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 » Thu Jan 16, 2025 7:30 pm

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Trump’s Texas tycoons
Originally published: Texas Observer on January 13, 2025 by Justin Miller (more by Texas Observer) | (Posted Jan 16, 2025)

Texas may fancy itself the MAGA mega-state, the indispensable beacon of brash conservatism that provided the fuel and fodder—if not the decisive electoral votes—for Donald Trump to return to power. But that stature will apparently not be reflected in the president’s second administration. Just three Texans have been appointed to his cabinet as of early December, and not among them are the statewide leaders long-rumored as options for the top federal ranks.

Nor will Texans wield any outsized influence within the Republican-controlled Congress. After a wave of retirements, Texas Republicans in the U.S. House collectively possess the least seniority and committee chairmanships in a generation, their ranks now filled with gadflys, sycophants, and back-benchers. The two Texans in the U.S. Senate include a self-righteous striver and an on-the-outs old establishment hand. Sam Rayburn or LBJ, there is not.

But the Texas tycoons who financed and fomented Trump’s reelection will, as ever, reap the spoils and plunder provided by the coming years of a Republican-run Washington. And, much like Trump’s first term, the Lone Star State’s top GOP leaders will stay put at home—leading the policy vanguard from the statehouse, helping build the president’s promised mass-deportation machine, and cheerleading the Trump economy (tariffs and all).

There will be plenty of glory and gains for the politicians and plutocrats. But don’t count on them to sound the alarm when the unbridled winds of “change” become a destructive gale. They’ll just keep blowing hot air.

THE BILLIONAIRE BACKERS
Elon Musk
CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, X
Net Worth: $450 billion

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MUSK JUMPS AT A TRUMP RALLY IN PENNSYLVANIA IN OCTOBER. (AP PHOTO/EVAN VUCCI)

The mad genius, or the puerile pretender, Musk controls a nearly trillion-dollar business empire that includes a rocket developer with major federal contracts, the largest electric vehicle manufacturer, and one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. In protest of COVID-19 protections for workers and other Californian impositions, he moved to Texas about five years ago and brought his companies with him.

The formerly liberal oligarch has since shifted drastically to the political right, as Texas transplants are wont to do, embracing the most airheaded and dangerous ideas conservatism has to offer. The world’s richest person, he now has a $35-million multi-mansion compound in West Austin that he reportedly envisions as home for some combination of his 11 children and their multiple mothers. On the eastern outskirts of town, he’s built a 10 million-square-foot gigafactory that produces the Tesla cybertruck, and over in Bastrop he has a sprawling center of operations, where his Boring Company and X (formerly Twitter) are now based and where he’s building a company town for his workers. His footprint in politics has grown even faster.

Rarely, if ever, has one ultrawealthy individual shoved America further in the direction of plutocracy than did this 53-year-old South African immigrant in his push for Trump’s presidential comeback. X became a massive MAGA megaphone. And Musk opened his pockets wide, giving at least $118 million to America PAC, a super PAC (also based in Austin) that he formed to serve as the Trump campaign’s GOTV ground game. The PAC reportedly spent at least $200 million on the president-elect’s behalf.

Thus, in a matter of months, Musk became one of Trump’s largest donors and closest advisors. After the election, Musk reportedly joined him on calls with foreign leaders, consulted on personnel picks and policy plans, and generally palled around Mar-a-Lago.

Trump soon announced that the X-presario would lead the Department of Government Efficiency (i.e. DOGE, a nod to a Musk-affiliated cryptocurrency), a supra-governmental entity ostensibly tasked with taking a flamethrower to the federal bureaucracy. Musk’s DOGE plans haven taken on a cult status within the Trump revival movement. The department will not be an actual part of the federal government; rather, it will be an outside entity with no statutory power but likely plenty of influence. This has the convenient upside of helping Musk, whose businesses have substantial interests in federal policymaking, sidestep the ethics rules around conflicts of interest for political appointees.

Those conflicts are numerous as his business ventures involve heavily regulated industries—from self-driving cars and rocket launches to artificial intelligence and brain implants. SpaceX, his literally explosive rocket and satellite company, is among the largest federal contractors—for NASA, the Defense Department, and other federal agencies. Musk’s companies were awarded over $3 billion in contracts in 2023 alone, and more than $15 billion over the past decade. Musk has also pushed hard for Trump to get rid of the billions in tax credits for domestic electric vehicles that were enacted by the Biden administration, a move that could devastate Tesla’s fledgling EV competitors and ensure his company’s market dominance. (This is to say nothing of Musk’s myriad foreign business entanglements with China, Russia, Ukraine, and more.)

Of course, MAGA world is littered with big stars who burned bright and faded fast when their policy aims or personalities clashed with Trump’s. There have been early signs that Musk may be at risk of overstepping. Perhaps, though, Musk will prove too big even for Trump to manage, achieving a kind of shadow presidency in the absence of the constitutional ability to run himself.

Kelcy Warren
Executive Chairman of Energy Transfer Partners
Net Worth: $7.6 billion

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KELCY WARREN REVIEWS DOCUMENTS IN DALLAS IN 2016. (AP PHOTO/JOHN L. MONE)

The Dallas energy titan is the quintessential good ol’ boy billionaire in Texas’ oil and gas industry. He’s made piles of money building Energy Transfer Partners into one of the world’s largest pipeline companies. And he’s used that wealth to become one of the premier Republican benefactors in the country. Warren cares primarily about ensuring maximum profit and minimal federal government intervention in the fossil fuel sector. He maintains a relatively low public profile but carries a big stick.

Warren spent tens of millions trying to make Rick Perry president, then got Perry a spot on his corporate board of directors as a consolation prize. After jumping on the Trump train, the Dallas oilman became a top donor—giving $10 million in the 2020 cycle and hosting Trump’s first in-person fundraiser during the pandemic. (Trump reportedly had an investment of up to $1 million in Energy Transfer Partners back in 2015.)

Warren once again led the charge among oil and gas barons to get Trump back in office in 2024, forking over another $5 million to the president-elect’s super PAC and hosting fundraisers for him in Houston and at his Dallas estate with others of the Texas billionaire class.

Trump leaned heavily on Warren’s industry to burnish his faltering money machine. At a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago last May, energy execs complained about how much they had to spend on lobbying against Biden’s climate initiatives. (Under Biden’s clearly oppressive regime, the industry somehow managed to produce record levels of oil and raked in massive profits.) In response, Trump called on the fossil chieftans to give his campaign $1 billion, which they’d more than recoup in the coming orgiastic fracking spree. Industry execs fell well short of that, but they did provide over $20 million.

Among the top priorities for Warren & co. is for Trump to lift any federal restraints on the lucrative liquefied natural gas (LNG) export market that has spurred a boom of new terminal projects along the Gulf Coast in Texas. Biden’s temporary hold on LNG export permits sparked fierce backlash from the industry over the past year.

Warren’s Energy Transfer is one of the biggest global LNG players—the company was especially irked when the feds recently declined to give another permit extension for a planned terminal project in Louisiana.

With Trump back in office, the oil and gas boys will be back in the driver’s seat. Crank up the A/C.

Tim Dunn
Oilman (and part-time pastor and full-time theocracy stan)
Net Worth: $2.2 billion

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DUNN AT A TEXAS PUBLIC POLICY FOUNDATION EVENT IN AUSTIN. (PATRICK MICHELS)

The man from Midland is a more singular figure among Texas oilmen. He’s the major financier and architect of a political project to advance Christian nationalism (a label he rejects) in the state. He’s funded a small army of candidates and PACs who adhere to his hardline brand, and he’s tried to purge many Republicans who don’t. Dunn is kind of like the great Oz of Texas politics. While his project has had its share of failures over the years, he plays a long game. The billionaire is perhaps more powerful than ever—and wealthier, as he reportedly netted over $2 billion when he sold his oil outfit CrownRock last year.

While he’s largely focused his political efforts on state politics, Dunn went all in on Trump 2.0. He cut a $5 million check to Trump’s PAC in late 2023. He also joined the board of the America First Policy Institute, a think tank known in MAGA land as Trump’s “White House in waiting,” and donated at least $250,000 to it. He’s also become business partners with Brad Parscale, Trump’s former digital guru, on a “non-woke” Christian-centric AI advertising endeavor.

Like others of his apocalypse-courting ilk, Dunn fiercely opposes efforts to curb climate change and expand clean energy. “The extremists want to deindustrialize America. They want to live in huts around a campfire,” he said in 2022.

But his true focus is on using government to advance and enforce his vision of turning religious doctrine into state dictates. For fundamentalists like Dunn, Trump is but a vehicle for bringing Christ back down upon as all—boots-first.

THE POLICY HANDS
Brooke Rollins
President & CEO, America First Policy Institute
Reformed Rick Roller

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ROLLINS (RIGHT) AND DONALD TRUMP IN 2018 (AP PHOTO/CAROLYN KASTER)

For 15 years, Brooke Rollins was the CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), the conservative think tank funded by some of the biggest right-wing donors and corporate interests in the state, which she joined after working for then-Governor Perry. TPPF served as a personnel pipeline for the first Trump administration. Rollins first joined the White House in 2018 to work for the Office of American Innovation, a pet project run by Jared Kushner to ostensibly liaise with the private sector to reform the federal government. (Sound familiar?) As a conservative proponent of criminal justice reform, Rollins helped lead the push to enact the federal First Step Act in 2018, a law that Republicans have sought to memory-hole since Old Testament views on policing and prisons came back in vogue post-2020. Rollins was promoted to director of the domestic policy council in the final year of Trump’s first term.

In 2021, Rollins co-founded the America First Policy Institute, one of various shadowy outside groups that were formed to institutionalize Trumpism during the Biden years.

While she is reportedly well-liked by Trump himself, Rollins is viewed with skepticism by the more populist wing of the MAGA movement, which sees her as representing the establishment corporatism of the old Republican Party. The knives came out when she emerged as a leading contender for Trump’s chief of staff, a post she didn’t get. Still, Rollins, her America First Institute, and TPPF are all well-positioned to bring some ideological heft to what will mostly be a carnival of corruption and cultural regress.

For starters, in a surprising move, Trump tapped Rollins in late November to be his secretary of the Department of Agriculture. In a thank-you post on X, she posted in all-caps: “WHO’S READY TO MAKE AGRICULTURE GREAT AGAIN?”

Kevin Roberts
President, Heritage Foundation
Match Lighter

Democrats made Project 2025 into a shorthand meme for the least popular and most extreme executive policies Trump would begin instituting on day one if elected president again. As head of the Heritage Foundation, which produced the infamous proposal, Kevin Roberts became the face of that project. Stories ran about his calls for a “second American revolution” and about how his forthcoming book, originally titled Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America, included a foreword penned by Trump’s veep pick JD Vance.

Roberts’ Texas ties aren’t especially deep, but he took over TPPF when Rollins departed, and he ran it for three years before going to Heritage.

Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 in his campaign, and Roberts played along. “No hard feelings from any of us at Project 2025 about the statement because we understand Trump is the standard-bearer and he’s making a political tactical decision there,” Roberts said last July.

While Heritage may not hold the same sort of reverence among MAGA loyalists as it did with the old tea-party insurgents, the powerful think tank will still loom large in Trump’s second term—and much of the Project 2025 particulars will undoubtedly come to fruition, for want of other ideas if nothing else.

And Roberts’ purported exile will surely come to an end. At his book launch party in a Manhattan penthouse the week after the election, Roberts said, “I anticipate speaking with [Trump] pretty soon. … We’re very optimistic about working with the administration.”

THE STATEWIDES
Greg Abbott
Governor
Helping Hand

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ABBOTT SPEAKS AT A NEWS CONFERENCE IN AUSTIN. (AP PHOTO/ERIC GAY)

The Texas governor won a ton of brownie points with Trump by spending over $10 billion in state funds to carry on the former president’s border security theater, after Biden’s election, via Operation Lone Star. This provided a high-profile platform from which to incessantly attack the Democratic administration for its alleged “open borders” and to politicize the plight of millions of migrants who sought asylum or work in the United States over the past four years. The costly operation provided a constant stream of footage on Fox News.

Abbott’s shrewdest initiative was his busing program that gave tens of thousands of migrants who congregated in towns like Del Rio and San Antonio free rides to big Democratic cities that claimed to be immigration sanctuaries. This was a highly effective act of political trolling as the unexpected influx of migrants into places like New York City, D.C., Chicago, and Denver prompted the exact histrionic reactions from Democratic mayors that Abbott had hoped for.

With concerns about immigration and border security top of mind for many voters in 2024, Abbott had helped prime the pump for Trump—and for mass deportations that threaten the economic and cultural foundations of Abbott’s own popularity.

The governor no doubt played a part in reelecting Trump, and Abbott now says he can finally ramp down his outlandish border security spending and put the resources toward more bread-and-butter aims—like property tax cuts. But it may be hard for Abbott to truly shut off such a politically useful cash spigot, now that so many private contractors have developed a taste for the border brew.

Dan Patrick
Lieutenant Governor
True Believer

The lite guv never misses an opportunity to tell everyone how close he is with Trump. And he loves to show off that influence by getting Trump to weigh in on various provincial issues in Texas—from wonky disputes over property tax policy at the Capitol to down-ballot primaries in far-flung districts, namely in service of Patick’s war against the state House speaker.

But the Mussolini of the Texas Senate is in winter (though not quite so old as Trump). Not in great health, Patrick seems largely focused on tending to his domain and grooming a successor. Soon after the election, he took to X to preempt any suggestions that he’d take a position in Trump’s cabinet. Instead, he’ll likely do what he’s always done: deploy his old broadcast skills on Fox News.

Ken Paxton
Attorney General
Fellow Prosecutee

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PAXTON SPEAKS OUTSIDE THE U.S. SUPREME COURT. ( BRYAN OLIN DOZIER/NURPHOTO VIA AP)

Perhaps no Texas Republican benefits more from Trump’s return than state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been among the president’s most loyal backers from almost day one. The two share the common lived experience of being both under the thumb of federal investigations and targeted by would-be usurpers within their own party. They have cast themselves as tireless fighters targeted by corrupt institutions because they take on establishment powers.

Trump will likely free Paxton from the last of his legal troubles by getting the DOJ to shut down its years-long federal investigation into his alleged bribery and abuse of power involving the indicted boy wonder of Austin real estate Nate Paul. For months and years on end, rumors have swirled in Austin that a Paxton indictment is imminent. That hasn’t happened. And now, it most likely never will.

Depending on how many U.S. attorney general appointees Trump cycles through, Paxton might get the chance at some point to lead the very agency that some thought might hold him to account.

But, more likely, Paxton is in prime position to burnish Trump’s loyalist ranks in the U.S. Senate. The Texas AG has been teasing a primary challenge against the austere establishment Republican John Cornyn for months. The senior senator, up for reelection in 2026, was recently snubbed in his long-sought bid for Republican majority leader and would be in for the fight of his life against a Trump-backed challenger.

John Cornyn
Senior U.S. Senator
Future Cautionary Tale

The longtime senator spent the past 20 years in the upper chamber as an acolyte of Mitch McConnell, patiently awaiting his turn to take the top job—all the while accumulating power and goodwill with backslaps and big campaign checks. In the alternative universe in which Jeb Bush is completing his second presidential term, Cornyn’s ambitions may have come to fruition. But Trump’s ascent threw a live grenade into the Senate, blowing up his plans.

When Trump fomented an insurrection in January 2020, Cornyn said hasta la vista, insisting Republicans needed to move on and find a standard-bearer who appealed to a broader base. As many others have learned, it’s unwise to underestimate the man of orange hue and seemingly endless political lives.

In a three-way race, Cornyn lost his bid for leader to fellow McConnellite John Thune, of South Dakota (a boon for a state with fewer people than Fort Worth). All this to say: Big John may finally be on the outs, cut down by the likes of Big Don.

Ted Cruz
Junior U.S. Senator
Coattail Connoisseur

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CRUZ IN 2022 (SHUTTERSTOCK/TexasObserver)

Trump’s electoral blowout in Texas helped lift Cruz to a commanding win of his own. After a nailbiter reelection in 2018, Cruz has restored himself to a position of political strength in Texas, no longer seen as such a vulnerability. In a second Trump presidency, Cruz will command a large platform, likely ascending to chair of the powerful U.S. Senate Commerce Committee.

Perhaps he’ll even take another half-hearted shot at reinventing himself as less a microwaver of seafood, as it were, and more a serious statesman.

At 53, Cruz has options, and he’s still a self-righteous striver. It’s possible he’ll fritter away a third Senate term indulging his ego by podcasting, but he also might get himself appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Or maybe he’s got his eyes set on 2028. Des Moines is always calling.

https://mronline.org/2025/01/16/trumps-texas-tycoons/#

******

Forget presidential fanfare, U.S. imperialism occupies the White House

Finian Cunningham

January 16, 2025

U.S. imperialist power occupies the White House seamlessly and the world will continue to deal with the consequences of criminal American warmongering.

Donald Trump takes over from Joe Biden at the White House in less than a week in what is, for all intents and purposes, a theatrical change of the executive figurehead.

One manikin is wheeled out, another wheeled in. Cue the brass band and gun salutes.

There’s a big difference in personal style and rhetoric about policies. But the world will continue to endure its experience of U.S. power – one of imperialistic militarism, conflict, and violence.

Outgoing Democrat President Joe Biden let the cat out of the bag – as he is prone to do – when he delivered what was billed as his last foreign policy speech this week. He outlined a world of U.S. domination by military force and proxy machinations. It was a dystopian view of international relations – yet Biden exulted in the belief that “America is winning” and that this something noble to report to the American people.

During his 30-minute rant at the State Department, Biden declared: “The United States is winning the worldwide competition compared to four years ago. America is stronger. Our alliances are stronger, our adversaries and competitors are weaker.”

It was hard to listen to Biden as he slurred from one fragmented sentence to the next without punctuation. It was harder still to listen to the delusional lies about America leading the world under the aegis of his administration.

He went on to boast that adversaries Russia, China and Iran were all weakened by his policies to create a new Cold War. That’s right, Biden actually claimed it a virtue when he stammered, “the post-Cold War is over, a new era has begun” of fierce competition and crises.”

The proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, where as many as one million military deaths have been incurred in three years, has been recklessly fueled by the Biden administration. The Biden White House and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson deliberately sabotaged an early peace settlement in March 2022.

Biden has thus brought the world to the brink of nuclear war between the United States and Russia. World security has not been this dire since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 – and yet Biden is crowing about this appalling situation as an “achievement” he can report to the American people.

During his foreign policy speech, the Israeli genocide in Gaza fueled by U.S. weapons, which has killed over 46,000 Palestinians – mainly women, children and elderly – was sickeningly rationalized by Biden as a price for weakening Iran.

Biden also bragged about the militarization of the Asia-Pacific with U.S. forces and allies under his watch, purportedly to contain China but which is escalating provocations with another nuclear power.

The cynicism of Biden is grotesque. At one point, he proclaimed, “We have not gone to war to make these things happen.”

It was reminiscent of U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham boasting how the proxy war in Ukraine was the best investment ever made by Washington since Russian soldiers were being killed without the deployment of American troops.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova got it right when she commented: “Today’s statement by Biden is an admission of a deliberately executed provocation. The Biden administration knew it was pushing the world toward the brink and still chose to escalate the conflict.”

Escalation is what Biden is doing as he packs his bags at the White House. This week saw more air attacks deep inside Russia with U.S.-supplied and operated long-range ATACMS missiles. Biden gave the go-ahead for such strikes at the end of last year despite Moscow’s warning that it was inciting a global war and nuclear armageddon.

Next week, the senile Biden heads off to a retirement home. But there is little reason to expect that the incoming Trump administration will change U.S. policy from its course of seeking global domination and confrontation to achieve that. Biden claimed he was leaving the next administration “a very strong hand to play.”

The course of conflict is historically determined by an imperialist power seeking to maintain its global power. Trump is not going to challenge the fundamental dynamic of U.S. imperialism.

During the presidential campaign, Trump often derided Biden for making the U.S. a “laughing stock of the world.” No doubt, Trump would disparage Biden’s egotistical claims of making America stronger.

Trump’s campaign tapped anti-war sentiment among U.S. citizens. He repeatedly vowed to end the war in Ukraine “on day one” of his presidency. The Republican said his focus would be “America First” and ending overseas wars and conflicts.

Even before his inauguration on January 20, Trump has gone full-bore imperialist, declaring that he is going to annex Greenland and Panama by military force if needed on the grounds of “national security.”

Trump is also more inclined to pander to Israeli aggression in the Middle East. He is on record in his endorsement of launching air strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.

His hostile views toward China are also well-documented and unhinged, as are those of his cabinet picks.

The latest reports on Trump’s much-vaunted peace intentions in Ukraine are not promising. His aides are now saying a resolution to the conflict may be months away – not “on day one.”

Trump and his aides, including his mouthpiece billionaire Elon Musk, are abjectly unqualified and ill-informed to have any ability to work through negotiations with Russia, Iran, China, or anyone else.

The difference between Biden and Trump amounts to nothing – despite all the trumpeting by Trump’s MAGA supporters and Biden’s Democrat followers who abhor Trump.

A Republican big mouth takes over from a Democrat degenerate. So what? U.S. imperialist power occupies the White House seamlessly and the world will continue to deal with the consequences of criminal American warmongering.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... ite-house/
"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 Jan 17, 2025 5:05 pm

January 17, 2025 by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
Trump bends the arc of history in West Asia – Part I

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An April 2023 satellite photo from Planet Labs PBC showing construction on an underground facility in the tangled mountains somewhere near Iran’s Natanz nuclear site which has been targeted by Israeli sabotage attacks multiple times

Iran’s Islamic revolution is in transition

My one-week visit to Tehran to observe the presidential election last June came as an eye-opener. I could sense beyond doubt that Iran was on the cusp of profound changes. The country, which I had known professionally for decades ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, was heaving with high expectations of a radical change of course.

The surest sign of it was the tacit encouragement from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei for the reformist candidacy of Masoud Pezeshkian. One of the colossal failures of the Western policy toward Iran has been all along its stereo-typed notions about Iran which is most evident in the reluctance to acknowledge Khamenei’s role. Khamenei realises that the country is crying out for change. The point is, Iran is on the one hand all but in the league of big powers in its indigenously developed military technology testifying to its mastery in technology, research and innovation and industrial scale production capability but with an economy, on the other hand, in dire straits.

Khamenei deduced that time has come for a peaceful orderly transition within the Islamic system, which required national unity. In Pezeshkian, Khamenei saw a politician with an unblemished record of probity in public life and of strong convictions. Hailing from an Azeri-Kurdish family, Pezeshkian’s understanding of the alchemy that is needed in governance to create unity in diversity in a plural society like Iran is unrivalled.

Above all, he is a deeply religious man, a teacher of the Quran, and a reciter of the Nahj al-balagha, a key text for Shia Muslims, who is committed to the Islamic system of Velayat-e faqih, based on the principle of guardianship of Islamic jurists. Khamenei saw in him a rare politician who can bridge the gap between reformists and conservatives and therefore as the best hope for energising the Islamic system and renewing its support base. (See my column titled Reading tea leaves in Iran’s election, Deccan Herald, June 26, 2024)

Late night chat shows on television are hugely popular in Iran and particularly so through an animated election campaign, as they brought out the plurality of political opinion surfacing — to which I was invited to participate every day. The main streams of thinking in front runner Pezeshkian’s electoral platform could be summarised as follows:

The topmost priority is to improve the economy, which is best achieved through the lifting of western sanctions.
A prerequisite in such a direction requires the resolution of the nuclear issue through negotiations with the US, which is feasible now that Iran is a “threshold nuclear power” with a formidable missile capability that already acts as deterrent against foreign aggression.
Ensuing from the above, Iran needs to engage with the West by recalibrating the foreign policy directions and national strategy to enhance mutual confidence.
A Donald Trump presidency would be the “X” factor but, nonetheless, his priorities could be different this time around, and at any rate Iran should be willing to negotiate with the US.
The nation desires social reforms and controversies such as mandatory hijab are best avoided, since they created tensions and divides in society that opened the door to foreign interference, through tolerance and patience in the fulness of time while the excessive state control to impose social norms is unwise.
Economic revival requires switch to market economy and for fostering trade and encouraging foreign investment, an overall opening up is needed in such areas as the Internet, visa system, etc.
Late president Ebrahim Raisi’s accent on the Persian Gulf countries being Iran’s First Circle in foreign policies was a fundamentally forward-looking move and needs to be followed through — in particular, the criticality of consolidating the impetus from the rapprochement with Saudi Arabia that also happens to be in sync with the historic shift in the Saudi regional strategies encapsulated in the so-called Vision 2030 anchored on a thriving economy, turning its back on using extremist jihadi groups as geopolitical tool in West Asia and undertaking social reforms of a historic nature to modernise the nation.
The last point is hugely important in the present context, as Tehran is sincerely committed to the rapprochement with Saudi Arabia which was brokered by China. It has not only reduced the bilateral tensions and erased the conflict of interests, the latest examples being Tehran’s acquiescence with the changes in the power structure in Syria and Lebanon where a palpable Sunni ascendancy is under way.

In strategic terms, Iran is gaining insofar as the locus of Saudi regional policies has shifted and decades-old US-Israeli strategy to isolate Tehran is no longer working. The Persian Gulf states have sought to reassure Iran of their neutrality in any conflict with Israel. Again, Iran’s normalisation with Egypt testifies to its growing acceptability as a regional partner (here and here)

The regional amity in the Persian Gulf and the growing difficulty to rally the Sunni Arab states against Iran has no doubt unnerved the Biden Administration and Netanyahu. On January 2, Axios broke the sensational story that the outgoing White House National Security advisor Jake Sullivan recently presented President Joe Biden at a secret meeting with options for potential American strikes on Iranian nuclear sites before the inauguration of Donald Trump later this month.

The Axios cited sources admitting that “the meeting was not sparked by new intelligence” and Biden was yet to make a “final decision”. Axios’ source called the meeting as part of “prudent scenario planning.” That is to say, there was no intelligence input or emergent situation to justify an attack on Iran and Biden was, characteristically enough, apparently hesitant to test the waters — as he often did on such crucial issues — more for purposes of record even after green lighting the policy shift, such as, for example, giving Ukraine F-16 fighter jets or ATACMS missiles or approval for hitting Russian territory.

In this case, in particular, there is no daylight between Biden and his team which is packed with arch neocons — Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in particular, the two super hawks responsible for giving full-throttle American support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pursue his horrific West Asian war, encompassing Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

Netanyahu has been dreaming for a very long time about an attack on Iran to destroy that country’s rise as a regional power and rival Israel’s military capability, but that remained a pipe dream without direct US involvement. It is entirely conceivable that Sullivan who eats out of Netanyahu’s hands acted on the latter’s behest and Biden was likely aware of that.

At any rate, in another follow-up report on January 6, Axios revisited the topic hyping up that a military option against Iran has become “a real possibility”. Curiously, the report claimed that after a meeting with Trump in November, Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, a close confidante of Netanyahu, the latter “came away thinking there was a high likelihood Trump would either support an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities — something the Israelis are seriously considering — or even order a US strike.”

Israelis are great hustlers and such an attribution to Trump was factually unwarranted, given his known aversion to wars. Plainly put, it was a white lie and crude “psywar” acmes at creating misconceptions regionally. In fact, Axios noted as a corrective in its report that there is a “flip side” to all this, as “others close to Trump expect that he’ll seek a deal before considering a strike” (against Iran).

https://www.indianpunchline.com/trump-b ... ia-part-i/

Trusting Trump's 'aversion to war' will get ya into the 'fool's village'. All the Zionists gotta do is show him the footage of the US hostages in the US embassy...

******

Warhawk Senator Marco Rubio confirmed as Trump’s Secretary of State

Anti-war organizers call out Rubio’s loyalty to the Israel lobby as Rubio indicates he will pursue additional sanctions against Cuba

January 16, 2025 by Peoples Dispatch

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Marco Rubio confirmation hearing/ Screenshot via CSPAN

Yesterday, amid the momentous news of a ceasefire agreement finally being reached in Gaza, right-wing Senator Marco Rubio was confirmed as Trump’s Secretary of State by the United States Senate. To some, Rubio’s confirmation, given his reputation as a warhawk known for promoting an aggressive approach against countries that do not tip-toe around the US line on foreign policy, contradicts Trump’s campaign promise of “preventing World War III.”

Rubio’s role as Secretary of State signals that Trump may immediately relist Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism. This week, in his final days as President, Biden removed Cuba from the SSoT list, a designation which has resulted in multiple humanitarian crises on the island.

During Rubio’s confirmation hearing, when asked about Biden’s delisting of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, the Florida Senator responded, “Nothing that the Biden administration has agreed to in the last 12 or 18 hours binds the next administration, which starts on Monday.”

Rubio is notorious for his promotion of a hostile foreign policy against countries such as Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela. Rubio has also attacked left-wing social movements within the domestic context, attempting to use the power of the state to harshly sanction the BDS movement and pro-Palestine and leftist organizations within the United States.

A protester with anti-war organization CODEPINK was arrested after disrupting Rubio’s Senate confirmation hearing. While under arrest, the protester shouted “you can’t be a warmonger and a diplomat!”

“He’s taken over one million dollars from the Israel lobby!” The protester, Adnaan, shouted. “He wants the US fighting in China, in Iran, in Russia, he wants them fighting in Gaza. He’s gonna cost the lives of millions of people around the world.”

Stumo, who is CODEPINK’s Washington DC Coordinator, told Peoples Dispatch, “We disrupted Marco Rubio’s confirmation hearing yesterday because his appointment as Secretary of State would be a slap in the face to the American people. We want no more endless wars, and Rubio is such a warhawk that he cannot represent our interests…Countless lives are at stake based on U.S. government policy in the next four years, and it is necessary to highlight our government’s disloyalty to the people – by disrupting the theatrical fait accompli of a hearing, if necessary.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/16/ ... -of-state/

*****

Trump’s Panama Canal threats leave country’s officials scrambling for answers
By Phil Mattingly and Andrew Seger, CNN
Updated 9:34 AM EST, Fri January 17, 2025

Panama City, Panama
CNN

The new Panamanian ambassador was given strict instructions as he prepared to meet then-President Donald Trump one day in 2019: Do not engage him in any substantive discussion of critical issues.

This was meant to be a carefully choreographed photo op, nothing more but a brief stop on the diplomatic conveyor belt as foreign ambassadors lined up in the West Wing to formalize their positions atop embassies across Washington.

But the instructions left Juan De Dianous unprepared for the brief interaction with Trump that followed. As he went to shake Trump’s hand, the president mentioned that in his experience there were “a lot of crooks” in Panama.

De Dianous died in 2021 and never sought to publicize or draw attention to the moment. But the story was relayed or confirmed to CNN by several former Panamanian government officials, who, like the rest of the world, are now grappling to divine Trump’s views on the Central American nation of 4 million people.

Through a series of social media posts and then most prominently during a press conference last week where he repeatedly railed against former President Jimmy Carter’s decision to give the Panama Canal over to Panama, Trump has set off a global guessing game about his intentions. His decision not to rule out the use of military force to retake the critical waterway escalated a dispute that seemingly appeared out of thin air.

Current and former government officials, senior canal officials and residents in Panama are now left with plenty of questions, but few answers.

What prompted the latest outburst? Would Trump really green-light a US military invasion to retake the Panama Canal? Are his attacks intended as a broader brushback to China in an escalating battle over hemispheric influence?

Or perhaps, as some in Panama speculate, did some shipping magnate pal complain to Trump about rising canal tolls over dinner at Mar-a-Lago recently?

Interviews with more than a dozen people in Washington, Mar-a-Lago and during several days of reporting on the ground in Panama suggest Trump’s skeptical views of the country stretch back decades.

Trump expressed disdain for the 1977 deal to hand over the canal long before he entered politics, but his opinion of Panama was also forged by his personal experiences there. Those began with the 2003 Trump-owned Miss Universe contest held in Panama City and then as the public name and face of a high-end hotel and resort development that would become buried in litigation and long-running disputes.

Image
In this 1977 photo, demonstrators, many with signs and banners protesting a treaty to return control of the Panama Canal to Panama, are gathered on the steps of the east entrance of the US Capitol building in Washington, DC. Warren K Leffler/US News & World Report Magazine Collection/PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Trump’s salvos prompted a swift response from Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, who aggressively pushed back on social media and in local media interviews.

Mulino has since appeared to recalibrate as part of an intentional strategy to direct discussions through proper diplomatic channels once Trump officially takes office. There have been no signs of an emergency trip to Mar-a-Lago to curry favor with the president-elect.

Trump’s advisers point to plans for a more aggressive posture toward Beijing’s growing influence in Latin America as the driving force behind Trump’s comments.

But the truth for Panamanian officials is that in the absence of direct communications with the incoming administration or fact-based explanation from Trump himself, a vacuum has been created — left to be filled by any number of theories.

Deciphering intent from threats
“He’s like a magician,” Jorge Quijano said of Trump as he raised his left hand and started waving. “You know, he wants you to look at this, this hand, and then he’s doing something else with the other. So really, his purpose — I don’t know what it is.”

Quijano, the Panama Canal Authority Administrator from 2012 to 2019, didn’t frame his point in a critical or pejorative manner. In fact, it’s one echoed repeatedly by current and former Panamanian officials who spoke to CNN. There is no dismissal of Trump’s social media posts, nor is there mockery or derision.

Trump’s words, whatever the platform, are taken seriously in the sense that there is a widespread belief that they’re signaling … something.

“We’ve communicated that we’d welcome conversations with the president-elect’s team,” one senior Panamanian government official told CNN. There hasn’t been a reciprocal desire on that front to this point, the official said.

Image
A tugboat assists a ship as it navigates the Chagres River while it transiting through the Panama Canal on September 20, 2023, in Gamboa, Panama. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

As Quijano weighed Trump’s recent comments, he sat on a hotel balcony overlooking Panama Bay. Massive cargo ships were visible in the distance, waiting for their respective schedule times to traverse the locks on their 51-mile journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

The US built and operated the canal and its surrounding canal zone from its opening in 1914 until its official handover to the Panamanian government in 1999. One of the world’s busiest shipping passageways, roughly 4 percent of the world’s maritime trade and more than 40 percent of US container traffic traverse the 51-mile route across the Isthmus of Panama.

The canal has defined Quijano’s adult life. He started working there in 1975, two years before President Carter and Panamanian Leader Gen. Omar Torrijos signed treaties that would lead to its eventual handover.

Quijano makes clear he’s no politician, but he has a keen understanding of the political consequences of the deal Carter put in motion.

“Jimmy Carter lost because of what he did,” Quijano said referring to the Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, which was punctuated by sharp criticism of the treaties.

Quijano was sitting just off the main floor of the JW Marriott Panama, the same hotel that used to bear Trump’s name.

‘I fell in love with the place’

Trump first crossed paths with Panama in 2003. Back then, Trump owned the Miss Universe contest and that year the pageant was held in Panama City.

“My interest in Panama really began when we had the Miss Universe contest in Panama,” Trump said in a 2009 promotional video for a new hotel development.

“I was there for quite a bit of time with the Miss Universe and I fell in love with the place.”

Even then, Trump viewed Carter’s deal to hand over the canal as a mistake, according to two people who worked with the pageant’s operations and had regular interactions with Trump.

“He said more than once that the US got ripped off,” one of the people said. “It wasn’t a grand statement, just an observation he wasn’t shy about sharing.”

Trump’s specific views on the Panama Canal tracked with his long-standing contention that the US was being ripped off by foreign countries, largely due to poor negotiations and weakness in the ranks of government officials.

That view landed Trump in hot water as he toyed with a 2012 run for president at the same time he prepared for the grand opening of the Trump Ocean Club, the Trump licensed and Trump Organization-managed hotel.

Image
A man walks next to the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel in Panama City on February 27, 2018. Rodrigo Arangua/AFP/Getty Images

Finished in 2011, the soaring 70-story, glass-façade resort remains the tallest building in Central America and marked Trump’s first major international property licensing deal.

But when Trump was quoted in a 2011 CNN story at the time saying the US “stupidly” returned the canal to Panama “in exchange for nothing,” the comments sparked local outrage and led Panama City’s municipal council to vote unanimously to declare Trump “persona non grata.”

Trump moved quickly to clarify, in an interview with the Panamanian newspaper La Prensa, that his comments had been “respectful of Panamanians for the excellent deal they closed” and that “U.S. negotiators, led by Jimmy Carter, did an extremely poor job.”

Trump continued in the days that followed to attack Carter and the treaties that led to the handover in a Fox News interview and would host the grand opening of the Trump Ocean Club a few months after that.

Panama’s president at the time, Ricardo Martinelli, attended the festivities.

The soap opera-like roller coaster that consumed the years that followed the building could fill several file cabinets based on the legal filings alone, but the short version is that by 2018, the Trump name was being theatrically chiseled off the hotel’s signage in a very public manner.

The hotel has since been rebranded the JW Marriott Panama.

‘Why now?’
As Jorge Eduardo Ritter arrived at the hotel for a Saturday morning meeting, the former foreign minister of Panama noted the irony of the location.

Like so many here, Ritter was primarily interested in figuring out what it was, exactly, Trump was angling for in his social media attacks.

“A lot of people just think that there are those remarks that have no fundamental truth in it, so they disregard it,” Ritter said. “I don’t like to disregard what President Trump says, because when he says something, he might not mean exactly what he is saying, but he is looking for something.”

Ritter didn’t want to entertain the possibility that Trump’s private business experience played a role in his current fixation on the Panama Canal. Trump, he noted, has a far longer history attacking the handover agreement.

But he did view Trump’s remarks as a clear, and potentially ominous, signal.

“This fixation with Panama — I sense that something is going to happen,” Ritter said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a military invasion or he will take over the canal, but something is going to happen.”

The irony of the current tension, several Panamanian current and former officials noted, is that despite Trump’s personal experiences and long-standing fixation on the canal’s handover, he paid little attention to the country in his first term.

Trump never nominated an ambassador to the country in his four years, relying instead on a holdover from the Obama administration and then career officials to fill the job on an acting basis.

Chinese ties with Panama also strengthened significantly during Trump’s first term in office. Panama severed its diplomatic ties with Taiwan in an overt shift to bolster ties with Beijing in 2017 and joined China’s Belt and Road initiative a year later.

Trump’s concerns about Beijing’s influence over the canal center on two ports, situated at either end of the canal, that are operated by CK Hutchison Holdings, a Hong Kong-based company that first secured those rights in 1997 — two decades before he entered the White House.

Ilya Espinosa de Marotta’s first thought when she saw Trump’s initial social media attacks on the Panama Canal’s operations was one of confusion.

“Why now?” the Panama Canal Authority’s deputy administrator recalled to CNN.
“Hong Kong has been here since ’97. We’ve been running the canal for 25 years. We’ve been very transparent — you can know this is run 100 percent by Panamanians, so why now? It puzzles me.”

Image
Cargo ships wait to transit the Panama Canal in Panama City, on June 28, 2024. Matias Delacroix/AP/File

Still, the Hong Kong-connected seaports have drawn scrutiny and national security concerns from US officials and were cited by Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, during his confirmation hearing this week as evidence that the terms of the treaty agreements that require neutrality in the canal’s operations may have been violated.

Yet those concerns come at a moment where the Panamanian government’s posture appears sharply different than it was during Trump’s first term.

President Mulino made stemming the flow of migrants through the Darien Gap, the treacherous jungle stretch that links Colombia to Panama where hundreds of thousands of migrants have trekked in recent years, a top priority. Upon his inauguration last year, Mulino immediately took action on a deal with the Biden administration to deliver on that pledge.

‘That’s not a true statement’
Since Trump’s election, Mulino has made clear his desire to partner with the incoming Trump team on its long-standing top priority.

That Mulino was put in the position of having to fire back at Trump on social media and in a video statement defending the sovereignty of the Panama Canal has left Panamanian officials CNN spoke to, for lack of a better term, flummoxed.

Asked if there was any validity to Trump’s claim that US cargo ships and US Navy vessels were paying higher rates than those from other nations, Marotta, the canal’s deputy administrator, didn’t hesitate.

“No – that’s not – that’s not a true statement,” she said, quickly batting down the idea of cutting the rates for US vessels as a way of placating Trump. “It’s not a possible option,” Marotta told CNN. “Because of the treaties.”

The treaties signed by Torrijos and Carter in 1977 continue to dictate the operational rules, regulations and infrastructure followed by the Panama Canal Authority to this day. In this case, the treaties bind Panama to ensuring tolls and related charges for transit are “just, reasonable, equitable, and consistent with international law.”

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President Jimmy Carter and Panamanian leader General Omar Torrijos embrace each other after signing the Panama Canal Treaty in Washington, DC, on September 7, 1977. UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Marotta was the engineer who led the Panama Canal Expansion Project, the $5.2 billion undertaking that opened in 2016 and dramatically expanded the canal’s operations and capacity to move far larger cargo ships through the waterway.

The US government’s role in that effort? “As far as financially? None,” Marotta said.

According to Quijano, the former canal administrator, not only are Trump’s allegations of exorbitant tolls on US ships not true, the question was never brought up during Trump’s first four years in office.

“I was the administrator in a period where I raised tolls as well, especially after the expansion was completed,” Quijano told CNN. “We raised the tolls and he was president during those years. I never heard from him any complaints about the canal or about anything.”

The canal’s original 1914 locks can handle ships carrying up to 5,000 containers. The expansion can handle ships carrying more than triple that amount — and the resulting revenue has transformed the financial standing of the canal.

The canal authority returned $2.4 billion to the Panamanian government in the last fiscal year.

There are major geopolitical, economic and climate issues the authority has grappled with over the last several years, and that have created acute problems Marotta and her colleagues are intensely focused on trying to navigate on a day-to-day basis.

The canal, after all, is not a public utility. It is a business — and an absolutely critical one for Panama’s economy and people, with a workforce of 8,500 and the source of potable water for 50 percent of the country’s population.

“To us, this is a revenue provider for the country,” Marotta, who started working at the canal in 1985 and witnessed the transformed approach after the handover. “So we look at the business model and not the government break-even model — that in itself is a big change.”

‘No Chinese soldiers anywhere’
On a sweltering January day in the first weeks of Panama’s dry season, the political storm coursing around the canal seemed peripheral at best.

Tourists packed the grandstands just outside the operational perimeter of the Miraflores Locks. Kids wandered through a large outdoor playground. Inside the visitor center, the souvenir shops and concession stands were full, as the voice of Morgan Freeman greeted tourists ahead of the IMAX documentary the Oscar-winning actor narrates at the start of every tour.

Yet beneath the business-as-usual sheen of normalcy, signs of a nation’s struggle to reclaim its sovereignty aren’t hard to find.

Marotta spoke to CNN less than two weeks after Panama’s celebration of 25 years operating the canal, where Mulino said, “Rest assured, it will stay in our control forever.”

The Panama Canal Administration Building Marotta walks into for work each day was, until the 1999 handover, inside the US-operated Panama Canal Zone.

Just four days prior, Mulino had been couple of hundred yards away from where she spoke, laying a wreath at the eternal flame that marks the memorial to the Panamanians killed in 1964 protesting American control of the canal and the zone surrounding its operations.

Martyr’s Day is commemorated on January 9 each year — a visceral reminder of a nation’s experience that runs far deeper than its cornerstone engineering marvel.

“People focus on the canal, the canal, the canal,” Marotta says. “But what made the country of Panama – the people of Panama – wanting the canal to be transferred to Panama wasn’t just the canal. This was like a US territory inside a country. So there were barriers. There was US police, there were US schools. It was a completely other country within our country, and there were many military bases.”

Quijano grew animated talking about Trump’s threats to seize the canal by force.

“That’s not going to happen,” Quijano said. “I’ll be on the streets myself defending our sovereignty because the canal is over sovereign land.”

One canal employee casually noted that passengers on a cruise ship that came through the locks earlier in the week held up signs apologizing for Trump’s recent antagonism. He seemed to get a kick out of it.

Walking into the operations center in between the two passageways, another pointed out the critical functions a handful of personnel toward the back of the room were intensely focused on carrying out.

Then he paused.

“See? All Panamanian. No Chinese soldiers anywhere.”

https://us.cnn.com/2025/01/17/politics/ ... index.html

Funny how you don't hear much about the US latest military action in Panama, when 6000 Panamanians were kill in an operation to capture Bush Sr's old buddy Noriega. The Panamanians remember, there is more anti-US resentment there than anyplace else in CA that I've visited and I don't blame them one bit.(Never been to Nicaragua)
"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 » Sat Jan 18, 2025 3:29 pm

Over 80 US cities to hold protests on Trump’s inauguration day

Demonstrators mobilizing in over 40 US states to launch movement pledging to oppose “ultra-right, billionaire agenda”

January 17, 2025 by Peoples Dispatch

Image
Activists in Houston, Texas designing signs for Inauguration Day protests. Photo: Vivek Venkatraman

Demonstrations have been called in more than 80 US cities, in over 40 states, on the day of incoming President Donald Trump’s inauguration. These cities include Washington DC, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, Charlotte, Montgomery, Chicago, Houston, and New Orleans.

These demonstrations, intended to mark the start of a movement against Trump’s “ultra-right, billionaire agenda”, have been endorsed by a variety of working class and grassroots organizations. These include the Party for Socialism and Liberation, United Auto Workers Local 4811, the Palestinian Youth Movement, United Educators of San Francisco, Black Men Build, the Democratic Socialists of America, the People’s Forum, the Palestinian Youth Movement, the ANSWER Coalition, the US Palestinian Community Network, UNITE HERE Local 2, Artists Against Apartheid, CODEPINK, the Los Angeles Tenants Union, and Dream Defenders.

Conveners of the demonstrations have spoken to the variety of Trump’s promised attacks on working people. “Trump is planning to wage war on immigrant families through a brutal mass deportation campaign,” said Claudia De La Cruz, who ran on a socialist platform in her campaign for president against both Harris and Trump, on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. “We will stand up and say NO to these attacks. Trump is a billionaire, was elected with the help of other billionaires, and runs the government on behalf of the billionaire class. All working people, no matter where you were born, should stand together in solidarity against the billionaire class that wants to rob and exploit us all.”

Brian Becker, the national director of the ANSWER Coalition, does not believe Trump’s promises to “put American Workers first.” According to Becker, Trump “ran a con game during the election.”

“His real agenda is to destroy worker’s rights, deport millions of immigrant families,” Becker said. Trump plans to “pave the way for a complete corporate takeover by ending regulations to protect the environment, firing thousands of public sector workers, and transferring ever-larger parts of the national treasury to the military industrial complex.”

Manolo De Los Santos, Executive Director of The People’s Forum, said, “The Trump victory in the 2024 election represents the complete failure of the Democratic Party to stop the rise of the ultra-right.”

“We can defeat the Trump program not by following the Democratic Party establishment, but by building a massive movement against the ruling class and the political system that gives everything to billionaires while impoverishing an ever larger section of the population.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/17/ ... ation-day/

******

Michael Hudson: Trump on Greenland, Panama and Canada
Posted on January 18, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Michael Hudson returns to Nima’s Dialogue Works to discuss some of Trump’s latest provocations. It is revealing how many of the pols and pundits who decried Putin as a land-grabber seeking to reconstitute the USSR have little to say about this scheme.

By Nima Alkorshid. Originally published at Dialogue Works



NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, January 9th, and our friend Michael Hudson is back with us. Welcome back, Michael.


MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s good to be back.


NIMA ALKHORSHID: Let’s get started, Michael, with Donald Trump and his policy toward an island called Greenland. Here is what he said about this island:


[Video Starts]


DONALD TRUMP: Well, we need Greenland for national security purposes. I’ve been told that for a long time, long before I even ran. I mean, people have been talking about it for a long time. You have approximately 45,000 people there. People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it. But if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security. That’s for the free world. I’m talking about protecting the free world. You look at—you don’t even need binoculars. You look outside, you have China ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen. We’re not letting it happen. And if Denmark wants to get to a conclusion—but nobody knows if they even have any right, title, or interest. The people are going to probably vote for independence or to come into the United States. But if they did, if they did do that, then I would tariff Denmark at a very high level.


[Video Ends]


NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Go ahead, Michael. What’s going on in the mind of the policy?


MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, this fits into Trump’s policy that he said. A basic policy is ‘we win, you lose.’ And some of his plans actually seem to work. I think there is no—what’s striking is there has been no attempt to tell Greenland what they may benefit from all of this. So it’s pretty obvious that he doesn’t really care about a plebiscite. He’s talked about, well, [45,000] people there. Let’s offer them—if you have a plebiscite and you become independent and you vote for some national security alliance with the United States, just think, for [45,000] people times a million dollars, you know, that’s—for a few billion dollars, we’re going to get all of these natural resources, and we’ll get control of the North Atlantic sea lanes that have to go by Greenland on their way to Nova Scotia and Canada, and we’ll get control of the Arctic sea lines, the northern route through the Arctic Ocean that’s warming up now, and that will enable America to block other countries there. So it’s obvious what he wants.


He’s following the same advertising agency that George W. Bush used when he hired an advertising agency to say, “How can we convince the American people that we need to go to war in Iraq?” And they said, “Well, you want to claim that Iraq’s threatening us with weapons of mass destruction.” No truth at all, but it’s the old Joseph Goebbels idea that you can always get a population behind you saying that you’re under threat and it’s national security. So that’s sort of how Trump is dealing with the domestic audience. Almost all of the speeches are aimed at the domestic American audience, not at Greenland or other countries, not even at the European Union or Denmark that has Greenland as a protectorate. What he said is, “You have raw materials that we want. You can give us naval control. And if you don’t give it to us, we don’t want to have to use force.”


But as he said to Denmark, “Well, you know, we can use economic force. We don’t need military force. We can put special tariffs on Danish imports to America.” And in fact, we could extend these tariffs against the whole European Union if they don’t go along with it. And this seems to be working.


The Financial Times today quoted Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Rasmussen, saying that he’s ready to talk to the United States about, quote, “How we can possibly cooperate even more closely to ensure that American ambitions are fulfilled.” Well, that’s about as much of a capitulation as you can get.


The Wall Street Journal says that what Trump wants is what he calls a defense-free association or a “free association for defense”, like America has with the tiny Pacific Islands that it appropriated and that always vote with America and Israel in the UN against all of the members.


So if there’s a kind of free alliance, he’ll treat Greenland like he treats American Samoa and other countries like that to make it a protectorate. So it’s obvious that he’s trying to have an opening wedge to occupy Greenland with, just say, well, we need a military base there to protect us. And the military base is going to expand into what happens to be whatever raw materials they decide that Greenland [has]. And all of a sudden, the United States will occupy Greenland.


And I think I can figure out what the plan is. It’s very much like American companies dealt with Iceland. I’ve spoken to three Icelandic Prime Ministers about how it is that they let American companies in Iceland set up huge electric generation facilities off Iceland’s geothermal power. The fact that there’s all this volcanic activity that heats up the water. And the first thing, the companies built facilities to refine aluminum, which is basically made out of electricity. And later to set up bitcoin mining companies.


And I asked the Icelandic prime ministers, what did you get out of this? And they said, well, you know, they don’t pay much tax because the companies lent them the money to produce this electricity. And they, all of the income is expensed in interest.


What they said is they’d hire Icelanders to Icelandic labor. And they waved the flag of Icelandic labor. They hired altogether between 12 and 20 Icelandic workers, just as guards of the companies and porters to carry things around. So for, you know, this maybe half a million dollars of spending a year, they got $100 billion. I mean, just a total giveaway.


And I asked each prime minister, why did you do it? And they just shrugged. They said, well, you know, that was, you know, that was the deal that was offered. I think America thinks that it can treat Greenland and other countries the way that its companies treated Iceland and Fiji.


I’m sure that Trump will have American companies do most of the work in Greenland if there is something, but you can see that he’s trying to soften them up. I think he may end up telling Greenland, “Well, look, if you have a plebiscite, we’ll give each of you a million dollars. Isn’t that something?” The whole idea is that if a country can have a plebiscite and declare independence, in this case, independence from Denmark, this is the same principle of plebiscites that Russia has used with Luhansk and Donetsk. That legitimizes the whole idea.


When the United States carved out Kosovo from Serbia, it didn’t even have a domestic plebiscite. It just said, “We had a plebiscite in Washington, and the cabinet got together and we voted to create Kosovo.”


So the question is, who’s going to vote on the plebiscite? Well, this was just obviously a charade. And I think that what Trump is trying to do is not really going to invade Greenland because I think you might need congressional approval to declare war on something. I think the whole attempt is to negotiate with Denmark, for Denmark to give the United States what it wants, this national security agreement.


Well, the problem is that you can see that there’s some rankling among the European Prime Ministers because right now they’re all NATO Prime Ministers, and they’re threatened by nationalistic parties overthrowing them. And so they’re making a show of saying, “Oh, this is really bad. What are we going to do?”


Trump is using the big lever against them, is saying, “NATO isn’t pulling its share. We may have to withdraw from NATO if they don’t agree to spend 5% of their GDP on arms to defend themselves against the fact that Russia may walk right through Europe to England.” And imagine 5% of the European, the NATO GDP, for arms, would be ten times Russia’s military budget. I mean, way out of all proportion.


And as we’ve seen in Ukraine, the American arms don’t work, the European arms don’t work, and the European arms industry has a problem- making arms because it doesn’t have the oil and the gas to heat up the steel to make arms that have to be made out of steel and metals.


So you can see that Trump is boxing in Europe as a by-product of using Greenland as sort of a wedge into Europe for NATO.


If he said, well, we’re talking about national security, Russian ships and Chinese ships go across the North Atlantic, and we really need Greenland to protect this. And if you’re not agreeing to a national security occupation of Greenland by American military bases along the south of the North Atlantic and along the north in the Arctic, then we really don’t have any reason to be part of NATO. [If] you’re not defending us, [then] we’re not defending you. Unless you cut back your social spending by 25% and shift that to military spending on American arms. That’s really what it ends up all about. What a clever tangle. It’s almost like reading a detective story and tracing things back and back and say, how did it all begin? What was the opening wedge? You know, you can see that there’s a whole kind of plan that’s unfolded, and the plan’s discussed openly, Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, all of this is in the open. And the Danish Prime Minister said, well, you know, I’m sure we can help American ambitions.


Well, American ambition is to control the whole world. And the important thing is that Trump realized and said explicitly, we don’t have to control the world militarily. We can control it economically by making economic threats. We don’t have anything to offer other countries. All we have to do is threaten them. That’s the only bargaining wedge the United States has. Only threaten. We can threaten their transportation. We can threaten not to support that. We can threaten them with tariffs. We can threaten them with financial regulations. But we really don’t have anything positive to offer them, except the agreement to sell them overpriced military hardware that doesn’t really work.


NIMA ALKHORSHID: Right now, I think in the mind of Europeans, they’re thinking, what’s going on with Donald Trump? Because after all, we know the main purpose of NATO is to protect Europeans from other powers like China, Russia, and the enemies, as they call it. But here comes Donald Trump, and he’s talking about Greenland, which is part of Denmark. He wants to capture. Here we see a NATO member against the other NATO member.


And how he can, how do they in the European Union, how do they understand it? How can they make it sensible in their mind? Because after all, the whole, when you look at Ukraine, when you look at what has happened in Ukraine, when you look at the propaganda machine, Sweden, Finland, all of them together, the new members of NATO, we want to protect you. And right now, Donald Trump wants to capture part of Denmark.


MICHAEL HUDSON: His way of making it sensible is transactional. The sensible is, we will hurt you if you don’t do what we want. It is in your interest not to be hurt. So, let’s make an agreement that we will not hurt you, and in exchange you will give us what we want. That’s his idea of the transaction. That basically is the principle of American foreign policy. All it has is the threat to destroy and to create chaos and to disrupt. And the gain that other countries have is, we won’t invade you if you do what we want. Well, that’s not the kind of deal that was usually thought. And just imagine the European countries saying, well, it looks like the European NATO countries need to defend themselves against an attack from the other side of the Atlantic.


Well, that’s not what the NATO head is saying. The NATO head, the new head, has said, we want to change the way that NATO spends money on arms. And in the past, all along, each country has decided how much it wants to spend on arms and to do its own negotiation for arms. We want a centralized negotiation through NATO so that all countries can negotiate together in surrendering to the United States and giving the United States whatever it wants.


So, the United States has made through NATO an official proposal for surrender that there are individual countries and voters of Europe will have no voice in what arms they buy, who they buy them from, and at what price they’ll buy them from. NATO, through the European Union leadership, independently of national leaders is essentially going to capture them. So, this is a move by the United States to capture the European political system and essentially by surrounding the so-called democratic elections of each country with this overall NATO and the EU are in charge of how governments are going to spend the money, how much their budget is going to be spent on arms or other things.


And to meet the objectives that the United States insists on for Europe to buy American arms, that means cutting back the social spending, cutting back the subsidies that the European countries have had to give their homeowners and renters to afford heat, oil and gas heating and electricity. It means absolute political crisis for Europe. And you can be sure that America can then talk to the individual leaders of the countries and say, well, you don’t want a political crisis, do you? That would throw you out of office. So, I really think you should surrender to us.


This is the opening ploy in an overall plan for America to defeat Europe economically and convince it to surrender on economic grounds, commercial, trade, financial grounds. Well, you can see already what’s happening. If you look at the Euro’s exchange rate, it’s plummeting because people realize, well, now that it’s not producing its own consumer goods, and so now that it’s not buying inexpensive energy from Russia and other countries and is even being blocked from China, its trade deficit is going to go way up. The Euro is falling. That means that prices are going up.


When a currency falls, that means that it costs more domestic Euros to buy commodities that are priced in dollars, not only from the United States, but from other countries all over the world, the price, raw materials in dollars and trade in dollars, not to mention all of the foreign debts and domestic debts that are denominated not only by governments, but among large corporations, in dollars. This is creating a financial squeeze on Europe.


So it looks to me like what Trump is going to be introducing in his administration is trade chaos, fiscal chaos, financial chaos, balance of payments, exchange rate chaos.


And if you are the largest economy and are the most self-sufficient economy and can prevent other countries from being self-sufficient, or having trade agreements that enable them to be self-sufficient, energy or whatever, then you’ve got control. You’ve got control of them. I think that’s basically what the United States is saying. What are you going to do about it?


NIMA ALKHORSHID: And shifting from Greenland to Canada, which is a huge country and it’s again, a U.S. ally, but what is the main purpose for Canada, Michael? What is the main reason that Donald Trump is talking about Canada right now?


MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, for the last 40 years, America has been exploiting Canadian industry and also the Athabasca tar sands. So the, I guess the basic model for U.S. trade with Canada was the auto agreements that were made in the late 1970s. I think everybody’s, I think everybody’s forgotten about them, but America threatened Canada with not allowing their importation of automobile parts. So America’s big car-making city is Detroit and right across the Detroit Bridge, I guess, is Windsor over the water and the auto parts agreement basically imposed huge costs on Canada.


The United States obviously wants Canadian resources and as Trump says, it wants to avoid it. Well, here again, he’s simply made threats.


Here’s what he could have done. There’s a lot of resentment, as I think we spoke in the last program, by the prairie states, Alberta and Manitoba against Ontario. Here, since World War II, all of Canada’s industrial and financial concentration was in Ontario at the expense, not only of the French-speaking Quebecois, but against the prairies. And there was almost, there was talk in the 60s and 70s about, is Canada going to break up? Are these prairies going to go on their own way? Now, Trump could have gone to Canada. If he really were serious about trying to absorb Canada, he would say, “What’s in it for you, Canada, for joining us? Here’s how we can treat you. We can give you the same wonderful agreement we’ve given Puerto Rico or Haiti and talked it all up, some kind of an agreement.” And he could have played on Canada’s, the resentment of parts of Canada against Ontario. Instead, he’s talked about all of Canada together.


Well, Ontario doesn’t have the resources that the rest of Canada have. He’s made no attempt to do that at all. All he’s trying to do is bluster and that’s counter-effective. And essentially, we don’t know exactly what he wants yet. He hasn’t said it, but what he has said was, “If you don’t give us what [we] want, we’re going to impose 20% tariffs against you.” Those tariffs against you are going to force the Canadian dollar way down. And the Canadian dollar has gone, I think it’s now $1.43 in Canadian dollars to buy a US dollar, you know, up from about $1.23 or something a few months ago. Well, you can see if the Canadian dollar is plunging in its exchange rate, that makes its imports denominated in dollars much more expensive. There’s a big Canadian inflation. That’s part of why they really want to get rid of the Prime Minister and the Liberal Party.


But also a lot of Canadian industry corporations denominate their debt in US dollars or even foreign currencies. Well, this is causing a huge financial squeeze on corporate profits, on the government that owes money in US dollars. The cost of basing its economy on dollars is as bad for Canada as it’s been for the Global South countries that owe their foreign debt in US dollars as their prices for energy are going up and as they’re being squeezed, as we’ve spoken before.


So the rest of the world is sort of confronting the fact that it’s in a squeeze of using the dollar on the one hand, and depending on trade with the United States or with US corporations on the other hand. And the American government, Trump is now using this really in the way that the US government has been doing all along, as a wedge to gain diplomatic control of Europe and other countries that are using the dollar, trade with the dollar or trade in commodities that are priced in dollars.


So Trump has essentially said, well, we’re going to use economic and financial leverage to get what we want. We don’t need military leverage anymore. Well, especially because America is out of military arms and Ukraine has shown that it’s sort of a paper tiger for all of that.


So I was going to suggest in the past that what I called Hudson’s Law that I thought would peak under Trump, that every US action attacking other countries tends to backfire and create a counter reaction that costs America at least twice as much. I thought of that when it comes to the trade sanctions that America has imposed against Russia.


That obviously one effect is going to be, well, America may end up losing Europe. Because you can see the European nationalist feeling against being cut off from trade with Russia and now with China, too. But I think that Trump and the deep state in America have anticipated that, yes, there’s a reaction. We don’t want to lose Europe as a result of what we’ve done during the war against Russia and Ukraine. So now it’s the time to really lock in America’s economic and political leverage over Europe so that it really faces the choice: either we give in to American demands, whether it’s to buy more American arms, to buy American liquefied natural gas instead of trade with Russia, Or to cede our protectorate, Greenland. Greenland is not part of the EU, but it’s supposedly a protectorate, just like the Dutch have the Dutch Antilles, the Dutch West Indies, that it’s made into offshore banking and tax avoidance centers. That’s the system that’s been put in place and there’s such a momentum for such systems and inertia that other countries really are not able to break away from their dependency on the dollar and trade with the dollar and financing their credit system and banking system with dollars.


They really don’t have much of a choice unless they move on a system-wide basis to change how the system works. Well, that’s not how European governments think. That’s called socialism. And they’re not about to go that route. So that inertia benefits the United States.


It’s as if the United States is in a position of being the only mover in international affairs. Other countries are passive and being passive, they can be threatened. And all these threats only work under the existing economic and trade and financial system that’s in place. What are they going to do?


Well, the only countries that are trying to find an alternative to this are the BRICS and the global majority. And I don’t see Europe and Latin American dependencies joining the global majority, at least for another 30 years, which is as far as you can possibly see. They accept the fact that they’re locked into the system. And unlike other countries, they’re not saying, is there an alternative? Europe is in a mental depression, an ideological depression. They think that there isn’t any alternative. That’s the problem.


NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, before going to BRICS and the fight, the biggest fight that we are going to see in the future. But here in Panama Canal, he’s talking about the Panama Canal, which in his mind, is in the hand of China. China is manipulating everything in Panama. And that’s why we have to capture the canal. We have to get the canal from Panama. How is that going to work out for Donald Trump? And is this the main reason for what he is [saying] about Panama?


MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, what he’s talking about is fantasy. So it’s not really what he intends. He said two things. On the one hand, as you said, well, China’s running the Panama Canal. Well, what China is doing is, it’s organized two ports. China’s specialty that it’s gone throughout the world as part of its Belt and Road initiative is port development, as it has in Athens and Greece and other countries. It’s developed sort of the ports for loading and unloading in Panama. That’s not control of the Panama Canal. It has nothing to do with the Panama Canal. It’s only running a port.


The second thing Trump has said is that Panama charges American ships more than other ships. And it’s anti-American. Well, that’s not the case at all, as almost all the American papers acknowledge. Panama charges the same price for any country. And there’s no way to avoid that because there are so many flags of convenience that you really don’t know what country has what ship. So Panama charges each ship according to how big it is. What’s the volume, what’s the tonnage of what it’s carrying, because that is the only logical way of charging users for what they’re doing.


And the fact is that the drought, and the same drought that’s caused all of these forest fires in California right now has occurred all along the Pacific coast and on Panama too. Panama has a drought. It doesn’t have the fresh water that it needs to pump into the canal to have the canal’s water level high enough that the big ships can get by.


So obviously, it has to charge the big ships more because there’s an enormous sacrifice of domestic water for this. Water probably becoming more valuable than oil on balance for the whole world. Fresh water is needed everywhere that there is a drought, and there’s a drought throughout Africa, there’s a drought throughout the whole Southern Hemisphere and all along the Pacific Coast


So I think what Trump wants is to say, well, instead of charging ships by the tonnage and the size, we want you to just charge them by the country so that a big oil tanker will pay the same rate as a small yacht going through or whatever is going through there.


I think he’s trying to get some kind of rewriting the principle on which canal fees are based in a way that will favor the large American ships. That’s the only thing that I can see because what else would America want in Panama? There’s a client oligarchy there that is rather unpleasant, and I don’t think there’s anything that America really wants.


But to control the canal and by regaining the canal, it can close it to countries that don’t follow American foreign policy, like a Danish ship that won’t give us Greenland or a European ship that won’t pay its NATO fees.


You can see that Trump is looking for choke points. A choke point is, as we said, trade with the United States, that’s a choke point that can be turned off with tariffs, whether it’s Canada or the EU, canal and transportation, that’s a choke point. Energy, oil and gas, that’s a choke point, which America is solved by its actions in Syria, Iraq, all throughout the Near East.


And the monetary checkpoints that it’s trying to impose. So if you look at American policy as looking for the choke points to disrupt other countries’ traditional patterns of trade and investment, then you see America’s role as a chaos creator. And a lot of people have said, well, America’s policy is chaos. They haven’t really spilled out exactly how to create this chaos economically. And I think that’s what Trump realizes in which other countries or their politicians are too embarrassed to talk about explicitly. So that’s why we can talk about it, they can’t.


NIMA ALKHORSHID: As you know, he wanted to build a big wall between the United States and Mexico in his first term. And he couldn’t finish the wall before leaving Washington. That was one of the main problems between Donald Trump and Joe Biden and his administration about the wall between the United States and Mexico. And right now he’s talking about, it’s not a wall. It’s about the countries, about the island, about the canal. These are huge objectives in his mind.


Do you think that for these people who are going to work with him, is that achievable in his mind? Is he really thinking that he can achieve these objectives before leaving Washington? Because he has four years in power. If he couldn’t build a wall, how can he capture these territories, these countries?


MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the key word is what you said, in his mind. In his mind and in the mind of American negotiators, they don’t take into account what other countries may do in response. I think he didn’t finish the wall because he can now say, you know, we have a choice. We can finish the wall and isolate your trade and then you won’t be able to trade with America. Or we can agree to leave trade open and you can have your maquiladoras, your assembly plants export at the United States. You know, we can avoid disrupting your trade by imposing the wall, not only against immigrants, but against you, Mexico.


Well, what has changed the equation is that Mexico has just elected a new president who’s a socialist president, basically, and is trying to redevelop Mexico. So Mexico realizes that it was the big loser from President Clinton’s NAFTA agreement of the 1990s.


The NAFTA agreement for free trade meant that all of a sudden America’s low prices subsidized grain exports flooded Mexico. And that made domestic Mexican agriculture unprofitable. And the result is that Mexico, as a result of NAFTA, lost its ability to feed its own people and became dependent on American food trade. So I guess you could say America, among all of the trade categories that America wants to threaten, food is a basic category there.


But now Mexico can say, well, you’ve changed the rules of NAFTA. We’re not going to be part of that anymore. We may lose the trade with the United States, but we’re talking long term. We have to begin growing grain in Mexico again. And Mexico has the ability to ban Monsanto, Bayer, the special seed varieties. They can go back to domestic Mexican grain and somehow revive domestic farming there.


Well, that would give Mexico an option to actually use its immigrant labor that was on the way to the United States. What if Mexico was to decide, we want to develop our own agriculture in the way that the United States did in the 1930s with its Agricultural Adjustment Act that produced the largest productivity of any industry in the world up to that time? We can be productive. We don’t need corporate farms. We don’t need to rely on American control of the platform to sell our goods. We can have our own marketing agency in Mexico so we don’t have to depend on American companies.


And we can begin to industrialize our own countries. You put in place the maquiladoras, the industrial parts. We can now become independent of the United States in industrial goods. We can make agreements with Asian countries to help develop our industry. Putting it here. We have a lot of labor and we’re having more and more labor as America’s driven labor out of Guatemala, out of Honduras, out of the countries where it’s installed client dictatorships into Mexico. Mexico could become a new America.


I think that Donald Trump realizes this and why he’s become especially nationalistic to say, let’s change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. I mean, you can see the belligerence, the bellicosity of the US towards Mexico for its thoughts that it can become independent of American foreign policy and economic policy and financial policy.


This is all taking place there. And imagine what would happen if Mexico were to join the BRICS, ultimately, saying, well, the United States is trying to disrupt any attempt we have to create prosperity for our people. So we’re going to join with the rest of you in a new collective group of mutual self-support. Imagine if that were on the line.


Well, if you’re part of the deep state here, you’re always saying, “what if other countries did something that we don’t like? What if other countries became independent of our ability to impose choke points on them, to force them to do whatever we want in the world? How do we derange the interconnections to prevent this? How do we break up China’s Belt and Road, interrupting it with nationalistic or al-Qaeda terrorists to do that?”


This is American foreign policy. And at some point, all of this policy is going to end up backfiring and the attempt to hurt other countries will end up hurting America twice as much by leaving America isolated all by itself.


Well, America can live isolated. I mean, America has the ability to become self-sufficient in absolutely everything, but that’s not enough for it. Being self-sufficient isn’t enough for the US. It wants to be able to gain all of the economic surpluses from the rest of the world. And that’s really what it’s had. It’s a colonialist country, not a military colonialist in Greenland or others, but an economic and financial colonialist. That’s what’s taking place. And this is considered something that you don’t talk about in polite company. And it needs to be taught. I’m sure that the BRICS countries in their meetings together, certainly the Chinese and the Russians are talking about it, but it’s not being talked about in the countries that are the most immediate targets of American foreign policy. And needless to say, these are the countries that are the friendliest to America.


These are the easy-picking countries. These are the countries that already, they’re not client oligarchies, but they’re client politicians. The whole neoliberal politicians that are the mainstream of Europe and are now threatened with being voted out of office. I think the nightmare to America is, what if these nationalistic parties get together and say, there is an alternative. Well, the problem is that the nationalistic, the alternative is socialism of one form. It’s mutual aid and the nationalistic parties are right wing. So how on earth are you going to get the nationalistic parties to ever come about with a kind of agreement to protect their own economic interests independently from the United States?


America has basically poisoned the left-wing parties, the social democratic parties, the labor parties throughout Europe to convert them to neoliberalism so that you had Tony Blair being twice as neoliberal as Margaret Thatcher doing things that Thatcher couldn’t even think of doing like privatizing the transportation system and things like that. So how on earth can you have other countries becoming independent of the United States without a program? And the program has to be spelled out. Here’s what we have to do so that if America threatens to disrupt trade with America, we can trade with each other. We have a plan B. There’s been no attempt by Europe or by America’s closest allies to develop a plan B. There’s only plan A and the alternative to plan A is chaos. That’s the present. How can these countries develop a plan that’s not chaos?


If the only alternative to neoliberalism is a kind of right-wing nationalism that doesn’t have an economic program, which would have to be what is called, let’s say, a social market economy. Basically, you don’t have to call it socialism, just social market economy like the United States to begin to create in the 1930s and indeed like the United States was creating in the 1980s and 1890s when it was becoming a protectionist country that enabled it to become the leading industrial country and leading financial country of the world. That’s what other countries can look at. But there’s no discussion. Why don’t we try to enrich and create prosperity in our countries the way that the United States did in the 19th century by following what it itself did? That’s how it ended up in the position to do to us what it’s threatening to do to us today. We are victims of the threat to create chaos in our country that would lead to certainly us politicians being voted out of power, but also leading to the economy to undergo a traumatic shrinkage as you pulled out the interconnections, just like you pulled out the oil and gas connections with Russia and the trade with Russia. You’re trying to pull out the connections between the EU and China now.


NIMA ALKHORSHID: We’ve learned that Indonesia, which became a BRICS partner on January 1st. Two days ago, they have announced that Indonesia has BRICS membership, full BRICS membership. Here comes the question, as BRICS is trying to be more charming, building trust among the countries that are interested to be part of BRICS. On the other hand, we are witnessing that the United States is destroying the European Union, European countries with the war in Ukraine and what has happened to the German economy. And right now they’re talking about Canada, Mexico and all of that. How is that going to help the United States in the long run? Because I don’t see any sort of victory in the long run for the United States. BRICS is just growing and growing stronger. At the same time, the United States can be stronger, but they’re weakening their allies. That’s the problem.


MICHAEL HUDSON: American policy lives in the short run. Financial policy lives in the short run. Trump will be out of office in four years. So will most politicians in the world. Politicians live in the short run. Diplomacy lives in the short run. And America feels that if it can smash up the world and make a grab bag that it can, in the short run— yes, it’ll interrupt American trade and finance too. But in the long run, America can be self-sufficient. Europe can’t. And Mexico can’t. And Canada can’t.


That as long as other countries don’t create their own mutual agreements for Plan B, then they’re going to be subject to living in the short run. And in the short run, America can always win. In the long run, as you just pointed out, it loses if countries act in their self-interest.


So the question is, how can the United States prevent countries from acting in their self-interest? Well, this brings into question the whole materialist approach to history. The materialist approach is, countries will act in their self-interest and the most efficient, productive economies are going to win in a kind of Darwinian struggle for existence and dominate the world. But that’s not what’s happened. America is not the most efficient economy. It’s de-industrialized its economy. It’s financialized its economy. So somehow this materialist approach to history is a long-term approach. And as long as you can say, well, that’s the long run. If we can continue to keep the whole world living in the short run, living on a response from one emergency to another, living from one state of chaos to another state of chaos, with each state of chaos enabling us to grab a little bit more, then we’re going to be able to control them by creating chaos. This is the opposite of how America thought, how the world thought America was going to gain power after World War I and after World War II.


America at that time said, well, we’re the leading industrial power. European industry has been destroyed by World War II. You’re dependent on us. We’re the leading financial power. By 1950, when the Korean War began, America had 80% of the world’s monetary gold supply. So America had gold. It had the industrial power. It had the agricultural power. It had control of the oil trade. For the long run, everybody thought that, well, all America has to do is let other countries be a part of this. And yes, America will be the big gainer, but other countries can also gain because they’ll have access to America and American finance as well as trade.


Well, all of that somehow has been lost in the last 75 years. Other countries have not realized that they’re living in a world where the main institutions that were created at the end of World War II, 1944, 1945, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United Nations, all of these groups that were created under one set of conditions no longer serve today’s conditions of what the rest of the world needs to be prosperous for itself. Somehow they’ve turned what America promised to be leadership into a we win, you lose. And that if that’s the principle of every transaction that America makes, Trump’s transactional approach of any deal that’s made, then the rest of the world has to lose more and more and more. And it will be like a salami tactic, cutting off one thing after another until all of a sudden other countries have lost their ability to become self-sustaining.


They’ve all been cut up and just like the United States has said, well, we want to cut up Russia into five or six countries. We want to make China look like Yugoslavia, cut up into provinces. They want the whole of the whole world to be cut up into parts.


And in Europe, it’s sort of the opposite. In Europe, they said, well, our solution there is to have NATO control all of the parts under U.S. control. And it doesn’t matter what other countries do. And I think that’s what the United States wants to create. A world in which it doesn’t matter what other countries, politicians or voters want to do. They really have no choice. And if you look at the aim of American foreign policy is to prevent other countries having a choice to create any alternative to America’s resource grabbing, annexation of raw materials, creation of military bases along the world’s major trade routes, the ability to cut off trade linkages like the Panama Canal or trade in the North Atlantic, then you have the key to American foreign policy.


But I don’t see any organized group that is coming right out and spelling out this kind of international strategy that is implicit, is the counterpart to everything that the United States is doing. That’s what’s so surprising that there’s a lack of the rest of the world acting in its self-interest, because in order to do that, it would need a program. It would need an economic model. What is the model for our economy that we want? What kind of trade agreement do we want, if not the World Trade Organization that America’s paralyzed? What kind of financial and credit arrangement do we want, if not the International Monetary Fund telling us to impose austerity on our labor force as if that’s going to enable us to export more instead of preventing us from industrializing? There’s no economic theory. There’s no political theory. That’s what’s so amazing. The passivity of the rest of the world in all of this.


NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much, Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always. And next week, we’re going to have Richard with us, joining us.


MICHAEL HUDSON: I always try to end on an up note. That’s my up note. There is no alternative presence. Yeah.


NIMA ALKHORSHID: Okay.


MICHAEL HUDSON: Bye-bye.

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

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Say what? Marco Rubio, America’s new top diplomat, says no clear reason why U.S. bankrolled Ukraine

January 17, 2025

Marco Rubio is a liar. He better practice getting real if he wants to be a top diplomat rather than the duplicitous hawk he has been for most of his career.

It doesn’t bode well that the next U.S. Secretary of State begins his top-flight position in government by telling blatant lies and fatuities.

Marco Rubio (53) is a sure bet to be confirmed as America’s most senior international envoy representing the new administration of President Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated in the White House on Monday.

This week, Florida Senator Rubio appeared before the Senate in confirmation hearings for his post. Rubio has been a senator since 2011 and has served on foreign relations and intelligence committees. Despite bitter personal clashes with Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign, Rubio was picked for the top diplomat post in the incoming administration. The confirmation is a done deal given his deep connections in Congress among Republicans and Democrats.

The ambitious son of Cuban immigrants is known for his hawkish views. He previously called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “thug” and described Russia as a “gangster state with nuclear weapons.”

Any future trips to Moscow will be awkward to say the least, especially when the “tough guy” Floridian meets a real diplomat like Russia’s Sergei Lavrov.

Strangely, though, this week, Rubio projected himself as the voice of reason and diplomacy. It was quite a U-turn.

He told the Senate committee that the top priority of the Trump administration will be to bring the war in Ukraine to an end. That view aligns with Trump’s oft-expressed desire for a settlement to the three-year conflict.

There’s a lot to parse in Rubio’s weasel words.

He informed senators: ”It should be the official policy of the United States that we want to see it [the war] end… This is not going to be an easy endeavor… My hope is that it could begin with some ceasefire.”

Rubio was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Ukrainian regime, believing that it would inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.

Now, he has suddenly been overcome with seeming prudence and concern for peace by declaring that Ukraine cannot possibly win against Russia.

Rubio went on: “In order to achieve objectives like the one that needs to occur in Ukraine, it is important for everyone to be realistic. There will have to be concessions made by the Russian Federation, but also by the Ukrainians, and the United States lends itself there. It’s also important that there be some balance on both sides.”

So, you see what’s happening here. Rubio is uncharacteristically sounding like a peace envoy – after years of spouting belligerence towards Russia – and sneakily setting up the United States to be a kind of broker between two warring parties. Note how he advocates concessions by both sides – Ukraine and Russia – without mentioning that the U.S. is a principal party to the conflict (albeit by using proxy Ukraine).

He appeals to people to be “realistic” because Ukraine can’t win and it is “running out of Ukrainians.” This is after Rubio and countless other hawkish politicians in Washington pushed this war to the destruction of Ukraine, with over one million casualties from far superior Russian firepower. Rubio and his imperialist warmongering ilk have pushed this proxy war at the risk of inciting a nuclear conflagration with Russia.

But it was the bit when Rubio tried to sound like the innocent diplomat deploring violence that peaked contempt for this pathetic Yes Man.

After acknowledging that the United States has supplied Ukraine with $175 billion in total aid, including at least $65 billion in military, since the eruption of conflict in February 2022, Rubio complained that it was “never clearly delineated what the end goal of the conflict was.”

He added: “What exactly were we funding? What exactly were we putting money towards? On many occasions, it sounded like ‘however much it takes for however long it takes’. That is not a realistic or prudent position.”

Marco Rubio is a liar. He knows full well from his deep involvement in U.S. imperialist machinations that the plan was to sponsor a NeoNazi regime in Kiev since the CIA-backed in 2014 to wage war on Russia for its calculated strategic defeat and conquest.

Washington bankrolled Ukrainian fascists to do its dirty work. That’s exactly what it was funding. Now Rubio is pretending that it was all some kind of misadventure that needs to be brought to a settlement.

The funding of the Kiev regime by the United States and the European Union to the tune of at least $300 billion combined was not only about trying to destroy Russia and exploit its post-war vast natural wealth.

The capital funneled into Ukraine was also a gargantuan laundering scheme whereby hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ money was sluiced to the Western military-industrial complex. These companies then reward their political pimps with hefty campaign donations.

Another huge aspect of the war racket was that Western capital was given a free hand to plunder the resources of Ukraine under the propped-up regime. Wall Street banks, private investment companies, agribusiness, and mining corporations have bought up Ukraine’s territory for knockdown prices facilitated by the Kiev regime. Western vulture capitalists like BlackRock are massive financial donors to politicians in Washington, including the sniveling Rubio.

So bankrolling the Russia-hating NeoNazi regime was always a well-planned investment that has made a lot of people wealthy even though Ukraine has been decimated.

The main objective of defeating Russia has not gone well, though. Russian forces are steadily wiping out the NATO-backed regime despite the weapons flowing from the U.S.-led alliance.

That’s why Rubio is now appearing as a peace envoy calling for the war to end. He only wants the war to end because Russia has delivered an embarrassing debacle to the American war machine.

But note how Rubio is proposing a “ceasefire” and “compromise”. That amounts to the U.S. and its NATO accomplices imposing a frozen conflict on Russia, which can be reignited in the future.

Moscow has already made it clear that the proxy conflict pertains to a much bigger picture and commensurate solution. Russia insists on keeping its reclaimed historic territories of Crimea, Donbas and Novorossiya; the Kiev NeoNazi regime must be eradicated; any new Ukrainian state must be neutral and never part of NATO; and the NATO alliance has to negotiate a wholesale new security treaty for Europe, one that forbids aggression and expansionism and respects Russia’s national security and rights.

That’s the objective reality check that the Trump administration needs to deal with.

Russia will win the U.S.-led NATO proxy war on Russia’s terms. Marco Rubio better practice getting real if he wants to be a top diplomat rather than the duplicitous hawk he has been for most of his career.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... d-ukraine/
"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 Jan 19, 2025 6:38 pm

January 19, 2025 by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

Trump bends the arc of history in West Asia – Part II

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US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff (R) met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Tel Aviv, January 11, 2025

Trump frogmarches Netanyahu down the deep stairs
President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and their key operative in the White House, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, hopelessly underestimated President-elect Donald Trump’s quick reflex action to demolish their demonic plot to kickstart a war with Iran by attacking its nuclear installations just before the new president’s inauguration.

Trump was on guard about the “real possibility” that Biden team might create an alibi to attack Iran and trigger a regional war in the final phase of transfer of power that would get him bogged down in a quagmire and potentially derail his administration’s foreign policy strategies on the whole.

The point is, it is in West Asia that Trump’s presidency is threatened by the spectre of a foreign and military policy quagmire — not in Eurasia or Asia-Pacific, much as stakes are high in those two theatres as well. For, Israel’s security is also about US domestic politics!

Indeed, Trump played cool and kept his thoughts to himself. He even allowed a free run for Netanyahu’s grandstanding to project that he had a special equation with Trump and that the latter had planned to confront Iran militarily.

Trump’s choice of Steve Witkoff, a Jew, as his special envoy for West Asia, went relatively unnoticed. Witkoff is an unknown political newcomer in Trump’s incoming team but it may signify the marginalisation of Jared Kushner and the burial of the Abraham Accords.

Certainly, Witkoff, a self-made billionaire (son of a maker of ladies’ coats in New York City), is an interesting choice because he has no previous experience in international diplomacy and his expertise lies in demolishing properties that outlived their utility and erect new edifices and making massive profits out of it — ie., a New York real estate developer and investor like Trump himself. Trump has known his tough negotiating skills, his tenacity to break concrete walls and clinch deals, and create innovative designs in trying conditions.

Trump saw in Witkoff just the man to frogmarch Netanyahu. It was a made-to-order situation, as Trump was determined not to inherit the catastrophic stalemate in West Asia that Biden was leaving behind in league with Netanyahu — with American influence and prestige in the pits regionally and Israel’s reputation irreparably damaged internationally.

Witkoff hit the ground running, as he flew into Tel Aviv to deliver the astonishing message to Netanyahu that Trump wanted a deal in Gaza in place by the time he took office. News soon emerged last week on Israel’s Channel 12 that Trump sent a message to officials in Tel Aviv, urging Israel to avoid any “unnecessary” escalation and refrain from statements that could lead to regional conflicts, particularly during the transition period before his administration begins.

Channel 12 added that “Trump’s aides informed Israeli officials that the incoming US administration aims to achieve stability in the Middle East, focusing on fostering “peace” between Israel and Lebanon and maintaining the ongoing ceasefire.

The report went on to say, “In his discussions with Israeli officials, Trump emphasised that he had no intention of engaging in new wars during the early days of his presidency, as he intends to prioritise addressing domestic issues in the United States.”

Quite obviously, Trump sensed that Netanyahu was orchestrating a doomsday scenario to force his hands at a time when Tehran had been signalling repeatedly that it had no intentions whatsoever to pursue a nuclear weapon programme and has vowed to make 2025 the year when the Iran nuclear issue can be settled with the West. President Masoud Pezeshkian himself has made this pledge alongside an offer to negotiate with the US. (See a riveting interview by the former Israeli PM Ehud Barak with Politico.)

Meanwhile, a powerful neocon voice also appeared giving rationalisation for the Israeli plans to push Trump into the war path. This came in the form of an essay in the Foreign Affairs magazine which appeared on January 6 authored by none other than Richard Haas at the Council of Foreign Relations.

Haas is a prominent fixture in the US foreign policy establishment and his article titled The Iran Opportunity aimed at drumming up opinion against Trump venturing into any breakthrough with Iran as he had done vis-a-vis North Korea in his first term. Haas was transmitting the Israeli signal.

Substantively, Haas’ article was a huge disappointment — a rehash of the fantasises and falsehoods that went for Washington’s Iran policy during the past four decades. Importantly, with no empirical evidence to back up the argument, he insisted that Iran is a much diminished power today after the takeover in Syria by Islamist groups, and a window of opportunity has opened to settle scores with Tehran. In sum, Haas literally reproduced the Israeli narrative under his byline, a wilful deception which gives no credit to his reputation.

However, Trump didn’t like Netanyahu hustling him. Trump remembers how Netanyahu led him up the garden path to order the assassination of the top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and then himself scooted at the last minute. (Interestingly, Pezeshkian told NBC News in an interview last week that Tehran never issued any fatwa against Trump on account of Soleimani’s death.)

Trump wouldn’t allow himself to be taken for a ride by Netanyahu and explicitly posted on Truth Special a harsh remark about Netanyahu (“deep, dark son of a bitch”) by the American strategic thinker Prof. Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia University in an hour-long event hosted by the Cambridge Union in the UK last month.



Sachs made copious references to Israel’s pivotal role in triggering regional wars and posted a red alert to the incoming US administration that Netanyahu is on the march again — this time, to start a war with Iran — and Trump should not walk into that trap.

There is no question that the latest Gaza deal was literally shoved down Netanyahu’s throat by Witkoff. According to Israeli reports, Witkoff called Netanyahu’s office from Doha where he was camping to seek a meeting in Tel Aviv last weekend but only to be told off that Friday was the time for Jewish Sabbath. Whereupon, Witkoff, reportedly, used an expletive and summoned Netanyahu to a meeting. Which, of course, Netanyahu complied with. By the way, Israeli cabinet’s formal approval for the Gaza deal was already available within 24 hrs thereafter.

Now, Witkoff, with Trump’s approval of course, “plans to be a near-constant presence in the region in an attempt to prevent the deal from unraveling” and is considering a visit to Gaza Strip “as part of his efforts to keep a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas on track, according to a transition official with direct knowledge of the ceasefire process.” (here)

Trump may be looking beyond the Gaza deal. The positive response from Tehran and the Arab capitals (as well as the overwhelming international support) provides a stimulus for Trump to follow through. Trump understands that West Asia has transformed beyond recognition since he left office and the Iran-Saudi rapprochement and consequent historic shift in Saudi strategy is a crucial template. (See a thought-provoking article in Foreign Affairs, The Saudi Solution? How Riyadh’s Ties to America, Iran, and Israel Could Foster Stability)

The big question is how far Trump will go to bend the arc of history — specifically, will he engage with Tehran? No doubt, back channels are at work — eg., reported meeting on Nov 11 between Elon Musk, close adviser to Trump and Iran’s ambassador to the UN. All sorts of possibilities exist.

https://www.indianpunchline.com/trump-b ... a-part-ii/

With due respect for the veteran diplomat....

1.Trump is an inveterate Zionists.

2. Trump does not think strategically, he thinks egocentrically and reactively.

3. 1 & 2 will dash any attempt at 'legacy', except in Trump's mind. (which may be all that counts...)

******

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Then-president Donald Trump meets with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2019. Meta has donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. Credit: Flickr/whitehouse45 (public domain)

Corporations and billionaires are bankrolling Trump’s inauguration
Originally published: Liberation News on January 15, 2025 by Morgan Artyukhina (more by Liberation News) | (Posted Jan 18, 2025)

Some of the richest people in the country have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s presidential inaugural committee. It’s a reminder to Trump, as he begins his second presidential term, who is the real power behind the throne.

Coronating a capitalist executive
According to recent media reports, the presidential inaugural committee, which is set up to finance and coordinate the varied balls, dinners, and general pomp and circumstance of the presidential inauguration, has swollen to more than a record $170 million and is expected to hit $200 million. This colossal amount of money is nearly twice what Trump collected for his first presidential inauguration in 2017, which was itself nearly twice what his predecessor, Barack Obama, collected ahead of his 2009 inauguration: $53 million.

The money has come from some of the wealthiest people in the country, many of whom have coughed up millions of dollars each. Unlike with political campaigns, there is no limit to the amount of money a person or company can donate to a presidential inaugural committee.

The full list of donors to Trump’s presidential inaugural committee and the volumes of money they gave will eventually be published 90 days after the inauguration, but media leaks and research from Public Citizen have given us some idea of the names on the list.

They include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Uber CEO Dara Khosorwshahi, hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, and corporate donations by auto giant Ford and Robinhood, the amateur stock trading app. According to Public Citizen, Amazon, AT&T, Google, GM, Microsoft, and Toyota, among others, have each contributed $1 million. Uber and its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi have given $2 million.

Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, told the New York Times after the election that he was “very optimistic” about a Trump presidency.

“He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation, and if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him,” Bezos said.

We do have too much regulation in this country.


Their message is clear: When Trump takes the presidential oath of office on Jan. 20, his job is to work for them. As Karl Marx wrote in “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848,

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

‘He just wants America to win’
The person Trump has put in charge of this slush fund is Kelly Loeffer, who is also his pick to head the Small Business Administration. Loeffler made her name first as CEO of an asset management firm, then as a far-right U.S. senator from Georgia. She initially supported Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, but reversed course following the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, emotionally denouncing Trump’s attempted coup before the U.S. Congress.

But, like many in the capitalist ruling class, Loeffler later buried the hatchet with Trump and became a top donor to his 2024 election campaign, giving him $4.7 million.

Other finance chairs for the committee include billionaires like Diane Hendricks, who donated generously to Trump’s 2016 election campaign, got millions in tax write-offs signed into law by Trump once he was in office, and turned around and gave him even more for the 2024 election campaign. Another is Miriam Adelson, a billionaire GOP mega-donor who spent $100 million on a pro-Trump super PAC. Adelson is also a major financier of American Zionist institutions, the publisher of Israel’s largest newspaper Israel Hayom, and author of an October 2023 op-ed in Forbes that denounced Palestinians and their supporters as “dead to us.”

Zuckerberg, who postured as “standing up to Trump” by implementing misinformation and violent speech controls on Facebook and Instagram during Trump’s first presidency, has also been cozying up to Trump ahead of his second term. Meta gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and Zuckerberg recently traveled to his Mar-a-Lago resort to pay him a personal visit.

“It’s one of the things that I’m optimistic about with President Trump is, I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg told pro-Trump podcaster Joe Rogan earlier this month. Meta recently announced it was rolling back its speech controls to allow hate speech against women and LGBTQ people, two groups in the crosshairs of the far-right as Trump comes back into power.

Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have also visited Mar-a-Lago in recent weeks to patch things up with Trump. Gates similarly butted heads with Trump over issues like vaccine efficacy and U.S. funding for the World Health Organization–an entity whose partners Gates has invested billions in–but after the Nov. 5, 2024 presidential election, Gates tweeted:

Congratulations to President Trump and VP-elect Vance. America is at its strongest when we use ingenuity and innovation to improve lives here in the U.S. and around the world. I hope we can work together now to build a brighter future for everyone.[

Billionaires afraid of Trump? Hardly
In the capitalist press, these massive donations and personal visits have been portrayed as corporate moguls trying to “curry favor” with Trump out of fear.

Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, told CNBC the donors “very much fear that Donald Trump may take retribution against them.”

“‘Zuckerberg wants to get off Trump’s enemy list,” CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter said recently.

That’s the simple explanation.

Of course, that is exactly how Trump has framed it as well. He recently told a reporter Zuckerberg had “probably” had a change of heart about the president-elect after Trump threatened to have him thrown in prison during the campaign “if he does anything illegal” during the election.

In fact, during his interview with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg let the cat out of the bag about why he likes the fact that Trump “wants America to win.”

“I do think that the American tech industry is a bright spot in the American economy. I think it’s a strategic advantage for the United States that we have a lot of the strongest companies in the world and I think it should be a part of the U.S.’ strategy going forward to defend that,” the Meta CEO said.

What Stelter went on to say got much closer to the truth. “He wants favorable treatment for Meta from the U.S. government, he wants the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] case against his company to go away, and I think everything he’s doing should be viewed through that lens,” the CNN analyst said.

Zuckerberg’s blatant admission, a moment of “saying the quiet part out loud,” reveals why rabid Zionists like Adelson, tech moguls like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Gates, and a myriad of mega-financiers, stock traders, and businessmen have united to sponsor Trump’s re-election and buy their way into inauguration balls and parties where they can rub shoulders with Trump and his coterie: they are trusting Trump to defend their interests as the chief executive of the largest capitalist empire on the planet.

Crushing Chinese competition
During his first administration, Trump waged a trade war and demonization campaign against China intended to cut Chinese companies off from major markets, most especially the U.S. market. Under Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden, Americans were effectively banned from buying from hundreds of Chinese tech firms, including global leaders like Huawei, Tencent, Xiaomi, and the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. U.S. defense analysts also identified Chinese companies taking the lead in artificial intelligence research–part of a state-directed program to turn China into an AI powerhouse by 2030–as part of the strategic threat China supposedly poses to the United States.

In his second administration, Trump has pledged to implement strong tariffs against Chinese imports. While the decrease in purchases will definitely hurt Chinese companies that sell in the U.S., the real victims of this policy will be American buyers, for whom prices on those goods will go up even more than they already are.

The impending ban on TikTok, variously rationalized by U.S. lawmakers as a crackdown on the spread of pro-Palestine and pro-LGBTQ content or supposed “national security” concerns about data collected on the app, is just the latest part of this drive.

Only the people can stand up to the billionaires
Regardless of the excuses given or the party in the White House, the point is the same: to protect American businesses from foreign competition, most especially from China. The richest people in the country have entrusted Trump with the task of managing this competition in a way that protects their profits, and this is the only purpose behind their decision to pour money into Trump’s campaign and presidential inaugural committee. They expect a strong return on their investments.

Trump’s second administration promises to be an all-out war on the working people of America and the planet as it seeks to help billionaires loot the public treasury and maximize their profits at our expense. More than ever it is clear that working and oppressed people must unite to fight this effort and to reject every attempt at division they attempt to sow among us. The ruling class doesn’t have us outnumbered, they just have us out-organized.

https://mronline.org/2025/01/18/corpora ... uguration/

******

Marco Rubio Does Not Have It All as US Secretary of State
January 18, 2025

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US President-elect Donald Trump and his pick for secretary of State, Marco Rubio, at a campaign rally in November 2024. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP.

By Misión Verdad – Jan , 2025

On January 15, one of the most anticipated Senate hearings took place: the confirmation of Marco Rubio as US Secretary of State for the Donald Trump administration. The Cuban-American politician, known for his sponsorship of “regime change” against countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua and for being a traditional anti-China hawk, faced questions about his abilities to lead the US diplomatic portfolio.

Beyond the hearing and his answers, which fixated on Iran, China, and other topics of hawkish obsession, the nominee faces serious limitations in performing his duties within the Trump administration. The appointment of multiple special envoys with direct access to the president represents a structural challenge to State Department leadership and significantly reduces the next secretary of state’s room for maneuver.

Special envoys in the State Department
The recent appointment of Richard Grenell as special envoy for Venezuela and North Korea represents a strategic move in the diplomatic framework of the incoming Trump administration. This role not only reinforces the next president’s priorities but also evidences an attempt to channel foreign policy toward core issues that require specialized and sustained attention.

Since the days of George Washington, with Gouverneur Morris as a private agent for trade negotiations with England, the figure of special envoys has been a flexible tool in US foreign policy.

Over the years, their role has evolved to address complex issues that require exclusive attention, which has prevented the saturation of State Department offices. During Barack Obama’s presidency, this mechanism underwent an unprecedented expansion and highlighted its effectiveness in managing specific issues in an intensive and focused manner.

In the case of Grenell, the special envoy’s mission is twofold. On the one hand, the position gives him relevance in executing Trump’s directives on Venezuela and moves him away from mere coordination with traditional figures such as the secretary of State. On the other hand, his role may face serious obstacles in dealing with a State Department, whose often rigid and labyrinthine structure may hinder negotiations or implement extremist strategies.

In this case, Rubio will find limits to the pragmatism that Grenell will have to employ with a view to conducting possible negotiations, especially considering the economic and energy interests at stake between Caracas and Washington.

Indeed, according to Bloomberg, “Rubio, the intellectual, could use his prodigious intellect to accommodate Trump’s whims, in effect articulating everything the president does, whether it makes sense or not. In this way, he could keep his job. Alternatively, he could stick to his principles and be out of a job in short order.” This balance between pragmatism and fundamentals will be one of the biggest tests for Rubio, who, even in the Democratic wing, is widely regarded as an “institutionalist,” as Emily Horne, a former National Security Council spokeswoman in the Biden administration, put it.

In short, the assignment of Grenell, who will operate directly under Trump’s command, suggests that this is an attempt to shape a less chaotic and more structured strategy towards Venezuela. However, the “success” of this mission will depend on several factors:

Presidential pragmatism: Trump will need to balance the interests of his political base with the strategic benefits of keeping certain channels of communication open with Caracas.
State Department bureaucracy: Grenell will need to navigate the bureaucratic corridors and coordinate effectively with the State Department’s regional bureaus to advance his mission. Rubio will be a stumbling block.
The oil lobby: The influence of Chevron and other players in the energy sphere will be crucial for containing the impulses of more radical sectors in Congress.
The appointment of the special envoy in question could be an opportunity to redesign the US policy towards Venezuela, tempering it of ideological obsessions and bringing it closer to more pragmatic objectives. However, the risk of repeating past mistakes persists, especially if the “extremist lobby” led by Rubio and others succeeds in dragging the administration back into erratic and geopolitically unsustainable policies.

The scenario will ultimately be a test not only for Grenell but also for the Trump administration’s ability to reconfigure its strategy towards a country whose regional and global impact cannot be ignored.

Sanctions: the preferred weapon, with Venezuela on the radar
In one of the rounds of questions at the hearing, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) momentarily rattled the prevailing narrative of the hearing by asking, “Can you give me examples where sanctions have improved behavior?” Rubio responded with evasive justification, admitting that sanctions may not generate change but insisting that they serve the purpose of “denying resources to governments.”

Rubio added that what cannot continue to happen is for China to continue to get all the benefits of the international system, and in this scenario, “the only other alternative left in the toolbox is economic sanctions.”

Against that, Paul closed the debate with an uncomfortable observation: “I do not think we are achieving it very often. Maybe it is time to think about a different way of doing business rather than just saying, let’s sanction everybody and call people names we don’t like because I don’t think that helps.”

However, after the initial statements loaded with rhetoric and ambitious promises, the emphasis on Venezuela did not occupy a central place in the session. Nevertheless, the topic did not take long to emerge, and almost as a personal obsession was promoted by Rick Scott (R-Florida) in an attempt to stoke the discursive attacks against Venezuela, stating that “the Biden administration allowed the oil to flow, stole the elections, completely violated what Biden told me he would do,” and emphasized that thanks to Rubio, Donald Trump published a tweet about María Corina Machado.

In this way, Rubio took the opportunity to deploy his usual repertoire of visceral statements, among which the following standouts:

Venezuela, unfortunately, is not governed by a government. It is governed by a drug trafficking organization.
I strongly disagree that we enter into negotiations with Maduro.
They used migration against us to get these concessions.
They have these blanket licenses where companies like Chevron are actually providing billions of dollars to the regime’s coffers.
All of that needs to be re-explored because, in Venezuela, you have a Russian presence; you have a very strong Iranian presence.

Rubio, who, together with Leopoldo López, was the promoter of the illegal sanctions that have seriously impacted the Venezuelan economy, is immovable in his position. However, behind his insistence on tightening sanctions, a strategic question arises: how powerful is Chevron’s lobby to maintain its operation in Venezuela amid Rubio’s sanctioning fervor?

The reality is that, beyond the Florida Republican’s speech, solid technical arguments justify the continuity of the license granted to Chevron. But, as Rubio well knows, in Washington, technical arguments do not always prevail; political will is what defines the game.

Ultimately, the real question is not whether the sanctions will achieve their objective but to what extent the United States is willing to sacrifice its own commercial and energy interests for the sake of a stubbornly rigid foreign policy.



China: axis of US foreign policy
Rubio began his remarks with an aggressive and hostile criticism of China, describing it as a “clear but hidden” partner of adversaries such as Russia. He claimed that Beijing has indirectly contributed to the Russian military effort in Ukraine through sanctions evasion and technology sales.

Beyond his usual anti-China rhetoric, he stressed the importance of maintaining a balance between confrontation and diplomacy, acknowledging that “never in human history have two powers like the United States and China clashed without catastrophic consequences.”

During the session, Nebraska Republican Senator Pete Ricketts introduced one of the most incisive questions of the session: China’s place as the United States’ greatest adversary. Ricketts called the People’s Republic of China “the head of the stake in this axis of dictators,” noting that Beijing is involved in nearly every current international issue affecting the United States, from fentanyl to tensions in the Indo-Pacific.

“The Chinese Communist Party is the biggest challenge we face,” Rubio responded, which was not unexpected because, in his long legislative career, he devoted most of his time and energy to issues with China. Between 2023 and 2024, the senator promoted more than 100 bills against the country.

So, in his response, Rubio described the People’s Republic of China as an adversary that combines technological, industrial, economic, scientific and geopolitical dimensions, characteristics that, according to him, surpass the capabilities of even the extinct Soviet Union. For him, the bilateral relationship will be the defining issue of the 21st century, a sort of common thread to understand the geopolitical challenges that will mark the coming decades.

From trade to supply chains, the United States depends on China to a degree that makes any direct confrontation both risky and costly. The central question is not whether the United States wishes to oppose China but whether it can do so without compromising its own economy.

Results of the hearing
Overall, the US Senate hearing to evaluate Rubio’s nomination as Secretary of State in the Trump administration provided an image of the priorities and challenges that will mark US foreign policy in the coming years.

The confirmation, which appears likely to pass on a snap vote on Trump’s first day in office, would mark an era of greater confrontation in US foreign policy, especially with China.

Ultimately, the impact of these initiatives will depend on Marco Rubio’s ability to align with Donald Trump’s foreign policy priorities or whether the former president will find in his secretary an enforcer willing to follow his lead. This balance between strategic leadership and subordination will define the effectiveness of policies pushed against Venezuela and how they fit into the current geopolitical landscape.

The hearing also reflected a broader picture of the challenges that Rubio will face in working with a president whose conception of foreign policy is dominated by electoral pragmatism and the personalization of power. He could choose to adapt to Trump or stand firm in his convictions and risk becoming politically isolated.

The appointment of special envoys like Grenell reinforces this challenge, as they will operate directly under Trump’s orders, further reducing the State Department’s autonomy. This, combined with the differences between the two on issues such as China and sanctions, raises a fundamental question: will Marco Rubio be an enforcer of Trump’s vision, or will he do everything possible to make his dogmas prevail, even at the expense of the position?

(Misión Verdad)

https://orinocotribune.com/marco-rubio- ... -of-state/

******

What Will A Trump-Aligned EU Look Like?
Posted on January 19, 2025 by Conor Gallagher

Outgoing President Joe Biden used his farewell speech to offer warnings about an American oligarchy taking over the country. He spent about half a century in public office serving the oligarchs and helping them tighten control over the country, but he’s not wrong (aside from his choice of verb tense).

Despite a lot of hope about Trump reorienting American foreign policy to better reflect the country’s strategic interests, there are two questions that are rarely addressed in these pieces:

Is Trump going to take on this entrenched American oligarchy? All evidence points to a resounding ‘no.’
If not, the only interests that matter are those of the oligarchy, and what does it want? Everything.

Until proven otherwise, it’s probably best to view America’s “democratic” transitions of power not as a potential change in underlying strategy but as a useful spectacle that allows for a rebrand.

What does this mean for Europe? There’s a strong argument that it would be in the US national interest to back out of Europe. And the best thing that could happen to Europe would be a Trump-led US withdrawal from the continent, which would force the EU to rethink some of its economic and security policies.

What we are likely witnessing instead is the elevation of putative nationalists like Italian Prime Minister Girogia Meloni and the Alternative for Germany (Afd) party who 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. In a worst case scenario we are likely to see even more authoritarianism in order to continue to transfer wealth from Europeans to US oligarchs.

Europe is now awash with ideas of how to “woo” Trump which is really about appeasing American oligarchy: buy more weapons, buy more LNG and oil, get tougher with China, and Meloni has set an example of selling off Italian assets to US capital.

Why Would Trump Walk Away from a Successful Bust Out Operation?

The problem with believing that Project Ukraine and the accompanying subjugation of Europe is simply the product of some liberal-woke-Green-DEI cabal that had power across the West is that it ignores the deep-seated economic interests of American plutocrats seeking to extract wealth from any part of the world they control. That’s what the permanent state, driven by the US’ numerous buzzing plutocrat-funded think tank hives crafting bills and direct foreign policy — essentially acting as a shadow government. In some cases, the oligarchs are increasingly comfortable cutting out the middle man, as Musk shows.

Maybe I’ve missed it, but while Trump may pursue some modicum of peace in the empire’s numerous conflicts, a redistribution of wealth from the top down is not on tap, and at best there will be a shift in tactics on how to extract wealth from the rest of the world. Gains are to be increased for American plutocrats at the expense of allies and “enemies” alike seems closer to the real meaning of “America First.”

When viewed through the more traditional state strategy lens, that permanent state is often accused of suffering from a competency crisis due to its oversight of an endless parade of failures, but if you view the US as more of a gangster state focused on the short-term return for the bosses/oligarchs, well, they might be more competent than they seem. It also means the overarching strategy is unlikely to change while the oligarchs are running the show.

With that in mind, despite Ukraine’s impending defeat on the battlefield, are the US gangsters going to want to lose the gains of splitting Europe from Russia? What about the bonuses of having a terrorist state in Europe funneling arms elsewhere and willing to do dirty work like trying to blow up the TurkStream Pipeline — which if successful would benefit American energy companies. And in any detente with Russia, will American oligarchs have any interest in abandoning small progress in the Caucasus and Caspian where they are trying to control the flow of resources toward Europe from that direction as well?

In Europe there is no evidence that the old guard or the new faux nationalist political parties arriving on the scene are prepared to take on the US empire. Indeed, even the Alternative for Germany party, which has long been brutally honest about Berlin being a “slave” to the US, just last week adopted a motion to build closer relations between the two countries. That followed the party receiving some love from Elon Musk and incoming Vice President JD Vance. So is the party now willing to accept its servitude because the new slave master is more friendly or does it expect Trump to set Germany free? It’s likely to be disappointed in either case.

Even if the US extricates itself from Ukraine while ensuring that a new iron curtain is drawn between Europe and Russia, that might mean good business for US oligarchs, but also that Europe’s problems will only multiply. Here’s the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) highlighting some of what Europe could be expected to do to remain in Trump’s/the American oligarchs’ good graces:

Europe can propose creative policies – in Trumpian terms, ‘smart deals’ – to cement these shared interests and secure both itself and Ukraine. One is to coordinate the seizure of US$300 billion of Russian central-bank assets frozen in G7 financial systems, and use part of this to buy American weapons for Ukraine. This would boost both Europe’s security and America’s economy…

Yes, we can’t forget: will the Trump administration pass on the NATO racket of getting member states to pony up Trump’s target of 5 percent of GDP to buy (mostly) American-made weapons?

It’s much more than most European nations can afford financially or politically and will likely require more authoritarian measures to funnel that money out of the country. Are the European members of Trump International going to say no to military expenditures that will cripple what remains of social programs in their countries? Or is it more likely they will privatize in the name of cost-cutting and organize fire sales for American takeovers? NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is already asking European citizens to continue making “sacrifices” in order to buy more weapons. European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and others are supportive. And Lithuania just became the first EU and NATO country to pledge to meet the 5 percent target starting in 2026.

No matter that all the Western wonder weapons failed in Ukraine, the purchases must go on in the name of defense against the Russian horde.

Where else can Europeans sacrifice more? They must take a tougher line against China, as IISS again points out:

If Russia is America’s problem as well as Europe’s, it follows that China is Europe’s problem as well as America’s. The July 2024 NATO Summit labelled China the ‘decisive enabler’ of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Europe must therefore integrate economics and security into its China policy more effectively. This is overdue for Europe’s own security, but will also assuage US concerns about Europe’s commercial interests in Beijing.

Incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a big time believer in such demands:

We need to find out if @EmmanuelMacron speaks for Europe

After his 6 hour meeting in China he told reporters that Europe should create distance with the U.S. & should not get involved in supporting America over China when it comes to Taiwan


And there’s the issue of enriching American energy companies. Again from IISS:

America, for its part, could also replace Europe’s imports of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG), now at a record high, with American LNG supplies. With Trump expected to lift the Biden administration’s ban on new LNG export terminals, this would create synergies of security and prosperity. Going further, Europe could also encourage the US to sell it more oil.

Trump has been clear about this:

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European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, who at least is self aware enough to know who she really serves, was quick to come out with suggestions to do just that following Trump’s election. And all her “tools” will continue to be useful if used in service of a more Trump-aligned EU. She has the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive to make business with certain countries more unattractive while simultaneously making US — especially energy — exports more appealing. Ursula also has the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, International Procurement Instrument, an Anti-Coercion Instrument, and the EU Critical Raw Materials Act at her disposal to use in service of the US empire against whomever it requires. As the IISS and Rubio highlight above, following the successful severance of Europe from Russia the next target is Beijing, and Ursula has increasingly used her tools to, as she calls it, “derisk” from China.

Civizational Europe

The EU’s genocide-supporting, anti-free-speech, war-with-russia “center” has been embracing the right kind of “right” for some time. As we highlighted last week, Elon Musk and AfD co-chair Alice Weidel’s X history lesson equating communism with Nazism was right in line with the “rules-based international order’s” longtime efforts to rehabilitate fascists, blame the Russians for WWII, and rewrite history in Ukraine, other former Soviet states, and increasingly in the West itself.

Weidel and Musk also propagated the false claim that Hitler was in fact a communist in a bid to portray privatizations — and presumably sell-offs of European assets to Musk’s billionaire friends — as anti-Hitlerian. Weidel, of all people should know, should know Hitler wasn’t a communist. If he was, one would think that the seed money the AfD received from a reclusive billionaire descendant of prominent Nazis wouldn’t have been availabel as it would have long ago been redistributed by Adolf instead.

This all of course fits in perfectly with a neoliberal EU that has effectively accommodated the right by eliminating effective working-class opposition. That process could now be openly expedited in order to appease the increasing demands of American and European oligarchs who have seen their dream of plundering Russia and Ukraine’s natural resources thwarted.

Perhaps Europe will now lose the pretense of sovereignty and along with it the green veneer and superior-values schtick and embrace what it champions in the former USSR states and has ushered to the altar in the bloc. Researcher Jonas Elvander,, the editor of foreign affairs at the Swedish socialist magazine Flamman and a PhD researcher in history at the European University Institute in Florence, makes the case this is indeed what is happening:

So far, the far right have mostly been sceptical of the EU, but there are no guarantees it will remain so….Since many far-right parties have emerged out of the neoliberal movement, while others are increasingly ready to adopt neoliberal policies in a bargain for power with the centre right, there is little that stops the EU from becoming a vehicle for far-right policies. In many ways we are already seeing the beginnings of such a development today…

The road had already been paved by the Commission’s adoption of a hardline approach to migration and the new Commission portfolio tasked with guarding the “European way of life.”


So it’s more of the same, but with new branding:

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“Santa Giorgia” street art in Milan. Source: https://twitter.com/PalomboArtist

One obvious benefit of a marketing rethink from Davos liberalism to a faux nationalism is that it’s challenging to sell and inspire many people to fight for neoliberalism. In the US, the bourgeoisie might fly a Ukrainian flag above their “in this house we believe” yard signs, but they’re not prepared to fight. Nationalism, religion, and defense of a common European heritage are more useful tools in what’s being pitched as a civilizational battle to come.

And that’s a scary place for Europe — or more accurately working class Europeans — to be.

A recent Washington Post op-ed asked whether Europe will soon be dominated by US corporations in the same way that “the United Fruit Co. once subjugated Honduras.”

That assumes it’s not already at the complete mercy of American billionaires — a presumption that Musk’s recent toying with the continent’s politics likely disproves. And while today Musk is purportedly after a fair shake for the AfD, justice in the UK, and helping friends in Italy, who’s to say what his underlying economic interests are or what’s being cooked up by his friends in the bowels of the Blob? Maybe tomorrow Musk and Trump decide they’d like to support Europe against Russia the same way the US has been supporting Ukraine. Or maybe they wait a few years until after they’ve bled the cash cow dry.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... -like.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 » Mon Jan 20, 2025 4:31 pm

Trump to sign over 200 executive orders after inauguration
January 20, 17:05

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Agent Donald's inauguration will take place today at 20:00 Moscow time.
After it, Trump promised to sign a huge number of already prepared decrees on a variety of topics at the speed of a furious printer - from the expulsion of migrants from the United States to the completion of the declassification of documents on the assassination of Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Various decrees of Biden will also be canceled.
Trump promised that after the inauguration everyone will have fun watching TV, implying a huge amount of trash and fun in the signed decrees.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9622163.html

Google Translator

******

Trump shows the imperial face that was supposed to remain hidden

Hugo Dionísio

January 19, 2025

Everything that the Democratic Party and its followers try so hard to hide from the people… is no longer secret

The reactions of astonishment, repudiation and some discomfort that have spread through the mainstream press regarding Donald Trump’s statements about taking Greenland by force, the Panama Canal and even Canada, mostly suffer from the most shameless hypocrisy, huge doses of delusion and unacceptable ignorance, especially on the part of those who make it their business to tell others what to think, assuming that they are in possession of an above-average level of information.

Given what has been the behavior of the United States of America, its presidents, sovereign bodies and those that act as its main tentacles, within and beyond its borders – I’m talking about multinational corporations and NGOs – , what is different about Donald Trump’s behavior? Is this a new attitude from a U.S. president?

Are we back to the days of “political incorrectness” or lack of politeness, masks used to create the idea that the U.S. elite is preocupied with others claims.., complies with international law and respects the sovereignty of other nations? Do we have to watch another replay of the moralistic parade that characterized Trump’s first term in office, even if they all ended up not only doing things similar to what he said but, more importantly, not undoing what was done by him?

Donald Trump, as we’ll see later, is simply giving voice and body to the power he thinks and somehow knows he has in his hands, doing so in the most direct, pragmatic and brutal way. Which has been the way of many throughout U.S. history. Including Biden. Trump does everything he can to present himself as the “real deal”, rather than the “political correctness” that characterizes the equally barbaric liberal and neoliberal attitude. Under Trump we can all access the privilege of seeing the empire in all its brutality and viscerality, without behavioral masks, without emotional filters

What used to be closed off only to a commanding elite or to the stubborn who insist on taking a critical stance towards any fact, idea or information that comes their way, is now unveiled to all the people. In this sense, Trump’s attitude is more democratizing, in other words, more mobilizing of democratic action, in the sense that it activates, exhorts and prompts action in response from a much wider social group, previously numbed by the politeness, harmlessness and falsehood of the situationist political attitude.

Is Trump’s proposal so different from other annexations that the U.S. has made throughout its short but intense history? Would the U.S. be the superpower it is today if, in the mid-19th century, it hadn’t annexed Texas, making it the 28th state? Or California? States whose partition gave rise to Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah?

And who was responsible for this annexation? A Republican? Not really. It was the Democrat James K. Polk, elected as the 11th president of the USA, who was responsible for the annexation of Texas, California and Oregon. Of course, this was the newly created pre-Civil war Democratic Party, a intrinsically liberal oriented party. But the process that was then undertook does not differ substantially from U.S. interventionism at the hands of Democrats and Republicans over the last 80 years. At that time, all that was needed was to send some settlers to those places, finance their revolt and apply the so-called “Polk Corollary”, according to which the U.S. would incorporate the territories whose “peoples” wanted – very “democratically” – to join them.

It should also be noted that the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” was essentially defended by the Democratic Party itself, founded in 1828. It was on the basis of this doctrine that the war against Mexico, which ended with the conquest of the aforementioned territories, was justified. The Whigs, on the other hand, were against foreign interventionism, especially in relation to questions that have to to with European colonizers. And isn’t Trump’s attitude a corollary of the unmasked application of the Monroe Doctrine (that is different from what Monroe actually said)? The doctrine according to which Latin America was classified as the U.S. “back yard”?

Let’s face it, U.S. expansionism didn’t stop there, it reached Puerto Rico, a territory in which the U.S. practiced all kinds of barbarities to prevent the self-determination of that people, who overwhelmingly supported the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico (War against all Puerto Ricans, revolution and terror in America’s colony, by Nelson A. Denis), maintaining that territory as a colony to this day. Indigenous peoples will have hundreds, if not thousands, of stories just like Trump’s. Trump is, in fact and in his way, behaving like a truly American president.

Nowadays, nothing has changed, apart from the capacity for propaganda, benefiting greatly from scientific knowledge in the field of communication and psychology. Examples of annexation abound, Syria being just another example. It was under Obama that U.S. troops arrived in Syria, namely on 22 September 2014, supposedly to fight ISIS, although it is known that, in essence, the troops sent by Obama were there to form, train and mobilize what they called the “Free Syrian Army” and its “moderate rebels”. In 2019, it was Trump who demobilized the troops in Syria, leaving some behind, according to him, to “keep the oil“.

It’s interesting, or just another example of why this whole attitude towards Trump is a monumental hypocrisy, that Joe Biden, after serving a full term, not only failed to vacate illegally occupied Syrian territory, but also played a key role in supporting Turkey to destroy that nation, creating the conditions for a longer and more entrenched U.S. stay. Nor has he stopped the brazen theft of oil.

So the truth here is very simple: Trump, like Bush the father, like Bush the son, were just the ugly faces whom the Democrats – defenders of U.S. manifest destiny, globalism and interventionism – accused of carrying out the acts that the Democrats themselves, later, not only consolidated, but deepened. With the exception of Afghanistan, from where Biden withdrew, the normal thing is for the Democrats, their disciples and proxies in Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand, to blame interventionism on the Republicans, but the Democrats, like the Republicans, not only don’t undo, but continue and deepen these policies.

The example of Afghanistan means for Biden what the withdrawal from Iraq means for Trump. If Trump hasn’t withdrawn completely, it’s once again because of oil. Biden, even after the Iraqi parliament voted to withdraw U.S. troops, continued to resist their withdrawal.

None of the international fronts opened by Trump were closed by Biden. The technological war against Huawei was intensified and extended by Biden to other companies and technologies, and the same goes for the trade war. Unlike Trump, who in his first term was able to talk to Vladimir Putin, Biden refused any contact and, in good Democratic fashion, deepened the gap between a country as important as the Russian Federation, creating an international security crisis the like of which has not been seen for a long time

It was also under the “leadership” of the Democratic Party that NATO destroyed Yugoslavia, and it was under Biden that the first televised and online genocide in human history took place in Gaza. In fact, if there is a prominent and present figure in U.S. interventionism over the last 30 to 40 years, it is Joe Biden, the right-hand man of Bill and Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

Everyone remembers how Joe Biden said, next to a stunned and hierarchically subordinate Chancellor Scholz, that he would destroy the NordStream gas pipeline if Russia “invaded” Ukraine. The pipeline, jointly owned by the Russian Federation and NATO countries, was thus destroyed, which under international law constitutes an act of war against a civilian infrastructure, moreover the sovereign property of “allied” countries. This threat, which was later carried out, is essentially no different in its brutality and disregard for other people’s sovereignty from Trump’s claim to Greenland, despite Denmark.

Perhaps the “moderates”, an epithet used to designate the fanatics of situationism and other fanboys of U.S.-led neoliberal globalism, love those narratives commissioned to hide the truth, such as the one that it was a group drunken Ukrainians who, in one of the best-guarded seas in the universe, not only threw a wild party but also blew up an energy installation protected by international law. But this paradoxical, delusional and lying narrative only confirms everything I’ve been saying here. Trump and the Democrats only differ in the amount of honesty with which they assume their real interests. The former tells it like it is, in Wild West fashion, while the latter are compulsive liars and illusionists, experts at pointing one way and turning the other, benefiting from the scientific use of the disciplines of illusionism and contortionism.

Like Trump, whose attitude shows how little regard he has for current European leaders, not even considering them worthy of a euphemistic or mystifying speech to justify aggression, Biden was no different (we all remember Nuland about Europeans opinion on Ukrainian matters). Nor did he respect Scholz as the head of state of one of the most important countries in the world. Confirming what we’ve seen about the character of such figures, Scholz didn’t even defend himself or his country. Not even to try some kind of diversion, a joke or something. As if his proximity to his boss had frozen him in fear.

Perhaps the so-called “moderates”, the majority of commentators who populate the increasingly irrelevant Western mainstream media and those elected to political office who simply follow the directives issued by the U.S./G7 and NATO power directories, attach too much value to a cynical and hypocritical attitude that is so fashionable in the corridors of power in the West and which consists of thinking one thing and saying another; of wanting something very much and showing that you don’t really want it that much. But those on the ground, in the day-to-day reality of the struggle for survival and the struggle to transform the world, might benefit from the susceptibility of a growing number of people to look at their TVs and, instead of watching some politically stylized Copperfield show, have access, for a change, to the real face of the empire, its tics, quirks and whims.

I don’t know if it’s tragic or caricatured, but the public space in the West, the space of “post-truth”, has become a vast and continuous theater in which figures parade continuously and successively, making it seem as if the opposite of what is practiced is being done, making it seem as if the opposite of what is objectified is being defended, making it seem as if the real people responsible for what we all see and see happening are being hidden. On these stages of illusion that the media have become, mystifying has become synonymous with informing and illusionism has become communication itself.

On such a stage, of course, figures like Trump, Putin, Xi Ji ping, Maduro, Claudia Sheinbaum, Lukashenko, Fitzo or Orban, whatever their political-ideological camp, are deeply hated figures. What they think they say and what they say, as a rule, coincides with what they stand for. They also commit the mortal sin of wanting to exercise the power that has been constitutionally entrusted to them, not allowing interference that is not in accordance with their will and the responsibilities assigned to them. This sovereign (towards themselves and others) and haughty character earns them the epithet “dictator”, which, let’s face it, often comes from a booklet called the “CIA World Factbook”.

What we have to ask ourselves is why we need a power that says it is against torture, but keeps Guantanamo Bay running and, like that facility, thousands of secret prisons around the world. Or, a power that, over the last 80 years, has transferred around 20% of the wealth produced annually from the poorest 50%, the workers, to the richest 10%, the oligarchs, with these 10% now dominating more than 30% of U.S. output and the poorest 50% being left with a mere 6 or 7%. All this while making fine speeches about democracy – for the richest 10% of course – and human rights, as long as these don’t clash with more important interests, such as monetary ones.

These people will be delighted to hear Biden, at the same press conference, say that he is going to send arms to Israel and then say that he is concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza and ask Netanyahu to be more lenient with the bombs that he himself has authorized to be sent. They will also be delighted to see Blinken say that he has to “help” Ukraine with more weapons and then accuse the Russian Federation of tearing down Ukrainian buildings to eliminate the soldiers that NATO sends there. Or watching Zelensky say that he is fighting for democracy while eliminating all opposition to the left and center.

The politeness and cynicism that most confuse with “democratic culture” and “institutional respect” are based on the same principles – or lack thereof – that lead them to ban media outlets in the name of defending “freedom of expression”, and to stalk individuals on social networks, listening to phone calls, videos and analyzing private messages, in the name of defending freedom of opinion. It is in the name of this politeness that the billions of dollars a year that the U.S. budget devotes to the media are silenced, so that it can produce information that “counteracts the malign influence” of Russia, China or Iran. Even if, in order to produce such messages, facts have to be invented, lied about and manipulated. How can anyone sane, and with the slightest concern about the people he represents, allow a foreign country to use endless funds to eliminate the relationship between Europe and China, or Europe and Russia, as if they were our patriarchs or guardians and the European peoples were subject to a process of civil disqualification, incapable of exercising their rights and assuming their duties.

As we watch Elon Musk meddle in European politics, using his “X” to propagate his ideas, all those who are shocked should think twice and realize that Musk’s use of the “X” is no different from the use of Facebook, Google or the mainstream media (concentrated under Clinton’s auspices) by the White House and the CIA. Musk’s disrespect for the sovereignty of the European member states is no different from the disrespect shown by the political representatives of those states towards themselves and the people they claim to defend, when they gave up governing and left everything in the hands of Washington and the mandatary Ursula Von Der Leyen. Basically, Elon Musk is just using the power he knows exists, without any masks either.

Trump, Elon Musk or J.D. Vance (guys will still come out and say I support them) disconcert these people because they denounce, without subterfuge, without false modesty, without hypocrisy, the state submission and subordination in which European politicians find themselves vis-à-vis the White House, vis-à-vis the corporate empire they now head. Knowing this, they blatantly use this power, lowering the recipients of their orders to the level of what they are: mere corporate officials looking to climb the career ladder and corrupt (morally or financially) proxies, so easy to manipulate. If there is one skill that all affirmative leaders have, it is knowing where the triggers are that manipulate each being, each personality. Like no one else, they know how to pull them and reward them to get what they want.

Faced with such behavior, people like António Costa, Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas, Montenegro, Starmer, Scholz, Macron or Meloni (who they are now promoting as a new Mussolini 2.0 in a woke version) are totally disarmed. There is no more make-believe. Either they follow their leader or they are crushed. The other option is to fight, to assume an alternative. Trump is forcing them to take a stand and leave the swamp of indecision, salami-slicing and cynicism. No climber likes to be unmasked in this way. Neither for good nor for ill.

As the Democratic administrations have shown, the brutal attitudes that the Republicans adopt are always later confirmed and deepened by the “civilized” Democrats. Just as the “social democratic and socialist” parties (now all “liberal”) do in Europe, in relation to the openly neoliberal, conservative and reactionary parties. The latter pave the way, which the former later consolidate by saying they are not doing it. In the end, we all know that we have become poorer. And this creates the appearance of a movement that keeps everything the same.

This is nothing more than the “good cop – bad cop” story. The role of the Trumps and Bushes is to further the manifest destiny, which is to say, the expansion of the empire, so that the Clintons and Obamas can come along as saviors and, amid the fine words of unity, freedom and democracy, normalize the barbarity that they wanted and took advantage of. Speaking of progress, we can all see that we live in a more violent, impoverished, backward and less democratic society.

After all, what does the world need if not the truth? Be it brutal and oppressive, be it unacceptable or uncomfortable. But let it be the truth and, in that case, Trump is much more faithful to the truth than Biden. Trump gives us the true face of the USA, the one that is not masked and obscured by the Goebbelsian speeches of the Democratic Party. Even when he lies and conspires, Trump tells us the truth, because he does so with such presumption, imbecility and arrogance that it is easy to discredit and dismantle the speech.

You can fight with the truth. They hate Trump because he shows us who the enemy is, giving name and body to the monster that hides behind U.S.-led globalism. Everything that the Democratic Party and its followers try so hard to hide from the people… is no longer secret.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... in-hidden/

Like we've ben saying for years, 'the Democratic Party is the piss that sets the Republican dye in the national fabric'.

******

(Not Trump but Reagan, nonetheless...See the OP of the 'Sympathy' thread.)

Reagan and Education Issues
January 19, 13:09

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Interesting data ( https://t.me/ochen_mnogo_prufov/4724 ), but I wouldn't say it was some kind of revelation. In principle, probably anyone would say that people are gradually getting dumber, like, this didn't happen before. "There were fewer morons in our generation," as one movie character said. It didn't start yesterday, jokes about "the sum of intelligence on the planet is a constant value, and the population is constantly growing" were considered old already in the 1970s. It's just that today, mass dumbing down has become more noticeable and obvious (yes, and in terms of "when there were no social networks, only your family knew you were a fool" too). Some news flashed somewhere about zoomers in the UK - like, they are not able to unscrew a light bulb themselves and call a specialist. On the one hand, you can only laugh at these poor guys, really, they are morons, on the other hand, let's continue the topic: how many of those who giggle at these zoomers are capable of solving the problem with the faucet in the bathroom? Or with faulty electrical wiring? Or how to hang 10 bookcases EVENLY? Or how to make a 2.5x4 m bookcase from start to finish? Or how to make a wall cabinet with 100 pull-out drawers for small items yourself? Huh? Oh, yes, that's different... (No, I understand that everyone will say, yes, what's the big deal - ok, let me congratulate you, you, you are the very happy exception to the rule). I understand that there are real men who are so bursting with their own cool that their T-shirts are bursting at the seams with pride - they can build a summer house themselves, and level and concrete a driveway the size of a runway, and they are gods in the kitchen, and consider food delivery a service for infantiles, and this way and that, and on the doorframe, and a jack of all trades - well, good luck to them, a flag in their hands and a drum around their necks. (In elementary school, they add to this: "... and a steam locomotive to meet them", but we will not say that).

But seriously, if we leave out the so-called zoomers and real men, there is a problem. And it, such a suspicion, is not solvable in the near future. That is, in principle, solvable - mass epidemics and large-scale wars very quickly and efficiently cure infantilism and invest incredible intelligence, but this is the case when the medicine is no worse than the disease. A real mass epidemic of some kind of HEH on a global scale (real, not a farce with covid) is fraught with corpses, and the speed of their disposal will be hopelessly behind, and a global war, even without WMD - this is completely "Lord, protect us!"

Among the subjects we were taught at the time, there was one called "Mega-trends". Well, there was a demographic trend, economic, migration, etc. And there was another trend that was discussed off the record - civilizational. Yes, exactly that - the general trend of the population becoming dumb. This is not a fairy tale, not a conspiracy theory, not the machinations of ZOG and reptilians - this is a fact. We were not given recipes for solving this problem, but the situation was outlined in detail - because we will have to deal with it (by the way, we had to).

Now, looking for materials on the USA and Africa, I came across some reasoning in one blog - on the topic of America becoming dumber. (The late Zadornov, who launched the meme "Well, dumb!", was not so wrong - yes, they are dumb, but as always, details and context are important). And that would be fine, well, he's getting dumber and dumber, but this process affects foreign policy (among other things). And that's not so funny, they have nuclear weapons, you never know. I became curious when this process began. And the picture, in the end, turned out to be very interesting.

In short - Ronald Reagan is to blame for everything. I'll have to dwell on him in detail. For some reason, some bloggers have taken to writing about him with downright respect, like, he was an outstanding president, almost great, forced the USSR to take the path to ending the Cold War, one of the most prominent historical figures, and so on. Reading these passages, I was surprised: well, okay, if a true blue Reaganaut wrote something like that, that's normal, America is full of them, and there are more than enough books with such a message - but why do these homespun scribblers proclaim such things? However, Ihara Saikaku once said a very precise definition about bloggers: “What can I say, that’s why they are commoners, so that they can constantly reveal their feeblemindedness.” Let them.

First of all, Reagan was a dunce. Well, not in the medical sense, of course, but a regular idiot, yes. That's what they called him - "an amiable dunce." That's an affectionate term; his speechwriter Peggy Noonan generally considered Reagan's brain "a barren desert" - and, frankly, she knew better. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill (1977-1987) became famous for the phrase: "Reagan knows less than any other president I've known" (and O'Neill began his career as a congressman under Truman!). The two most popular jokes about Reagan in Washington during his presidency. 1. "Reagan tried to secretly defect to the USSR, but he was turned back at the border because he could not answer a single question" and 2. "President Reagan's library burned down: two whole books, one of which he never got around to coloring." Actor John Wayne, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, to the right of whom there was only the wall, once couldn't stand it and wrote a letter to presidential candidate Reagan (1976), asking him to "stop brainwashing Americans with all sorts of nonsense" (Reagan didn't pay any attention to it at all, although they knew each other, were friends for some time, and even starred in the same film). It's boring to even mention other "little things": Reagan seriously stated that there is no equivalent to the word "freedom" in Russian; that a ballistic missile can be returned "to the stable" after launch; that he personally participated in the liberation of concentration camp prisoners (yes, he told Simon Wiesenthal this), and so on and so forth. In terms of "blockheadedness," Reagan surpassed ALL US presidents from the beginning of the 20th century to this day. There were intellectuals, middle class people, simpletons, warriors, businessmen – but they were all smarter than Reagan. There is another contender for the title of the dumbest president, George W. Bush – but he is also far from Reagan. Even Reagan’s supporters and admirers admit that he was charming, practical, witty – but to call him smart is somehow… well, that’s understandable. True, they add, “this did not prevent him from being a great president.” Well, for admirers, of course, an idol is always whiter than snow, and, in general, there are people who consider Gorbachev a great statesman (this is not a joke), so what now, should we take their word for it? Although, as for the medical definition – well, that’s another matter… The famous neuropsychologist Eichon Goldberg (a Reagan fan, by the way) diagnosed him with signs of impending dementia back in the mid-1980s (although Reagan was officially diagnosed only in 1994). So, in his second term, America was apparently ruled by a man with a fading consciousness. In any case, whether he had dementia at the time or not, equating Wehrmacht soldiers with Holocaust victims (see the Britburg incident) or jokes like “The bombing [of Russia] will begin in five minutes” reveal him as a man who can hardly be described as anything other than a “moron.”

Like any person with limited intelligence, Reagan treated smart people with suspicion, and sometimes even with hostility. It's at the level of instinct - the so-called "ordinary people" immediately feel unkindly wary of those who "are you the smartest or something?" Anyone who had the chance to serve in the Soviet army in the same platoon with Kubanoids, Rostovites and other left-bank farmstead bulls will instantly understand what I'm talking about, it's not forgotten. Reagan was one of those.

This makes him akin to Khrushchev, another complete fool. There's a real problem there, Nikita Sergeyevich was some kind of monstrous blockhead. A sycophant, a toady, a magnificent intriguer, vindictive, cruel, uncouth and ill-mannered - and a complete fool at that. During his ten years at the helm, he managed to turn all layers of the country's population against himself (that is, everyone: workers, peasants, the army, party organs, diplomats, ministers, security officials, scientists, creative workers - totally) - and when, finally, he was kicked out into retirement, from which the country sighed with relief, he sulked in resentment until his death, not understanding why and how he was offended so much. Yes, for the same reason. And Khrushchev especially did not like the "smart ones" (as they did him). The intelligentsia shook from him, as if on a vibration stand. It is clear that in front of him they almost crawled on all fours and were ready to kiss his feet - by the way, the most foot-kissing ones during perestroika began to scream with all their might about their "dissidence from early childhood", trying to cover up the shameful episodes of their biography with the volume of their screams. Nikita paid the intelligentsia back in kind - his verdict: "Faggots!" will remain for centuries. Although here we must admit honestly - a rare case when Khrushchev was 100% right; faggots, Nikita Sergeyevich, they are the most, and what kind!

Naturally, he treated the human resource of these faggots ... intellectuals - students - with poorly concealed hostility. A fact known to every film critic - during Nikita's entire reign, there were practically no positive images of students on the screen, you have to look for them with a magnifying glass. Gaidai's Shurik is already Brezhnev's time. "Peers" by V. Ordynsky has the most indirect relationship to students, there Kira and Tatyana serve as cardboard decorations, and the emphasis is on exposing the morally decaying Svetlana (who also failed her exams). "In a good hour" by V. Eisymont - again about those who flew past the university. "Colleagues" (A. Sakharov) and "My Younger Brother" (A. Zarkhi) are out of the question. With great difficulty, "Silence" (V. Basov) can be added here - but even there, student Uvarov turns out to be the main villain and bastard; and the expelled positive hero Vokhmintsev is no longer considered a student. And the film, in general, is not about how to go from session to session. There is also "The City Lights" by Vengerov, but there the main character, experiencing the drama, is only preparing for admission. So there are two exceptions: "Newton Street, Building 1" (T. Vulfovich) and "Come Tomorrow" (E. Tashkov). But that's all. Once again - being a villager and a ragul (even if he went to the proletariat), Khrushchev did not like impudent youth.

And then we return to Reagan...

= = Pause= =

In general, this is an interesting option for fans of alternative history. Khrushchev and Reagan turned out to be quite separated in time - a difference of 17 years is serious. When NS was sent into retirement, RR was not even a governor yet. But if we imagine that one was born a little later, and the other - a little earlier ... The option when both become the leaders of their countries. Well, the fact that they would instantly recognize a kindred spirit in each other is understandable, a fool sees a fool from afar. And then ... either they would have established coexistence (it is sometimes easier for fools to come to an agreement), or, on the contrary, they would have butted heads so much that the world would literally crack, there would have been enough nuclear bombs. But these are just thoughts.

== Pause is over ==

We return to Reagan - who not only did not like students, but did not consider them people. On April 30, 1970, California Governor Ronald Reagan, speaking about the student protests that were happening all over the country, called the students “brats,” “nuts,” and “cowardly fascists.” He also threatened that “this policy of appeasement with the students must end” and “if it means a bloodbath, so be it!” Boom! Four days later, on May 5, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed students at Kent State University, leaving 4 dead and 9 wounded. A week later, under pressure from the press, Reagan mumbled that “bloodbath” was just a figure of speech, and only neurotics could take his words seriously.

Even when he was just running for Governor of California, candidate Reagan categorically stated that the University of California at Berkeley must be cleansed of hippies, members of the Free Speech Movement and other radicals - kick them out once and for all. It is necessary, he declared, to pass a law on checking the teaching staff for affiliation with communists. Reagan's calls for a "firm hand" were heard - he won. And literally from the first second, the newly-minted head of the state began to:

- push through a law on ending free education in colleges and universities of the state (in those that were under the jurisdiction of the state itself, this did not apply to private universities);
- demand an annual reduction in the education budget by 20%;
- block the allocation of funds for the construction of new buildings on campuses;
- dismissal of particularly distinguished professors, such as Clark Kerr, president of UoC-B;
- and finally, here and there, it is necessary to declare that “the state must stop this vicious practice of allocating money to God knows who to satisfy their intellectual curiosity.”

The latter deserves special mention. Young people don't remember, but those who lived through the infamous "perestroika" and retained a good memory can confirm that the nasty phrase "science is a way to satisfy your curiosity at the state's expense" began to gain popularity in the late 1980s. The cooperators adored it, but it's understandable, they saw nothing but money and considered everyone but themselves to be idiots - and then "new Russians" sprouted from this manure, picking up the same tune. (They are not the only ones - the once popular writer A. Bushkov chewed over this phrase in his first books in every possible way, mocking scientists. Then for some reason he suddenly stopped and now pretends that nothing happened). What this phrase led to is well known. Now, probably, no one will say how many scientific schools were destroyed in Russia with the beginning of market reforms, research centers disappeared, fundamental research was ruined, the theoretical base was killed and scientific and practical enterprises were destroyed. We will keep silent about human losses: candidates of science became shuttle traders or traded for pennies at the market - that is, if they were lucky. Those who were not so lucky - they filled the cemeteries all over the vast. Yes, yes, precisely because of the adopted phrase about curiosity and the state account, which zero to zero coincides with Reagan's. However, our reformers did not hide their admiration for the Great (!) American (!) President (!), pronouncing his name with passionate bated breath.

As governor, Reagan fought not only against higher education - he methodically killed primary education, all the time cutting funds. The result was an increase in local taxes and the total destruction of the state's public school system. Classes swelled, textbooks were not updated, buildings were falling apart, and teachers did not know what to do - quit or shoot themselves. When the Los Angeles teachers' union took to the streets demanding an end to this disgusting behavior, Reagan did not bat an eye. When he became governor, California's education system was the best in the United States. When he left this post, it became the worst. But! Reagan was idolized by Republicans - our man, they said! The secret is simple: his supporters simply did not notice public schools - they received their education exclusively in private schools and universities.

Yes, it's worth mentioning. Before Reagan became governor, California residents didn't pay tuition at state-funded universities - education was free for them. They only paid incidental costs ($84 per year), while non-residents paid $300 per year for tuition. And then it went crazy: 1968 - "registration" costs of $300 per year for everyone, tuition for non-residents - $1,200; 1970 - to this is added $150 per year as an "education fee"; 1974 - the education budget was only 32% fulfilled; 1975 - annual tuition for residents - $630, for non-residents - $2,130. In 2023, the fee for residents was $14,000. And that, too, is Reagan’s legacy: by forcing universities to raise tuition, he launched the “student debt” process. Today, 43 million Americans are burdened with it. Not to mention that under Reagan, the road to higher education was largely closed to the working class and minorities of color. (There was something about “cooks’ children” before, don’t you recall?)

Incidentally, Reagan himself considered the poor to be stupid. Speaking to students at one of the (private) schools in May 1986, he said, “I don’t believe that anyone in America is starving because they are denied food or have no access to food. It’s simply because they don’t know where or how to get [nutrition] help.” Well, he didn’t directly call the poor stupid – but his words clearly implied that the poor remain poor because they choose to be that way. A week later he said it openly on air: "...we have people who choose to sleep on cardboard boxes, to be homeless - just because they chose it." Well, yes, in the middle of winter (and winters in the US can be harsh) people choose to sleep in a refrigerator box wrapped in newspaper; such fools, really.

Reagan's supporters try to keep quiet about the fact that during the presidential campaign he advocated the total abolition of the US Department of Education, the cessation of teaching subjects in Spanish ("let them learn English"), and generally a reduction in the role of the federal government in education matters, delegating these issues to the states. Having entered the White House, the first thing he did was to start cutting the education budget. When he handed over the reins of power to George Bush, the budget was half of the original: in 1981, 12% of all money was allocated to education, in 1989 - only 6%. When, after leaving office, he was once asked which of his deeds (excluding foreign policy) he considered to be the most outstanding, he answered: "Optimization of the education system." He was proud of this for the rest of his life. (Or maybe he was not proud - dementia set in rather quickly). A good word - "optimization". Sounds good. Beautiful. It is not for nothing that all sorts of managers, MBA holders, heads of companies and generally "successful and accomplished people" adore it. Normal people firmly know and remember that the use of "optimization" in its consequences, if inferior to genocide, then not by much. Of two evils - a nuclear explosion or optimization - they will choose the first: at least there is a chance to survive. With "optimization" - no. This creation of darkness always turns a person into a statistical unit and dispassionately writes off as a loss.

In general and as a whole. Governor Reagan destroyed the educational system of the state of California. President Reagan brought down the general educational system in America. And - the fruits of this are now manifested in all their glory. The general level of education and intelligence in the USA over these years (about 40 years) has fallen - and continues to fall, this process is unstoppable. No, individual geniuses and outstanding people appear in the USA, no one argues. But if you take the average number, the general mass of people - the picture is sad. And this same half-educated mediocrity is now penetrating all spheres of American life, like ink spreading across pink blotting paper. In fact, it has already penetrated – it’s just that the process is now picking up speed. And since no part of society can be isolated from the others – we have this same mediocrity in American politics (foreign and domestic), and in education, and in production, and in the armed forces, and in culture – everywhere. And we will have to (and, in fact, already have to) deal with it. Including on the foreign policy track. Fun years are ahead.

Around 2003, I came across an article on some American resource called something like “The Decline and Destruction of American Education.” In 2011, during a long flight, reading Time and Newsweek bought at the airport, I found roughly the same materials in them – articles in both places on the topic of “Why are we getting dumber?” Needless to say, similar material (and more than one) was easily found on the Internet in 2021.

There is a simple rule, proven by time: if you hit education with a wrench, then in a few decades the population will be pigs. There have been no exceptions to this, there are none and there will not be. Once again: if you do vivisection on education under the guise of reforms, then in a generation or two you will get a herd of Pithecanthropus. So tell them about optimization and good intentions.

But then the morning came, and Scheherazade stopped her permitted speeches…

https://t.me/amadoda/826 - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9619696.html

Google Translator

And you can be sure that Trump's attitude towards public education is similar. After all, it is clear that he skated through his education, he knew he didn't really need it, he was rich enough and therefore confident that he knew it all...
"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 Jan 21, 2025 4:46 pm

Trump Is No Traitor to His Class
January 20, 2025

Arrayed around him in the Capitol’s rotunda for his inauguration were people with more blood on their hands than every serial killer in U.S. history, says John Wight.

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Donald Trump delivering his second inaugural address on Monday. (C-Span)

By John Wight
Special to Consortium News

Leaders who assume power promising a “new golden age” have littered human history since the beginning of time. From Alexander the Great to Julius Ceasar, Augustus, Napoleon Bonaparte, Otto von Bismarck, Adolf Hitler — for such historical and historic figures megalomania and grandiosity have walked hand-in-hand on the road to hell.

In our time we have Donald J. Trump, the newly sworn in 47th president of the United States. Technically a convicted felon, Trump with his re-election represents America with its mask of propriety removed.

Yet, in grim irony, arrayed around him in the Capitol’s rotunda for his inauguration were people with more blood on their hands than every serial killer in U.S. history. There they were — the Clintons; former President Barack Obama, George W. Bush et al. — war criminals all yet with the temerity to regard Trump as an outlier.

Trump’s real crime is that he refuses to play the patriot game. An isolationist and white supremacist by inclination and instinct, for such as he is, the real enemy is at home on the American continent.

The Gulf of Mexico is to be renamed the Gulf of America. The Panama Canal will be restored to U.S. ownership. Canada is to be brought to heel via trade tariffs. Illegal migrants are to be hunted down and deported. The U.S. Justice Department is to be cleansed of rogue elements. As are the intelligence services.

Further afield, peace in the world has been declared. President Vladimir Putin and Russia will be respected as a strong leader and country, not derided as an official enemy, while those Europeans who have been sucking at the teat of U.S. largesse vis-a-vis NATO have been put on notice. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

Does Trump’s re-election bring with it the promise of a new dawn when it comes to U.S. foreign policy? If the rhetoric and bombast is to be believed, it would seem so.

But here’s the thing — John F. Kennedy arguably attempted to steer a similar course when he entered the White House and ended up with two in the head.

If Trump and his people really are serious about “draining the swamp,” they’d better buckle up, because the huge vested interests in the maintenance of the status quo ante at the apex of power — economic, military, judicial — in America will not go quietly into that good night.

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From left in front row during the inaugural address on Monday: Outgoing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. From left over Harris’ shoulder in second row: former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and former President George W. Bush. (C-Span)

That Trump has a mandate is not in doubt. Republican control of both the House and the Senate gives his administration the launchpad to implement just about anything it desires at this juncture. The first 100 days is traditionally when a “change administration” makes its mark. Think Abraham Lincoln, think Franklin D. Roosevelt — presidents who changed the course of history did so within this precious window of time

The underestimation of Trump by his establishment detractors has been the story of his foray into politics. First they laughed and ridiculed, then they scorned, and finally they tried to destroy him in the courts.

None of it worked. Why? Simply because like or loathe him, he understands America more than they ever could from the vantage point of a Washington insider’s establishment bubble, which by the time he came on the scene was despised across the country’s heartlands with the passionate intensity of a Yeats poem.

America as a nation is sick with division, hate and alienation. Nothing makes sense anymore. The chasm between the ostentation of the nation’s billionaire class and the lived experience of those denied healthcare due to a lack of means is so wide that when Luigi Mangione allegedly assassinated healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in December last year, the sense that justice rather than murder had been done was palpable.

If Mangione represents revolution in the name of the put-upon masses, Trump represents nativism in the name of distraction. He wants Americans to punch down at illegal migrants rather than up at rogue billionaires and corporate CEOs.

Unlike FDR, Trump is no traitor to his class. His ability to posture as an anti-establishment man of the people is merely a metric of how cowed the masses have become in this time of late stage capitalist chaos. It’s all guns and God and God and guns. White is right and brown is down.

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U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump in November 2024. (Office of Speaker Mike Johnson, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Which brings us to Elon Musk. That this ketamine-addled billionaire and product of white South Africa has been able to get within such proximity to power in Washington; this only confirms the veracity of the adage that when a clown enters the palace, the palace becomes a circus.

The man is a crackpot and crank combined, a Bond villain straight outta Central Casting. “Department of Government Efficiency?” It sounds positively Orwellian. Be ready for swinging cuts to social programs — to welfare, Medicaid and Obama’s Affordable Care Act — all in the name of efficiency.

Be ready for tax breaks for the rich and attacks on the working class and labor movement. Be ready for anything actually. Musk will take up his post like a sorcerer conducting experiments in a laboratory of the damned.

The issue is not “efficiency,” the issue is not “weak leadership,” the issue is not “making America great again.”

The issue is an economic and value system that has reduced the human experience to mere dollars and cents, resulting in the mass alienation cultivated thereby.

The issue is the normalization of genocide in Gaza in the name of ethno-supremacy and ethno-fascism.

The issue is war in Ukraine in the name of hegemony and imperialism not sovereignty.

Trump does not possess solutions, only questions. When Father Georgy Gapon led the poor bedraggled masses to the Tsar’s palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, he did so in the belief that one man had it within his gift to transform the lives of his subjects if only they believed in the concept of a saviour.

Trump has managed to bewitch his own subjects with the idea that he is their saviour.

Their disappointment is guaranteed.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/20/t ... his-class/

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Trump lifts US sanctions on extremist Israeli settlers as pogroms ravage occupied West Bank

Settlers set fire to Palestinian homes and vehicles in the West Bank in protest against the Gaza ceasefire, which Trump said he is ‘not confident’ about

News Desk

JAN 21, 2025

Image
(Photo credit: AFP)
US President Donald Trump has removed sanctions previously imposed on illegal extremist settlers in the occupied West Bank, just hours after his inauguration on 20 January and as part of his first executive orders.

The White House announced the “recission” of “Executive Order 14115 of 1 February 2024 (Imposing Certain Sanctions on Persons Undermining Peace, Security, and Stability in the West Bank).”

Israeli Finance Minister and Religious Zionist party leader Bezalel Smotrich welcomed Trump’s decision.


“I sincerely thank President Donald Trump for his just decision to lift the sanctions imposed by the Biden administration against settlers and activists in right-wing organizations. These sanctions were a severe and blatant foreign intervention in Israel’s internal affairs and an unjustified violation of democratic principles and the mutual respect that should guide relations between friendly nations,” he said via X.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir also welcomed “the historic decision of incoming US President Donald Trump to lift the sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on the settlers of Judea and Samaria,” calling it the “righting of an injustice.”

The order was signed by the administration of former president Joe Biden in February 2024.

Trump is popular among Israel’s far-right settler movement due to his policies – which in his last term saw the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights and the moving of the US Embassy to Jerusalem. It has been heavily anticipated that Trump will support Israeli ambitions for annexation of the West Bank.

On the eve of his inauguration, Israeli settlers carried out large-scale attacks on the villages of Al-Funduq and Jinsafut, east of Qalqilya in the occupied West Bank, setting fire to Palestinian homes, vehicles, and shops.


Earlier that evening, Israel shuttered dozens of checkpoints and entrances into the West Bank and carried out a massive campaign of arbitrary arrests, detaining over 60 Palestinians.

Israeli settlers also rampaged through several Palestinian towns in the West Bank on 19 January in a show of anger at the ceasefire deal in Gaza – which has so far seen the release of three Israeli captives in exchange for 90 Palestinians.

Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered the release of all settlers in administrative detention, in line with an announcement made in November.

Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and their extremist settler follower base are opposed to the deal. National Security Minister Ben Gvir has announced his resignation from the government as a result.

Trump said on Monday he was “not confident” about the ceasefire in Gaza. According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both Trump and Biden assured Israel that it has the right to continue the war on the strip.

The Israeli army signaled on 20 January that it has ordered preparation for a possible resumption of fighting in Gaza. Israel has already violated the ceasefire, injuring several civilians with gunfire, including a child. The army also said it is preparing for “major operations” in the West Bank.

Israeli troops began a mass operation in Jenin on Tuesday, after the PA reportedly ended its six-week siege on the city.

https://thecradle.co/articles/trump-lif ... -west-bank

******

Suddenly Hitler
January 21, 13:36

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Elon Musk says accusations that he publicly gave the Nazi salute are part of a "Sudden Hitler"-style campaign by Democrats to discredit him.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9623240.html

Google Translator

This guy is a dangerous freak. Just waiting for the fall out when Trump dumps on EVs...

******

What is good for the U.S. is also good for Elon Musk, and vice versa

Eduardo Vasco

January 20, 2025

Nothing has changed in the last 70 years. Only that GM has given way to Tesla.]

The United States is experiencing “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few super-rich people,” that is, an “oligarchy.” This is how President Joe Biden addressed American citizens in his farewell speech from the White House, broadcast on national television. Indirectly referring to the billionaires linked to Donald Trump, he declared that their “extreme wealth, power, and influence” are “literal” threats to democracy.

Since all the misfortunes that have been occurring in the U.S. and around the world are attributed exclusively to the far right, it is hidden, however, that this concentration of power and wealth has been going on for a long time and is nothing new. The conclusion of the bourgeois revolution with the unification of the country after the civil war meant the transition of power from the agrarian bourgeoisie, linked to the Democratic Party, to the industrial bourgeoisie, represented by the Republican Party. Already at that time, the great capitalist monopolies that would control U.S. politics to this day were being formed.

“The Rockefellers in oil, the Carnegies and Fricks in steel, the Morgans in banking, or the Harrimans and Hills in railroads—these were the men who had an influential voice in the Republican Party, and also in the Democratic Party, from 1865 to 1901,” wrote historian Arthur S. Link. “They financed political campaigns and received government rewards in the form of concessions for public services, land, tax exemptions, or tariff protections.”

After World War II—in which the U.S. entry was a necessity for these monopolies—the concentration of political power by the monopolies was consolidated. When he came to power in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower filled his cabinet with representatives of the big companies: Charles Wilson, of General Motors, for the Pentagon; George Humphrey, of M.A. Hanna Steel Company, for the Treasury; Sinclair Weeks, an industrialist, for Commerce; Arthur Summerfield, from the automobile industry, for the Post and Telegraph Office; Ezra Taft Benson, from the agricultural markets, for Agriculture; and the wealthy corporate lawyer John Foster Dulles for the State Department. Together with Douglas McKay, from the Interior, and Herbert Brownell, from Justice, they formed a cabinet that was described by the New Republic as having “eight millionaires and a fireman.” The fireman was Secretary of Labor Martin Durkin, a union leader from the American Firemen and Plumbers Association. A few months later, Durkin would be replaced by the big retailer James Mitchell, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare would be created under the responsibility of Oveta Culp Hobby, wife of the communications entrepreneur William P. Hobby.

Perhaps one of the governments most famous for its relationship with the “oligarchy,” as Biden put it, was that of George W. Bush. As an oil businessman himself (in addition to his contacts with other areas, such as arms), his vice president was Dick Cheney (an oil businessman), whose wife worked on the board of the arms giant Lockheed. Donald Rumsfeld, who was his Secretary of Defense (and also Gerald Ford’s), had businesses in the pharmaceutical and electronics industries, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was an advisor to Chevron. It is no surprise that many of the companies directly linked to the Bush Jr. administration were among the major beneficiaries of the invasion of Iraq.

The great businessman of the Trump administration

Donald Trump returns to the United States government maintaining this tradition. A tycoon with businesses in various sectors (from real estate to entertainment), he has appointed major businesspersons to key positions (Scott Bessent for Treasury; Linda McMahon for Education; Howard Lutnick for Commerce; Chris Wright for Energy; Doug Burgum for Interior; Susi Willes to head the White House and Steven Witkoff for the Middle East). But the big name will not occupy an official position: Elon Musk will be in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, to reduce public spending by a third.

The richest man in the world and the largest donor to Trump’s campaign (220 million dollars), Musk has become so close to the new president that he has already become a target of the most radical MAGA ideologues, such as Steve Bannon, who accused him of betraying Trumpism by defending the possibility of increasing the immigration of skilled workers to work in his companies, receiving lower wages and filling the vacancies of American workers. The technology billionaire also upset the traditional sectors of the military-industrial complex when he proposed to the government that Lockheed’s arms contracts be replaced by drones developed in Silicon Valley.

In fact, Musk will not have contracts with the U.S. government after Trump’s second term. Since Joe Biden, SpaceX has been building a network of spy satellites for intelligence agencies and the Pentagon. Outside the United States, Musk began investing in the extraction of Argentine lithium to supply Tesla. Since then, he has also become friends with Javier Milei and supported his election, apparently in exchange for Argentine lithium concessions. In a TV show after being elected, Milei revealed that Musk was “extremely interested in Argentine lithium”, assuring that he would change the country’s legislation to guarantee “a legal framework that respects the property rights” of the businessman and other American companies. Shortly after, Milei also announced the “deregulation of satellite internet services to allow the entry of companies like Starlink”.

This is certainly one of the reasons for Trump’s rapprochement with Milei. A few years ago, Musk also revealed that he had supported the 2019 coup in Bolivia, which has the world’s largest lithium reserves. “We will coup whoever we want,” he posted at the time. This history, combined with recent tensions with President Lula and the Brazilian Supreme Court, raises alarm bells about the imminent possibility of Brazil being one of the next in line for the coups mentioned by Musk. Bolsonaro’s supporters are desperate to return to government and replace the Chinese automakers that recently arrived in the country with Tesla, as well as to ensure that the Chinese company SpaceSail, which signed contracts with Telebrás, is eliminated from the competition with Starlink.

Judging by his frequent statements that go far beyond the area of spending cuts, for which Musk was appointed by Trump, the owner of X both influences and expresses the opinion of the president himself and sectors of his new government. Even wealthy countries such as Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom have been the target of Musk’s greed, as he supports the annexation of the former and the rise of the far right in the governments of the other two. All these cases, both in the Americas and in Europe, reveal an aggressive interventionist policy – a tendency of part of the new Trump administration, divided between isolationists and conservative “internationalists”. It is logical that this aggressiveness is not motivated by any ideology, but rather by the need for profits of Musk and other businessmen in the Trump administration.

Charles Wilson, a large shareholder in General Motors who was appointed Secretary of Defense by Eisenhower, declared during his Senate hearing in 1953: “What is good for the country is also good for General Motors and vice versa.” In this sense, nothing has changed in the last 70 years. Only that GM has given way to Tesla.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... ice-versa/

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How Trump 2.0 Could Herald a New Age of Authoritarian Capitalism
Posted on January 21, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. It seemed appropriate to go with the news flow and thus provide an extra helping of Trump coverage. Please filter out the upset in the opening paragraphs about the right wing around the world being a threat to democracy, as opposed to things like social services and liberalized immigration. The article provides a wide-ranging review that is generally useful.

As for the “right wing” trope, as former ambassador Chas Freeman pointed out, Iran has a guided democracy much like the US (as in some subjects are not open for discussion, here such as our fondness for regime change operations around the world). So what amounts to a democracy is very much in the eye of the beholder, particularly given the overturning of elections in Romania and the Collective West extolling Zelensky, who has outlawed opposition parties, banned opposition media, and is still in office only by virtue of declaring martial law, as some sort of model And as a proof of how “democratic” US democracy is in practice, progressive policies like taxing the rich, strong workplace safety rules, and improving Social Security have for decades gotten substantial majorities in polls, yet are non-starters or get only token gestures in terms of policy action.


However, the Trump and then Melania memecoin grifts are so beyond the pale as to confirm the worst fears of Trump critics, at least as far as plutocratic abuses are concerned. Some readers in comments argued that the crypto community viewed the Trump coin issuance with alarm. Memecoins are the most rube-exploitative products and the Trump ripoff would discredit crypto rather than help more it towards acceptance as a normal commercial instrument.

As reader Verethragna pointed out yesterday in comments on Lambert’s memecoin post:

In any sane country, Trump would be in prison for blatant fraud and corruption on a massive scale. (In China, he would have received the death penalty for corruption, embezzlement, etc. a very long time ago. To be clear, the same goes for most members of the Biden family too.) But successive US administrations have decided that pump-and-dump schemes are perfectly within the law as long as they involve cryptocurrencies, and also the Supreme Court has confirmed that presidents are above the law anyway.

Lambert’s headline observation, that the massive, shameless Trump scam offends the norms fairy is likely to prove more significant abroad than here. It completely negates any pretense that the US operates under the rule of law, as opposed to sheer muscle and positional advantage. It will strengthen the position of Trump opponents in Europe, even the weak Kier Starmer, who seems to be trying to elevate the UK to a leadership role in thwarting Trump via his barmy 100 year napkin-doodle deal with Ukraine. That pact, however, does give the UK a pole position in jockeying to be the home of the upcoming Ukraine government-in-exile.

I am not even remotely an expert on foreign regulation of crypto currency, but the Trump memecoin could also lead foreign governments to try to restrict non-government, or alternatively, non-domestically-issued crypto. Keep in mind the US has more IRS crypto compliance kicking in in 2025 and 2026. From The Currency
Analytics:

As part of an effort to ensure greater tax compliance, the IRS is implementing new reporting standards for centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. Beginning in 2025, these platforms, including custodial wallet providers and certain payment processors, will be mandated to submit transaction data through a new form: the 1099-DA. This form will include a comprehensive record of digital asset purchases, and transfers…

While the new reporting rules will apply to all crypto transactions starting in 2025, reporting the cost basis—the original purchase price of a digital asset—will not be required until the 2026 tax year. For investors, this delay could lead to complications, especially since cost basis is crucial for determining gains or losses on sold assets.

See also CNN: Many crypto investors’ transactions this year will be reported to the IRS for first time. KPMG has reported that the IRS expects the new crypto 1099s to exceed the total number of 1099s now issued.

The OECD also is moving along with crypto reporting as indicated by an October 2024 document on IT implementation.

Now to the main event.

By Laurie Macfarlane, a co-director at Future Economy Scotland and a Fellow at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). He was formerly economics editor at openDemocracy and a senior economist at the New Economics Foundation. Originally published at openDemocracy

After four years of narrowly avoiding prison, Donald Trump is back in the White House. For many observers outside the US, the re-election of a convicted felon who tried to illegally overturn an election is baffling.

But Trump’s second victory was no fluke – and nor was it merely the result of Russian interference or ‘deplorable’voters. Although Trump left formal politics in 2021, the forces that brought him to power did not. This time, he is entering office far better organised, far stronger, and with a more diverse political base.

Trump is also not alone: across the West, right-wing populism is on the march, while progressive parties continue to find themselves on the back foot. In an increasingly unstable world, the rising tide of the authoritarian right poses huge challenges for the global economy. Left unchecked, it has the potential to imperil peace, prosperity and the planet.

To fully assess the threat this right-wing populism poses, and how to counter it, we must carefully assess the conditions under which Trump is assuming power – as well as the plans he has for wielding it. Like all political developments, Trump’s dramatic return has not happened in a vacuum. Instead, it must be viewed in the context of a series of profound political and economic shifts that are reshaping the face of Western capitalism.

Red Dragon Rising

Following China’s entry into the global trading system in 2001, many economists in the West assumed that China’s state-capitalist model would deliver some catch-up growth, then quickly run out of steam. The theory was that while state-led systems can be effective at rapidly mobilising existing resources, they struggle to drive productivity growth and innovation. This, it was thought, would eventually force China to open up its economy and embrace liberal democracy.

However, China’s achievements to date have made such pronouncements look remarkably naive. Not only has liberal democracy not arrived in the People’s Republic, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has developed a distinct economic model that has lifted nearly a billion people out of poverty and transformed the country into one of the world’s largest and most dynamic economies. Somewhat ironically, it is Western governments that have had to adapt to China’s model – not the other way around. In recent years, China’s successes have forced Western governments to pivot away from free market orthodoxy and resuscitate muscular industrial policy, which had long been banished from Western policy toolkits.

The importance of China’s spectacular rise to Trump’s victory in 2016 cannot be overstated. At a time when most Americans felt the economy simply wasn’t working, Trump offered a clear albeit false diagnosis of the problems – China and immigration – and an aggressive strategy for dealing with them, when the Democrats were doing neither. His aim was to stand up to China, bring back jobs and put ‘America first’. His weapon of choice, tariffs, marked a major break with the neoliberal consensus of recent decades. Protectionism was back, spearheaded by the world’s largest economic and military power.

But in reality, Trump’s ‘trade war’ was never about trade or jobs. As I wrote back in 2020, it was primarily a response to US fears of losing technological supremacy in the face of successful Chinese industrial policy. From the very beginning, the ‘trade war’ was less about trade, and more about constraining Chinese development and preventing China’s rise as a rival technological power.

Since Trump’s exit from the White House in 2021, this ‘return of the state’ in Western economies has accelerated, fuelled by two other forces. The first has been a global ramping up of action to tackle the climate crisis. As a growing number of countries have embraced net zero targets, many have enacted new industrial policies to try and bolster capabilities to compete in emerging green supply chains. The second factor was the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw governments intervene in economies on an unprecedented scale. In order to contain the economic fallout, Western countries ripped up the neoliberal playbook in favour of widespread state planning and cash transfers. While the promises to ‘build back better’ inevitably rang hollow, many governments and businesses did act to bolster domestic supply chains in an attempt to address the chronic lack of resilience the pandemic exposed.

Acutely aware of these challenges, in 2021 the incoming Joe Biden administration sought to break with the economic consensus of his Democrat predecessors. Not only did Biden keep most of Trump’s tariffs on China, he increased them. His administration then embarked on the US’s most significant experiment with industrial policy for decades.

The key pillar of so-called ‘Bidenomics’ was the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Despite its name, the IRA was not primarily about reducing inflation. Instead, it launched the biggest investment programme in modern American history to revitalise the economy, enhance energy security, and tackle the climate crisis. The package included large tax breaks and subsidies to bolster US manufacturing capacity, and wean the US away from Chinese imports. In practice, the IRA was a significantly watered-down version of Biden’s initial ‘Build Back Better’ agenda, which, in addition to ambitious climate spending, also proposed trillions of additional dollars on social spending in areas such as housing, childcare and healthcare, as well as more progressive tax hikes. This agenda was blocked by Republicans and conservative Democratic senators, who also secured big giveaways to the fossil fuel industry.

Nonetheless, the IRA represented a significant step change in the ideological outlook of the world’s largest economy. It also posed new challenges for China, particularly as some policies were explicitly designed to discourage companies from using Chinese components. In a remarkable role-reversal, in May 2024 China lodged a complaint against the US at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), arguing that IRA subsidies “distort fair competition”.

On the basis of conventional economic metrics, Bidenomics appeared to be working. Following the pandemic, US economic growth outperformed peer nations, business investment soared, and unemployment remained low. The problem was that Americans simply weren’t feeling it. A big reason for this was inflation, which surged across the world as economies reopened after the pandemic, and Russia invaded Ukraine. Although in the US, inflation had fallen to less than 3% by the time of last year’s election, the damage had been done. Under Biden’s leadership, real earnings had fallen and satisfaction with the economy tumbled. Months before the presidential election, more than half of Americans wrongly believed the US was experiencing a recession, according to a poll for The Guardian. The consequences of this disconnect between buoyant economic statistics and peoples’ lived experiences were fatal. As economist Isabella Weber put it in the New York Times: “Unemployment weakens governments. Inflation kills them.”

As for Biden’s programme of green reindustrialisation, it didn’t quite live up to its promise. Although the IRA successfully catalysed billions of investments in clean energy, the immediate impact on jobs and living standards was modest. Since 2020, the number of manufacturing and construction jobs in the US economy has increased by around 800,000. While this might sound impressive, it amounts to less than 0.5% of the total workforce.

This does not mean the IRA should be seen as a failure – far from it. Investment takes time to deliver returns, and ironically it will be Trump who reaps the political rewards when they start to materialise. But these statistics also reveal a significant flaw in Biden’s approach to industrial policy. In the 21st century, most Americans do not work in manufacturing and construction, and likely never will. They don’t care much for semiconductors, nor do they pay much attention to GDP growth and business investment. What they care about is whether their life is getting better or worse. The initial Build Back Better agenda recognised this, while the watered-down IRA did not.

Trumpism 2.0

While Bidenomics failed to get its namesake re-elected, it played a crucial role in putting industrial policy back on the global agenda. Though this is long overdue, it is a mistake to think that a more interventionist state always pushes politics in a progressive direction. What really matters is who wins and who loses from these interventions. In other words: who are these interventions really designed to serve?

Seen through this lens, Trump’s vision for the role of the state looks rather different. He has already vowed to kill the IRA’s climate measures, referring to the act as “the greatest scam in the history of any country”. In its place, Trump has a new plan for industrial policy: “drill, baby, drill”. He has also pledged to deliver “the largest deportation operation in American history”, targeting millions of undocumented migrants whom he says are “poisoning the blood” of the US – and using the military to do so if necessary. The long-term economic impact of such a move would be severe, with some analyses estimating it could reduce annual US GDP by up to 7%, or nearly $1.7trn.

As a means of flexing American economic muscle globally, Trump has also promised to double down on tariffs, pledging to impose blanket 10-20% duties on all US imports and 60% on goods from China. In a sign of creeping paranoia that some countries may act to reduce their reliance on US trade, he recently threatened to impose 100% tariffson the ten nations that form the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates – if they create a currency aiming to challenge the US dollar’s dominance in global trade.

In order to collect the billions in expected tariff revenues, the incoming president also recently announced the creation of a new ‘External Revenue Service’, stating: “Through soft and pathetically weak trade agreements, the American economy has delivered growth and prosperity to the world, while taxing ourselves. It is time for that to change.”

Whether these sharply higher tariffs represent a hard commitment or merely a negotiating tactic remains to be seen. However, it is clear that Trump intends to weaponise the US’s economic clout to strong-arm allies and adversaries alike. ‘America first’ is the aim, while economic warfare is the game, it would appear.

This again would not come without an economic cost – both to the US and its trading partners. Despite being Trump’s flagship policy, it remains unclear whether he knows how tariffs actually work. He has repeatedly insisted that they are paid by “other countries”, when in reality they are a tax on American companies paid when foreign-made goods arrive at the US border.

Perhaps most alarmingly, Trump has taken state interventionism to a whole new level by threatening to seize territoriesbelonging to other sovereign nations. One prime target is Greenland, where the aim is to control its trove of natural resources to guarantee the US’s “economic security”, with a particular focus on rare earth metals. Another is the Panama Canal, which the US ceded control over to Panama in 1977 under President Jimmy Carter. Perhaps most ambitiously, Trump has floated the idea of annexing Canada, describing the two countries’ shared border as an “artificially drawn line” and vowing to use “economic force” to make Canada the 51st US state. The US projecting its power overseas to secure its economic interests is far from new. But rarely has a president been this direct and explicit about it.

The focus on Greenland’s rare earth metals is no accident. China currently dominates global rare earth metal production and has recently restricted the export of critical minerals and associated technologies ahead of Trump’s second term. These elements, which play a critical role in the manufacturing of batteries and countless high-tech products, are quickly becoming one of the most important geopolitical battlegrounds.

With China and the US each taking increasingly aggressive measures to limit the trading of key resources and components, the drift towards a new ‘technological cold war’ – as well as a military hot war – between East and West looks set to accelerate under Trump’s second reign. A partial decoupling of US and Chinese technology ecosystems is already well underway – with the extreme pressure the US applied to the UK government in 2020 to ban Huawei from the UK’s 5G network providing one example. Not unrelatedly, today the UK has among the worst-performing 5G signal in Europe. The recent US clamp down on the Chinese social media app TikTok provides another such example, with US lawmakers moving to ban the app on national security grounds. However, just before taking office Trump – who had previously backed a ban – pledged to delay implementation of the law to allow more time to “make a deal to protect our national security”.

If these trends continue to accelerate, it is possible to imagine a world that is bifurcated into distinct technological ‘zones’. In this scenario, countries would be able to use US technology or Chinese technology – but not both. Each country must pick a side.

A Technological Arms Race

Any further slide towards technological bifurcation between East and West would pose huge challenges for the US and its allies. Whether it is clean energy, electric vehicles or radio communications such as 5G, Chinese companies are rapidly coming to dominate many critical 21st-century markets, in some cases to an extraordinary degree. As such, any further attempt to restrain Chinese technology or exclude Chinese goods from Western markets would have serious economic consequences, while also heightening military tensions. It would also pose existential challenges for China’s economic model, which has long relied on exporting to the US and other Western economies to drive economic growth.

Evidence indicates that China is also rapidly racing ahead to dominate many advanced technologies of the future. It is winning the technological race against the US in 37 of 44 advanced technology fields assessed in the report spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, biotechnology and artificial intelligence, according to a recent study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The study also found there was a high risk of China establishing an effective monopoly in eight technologies – including supercapacitors, 5G and 6G communications, electric batteries, and synthetic biology – while the US enjoyed no such monopoly opportunities. For some technologies, all of the world’s top ten leading research institutions are based in China, which are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the US.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, China’s rapid advancements also extend to deadly weapons technology. While recent Chinese advances in nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles allegedly took US intelligence agencies ‘by surprise’, China has generated over 60% of the world’s high-impact research papers into advanced aircraft engines and hypersonics over the past five years, and currently hosts seven of the world’s top ten research institutions.

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China has produced over 60% of the world’s high-impact research papers into advanced aircraft engines and hypersonics over the past five years
Chart by openDemocracy using data from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute

While China’s rapid advancements have confounded its critics, its economy is far from invincible. Despite the best efforts of the CCP’s latest five-year plan, Chinese economic growth is slowing considerably and is widely expected to fall short of its target this year. Among the reasons for this has been China’s fragile real estate sector, which after decades of debt-fuelled speculation has finally started to unravel. In 2021 China’s largest property developer, Evergrande, defaulted on its debt, with multiple other major developers following closely behind. These defaults forced Beijing to announce an emergency package of support measures to stabilise the sector, which accounts for about a fifth of the country’s economic activity. In many ways, the sector’s woes – soaring debt and slowing growth – have become emblematic of the challenges facing the wider Chinese economy. Sustaining growth in the face of an escalating trade war would require a radical reorientation of China’s economic model, lessening dependence on exports and real estate speculation towards substantially boosting domestic demand.

China’s looming demographic crisis poses another major threat to its economic future. The CCP’s ‘one-child policy’, which was enforced between 1980 and 2015, means its population is currently ageing faster than any other country in modern history. Over the next decade, about 300 million people currently aged between 50 and 60 are set to leave the Chinese workforce. In 2020, there were five workers for every retiree, by 2050 this is expected to fall to 1.6 workers per retiree. The compounding effect of a rapidly contracting labour market, and the associated shrinking tax base, poses huge challenges for future growth and fiscal policy, as well as the provision of pensions and care in old age.

The challenge facing Beijing is therefore stark: can China continue to drive growth and technological advancement in the age of Trumpism 2.0, while staving off financial contagion and a demographic time bomb? China has confounded its critics before – but never before has its outlook looked so uncertain.

Europe’s Predicament

Caught in the crossfire between China and the US, Europe stands at a critical juncture. Lacking the technological dynamism to compete with the world’s two economic superpowers, and with many key industries in decline, European leaders have struggled to respond effectively. To date, its strategy has amounted to a tepid foray into industrial policy through the Green Industrial Plan, which aims to counter the EU’s import dependency for key commodities and technologies.

In a grudging admission that the free-market dogma underpinning the single market might be a barrier to an industrial revival, the European Commission has also relaxed state aid rules, enabling states to provide more generous subsidies for green industries. While these necessary reforms to the single market are long overdue, the ongoing failure to reform the eurozone’s fiscal architecture makes it difficult to see the EU posing a serious threat to US and Chinese technological dominance anytime soon.

For EU leaders, the most pressing issue is the prospect of new tariffs and threats to sovereign European territory. While Europe cannot compete with the US technologically or militarily, as the world’s largest trading bloc it can compete on trade. Reports suggest the European Commission is exploring a ‘carrot and stick’ approach: implementing its own retaliatory tariffs while also pledging to buy more US goods. A trade war between the US and Europe is unlikely to end well for either party, but would be particularly painful for Europe.

Even if transatlantic tariffs are avoided, there is still the question of what to do in relation to China. If Trump follows through with imposing 60% tariffs on Chinese goods, should the EU do the same? If it doesn’t, Europe may face a flood of cheap Chinese goods dumped on its doorstep, further harming domestic producers. Then there is the question of how Europe should respond to the accelerating technological decoupling between East and West. While the EU has taken various steps to try and turbocharge research and innovation in recent years, it still lags significantly behind the US and China. In theory, there is a strong case to be made for Europe to forge its own path, neither bowing to US or Chinese authoritarianism. However, this ambition may be thwarted by challenges closer to home.

In recent years, far-right parties have seen a dramatic surge in support across the continent. Last year France cameinches away from electing Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, while in 2023 the Netherlands elected anIslamophobic populist. Far-right parties continue to make considerable inroads in Germany, Spain, Italy and elsewhere. Many of these parties are in direct contact with Trump’s wider networks and have also received glowing endorsementsfrom billionaire and Trump fanboy Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter). As well as being Trump’s largest donor, Musk has quickly positioned himself as one of the president’s most influential aides. The prospect of escalating transatlantic coordination between the authoritarian right and billionaire egomaniacs represents one of the biggest threats to Europe’s future.

Britain’s Alignment Problem

The challenges faced by the EU are perhaps even more acute in the UK. Brexit was supposed to unleash Britain as a great, swashbuckling trading nation once again. But this fantasy was always rooted in a failure to come to terms with the UK’s rapidly diminishing power in the world. While the EU lacks technological leadership but has considerable trade power, the UK has neither. At a time of growing geopolitical tensions over technology and trade, the UK is a sitting duck.

In the event that Trump does escalate a global trade war, Keir Starmer’s government will likely have to pick a major bloc to align with – or absorb considerable economic pain. This was always the deep irony of Brexit; while it was supposed to be about “taking back control”, the UK was always going to be forced to align with decisions taken by one of the world’s major power blocs, albeit having no control over the rules.

This reality was recently bluntly spelt out by Stephen Moore, one of Trump’s closest economic advisers. “The UK really has to choose between the European economic model of more socialism and the US model, which is more based on a free enterprise system,” Moore told the BBC last year. Moving towards the US model of “economic freedom” would significantly increase the likelihood of securing a US trade deal, he added. However, this would also likely involve bowing to US demands to open up key British markets – such as agriculture and pharmaceuticals – to American competitors. Given the gulf in bargaining power and Trump’s notoriously aggressive deal-making, this would almost certainly not end well for the UK.

Starmer’s government therefore faces an unenviable lose-lose dilemma. Align with the US to avoid tariffs and secure a trade deal, and suffer the deeply unpopular consequences of Trump’s trade conditions, from chlorinated chicken tosignificantly higher NHS drug prices. Or align more closely with the EU once again, and risk plunging the country into civil war over Brexit all over again. Given the present political dynamics in Britain, this could be disastrous for the Labour Party.

While, on paper, the landslide victory Labour secured at last year’s election victory appeared decisive, looks can be deceiving. In reality, the party’s majority was built on incredibly fragile foundations – and the UK is far from immune to the threat of right-wing populism. Since then, election support for the party has plummeted, while support for Nigel Farage’s pro-Brexit Reform party has surged. With the two parties neck and neck in the polls, any attempt to align more closely with the EU would be capitalised on by Reform, likely to devastating effect. Even without this, Reform could be on track to upend British politics in the next election, subverting the traditional two-party system, perhaps with help from an increasingly unhinged Musk.

Global Fractures

China’s global ascendency, combined with the US’s political fracturing, has led some to speculate that we may be witnessing the ‘end of the American century’. Back in 2020, I argued that such premonitions were premature. The two pillars of the US’s global power – military and financial – remained rooted in place.

However, it was clear that the election of Trump in 2016 was eroding the US’s soft power, and its ability to act as the paragon for liberal democracy. Trump’s subsequent attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 election only put this on steroids. Far from being viewed as a successful model to emulate, the US began to resemble a cautionary tale to avoid.

Biden made a conscious effort to repair US prestige on the world stage. “America is back,” he vowed at his first addressto world leaders from the State Department in February 2021. “We are a country that does big things. American diplomacy makes it happen. And our Administration is ready to take up the mantle and lead once again.”

However, polling undertaken in 2021 found that while most people in Europe were happy to see Biden elected, they believed that the US political system was “broken”. Perhaps most alarmingly for US strategists, a majority also believed that China would be more powerful than the US within a decade – and said they would want their country to stay neutral in a conflict between the two superpowers. In the years since, Biden’s international standing has been further stained by his resolute support for Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, which has generated intense animosity towards the US in many parts of the world.

Despite Biden’s efforts, it is likely that a second Trump term will fracture relations in the West further, as tensions relating to tariffs, Ukraine and NATO start to bite. How this plays out remains to be seen, any prolonged souring of relations among Western countries would likely benefit China, and hasten the transfer of global power from West to East.

Meanwhile, the much-vaunted ‘rules-based international order’ looks more fragile than ever before. Under Trump’s first reign, the US pulled funding from multiple UN agencies, withdrew from the Paris Agreement on climate change, and even pulled out of the World Health Organization (WHO) during the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies severely criticised institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, long a critical tool for projecting US power. At the same time, the number of countries turning to Chinese-backed alternatives to fund development projects and joiningChina’s Belt and Road Initiative has continued to grow over the past decade.

In recent months, the ongoing war in the Middle East has exposed the feebleness of international law, with multiple signatory countries openly defying the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister and former defence minister. The US has never become a signatory to the ICC, but Trump previously sanctioned two ICC prosecutors after they began investigating whether US forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan – with secretary of state Mike Pompeo declaring it as a ‘kangaroo court’. At the start of this year, the US House of Representatives voted once again to sanction the ICC in retaliation for its arrest warrants against Israeli leaders.

What Trump’s stance towards such international institutions will be in his second term remains to be seen. But with his “America first” stance unlikely to soften anytime soon, the so-called ‘crisis of multilateralism’ looks set to deepen.

A Global Wake Up Call

Overall it is clear that Trump’s re-election represents a critical turning point for the West. While his first victory represented a high-risk gamble into the unknown, this time Americans fully knew what they were voting for. Far from softening the autocratic tendencies he was widely criticised for, he has doubled down on them.

Towards the end of Trump’s last reign, I argued that the West was being haunted by the spectre of ‘authoritarian capitalism’. The analysis identified three profound economic and political shifts that were reshaping Western economies: a China-induced pivot away from free-market orthodoxy, a clampdown on democratic freedoms, and a rise in state surveillance. Together, these shifts represented a distinct political economy that, if not contained, could usher in a new age of more authoritarian governance.

Thanks to the emerging transatlantic alliance between Trump, the European far-right and billionaire social media moguls, this is a reality we now face. Exactly what Trump will do in power, and whether his far-right allies in Europe will succeed in following his footsteps, is impossible to predict. But we should be under no illusions about the threat that this alliance poses. This is not the same Trumpism that won the election in 2016: it’s an altogether different – and more dangerous – project. How should progressives seek to counter the ascendance of a new authoritarianism?

One thing is clear: stoking anti-China sentiment will not cure the ills of Western capitalism. The roots of these problems, and therefore their solutions, can be found much closer to home. Simply trying to ban or censor voices on the authoritarian right won’t work either. When the voices in question include the US president and the second most popular party in the beating heart of Europe, silencing them isn’t an option (although that hasn’t stopped hundreds of German politicians from trying). Instead, the roots of these problems need to be dealt with at the source. In reality, it is not China or immigrants that are screwing over ordinary working people, but an extractive and unequal economic system.

The world’s richest 1% today owns more wealth than 95% of humanity. Last year total billionaire wealth increased by $2trn, growing three times faster than the year before. The wealth of the world’s five richest men has more than doubledsince 2019, soaring from $506bn to over $1.1trn. That list includes Trump’s cheerleader-in-chief, Musk, who paid a true tax rate of just over 3% in the US between 2014 and 2018, according to an investigation by ProPublica. The average worker in advanced economies, meanwhile, has typically seen their real pay fall or stagnate.

The contrasting fortunes of the mega-rich and everyone else are not unconnected. Despite what our leaders claim, capitalism in the ‘developed world’ has primarily become an engine for redistributing wealth upwards – both from its own citizens and the rest of the world. Skyrocketing inequality is also inextricably linked to the climate and environmental crisis. As well as hoovering up much of the world’s wealth, the richest 1% emit as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity. As such, tackling the climate crisis and reducing inequality must go hand in hand.

But by deflecting legitimate economic grievances towards external bogeymen and migrants, it is the authoritarian right – not the progressive left – that has most successfully capitalised on this broken system. If we are to address the central economic and environmental challenges we face, this urgently needs to change.

Progressive forces have transformed Western political economy before, and the task before us is to do so again. The goal must be to tackle inequalities, raise living standards and address the environmental crisis – while standing with migrants and other minoritised groups against persecution and oppression. This will inevitably involve a more proactive role for the state. The key question is: in whose interests will it act? The lesson from Bidenomics is that focusing primarily on industrial sectors such as renewable energy and manufacturing won’t work unless it is accompanied by policies to rein in corporate power and redistribute wealth. This means challenging the power of vested interests head-on, not cowering to them.

This project must also aim to strengthen democracy and protect civil liberties at a time when both are increasingly under threat. In recent years governments across the US, Europe and the UK have cracked down on the right to protest with draconian legislation. Given Trump’s terrifying track record – including calling for the military to quash peaceful protests by “radical left lunatics” – we should expect the assault on the right to protest to intensify, alongside a curtailing of civil liberties more broadly. Peaceful protest will be absolutely critical for resisting the authoritarian right across the world, which is exactly why it is likely to be suppressed.

At the global level, lessons can be learned from Trump’s own playbook. In power, Trump has not shied away from breaking international norms or shaking up global institutions. Progressives must be willing to do the same – albeit for very different ends. While this may make some uncomfortable, it is a necessary prerequisite to delivering the kind of global transformation needed. The existing ‘rules-based international order’ is meaningless when some of the most powerful actors are not playing by these rules. Global cooperation is needed more than ever, but the existing multilateral order is fundamentally broken. It must undergo sweeping reforms to promote a more prosperous, peaceful and sustainable world.

Perhaps most importantly, however, there needs to be a clear focus on who the real enemy is – and the goals that need to be achieved to defeat them. For decades, the left has viewed its enemy as neoliberalism, and its main task as building an alternative to it. But if neoliberalism is not dead yet, it is slowly dying.

Instead of fighting the last war, progressives must start grappling with the distinct political economy of a new authoritarianism. In practice this requires developing a completely new set of strategies, tactics and policies. We are not only losing – we are losing badly. More of the same simply will not cut it.

The challenge now is therefore much greater than when Trump last took office. The spectre of authoritarian capitalism is not just haunting the West, it is already here, and it is actually quite popular. Now it must be resisted from the ground up.

The key question is: can we build the power needed to challenge it? Right now, it’s not looking promising. We can only hope that the arrival of Trump 2.0 provides the wake-up call the world so desperately needs.

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

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 21, 2025 11:25 pm

(There's so much thee had to be another Trump dump:)

The Imperial Presidency Marches On
January 20, 2025

As he was sworn in for a second time, Donald Trump openly declared America to be a territorial empire that would expand, even to Mars, reports Joe Lauria.

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Donald Trump delivering his second inaugural address on Monday. (C-Span)

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

Donald J. Trump in his second inaugural address left little doubt that he will seek to expand America’s global empire and reverse what he sees as its recent decline, boldly declaring that a “golden age” of U.S. supremacy had begun.

Trump has been seen before ripping the mask from America’s true global intentions and on Monday made clear the U.S. has been an empire for centuries, which he aims to enforce in a super-charged, imperial presidency.

“America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world,” he proclaimed.

“America will soon be greater, stronger and far more exceptional than ever before,” he added. Challenges the U.S. face will be “annihilated by this great momentum that the world is now witnessing in the United States of America.”

He declared: “From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”

[During the transition period, Trump took aim at the nine- nation BRICS bloc, which constitutes the greatest challenge to U.S. global dominance, since certainly the Soviet Union.]

As though he couldn’t have made the point about U.S. primacy any clearer, he declared:

“Above all, my message to Americans today is that it is time for us to once again act with courage, vigor and the vitality of history’s greatest civilization. […]

The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” [Emphasis added.]


Trump used the word destiny, even “manifest” destiny to proclaim the country’s quasi-religious right to rule worlds. “Our liberties and our nation’s glorious destiny will no longer be denied,” he said.

And the U.S. would not stop at just the dominance of planet Earth. “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars,” he said.

“The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,” Trump said. “The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls.”

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Donald Trump promising to make the U.S. “more exceptional than ever before” during his second inaugural address on Monday. (C-Span)

He then launched into a riff on “American exceptionalism,” recounting the building of an empire from “our American ancestors [who] turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic” by pushing “thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness,” without mentioning the people who already lived there and were soon annihilated.

“Ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation,” he said. “And right now, our nation is more ambitious than any other.”

Trump apparently intends to do what few empires have done before: expand by starting no new wars. He said though that the U.S. would “build the strongest military the world has ever seen,” something that previous president have already done with little effect lately in winning wars of aggression.

“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but by the wars we end and more importantly the wars we never get into,’’ he said in his inaugural address from inside the Capitol rotunda. He wants to be seen as a “peacemaker” he said, clearly the peace of an enforced Pax Americana.

Trump again played on a note he has sounded many times before, a frankly absurd notion that America is a victim on the world stage.

“From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer,” he said.

While the U.S. has for decades run roughshod over the sovereignty of a host of nations, he declared, “Our sovereignty will be reclaimed.”

Trump blasted the stewardship of the empire by the Biden administration. “We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad,” he said.

Trump attacked any effort in U.S. schools to open students’ eyes to America’s actual historic behavior in the world.

Image
Donald Trump delivering his second inaugural address on Monday. (C-Span)

“We have an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves in many cases, to hate our country despite the love that we try so desperately to provide to them,” he said. “All of this will change starting today, and it will change very quickly.”

Trump wants American school children to only be taught what he sees as the greatness of America’s historical, imperial might. In doing so, he praised President William McKinley, one of the most openly imperial presidents in history, who led the war to take territory from the Spanish Empire.

In his quest to reverse what he see as “wokeness,” Trump wants to deny the long history of indigenous peoples on the North American continent, victims of empire-building, white settlers for whom Trump acts as spokesman.

He said: “A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. And we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs.”

He said McKinley “gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal,” as if making money is what presidents do.

Trump declared that the canal has “foolishly been given to the country of Panama” after the U.S. built it. “We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made,” he said, incorrectly stating that China “operates” the canal, when it only controls ports at either end.

“China is operating the Panama Canal,” he said, “and we didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama. And we’re taking it back.”

Trump unquestionably compared himself to the super empire-builder who he says paid for the canal. “President McKinley made our country very rich, through tariffs and through talent. He was a natural businessman,” Trump said.

Trump sees what appears to be a megalomaniacal role for himself in furthering U.S. imperial might. In speaking of his survival from an assassin’s bullet, he said: “My life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/20/t ... arches-on/

*******

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Donald Trump Is The Empire Unmasked

The hood stays popped open the entire time, showing the whole world how the imperial sausage gets made.

Caitlin Johnstone
January 21, 2025

During his inaugural address, the new president of the United States was refreshingly open about the fact that Washington is the hub of a continuously expanding empire which is ruled by billionaire plutocrats.

As Joe Lauria highlighted for Consortium News, President Trump’s speech included references to the “manifest destiny” of America, saying that under his presidency the US will consider itself a nation that “expands our territory”. He waxed fondly about the settler-colonialist past which established the country at the expense of the people who were already living there, and vowed to take control of the Panama Canal.

Trump gave this speech to an audience where the wealthiest people on earth sat alongside his own cabinet in the best seats in the house. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were seen together in the crowd among the more official members of the incoming administration. Israeli-American Trump megadonor Miriam Adelson, who according to Trump helped dictate US policy toward Israel during his first term, was seen sitting among Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the Clintons at the inauguration. There will reportedly be no fewer than 13 billionaires with official roles in the new Trump administration.


If you were to twist my arm and force me to say something positive about Donald Trump, this is the sort of thing I would point to. He makes the US empire much more transparent and unhidden. He removes its mask and reveals the twisted face beneath it.

The US isn’t suddenly ruled by billionaires now that Trump is president; it was already ruled by billionaires. The US isn’t suddenly an empire bent on global domination now that Trump has been sworn in; that was already the case. But you’re not supposed to just come right out and say that.

Well, Trump comes right out and says it. He says the quiet parts out loud. He’s the only president who’ll openly boast that US troops are in Syria to keep the oil or lament that they failed to take the oil from Venezuela, or just come right out and tell everyone he’s bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs. He puts much less effort into disguising the true nature of the US empire than other presidents.

That’s the only reason various factions of America’s unofficial permanent government have had objections to Trump’s presidency over the years. It’s not because he presents a threat to the establishment or because he’s trying to bring down the deep state, it’s because he is viewed as a poor custodian of the empire. He either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the importance of keeping a polite face on the imperial machine.

If I were forced to say something positive about Trump, that would be it. The thing some US empire managers dislike about him is the only thing I like about him: that he makes the US empire a less effective evil because of how much less hidden he keeps the inner workings of the machine. The hood stays popped open the entire time, showing the whole world how the imperial sausage gets made.


Not that there haven’t been plenty of mask-off moments during the dementia-muddled chaos of the Biden administration as well. A new article in Time titled “Why Biden’s Ukraine Win Was Zelensky’s Loss” is a good example of this; the report cites a former member of Biden’s National Security Council saying that victory for Ukraine was never part of the Biden administration’s plan.

The opening paragraph reads as follows:

“When Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago, President Joe Biden set three objectives for the U.S. response. Ukraine’s victory was never among them. The phrase the White House used to describe its mission at the time — supporting Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’ — was intentionally vague. It also raised the question: As long as it takes to do what?”

“Ukraine’s victory was never among them.”

Talk about a mask-off moment. It has long been clear that the US pushed Ukraine into an unwinnable war with the goal of bleeding and preoccupying Moscow, and that it actively sabotaged peace negotiations in the early days of the war in order to pursue these goals. Now that the job has been done and the demented meat puppet is out of office, we are finally hearing it from Biden’s own handlers in his administration.

And of course there was Gaza, where the world spent 15 months watching history’s first live-streamed genocide right in front of their faces while western officials made nonstop excuses of less and less believability. If there’s to be any good to come from that incomprehensibly horrific nightmare, it’s that it has shown everyone the true face of the empire.

The more glimpses people get of the true face of the empire, the less effective the imperial propaganda becomes, because propaganda only works if you believe it. The primary obstacle to revolutionary change under the western empire is the fact that its citizenry have been successfully propagandized into accepting the status quo. The more people open their eyes to the fact that we are ruled by psychopaths who are driving us to our doom on multiple fronts, the closer we get to a collective movement toward a healthy world.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/01 ... -unmasked/

******

Day of Decrees
January 21, 11:07

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On Donald Trump's First Executive Orders

On his very first day in office, the new US president signed a stack of executive orders. The first documents concerned appointments within the administration, including at the cabinet level.

However, Trump and his team also made decisions to:

— withdraw from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement;

— cancel 78 decisions made during Joe Biden's presidency. It is noteworthy that Trump once again designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism;

— restrict the right to obtain US citizenship by birthright;

— close government programs for gender inclusion and gender reassignment;

— designate drug cartels as terrorist organizations;

— pardon about 1,500 people convicted of protesting on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021;

— begin the process of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the American Gulf;

— declare a state of emergency on the US southern border to stop the influx of illegal migrants;

— hold former Biden administration officials accountable for illegally disclosing sensitive information;

— unblock TikTok and allow an American company to own half of the social network;

— adopt a directive ordering the restoration of freedom of speech and "preventing the introduction of state censorship."

Thus, Trump did not repeat his previous mistakes and delay orders. He decided to conduct a kind of "political blitzkrieg" before his opponents had time to come to their senses, make secret alliances and fight back against the new president, as was the case in 2017-2021.

https://t.me/boris_rozhin/151992 - zinc

Also, a trade war against Mexico and Canada will start on February 1. Tariffs of 25% will be imposed against them.
Foreign aid programs (including Ukraine) will be suspended for 90 days.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9622897.html

Google Translator

Those people weren't convicted of protesting, what bullshit. If we had protested like that we'd have been shot down like dogs.

Whadda sack of pus.

******

Trump Shreds Emoluments Clause with New Memecoin while Norms Fairy Weeps (and Melania Joins the Fun)
Posted on January 20, 2025 by Lambert Strether
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

On the Friday before inauguration day at 9:00pm, President-elect Donald Trump released a memecoin, $TRUMP, that by Sunday was valued at $58 billion, making him one of the world’s 25 richest people. Felix Salmon summarizes:

The $TRUMP memecoin — a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon — now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth.

The coin (technically a token that’s issued on the Solana blockchain) has massively enriched Trump personally, enabled a mechanism for the crypto industry to funnel cash to him, and created a volatile financial asset that allows anyone in the world to financially speculate on Trump’s political fortunes….

Some 200 million of the 1 billion total coins have already been released and are being actively traded. The rest, which are owned by Trump-controlled entities, will be able to be sold at various points over the next three years, starting in April.

Not to be outdone, Melania Trump launched her own coin MELANIA Sunday night, almost immediately achieving a market capitalization north of $5 billion.


Here is a handy chart:

Image

These sudden, lightning strike-like events strike me as remarkable, extraordinary, potentially signaling a change to the Constitutional order. And yet they aren’t front page news at the New York Times or the Washington Post[1] (being exclipsed by the inaugural itself, TikTok, the coming winter storm, etc.). What can they mean? In this post I’ll try a sketch a preliminary answer to that question.

Let me concede immediately that I loathe Bitcoin and its “community” (and loathe them despite any raised hands saying “I personally profit from it!”). See Bloomberg, “Joseph Stiglitz: Bitcoin ought to be outlawed“:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said “bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention, lack of oversight.” “So it seems to me it ought to be outlawed,” Stiglitz said Wednesday in a Bloomberg Television interview with Francine Lacqua and Tom Keene. “It doesn’t serve any socially useful function.”

However, this is not the post to give my loathing analytical form (here is a partial list of NC posts on bitcoin; the headlines will give you an idea of the general tenor of our coverage[2]). What I will do first is define some terms for those who came in late: Blockchain, for example. After that I will consider the Constitutional, even existential, questions raised by Trump’s memecoin.

Definitions: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Shitcoin, Memecoin

The world of so-called[3] “decentralized finance” has an extensive vocabulary all its own, seeminly spawned in imitation of — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — genuine finance. Our purpose, however, is to understand Trump’s memecoin, and for that we need four terms: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Shitcoin, and Memecoin.

Bitcoin (and Crypto (and Blockchain). From the Monthly Review (2022):

Bitcoin was launched a few months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers as a prototype for a secure, permissionless digital currency that would be created, without the guarantee of a financial intermediary as the basis for its credibility, by ‘mining’—the energy-intensive process of deploying a large amount of computing power to solve a cryptographic puzzle (also called proof of work) validating a transaction[4]. While currencies are conventionally underpinned by trust in a powerful central authority, Bitcoin relies on this cryptographic proof, drawing on open-source software and a network of servers sharing data to verify and record transactions so that a multitude of users can anonymously validate the cryptocurrency. Time-stamped, cryptographically proven transactions, immutably recorded in ledgers, are shared and replicated across servers, forming the blockchain—the technological bedrock of the decentralized logic of the cryptoverse. A limit on the maximum number of bitcoins that can be mined (21 million) is built into the trustless mechanisms on the grounds that this technologically imposed scarcity acts as a bulwark against inflation and the profligate impulses of the state. But perversely, this artificial scarcity ensured the allure of Bitcoin as a speculative asset.

Bitcoin has now been joined by a vast number of other cryptocurrencies. Crypto coins are subject to stomach-churning price swings, a painfully slow settlement process, and a huge environmental footprint, undermining their utility as a stable, liquid, and efficient means of settlement.


Shitcoin. From Investopedia: “The term shitcoin refers to a cryptocurrency with little to no value or no immediate, discernible purpose. The word is a pejorative term often used to describe altcoins or cryptocurrencies developed after Bitcoin became popular.” (Of course, Stiglitz would argue, and I would assert, that all bitcoins are shitcoins.) And a subtype of the shitcoin is–

Memecoin. From The Motley Fool:

Meme coins are cryptocurrencies that originate from internet memes or have a humorous or viral aspect. Unlike Bitcoin (BTC -0.4%) or Ethereum (ETH 1.29%), which are backed by robust blockchain technologies and have clear utility in [fraud] digital transactions and decentralized applications (dApps), meme coins often lack a specific purpose beyond the community and cultural value they hold.

Dogecoin (from which Musk’s DOGE derives, Musk being a DOGE holder, naturally) is a meme coin derives from the DOGE meme (see Know Your Meme). Another example from the Daily Mail:

Meme coins are generally considered to be incredibly risky investments, since they are prone to insider-trading and extreme volatility.

There are thousands of them available for purchase through many different platforms, but the most recent meme coin that has gotten negative media attention was Haliey Welch’s.

Welch, better known as the ‘Hawk Tuah Girl,’ launched $HAWK with the help of a shady foundation on December 4.

The token cratered by over 90 percent just hours after it reached a $490 million market cap, prompting accusations of fraud from the crypto community and a lawsuit against the creators of the coin.


Trump signals that his coin is a memecoin in his URL (“gettrumpmemes.com”) and in the verbiage on the page:

Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol “$TRUMP” and the associated artwork, and are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type. GetTrumpMemes.com is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or governmental agency.


We’ll see about that “not political” in the next section.

Issues Raised by Trump’s Memecoin

There are at least four.

First, executive unity. I struggled to think of a good reason for Trump’s spectacular autogolpe as a top-tier, world-class oligarch immediately before he took the oath of office, a reason not involving lust for power or open corruption, and this is what I came up with. In Federalist #70, famous for the discussion of “energy in the executive,” Madison writes (I have marked the two key portions [A] and [B):

Those politicians and statesmen who have been the most celebrated for the soundness of their principles and for the justice of their views, have declared in favor of a single Executive and a numerous legislature. They have with great propriety, considered energy as the most necessary qualification of the former, and have regarded this as most applicable to power in a single hand, while they have, with equal propriety, considered the latter as best adapted to deliberation and wisdom, and best calculated to conciliate the confidence of the people and to secure their privileges and interests.

That unity is conducive to energy will not be disputed. Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished.

This unity may be destroyed in two ways: either by vesting the power in [A]two or more magistrates of equal dignity and authority; or by vesting it ostensibly in one man, subject, in whole or in part, to the control and co-operation of others… The experience of other nations… [a]s far, however, as it teaches any thing, it teaches us not to be enamoured of [B plurality in the Executive.


[A] “two or more magistrates.” I think I was one of the first to joke about “President Musk,” but the jokes had a basis in reality, as Musk really did seem to be an independent actor. By increasing his personal wealth overnight to $35 billion dollars, Trump shows fellow billionaire Musk, in the crudest way possible, who the big dog on the block really is.

B “plurality in the Executive.” Trump’s experience in his first administration must surely have given him the sense of “plurality in the executive,” given for example that he ordered withdrawal from Syria, and it didn’t happen, which can only mean there are people in his administration just as powerful as he is. Now, I don’t think Trump becomes “the big dog” in our enormous Federal government as easily as he does in a one-on-one with Musk, but the sense of Trump’s dominance can only increased (importantly, within Trump himself).

Second, the emoluments clauses. Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 (foreign emoluments):

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Article II, Section 1, Clause 7 (domestic):

The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.

And the Legal Information Institute’s commentary:

For most of its history, courts have rarely substantively analyzed or interpreted the Foreign Emoluments Clause. During the administration of President Donald Trump, however, a number of private parties, state attorneys general, and Members of Congress sued the President based on alleged violations of both the Foreign Emoluments Clause and the Domestic Emoluments Clause (collectively, the Emoluments Clauses). Three major federal lawsuits concerning the Emoluments Clauses were filed against President Trump. Over nearly four years, these cases progressed through the lower federal courts, resulting in the first significant judicial decisions on the Emoluments Clauses.

In late 2020, the Supreme Court denied review in one of these cases, and—after the end of President Trump’s term in January 2021—instructed two federal appellate courts to vacate their judgments and dismiss the other two cases as moot.


So Trump’s memecoin puts us in uncharted territory. More:

The final litigated issue was the meaning and scope of the term “emolument” as used in the Emoluments Clauses—particularly, whether it includes private, arm’s-length market transactions. In the litigation, President Trump argued that ’emoluments’ included only benefits received by an officeholder in return for official action or through his office or employment. Plaintiffs urged that ’emoluments’ be defined more broadly to apply to any ‘profit, gain, or advantage’ received by the President from a foreign or domestic government. The two district courts that reached the issue adopted the plaintiffs’ broader definition of ’emolument,’ although the appellate courts subsequently vacated those decisions.

Trump’s memecoin, then, would seem to be barred by the district courts broader definition, but not barred by the appellate courts. To put the matter in very simple terms:


Anthony Scaramucci
@Scaramucci
·
Follow
Most dangerous thing for country about Trump coin is what comes next. Now anyone in world can essentially deposit money into bank account of President of USA with a couple clicks. Every favor - geopolitical, corporate or personal - is now on sale, right out in the open.
8:01 AM · Jan 19, 2025


(This article argues that Trump’s memecoin is carefully crafted to win a Supreme Court case legalizing the practice, but the technical basis on which it does so is beyond me. Perhaps some kind reader can explicate.)

Third, a cult of personality. Once again, from Trump’s site:

“Celebrate Our Win & Have Fun!”

Note the word “our” (and how the heck is owning a memecoin fun? I genuinely don’t get it. More:

Join the Trump Community. This is History in the Making!

I genuinely don’t get the “community” aspect either, though it’s often used by coin touts. And once more:

Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol “$TRUMP” and the associated artwork , and are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type. GetTrumpMemes.com is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or governmental agency. See Terms & Conditions Here, See Card Allocation Here.

On one level, “is not political” is just silly. “Celebrating the win” is obviously political, given that an election was won; “community” is political as well, by definition (even more so when forming the community is “history in the making”). Presumably that’s all boilerplate that Bud From Legal insisted be in there. However, the part that concerns me is this:

… an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol “$TRUMP” and the associated artwork…

I hate to invoke Godwin’s law, and heaven knows I don’t think MAGA are Nazis. But the idea that one pays to express “support” seems like a phase shift to me; it reminds me uncomfortably of the fact that Nazi brownshirts had to buy their own uniforms; a level of commitment, especially in bad times, far greater than going to rallies or voting. “If this goes on,” if the level of commitment is escalated, drawing more and more relentlessly in, then I am even more uncomfortably reminded of what I have always regarded as the dividing line between fascist adjacency and outright fascism, the line we have never crossed: “a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants.”

Fourth, financialization of the body politic. Felix Salmon writes:

Trump’s fans believed it made sense to stand by him through the scandals and the victories, because they thought his leadership would provide them with opportunities down the road.

But now holders of TRUMP have a direct financial incentive to amplify his message and defend his presidency, because the token is sure to rise in value whenever sentiment moves in his favor.

I suppose if money is speech….

Conclusion

I’ve never been one to worship, with Democrats, at the altar of the Norms Fairy. But it does seem to me that a President using the imminence of his inauguration to transform himself into an instant multi-billionaire is a norms violation on a colossal, a gargantuan scale, a mountain so huge that we cannot see its peak from where we stand. Felix Salmon writes:

Trump has just delivered a masterclass in the ability of a president to turn power into wealth.

(Or social capital into economic capital). Can anybody really believe that a sitting President should have the power to teach that lesson? Can anyone believe that the Constitution’s framers intended it? Does this mean every future President can do the same thing? Why not every politician? Will Bitcoin prices replace polling? Why not? Heck, why not voting? Meanwhile, even the tech bros are aghast. From Web3 Is Going Great:

[S]ome in the crypto world are reacting with horror at Trump’s decisionmaking. While they hoped that Trump’s administration would be crypto-friendly, they did not seem to anticipate that the Trump family would openly embrace some of the ecosystem’s worst parts to enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense.


(Again, I think the “worst parts” of crypto “ecosystem” are the “ecosystem” itself, but it’s telling that even true believers have problems with the grossness of Trump’s act.) And what on earth can Susie Wiles think? Or did she find out about it from Trump’s post?

NOTES

[1] RealClearPolitics, which I had thought was a reliable, albeit conservative aggregator, hasn’t mentioned the story at all:

Image

[2] Naked Capitalism on Bitcoin:

What Happens If Bitcoin Succeeds? (2021)

Crypto Crackdown: Only the Beginning? (2021)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Shellacks Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies (2021)

The Only Crypto Story You Need? A Response to Matt Levine’s The Crypto Story (2022)

Jim Chanos: “The Crypto Ecosystem Is Well-Suited for the Dark Side of Finance.” (2023)

Feds Bust $3.4 Billion Crypto Theft, Demonstrating Ability to Penetrate Supposed Secrecy (2023)

What Does Mustard Gas Have in Common with Crypto and Blockchain? (2023)

[3] As it turns out, decentralized finance has turned out to be extremely concentrated. The creation of bitcoins (“mining”) is very concentrated, because it’s capital intensive; it takes a lot of electrical and processing power. So is bitcoin ownership (see list of whales here). Interestingly, the mythical Bitcoin founder, Satoshi Nakamoto “could be a single person or a group of people. Either way, the identity remains a successfully guarded secret.” Nakamoto is said to own 1.1 million Bitcoins, making him one of the 30 richest people in the world. (Speaking of “groups of people,” it’s interesting to consider whether there are any institutions that would find the anonymity enabled by bitcoin of practical use.)

[4] Some blockchain vendors have replaced “proof of work” with “proof of stake.” See here.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... e-fun.html

Can there be any question that Trump's overwhelming motivation is self-aggrandizement of wealth and ego?

And need I remind that Rome had two chief magistrates...

******

Trump's team wants Maduro to leave Venezuela

Marc Caputo

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Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photo: Brandon Bell and Jesus Vargas/Getty Images

The incoming Trump administration wants regime change in Venezuela, where dictator Nicolás Maduro stole his election, jailed a rival and this month even threatened to invade the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.

Why it matters: Venezuela under Maduro has been a massive problem for Latin America and the U.S. It's accounted for the largest modern-day migration in the Western Hemisphere — nearly 8 million people have fled Maduro's regime in the past decade.

Trump's team says it wants Maduro to go the way of recently toppled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. But regime change doesn't necessarily mean military action, Trump advisers say.
"We wouldn't mind one bit seeing Maduro being neighbors with Assad in Moscow," a Trump adviser involved with foreign policy discussions told Axios.
Zoom in: During his campaign, Trump accused Maduro of intentionally sending criminal gangs such as Tren de Aragua to the U.S.

Oil-rich, cash-poor Venezuela is "governed by a narco-trafficking organization that has empowered itself as a nation-state," Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — who once was targeted by a Venezuelan assassination plot — said Wednesday in his confirmation hearing to be Trump's secretary of state.
Venezuela's closest ally is Cuba, America's oldest Latin American foe. Maduro's regime also is aligned with China, Russia and Iran, which is building drones in Venezuela, Rubio testified.
What's next: Trump sanctioned Venezuela during his first term, but it's unclear what the president-elect wants to do to push Maduro out of office.

Trump's interest in regime change in Venezuela has been heightened by President Biden's last-minute decision Tuesday to loosen U.S. restrictions on Cuba, whose socialist regime Trump sees as the hub of Latin America's problems.
"It's not sustainable," the Trump adviser involved with foreign policy talks said of the situation in Venezuela. Maduro is "literally ruining the country ... massive refugee issues, sending criminals to the United States, oil production is down, and there are Chinese, Russians and Cubans in there."
The big picture: Trump's interest in Venezuela is part of a broader, emerging national security policy that's anything but the isolationist model his "America First" theme often has seemed to project — especially when it comes to the Western Hemisphere.

Since the November election, Trump has renewed his interest in acquiring Greenland or expanding the U.S. presence there for strategic reasons.
He's also threatened to take back control of the Panama Canal out of concern about China's presence there.
Trump's tactics — dubbed the "Donroe Doctrine" — also have included speculation about annexing Canada and potentially invading Mexico — to the annoyance of those U.S. allies.
Between the lines: Oil interests and investors mounted a pressure campaign late last year to try to smooth relations between the U.S. and Venezuela.

In November, they proposed what amounted to an oil-for-migrants deal in which the U.S. would ease sanctions and get more oil products like asphalt from Venezuela. In turn, Venezuela would agree to slow emigration or maybe take back millions of migrants deported from the U.S.
But Trump hasn't sounded enthusiastic about striking a deal with Maduro.

"We don't have to buy energy from Venezuela when we have 50 times more than they do," he told reporters last month. He predicted Venezuela would take back deported Tren de Aragua gang members.
On Jan. 9, after Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was briefly arrested, Trump took to Truth Social, mentioned her by name and warned that "freedom fighters should not be harmed, and MUST stay SAFE and ALIVE!"
After Maduro threatened to invade Puerto Rico, the island's governor, Jenniffer González-Colón, asked Trump to respond. So far, Trump has held his tongue.

When the Trump adviser was asked about the Trump team's reaction to Maduro's threat, he replied with a laugh: "He's going to invade Puerto Rico? With what?"

https://www.axios.com/2025/01/18/trump- ... nts-maduro

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Counterproductive effects of illegal sanctions
"Maximum pressure" is contradictory to Trump's immigration agenda
Jan 20, 2025 , 5:00 pm .

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Donald Trump during the inauguration day of his return to the White House, Monday, January 20, 2025 (Photo: AP Photo)

The day has come. Donald Trump took office as president of the United States with a speech that combined exceptionalist rhetoric - threatening to retake the Panama Canal and rename the Gulf of Mexico - hyperbolic promises - planting the American flag on Mars - and certain nostalgic impulses of a country that, according to him, will resume the hegemonic path lost in recent years: " the decline is over ," he said.

As expected, immigration was the main focus.

One of the first objectives of Donald Trump's second administration, according to him, is to address the issue of illegal immigration in the United States. The migratory flow from South and Central American countries to the United States is among the priorities of the new Republican government.

The origins of migrant caravans crossing the southern US border include, above all, nationals from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, but also from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Trump has accused Joe Biden's government for years of allowing the indiscriminate passage of immigrants. Considering that this population has been the greatest force of the real economy in the United States, a sector of society that was, to a large extent, one of the engines that prevented the country from falling into recession in recent years, empirical data and economic analysis show that the measures of the previous Democratic administration had a good reason to normalize the immigration flow - here is a good article published on March 13, 2024, by the British Michael Roberts on this subject.

But that is about to come to a standstill. In his inaugural address on Monday, January 20 as the 47th president of the United States, Trump announced that one of his first orders would be to declare a state of emergency on the southern border, send troops and reinstate a policy that forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for a court date on U.S. soil: the "Remain in Mexico" policy , put in place during his previous administration, is coming back into play.

Furthermore, the New York Post reports :

"Trump plans to end several Biden administration immigration policies, including mass humanitarian parole, which gives special consideration to migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The CBP One program, an app that allows migrants to register and apply for legal entry into the U.S. from Mexico, will also be suspended."

The New York outlet also reports that, according to officials in the new White House, the Republican president has "plans to designate organized migrant gangs, including Venezuela's Tren de Aragua, as terrorist organizations" via executive order.

All of this would be an effort to establish a second, reloaded edition of Maganomics, which considers that there should be a reduction in immigration. In an article last November , the aforementioned economist Roberts cites a recent report from the American Immigration Council, which:

"It finds that if the government deports a population of roughly 13 million people who in 2022 lacked permanent legal status and faced the possibility of removal, the cost would be enormous: about $305 billion."

This would obviously be a policy that would have short, medium and long-term impacts on the American economy and society.

Contradictions that arose
But these measures would undoubtedly contradict the "maximum pressure" strategy advocated and demanded by hawks and neoconservatives against Venezuela, Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, who will be part of the Trump 2.0 government in key foreign policy positions.

That is the warning issued by Americas Quarterly editor-in-chief Brian Winter in an article published on January 14 , in which he collected the opinions of "some two dozen political and business figures from across the Americas" and asserted that "no one knows to what extent Trump and his team will adopt an aggressive approach [with respect to Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua]. Some analysts believe that he will avoid returning to the 'maximum pressure' policies of his first term for fear of unleashing an even larger wave of migration."

Indeed, part of Washington, at least in the legislative wing, has taken note of the White House's previous experience regarding foreign policy with respect to our countries, and is apparently well aware that the "maximum pressure" reloaded would come into direct conflict with the geopolitical and economic interests of Maganomics, despite the Axios report of January 18 that would point, between the lines, to a return of that policy against Venezuela, without actually naming it.

The report by the US Congressional Research Service, published on January 13 , was explicit in concluding that the unilateral sanctions that resulted in a criminal economic, commercial and financial blockade against Venezuela "contributed to secondary migration to the United States."

We quote:

"The Trump Administration sought to promote democracy and human rights in Venezuela by using a 'maximum pressure' sanctions strategy to try to force Maduro to cede power. The sanctions proved insufficient to achieve that goal and may have exacerbated an ongoing economic crisis that contributed to mass emigration, including to the United States."

Let us remember that the US Congressional Research Service is bipartisan and, therefore, its reports can be attributed to it as dossiers whose conclusions are shared by both traditional parties.

The conclusions drawn by Congress have also been endorsed by other institutions and researchers, of different ideological and political tendencies, based on empirical data on the relationship between sanctions and migration. They highlight:

Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) (report by opposition economist Luis Oliveros)
University at Albany , State University of New York (reporting by Joel Alexander Lopez)
University of Denver (report by opposition economist Francisco Rodríguez)
UN Human Rights Council (report by Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan)
Even The Washington Post reported on May 10, 2023 that "Democrats led by Hou
se lawmakers from border states are urging President Biden to end Trump-era sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela, which have battered those countries' economies and contributed to a surge of migrants at the U.S. southern border."

Thus, there are multiple sources that prove the direct effects of unilateral sanctions during the era of "maximum pressure" on Venezuelan migration.

Given the fact that Trump 2.0 will take drastic measures regarding immigration in the United States, a return to the foreign policy regarding Venezuela that was adopted during his first term does not seem convenient, much less bold. It would imply a strategic contradiction since the "scourge" that he is trying to remedy, on the one hand, would be encouraged and fueled, and on the other, since the direct correlation between illegal sanctions and migratory flow from Venezuela has been proven.

What will prevail in this first part of his nascent administration? The "common sense" he advocated during his inaugural address or the interests of the extremist wing of South Florida?

Everything remains to be seen, but the evidence on the subject is on the table.

"Maximum pressure" would be useless in achieving the migration objectives that have been set and prioritized as the most important for his new administration. This would also send a contradictory message to his voters: the failure to fulfill his promises and his involvement in wars and conflicts abroad, neglecting the "golden era" that he has promised to build.

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/la-m ... a-de-trump

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

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 22, 2025 5:32 pm

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Why Greenland? How Trump learned to love the bomb
Originally published: theAnalysis.news on January 17, 2025 by Paul Jay (more by theAnalysis.news) (Posted Jan 22, 2025)

As Donald Trump takes office, he has revived one of his most audacious ideas: acquiring Greenland. When asked directly if he would rule out using military force to take Greenland from Denmark, Trump refused to do so, sparking international outrage. This renewed interest in Greenland is closely tied to his plan to build a nationwide anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system, which he calls the “American Iron Dome.”

The only thing worse than Trump’s Iron Dome being an enormous boondoggle that doesn’t work, is that it does work. A functional system would undermine global strategic stability by incentivizing adversaries to build even more offensive weapons and countermeasures, increasing the risks of nuclear confrontation. Even a fully operational Iron Dome would offer little protection against a large-scale first strike. Thousands of missiles and decoys would overwhelm any conceivable defense system. At best, the system provides a false sense of security while provoking adversaries to expand their arsenals. At worst, it increases the likelihood of nuclear war.

Following the Money
The drive for an “American Iron Dome” reflects a familiar pattern in U.S. military policy: manufactured threats serving corporate profits. Just as the aerospace industry needed Soviet threats to justify military spending after WWII, today’s military-industrial complex requires new enemies and weapons systems to maintain profitability.

Traditional defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon stand to make billions from the Iron Dome project. But now Silicon Valley billionaires who backed Trump have joined the feeding frenzy. For instance, SpaceX could secure hundreds of billions in contracts for its Starlink satellite network and launch capabilities. Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies could profit enormously from developing AI systems for missile tracking.

This marriage between Silicon Valley and traditional military contractors represents a dangerous expansion of the military-industrial complex. What began as a civilian tech industry increasingly turns to military contracts for reliable government funding. Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” mentality, dangerous for social media, becomes catastrophic when applied to nuclear deterrence.

The Fantasy of Missile Defense
The fundamental challenge of missile defense hasn’t changed since the 1960s: hitting a bullet with a bullet. Intercontinental ballistic missiles travel at roughly 15,000 miles per hour. Intercepting them requires detecting, tracking, and destroying objects moving 20 times faster than a bullet across vast distances.

This technical challenge becomes even harder against modern threats. Russia and China deploy multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), releasing several warheads from a single missile. They also use sophisticated decoys and countermeasures. A single missile might release dozens of decoys along with actual warheads, overwhelming defense systems.

The math is stark: even a 95% successful intercept rate (far beyond current capabilities) would allow dozens of warheads to reach targets in a large-scale attack. Meanwhile, the enormous cost of trying to achieve such effectiveness—likely trillions of dollars—incentivizes adversaries to build more offensive weapons, which are far cheaper than defensive systems.

The First Strike Temptation
While sold to the public as defensive, Iron Dome’s real strategic importance is offensive. A missile defense system that could intercept a small number of retaliatory missiles, even if unable to stop a full-scale first strike, could make nuclear war seem “winnable” to military planners.

Here’s the dangerous logic: If the U.S. launched a surprise first strike that destroyed most of an adversary’s nuclear weapons, the remaining retaliatory missiles might be few enough for Iron Dome to handle. This creates a destabilizing temptation to strike first during a crisis, while incentivizing adversaries to maintain hair-trigger launch readiness to avoid having their weapons destroyed on the ground.

This explains why Russia and China view U.S. missile defense as an offensive threat. They understand that combining first-strike weapons with even a partially effective missile defense system fundamentally undermines strategic stability based on mutual vulnerability.

Greenland’s Strategic Role
Greenland’s location makes it crucial for missile defense and nuclear strategy. The U.S. already operates Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, hosting radar installations for missile defense. Trump’s plan would expand this infrastructure dramatically, integrating Greenland into a broader strategy of Arctic militarization.

Polar Politics and Missile Routes
Greenland’s position is uniquely critical for polar missile routes, which provide the shortest path between continents for nuclear weapons. Control of these routes could give the U.S. both faster strike capabilities and enhanced early warning. Expanding military presence in Greenland would place nuclear-armed systems closer to Russia and China, while providing key strategic points for missile defense installations.

This militarization would transform the Arctic from a region of relative cooperation into a nuclear flashpoint. Russia and China already view U.S. military presence in Greenland as a strategic threat. Expanding this presence through acquisition would accelerate Arctic militarization, potentially triggering a new nuclear arms race in the region.

This mirrors Cold War patterns. In the 1960s, the U.S. secretly constructed Camp Century in Greenland, officially a research station but actually testing “Project Iceworm”—a covert plan to house nuclear missiles beneath the ice sheet. The U.S. concealed this from Denmark, which prohibited nuclear weapons on its territory. The project failed when ice proved unstable, leaving toxic waste and radioactive material now surfacing due to climate change.

The ABM Treaty Lesson
The 1972 ABM Treaty between the U.S. and Soviet Union limited each side to one missile defense site, maintaining strategic stability through mutually assured destruction (MAD). Its 2001 abrogation by the Bush administration unleashed a new arms race, with Russia and now China expanding arsenals to counter U.S. missile defenses.

This wasn’t accidental. Neoconservatives tied to the military-industrial complex had pushed to end the ABM Treaty since the 1990s, as outlined in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” This agenda resurfaces in Project 2025, developed by Trump administration members, which calls for a new nationwide ABM system.

Manufacturing Threats, Maximizing Profits
The pattern is clear: military contractors require threats to justify weapons programs. After WWII, the aerospace industry faced collapse without military contracts. As Lockheed’s CEO Robert Gross wrote explicitly in 1945: “If we have a true and lasting peace, obviously the demand for military airplanes will be limited. On the other hand, if we have an armed truce… the demand for military airplanes might be very considerable.”

Today’s push for an American Iron Dome follows this template. Corporate profits demand new weapons systems, which require new threats, driving policy toward conflict. Even Wall Street, which owns much of the military industry through direct investments and index funds, risks global catastrophe for relatively small profits from nuclear weapons manufacturing.

If Trump proceeds with his Iron Dome ABM system, it won’t enhance American or global security—it will dramatically increase the risk of nuclear war. The massive expenditure will enrich his Silicon Valley and military-industrial complex allies while proposed cuts to social programs and environmental protection threaten the actual security and well-being of ordinary people. This represents the continued triumph of profit over human survival, a pattern that must be broken before it breaks us

https://mronline.org/2025/01/22/why-greenland/

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Thousands take to the streets across the US to mark “counter-inauguration” on first day of Trump presidency

Mobilizations took place in over 80 cities on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to honor MLK’s legacy of struggle and mount movement against Trump

January 21, 2025 by Natalia Marques

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Thousands march in Manhattan on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration (Photo: Wyatt Souers)
“We are here in the counterinauguration of the 47th president of the United States,” said Claudia de La Cruz in front of a rally of thousands in Washington Square Park. On January 20, the day of now-President Donald Trump’s inauguration, people took to the streets in over 80 cities across 40 states, including Washington DC, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, Charlotte, Montgomery, Chicago, Houston, and New Orleans, to launch a mass movement pledging to oppose Trump’s “ultra-right, billionaire agenda”.

A variety of working class and grassroots organizations worked together to mobilize for these demonstrations. These organizations include the Party for Socialism and Liberation, United Auto Workers Local 4811, the Palestinian Youth Movement, United Educators of San Francisco, Black Men Build, the Democratic Socialists of America, the People’s Forum, the ANSWER Coalition, the US Palestinian Community Network, UNITE HERE Local 2, Artists Against Apartheid, CODEPINK, the Los Angeles Tenants Union, and Dream Defenders.

“We are here in honor of Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King,” De La Cruz continued. “We stand in his legacy when he told us that today is tomorrow. That there is an urgency in this country to make revolution. That there is an urgency in this country to end the rule of billionaires.”

Indeed, Trump’s inauguration was held on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday in the United States intended to honor the legacy of the civil rights leader. Many were outraged that Trump would mark his first day as president on this day, given his loyalty to racist, right-wing billionaires.

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Harvard students demonstrate in Boston on January 20 (Photo: Micah Fong)

Richest cabinet in history
Trump broke a record for donations for his inauguration, raising more than USD 170 million. Trump has raised so much money for his inauguration from the ultra-rich that some events have run out of room for V.I.P. tickets. Among these donors include Fortune 500 companies and individual billionaires such as Amazon, Ford, and hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. Trump nominated an unprecedented number of 13 billionaires for his cabinet, making his administration set to be the richest in US history.

Tech CEO’s brought their whole families to Trump’s inauguration, and got the prime seats.

“I don’t even think the cabinet nominees have plus ones in there,” says CNN anchor pic.twitter.com/rjeCRTrCtu

— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) January 20, 2025


During a speech in Washington, DC, following Trump’s inauguration, world’s richest man Elon Musk appeared to deliver a “Roman salute,” associated with Nazi Germany, not once, but twice. Musk has been tapped by Trump to run the newly-created “Department of Government Efficiency,” tasked with broadly slashing social services, government jobs, and regulations.

Labor fights back
Organizations of the working class remain defiant in the face of Trump’s loyalty to the ultra-rich. Grant Miner, President of UAW Local 2710, which represents student workers at Columbia, urged workers to spite Trump’s anti-union agenda and continue to organize unions at their workplaces, and called on workers already in unions to “make a union that fights for the working class.”

“One thing Trump and all his billionaire buddies have made clear is that they plan to fight unionization every step of the way,” Miner told Peoples Dispatch.

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Demonstrators hold banners in Washington, DC, where Trump was inaugurated as President (Photo: Party for Socialism and Liberation)

“That means installing administrative judges who are conservative, who will overturn previous court decisions to try to roll back worker protections, and make it harder to unionize,” the UAW leader described. Miner emphasized, however, that victory in the labor movement has not historically originated from increased worker protections. What has led to wins in the labor movement has been “worker power,” or collective struggle, according to Miner.

“How is the labor movement planning to fight Trump’s billionaire agenda? We’re planning to organize more! We’re planning to organize places that have never been organized before,” Miner emphasized.

Migrant workers vow to fight mass deportations
As Trump’s threatened mass deportations of 15 to 20 million migrants loom, immigrant worker organizations vow to fight back. Organizations such as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) have even mobilized “Fire Relief Brigades” to help clean up the streets of Los Angeles following the devastation incurred by the wildfires. As described by Los Angeles-based NDLON volunteer Manuel Vicente, these fire brigades are a way to respond to Trump and the right’s anti-migrant attacks. “We respond to those attacks with love,” Vicente said.

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Demonstrators hold signs denouncing deportations in Atlanta (Photo: Elias Nail-DuPree)

“Day laborers have been the first responders in Los Angeles when fires are going on,” said NDLON organizer Jorge Torres at the rally in Washington Square Park. “This is an example of when the government doesn’t show up. Who shows up? We show up, the community shows up.”

Not for sale
In Los Angeles, residents are dealing with the twin crises of destruction from wildfires as well as post-disaster price gouging by landlords. The newly-formed organization “Altadena not for sale” showed up to a mass demonstration in Los Angeles on January 20. Altadena residents, hailing from a historically Black neighborhood, are organizing to ensure that longtime community members are not pushed out once the neighborhood is rebuilt post-wildfires.

MJ, a survivor of both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Katrina, attended the rally in Los Angeles and stood in solidarity with Altadena residents, sporting an “Altadena not for sale” t-shirt. “My entire family, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, they lost everything in Hurricane Katrina,” MJ said.

“Now when you visit New Orleans, it’s not the same as it was before Hurricane Katrina,” MJ said, referring to the way that developers took advantage of the destruction to buy up property and drive up prices, pushing out longtime residents. Altadena residents worry the same is in store for Los Angeles, and are determined to put up a fight against landlords and developers. “I’m here standing up for this now, because I have the voice and the ability to stand up for these cities and these communities and these neighborhoods,” MJ said.

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Demonstrators in Los Angeles hold banner demanding full relief for wildfire victims (Photo: Bianca Carillo)

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/21/ ... residency/

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Did Trump Just Drop Some Hints About His Peace Plan?
Andrew Korybko
Jan 21, 2025

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Trump’s known for his capriciousness, however, so it might be that he either didn’t mean to hint at anything at all in his latest remarks about Russia or he might unexpectedly change his mind about the compromises that he considers to be acceptable for each party during his upcoming call with Putin.

Trump said a few words about Russia shortly after his reinauguration while signing Executive Orders in the Oval Office. They’re important to interpret since they might hint at his peace plan, which he’s yet to officially reveal, but reports have circulated claiming that he’ll “escalate to de-escalate” through more sanctions against Russia and armed aid to Ukraine if Putin rejects whatever deal he offers. He’ll likewise allegedly cut Ukraine off if Zelensky rejects the same deal. Here’s what he said on Monday afternoon:

“Zelenskyy told me he wants to make a deal, I don’t know if Putin does ... He might not. I think he should make a deal. I think he’s destroying Russia by not making a deal. I think, Russia is kinda in big trouble. You take a look at their economy, you take a look at their inflation in Russia. I got along with [Putin] great, I would hope he wants to make a deal.

He’s grinding it out. Most people thought it would last about one week and now you’re into three years. It is not making him look good. We have numbers that almost a million Russian soldiers have been killed. About 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers are killed. Russia’s bigger, they have more soldiers to lose but that’s no way to run a country.”

Starting from the beginning, his claim that Zelensky “wants to make a deal” coupled with his uncertainty about Putin’s willingness might be meant to portray the latter as an obstacle to peace, thus possibly setting the stage for the previously mentioned punitive measures. As for his opinion that Putin is “destroying Russia”, that’s hyperbole but frames his counterpart as the weaker of the two, especially when contrasted with Trump’s declaration earlier that day about the start of an American Golden Age.

He then elaborated by pointing to Russia’s inflation rate, which is implied to be the result of the West’s unprecedented sanctions and correspondingly hinting at the possibility of some relief in exchange for Putin agreeing to compromise instead of continuing to pursue his maximum goals. Building upon that, citing Ukraine’s grossly inflated estimate of Russian losses might belie ignorance of the facts if he truly believes their numbers, but it could also reaffirm his expectation that Putin must compromise.

To explain, Trump seems to believe that Western sanctions’ effect on the Russian economy and the battlefield losses that Russia has suffered (both of which are exaggerated in the context that he referred to them) justify proposing compromises from Putin, not giving into his demands. For this reason, it’s likely that the earlier reports about him planning to propose something less than what his counterpart signaled would be acceptable are true, after which he’ll “escalate to de-escalate” if it’s rejected.

Observers can only speculate about the substance of his envisaged proposal, but it might look something like what was suggested at the end of this analysis here, particularly with regards to the proverbial carrots that Trump might offer Putin with regard to Ukraine’s neutrality and phased sanctions relief. As for the compromises that might be requested of Russia, these could include freezing the Line of Contact while being asked to accept only the partial demilitarization of Ukraine and practically no denazification.

Trump’s known for his capriciousness, however, so it might be that he either didn’t mean to hint at anything at all in his latest remarks about Russia or he might unexpectedly change his mind about the compromises that he considers to be acceptable for each party during his upcoming call with Putin. Nobody can therefore say with certainty what he had in mind, let alone what he’ll ultimately do, but this analysis is premised on the assumption that he might have even subconsciously let part of his plan slip.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/did-trum ... ints-about

GIGO

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The Guardian: European jitters about Trump 2.0 not shared by much of world, poll finds
January 20, 2025
By Jon Henley, The Guardian, 1/14/25

European anxiety about Donald Trump’s return to the White House is not shared in much of the world, a poll has shown, with more people in non-western powers such as China, Russia, India and Brazil welcoming his second term than not.

The 24-country poll, which also included Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Indonesia and Turkey, found that Switzerland, the UK, 11 EU nations surveyed and South Korea were alone in feeling Trump 2.0 would be bad for their country and for peace in the world.

“In short, Trump’s return is lamented by America’s longtime allies but almost nobody else,” stated the report by the European Council on Foreign Relations thinktank, adding that his re-election left Europe in particular “at a crossroads” in its relations with the US.

The report also found that many people outside Europe believed the incoming president was committed to ending wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and saw a Trump-led US as just one leading power among several – including the EU.

“Europeans need to recognise the advent of a more transactional world. Rather than attempt to lead a global liberal opposition to Trump, they should understand their own strengths and deal with the world as they find it,” the report said.

Respondents fell into five groups, ranging from “Trump welcomers”, most common in India (75%), Russia (38%), South Africa (35%), China (34%) and Brazil (33%), to “never Trumpers”, prevalent in the UK (50%), Switzerland and the EU (28%).

Optimism about Trump’s second term was especially pronounced in India – where 82% saw it as a good thing for peace in the world, 84% as good for their country, and 85% as a good thing for US citizens – and Saudi Arabia (57%, 61% and 69% respectively).

Among long-term US allies, responses were very different: 22% in the 11 EU countries surveyed, 15% in the UK and 11% in South Korea said they thought Trump would be good for their country, while only slightly more felt he would be good for peace.

Large proportions in several countries also felt Trump’s return would make peace more likely in Ukraine and the Middle East specifically, including India (65% and 62%), Saudi Arabia (62% and 54%), Russia (61% and 41%) and China (60% and 48%).

Ukrainians were much more reserved, with 39% believing Trump would help bring peace to their country and 35% saying this was less likely, while in Europe and South Korea there was widespread scepticism that Trump 2.0 would make any difference.

Only 24% in the UK, 31% in South Korea and 34% in the 11 EU countries said Trump’s return would make peace in Ukraine more likely, while even fewer (16% in the UK, 25% in the 11 EU countries and 19% in South Korea) felt it would have that effect in the Middle East.

The report’s authors argued that their findings confirmed a general “weakening of the west” and the emergence of a far more transactional, à la carte world, pointing to a strong acceptance in many countries of Russia as an ally or a necessary partner.

Despite Moscow’s brutal war on Ukraine, the survey found that the number of Indian and Chinese people who considered Russia to be their country’s ally had actually grown marginally in the past year, while average US opinion of Russia had also improved.

By contrast, faced with Trump’s return, just one in five Europeans (22%) said they viewed the US as an ally, which is significantly fewer than the 31% who did so two years ago, and half the relatively unchanged proportion of Americans who considered the EU an ally.

Most people in countries including Brazil, Indonesia, China, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey expect Russia’s global influence to grow, but majorities in all those countries plus the EU and UK think China will be the strongest power in 20 years.

US influence is expected to increase, but few believe “Make America Great Again” (Maga) will lead to global dominance. “US geopolitical exceptionalism is beginning to recede,” the authors said, with the US expected to act in future as a “normal” large power.

People around the world also saw the EU as a major global power, with majorities in most countries considering it capable of dealing on equal terms with the US and China. (Ironically, those least likely to share that view were Europeans.)

Majorities in India (62%), South Africa (60%), Brazil (58%) and Saudi Arabia (51%), and pluralities in Ukraine (49%), Turkey (48%), China (44%), Indonesia (42%) and the US (38%), believed the EU would wield “more influence” globally in the next decade.

Moreover, the bloc was widely seen as an “ally” or “necessary partner”, including in countries such as Brazil, India and South Africa. The recent EU-Mercosur trade agreement “shows the kind of deals” a more united EU could make, the report said.

The authors stressed, however, that the west was clearly divided as Trump returns, not just between the US and Europe (and other allies such as South Korea), but also within the EU: some member states were far more welcoming of Maga than others.

“What the EU must do to be taken seriously by Trump’s White House resembles what it must do to make friends and influence people globally,” the report’s authors, foreign policy experts Mark Leonard, Ivan Krastev and Timothy Garton Ash, wrote.

Rather than trying to shape liberal resistance to Trump and “posing as a moral arbiter of everyone else’s behaviour”, Europe should “build its domestic strength and seek new bilateral partnerships to defend its own values and interests”, they said.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/01/the ... oll-finds/

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Four Lawsuits Targeting DOGE Filed Immediately After Trump Swearing In Demand Compliance with FACA, Other Laws
Posted on January 21, 2025 by Yves Smith

I’d grumbled to Lambert about the lack of discussion among self-styled Trump resisters of litigation to counter some of the obvious lawbreaking initiatives Trump planned, with DOGE, intended to serve as a scorched-earth austerity exercise, at the top of the list. But the truly serious opposition was beavering away quietly. Four groups filed suits hard on the heels of Trump officially taking office. Three have overlapping claims, about how the organization and governance (such as it is) of DOGE violates key provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (“FACA”), which stipulates how bodies consisting of non-government employees must be constituted to act in an advisory capacity.1 Here is are links to the filing with Public Citizen as lead plaintiff, the one led by American Public Health Association, and by and by the National Security Counselors (with Jerald Lentini as lead plaintiff).

The defendants differ across the filings. For Public Citizen, they are Trump and the OMB. For the American Public Health Association, they are the OMB, the Acting Director of the OMB, and DOGE. The National Security Counselors’ pleading targets DOGE, the OMB, the Office of Personnel Management, the Executive Office of the President, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the directors of the OMB and OPM.


The causes of action and remedies also vary a bit across filings. Curiously, the Public Citizen suit does not call for injunctive relief (ie, making DOGE stop in its tracks) but American Public Health Association does. Only the the American Public Health Association suit does, filing claims under the Administrative Procedures Act and arguing it was entitled to seek a writ of mandamus. The National Security Counselors documents cites “FACA/Mandamus” for four of its causes of action, “FACA/APA” for the fifth and “FACA/DJA” for the sixth. It calls not for injunctive relief but among other things to permanently enjoin DOGE Musk, Ramaswamy, and “all DOGE subunits” from holding meetings or conducting any DOGE business, and permanently enjoining the defendants from relying on any DOGE report or recommendation.

It is over my pay grade, but one has to assume that the defendants will want to consolidate these cases into one, and it is not clear if the differences in the named defendants and claims will prevent that.

The Public Citizen suit has an interesting angle in that Public Citizen and its fellow plaintiffs had organization members apply to be members of DOGE and got no answer.

The fourth suit, from the Center for Biological Diversity, per Politico “…seeks all records from the Office of Management and Budget relating to DOGE. ”

By way of background, from Lambert’s write-up of DOGE’s dodgy game plan from earlier this month:

Of all the strange creatures engendered during the interregnum between Trump’s election and his inauguration, the strangest of all must be DOGE[1] (the Department of Government Efficiency): Nobody (including Grok) seems to know what it is!….

And here is the official announcement, on November 12:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ways DOGE fails to comply with FACA, to summarize across the filings, includes:

The lack of a charter, which among other things, must stipulate a time frame for operation and the agency or official to whom the committee reports;

Failure to provide that membership is not “fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed by the advisory committee.” There are many supporting requirements here, such a creating a “member balance plan”;

Failure to comply with prior notice and open meeting requirements;

The use of Signal for communications among members, which violates public records requirements (as in ability to FOIA)

There is plenty of information in the press, as these filings show, to confirm that DOGE intends to and would operate in a law-and-procedure flouting manner.

The normal response to a suit like this would be to back up and comply. But the desire to move fast and break lots of things, and to not have any inconveniences like records or opposing views that have some actual say as part of the process, look to be fatal impediments to what Musk and Trump want DOGE to achieve.

It is hard to see how this filing could be knocked out quickly or easily by preliminary motions. If nothing else, the Public Citizen filing should survive a challenge to standing by its plaintiffs being blocked in its pursuit of their missions by being ignored by DOGE. Similarly, the Biological Diversity against the OMB for all records related to its interactions with DOGE critters looks like a straight up FOIA case and should proceed.

Discovery should be highly embarrassing to DOGE, as in great fun.

The problem for Team DOGE is even if its members choose to defy a court ruling against them, a win by the plaintiff would put a deep freeze on cooperation from civil servants, even before them being highly motivated not to cooperate if given adequate legal cover in possible employment suicide and institution whackage. So these actions do have the potential to succeed, not just legally but also practically.

_____

1 I would have embedded the filing from Public Citizen. Aside from being the first filed, we have a soft spot for Public Citizen, since they did a phenomenal job on beating back the Trans-Pacific partnership and this site was an occasional running buddy in those efforts. However, there’s been a bad tendency in recent years for massively bloated file sizes for even simple and not long pdfs, to the degree that we can’t even shrink them enough to embed them.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... -laws.html

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Grab Greenland? Go on Trump, expose fraud of U.S. protection and servility of Danish & NATO lackeys

Finian Cunningham

January 21, 2025

Ridenour says Denmark has no legitimate authority to rule Greenland, which Copenhagen has treated for centuries with racist colonial arrogance.

Incoming U.S. President Donald Trump has boasted about annexing Greenland from Denmark – by military force if needs be.

Veteran journalist Ron Ridenour says, ironically, go ahead Trump, grab Greenland, take all of it.

It’s not that Ridenour is a fan of the new president or endorses U.S. imperialism.

Far from it, Ron Ridenour has been an outspoken critic of American imperialism for over 60 years as a journalist and author.

However, he sees value in the Greenland grab in that it exposes the fraud of the U.S. posing as a protector of NATO allies.

Ridenour has written extensively on what he calls Denmark’s abject servility to U.S. imperialism and NATO’s aggression. He points out that Denmark has been a loyal lackey in promoting the NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.

Now, the U.S. “leader” (master) is snubbing Denmark’s so-called sovereignty over Greenland. The high-handed contempt of Trump towards Denmark is welcomed by Ridenour because it fatally corrodes the NATO alliance.

Ridenour says Denmark has no legitimate authority to rule Greenland, which Copenhagen has treated for centuries with racist colonial arrogance.

Trump’s ambition to annex Greenland for U.S. national security interests is an object lesson to NATO allies that they are ultimately dispensable.

If Trump goes ahead with the Arctic land grab, then the impact on NATO will shatter the illusions of the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... o-lackeys/

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CovertAction Bulletin: Trump Inauguration Met With Nationwide Protests
By Rachel Hu and Chris Garaffa - January 22, 2025

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[Source: AP]

https://covertactionbulletin.podbean.com/
CLICK HERE to listen on podcast platforms worldwide
Support this broadcast: become a patreon!

Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday was met with protests around the country. As he immediately launched attacks on immigrants, the environment, LGBTQ people, labor and beyond, people took to the streets in opposition, pledging to continue organizing to defend the oppressed against the onslaught of attacks from Trump and the billionaires.

In this episode, we get into some of the many executive orders that Trump put out on his first day in office. We also analyze the foreign leaders he did—and didn’t—invite to his inauguration, highlighting the presence of the European far right in the form of parties like the German AfD. And we talk about the protests connecting struggles from coast to coast and across the world.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... -protests/
"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 Jan 23, 2025 4:31 pm

Trump Keeps His Promises While Democrats Must Be Abandoned

Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 22 Jan 2025

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President Trump signs a series of executive orders at the White House on January 20. Photo: Jabin Botsford /The Washington Post via Getty Images

Trump begins his term delivering on promises, but compromised and colluding democrats have ready excuses for betraying their voters.

“Yet, with the return of Trump, opportunists in our communities and beyond are telling us that the real culprits in our oppression and the targets for opposition are Trump and republicans.”

Black Alliance for Peace

Donald Trump is once again president of the United States. The man who was counted out politically after he was charged and convicted of felonies in cases that were legally dubious efforts to keep him out of the white house, once again emerged victorious and is the 47th president of the United States.

Trump is a significant figure in U.S. politics, having won two presidential elections when the odds were against him. His success is in large part due to racist appeals to white voters. But those clarion calls might fall on deaf ears were it not for Democratic Party collusion with a greedy plutocracy and its own racism, which consigns its most loyal constituency to opportunistic tokenism.

Trump is definitely true to his word. Beginning on his inauguration on January 20, 2025, Trump signed a flurry of executive orders, making real his campaign promises. He reinstated the state sponsor of terrorism designation against Cuba that Joe Biden had lifted just the week before. He pardoned the people convicted of offenses committed when they acted on his behalf and stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. He has set in motion some yet-to-be-determined visa restrictions reminiscent of his “Muslim Ban.” All federal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) staff have been placed on paid leave. While a constitutional amendment will prevent him from moving forward, he began an effort to end birthright citizenship.

It is difficult for Black people not to be concerned when a man committed to realizing many of the right wing policies they oppose is back in the white house with majorities in both houses of congress. But one must ask how well Joe Biden met their needs. Aside from making Juneteenth a federal holiday, a move republicans supported as well, how did Joe Biden fulfill their political goals?

When leaders of civil rights organizations asked him to use executive order authority in a December 2020 meeting he refused. “‘On Day 1, I’m gonna have an executive order to do this!’ Not within the constitutional authority. I am not going to violate the Constitution. Executive authority that my progressive friends talk about is way beyond the bounds.” Trump is less concerned about the possibility of challenges or court rulings which could overturn his policies. He is standing by his political commitments while democrats look for reasons to disappoint their voters.

The worst possible reaction to Trump’s actions would be to succumb to dejection and resignation. It is clear that ending the reliance on democrats and the electoral process itself is the first step to gaining some degree of political success. The Democratic Party is at a very low point with voters and only 33% of them have a favorable opinion of the wing of the duopoly that Black people still cling to with great devotion.

It is true that they may not be down forever. Trump may lose support, democrats may see lightning strike twice and find an Obama-like figure who can skillfully make the public believe that their desires for change have finally come true.

Whether they manage to do that or not, focusing on Trump alone is a losing proposition. Doing so stunts any political growth and makes the possibility of any change in the conditions of the masses of the people seem impossible. Independence from the Black political class and other misleaders is the only way to move forward. A new liberation movement has to be forged, one that eschews seeking approval from people who rely on the largesse of an oligarchic class.

Even so-called progressives, such as “the Squad” are of little use. In a conversation with journalist Michael Tracey, former congresswoman Cori Bush gave an astounding explanation for voting to send billions of dollars in public money to fund the proxy war in Ukraine. Bush claims that she did so because of the Biden administration assertion that U.S. troops would have to fight there if congress didn’t appropriate a bottomless pit of money. She said she wanted to keep “Black and brown bodies” safe from harm and to stop Russia.

Bush was defeated in her re-election campaign when the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) supported her opponent. AIPAC bragged quite openly about their effort to unseat her and she is seen as a progressive icon. Yet she expects a nonsensical explanation for supporting the military industrial complex and U.S. imperialism to be believed. Bush and other so-called progressives backed a dangerous and deadly project that they could have opposed on the merits. Bush’s colleagues still in congress may opportunistically wring their hands over every step of the Trump presidency but as long as they engage in double talking fakery they and their supporters will lose.

In the first two years of Biden’s presidency and the democrats’ control of congress they pretended to want what voters asked them to do. Instead they made excuses claiming that phantom parliamentarians prevented them from acting or expressed fear of court rulings that might go against them.

The truth is that they don’t work for the people. They work for defense contractors and Wall Street and wealthy donors. They cannot act on behalf of those interests and also help the people. It isn’t possible to back away from their true loyalty.

Donald Trump’s vow to take back the Panama Canal may seem foolish but is it different from pledging to fight a proxy war in Ukraine that will defeat Russia? It certainly is no worse than the Biden/Harris commitment to Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.

Trump won’t raise the federal minimum wage but Biden didn’t do that either. The Voting Rights Act enforcement provisions were eviscerated by Supreme Court decisions but Biden didn’t fight to restore them when he might have been able to.

No one should be fooled by Trump’s deportation plans when Obama and Biden deported more people than he did in his first term. It is democrats who are building “cop cities” around the country. It was Biden’s Justice Department which indicted the Uhuru 3. It was Biden who hatched a plan for yet another occupation of Haiti.

It may be difficult to ignore the theater surrounding Trump’s executive orders, but remember that Biden refused to do the same thing. More people were killed by police in 2024 than in any year that records have been kept. The faces of imperialism and neoliberal austerity and police brutality will periodically change, but their methods will not. No one can fight Trump who didn’t also fight his predecessors. The struggle during his administration will not be unique but it must be sustained no matter who comes after him. If not, all expressions of opposition are worthless. The history of Black struggle and movement building can be revived if we act as fearlessly as the ancestors we claim to respect.

https://blackagendareport.com/trump-kee ... -abandoned

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Trump’s Foreign Policy Is About Pushing Back on China
January 22, 2025

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Donald Trump speaks at his victory rally at the Capital One Arena on January 19, 2025, in Washington, DC. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images.

By Steve Ellner – Jan 20, 2025

Donald Trump’s recent blustery foreign policy proclamations have many pundits scratching their heads. They should be seen as part of a broader project of reasserting US hegemony in the Americas and pushing back on Chinese geopolitical influence.

Donald Trump’s threats to take over the Panama Canal, convert Canada into the fifty-first state, and purchase Greenland may not be as ludicrous as they first seem. The proposals, albeit unachievable, lay the groundwork for a more “rational” strategy of targeting China (not so much Russia) and singling out real adversaries (as opposed to Canada and Panama), which include Cuba and Venezuela, with Bolivia not far behind. The strategy is what James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation calls the “rejuvenation of the Monroe Doctrine”—which, after all, in its day encompassed Canada and Greenland in addition to Latin America.

Trump’s choice of anti-Cuba zealot Marco Rubio as secretary of state reinforces the perception that the Trump administration’s foreign policy will pay special attention to Latin America, and that Latin American policy will prioritize two enemies: China and the continent’s leftist governments. Carafano calls the strategy “a pivot to Latin America.”Political analyst Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, writing in Americas Quarterly, was more specific about the likely upshot of the administration’s policies. After citing Trump’s plans for military action against Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela in his first administration, Tokatlian reasons that “a second Trump White House may well lack some of the more rational voices that averted more rash actions the first time around.”

Honoring the Monroe Doctrine
The pundits are at odds as to whether Trump was fantasizing and hallucinating when he made his threats against Panama, Canada, and Greenland or was acting out his “art of the deal” strategy of intimidation to extract concessions. But both interpretations miss the broader context, which suggests that a larger strategy of US interventionism is on the table.

The Panama threat is a reminder that currents on the Right and within the Republican Party still denounce the “canal giveaway.” Ronald Reagan warned against it in his attempt to secure the presidential nomination in 1976, and he again raised the issue in his successful bid for the presidency in 1980. Two decades later, in the lead-up to the turning over of the canal, prominent journalist Thomas DeFrank alleged that Panamanians were incapable of maintaining an efficient economy. He concluded that once the United States pulled out, Panamanians would “suffer more economic woes, let the canal languish and decline, and prove Ronald Reagan a prophet.”

The “Reagan Doctrine,” which justified US intervention in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and elsewhere on grounds of combating Soviet influence, was an update to the Monroe Doctrine. Subsequently, in 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry declared that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over”—though he didn’t renounce US interventionism, only unilateral intervention. The neocons and the Republican right rejected even this bland position.

Now the “rejuvenated” Monroe Doctrine promises to direct attention at practical targets of US intervention, which are south of the border, as the US invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 demonstrated. Both were quick, “clean” operations, in stark contrast with the drawn-out wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Carafano of the Heritage Foundation—which has done much strategizing for Trump’s administration, including formulating Project 2025—writes that a revived Monroe Doctrine “would comprise partnerships between the U.S. and like-minded nations in the region that share common goals, such as mitigating the influence of Russia, China and Iran.” As for the enemy closer to home, Carafano singles out the São Paulo Forum, which consists of leftist governments and movements in Latin America. And Trump himself identified Venezuela as one “of the hottest spots around the world” that his presidential envoy for special missions, Richard Allen Grenell, would be dealing with.

Trump’s remarks on the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland may foreshadow forceful, if not military, actions to achieve regime change against the United States’ real adversaries. Trump holds a special grudge against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. He may want a second chance to topple Maduro after the first attempt, beginning with the recognition of the parallel government of the inept Juan Guaidó in 2019, turned out to be such a fiasco. The same can be said for Rubio, who at the time called on the Venezuelan military to throw its allegiance to Guaidó and added that US military intervention was on the table. The well-publicized concerns about the Venezuelan presidential elections of last July 28 provide Trump and Rubio a golden opportunity.

The new right that has emerged in the twenty-first century, with Trump as its most visible figure, is more fixated on combating leftists like Maduro than were conservatives of the prior years following the end of the Cold War. And Latin America is the only region in the world where leftist governments abound in the form of the so-called Pink Tide (including the governments of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico). Those nations are in the crosshairs of Trump and his close allies.

Elon Musk is a prime example of one of those allies. Having assimilated the new right’s McCarthyism, Musk tweeted “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator.” In the four days following Venezuela’s July 28 elections, he wrote over five hundred messages about Venezuela, one of which was a tweet that read “shame on dictator Maduro.” Musk also applauded the right-wing coup against Evo Morales in 2019, and after Morales’ party returned to power in Bolivia, he brazenly warned, “We will coup whoever we want.”

The McCarthyite new right has more strongly targeted the further left Latin American leaders like those of Cuba, but it isn’t letting moderate ones like Lula off the hook. Rubio calls Lula Brazil’s “far-left leader,” while Musk has expressed certainty that he will not be reelected in 2026. Some analysts have raised the possibility that Trump will slap Lula’s government with tariffs and sanctions in order to support the return to power of Jair Bolsonaro and the Brazilian far right.

Since its initial formulation, the Monroe Doctrine has been given different readings. While James Monroe’s principal message in 1823 has been summarized as “America for the Americans,” Latin Americans have recalled the Monroe Doctrine’s two-hundred-year legacy of countless US interventions. Meanwhile, Trump invokes the Monroe Doctrine as a warning to China to steer clear of the Western hemisphere.

The China target
Trump’s real target in all three threats was China. Trump posted that the Panama Canal “was solely for Panama to manage, not China” and said that “we would and will NEVER let it fall into the wrong hands!” Actually, a Hong Kong–based company is administering two of Panama’s five ports, a far cry from Trump’s claim that Chinese soldiers are operating the canal.

Trump made his case for the annexation of the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland (a gateway to the Arctic) by arguing for the need to block China’s growing presence in the hemisphere. Trump’s threat to annex the territory of a sovereign nation says a lot about the bellicose mentality of the incoming president. It is also a reflection of the desperation of segments of the US ruling class and political elite in the face of the nation’s declining economic power. The real reason why Trump is targeting China, while he plays peacemaker between Russia and Ukraine, is economic.

In the twenty-first century, China’s investment in and trade with Latin America have increased exponentially. China has now surpassed the United States as South America’s top trading partner; some economists predict that the net value of this trade, which in 2022 was valued at $450 billion, will exceed $700 billion by 2035.

When it comes to Washington’s anti-China rhetoric, competition with the United States on the economic front receives less attention than it merits. If ever the “it’s the economy, stupid” statement was apropos, it’s in the case of China’s challenge to US hegemony.

The Heritage Foundation’s 38,000-word “Plan for Countering China” enumerates an endless number of noneconomic threats posed by China. Many of the threats put the spotlight on Latin America due to its proximity. For example: “China’s role in global drug trafficking, exploiting instability in the U.S. and Latin America caused by illegal migration … The U.S. government should close loopholes in immigration law and policy that China is exploiting.” Other areas of concern attributed to China and originating largely from Latin America include “transnational criminal activity,” “war drills” carried out in Latin America, and China’s Cuba-based espionage. In addition, in a conversation with the Chinese government, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen raised concerns regarding that nation’s alleged sponsorship of “malicious cyber activities.” The Right also alleges that China seeks to export autocracy or, in the words of then secretary of state Mike Pompeo, “validate its authoritarian system and spread its reach.”

Washington’s discourse on China’s threat to democracy resonates among the far right in Latin America. Leopoldo López, for a long time “our man in Caracas” on the far right of the political spectrum, testified before the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2023 that “autocrats” like Maduro and “Chinese communists” were, with Russia, “at the center of [an] autocratic network.”

Yet there is little evidence to back up Pompeo and López’s accusations. While the undemocratic features of the Chinese state are not in dispute, China is hardly trying to spread authoritarian rule. In fact, Beijing’s repetition of the phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics” suggests that it has little interest in exporting a model in the way that the USSR did, for instance.

Jeffrey Sachs has made the point clearly that the US-China clash is not really about ideology but rather about economic growth: “Then we have the tensions with China. This is blamed on China, but it’s actually an American policy that began under former President Barack Obama because China’s success triggered every American hegemonic antibody that says China’s becoming too big and powerful.” If economic rivalry is the real source of worry in Washington, then China is clearly a larger concern than Russia. Carafano notes, “There are persistent calls in the U.S. to pivot to Asia and leave Russia as Europe’s problem. Others suggest an accommodation with Moscow to undercut relations between Russia and China.”

The renowned international relations scholar John Mearsheimer is the foremost advocate of the position that the Chinese threat to the United States is second to none. For Mearsheimer, ideology is not at play, but rather China’s unanticipated rapid economic growth. He argues that “it would be a mistake to portray China as an ideological menace today” and adds that contemporary China “is best understood as an authoritarian state that embraces capitalism. Americans should wish that China were communist; then it would have a lethargic economy.”



The Right versus Latin America’s economic elite
As in the United States, some powerful economic actors in Latin America support the far right, but elites’ interests and viewpoints don’t always coincide. This is the case with agriculture and other business sectors that stand a lot to lose from the Latin American right’s hostility toward China, which jeopardizes markets and the influx of investments. Indeed, local business groups have come into conflict with right-wing politicians and often find themselves at odds with Washington’s anti-China campaign.

True to form, the Latin American right, along with Washington, has put up resistance to initiatives promoting cooperation with China. For instance, the decision of Panamanian president Juan Carlos Varela to sever diplomatic relations with Taiwan and extend them to Beijing in 2017 was not free of controversy. The Trump administration reacted by withdrawing its ambassador in protest, leading Varela to demand “respect … just as we respect the sovereign decisions of other countries.” This was followed by a scandal known as “VarelaLeaks” involving an alleged $142 million in bribe money from mainland China to secure the deal. China adamantly denied the charge.

After taking power, far-right leaders like Bolsonaro and Argentine president Javier Milei were extremely virulent in their language regarding China. In Bolsonaro’s first year in office, for instance, his foreign affairs minister, Ernesto Araújo, declared that Brazil would not “sell its soul” to “export iron ore and soy” to communist China. But in both cases, pressure from business resulted in surprising turnabouts. Milei, for his part, at first thwarted the implementation of agreements with Beijing and called its leaders “murderers” and “thieves” but then opted for pragmatism. After an exceptionally friendly encounter with Chinese president Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit in Rio last November, a currency swap deal worth billions of dollars was resumed.

All this indicates that the Trump administration will probably face resistance to its anti-China campaign in Latin America from an in some ways unexpected source, namely local business interests.

A Cold War rerun?
The Heritage Foundation’s foreign policy statement designed for a second Trump presidency is called “Winning the New Cold War: A Plan for Countering China.” The title is deceptive. The US-China rivalry lacks the basic ideological dimension of the former Cold War, which consisted of a confrontation between two distinct political-economic systems, both of which were fervently defended as superior dogmas.

Furthermore, China does not practice the “internationalism” that characterized the Soviet Union, which counted on the loyalty of communist parties throughout the world. Indeed, prominent leftists have criticized Beijing’s alleged lack of solidarity with left-wing movements and governments elsewhere.

In addition, China’s economic model now boasts over four hundred billionaires (according to Forbes), even while the new right’s discourse demonizes “Chinese communism.” The Right’s narrative also blames China and its economic expansion, itself partly driven by Chinese capitalists, for the inroads made by the Left in Latin American. The twisted logic recalls Adolf Hitler’s vitriolic attacks on Jewish capitalists for supposedly being responsible for the advance of communism.

Similarly, the Heritage Foundation calls out Latin American Pink Tide governments for “opening the region to China.” Carafano points to the leftist leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia for their nations’ “expanding relations” with China, Russia, and Iran. In the spirit of conspiracy theory, Carafano writes, “The [São Paulo] Forum formulates increasingly active and aggressive policies to undermine pro-U.S. regimes in the region and accepts transnational crime, including networks from the Middle East, as a helpful tool for destabilization.” In addition to the failure of the forum’s detractors to present concrete evidence linking the group to crime and terrorism, its heterogeneity, which includes grassroots labor, ethnic, and environmental movements as well as ones inspired by the Catholic Church, makes the claim implausible on its face.

Economic rivalry, not ideological difference, is the essence of the confrontation between the United States and China in Latin America. The real issue is China’s increasing economic ties in the region, including massive investments in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative for ambitious infrastructure projects, which twenty-two Latin American and Caribbean nations have signed on to. President Joe Biden attempted to counter the Belt and Road Initiative with his “Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity,” which he launched at the Summit of the Americas in 2022. He called it a “new and ambitious economic agenda.” The think tank Council on Foreign Relations characterized these investments to counter the Belt and Road Initiative as paltry, however.

Under Trump, the prospects for US investment in Latin America are likely worse. In his recent article forecasting the trends of Trump’s second administration, Tokatlian wrote, “If recent history is any guide, Washington is unlikely to offer much of an alternative when it comes to investments or help with infrastructure.” If this is the case, the United States will be in no position to win the hearts and minds of Latin Americans. If China does, it will be because of its vibrant economy, not because of the export of ideology.

https://orinocotribune.com/trumps-forei ... -on-china/

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Lover of the Russian people
January 22, 22:39

Image

Trump threatens Russia with new sanctions and new tariffs on Russian goods supplied to the US "if Russia does not complete the SVO".
We have already been through this under Biden.

"Russia helped the US win World War II". That's how it was.

The deal on Ukraine is simple - its terms were announced by Putin last summer.
Attempts to change the position of the Russian Federation through primitive threats are unlikely to lead Trump to what he wants.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9626477.html

Google Translator

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DOGE, aka the Deep State made official?

Lorenzo Maria Pacini

January 23, 2025

There is something about DOGE, a new ministry entrusted to the leadership of Elon Musk, that needs to be clarified.

In the new formatting of the TRUMP 2.0 administration, DOGE, a new ministry entrusted to the leadership of Elon Musk, appears. There is something that needs to be clarified about it.

What is (for now) the DOGE

An acronym for Department of Government Efficiency, the DOGE represents an initiative in the administrative landscape of the United States, entrusted to the leadership of Elon Musk. This entity was conceived as a body external (remember this detail) to the federal government, operating as an advisory board with the purpose of providing strategic guidance for streamlining government spending and reducing bureaucracy.

In other words, it aims to dismantle bureaucratic structures, reduce excessive regulations, cut unnecessary expenditures, and restructure federal agencies, leveraging an innovative and technologically advanced business approach. His mission is to promote a leaner and more responsive government, capable of responding efficiently to the needs of the citizenry, minimizing waste and streamlining decision-making processes.

Now the question is, why Musk of all people?

Simple: the Pretoria-based billionaire is known for his futuristic vision and ability to implement technological solutions in various sectors, so Trump expects that he will bring a distinctive methodology based on data analytics, the use of artificial intelligence, and a kind of enterprise management within the governmental context. Transparency and administrative efficiency are called for, so as to allow for more transparent and accessible management of public resources.

DOGE, then, is not set up as a traditional government agency, but rather as an advisory entity working in synergy with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget to drive large-scale structural reform.

That’s right: something external, paid for with taxpayer money, that will have influence on the inside.

A curious fact: Some believe that the potential impact of this department could be compared to that of the Manhattan Project, with an expected end date for its activities by July 4, 2026. The Manhattan Project was the “top-secret” research and development project contracted between the U.S., UK and Canada to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. What did the outcome of that project mean? Simply, so to speak, the change of the course of war and the appearance of the whole world, with the nuclear arms race, nuclear deterrence, etc., as a result.

What do “Trump’s people” want to do? Following this logic, a full-fledged atomic revolution of the U.S. administration. And maybe that is exactly what they will succeed in doing.

Something doesn’t add up…

Let’s repeat: an external entity with internal influence. At the helm, Elon Musk.

Assuming that the Deep State would be nothing more than the bankers telling the state and its apparatuses what to do and how, does it not seem to you that this is the same thing, only “normalized” by the state?

It is a legitimate question. Why would one accept a billionaire tycoon in transhumanism, finance, military research, telecommunications as an “outside influence” on the government? Isn’t that what so many other overlords of transnational potentates already do? Then what changes?

This is the right question to ask.

Elon Musk who is the largest private contractor for government entities of our time. Mainly of U.S. defense and security, with Starlink, but also of China, from which Tesla receives substantial funding. Now he will be the one who will have to say how to manage the federal agencies.

Clearly, the nature of the process that goes beyond the concept of “conflict of interest.”

We are witnessing a formalization of the Deep State, a step that will blur the fine line between public and private even more.

The word “Doge” symbolically refers to the head of the Republic of Venice, which was an oligarchic mercantile republic: is this an allusion to what this ministry or, more broadly, the Trump 2 government will be?

More importantly, why should Americans-and colonized peoples-accept such a thing? So many years of fighting against the Deep State only to find it in government. Great.

An era of new political relations, of new paradigms, is probably opening. If indeed Musk’s DOGE will be and do this, we will have to re-theorize many aspects of politics as understood in Modernity. Theory and practice.

For now, as we wait to see the DOGE come into operation, we can share some observations:

1. Political power in democracies is based on the principle of representation, which is the process by which citizens delegate some of their decision-making capacities (making political decisions, legislating, governing) to their representatives through elections. Without the legitimacy of representation, there is no democracy. Representation is based on popular sovereignty, citizens’ freedom of choice, and the accountability and responsibility of elected representatives.

In doing so, DOGE could truly legitimize a form of outside interference that arbitrarily nullifies, ipso facto, the need for and effectiveness of representation, falsifying democracy to the point of making it an aesthetic virtualization.

2. Admitting that democracy does not interest us, and also admitting its eventual termination or falsification through the activity of the DOGE, a kind of political hybrid would be formed, almost like an oligarchic patriciate. The fact that it is an external political entity suggests that there will probably not even be a need to be accountable to the government and that, perhaps, the government will have no decision-making power over DOGE. Literally a “parallel republic.”

This forces us to ask questions about the legal system and political practice of this configuration. It is unclear what kind and how much power DOGE will have in American politics. It is unclear what legislative backstop there will be. The threefold separation of state powers, as defined by the fathers of the modern era, suddenly collapses.

3. The president, we ask, what will he become? If a potentially limitless external entity will be able to influence the government, then who will really have the power, the DOGE or the President?

This is no small question. The election elected the president, not the DOGE. Musk was not directly voted in by anyone, yet he finds himself with enormous power, which we can also interpret as an extension and reshaping of his financial power.

It will be interesting to delve into the new course of American politics. What is certainly shocking is that the Deep State changes name and symbols, but not function. It is all about communication. Infowarfare works more than ever.

Then again, these American pranksters chose the name DOGE, from the maritime republic of Venice. A perfectly thalassocratic choice. The Empire of the Sea is preparing its fleet.

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

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How Far Will Trump Get With Shock and Awe?
Posted on January 22, 2025 by Yves Smith

Trump sought to break from the gate of his second term at top speed, executing a raft of executive orders and other directives on his first day (see Lambert’s tally for details) and even holding an informal press conference during his signing. And he’s keen to keep the appearance of momentum up. For instance, he didn’t implement additional tariffs among his opening day actions, even though that is within Presidential authority, but on his second day saber-rattled about deploying them against China and Europe.

But as most readers here know, an executive order is valid only within the ambit of Presidential authority. Trump has elicited a raft of legal challenges with more likely to follow, on some of his executive orders that smack of overreaching. Others, as we’ll show, are more on the order of press releases, to call extra attention to things he could have done via less flashy means. We’ll also look at his memorandum on OECD-driven pending changes in taxes on multinational. It’s elicited a kerfluffle among the media, when the reaction appears to be a result of having missed the earlier plot. Finally, we’ll turn briefly to Ukraine. There, many Trump-friendly commentators are concerned that he’s being cognitively captured by neocons who may succeed in keeping the US supporting the war.

Keep in mind Trump is already running into execution problems, or what in the Johnson Administration was called a credibility gap. Trump has not gotten an end to the Ukraine conflict within 24 hours of taking office. Trump has not imposed his much-noised about big tariffs on China, Europe, Mexico or Canada.1 The sanctuary city immigration raids, promised to start on Tuesday in Chicago by ICE chief Tom Homans, have yet to begin.

One way to think about the Trump show of force is that it amounts to an effort to restore the Presidential ability to use jawboning to get his way. A notable historical example, recounted in Slate:

The federal government’s ongoing collaborative role in the [labor negotiation] process was demonstrated in April 1962 when President John F. Kennedy, having talked the United Steel Workers into accepting a moderate wage increase, publicly attacked U.S. Steel over a price hike he deemed excessive (“a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest”), forcing the steel giant to back down. According to [MIT economists Frank] Levy and [Peter] Temin, this display of muscle “helps to explain why the reduced top tax rate” enacted two years later (it dropped to 70 percent) “produced no surge in either executive compensation or high incomes per se.” Fear of attracting comparable attention from President Lyndon Johnson kept corporations from showering the bosses with obscene pay hikes.

The Wall Street Journal, in its lead story today CEOs Launch War Rooms, Hotlines to Cope With Trump’s Order Blitz, confirms that Trump has gotten the attention of C-suites. Remember, for every group like the AI overlord looking to feed at Trump’s promised $500 billion trough (which would have to be approved by Congress), there are many who are looking at having rice bowls broken, for instance, by spending cuts or unfavorable regulatory changes (recall that quite a few sectors of the economy depend on existing complexity, starting with H&R Block and TuroTax, not that they are under threat). High points from the Journal’s account:

The blitz of executive orders and memos from President Trump left business leaders—some still in the tuxedos they wore to White House inaugural galas—scrambling to make sense of sweeping changes to tax, immigration, trade and energy policies….

Many of Trump’s first-day moves were expected, and there were few details on some of the biggest topics, including deportations….

The details of any new tariff policy would be critical for companies including 3M, the American manufacturing company behind everything from Scotch tape to materials used in electric-vehicle batteries….

Many companies remain concerned about changes to immigration policies. The law firm Fisher Phillips on Tuesday launched a rapid-response immigration team….

The firm sent clients a 24-hour hotline number that they could call in the event of an unexpected immigration raid. Employees in such industries as construction, hospitality and healthcare have conducted training sessions or posted placards at front desks so receptionists know what to do—and whom to call—should immigration officials show up unannounced.

Peter Belluomini, a citrus grower in Kern County, Calif., said he temporarily lost about 70% of his harvest crew earlier this month when a local Border Patrol raid prompted many workers to lie low.

“Basically the word gets out in the community and that part of the labor force gets nervous so they’ll stay home,” he said. Belluomini added that he expected “any disruption would be temporary and short-lived.”


However, despite the whinging and lobbying, the Journal report that big business remains optimistic that Trump will be a plus for them.

Neither piece appears to allow for the fact that many of Trump’s plans are subject to being delayed or overturned by court challenges. We described the fast-out-of-the-box filings against the improper construction of DOGE, including its lack of required transparency, like keeping records that can be FOIAed. If DOGE manages to get off the ground, it is certain to face additional litigation, such as over its expected refusal to spend fund already approved by Congress, or impoundment. Note that the Trump team appears to be avoiding engaging that type of battle yet; for instance, it put a 90 day pause on foreign aid for review as opposed to (yet) trying to cancel any. Well, with a noteworthy exception:

Trump signed an executive order suspending all foreign aid for 90 days. This was the headline published by all media outlets.

Buried in the fine print was that Israel and the US-Israeli Arab shield puppet regimes of Egypt and Jordan are exempted from the order. pic.twitter.com/CWS6UHFvj8

☀️👀 (@zei_squirrel) January 22, 2025

Image

Similarly, the lead story at the Financial Times tonight is Donald Trump halts more than $300bn in US green infrastructure funding. The subhead correctly points out that this is a pause; Trump again is going to have to devise legal justifications for ending the spending permanently and can still expect court pigfights he may well lose.

This list is sure to grow, but in an e-mailed morning update, the Hill identified some new legal actions taken against some of the Trump first-day initiatives:

He also pledged to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed under the 14th Amendment. On Tuesday, attorneys general from 22 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, sued Trump in two federal district courts to block an executive order that refuses to recognize children of immigrants without legal status who were born in the U.S. as citizens. 

“President Trump now seeks to abrogate this well-established and longstanding Constitutional principle by executive fiat,” one group of states wrote in their complaint. “The principle of birthright citizenship has been enshrined in the Constitution for more than 150 years. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment unambiguously and expressly confers citizenship on ‘[a]ll persons born’ in and ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States.” ….

Meanwhile, the National Treasury Employees Union sued over an executive order creating a new class of federal employees — Schedule F — who can be hired outside the traditional merit-based system for bureaucrats. Federal workers see Schedule F as a way to insert politics into government actions, a move that could both reward Trump allies and politicize government decision making.


However, it’s important to keep in mind some of the executive orders have more bark than bite. The order on “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government” clearly takes aim at ideological and popular support of trans rights, so the official cover can be argued to be more important than the immediate impact. But the order does not attempt to bar funding of transitioning by minors. And even some of the areas it takes aim at are misfires. For instance:

There's a direction that Homeland Security should change rules about passports, visas, and Global Entry cards to redefine sex under Trump's terms. But those are programs under the Department of State.

— Ezra Ishmael Young (@ezraiyoung) January 21, 2025


Office of Personnel Management (federal gov't HR) is asked to make sure that all federal employee records "accurately report" sex, as defined at conception. There are ~2.3M fed workers. That's a lot of time machines and microscopes.

— Ezra Ishmael Young (@ezraiyoung) January 21, 2025


Trump demands that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent agency, rescind a guidance document. Prez has no such power. As the label suggest, independent agencies are in fact independent.

— Ezra Ishmael Young (@ezraiyoung) January 21, 2025



A press release packaged as an order is “America First Policy Directive To The Secretary Of State”:

Image

Seriously? A memo to Mario Rubio would have been more than sufficient.

But let’s turn to some odd coverage. Last night, the first day memorandum, “The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Global Tax Deal (Global Tax Deal)” generated lead story at the Financial Times: Donald Trump threatens tax war over US multinationals.2 It and the Wall Street Journal coverage oddly miss a key point, which is why Trump can proceed here with a mere memorandum: the OECD scheme to harmonize a corporate base rate had never been approved by Congress. The OECD seemed to be operating as if this was a “rules based order” item, that if the IRS implemented it merely on Biden Administration authority, of course it would all be good. But the reality is the IRS has a nasty propensity to lose pretty much all big corporate cases filed against it, so the odds are the US (and OECD) would have faced an unholy mess if this scheme went live.3 See the embedded document at the end of the post, posted by Tax Notes, in which House leaders tell the OECD that the Biden Adminstration did not have the authority to commit to OECD recommendations (not rules, they aren’t rules).

A short version of the bone of contention, from the Financial Times account:

Donald Trump has ordered officials to draw up retaliatory measures against countries applying “extraterritorial” levies on US multinationals, in a move that threatens to trigger a global confrontation over tax regimes.

The US president made the move in an executive order on Monday night, withdrawing US support for a global tax pact agreed at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) last year that allows other countries to levy top-up taxes on US multinationals….

The global deal agreed at the Paris-based OECD in 2021 and partly introduced by several countries last year was expected to raise the tax take from the world’s biggest multinationals by up to $192 billion (€185 billion) a year.

Under “pillar two” of the OECD deal if corporate profits were taxed below 15 per cent in the country where the multinational was headquartered, signatories could potentially charge top-up levies. But one part of the interlocking measures, known as the undertaxed profits rule (UTPR), has long drawn Republican anger, with the party labelling it “discriminatory”.


Oddly, my pdf of the original story, but not the Irish Times version, contains:

Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network, an international campaign group, said Trump’s move in effect left the OECD pact “dead in the water”.

The Journal article did give a clearer idea that the Biden Administration had never properly firmed up the OECD commitment, but skipped over what the new scheme was about.

In 2021, about 140 countries reached an international tax agreement in two parts, attempting to put a floor under corporate tax rates and create clearer rules for which countries get to tax which income. Companies and Republicans have been objecting in particular to attempts to tax U.S.-based companies that pay below the 15% corporate tax floor in the U.S., which undercut the research tax credit.

Trump signed an executive memo on Monday that says Biden administration commitments under the deal have no force within the U.S. without congressional approval and asked administration officials to study potential U.S. actions.


Tonight, however the Financial Times described how the US has the means to aggressively retaliate if the other OECD members try to apply the new system to US companies abroad. From Donald Trump threatens to double tax rates for foreign nationals and companies based on a more careful reading of a related order:

His order, signed on Monday, specifically asks the Treasury secretary to “investigate whether any foreign country subjects US citizens or corporations to discriminatory or extraterritorial taxes” so it conforms with Section 891.

This section says that when a president formally declares there is such discrimination, the tax rates should “be doubled in the case of each citizen and corporation of such foreign country” — without needing Congressional approval.

“This [invoking Section 891] is the most extreme option and it’s interesting that they’re threatening to use it straight out of the gate,” said Alex Parker, tax legislative affairs director at Eide Bailly. “Based on the way the legislation is worded, it does seem to be double or nothing.”

Trump also issued a separate policy memo withdrawing US support for last year’s OECD global tax pact, which allows other countries to levy top-up taxes on US multinationals.


Finally, and only briefly, to Ukraine. Trump is a master of sensing weakness, witness him successfully putting Netanyahu on the back foot (although nothing is over till it’s over with Netanyahu). Sadly, that means Trump is particularly ill-prepared to contend with a situation where he has no leverage, as with Russia. He can’t cow or threaten Putin, nor can he deliver anything Putin might value, like a binding commitment of no Ukraine in NATO evah. He also can’t achieve a “new European security architecture” which is another keen Putin desire. Not only, as the Russians know bloody well, no US commitment can be assured to endure even as long as a single administration, but Starmer and key European have worked themselves up to a new high warble of anti-Russia war lust statements.

Of course, statements like the ones Trump just made are the predictable result of filling his foreign policy team full of neocons:

US President Donald Trump says Russian President Vladimir Putin should make deal to end war in Ukraine because conflict is destroying Russia pic.twitter.com/rkCuxulJhj

— TRT World Now (@TRTWorldNow) January 21, 2025

(Video at link.)

I can’t find a clip on Twitter that includes this section, quoted in Politico:

Trump said Putin couldn’t be happy with the slow progress of his war against Ukraine — nearly three years after he ordered an all-out assault, and 11 years after disguised Russian troops first entered Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.

“He’s grinding it out. Most people thought it would last about one week and now you’re into three years. It is not making him look good,” Trump said.

“We have numbers that almost a million Russian soldiers have been killed. About 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers are killed. Russia’s bigger, they have more soldiers to lose but that’s no way to run a country,” he added.


The claim about Russian losses has been sharply disputed by many Ukraine war commentators. Simplicius is representative:

Unfortunately, Trump exposes his complete ignorance and lack of credibility when it comes to the Ukrainian conflict by subsequently complaining that Russia has suffered an outrageous one million dead soldiers in the war. How can anyone possibly count on the man so ill-informed to be the savior that miraculously ends the war? We can understand a little flourish for the media to dress it up a bit, make things seem more dire for effect—but peremptorily citing such numbers just makes Trump look sadly disconnected, which further colors any of his efforts toward the war as similarly half-assed; that’s not to even mention his claim that Spain is a member of BRICS.

He goes on to say that Putin is destroying Russia by not making a deal, and the way he says it almost feels as if Trump is now convinced that Putin has already made up his mind not to “make a deal”. He further claims that Russia’s economy is in ruins, and most notably, says that he would consider sanctioning or tariffing Russia.


Is there anything left for the US to sanction? Alexander Mercouris has argued that if the US were to find a way to further tighten the screws on Russian energy exports, it would increase prices in the US, since these are global, connected markets. It appears that concerns about inflation have stayed Trump’s hand on imposing new tariffs. Why should the calculus be any different with Russian sanctions, even before getting to the fact that they’ve backfired?

Now perhaps Trump will get a wake up call when he does meet Putin, not from any Putin-provided facts about the economy or the state of his military, but by simply making clear to Trump that Russia has the means to continue the war indefinitely and the Russia people are overwhelmingly in support of the campaign.

So while Trump likes conflict, he likes winning even more. And it’s far from clear how many of the dust-ups he’s started will produce wins. But even if he loses more than he succeeds on the policy front, he does look well on his way to shifting priorities and prevailing ideologies.

____

1 The Bloomberg story linked above and the Wall Street Journal piece quoted below differ on how quickly Trump might act on tariffs, if at all. Bloomberg points out that his executive orders call for reviews: “But the only actual action taken so far is the call for a review of trade practices that’s due by April 1, potentially giving China and others almost 10 weeks to avert new levies or address his demands.” The Journal, by contrast, cites Trump as saying he will Do Something with respect to Mexico and Canada by February 1.

2 Oddly, that version is no longer available on the pink paper’s site (I happened to have pdf’d a copy) but can be found syndicated at venues like the Irish Times

3 Yours truly is NOT arguing against the substantive merits of the OECD initiative but the Biden Administration fudge.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... d-awe.html

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Col. Daniel Davis: Trump’s Return: Immediate Impact, Putin Reacts
January 22, 2025



https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/01/the ... mes-trump/

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Poland’s President Is Trying To Trick Trump Into Perpetuating The Ukrainian Conflict
Andrew Korybko
Jan 23, 2025
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Duda’s influence operation is aimed at getting Trump to humiliate Putin out of the mistaken belief that this is the only way to avert World War III, which would actually perpetuate the conflict by sabotaging the peace process and thus serving as the pretext for the US to “escalate to de-escalate” on its terms.

Outgoing Polish President Andrzej Duda gave an interview to interview to the Washington Post where he discussed several important topics, chief among them the Ukrainian endgame, which he suggested is inextricably connected to psychology and optics. Russia must believe that it wasn’t victorious, which isn’t the same as defeating Russia, just preventing it from winning. He’s a close friend of Trump’s so he might whisper some of this in his ear to influence the endgame. Here’s exactly what Duda said:

“So we believe that if Russia wins this war against Ukraine, it is going to launch a further attack. It is very simple. If Russia has got this internal conviction that it has been victorious in that conflict, it does not even have to seize the whole of Ukraine.

It is not really--it is not important how big that victory would be. If there is this internal conviction that they are victorious, they will attack again. And I would like you, ladies and gentlemen, to understand in detail my way of thinking, because I am not sure whether you have been following my statements in a regular way. What I always say is that it is not about defeating Russia, because to many people, defeating Russia would mean a parade held in the Red Square.

The thing is to make it impossible for Russia to win, to prohibit Russia from winning. The thing is that we prevent Russia from achieving a big victory. It is to make sure that Russia cannot trumpet that it has been victorious, that it achieved success.”

MAGA thought leader Steve Bannon warned earlier this week that Ukraine could turn into Trump’s Vietnam if he doesn’t swiftly end the conflict like he promised, recalling how the precedent of Nixon ultimately taking ownership of LBJ’s war might lead to Trump taking ownership of Biden’s. According to him, a trap is being set for Trump by the military-industrial complex, the Europeans, and some misguided friends like new special envoy to Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg.

It’s within this context that Duda’s suggestions about the Ukrainian endgame should be analyzed. By framing everything the way that he did, namely by fearmongering that Russia might attack NATO even if it doesn’t “seize the whole of Ukraine” so long as it still thinks that it was victorious, Duda is therefore trying to mislead Trump into proposing an unacceptable deal to Putin knowing very well that it’ll likely be rejected. This could then prompt Trump’s advisors to pressure him into “escalating to de-escalate”.

Prior reports indicate that he might impose more sanctions against Russia and dispatch more armed aid to Ukraine in that scenario, which risks escalating and perpetuating the conflict in ways that might very well turn it into Trump’s Vietnam, albeit with nuclear stakes if either side miscalculates. Poland, all of its state-level European peers except for Hungary and Slovakia, and the military-industrial complex would be pleased with this outcome since they’re afraid that Trump is planning to abandon Ukraine.

Trump is known to be easily manipulatable and he’s also considered to be someone who’s obsessed with beating all his competitors. These combined traits make Trump susceptible to Duda’s influence operation aimed at getting him to humiliate Putin out of the mistaken belief that this is the only way to avert World War III. If Trump listens more to Duda and less to Bannon, then he might soon have his own Vietnam, which will dominate his second term and derail his entire agenda in ultimate betrayal of his base.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/polands- ... g-to-trick
"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 Jan 24, 2025 3:49 pm

The age of interplanetary exceptionalism

Pepe Escobar

January 22, 2025

Only the U.S. can rebrand a genocide into a great real estate opportunity in a “phenomenal location”.

Let’s start with the key take away: Manifest Destiny reaching the stars. Literally.

Trump 2.0 – the greatest show on earth – did start with a (big) bang: “We will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars.” And that means planting the American flag on Mars. The real thing. Not a Netflix flick. No wonder platinum sidekick Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO, achieved instant rapture.

Welcome to Interplanetary Exceptionalism. Literally. As in the land of the free, home of the brave, in this new golden era, will be “far more exceptional than ever before”. Imperial decline is over. Embrace the new, brutally benign Empire. Or else.

In practical terms, it all started, predictably, with a flurry of executive orders – like a psychedelic vortex.

Time to send troops to the southern border (El Paso is already blocked) to stop the illegal immigrant “invasion”; declare drug cartels as terrorist organizations; and rename the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America”.

Add to it declaring a state of emergency to boost energy production: “We’re going to be using our emergency powers to allow countries and entrepreneurs and people with a lot of money build big plans, AI plans. We need double the energy that we already have.”

That’s code for the Empire necessarily exercising total control on AI and massive, energy-consuming AI data centers.

In between, Trump 2.0 will suspend every “foreign aid” scheme for 90 days to assess their “consistency with U.S. national interests and foreign policy goals” (Translation: Kiev, run for cover.)

Trump 2.0 will recognize only two genders – male and female; get “wokeness the hell out of our military immediately and make it like it used to be”; and “take back” the Panama Canal (“American Canal”, anyone?)

And never forget the intimation of a Big Trade War: possible 25% tariffs slapped on Canada and Mexico starting February 1st, to force negotiations. And further on down the road, the target will be the EU: Brussels is already on deep freak out mode.

Tik Tok, who’s there?

On the domestic front, one of the most intriguing gambits is the Tik Tok dossier: “U.S. Tik Tok deal may be worth a trillion dollars”, the President said. Buying 50% of Tik Tok might be a joint venture. With essential input by Trump’s son Barron, Tik Tok de facto helped Trump and Republicans to gain no less than 36% of the youth vote.

The possible Tik Tok deal essentially forces China to split 50% of ownership with American shareholders – so it may continue to sell ads in the U.S. This is all about financial gains linked to advertising.

The equity structure of Tik Tok is quite intriguing. 20% is held by the founder, Zhang Yiming. Other 20% is held by Tik Tok’s employees around the world. The remaining 60% is held by three American funds. So the U.S. in fact has long held more than 50% of the shares.

The difference now is that Trump/the U.S. government want to force founder Zhang Yiming to sell his shares.

Now imagine a parallel world where Brussels would force 50% of YouTube or X to be bought by a European oligarch so it would be allowed to do business in Europe (this in fact might even actually happen one day).

Now let’s hit the foreign policy cauldron.

Ukraine. Trump was evasive: a potential timeline for solving the proxy war in Ukraine could be discussed during an upcoming phone call with Putin (“soon”). When it comes to keeping the sanctions on Russia, Trump defined them as “tariffs”.

NATO. Gotta pay. A lot more: “NATO has to pay 5 percent. We are in the Ukraine war by $200 billion more than NATO. It’s ridiculous because it affects them a lot more. We have an ocean in between. And we’ve spent $200 billion more on Ukraine than NATO has spent. And they’ve got to equalize.”

NATO head, the Dutch Rutti-Frutti, seems to have got the message even before the inauguration; he’s already spinning the 5% for all European citizens like a mad dog. What if health care and social services need to be cut: it’s for the greater (imperial) good.

EU. The brutally benign message to the EU – which Trump did not even mention – is that these chihuahuas belong to the U.S. sphere of influence. Trump imperially ignored them.

With one spectacular exception. Asked about a possible 100 percent tariff “on those countries like Spain”, Trump’s answer was a pearl: “As a BRICS nation, yes.”

Someone forgot to tell Madrid they are now on BRICS. Yet the key point remains: Trump threatens to impose 100% tariffs on all BRICS nations going the de-dollarization way. Incidentally, 95% of payments between Russia and China are now in rubles and yuan.

Missile Defense. Trump: “I will direct our military to begin construction of the great Iron Dome missile defense shield, which will all be made in the U.S.A.” Well, the Pentagon should ask the Houthis for some input.

Venezuela. An intriguing twist: Trump envoy Ric Grenell is setting up direct talks with Caracas. Venezuela Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello is encouraging “rebooted” relations. And the Attorney General is willing to restart cooperation on smothering criminal gangs – extradition included.

None of that means that regime change will be discarded. All that oil and all those minerals, the brutally benign Empire badly needs them.

Cuba. Back to the list of “state sponsors of terrorism”. Havana originally made it during Trump 1.0, in 2021. And now with Marco Rubio in the State Dept., prospects are bleak. Havana will always resist.

Gaza. Trump was asked how confident he is about the Gaza ceasefire: “I’m not confident. That’s not our war, it’s their war.”

But the best was saved for last: “Gaza is like a massive demolition site. That place is, it’s really got to be rebuilt in a different way […] Gaza’s interesting. It’s a phenomenal location. On the sea, best weather […] It’s like some beautiful things could be done with it.”

Never underestimate This Year’s Model: the Golden, Exceptional, brutally benign Empire. No other entity can rebrand a genocide into a great real estate opportunity in a “phenomenal location”.

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

******

"Heil Tesla"
January 23, 23:03

Image

The number of memes with Musk giving the Nazi salute has tripled.
Tesla is a car for real Aryans.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9628471.html

Google Translator

******

Thousands protest Trump’s coronation, vow to fight billionaire oligarchy
January 23, 2025 Jace Carter

Image
Washington, D.C., Jan. 20. SLL photo

Washington, D.C., Jan. 20 – Despite below-freezing temperatures and strong winds, a thousand or more people took to the streets today during President Donald Trump’s inauguration to demonstrate that the movement for Palestine and for workers’ and migrants’ rights isn’t going anywhere just because the oligarchy-supporting fascist has now taken back the Oval Office for a second term. In fact, our united struggle for liberation will only continue to intensify against Trump’s plans to enact his far-right billionaire agenda against the working class fully.

That agenda includes but is not limited to: mass deportations of migrant workers, severe repression of unions’ rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and the student intifada, and more reckless spending for the U.S. war machine to further its aggression against the Axis of Resistance in the Middle East, against China and Latin America, and in Ukraine through the U.S.-NATO proxy war against Russia.

The action was organized by the We Fight Back Network, a coalition of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Maryland 2 Palestine, and Anakbayan DC, with dozens of other endorsing organizations including the Peoples Power Assembly and Struggle-La Lucha who were well represented in the streets.

People gathered at Malcolm X Park, a very fitting location for MLK Day, symbolic of the continuous struggle for justice once led by these well-known revolutionaries, all while our fascist government once again used this day to try to reduce both men’s legacies, pushing the myth of their opposition to each other. We know that they both knew that extreme poverty and racism in this country are directly linked to capitalism and militarism. They both also knew that the only way to end these material conditions is for all oppressed workers to unite together and fight back against the ruling class.

During the rally, it was announced that Indigenous revolutionary and political prisoner Leonard Peltier, who was wrongfully incarcerated over 50 years ago for the murder of two FBI agents, had finally been granted executive clemency in one of President Biden’s final acts before leaving office. This surprise announcement brought immense joy and relief to an already fired-up crowd ready to take to the streets.

People marched down 16th Street past various embassies and luxury apartments, much to the disgust of a few Trump supporters straining their necks to make their obnoxious voices heard amongst the roar of those chanting “No Trump, No KKK, No fascist USA!” “The people, united, will never be defeated!” and “There is only one solution, intifada, revolution!” to name a few.

While both the MPD and U.S. Park Police encroached on the marching crowd with their bicycles on the sidewalks, other onlookers watched from either their balconies or on the sidewalks, taking plenty of photos and videos. A notable feature that stood out against the various signs and protest art held by the crowd was a large makeshift guillotine smeared in fake blood with a sign underneath that read “COME GET SUM!” an obvious jab at the billionaire oligarchy set to rule during Trump’s second presidency, inspiring the need for revolution against the ruling class.

The march then turned onto Massachusetts Avenue before stopping at the Philippine Embassy, where members of Malaya DC and Anakbayan DC held another brief but energetic rally, which denounced the economic and militaristic relationship between both Trump and President Marcos Jr.’s governments. “We will see that [President Ferdinand] Marcos Jr. will continue to intensify militarization in the Philippines,” said Norynne Caleja of Malaya DC. “We will continue to see the United States bring forth funding for aerial bombings in our peasant communities, in our Indigenous lands.”

The march continued down Massachusetts Avenue before ending at DuPont Circle, where the final and perhaps most spirited rally was held. Speakers emphasized the importance of continuing to organize and build alternative structures outside of the capitalist, imperialist system that has worked exactly as intended: to press the boot further onto the necks of the working class through starvation wages, lack of affordable housing, union-busting, piss-poor education and health care, and insanely high grocery prices.

The struggle for a better future for all is a commitment we must continue to make, and, seeing as we are no strangers to what repression against our movement has looked like under a Biden administration, we must not retreat when the right-wing extremists under Trump launch their all-out assault against us!

We must revive the fighting spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as all the great revolutionaries who precede us, as it is only through the power of the people that we will put an end to this seemingly endless nightmare of capitalism! Long live Palestine! Long live Lebanon! Long live the struggle for liberation! Long live international solidarity! The people will continue to fight back!

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... oligarchy/

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Grassroots organizers in Colorado are ready to defeat Trump’s mass deportation agenda

Aurora, Colorado has become the epicenter of anti-migrant hysteria. But residents, together with organizers, are undeterred by fear and determined to fight back

January 23, 2025 by Natalia Marques

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Organizers hold meeting on resisting mass deportations in Denver, Colorado

Through racist, anti-migrant claims, falsehoods, and fearmongering, the Colorado suburb of Aurora has emerged as the right-wing’s potential staging ground for US President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Trump has pledged to launch the largest mass deportation operation in US history, expelling between 15 to 20 million migrants in an effort that will have ripple effects across working class communities and the entire US economy. The current US President has dubbed his mass deportation effort “Operation Aurora,” after a town that has become the epicenter of anti-migrant hysteria.

The bulk of this hysteria began with a viral video showing a group of armed men at The Edge at Lowry apartment complex in Aurora. This video circulated widely across right-wing social media spheres, fueling claims that this apartment complex, as well as the entire city, had been taken over by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. These claims were fueled by right-wing political figures including Aurora City Council member Danielle Jurinsky, who claimed that there was a “complete gang takeover of parts of our city.”

City officials refuted such claims, including Aurora’s mayor, Michael Coffman, a Republican. Residents of The Edge placed the blame squarely on their landlord, claiming that the Brooklyn, New York based CBZ Management, has exploited anti-migrant frenzy as an excuse to neglect repairs in the building. Mayor Coffman himself has dubbed CBZ Management as “out of state slumlords.”

This did not stop the right-wing political machine from capitalizing on the rumors to build up anti-immigrant sentiment. Trump himself has used the frenzy surrounding the city to promote his mass deportation plan on multiple occasions. At a September campaign rally, Trump claimed that his mass deportation operation would begin in both Springfield, Ohio, the city where Trump infamously claimed that migrants were eating residents’ pets, and Aurora.

Trump also staged a campaign rally in Aurora on October 11 of last year, in which top Trump advisor and alleged white nationalist Stephen Miller declared that the then-candidate would create “a country of, by and for Americans, and Americans only.” At the same rally, Trump repeated falsehoods that the city had been “invaded and conquered” by Tren de Aragua.

“Kamala has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world,” said Trump at the rally in Aurora. “And she has had them resettled, beautifully, into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens, that’s what they’re doing. And no place is it more evident than right here.”

Trump and his allies have painted a picture of Aurora as being overrun by migrant crime, however, according to data from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, crime in Aurora and the wider Denver area has been declining since late 2022. In 2024, Aurora recorded 37 homicides, the lowest number in four years. Data consistently shows the immigrants, in particular undocumented immigrants, commit crime at lower rates than those born in the US.

Aurora fights back
How did the city of Aurora end up at the center of anti-migrant falsehoods, to fuel support for the expulsion of millions of workers?

“Trump saw an opportunity to demonize immigrants in order to win an election,” said Nate Kassa, an organizer in Aurora with the East Colfax Community Collective (EC3), which has worked with the largely immigrant tenants of CBZ Management. EC3 has entered into coalition with grassroots and immigrant groups in order to fight mass deportations in the area. “He labeled these immigrants as gang members, so that he could demonize them, so that people would feel motivated to vote for him.”

EC3, alongside organizations such as the Colorado Immigrant Rights Network and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, are organizing communities to fight Trump’s program of mass deportations. Among these plans include a demonstration on January 25, which has been endorsed by several organizations including the Aurora Education Association, the Aurora Immigrant Protection Network, the Center for Freedom and Justice-Colorado, and the Colorado People’s Alliance.

This demonstration is “bringing together different organizations and people in the community who are disgusted with Trump’s racist rhetoric and with his promises to deport millions of immigrants,” Kassa told Peoples Dispatch. “We’re taking the streets to bring together diverse sectors of the community, to stand for immigrants, to stand against different aspects of Trump’s right-wing agenda.”

“We’re seeing a huge community effort to band together immigrants rights organizations, teachers unions, nonprofits, that are all coming together because they recognize that we have to stand together as a community,” Kassa described.

Katie Leonard, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation in Denver, described the efforts that community activists have undertaken to begin to mount a grassroots movement against Trump’s policies, and protect the area’s immigrant communities from the threat of mass deportations. “The first step really has been spreading our rapid response hotline information, so people can report [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement/ICE] activity in the community and so that we can understand what’s going on.” Organizers like Leonard are working to ensure that immigrant workers have a profound understanding of their rights when it comes to interactions with ICE, through “Know Your Rights” trainings and community meetings.

Kassa claims that the immigrant workers he organizes with have “a lot of fear” of Trump’s policies, especially given that the residents of the apartment complexes that have been the site of rumors of Venezuelan gang activity have been visited by right-wing agitators. “Right-wing racists” have “come out and harassed residents,” Kassa claims.

Leonard echoes these claims, and has led efforts to provide community patrols of these buildings in order to keep residents safe when there are right-wing threats. “If tenants are feeling unsafe or threatened, they will reach out to community organizations, community organizers and PSL members,” Leonard described. “And we will show up to make sure that we’re keeping an eye on what’s going on.”

This community patrol work was born out of grassroots efforts to support tenants when they were evicted en masse from their homes at the CBZ Management-owned 1568 Nome St. apartment complex after it was condemned by the city of Aurora, after an intense struggle was waged by residents to defend their homes.

“This is a diverse and strong community,” Kassa said of immigrant workers in Aurora. “No matter how big Trump’s policies are to oppress and suppress our community, we know that we have power.”

“These are breadwinners, parents, family members, beloved community members. Immigrants are the beating heart of our community here in Aurora,” Leonard said.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/23/ ... on-agenda/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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