion for the Free Electron Laser. $1 billion for the Boost Surveillance and Tracking Satellite. $720 million for the Space-based Chemical Laser. $700 million for the Neutral Particle Beam. $366 million for the Airborne Optical Aircraft. The list goes on.

To cover up these failures, Trump blames (as he does with everything from losing elections to fatal plane crashes) a deep conspiracy. He claims in his new order that Reagan’s program “was canceled before its goal could be realized.” Other presidents then handcuffed the U.S. population by, still according to Trump’s executive order, limiting the effort “only to stay ahead of rogue-nation threats and accidental or unauthorized missile launches.”

Again, this is nonsense. As it became clear that the space-based laser weapons Edward Teller told Reagan he could build were a fantasy, Reagan and subsequent presidents scaled down the program to try to get some kind of workable defense. But after spending over $415 billion over decades, all the United States has to show for the effort is 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California that can hit a cooperative target in carefully scripted demonstrations—about half of the time. Congress currently allocates $30 billion a year on missile defense and defeat programs, most run by the SDI successor, the Missile Defense Agency.

Not an iron dome; more like an iron colander. The major technical problems that remain unresolved—and eventually forced the cancellation of all SDI’s ambitious plans—are the same obstacles that have ruled out an effective ballistic missile defense for more than 60 years:

the ability of the enemy to overwhelm a system with offensive missiles;
the questionable survivability of space-based weapons;
the inability to discriminate among real warheads and hundreds or thousands of decoys;
the problem of designing battle management, command, control, and communications that could function in a nuclear war; and,
the low confidence in the ability of the system to work perfectly the first—and, perhaps, only—time it is ever used.
These problems have been detailed at length already in the Bulletin’s columns, congressional reports, and independent expert studies, including two that played a major role in the Star Wars debates—the 1987 American Physical Society Directed Energy Weapon study and the 1988 Office of Technology Assessment Ballistic Missile Defense study.

These and other technical problems would have to be resolved before an effective missile defense system can be deployed. In the long term, new technologies, particularly directed energy weapons, hold some promise. In the short term, however, there is little reason for blind technological optimism.

Intentionally confusing the U.S. public and gullible politicians by conflating the limited success of less-complicated defenses against short-range rockets with the infeasibility of destroying hundreds of long-range ballistic missiles is part of the sales effort.

“Israel has an Iron Dome. They have a missile defense system,” Trump promised at the Republican Party convention last year.

Why should other countries have this, and we don’t?

Because it is technically impossible to build a system that can protect the United States from ballistic missile attack, Mr. President. No amount of hucksterism will change that.

“Iron Dome defends small areas from short-range nonnuclear missiles. It’s a vastly easier task than defending the whole country against missiles that travel 100 times further and seven times faster,” missile defense expert Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists explains.

“There is zero possibility of a comprehensive missile defense of the United States in the foreseeable future,” James N. Miller, who served as undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, told Max Boot.

We are not going to escape mutual assured destruction vis-à-vis Russia or China.

As shown repeatedly over the past 60 years, the only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear-armed missiles is to negotiate their elimination. Pretending that there is a magic shield that can be willed into existence will only make the problem of national missile defense worse.

https://mronline.org/2025/02/07/the-nat ... asy-again/

*****

‘So Much for Lowering Costs’: Fury Over Musk’s Death Wish for CFPB That Returned Over $20 Billion to Consumers
Posted on February 10, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. It’s important to keep shredding defenses of the Musk wrecking ball operation. If he really care about cost reduction, the Pentagon and related military spending would be top of his list. Why, for instance, yet not a peep about why we need nearly 800 bases overseas and which might be suitable for closure?

By Jon Queally, managing editor of Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams

Defenders of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that has returned tens of billions of dollars to duped and defrauded U.S. consumers expressed outrage overnight and into Saturday after the independent agency was declared deceased by billionaire Elon Musk and its operations were handed over to the chief architect of the far-right Project 2025 Russell Vought.

Vought, who earlier this week was confirmed as head of the Office of Management and Budget by Senate Republicans, was named acting director of the CFPB by President Donald Trump, according to various reports.

The appointment of the far-right ideologue came less than a day after reports emerged that members of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) were granted access to key CFPB systems and Musk himself posted to his online social media X that the agency should “RIP,” suggesting it was in the process of being dismantled or, in his mind, already killed.

“Since its creation, the Bureau has returned $21 billion to people’s wallets by fighting against illegal financial charges, junk fees, debts, and fraud,” said Mike Calhoun, president of the nonpartisan Center for Responsible Lending, in a statement on Saturday. Now, when people are already struggling to pay higher prices for necessities like eggs and milk, the Trump administration appears to have decided to deepen the pain by directly taking aim at the agency that helps keep our money safe.”

“‘Let them eat debt’ is not a strategy for making America great again,” Calhoun added, “and weakening the CFPB certainly isn’t the way to keep working families, our financial markets, or our economy strong.”

Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which challenges corporate encroachment on the common good, said, “Obviously this isn’t about ‘efficiency.’ It’s about dismantling law enforcement that protects Americans from corporate power.”

Congressional Democrats also reacted with contempt to Musk’s message and the news that the agency’s systems—like those of other agencies DOGE has put its hands on—were under threat.

Congressman Greg Casar @RepCasar
·
Follow
The richest man in the world wants to shut down an agency that keeps people like him from ripping off the rest of us.

CFPB has returned billions of $$ to Americans who’ve been screwed by Big Banks and Big Tech.

Fire Elon Musk.


“Here is the richest man in the world bragging about eliminating an agency that has delivered $21 billion back to working-class families since its inception,” said Democrats on the House Committee on Financial Services, led by Ranking Member Maxine Waters of California. “Even most Republicans want the CFPB to continue protecting them from being ripped off by abusive big banks and predatory lenders.”

Image
Elon Musk @elonmusk
CFPB RIP 🪦


“Here are the FACTS: 81% of voters, both Republicans and Democrats, support the CFPB and want the agency to continue its work,” said Rep. Juan Vargas (D-Calif.), also a member of the committee. “Even so, Trump has moved to freeze the CFPB to take money out of YOUR pocket to line those of his billionaire friends.”

In a letter sent to the CFPB on Friday—addressed to the previous acting director, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose first act of business was reportedly to order a halt of “all meaningful work”—Waters, Vargas, and 79 other Democratic members of the House said they were “deeply alarmed and troubled that you appear to be launching the Trump Administration’s plan to contravene the will of Congress and unlawfully ‘delete’ this popular consumer watchdog that enjoys the broad bipartisan support of four out of five Americans.”

According to the letter:

… we understand that you have ordered staff to halt all meaningful work of the CFPB, including ordering staff to stop investigating violations of consumer financial protection laws or settling enforcement actions, basically letting bad actors off the hook. We also understand that you have arbitrarily ordered the suspension of all CFPB rules that have yet to take effect, which would delay billions of dollars in savings and credit opportunities for consumers, if not rob them entirely.

We urge you to immediately rescind what appears to be an illegal stop work order and allow the public servants at the CFPB to get back to work for the American people as required by law.

As of this writing, the CFPB’s homepage (www.consumerfinance.gov) prominently displayed a 404 error message, though portions of the site appeared to be active.

In a Saturday statement, the Democrats on the House Finance Committee said the 404 image on the CFPB website was intentionally “deceptive,” calling it “a brazen attempt to fool consumers and the public about the status” of the agency.

“As of this moment, links and pages are still up and functional on the website,” the statement said, “including the Consumer Complaint portal and database and Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) database. Various aspects of the CFPB’s web content is required by statute to be published and available on the CFPB’s website.”

Nadine Chabrier, counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, said the “deeply troubling” developments at the agency will “undermine the CFPB’s mission to protect consumers from financial misconduct” of various kinds.

“CFPB has returned more than $20,000,000,000 to consumers since it was founded,” said Rep. Gabe Amo (D-R.I.) on Friday evening in response to Musk’s tweet. “Let’s be clear: the people cheering this the loudest are scammers and people who don’t want you to keep your hard-earned dollars. So much for lowering costs.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... umers.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 11, 2025 4:45 pm

Chris Hedges: The Empire Self-Destructs
February 11, 2025

These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.

Image
And Then the World Blew Up – by Mr. Fish.

By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost

The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of state.

These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.

Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude.

They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths. Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.

They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. They are pulling out of the World Health Organization. They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza.

They suggested Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal.

They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under U.S. control which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the U.S.

The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg monarch, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities.

They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society.

I spent two years researching and writing about the warped ideologues of those who have now seized power in my book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Read it while you still can. Seriously.

These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration, are unapologetic about their hatred for pluralistic, secular democracies. They seek, as they exhaustively detail in numerous “Christian” books and documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to deform the judiciary and legislative branches of government, along with the media and academia, into appendages to a “Christianized” state led by a divinely anointed leader.

They openly admire Nazi apologists such as Rousas John Rushdoony, a supporter of eugenics who argues that education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches and Biblical law must replace the secular legal code, and Nazi party theorists such as Carl Schmitt.

They are avowed racists, misogynists and homophobes. They embrace bizarre conspiracy theories from the white replacement theory to a shadowy monster they call “the woke.” Suffice it to say, they are not grounded in a reality based universe.

Christian Dominion

Christian fascists come out of a theocratic sect called Dominionism. This sect teaches that American Christians have been mandated to make America a Christian state and an agent of God. Political and intellectual opponents of this militant Biblicalism are condemned as agents of Satan.

“Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and ‘Christian values’ form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all,” I noted in my book.

“Labor unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and ‘homeland’ security.”

The Christian fascists and their billionaire funders, I noted, “speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past.” They commit logocide, killing old definitions and replacing them with new ones.

Words — including truth, wisdom, death, liberty, life and love — are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings. Life and death, for example, mean life in Christ or death to Christ, a signal of belief of unbelief.

Wisdom refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the doctrine. Liberty is not about freedom, but the liberty that comes from following Jesus Christ and being liberated from the dictates of secularism.

Love is twisted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those, such as Trump, who claim to speak and act for God.

As the death spiral accelerates, phantom enemies, domestic and foreign, will be blamed for the demise, persecuted and slated for obliteration. Once the wreckage is complete, ensuring the immiseration of the citizenry, a breakdown in public services and engendering an inchoate rage, only the blunt instrument of state violence will remain.

A lot of people will suffer, especially as the climate crisis inflicts with greater and greater intensity its lethal retribution.

The near-collapse of our constitutional system of checks and balances took place long before the arrival of Trump. Trump’s return to power represents the death rattle of the Pax Americana.

The day is not far off when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, Congress will take its last significant vote and surrender power to a dictator. The Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to do nothing and hope Trump implodes, have already acquiesced to the inevitable.

The question is not whether the U.S. goes down, but how many millions of innocents it will take with it. Given the industrial violence the U.S. empire wields, it could be a lot, especially if those in charge decide to reach for the nukes.

The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.) — Elon Musk claims is run by “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” — is an example of how these arsonists are clueless about how empires function.

Who Gets US Foreign Aid

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A Haitian woman in Port-au-Prince in 2010 receives her ration of rice distributed by World Vision in coordination with the U.S. Military and the United Nations World Food Program. (R.Gustafson, U.S.A.I.D., Flickr,
CC BY-SA 2.0)

Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponized to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organizations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.

When the U.S. offered to build the airport in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, investigative journalist Matt Kennard reports, it required that Haiti oppose Cuba’s admittance into the Organization of American States, which it did.

Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds “democracy promotion” and “judicial reform” that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.

U.S.A.I.D., for example, paid for a “political party reform project” that was designed “as a counterweight” to the “radical” Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo) and sought to prevent socialists like Evo Morales from being elected in Bolivia.

It then funded organizations and initiatives, including training programs so Bolivian youth could be taught American business practices, once Morales assumed the presidency, to weaken his hold on power.

Kennard in his book, The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire, documents how U.S. institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, U.S.A.I.D. and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South.

Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. The heavily funded aid programs, designed to bring down Morales, eventually led the Bolivian president to throw U.S.A.I.D. out of the country.

The lie peddled to the public is that this aid benefits both the needy overseas and us at home. But the inequality these programs facilitate abroad replicates the inequality imposed domestically. The wealth extracted from the Global South is not equitably distributed. It ends up in the hands of the billionaire class, often stashed in overseas bank accounts to avoid taxation.

Funding the Iron Fist

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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Pentagon on Feb. 5. (DoD, Madelyn Keech, Public domain)

U.S. tax dollars, meanwhile, disproportionately fund the military, which is the iron fist that sustains the system of exploitation. The 30 million Americans who were victims of mass layoffs and deindustrialization lost their jobs to workers in sweatshops overseas. As Kennard notes, both home and abroad, it is a vast “transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically.”

“The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimizes theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest,” he writes. “The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”

Foreign aid maintains sweatshops or “special economic zones” in countries such as Haiti, where workers toil for pennies an hour and often in unsafe conditions for global corporations.

“One of the facets of special economic zones, and one of the incentives for corporations in the U.S., is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on how you can treat labor and taxes and customs,” Kennard told me in an interview.

“You open these sweatshops in the special economic zones. You pay the workers a pittance. You get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. The state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is, where they’re offshoring this production, doesn’t benefit at all. That’s by design. The coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased. It’s the corporations that benefit.”

These same U.S. institutions and mechanisms of control, Kennard writes in his book, were employed to sabotage the electoral campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of the U.S. empire, for prime minister in Britain.

The U.S. disbursed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. It funded clean water initiatives, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. In 2024, it provided 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.

Humanitarian aid, often described as “soft power,” is designed to mask the theft of resources in the Global South by U.S. corporations, the expansion of the footprint of the U.S. military, the rigid control of foreign governments, the devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction, the systemic abuse of workers in global sweatshops and the poisoning of child laborers in places like the Congo, where they are used to mine lithium.

‘Draining the Swamp’

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Protest outside the U.S. Treasury building on Feb. 4. (Geoff Livingston, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organizations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.

The seizure of government personnel records and classified material, the effort to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts — mostly those which relate to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors general and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalize the leviathan they worship.

They plan to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service, part of the internal machinery of the empire. The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms.

These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.

Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the U.S. will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression.

This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates. The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain.

The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.

“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power:

When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.” He writes:

“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq].”

The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties including due process, torture, militarized police, the massive prison system, militarized drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.

The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/11/c ... destructs/

The Soviet Union was never an empire, Hedges you asshole.

Trump Vows to Press King of Jordan on Gaza Cleansing
February 11, 2025

The U.S. president said he would consider using aid to Jordan and Egypt as leverage to make them take part in the war crime of ethnically cleansing Gaza, reports Joe Lauria.

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King Abdullah II of Jordan, left, and President Donald J. Trump, in 2017. (White House, Shealah Craighead)

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

As King Abdullah II of Jordan prepares to visit the White House on Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters he could withhold aid to both Jordan and Egypt if their leaders don’t agree to accept the nearly 2 million Palestinians that Trump wants expelled from Gaza.

“Yeah, maybe, sure, why not? If they don’t, I would conceivably withhold aid, yes,” Trump said.

Jordan is the third biggest recipient of combined military and economic U.S. foreign aid ($1.7 billion) and Egypt is the fourth ($1.5 billion). Only Ukraine ($17.2 billion/2 percent military) and Israel ($3,3 billion) were ahead of them.

Thus Trump holds leverage over both Amman and Cairo. And it looks like he might not be afraid to use it. Despite a week of outrage, derision and disbelief that followed Trump’s revelation that he wanted to transfer all Palestinians from Gaza, he seems more determined than ever to do it.

Asked in a TV interview that aired on Monday if the Palestinians could return after he supposedly rebuilds Gaza, Trump said bluntly: “No, they wouldn’t.”

“We’ll build safe communities a little bit away from where they are where all of this danger is,” the real estate magnate said. “In the meantime, I would own this. Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land.”

Once his real estate deal is complete the Palestinians won’t return. Notice he said “I” would own Gaza, not the United States.

What Distraction?

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President Donald Trump greet’s Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, 2017 (White House/Shealah Craighead)

Despite days of this very clear language, pundit after pundit, one social media pontificator after another say Trump is just trying to artfully shock people for an ulterior motive, or that it’s all just a distraction. But a distraction from what? If there is anything he’d want to distract people from it would be the commission of one of the most heinous war crimes: the ethnic cleansing of an entire population.

But instead Trump announced his intention to do it live, a week ago under the full glare of TV lights in the East Room of the White House with an overjoyed Israeli prime minister at his side. He wants to put it right in our faces. It’s no distraction. He speaks as though he is doing the Palestinians a favor.

Perhaps it’s time to understand that he might just be meaning what he says. King Abdullah is about to find out at the White House on Tuesday when he sits down with Trump in the Oval Office.

Abdullah’s reign is on the line. If he says no to Trump, he could be flushing $1.7 billion a year. That’s nearly 4 percent of Jordan’s $50.8 billion GDP. But only roughly 25 percent of that is military aid, about $429 million.

If he says yes, there will be upheaval in Jordan, a nation already made up by a majority of Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Taking in Palestinians from Gaza could open the way for an even greater influx from the West Bank if the extremists in Tel Aviv begin their ethnic cleansing there.

Analysts say Abdullah acquiescing to ethnic cleansing and increasing the population of Palestinian refugees is a combination that could topple him. It’s likely Abdullah will say no to Trump.

The calculation for Egypt could be different. Of the $1.5 billion in U.S. aid, $1.2 billion funds the military. Without U.S. assistance, the Egyptian military could draw near to collapse, despite the many business ventures it is involved in.

It’s an amount Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi could not afford to lose. But he would have to take in the majority of the Gazan refugees, given the proximity. The streets of downtown Cairo would go wild in protests likely rivaling those that brought down Hosni Mubarak.

There is no easy way out for Sisi. He could suggest to Trump that Egypt would turn to Russia and China to replace U.S. aid, if he can get it.

Of course the part Trump doesn’t dwell on now is how is he going to take over Gaza with Hamas still in power? Israel failed to defeat it after 15 months. But all indications are that the fighting is soon to resume, after Hamas paused the hostage handovers because of what it says are Israeli ceasefire violations.

The bellicose rhetoric is rising. Trump has warned Hamas that if it does not release all the remaining Israeli hostages by “12 o’clock on Saturday,” the cease-fire is over. “All hell is going to break out.”

In Trump’s mind the Israelis will provide the muscle, the Gulf the financing, Egypt and Jordan the land and he will own it all.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/11/t ... cleansing/

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South African communists blast Trump’s imperialist agenda: “We will not bow to imperialist threats”

By South African Communist Party (SACP) (Posted Feb 11, 2025)

Originally published: In Defense of Communism on February 10, 2025 (more by In Defense of Communism) |

In a statement issued on 6 February 2025, the South African Communist Party (SACP) condemns U.S President Donald Trump’s threats against South Africa and defends the country’s national sovereignty.

The statement reads:

The South African Communist Party (SACP) unequivocally condemns the right-wing conservative President of the United States, Donald Trump, in the strongest possible terms. We reject his imperialist agenda and the entire United States imperialism and its extension to our country with the contempt it deserves.

South Africa is an independent country with its own democratic sovereignty and territorial integrity. We are not a colony of the United States or any other state for that matter: we fought against and shall fight against any attempts at undermining our national independence, democratic sovereignty and territorial integrity. The SACP rejects with the contempt it deserves the agenda by the United States to operate outside both international convention and democratic multilateralism and make itself the ruler of the world.

We reaffirm our unwavering support for expropriation in line with our constitution and legal framework, including the recently assented Expropriation Act, which repealed the apartheid-era Expropriation Act. Trump’s opposition to the new law, as reflected in his misleading and reactionary statements, exposes his hypocrisy—he never expressed any misgivings about the apartheid-era legislation that entrenched racial land dispossession. In contrast, our new legislation aligns with our constitution’s mandate to “enable citizens to gain access to land on an equitable basis” and to “redress the results of past racial discrimination”. The experience gained from implementing this new, democratic Expropriation Act may in fact necessitate its further strengthening to ensure the fulfilment of our constitutional obligations.

For the record, Trump is not the President of South Africa—he is the president of the United States. We will not allow him to interfere in our internal affairs, undermine our democratic national sovereignty, or impose his reactionary will upon our people. Our national self-determination was not handed to us on a silver platter by the imperialist-backed apartheid regime—it is the hard-won result of centuries of gallant resistance against colonial oppression and decades of liberation struggle. We have proven, beyond any doubt, our ability to stand firm against the racist regimes and agendas that once sought to subjugate our people.

Trump’s comments are based on a racist, distorted briefing from the beneficiaries of apartheid, falsely alleging that the South African government has “confiscated land” during this democratic dispensation and probably committed worse atrocities. In contradiction, it was under the racist regimes of colonial and apartheid oppression that the historical injustice of land confiscation occurred. This racist past and its legacy must be addressed. It is, among others, the historical task of the new Expropriation Act to do so. We will not allow Trump to enforce the legacy of colonial and apartheid land confiscation in our country.

Trump has parroted the maliciously fabricated junk, revealing his racist sympathies. Furthermore, Trump ignorantly assumes that South Africa is dependent on United States aid and has threatened to withdraw such support based on the racist blue lies. As President Cyril Ramaphosa clarified in an X post on 3 February 2025, “With the exception of PEPFAR Aid, which constitutes 17% of South Africa’s HIV/AIDS programme, there is no other funding that is received by South Africa from the United States”. Trump’s rants through the so-called “Truthing” and “reTruthing” on “TruthSocial”—his social media platform which should be aptly renamed “FalseSocial”—amount to nothing but “Falsifying” and “reFalsifying”.

Our constitution, the supreme law of our land, provides for deprivation of property, including expropriation, within a just and legal framework. It explicitly states, “No one may be deprived of property except in terms of law of general application, and no law may permit arbitrary deprivation of property”. Our constitution clearly states that, “Property may be expropriated only in terms of law of general application—for a public purpose or in the public interest”.

More decisively, our constitution states in no uncertain terms that no provisions in the property section, including those not covered in this statement,

… may impede the state from taking legislative and other measures to achieve land, water and related reform, in order to redress the results of past racial discrimination, provided that any departure from the provisions of this section is in accordance with the provisions of section 36(1).

This section does not prohibit expropriation but rather provides the legal foundation for it under law of general application and limitation of rights if need be under section 36(1). We will not be intimidated by Trump’s racist fearmongering or the remnants of apartheid-era privilege that seek to derail democratic transformation by seeking to threaten us with the racist and conservative agenda that Trump has embraced. In South Africa, the conservative party seeks to perpetuate the legacy of the racist colonial and apartheid land dispossession and oppression. We shall not allow this to prevail, having fought such a gallant liberation struggle to undo the historical injustice.

The SACP remains resolute: South Africa belongs to all South Africans who live in it. We will not bow to imperialist threats. The struggle continues!

https://mronline.org/2025/02/11/south-a ... t-threats/

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American Carnage and the Establishment of a Military Dictatorship
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - February 10, 2025 0

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[Source: theweek.com]

Immediate impeachment is the only option, but we must bring criminal charges against all the collaborating politicians, Democratic and Republican alike

It breaks the heart to see so many lost souls congratulating themselves on the impending approval of Gabbard and Kennedy by the Senate, two corrupt and gutless politicians who have not said a word in opposition to the takeover of the federal government by the vicious gangs that prop up the Trump and Musk puppets.

These same fools are delighted that Trump had somehow shut down the “deep state” by closing USAID without any explanation or transparency.

The Trump regime is engaging in an unprecedented takeover of the federal government by intimidation, bribes, and force, and it is covertly merging the United States Northern Command, the FBI, ICE, and intelligence agencies into one massive instrument of oppression that serves not the senile Donald Trump, nor the narcissistic figurehead Elon Musk, but a dark cabinet of billionaires who intend to weaponize the entire United States government against its own citizens and the world, to dismantle all parts of government that serve the needs of citizens, and to sell off everything held in common to the highest bidder, or the best-connected financier.

Image
[Source: theweek.com]

Some are staging a few protests. The Democratic Party is so supine and inert as to not warrant comment. What we need to do is to declare that this entire administration, and most of the Congress enabling it, are in clear violation of federal law, the Constitution, and of the most basic mores that separate civilization from barbarism.

Trump and company have dipped into barbarism and they must all step down, every one of them. If they will not, then the citizens, as they are entitled to do by the Constitution, should take action—and must do so without involving the puppet Democratic Party that exists only to try to bait citizens into useless conflicts that distract from the predations of the billionaire parasite class.

Image
[Source: commons.wikimedia.org]

Elon Musk is using the bogus “Department of Government Efficiency” to run the entire federal government much as he ran Twitter when he took it over, ordering mass firings, giving ultimatums to administrators, and using the threat of force to make the entire civil service his own playpen.

For all the corruption in the FBI and the Department of Justice, it is clear that the Trump administration is not trying to restore transparency, but rather to use the decay of the institutions as an excuse to further reshape all of government into a weapon—using threats against government officials as a means of forcing through change.

There is no indication that Trump intends to end the interference abroad in other nations by the U.S. government, or to end the spying on, and oppression of, citizens at home. Trump has never made such a statement, and most of his words imply the complete opposite.

This militarization of the government itself is unprecedented in American history.

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[Source: foxnews.com]

When Musk seized control of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and fired hundreds of employees on the spot, and then ordered all of the agency’s nearly 10,000 employees to stay home, the enthusiasts of the Trump revolution were ecstatic. Here, they claimed, was proof that a real war with the “deep state” was beginning. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

USAID is deeply corrupt and has used its services to further the interests of multinational corporations and served as cover for intelligence agencies pushing for imperialist expansion. It is a fiction that USAID made no contributions at all, however. Moreover, USAID is not being shut down—despite the headlines, but rather being made a part of the even more imperialist State Department of Marco Rubio. The same campaigns carried out under USAID will be carried out under new names.

If a legitimate administration had wanted to reform, or to end, USAID, it would have released all documentation concerning its previous illegal activities and brought charges against its administrators based on federal and international law. A series of hearings would have been held and, without any doubt, the criminality in USAID would be revealed to not be in USAID at all, but in the intelligence agencies that use it, and in the multinational banks that manipulate those intelligence agencies. Blaming USAID is like blaming the butcher for the killing of chickens or the assassin for the murder of foreign leaders.

None of the criminal corporations and intelligence operators behind USAID were exposed in the last week. No classified documents indicating criminal action were released.

USAID was shut down so as to frighten other more essential government agencies so that they fear the new powers of the Trump regime.

When Musk stated “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die,” he was making a direct threat to civil servants throughout the federal government.

When he stated that “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” he was not talking about reality, about how USAID was abused by the rich to undermine national sovereignty of nations around the world. He was falsely attributing the totalitarian nature of government under corporate control to Marxism and Socialism in an attempt to mislead the public.

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[Source: consumerfinance.gov]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a federal agency set up after the 2008 Wall Street crash, was also shut down by the self-appointed Musk so as to assure there will be no part of government overseeing the destruction of the entire financial system. Trump named Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the hedge-fund billionaire, as administrator to oversee its demise.

The president is not empowered by law or the Constitution to shut down USAID or CFPB. The Congress must act to do so. To take such action without congressional approval is itself grounds for immediate impeachment. The complicity or corruption of Democrats is irrelevant. We are talking about the rule of law.

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[Source: en-academic.com]
And that was not all. The Trump regime froze all federal grants and payments in an order issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Although a federal judge temporarily blocked the order, a shutdown of federal payments to state, local and non-governmental agencies, including for Medicaid, has started, and the Trump regime intends to try again to shut down the government entirely by ending the system for payment. The chaos imposed by previous American regimes abroad in Syria or Iraq, in Nicaragua or El Salvador, has at last come home to roost.

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[Source: freebiesupply.com]

This war on the economy also is being waged through a bid to take over the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve by a tiny handful of operatives reporting to the billionaires. Musk’s DOGE was given access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS), the Treasury system that handles 90% of the payments made by the U.S. government, including Social Security checks, income tax refunds, and federal paychecks. That is to say that DOGE, now but an extension of Musk’s opaque “X” (SpaceX, X, Tesla and other scams), now controls all payments for the entire federal government and can stop them, or misdirect them, at any time.

[img]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagazine. ... =402&ssl=1
[Source: nasabaregistry.org]

The Treasury’s top career civil servant at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, David Lebryk, was immediately removed from office when he objected to the intervention by private company into what should be a technical system for making payments.

As is so often the case in dying empires, career civil servants are the first to go. Most likely, money itself will be destroyed next and citizens forced to turn to the crypto currencies offered up by billionaires as the United States faces something like the German inflation of 1923.

Already plans are in place to eliminate the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and to privatize, or eliminate, much of the Department of Health and Human Services using the pretext that Kennedy is somehow fighting vaccines—when he is doing nothing of the sort.

The Department of Defense is also being rendered as a totalitarian force that can seize anyone and lock them up in in the torture chambers of El Salvador, or at Guantánamo Bay, if the White House gives the word.

Immediate impeachment is the only option, but it must be accompanied by criminal charges against all the collaborating politicians, Democratic and Republican alike.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... tatorship/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 12, 2025 4:21 pm

(Gotta say the Trumpster is living up to the title of this thread, and then some. Satirists couldn't make this up, with the Gaza proposal the cherry on the shit pie.)

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters onboard Air Force One on February 9, 2025. [Photo: Ben Curtis/AP]

Donald Trump says he’s committed to buying and owning Gaza
Originally published: Radio Havana Cuba, edited on February 9, 2025 by Ed Newman (more by Radio Havana Cuba, edited) | (Posted Feb 12, 2025)

U.S. President Donald Trump has reiterated his controversial proposal to take control of Gaza, saying he is committed to “buying and owning” the war-ravaged enclave.

Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Sunday, Trump said Gaza should be thought of as a “big real estate site” and other countries in the Middle East could be tasked with handling its redevelopment.

“As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it; other people may do it, through our auspices,” Trump said while en route to New Orleans to attend the Super Bowl.

But we’re committed to owning it, taking it, and making sure that Hamas doesn’t move back. There’s nothing to move back into. The place is a demolition site.

Trump also claimed that displaced Palestinians would prefer not to return to Gaza despite his proposal prompting backlash from Palestinian representatives and much of the international community.

“If we could give them a home in a safer area—the only reason they’re talking about returning to Gaza is they don’t have an alternative. When they have an alternative, they don’t want to return to Gaza,” the U.S. president said.

Hamas, the Palestinian group that governs Gaza, reiterated its opposition to Trump’s proposal on Sunday, calling his latest remarks “absurd.” “Gaza is not a property that can be bought and sold, and it is an integral part of our occupied Palestinian land,” Izzat al-Risheq, a member of the Hamas political bureau, said in a statement shared on Telegram.

“Dealing with the Palestinian issue with the mentality of a real estate dealer is a recipe for failure,” al-Risheq added.

Our Palestinian people will thwart all displacement and deportation plans. Gaza belongs to its people.

Earlier on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Trump’s proposal as “revolutionary” and “creative” while addressing a cabinet meeting held hours after his return from Washington, DC, where he held talks with the U.S. president.

Trump stunned Palestinians and the international community on Tuesday by proposing that Washington take over Gaza as part of an audacious redevelopment plan that he claimed could transform the enclave into “the Riviera of the Middle East”.

The U.S. president doubled down on his suggestion the following day, after officials from his administration attempted to dampen blowback to the proposal by insisting that any resettlement of Palestinians would be temporary.

Trump, a real estate developer before entering politics, has provided few details about how he would implement his proposal, which would face huge practical hurdles in addition to raising legal and ethical concerns.

After initially saying he was open to the possibility of sending the U.S. military into Gaza, Trump later said that no American soldiers would be needed to carry out the plan.

Neighbouring states such as Egypt and Jordan have roundly rejected calls to take in displaced Palestinians despite Trump’s suggestion that they could be resettled in “other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts”.

On Sunday, Saudi Arabia condemned a suggestion by Netanyahu that the kingdom’s land be used to establish a Palestinian state.

“The kingdom affirms that the Palestinian people have a right to their land, and they are not intruders or immigrants to it who can be expelled whenever the brutal Israeli occupation wishes,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement, accusing the Israeli leader of attempting to “divert attention” from Israel’s ongoing “crimes” in Gaza.

https://mronline.org/2025/02/12/donald- ... ning-gaza/

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Jordan King Privately Tells Trump No to Ethnic Cleansing
February 12, 2025

King Abdullah II appeared open in public to Trump’s diabolical plan to force 2 million Palestinians out of Gaza but later said on X that in private he had rebuffed the president. Joe Lauria reports.

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Trump greeting King Abdullah at the White House on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025. (White House/Wikimedia Commons)

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

After King Abdullah II of Jordan left the White House on Tuesday with the impression he was open to President Donald Trump’s idea to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, the king took to X to say he had instead categorically rejected the idea in private with Trump.

“I reiterated Jordan’s steadfast position against the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank,” Abdullah wrote. “This is the unified Arab position. Rebuilding Gaza without displacing the Palestinians and addressing the dire humanitarian situation should be the priority for all.”

The king said:

“Achieving just peace on the basis of the two-state solution is the way to ensure regional stability. This requires US leadership. President Trump is a man of peace. He was instrumental in securing the Gaza ceasefire. We look to US and all stakeholders in ensuring it holds.”

Demurred in Public

During his opening remarks in the Oval Office earlier on Tuesday, before his substantial talks with Trump, Abdullah displayed extreme deference to the president in the face of pressure to participate in an historic crime which could destroy his throne.

A look of extreme discomfort came over his face as the king said before the cameras:

“With all of the challenges in the Middle East we can finally see somebody who can take us across the finish line to bring stability, peace and prosperity to all of us in the region. It is our collective responsibility in the Middle East to continue to work with you, to support you to achieve those lofty goals.”

Abdullah knew very well what Trump’s goals are and they are the opposite of lofty, namely to achieve an historic crime in the bloodied Middle East of expelling 2 million people from their land. And then constructing a playground for the rich over the unmarked graves of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

Abdullah knew going into the White House meeting he would be humiliated if he did not stand up to the bully threatening to commit this crime and to drag him into it.

Trump had threatened in an offhand remark to a reporter on Monday that he would be willing to cut off aid to Jordan if it did not agree to accept some of the 2 million Palestinians Trump wants to throw out of Gaza with Israel’s help to build a resort over an active crime scene.

The International Court of Justice is adjudicating whether Israel has already committed genocide in Gaza.

If Trump follows through with his intentions, a brave nation could come forward to put the United States in the dock next to Israel. The International Criminal Court could add Donald Trump’s name to the indictment and arrest warrant it issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The ICC has jurisdiction over the crime of forced relocation.

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Threats

The aid to Jordan Trump threatened to cut off is only 4 percent of the country’s GDP. But as The New York Times helpfully pointed out on Tuesday, there is also a secret U.S. budget supporting Jordan’s intelligence services.

Who knows what other threats Trump may have suggested over lunch at the presidential mansion with Abdullah and his son Hussein, the crown prince. At a press encounter before their private talk, it seemed that a king could not have bowed any lower before a president.

The press was let into the Oval Office apparently without the monarch’s foreknowledge, which the Times suggested was another Trump tactic to humiliate him before the cameras.

Trump was pointedly asked why the king should take in the Palestinian people when he had said he didn’t want to. “Well, I don’t know. But he may have just something to say because we discussed, just briefly, I think maybe you want to say it now or …? Trump said, putting him on the spot.

Abdullah stuttered, closed his eyes and said:

“Well, Mr. President, I think, we have to keep in mind that there is a plan from Egypt and the Arab countries. We’ve been invited by Mohammed bin Salman to discussions in Riyadh.

I think the point is, how do we make this work in a way that is good for everybody. Obviously we have to look at the best interests of the United States, of the people in the region, especially to my people of Jordan.

And we’re going to have some interesting discussions today. I think one of the things that we can do right away, is take 2000 children that are either cancer children or in, very, ill state, to Jordan as quickly as possible.

And then wait for, I think, the Egyptians to present their plan on how we can work with the president on the kind of challenges ….”


It seemed an elaborate kicking of the can down the road until he could get out of Washington. It was definitely not a “No” until at least the Arab delegation arrived in Washington. It seemed at the time like a door left open, which Trump walked through, responding,

“That’s really good. And we appreciate it. And we’ll be working on the rest with Egypt, I think you’re going to see some great progress. I think with Jordan, you’re going to see some great progress, three of us, and we’ll have some others helping, and we’re going to have some others at a very high level helping, and the whole thing will come.

It’s not a complex thing to do. And with the United States being in control of that piece of land, a fairly large piece of land, you’re going to have stability in the Middle East for the first time. And, the Palestinians or the people that live now in Gaza will be living beautifully in another location. They’re going to be living safely.”


Trump apparently thought he heard Abdullah say, “Yes.” The king uttered nothing when Trump said “with the United States being in control of that, piece of land…”

Later Trump said, “I believe we will have a parcel of land in Jordan…” for the expelled Palestinians to live on “when we finish our talks.” Again Abdullah said nothing.

Trump sees himself as a savior. Once the Palestinians are ethnically cleansed from Gaza they won’t be “living in hell, and they’re going to end up having a a great home, great families that don’t have to get the mugged and killed and beaten up and harassed by Hamas and everybody else,” he said.

But who is “everybody else?” Mustn’t he know that he is covering up Israel’s indiscriminate mass murder since October 2023? “A civilization has been wiped out in Gaza,” he stated, but he dare not say by whom.

By excising from the story that Israel has made their lives hell, that Israel has created the “demolition site,” that Israel has killed so many innocent people, Trump seeks to reduce criticism of Israel to antisemitism.

His mention of “muggings,” makes it seem as though he’s still talking about the Central Park jogger. Instead, Trump is hitting upon a nauseating theme repeated often by American politicians referring to Israelis living in a “tough neighborhood” in the Middle East surrounded by Arabs, a thinly veiled racist analogy to American ghettos.

Trump, the former slumlord, with zero historical knowledge, sees the Palestinians as slum dwellers subject to muggings, not victims of a genocide.

Exuding Arrogance

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U.S. President Donald Trump announcing his plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza on Feb. 4, 2024 at the White House, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looking on. (The White House, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Not knowing what Abdullah would tell him in private, Trump said he was 99 percent certain he will work something out with Jordan and Egypt without having to withhold aid.

A reporter asked Trump how he knows Palestinians want to leave their land and then confronted him with the fact that “some people call this ethnic cleansing.” All Trump could say was: “They will have new homes where they can live safely.”

The king was asked what he thought about the U.S. owning the Gaza Strip. At this point, he did not dismiss the idea, saying:

“Well, I think as I said earlier, the president is looking at Egypt coming to present their plan. As I said, we will be in Saudi Arabia to discuss how we can work with the president and with the United States. So I think let’s wait until the Egyptians can come and present it to the president and not get ahead of ourselves.”

The response to Trump would be from a “multitude of countries,” Abdullah said, hiding the fact that he would deliver Jordan’s response once they got behind closed doors.

Asked about Jordanian land for the Palestinians, Abdullah said, “Well, I think what we said is I have to look at it to the best interests of my country. .. And again, I believe that the president is looking forward to to getting a group of us Arabs up here to discuss the overall plan.”

A reporter persisted with Trump, asking him whether he would be willing to change his mind if he is presented with a different plan. Not knowing what was to come from Abdullah, Trump said:

“I think we sort of have gone down the line. We know pretty much what is going to be presented and I think it’s going to be something that’s going to be magnificent for the Palestinians. They’re going to be in love with it. I did very well with real estate. I can tell you about real estate.”

“Mr. President, doesn’t it concern you that moving 2 million people –,” a reporter began but was cut off by Trump.

“It’s a very small number of people relative to other things that have taken place over the decades and centuries,” Trump actually said. “It’s a very small number of people, and they’re living a terrible life. Look at the way they’re living now.”

“But if they don’t want to leave, how are you going to force them?” the reporter persisted.

“Oh, they’re going to be great,” Trump said. “They’re going to be very happy.”

The magnitude of the crime he is proposing is blocked from his mind as he returns robotically to how horribly “these people” live and how he is going to help them.

What Will Trump Do Now?

Abdullah’s fake out in public leaves Trump in a tough spot. The Egyptian foreign ministry put out a statement on X about three hours after Abdullah’s post. It says:

“Egypt affirms its intention to present a comprehensive vision for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip in a manner that ensures the Palestinian people remain in their homeland and aligns with their legitimate and legal rights.”

Trump said in the Oval Office before the private meeting that other countries, like Indonesia, might take Palestinians in. “There’s a lot of countries with big hearts, and this gentleman is at the top of the list,” he said pointing at Abdullah, not knowing what he was about to hear.

Trump may have been trying to humiliate Abdullah but in the end it was Trump who is holding the short end. However, his determination is not to be underestimated, nor his vindictiveness. He may indeed move towards cutting off aid and finding other countries.

Nazi Germany had several ideas about where to send all the Jews and in the end history knows their solution. Many thousands have already been killed in Gaza. And not by muggers.

More War First

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Israeli soldiers in eastern Rafah in Gaza, May 2024. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

That leaves more war. Before Trump can find a home for the Palestinians, clear the rubble and start building he has to get Israel to overthrow Hamas by force, something Israel has so far failed to do after 15 months.

It is almost certain now that Israel will resume the onslaught against Gaza after Trump’s Saturday deadline backed by Netanyah passes for Hamas to release all the Israeli hostages at once, something that’s not part of the ceasefire deal.

“I don’t think they are going to make the deadline, personally,” Trump said. “I think they want to play tough guy.” In other words, Trump expects Israeli bombardments to renew as soon as this weekend.

Once the “fighting is over,” he said previously, Israel will “turn over” Gaza to the U.S. “We don’t have to buy it,” he said Tuesday. “There’s nothing to buy. Will just have it.”

Under what authority could the U.S. just “have it?” a reporter asked. “Under U.S. authority” was Trump’s answer, one worthy of Nero.

Asked how he feels about the U.S. taking Gaza, Abdullah responded: “As the president said, we as Arabs will be coming the United States, with something that we’re going to talk about later, to discuss all these options.” Abdullah remained stone-faced when Trump said his Gaza plan would bring jobs to Jordan. Of course “later” meant right after the press event in the private dining room.

The West Bank

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Separation wall between Israel and Palestine, from Anata in the Occupied West Bank, 2005. (Photo by Dafna Kaplan via David Lisbona, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Trump was also asked if he could give the king a guarantee that he would not allow Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. Trump gave a lesson in evasion instead. He said,

“I think that’s going to work out very well. That’s not really what we were talking about today, it’s something that is going to work out automatically. And it’s in good shape and other people have discussed it with us and with me. That’s gonna work out. West Bank is going to work out very well.”

In other words, no. He’s discussed this with Israel and his major donor Miriam Adelson and the West Bank is gonna work out very well for them, if they get their way.

In his X post afterward, Abdullah wrote:

“I also stressed the importance of working towards de-escalation in the West Bank and preventing a deterioration of the situation there that could have far-reaching implications for the entire region.”

The territory was administered by Jordan until the 1967 war when Israel seized the West Bank and has refused ever since to relinquish it, despite the demand of the U.N. Security Council.

Jordan still administers the Dome of the Rock, upon which extremist Israelis, now in power, want to rebuild the Jewish Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. The extremists have for decades tried to declare Palestine to be part of Jordan, where they want to expel Palestinians living on the West Bank, which they call Judea and Samaria.

If Abdullah agreed to take Palestinians from Gaza there would be upheaval in Jordan, a nation already made up by a majority of Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Analysts say Abdullah acquiescing to ethnic cleansing and increasing the population of Palestinian refugees is a combination that could topple him.

Taking in Gazan Palestinians could open the way for an even greater influx from the West Bank if the extremists in Tel Aviv begin their ethnic cleansing there.

The age-old dream of these extreme Zionists to control Gaza and the West Bank has never been closer to realization. That would explain the constant grin on Netanyahu’s face last week when he was listening to Trump’s “plans.”

Israel has used the now crumbling ceasefire in Gaza to turn their military attention to the West Bank, where UNRWA said Monday 40,000 Palestinians had already been displaced from their homes.

Is their next stop Jordan? Not, it seems, if Abdullah can do anything about it.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/12/j ... cleansing/

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Trump, white supremacy and capitalism: The enemies of Black liberation
Originally published: Liberation News on January 31, 2025 by Liberation News Staff (more by Liberation News) | (Posted Feb 11, 2025)

Black communities bear the brunt of capitalism
The working class is facing a period of grave instability—faced with the challenge of managing rising prices of basic goods, stagnant or even deflated wages, and a future that is increasingly insecure in more ways than one. And as is so often the case, Black working class communities are experiencing the worst consequences of these systemic failures.

Black workers entered 2025 faced with the same challenges that have plagued Black communities for generations—higher levels of unemployment, lower wages, and broad disinvestment that impacts all aspects of life. Still, Black workers make, on average, 20% less than their white counterparts, experience an unemployment rate more than 150% of the national average, and a median wealth of a mere $45,000. One out of every three Black children lives in poverty.

The cycle of poverty is a never-ending, self-fulfilling prophecy under the capitalist system. When communities don’t have an adequate tax base or political influence, then critical programs are not properly funded. When critical programs aren’t properly funded, educational, environmental and health outcomes are all predictably worsened. Impoverished communities, then, become even easier for governmental bodies to neglect as “a lost cause”.

That we see more Black people represented in higher positions of power today does not diminish the grave reality of widespread poverty and disinvestment that Black working class people are experiencing. In fact, this disparity can be used as a means of further criminalizing Black communities. Black communities experience higher levels of policing, but all the research shows that police don’t actually solve crime. They end up perpetrating the crime of mass incarceration instead. While Black people make up only 13% of the U.S. population, they represent nearly 40% of the prison population, further contributing to the deterioration of Black communities.

The entire system is rigged against Black working class people—and no matter who is in the White House, the symptoms do not get any better.

Trump’s war on the Black community
Throughout the history of this country, the struggle of the Black community for equality and democracy has been the main engine of progress. The overarching goal of the Trump administration is to undo that progress and plunge the country into a new era where there are no limits on the power of the rich and corporations to exploit the people and destroy the planet. Even if he focuses his racist rhetoric against other targets, like immigrants from Latin America, at the core of Trump’s agenda is an all-out assault on Black people—and his first actions as president proves it.

Right when he took office, Trump issued an executive order telling the Department of Justice to freeze all civil rights lawsuits—whether it’s against cops, local government agencies, or private corporations like banks that discriminate in loan applications. And the DoJ has to suspend all “consent decrees” where the federal government imposes certain policy reforms on police departments that have proven themselves to be the most racist and violent. As a signal to cops that they can kill Black people with impunity, he pardoned two DC police officers involved in the killing of a 20 year-old Black man, Karon Hylton-Brown.

Trump’s ban on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs is the last nail in the coffin of affirmative action. Whatever the limitations of DEI programs are, they still represent the last remaining programs aimed at combating racism in the workplace. And now, Black workers in the federal government run the risk of being branded a “DEI hire” and lose their job on that basis.

Trump also wants to take the public services that Black workers rely on the most and—instead of making badly-needed improvements—destroy them by turning them over to private corporations. Trump wants to privatize the postal service, the largest source of jobs for Black workers that pay a living wage. Medicaid and Medicare help curb the worst inequalities in the health system, but Trump wants insurance companies to take over and turn these programs into a source of profit. Schools in Black communities are given totally inadequate funding, but instead of providing more resources Trump wants to let charter school corporations take over public education.

But just because Trump wants to push through these policies doesn’t mean he’ll be able to get away with it. By far the most serious challenge to Trump during his first term was the 2020 George Floyd uprising, which drew millions of people into the streets. The Black working class was able to do what none of the Democratic Party politicians could accomplish—take a courageous stand and put Trump on the defensive. Now that he’s back in office, Trump could face even more massive resistance than the first time.

For Black liberation to become a reality, this system must fall!
Racist injustice against Black people is so persistent in America not just because of personal attitudes and prejudices—it is an essential tool used by the billionaires who rule this country and the powerful institutions they control to cement their domination over society.

White supremacy allows the ruling class to grow even richer by exploiting Black workers especially intensely—slavery is the most extreme example and was the foundation the entire economy of the United States was built on. And racism also helps the elite maintain their political power by dividing working people. If Black people are demonized and presented as the source of social problems, then the millionaires and billionaires who are actually to blame get let off the hook.

Through courageous struggle, there have been periods of historic progress towards Black freedom. But whenever that struggle slows down, the natural tendency of the system is to roll back that progress. Take affirmative action for instance—the Black liberation movement of the 1960s won affirmative action programs nationwide, but starting in 1978 the courts gradually restricted these policies before ending them altogether.

For decades, the vast majority of Black voters have supported Democratic Party politicians, only to have those politicians abandon the interests of the Black community as soon as they take office. No matter how many Black politicians are elected, or how many Black people are in positions of prominence in economic and cultural institutions, conditions for the working class majority of the Black community never change—or get even worse.

The problem is at the roots: this country is ruled by a tiny handful of billionaires, and decisions are made to maximize profits for those billionaires. White supremacy persists because it is in their interests for it to persist. But the grinding oppression and inequality Black communities are subjected to would be totally at odds with the goals of a society ruled by the working class, where decisions are made to meet the needs of the people and the planet. That’s why visionary Black freedom fighters from W.E.B. DuBois to Assata Shakur to Huey Newton have looked to socialism as the key to achieving Black liberation. White supremacy will only be overthrown if it is uprooted alongside the capitalist system that gave birth to it.

https://mronline.org/2025/02/11/trump-w ... apitalism/

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The Government-Funded, Landlord Trump
February 10, 2025

Government spending, particularly the generous big-landlord benefits in law and tax policy, helped the U.S. president build up his real estate fortune, writes Fran Quigley.

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Fred Trump and his son Donald, around 1986, at New York City’s Wollman Ice Rink in Central Park, which was renovated by their company between 1980 and 1986. (Bernard Gotfryd, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

By Fran Quigley
Common Dreams

President Donald Trump is making good on his promised threat to “dismantle Government bureaucracy” and “cut wasteful expenditures,” issuing orders to choke off the funding pipeline for federal grants and assistance programs.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking because government spending, particularly the generous big-landlord benefits baked into U.S. law and tax policy, forms the very foundation of Trump’s own wealth.

The Trump real estate fortune was built by hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies and huge tax breaks, none of which are available to the working people Trump is hurting with his current attacks.

Trump became wealthy the traditional American way: he was born into it. As most thoroughly described in Samuel Stein’s excellent 2019 book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, Donald’s father Fred’s real estate empire began with Brooklyn and Queens housing developments financed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).

For some of those Trump developments, the path was literally cleared by government demolition of existing homes and buildings.

Fred Trump’s appetite for government funding was so voracious that he was investigated by the Senate Banking Committee for defrauding post-World War II government housing programs by lying about the costs of his projects.

That was not the only investigation targeting Fred Trump’s government-funded properties. His Maryland buildings were so decrepit and his ignoring of the residents’ pleas for help and city orders to repair so blatant that the elder Trump was actually arrested in 1976 for operating a “slum property.”

A U.S. Department of Justice discrimination lawsuit during the same era showed that the Trump properties systematically blocked Black prospective renters, using racist practices like attaching to their applications a paper bearing a big letter “C” — for Colored — so they could be rejected out of hand.

That federal housing discrimination lawsuit, filed in 1973, did not just name Fred Trump. It also included the company’s president, his 27-year-old son Donald.

Donald Trump soon followed in his father’s footsteps by exploiting government programs to develop his buildings. The benefits included an unprecedented 40-year tax abatement, funding that was designed to support low-income neighborhoods, sweetheart deals to privatize public land and government bonds used to finance his developments.

“Donald Trump is probably worse than any other developer in his relentless pursuit of every single dime of taxpayer subsidies he can get his paws on,” a New York deputy mayor told The New York Times in 2016.

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Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan. (Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

For example, the famous Trump Tower benefited from over $163 million in tax abatements provided by New York politicians whose campaigns Trump helped fund.

That money was part of what the Times estimated was nearly a billion dollars Trump received in government grants and tax breaks for his New York properties alone, not counting the government benefits for his properties in Florida, Nevada and Atlantic City.

“Donald Trump’s business wouldn’t be possible but for major government subsidies,” Timothy O’Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, told NPR.

Trump’s dependence on government funding is more than matched by the taxpayer dollars hoovered up by his designated government waste czar Elon Musk.

As CNN has reported, the world’s richest person reached his status thanks to government loans and contracts that propped up Tesla and SpaceX in their vulnerable beginning stages. Musk still rakes in billions of dollars from government contracts and government-mandated payments to Tesla by other automakers.

“The foundation for Musk’s financial success has been the U.S. government,” tech analyst Daniel Ives told CNN.

We know that the Trump-Musk attacks on federal government programs are deeply harmful to vulnerable people, devoted civil servants and communities and organizations trying to make the world a better place.

[CN: The Jan. 27 government memo freezing grants and subsidies says, “any program that provides direct benefits to Americans is explicitly excluded from the pause and exempted from this review process. In addition to Social Security and Medicare, already explicitly excluded in the guidance, mandatory programs like Medicaid and SNAP will continue without pause.”]

Less well known is that Trump and Musk both owe their fortunes and careers to the very government spending they demonize now. They used government programs to climb to great heights, and now are intent on pulling up the ladder behind them.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once said that a hypocrite politician is one who cuts down a redwood tree, then stands on its stump to deliver a speech about conservation.

When the wealthy and powerful Donald Trump mounts his attacks on government programs, he does so while standing on a platform built by government largesse.

Fran Quigley directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law.

This article is from Common Dreams.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/10/t ... ord-trump/

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Landless and Poor, Black South Africans Say they will Defy Trump and Move Ahead, Finally, with Land Reform
Jon Jeter 12 Feb 2025

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Donald Trump tweets that the U.S. will be cutting off aid to South Africa. Photo: Twitter

In a reactionary torrent of false claims, culminating in an executive order to suspend aid to South Africa, Donald Trump is attempting to wield the might of the United States to stand in the way of its land reform process.

The number of carjackings in South Africa exploded after voters of all races went to the polls for the first time in 1994 to abolish apartheid and has remained high ever since, befitting what is, by the most commonly used yardstick, the world’s most unequal country . On a per capita basis, carjackings in South Africa outpace those in the U.S. by a factor of nearly 20.

More disturbing is that carjackings in South Africa are more likely to be fatal than almost anywhere else in the world. There are myriad reasons for this, but when I lived in the country 25 years ago, it was an article of faith among police, researchers, and journalists that a primary reason was the inability of some South African whites—especially the Afrikaners who were responsible for introducing apartheid in 1948--to surrender their vehicle to Blacks who they continued to view as employees or children.

One white South African photographer joked at the time that many an Afrikaner motorist had met his maker after bellowing the final words:

Get the f#$k away from my car, kaffir!

These, I think it safe to say, are Donald Trump’s people and partly explain why he signed an executive order last week suspending aid to South Africa for passing legislation in January allowing the government to seize farms from a tiny yet affluent white minority and transfer ownership to impoverished Blacks.

It's all of a piece for Trump whose articulation of solidarity with brash, bullying white bigots abroad is calculated to assuage the fears of whites at home, encouraging them to blame their diminishing living standards on anyone—unqualified Black air traffic controllers, despotic African politicians, Mexican immigrants, Communists, the Chinese, Panamanians, the LGBTQ community—rather than the wealthy, mostly white aristocracy that has managed to capsize a functioning industrial economy in the 45 years since Ronald Reagan began to double down on a divide-and-conquer political strategy.

While Reagan cloaked his support of apartheid in the Orwellian policy of “constructive engagement,” Trump wears his white supremacist bona fides on his sleeve like some Proud Boys’ badge of honor.

In a February 2 post on his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote that “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.

“The United States won’t stand for it, we will act,” he wrote. “Also, I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of the situation has been completed!”

Responding to reporters’ questions the following day, he said:

“Terrible things are happening in South Africa.”

Indeed there are but that has nothing to do with land reform legislation that is, given the circumstances, rather timid, requiring the government to negotiate in good faith to buy farms at a fair-market price with expropriation as a last resort, to be implemented only when buyer and seller cannot agree to terms.

This is not simply a matter of Black South Africans settling scores with European settlers who arrived in the country on April 6, 1652, and promptly went to work stealing the land at gunpoint, never to return it.

Thirty-one years after this country of 60 million people won its independence from a tiny white minority representing only 8 percent of the population, the balance of economic power remains unchanged. Black South Africans account for 80 percent of the population yet own only 4 percent of all privately-owned farmland. While South Africa is the most industrialized country on the continent, it continues to rely heavily on agriculture, and the concentration of vital lands among the white minority puts a lid on the country’s prosperity. Much like the 1862 Homestead Act ultimately unleashed the free-market economy in the U.S., giving more South Africans access to the land will expand the middle class, reduce poverty, crime and political instability.

"Land is the key to accumulating wealth in an agrarian society," Shadrack Gutto, a law professor at the University of the Witwatersrand told me in 2001. "You cannot possibly improve Africa for future generations without somehow addressing the need to return to its rightful owners the land that has been unlawfully taken from them over the course of 300 years. What you have is a very small segment of the population ready to jump to the industrial phase, and everybody else gets left behind."

Much as their national rugby team, the Springboks, galvanized South Africans of all races by winning the world cup in 1995 as it was transitioning to democracy, saber-rattling by the Trump administration seems to be strengthening the nation’s resolve, a white South African journalist told Black Agenda Report on condition of anonymity

“We will not be bullied,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa affirmed in his State of the Nation address last week. Without mentioning Trump, he continued:

“We are witnessing the rise of nationalism and protectionism, the pursuit of narrow interests and the decline of common cause.”

Julius Malema, a South African lawmaker and leader of a Communist-inspired opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, responded to Trump’s remarks last week saying:

“The statement by Donald Trump is offensive and undermines our sovereignty and is a reminder that our reliance on foreign aid and foreign direct investment surrenders us to the will of imperialists who use money to dictate the economic and policy direction of Africa. We want to make it categorically clear to the President of the USA that we are going to expropriate land without compensation and pursue legislative measures to do so and no threat will stop us.”

The Trump administration, however, continues to paint South African whites as victims. Responding to a Ramaphosa post on X last week, Trump’s advisor Elon Musk, who was raised in South Africa, responded: “Why do you have openly racist laws?”

That sparked this exchange between Malema and Musk:

Image

Trump’s executive order is a study in racist demagoguery, asserting South Africa’s expropriation law authorizes “the government… to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” In the executive order, the US also offered to resettle Afrikaaner South Africans, a suggestion that was dismissed by Afrikaaner groups , including some that lobbied Trump to intervene.

South Africa’s white farmers have for years been a concern for Europeans internationally, especially since the late President Robert Mugabe began confiscating farmland from whites in neighboring Zimbabwe in the 2000s.

In 2018, during his first term in office, Trump repeated an old wives’ tale that South Africa had witnessed “large-scale killings” of white farmers ; no evidence exists to support the allegation.

Compounding matters is South Africa’s action at the International Court of Justice charging Israel with committing genocide against Palestinians following Hamas’ Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023. To be sure, South Africans have a dog in the fight: Israel supported the apartheid regime even during the international boycott, and the Palestinians are, along with the Cubans, among the ANC’s staunchest allies. Speaking again on the condition of anonymity, the white journalist wrote in a direct message:

“Also (I) don't think SA will be bullied into withdrawing its genocide case against Israel at ICC which has wide support.”

Ironically, many Black South Africans say that they need to deploy the same nationalist sensibilities espoused by Trump and the apartheid regime of old by investing, almost maniacally, in economic development in Black communities. As one example, Black South Africans have, over the years, suggested parroting the land reform schemes in postwar South Africa and Rhodesia.

Not only did the white-minority governments seize Black farmland, but they handed the sector over to veterans returning home from war, many of whom had little to no experience in agriculture. (For instance, Rhodesia’s iconic Prime Minister, Ian Smith, often referred to as Africa’s Bull Connor, was a butcher’s son.) But the white-minority government propped them up with loans. When the crop failed, the government forgave the loan, and issued another one; when that crop failed, they forgave the debt and loaned more money. On and on it went until white farmers in Rhodesia and South Africa were widely known as among the finest farmers in the world.

Combined with the young, pan-Africanist leaders who have come to power in the Sahel region, Trump’s provocation, many Africans say, could spark this kind of investment, and economic development that finally returns Africa to Africans.

https://blackagendareport.com/landless- ... and-reform
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 13, 2025 4:14 pm

Trump’s Shock Doctrine: Uncertainty and the Repudiation of Contracts
Posted on February 12, 2025 by Yves Smith

Trump is surrounded by ideologues, so they really may believe that their efforts to gut entire Federal operations will somehow magically be beneficial. The same was true of the Chicago Boys, who administered a no-holds-barred neoliberal program in Chile under Pinochet. After an initial boom, a rapid rise in debt and insider looting led to a bust so severe that Pinochet backpedaled hard. Among other things, he nationalized banks, restored a minimum wage and unions, and embarked in large-scale Keynesian stimulus.1

However, the Trump shock is markedly different from and more intense and wide-ranging than neoliberal shock doctrines. And it isn’t simply by virtue of the US being a much bigger actor and Trump disrupting trade agreements with his tariff push. It’s that Trump is using radical uncertainty as part of his approach. And his effort, turbocharged by Musk’s DOGE, is threatening the integrity of contracts and legal provisions on a large-scale basis. Even though practice too often falls short of ideals, the adherence to agreements, and underlying and older notions of good faith and fair dealing, along with equity, are foundational to a market economy. So Trump isn’t merely throwing a wrecking ball at entire institutions on his hit list, even when often only parts of them or certain practices are as rancid as his enthusiasts believe. To change metaphors, his slash and burn approach is so extreme that it represents a hazard to commerce.

One example: the reason the UK (and ones following UK law, like Hong Kong back in the day)and US are preferred jurisdictions for entering into financial and other business agreements is that statutes and precedent are generally well settled. So a wronged party who has clear contractual or other legal rights has a high degree of confidence that he can get some satisfaction if he goes to court. That sense of confidence is bolstered by strong discovery rights.

Trump is already running roughshod over contracts with his payments freezes (temporarily blocked) and his attempt to limit NIH and NSF for indirect costs to 15%. Even though the lawsuits that have successfully enjoined this action go at the question of Trump’s authority to change the formulas going forward, the order imposed a 15% cap effective as of February 10. That meant the Trump effort was trying to unilaterally change terms of existing contracts. 2

The sense that Trump could upend all sorts of established programs on which millions depend, from Medicaid and SNAP to even the still-scared cows of Medicare and Social Security, has many on edge. For those not directly exposed, the downdraft could still hit businesses and professionals on which they depend. Thus the effects have the potential to become disproportionate to the original cuts as cutbacks and closures cascade.

This is before getting to the second prong of Trump’s intended economic revolution, that of the widespread imposition of tariffs. Recall Trump deployed them on only a limited basis in his first term. On his current intended scale, they are certain to increase inflation and create shortages, as industry groups are already predicting for Trump’s tariffs on Chinese pharmaceuticals and drug components.

A short take:


𝔗𝔯𝔲𝔱𝔥 𝔐𝔞𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔰
@politicsusa46
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Please stop listening to the fairytales Trump is pushing day after day. He is asset stripping America. The power he perceives he has on the global stage is diminishing by the day as economies are taking steps to shift reliance on the US.

This tariff madness is NOT helping…


Confirming the clip above, from today’s Financial Times, in ‘Cost and chaos’: Donald Trump’s metal tariffs sweep across corporate America:

The push to shore up supplies of crucial inputs comes after the White House on Monday said the US would impose tariffs of 25 per cent on all steel and aluminium imports from March 12, part of a sweeping programme of protectionist trade policies that have unsettled many American businesses.

The US is a net importer of steel and aluminium, meaning the tariffs are expected to push up prices across the country’s market. The extra amount that plants in the Midwest pay for aluminium, compared with those on offer in London, has surged in recent days.

Futures tracking the Midwest premium — a vital benchmark for prices paid by US companies, which includes transport, tax and other costs — for settlement next month have jumped 25 per cent since the end of January, according to LSEG data.

And Trump and Musk are seeking to make such big spending cuts in such a short timeframe that even putting aside what economist like to call “fiscal multipliers” and potential outsized supply chain damage, that a reduction in GDP growth and worse seems baked in. Recall that Pinochet did generate an initial boom. By contrast, the extent and severity of Trump actions, along with his fondness for whipsaws like on again, off again Mexico and Canada tariffs, are already sapping confidence. And the the Wall Street Journal highlights that the problem is not just the radicalism of many of Trump’s actions, but that that they are too often incoherent. From Trump’s Conflicting Business Policies Sow Economic Uncertainty:

But events since the inauguration have dented that optimism. The S&P 500 rose 5% in the first five days after the election and has since moved sideways. The University of Michigan on Friday said its preliminary index of consumer sentiment, based on surveys conducted since Trump’s inauguration, dropped in February. Preliminary results of a small business survey by Vistage Worldwide for The Wall Street Journal show that a postelection pop in confidence was reversed in February. Wall Street just ended the quietest January in a decade for mergers and acquisitions announcements.

Ethan Karp, chief executive of Magnet, a nonprofit in Cleveland that works with local manufacturers, said, “There is so much turmoil. People don’t know what is going to land. Even though there is potential long term benefit to the tariffs in terms of reshoring, the immediate things that are happening is just turmoil.”…

An index of policy uncertainty based on news articles, co-developed by Nick Bloom, a Stanford University economist, has reached levels last seen during the pandemic and in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Uncertainty can hamper long-term investment such as in research and development and infrastructure, Bloom said.

One of many examples comes in the Financial Times in ‘We’ll all have to go vegan’: Wisconsin dairy farmers fret over immigration crackdown:

John Rosenow, a Wisconsin dairy farmer, says that if Donald Trump deports all undocumented aliens, Americans will have to get used to a whole new diet.

“If there’s no immigrant labour, there’s no milk, no cheese, no butter, no ice cream,” the dairy farmer said. “We’ll all have to go vegan.”…

The dairy industry is particularly vulnerable. Produce growers can recruit legal seasonal workers to harvest fruit and vegetables, under the H-2A visa programme for temporary farmhands. But there is no such system for dairy farms, which require workers to milk cows three times a day, all year round…

“Let’s say the people in Washington could wave a magic wand and make all these people disappear — you’d have dead cows piling up outside the dairy farms,” he [Hans Breitenmoser of Lincoln County] said. “The industry would die a horrible death within 48 hours. Because no one would be there to slaughter the cows, let alone milk them.”

There is no sign yet that Trump intends to go after farm workers. Tom Homans at ICE’s targets are immigrants with final deportation orders (about 1.4 million) and “criminals” which is taken to mean both the convicted and those merely charged, which totals 655,000. Homans is also making a big show of targeting sanctuary cities, which as far as I can tell, do not have a lot of dairy farms.

But even if ICE does not plan to deport agriculture workers, it’s not hard to see how a raid or two near dairy farm country could create a panic, and do huge damage via dairy workers going into hiding, as in not showing up to milk cows. How hard would it be to issue plausibly deniable reassurances through Congresscritters or state legislators, which could then be conveyed to farmers and via them, to farm hands? This is an easily preventable train wreck, yet no can be bothered.

The Wall Street Journal also reported on imminent labor shortages due to undocumented immigrant crackdowns:

Still, it’s likely to have economic repercussions, including exacerbating labor shortages. In a recent survey, members of the Associated General Contractors of America listed an insufficient supply of workers as one of their top concerns for 2025. Members in Florida, Georgia, Texas and Oklahoma, among other locations, have reported workers not showing up “because of rumors or fears of potential ICE raids,” said spokesman Brian Turmail.

Another layer of policy inconsistency is on how Trump’s geopolitical schemes collide with his domestic priorities. Trump has said he wants lower oil prices to hurt Russia and bring them to the negotiating table, and has even gone as far as trying to pressure OPEC members. But they have no reason to hurt their incomes to help Trump, particularly when Trump is also threatening to destabilize the region by forcing Egypt and/or Jordan to take Palestinian expellees. And many experts have also pointed out US shale gas producers won’t play ball either because they have no interest in depleting their reservers for inadequate rewards.

Yanis Varoufakis does think there is some method in Trump’s madness on the currency front. From Unherd:

According to Trump, America imports too much because it is a good global citizen which feels obliged to provide foreigners with the reserve dollar assets they need. In short, US manufacturing has been in decline because America is a good Samaritan: its workers and middle class suffer so that the rest of the world can grow at its expense.

But the dollar’s hegemonic status also underpins American exceptionalism, as Trump knows and appreciates. Foreign central banks’ purchases of US Treasuries enable the US government to run deficits and pay for an oversized military that would bankrupt any other country. And by being the linchpin of international payments, the hegemonic dollar enables the President to exercise the modern-day equivalent of gunboat diplomacy: to sanction at will any person or government.

This is not enough, in Trump’s eyes, to offset the suffering of American producers who are undercut by foreigners whose central bankers exploit a service (dollar reserves) America provides them for free to keep the dollar overvalued….

And that’s not the worst of Trump’s concerns. His nightmare is that this hegemony will be fleeting….

For when US deficits exceed some threshold, foreigners will panic. They will sell their dollar-denominated assets and find some other currency to hoard. Americans will be left amid international chaos with a wrecked manufacturing sector, derelict financial markets and an insolvent government…..

Central to this new global order would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more. Can Trump have his cake (a hegemonic dollar and low-yielding US Treasuries) and eat it (a depreciated dollar)? He knows that the markets will never deliver this of their own accord. Only foreign central banks can do this for him. But to agree to do this, they need to be shocked into action first. And that’s where his tariffs come in….

But tariffs are only the first phase of his masterplan. With high tariffs as the new default, and with foreign money accumulating in the Treasury, Trump can bide his time as friends and foes in Europe and Asia clamour to talk. That’s when the second phase of Trump’s plan kicks in: the grand negotiation….

Acquiesce to what? To appreciating their currency substantially without liquidating their long-term dollar holding. He will not only expect each spoke to cut domestic interest rates, but will demand different things from different interlocutors. From Asian countries that currently hoard the most dollars, he will demand they sell a portion of their short-term dollar assets in exchange for their own (thus appreciating) currency. From a relatively dollar-poor eurozone riddled with internal divisions that increase his negotiating power, Trump may demand three things: that they agree to swap their long-term bonds for ultra-long-term or possibly even perpetual ones; that they allow German manufacturing to migrate to America; and, naturally, that they buy a lot more US-made weapons.

There are many fallacies in the Trump reasoning. A partial list: first, Trump wants the US to be a mercantilist and run trade surpluses. So does everyone else, since they get to import other countries’ demand. The stable alternative is a system where countries run more or less balanced trade, which is what Keynes’ bancor was meant to enforce. But countries have to surrender sovereignity to do that. Think Trump will allow that?

Second, as readers know, it will likely take 10 years, more like 20, to get manufacturing back, even if we had industrial policy, which does not seem to be on Trump’s dance card. Putting aside the wee problem of how ugly the transition period might get, the US is out making itself stoopider with AI and investing there in preference to bricks and mortar.

Third, as today’s inflation release showed, inflation is untamed, so the Fed is not set to cooperate any time soon.

But IMHO Varoufakis overthink Trump. Trump has been so inconsistent on so many topics (starting with Ukraine) that attributing a grand plan to him seem to be a big stretch.

I believe Trump instead epitomizes the Sun Tsu warning:

All tactics and no strategy is the noise before the defeat.

We’ll stop here, since this is a large topic in an overly dynamic environment. But killing the Confidence Fairy does not produce happy market or economic outcomes. Even if there actually is a logic in Trump’s slash and burn campaign, the immediate costs look pretty sure to exceed theoretical benefits.

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1 Our summary in ECONNED:

The “Chicago boys,” a group of thirty Chileans who had become followers of Friedman as students at the University of Chicago, assumed control of most eco- nomic policy roles. In 1975, the finance minister announced the new program: opening of trade, deregulation, privatization, and deep cuts in public spending.

The economy initially appeared to respond well to these changes as foreign money flowed in and inflation fell.27 But this seeming prosperity was largely a speculative bubble and an export boom. The newly liberalized economy went heavily into debt, with the funds going mainly to real estate, business acquisitions, and consumer spending rather than productive investment.28 Some state assets were sold at huge discounts to insiders. For instance, industrial combines, or grupos, acquired banks at a 40% discount to book value, and then used them to provide loans to the grupos to buy up manufacturers.29

In 1979, when the government set a currency peg too high, it set the stage for what Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof and Stanford’s Paul Romer call “looting” (we discuss this syndrome in chapter 7). Entrepreneurs, rather than taking risk in the normal fashion, by gambling on success, instead engage in bankruptcy fraud. They borrow against their companies and find ways to siphon funds to themselves and affiliates, either by overpaying themselves, extracting too much in dividends, or moving funds to related parties.

The bubble worsened as banks gave low-interest-rate foreign currency loans, knowing full well the borrowers in their own industrial group would default when the peso fell. But it permitted them to use the proceeds to seize more as- sets at preferential prices, thanks to artificially cheap borrowing and the eventual subsidy of default.30

And the export boom, the other engine of growth, was, contrary to stateside propaganda, not the result of “free market” reforms either. The Pinochet regime did not reverse the Allende land reforms and return farms to their former own- ers. Instead, it practiced what amounted to industrial policy and gave the farms to middle-class entrepreneurs, who built fruit and wine businesses that became successful exporters. The other major export was copper, which remained in government hands.31

And even in this growth period, the gains were concentrated among the wealthy. Unemployment rose to 16% and the distribution of income became more regressive. The Catholic Church’s soup kitchens became a vital stopgap.32 The bust came in late 1981. Banks, on the verge of collapse thanks to dodgy loans, cut lending. GDP contracted sharply in 1982 and 1983. Manufacturing output fell by 28% and unemployment rose to 20%.

The neoliberal regime suddenly resorted to Keynesian backpedaling to quell violent protests. The state seized a majority of the banks and implemented tougher banking laws.33 Pinochet restored the minimum wage, the rights of unions to bargain, and launched a program to create 500,000 jobs.34

2 Contracts are not sacred. Parties regularly cure big or expected big breaches via waivers. And the breaching party usually makes a concession, like a payment.

Most take the enforceability of contracts and other consumer law protections, like truth in advertising, as givens. It is actually hard to conduct business with parties you do not know personally and trust when that breaks down. Again from ECONNED:

Consider purchasing a computer in the neoclassical paradigm. The buyer has no way of being certain that the computer lives up to the vendor’s promises. So the consumer will have to bring an expert to test the computer’s functionality at the time of purchase (does it really have the memory and chip speed prom- ised, for instance?). The seller will need to be paid in cash, otherwise the buyer could revoke payment.
And what happens if the computer fails in a few weeks? Assuming the vendor has not fled the jurisdiction, the only remedy is litigation, or an enforcer with brass knuckles.

But even that scenario is too simplistic. It assumes the buyer can evaluate the expert. But in fact, if you aren’t a computer professional, you can’t readily assess the competence of someone who has expertise you lack. And even if the person you hired is competent, he might arrange to get a kickback from the seller for endorsing shoddy goods. The same problem holds true in any area of specialized skills, such as accounting, the law, or finance. Many people judge service quality by bedside manner, which is not necessarily a good proxy for the qual- ity of the substantive advice. And as we will see later, one of the factors that helped create the crisis was the willingness of investors to buy complicated financial products based on the recommendation of a salesman who did not have the buyers’ best interests at heart.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... racts.html

The Golden Goose: The Consequences of Trump’s War on American Universities
Posted on February 13, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This post is a more extensive assessment of the topic broached by KLG via e-mail and that I hoisted into a post. KLG described how proposed indirect overhead cuts for NIH and NSF grants would put most large med school research into a loss. Rajiv Sethi goes much further in documenting the damage, that it would put the universities themselves in a loss and have a devastating impact on advanced research across a very broad front. This would rapidly undermine the US’ contested leading position, above all compared to China, when Trump has made containing China a top priority.

Sethi also describes how J.D. Vance earlier and in very blunt terms described universities as the enemy and how they needed to be brought under the control of conservatives. Recall how we have repeatedly described the massive growth in student debt as a PMC growth and enrichment project, particularly with the great increase in the relative size of well-paid, “doing exactly what?” administrators. One of the big project, despite the very large increase in Federal funding via loans, was enlarging fundraising staff. Yet one of the notable results was how much of the new money went into glitzy, not-education-value added initiatives like new buildings and fancy gyms. Those edifices create naming opportunities.

By Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics, Barnard College, Columbia University &; External Professor, Santa Fe Institute. Originally published at his site

Late last week, the National Institutes of Health announced a major reduction in the maximum allowable rate at which universities and research labs are compensated for facilities and administrative costs associated with federal grants:1

Image

A federal judge has temporarily blocked this change from taking effect in 22 states following a challenge by a coalition of attorneys general. Pennsylvania is not among the states that sued, and Penn State has paused both the submission of new applications to the agency and the acceptance of new awards that carry the reduced indirect cost rate. I suspect that many major research universities have made or are contemplating similar pauses, not wanting to commit themselves to the lower rate until the dust has settled.

I don’t know how these legal battles are going to play out, but if the cap on indirect costs is sustained, it will have profound effects on balance sheets. Columbia, for example, is expected to lose over 100 million dollars a year from this one change alone, and twice as much if other federal agencies follow suit. Stanford’s projected losses are in the same ball park. Other major research universities, including flagship state schools, all face roughly the same fate.

The last time there was a fiscal shock of comparable magnitude was during the pandemic, when Columbia faced about 300 million dollars in net losses over two years due to reduced occupancy in housing units, a precipitous drop in the number of international students, lower revenues from medical procedures, and new expenditures on testing, tracing, student evacuation, and upgraded classroom technologies. The university responded with employee furloughs, hiring and salary freezes, temporary reductions in retirement benefits, depletion of cash reserves, and new debt issuance.

The difference this time is that the fiscal shortfall is of indefinite duration, and cannot be addressed by temporary measures. Harvard’s president has argued that the proposed cap “would slash funding and cut research activity at Harvard and nearly every research university in our nation.” He predicts the following consequences:

The discovery of new treatments would slow, opportunities to train the next generation of scientific leaders would shrink, and our nation’s science and engineering prowess would be severely compromised. At a time of rapid strides in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, brain science, biological imaging, and regenerative biology, and when other nations are expanding their investment in science, America should not drop knowingly and willingly from her lead position on the endless frontier.

For reasons discussed below, such arguments are unlikely to sway those responsible for higher education policy in the current administration.

It is possible that the courts will block changes to the terms of awards that have already been issued. Perhaps they will even prevent changes in the rates attached to awards made in the current fiscal year, given that these were negotiated and agreed upon several months ago. But I don’t see what prevents the administration from simply refusing to agree to rates above the proposed cap when negotiations for the next fiscal year commence.

That is, had the administration simply announced that future negotiations would be subject to the reduced cap, I don’t think that grant recipients would have had a case for legal action.

So why not simply do this instead of changing rates midstream?

My guess is that the primary goal was not the anticipated budgetary savings, which (over a long horizon) would have been roughly the same with delayed implementation. The goal—as was the case with public tariff announcements against Colombia and our major trading partners, the abrupt curtailment of foreign aid, the intention to acquireGreenland and the Panama Canal, and the proposal to forcibly resettle the entire population of Gaza—was to project immense power and the willingness to use it.

It’s important to understand that the NIH announcement is just the opening salvo in an all-out assault on universities that has yet to begin in earnest. Other initiatives currently being contemplated include the leveraging of the accreditation process to force major changes to the curriculum, the filing of federal civil rights cases, and the taxation and partial confiscation of endowments. We may also see selective denials of visas for foreign students and the targeted freezing of federal grants and contracts.

The sitting Vice President has described American universities as the enemy. To get a clear sense of what he means by this, consider the following remarks made about an hour into a podcast episode recorded in 2021 (emphasis added):2

Universities I really believe are the gatekeepers. Everything runs through the universities… Everything that is broken about our society—from Fauci’s authority to the things that our kids are being taught in the sixth grade—runs through the university system. There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.

So the idea that we get a little bit more diversity at Harvard or Yale or Ohio State, or we maybe make things a little bit nicer for conservatives, or we found some conservative clubs on campus, no no no no no. Unless we’re willing to de-institutionalize the left in those institutions—or destroy the institutions absent that—we are going to continue to make the most powerful academic actors in our society actively aligned against us. The only way to work is to actually take some of these institutions over.

Back in 1918, the British politician Eric Geddes argued that on the matter of war reparations, Germany should be “squeezed as a lemon is squeezed—until the pips squeak. My only doubt is not whether we can squeeze hard enough, but whether there is enough juice.”3 University endowments in the aggregate currently hold more than 800 billion dollars in total wealth. There are about thirty institutions (including virtually all Ivy Plus schools and a number of flagship state universities) with more than five billion each, and another hundred or so with more than one billion. That’s a lot of juice, and the temptation to “take it over” is accordingly immense.

The endgame here seems to be the installation of loyalists on boards of trustees and in senior administrative positions. Universities will resist this loss of autonomy, and may prevail in the end, but they will pay a very steep price along the way.

The country, too, will pay a price.

You can’t bludgeon an institution (or nation) without strategic adjustments being set in motion. In response to the tariff threats—even those that were withdrawn in the face of concessions—I have argued that there will be long term changes in global trade flows and geopolitical alignments. What might be the long term effects of the squeezing of American universities?

I can imagine two kinds of adjustments—the movement of people across institutions, and the movement of institutions across borders.

Nils Gilman predicted back in July of last year that actions such as those currently being taken would “spell the end of the post-WWII global hegemony of American academia.”4 Consider, for instance, the winners of Nobel prizes in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine over the past five years. Of the 37 total recipients, 22 were affiliated with American institutions at the time of the award. Eight of these these were born elsewhere—in Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Lebanon, Russia, and Tunisia.

Nobel prizes typically recognize research done decades in the past. The international presence in American higher education is even more pronounced today than it was then, and encompasses a broader range of source countries. These people have crossed oceans to study and work in American labs. They do so because that is what others like them are also doing—they jointly create the environment within which they feel they can thrive. It’s a positive feedback loop that has entrenched America’s position at the cutting edge of multiple research frontiers.

But it is in the nature of positive feedback loops that they can also operate in reverse. Too tight a squeeze of higher education runs the risk of turning a virtuous cycle into a vicious one. Other countries may see an opportunity to attract the scientists who are currently drawn to American universities. For example, the University of Toronto, Monash, Seoul National, and the Max Planck Institutes are already major centers for research, and with the support of their respective governments, could anchor the growth of new scientific ecosystems.

But there’s another possibility worth considering. The leading American universities are globally recognizable brands. They can leverage their reputations by setting up satellite campuses in far-flung locations, as New York University has already done. Potential hosts would compete to offer inducements in the form of research infrastructure and intellectual autonomy. Squeezed at home but embraced abroad, these institutions would be in a stronger position to weather the storm. But some of the local economic spillovers they generate for domestic companies and communities would be lost.

American universities are certainly not beyond reproach. I have argued repeatedly that they are in serious need of reform. Confidence in them has declined sharply over the past few years, especially but not exclusively among Republicans. They need to acknowledge that there are legitimate reasons for this, and work to regain the public trust. This requires embracing institutional neutrality, protecting free expression even when allegedly harmful, and building a climate in which self-censorship is not incentivized. It also requires adopting admissions practices that are transparent and defensible in plain language, and systematically tracking the lifelong achievements of graduates so that they can test and improve their selection procedures in ways that are mission-aligned. These are all changes that are desirable in their own right, regardless of political pressures or threats faced.

But whatever their flaws, American universities are also powerful magnets for global talent and major export engines on which our economy depends. Squeezing them hard may provide their fiercest critics with some short-run satisfaction, but like the cottager in Aesop’s fable, we may end up losing a steady stream of golden eggs.

1

Anyone who was surprised by NIH announcement really hasn’t been paying attention. Just three weeks after the election last year, Vivek Ramaswamy declared an intention to do exactly this, arguing that it would be “a great early win” for Jay Bhattacharya at the head of the agency and that the Department of Government Efficiency would “gladly help him deliver it.” Ramaswamy has since parted ways with DOGE but he was just a mouthpiece for the policy, not it’s originator.

2

In transcribing JD Vance’s spoken words I have dropped fillers such as like and you know. The recording was made a few months before he ran in a contested Senate primary in Ohio, a race he managed to win thanks in large part to an endorsement by Donald Trump. It’s safe to say that his transition from “skeptic to superfan” was already close to complete by the time of the podcast interview.

3

The memorable phrase coined by Geddes was repurposed by Denis Healey in 1974, when (as Chancellor of the Exchequer) he pledged to “squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak.” A decade later Healey ran for the Labour Party leadership and lost to Michael Foot; the history of Britain would have been quite different if he had prevailed.

4

Gilman seems to have deleted his account on X, and with it his remarkably prescient thread.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... ities.html

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PATRICK LAWRENCE: Musk & the Myth of USAID
February 12, 2025

Among the agency’s missions, the one to promote democracy has made it a very sad story.

Image
A shuttered USAID in Washington, D.C., on Sunday. (Ted Eytan, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

What hath the MAGA movement wrought? I doubt the archest of Donald Trump’s arch-enemies ever imagined that in his second term he would take things this far in the direction of dangerous or dumb or both.

To be clear straightaway, Trump’s full-frontal attack on the Deep State and the liberal authoritarians who collaborated to subvert his first four years in the White House is wholly warranted.

In particular, purging the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation while exerting some measure of civilian control over the intelligence apparatus are not only well-grounded undertakings: They are necessary if the foundations of the decadent republic are to be restored after the wanton misuse of these institutions during the Biden years.

But let us be clear in all directions: A lot of what Trump is getting up to this time merits principled objection in the name of reason, decency, democracy, and a genuine global order — but not, I add immediately, in defense of liberal ideology and (its close cousin) an imperium that conducts its business in a more cosmetically acceptable fashion.

Ownership of the Gaza Strip? Wresting control of the Panama Canal from the sovereign Republic of Panama? I read last Friday Trump has issued yet another executive order, this one to halt aid to South Africa and offer the country’s notoriously racist Afrikaner farmers refugee status as victims of a “massive human rights VIOLATION,” as he put it in a social media post — adding that he considers them “racially disfavored landowners.”

Just when you think you’ve heard everything, Donald Trump says something else. As in every day at this point in the proceedings.

On Monday Trump said in an interview with Fox News that the Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip will not be permitted any right to return home after he turns it into some kind of glitzy West Asian version of Palm Beach. “I’m talking about building a permanent place for them,” he told Fox’s Bret Baier.

“A permanent place”: Trump just confirmed he is on for the ethnic-cleansing of Gaza he previously proposed in all but name. The force required to get this done, and the direct role he plans to play in executing the project, will make the president of the United States guilty, by all internationally accepted definitions, of crimes against humanity and very possibly war crimes.

As Joe Lauria, Consortium News’ editor-in-chief, astutely pointed out in a conversation the other day, during Trump’s first term the more thoughtful of our independent media were so taken up with defending him against the anti-democratic fabrications of the Russiagate hoax that there was neither the time nor the column inches to attend to all that was objectionable or condemnable about the Trump of 2017 to 2021.

Writing Off the Wall

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U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Musk and Trump on Nov. 16, 2024. (Office of Speaker Mike Johnson, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Now, as Trump and his people pounce with ferocity on the liberal authoritarians and their various totems, icons, and virtue-signaling programs, there is some sorting out to do. Nothing makes the plainer than the running battle in Washington over the life or death of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The USAID case is worth some consideration. In it we find … the bluntness of Trump and Musk, the blindness of liberals.

USAID’s fate has been a cause célèbre since Elon Musk, who runs Trump’s government efficiency program, said publicly earlier this month that he had the president’s agreement that “we should shut it down.” It has been tears and the gnashing of teeth ever since.

Musk, who I count the most dangerously anti-democratic figure in the cabal of the mostly mal-intended Trump has gathered around him, sent a team of underlings from his Department of Government Efficiency into USAID’s building, a few blocks from the White House, shortly after he declared the president’s assent to begin closing the agency.

Employees were locked out of their offices and email accounts and told to stay home; USAID websites were blocked or taken down. All full-time USAID people were placed on leave and orders went out to recall the thousands of people USAID has in the field around the world. The New York Times reported last Thursday that the White House’s intent is to cut USAID’s staff from more than 10,000 to fewer than 300.

The USAID case now seems headed for court. A federal judge, Carl Nichols of the District Court in Washington, issued a restraining order at the end of last week temporarily blocking parts of the Trump–Musk plan. This was in response to a lawsuit filed by two unions — one representing federal employees and the other Foreign Service officers.

But there is a telling detail here that is not to be missed: Last weekend a variety of mainstream media — NBC News, The New York Times, and others — published a photograph of a federal government maintenance worker high on a ladder as he chiseled off USAID’s name above the entrance to its building at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The writing, let’s say, is off the wall. I do not see America’s premier dispenser of foreign aid and humanitarian assistance surviving Elon Musk’s Storm Trooper-esque sweep — not as the agency has long been known.

And how has USAID been known? This is our question. It is what makes this case worthy of some scrutiny.

Kennedy’s Idea

It was John F. Kennedy who established the Agency for International Development in 1961, his first year in the White House. He gave the State Department authority over it, gave USAID a generous budget, and sent it forth in the world to address the countless problems of others we can file under the heading “Underdevelopment.”

Kennedy was no stranger to self-interest, but this project, like the Peace Corps, was in some good measure an expression of the altruism we find threaded through many of his speeches and policies.

(Can self-interest and altruism co-exist in the same mind, the same heart, the same institution? It seems a contradiction in terms, given altruism is defined as selfless concern for others, but I give Kennedy some rope on this question:

The evolution of his vision and understanding in the course of his thousand days was decisively in the direction of an America that could finally reject its idea of itself as an empire. He paid for this evolution with his life, let us remind ourselves.)

Social and economic development programs, health and nutrition programs, irrigation and drainage projects, disease eradication, environmental remedies: Kennedy wanted USAID to make life for others better in all these ways and many more. But note: Among its missions was one to promote democracy.

It is this last assignment that has made USAID a very sad story. By the time the agency sponsored the founding of the

National Endowment for Democracy, during Ronald Reagan’s first term, “altruism” was a Boy Scout’s term for a lot of the business USAID got up to.

Image
Graffiti on a USAID sign in the occupied West Bank, 2007. (David Lisbona, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

The aid and humanitarian programs remain, and millions of disadvantaged people in more than 100 countries depend on them. But USAID is all about American self-interest now — acting as an instrument of the imperium’s foreign policies with no exceptions that come readily to mind.

Along with the National Endowment for Democracy, it has taken over the coup function from the C.I.A. when this is possible — infamously in NED’s case.

Promoting democratic governance, fighting corruption, helping newspapers and broadcasters do good, professional work, funding all manner of “civil society” groups: What’s not to like is the question you are supposed to ask. Whad’y’a mean, not altruistic?

You have some infamous cases. The “color revolutions” in the former Soviet republics, Venezuela, Ukraine for many years prior to (and since, indeed) the coup the U.S. cultivated in 2014: USAID was the man for all seasons, if I can put it this way.

Russia is a notable case. Reflecting Washington’s regret that Vladimir Putin did not turn out to be another pliant tool when he assumed power from the inebriated Boris Yeltsin in 2000, USAID’s subterfuge got so out of hand in the ensuing years that Putin expelled all of its operatives in 2012.

Image
Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal with USAID Administrator Samantha Power in Kiev, Oct. 2, 2024. (Kmu.gov.ua, Wikimedia Commons,
CC BY 4.0)

Georgia is another just now. USAID shrieked and shouted foul last August, when the Parliament in Tbilisi passed a law requiring NGOs receiving a fifth or more of their funding from abroad to register as foreign agents. Some $95 million in U.S. funding, a good bit of it going to “civil society operations” via USAID, has since been on hold.

What? We’re here to manipulate your political process to tilt Georgia Westward, and you, the elected government in Tbilisi, object? How undemocratic of you. How authoritarian. How… how “pro–Russian.” Netted out, this is USAID’s position on the question.

Preserving the Imagery

There are other dimensions to USAID’s doings worth a mention. Its budget so far in this century has averaged something more than $20 billion. The Washington Post reported last week that in 2020 (the latest figures available, presumably) $2.1 billion of that went to corporate farming operations.

USAID ships food aid to poor nations. USAID subsidizes what we call Big Ag. Both of these statements are true. This is altruism with American characteristics, let’s say.

It is instructive to hear the protests of those now standing in defense of USAID. They run consistently to the good the agency does via its overseas operations, and this reality must be honored. There is no question but that countless people in Africa, Asia and Latin America will suffer if Trump and Musk shutter this institution.

There is another photograph that tells an interesting story. It appears atop a Times piece headlined, “Falsehoods Fuel the Right–Wing Crusade Against U.S.A.I.D.” It shows a group of people protesting the Trump plan on Capitol Hill last week.

The protesters carry aloft a wall of placards. One carried by a young boy reads, “Both my parents lost their jobs thanks to President Musk.” O.K. Self-interest is alive and well and living in Washington. Another, held above it, says, “USAID: national security investment.” Some honesty here, but it has been a long day’s journey for American altruism.

I look at the people in the photo — the dress, the demeanor. They seem to me a latter-day gathering of counterculture folk, intent on doing good and keeping their hands clean. It is good to know such people are still among us.

But they are either lost or they are liars. Assuming the former, their references are to an aid agency that long ago succumbed to ideology and corruption. Their USAID is a mythological object at this point, a museum piece.

They are not, in a phrase, facing up to what USAID has become since, as I think of its decline, the Reagan years and the birthing of the straight-out malevolent NED, a C.I.A. op in very thin disguise. This is to say they do not seem to face up to what has become of America since the altruistic Kennedy days.

And facing it, facing it all, is high among the responsibilities of my generation and all those that follow it.

Mainstream media and all manner of political and public figures have rushed to the side of those Capitol Hill protesters this past week. It makes for an amusing spectacle, this effort to preserve the old imagery of USAID and pretend, as the Times does in the piece linked above, that all the talk of USAID’s not-very-democratic promotions abroad are conspiracy theories and — what would we do without this? — Russian disinformation.

Pitiful. The simple fact is that all the commotion Trump and Musk have prompted has caught USAID with its pants down.

There is no saying the outcome of Trump and Musk’s evangelical crusade against USAID. There is no telling even what their motives are, what they are after. There is something more than efficiency at work in what seems to resemble a vendetta in its severity, it seems to me.

Will Trump and Musk choose to forego all the foreign subterfuge with which they can project American power via the agency’s plethora of pernicious programs? I doubt this, without much grounding for my doubt.

Is the intent somehow to attack Samantha Power, USAID’s done-for director and a Deep State operative if ever there was one? I doubt this, too, allowing for a slim possibility.

I doubt altogether that Trump and Musk have mounted their campaign against USAID for the right reasons, whatever they may be.

The rump contingent of USAID staff that will remain after the purge, I read, will be those dedicated to humanitarian assistance. This is curious, certainly.

But it is always this way with Trump. We are left to wonder what he is trying to do and why he is trying to do it.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/12/p ... -of-usaid/

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