Trump’s Latest Angry Post About Putin Is His Most Significant One Yet
Andrew Korybko
May 27, 2025
Trump is either being maliciously misinformed about the conflict from his trusted advisors (not counting Witkoff of course) or that he’s manipulatively creating the pretext for US escalation.
Trump’s latest angry post about Putin revealed a lot about how he perceives the Ukrainian Conflict. According to Trump, “[Putin] has gone absolutely CRAZY! He is needlessly killing a lot of people, and I’m not just talking about soldiers. Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever. I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!”
What’s really happening is that Russia ramped up its bombing campaign against Ukraine in response to Ukraine ramping up its drone one first, during which time Putin’s helicopter was almost downed after it was caught in a drone swarm while he was visiting Kursk last week. Zelensky earlier demanded that the US condemn Russia for its latest attacks after it was silent all week long, which Trump just complied with despite remaining suspiciously silent after Zelensky implicitly threatened Moscow’s Victory Day parade.
As for Trump’s claim that Putin “wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it”, this is a gross misportrayal of his latest buffer zone plan that was announced in response to Ukraine’s aforementioned ramped-up drone campaign that provoked Russia’s reciprocal bombing one. Right around the start of these tit-for-tat escalations, Trump held his third call with Putin this year, which was analyzed here and included a list of ten background briefings to bring observers up to speed about the conflict’s military-political dynamics.
Although Trump also wrote in his latest angry post about Putin that “President Zelenskyy is doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop”, his ire is clearly directed much more at the Russian leader than the Ukrainian one. Objective observers can therefore conclude that Trump is either being maliciously misinformed about the conflict from his trusted advisors or that he’s manipulatively creating the pretext for US escalation.
Regarding the first possibility, although his Envoy to Russia Steve Witkoff is a close friend, some in Trump’s circle reportedly don’t like or even trust him and they might have whispered into Trump’s ear. As for the second, Trump’s confirmation that he’s weighing new sanctions against Russia – which came after prior posts about this – could lead to him approving ally Lindsey Graham’s plan to move his proposed legislation through Congress, which would impose 500% tariffs on all Russian energy clients.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also confirmed that more sanctions against Russia and even aid to Ukraine could be in the cards so the US might not walk simply away from the conflict like some expect. Of course, Trump’s latest anger with Putin might just be a ploy to pressure him into compromising on more of his maximum goals than he feels comfortable with or could have been an emotional outburst with no strategic intent in mind, but it still raises questions about how Trump perceives the conflict.
There’s no excuse for Trump blaming the latest tit-for-tat escalations on Putin, let alone claiming that he’s “gone absolutely CRAZY” and might even “want ALL of Ukraine”, which proves that something is seriously wrong. Either Trump is being maliciously misinformed about the conflict from his trusted advisors (not counting Witkoff of course) or he’s manipulatively creating the pretext for US escalation. The coming week might therefore reveal more about which of these two explanations is the most likely.
It ain't malice per se but rather a common understand, a 'ruling idea of the epoch' as Marx had it, which informs both Trump and his advisors despite their likely disparity in knowledge and intelligence. They bedrock believe in the idea of 'America' as was drummed into our heads back in the 60s grade school. Trump is of course much less informed, being a lazy arrogant pig yet the smart guys who studied are just as clueless, they just fake it better(sometimes).
As the intervening decades have allowed some truth to rise even to the mass consciousness which might bring one to question these bedrock assumptions. Our owners who have thrived on that pack of lies take umbrage and maybe feel the first twinges of existential fear. Trump, as the avatar of his class, responds like a cornered rat, channeling the zeitgeist of his class. They would change the past, present and future to ensure their dominance, such is their hubris.
One of the assumptions of too many commentators is the Calvin-esque assumption that because Trump is a billionaire(mebbe...) that he must be smart. This totally ignores the power of serious money, which papers over a multitude of sins.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Trump Administration’s Suspending Enforcement of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Will Undoubtedly Pave the Way For Greater Global Corruption
By Rachael Gonzalez - May 27, 2025 1
[Source: financialcrimesacademy.org]
In a world increasingly marred by corporate misconduct and political complicity, the Trump administration’s decision to effectively suspend the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) stands out as a staggering abdication of moral leadership.
By retreating from this critical anti-corruption framework, Washington sent a clear and troubling message: Multinational corporations could engage in bribery and corruption abroad with little fear of consequence. Among the clearest beneficiaries of this deregulatory turn are entities like the Adani Group, a commodity-trading business with investments in mining, weapons and natural gas, whose questionable business practices have thrived in an environment devoid of robust oversight. The Trump-era erosion of FCPA enforcement did not merely weaken America’s credibility on the world stage—it actively fueled a climate where the corrupt prosper unchecked.
Undermining a Legal Pillar of U.S. Integrity
In February, President Donald Trump issued an executive order initiating a 180-day pause of the FCPA, the 1977 law that prohibits people and companies from bribing foreign officials to gain or retain business. The legislation set a powerful precedent, influencing anti-corruption laws globally, which has led to a more coordinated cross-border approach to combating bribery and corruption.
The Department of Justice (DOJ), under Attorney General Pam Bondi, has “reprioritized” its resources, moving away from corporate corruption and fraud cases.
Pam Bondi [Source: theepochtimes.com]
Key task forces such as the National Security Division’s Corporate Enforcement Unit and the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative have been disbanded. These units previously played a critical role in enforcing the FCPA and recovering assets linked to corruption. By reallocating resources to combat illegal immigration, drug cartels, and cyber threats, the DOJ has effectively reduced its capacity to pursue white-collar crime.
Gary Kalman [Source: linkedin.com]
“This is not just a rollback. This is a retreat,” said Gary Kalman, executive director of Transparency International U.S., in a statement following the order. “Suspending the FCPA diminishes—and could pave the way for eliminating—the crown jewel in the U.S.’s fight against global corruption.”
A Signal to Corrupt Actors?
One immediate beneficiary of this regulatory retreat appears to be the Adani Group, a sprawling Indian conglomerate whose rapid ascent has been clouded by controversy.
Investigations in Australia and India have uncovered troubling patterns: opaque offshore networks, political favoritism in acquiring infrastructure contracts, and aggressive legal tactics to silence critics.
“The suspension creates an enforcement vacuum,” said Daniel Kahn, former chief of the DOJ’s FCPA unit. “It tells companies like Adani that they can operate in the gray zones without fear of American scrutiny.”
[Source: inventiva.co.in]
In India, critics of the Modi government—which maintains close ties to Adani—have already voiced concern that U.S. disengagement from anti-corruption enforcement will weaken local reform efforts and embolden cronyism.
Gautam Adani and Narendra Modi [Source: telegraphindia.com]
The story of Adani’s unbridled expansion is more than a cautionary tale. It is a grim reminder that corruption, when left unchecked, metastasizes—weakening democracies, distorting markets, and emboldening autocrats.
For critics, the timing of the pause could not be more troubling. From Brazil to Nigeria to India, anti-corruption efforts are facing headwinds, often led by authoritarian governments hostile to transparency. The Trump administration’s move, experts say, could embolden corrupt officials abroad and the companies willing to do business with them.
“The chilling effect is already being felt,” said Sarah Chayes, former anti-corruption adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Foreign officials once cautious about accepting bribes from U.S. firms now assume it’s back to business as usual.”
Sarah Chayes [Source: e-ir.info]
When American Trust Falters
Domestically, Trump’s order has deepened fears about the erosion of institutional integrity.
Transparency International downgraded the United States further in its Corruption Perceptions Index just weeks after the executive order. Civic groups warn that, by undermining the rule of law abroad, the administration risks normalizing corporate malfeasance at home.
Walter Shaub [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
“This is about much more than foreign deals,” said Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics. “If bribery becomes just another cost of doing business globally, it seeps back into American political and corporate culture too.”
The suspension has also exposed rifts within the business community. While some multinational executives privately welcome looser constraints, many fear long-term reputational damage. Firms that continue to uphold rigorous compliance standards now face competitive disadvantages, while opportunistic actors seize short-term gains.
The Trump administration insists that it can restore enforcement after 180 days without lasting damage. Experts are skeptical.
Judge Mark Wolf [Source: integrityinitiatives.org]
“Deterrence doesn’t come with an on-off switch,” said Judge Mark Wolf, founder of Integrity Initiatives International. “If you suspend the FCPA even temporarily, you invite bad actors to move swiftly, before the window closes. The harm is done the moment the rules are questioned.”
Already, signs of erosion are visible. In Latin America, where the FCPA had been a crucial backstop against entrenched corruption networks, officials report increased pressures on companies to engage in bribery. Reformers in Southeast Asia warn that Washington’s retreat strengthens authoritarian regimes, which interpret America’s inconsistency as license for further abuses.
For decades, U.S. enforcement of the FCPA was not just about law; it was about credibility. In diplomacy, trade and development, American officials often leveraged anti-corruption commitments as part of broader alliances. That leverage is slipping away.
The High Cost of “Looking the Other Way”
Restoring the FCPA’s authority—even if Trump’s suspension is lifted on schedule—will not be easy. Legal scholars point out that every day of non-enforcement deepens the culture of impunity and complicates future prosecutions.
“The real risk isn’t just corporate misbehavior—it’s systemic cynicism,” said Eileen Lainez, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a marketing and communicaitons director with the defense contractor L3Harris. “The belief that rules are optional, that enforcement is political. Once that belief spreads, it corrodes both markets and democracies.”
The Adani Group’s potential windfall is a cautionary tale. So, too, are the quiet boardroom conversations now happening around the world: If America is no longer serious about fighting corruption, why should anyone else be?
America once championed the idea that markets should be free but fair—that success should come from merit, not illicit advantage. Trump’s pause on the FCPA risks reducing that noble aspiration to just another slogan, discarded when inconvenient.
In a turbulent global era, abandoning anti-corruption norms is not a show of strength. It is an invitation to chaos—and America, like the world, will not escape the consequences.
Corruption and bribery are endemic to commodity/money societies. You might control it but only ending money will solve the problem.
*****
Keith Kellogg ...
... is an Exhibit A of military ignorance, characteristic of the US top brass.
The carnage in Ukraine has led to casualty rates “beyond World War II numbers” as the “industrial-strength killing” rages on the battlefield, the US special envoy for Ukraine lamented Tuesday. Retired Gen. Keith Kellogg was adamant that negotiations are the sole way to end the bloodshed and that President Trump is the “only guy” who can lead those deliberations.
1. This is what happens when your military education is based on watching Hollywood movies and skipping basic arithmetic classes. He obviously doesn't know the difference between roughly 65 to70 million killed in WW II and 1.5 VSU KIAs. 70 mil > 1.5 mil.
2. Trump cannot be the "only guy", because he as POTUS together with the US is a co-BELLIGERENT on the side of 404 in the conflict with Russia. The only thing he could do was to stop bloodshed in his first 100 days, he didn't. He thought he was smart--he is not. It is his war now.
He evidently understood it, hence his outbursts. Meanwhile, down the memory lane to 2023 with the first Patriot PAC3 "being slightly damaged". Classic--first shooting as much of a package as possible at something, then the arrival of Kinzhal and then uncontrolled shoot-off of missiles due to detonation.
Elon Musk says Trump’s agenda bill ‘undermines’ DOGE mission
By Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, CNN
Updated 7:38 AM EDT, Wed May 28, 2025
Elon Musk listens to President Donald Trump speak in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 11. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
CNN
—
Elon Musk raised concerns about President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and spending cuts package, saying in a video released Tuesday that he believes it would raise the US budget deficit and undercut efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency.
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” the tech billionaire and Trump donor told “CBS Sunday Morning.” “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both.”
Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts and a big boost to the US military and to national security spending – largely paid for by overhauls to federal health and nutrition programs and cuts to energy programs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill would pile another $3.8 trillion to the deficit. It narrowly passed the House last week, and now heads to the Senate, where it will likely face many changes.
Musk’s comments come amid a media tour ahead of a SpaceX test flight Tuesday evening. Musk is stepping away from full-time government work to focus on his companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, which have struggled in part as a result of Musk’s alliance with the Trump administration.
He noted the move in an interview with Ars Technica on Tuesday, hours before SpaceX’s Starship test flight.
“I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics, it’s less than people would think, because the media is going to over-represent any political stuff, because political bones of contention get a lot of traction in the media,” he said when asked whether he feels his focus on politics over the past year has “harmed” SpaceX. “It’s not like I left the companies. It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks.”
Musk also noted last week that he’ll spend “a lot less” money on politics in the future, but it’s still not clear whether the remarks signal any change in his pledge to commit $100 million into political groups controlled by the president. Musk previously spent more than $290 million to help get Trump and GOP congressional candidates elected in November. Musk-linked groups also shelled out more than $20 million on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this year that his preferred candidate ultimately lost.
Musk also continued to defend the work DOGE has been doing in Washington, telling the Washington Post on Tuesday that the team has become a “whipping boy.”
“DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” he said. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”
CNN has previously reported that DOGE is poised to continue its work even as Musk steps back, with staffers to remain in place, embedded across federal agencies, for months or years to come.
What’s Steven Hatfill doing as a health adviser for Trump?
May 28, 2025 Stephen Millies
Steven Hatfill was the main suspect in the 2001 anthrax deaths before the FBI turned its attention to Bruce Ivins.
Remember Steven Hatfill? He was the main suspect in the 2001 anthrax deaths before the FBI turned its attention to Bruce Ivins.
Five people were killed by anthrax being sent in envelopes through the mail. Among them were the Black postal workers Joseph P. Curseen, Jr. and Thomas L. Morris, Jr. These attacks, which terrified millions, began one week after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
Hatfill has now been named an adviser to the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under Trump.
One of the reasons that Hatfill was under suspicion was his support for racist regimes. This included going to pre-liberation Zimbabwe in 1978, when the African country was run by white settlers who called it Rhodesia.
Their leader, Ian Smith, declared, “I don’t believe in majority rule, black majority rule, not in a thousand years.”
Smith was no different than the white landowners from South Africa who are being welcomed as “refugees” by Trump.
When Hatfill arrived in so-called Rhodesia, a liberation struggle — or Chimurenga — was being waged by Africans against Ian Smith and his white minority dictatorship. Thousands of Africans died fighting for freedom. By 1980, the people of Zimbabwe had overthrown Ian Smith and colonial rule.
Hatfill was already enrolled in the Godfrey Huggins Medical School, which is now the University of Zimbabwe’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. He graduated in 1983 with a doctor’s degree.
It’s alleged that Hatfill claimed to have served with the Selous Scouts, a death squad that hunted liberation fighters and massacred many Africans during the Chimurenga. These terrorists were blamed for an anthrax outbreak that killed 182 people and thousands of cattle.
Hatfill then went to South Africa, where the apartheid system
was still in power and was keeping Nelson Mandela in prison. Its Nazi army was continuing its war against the People’s Republic of Angola.
The war against Zimbabwe
Hatfill may have been exaggerating his racist activities, particularly
whether or not he had any connection with the bloodthirsty Selous Scouts. But his bragging only burnished his credentials with the military-industrial complex. It certainly endeared him to Trump’s aides.
Hatfill had no trouble getting hired by Science Applications International Corporation, a major military contractor. Or being employed as a researcher for the U.S. Army’s biological warfare laboratories at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
Keeping Ian Smith and his fellow white settlers in power had been a holy cause for racists in the United States and Britain. Soldier of Fortune magazine encouraged mercenaries to volunteer to fight for the white minority government.
Writers for William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine and the ex-or maybe not-so-ex CIA ghoul David Atlee Phillips formed the
American-Rhodesian Association. Many researchers believe that Phillips played a key role in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
In 1971, the U.S. Senate lifted sanctions passed by the UN on chrome imported from Ian Smith’s white supremacist regime. This was the senators’ response to African delegates welcoming the People’s Republic of China to its rightful seat in the UN.
The wealthy and powerful have continued their attacks against Zimbabwe. For 25 years, the U.S. has imposed severe sanctions on the African country, which include cutting off Zimbabwe’s access to credit from Western financial institutions.
This was revenge for Zimbabwe’s people taking back their land, which was stolen by white farmers. That’s what should have been done after the U.S. Civil War.
Formerly enslaved Africans deserved the land that they had worked for centuries, along with members of Indigenous nations from whom it was stolen. The slogan “land back” echoes from Wounded Knee to Palestine.
Reopen the anthrax investigation
Hatfill also became an attractive job candidate for the Trump administration because he endorsed quack cures for COVID-19. The entire crew of Trump’s health appointees — starting with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — are quacks.
This goes hand-in-hand with Trump’s proposed budget that will cut 14 million people from Medicaid by 2034.
Another reason Hatfill was hired was his support for the phony claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. This big lie was the rallying cry of the fascist mob, which was allowed to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
There’s never been a satisfactory answer to who committed the 2001 anthrax attacks, despite the FBI hounding Dr. Bruce Ivins to commit suicide. The attacks helped drive through the misnamed Patriot Act — which gave U.S. spy agencies greatly increased power to wiretap and other violations of civil rights — through Congress.
The U.S. Army has had a long record of experimenting with anthrax and other biological weapons.
The war criminals in the Japanese Army’s Unit 731, who killed at least 14,000 people in biological warfare experiments, were given immunity from prosecution after World War II. This was in exchange for sharing their research with the Pentagon. (“Unit 731 Testimony,” by Hal Gold.)
In 1968, 6,000 sheep were killed by a nerve agent near the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground, 85 miles west of Salt Lake City.
The body of the U.S. Army’s anthrax expert Frank Olson was found outside a New York City hotel on Nov. 18, 1953. The official story was that Olsen jumped out of a window because of an LSD experiment gone bad. His son Eric Olson believes his father was murdered.
The FBI claims that Dr. Bruce Ivins was guilty of the 2001 anthrax attacks. After Ivins committed suicide, the FBI closed the case.
Many people have doubts about Ivins’ guilt, including his co-workers at Fort Detrick. Dead people like Lee Harvey Oswald or Bruce Ivins can be blamed, but can’t testify.
If Ivins was responsible, that means the attacks came from within Fort Detrick using the U.S. Army’s supplies of anthrax.
It’s time to reopen the investigation into the 2001 anthrax deaths. And take another look at Steven Hatfill.
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The White House as Mad House
May 28, 2025
It is time, plain and simple, to give up the thought that anything good is to come out of Trump’s next three and a half years.
U.S. President Donald Trump announcing the Golden Dome missile defense system last week in the Oval Office. (White House /Joyce N. Boghosian)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
O.K, the Gulf of Mexico will remain so named, and the Government Publishing Office on North Capitol Street in Washington can stand down: The “Gulf of America” idea is no longer much of a kick.
In the same line, Greenland will remain a Danish possession. Canada will still be called Canada, and Canadians can continue to think of themselves as gentler and more courteous than the nation of yahoos on their southerly border.
Only a few weeks ago there were those among us who anticipated the demise of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the course of this spring. No, NATO’s future is secure; its grand headquarters in Brussels will not be turned into a hospital, as some people, possessed of the old “irrational exuberance,” foretold in the Trump regime’s early days.
Ditto the European Union: If anything, the technocrats in Brussels and the central bankers in Frankfurt stand to gain power as the Continent drifts into its version of neoliberal authoritarianism.
And the Deep State: not going anywhere, this sprawl of invisible, undemocratic power. The headquarters building of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a few blocks from the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue: No again, Trump’s people will not turn it into an exhibition hall dedicated to institutional corruption.
The Trump White House doesn’t say much about these sort of things these days. They were all fun, but fun things become un-fun when, like windup toys, they stop going along as the springs go slack.
True enough, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, the C.I.A. propaganda front The New York Times insists on describing as a producer of “independent journalism” — Jeez, I mean really — may be headed for the Museum of Cold War Artifacts now that Trump is defunding it. But I am in wait-and-see mode on this one.
When distractions wear out, there must be new distractions. This is the Trump regime’s m.o., you see.
We’re now reading about Trump’s plan for a hyper-technologized missile shield system he is calling Golden Dome. This is all about satellites in space, hundreds of them, and advanced rockets that will activate when enemy projectiles are detected.
“When distractions wear out, there must be new distractions.”
Trump’s people put the cost of Golden Dome at $175 billion, which means the true cost will be some multiple of this figure. The Congressional Budget Office says $500 billion is more like it. Trump promises to get this done in three years. Defense technology people say this kind of thing will take two decades to develop.
I have in mind the old Strategic Defense Initiative, the “Star Wars” debacle of the Reagan years. I am interested only in how long it will take for Golden Dome to prove another irresponsible fantasy and how much money will be wasted between now and then.
His Second Term So Far
Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during a Memorial Day ceremony on Monday at Arlington National Cemetery. (White House / Daniel Torok)
How shall we think of Donald John Trump now that he is a few months in office and the lay of the land comes clear? Who is he? What makes him tick, as the old cliché goes?
The drift among those who make America run and will go along with anything so long as it is profitable, is that there is no denying, rejecting or subverting Trump this time around. You have to sidle up to the man — dinners at Mar-a–Lago, Oval Office sessions, and so on — to make it these next four years.
This turn in thinking has been evident since the 2024 campaign season. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg went to Mar-a–Lago to dine with Trump and all the liberals gasped? The chief executive at Meta proved merely the first to put his forehead to the palace floor.
You can generally count on the liberal cliques, especially the corporatists out in Silicon Valley, to get it wrong. During his first term they did everything they could think of to subvert Trump. Those who once tried to sink his ship now clamber up to the first-class deck.
This is upside down. Trump had a few sound ideas —decommisioning NATO, ending the forever wars, a renewed detenté with Russia — during his first attempt to be president. Now he trades in idiocies and cannot get done the only good idea — better ties with Russia — that remains from his first term.
A few months into his second four years Trump proves a dangerous figure in all sorts of ways — dangerously stupid, dangerously incompetent, dangerously erratic, dangerously distracted — and so must be subjected to damage control to the fullest extent.
“Now he trades in idiocies and cannot get done the only good idea — better ties with Russia — that remains from his first term.”
Courts of law already prove key to this imperative. A coherent “movement” in the 1960s sense of this term appears out of the question — Americans seem too atomized, privatized, and alienated for any such thing to materialize — but let’s not forget that the 1960s were unimaginable during the 1950s.
There is no knowing what Trump will say or do Tuesday based on what he says or does Monday. He once wanted to get America out of its wars of adventure and altogether out of other nations’ business. Now he boasts that a $1 trillion budget for the military-industrial complex is on the way.
It is time, plain and simple, to give up the thought that anything good is to come out of the next three and a half years.
I have come to three different ways to reckon with how one might best understand who the occupant of the White House truly is such that one’s expectations of our 47th president remain in line with reality between now and Jan. 20, 2029.
It is possible to be 78 and still count as a hyperactive child. Trump demonstrates this to my satisfaction, anyway.
Think of a child on Christmas morning, flitting from one toy to the next, maybe fascinated briefly even by the boxes they came in. Everything’s a mess in no time.
Now think of Trump’s record these past four months — Greenland, the Gulf of America, I-just-had-an-excellent-call-with-Vladimir-Putin, Putin-is- absolutely-crazy, etc.— and ask yourself how much difference there is between the two.
There is the question of a democratic society, even one that was collapsing long before Trump came along.
“There is no knowing what Trump will say or do Tuesday based on what he says or does Monday.”
I look at Trump and cannot help but think of a World War II correspondent named Mark Gayn, improbable as this may seem. Gayn covered Tokyo after the surrender and described what he saw during the Occupation in his book Japan Diary (William Sloane, 1948).
Apart from a brief experiment early in the 20th century, the Japanese had no experience of democracy — no experience, no understanding of it, no idea how it worked. In the autumn of 1945, Gayn observed with acuity, many Japanese consequently thought democracy meant “you can do whatever you want,” as he put it. A certain social and political chaos resulted in the Occupation’s first months.
This, too, is Trump. Trampling the Constitution, which I doubt he has read, ignorant or abusive — or both — of principles such as checks-and-balances, storms of executive orders that may as well begin, “I want…”
This is a man with no evident idea of the limits governing the president as well as the rest of us. “I can do whatever I want” appears to be his operating principle.
Contempt for Expertise
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a Senate hearing on May 20. (C-SPAN clip)
If you look at Trump’s cabinet — Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi among the most obviously unqualified — you have to conclude Trump holds experts and the notion of expertise in near-total contempt.
This is true of Trump himself, of course: he who can end a war in 24 hours, he who can bring manufacturing back to the United States — he who altogether can make America great again.
True enough, experts deserve much if not most of the malice and mistrust Trump expresses in behalf of many, many people. This is because a goodly proportion of them, having discarded all thought of disinterest, have long abused their capacity to influence policies and events in the cause of their own or someone else’s gain.
We now live in a society wherein elites and any kind of elitism, as well as experts and expertise, are prevalently — fair to say — discredited. This is a problem. Trump and his dreadful gathering of incompetents are not the answer.
The other week Maggie Hassan, a Democratic senator from the great state of New Hampshire, asked Kristi Noem, “What is habeas corpus?” You have to figure Hassan saw the secretary of Homeland Security for all she is and is not.
“Well,” Noem replied — and this is in Senate hearings, mind you — “habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to—”
At which point Hassan cut her off, having made her point. It is mine, too: Good enough to mistrust experts, given what many of them have done with their training and their elevated positions. Not good enough to proceed as if a healthy society can do well without them.
Hassan cutting off Noem during the May 20 Senate hearing. (C-SPAN clip)
The Trump regime, in short, faces us with a truth that seems to have fallen by the wayside over many years. No polity can do well without qualified experts. It requires experts who have the principles and moral scruples to make use of their qualifications and learning in the cause of the commonweal.
Trump, in his disdain, has a baby-and-bathwater problem, to put this point another way.
It is the same with elites, I may as well add. “Elitism” may be a condemnation for many people, but not where I live. Please don’t make me imagine what life would be like in a society wherein there is no elite. The thought reeks of what we used to call “ultra-left adventurism.”
I refer here to an elite that, as with experts, understands the responsibilities they bear in consequence of their privilege and their positions. And I mean their positions in society, not atop it.
It is the wrong kind of experts Donald Trump will deliver to us these next three and some years. He can carry on all he wishes about the capacity of Everyman to get complex things done. But such displays will not make America any more democratic.
In my view all the hollow posturing will, in net terms, confirm the influence of just the sort of experts Trump and his crew purport to eschew — not least those at the Pentagon and other institutions vital to the imperium.
I wish I could end this column with something like “Good night and good luck,” but there’s no matching Ed Murrow for freighting a phrase, and this one belongs to him in any case. “Bon courage” was Dan Rather’s signoff for a brief time, an attempt at gravitas swiftly booed off the air for its pretentiousness.
“M.I.C., see you real soon” is the best I can come up with.
Trump’s ‘big beautiful’ budget: Military spending soars, accelerating U.S. economic decay
May 29, 2025 Gary Wilson
President Donald Trump, the brooding figure on the left end, with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Major Gen. Trevor Bredenkamp at a Memorial Day wreath-laying ceremony. Trump wears heel lifts, which gives him a pronounced hunch.
President Donald Trump delivered a rally-style commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on May 24, aggressively promoting militarism, nationalism, and his ongoing attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as well as transgender rights.
Addressing the graduating cadets, Trump glorified the U.S. military as “the greatest and most powerful army the world has ever known,” claiming personal credit for its expansion during his first term.
“I rebuilt the army and the military like nobody has ever rebuilt it before,” Trump boasted, putting military power at the center of U.S. global dominance.
Trump intensified his militaristic agenda: “We’re getting rid of the distractions and focusing our military on its core mission: crushing America’s adversaries, killing America’s enemies, and defending our great American flag.”
Trump said that’s why the U.S. will invest in new tanks, planes, drones, ships, and missiles. In addition, the U.S. will build the Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield, which has been described as a $175 billion fantasy and a boondoggle for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
He also praised recent reactionary policies designed to dismantle DEI programs in the armed forces.
The Trump administration has moved to ban trans troops from the military — a decision the Supreme Court upheld earlier this month. Trump’s policies have reintroduced a discriminatory ban on transgender military personnel and imposed new uniform physical standards aimed at severely limiting women’s participation in combat roles.
Unprecedented military expansion
On May 2, Trump released his budget request for 2026, dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Over 75% of Trump’s budget is allocated for the military and police.
In the budget proposal, military spending is $1.01 trillion, accounting for approximately 60% of the total requested. For the non-military Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Veterans Affairs, the request is $272.2 billion.
Funding for departments whose primary purpose isn’t military, military-adjacent, or policing is $409 billion, or only 24% of the budget.
The proposal includes $163 billion in federal spending cuts, all of which target non-defense programs. For a breakdown of the cuts, see: Trump’s ‘big beautiful’ cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more.
Military Keynesianism
Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have argued that increased military spending and the production of armaments will reindustrialize the country and create jobs, using this rationale to justify historically large Pentagon budgets. And completely ignoring that military expansion is not, in any way, shape, or form, reindustrialization.
Trump has explicitly said it would provide unmatched military strength and support job creation through the purchase of new equipment and capabilities, mirroring the arguments made by Democrats, including Biden, about the economic benefits of Pentagon budgets.
The Biden administration promoted the jobs argument, especially when seeking support for military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Biden described the U.S. arms industry as the “arsenal of democracy,” emphasizing the economic benefits to states involved in weapons production.
Military Keynesianism is an economic policy approach that advocates for sustained, high levels of military spending as a primary tool for government stimulus and economic growth, based on the core principles of Keynesian economics.
Keynesian economics, developed by John Maynard Keynes, argues that during economic downturns, such as recessions and depressions, government spending (fiscal stimulus) injects money into the economy, creates jobs, and stimulates production.
Many capitalist politicians and economists argue that only World War II’s massive government spending finally brought the Great Depression to an end. This suggests that sufficiently large stimulus packages — extensive deficit spending by the government — can overcome any economic downturn.
War economies do indeed trigger sharp increases in production as dormant factories resume operations. Manufacturing surges and unemployment declines as workers join either the military or the defense industries. When depression conditions exist before conflict begins — as occurred before both world wars — economic downturns will end.
However, this “recovery” comes at a profound cost: the suppression of expanded reproduction – the essential process of capital accumulation that defines capitalism. Instead, the war economy imposes a state of contracted reproduction. Once the economy reaches full war capacity, production plateaus and inevitably begins a gradual decline as society consumes its existing resources without replacing them (expanded reproduction).
In the United States, normal economic expansion following the collapse of the early 1930s didn’t resume with World War II, despite the end of the Depression. The wartime economic model represents a temporary transformation rather than a sustainable solution. While it can rapidly mobilize resources and eliminate unemployment, it does so by redirecting productive capacity away from civilian goods and long-term investment toward immediate consumption of military materials. This creates an illusion of prosperity while actually weakening the economic foundation necessary for sustained growth and innovation that characterizes healthy capitalist development.
The contradictions of monopoly capitalism
Under competitive capitalism, the profit motive drives firms to reinvest surplus value into productive capital, fostering technological advancement and market expansion. Marx’s analysis of expanded reproduction hinges on this cyclical reinvestment process, where profits fund new machinery, labor, and infrastructure.
However, the rise of monopolies has disrupted this dynamic. By controlling markets through cartels, patents, and economies of scale, monopolies replace price competition with administered pricing strategies. This allows firms to sustain higher profit margins by extracting surplus value through inflated prices rather than productive efficiency.
The consequence is a structural surplus that cannot be absorbed through traditional reinvestment. If monopolies channel profits into new capital, they risk overproduction and the erosion of their pricing power, undermining the very basis of their profitability. This creates a paradox: the mechanisms that maximize short-term profits simultaneously stifle long-term growth.
Imperialist expansion serves as an outlet for surplus capital, channeling it outward through foreign direct investment and the exploitation of natural resources in less developed regions. The result has been a rigid global hierarchy that divides the world into dominant imperialist powers and the subordinated states, commonly called the Global South.
Commodities of destruction
Military spending means contracted reproduction, not expanded reproduction, the lifeblood of capitalism.
The goods churned out by the world’s arms manufacturers are not commodities in the ordinary sense.
To understand what makes military goods so distinctive, we must first revisit what Marx meant by a commodity. In the classical sense, a commodity is a product of human labor created for exchange on the market. Its existence is defined by two essential qualities: use-value — the ability to satisfy a human need or want — and exchange-value — the price it commands, determined by the socially necessary labor time required for its production.
Under “normal” conditions, the production and circulation of commodities are governed by the logic of supply and demand. Businesses compete to sell their products or services to consumers or other businesses, and profit is the driving force behind the entire system. This is the cycle that keeps the capitalist machine in motion: Workers sell their labor, receive wages, buy goods, and capitalists reinvest profits to expand production.
But what happens when the commodity in question is a tank, a missile, or a fighter jet? Here, the rules of the game change dramatically. The products of the military-industrial complex are not like bread, clothing, or even automobiles. They are unique in how they are produced, sold, and consumed.
First and foremost, military goods are not produced for a conventional market. The primary — and often sole — buyer is the state. Demand for these products is not determined by the needs or desires of private individuals, but by political decisions made in the corridors of power – the White House, Congress or the Pentagon.
The rationale is not “what does society need?” but “what does the state require to project power or pursue imperial ambitions?” As a result, arms manufacturers are shielded from the risks of competition. Their profits are secured by government contracts, often awarded without competitive bidding and structured to guarantee returns regardless of efficiency or actual need.
This artificial demand is only the beginning of what sets military commodities apart. Their use value is fundamentally different from that of ordinary goods. Where food nourishes, housing shelters, and clothing warms, military goods are designed for destruction or deterrence. Their utility lies not in satisfying human needs, but in their capacity to threaten, maim, or kill. The value of a cruise missile is realized not in peaceful exchange, but in its potential to obliterate a target. In this sense, military commodities are not just useless from the standpoint of social welfare — they are actively anti-social, their value rooted in violence. They are the means of destruction.
Marx’s labor theory of value holds that the price of a commodity reflects the amount of socially necessary labor required for its production. Yet military goods routinely defy this logic. Their prices are often wildly inflated, thanks to cost-plus contracting, political lobbying, and the lack of market discipline. The state, not the market, determines what is produced, how much is produced, and at what price. This distortion severs any meaningful link between labor input and exchange value, turning the arms industry into a haven for waste and profiteering.
Perhaps most damningly, military commodities play no productive role in the ongoing reproduction of capital. Ordinary goods — whether consumer products or means of production, such as machines, tools, and factory equipment — circulate through the economy, enabling workers to live and capitalists to accumulate further profits. Military goods, by contrast, are “consumed” in war or left to rot in arsenals. They do not feed, clothe, or house anyone; they do not contribute to the expansion of productive capacity. Instead, they represent a colossal diversion of human labor and material resources into activities that, from the standpoint of human need, are utterly wasteful.
The products of the military-industrial complex are commodities only in the most superficial sense. The laws of supply and demand do not govern them, nor do they serve human needs.
This diminishes the economy and has been a major factor in U.S. imperialism’s stagnation and economic decline.
Contracted reproduction and the crisis of imperialism
Contracted reproduction occurs when society’s vital resources — labor, capital, and technology — are diverted to produce military goods and services. Unlike productive investments, which expand future capacity or meet human needs, these resources are ultimately wasted: consumed in warfare, stockpiled indefinitely, or deployed to enforce imperial dominance. This diversion actively shrinks the productive sectors — those that create real social wealth (such as food, housing, and essential goods) — while the parasitic military sector expands at their expense.
This process reveals a core contradiction of monopoly capitalism: To sustain profits and imperial power, the system cannibalizes its foundations. By prioritizing the destructive needs of the military-industrial complex over the long-term societal vitality of the many, it trades long-term societal vitality for short-term dominance, thereby accelerating stagnation and systemic decay.
Donald Trump held phone calls with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, then announced that the two countries will “immediately start negotiations toward a ceasefire” in the 3-year-long conflict between the two. His announcement also touted a goal of increased trade and economic ties with Russia. It also comes weeks after the U.S. and Ukraine signed what’s been called a “mineral for muscle” deal, giving the United States the ability to profit from Ukraine’s natural resources.
While an end to the conflict that’s gone on for over 3 years now, and has its origins further back in recent history, is more than welcome, it’s important to understand how we got here and how the “peace” process is playing out. The way the Trump administration is going about this ceasefire isn’t really from a desire for peace, but a desire for greater control in the region overall – over both Russia and Ukraine – and the ability to focus the U.S. military on China.
Trade Court Invalidates Trump’s Sweeping Tariffs; Have We Reached Peak Trump?
Posted on May 29, 2025 by Yves Smith
The federal Court of International Trade has ruled that the Trump Administration exceeded its authority in levying “emergency” tariffs on virtually every country in the world, as well as in imposing fentanyl-related tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada. We have embedded a copy of the opinion at the end of the post (hat tip Gordon H). We hope you can take the time to read it.
Some background from the Financial Times:
Under the US constitution, Congress has the power to set tariffs. But the Trump administration has said the International Emergency Economic Powers Act gives the president the power to do so if there is a declared national emergency.
In declaring a national emergency in his executive order on April 2, Trump cited factors including a lack of reciprocity in bilateral trade relationships, and US trading partners’ policies that suppress domestic wages, amounted to an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the US economy and to national security.
The court cases challenged his use of those powers
.
From Reuters:
A U.S. trade court blocked President Donald Trump’s tariffs from going into effect in a sweeping ruling on Wednesday that found the president overstepped his authority by imposing across-the-board duties on imports from U.S. trading partners.
The Court of International Trade said the U.S. Constitution gives Congress exclusive authority to regulate commerce with other countries that is not overridden by the president’s emergency powers to safeguard the U.S. economy….
The judges also ordered the Trump administration to issue new orders reflecting the permanent injunction within 10 days. The Trump administration minutes later filed a notice of appeal and questioned the authority of the court.
The court invalidated with immediate effect all of Trump’s orders on tariffs since January that were rooted in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a law meant to address “unusual and extraordinary” threats during a national emergency.
The court was not asked to address some industry-specific tariffs Trump has issued on automobiles, steel and aluminum, using a different statute.
Additional detail from The Hill:
Wednesday’s ruling blocks Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariffs, which placed a 10 percent levy on all imports and higher reciprocal tariffs for dozens of countries. It also blocks earlier orders that imposed tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China. Many had been adjusted as or delayed as stocks fell and Treasury yields rose in the wake of Trump’s trade shifts.
The judges gave the Trump administration 10 days to issue any administrative orders needed to effectuate their ruling.
The Administration appealed the ruling Wednesday evening, but the excerpts in The Hill give the impression that it’s a handwave, a mere reassertion of arguments made in the trade court filing.
This reversal comes as Trump is floundering. His approval ratings remain poor, particularly so early in this term.1
Elon Musk has had to abandon DOGE due to blowback to Tesla sales and resulting shareholder demands. Musk has gone from ally to critic, complaining that Trump’s “big beautiful bill” undermines DOGE, just when it barely passed in the House and there’s considerable Senate opposition. For instance, Josh Hawley has just positioned himself as defender in chief of Medicaid, standing against Trump’s planned cuts.
In a potentially bigger blow, Musk, who was a major Trump funder in 2024, says he plans to greatly reduce his political spending. One wonders how many Congresscritters will be prepared to stick their necks out for Trump when his money sources are pulling away.
Similarly, on the Project Ukraine front, Trump has been unable to bring Ukraine or Russia to heel, which is pretty embarrassing given that Ukraine is on US-provided life support. Alexander Mercouris said in his last show that those who know Trump say he wants to wash his hands of the matter and seeks to exit, probably imposes token additional sanctions so as to placate hawks like Lindsey Graham on the way out.
The fact that these two big tariff salvos have been nixed by the court does not mean Trump is bereft of options. We’ll turn to those first.
However, the fact that Trump is having to fight for the authority to use tariffs with a bludgeon, will be delayed, and may wind up considerably restricted in their scope and level, reduces both his bargaining leverage and his credibility.
There is also the wee question of what happens to the tariffs collected, and the impact on his big beautiful bill and the US deficit if Trump looks less likely to impose broad tariffs. Bloomberg points out that the Administration collected a record $16.5 billion in April. Admittedly, this total includes Trump 1.0 tariffs as well as unaffected duties on steel and aluminum. But unless the Administration wins its appeal, a lot of these monies collected would need to be refunded. Oopsie!
Less tariff revenue means funding needs to come from somewhere else, unless the US deficit is to rise even faster, an outcome Mr. Market, the Fed, many voters, and thus many Congresscritters, view with considerable disapproval. Bloomberg added:
If the ruling isn’t reversed or ignored, one of the consequences could be greater fiscal concerns at a time when bond markets are questioning the trajectory of the US’s mounting debt load. The Trump administration has been citing increased tariff revenues as a way to offset tax cuts in his “one big, beautiful bill” now before Congress, which is estimated to cost $3.8 trillion over the next decade.
Trump of course is appealing and seeking an injunction on the court’s order to implement a reversal in ten days. The ruling below strikes me as very tightly reasoned, so I don’t see the odds of it being reversed on appeal as good. If you accept that Congress circumscribed emergency tariff authority in the 1970s in a major dustup with the Nixon Administration (see the discussion of Yoshida I and II), you can’t buy the argument that this statute allows Trump to invoke emergency authority on his say-so and impose tariffs in a capricious manner (see his emotion-driven escalation with China).
CNBC sets forth some possible Trump’s fallbacks:
Economists at Goldman Sachs said the White House has a few tools at its disposal that could ensure it is only a temporary problem…
The Trump administration does have other legal means of imposing tariffs, however, according to Goldman. These include Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, Section 301 and Section 338 of the Trade Act of 1930.
Section 122 does not require a formal investigation and could therefore be one of the swiftest ways to get around the court roadblock.
“The administration could quickly replace the 10% across-the-board tariff with a similar tariff of up to 15% under Sec. 122,” analysts at Goldman said. They noted, however, that such a move would only last for up to 150 days after which law requires Congressional action.
Trump could also swiftly launch Section 301 investigations on key U.S. trading partners, laying the bureaucratic groundwork for tariffs, although Goldman said that this process will likely take several weeks at a minimum.
Section 232 tariffs, which are already in place for steel, aluminum and auto imports, could also be broadened to other sectors, while Section 338 allows the president to impose levies of up to 50% on imports from countries that discriminate against the U.S.
Goldman noted that the latter has not been used before.
A right-wing contact claimed that the Trump Administration had already been working on the investigations needed to support other means of deploying tariffs, and had reached for the emergency authority as the fastest way to get out of the box. Given the terrible caliber of Trump’s staff work on the foreign policy and immigration fronts, and that DOGE has been willy-nilly driving out seasoned Federal employees and that Trump has postured as if he is allergic to hiring consultants, one wonders if there are evidentiary baselines that these investigations must meet and whether the Team Trump will satisfy them.
Regardless, this Trump loss creates yet more uncertainty, which is anathema to businesses. From Axios:
What to watch: With tariffed goods arriving at U.S. ports every day, the confusion over what’s in force and what to charge could throw imports into chaos.
Markets, and businesses, will likely be paying rapt attention in coming days to how the administration responds and whether higher courts intervene.
“(It) gives foreign governments – once compelled to negotiate new terms of the trade agreements the Trump administration broke – significant new leverage in ongoing trade talks,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president of the Cato Institute’s Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, in a statement.
From the Financial Times:
The ruling is a dramatic twist in the trade wars that Trump launched in the early months of his presidency. Even if the ruling is appealed, it will for now embolden opponents of the tariffs in corporate America, foreign capitals and the US Congress who have been trying to persuade Trump to roll back the levies.
And what about all those trade negotiations? Recall that even the UK “deal” is only at the trade version of an agreement in principle. Again from Bloomberg:
Major trading partners including China, the European Union, India, and Japan that are in negotiations with the Trump’s administration must now decide whether to press ahead in efforts to secure deals or slow walk talks on the bet they now have a stronger hand…
Also thrown into doubt would be the outlines for a trade deal that Trump reached with the UK earlier in May. That potential pact calls for the imposition of a 10% US tariff on all imports from the UK that would be null and void if Wednesday’s decision endures.
“I don’t know why any country would want to engage in negotiations to get out of tariffs that have now been declared illegal,” said Jennifer Hillman, a Georgetown Law School professor and former WTO judge and general counsel for the US Trade Representative. “It’s a very definitive decision that the reciprocal worldwide tariffs are simply illegal.”
Importantly, Hillman said, the court had also ruled that Trump couldn’t just impose tariffs as leverage in a negotiation. “What the court is saying is creating leverage is not a legitimate use of tariffs,” she said. “To me it’s a very, very important decision.”
Hillman and other legal experts pointed out that Trump has other legal authorities he can draw on. But none would give him as broad powers as those he invoked under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, that Trump has invoked.
In response, Trump Administration spokescritters have fallen back on screeching the tired trope of “unelected judges”. More worrisome is Trump looks to be increasingly going off the rails. I’m not the only one to notice it. Colonel Larry Wilkerson deemed the Trump “Putin is CRAZY” tweet followed by a threatening one to be either the work of out-of-control minions or an indicator of dementia. Wonder what he’ll make of this:
____
1 From Yahoo!:
A YouGov/The Economist poll conducted between May 23 and May 26 found that among registered voters, 46% approved of how Trump is handling his job as president, while 52% expressed disapproval.
Among U.S. adults surveyed, 44% approved of how Trump is managing things in the Oval Office, while 52% said they disapproved.
The survey found that Trump’s overall approval rating increased by a percentage point compared to the previous YouGov/The Economist poll, conducted between May 16 and May 19.
In that poll, 45% of registered voters approved Trump’s handling of the presidency and 52% said they disapproved. Among U.S. adults surveyed, 43% expressed approval, while 51% expressed disapproval.
(pdf at link)
Elon Musk has announced that he is ending his tenure as a special government official in the administration of US President Donald Trump. He added that the mission of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) "will only get stronger."
This decision came the day after he criticized Trump's key legislation, which the US president calls the "Big Beautiful Bill." In an interview with CBS, Elon Musk called the initiative a "massive spending bill" that increases the budget deficit and "undermines the work" of DOGE.
@banksta
Everything is following the patterns of Trump's first presidential term, when his team began to fall apart during the first year and was gradually replaced by figures associated with the Deep State and neocons. Waltz and Musk have already fallen away. In the future, Witkoff and Hegseth. In a year, Trump's team will be very different from the one he brought to the White House.
They played around and that's it.
You can take it to the bank. Two top Russian officials, Sergei Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov repeated the same thing today:
US President Donald Trump is being misled about the Ukraine conflict by those pushing Washington toward supporting the Kiev regime and taking a more aggressive stance on Russia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
Surprise, surprise (not really)! Trump, again, surrounded himself with the bunch of shysters such as sore loser Kellogg and a bunch of neocons who keep highly primitive geopolitical mind Trump in a complete darkness. When Lavrov and Ushakov speak like that, it means only thing--Donnie, you are being played for the fool that you are. But in the end--getting to the position of POTUS objectively requires what Alexandr Svechin wrote about 90 years ago in his seminal Strategy, I quote:
The first duty of the art of politics with respect to strategy is to formulate the political goal of a war. Any goal should be strictly coordinated with the resources available to achieve it. The political goal should be appropriate to one’s war-waging capabilities. To meet this requirement, a politician must have a correct conception of the relations of friendly to hostile forces, which requires extremely mature and profound judgment; a knowledge of the history, politics and statistics of both hostile states; and a certain amount of competence in basic military matters. The final statement of the goal would be made by the politician after an appropriate exchange of views with strategists, and it should help rather than hinder strategic decisions.
Trump doesn't satisfy ANY of those requirements. Not surprising from the guy who is a showman, and real estate shyster from NYC. That will be the topic of my today's video.
Welcome to the Inquisition: Trump’s Christ Nationalist Brigades Aim to Gut Church-State Separation
Posted by Internationalist 360° on May 29, 2025
Bill Berkowitz
The ghosts of Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the OG’s (Old Guard) of the religious right are dancing these days. Since his inauguration, Trump has rewarded his religious right allies with executive orders creating a “Religious Liberty Commission” and a “Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias.”
“Together they will put the force of the federal government behind the conspiracy theories, false persecution claims, and reactionary policy proposals of the Christian nationalist movement, including its efforts to undermine separation of church and state,” Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery recently reported.
On May 1, members of the religious liberty commission were announced, and nearly all are ultra-conservative Christian nationalists with a huge right-wing agenda. The commission’s chair is Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and its vice chair is Ben Carson.
Right Wing Watch profiled several of the commission’s members:
Paula White, serving again as Trump’s faith advisor in the White House, has used her position to elevate the influence of dominionist preachers and Christian nationalist activists. A preacher of the prosperity gospel, White has repeatedly denounced Trump’s opponents as demonic. When Trump announced the Religious Liberty Commission, White made the startling assertion, “Prayer is not a religious act, it’s a national necessity.”
Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who developed the Heritage Foundation’s “road map” for overturning marriage equality and was the face of Heritage’s anti-trans activism.
Franklin Graham, the more-political son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham, is a MAGA activist and fan of Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay policies who backed Trump in 2016 as the last chance for Christians to save America from godless secularists and the “very wicked” LGTBT agenda. After the 2020 election Graham promoted Trump’s stolen-election claims and blamed the Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol on “antifa.”
Eric Metaxas, a once somewhat reputable scholar who has devolved into a far-right conspiracy theorist and MAGA cultist, emceed a December 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally at which Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes threatened bloody civil war if Trump did not remain in power.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who helped lead U.S. Catholic bishops’ opposition to legal abortion and LGBTQ equality, was an original signer of the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto for Christian conservatives who declared that when it comes to opposition to abortion and marriage equality, “no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.”
Kelly Shackleford, president of First Liberty, who works to undermine church-state separation via the courts; Shackleford has endorsed a Christian nationalist effort to block conservative judges from joining the Supreme Court if they do not meet the faith and worldview standards of the religious right.
Allyson Ho, a lawyer and wife of right-wing Judge James Ho, has been affiliated with the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ equality religious-right legal groups Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty Institute.
Other commission members include Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire ministry; 2009 Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean Boller; TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw; and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik.
Montgomery noted that “Advisory board members are divided into three categories: religious leaders, legal experts, and lay leaders. The list is more religiously diverse than the commission itself; in addition to right-wing lawyers and Christian-right activists, it includes several additional Catholic bishops, Jewish rabbis, and Muslim activists.”
Notable new advisory board members:
Kristen Waggoner, president of the mammoth anti-LGBTQ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which uses the courts to make “generational” wins like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, has been named as a possible Supreme Court Justice by the Center for Judicial Renewal, a Christian nationalist project of the American Family Association’s advocacy arm. The ADF is active around the world.
Ryan Tucker, senior counsel and director of the Center for Christian Ministries with Alliance Defending Freedom.
Jentezen Franklin, a MAGA pastor, told conservative Christians at a 2020 Evangelicals for Trump rally, “Speak now or forever hold your peace. You won’t have another chance. You won’t have freedom of religion. You won’t have freedom of speech.”
Gene Bailey, host of FlashPoint, a program that regularly promotes pro-Trump prophecy and propaganda on the air and at live events. Bailey has said the point of FlashPoint’s trainings is to help right-wing Christians “take over the world.” FlashPoint was until recently a program of Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel.
Anti-abortion activist Alveda King, a niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., once dismissed the late Coretta Scott King’s support for marriage equality by saying , ‘I’ve got his DNA. She doesn’t.”
Abigail Robertson, CBN podcast host and granddaughter of Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.
Donald Trump claiming that he’s the front man for “bringing religion back to our country,” is as if the late Jeffrey Epstein claimed that he was working to end sex trafficking.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation called Trump’s religious liberty commission “a dangerous initiative,” that “despite its branding, this commission is not about protecting religious freedom — it’s about advancing religious privilege and promoting a Christian nationalist agenda”.
Trump Accuses China Of Violating Agreement He Did Not Adhere To
The U.S. President is performing one of his usual stunts:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump - May 30, 2025, 12:09 UTC
...
I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen. Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!! The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!
Trump's take is, of course, nonsense. But to see that one has to take a step back.
Trump had raised absurdly high tariffs against China which then had responded in kind. Additional hostile measures imposed by the U.S. were targeting China's import and production of semiconductors.
In response China limited the export of products for which it holds a monopoly. These are mainly rare-earth elements and magnets produced with them. While these are rather small items trade-wise they are needed to make modern electrical motors and are thus a significant part of the supply chain for higher level production items.
The high tariffs on products from China threatened to lead to empty shelves in U.S. markets. The financial markets were concerned. The U.S. dollar, stocks markets and treasuries decreased in price. A financial crisis was developing. Trump had to pull back.
On May 11 the U.S. and Chinese trade representative met in Geneva. In a Joint Statement they agreed on a pull back from high tariffs and to pause other trade related measures. The preamble of the deal is making the most important points:
The Government of the United States of America (the “United States”) and the Government of the People’s Republic of China (“China”),
Recognizing the importance of their bilateral economic and trade relationship to both countries and the global economy;
Recognizing the importance of a sustainable, long-term, and mutually beneficial economic and trade relationship;
Reflecting on their recent discussions and believing that continued discussions have the potential to address the concerns of each side in their economic and trade relationship; and
Moving forward in the spirit of mutual opening, continued communication, cooperation, and mutual respect;
The Parties commit to take the following actions by May 14, 2025:
Both sides reduced their tariffs. China also promised to reduce some of its non tariff measures:
China will [..] adopt all necessary administrative measures to suspend or remove the non-tariff countermeasures taken against the United States since April 2, 2025.
The financial markets relaxed and everyone was happy about it.
But on May 14, the very same day the new rules were to apply, the U.S. introduced new and extremely harsh measures against Chinese products:
The US Commerce Department issued guidance stating that the use of Huawei Technologies Co’s Ascend artificial intelligence (AI) chips “anywhere in the world” violates the government’s export controls, escalating US efforts to curb technological advances in China.
The agency’s Bureau of Industry and Security said in a statement on Tuesday that it is also planning to warn the public about “the potential consequences of allowing US AI chips to be used for training and inference of Chinese AI models”.
While this may not have been a technical breach of the Geneva agreement it certainly violated the spirit of the agreed upon Joint Statement:
Barely a week into a U.S.-China truce in their long-running trade war, Beijing has accused Washington of violating the temporary agreement reached in Geneva.
The Chinese Commerce Ministry said on Monday that the U.S. was taking "discriminatory measures" against China, after the U.S. Commerce Department recently warned American businesses to avoid Chinese-made microchips, specifically those produced by Chinese tech giant Huawei.
Both countries have walked back a series of punitive actions against the other as part of a 90-day pause agreed at the recent talks in Switzerland after U.S. President Donald Trump had imposed heavy tariffs. A consultation mechanism was created to discuss their wide-ranging trade disagreements, but the scope of the special channel may now be under dispute.
The Chinese government's strongly worded pushback against sustained U.S. industrial policy in emerging and critical technologies—such as advanced computer chips fueling the race for AI supremacy—suggests the deep-rooted economic security concerns present in both camps will not be easily addressed despite agreements on paper.
China demanded that the U.S. "correct its mistakes". As the U.S. made not attempt to do so China slow walked (archived) the lifting of export restrictions on rare-earth metals and on magnets made thereof:
On May 12, the countries announced after weekend meetings in Geneva that they would suspend most of their recently imposed tariffs. Since then, however, both governments have shown that they are still prepared to wield controls over critical exports as weapons against one another, with moves that are potentially even more damaging to trade and global supply chains.
China has restricted its exports of rare earth magnets, which are crucial for cars, semiconductors, aircraft and many other applications. Close to 90 percent of the world’s rare earth metals, including magnets, are produced in China.
And the United States on May 13 banned the latest semiconductors from Huawei, a Chinese electronics giant. Then on Wednesday, President Trump suspended the shipment of American semiconductors and some aerospace equipment needed for China’s commercial aircraft, the C919, a signature project in China’s push toward economic self-reliance.
...
Last week, Ford Motor temporarily closed a factory in Chicago that makes Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles after one of its suppliers ran out of the magnets. In most new cars, the magnets are used in dozens of electric motors that operate brake and steering systems, fuel injectors and even power seats.
On Monday, China granted some export licenses for rare earth magnets to be shipped to the United States and Europe, ...
...
Several companies in Europe, including Volkswagen, were granted permission by Beijing to continue procuring rare earth magnets soon after China began enforcing export controls on them in April. American companies have been juggling factory schedules, reassigning their dwindling magnet supplies to continue making their most profitable products.
China asserts that the U.S. is in breech of the Geneva agreement. As the U.S. introduced new non-tariff barriers against Chinese products China has stopped to lift its own non-tariff measures against the export of products the U.S. needs.
Trump's claim that China "HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US" is obfuscating the fact that the U.S. was the first to violate its commitments.
This again proves that the U.S. is non-agreement-capable (недоговороспособны (archived)).
Anyone dealing with it is well advised to always keep measures in hand that can be used to compel adherence to whatever agreement is made.
China, like Russia, Iran and others, has long learned that.
So what is Mr. NICE GUY going to do about that?
Posted by b on May 31, 2025 at 11:01 UTC | Permalink
After pushing out hundreds thousands of federal workers, Elon Musk steps down
Elon Musk has officially stepped down from his position heading the “Department of Government Efficiency” amid mounting tensions with the Trump administration
May 31, 2025 by Peoples Dispatch
Trump gives Musk a golden key to the Oval Office (Photo via White House/X)
The world’s richest man has just stepped down from his position leading a federal government task-force responsible for gutting large portions of the federal government.
In a send-off press conference held in the Oval Office on Friday, May 30, Elon Musk received glowing praise from Trump himself. Trump handed Musk an ostentatious golden key to the president’s office after praising the billionaire as “one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced,” who has “worked tirelessly helping lead the most sweeping and consequential government reform program in generations.”
This “reform program” has been Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has spearheaded sweeping attacks against government agencies leading to the exodus of over 280,000 workers via layoffs, buyouts, or other planned reductions, according to data analyzed by The New York Times. These are reductions that could affect at least 12% of the federal workforce.
Especially hard-hit targets have been agencies such as the US Agency for Global Media, which supervises outlets such as Voice of America and Radio Martí, as well as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), both of which have been almost completely gutted. Also hard hit has been the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, after some of Musk’s own business ventures came under CFPB scrutiny, and the Department of Education, which Trump has vowed to dismantle entirely.
The days of DOGE are not over, even with Musk stepping down from its leadership as a “special government employee.” According to Trump himself, the billionaire is “really not leaving,” and will continue to be “back and forth” from the White House. DOGE’s operations will continue, and Musk expressed confidence that his stated goal of cutting one trillion dollars from the federal budget would succeed through the department’s efforts. At the start of Trump’s second term, Musk had promised to slash one trillion dollars from next year’s budget, but has fallen far short of this goal.
Musk is stepping down amid profound disagreements and tensions with key Trump administration policies. In his first major public disagreement with the President, Musk voiced that his is “disappointed” with Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the Republican Party’s domestic policy bill that is heavily backed by Trump – claiming the act “increases the budget deficit” and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning.” Musk has also expressed some disagreement with Trump’s sweeping tariff policies.
Behind the scenes, tensions appear to be even worse than they appear on the surface, with reports indicating clashes between Musk and top Trump officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent – who Musk allegedly “got physical” with according to ex-Trump strategist Steve Bannon.
Musk’s appearance in the Oval Office on Friday – standing far to the side while Trump opened with praise of Bessent and other officials leading the charge on tariffs, while sporting a Black eye he claims came from his 5-year-old son – has been scrutinized as a fall from grace compared to Musk’s stardom in the first days of Trump 2.0.
Yet the austerity agenda continues, with Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, claiming that the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” “saves more than 1.6 TRILLION in mandatory spending, including the largest-ever welfare reform.” In a White House statement, Miller addresses what he dubs “claims the bill increases the deficit,” stating that the bill’s spending in fact reduces the current deficit.
Make America Dumb Again
The New Trump Project
Roger Boyd
Jun 01, 2025
In the late 1800s the US was not the global scientific leader, that was a Germany that was handily winning the Second (Technological/Scientific) Industrial Revolution, with its universities leading the world. Utilizing WW1 to its greatest advantage, on November 4th 1918 (one week before the armistice) the US passed an amendment to the Trading with the Enemy Act which legalized the confiscation and sale of patents taken out by Germans in both the US and Germany. This was a massive boon to US industries, such as the chemical industry, as Germany was a world leader in the development and production of such things as dyestuffs, medicinals, explosives, steel and electrical equipment. US industry simply stole Germany’s intellectual property on a mass scale, a theft without which US industries such as the chemical industry would have had a much harder time developing.
Then in the pre-WW2 years, the US gained another intellectual gift as many thousands of scientists and technologists fled Nazi Germany. Ironically, at the end of WW2 the US secretly recruited thousands of Nazi scientists under such programs as Operation Paperclip. These infusions of German talent were critical to many US industries in the post-war years, as with the aerospace industry.
In 1952 the US Congress facilitated the ongoing theft of the world’s talent by the US by establishing the H1 visa for “an alien having a residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning who is of distinguished merit and ability and who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform temporary services of an exceptional nature requiring such merit and ability", formalizing previous practices for giving preference to such immigrants. This became the H-1B via in 1990. Over 400,000 such visas were approved for foreign high-skilled workers in 2024, including many for post-doctoral, researcher and professor positions. To these can be added the many, many talented foreign nationals who gained a Green Card or citizenship.
The F (student) visa was also established in 1952, with the number of foreign students in the US really taking off in the 1970s; to over quarter of a million in 1980 (vs. only 135,000 in 1970 and 50,000 in 1960), nearly 400,000 in 1990, over half a million in 2000, just under 700,000 in 2010, over a million in 2015 and 2020, rising to over 1.1 million in 2024. About 60% of these students are in STEM fields, more than twice as high a percentage as American students, and about 20% stay and work in the US after their studies. One third of foreign students are from China, one sixth from India.
The Trump administration’s xenophobic and racist immigration policies, together with the severe restrictions on the free speech rights of H-1B and F1 visa holders (as well as even permanent residents), threaten the colossal benefit that the US receives by grabbing so much of the world’s leading scientific and technical talent pool. Already in 2020, with China having twice as high a percentage of undergraduate students in STEM as the US, China had 3.57 million STEM graduates vs. 820,000 in the US. About 15% of those US STEM graduates were foreign students, but at the Masters and PhD levels it was 49% and 57% respectively; just over 100,000 out of 200,000 US Masters and PhD STEM graduates a year. Without the foreign students, US post-graduate STEM programs would be decimated and undergraduate programs severely affected. The majority of foreign students who gain post-graduate degrees stay within the US, that’s over half of the supply of such STEM graduates to the US each year. Over 40% of doctoral level scientists and engineers within the US are foreign born.
The foreign students also tend to pay full price, which of course helps subsidize the domestic students. As well of course, contributing to the local economies where they are - especially in student towns. For example, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has nearly 9,000 foreign students that represent 17% of its student body (a much higher percentage of course at the Masters and PhD levels).
With over 40% of doctoral level scientists being foreign born, and half of the new supply of Masters and PhD graduates being foreign students, the Trump administration policies threaten to significantly reduce the STEM workforce in the US as well as academic STEM programs. At the very time when China is ramping up its STEM programs and research at a breakneck speed and is passing the US in so many critical scientific and technological fields. In 2024 the number of China’s STEM graduates had risen to 5.7 million, including 77,000 STEM PhDs vs. 46,000 in the US (and more than half of the latter were awarded to foreign nationals).
The US is also failing badly in basic education, with US math skills remaining stagnant for decades while other countries continue to improve, with the top five match scoring countries all in Asia. The US scores 28th in math, 16th in science, 9th in reading, lower than the OECD average. In 2023 only 44% of US adults could be considered fully literate, with 29% partially illiterate and 28% experiencing severe issues with literacy; so that reading score should be taken with a pinch of salt. In the late nineteenth century the vast majority of the US population were literate, so the US is actually worse off now than 150 years ago. Less than 3% of Chinese adults are currently illiterate, and that’s with the need to memorize thousands of Chinese characters against only 26 English alphabetic characters.
At the very time that a focus on driving much higher attainment in the basic subjects is required, the K-18 US educational system is beset with a rejection of a focus on excellence from a “left” which are really bourgeois neoliberal social progressives. An actual real communist, Antonio Gramsci, wrote of the need for a traditional basic education that is required to equip students with the skills to be productive and politically informed citizens. Ironically, the educational changes that were being made by the fascist Mussolini regime and that Gramsci was against are mirrored by significant parts of the current “left” progressive educational agenda; dumbing down children and rewarding mediocrity to produce better sheep.
At the same time the neoliberal state focuses on dumbed down multi-choice test-driven curricula, and the free-market extremists (heavily supported by oligarch money) press for school vouchers and a general attack on the public school sector and teacher unionization. Now added to by the Trump administration assault on educational institutions.
Compare the incredibly successful Chinese public school system to the failing US one.
With the US federal education budget being slashed in the “Big Beautiful Bill”. Texas is a good case of where the oligarchs want the US to be:
The Trump administration is accelerating the trend of Making America Dumb Again, perhaps even dumber than it was in the late nineteenth century, while countries such as China reach for a better educated future. When a ruling class take actions that fundamentally undermine the national strength upon which its wealth and power is dependent, the End of Empire phase is in full swing.
Agent Donald has announced the start of mass deportations from the United States.
Yesterday, the court actually allowed the US authorities to deport 500,000 people from the country.
Trump and the fantasy of a ‘White Genocide’
Originally published: The Wire on May 30, 2025 by E.D. Mathew (more by The Wire) | (Posted Jun 03, 2025)
Last week, when images of charred bodies and bombed-out hospitals in Gaza should have dominated global headlines, the stagecraft of American politics instead offered a grotesque display of deflection.
While over 53,000 Palestinians—70% of them women and children—have been killed and hundreds of thousands wounded, President Donald Trump chose to focus on a fabricated crisis half a world away: the alleged “white genocide” of Afrikaner farmers in South Africa.
Behind the Resolute Desk, Trump staged a performance. Clutching doctored visuals and sensational headlines, he confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with a fantasy.
One video showed symbolic white crosses—meant as protest art—misrepresented as a graveyard. Another was lifted from unrelated rebel violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet Trump insisted: white South Africans were victims of genocide, and the U.S. must act.
Act it did. Last week, some 50 Afrikaner “refugees” arrived at Dulles International Airport to an orderly and patriotic welcome. They were fleeing no war, no mass violence, no state persecution. But they fit a narrative. They were all white.
A manufactured crisis
The myth of “white genocide” in South Africa is not new. Propagated by far-right corners of the internet and echoed by figures like Elon Musk, born in South Africa, it claims a deliberate campaign to exterminate white farmers. But South Africa’s own statistics debunk this.
Between October and December 2024, just 12 people died in farm-related attacks. Only one was a white farmer. Murders in farming communities account for a tiny fraction of the nation’s high crime rate.
Land reform legislation—another bogeyman Trump invoked—has not led to any uncompensated land seizures. It is a policy designed to correct apartheid-era dispossession, and it mirrors eminent domain practices familiar in the United States. Yet Trump used it as evidence of “ethnic cleansing.”
Ramaphosa, accompanied by a diverse delegation including white Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen, attempted to clarify this. Trump dismissed them. “The farmers are not Black,” he snapped, reducing a complex national reality to racial grievance theatre.
His administration’s actions followed suit. Despite the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees finding no evidence of persecution, Trump fast-tracked refugee status for Afrikaners. At the same time, his administration continued denying asylum to Afghan interpreters, Haitian migrants and war-displaced Palestinians.
While Washington manufactured moral panic over a non-existent campaign in South Africa, Gaza descended deeper into horror.
Hospitals have collapsed. Food and water are scarce. The dead are buried beneath rubble. Over 53,000 have perished, with the UN warning of famine and human rights groups citing war crimes. Civilians, not combatants, bear the brunt. A real genocide is taking place while the world looks away.
Yet there are no chartered flights from Gaza. No red-white-and-blue flags welcoming survivors. No Oval Office briefings with posters of bombed schools. Instead, Trump’s administration has actively enabled the carnage—slashing funding to UNRWA, vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the UN and supplying the very bombs that devastate Rafah and Jabalia.
In stunning contrast, South Africa—dismissed by Trump as an alleged persecutor—has filed a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Their evidence? Systematic targeting of civilians, the destruction of infrastructure and a blockade designed to starve a population into submission.
Hollow humanitarianism
This duality isn’t just hypocrisy, it’s racialised statecraft.
Trump’s embrace of the Afrikaner refugee narrative is no accident. It caters to a base primed by years of grievance politics and racial nostalgia. His is an administration that dreams of Norwegian immigrants while banning travellers from Muslim-majority countries; that deports Black and brown migrants en masse while rolling out the red carpet for white South Africans who are neither stateless nor endangered.
Even prominent Afrikaner voices in South Africa have opposed these Trumped up fears. “We are not victims,” wrote Afrikaans journalist Max du Preez.
There is no genocide.
Yet this fabrication has become U.S. immigration policy. Trump’s pantomime of humanitarian concern for privileged whites, while denying the existence of genocide where hundreds are dying daily, is not just tone-deaf, it’s duplicitous.
The visual disparity says it all. At Dulles Airport, orderly receptions and media fanfare. In Gaza, the charred remains of children pulled from collapsed buildings. One group is awarded refugee status for fears unsupported by data. The other is at the receiving end of drones, blockades and the cold language of “collateral damage.”
Trump’s performance with Ramaphosa felt surreal. It resembled how he dealt with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not too long ago. This tactic diverted attention from American complicity in one of the most devastating modern-day humanitarian crises.
Even as Ramaphosa attempted to discuss trade, cooperation and South Africa’s multiracial democratic aspirations, Trump clung to his fictions. This is not diplomacy; it is demagoguery.
A reversion to racism
Trump’s fixation on South Africa reveals deeper animus. His administration’s hostility toward the country—cutting aid, expelling ambassadors, threatening tariffs—has been thinly veiled racism masquerading as foreign policy. South Africa’s post-apartheid commitment to non-racialism stands in stark contrast to the ethno-nationalist politics Trump promotes.
His disdain isn’t limited to South Africa. He has expressed admiration for “orderly” societies like Norway while calling African nations “shithole countries.” He has shown more sympathy for Russian soldiers than for Sudanese refugees. His policies reflect this worldview.
In Gaza, the cost of this selective empathy is measured in lives.
When sanctuary is extended not to the endangered but to the electorally convenient, what remains of American moral leadership? If genocide can be ignored while fantasy becomes foreign policy, then humanitarianism is hollowed out—wrapped in flags, drowned in hypocrisy and weaponized against the very people it claims to protect.
What Trump has done in spotlighting the fantasy of “white genocide” while ignoring the actual one in Gaza is not just an abandonment of truth is an abdication of responsibility, a moral collapse.
The U.S. cannot claim to lead if it cannot even see. Gaza does not need America’s pity—it needs its protection. That it receives neither is more than a policy failure.
Irony is dead. It lies buried in Gaza, under the rubble the West helped create.
... as a high roller. Also, the US air power is grossly exaggerated, not to mention the fact that NO US pilot or USAF commander has any experience of operating against modern air defense and top notch air force. Blowing up Iraqi Scuds or Afghan weddings is not much of a combat experience. But the points made are good ones.
Per this. Only retards would believe this BS.
Of course he knew. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that this was encouraged by him because this PR stunt mentality is exactly how he operates. He lost all credibility.
... for telling to Judge's face that BBC is sheer propaganda. Memorandum is for Trump whose maturity level is that of a teenager. He thinks he is smarter than everyone else.
(All of this from a guy who 6 months ago was sure that Trump was gonna fix everything. That's what ya get when you're a knee-jerk culture warrior.)
******
Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Continues Assault on Obamacare
Posted on June 4, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. This under-the-radar part of the pending Trump budget bill is yet another manifestation of Lambert’s second law of neoliberalism: “Die faster!” This post gives detail on how it will cut Obamacare coverage.
Obamacare plans are very variable by ZIP code, and many have such limited networks and benefits relative to premiums, even with subsidies, to be a bad deal. But others have policies that are beneficial, even essential, to the individuals and families that sign up. So this is part of the end-state neoliberal trend of gutting social safety nets. We’ve been warning that Trump was serious about reverting the US to 1890s conditions, including massive inequality and immiseration of the poor.
By Phil Galewitz< and Julie Appleby. Originally published at KFF Health News
Millions would lose Medicaid coverage. Millions would be left without health insurance. Signing up for health plans on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces would be harder and more expensive.
President Donald Trump’s domestic policy legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that cleared the House in May and now moves to the Senate, could also be called Obamacare Repeal Lite, its critics say. In addition to causing millions of Americans to lose their coverage under Medicaid, the health program for low-income and disabled people, the measure includes the most substantial rollback of the ACA since Trump’s Republican allies tried to pass legislation in 2017 that would have largely repealed President Barack Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment.
One difference today is that Republicans aren’t describing their legislation as a repeal of the ACA, after the 2017 effort cost them control of the House the following year. Instead, they say the bill would merely reduce “waste, fraud, and abuse” in Medicaid and other government health programs.
“In a way, this is their ACA repeal wish list without advertising it as Obamacare repeal,” said Philip Rocco, an associate professor of political science at Marquette University in Milwaukee and co-author of the book “Obamacare Wars: Federalism, State Politics, and the Affordable Care Act.”
The GOP, Rocco said, learned eight years ago that the “headline of Obamacare repeal is really bad politics.”
Democrats have tried to frame Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act as an assault on Americans’ health care, just as they did with the 2017 legislation.
“They are essentially repealing parts of the Affordable Care Act,” Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) said as the House debated the measure in May. “This bill will destroy the health care system of this country.”
Nearly two-thirds of adults have a favorable view of the ACA, according to polling by KFF, a national health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
In contrast, about half of people polled also say there are major problems with waste, fraud, and abuse in government health programs, including Medicaid, KFF found.
“We are not cutting Medicaid,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said May 25 on CNN’s “State of the Union,” describing the bill’s changes as affecting only immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization and “able-bodied workers” whom he claimed are on Medicaid but don’t work.
The program is “intended for the most vulnerable populations of Americans, which is pregnant women and young single mothers, the disabled, the elderly,” he said. “They are protected in what we’re doing because we’re preserving the resources for those who need it most.”
The 2025 legislation wouldn’t cut as deeply into health programs as the failed 2017 bill, which would have led to about 32 million Americans losing insurance coverage, the Congressional Budget Office estimated at the time. By contrast, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with provisions that affect Medicaid and ACA enrollees, would leave nearly 9 million more people without health insurance by 2034, according to the CBO.
That number rises to nearly 14 million if Congress doesn’t extend premium subsidies for Obamacare plans that were enhanced during the pandemic to help more people buy insurance on government marketplaces, the CBO says. Without congressional action, the more generous subsidies will expire at the end of the year and most ACA enrollees will see their premiums rise sharply.
The increased financial assistance led to a record 24 million people enrolled in ACA marketplace plans this year, and health insurance experts predict a large reduction without the enhanced subsidies.
Loss of those enhanced subsidies, coupled with other changes set in the House bill, will mean “the ACA will still be there, but it will be devastating for the program,” said Katie Keith, founding director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at Georgetown University.
Republicans argue that ACA subsidies are a separate issue from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and accuse Democrats of conflating them.
The House-passed bill also makes a number of ACA changes, including shortening by a month the annual open enrollment period and eliminating policies from Joe Biden’s presidency that allowed many low-income people to sign up year-round.
New paperwork hurdles the House bill creates are also expected to result in people dropping or losing ACA coverage, according to the CBO.
For example, the bill would end most automatic reenrollment, which was used by more than 10 million people this year. Instead, most ACA enrollees would need to provide updated information, including on income and immigration status, to the federal and state ACA marketplaces every year, starting in August, well before open enrollment.
Studies show that additional administrative hurdles lead to people dropping coverage, said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor and co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.
“Not only do people drop out of the process, but it tends to be healthier, younger, lower-income folks who drop out,” she said. “That’s dumb because they go uninsured. Also, it is bad for the insurance market.”
Supporters of the provision say it’s necessary to combat fraudulent enrollment by ensuring that ACA beneficiaries still want coverage every year or that they are not being enrolled without their permission by rogue sales agents. Most of the Medicaid coverage reductions in the bill, the CBO says, are due to new work requirements and directives for the 21 million adults added to the program since 2014 under an expansion authorized by the ACA.
One new requirement is that those beneficiaries prove their eligibility every six months, instead of once a year, the norm in most states.
That would add costs for states and probably lead to people who are still eligible falling off Medicaid, said Oregon Medicaid Director Emma Sandoe. Oregon has one of the most liberal continuous eligibility policies, allowing anyone age 6 or older to stay on for up to two years without reapplying.
Such policies help ensure people don’t fall off for paperwork reasons and reduce administrative burden for the state, Sandoe said. Requiring more frequent eligibility checks would “limit the ability of folks to get care and receive health services, and that is our primary goal,” Sandoe said.
The 2017 repeal effort was aimed at fulfilling Trump’s promises from his first presidential campaign. That’s not the case now. The health policy provisions of the House bill instead would help to offset the cost of extending about $4 trillion in tax cuts that skew toward wealthier Americans.
The Medicaid changes in the bill would reduce federal spending on the program by about $700 billion over 10 years. CBO has not yet issued an estimate of how much the ACA provisions would save.
Timothy McBride, a health economist at Washington University in St. Louis, said Republican efforts to make it harder for what they term “able-bodied” adults to get Medicaid is code for scaling back Obamacare.
The ACA’s Medicaid expansion has been adopted by 40 states and Washington, D.C. The House bill’s work requirement and added eligibility checks are intended to drive off Medicaid enrollees who Republicans believe never should have been on the program, McBride said. Congress approved the ACA in 2010 with no Republican votes.
Most adult Medicaid enrollees under 65 are already working, studies show. Imposing requirements that people prove they’re working, or that they’re exempt from having to work, to stay on Medicaid will lead to some people losing coverage simply because they don’t fill out paperwork, researchers say.
Manatt Health estimates that about 30% of people added to Medicaid through the ACA expansion would lose coverage, or about 7 million people, said Jocelyn Guyer, senior managing director of the consulting firm.
The bill also would make it harder for people enrolled under Medicaid expansions to get care, because it requires states to charge copayments of up to $35 for some specialist services for those with incomes above the federal poverty level,which is $15,650 for an individual in 2025.
Today, copayments are rare in Medicaid, and when states charge them, they’re typically nominal, usually under $10. Studies show cost sharing in Medicaid leads to worse access to care among beneficiaries.
Christopher Pope, a senior fellow with the conservative Manhattan Institute, acknowledged that some people will lose coverage but rejected the notion that the GOP bill amounts to a full-on assault on the ACA.
He questioned the coverage reductions forecast by the CBO, saying the agency often struggles to accurately predict how states will react to changes in law. He said that some states may make it easy for enrollees to satisfy new work requirements, reducing coverage losses.
By comparison, Pope said, the ACA repeal effort from Trump’s first term a decade ago would have ended the entire Medicaid expansion. “This bill does nothing to stop the top features of Obamacare,” Pope said.
But McBride said that while the number of people losing health insurance under the GOP bill is predicted to be less than the 2017 estimates, it would still eliminate about half the ACA’s coverage gains, which brought the U.S. uninsured rate to historical lows. “It would take us backwards,” he said.
Photo composition showing US President Donald Trump face-to-face with German fascist dictator Adolf Hitler. Photo: AI-generated/Qwen.
By Stansfield Smith – Jun 2, 2025
With the second coming of Trump, many who profess left credentials again proclaim fascism is back, after we voted “fascism” out in 2020. Every four years we hear the story: “this election is the most important in our lifetime.” Republicans are the new fascism, Democrats are the lesser evil. No matter what, corporate interests fund both parties and dictate their policies. No matter Democrat Biden green-lighted the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. No matter whether Biden deported more than Trump did, no matter every year the police killed more under Biden than Trump. Trump is the Hitler, not Biden. So once again, time for a reality check on actually existing fascism.
Actually existing fascism in Hitler’s Germany
Hitler’s rule began January 30, 1933, but even prior to this, Germany’s political climate bore no similarity to our own. In the summer 1932, Germany, then with 66 million people, had 30% unemployment, up from 8.5% in 1929, while industrial production dropped 42%.
The three contending parties in the July 1932 election, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party [Nazis], the Social Democrats, and the Communists – each won millions of votes. The German Communist Party, the largest in Europe, numbered 360,000 members, and possessed its own paramilitary organizations. The Social Democratic Party was one million strong, many in their own paramilitary group. The Nazis numbered 1.5 million, with 445,000 Stormtroopers or Brownshirts.
Clearly this reality bears no relation to the US today: we have no mass unemployment, let alone fascist, communist and Social Democratic parties as the leading contenders. In Germany, socialism or fascism—or, three versions of “socialism”—stood as the alternatives in the election. Here we may choose a traditional corporate party run by the 1%, and on “the other side of the aisle,” another one.
William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (p. 165) describes the1932 German election climate, alien to our own. In Prussia, with two thirds of Germany’s population, “between June 1 and 20 there were 461 pitched battles in the streets which cost 82 lives and seriously wounded 400 men…. In July, 38 Nazis and 30 Communists were among the 86 dead.” On July 10, 18 were killed, and a week later, July 17, “when the Nazis, under police escort, staged a march through Altona, a working class suburb of Hamburg, 19 persons were shot dead and 285 wounded.”
In six weeks, 200 were murdered in a part of Germany where 40 million lived. To make it simple for “Trump fascism” folk, that would mean 1700 killed in fascist – antifascist combat during a six-week period in the 2024 presidential campaign.
In the November 1932 election, the two socialist parties obtained 37.3% of the votes compared to 39% for the Nazis and the German Nationalists. Just over two months later, on January 30, Hitler was appointed Chancellor.
He quickly purged the nation’s police forces, replacing all police chiefs with Nazis. The police were ordered not to interfere with the work of Stormtroopers and the Nazi SS. Nazism 1919-1945, A Documentary Reader Vol. 1, The Rise to Power presents the February 17, 1933 Nazi police order: “The activities of subversive organizations are … to be combated with the most drastic methods. Communist terrorist acts are to be proceeded against with all severity, and weapons must be used ruthlessly when necessary.”
Just two weeks in power, Hitler’s Stormtroopers had license to beat, even kill leftists and Jews. Here, Trump’s main target was non-white immigrants, though deportation numbers have actually declined since Biden left office.
February 22, 1933, with fascism in power for only three weeks, 50,000 Stormtroopers and SS men were made part of the police. Did “fascist” Trump incorporate an equivalent of 250,000 Klansmen into the police forces here?
In just three weeks Hitler had the German police forces in Nazi hands, while another two million Stormtroopers patrolled the streets. Mass arrests began, public buildings and homes raided to seize political opponents, often placed in newly constructed “camps.” Meanwhile, Trump, a supposed Hitler, into his second term, has done none of this.
February 27, not a month in power, the German Reichstag, their version of Congress, was torched, which the Nazis immediately pinned on the Communists. The Nazi’s Emergency Degree declared, “Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.” (Nazism 1919-1945, A Documentary Reader Vol. 1).
So began their anti-Communist witch hunt. Truckloads of Stormtroopers rounded up targets, carting them off for beatings and torture. The Nazis seized Communist Party headquarters. Their meetings were banned, their press shut down, party funds confiscated, Communist deputies in parliament arrested. Social Democrats’ meetings were likewise banned, their press shut down; their party outlawed in June. It took a month for the new Nazi regime to behead the left. This was fascism in action.
Reality check
For those fantasizing Trump fascism, a reality check: in his first month Hitler had licensed imprisonment without trial, turned over policing and the judicial system to the equivalent of the KKK, and imprisoned or driven underground thousands of liberal, Communist and Social Democratic opponents. Stormtroopers and SS thugs took over town halls, trade union offices, newspapers, businesses, and courts, removing “unreliable” officials.
Before even 60 days in power, on March 21, it now became a crime to criticize the Nazi party, with trial by military style courts with no jury and often with no right to defense.
April 7 all Jews were dismissed from civil service jobs; Nazi governors were appointed in all German states, having the power to appoint and remove local governments, dissolve state assemblies, and appoint and dismiss state officials and judges.
On May 2, Hitler destroyed the trade union movement. After the Nazis had cynically made May Day a national holiday, all the trade union offices were occupied, all union property and funds confiscated, trade union leaders arrested and the trade unions reorganized as the Nazi’s German Labor Front.
On May 6 huge book burnings began, with 25,000 at the University of Berlin. Soon, all professionals in the fine arts, music, theater, literature, press, radio and film had to join their respective Nazi cultural organizations whose directives became law.
We can only wonder how some imagine Trump is following Hitler’s footsteps.
There were now two million Nazi Stormtroopers; given Germany’s 66 million population, a comparable Trump fascist gang would number 10 million. These “brown-shirted gangs roamed the streets, arresting and beating up and sometimes murdering whomever they pleased while the police looked on without lifting a nightstick…. Judges were intimidated; they were afraid for their lives if they convicted and sentenced a storm-trooper even for cold-blooded murder.” (Shirer, p. 203). Do we see 10 million government fascist thugs doing this here?
On July 14 all political parties besides the Nazis were prohibited, the fascists could confiscate the property of any organization it considered anti-Nazi, and could revoke anyone’s citizenship.
By 1935, 20% of German Communist Party members, 30,000, were in concentration camps. These were the most militant element of the anti-Nazi resistance. Another 10-20% of members continued underground work, but the Nazis soon rounded up, imprisoned, and executed a high percent of them. By 1939, 30,000 communists had been executed and 150,000 more sent to Nazi concentration camps.
“Within twelve months he had overthrown the Weimar Republic, substituted his personal dictatorship for its democracy, destroyed all the political parties but his own, smashed the state governments and their parliaments and unified and defederalized the Reich, wiped out the labor unions, stamped out democratic associations of any kind, driven the Jews out of public and professional life, abolished freedom of speech and of the press, stifled the independence of the courts and ‘coordinated’ under Nazi rule the political, economic, cultural and social life of an ancient and cultivated people.” (Shirer, p.189)
That was fascism in real life, not the make-believe one liberal-leftists see today. Trump has not thrown out the Constitution, wiped out the AFL-CIO, banned political parties, nor sent his political opponents to concentration camps.
Why this infantilism about Trump fascism?
In almost every presidential election going back generations, people on the liberal-left continuum resort to this scare tactic of Republican “fascism.” They may admit corporate America owns the two parties—as Bernie still does—yet vote Democratic as some “lesser evil.” They may even provide a class perspective on corporate rule of the US. They may accurately explain why our living conditions steadily worsen, that it continues regardless of who is the president. But note: very few say this during election year.
Instead, in election season we are told we must first defeat the fascist threat, then build our movement. This has been an effective strategy to trap our movement in the Democratic Party for generations. Not only does it reinforce domination by corporate America, not only does it miseducate people about fascism, but it also obstructs the working class struggle to combat our ever-worsening living conditions.
This infantile Trump “fascism” story has even led many liberal-leftists to become defenders of national security state operations by affirming the anti-Trump Russiagate hoax and by their support for the US war on Russia in Ukraine.
This has given “lesser evil” Republican pundits a wider hearing among working people with their exposes of these operations – the milieu including Candice Owen, Tucker Carlson, Judge Napolitano, and Ron Paul.
When the ruling class needs fascism
So long as corporate America has the working class – and the liberal-left – tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary methods of rule break down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces.
The historic function of fascism, as Nazi rule shows, is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy. That is far from the case in the US today.
Unfortunately, it has been habitual for the liberal-left to emphasize the crimes Republicans engineer against working people here and abroad, but underplay those committed by Democrats. This only helps to misdirect discontent towards the Democratic Party.
Labelling the crimes of Trump and Republicans as fascist propagates the just-so story that imperialist rule is nicer under Democrats. A Democrat oversaw the slaughter of 20% of the North Korean population (US own admission), a level equal to the Nazis in Belarus; a liberal Democrat, Nazi-style, imprisoned a whole ethnic group; a liberal Democrat brought mass slaughter to Vietnam; a liberal Democrat legalized indefinite military detention of US citizens without charge; a liberal Democrat brought us to the very edge of nuclear holocaust. It miseducates people to spread the myth that imperial brutality is somehow less barbaric than the Nazis, or depends on which party rules.
Caitlin Johnstone goes after believers in Democrats as “lesser evil,” pointing out that the Democratic Party exists to make sure good people do nothing. She forgets about believers in Republicans as “lesser evil,” and that party also exists to make sure good people do nothing. Both parties funnel popular movements into channels the corporate elite can control.
Advocates of Trump as fascist not only discredit and isolate themselves from more politically aware working people. Those who push the Trump fascism story are signaling to all their own attachment to the Democrats and the two party system. Historically, they have been a powerful obstacle in the way of the need to build a working class movement politically independent of the 1%.
Washington’s ‘Golden Dome’ – Multi-Trillion Tax Dollar Heist at Best, Dangerous Provocation at Worst
June 4, 2025
US President Donald Trump proposing Golden Dome air defense system for the United States, May 21, 2025. Photo: The Sun.
By Brian Berletic – May 25, 2025
US President Donald Trump has announced his administration has chosen the architecture for the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system, claiming it will cost $175 billion and be operational in “less than three years” with a “success rate close to 100%.”
During President Trump’s announcement on May 21, 2025, it was claimed the Golden Dome will consist of technology deployed across land, sea, and space capable of intercepting hypersonic, ballistic, and advanced cruise missiles, “even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they are launched from space.”
Former-US President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program (also known as the Strategic Defense Initiative) was repeatedly cited during the announcement. That program sought to use space-based weapons to void the doctrine of“mutually assured destruction” allowing the US to conduct a nuclear or non-nuclear first strike on another nation and avoid what had otherwise been an inevitable nuclear retaliation that would destroy both nations in the process.
Specifically, because mutually assured destruction was seen as a better deterrence against a first strike by one nuclear-armed nation against another, along with concerns over costs, technological limitations, and then-existing arms control treaties like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), the initiative was never fully realized.
Granting the US impunity to attack, not “defend” itself
US Space Force General Michael Guetlein, picked to lead the Golden Dome project and present during its announcement, would claim:
As you’re aware, our adversaries have become very capable and very intent on holding the homeland at risk. While we have been focused on keeping the peace overseas, our adversaries have been quickly modernizing their nuclear forces, building out ballistic missiles capable of hosting multiple warheads, building out hypersonic missiles capable of attacking the United States within an hour and traveling at 6,000 mph, building cruise missiles that can navigate around our radar and our defenses and building submarines that can sneak up on our shores and worse yet, building space weapons. It is time that we change that equation and start doubling down on the protection of the homeland.
Yet what General Guetlein calls “keeping the peace overseas,” is in reality the United States encroaching along the borders and shores of nations like Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea.
This includes the stationing of not only missile defense systems like Patriot, THAAD, and the Aegis Ashore system in close proximity to these nations in violation of the ABM treaty the US has since abandoned, but also first-strike offensive weapons like the Typhon missile launcher capable of firing both Standard SM-6 anti-air missiles, but also ground-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles previously prohibited under the INF treaty the US has also since abandoned.
For example, the US has positioned THAAD systems in both the Middle East and Asia, and its Typhon missile system is currently stationed in the Philippines with additional units on the way, specifically aimed at China.
Beyond the global-spanning military footprint of the United States, Washington is also preparing for or already directing multiple proxy wars against these nations.
The conflict in Ukraine was entirely engineered by the United States, beginning with Kiev’s political capture in 2014, the training and arming of Ukraine’s military, and the capture, reorganization, and direction of Ukraine’s intelligence agencies by the US Central Intelligence Agency.
The US has been waging war and proxy war against Iran for decades, including invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq right on its borders, invading and overthrowing the government of Iran’s ally Syria, the waging of war on Yemen-based Ansar Allah—also an Iranian ally. The US also maintains constant financial, political, and military support for Israel, which has repeatedly attacked Iran and its allies.
And despite officially recognizing Taiwan as part of “One China,” the United States has continued supporting separatist political parties administering Taipei, is arming local military forces, and is even stationing US troops on the island province itself.
All of this has forced Russia, Iran, China, and other nations to respond by bolstering military spending, increasing research and development into missile technology, and the creation of credible deterrents against decades-spanning US aggression and proxy war along and even within their borders.
While the Trump administration depicts the Golden Dome as necessary to “forever end the missile threat to the American homeland,” it is instead being built to enable the US to forever threaten other nations around the globe with its missiles.
Dubious claims about Golden Dome’s “near 100%” success
At one point during the Golden Dome’s announcement, US President Trump would claim: “I will tell you an adversary told me, a very big adversary, told me the most brilliant people in the world are in Silicon Valley. He said, ‘we cannot duplicate them. We can’t.’”
He also claimed: “We have things that nobody else can have. You see what we’ve done helping Israel. You probably wouldn’t have in Israel. They launched probably 500 missiles all together and I think one half of a missile got through and that was only falling to the ground as scrap metal.”
Except none of this is true.
If President Trump is referring to the 2024 Iranian retaliatory strike on Israel, up to 200 missiles were fired, with dozens if not scores of them circumventing Israeli missile defenses and striking targets, including dozens striking and damaging Israel’s Nevatim Airbase alone, according to NPR.
No air or missile defense system has a “success rate close to 100%.”
While any particular system may have a “success rate close to 100%” intercepting individual targets, retaliatory strikes are planned specifically to include a large enough number of missiles, drones, and other projectiles to saturate a defense system’s ability to intercept them all during a single attack. This means that while many incoming targets will be intercepted, many others will not, and critical targets will inevitably be struck and destroyed.
Regarding the state of US missile defense technology, unless President Trump is referring to undisclosed innovations, nothing the US currently is known to possess in terms of air and missile defense systems consists of “things that nobody else can have.”
And while in the past Silicon Valley drove unparalleled advances in technology contributing to a decisive military advantage for the US, the gap has since drastically closed and in some instances is widening in favor of nations like Russia and China.
The conflict in Ukraine, for example, has demonstrated glaring Russian advantages in several key areas that void the entire premise the Golden Dome is predicated on. Russia has demonstrated that it is capable of producing both larger quantities of ballistic and cruise missiles as well as layered integrated air defense systems and at a fraction of the cost the US and its European partners spend on arms and ammunition production.
Russia’s advantage is so great, it prompted the first-ever US National Defense Industrial Strategy in 2022.
The paper admitted the US (and the rest of the collective West) suffers from a bloated, inefficient military industrial base incapable of meeting the demands of the type of large-scale, high-intensity, protracted warfare taking place in Ukraine and likely to take place in future conflicts with either Russia or China.
As previously reported, the paper lays out a multitude of problems plaguing the US military industrial base including a lack of surge capacity, an inadequate workforce, overdependence on offshore downstream suppliers, as well as insufficient“demand signals” to motivate private industry partners to produce what’s needed, in the quantities needed, when it is needed.
In fact, the majority of the problems identified by the report involved private industry and its unwillingness to meet national security requirements because they were not profitable.
Nations like Russia and China do not rely on private industry partners for national defense programs. Much of the industrial power researching, developing, and mass-producing arms and ammunition in these countries takes place within state-owned enterprises. Because national defense is the chief priority of these enterprises, money is invested whether it is profitable or not.
This is what allows Russian and Chinese industry to maintain huge workforces, facilities, and tooling even when production is reduced, while private industry in the West would slash all three to maximize profitability. The first model allows a nation to surge the production of arms and ammunition on short notice—the other requires strong enough “demand signals” to justify the time-consuming process of building up the levels of all three—a process that can take years.
None of the problems described regarding the US military industrial base have been addressed since the National Defense Industrial Strategy was published in 2022. Corporations like Lockheed, Raytheon, L3Harris, and newer companies like Anduril slated to play a role in the proposed Golden Dome system continue to pursue a strictly for-profit model that will create the same disparity in quantity and quality seen playing out on and over the battlefield in Ukraine.
This leaves the likelihood the Golden Dome—like all other modern US military programs—will fall far short of stated expectations because of the fraud, waste, and abuse that defines US military industrial production.
The ultimate irony is that while the Golden Dome is sold to the public as “protecting” America, vast sums of public money that could actually improve the lives of Americans at home through infrastructure, education, and healthcare, will instead by siphoned off by demonstrably incompetent and corrupt arms manufacturers, all in an attempt to enhance Washington’s ability to menace the rest of the world with greater impunity—not protect the US at home.
The rest of the world will predictably react to the Golden Dome by creating their own means to defend themselves and retaliate against the US if attacked, making Americans not only less safe, but in the process of building the Golden Dome, less prosperous.
WAR AGAIN — PLAYING MOLOTOV TO THE TWO RIBBENTROPS WHO THINK PUTIN IS AS WEAK AS GENERAL MACARTHUR SAID OF STALIN IN 1952
By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
With the Oreshnik Moment on pause, who will say what is to be gained, what risked, what lost when President Vladimir Putin decides to play Molotov (lead image, lower right) to these two Ribbentrops (lead image, top left and right)?
“We have so much in common”, President Donald Trump was told yesterday by Friedrich Merz, Chancellor of Germany with a 25.5% vote. “With your German provenance, I think this is a very good basis for close cooperation.”
Trump replied apologetically: “I’m the one that ended Nord Stream 2, uhh, going to a place called Germany, come to think of it. I’m sorry I did that, uhhh [smiling at Merz]. But I ended Nord Stream 2. Nobody else did”.
Reminding Trump that the next day, June 6, is the 80th anniversary of the landings in Normandy to open the western front against German forces, Merz said: “This is the D-Day anniversary when the Americans once ended the war in Europe.”
The Chancellor was repeating Adolf Hitler’s version of the war. Trump agreed. “That was not a pleasant day for you? Turning to the cameras, he repeated: “this was not a great day.” Merz replied: “Well, in the long run, Mr. President, this was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship. We know that we owe you. But this is the reason why I’m saying that America is again in a very strong position to do something on this war and ending this war. So, let’s talk about what we can do jointly.”
Their joint plan, Merz and Trump agreed, means rearming Germany again, with US troops to remain where they are in Europe. This is war against Russia again.
Asked by a German reporter “if Germany is doing enough on defence”, Trump replied: “Well, I don’t know, I haven’t discussed it very much. I know that you are spending more money on defence now, and errr, quite a bit more money, and that’s a positive thing… I’m not sure General MacArthur [from 1945 to 1951 Supreme Allied Commander] would have said it’s positive. You know, he wouldn’t like it, but I sort of think it’s good. You [turning to Merz smiling] understand what I mean by that. He made a statement, ‘Never let Germany rearm’. And I always think about that… at least up to a certain point. There will be a point when I’ll say, please don’t arm any more if you don’t mind — [patting Merz on the leg] – we’ll be watching them.” – Min 9:26.
Twenty hours after Trump’s Oval Office press session with Merz, Rollcall.com has not yet published the full video record and verbatim transcript. This is an exceptional delay. As a result, the excerpts of the Trump-Merz session now in print come for the most part from the media supporting both Trump and Merz against Russia. Read these excerpts as I have transcribed them.
General Douglas MacArthur did not say “never rearm Germany”. There is no record of MacArthur saying it. That was what Soviet leader Joseph Stalin told the western allies.
The historical record reveals that the US, UK and France were uncertain among themselves the extent of German rearmamemt which might be triggered if the West pressed for reciprocal withdrawals of Soviet and western troops from occupied Germany.
MacArthur, however, did intend that the US should threaten Stalin with the prospect that Germany would be rearmed to fight Russia again. This plan of MacArthur’s was sent in writing in 1952 to incoming President Dwight Eisenhower and the new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. MacArthur was confident, he told them, that Stalin was ailing physically and militarily too weak to resist effective US pressure.
Stalin making his last public speech on October 14, 1952. MacArthur’s plan to escalate military pressure on Stalin was prepared in November 1952. Stalin died on March 5, 1953.
“The plan suggested by MacArthur to President‐elect Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles,” the New York Times has reported from US state archives, “was to threaten Russia with a complete rearmament of Germany and Japan, possibly including nuclear power, unless Stalin agreed to live up to his promise of the self‐determination of the peoples of Poland, East Germany and Central Europe. ‘MacArthur believed and suggested to the President‐elect that Stalin had no alternative but to accept. On the other hand, if Eisenhower waited six months, the lustre of his prestige would wear away in political strife and allied suspicions and his opportunity would be lost forever.”
In Washington yesterday Merz revived the MacArthur plan; Trump is signalling that he has agreed.
Asked whether he plans to withdraw US troops from Germany, Trump said they will stay: “The answer is yes, we will. Yes, we’ll talk about this. But if they’d like to have them there, you know, yeah, we, we’ll be doing that. No problem.”
Asked by a German reporter “what kind of a play is he [Putin] playing”, Trump replied: “Well look, he’s, he got hit. He’s been doing hitting, so I understand it, but he got hit hard. And he, I don’t think he’s playing games. I’ve always said he wanted the whole thing. I thought he wanted the entire, uh, everything having to with Ukraine. That’s something that would never have happened if I were president. The election was rigged…I used to talk with him about Ukraine a lot. I was the apple of his eye. But he would not have done what he did.”
Trump was falsifying. The Indian attack on Pakistan’s air bases, its air defence batteries, and command-and-control also struck at the nuclear storage bunkers at the Mushaf airbase at Sargodha on May 10. At that point, following the operational intelligence of what was happening from Indian and US sources, it has been reported the US activated the “kill switch” to prevent the arming of the Pakistan Air Force F-16s with nuclear missiles. This has not been corroborated.
Trump began threatening to attack Russia.
“If I see somebody’s out of line, if Russia is out of line uh, will be, uh, you’ll be amazed…I’m the one that stopped the pipeline. It’s called Nord Stream 2. Until I came along, nobody ever heard, not one person in this room ever heard of Nord Stream 2. You [Merz] probably did because it went to Germany.” Merz laughed, adding: “this [pipeline] was a mistake”. Trump: “But I stopped, I stopped it. Yeah, you’ve said that openly. It was a mistake because – and I used to go with Angela [Merkel, Chancellor 2005-21] and I say, well, wait a minute we’re spending all this money to defend you against Russia, and then you’re giving Russia billions of dollars a month. What kind of a deal is that? You know you [Merz] said it better than anyone else, uh, I appreciate it. But I’m the one that stopped it….I stopped it, it was dead. And then they say I’m friends with Putin.” Min 34:24.
Reporting what Putin told him in their telephone call on June 4, Trump claimed: “Putin said to me, you know, you’re not tough on Russia. You stopped the biggest most important job we’ve ever done. You stopped it. Then Biden came in and he let it be built.”
Trump went on to blame Russia for attacking Orthodox churches in the Ukraine. “You know, [Ukraine] had the most beautiful turrets, they call them turrets, little towers, beautiful towers, the most beautiful in the world. They are all now laying on their side, blown to smithereens. It’ll never happen again. They’ve taken away the culture of a country. They’ve [Russia] taken away the heritage of a country. It’s a terrible thing.”
Another German was cued to ask Trump whether he supports imposing the Lindsey Graham sanctions bill in the US Senate to prevent India and China buying Russian oil and gas. “I haven’t looked at it…I’m a very quick study. At the right time I’ll do what I wanna do….They are waiting for me to decide what to do. And I’ll, I’ll know, maybe very soon. It’s a harsh bill. Yeah, very harsh.”
Merz was then asked whether he agrees with Trump’s children’s-fight analogy of the war in the Ukraine. He sidestepped. “I told the president before we came in that he is the key person in the world who can really do that by putting pressure on Russia, and we will have this debate later on…we are on the side of Ukraine and we are trying to get them stronger and stronger just to make Putin stop this war.”
When Trump spoke of seeing satellite pictures of the “war field…real bodies, arms, legs all over the place”, Merz interrupted to say: “This is only by Russian weapons against Ukraine.”
Trump: “Yup.”
Merz: “This had never happened with Ukraine weapons against Russia.”
Trump: [nods head in agreement]
Merz: “Never. Ukraine has only targeted military targets, not civilians, not private, not energy infrastructure.”
Trump’s Embrace of Dystopian Palantir Spying Tool Sends Stock Soaring
Posted by Internationalist 360° on June 5, 2025
Kit Klarenberg
The Trump administration has charged the surveillance firm Palantir with agglomerating the US population’s personal data across government agencies, raising alarm about a centralized spying tool targeting hundreds of millions without oversight. Wall Street responded to the news by sending Palantir’s stock price to unprecedented heights.
During an end-of-year investor call this February, Palantir co-founder and militant Zionist Alex Karp bragged that his company was making a financial killing by enabling mass murder.
“Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies,” he stated, adding: “And on occasion, kill them.”
CIA seed front company Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp brags about how good business is to shareholders while admitting .. “When it’s necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them .. And we hope you’re in favor of that”
Right before he dumped $1.23 Billion in company stock pic.twitter.com/gLdiMLS4xj
— Nightwatch N8 (@NightwatchN8) February 20, 2025
On this front, Karp claimed Palantir was “crushing it,” and he professed to be “super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”
Karp went on to predict social “disruption” ahead that would be “very good for Palantir.”
“There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off,” he warned, suggesting that his firm was producing the most vital technology enabling elites to restore control during the coming unrest.
Palantir is already playing a decisive role in the besieged Gaza Strip, where its products assists Israel’s application of a ferocious AI targeting system known as Lavender which directs its ongoing genocide. In the face of public protest, Karp has acknowledged that he is directly involved in killing Palestinians in Gaza, but insisted the dead were “mostly terrorists.”
At the start of January, the overtly pro-Israeli firm’s board of directors gathered in Tel Aviv for its first meeting of the new year. Since then, its financial fortunes have improved dramatically.
Throughout May, Palantir’s stock exploded, making it the S&P 500’s top-performing company. On June 2, Palantir’s share price hit an all-time high, a year-on-year jump of 512%, turbocharging the company’s market value to roughly $311 billion. Driving this abrupt burst of investor exuberance was a series of lucrative deals signed with multiple US government agencies since Donald Trump took office, and the expectation Palantir will ink massive contracts going forward.
Palantir’s products expand mass surveillance at home, Pentagon targeting across the globe
On May 30th, the New York Times published a lengthy probe linking these deals to an executive order signed by Trump in March, calling for seamless, mass sharing of data across government agencies through a Palantir application called Foundry.
The report did not explain to readers how Palantir emerged as a small startup thanks to sponsorship from the CIA’s venture capital wing, In-Q-Tel, which gifted Peter Thiel’s company $2 million in 2004. Instead, the paper leaned in to a partisan angle playing on Democratic fears that Trump could abuse a unified database to target political foes.
Nonetheless, the Times provided valuable insight into Palantir’s penetration of a vast array of US government agencies, by raking in more than $113 million in federal government spending since Trump took office, on top of “additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.” In late May, the company’s existing contract with the Department of Defense was beefed up by $795 million, bringing it to an eye-popping total award of $1.3 billion.
Palantir currently provides the Pentagon with AI targeting software known as Maven, which it uses in battlefields from Syria to Yemen to Ukraine and beyond. The contract will last until at least May 2029. The Trump administration’s fondness for Palantir has placed its data analytics and storage tool Foundry in at least four federal agencies, including the DHS and Health and Human Services Department. Talks are also apparently ongoing with the Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service to adopt the resource. This would facilitate merging all these agencies’ datasets.
According to the Times, Palantir was selected to deliver on Trump’s order to enhance intradepartmental data sharing by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. At least three DOGE members previously worked at the company, while two others have worked at Thiel-funded firms. The outlet cited leaked screenshots indicating DHS officials exchanged emails with DOGE in February about merging citizen records, while quoting nameless Palantir employees worrying “about collecting so much sensitive information in one place,” particularly given the allegedly “sloppy” approach to security of “some DOGE employees”.
While focusing heavily on the risks posed by Trump’s embrace of Palantir technology, the Times acknowledged in passing the company “has long worked” with different branches of the US federal government, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In February 2022, Palantir was enlisted by the Biden administration to manage Covid vaccine distribution. Meanwhile, in April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “removal operations team” gave Palantir $30 million “to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time.”
Karp, for his part, has infuriated Trump’s base by boasting during an interview in Davos, Switzerland in 2023 that he “singlehandedly stopped the rise of the far-right in Europe” through an application called PG. The following February, he claimed before an audience at the Future Investment Initiative Institute that by supposedly stopping “innumerable terror attacks” across Europe, Palantir prevented the resurgence of fascism.
“I love when I’m getting yelled at in cities in Europe,” Karp declared. “Keep yelling at me… the only reason why someone’s not goose-stepping between me and you is my product,” he laughed.
CIA agent and head of Palantir Alex Karp says his company’s software “single-handedly” stopped the “far right” in Europe.
Founded in 2003 with funding from the CIA’s In-Q-Tel program, Palantir’s only client before 2008 was the CIA. pic.twitter.com/Shq0uA5x16
— Reed Cooley (@ReedCooley) May 31, 2025
Palantir penetrates the West as privatized national security state backbone
For years, Palantir has been at the heart of US-led efforts to neutralize Iran’s alleged nuclear program. It has created a predictive analytical tool dubbed Mosaic for the purpose, used by the International Atomic Energy Agency and US officials to visualize ties between the people, places and material involved in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities. Data harvested and pored over by the resource includes potentially tainted material supposedly stolen from Tehran by Mossad.
Such work mimics the services Palantir has provided for US government agencies such as the CIA, DHS, FBI, and Pentagon. These entities routinely turn over untold quantities of data to the firm to exploit for a variety of applications. For example, Palantir’s Gotham tool has been weaponized by the US military to supposedly predict insurgent attacks. In Afghanistan, it combined maps, intelligence briefings, and incident reports for mission planning, leading Bloomberg to dub Palantir the “secret weapon” of the so-called war on terror.
Meanwhile, documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate the US signals intelligence giant and its British counterpart GCHQ have relied heavily on Palantir’s products. A leaked 2011 presentation connected the company’s wares to multiple secret Five Eyes spying operations, and provided glowing personal testimonials from the agencies’ analysts. One crowed: “[Palantir] is the best tool I have ever worked with. It’s intuitive, i.e. idiot-proof, and can do a lot you never even dreamt of doing.”
Local law enforcement agencies are also making use of Gotham. The total number of forces worldwide using the technology is unknown, but leaked Los Angeles Police Department training documents on Gotham, including an ‘Intermediate Course’ and an ‘Advance Course,’ shed significant light on the tool’s internal workings. The sheer volume of data collected on citizens – whether they are law-abiding, are suspected of having committed a crime, or are simply connected to individuals accused of wrongdoing – is staggering.
This includes sex, race, names, contact details, addresses, prior warrants, mugshots, surveillance photos, personal relationships, past and current employers, tattoos, scars, piercings and other identifying features. Such a cutting-edge service doesn’t come cheap, and Gotham subscriptions run to millions of dollars annually. The vast windfall reaped from multiple state entities since Palantir’s inception has made the firm’s founders very wealthy indeed – Karp’s personal worth alone is currently estimated at $12.2 billion – and allowed the company to go public in September 2020.
On top of the privacy concerns raised by a secretive company with access to so much private data, the practical efficacy of Palantir’s technology has also come under scrutiny its Foundry application was implanted in Britain’s NHS in December 2020. That’s when Palantir was awarded a legally dubious no-bid contract to run the Service’s Covid-19 Data Store for two years despite warnings that the company could preside over “an ‘unprecedented’ transfer of citizens’ private health information” into its own database.
The following year, the NHS awarded Palantir a $447 million contract to build a “Federated Data Platform” combining the medical records of all British citizens. Next, the British government paid millions to a consultancy firm called KPMG to market Palantir’s platform to local NHS Trusts, which oversee the administration of individual hospitals throughout the country. Since then, several senior medical officials have warned that Palantir’s technology was inferior to current systems, and could actually hinder NHS work.
Yet British PM Keir Starmer has continued his government’s cooperation with Palantir, even visiting the company’s offices in downtown Washington DC immediately after meeting with Trump this February. Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir UK, cheered Starmer’s attitude after the visit: “You could see in his eyes that he gets it. The ambition is there – the will is there.”
Palantir’s Mosley happens to be the grandson of Sir Oswald Mosley, the World War II-era Nazi sympathizer who led the British Union of Fascists.
Keir Starmer made a special trip to Palantir while he was visiting the US at the end of February & apparently “enthused about how Britain wouldn’t over-regulate AI, instead seizing its opportunities in pursuit of ‘a new economic deal’ with advanced technology at its core.” pic.twitter.com/piC0vdL76b
— 12 Ball (@BoltzmannBooty) March 21, 2025
While Thiel’s personal affinity for Trump and close relationships with key members of the president’s cabinet may have eased Palantir’s entry into sensitive government areas, the company’s current trajectory has been years in the making. Having penetrated the national security state of countries across the West, the firm and its messianic CEO are working to consolidate a trans-Atlantic network of control with unprecedented powers, lucrative profits, and a growing body count.
Trump! Bitch! Where are Epstein's files?!
June 6, 12:59
The Trump-Musk coalition finally fell apart yesterday. The parties publicly smashed pots.
Trump called Musk crazy and ineffective, and also threatened to deprive Musk's companies of government contracts, which caused the value of Musk's assets on the stock market to collapse (someone made a lot of money on this).
Musk actually accused Trump of pedophilia, saying that Trump will not make Epstein's lists public because he himself is on Epstein's lists.
Musk also said that Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" is terrible and will increase the US debt, and that in the second half of 2025, because of Trump and his policies, a recession will begin in the US.
Musk also publicly supported Trump's impeachment and the appointment of Vance as president. Musk later withdrew his threat to sever ties with the government in the space sector.
Trump said that he is not afraid of criticism and that he will push through his "Big Beautiful Bill". In short, they parted ways.
As a result, a thermonuclear bomb exploded in US domestic politics, undermining the "broad coalition for Trump." The consequences will be long-term and systemic. The Democrats are already rubbing their hands.
However, in many ways this was expected. Trump is following the path of the first administration, when he very quickly lost his original team. First Waltz left. Now Musk. Next will be either Hegseth or Witkoff.
He still doesn't understand the gravity of the situation for him and the US. The US IS AT WAR with Russia. Trump IS AT WAR with Russia. The only thing he can do is PR and BS covering up for his incompetence and the fact that no one in Russia takes him seriously anymore. He also tries to cover up for US' impotence. His word is worthless. It is stupefying seeing the US having last four POTUSes being nothing but a bunch of clowns. Last two, however, take the prize, albeit the previous one wasn't even a normal human in medical sense. I speak about the off-ramp for the US now closed in my newest video, which should be up shortly. Mr. Trump, you are fired!
Michael Hudson: Trump’s Contradiction-Riddled Strategy to Preserve US Hegemony
Posted on June 7, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. I am highlighting Michael Hudson in the headline because in general and here, I find his analysis to be of merit. Hudson contends that Trump does have a US plan to rescue US hegemony, but its components are so self-defeating as to warrant a new favorite Trump label, “crazy”.
Originally published at Dialogue Works
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, June 5, 2025, and our friends Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson are back with us. Welcome.
RICHARD WOLFF: Glad to be here.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Let’s get started with Lindsey Graham and his latest visit to Ukraine. Not only Lindsey Graham, Blumenthal, and Mike Pompeo as well, they went to Ukraine. Here is what Lindsey Graham said:
LINDSEY GRAHAM: Russia said that Ukraine doesn’t have good cards. Well, Russia is much bigger and has a lot more people. I get that. But the world has a lot of cards against Russia. And one of those cards that we have is about to be played in the United States Senate. In America, you have more than one person at the card table. We have three branches of government, and the House and the Senate are poised to act. What would change our mind? If Russia came to the table, agreed to a ceasefire, and earnestly.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, one of those cards that he’s talking about is 500% secondary tariffs on Russian energy, which we know would influence China, India, and eventually Europe. Your take?
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, Lindsey Graham has been a bloviating senator all his career. This is all theater. He has been all theater. He is all theater.
He has gathered together the many other members of both houses who, like him, are thespians at heart and politicians only secondarily. This is showmanship. That’s all. It’s something that he has decided will improve his standing down there in the American South, where he comes from and where he gets elected by people who approve that kind of theater, even as their actual situations decline.
We are no longer living in the world that appreciates that theater. What he doesn’t understand as he invokes the world is that in view of the world, the very behavior he proposes is considered the actions of a rogue nation, a nation that is willing to threaten, disrupt global trade for the whole world. This is not admirable. This has nothing to do with bringing cards to a table. This is bullying behavior, and it is doubly offensive because the bully isn’t in charge anymore.
The Chinese know and the Russians know, having spent the last 15 years building themselves up, growing their economies much faster than the United States, and much faster than the United States and its G7 allies, that they now have in their BRICS alliance people from whom they can buy, people to whom they can sell, and those people are more than half the population of the world and have shown in the Ukraine war that they can absorb whatever it is that the United States and Western Europe wish to do in interfering with the trade of Russia.
When Russia couldn’t sell its oil and gas to the Europeans, did they collapse the way the Europeans promised? No. Did the ruble disappear the way the Europeans promised? No. Did the levying of much more than a big tariff, a literal embargo? We’re not going to buy your oil and gas. We’re not going to let you use our SWIFT international payments system. We’re going to seize $300 billion of assets back in your currency that you have kept in Western institutions.
And so all of these things, which in total are a bigger effort against Russia than what Mr. Lindsey Graham now proposes, they all failed. So I got news for Mr. Graham. His proposal, if it were adopted, will not only fail to hold back Russia and China in the way all the previous sanctions and limits and tariffs have failed, but will enhance the already badly damaged reputation of the United States. And I mean, enhance it as a rogue, as the biggest single threat to global trade and global economic development in the world, which for the United States is a very bad sort of self-destructive behavior.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard, you call America a rogue nation. Madeleine Albright called America the exceptional nation. And that’s America’s strength being a rogue nation. Think of it as a rogue nation, not with atom bombs, which it won’t use, but with the ability to create chaos. And what Graham is threatening is we can create chaos in Europe and other countries by imposing this enormous tariff on countries that trade, that obtain their gas from Europe instead of from us.
And we can impose similar chaos on countries that trade with China and its companies, Huawei. I think there’s already threats against that. Companies that use China’s international payment system to avoid the U.S. dollar. The aim of this chaos is to create an entirely new world order whose rules are the reverse of the economic order that America created in 1945 when it was the world’s leading creditor nation and also the world’s leading industrial power after in the wreckage of World War II.
Now, the situation is just the reverse. The United States is the world’s major debtor nation, mainly to other governments, and it’s also a deindustrialized nation, the most trade-dependent nation of all. And so, what the Republican administration, with the full support of the Democrats, is trying to do is: how can we make a virtue of all of this?
How can we somehow use our ability to create chaos to threaten other countries with these huge sanctions, denying them access to the American market, denying them military protection, such as the United States had offered in World War II, and instead making them prone to fighting with Russia, as we’ve seen over the attacks by Ukraine on Russia with full backing of Britain’s MI6 and Macron and German’s support?
So, what Lindsay Graham was doing was bragging about America’s strength in the ability to confront other nations with what the United States can do to smash the whole international set of rules if they don’t adopt the new rules that the Trump administration is trying to impose.
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, let me respond. Maybe we disagree here. I agree with what you’re saying. Everything makes perfect sense to me, but I see it in a context that this is the behavior of a desperate government going down, and in the language I learned as a kid, trying to take everybody down with it.
Or using whatever you might call the last card, if we’re going to stay with that metaphor, the last card they can imagine playing because they’ve run out of all the other cards that they used to have available. They don’t have it available. The irony is the nuclear weapons they built up, they can’t use, and the rest of the weapons they don’t have anymore. And so they’re stuck with this sort of situation.
I see it in that, and I don’t think it can work. I think it’s desperate not only because it is so disruptive and it is so chaotic and it is so risky, but it’s also desperate because I don’t think the conditions are there. And I think that more and more of the world sees that. And, you know, for this kind of a major bluff to work, you can’t be seen as bluffing. And I think what the world sees here is bluffing.
And that when he does it one day and undoes it the next day, the notion that this could be bluffing becomes a virtual certainty. He wants to get some concessions so that he looks like he’s dominant in some way. And so, by yelling 500% and actually settling later for 10%, he can make some claim that he got something and he looks better for the evening television.
But, you know, that only works for a while until everybody realizes that’s what you’re doing. And that’s what we have now. You know, the signs that are accumulating that we may have both stagnation starting in the second half of this year and inflation getting going in the second half of this year. Well, you know, those are signs that this is a very risky line of action.
And you have to ask the logical question: why would you be doing this? And after we make the cracks that the whole world is making, that he’s unstable or he’s looking to make money or he’s looking to get attention, all of which have their grains of truth, you still have to ask the question, why in this way would this man act at this point? And there, I think, the desperation of the American empire’s decline is the answer.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, let’s talk about this bluff then. There’s method behind the madness. And they actually have a plan. It’s a mad plan. You’re right. Other countries can see through it. But let’s walk through exactly what their plan is, because they’ve spelled it out in detail. And it’s worth going over, I think.
When Trump and Rubio acknowledge that we’re entering a multipolar world, I think what they mean is that Europe, Asia, other continents are now all on their own in the sense of every country for itself. And to Trump, that means the United States is going to act for itself, in its own interest, to try to be the winner.
And what its interest is, is actually creating a new world order in which other countries somehow can be locked into dependency on the United States—even though we’re no longer a creditor nation, even though we’re no longer a trade surplus country, and even though we’re making other countries militarily endangered, not protecting them anymore.
I think that Trump’s strategy is to save the U.S. economy and its foreign policy from having to bear the loss of its financial and trade dominance that led it to create the post-1945 order in its own interest. That order lasted 80 years, and it’s now changing. And they actually have a plan, and they’ve outlined the plan for what they want to do. And I think, of course, it’s a bluff—but let’s go over exactly why it’s going to fail.
Instead of the United States offering financial support, it’s now demanding that the rest of the world support its own financial position and even its domestic reckless budget deficit. And other countries are supposed to oppose China and Russia by joining a new Cold War—to prevent China, Russia, and the BRICS countries from shaping a new world economic order. That’s the guiding strategy.
And I think the first aim of the global majority that the United States is opposing is to avoid the use of the U.S. dollar, as you pointed out, for their mutual trade and investment, and as a vehicle for saving their foreign exchange reserves in the form of holding Treasury securities and lending to the United States government.
This balance of payments aspect of the current crisis is, I think—certainly to me—the key. The United States doesn’t have atom bombs, but as I said, it does have the trump card—and Trump’s ability to create chaos. And as the old joke goes: if you owe the bank ten thousand dollars and you can’t pay, then you’re in trouble. But if you owe the bank 10,000,000, or a hundred million, or a billion dollars—then the bank’s in trouble.
Foreign central banks are holding U.S. securities and those of its federal agencies. They have a problem: how can they secure the value of all the savings they’ve mounted up since 1971, since the U.S. went off gold? All of the world’s central bank savings are already in U.S. dollars. The United States owes them so much money that it’s now using its debtor power—instead of its creditor power—as a means to control them by threatening chaos.
Trump is trying to fight to create a new illusion that somehow will give the illusion of solvency—if other countries agree to new worlds. Well, the fact is, the United States could pay other countries if it were willing to follow the policies that it and the IMF have demanded of Global South countries for the last 80 years.
Namely you pay your debts by selling off your public infrastructure, selling off your raw material rights, increasing taxes on income and wealth so that this money will not be available to consumers to buy imports. That’s how you generate a balance of payments surplus to pay your creditors.
Well, the United States has a double standard and again says, “We’re the exceptional country.” It’s not going to do what the old economic order forced the Global South countries to do.
The United States could roll back its military spending—which has long been the major component of its balance of payments deficits ever since the Korean War in 1950. It could cut back its new foreign investment. And it could begin selling off its existing investments in Europe, Asia, other countries, to pay its creditors. That’s exactly what the IMF and the United States insist that Argentina and other debtor countries must do.
But the United States is refusing to do these things, and that’s what makes it an outlaw country when it comes to the rules of traditional financial debt settlement. It’s using its strength as a debtor—no longer as a creditor—and that’s what’s turned the world upside down. And it’s used this to somehow be able to create a moral order in which it can convince at least its satellite rulers—people like Merz and Macron and Starmer—to continue to sacrifice their economies to support this new U.S. economic order.
RICHARD WOLFF: Okay, but let me respond by saying I don’t think he can do these things domestically or internationally. That may be the plan, that may be the method in the madness. I understand that argument, but I don’t think it’s doable.
And I think the desperation is again visible in coming up with a plan like that for which the world is no longer willing to be treated that way. And I think he’s learning it at every turn. The Chinese are not bending. No matter what, you know, let’s remember he had tariffs a few weeks ago in the neighborhood of 140 or whatever it was percent. And that made no difference at all.
You know, he just had a meeting with Xi Jinping, if I understand, yesterday, a telephone call having spent the last 10 days asking for one. That’s not the behavior of somebody who is terrorized by what you’re proposing or what you’re threatening.
The Chinese took the time and the care to produce an economic miracle, which includes an alliance that is crucial to them precisely because it creates enough of a world market for them to buy from and sell to that the United States’ abilities that we won’t let you here. Okay, don’t.
I want to remind people over the last week if I’m not mistaken all the leaders of Europe were on their knees cutting deals with the Chinese. They’re desperate too, and they are the ones because of their subordination, their inability to act independently from the United States anywhere is now hobbling them. They are learning that the cost of being subordinate to the United States can be very high. They were writing nicely for several decades; they were able to be social democratic to their own working class because the United States saved them from spending money on defense.
But the United States can’t do it for the reasons Michael just summarized. The United States is throwing the Europeans right under the bus. We’re not doing this anymore. You’re going to have to do it for yourself. Yes, but we can’t do that and be the social democratic societies we were developed over history to be.
And if you make us impose an austerity, then you will see that the “menchamps?” in France and their equivalents everywhere else will take the power in Europe because they can ride your inability. The Germans, we are spending $80 billion on defense. Oh, really? How’s that going to play in their own country? Not well.
Mr. Merz has a very thin majority. Mr. Macron has no majority. And Starmer has pissed away the little bit of bump he got because the conservatives were so awful. They now face the reality that another Trump-like figure, Farage, may become their next lead.
I mean, these are societies in advanced levels of decay. So I don’t think the United States can do most of what it is they’re threatening to do. I don’t see it. I don’t see them able to get the rest of the world to go along with this desperate effort now that they’re a debtor nation, now that the rest of the world has caught up or exceeded them.
They’re not in a position to dictate and they don’t understand it. They have the biggest military. They are very rich. It’s very hard for them, as it was for the British before them, to understand that they are now going back to what they were: a small, offshore, wet island off of Europe. That’s the British Empire’s resting place. And the United States is going its path to a decline from its peak.
And all you have is a desperate leadership that wants, on the one hand, to pander to the public awareness by pretending the decline of the empire isn’t happening, while at the same time taking these extraordinarily desperate, chaotic, disruptive steps in a final, last effort to do what isn’t anymore available to them to do. And this is a recipe for real trouble, mostly here at home.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Richard, you’re elaborating my points. Of course, I agree with that. What I’m doing is explaining: if you look at exactly what the U.S. plan is in detail, you see exactly why it won’t work. Of course, it won’t work. And when you look at the details, there actually is a plan, and it is so crazy that it won’t work.
And that’s what I want to explain exactly why it won’t work. For instance, we mentioned, I think, last week, Treasury Secretary Bessent’s proposal that foreign countries stretch out the maturity of their Treasury IOUs for 100 years.
That’s pretty illiquid. That’s like saying we can’t pay within my lifetime or the lifetime of my children. It’s pie in the sky. In other words, you lend us the money, write it all off. You can pretend that it’s money. You can pretend that it has value. Let’s have a pretend new economic order. That’s what the American policy rests on.
Pretense, of course, not the real thing. It’s the pretense of every Ponzi scheme dynamics, where debts grow and grow and grow, and all it requires new entrants into the scheme. More and more foreign central banks will hold the dollars. More and more countries will invest their trade surpluses and balance of payment surpluses in the dollar to somehow give the illusion of solvency, but it’s not going to exist.
Well, what the plan of Bessent and the Treasury wants is that other countries are going to commit their accumulated international savings, all of what they’ve saved since 1971, to back U.S. unipolar military and foreign policy hegemony. And this foreign support aims at the United States to pursue this massively polarizing tax shift from financial wealth onto labor and industry.
That’s the Republican plan. Huge tax cuts for the wealthiest, 10% of the population, all the rest of the population, labor, industry, agriculture, has its taxes go up. So the foreign central banks and the dollar-based international order, they’re enablers to America’s attempt to maintain its unipolar control of world diplomacy behind the Cold War that Lindsey Graham and others are trying to back. So far, Trump has not criticized Lindsey Graham. Other people are. Well, this solution of somehow saying U.S. Treasury bills are never to be paid. They’re a sort of permanent floating debt.
At the same time, Treasury and Trump are telling its allies that to be able to pay down its debts, if you really want us to pay them down, then you have to enable us to export to you and earn the money. That means that, sure, you can enable us to pay you by letting American industry replace your industry.
Your German car companies and technology companies can relocate to the United States. And if you relocate here, we can export and then we’ll be able to export to you. Your industry is going to have to be wound down, which of course it will be if you can’t get Russian energy anymore and have to depend on our energy, you know, move to the United States where everything’s less expensive.
Well, the whole idea that somehow the United States can use its deindustrialization as a weapon, it reflects a false line that it’s taken in development really since the 1990s. The United States is trying to say we can maintain our trade supremacy by focusing on monopoly goods, on information technology, military technology, social media platforms. And these were considered the high value added industries.
And the idea was the United States says, well, we don’t need blue collar manufacturing. We don’t need labor-intensive industries. And in fact, shifting, offshoring our employment to Asia is going to help hold down our domestic wage levels and all of that.
Well, all of a sudden, something very strange has happened. All of a sudden, if you look at what is happening with China today, amazingly enough, the United States has become dependent on low-wage industrial economies. All of this industry that is outsourced to China and other countries is now threatened with being blocked by Trump’s tariffs. And the United States doesn’t have the ability to produce these goods itself, even to the point of making screws to screw down the keyboards of the iPhones that are made by Apple.
So nobody expected the United States to become more dependent on low-wage industries that instead of where China and other countries have almost caught up with the information technology, with the dollar transfer systems, not needing the dollar, not needing the SWIFT, with all of these things. And this has turned the whole traditional idea of international advantage upside down.
The United States can’t reindustrialize to somehow earn the money to pay off its foreign debts, because the Chinese economist Liu Feng has pointed out that industrialization requires having the whole broad spectrum of industry, including the sectors that the United States has looked down on, like textiles. And even what the United States considered low-wage industries before, all of a sudden China is robotizing all of these.
And so now you’re having products that were made by low-wage manual labor made by robot factories. The United States hasn’t developed anything like this. The United States all of a sudden finds itself dependent on the smallest things that are key for its supply chains, as you and I have discussed before on Nima’s (show).
These supply chains for screws, for steel, for various inputs, not to mention the rare earths and everything, which China is not going to reduce its national security limits. So the United States has a skewed pattern of production. It’s focused on the internet, the information technology, but it doesn’t have the most basic industries that are needed to earn the money to somehow move its trade into a surplus to pay off its debt.
So the trade problem is hand in hand with the insolvency problem. And the fact is that other countries are broke. And here’s what faces other countries. Here’s the choice. Are they going to say, okay, we’ve been sucking – we’ve followed a blind alley that we’ve put all of our savings in the United States. Are we going to just accept the loss and go and create and join the global majority in a new restructuring of their economies?
Or are we going to say we can’t afford the disruption of a year, a two-year or three years, and we’re going to have to remain dependent on the United States because otherwise, the value of our foreign exchange reserves is essentially blocked.
Our ability to trade with China and Russia is blocked. And we’re locked into a dependency on trade with the United States that has to be a deepening and deepening loss for us because the United States plan, when you look at it, is so fallacious in its assumptions, so badly structured, that of course it won’t work. That’s really the political choice that’s facing Europe and the whole rest of the world.
RICHARD WOLFF: Let me add a couple, if I can, Nima and Michael. In recent days, looking at literature about the automobile industry, I came across a number of comments in which people who are not involved in the kind of conversation we’re having, whose focus is much more narrowly concentrated on the international automobile business, are projecting, several of them, that the relocation of automobile industry will in fact not be to the United States, but to China.
Why? Because of what Michael just said. They have all of the components, including the rare earths, which are crucial for those batteries without which the electric vehicle doesn’t function. And if you are going to move to the United States, and if the United States isn’t going to be able to get them from China, you’re moving to your own destruction. You cannot do that.
You’d be much better advised to build your automobile, your Volkswagen, or your Peugeot, or your Fiat in China, where you can be sure of access to the rare earths without which you can’t build a car anyway. So that’s one thing. Here’s another one: the history of monopoly in capitalism.
Let’s remember what it is: it’s when the producer of something can capture the market in the sense of becoming the only mono seller, poly, mono poly, the only seller. Why? Because then you can not only make the profit built into the surplus you get from your worker, but you can jack up the price above cost and get what’s called a monopoly revenue on top of it.
But the very existence of that, for example, in the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley, and this is the history of capitalism: the minute you get a monopoly revenue, you become the object of envy and competition from everybody else because you’re getting outlandish rates of return. And so the flow of capital is to try to get a piece of that since it’s much more profitable than to staying in the competitive areas of the economy.
So now we have DeepSeek, we have the Chinese who have demonstrated that when you have tried to copy, you can do it. Huawei can produce the relevant chips. So can the other companies. If the United States is developing a strategy that has the quality of depending on the monopoly position that its high-tech industries achieved for a while, then I’ve got news for them. You’re going to lose it.
The monopolists always do. General Motors and Ford once had a monopoly. They don’t anymore. And you’re not going to keep that monopoly here, which means your strategy, which assumes a certain monopoly position, is a strategy built on sand that is ebbing away. The Chinese are working on that too.
And by the way, not only the Chinese, but others. And so this is not only risky for all the reasons we’ve adduced, but it’s risky in terms of where the actualities of international capitalist competition lie. The Chinese have a dominant position in rare earths and crucial industries, not just the automobile industry, air traffic, airplanes, defense, those are also requiring rare earths. Now, will the United States make an effort to get new sources?
Sure, they will. May they succeed? They may. But we are now, the more and more we talk, the more and more, hopefully, you’re all picking up on the conditions, the many, many conditions that suggest that the strategy being pursued now is, well, it is so risky that I believe the word desperation captures it.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, it’s desperate, and that’s why I’m trying to spell out what its strategy is so you can see just in detail how desperate it is. And it gets worse and worse. I think you could say for the last two centuries, most of America’s technological innovation, maybe not most, but much, has been from immigrants, from individuals, scholars, scientists, technical labor fleeing the fight for freedom in their own country to come to the United States.
Well, the United States, I think there are 250,000 Chinese students in the United States. And now the United States is acting to block these students. Well, China has been complaining, as other countries before it have, about the brain drain.
They’re saying, well, you know, we have these, we’ve spent all the effort in raising these students, sending them to school in China. And now they’re going to the United States for graduate studies, studying the STEM curriculum. And now they’re deciding to work for American companies being trained there.
And so we’re losing a lot of our own technical labor because look at the American high-tech industries that are developed largely by Chinese labor. Well, Trump has said, we don’t want any more brain drain from China. We want to send the Chinese back to China so that they will be able to work to help develop Chinese technology, not American technology.
And not only that, but the one key, most apart from foreign brain drain to the United States developing technology, is government-subsidized research and development. Everything from the Manhattan Project for the Atom bomb to so much development has been government subsidy to universities to develop pharmaceuticals, technology, internet technology that the government then gives to the private sector is a gift to create the monopoly from this vast government spending, government-subsidized technology.
This is all being cut back from Harvard to other universities. That’s what Elon Musk did. Don’t subsidize government research and development. Concentrate research and development in China and Asia, not in the United States. We’re not going to be doing that anymore. And the reason is that many people, many of the scientists who wanted to develop technology, also want peace instead of war.
And if any of them say we’re for peace for any war, well, all of a sudden that is caused, I won’t get into the Zionist problem, but the students who are expressing political views other than the U.S. official foreign policy are being blocked from the United States, sent back to their countries. So the United States has cut off the two major sources of what was providing us technological advantage: immigration and government subsidy of university research and development.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I would like to stress that and also to take it a step back into the very economic structure. The Chinese version of modern economy is about 50% private capitalist enterprise, both Chinese and foreign, and 50% government-owned and operated enterprises.
That’s what they mean when they say they’ve got socialism with Chinese characteristics. The Soviet Union was much more government. The United States and Britain are much more private. The Chinese is a hybrid that is different and has to be highly controlled from above because you’ve got these two horses that don’t run in the same way in the same direction.
But the genius of what they’ve done, which explains why they’ve been growing two to three times faster than the U.S. for every one of the last 30 years, is because whatever the private profit motivation cannot accomplish because of its limits, the government can. The other half can make the investments that aren’t governed by a short-run profit calculus.
And the irony of what Michael just said is that in the United States, a modest, too small version of that was the government subsidizing the university to do some of that long-range, not-profit-dominated research. The idiocy of what’s being done to cut back the government support to get rid of the immigrants who are often the driving force of much of it.
That is a concession to the backlash of 30 years of globalization and neoliberalism. The liberals are every bit as responsible for that, the Democrats, as the Republicans. They were all cheerleaders for globalization, for liberalization, for automation and relocating jobs and all of the rest of it. And now they see the backlash that puts a guy in power who has to do all of the things necessary to hold on to his demagogic base.
So, yes, of course, he has to tell a dozen countries in Africa that they’re not welcome to send anybody to the United States. This is grotesque to deport immigrants. What are you doing? 10 million in a country of 330 million makes no difference. It’s irrelevant. What are you doing? You’re pandering, of course, but the pandering, without which he can’t be president, is going to have and is having real negative, self-destructive economic effects.
And I noticed in the last few days that whether it’s from Goldman Sachs or Bank of America or Ray Dalio or Jamie Diamond, there is a growing chorus of very big businessmen who are saying, uh-oh, this is spinning, from their perspective, out of control.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you made the very important point that China’s government is shaping its technology. And the United States is a more centralized planning economy than China, but it’s been planned by the financial sector for its own financial purposes. And China never had a financial sector because when Mao’s revolution occurred, they didn’t have a financial sector and the government had to itself provide the money and credit policy.
And the credit system is designed to finance tangible capital investment in research, development, industry, factories, machinery, education, and infrastructure, as opposed to the United States.
My friend Carlos Sanchez has his Karloff’s gymnasium, where he’s been publishing reports by the Chinese officials explaining exactly what makes their planning so different. And they point out that in the 1930s, all the way to the 1960s, when I went to school, we all had to read Gardner and Mean’s reports on the separation in the United States between financial ownership of industry and management.
Finance would, the financial sector would finance industry, but leave the corporate leadership to CEOs who were engineers or marketing specialists, not financial specialists. But all this began to change in the 1980s.
And all of a sudden, the financiers made themselves the managers of companies instead of the industrial managers. Instead of having the purpose of the companies to increase market share, to increase output, to increase production, the purpose was simply to make wealth by financial means, as we’ve spoken before, by stock buybacks, by paying out dividends, by increasing the price of stocks instead of lowering the price of production for what they’re doing.
And you had financial capitalism replace the dynamic of industrial capitalism. And so the Chinese call this industrial socialism. It’s not really industrial capitalism that evolved into finance capitalism. It’s government supportive industry not to make profits and economic rents for the 10% and the 1%, but for the entire economy to benefit.
That’s what makes socialism different. from capitalism ultimately. And in the 19th century, as we’ve said, everybody expected industrial capitalism to evolve into socialism. That’s not what happened. And instead, it’s been China and its fellow socialist economies that have picked up this idea of using industry, agriculture, and most of all, money and credit creation to increase the productivity and living standards of the economy, not to centralize wealth in the hands of the 1% and 10%.
That’s really the conflict of economic systems that is behind this whole new Cold War between the United States and Europe on the one hand and China, Russia, Iran, and the BRICS countries on the other. All of this attempt to somehow maintain U.S. hegemony with this crazy gerrymandered logic of finance and trade chaos that I’ve mentioned.
It’s all to somehow maintain the finance capital system as part of the Cold War against the industrial socialism that really was, I think, it’s the destiny of civilization to go in that direction. The United States is not part of that direction in which the rest of civilization is going in.
RICHARD WOLFF: If I could, Nima, I want to pick up on this last point of Michael, because I think basically it’s more important than anything else we’ve said. Here is the crucial thing that Michael just did. He connected the dilemmas of the United States relative to what is going on in this case in China, not to the ‘Chinese want to be the next empire’ or the ‘Chinese want to replace the Americans as the hegemony.’ None of that.
What he did was to link the different positions and, therefore, the different prospects of the United States, on the one hand, and China on the other, to the organization of their economic systems. In his case, he stressed the difference between the industrial and financial sectors, let’s call them, of the economy.
I would argue, just to expand it, that’s what ought to be the discussion. Why did the Chinese grow two to three times faster than the United States? Why have they caught up technologically? Why have they made the best electric car at a time when the electric car is going to be the means of transportation for the next 50 years, likely, etc. And that’s – we get then to the question: what can a society do that has a 50-50 split between public and private enterprise, that has one governed by the profit motive and the other one by a different set of notions and calculations?
Wow. That would be, then we can’t do that in this country because that questions the capitalist system that we have, puts it immediately in second place, having to justify why in the world would you hold on to a society that has organized its industry and its finance in the way we have, given that there’s another way that has worked much better.
That is so frightening as the proper question that we have to get rid of it. We have to make this a struggle of personalities, of the Communist Party against it, irrelevant. The fundamental question is: how did you organize your economy to get this result? And if it weren’t an ideologically unbearable question, it would be the one we would all be discussing now. That’s the irony of all of this.
MICHAEL HUDSON: What has made China so different is why did America deindustrialize? And it deindustrialized because of financialization. And China has avoided financialization because it doesn’t have the financial interests. And when you had the Secretary of the Treasury Bessent a week ago saying China has to not only open its markets, what we really want is China has to let in American banking. Let us finance your industry. Well, you know that China is not going to do that because if you let American finance banking do to China what it did to the American economy, it’s going to hell.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, and absolutely. You know, there’s an old saying that capitalists, capitalism will disappear because and when the capitalists will be selling to their executioners the rope with which to be then executed. When the – starting in the 1970s, when large numbers of American capitalists saw the opportunity for a quick profit by relocating their businesses into China, and they sat down and the Chinese said, “We will give you cheap labor and we will give you access to our market, which is growing much faster than yours. And in exchange, we want your technology.” When that deal was struck voluntarily by American big business, you had the beginnings of the process whose conclusion we are now discussing.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Okay, that is basically our theme for the last half year that we’ve been saying. And of course, the United States is now trying to convince China to sell us the rope to hang it militarily by the rare earths that are key for our military armaments against it, which is why China says you’re blocking us on national security grounds. We’re going to show you national security grounds.
Well, let’s see where the American economy is in six months, as you said earlier. Let’s just see what happens. Where are we going to be?
RICHARD WOLFF: I think we’re going to see a lot of it much sooner than six months. I really do believe the pre-tariff inventories have now been exhausted. The tariffs are going to show up in reduced imports. Already, this last month’s balance of trade is sharply different from the previous years in one variable: declining imports.
Okay, if you attach a tariff, that’s what you get. And they haven’t even hit yet in many cases. So, you’re also seeing the greed of our capitalists who know that in a world full of discussions of tariffs, they can raise their prices and claim it has to do with tariffs, and no one will know. And they thereby escape blame for raising their prices to make more profits.
And when you, and they have also, as you remember, the dollar has shrunken eight or nine percent since Mr. Bush took office. So, you have the diminishing value of the dollar and the tariff. You’re really hitting the American imports with a one-two punch that’s going to show up starting now.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I’m saying, okay, we’re going along with you. You know, we’ll accept all of your tariffs. You know, we’re not going to bargain with you. We’re not going to argue. We’re just going to, you impose your tariffs. Let’s see what economy breaks first.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Let me just put one of our audience have he has some sort of comment on here is what he said. He said, “Nima, please ask Professor Hudson and Wolff to teach an economic curriculum online. He would be willing to pay for that.” Yeah.
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, let me say in response that I have thought about that. I’ve thought about that because we, Michael and I and Nima have thought about doing something with the transcripts of these programs now for over a year.
And I have thought that, given the reaction I see to what we do here, that in effect, Nima is taking us through a kind of course in economics in which a series of related questions are posed each time, and that as the statistical reality unfolds in front of us, and I look at some different reports from those that Michael looks at, we are able to come together and enrich one another’s grasp of what’s going on, and it becomes a course in the immediate economic reality that we’re all living through.
So, I mean, I appreciate that you see that too. It’s one more voice pushing us to think about that.
MICHAEL HUDSON: There is a common denominator between Richards and my intellectual and political backgrounds.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, yes. And it has to do with the initials K and M.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much, Richard and Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.
Originally published: The Progressive Magazine on June 2, 2025 by David Rosen (more by The Progressive Magazine) | (Posted Jun 07, 2025)
On May 8, President Donald Trump announced his intention to end the Digital Equity Act, which established funding for programs that address unequal access to broadband access across the country, through a post on his Truth Social website:
I have spoken with my wonderful Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and we agree that the Biden/Harris so-called “Digital Equity Act” is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL. No more woke handouts based on race! The Digital Equity Program is a RACIST and ILLEGAL $2.5 BILLION DOLLAR giveaway. I am ending this IMMEDIATELY, and saving Taxpayers BILLIONS OF DOLLARS!
While it may no longer seem possible for Trump’s proclamations to surprise, this one still managed to shock experts in telecommunications, who say that the gutting of Digital Equity Act programs will disadvantage millions of Americans.
“It’s going to be huge,” Amy Huffman, policy director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, tells The Progressive.
People in every state and territory across the country will not have the robust [Internet] services that they would have otherwise.
The Digital Equity Act, which was enacted by Congress in 2021 as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, was originally intended to combat this very problem. The law provided $2.75 billion to establish grant programs to help close gaps in digital equity and broadband capacity, with a goal to “ensure that all people and communities have the skills, technology, and capacity needed to reap the full benefits of our digital economy.” Nevada, for example, was expected to receive $9.2 million in 2024 to increase access to devices and technical support and to provide training in digital skills. But on May 9, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) sent termination of funding letters to recipients of the grants authorized under the law.
Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband, says that Trump’s reversal of the Digital Equity Act will result in more Americans being unable to access the Internet due to lack of resources or skills. “We will continue to have a massive digital divide in this country,” Sohn tells The Progressive.
There are millions of people in this country who do not know how to turn on a computer, that don’t know how to use a search engine, that don’t know how to use a web-browser.
Jessica Rosenworcel, the former chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under President Joe Biden, estimated in 2024 that “nearly twenty-four million Americans are not connected to the Internet, including 28 percent of Americans living in rural areas and more than 23 percent of people on tribal lands.” The lack of comprehensive access, she said, “means millions of people still do not have the broadband they need to fully participate in modern life.” What’s more, many of those who will be negatively impacted from the potential loss of funding are Trump’s own supporters, who are highly concentrated in rural areas where broadband connectivity is still prevalent.
“In the world today, where everything is online, literally everything—accessing social services, accessing your doctor, accessing your kids’ school records, communicating with their teachers, you name it—anyone left offline means they are not adding to the local economy in the same way, they’re suffering, and they are losing out,” Huffman says.
Since its founding about ten years ago, she says, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance has developed more than 2,000 affiliate chapters throughout the nation and its territories and more than forty partnerships with tribal entities, ranging from “small community groups all the way up to state governments.”
Any attack on programs funded under the Digital Equity Act will also result in the loss of jobs including those of people Sohn calls “first-line sufferers” who teach others how to get online, often through non-governmental organizations or local offices of the nonprofit fundraising organization United Way. “We call them ‘digital inclusion’ organizations or ‘digital equity’ organizations,” she says.
There are thousands of people across the country whose job it is to get people online.
Sascha Meinrath, Palmer Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State University, notes that the Digital Equity Act—made up of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program and the Digital Equity Program—is actually the third national effort to address digital inequity.
The first effort, the Technology & Opportunities Program, was put forward in the 1990s. “It helped establish technology centers across the country,” Meinrath recalls. “The goal was to teach digital literacy in the early Internet era, almost proactively.” Thousands of community technology centers were created. But then the funding dried up, he says, and the centers shut down.
A second major effort, launched in 2009, was the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, which Meinrath says sought to “invest in infrastructure and focus on connectivity and digital justice.” It was a time-limited stimulus program whose funding expired after several years.
“We now have an administration that is reconstituting the same failures of yesteryear,” he says, “but not for lack of funding, not for things petering out. But actively precipitating this digital injustice apocalypse.”
Meinrath finds Trump’s approach especially “irrational” given that, in his opinion,
the President who brings connectivity to rural America will be a hero.
“All Trump had to do is not do anything,” he says.
BEAD would have brought him huge positive kudos from all different constituencies, and he chose—for whatever reason—to screw up the win.
Elon Musk has announced the creation of a new party in the United States, which will exist in defiance of the Republican and Democratic parties of the United States.
It will be called the "Party of America". Well, the foundations in the spirit of another "Third Force", as billionaire Ross Perot tried in the 90s (remember him?)
Polaagu, in the long run will not take off, but conceptually will lead to the fact that in 2026 the Democrats will regain control of the House of Representatives.
The conflict between Trump and Musk has somewhat subsided, but only in the public sphere. The gap has already been institutionalized and the ripples on the water will continue to diverge for a very long time.
P.S. Against the backdrop of the conflict with Musk, Trump nervously stated that because of the Ukrainian terrorist attacks, Russia received a reason to destroy Ukraine to hell.
