Trump’s Impact on the Financial Sector and Global Dollar System
Posted on August 29, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. This piece gives a high level review of the Trump economic policies that affect the financial system, particularly financial stability and customer protection. They are broader than one might think, ranging from crypto and stablecoin to Trump’s aggression with just about everyone (including Canada, Greenland, and Panama), which might lead Trump to end dollar swap lines. Currency swap lines enabled foreign central banks to bail out dollar dud assets like CDOs that their charges had gorged on (note the foreign central bank makes the loan and hence is the one exposed to the sick banks). If nothing else, be sure to read the discussion of currency swap lines, since it explains clearly how essential they are to confidence in the dollar. Another particularly informative section is on how stablecoin will undermine US sanctions.
The summary of each major type of policy change is layperson friendly while setting forth the nature of potential additional risks. Looming concerns are that all of these changes are being made ad hoc (and even though the authors don’t say so, are in the main ideological and/or to cater to very wealthy interests), with little thought about the bigger ramifications of them individually, and even less about their collective impact: probable big negatives for the dollar system, financial stability, customer/investor protection, and prevention of money laundering and other crimes.
By Gary Gensler, Professor of the Practice, Global Economics and Management, and Professor of the Practice, Finance, Sloan School of Management Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Lev Menand, Associate professor of law, Columbia Law School; and Joshua Younger, Lecturer in Law Columbia Law School; Portfolio Manager Tudor Investment Corporation. Originally published at VoxEU
The current US administration’s approach to financial markets and institutions mixes familiar deregulatory policies with a range of other policies that are largely without precedent. This column, taken from a CEPR book on the economic consequences of the second Trump administration, catalogues the relevant policy shifts that are likely to affect the financial sector and considers how these shifts may impact financial stability, capital markets, and the global dollar system.
Editors’ note: This column first appeared as a chapter in the CEPR book, The Economic Consequences of the Second Trump Administration: A Preliminary Assessment, edited by Gary Gensler, Simon Johnson, Ugo Panizza and Beatrice Weder di Mauro.
The second Trump administration’s approach to financial markets and institutions mixes familiar deregulatory policies with a range of other policies (financial and non-financial) that are largely without precedent and may lead to significant structural change in the long term. Combined, these policies have the potential to affect the financial sector in at least four ways. First, they could threaten the foundations of the global dollar system – mutual cooperation, trust, and interdependency, both between the producers and consumers of financial instruments and among the nations that constitute the dollar bloc. Second, they may undermine financial stability by loosening prudential standards, especially with respect to limits on leverage. Third, they can jeopardise consumer and investor confidence by relaxing regulatory standards and lessening financial law enforcement. Fourth, they could frustrate the financial crimes and sanctions regime, notably by promoting stablecoins, which can be used beyond the reach of governments to enable various forms of illicit activity.
These effects, in turn, could have a negative impact on the economy in the medium to long term. They raise the risk of financial instability and a messy deleveraging. They also may put upward pressure on interest rates for public and private dollar-denominated debt. Although the global dollar system has proven robust to past disruptions, and remains well entrenched, the administration’s new stance, if pursued to its logical end, could increase financial fragility and impair capital formation. If that comes to pass, a future exogenous shock to the economic or financial system would pose significant risk to economic growth if policymakers are unable, in the face of such a shock, to come together swiftly to avert a disorderly monetary contraction.
This chapter proceeds in two parts. First, it catalogues the relevant policy shifts that are likely to affect the financial sector. Then it considers how these shifts may impact financial stability, capital markets, and the global dollar system.
Policy Shifts
In its first hundred days, the second Trump administration has taken a range of steps that directly affect the financial sector. They also have taken other steps (not directly related to finance), particularly in relation to international alliances and the administrative state, which may, in the long run, have significant effects on the financial sector. Some steps are of the sort that often follows a change in party control in Washington. For example, the administration has adopted deregulatory and de-supervisory approaches to banking and markets frequently pursued by prior Republican administrations. Other steps, however, are more dramatic. For instance, the administration has asserted presidential supremacy over financial regulatory agencies, undermined central bank independence, and disrupted US relations with historic allies, all in ways with little to no precedent.
Deregulation
Banking
The core framework for the prudential regulation of US banks is provided by an international agreement known as the Basel Accord. Formed in the wake of a major international banking crisis in 1974 (Braun et al. 2021), 1 and championed by the United States, Basel was created to level the playing field for dollar-denominated banking around the world. That, it was hoped, would forestall a race to the bottom in regulatory standards that could fuel dollar-based financial bubbles and ultimately precipitate acute monetary contraction. Towards this end, the latest agreement, known as Basel III, was introduced in 2010 in response to the Global Financial Crisis. It was designed to significantly reduce leverage at global banks and tighten equity and liquidity requirements on the largest, most systemically important institutions.
The new US administration is now considering stepping back from the Basel framework. For the last several years, banking regulators have been working on the final round of rule changes associated with the Basel III agreement known as ‘Basel III endgame’. This April, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent questioned whether it made sense to continue with those changes. Instead, he told a group of bankers that “we could borrow selectively from them” to the extent that “they can provide inspirations”. And more generally, Bessent asserted that “[w]e should not outsource decision making for the United States to international bodies.” “Instead, we should conduct our own analysis from the ground up to determine a regulatory framework that is in the interests of the United States” (Bessent 2025a).
The administration so far has suggested several changes to banking regulation that deviate noticeably from current Basel standards. Most notably, it has questioned the current calibration of the limit on bank leverage (the ‘leverage ratio’). Secretary Bessent has criticised it as “too frequently binding” (when compared to risk-based capital rules) (Bessent 2025a). He also has recently floated excluding Treasury securities from consolidated measures of leverage, which would be at odds with current Basel standards (Tarullo 2023). The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) also has rolled back stricter merger review policies for national banks and federal savings associations (rescinding a 2024 policy statement and amending, without notice or comment, a 2024 final rule).
Consumer and investor protection
A similar liberalising push is apparent in other areas of financial regulatory policy. Most notably, the administration has nearly shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Established as an independent federal agency by Congress in response to the 2008 financial crisis (as part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010), the CFPB was intended to better protect American consumers from fraudulent and deceptive practices in the offering of financial products. As Rohit Chopra, who ran the agency under President Biden, recently put it: “At its core, [the CFPB] is a law enforcement agency. It takes big financial institutions to court who cheat consumers, whether it’s a credit reporting agency or a large bank or a credit card giant”. Various lawmakers have been attempting to defund and disable the CFPB since its founding (Sitaraman 2021), and the first Trump administration sharply curtailed its enforcement actions (Peterson 2019). But the new administration has functionally dismantled the organisation, slashing its funding, firing the vast majority of its staff and leaving it without a dedicated leader (see Chapter 8 by Neale Mahoney).
Investor protection is also facing reversals. To date, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has delayed implementation of new rules related to Treasury markets mandating clearing for much of the Treasury market (SEC 2025; see also Yadav and Younger 2025). The SEC also has indicated a desire to make it easier for retail investors to invest in private funds (“Such higher-risk, higher reward investments can help complete a diversified portfolio”) (Uyeda 2025).
The new administration also has rapidly embraced cryptocurrencies. In his first week in office, President Trump signed an Executive Order designed to fashion the US into the “crypto capital of the world”. In March, the White House announced a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a US Digital Asset Stockpile. In April, the Department of Justice announcedthat it would disband its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. Also in April, the new SEC Chair gave his first speech to a crypto roundtable, stating his view that the rise of cryptocurrencies would help to “modernize aspects of our financial system” (Atkins 2025).
Presidential supremacy over regulators
The White House also has asserted unprecedented claims to control government agencies including the financial regulators (see Chapter 3 by Gensler and Menand in this volume). These regulators have long benefited from significant autonomy from White House staff, especially in formulating legislative rules such as capital and liquidity requirements (Congressional Research Service 2023). Under the administration’s new policy, financial regulators will have to submit all proposed rules for review to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the White House, which can reject those proposals by declining to pass them back to the agencies for promulgation.
President Trump also has claimed the power to remove financial regulators at will, despite statutory language barring the president from removing them except for cause. This change may result in partisan domination of previously balanced multimember commissions such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the SEC, and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Further, the downsizing of agencies along with changes to civil service protections are likely to reduce policymaking capacity, lowering the expertise and experience of their staffs.
Central bank independence
In an even sharper break from recent administrations, the White House has attacked the legal foundations of central bank independence in the United States. In a recent Executive Order, the administration has asserted power to control the regulatory and supervisory functions of the Federal Reserve. While the Executive Order disclaims the power to control “monetary policy”, this distinction may not end up amounting to much. After all, the regulation of financial institutions is monetary policy (see Chapter 3), and a White House determined to relax monetary conditions could effectuate such a policy through changes to the rules governing bank balance sheets. 2
The administration also has shown little regard for monetary policy autonomy. On multiple occasions, the President has publicly called for a more accommodative stance. For example, in May he wrote: “With these costs trending so nicely downward, just what I predicted they would do, there can almost be no inflation, but there can be a SLOWING of the economy unless Mr. Too Late, a major loser, lowers interest rates, NOW.”
By statute, the president is permitted to remove Federal Reserve governors only “for cause”. The new administration has called this limit into question, however, at several points. For example, in April, the President said that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” The President also subsequently stated that “if I want him out, he’ll be out of there real fast, believe me”. The President already has fired a half dozen officials on multi-member commissions similar in structure to the Federal Reserve (see Chapter 3). Further, these statements about having the authority to remove Chair Powell are consistent with legal positions the administration has already staked out in court.
Although legal observers have questioned whether the Supreme Court would accept an attempt by the President to ignore “for cause” removal provisions in the Federal Reserve Act (allowing the president to remove Federal Reserve governors at will), the President also has made statements suggesting that he may have cause to remove Chair Powell. For example, the President said: “I don’t think he’s doing the job. He’s too late. Always too late. A little slow and I’m not happy with him. I let him know it.” Though the President has subsequently said that he was not going to remove Chair Powell, these comments at the time may have been in an effort to lay the ground for “neglect of duty” and “inefficiency” – two recognised “for cause” removal grounds (Manners and Menand 2021). 3
Stablecoins
The administration’s stance toward stablecoin issuers is of relevance to the monetary system. Stablecoins are digital assets designed to maintain a constant value relative to more traditional currencies. By far the most common application has been to mimic a US dollar. This is typically achieved by holding short-term, low-risk US dollar-denominated securities and bank deposits in a ‘reserve fund’. Stablecoin tokens are ‘minted’ when funds are deposited; they are ‘burned’ when holders ask for their fiat currency back (subject to restrictions after being redeemed, either for currency or in kind) (Gorton and Zhang 2023).
The stated goal of stablecoin issuers is to create ‘on-chain’ dollars which are imbued with all the technological advantages of cryptocurrencies but maintain access to the payments and economic networks used by more traditional monies. Practically, they have offered people a way to move dollars outside of the banking system via transfers on permissionless (i.e. open) blockchains. They initially were created because many cryptocurrency intermediaries were unable to get bank accounts due to their inability or unwillingness to sufficiently comply with anti-money laundering requirements. Their primary use, by far, has been within the crypto trading and lending ecosystem. At present, the size of the market is between $200 and $250 billion and is dominated by two issuers, Tether and Circle.
An Executive Order released days into the new administration called on federal agencies to “[take] actions to promote the development and growth of lawful and legitimate dollar-backed stablecoins worldwide”. 4 Congress is currently considering legislation that would provide a legal framework for banks and nonbanks to issue stablecoins. In May 2025, the US Senate voted to debate a bill which, if enacted, would regulate stablecoin issuers operating in the United States. It would require issuers to back reserves at least one to one with highly liquid short-term assets (e.g. Federal Reserve liabilities, Treasury bills, repurchase agreements, and demand deposits at federally regulated commercial banks), not pay interest, and confirms that such issuers are financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act. These steps address a number of issues raised during the Biden administration. (President’s Working Group Report on Stablecoins et al. 2021) As the legislation would address stablecoins issued or sold only in the United States and stablecoins could still be transferred on permissionless ledgers, it leaves open their overseas use outside of the money laundering laws.
In a separate set of developments, the US Treasury Department announced that it has removed the requirement that US firms comply with Congressionally mandated beneficial ownership data collection. This had been an important initiative by Congress and prior administrations to fill holes in entity ownership information to best enforce anti-money laundering and sanctions laws.
International alliances
In its opening months, the new administration has taken an aggressive stance towards historical allies. The White House has challenged the sovereignty of independent nation states including Greenland, Panama, and even Canada. It has terminated longstanding international programmes such as USAID. Through the imposition of tariffs that are in many cases prohibitively high, it has upended a global trading system that has been in place for generations.
In recent months, market observers have raised concerns that the administration’s adversarial posture might affect the future reliability of Federal Reserve central bank liquidity swap lines. Central bank liquidity swap lines are a key element of the existing global dollar system. These swap lines, often referred to as simply FX swap lines, are standing arrangements between the Fed and foreign central banks to lend dollars against foreign currencies. They date back to 1962 when they were first used to stabilise offshore dollar markets as well as for exchange rate management (McCauley and Shenck 2020). 5 Large-scale provisioning of offshore dollar liquidity using the swap lines proved essential in the Global Financial Crisis (Fleming and Klagge 2010) and Covid pandemic (Choi et al. 2021).
Financial and Economic Consequences
The new administration’s policy direction may have a range of possible financial and economic consequences including undermining the global dollar system, increasing risks to financial stability, reducing consumer and investor protections, and weakening controls on illicit financial activities.
The global dollar system
The global dollar system is an extensive and complex network. It is the product of a political project begun after World War II to build an international economy centred on the US dollar. This project, carried on by presidents of both parties, produced deep and liquid global capital markets and bank-based payment systems run on dollars as the international ‘key’ currency (Mehrling 2002). 6 Its stability depends on the confidence of a wide variety of participants. That confidence ultimately flows from governments, and particularly the willingness of those governments to cooperate amongst each other and, to some extent, sacrifice some of their own sovereignty in the interest of the collective whole. As one former Secretary of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision once put it: “Global financial stability is a public good.” Governments cooperate not to check each other but to provide this public good by checking the markets.
Many of the second Trump administration’s moves threaten to erode the trust that undergirds the system (Rogoff 2025). The first and most consequential area of concern is an uncertainty regarding the current administration’s willingness to backstop global dollar liquidity. Although nothing concrete has been made public, the adversarial posture of the administration toward historical allies has led some to question whether, due to a combination of domestic political considerations and geopolitical brinksmanship, the swap lines may not be available or not active in time to avoid damaging scenarios in a future financial crisis (McCauley 2025). 7
The FX swap lines are not just a crisis fighting tool, they are critical to confidence in the global dollar itself. In the same way that federal deposit insurance and access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window are critical to ensuring the safety and interoperability of the $20 trillion bank deposits issued by the US banking and credit union systems, the swap lines smooth out and lubricate the daily operations of dollar-issuing banks and the over $12 trillion in Eurodollar deposits across the world.
In other words, the stability of the global dollar system as presently constituted rests on the uninterrupted and mostly unconditional access to US dollar liquidity. 8 This element of the global dollar system is often overlooked, due to the perceived pre-existing commitment of the Federal Reserve and the US government to offer it when needed. This may be a reflection of military and political alliances that have themselves, until this administration, also been considered as firm commitments. Without reliable and timely access to emergency dollars, the next global crisis would be significantly more severe (Ricks 2016). Even if participants in the global dollar system were to come to believe emergency liquidity might have political strings attached, it could potentially precipitate a crisis in the first instance.
Stepping back from the Basel Accord also could have negative repercussions for the global dollar. The Accord may not always be popular with each of its participating countries. International agreements rarely are. But they have proven effective at fostering a congruent set of principles to safety and soundness regulation – a key element of maintaining confidence in the global dollar system without requiring depositors to be fully versed on the intricacies of each local banking system. Without it, the global dollar system could come to resemble the ‘free banking era’ of the 19th century in the United States, when substantial regional variation in bank regulation was a major impendent to the free flow of capital and, ultimately, a material drag on economic growth (e.g. Sprague 1910, Jalil 2015).
In that vein, Secretary Bessent’s comments and the broader posture of the administration represent a potentially worrisome departure from prior norms. While the United States, under prior administrations, has not implemented all of the recommendations of the various Basel Accords, it has generally made a good faith attempt to incorporate the spirit of those standards. 9 If the United States. were to deviate significantly from international standards, it is plausible that other countries may feel both license and competitive pressure to abandon them as well. The frequent panics and rampant instability of the United States’ antebellum banking system still serves as a valuable lesson for those who might consider going down that road.
That said, to date the administration has taken few concrete steps toward changing regulatory standards. One exception of great relevance internationally is the potential for changes to the implementation of Basel III in the United States. The devil will be in the details. Modest deviations from international standards are commonplace. More substantial changes, however, could contribute to the unravelling of international economic and financial cooperation. Such an unravelling could, in turn, trigger a global deregulatory unwinding that could be difficult to stop. Among other things, the global system allows the US government to borrow at lower interest rates and supports robust economic growth (Levine 2003); a shift to other currencies and away from dollars could reverse these effects over time.
Financial stability
The administration’s relaxation of regulatory standards has the potential to increase risks to financial stability by contributing to the buildup of additional leverage across the financial system over time.
That large financial institutions do not internalise the costs of their failure on their creditors and the economy at large can skew their incentives to adopt high leverage. To the extent that leverage is a binding constraint on a given institution, loosening those requirements without counterbalancing adjustments to equity requirements will therefore lead to lower capital levels. De-supervision – policies that reduce the intensity of stress tests and oversight by examiners – also may lead to increased regulatory arbitrage, including actions geared toward achieving greater synthetic and on-balance sheet leverage. A similar dynamic preceded the 2008 financial crisis, where a rollback in discretionary supervision facilitated firm behaviour that undermined the efficacy of bright-line rules (Menand 2018). Increased reliance on leverage has been associated with fragility in Treasury markets (Kashyap et al. 2025). More recently, the bank runs in 2023 were associated with de-supervision and deregulation of mid-sized banks and significant undercapitalisation (Hoenig 2023).
Presidential supremacy over financial regulators also could threaten financial stability over the medium to long term. This is because greater White House control over regulatory policy could favour financial actors seeking to arbitrage rules and, on the margin, could hamstring regulators seeking to prevent evasion. Enforcement, especially by markets regulators, could drop. More highly resourced and politically favoured actors may benefit disproportionately. Further, the pace of rulemaking is likely to slow, with White House deregulatory goals prioritised (see Chapter 3).
Consumer and investor protection
Relaxed regulatory standards, as well as the shrinking of policymaking and enforcement capacity at financial regulators, is likely to put consumers and investors at greater risk.
What will happen to the enforcement authority the CFPB previously exercised is, as yet, uncertain. Though the new administration has suggested that these authorities should be transferred to other regulators, it is unclear if they will be and if so, how effectively or efficiently they will be used.
Legal protections, whether they are provided by the CFPB, SEC, CFTC, or others, are intended to provide investors and consumers with assurances that they can make informed decisions free of fraud and misleading information about risks, investments, and products. Although state regulators are primed to step into part of the breach, history suggests that only rigorous federal enforcement can provide sufficient protection. In the long run, the associated lack of confidence could harm risk appetite and capital formation more generally.
Another key area of focus of changed policy has been regarding crypto assets. The new administration has made clear that it intends to actively promote the development of crypto assets. That may leave investors more exposed to the kind of fraud and abuse revealed in these markets.
Financial crimes, illicit activities, and sanctions
The efficacy of guarding against illicit activities and enforcing sanctions depends upon the use of the dollar as the international key currency. Businesses worldwide use dollars for most large cross-border and domestic payments. That privileged position has allowed the United States and its allies a degree of control over critical nodes in financial payment networks (i.e. chokepoints) as well as an invaluable informational advantage (i.e. a panopticon; Farrell and Newman 2019).
As a result, in recent decades, financial sanctions have emerged as a key tool for advancing US interests through non-military means (Mulder 2021, Fishman 2025). National security policymakers have used sanctions to bloc problematic transactions, individuals, corporations, and even entire countries from parts of the global economy.
Stablecoins, however, can undermine the United States’ ability to guard against illicit activities and promote national security policy (Massad 2024, Rauterberg and Younger 2024). 10 As transactions involving these tokens settle outside of the banking system and are pseudonymous, stablecoins are well designed to evade authorities. At the moment they are relatively small – less than half of 1% of the more than $45 trillion in US dollar monetary instruments circulating globally (Gensler 2024) – and, as mentioned, they are mostly used within the crypto trading and lending ecosystem. Like many digital creations, though, stablecoins have the potential to grow quickly. Already, some cryptocurrency companies are offering a way to hold stablecoins while earning interest (among the biggest competitive disadvantages at present with other monetary instruments).
Secretary Bessent recently cited expectations that stablecoins could grow to more than $2 trillion in just a couple of years (Bessent 2025b). This figure presumably reflects the anticipated effects of the administration’s advocacy, including “promot[ing] the development and growth of lawful and legitimate dollar-backed stablecoins worldwide”. 11(A new stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, an organisation majority owned by the President’s business interests, already exceeds $2 billion.) Previously there were significant hurdles to stablecoins replacing bank deposits and other more traditional forms of currency in international trade and finance. At the scale suggested by Secretary Bessent, however, in any jurisdictions in which stablecoins (or their affiliates) have the ability to pay interest, they could start to compete (although this introduces additional legal considerations; Birdthistle et al. 2025). Were that to occur, the use of the global dollar-based banking system for sanctions and guarding against illicit activities could be degraded.
Even if the growth of stablecoins falls short of more enthusiastic projections, the administration is taking other steps that reduce the efficacy of financial sanctions. The US Treasury’s recent announcements dropping requirements for new Congressionally mandated entity beneficial ownership reporting, for example, leaves a significant gap in the current tools for financial crimes and sanctions enforcement.
To the extent that this lowers the effectiveness of sanctions, it risks a destabilising shift towards more use of kinetic warfare rather than financial conflict.
Conclusion
The new administration is making policy changes that could pose long-term risks to the US financial system, including the global dollar architecture. Some of these are direct adjustments to financial policy, such as relaxing regulatory standards, reducing enforcement activity, and promoting nonbank stablecoins. Others are facially unrelated to the financial sector. Most notably, the new administration has called into question traditional economic alliances and relationships and asserted unprecedented control over regulatory agencies. Incidentally, it is these more general changes that may have the biggest effects on the financial sector and by extension the economy.
Each of these shifts is still unfolding. None has yet done lasting damage to the dollar, financial stability, capital markets, consumer protection, or national security. The administration’s actual and proposed actions, however, could eventually have significant impacts on each of these financial sector dimensions. Mark Sobel, a former senior Treasury official, recently warned: “by weakening America’s economic and institutional foundations, by not being a trusted partner, [the United States] is undermining the underpinnings of what has given rise to dollar dominance”. While there is, at present, no viable alternative to the US dollar, a transition away from key currencies to a more multipolar monetary system is certainly plausible. By its actions and policy goals, the second Trump administration is potentially pushing and accelerating that transition. Similarly, degradation of our consumer and investor protections, our ability to combat illicit finance, and checks on excessive leverage could contribute to future financial instability and higher cost of capital in the economy.
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1.See also https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... of-control
2.The administration has also failed to clarify its stance with respect to lender of last resort activities, which play a critical role in preventing disorderly monetary contractions.
3.The president also has insinuated that Chair Powell is engaged in misfeasance, another recognised removal ground. (“Well, he should lower [interest rates]. And at some point, he will. He’d rather not because he’s not a fan of mine. You know, he just doesn’t like me because I think he’s a total stiff.”) It is hard to predict how courts would adjudicate a challenge following a removal by the president for cause, given the lack of recent precedent.
4.Executive Order 14,178, “Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology”, The White House, 23 January 2025.
5.See also https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... lar-system
6.The key currency view of international monetary systems is often attributed to Charles Kindleberger, its most prominent advocate in the postwar years. This contrasts with a more multilateral approach championed by Robert Triffin and John Maynard Keynes.
7.See also https://www.reuters.com/markets/after-t ... 025-04-04/
8.At $13 trillion, the overseas dollar market is too big to rely on the domestic banking system alone (which is at most twice as large) (Gensler 2024).
9.A notable exception is the decision to exempt Treasuries and reserves from the Supplementary Leverage Ratio at both the bank holding and bank operating company levels in 2020. This was, however, done on a temporary basis and was specifically issued “n light of recent disruptions in economic conditions caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID–19) and current strains in U.S. financial markets” (85 FR 20578, 14 April 2020).
10.Stablecoins threaten to undermine the efficacy of this “economic weapon” (Massad 2023).
11.Executive Order 14,178
See original post for references
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08 ... ystem.html
Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Build only in the Roman style
August 30, 8:53
Trump ordered that new government buildings in the US be built in the classical Greek or Roman style.
This is in response to the painful fixation of a part of the American establishment on the theme of the succession of the Roman Empire (like our "Moscow - the Third Rome" with references to Byzantium and the "Thousand-Year Reich" in Europe with references to the Holy Roman Empire).
In Coppola's underrated and failed film "Megalopolis" ( https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9501769.html ), this theme was well raised. Only, unlike Coppola's allusions to the late Roman Republic on the eve of the military dictatorship, here there are direct instructions.
P.S. How often do you think about constructing buildings similar to the times of the Roman Empire?
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10041852.html
(Trump is truly the Avatar of his class, past and present:
Any questions?)
The Red Six operate according to the Kremlin's manual
August 29, 23:02
Towards the defeat of American agents in Greenland.
The President of Portugal declared that Trump is a Soviet and Russian asset.
P.S. Greenland will be free from Danish occupation! This is the Kremlin's manual.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10041500.html
Google Translator
******
Washington blocks Palestinian leaders from attending UN General Assembly
The US wants to block efforts by its European allies to recognize a Palestinian state at the upcoming UNGA meeting
News Desk
AUG 29, 2025
(Photo credit: AFP)
In an unprecedented move, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on 29 August revoked visas for Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders scheduled to attend the UN General Assembly in New York in September.
The State Department justified the move by citing PA payments to the families of Palestinian martyrs, President Mahmoud Abbas' plan to use a "constitutional declaration" to declare an independent Palestinian state at the General Assembly meeting, and Palestinian efforts to hold Israel accountable for war crimes in international courts.
"The Palestinian Authority must also cease its attempts to circumvent the negotiations through international legal campaigns, including appeals to the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, and efforts to secure unilateral recognition of a possible Palestinian state," the State Department said in a statement.
"Both steps have contributed significantly to Hamas's refusal to release its hostages and the collapse of the Gaza ceasefire talks," the statement claimed.
In response, the Palestinian Presidency issued a statement expressing "deep regret and astonishment at the decision."
Israel is facing charges of violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of the war crime of using starvation as a weapon in Gaza at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Fox News reported that "Rubio's decision marks a historic departure from the US practice of accommodating UN participation."
Though not a member of the UN, the State of Palestine has enjoyed non-member observer status since 2012, allowing Palestinian representatives to participate in debates but not vote.
The US has, for decades, assisted Israel in blocking Palestinian efforts to end the illegal occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza. Washington has also opposed Palestinians' efforts to win their freedom, whether through peaceful means or through armed struggle.
The State Department's decision was issued one day after Rubio met with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar in Washington. When asked by reporters what the plan was for a Palestinian state, Saar said that "there would not be one," The Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday.
https://thecradle.co/articles/washingto ... l-assembly
August 30, 8:53
Trump ordered that new government buildings in the US be built in the classical Greek or Roman style.
This is in response to the painful fixation of a part of the American establishment on the theme of the succession of the Roman Empire (like our "Moscow - the Third Rome" with references to Byzantium and the "Thousand-Year Reich" in Europe with references to the Holy Roman Empire).
In Coppola's underrated and failed film "Megalopolis" ( https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9501769.html ), this theme was well raised. Only, unlike Coppola's allusions to the late Roman Republic on the eve of the military dictatorship, here there are direct instructions.
P.S. How often do you think about constructing buildings similar to the times of the Roman Empire?
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10041852.html
(Trump is truly the Avatar of his class, past and present:
Any questions?)
The Red Six operate according to the Kremlin's manual
August 29, 23:02
Towards the defeat of American agents in Greenland.
The President of Portugal declared that Trump is a Soviet and Russian asset.
P.S. Greenland will be free from Danish occupation! This is the Kremlin's manual.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10041500.html
Google Translator
******
Washington blocks Palestinian leaders from attending UN General Assembly
The US wants to block efforts by its European allies to recognize a Palestinian state at the upcoming UNGA meeting
News Desk
AUG 29, 2025
(Photo credit: AFP)
In an unprecedented move, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on 29 August revoked visas for Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders scheduled to attend the UN General Assembly in New York in September.
The State Department justified the move by citing PA payments to the families of Palestinian martyrs, President Mahmoud Abbas' plan to use a "constitutional declaration" to declare an independent Palestinian state at the General Assembly meeting, and Palestinian efforts to hold Israel accountable for war crimes in international courts.
"The Palestinian Authority must also cease its attempts to circumvent the negotiations through international legal campaigns, including appeals to the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, and efforts to secure unilateral recognition of a possible Palestinian state," the State Department said in a statement.
"Both steps have contributed significantly to Hamas's refusal to release its hostages and the collapse of the Gaza ceasefire talks," the statement claimed.
In response, the Palestinian Presidency issued a statement expressing "deep regret and astonishment at the decision."
Israel is facing charges of violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of the war crime of using starvation as a weapon in Gaza at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Fox News reported that "Rubio's decision marks a historic departure from the US practice of accommodating UN participation."
Though not a member of the UN, the State of Palestine has enjoyed non-member observer status since 2012, allowing Palestinian representatives to participate in debates but not vote.
The US has, for decades, assisted Israel in blocking Palestinian efforts to end the illegal occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza. Washington has also opposed Palestinians' efforts to win their freedom, whether through peaceful means or through armed struggle.
The State Department's decision was issued one day after Rubio met with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar in Washington. When asked by reporters what the plan was for a Palestinian state, Saar said that "there would not be one," The Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday.
https://thecradle.co/articles/washingto ... l-assembly
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
What Happens as Trump’s Losses Mount?
Posted on September 3, 2025 by Yves Smith
To a vastly greater degree than most executives and national leaders, Trump has surrounded himself with toadies and sycophants. But what happens when even their efforts to keep telling Trump what he so badly wants to hear, that he is still a colossus astride the world and the prime mover of events, can no longer be maintained? As we’ll explain in due course, Trump already defaults to solving nearly all problems by trying to exert dominance. We can see how that’s already failing on the world stage ex with vassal states. What happens when Trump is met with more resistance from those he can’t successfully bully?
One of his measures of the success of his Liberation Day tariffs was the way other nations were supposedly eager to prostrate themselves to get “a deal”:
But as we recounted yesterday, at least for the moment, US courts have taken away Trump’s retaliatory tariffs weapon. Alligator Alcatraz is being closed. Trump, who very much does not want to be tarred with losing Ukraine, may be able to escape that in the self-serving information bubble he has around him, but not with the broader public or history. The spectacle of the Alaska summit with Putin accomplished little save perhaps extending Zelensky’s sell-by date as European leaders rallied around him. That was admittedly enabled by Trump in talking up a bilateral Putin-Zelensky or trilateral, with Trump in the mix. The Trump spin apparatus also tried to depict Putin as the source of the dead on arrival land swaps idea, and has made another error in not shutting down the UK and Europeans coming back to another non-starter, that of peacekeepers from some NATO members in Ukraine. It has now hit the point where the Russians, who have made a point of not contradicting Trump, are now feeling compelled to do so:
The Trump team seems to be beside itself over its inability to influence Russia either directly or through economic partners. Not only had Indian prime minister Modi refused to knuckle under to Trump’s additional 25% tariffs imposed as a sanction for buying Russian oil, but Modi has also rejected at least four Trump attempts to speak to Modi.1 The Trump team is now trying to get the EU to stop buying Indian and presumably also Turkiye petroleum products made from Russian oil. As Alexander Mercouris pointed out, the alternative sources would either be the US or the Middle East, and the level of demand would likely increase oil prices, something Trump does not want. Recall that one of India’s beefs about Trump’s campaign against its Russian oil buys was that the Biden Administration encourage India to make them, so as to reduce pressure on oil prices.
Another problem primed to get only worse for Trump is Israel. Not only is global opinion hardening even more against the ethnosupremacist state, but more nations are staring to take action, and not just the feel-good of recognizing Palestine as a state. Belgium is set to impose sanctions. More dockworkers on the Mediterranean are refusing to service ships from and to Israel, and I have yet to detect official pressure on them to handle these cargos. Yet many experts see Israel as gearing up to attack Iran again, likely this fall, when it is hard to imagine that Israel will do better, ex nukes, than it did in its surprise cyber attack/decapitation strike. And Iran has strengthened its defenses.
But Trump’s biggest vulnerability, and one he will also find hardest to deny, is the economy. Trump’s desperation to fire Powell or otherwise get control of rate policy is an admission that he sees conditions as weak and wants a monetary goosing. But the Trump deficits are massively stimulative. What more does he want? Both the fiscal spending and now the impact of the tariffs will keep inflation alive, if not increase it. Unless the US has a financial crisis, such as an AI bubble unwind which would whack confidence and spending, stagflation looks baked in.
And that’s before getting to the flawed thinking about lowering rates: not only do they not stimulate economic activity, except by leveraged speculators, but with investors correctly seeing Trump’s policies as too-inflation-prone, lowering short term rates will have little if any effect on longer maturities. So the Treasury won’t get interest expense relief, save by continuing to fund at the short end of the curve, and the housing market will not get much of a boost, since mortgage rates are typically set in relation to five to seven year bond yields.
Polls are already turning against Trump even before these dodgy dynamics get worse. Trump’s overall marks are falling, per this August 31 account:
Donald Trump’s approval ratings has taken another blow, a new poll shows. The US President’s ratings slipped to a record low in his second term, as per the Quinnipiac University poll.
The poll, released earlier this week, saw Trump take a three-point drop in his approval rating in just a month’s time. His decision to deploy the National Guard to Washington DC – in an effort to reduce crime – has also seen a 56-41 percent opposition.
Trump is now scoring badly on his once prime issue, immigration:
Pollster: Take a look at Trump's net approval rating on immigration. A lot of focus on Gallup at -27. That's horrible. Quinnipiac University, -16. That's awful. Marist is bad at -9. Ipsos is -8. Fox at -7. Bad. Bad to just downright terrible. The American people have turned Show more
And on tariffs:
And it’s not getting better:
After this long set-up, let’s turn to the question of what happens as it becomes more and more difficult for Trump to deny his failures. John Helmer has more than once pointed out Russians officials view Trump as having a strong preference for the use of violence to get his way. Examples abound, such as ICE chief Tom Homans’ threats against blue cities, the aggressive show of the ICE raids, the way Trump is destroying US leadership in science to bend US universities to his will and Trump’s show of force in US cities via gratuitous and likely illegal deployments of the National Guard. Other evidence comes in Trump, after his pretense of being a peace president, now wanting to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War and praising going on the offense militarily (a development that Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis described with alarm) and strategically ineffective shows of brutality. This is savagery masquerading as potency:
So the US Navy just apparently decided to murder a bunch of alleged and non-positively identified drug smugglers in international waters when they had half a dozen warships with helicopters available nearby to intercept - and then brag about it.
Moral collapse in action.
Let us not forget that Trump also relishes his self-assigned role as arms merchant in chief.
Top investor Ray Dialo has spoken out against Trump’s authoritarianism in a fresh interview in the Financial Times. From US sliding towards 1930s-style autocracy, warns Ray Dalio:
Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio has warned Donald Trump’s America is drifting into 1930s-style autocratic politics — and said other investors are too scared of the president to speak up….
The veteran investor also took aim at a rising impulse towards state control under Trump. Dalio resisted calling the president’s model authoritarian or socialist, but described the mechanics bluntly: “Governments increasingly take control of what is done by central banks and businesses.”
Asked about Trump’s Intel stake and export tariffs imposed on Nvidia and AMD, Dalio referred to his own concept of “the big cycle”, when during periods of great conflicts and risks countries’ leaders are more controlling of the markets and the economy.
“Classically, increased wealth and value gaps lead to increased populism of the right and populism of the left and irreconcilable differences between them that can’t be resolved through the democratic process. So democracies weaken and more autocratic leadership increases as a large percentage of the population wants government leaders to get control of the system to make things work well for them.”
Predictably, Dalio is worried about the liberties of capitalists as opposed to ordinary people. But on the other end of the food chain, consider that Trump, in his blizzard of initial executive orders, asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and DHS chief Kristi Noem to recommend whether Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the purported border crisis. They demurred because border crossings had dropped markedly from the Biden era to the early days of the Trump Administration. The deployment of the Insurrection Act would represent a huge threat to civil liberties. I personally know an activist who has helped organize anti-Trump protests who is securing citizenship in an EU state and plans an immediate exit from the US if the Insurrection Act were invoked. While this reaction may seem extreme, recall that Trump is fabricating a crime crisis in US cities to justify more Federal involvement in policing.
While yours truly is leery of armchair psychoanalysis, IM Doc, who has similar views, nevertheless said there was so much long-standing video evidence of Biden’s cognitive decline that it was evident he was suffering from dementia years before the 2024 election. Experts have found that 60% to 70% of communication is gossip, which is both information sharing/speculation and discussion of motives and behavior. So it’s not as if people to do routinely psychologize, even if they don’t go as far as resorting to references to clinical conditions.
It should not be controversial to depict Trump as an extreme narcissist. Some like to depict his even out-of-bounds conduct (even more flagrant lying and flip flops than in his past) as the result of mental deterioration. But it seems just as likely to be due to “acquired situational narcissism,” aka power going to someone’s head. Even though this is Trump’s second term, in his first he was considerably hamstrung by Russiagate and having many key staffers who were not just not loyal, but even actively working against him, like John Bolton. Having made a point of packing key positions with stooges, Trump has looks to be intoxicated his vastly increased room to maneuver.
But even so, Trump is not only self-sabotagingly fixated on dominating in encounters at the expense of the larger stakes, but his wilder and wilder behavior suggests on some level that he recognizes his trouble managing the contradictions to needed preserve a thin patina of success. With India alone, he’s tried been flailing to cover for the highly visible tariffs backfire. Recall Modi has not only refused to capitulate to the demand not to buy Russian oil, but is downgrading its once-key relationship with the US to strengthen ties with China. Trump has been trying to sell the howler that India offered a zero tariffs deal, when Modi isn’t even willing to take Trump’s repeated calls. Similarly, after his court setback on tariffs, Trump made the ludicrous claim that his tariffs had raised “trillions” in revenue. And he tried reasserting his manhood by threatening to impose 200% tariffs on pharma imports…a move that would make him hated across much of the US were he to go there.
But even before his reality TV days, Trump was obsessed with his image over his substance. See these extracts from a Barbara Walters interview when Trump was hawking a new book, Surviving at the Top (you can see the full segment here): (Video at link.)
As you can infer, Trump had been through difficult negotiations to try to preserve his sinking empire, so one might imagine he was at a bravura low. You can see him here maintain that his purchase of the Plaza Hotel was a great deal and he would not have to sell it; in fact, he did, at a loss of $83 million in 1995.2 In the full segment, Trump maintained he would not dispose of the Trump Shuttle. He did, in 1992.
What I found striking is how, in the edited section above, Trump’s face gets hard when Walters suggests that the title of his book ought to be Failing at the Top. H was quick to attack Walters by depicting the press generally as dishonest. She hits that back over the net calmly and Trump tries changing tactics to discrediting her sources and other types of deflection. Perhaps I am reading overmuch into this, but it looked like Trump was having to contain considerable anger. And more important, that anger was his reflexive response when his position was challenged.
Today, it’s easy to see how often Trump defaults to anger. Just look at his Truth Social posts, not just his frequent use of all caps and demonization, but also his apparent need to lash out when he encounters opposition.
How do narcissists react to defeat? What happens, say, if there is a market crash and Trump policies are cited a major cause? Or as Russia keeps rolling through Ukraine, that even the conservative press depicts Trump as having lost the wor?
It’s not pretty. Psychology Today sets forth some of the typical responses of narcissists to failure. A gander through search results suggests that its list is representative (although I am leery of the phrase “malignant narcissist” as unhelpfully judgmental and therefore rhetorically at odds with an effort to make a clinical description of behavior). Some highlights:
When things begin to sour for the narcissist, here is what we can expect:
They will falsely claim that everything is fine and that there is nothing wrong. They will try to first misdirect us or claim there is nothing to the allegations or circumstances.
If evidence is presented, they will seek to have it invalidated or claim that it is false, fake, or a product of vague conspiracies, but most certainly not true.
Any evidence presented, and those that present it will be attacked aggressively and vindictively…The narcissist will engage supporters or enablers to simultaneously attack those who offer proof or evidence, even if it embarrassingly exposes their poodle-like behavior as that of spineless sycophants…
As they lash out with vindictiveness, the malignant narcissist will continue to talk about themselves in glowing terms…being revered rather than reviled…
As circumstances become dire, the narcissist will not take any responsibility—ever. Anything that has gone wrong is the responsibility of others…
In the process of casting blame, even the most loyal and stalwart will be discarded and denigrated…. Lies are and always will be the number one tool of the malignant narcissist. The only difference now is that in facing failure or public ridicule, the lies must increase in frequency and audacity to the point of incredulity….
And while lies will increase, so too will be the need to devalue others in order to further value themselves. They will attack everyone and anyone in the most vicious and vindictive ways…They will dip down into a bottomless cauldron of antipathy and like an arterial spurt, will spew this toxic brew far and wide with metronomic regularity.
The malignant narcissist, lacking guilt or a conscience, is only concerned with respect and not being publicly shamed. Any kind of public embarrassment will cause them further anger, further rage, further attacks, further unethical comportment, and unprecedented incivility.
If the narcissist is going to be brought down, they will also seek to bring everyone else around them down to vindictively make them suffer. How the narcissist vilifies, lashes out, or destroys others (spouse, friends, business partners, workmates, the general public) is up to the morbid creativity and depravity of the malignant narcissist, the viable tools they have available, and of course how dire or desperate the situation.
The tone above is unduly melodramatic although the intent may be to spur those in close proximity to an extreme narcissist to get the hell away as quickly as possible. However, a key point is that if a narcissist enters a spiral of failure, he will seek to pull those around him down into his whirlpool. And he’ll do so with great determination and “creativity”.
Now of course, the complicating fact with Trump’s emotional self-defenses is that he has been persecuted, first by Russiagate, then with lawfare, and then an assassination attempt. So his view of himself as unfairly pilloried is not made from whole cloth. But Trump has clearly decided on revenge as part of his response (see John Bolton) both for its own sake and to cow anyone who might try to cross him.
But the general point still holds. If Trump faces persistent and well-founded criticism for his actions, he’s likely to react with a ferocity that dwarfs anything we have seen from him so far.
______
1 Tariffs were not the sole reason for the unraveling:
Inside Trump-Modi’s 35-Minute Call That Shattered Years of US-India Friendship
A single phone call. Just 35 minutes long. That’s all it took for U.S.–India relations to shift from warm friendship to icy tension. Insiders say Donald Trump’s conversation with Prime Minister Show more(Video at link.)
See also Modi’s refusal to back Trump’s Nobel Prize push soured India-US ties: Report reveals explosive phone call Mint
2 The New York real estate market started to turn only as of about 1994, While I can’t prove it, Trump may have gotten his creditors to accept holding off on the Plaza sale, either to hit a minimum price or until the general distress had abated.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/09 ... mount.html
******
Trump ‘losing patience’ with Europe, demands more tariffs on India: Report
Conflicting reports have emerged on whether India will cave to US economic pressure or continue to pursue energy ties with Moscow
News Desk
SEP 1, 2025
(Photo credit: Getty Images)
Washington is pressuring EU states to impose more tariffs on India over its energy ties with Moscow, according to sources cited by Axios and India Today.
Axios reported that the US would like EU countries to escalate economic pressure on Russia, including “a complete cessation of all oil and gas purchases” and the imposition of secondary tariffs – not only on India but on China too.
The US is “losing patience” with Europe, the sources added. They said that Washington believes the EU is pressing Ukraine to reject any territorial concessions to Russia.
“The Europeans don’t get to prolong this war and backdoor unreasonable expectations, while also expecting America to bear the cost. If Europe wants to escalate this war, that will be up to them. But they will be hopelessly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” a White House official told Axios.
India Today also reported that the US is seeking European tariffs on India and a halt to energy imports.
The EU has yet to comment on the matter.
Sources cited by Reuters at the end of last month said that New Delhi is looking to defy Washington and boost imports of Russian energy.
Three sources involved in the oil trade with India told Reuters on 28 August that Indian refiners are expected to increase Russian oil purchases by 150,000-300,000 barrels per day (bpd) in September, which is an increase of 10–20 percent from August.
However, an earlier report by Bloomberg claimed that India is planning to reduce its purchases of Russian oil as a “modest concession” to the US.
New US tariffs targeting India came into effect on 27 August, as part of US President Donald Trump’s vow to punish the country for its energy ties to Russia.
The new tariffs have been stacked on top of 25 percent country-specific tariffs, which took effect on 7 August, bringing the total levies up to 50 percent – among the highest imposed by the US.
India has been under heavy domestic pressure not to give in to US tariffs.
https://thecradle.co/articles/trump-los ... dia-report
******
They had complete control over the US Congress.
September 2, 9:01
- "The Israeli lobby controls power in the US"
- "You are a conspiracy theorist!"
- "Israel was the most powerful lobby group I have ever seen. They had complete control of Congress, and now they don't." (c) Trump
- ......
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10046975.html
("and now they don't.", Ho fucking ho.)
Google Translator
*****
At left, an ICE recruitment poster featuring President Donald Trump. At right, the 1872 painting ‘American Progress’ by John Gast, which depicts the westward expansion of Manifest Destiny and the forced expulsion of Native Americans, has also been used by the Department of Homeland Security to promote its anti-immigrant agenda. | Images via DHS
ICE employing Nazi-type propaganda to recruit
Originally published: People's World on August 12, 2025 by John Wojcik (more by People's World) | (Posted Sep 03, 2025)
A painting depicting an angelic Lady Columbia wearing the Star of Empire on her head, protecting white settlers racing westward in 19th-century America as Native American Indians flee in fear. The message accompanying it:
A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.
Image via DHS
In another, a white woman inside a covered wagon on the frontier has just given birth with the help of her husband. Its caption:
Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.
Then there are the posters. Donald Trump giving a military salute, with bold capital letters overlaid: “DEFEND THE HOMELAND—JOIN ICE TODAY.” In another bearing the same message, Kristi Noem, head of “Homeland Security” (itself a fascist term from the second Bush administration), is outfitted in a bulletproof vest and military cap, sitting behind the wheel of an ICE van.
Only recently, if someone told us that such reactionary and fascist-style art would be used to recruit masked secret police that roam, unidentified, through U.S. streets, kidnapping people and shipping them off to prisons and concentration camps without any due process, we would have declared them crazy.
Now, the most mainstream of lawmakers and politicians are using the term “fascism” to describe what we are dealing with.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz recently publicly compared ICE to the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police.
“Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” Walz said during a May 2025 speech at the University of Minnesota Law School’s commencement ceremony.
“They’re in unmarked vans, wearing masks… [people are] being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons, no chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared,” Walz said.
Image via DHSTrump, among numerous other fascistic moves, has drastically increased the number of nationwide arrests of immigrants since he returned to office in January. ICE’s arrests of immigrants have gone up by more than 100% across the country, often with little attention paid to the actual legal status of those kidnapped from the streets.
Other Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Dan Goldman of New York and Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, have also compared ICE to Hitler’s political and racial police. These two members of Congress were both recently blocked from inspecting an ICE facility, which the law entitles them to do.
The new ICE recruitment program comes amidst increasing criticism of Trump’s mass deportation terror program.
A signing bonus of up to $50,000 is being offered to new recruits. The solicitations are being used to entice law enforcement officers in cities to quit their jobs and sign up instead as ICE agents. Student loan forgiveness is another prize dangled in front of potential recruits by the same administration that fought tooth-and-nail to kill such relief for U.S. students in general.
Use of art to promote fascistic ideas is not unique to ICE. Posters featuring close facial shots of classical sculpture, including the David, have been appearing on college campuses. They are accompanied by printed slogans such as “Serve Your People” and “Protect Your Heritage.”
Nazi “art” in Germany often featured classical figures, individuals, and buildings. Hitler’s plans for the future capital of the “New Germania,” encompassing the entire world, involved buildings in the classical Greek style.
The name “Identity Evropa” appears on some of the fascist posters plastered around campuses in recent years. Identity Evropa is the name of a fascist, white supremacist organization identified as such by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
ICE is using similar imagery, artwork, and slogans to put forward the idea that the country is facing a great threat from “the other.” Nazi Germany similarly used its propaganda to scare people about such alleged threats from “the other,” whether they were Communists, Jews, or anyone else.
The Nazi parallels go even further, though, according to some observers. The painting showing the genocidal expansion westward that the Department of Homeland Security used is from 1872. The caption DHS added, along with the work’s title and painter—“A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.—American Progress, John Gast”—grabbed the attention of some right-wing watchers.
Image via DHS
The caption had exactly 14 words, which prompted Northern University Law Professor Evan Bernick to draw a comparison to the infamous white supremacist “Fourteen Words” slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” He also pointed to the fact that the “H” in both Heritage and Homeland were intentionally capitalized. H is the eighth letter of the alphabet; another neo-Nazi code is 88, or HH, for “Heil Hitler.”
Similarly, the pioneer wagon train birth painting, “New Life in a New Land,” also featured a caption that capitalized the words “Homeland” and “Heritage,” with no valid grammatical reason.
Is it all just paranoia and conspiracy thinking? White supremacists and American neo-Nazis have long relied on frontier imagery and glorification of the genocide of the indigenous peoples of North America as part of their propaganda efforts. So, Bernick’s analysis might not be far off.
With the Department of Homeland Security’s publicity materials, patriotism, racism, and violence all get blended together. Uncle Sam, for instance, is recast as a stormtrooper vigilante in some of DHS’ media, encouraging Americans to “help your country and yourself” by calling in to “report all foreign invaders.”
Descriptions of immigrants as criminals, predators, and invaders to justify deportation efforts also allow the administration to divide and conquer the many groups hurt by its anti-democratic and right-wing economic policies. The Nazis in Germany and fascists elsewhere have always described their opponents and victims in such terms in order to stoke division.
Rep. James Clyburn of Georgia, speaking on MSNBC this week, delivered a profound warning of where the country is heading. He declared:
If we don’t stop this and turn this around very soon, we will end up exactly like Germany did in the 1930s.
Judging by the recruitment posters and propaganda put out to promote ICE, that seems to be exactly what Trump and the Department of Homeland Security have in mind.
https://mronline.org/2025/09/03/ice-emp ... o-recruit/
Posted on September 3, 2025 by Yves Smith
To a vastly greater degree than most executives and national leaders, Trump has surrounded himself with toadies and sycophants. But what happens when even their efforts to keep telling Trump what he so badly wants to hear, that he is still a colossus astride the world and the prime mover of events, can no longer be maintained? As we’ll explain in due course, Trump already defaults to solving nearly all problems by trying to exert dominance. We can see how that’s already failing on the world stage ex with vassal states. What happens when Trump is met with more resistance from those he can’t successfully bully?
One of his measures of the success of his Liberation Day tariffs was the way other nations were supposedly eager to prostrate themselves to get “a deal”:
But as we recounted yesterday, at least for the moment, US courts have taken away Trump’s retaliatory tariffs weapon. Alligator Alcatraz is being closed. Trump, who very much does not want to be tarred with losing Ukraine, may be able to escape that in the self-serving information bubble he has around him, but not with the broader public or history. The spectacle of the Alaska summit with Putin accomplished little save perhaps extending Zelensky’s sell-by date as European leaders rallied around him. That was admittedly enabled by Trump in talking up a bilateral Putin-Zelensky or trilateral, with Trump in the mix. The Trump spin apparatus also tried to depict Putin as the source of the dead on arrival land swaps idea, and has made another error in not shutting down the UK and Europeans coming back to another non-starter, that of peacekeepers from some NATO members in Ukraine. It has now hit the point where the Russians, who have made a point of not contradicting Trump, are now feeling compelled to do so:
The Trump team seems to be beside itself over its inability to influence Russia either directly or through economic partners. Not only had Indian prime minister Modi refused to knuckle under to Trump’s additional 25% tariffs imposed as a sanction for buying Russian oil, but Modi has also rejected at least four Trump attempts to speak to Modi.1 The Trump team is now trying to get the EU to stop buying Indian and presumably also Turkiye petroleum products made from Russian oil. As Alexander Mercouris pointed out, the alternative sources would either be the US or the Middle East, and the level of demand would likely increase oil prices, something Trump does not want. Recall that one of India’s beefs about Trump’s campaign against its Russian oil buys was that the Biden Administration encourage India to make them, so as to reduce pressure on oil prices.
Another problem primed to get only worse for Trump is Israel. Not only is global opinion hardening even more against the ethnosupremacist state, but more nations are staring to take action, and not just the feel-good of recognizing Palestine as a state. Belgium is set to impose sanctions. More dockworkers on the Mediterranean are refusing to service ships from and to Israel, and I have yet to detect official pressure on them to handle these cargos. Yet many experts see Israel as gearing up to attack Iran again, likely this fall, when it is hard to imagine that Israel will do better, ex nukes, than it did in its surprise cyber attack/decapitation strike. And Iran has strengthened its defenses.
But Trump’s biggest vulnerability, and one he will also find hardest to deny, is the economy. Trump’s desperation to fire Powell or otherwise get control of rate policy is an admission that he sees conditions as weak and wants a monetary goosing. But the Trump deficits are massively stimulative. What more does he want? Both the fiscal spending and now the impact of the tariffs will keep inflation alive, if not increase it. Unless the US has a financial crisis, such as an AI bubble unwind which would whack confidence and spending, stagflation looks baked in.
And that’s before getting to the flawed thinking about lowering rates: not only do they not stimulate economic activity, except by leveraged speculators, but with investors correctly seeing Trump’s policies as too-inflation-prone, lowering short term rates will have little if any effect on longer maturities. So the Treasury won’t get interest expense relief, save by continuing to fund at the short end of the curve, and the housing market will not get much of a boost, since mortgage rates are typically set in relation to five to seven year bond yields.
Polls are already turning against Trump even before these dodgy dynamics get worse. Trump’s overall marks are falling, per this August 31 account:
Donald Trump’s approval ratings has taken another blow, a new poll shows. The US President’s ratings slipped to a record low in his second term, as per the Quinnipiac University poll.
The poll, released earlier this week, saw Trump take a three-point drop in his approval rating in just a month’s time. His decision to deploy the National Guard to Washington DC – in an effort to reduce crime – has also seen a 56-41 percent opposition.
Trump is now scoring badly on his once prime issue, immigration:
Pollster: Take a look at Trump's net approval rating on immigration. A lot of focus on Gallup at -27. That's horrible. Quinnipiac University, -16. That's awful. Marist is bad at -9. Ipsos is -8. Fox at -7. Bad. Bad to just downright terrible. The American people have turned Show more
And on tariffs:
And it’s not getting better:
After this long set-up, let’s turn to the question of what happens as it becomes more and more difficult for Trump to deny his failures. John Helmer has more than once pointed out Russians officials view Trump as having a strong preference for the use of violence to get his way. Examples abound, such as ICE chief Tom Homans’ threats against blue cities, the aggressive show of the ICE raids, the way Trump is destroying US leadership in science to bend US universities to his will and Trump’s show of force in US cities via gratuitous and likely illegal deployments of the National Guard. Other evidence comes in Trump, after his pretense of being a peace president, now wanting to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War and praising going on the offense militarily (a development that Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis described with alarm) and strategically ineffective shows of brutality. This is savagery masquerading as potency:
So the US Navy just apparently decided to murder a bunch of alleged and non-positively identified drug smugglers in international waters when they had half a dozen warships with helicopters available nearby to intercept - and then brag about it.
Moral collapse in action.
Let us not forget that Trump also relishes his self-assigned role as arms merchant in chief.
Top investor Ray Dialo has spoken out against Trump’s authoritarianism in a fresh interview in the Financial Times. From US sliding towards 1930s-style autocracy, warns Ray Dalio:
Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio has warned Donald Trump’s America is drifting into 1930s-style autocratic politics — and said other investors are too scared of the president to speak up….
The veteran investor also took aim at a rising impulse towards state control under Trump. Dalio resisted calling the president’s model authoritarian or socialist, but described the mechanics bluntly: “Governments increasingly take control of what is done by central banks and businesses.”
Asked about Trump’s Intel stake and export tariffs imposed on Nvidia and AMD, Dalio referred to his own concept of “the big cycle”, when during periods of great conflicts and risks countries’ leaders are more controlling of the markets and the economy.
“Classically, increased wealth and value gaps lead to increased populism of the right and populism of the left and irreconcilable differences between them that can’t be resolved through the democratic process. So democracies weaken and more autocratic leadership increases as a large percentage of the population wants government leaders to get control of the system to make things work well for them.”
Predictably, Dalio is worried about the liberties of capitalists as opposed to ordinary people. But on the other end of the food chain, consider that Trump, in his blizzard of initial executive orders, asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and DHS chief Kristi Noem to recommend whether Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the purported border crisis. They demurred because border crossings had dropped markedly from the Biden era to the early days of the Trump Administration. The deployment of the Insurrection Act would represent a huge threat to civil liberties. I personally know an activist who has helped organize anti-Trump protests who is securing citizenship in an EU state and plans an immediate exit from the US if the Insurrection Act were invoked. While this reaction may seem extreme, recall that Trump is fabricating a crime crisis in US cities to justify more Federal involvement in policing.
While yours truly is leery of armchair psychoanalysis, IM Doc, who has similar views, nevertheless said there was so much long-standing video evidence of Biden’s cognitive decline that it was evident he was suffering from dementia years before the 2024 election. Experts have found that 60% to 70% of communication is gossip, which is both information sharing/speculation and discussion of motives and behavior. So it’s not as if people to do routinely psychologize, even if they don’t go as far as resorting to references to clinical conditions.
It should not be controversial to depict Trump as an extreme narcissist. Some like to depict his even out-of-bounds conduct (even more flagrant lying and flip flops than in his past) as the result of mental deterioration. But it seems just as likely to be due to “acquired situational narcissism,” aka power going to someone’s head. Even though this is Trump’s second term, in his first he was considerably hamstrung by Russiagate and having many key staffers who were not just not loyal, but even actively working against him, like John Bolton. Having made a point of packing key positions with stooges, Trump has looks to be intoxicated his vastly increased room to maneuver.
But even so, Trump is not only self-sabotagingly fixated on dominating in encounters at the expense of the larger stakes, but his wilder and wilder behavior suggests on some level that he recognizes his trouble managing the contradictions to needed preserve a thin patina of success. With India alone, he’s tried been flailing to cover for the highly visible tariffs backfire. Recall Modi has not only refused to capitulate to the demand not to buy Russian oil, but is downgrading its once-key relationship with the US to strengthen ties with China. Trump has been trying to sell the howler that India offered a zero tariffs deal, when Modi isn’t even willing to take Trump’s repeated calls. Similarly, after his court setback on tariffs, Trump made the ludicrous claim that his tariffs had raised “trillions” in revenue. And he tried reasserting his manhood by threatening to impose 200% tariffs on pharma imports…a move that would make him hated across much of the US were he to go there.
But even before his reality TV days, Trump was obsessed with his image over his substance. See these extracts from a Barbara Walters interview when Trump was hawking a new book, Surviving at the Top (you can see the full segment here): (Video at link.)
As you can infer, Trump had been through difficult negotiations to try to preserve his sinking empire, so one might imagine he was at a bravura low. You can see him here maintain that his purchase of the Plaza Hotel was a great deal and he would not have to sell it; in fact, he did, at a loss of $83 million in 1995.2 In the full segment, Trump maintained he would not dispose of the Trump Shuttle. He did, in 1992.
What I found striking is how, in the edited section above, Trump’s face gets hard when Walters suggests that the title of his book ought to be Failing at the Top. H was quick to attack Walters by depicting the press generally as dishonest. She hits that back over the net calmly and Trump tries changing tactics to discrediting her sources and other types of deflection. Perhaps I am reading overmuch into this, but it looked like Trump was having to contain considerable anger. And more important, that anger was his reflexive response when his position was challenged.
Today, it’s easy to see how often Trump defaults to anger. Just look at his Truth Social posts, not just his frequent use of all caps and demonization, but also his apparent need to lash out when he encounters opposition.
How do narcissists react to defeat? What happens, say, if there is a market crash and Trump policies are cited a major cause? Or as Russia keeps rolling through Ukraine, that even the conservative press depicts Trump as having lost the wor?
It’s not pretty. Psychology Today sets forth some of the typical responses of narcissists to failure. A gander through search results suggests that its list is representative (although I am leery of the phrase “malignant narcissist” as unhelpfully judgmental and therefore rhetorically at odds with an effort to make a clinical description of behavior). Some highlights:
When things begin to sour for the narcissist, here is what we can expect:
They will falsely claim that everything is fine and that there is nothing wrong. They will try to first misdirect us or claim there is nothing to the allegations or circumstances.
If evidence is presented, they will seek to have it invalidated or claim that it is false, fake, or a product of vague conspiracies, but most certainly not true.
Any evidence presented, and those that present it will be attacked aggressively and vindictively…The narcissist will engage supporters or enablers to simultaneously attack those who offer proof or evidence, even if it embarrassingly exposes their poodle-like behavior as that of spineless sycophants…
As they lash out with vindictiveness, the malignant narcissist will continue to talk about themselves in glowing terms…being revered rather than reviled…
As circumstances become dire, the narcissist will not take any responsibility—ever. Anything that has gone wrong is the responsibility of others…
In the process of casting blame, even the most loyal and stalwart will be discarded and denigrated…. Lies are and always will be the number one tool of the malignant narcissist. The only difference now is that in facing failure or public ridicule, the lies must increase in frequency and audacity to the point of incredulity….
And while lies will increase, so too will be the need to devalue others in order to further value themselves. They will attack everyone and anyone in the most vicious and vindictive ways…They will dip down into a bottomless cauldron of antipathy and like an arterial spurt, will spew this toxic brew far and wide with metronomic regularity.
The malignant narcissist, lacking guilt or a conscience, is only concerned with respect and not being publicly shamed. Any kind of public embarrassment will cause them further anger, further rage, further attacks, further unethical comportment, and unprecedented incivility.
If the narcissist is going to be brought down, they will also seek to bring everyone else around them down to vindictively make them suffer. How the narcissist vilifies, lashes out, or destroys others (spouse, friends, business partners, workmates, the general public) is up to the morbid creativity and depravity of the malignant narcissist, the viable tools they have available, and of course how dire or desperate the situation.
The tone above is unduly melodramatic although the intent may be to spur those in close proximity to an extreme narcissist to get the hell away as quickly as possible. However, a key point is that if a narcissist enters a spiral of failure, he will seek to pull those around him down into his whirlpool. And he’ll do so with great determination and “creativity”.
Now of course, the complicating fact with Trump’s emotional self-defenses is that he has been persecuted, first by Russiagate, then with lawfare, and then an assassination attempt. So his view of himself as unfairly pilloried is not made from whole cloth. But Trump has clearly decided on revenge as part of his response (see John Bolton) both for its own sake and to cow anyone who might try to cross him.
But the general point still holds. If Trump faces persistent and well-founded criticism for his actions, he’s likely to react with a ferocity that dwarfs anything we have seen from him so far.
______
1 Tariffs were not the sole reason for the unraveling:
Inside Trump-Modi’s 35-Minute Call That Shattered Years of US-India Friendship
A single phone call. Just 35 minutes long. That’s all it took for U.S.–India relations to shift from warm friendship to icy tension. Insiders say Donald Trump’s conversation with Prime Minister Show more(Video at link.)
See also Modi’s refusal to back Trump’s Nobel Prize push soured India-US ties: Report reveals explosive phone call Mint
2 The New York real estate market started to turn only as of about 1994, While I can’t prove it, Trump may have gotten his creditors to accept holding off on the Plaza sale, either to hit a minimum price or until the general distress had abated.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/09 ... mount.html
******
Trump ‘losing patience’ with Europe, demands more tariffs on India: Report
Conflicting reports have emerged on whether India will cave to US economic pressure or continue to pursue energy ties with Moscow
News Desk
SEP 1, 2025
(Photo credit: Getty Images)
Washington is pressuring EU states to impose more tariffs on India over its energy ties with Moscow, according to sources cited by Axios and India Today.
Axios reported that the US would like EU countries to escalate economic pressure on Russia, including “a complete cessation of all oil and gas purchases” and the imposition of secondary tariffs – not only on India but on China too.
The US is “losing patience” with Europe, the sources added. They said that Washington believes the EU is pressing Ukraine to reject any territorial concessions to Russia.
“The Europeans don’t get to prolong this war and backdoor unreasonable expectations, while also expecting America to bear the cost. If Europe wants to escalate this war, that will be up to them. But they will be hopelessly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” a White House official told Axios.
India Today also reported that the US is seeking European tariffs on India and a halt to energy imports.
The EU has yet to comment on the matter.
Sources cited by Reuters at the end of last month said that New Delhi is looking to defy Washington and boost imports of Russian energy.
Three sources involved in the oil trade with India told Reuters on 28 August that Indian refiners are expected to increase Russian oil purchases by 150,000-300,000 barrels per day (bpd) in September, which is an increase of 10–20 percent from August.
However, an earlier report by Bloomberg claimed that India is planning to reduce its purchases of Russian oil as a “modest concession” to the US.
New US tariffs targeting India came into effect on 27 August, as part of US President Donald Trump’s vow to punish the country for its energy ties to Russia.
The new tariffs have been stacked on top of 25 percent country-specific tariffs, which took effect on 7 August, bringing the total levies up to 50 percent – among the highest imposed by the US.
India has been under heavy domestic pressure not to give in to US tariffs.
https://thecradle.co/articles/trump-los ... dia-report
******
They had complete control over the US Congress.
September 2, 9:01
- "The Israeli lobby controls power in the US"
- "You are a conspiracy theorist!"
- "Israel was the most powerful lobby group I have ever seen. They had complete control of Congress, and now they don't." (c) Trump
- ......
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10046975.html
("and now they don't.", Ho fucking ho.)
Google Translator
*****
At left, an ICE recruitment poster featuring President Donald Trump. At right, the 1872 painting ‘American Progress’ by John Gast, which depicts the westward expansion of Manifest Destiny and the forced expulsion of Native Americans, has also been used by the Department of Homeland Security to promote its anti-immigrant agenda. | Images via DHS
ICE employing Nazi-type propaganda to recruit
Originally published: People's World on August 12, 2025 by John Wojcik (more by People's World) | (Posted Sep 03, 2025)
A painting depicting an angelic Lady Columbia wearing the Star of Empire on her head, protecting white settlers racing westward in 19th-century America as Native American Indians flee in fear. The message accompanying it:
A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.
Image via DHS
In another, a white woman inside a covered wagon on the frontier has just given birth with the help of her husband. Its caption:
Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.
Then there are the posters. Donald Trump giving a military salute, with bold capital letters overlaid: “DEFEND THE HOMELAND—JOIN ICE TODAY.” In another bearing the same message, Kristi Noem, head of “Homeland Security” (itself a fascist term from the second Bush administration), is outfitted in a bulletproof vest and military cap, sitting behind the wheel of an ICE van.
Only recently, if someone told us that such reactionary and fascist-style art would be used to recruit masked secret police that roam, unidentified, through U.S. streets, kidnapping people and shipping them off to prisons and concentration camps without any due process, we would have declared them crazy.
Now, the most mainstream of lawmakers and politicians are using the term “fascism” to describe what we are dealing with.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz recently publicly compared ICE to the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police.
“Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” Walz said during a May 2025 speech at the University of Minnesota Law School’s commencement ceremony.
“They’re in unmarked vans, wearing masks… [people are] being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons, no chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared,” Walz said.
Image via DHSTrump, among numerous other fascistic moves, has drastically increased the number of nationwide arrests of immigrants since he returned to office in January. ICE’s arrests of immigrants have gone up by more than 100% across the country, often with little attention paid to the actual legal status of those kidnapped from the streets.
Other Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Dan Goldman of New York and Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, have also compared ICE to Hitler’s political and racial police. These two members of Congress were both recently blocked from inspecting an ICE facility, which the law entitles them to do.
The new ICE recruitment program comes amidst increasing criticism of Trump’s mass deportation terror program.
A signing bonus of up to $50,000 is being offered to new recruits. The solicitations are being used to entice law enforcement officers in cities to quit their jobs and sign up instead as ICE agents. Student loan forgiveness is another prize dangled in front of potential recruits by the same administration that fought tooth-and-nail to kill such relief for U.S. students in general.
Use of art to promote fascistic ideas is not unique to ICE. Posters featuring close facial shots of classical sculpture, including the David, have been appearing on college campuses. They are accompanied by printed slogans such as “Serve Your People” and “Protect Your Heritage.”
Nazi “art” in Germany often featured classical figures, individuals, and buildings. Hitler’s plans for the future capital of the “New Germania,” encompassing the entire world, involved buildings in the classical Greek style.
The name “Identity Evropa” appears on some of the fascist posters plastered around campuses in recent years. Identity Evropa is the name of a fascist, white supremacist organization identified as such by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
ICE is using similar imagery, artwork, and slogans to put forward the idea that the country is facing a great threat from “the other.” Nazi Germany similarly used its propaganda to scare people about such alleged threats from “the other,” whether they were Communists, Jews, or anyone else.
The Nazi parallels go even further, though, according to some observers. The painting showing the genocidal expansion westward that the Department of Homeland Security used is from 1872. The caption DHS added, along with the work’s title and painter—“A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.—American Progress, John Gast”—grabbed the attention of some right-wing watchers.
Image via DHS
The caption had exactly 14 words, which prompted Northern University Law Professor Evan Bernick to draw a comparison to the infamous white supremacist “Fourteen Words” slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” He also pointed to the fact that the “H” in both Heritage and Homeland were intentionally capitalized. H is the eighth letter of the alphabet; another neo-Nazi code is 88, or HH, for “Heil Hitler.”
Similarly, the pioneer wagon train birth painting, “New Life in a New Land,” also featured a caption that capitalized the words “Homeland” and “Heritage,” with no valid grammatical reason.
Is it all just paranoia and conspiracy thinking? White supremacists and American neo-Nazis have long relied on frontier imagery and glorification of the genocide of the indigenous peoples of North America as part of their propaganda efforts. So, Bernick’s analysis might not be far off.
With the Department of Homeland Security’s publicity materials, patriotism, racism, and violence all get blended together. Uncle Sam, for instance, is recast as a stormtrooper vigilante in some of DHS’ media, encouraging Americans to “help your country and yourself” by calling in to “report all foreign invaders.”
Descriptions of immigrants as criminals, predators, and invaders to justify deportation efforts also allow the administration to divide and conquer the many groups hurt by its anti-democratic and right-wing economic policies. The Nazis in Germany and fascists elsewhere have always described their opponents and victims in such terms in order to stoke division.
Rep. James Clyburn of Georgia, speaking on MSNBC this week, delivered a profound warning of where the country is heading. He declared:
If we don’t stop this and turn this around very soon, we will end up exactly like Germany did in the 1930s.
Judging by the recruitment posters and propaganda put out to promote ICE, that seems to be exactly what Trump and the Department of Homeland Security have in mind.
https://mronline.org/2025/09/03/ice-emp ... o-recruit/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Pleasant and comfortable conditions
September 4, 15:02
If the war does not end on terms that are favorable to us, we will achieve them by military means (c) Putin
Ukraine will have to accept any security architecture offered to it. Russia will have to feel comfortable as a result of the peace process (c) US Permanent Representative to NATO Whitaker
P.S. Yesterday Trump gave Putin another 2 weeks for no clear reason or purpose. Until Trump forces Europe to peace, the war will not end.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10051809.html
Google Translator
******
The Power Of Siberia 2 Pipeline Deal Signifies The Failure Of Trump’s Eurasian Grand Strategy
Andrew Korybko
Sep 04, 2025
Trump’s escalatory signals in Ukraine, the Indo-US split that he induced, and the attendant alleviation of the Sino-Indo security dilemma freed Russia up to clinch the long-negotiated Power of Siberia 2 deal.
Trump’s Eurasian grand strategy has sought to preemptively avert Russia’s potentially disproportionate dependence on China in order to avoid having its natural resources turbocharge the superpower trajectory of the US’ only systemic rival. In pursuit of this, the US envisaged entering into a resource-centric strategic partnership with Russia upon the end of the Ukrainian Conflict, expecting that this shared goal would incentivize Putin into agreeing to significant territorial and/or security concessions.
Trump’s unwillingness or inability to coerce Zelensky into any of Putin’s demanded concessions paired with increasingly concerning reports about plans to deploy NATO to Ukraine to spook Putin into ditching his balancing act and pivoting to China. The successful clinching of their long-negotiated deal over the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, which will nearly double Russia’s gas exports to China to ~100 bcm a year and at a cheaper price than the EU receives, signifies the failure of Trump’s Eurasian grand strategy.
Putin might have held out for longer had Trump not inadvertently catalyzed the incipient Sino-Indo rapprochement via his hypocritically punitive tariffs that aim to derail India’s rise as a Great Power. That spooked India into patching up its ties with China, which alleviated their security dilemma that the US was exploiting to divide-and-rule them. This in turn reduced India’s worries about closer Russian-Chinese energy cooperation that it previously feared could lead to Russia becoming China’s junior partner.
It was never officially voiced, but astute observers and those who’ve talked to Indian thinkers know that India was worried that China might leverage its influence over Russia to get it to curtail or cut off military exports to India, therefore giving China a pivotal edge in their border dispute. The Trump-induced Indo-US split and attendant alleviation of the Sino-Indo security dilemma freed Russia up to clinch the Power of Siberia 2 deal without fear of spooking India into the US’ arms and thus dividing-and-ruling Eurasia.
The growing convergence between BRICS and the SCO, which aim to gradually reform global governance via their complementary efforts to accelerate multipolar processes, is due in no small part to India’s embrace of both in response to new strategic threats from the US. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to China in seven years to attend the SCO Leaders’ Summit, during which time he held an important bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping, is expected to lead to a new normal in Sino-Indo ties.
The roots of their tensions haven’t been resolved, but Russia expects that they’ll now be better managed, ergo why it clinched its deal with China over the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline right after also concluding that the US won’t try to help it obtain any of what it wants from Ukraine. To review, Trump signaled escalatory intent in Ukraine reportedly as the quid pro quo for the US-EU trade deal and then Sino-Indo ties improved as Indo-US ones worsened, thus making Power of Siberia 2 politically possible.
Trump’s foreign policy towards Eurasia has therefore indisputably failed. His team’s misguided approach towards Russia and India in demanding too much of them led to those two and China working out their differences, which exist amongst themselves bilaterally but also regarding their ties with the US, and consequently accelerated multipolar processes at the expense of the US’ unipolar interests. The Rubicon has clearly been crossed after this latest pipeline deal and it’s anyone’s guess how the US will respond.
https://korybko.substack.com/p/the-powe ... eline-deal
******
We will resist Trump’s takeover of New Orleans
September 4, 2025 Workers Voice Socialist Movement
New Orleans, June 5, 2020 – thousands of people filled the park and streets around Jackson Square in New Orleans on the eighth day of protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
It is not about crime, it’s about dictatorship for profit
Occupations of L.A. and D.C. are the first steps to martial law
Everything Trump and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry do is designed to impoverish the people, strip us of our rights, destroy our lives and use force to suppress any struggle to stop them so that billionaires can extract maximum profits from our labor.
Trump and Landry are rapidly moving to impose a total dictatorship of the military corporations, banks, oil and gas, and tech companies over society. The billionaire owners of these corporations already take the vast majority of the wealth we sacrifice in the form of taxes. But they want the entire national budget for themselves.
The Trump presidency gets its marching orders from capitalist think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Pelican Institute, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), all of which are funded by and for the benefit of billionaires. They are celebrating $3.4 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, Section 8, Education, Child Care, Medicare, and Social Security. Even if you do not currently use these programs, cutting them will force down the wages of everyone else.
Trump and his billionaire cronies want no minimum wage, no pensions, no civil rights laws, no unions or any other organizations that would stand in the way of their profit-making. They are gutting what is left of voting rights. It’s not enough that political candidates are bought and paid for by the rich. They are openly taking over all state machinery for elections.
Trump’s deployment of shock troops has nothing to do with crime. But because Trump and Landry can’t state their real motives, they scapegoat and brand as “criminals” immigrants, trans people, women and most especially Black and Brown communities.
In Louisiana, the highest crime rate is in majority white rural areas, which also suffer from poverty and lack of opportunity. More than 1 in 5 of all people incarcerated around the planet are in U.S. jails and prisons. Prisons for citizens and immigrants are a profit-making industry, and corporations are using prison labor to get super-profits. Convict leasing, child labor, labor camps, debtors’ prisons are all about enslaving labor for maximum profit. This will inevitably drag down the wages of non-incarcerated workers as well.
Trump and Landry are preparing for resistance to their program of total impoverishment. On Aug. 25, Trump issued an executive order calling on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to designate Army and Air National Guard members in every state to “assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances.”
Resistance to occupation and dictatorship is inevitable. The people will not stand by as we lose our housing and homes and politicians rake in bribes. We will not stand by while seniors are in the streets and education becomes something that only the rich can afford. We will not be peacefully hungry. We have the right to good wages, healthcare, housing, equality, food, education, peace, and a livable planet. The handful of billionaires that are centralizing their control over our lives are the real criminals and parasites.
Repression Breeds Resistance. Trump and Landry smugly think they can lie about everything in order to enrich their pals. But while people may be temporarily stunned by the rapid rise of dictatorship, a reckoning is coming. They are few and we are many.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... w-orleans/
September 4, 15:02
If the war does not end on terms that are favorable to us, we will achieve them by military means (c) Putin
Ukraine will have to accept any security architecture offered to it. Russia will have to feel comfortable as a result of the peace process (c) US Permanent Representative to NATO Whitaker
P.S. Yesterday Trump gave Putin another 2 weeks for no clear reason or purpose. Until Trump forces Europe to peace, the war will not end.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10051809.html
Google Translator
******
The Power Of Siberia 2 Pipeline Deal Signifies The Failure Of Trump’s Eurasian Grand Strategy
Andrew Korybko
Sep 04, 2025
Trump’s escalatory signals in Ukraine, the Indo-US split that he induced, and the attendant alleviation of the Sino-Indo security dilemma freed Russia up to clinch the long-negotiated Power of Siberia 2 deal.
Trump’s Eurasian grand strategy has sought to preemptively avert Russia’s potentially disproportionate dependence on China in order to avoid having its natural resources turbocharge the superpower trajectory of the US’ only systemic rival. In pursuit of this, the US envisaged entering into a resource-centric strategic partnership with Russia upon the end of the Ukrainian Conflict, expecting that this shared goal would incentivize Putin into agreeing to significant territorial and/or security concessions.
Trump’s unwillingness or inability to coerce Zelensky into any of Putin’s demanded concessions paired with increasingly concerning reports about plans to deploy NATO to Ukraine to spook Putin into ditching his balancing act and pivoting to China. The successful clinching of their long-negotiated deal over the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, which will nearly double Russia’s gas exports to China to ~100 bcm a year and at a cheaper price than the EU receives, signifies the failure of Trump’s Eurasian grand strategy.
Putin might have held out for longer had Trump not inadvertently catalyzed the incipient Sino-Indo rapprochement via his hypocritically punitive tariffs that aim to derail India’s rise as a Great Power. That spooked India into patching up its ties with China, which alleviated their security dilemma that the US was exploiting to divide-and-rule them. This in turn reduced India’s worries about closer Russian-Chinese energy cooperation that it previously feared could lead to Russia becoming China’s junior partner.
It was never officially voiced, but astute observers and those who’ve talked to Indian thinkers know that India was worried that China might leverage its influence over Russia to get it to curtail or cut off military exports to India, therefore giving China a pivotal edge in their border dispute. The Trump-induced Indo-US split and attendant alleviation of the Sino-Indo security dilemma freed Russia up to clinch the Power of Siberia 2 deal without fear of spooking India into the US’ arms and thus dividing-and-ruling Eurasia.
The growing convergence between BRICS and the SCO, which aim to gradually reform global governance via their complementary efforts to accelerate multipolar processes, is due in no small part to India’s embrace of both in response to new strategic threats from the US. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to China in seven years to attend the SCO Leaders’ Summit, during which time he held an important bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping, is expected to lead to a new normal in Sino-Indo ties.
The roots of their tensions haven’t been resolved, but Russia expects that they’ll now be better managed, ergo why it clinched its deal with China over the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline right after also concluding that the US won’t try to help it obtain any of what it wants from Ukraine. To review, Trump signaled escalatory intent in Ukraine reportedly as the quid pro quo for the US-EU trade deal and then Sino-Indo ties improved as Indo-US ones worsened, thus making Power of Siberia 2 politically possible.
Trump’s foreign policy towards Eurasia has therefore indisputably failed. His team’s misguided approach towards Russia and India in demanding too much of them led to those two and China working out their differences, which exist amongst themselves bilaterally but also regarding their ties with the US, and consequently accelerated multipolar processes at the expense of the US’ unipolar interests. The Rubicon has clearly been crossed after this latest pipeline deal and it’s anyone’s guess how the US will respond.
https://korybko.substack.com/p/the-powe ... eline-deal
******
We will resist Trump’s takeover of New Orleans
September 4, 2025 Workers Voice Socialist Movement
New Orleans, June 5, 2020 – thousands of people filled the park and streets around Jackson Square in New Orleans on the eighth day of protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
It is not about crime, it’s about dictatorship for profit
Occupations of L.A. and D.C. are the first steps to martial law
Everything Trump and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry do is designed to impoverish the people, strip us of our rights, destroy our lives and use force to suppress any struggle to stop them so that billionaires can extract maximum profits from our labor.
Trump and Landry are rapidly moving to impose a total dictatorship of the military corporations, banks, oil and gas, and tech companies over society. The billionaire owners of these corporations already take the vast majority of the wealth we sacrifice in the form of taxes. But they want the entire national budget for themselves.
The Trump presidency gets its marching orders from capitalist think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Pelican Institute, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), all of which are funded by and for the benefit of billionaires. They are celebrating $3.4 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, Section 8, Education, Child Care, Medicare, and Social Security. Even if you do not currently use these programs, cutting them will force down the wages of everyone else.
Trump and his billionaire cronies want no minimum wage, no pensions, no civil rights laws, no unions or any other organizations that would stand in the way of their profit-making. They are gutting what is left of voting rights. It’s not enough that political candidates are bought and paid for by the rich. They are openly taking over all state machinery for elections.
Trump’s deployment of shock troops has nothing to do with crime. But because Trump and Landry can’t state their real motives, they scapegoat and brand as “criminals” immigrants, trans people, women and most especially Black and Brown communities.
In Louisiana, the highest crime rate is in majority white rural areas, which also suffer from poverty and lack of opportunity. More than 1 in 5 of all people incarcerated around the planet are in U.S. jails and prisons. Prisons for citizens and immigrants are a profit-making industry, and corporations are using prison labor to get super-profits. Convict leasing, child labor, labor camps, debtors’ prisons are all about enslaving labor for maximum profit. This will inevitably drag down the wages of non-incarcerated workers as well.
Trump and Landry are preparing for resistance to their program of total impoverishment. On Aug. 25, Trump issued an executive order calling on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to designate Army and Air National Guard members in every state to “assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances.”
Resistance to occupation and dictatorship is inevitable. The people will not stand by as we lose our housing and homes and politicians rake in bribes. We will not stand by while seniors are in the streets and education becomes something that only the rich can afford. We will not be peacefully hungry. We have the right to good wages, healthcare, housing, equality, food, education, peace, and a livable planet. The handful of billionaires that are centralizing their control over our lives are the real criminals and parasites.
Repression Breeds Resistance. Trump and Landry smugly think they can lie about everything in order to enrich their pals. But while people may be temporarily stunned by the rapid rise of dictatorship, a reckoning is coming. They are few and we are many.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... w-orleans/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Whadda ya mean 'we', Orange Man?
*******
Bubbles and lies: Trump’s tariff economy and the AI hype machine
September 4, 2025 Gary Wilson
The AFGE union pickets outside Norfolk International Airport in Norfolk, Virginia, March 25, 2025. The government is slashing social programs, busting unions, suppressing wages.
Wall Street just threw another parade. The so-called “Magnificent Seven” tech giants — Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Tesla — reported quarterly earnings. Headlines screamed that the economy is “booming,” and President Trump jumped in with his usual bravado: “America is the hottest country anywhere in the world.” Stock indexes hit records, and the pundits swooned.
But stop and read past the ticker tape. The reality on the ground is pretty ugly. Tech profits did climb, yes — but not because artificial intelligence is unleashing a new industrial revolution. The gains are coming from old, established business lines: advertising, cloud services, subscription platforms.
Meanwhile, hundreds of billions are being poured into AI hype — data centers, chips, research — not because AI is generating new wealth or employment, but because surplus capital cannot be profitably deployed in productive investment elsewhere. This is monopoly-finance capitalism: inflating assets and manipulating markets, turning money into more money, disconnected from real production or social need.
Outside the gleaming towers of tech, the U.S. economy is sputtering. Strip away Trump’s tariffs — which artificially boost GDP by forcing working people to buy domestic goods instead of cheaper imports — and growth falls to a pitiful 1.2%. Business investment is flagging, employment is frozen, and manufacturing jobs are disappearing faster than during the pandemic slump. Inflation clings stubbornly above 3%, keeping real wages locked where they were five years ago. For working people, the “record economy” is a joke.
Tariffs: A 1920s strategy in 2025
Import tariffs now average 18.2% — their highest level in nearly a century. Trump brags that they are “bringing in billions,” but in the context of a trillion-dollar military spending deficit, these billions are trivial. Meanwhile, tariffs push prices up and distort trade flows.
Yale economists estimate Trump’s tariffs will add 2% to consumer prices, roughly $2,400 per household annually. In other words, Trump is driving inflation onto working people while pretending to champion national self-reliance. The economic strategy is medieval, the impact is modern-day brutality.
Jobs data as political theater
If the economy is faltering, why do media headlines still trumpet growth and resilience? The answer is simple: The numbers are manipulated. On Aug. 1, the Labor Department quietly admitted that 258,000 fewer jobs were created over the past year than initially reported. That’s not a minor correction — it completely undermines the narrative of a robust labor market.
Overestimating employment during downturns is not a mistake; it is a capitalist tactic. Statistical agencies assume expansion continues at the same pace, even as businesses fail. As Marxists have long argued, this serves a purpose: Painting a rosier picture of the economy helps prevent investors from panicking in the stock, bond, and real estate markets, and delays pressure on central banks to cut interest rates.
Protecting the sham, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, accusing her of releasing “fake data,” the revision that showed a significant fall in jobs. In her place, he put E.J. Antoni, a Heritage Foundation hardliner and Project 2025 co-author, tasked with “fixing” the numbers — by redefining unemployment to make it look smaller, or even shutting down the monthly jobs report altogether. In short, the government office that tracks employment is being turned over to political loyalists whose job is to manipulate the numbers in favor of corporations and against workers.
The class logic of ‘full employment’
Capitalism does not thrive on full employment. It thrives on a “reserve army” of unemployed workers to keep wages low and discourage labor militancy. Celebrating “robust employment” is not a victory for workers — it’s propaganda to hide underemployment.
When most workers can’t walk away from low-paying jobs, corporate profits are safe. Interest rate hikes by the Fed that cause unemployment and economic hardship are praised as “stability.” And capitalist economists promote the idea that unemployment is necessary to stop wages and prices from rising too fast.
Unemployment is accepted because it protects profits.
The AI bubble and speculative capital
At the same time, U.S. capital is gorging itself on a new speculative bubble: artificial intelligence. Billions in private credit are financing massive AI projects. Wall Street celebrates the hype while real economic activity stagnates. GDP rises, but real purchasing power does not. Workers’ wages remain frozen, their job security eroding, while the ultra-rich sit atop speculative gains.
The AI boom is a classic capitalist mirage: It creates the appearance of innovation and progress while concentrating wealth and masking stagnation. When the bubble bursts — as these bubbles eventually do — the working class will be left holding the bag.
Capitalism’s double bind
U.S. capitalism faces a brutal contradiction. On one side, speculative capital thrives on the AI bubble, feeding itself through private credit and hype. On the other hand, the real economy flirts with stagnation, inflation, and layoffs. Tariff nationalism accelerates the squeeze, raising costs.
Trump, ever the carnival barker, insists that the country has never been richer even as workers’ wages are depressed, living standards stall, and more people face economic insecurity. His firing of statistical officials shows the blunt edge of authoritarian capitalism: When reality threatens profits, reality itself is rewritten.
But the problem is not just Trump. It is the logic of a system that requires recurring crises to discipline labor, manage overproduction, and restore profitability. AI hype, tariffs, and fake jobs numbers create the illusion of a booming economy — but it’s really just a cover for big profits gained by squeezing workers.
The human cost
For the working class, the contradictions are not abstract — they are immediate and brutal. Inflation quietly erodes paychecks. Jobs disappear in factories and warehouses. Prices for essentials rise under tariffs while AI hype fuels stock market gains for a handful of billionaires. The spectacle of economic growth is just that: a show. The reality is falling wages, mounting insecurity, and repression.
When the AI bubble bursts, when tariffs finally push the economy into stagflation, the bill will fall not on Trump or Wall Street, but on the working class. Profits at the top will be defended; sacrifices at the bottom will be demanded. History shows this is not a glitch but a feature of capitalist logic. Crises are the mechanism by which capital enforces its own survival.
Looking ahead
The illusions of prosperity cannot last forever. The gap between soaring profits and stagnant living standards grows wider every day. Trump’s authoritarian measures, AI hype, and tariff nationalism are temporary props for a fragile system. Eventually, the contradictions will surface: Speculative bubbles will collapse, inflation will bite, and unemployment will rise.
Workers will be the ones paying the price. And yet, this same system that penalizes labor could be challenged — if working people organize, fight for gains, and resist the repression imposed by recurring crises. The future is not set in stone; it is shaped by class struggle.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... e-machine/
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Trump Floats Idea of Declaring Housing Emergency: Another Self-Sabotage Operation?
Posted on September 4, 2025 by Yves Smith
Trump’s addiction to playing Colossus and putting more plates in the air to distract attention from the ones that have or about to crash to the ground has produced yet another not-too-bright idea: that of declaring a housing emergency so as to improve housing affordability. As we’ll see, making any real headway would take time and require pulling quite a few policy levers. It would also require helping the poors, something that this Administration demonstrates it is opposed via numerous policy actions, from SNAP benefits to Medicaid work requirements to Medicare cuts to running the homeless out of Washington, DC.
We aren’t alone in our skepticism. The constituency that ought to be all on board, relators, is as well.
One reason for the lack of enthusiasm is that the scheme is unconvincingly thin. From Bloomberg:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Trump administration may declare a national housing emergency this fall as the White House looks to highlight key issues for midterm campaign voters.
“We’re trying to figure out what we can do, and we don’t want to step into the business of states, counties, and municipal governments,” Bessent told the Washington Examiner. “We may declare a national housing emergency in the fall.”
Bessent said housing affordability would be a critical leg of Republicans’ 2026 midterm election platform. Bessent declined to list any specific actions the president may take, but he suggested that administration officials are directly studying ways to standardize local building and zoning codes and decrease closing costs.
The conservative publication Reason poured on the acid:
The secretary’s comments all suggest this housing emergency declaration is very much a work in progress, if it is declared at all.
Indeed, the fact that the administration is studying potential actions it might take within a few months doesn’t quite sound like it considers the state of housing in the country to be a proper dictionary-definition emergency requiring immediate action to prevent the loss of life, limb, and property.
Rather, it would appear this would be another “emergency” that the president will declare to force through policy changes that in nonemergency times would require going through the federal rule-making process or even, gasp, Congress.
While the press has cited a number of proximate causes for the housing price squeeze, they skip over the ultimate one: neoliberalism, meaning the policy shift that really took hold in the Reagan era to favor asset price increases over real wage growth and use easier access to consumer debt to create the illusion of rising prosperity. While there are many ways to tell this story, this one from Statista should suffice, of Median inflation adjusted hourly earnings of wage and salary workers in the United States from 1979 to 2023. Look at the scale of the chart to see how small the rise has been over time:
Another factor has been the change in policy over the role of housing. Matt Stoller, in a Fordham Law Review article, described how housing was once shelter plus a forced savings vehicle. Most people stayed with one employer in one location for their working life. Buying a house with a 30 year mortgage meant that these employees would pay off their mortgage over their career and retire owning their house free and clear, and as a result, with much lower monthly fixed costs. Financialization now allows for equity extraction.
Housing (and medical) costs are pain points as Americans are ever more pessimistic about their futures. From a Lobor Day article in the Wall Street Journal, Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds:
A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds that the share of people who say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to 25%, a record low in surveys dating to 1987. More than three-quarters said they lack confidence that life for the next generation will be better than their own, the poll found.
Nearly 70% of people said they believe the American dream—that if you work hard, you will get ahead—no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys…
The discontent reaches across demographic lines. By large majorities, both women and men held a pessimistic view in the combined questions. So did both younger and older adults, those with and without a college degree and respondents with more than $100,000 in household income, as well as those with less….
And yet many people in the survey, as well as in interviews, said they felt a sense of economic fragility, even if their finances were adequate or secure today. In a generational cascade, majorities said the prior generation had an easier time buying a home, starting a business or being a full-time parent rather than in the workforce, while majorities also said they lacked confidence that the next generation could buy a home or save adequately for retirement.
While Jeff Lindly, 61, said he believes the economy is improving slowly, his adult children’s experience in the housing market draws a contrast with his own. Lindly was able to earn enough to support his wife and family when his children were young. They bought a house and, later, built two more. Now, two of his three adult children live with him in Godley, Texas, one in a trailer on the property and one with her husband and child in the home.
“They can’t afford a house yet, even though they’re trying to save by living with us,” said Lindly, a real-estate appraiser who said that he expects housing affordability to improve with time and that he supports President Trump’s policies. His income recently has been about 40% of what is typical amid a slow housing market.
Precarity is a feature, not a bug, of neoliberalism.
Most accounts describe the severity of the home price crunch and list proximate causes. For instance, from Newsweek:
The U.S. housing market is currently in the midst of an affordability crisis caused by a combination of sky-high home prices, historically elevated mortgage rates, and other rising costs including property taxes, homeowners association fees, and home insurance premiums.
Limited inventory during the pandemic homebuying frenzy, when mortgage rates as low as 2-3 percent sparked a nationwide surge in demand, led to home prices rocketing by more than 40 percent between 2019 and 2022, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Three years after mortgage rates shot up to 6-7 percent as a result of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign to fight inflation, putting a dampener on demand, home prices nationwide remain much higher than before the pandemic. As of July, according to Redfin, the median sale price of a typical U.S. home was $443,141, up 1.1 percent from a year earlier.
Mortgage rates have also remained stubbornly high…
Not only Americans are struggling to buy homes—with sales down by 1.6 percent in July compared to a year earlier and sellers outnumbering buyers by more than 500,000, according to Redfin data—but those who already own a property carry a heavier financial burden to maintain it than they did before the pandemic.
Property taxes have risen in nearly every major U.S. metropolitan area over the past five years as a result of the rise home values, according to a Redfin report. Home insurance premiums have surpassed 40 percent over the past six years, according to LendingTree, as more frequent and more severe natural disasters increase the risk of paying higher claims for carriers.
Alert readers will notice that housing prices are sticky and should have fallen in light of higher mortgage rates and insurance costs, as well as the fact that things like HOA fees, property taxes, and those insurance costs are not something the Feds can readily address.
Some assert that there is a housing shortage. We debunked that in a July post.1
Paul Krugman argued that the problem may be that the US has hit the limits of sprawl and more dense housing, such as apartment buildings and townhouses, might be the answer. We’ve been advocating that for years as the most obvious remedy for affordability, since what the US needs is more lower-cost units. Not just homebuilders, but also developers of multi-family housing, have greatly preferred the high end buyer. But another obstacle is NIMBY-ism, that many communities reject permits for more dense housing. Can’t let the riff-raff in!
So what can Trump do? Even if he gets Powell out sooner rather than later and gets his much-desired rate cut, that will have little effect on mortgage rates. The central bank sets interest at the short end of the yield curve. Mortgage rates are set off five to seven year rates. Those reflect inflation expectations. It’s hard to see those falling much, given Trump’s gaping fiscal deficits, ex a crash.
Of course, the Fed could engage in QE again, since the point back in the day was to lower both Treasury yields and mortgage spreads over Treasuries. But QE has become a dirty word, so this seems extremely unlikely.
Time Magazine questioned what Trump might do:
Under the 1976 National Emergencies Act, the President can declare a national emergency at his discretion. The act does not provide an explicit definition of what constitutes an “emergency,” but it does require the President to issue a formal declaration, such as through an executive order, and cite the statutory powers he plans to use in that declaration.
Declaring a national emergency allows the President to bypass Congress to take a range of actions limited to the 137 emergency powers defined by law, as well as an additional 13 statutory powers if Congress declares a national emergency…
Congress can terminate a national emergency by passing legislation, although the President can veto the resolution unless it reaches a supermajority. Otherwise, a national emergency can technically go on forever, so long as it is reaffirmed every year.
But national emergencies, and actions undertaken during them, can also be challenged in court…
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he would address the housing crisis by making federal land available for housing development and by slashing regulations.
And from Realtor.com:
However, any federal attempt to tackle the housing crisis will have to face the harsh reality that most of the key policies that influence housing supply are set at the state and local level.
“It remains unclear exactly what kind of emergency measures the administration could take to address housing, or even if using emergency powers in this way is lawful,” says Realtor.com® Senior Economist Joel Berner. “The best ways the administration could make an impact are by encouraging the building and purchase of homes.”
Berner suggests that finding ways to streamline the permitting process for homebuilders—and put fewer restrictions on builders—could help boost housing supply, particularly in heavily-regulated, high-cost areas like the Northeast.
“This would have the best long-term impact, but the federal government could also juice the housing market in the short run by making it easier to buy a home,” he says. “This could include offering a tax credit to offset closing costs.”
A similar tax credit was offered to first-time homebuyers during the Obama administration in 2008, when the economy entered deep recession. However, that tax credit required an act of Congress, and it is unclear whether the executive branch could take a similar step on its own.
In other words, thin gruel.
Michael Shedlock, who was not impressed, still had a proposal:
Housing Hoot
“We’re trying to figure out what we can do, and we don’t want to step into the business of states, counties, and municipal governments,” said Bessent.
Since when did Trump decide not to step into the business of states, counties, and municipal governments, the Fed, the business of India, or the business of anything else including the Smithsonian?
I have a suggestion Mr. President: End the lumber tariffs, the steel tariffs, and all the rest of the tariffs that inflate the cost of a new home.
So this may be the trial balloon of the day, or perhaps we’ll see a variant of the Ukraine raw earths deal: a lot of noise and spinning wheels, generating pretty much nothing in the way of results.
––––––––
1 From the post:
The big problem in the US is housing affordability. There is no housing shortage:
The total is just short of 148 million. About 35% is rental property, which has a typical vacancy rate of 7%, so one could argue for reducing the total stock by 3.6 million. FRED shows the active listings for owned residences at under 1.1 million; Zillow has the for-sale inventory as of end of June at 1.3 million. Generously (for the purpose of this analysis) using the Zillow figure and assuming all homes listed for sale are not occupied, we get 143.1 million, so say 143 million.
The Census put the number of households (admittedly as of 2023) at 127.8 million.
So there is no housing shortage on a macro level, as many claim.
Now real estate is always and ever local, so there are shortages in certainly chronically underhoused metro areas like New York City, and no doubt in certain other spots.
The not-sufficiently-discussed issues are the mismatch in housing stock composition versus needs (particularly the dearth of affordable housing) and the way policy schemes to increase housing affordability, just like the canard of health care “access”, have increased prices and enriched providers.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/09 ... ation.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the press on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, on July 11, 2025. (Photo by Mehmet Eser/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images/Common Dreams)
‘Devastating’ new jobs report shows Labor Market ‘cracking’ under Trump
Originally published: Common Dreams on September 5, 2025 by Brad Reed (more by Common Dreams) | (Posted Sep 06, 2025)
A federal jobs report released on Friday showed the U.S. economy added a mere 22,000 jobs in August in yet another signal of weakness in the U.S. labor market.
Economists had projected the economy would produce 75,000 jobs on the month, which means that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers released on Friday were well below the consensus estimate.
What’s more, the total number of jobs created in July and June were once again revised downward, and the economy as a whole has added an average of fewer than 30,000 jobs over the last three months.
Heather Long, the chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, put the bad jobs report in stark terms.
“The labor market is going from frozen to cracking,” she said, and then pointed to net job losses in industries including mining, construction, and manufacturing that show significant stress in the blue-collar economy. In fact, the majority of job growth came from the healthcare industry over the last month.
“The U.S. job market is almost entirely dependent on healthcare,” she observed.
That’s not healthy for the economy.
Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan, also said that the new numbers showed a continued deterioration in both the U.S. labor market and the economy as a whole.
“I’m worried,” he said.
The economy was in a good place in late 2024. That’s no longer true. And the trajectory is, at a minimum, concerning. That’s millions of people’s lives, and millions of stories of pain.
Wolfers also zeroed in on the fact that manufacturing employment has been contracting for several months, despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s pledges to lead a manufacturing revitalization.
“But the Administration has made dramatic policy shift to boost manufacturing, and it just ain’t working,” he said.
Manufacturing employment fell [by 12,000 jobs], and is down [78,000 jobs] over the year.
Former BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer, whom Trump fired last month after he baselessly accused her of concocting negative job numbers to harm him politically, argued on Bluesky that the new report’s downward revisions of previous monthly estimates are indicative of a labor market that is very quickly cooling.
“The larger-than-usual downward revision last month was in large part driven by a negative skew in the job growth distribution among late reporting firms,” she said.
That’s unusual, but it’s happened before when the pace of job growth slows rapidly. This print is more evidence that was the case.
Mike Konczal, senior director of policy and research at the Economic Security Project and former member of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, argued the new jobs report demonstrates that “the theory of Trumponomics is failing.”
“The first theory of Trumponomics was that tariffs would build up manufacturing work and federal workforce cuts would free up workers for them,” he explained.
That’s failed. Manufacturing lost jobs almost as fast as the federal workforce (-12 vs. -15K).
Konczal then showed how Trump’s tariffs have hurt his stated goal of bringing back well-paying jobs for blue-collar men, as industries that produce such jobs have also been harmed by his tariffs on foreign goods and materials.
He also pointed out that Trump advisers claimed that mass deportations of undocumented immigrants would create new job openings that native-born workers would rush in to fill.
“But, you guessed it, that’s also failing,” he said.
Amidst the broader weakening, the native-born unemployment rate is at the highest levels since the pandemic.
Elise Gould, the director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, similarly noted that “there have… been sustained losses over recent months in manufacturing, construction, and mining,” in recent months, which she said was “an indication that Trump’s blue-collar renaissance is clearly not happening.”
Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the progressive advocacy organization Groundwork Collaborative, called the jobs report “devastating,” while laying the blame at the feet of Trump.
“Trump’s promises to working families have fallen flat,” he said.
The unemployment rate is the highest in nearly four years, the economy has lost nearly 40,000 manufacturing jobs this year alone, and millions of workers are unable to find full-time employment. Families are getting fewer chances to secure the American dream in Trump’s economy.
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) reacted to the jobs report by issuing a scathing rebuke to Trump and his management of the economy.
“Donald Trump inherited an economy built on years of steady job growth,” he said.
In just seven months, he’s managed to screw it up—just like he’s screwed up everything else in his life. Now, working families are getting squeezed from every direction: higher prices, Republicans’ Big Ugly Law ripping health care away from millions, and a job market that’s slowing down.
https://mronline.org/2025/09/06/devasta ... der-trump/
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US Federal Judge: Trump Isn’t National Police Chief
September 7, 2025
Trump “willfully” violated the Posse Comitatus Act and his deployment of federal troops to L.A. was illegal, a federal judge ruled, Marjorie Cohn reports.
National Guard Troops in Los Angeles, June 2025. (U.S. Northern Command /X)
By Marjorie Cohn
Truthout
Donald Trump appears fixated on “creating a national police force with the president as its chief,” a U.S. federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles to enforce the immigration laws was illegal.
Trump has already sent troops to Washington, D.C., and has also set his sights on Oakland, San Francisco, Chicago, and Baltimore.
Trump will appeal the ruling. The appellate courts will determine whether he will be allowed to use the military as his personal police force notwithstanding the clear command of the Posse Comitatus Act.
In his 52-page decision, Breyer ruled that defendants Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Department of Defense “willfully” violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a 1878 law that prohibits the use of the military to enforce domestic laws.
The act forbids the willful use of “any part of the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a posse comitatus [power of the county] or otherwise to execute the laws.” It only allows exceptions that are expressly authorized by the Constitution or act of Congress, such as the Insurrection Act, which Trump did not invoke.
Breyer concluded that “at Defendants’ orders and contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws” in and around Los Angeles. He ruled:
“Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence.”
On June 7, without the consent of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Trump issued an edict under 10 U.S.C. section 12406 to activate National Guard units for “the enforcement of Federal law and to protect Federal property, at locations where protests against these functions are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations.”
In his edict, Trump wrote that:
“To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
Not limiting his order to California, Trump deployed 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles for 60 days at the discretion of Defense Secretary Hegseth. That number was later increased to 4,000 and the defendants also mobilized 700 Marines to deploy to Los Angeles.
Three months later, 300 members of the National Guard remain stationed in L.A.
“There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence,” Breyer noted. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”
Newsom and the State of California filed this case on June 9, and Breyer then found that Trump, Hegseth, and the Department of Defense illegally deployed federal troops to L.A.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled Breyer and held that the defendants had properly mobilized the troops under 10 U.S.C. section 12406, but the appellate court didn’t weigh in on the plaintiffs’ assertion that defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.
Facts Adduced at Trial
Breyer presided over a trial from August 11 to August 13 that dealt with the merits of the plaintiffs’ Posse Comitatus claim.
It was established at trial that in early June 2025,
“ICE targeted ‘several locations in downtown LA and its immediate surroundings’ that are ‘known to have significant migrant populations and labour-intensive industries’ … Public protests quickly followed.”
Breyer wrote that the L.A. Police Department and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department “responded to these protests and maintained control of the situation.”
Nevertheless, the defendants deployed military forces to L.A. and they were put under the control of Task Force 51, which received training on the permissible scope of their activities under the Posse Comitatus Act.
Their training materials said that “active-duty military personnel may not provide ‘direct, active assistance to civilian law enforcement authorities by performing law enforcement functions,’ unless a Constitutional or an Act of Congress exception specifically permits it.”
Task Force 51 was given a list of “Prohibited Law Enforcement Functions,” which included “active, direct”:
(1) Pursuit, (2) Arrests, (3) Apprehension, (4) Search, (5) Seizure, (6) Security patrols, (7) Traffic control, (8) Riot control, (9) Crowd Control, (10) Evidence collection, (11) Interrogation, and (12) Acting as Informants.
But Task Force 51 troops were orally instructed that 4 of 12 listed functions that were highlighted in red — security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, and riot control — “were subject to a so-called constitutional exception to the Posse Comitatus Act,” Breyer noted.
Moreover, the Defense Department instructed the Northern Command and Task Force 51 “that the President and Secretary’s June 7 memoranda created a constitutional exception to the Posse Comitatus Act and thereby authorized Task Force 51 to engage in the four functions listed in red,” Breyer added.
Task Force 51 troops and some Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents wore camouflage uniforms, which made it difficult to differentiate them at a distance. Task Force 51 troops carried weapons with live ammunition.
“The presence of Task Force 51 deterred engagement by the public, especially by those who might have attempted to hinder or protest an arrest by ICE agents,” Breyer noted.
Breyer Rejects Invention of ‘Constitutional Exception’ to Posse Comitatus
The defendants argued that there is a “constitutional exception” to the Posse Comitatus Act, which gives the president inherent constitutional authority to protect federal property, personnel, and functions.
“Under this ‘constitutional exception,’ as Defendants call it, the President has inherent constitutional authority to protect federal property, federal personnel, and federal functions, so any actions that can be construed as such ‘protection’ are lawful in spite of the Posse Comitatus Act,” Breyer wrote.
“This assertion is not grounded in the history of the Act, Supreme Court jurisprudence on executive authority, or common sense.”
The judge cited the defendants’ knowing contradiction of their own training manuals and their refusal to coordinate with state and local officials.
Breyer noted that Trump, Hegseth, and the Department of Defense
“‘coach[ed]’ federal law enforcement agencies as to what language to use when submitting requests for assistance in an attempt to circumvent the Act … These actions demonstrate that Defendants knew that they were ordering troops to execute domestic law beyond their usual authority. Whether they believed that some constitutional or other exception applied does not matter; ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse.’”
During the trial, Breyer was incredulous at the defendants’ arguments. “Are you saying because the president says it, therefore it is?,” the judge asked. “In other words, we’re going to see federal officers everywhere if the president determines there’s some threat to the safety of a federal agent.”
Breyer Issues a Narrow Injunction
Breyer issued an injunction forbidding the defendants from using the National Guard troops currently deployed to Los Angeles from enforcing the law. Defendants are not required to withdraw the 300 National Guard troops from L.A. And they are not prevented from using the troops for purposes consistent with the Posse Comitatus Act, such as protecting federal property.
Under Breyer’s order, Hegseth and the Department of Defense are enjoined from:
” … deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California, to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants, unless and until Defendants satisfy the requirements of a valid constitutional or statutory exception, as defined herein, to the Posse Comitatus Act.”
Veterans protesting in Washington, D.C., June 2025. (Courtesy of Ann Wright)
This order applies only to the defendants’ use of the National Guard in California, not nationally. Breyer stayed his injunction until September 12, 2025, ostensibly to provide the defendants an opportunity to appeal his ruling.
True to form, Trump reacted to the ruling by calling Breyer “a radical left judge.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who filed the lawsuit, applauded Breyer’s decision. The ruling “affirms that President Trump is not King, and the power of the executive is not boundless,” Bonta said in a news release. He added:
For more than two months, the President has engaged in political theater, using National Guard troops and Marines as pawns to further his anti-immigrant agenda. In doing so, he trampled on one of the very basic foundations of our democracy: That our military be apolitical and the activities of troops on U.S. soil be extremely limited to ensure civil liberties and protect against military overreach.
But in light of the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision giving presidents monarchical powers, a ruling that reverses Breyer’s decision would not be surprising.
“The stakes are huge,” Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, told the Los Angeles Times. “If this District Court decision is reversed by either the 9th Circuit or the Supreme Court or both … the Trump administration would go hog wild.”
Trump, who is already going hog wild on a near daily basis, could then militarize cities across the country and terrorize us all.
The legal tug-of-war on this front, however, is far from over: Today, the Attorney General of Washington, D.C., sued Trump, Hegseth, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, the Secretary of the Army, and the Justice Department, seeking an injunction for violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. The lawsuit calls Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to the streets of D.C. a “military occupation.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/09/07/u ... ice-chief/
******
Can Trump re-adjust in the post-Tianjin SCO moment? Was the timing of China ‘throwing down the SCO gauntlet’ entirely fortuitous?
Alastair Crooke
September 8, 2025
Does Trump even enjoy the leeway from his unseen bonds to seize on nuclear détente as his Nobel Prize story, should he so choose?
The gloves are off. The SCO Summit was a clear demonstration of the reality of power starkly coalescing, on the one hand, and one of power visibly ebbing, on the other. The amazing military parade was the summit counterpart – it spoke loudly: You want to take us on? ‘We are ready’.
China has thrown down the gauntlet with precision timing. (You’d almost think they had planned it that way …). ‘History is being written – in Russian and Chinese ink’, observed one Russian commentator.
Western political systems are in turmoil, beleaguered by populist politics promising everything, yet lacking the tools by which to resolve anything. Western alliances are riven by doubt and uncertainty, with political stability fissuring under pressure from the failures of western borrow and spend policies. Even The Economist concedes that “a new reality is taking hold”.
Trump’s reaction to the SCO spectacle was a snarky dig at some perceived anti-American ‘conspiracy’. Yet, if he feels himself to be the ‘wallflower’ to this gathering of ‘friends’, it is because he chose not to go to Tianjin. He has only himself to blame. Should the SCO become defined in the western psyche as anti-western, then that too will be largely down to Trump – and how he chooses to frame the U.S.’ future.
Xi made this latter point in his opening speech: “Humanity is again faced with a choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, and win-win outcomes; or zero-sum games”.
Unfortunately, Trump is probably too far down the road of pursuing American ‘exceptionalist greatness’ to expect much of a nuanced response from him. But then again, Trump often does seem to defy the obvious.
The default psychological mode of the West will be defensively antagonistic. The U.S. clearly has not been prepared psychologically to go onto any sort of equal footing with these SCO powers. Centuries of colonial superiority have shaped a culture where the only possible model is hegemony and the imposition of pro-Western dependency.
To acknowledge China, Russia or India as having ‘detached’ from the ‘Rules-based Order’ and constructed a separated non-western sphere clearly implies accepting the end of western global hegemony. And it means accepting too, that the hegemonic era as a whole is over. The U.S. and European ruling strata are categorically not in the mood for this. The European ruling strata, like true believers, continue to bristle with hostility toward Russia.
So for the Europeans, there is no question that they too felt something judder, but did not understand what exactly had caused the tremor – and thus decided on rudeness as a response. Friedrich Merz stated his belief: “Putin is a war criminal. He is perhaps the most serious war criminal of our time that we have seen on a large scale. We must be clear about how to deal with war criminals: There is no room for leniency”.
The reality (and the little that we know) of what has emerged from China’s Tiananmen Square parade will undoubtedly cause consternation in Washington, Brussels and London: President Xi declared China’s rise to be “unstoppable”, whilst showcasing over 10,000 troops marching in perfect synchronicity and revealing impressive new Chinese weaponry (a nuclear, 20,000 km range ICBM; a laser-powered interceptor and giant underwater drones).
Most notably, President Xi (also for the first time) showcased the PLA’s land, sea, and air-based nuclear force – a complete and deadly triad.
At the victory celebration parade, Xi stood proudly with his U.S.-sanctioned allies, and sat on the dais with Kim Jong Un directly to his left and Putin to his right – a symbolic line up few can have expected. Equally, the bonhomie evident between Putin, Xi and Prime Minister Modi clearly was real and not contrived.
The practical output from the summit too will nonplus the West. The announcement of the Siberia 2 pipeline, Blomberg notes, effectively puts an end to plans for U.S. ‘energy dominance’.
As Blomberg’s editorial put it, “China may now stop importing more than half of its foreign LNG, and by the early 2030s, the share of Russian gas in China’s needs could reach 20%. Analysts quickly calculated the implementation of the Power of Siberia 2 project is equivalent to a drop in demand of about 40 million tons of LNG per year”.
“This means that many LNG production projects, which the U.S. had bet on, no longer make sense”.
What will be the other sequellae? The U.S. and European dark State will not take these events lightly. In their hostility, their anger will likely focus on Russia first and foremost (via Ukraine), and in parallel, via Russia and China’s strategic ally, Iran.
During the summit, Xi proposed the creation of a new international security and economic order, explicitly challenging the existing U.S.-led institutional system. He described the initiative as a step toward building a multipolar world. And having announced it – the first specific piece of SCO ‘action’ followed directly.
China and Russia joined Iran in rejecting a European initiative to reinstate UN sanctions on Tehran through the ‘snapback mechanism’. A letter signed jointly by the Foreign Ministers of China, Russia and Iran, and addressed to the UN Secretary General, stated in uncompromising terms that for the E3 to trigger ‘snapback’ provision “clearly contravenes the resolution, and therefore, is by default, legally and procedurally flawed. The E3’s course both abuses the authority and functions of the UN Security Council – whilst misleading its members as well as the international community concerning the root causes of breakdown in the implementation of the JCPOA and the UNSCR 2231”.
Harsh language, which nonetheless may not prove sufficient to stop the sanctions snapback from coming into effect in 30 days from the 28 August transmission of the E3 letter to the Security Council.
The E3 claim that their action actually provides ‘space’ for Iran to negotiate a return to full JCPOA compliance – but this is belied by the E3 tying the 30 day negotiation period to new demands for Iran’s missile inventory and its foreign policy posture to be integral to any agreement. They know that these further elements will never be accepted by Iran.
The E3 therefore effectively are setting up Iran for military action through the introduction of unrealisable conditionality.
It is clear that China and Russia’s statement implies that they will not comply with any snapback sanctions should they be imposed on Iran.
Trump periodically claims that he does not want war with Iran, but nonetheless, he already struck Iran’s nuclear facilities (on 22nd June).
The ‘snapback framing’ with its punitive conditionality seemingly intended to incur a breakdown in diplomacy did not arise out of the blue.
Recall that it was Trump, who in February 2025, signed a National Presidential Memorandum (a legally binding injunction) that U.S. objectives are to be that ‘Iran be denied a nuclear weapon; intercontinental ballistic missiles and that ‘Iran’s network and campaign of regional aggression be neutralized’”; that the Treasury Secretary should implement maximum sanctions pressure on Iran; and the U.S. representative to the UN should work with key allies to complete the ‘snapback’ of international sanctions and restrictions on Iran, whilst holding Iran accountable for its breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (amongst many other provisions included in the memorandum)’.
The February 2025 Presidential Memorandum set the table towards either eventual military action against Iran – or Iran’s total capitulation. Denying Iran its missile defence and links to regional allies was always a non-starter. Yet here these demands are resurfacing again with the latest E3 demands. Who’s behind this? Trump, and behind him – Netanyahu.
Round one on Iran has already been tried, and now, forces behind the scenes are pressing for a further round. They see Iran strengthening, Israel weakening, and the window of opportunity shortening. They are in a hurry.
The other strand of western retribution to the SCO ‘impudence’ in standing aloof from western primacy likely will take shape in Ukraine. More pressure, military and financial on Russia, will be the demand by the Europeans and Zelensky.
Russia no doubt briefed colleagues at Tianjin that it intends to convey the message to Trump that Russia will be continuing the Special Military Operation until all the set tasks and goals are fully achieved (since Washington seems unable to control the Ukrainians and Europeans). Should matters take a different course, Russia stands ready for a diplomatic path to end the conflict – but on its terms. The primary effort however, will be that of securing victory on the battlefield. Should Trump escalate in response, Russia will respond appropriately.
Trump subsists under huge pressures and (unknown) hooks. But what we have seen again and again with Trump is that he defies the obvious. He manages to survive things – to outlast them, and indeed to thrive in some sense precisely because of them. Adversity is his lifeblood. He has that inexplicable indomitable quality that those who know him well claim to feel.
Can Trump re-adjust in the post-Tianjin moment? Will a continuation of his demand for U.S. entitlement to financial hegemony now lead – in the face of a defiant SCO bloc – to a weakening of America? Was the timing of China ‘throwing down the gauntlet’ entirely fortuitous? Or, is the West’s financial status more brittle than generally understood?
Does Trump even enjoy the leeway from his unseen bonds to seize on nuclear détente as his Nobel Prize story, should he so choose?
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... ortuitous/
Too many of these professional diplomacy types seem to find it necessary to believe that Trump has most of his marbles most of the time. That much of the weird and otherwise inexplicable pronouncements are clever 5-D chess or a 'cunning plan' whereas sometimes what you see is what you get...In this case a disjointed mind driven entirely by it's ego needs.
Putin and Lavrov however do not have this need nor the luxury to squeeze Trumpian behavior into a conventional diplomatic framework. They know he's nuts and act accordingly.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Sylvia Demarest: Seven Months into the Trump Administration, a Report on Militarism, War, and the Prospects for Peace
September 8, 2025
By Sylvia Demarest, Substack, 8/26/25
In his inaugural address, President Donald J. Trump expressed a desire to be a “peacemaker and a unifier.” He emphasized that his administration would focus on restoring confidence and pride in the nation while aiming to “end wars and prevent new conflicts.” Trump pledged to create peace by building “the strongest military the world has ever seen,” indicating that military strength would be a key component of his approach to achieving peace. He stated, “Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable.” This is similar to past claims of “peace through strength” forced on every US president by militarism. To back up his pledge of “peace through strength”, the Big Beautiful Bill Act added $150 billion to the annual budget of the Department of Defense. This means the US has a trillion dollar defense budget, and funds an industrial weapons monopoly that produces overpriced, exceptionally complex weapons, while promoting the sale and use of these weapons around the world. By any measure, the creation of an entity this destructive, is objectively insane.
US diplomatic and military history since WW2 is a history of unbridled war and bullying. Every day, President Trump seems to issue a new threat. But the world is changing. Economic power is shifting to the east and military power may be shifting as well. In this environment, “building the strongest military the world has ever seen” may no longer be economically and technologically feasible. The old tactics of bullying and threating war could backfire. Also, the power of the national security must somehow be managed. Could this “tug of war” explain the never ending “Trumpian chaos”? Some observers think it does, I have no idea.
Every US president who has tried to promote peace has faced pressure and opposition. First from Military Keynesianism to both sell and use up the weapons the weapons manufacturers produce. Next, from a National Security State that pressures every president to promote war, sell weapons, and promote US hegemony. We are witnessing massive personnel changes in DC, both in the military hierarchy, in the intelligence community, and now even at the Federal Reserve; but the goal of these changes is unclear, and the power of the national security state cannot be discounted. Take the example of John Bolton, National Security Advisor in the first Trump administration. Formerly untouchable, Bolton’s home and office were just raided by the FBI. Bolton is typical of the deep state warmongers who populate Washington DC. His advice to President Trump during Trump’s first term serves as an example of the warmongering militarism US presidents must deal with. This is from Bolton’s book: The Room Where It Happened.
From James Carden: “In the span of just several pages, Bolton recalls that at one time or another he has counseled Trump to launch a preventive strike on Iran’s nuclear program; scrap the Paris climate agreement; tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (aka the Iranian nuclear deal); pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty; withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council; defund the UN Relief Works Agency; prepare a preemptive strike against North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile program; and consider the idea of a sinister, conspiratorial link between Iran, North Korea, and Syria.”
Carden continues: “After a litany like this, one can’t help but recall MacGeorge Bundy’s observation about the hawkish Washington columnist Joseph Alsop, that he had “never known him to go to any area where blood could be spilled that he didn’t come back and say more blood. That is his posture toward the universe.”
Taking the President’s stated goal to be a “peacemaker “at face value, this essay examines the impact of US militarism on both the national debt and our society, looks at Trump’s claim to have ended 6 wars, and briefly examines the potential for peace given the ongoing wars and the prospect for new wars.
The cost of Militarism –the impact on the US national debt
According to up-to-date data from the US Treasury on the budget shortfall, the federal deficit in the United States for 2025, is $1,628,515,019,238. This number represents how much federal spending exceeded revenue for the last budget year. I am writing down the full number arithmetically so you can see the true size. The total US national debt now exceeds $37 trillion–that’s 37 plus 12 zeros! In 2024 debt service i.e. interest paid on the national debt toped 1 trillion for the first time in our history. These annual deficit numbers are greater than the Gross Domestic Product of most countries. The US finances this deficit by selling treasury securities. The ability to sell those securities, especially to foreigners, depends heavily on the dollar’s role as a global reserve currency, and on the US maintaining a strong economy.
There are three big ticket items in the federal budget that account for most of the spending: the cost of militarism, the cost of health care and pharmaceuticals, and beginning last year, the interest paid on the national debt. As Yogie Bera is claimed to have said: “if something can’t go on forever, it will stop.” What would the end of our ability to finance these budget deficits mean for the welfare of the people of our country? At best, a serious decline in our standard of living, at worst, hyperinflation, chaos and civil war.
If annual cost of the Department of Defense, over the last 80 years, is added to the cost of the wars the US has fought over that time, our current national debt represents the accumulated cost of this history of militarism and war. As discussed in several articles on this Substack, since the end of WW2 the US has been captured by militarism and has become economically dependent on military spending i.e. on “Military Keynesianism”. The societal cost, as represented by the decline of economic fairness, along with our growing economic and social dysfunction, has been documented on this Substack. The extreme concentration of wealth and power in the US (and the West) is a direct result of the triumph of militarism, along with neoliberalism (financialization), and the monopolization of the US economy. The resulting dysfunction is manifest at every level of our society, economic, social, legal, and psychological. Yet, sadly, despite the cost, blood lust, war, and greed, continues to dominate our government.
President Trump’s first 7 months
Air strikes: In the first seven months of his second term, Donald Trump has conducted 529 airstrikes in over 240 locations across the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. The exact number of countries targeted is not specified, but the airstrikes have been extensive, with a significant focus on regions like Yemen including the strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. This is almost as many air strikes as conducted by the Biden Administration in four years.
Most of these strikes targeted the “Iran-backed Houthis “known as Ansar Allah, a Zaydi Shia Islamist political and military group from Yemen that emerged in the 1990’s. Ansar Allah opposes the Yemen government; they control part of Yemen and have blocked Israeli access to the Red Sea in opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza. They are one of the few groups to actively oppose Israel, despite the cost.
Ending 6 wars: President Trump claims to have ended 6 wars in the last 7 months. For these efforts, he wants a Nobel Peace Prize. Trump is actively lobbying the Nobel committee. Let’s examine each claim:
Egypt-Ethiopia: This goes back to Trump’s first term when the two countries were feuding over a huge hydropower dam. There was never a war nor a peace agreement over this issue.
India-Pakistan: Trump announced that the two nuclear power countries had reached a cease fire in May. India does not credit Trump with brokering the halt in the fighting.
The Congo and Rwanda: A treaty was announced by Trump in May, including opening the door to Western and US investment including potential access to certain minerals. Secretary of State Rubio was credited with bringing the parties together.
Cambodia-Thailand: Leaders of the two countries agreed to a ceasefire on July 28 after five deadly days of fighting, Reuters reported. Trump urged them to negotiate a ceasefire or else trade deals with the governments would stall.
Armenia-Azerbaijan: This one is complicated and potentially related to a new attack on Iran. The agreement includes what is called “The Trump Route”. This route splits Armenia and Azerbaijan and terminates on the border with Iran. The treaty gives the US exclusive development rights. This is not a move that will promote peace. Iran is opposed and the agreement would provide the US/NATO/Israel with access to both the Iranian border and the Caspian Sea, potentially destabilizing the entire area. Still, the two former Soviet republics and Trump signed a peace agreement at the White House on Aug. 8, ending a decades-long war. The leaders of the countries gave Trump ample praise for his efforts at the ceremony.
The sneak attack on Iran: In the boldest claim of all, Trump took credit for ending the 12-day war with Iran, a war he helped start! Trump announced on June 23 a ceasefire between the two countries after the U.S. joined Israel in bombing Iranian nuclear sites. I doubt that hostilities against Iran are over.
Ending The Ongoing Wars
Ukraine–Ending the Ukraine war in 1 day: There is zero evidence that the positions of either Russia or Ukraine have budged since the Alaska meeting on the 15th, or after the White House meeting with Zelensky and the 7 representatives of the EU on the 18th. The parties are still far apart, and the war will continue so long as the US and NATO continue to provide money, weapons, and targeting support to Ukraine. In a speech last Sunday marking Ukrainian independence, Zelensky pledged not to give up land for peace, and to reclaim Crimea by force. Regarding Russia, there were suggestions that maybe Putin will relent and not insist that Ukraine withdraw its forces from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson should Ukraine Russian withdraw from the Donbass, as a prelude to a ceasefire. Unfortunately, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, did not support this claim in a recent interview. At the White House meeting on the 18th, Zelensky reiterated his position that all territory, including Crimea must be returned to Ukraine, and Russia be forced to pay billions in reparations. This proposal will not end the war.
On August 7th Gallup published polling results showing that 69% of Ukrainians favored a “negotiated end to the war as soon as possible”. This is a radical change from 2022 when only 22% supported a negotiated end to the war.
For those of you interested in the history anti-Russian meddling by the CIA in Ukraine, I recommend an essay by Kit Klarenberg: “Declassified: The CIA’s Covert Ukraine Invasion Plan.” Without going into details, the article discusses the planning that went into promoting a civil war in Ukrainian, creating the conditions that forced Russia to intervene.
Perhaps the Alaska meeting was designed to defang or delay the demand by Senator Lindsey Graham that the US return to tariff and sanctions threats. These threats did not go over well with India, Brazil, and China.
Ukraine continues to be supported with money and arms. Ukraine has been promised long-range missiles from the US and NATO countries, assuming they are presently available for delivery. Ukraine has also been promised assistance in building missiles in Ukrainian. One missile factory was just destroyed by Russia. Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones and missiles have had some success in impacting oil supplies and prices within Russia with drone strikes. It is claimed that some of these drones may have been fired from Finland and/or the Balkans–dangerous if true.
Opening Communications with Russia: There are many reasons other than ending the Ukraine war for the US to reopen communications with Russia. Communications were completely cut off by the Biden Administration when the war began in February of 2022. Even in the height of the Cold War the US and Russia communicated with each other. Cutting off communications was dangerous and unnecessary.
One big reason for the US and Russia to communicate is the Artic and its resources. Remember, the US offered to buy Greenland and suggested that Canada become the 51ststate? Look at a map–if this were to happen, the US and Russia would share a border with the Arctic of almost equal size and would dominate the region. Right now, Russia is far ahead of the US in developing the Arctic’s potential. Russia has military bases there, oil fields, and operates very effective ice breakers giving her year-round access.
Then there are other resources and expertise Russia possesses. Rosatom has perfected the nuclear fuel cycle, meaning nuclear waste can be reprocessed and reused. Rosatom also builds advanced nuclear facilities. Meanwhile, China has built and is operating a Thorium molten salt reactor that will not melt down. If the US can partner with Russia, we can greatly expand our use of nuclear power.
Otherwise, there is little evidence of concrete change in the US/Russia relationship.
Israel–The ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank: All modern wars are horribly destructive and everything possible should be done to prevent them. One of the most unbearable conflicts today is the ongoing destruction of Gaza and the ongoing starving of two million Palestinian people, if many Palestinians still survive.
This war is a prime example of what money and unaccountable power can accomplish. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have been directly involved in supporting and facilitating this genocidal war, and in helping silence those who are opposed. Congressional delegations from both political parties traveled to Israel this summer and were photographed with Netanyahu. This is despite the fact that what is happening in Gaza represents one of the most monstrous misdeeds of Western imperialism in the 21st century.
Slowly the façade of “western civilization” is being removed, and we are being forced to acknowledge that this ongoing atrocity is the result of deliberate policy–a policy supported not only by Zionism, but by the US, the UK, and much of the EU. It reflects an imperial policy that has been in effect for a long time. As Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli explicitly statedin the 19th Century regarding the objective of the British Empire: “Gain and hold territories that possess the largest supplies of the basic raw materials. Establish naval bases around the world to control the sea and commerce lanes. Blockade and starve into submission any nation or group of nations that opposes this empire control program.”
Today, the Zionists of Israel, with the help of our government, are again using blockade and starvation as a weapon. The wealth and power of Zionist billionaires, including their ability to destroy anyone who dissents, has acted as a shield against accountability.
The destruction of the indigenous population of Palestine may be another step in recently reiterated plan for “Greater Israel”. The goal of “Greater Isreal” is to rule the Middle East and its energy resources on behalf of Zionist and Western interests. War with Iran is needed to take control of Iran’s oil as part of “the plan” to counter and control China. To achieve these goals, several million Palestinians must die or be relocated, Lebanon, Syria, and parts of Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia must be conquered, and their occupants expelled to be replaced by Zionists.
This sounds crazy but replacement is happening right now in the West Bank. 25 Jewish settlers from Canada and the U.S. arrived in the occupied Palestinian territories today, moving into homes and land taken from Palestinians. “Taken from” means that violence was used to steal Palestinian property without paying any compensation. After all, 93% of Palestine has been stolen from Palestinians since 1948 without one penny of compensation being paid to any of the Palestinians who owned the land and homes. This is what wealth and power permits–the ability to act with complete impunity.
The prospect for new wars
War with Iran: There are indications that the Israeli/US war against Iran could begin again at any time. President Trump has threatened war if Iran does not end its nuclear program. Iran has refused to do this. War with Iran is could envelope the entire Middle East.
There were recent reports of Israel wanting to launch a preemptive war against Iran–with US weapons and support, of course. Israeli Colonel Jacques Neriah, a former intelligence official and a special analyst for the Middle East, warned on Sunday of an impending “second round” of war against Iran as Tehran weighs a revenge attack on Tel Aviv. “There is a sense that a war is coming, that Iranian revenge is in the works. The Iranians will not be able to live with this humiliation for long,” Neriah told Udi Segal and Anat Davidov on 103FM.
“Israel must launch a preemptive strike against Iran in its present state, as a large part of its military capabilities is paralyzed,” he added.
Let’s recall the events of the 12-day war that Israel started. Israel launched a sneak attack, while Iran was engaged in peace negotiations with the US. The sneak attack was designed to assassinate the entire Iranian civilian and military leadership–a decapitation strike that almost succeeded. Now, Israel wants the US to go to war with Iran to finish Iran’s destruction. Given Zionist power in the US, Israel may successfully goad the US into another war. After all, the US has been fighting Israel’s wars in the Middle East since 911. These are wars of choice, based on lies, that destabilized the Middle East, killed millions, caused in thousands of US casualties, and added trillions to our national debt. Why would the US fight another war for Israel?
Wars in this hemisphere: The Trump Administration has taken 2 actions that could lead to war in this hemisphere. This includes a possible war against Venezuela, or strikes against drug cartels in countries like Mexico, Columbia, and Venezuela.
Drug cartels: President Trump has signed a directive on the use of military force against drug cartels. Here’s the New York Times: “President Trump has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organizations, according to people familiar with the matter.”
“The decision to bring the American military into the fight is the most aggressive step so far in the administration’s escalating campaign against the cartels. It signals Mr. Trump’s continued willingness to use military forces to carry out what has primarily been considered a law enforcement responsibility to curb the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs.”
“The order provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels.”
“U.S. military officials have started drawing up options for how the military could go after the groups, the people familiar with the conversations said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations.”
War with Venezuela: The Trump Administration has placed a $50 million reward for the arrest of the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and sent a flotilla of ships to threaten the county. President Trump last week ordered at least three Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyers, a submarine and other assets to head towards Venezuela. Earlier this week Reuters also reported that, in addition to the destroyers, 4,000 marines aboard an Amphibious Ready Group were also sent.
The US has been at odds with Venezuela for decades, and has supported coups and other regime change efforts, first against Hugo Chavez, and now against Nicholas Maduro. The cause is a wave of nationalizations of the oil industry and sanctions, resulting in defaults and the US seizing Venezuelan assets, including Citgo. The US has also supported various “governments in exile” using confiscated Venezuelan assets. One government in exile was headed by Juan Guaidó. The asset confiscation and debt defaults amount to over $18 billion. Bids are being taken now for a forced sale of Citgo.
Meanwhile, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves on earth totaling 303 billion barrels, larger that Saudi Arabia at 267 barrels. US refiners are optimized to use this heavy crude; they need and continue to buy Venezuelan crude. US refiners, working for years with Citgo and Venezuela, spent billions on refineries to process this crude. The sanctions the US imposed on Venezuela has hurt margins because alternatives from Canada and Mexico do not work as well in these refineries. Venezuelan crude is a strategic asset for US refiners. These refiners include some of the largest oil companies in the world.
It is difficult to understand why this flotilla of war ships, along with marines, are being sent to Venezuela given the success of recent diplomatic negotiations that resulted in the resumption of the oil trade. This resumption marks a significant shift in bilateral energy relations after years of sanctions and restricted trade, and has created a pathway for Venezuelan oil tankers to once again deliver their cargo to U.S. refineries. Venezuelan crude is on its way to the US–why does the US need to go to war with Venezuela?
Conclusion
So far there is no peace and not much unity. Ongoing wars have not been ended, and several countries face new threats of war. At some point the people of the United States will have to step in and impose sanity on the warmongers if we are to survive as a nation. This Substack has spent the last 5 months outlining how neoliberalism, militarism, and monopolization has so concentrated wealth and power that most people can no longer afford the cost of living. Our emphasis should be on restoring economic fairness and opportunity, not starting a world war. War is no longer a realistic option and our emphasis on militarism increasingly represents a waste of precious assets. Modern war holds the potential to destroy civilization itself. I keep saying–drive around and imagine bombs exploding all around you–this will happen unless we come to our senses as a nation.
The President of Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, has discussed his dealings with 4 US Presidents since 2000. President Putin reported that while the US president changed, the foreign policy of the US did not. Worse, President Putin reported that every US president he dealt with was unable to carry out the agreements they reached after returning to the US.
Perhaps this is because the decision to go to war with Russia was made well before the Maidan coup of February 2014 and western warmongers were waiting for the opportunity to go to war with Russia? Well, they have had their opportunity. As a result of the Ukraine war, the West has forced Russia, once again, to become a great power with global reach. Unlike the US and the West, Russia has the resources and the industrial capacity to sustain a war economy.
The goal of western militarism was outlined by the Rand Corporation in 2019–to overextend and unbalance Russia. While this has yet to happen to Russia, the West now seems overextended and unbalanced. Meanwhile, Russia continues to increase her industrial capacity. This Russophobic hatred of Russia has damaged the economies of the European community, yet the leaders of Europe’s largest economies refuse to demand a peaceful solution to the war in Ukraine.
If the oil reserves of Russia, Iran, Venezuela and the arctic are added together, the outlines of a plan to control the world economy and sustain US hegemony becomes clear. Given the growing power of Russia and China, the US and the West appear to have lost the opportunity to achieve such a plan.
There are other dangerous considerations at work that demand peace. The US is running dangerously low on stockpiles of vital conventional weapons. This could limit US options for conventional war. The lack of conventional weapons could lead to the use of nuclear weapons–not by Russia, China, Iran, or Venezuela–but by the United States and/or Israel. This means that the risk of nuclear war is currently greater than most people realize. It is time for peace to prevail. Is President Trump serious about peace? Does Trump, or any US President, have the power to make peace? We are about to find out.
https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/09/syl ... for-peace/
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More Trump Administration Circular Firing Squad with Investor-Spooking ICE Raid on Hyundai-LG Plant
Posted on September 9, 2025 by Yves Smith
When you think the Trump Administration has hit Peak Stoopid, it always manages to outdo itself. Today’s example is the ICE raid on a Hyundai-LG Energy Solutions facility in Georgia, in which Korean workers, many of them management types or specialists, were hauled away in wrist and some even in ankle chains, as if they were violent thugs who needed to be restrained. As we’ll explain, if the Administration is to get anywhere with its reindustraialization fantasy, it needs to bring in skilled foreign workers at the technical, supervisory, and managerial levels. Good luck with that now.
Mind you, as we will also explain, this factory had had a bad safety record, including deaths, and there are allegations that some of the construction workers were Koreans brought in on visas that did not permit manual labor. So Hyundai was not doing the best job of running this startup and if Administration charges are borne out, may have been been abusing these low-level workers. However, a significant number of the expats were technicians and seasoned supervisors.
Something folks are missing here: this raid wasn’t about “illegals taking American jobs.” It was about ICE storming the Hyundai–LG battery plant in Georgia, part of a $7.6B Metaplant project that isn’t even operational yet.
They dragged out more than 300 South Korean Show More
The open question is what this self-sabotage implies about Trump priorities. It’s not hard to surmise that normalizing violent repression is more important than any other aim. And if one is cynical, the reason for targeting a Korean plant is that there would be less of a reaction to hauling off individuals with more social status than, say, workers at meatpacking plants, if they were foreign. In other words, this is moving up the food chain in terms of who the authoritarians are targeting.
Let’s first look at the raid and then its implications. From CNN:
More than 500 federal, state and local agents participated in the operation that ended with the arrest of 475 people in Ellabell, approximately 25 miles west of Savannah, Georgia. The small community was shaken by what was the largest raid so far in the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown on US workplaces.
Let’s stop and point out that this is a huge show of force. CNN focused on Latinos included in the arrests, likely due to the ability to find some family members who could provide more detail. However:
The majority of those held are South Korean nationals, [Steven] Schrank [special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Georgia and Alabama] said, adding he did not have a breakdown of the nationalities of those arrested. Over 300 of the people arrested were South Korean, the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister Cho Hyun said on Saturday.
The CNN story features Schrank asserting the detainees had overstayed visas or did not have them. One of the CNN interviewees disputed that, as have others. From Associated Press:
A lawyer for several workers detained at a Hyundai factory in Georgia says many of the South Koreans rounded up in the immigration raid are engineers and equipment installers brought in for the highly specialized work of getting an electric battery plant online.
Atlanta immigration attorney Charles Kuck, who represents four of the detained South Korean nationals, told The Associated Press on Monday that many were doing work that is authorized under the B-1 business visitor visa program. They had planned to be in the U.S. for just a couple of weeks and “never longer than 75 days,” he said.
“The vast majority of the individuals that were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that were South Korean were either there as engineers or were involved in after-sales service and installation,” Kuck said.
And to provide more background, the plant was under construction. These experts were to help it get up and running…so it could employ Americans:
1/ Something that's not being reported much re: ICE crackdown at Hyundai-LG Georgia battery factory: Korean companies investing billions cannot get proper visas, are then criminalised for bringing skilled workers to fill gaps American labour cannot.
Sentiment is one of betrayal.[/img]
Now it turns out that the raid looks like the result of a MAGA stunt gone bad. Rolling Stone was fast out with the story:
Tori Branum is a Marine Corps veteran, firearms instructor, and Republican candidate for Georgia’s 12th congressional district.
She’s also a proud “America first” supporter of President Donald Trump. On Thursday, as agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security were still carrying out a raid at a Hyundai plant in rural Bryan County, just outside the district Branum is running to serve, she expressed pride in something else: her purported role in causing the raid, which resulted in the arrest of 450 people, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
There had been safety problems, including three deaths, and OSHA had multiple investigations open at the plant. Two of the deaths were forklift accidents. There are also claims from the Administration that some (many?) of the Korean workers bought in on short-term business visas were doing performing manaul labor, which is not allowed on those visa categories.
ICE announced an investigation into “human trafficking” at the site, which sounds like a stretch until you understand that, per labor reporter Mike Elk, that:
During previous Democratic administrations, workplace safety officials in federal courts routinely argued that “human trafficking” existed when an immigrant worker’s legal status was tied to an employer that was asking them to violate labor laws. Due to workers’ dependence on their employer for their immigration status and in violation of labor laws, workplace safety advocates have argued that such practices constitute “human trafficking.”
[Labor reporter and South Korea expert] Tim Shorrock says that he doesn’t necessarily trust the Trump Administration’s spin on the raid, but does say there is reason for concern if workers on ESTA visas were illegally forced into dangerous construction work.
“That’s a situation of exploitation,” says Shorrock, who says that unions in both Korea and the United States should be paying close attention to the working conditions at Hyundai’s plant in Savannah, Georgia.
One has to wonder about the concern for the workers at this plant, when as we recounted many years ago, abuse of H1-B visa working as IT contractors is endemic. That is not to say labor abuses at foreign-owned plants are not serious, but that enforcement this selective looks sus.
And of course there is another side to this story:
1/ Something that's not being reported much re: ICE crackdown at Hyundai-LG Georgia battery factory: Korean companies investing billions cannot get proper visas, are then criminalised for bringing skilled workers to fill gaps American labour cannot.
Sentiment is one of betrayal.
But even if the ICE version of events is closer to the whole truth than the Hyundai version, the Administration’s apparent keen need to put this plant crackdown as an ICE raid looks to be yet another backfire, in that Team Trump seems to understand only domination, and not calibrated but effective use of power.
If the concern was abuse of relatively short-term work visas, how about calling management and saying, “You have a month to clean this up, otherwise ICE will pay a visit”? Recall I worked extensively with the Japanese in their heyday back in the 1980s. It was well known among the foreign firms operating in Tokyo that the Ministry of Finance could (and would) completely paralyze their operations by sending in a team for a MoF audit (the first step was to blow a whistle loudly; the white-gloved team would run in and slap seals on all the files and halt all work on personal computers). And therefore a threat of a MoF audit did lead to compliance. In other words, there were likely “show of authority” moves available that would have gotten the attention of Hyuandai management that wouldn’t have given Team Trump yet another press clip that could have brought the operation to heel.
And keep in mind that despite the concern, which may be justified, about mistreatment of Koreans doing construction work at the plant, some (we don’t know how many) were skilled workers necessary to get the equipment installed and shake the operations down. Although it is an entirely different type of production, my father was one of the most seasoned managers/executives in the paper mill industry in running startups and major expansions. They were not easy. A successful startup would take two years and burn 20% of the capital cost. An unsuccessful one would hemorrhage cash pretty much forever. And all of these startups required bringing in experts from the vendors to help with design, installation, and training.
The Financial Times has as its lead story a href=”https://archive.is/3dVbf” rel=”nofollow”>Workers in shackles, companies in shock: Georgia raid spooks foreign investors in US. From its account:
Multinational companies with foreign employees in the US have sought legal advice and paused some travel after federal authorities arrested hundreds of South Korean workers at an electric-car battery plant in Georgia last week.
The detention of 475 people, mostly South Korean nationals, at the Hyundai-LG Energy Solution factory under construction in Ellabell, Georgia, last week represented a new front in the White House’s broad crackdown on illegal immigration.
Video released by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed people shackled at the ankles, wrists and waist outside the plant, which forms part of the Trump administration’s push to expand manufacturing in the country. ICE said that in its execution of a federal warrant it found individuals were “fraudulently using visitors’ visas”.
Let’s stop here. Do you seriously think these workers from South Korea got their own visas? The few times I needed a visa to travel for work, my employer got it. Oh, and I was told by McKinsey to lie in one case too, on a four-month assignment to the UK, and claim I was there on holiday. So why weren’t employers read the riot act instead?
Back to the story:
Other immigration lawyers said that they believed many of the arrests were of individuals who entered the US on so-called B-1 visas used by foreigners for business meetings, or had arrived under a related visa waiver programme. Many of those arrested were working for subcontractors….
But the rules around these terms of entry have been somewhat ambiguous. “It may be an aggressive use of the B-1 category for business meetings, or it could be an over-reach by ICE, and they may have taken a more restrictive view of what’s allowed as a business visitor than what’s in the regulations,” said Dan Maranci, a partner at WR Immigration, a law firm.
Charles Kuck, founding partner of Kuck Baxter, an Atlanta-based immigration law firm, said he was representing some of the people arrested in Ellabell. Many of the Korean workers were in the US under a visa provision that allows vendors to a US business to help install equipment, he said….
Tami Overby, an international trade consultant with DGA Group and former president of the US-Korea Business Council, said that big foreign companies had halted some travel to the US as they review the legal ramifications of the Georgia crackdown.
“When this happened, it was so unexpected and so shocking to see hundreds of Korean workers looking like criminals,” she said. “Those videos and those photos have played not just in Korea but in Japan, in Taiwan, in other trading partners of the US who also have large investment going on in the US.”….
DGA Group’s Overby said that the industries most at risk of being swept up in a dragnet over business visitor visas were those that bring in local talent. The need is particularly acute in sectors where US workers lack the technical expertise compared with those in Asia, such as battery manufacturing, shipbuilding and semiconductors…
Taiwanese executives said the raid sent a chill through the foreign business community. “Maybe Trump did it for some political reason, to send a message to the South Korean government,” said one. “The US government has become very different and unpredictable now.”
And this raid happened as US-South Korean negotiations over $350 billion of South Korean investment were already starting to go pear-shaped. From Bloomberg:
Speaking at a forum on Tuesday, Kim Yong-beom, director of national policy at South Korea’s presidential office, said Seoul has been emphasizing to US officials that it cannot accept the same terms as Japan’s $550 billion investment pledge finalized last week, citing the disparity in the size of the two economies and the potential repercussions on the foreign exchange market….
The $350 billion fund is a central pillar of the trade deal that preserved a 15% tariff on imports from South Korea, but the two countries remain divided over how the fund will operate. Kim said last month that the investment pledge would be structured mainly as loan guarantees rather than direct capital injections.
Mind you, there is yet no sign that this agreement won’t get done, but the US and Japan found it difficult to get to a detailed memorandum.
And there are forms of possible backlash:
In response to the ICE raid at the Hyundai plant in Georgia that resulted in detaining around 300 South Koreans, one lawmaker in Seoul suggests looking into U.S. nationals teaching English on a tourist visa in S. Korea
So yet again, to invoke a saying based on Sun Tsu’s teachings, “Tactics with no strategy is the noise before the defeat.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/09 ... plant.html
******
President Donald Trump speaks as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg listens during a dinner in the State Dining Room of the White House, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]
Trump’s dictatorship and the American oligarchy
Originally published: World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on September 5, 2025 by Andre Damon (more by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)) | (Posted Sep 09, 2025)
On Thursday, President Donald Trump held a public dinner with representatives from five of the six largest companies in the world—all multinational technology companies headquartered in America—pledging to expand their profits and accepting their praise and thanks.
Trump, on his best behavior, pledged to “make it a lot easier” for the assembled billionaires to “get your permits.” The oligarchs, in turn, profusely expressed their appreciation for Trump in “supporting our companies instead of fighting with them,” as Google co-founder Sergey Brin put it.
The executives thanked Trump on 30 separate occasions in the space of 15 minutes. They extolled his “incredible leadership” (Bill Gates, Microsoft) and repeatedly expressed that they were “grateful” (Brin and AMD CEO Lisa Su) for his “support.”
“Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation president. It’s a very refreshing change,” declared OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think it’s going to set us up for a long period of leading the world, and that wouldn’t be happening without your leadership.
If ever a scene embodied the Communist Manifesto’s maxim that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” it was Thursday’s conclave of technology oligarchs at the White House. It demonstrated conclusively that Trump’s efforts to establish a dictatorship in the United States serve the interests of the financial oligarchy, and that the targets of this dictatorship are the workers whose labor creates the oligarchy’s wealth.
Among those present were:
Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, the second-largest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $3.6 trillion. Sam Altman of Microsoft proxy OpenAI was also present, along with former chairman and CEO Bill Gates (net worth $122 billion).
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, the third-largest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $3.5 trillion.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (Google), the fourth-largest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, with a net worth of $191 billion, was also present.
David Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, attended on behalf of Jeff Bezos (net worth $256 billion) and his company Amazon, the fifth-largest corporation in the world, with a market capitalization of $2.4 trillion.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (Facebook), the sixth-largest corporation in the world, with a market capitalization of $1.8 trillion. Zuckerberg is the third-wealthiest man in the world, with a net worth of $263 billion.
Inside the White House, a newly-gilded Rococo ballroom seated 30 men and women representing corporations with a market capitalization greater than the gross domestic product of every country in the world except the United States. Outside, the streets of the American capital were patrolled by armed and masked soldiers, gripping assault rifles and supported by armored vehicles mounted with gun turrets, amid Trump’s occupation of major American cities as part of his effort to establish a dictatorship.
The world inside and the world outside the White House collided in the words of Brin, who praised the “civil rights” work of the administration in Venezuela. He was referring to the murder of 11 people just days earlier in international waters by a flotilla of American gunboats, which marked a new high water mark in Trump’s use of illegal summary mass execution, with no legal precedent of any sort.
Having presided at Trump’s inauguration ceremony, in which he took office by capitalizing on the collapse of support for the incumbent Democratic Party, the technology oligarchs gathered once again to consecrate Trump’s self-coronation as king and dictator of America.
In exchange, Trump gave his full blessing for the initiative of the technology companies to integrate artificial intelligence—run on their servers, their consumer hardware, and their software—into all aspects of social and economic life, paving the way for an economic restructuring that is expected to destroy 800 million jobs by 2030.
The meeting was timed for what was, for the technology executives, a propitious occasion. Two days earlier, a U.S. district court judge ruled in favor of Google and Apple in a landmark antitrust case. Google, the fourth-largest company in the world, would be allowed to keep its monopoly on internet search, and Apple, the hardware monopolist and third-largest company in the world, would be allowed to keep receiving monopoly rent from Google for making it the default search engine on its phones and computers.
Trump congratulated Google and Apple on their “very good day,” condemning his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, as being “the one that prosecuted that lawsuit.”
The “very good day” for America’s technology monopolies was only the latest in a series of such “good days.” Since 2012, the so-called “magnificent seven” technology companies, five of which were represented at the dinner, have seen their share of the S&P 500 stock index rise from just over 7 percent in 2012 to 34 percent.
In 2012, their market capitalization stood at just $1.1 trillion. Today, their combined market capitalization has surged over 15-fold, to $19 trillion.
https://mronline.org/2025/09/09/trumps- ... oligarchy/
September 8, 2025
By Sylvia Demarest, Substack, 8/26/25
In his inaugural address, President Donald J. Trump expressed a desire to be a “peacemaker and a unifier.” He emphasized that his administration would focus on restoring confidence and pride in the nation while aiming to “end wars and prevent new conflicts.” Trump pledged to create peace by building “the strongest military the world has ever seen,” indicating that military strength would be a key component of his approach to achieving peace. He stated, “Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable.” This is similar to past claims of “peace through strength” forced on every US president by militarism. To back up his pledge of “peace through strength”, the Big Beautiful Bill Act added $150 billion to the annual budget of the Department of Defense. This means the US has a trillion dollar defense budget, and funds an industrial weapons monopoly that produces overpriced, exceptionally complex weapons, while promoting the sale and use of these weapons around the world. By any measure, the creation of an entity this destructive, is objectively insane.
US diplomatic and military history since WW2 is a history of unbridled war and bullying. Every day, President Trump seems to issue a new threat. But the world is changing. Economic power is shifting to the east and military power may be shifting as well. In this environment, “building the strongest military the world has ever seen” may no longer be economically and technologically feasible. The old tactics of bullying and threating war could backfire. Also, the power of the national security must somehow be managed. Could this “tug of war” explain the never ending “Trumpian chaos”? Some observers think it does, I have no idea.
Every US president who has tried to promote peace has faced pressure and opposition. First from Military Keynesianism to both sell and use up the weapons the weapons manufacturers produce. Next, from a National Security State that pressures every president to promote war, sell weapons, and promote US hegemony. We are witnessing massive personnel changes in DC, both in the military hierarchy, in the intelligence community, and now even at the Federal Reserve; but the goal of these changes is unclear, and the power of the national security state cannot be discounted. Take the example of John Bolton, National Security Advisor in the first Trump administration. Formerly untouchable, Bolton’s home and office were just raided by the FBI. Bolton is typical of the deep state warmongers who populate Washington DC. His advice to President Trump during Trump’s first term serves as an example of the warmongering militarism US presidents must deal with. This is from Bolton’s book: The Room Where It Happened.
From James Carden: “In the span of just several pages, Bolton recalls that at one time or another he has counseled Trump to launch a preventive strike on Iran’s nuclear program; scrap the Paris climate agreement; tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (aka the Iranian nuclear deal); pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty; withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council; defund the UN Relief Works Agency; prepare a preemptive strike against North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile program; and consider the idea of a sinister, conspiratorial link between Iran, North Korea, and Syria.”
Carden continues: “After a litany like this, one can’t help but recall MacGeorge Bundy’s observation about the hawkish Washington columnist Joseph Alsop, that he had “never known him to go to any area where blood could be spilled that he didn’t come back and say more blood. That is his posture toward the universe.”
Taking the President’s stated goal to be a “peacemaker “at face value, this essay examines the impact of US militarism on both the national debt and our society, looks at Trump’s claim to have ended 6 wars, and briefly examines the potential for peace given the ongoing wars and the prospect for new wars.
The cost of Militarism –the impact on the US national debt
According to up-to-date data from the US Treasury on the budget shortfall, the federal deficit in the United States for 2025, is $1,628,515,019,238. This number represents how much federal spending exceeded revenue for the last budget year. I am writing down the full number arithmetically so you can see the true size. The total US national debt now exceeds $37 trillion–that’s 37 plus 12 zeros! In 2024 debt service i.e. interest paid on the national debt toped 1 trillion for the first time in our history. These annual deficit numbers are greater than the Gross Domestic Product of most countries. The US finances this deficit by selling treasury securities. The ability to sell those securities, especially to foreigners, depends heavily on the dollar’s role as a global reserve currency, and on the US maintaining a strong economy.
There are three big ticket items in the federal budget that account for most of the spending: the cost of militarism, the cost of health care and pharmaceuticals, and beginning last year, the interest paid on the national debt. As Yogie Bera is claimed to have said: “if something can’t go on forever, it will stop.” What would the end of our ability to finance these budget deficits mean for the welfare of the people of our country? At best, a serious decline in our standard of living, at worst, hyperinflation, chaos and civil war.
If annual cost of the Department of Defense, over the last 80 years, is added to the cost of the wars the US has fought over that time, our current national debt represents the accumulated cost of this history of militarism and war. As discussed in several articles on this Substack, since the end of WW2 the US has been captured by militarism and has become economically dependent on military spending i.e. on “Military Keynesianism”. The societal cost, as represented by the decline of economic fairness, along with our growing economic and social dysfunction, has been documented on this Substack. The extreme concentration of wealth and power in the US (and the West) is a direct result of the triumph of militarism, along with neoliberalism (financialization), and the monopolization of the US economy. The resulting dysfunction is manifest at every level of our society, economic, social, legal, and psychological. Yet, sadly, despite the cost, blood lust, war, and greed, continues to dominate our government.
President Trump’s first 7 months
Air strikes: In the first seven months of his second term, Donald Trump has conducted 529 airstrikes in over 240 locations across the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. The exact number of countries targeted is not specified, but the airstrikes have been extensive, with a significant focus on regions like Yemen including the strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. This is almost as many air strikes as conducted by the Biden Administration in four years.
Most of these strikes targeted the “Iran-backed Houthis “known as Ansar Allah, a Zaydi Shia Islamist political and military group from Yemen that emerged in the 1990’s. Ansar Allah opposes the Yemen government; they control part of Yemen and have blocked Israeli access to the Red Sea in opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza. They are one of the few groups to actively oppose Israel, despite the cost.
Ending 6 wars: President Trump claims to have ended 6 wars in the last 7 months. For these efforts, he wants a Nobel Peace Prize. Trump is actively lobbying the Nobel committee. Let’s examine each claim:
Egypt-Ethiopia: This goes back to Trump’s first term when the two countries were feuding over a huge hydropower dam. There was never a war nor a peace agreement over this issue.
India-Pakistan: Trump announced that the two nuclear power countries had reached a cease fire in May. India does not credit Trump with brokering the halt in the fighting.
The Congo and Rwanda: A treaty was announced by Trump in May, including opening the door to Western and US investment including potential access to certain minerals. Secretary of State Rubio was credited with bringing the parties together.
Cambodia-Thailand: Leaders of the two countries agreed to a ceasefire on July 28 after five deadly days of fighting, Reuters reported. Trump urged them to negotiate a ceasefire or else trade deals with the governments would stall.
Armenia-Azerbaijan: This one is complicated and potentially related to a new attack on Iran. The agreement includes what is called “The Trump Route”. This route splits Armenia and Azerbaijan and terminates on the border with Iran. The treaty gives the US exclusive development rights. This is not a move that will promote peace. Iran is opposed and the agreement would provide the US/NATO/Israel with access to both the Iranian border and the Caspian Sea, potentially destabilizing the entire area. Still, the two former Soviet republics and Trump signed a peace agreement at the White House on Aug. 8, ending a decades-long war. The leaders of the countries gave Trump ample praise for his efforts at the ceremony.
The sneak attack on Iran: In the boldest claim of all, Trump took credit for ending the 12-day war with Iran, a war he helped start! Trump announced on June 23 a ceasefire between the two countries after the U.S. joined Israel in bombing Iranian nuclear sites. I doubt that hostilities against Iran are over.
Ending The Ongoing Wars
Ukraine–Ending the Ukraine war in 1 day: There is zero evidence that the positions of either Russia or Ukraine have budged since the Alaska meeting on the 15th, or after the White House meeting with Zelensky and the 7 representatives of the EU on the 18th. The parties are still far apart, and the war will continue so long as the US and NATO continue to provide money, weapons, and targeting support to Ukraine. In a speech last Sunday marking Ukrainian independence, Zelensky pledged not to give up land for peace, and to reclaim Crimea by force. Regarding Russia, there were suggestions that maybe Putin will relent and not insist that Ukraine withdraw its forces from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson should Ukraine Russian withdraw from the Donbass, as a prelude to a ceasefire. Unfortunately, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, did not support this claim in a recent interview. At the White House meeting on the 18th, Zelensky reiterated his position that all territory, including Crimea must be returned to Ukraine, and Russia be forced to pay billions in reparations. This proposal will not end the war.
On August 7th Gallup published polling results showing that 69% of Ukrainians favored a “negotiated end to the war as soon as possible”. This is a radical change from 2022 when only 22% supported a negotiated end to the war.
For those of you interested in the history anti-Russian meddling by the CIA in Ukraine, I recommend an essay by Kit Klarenberg: “Declassified: The CIA’s Covert Ukraine Invasion Plan.” Without going into details, the article discusses the planning that went into promoting a civil war in Ukrainian, creating the conditions that forced Russia to intervene.
Perhaps the Alaska meeting was designed to defang or delay the demand by Senator Lindsey Graham that the US return to tariff and sanctions threats. These threats did not go over well with India, Brazil, and China.
Ukraine continues to be supported with money and arms. Ukraine has been promised long-range missiles from the US and NATO countries, assuming they are presently available for delivery. Ukraine has also been promised assistance in building missiles in Ukrainian. One missile factory was just destroyed by Russia. Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones and missiles have had some success in impacting oil supplies and prices within Russia with drone strikes. It is claimed that some of these drones may have been fired from Finland and/or the Balkans–dangerous if true.
Opening Communications with Russia: There are many reasons other than ending the Ukraine war for the US to reopen communications with Russia. Communications were completely cut off by the Biden Administration when the war began in February of 2022. Even in the height of the Cold War the US and Russia communicated with each other. Cutting off communications was dangerous and unnecessary.
One big reason for the US and Russia to communicate is the Artic and its resources. Remember, the US offered to buy Greenland and suggested that Canada become the 51ststate? Look at a map–if this were to happen, the US and Russia would share a border with the Arctic of almost equal size and would dominate the region. Right now, Russia is far ahead of the US in developing the Arctic’s potential. Russia has military bases there, oil fields, and operates very effective ice breakers giving her year-round access.
Then there are other resources and expertise Russia possesses. Rosatom has perfected the nuclear fuel cycle, meaning nuclear waste can be reprocessed and reused. Rosatom also builds advanced nuclear facilities. Meanwhile, China has built and is operating a Thorium molten salt reactor that will not melt down. If the US can partner with Russia, we can greatly expand our use of nuclear power.
Otherwise, there is little evidence of concrete change in the US/Russia relationship.
Israel–The ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank: All modern wars are horribly destructive and everything possible should be done to prevent them. One of the most unbearable conflicts today is the ongoing destruction of Gaza and the ongoing starving of two million Palestinian people, if many Palestinians still survive.
This war is a prime example of what money and unaccountable power can accomplish. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have been directly involved in supporting and facilitating this genocidal war, and in helping silence those who are opposed. Congressional delegations from both political parties traveled to Israel this summer and were photographed with Netanyahu. This is despite the fact that what is happening in Gaza represents one of the most monstrous misdeeds of Western imperialism in the 21st century.
Slowly the façade of “western civilization” is being removed, and we are being forced to acknowledge that this ongoing atrocity is the result of deliberate policy–a policy supported not only by Zionism, but by the US, the UK, and much of the EU. It reflects an imperial policy that has been in effect for a long time. As Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli explicitly statedin the 19th Century regarding the objective of the British Empire: “Gain and hold territories that possess the largest supplies of the basic raw materials. Establish naval bases around the world to control the sea and commerce lanes. Blockade and starve into submission any nation or group of nations that opposes this empire control program.”
Today, the Zionists of Israel, with the help of our government, are again using blockade and starvation as a weapon. The wealth and power of Zionist billionaires, including their ability to destroy anyone who dissents, has acted as a shield against accountability.
The destruction of the indigenous population of Palestine may be another step in recently reiterated plan for “Greater Israel”. The goal of “Greater Isreal” is to rule the Middle East and its energy resources on behalf of Zionist and Western interests. War with Iran is needed to take control of Iran’s oil as part of “the plan” to counter and control China. To achieve these goals, several million Palestinians must die or be relocated, Lebanon, Syria, and parts of Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia must be conquered, and their occupants expelled to be replaced by Zionists.
This sounds crazy but replacement is happening right now in the West Bank. 25 Jewish settlers from Canada and the U.S. arrived in the occupied Palestinian territories today, moving into homes and land taken from Palestinians. “Taken from” means that violence was used to steal Palestinian property without paying any compensation. After all, 93% of Palestine has been stolen from Palestinians since 1948 without one penny of compensation being paid to any of the Palestinians who owned the land and homes. This is what wealth and power permits–the ability to act with complete impunity.
The prospect for new wars
War with Iran: There are indications that the Israeli/US war against Iran could begin again at any time. President Trump has threatened war if Iran does not end its nuclear program. Iran has refused to do this. War with Iran is could envelope the entire Middle East.
There were recent reports of Israel wanting to launch a preemptive war against Iran–with US weapons and support, of course. Israeli Colonel Jacques Neriah, a former intelligence official and a special analyst for the Middle East, warned on Sunday of an impending “second round” of war against Iran as Tehran weighs a revenge attack on Tel Aviv. “There is a sense that a war is coming, that Iranian revenge is in the works. The Iranians will not be able to live with this humiliation for long,” Neriah told Udi Segal and Anat Davidov on 103FM.
“Israel must launch a preemptive strike against Iran in its present state, as a large part of its military capabilities is paralyzed,” he added.
Let’s recall the events of the 12-day war that Israel started. Israel launched a sneak attack, while Iran was engaged in peace negotiations with the US. The sneak attack was designed to assassinate the entire Iranian civilian and military leadership–a decapitation strike that almost succeeded. Now, Israel wants the US to go to war with Iran to finish Iran’s destruction. Given Zionist power in the US, Israel may successfully goad the US into another war. After all, the US has been fighting Israel’s wars in the Middle East since 911. These are wars of choice, based on lies, that destabilized the Middle East, killed millions, caused in thousands of US casualties, and added trillions to our national debt. Why would the US fight another war for Israel?
Wars in this hemisphere: The Trump Administration has taken 2 actions that could lead to war in this hemisphere. This includes a possible war against Venezuela, or strikes against drug cartels in countries like Mexico, Columbia, and Venezuela.
Drug cartels: President Trump has signed a directive on the use of military force against drug cartels. Here’s the New York Times: “President Trump has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organizations, according to people familiar with the matter.”
“The decision to bring the American military into the fight is the most aggressive step so far in the administration’s escalating campaign against the cartels. It signals Mr. Trump’s continued willingness to use military forces to carry out what has primarily been considered a law enforcement responsibility to curb the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs.”
“The order provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels.”
“U.S. military officials have started drawing up options for how the military could go after the groups, the people familiar with the conversations said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations.”
War with Venezuela: The Trump Administration has placed a $50 million reward for the arrest of the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and sent a flotilla of ships to threaten the county. President Trump last week ordered at least three Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyers, a submarine and other assets to head towards Venezuela. Earlier this week Reuters also reported that, in addition to the destroyers, 4,000 marines aboard an Amphibious Ready Group were also sent.
The US has been at odds with Venezuela for decades, and has supported coups and other regime change efforts, first against Hugo Chavez, and now against Nicholas Maduro. The cause is a wave of nationalizations of the oil industry and sanctions, resulting in defaults and the US seizing Venezuelan assets, including Citgo. The US has also supported various “governments in exile” using confiscated Venezuelan assets. One government in exile was headed by Juan Guaidó. The asset confiscation and debt defaults amount to over $18 billion. Bids are being taken now for a forced sale of Citgo.
Meanwhile, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves on earth totaling 303 billion barrels, larger that Saudi Arabia at 267 barrels. US refiners are optimized to use this heavy crude; they need and continue to buy Venezuelan crude. US refiners, working for years with Citgo and Venezuela, spent billions on refineries to process this crude. The sanctions the US imposed on Venezuela has hurt margins because alternatives from Canada and Mexico do not work as well in these refineries. Venezuelan crude is a strategic asset for US refiners. These refiners include some of the largest oil companies in the world.
It is difficult to understand why this flotilla of war ships, along with marines, are being sent to Venezuela given the success of recent diplomatic negotiations that resulted in the resumption of the oil trade. This resumption marks a significant shift in bilateral energy relations after years of sanctions and restricted trade, and has created a pathway for Venezuelan oil tankers to once again deliver their cargo to U.S. refineries. Venezuelan crude is on its way to the US–why does the US need to go to war with Venezuela?
Conclusion
So far there is no peace and not much unity. Ongoing wars have not been ended, and several countries face new threats of war. At some point the people of the United States will have to step in and impose sanity on the warmongers if we are to survive as a nation. This Substack has spent the last 5 months outlining how neoliberalism, militarism, and monopolization has so concentrated wealth and power that most people can no longer afford the cost of living. Our emphasis should be on restoring economic fairness and opportunity, not starting a world war. War is no longer a realistic option and our emphasis on militarism increasingly represents a waste of precious assets. Modern war holds the potential to destroy civilization itself. I keep saying–drive around and imagine bombs exploding all around you–this will happen unless we come to our senses as a nation.
The President of Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, has discussed his dealings with 4 US Presidents since 2000. President Putin reported that while the US president changed, the foreign policy of the US did not. Worse, President Putin reported that every US president he dealt with was unable to carry out the agreements they reached after returning to the US.
Perhaps this is because the decision to go to war with Russia was made well before the Maidan coup of February 2014 and western warmongers were waiting for the opportunity to go to war with Russia? Well, they have had their opportunity. As a result of the Ukraine war, the West has forced Russia, once again, to become a great power with global reach. Unlike the US and the West, Russia has the resources and the industrial capacity to sustain a war economy.
The goal of western militarism was outlined by the Rand Corporation in 2019–to overextend and unbalance Russia. While this has yet to happen to Russia, the West now seems overextended and unbalanced. Meanwhile, Russia continues to increase her industrial capacity. This Russophobic hatred of Russia has damaged the economies of the European community, yet the leaders of Europe’s largest economies refuse to demand a peaceful solution to the war in Ukraine.
If the oil reserves of Russia, Iran, Venezuela and the arctic are added together, the outlines of a plan to control the world economy and sustain US hegemony becomes clear. Given the growing power of Russia and China, the US and the West appear to have lost the opportunity to achieve such a plan.
There are other dangerous considerations at work that demand peace. The US is running dangerously low on stockpiles of vital conventional weapons. This could limit US options for conventional war. The lack of conventional weapons could lead to the use of nuclear weapons–not by Russia, China, Iran, or Venezuela–but by the United States and/or Israel. This means that the risk of nuclear war is currently greater than most people realize. It is time for peace to prevail. Is President Trump serious about peace? Does Trump, or any US President, have the power to make peace? We are about to find out.
https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/09/syl ... for-peace/
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More Trump Administration Circular Firing Squad with Investor-Spooking ICE Raid on Hyundai-LG Plant
Posted on September 9, 2025 by Yves Smith
When you think the Trump Administration has hit Peak Stoopid, it always manages to outdo itself. Today’s example is the ICE raid on a Hyundai-LG Energy Solutions facility in Georgia, in which Korean workers, many of them management types or specialists, were hauled away in wrist and some even in ankle chains, as if they were violent thugs who needed to be restrained. As we’ll explain, if the Administration is to get anywhere with its reindustraialization fantasy, it needs to bring in skilled foreign workers at the technical, supervisory, and managerial levels. Good luck with that now.
Mind you, as we will also explain, this factory had had a bad safety record, including deaths, and there are allegations that some of the construction workers were Koreans brought in on visas that did not permit manual labor. So Hyundai was not doing the best job of running this startup and if Administration charges are borne out, may have been been abusing these low-level workers. However, a significant number of the expats were technicians and seasoned supervisors.
Something folks are missing here: this raid wasn’t about “illegals taking American jobs.” It was about ICE storming the Hyundai–LG battery plant in Georgia, part of a $7.6B Metaplant project that isn’t even operational yet.
They dragged out more than 300 South Korean Show More
The open question is what this self-sabotage implies about Trump priorities. It’s not hard to surmise that normalizing violent repression is more important than any other aim. And if one is cynical, the reason for targeting a Korean plant is that there would be less of a reaction to hauling off individuals with more social status than, say, workers at meatpacking plants, if they were foreign. In other words, this is moving up the food chain in terms of who the authoritarians are targeting.
Let’s first look at the raid and then its implications. From CNN:
More than 500 federal, state and local agents participated in the operation that ended with the arrest of 475 people in Ellabell, approximately 25 miles west of Savannah, Georgia. The small community was shaken by what was the largest raid so far in the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown on US workplaces.
Let’s stop and point out that this is a huge show of force. CNN focused on Latinos included in the arrests, likely due to the ability to find some family members who could provide more detail. However:
The majority of those held are South Korean nationals, [Steven] Schrank [special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Georgia and Alabama] said, adding he did not have a breakdown of the nationalities of those arrested. Over 300 of the people arrested were South Korean, the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister Cho Hyun said on Saturday.
The CNN story features Schrank asserting the detainees had overstayed visas or did not have them. One of the CNN interviewees disputed that, as have others. From Associated Press:
A lawyer for several workers detained at a Hyundai factory in Georgia says many of the South Koreans rounded up in the immigration raid are engineers and equipment installers brought in for the highly specialized work of getting an electric battery plant online.
Atlanta immigration attorney Charles Kuck, who represents four of the detained South Korean nationals, told The Associated Press on Monday that many were doing work that is authorized under the B-1 business visitor visa program. They had planned to be in the U.S. for just a couple of weeks and “never longer than 75 days,” he said.
“The vast majority of the individuals that were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that were South Korean were either there as engineers or were involved in after-sales service and installation,” Kuck said.
And to provide more background, the plant was under construction. These experts were to help it get up and running…so it could employ Americans:
1/ Something that's not being reported much re: ICE crackdown at Hyundai-LG Georgia battery factory: Korean companies investing billions cannot get proper visas, are then criminalised for bringing skilled workers to fill gaps American labour cannot.
Sentiment is one of betrayal.[/img]
Now it turns out that the raid looks like the result of a MAGA stunt gone bad. Rolling Stone was fast out with the story:
Tori Branum is a Marine Corps veteran, firearms instructor, and Republican candidate for Georgia’s 12th congressional district.
She’s also a proud “America first” supporter of President Donald Trump. On Thursday, as agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security were still carrying out a raid at a Hyundai plant in rural Bryan County, just outside the district Branum is running to serve, she expressed pride in something else: her purported role in causing the raid, which resulted in the arrest of 450 people, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
There had been safety problems, including three deaths, and OSHA had multiple investigations open at the plant. Two of the deaths were forklift accidents. There are also claims from the Administration that some (many?) of the Korean workers bought in on short-term business visas were doing performing manaul labor, which is not allowed on those visa categories.
ICE announced an investigation into “human trafficking” at the site, which sounds like a stretch until you understand that, per labor reporter Mike Elk, that:
During previous Democratic administrations, workplace safety officials in federal courts routinely argued that “human trafficking” existed when an immigrant worker’s legal status was tied to an employer that was asking them to violate labor laws. Due to workers’ dependence on their employer for their immigration status and in violation of labor laws, workplace safety advocates have argued that such practices constitute “human trafficking.”
[Labor reporter and South Korea expert] Tim Shorrock says that he doesn’t necessarily trust the Trump Administration’s spin on the raid, but does say there is reason for concern if workers on ESTA visas were illegally forced into dangerous construction work.
“That’s a situation of exploitation,” says Shorrock, who says that unions in both Korea and the United States should be paying close attention to the working conditions at Hyundai’s plant in Savannah, Georgia.
One has to wonder about the concern for the workers at this plant, when as we recounted many years ago, abuse of H1-B visa working as IT contractors is endemic. That is not to say labor abuses at foreign-owned plants are not serious, but that enforcement this selective looks sus.
And of course there is another side to this story:
1/ Something that's not being reported much re: ICE crackdown at Hyundai-LG Georgia battery factory: Korean companies investing billions cannot get proper visas, are then criminalised for bringing skilled workers to fill gaps American labour cannot.
Sentiment is one of betrayal.
But even if the ICE version of events is closer to the whole truth than the Hyundai version, the Administration’s apparent keen need to put this plant crackdown as an ICE raid looks to be yet another backfire, in that Team Trump seems to understand only domination, and not calibrated but effective use of power.
If the concern was abuse of relatively short-term work visas, how about calling management and saying, “You have a month to clean this up, otherwise ICE will pay a visit”? Recall I worked extensively with the Japanese in their heyday back in the 1980s. It was well known among the foreign firms operating in Tokyo that the Ministry of Finance could (and would) completely paralyze their operations by sending in a team for a MoF audit (the first step was to blow a whistle loudly; the white-gloved team would run in and slap seals on all the files and halt all work on personal computers). And therefore a threat of a MoF audit did lead to compliance. In other words, there were likely “show of authority” moves available that would have gotten the attention of Hyuandai management that wouldn’t have given Team Trump yet another press clip that could have brought the operation to heel.
And keep in mind that despite the concern, which may be justified, about mistreatment of Koreans doing construction work at the plant, some (we don’t know how many) were skilled workers necessary to get the equipment installed and shake the operations down. Although it is an entirely different type of production, my father was one of the most seasoned managers/executives in the paper mill industry in running startups and major expansions. They were not easy. A successful startup would take two years and burn 20% of the capital cost. An unsuccessful one would hemorrhage cash pretty much forever. And all of these startups required bringing in experts from the vendors to help with design, installation, and training.
The Financial Times has as its lead story a href=”https://archive.is/3dVbf” rel=”nofollow”>Workers in shackles, companies in shock: Georgia raid spooks foreign investors in US. From its account:
Multinational companies with foreign employees in the US have sought legal advice and paused some travel after federal authorities arrested hundreds of South Korean workers at an electric-car battery plant in Georgia last week.
The detention of 475 people, mostly South Korean nationals, at the Hyundai-LG Energy Solution factory under construction in Ellabell, Georgia, last week represented a new front in the White House’s broad crackdown on illegal immigration.
Video released by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed people shackled at the ankles, wrists and waist outside the plant, which forms part of the Trump administration’s push to expand manufacturing in the country. ICE said that in its execution of a federal warrant it found individuals were “fraudulently using visitors’ visas”.
Let’s stop here. Do you seriously think these workers from South Korea got their own visas? The few times I needed a visa to travel for work, my employer got it. Oh, and I was told by McKinsey to lie in one case too, on a four-month assignment to the UK, and claim I was there on holiday. So why weren’t employers read the riot act instead?
Back to the story:
Other immigration lawyers said that they believed many of the arrests were of individuals who entered the US on so-called B-1 visas used by foreigners for business meetings, or had arrived under a related visa waiver programme. Many of those arrested were working for subcontractors….
But the rules around these terms of entry have been somewhat ambiguous. “It may be an aggressive use of the B-1 category for business meetings, or it could be an over-reach by ICE, and they may have taken a more restrictive view of what’s allowed as a business visitor than what’s in the regulations,” said Dan Maranci, a partner at WR Immigration, a law firm.
Charles Kuck, founding partner of Kuck Baxter, an Atlanta-based immigration law firm, said he was representing some of the people arrested in Ellabell. Many of the Korean workers were in the US under a visa provision that allows vendors to a US business to help install equipment, he said….
Tami Overby, an international trade consultant with DGA Group and former president of the US-Korea Business Council, said that big foreign companies had halted some travel to the US as they review the legal ramifications of the Georgia crackdown.
“When this happened, it was so unexpected and so shocking to see hundreds of Korean workers looking like criminals,” she said. “Those videos and those photos have played not just in Korea but in Japan, in Taiwan, in other trading partners of the US who also have large investment going on in the US.”….
DGA Group’s Overby said that the industries most at risk of being swept up in a dragnet over business visitor visas were those that bring in local talent. The need is particularly acute in sectors where US workers lack the technical expertise compared with those in Asia, such as battery manufacturing, shipbuilding and semiconductors…
Taiwanese executives said the raid sent a chill through the foreign business community. “Maybe Trump did it for some political reason, to send a message to the South Korean government,” said one. “The US government has become very different and unpredictable now.”
And this raid happened as US-South Korean negotiations over $350 billion of South Korean investment were already starting to go pear-shaped. From Bloomberg:
Speaking at a forum on Tuesday, Kim Yong-beom, director of national policy at South Korea’s presidential office, said Seoul has been emphasizing to US officials that it cannot accept the same terms as Japan’s $550 billion investment pledge finalized last week, citing the disparity in the size of the two economies and the potential repercussions on the foreign exchange market….
The $350 billion fund is a central pillar of the trade deal that preserved a 15% tariff on imports from South Korea, but the two countries remain divided over how the fund will operate. Kim said last month that the investment pledge would be structured mainly as loan guarantees rather than direct capital injections.
Mind you, there is yet no sign that this agreement won’t get done, but the US and Japan found it difficult to get to a detailed memorandum.
And there are forms of possible backlash:
In response to the ICE raid at the Hyundai plant in Georgia that resulted in detaining around 300 South Koreans, one lawmaker in Seoul suggests looking into U.S. nationals teaching English on a tourist visa in S. Korea
So yet again, to invoke a saying based on Sun Tsu’s teachings, “Tactics with no strategy is the noise before the defeat.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/09 ... plant.html
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President Donald Trump speaks as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg listens during a dinner in the State Dining Room of the White House, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]
Trump’s dictatorship and the American oligarchy
Originally published: World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on September 5, 2025 by Andre Damon (more by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)) | (Posted Sep 09, 2025)
On Thursday, President Donald Trump held a public dinner with representatives from five of the six largest companies in the world—all multinational technology companies headquartered in America—pledging to expand their profits and accepting their praise and thanks.
Trump, on his best behavior, pledged to “make it a lot easier” for the assembled billionaires to “get your permits.” The oligarchs, in turn, profusely expressed their appreciation for Trump in “supporting our companies instead of fighting with them,” as Google co-founder Sergey Brin put it.
The executives thanked Trump on 30 separate occasions in the space of 15 minutes. They extolled his “incredible leadership” (Bill Gates, Microsoft) and repeatedly expressed that they were “grateful” (Brin and AMD CEO Lisa Su) for his “support.”
“Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation president. It’s a very refreshing change,” declared OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think it’s going to set us up for a long period of leading the world, and that wouldn’t be happening without your leadership.
If ever a scene embodied the Communist Manifesto’s maxim that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” it was Thursday’s conclave of technology oligarchs at the White House. It demonstrated conclusively that Trump’s efforts to establish a dictatorship in the United States serve the interests of the financial oligarchy, and that the targets of this dictatorship are the workers whose labor creates the oligarchy’s wealth.
Among those present were:
Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, the second-largest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $3.6 trillion. Sam Altman of Microsoft proxy OpenAI was also present, along with former chairman and CEO Bill Gates (net worth $122 billion).
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, the third-largest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $3.5 trillion.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (Google), the fourth-largest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, with a net worth of $191 billion, was also present.
David Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, attended on behalf of Jeff Bezos (net worth $256 billion) and his company Amazon, the fifth-largest corporation in the world, with a market capitalization of $2.4 trillion.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (Facebook), the sixth-largest corporation in the world, with a market capitalization of $1.8 trillion. Zuckerberg is the third-wealthiest man in the world, with a net worth of $263 billion.
Inside the White House, a newly-gilded Rococo ballroom seated 30 men and women representing corporations with a market capitalization greater than the gross domestic product of every country in the world except the United States. Outside, the streets of the American capital were patrolled by armed and masked soldiers, gripping assault rifles and supported by armored vehicles mounted with gun turrets, amid Trump’s occupation of major American cities as part of his effort to establish a dictatorship.
The world inside and the world outside the White House collided in the words of Brin, who praised the “civil rights” work of the administration in Venezuela. He was referring to the murder of 11 people just days earlier in international waters by a flotilla of American gunboats, which marked a new high water mark in Trump’s use of illegal summary mass execution, with no legal precedent of any sort.
Having presided at Trump’s inauguration ceremony, in which he took office by capitalizing on the collapse of support for the incumbent Democratic Party, the technology oligarchs gathered once again to consecrate Trump’s self-coronation as king and dictator of America.
In exchange, Trump gave his full blessing for the initiative of the technology companies to integrate artificial intelligence—run on their servers, their consumer hardware, and their software—into all aspects of social and economic life, paving the way for an economic restructuring that is expected to destroy 800 million jobs by 2030.
The meeting was timed for what was, for the technology executives, a propitious occasion. Two days earlier, a U.S. district court judge ruled in favor of Google and Apple in a landmark antitrust case. Google, the fourth-largest company in the world, would be allowed to keep its monopoly on internet search, and Apple, the hardware monopolist and third-largest company in the world, would be allowed to keep receiving monopoly rent from Google for making it the default search engine on its phones and computers.
Trump congratulated Google and Apple on their “very good day,” condemning his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, as being “the one that prosecuted that lawsuit.”
The “very good day” for America’s technology monopolies was only the latest in a series of such “good days.” Since 2012, the so-called “magnificent seven” technology companies, five of which were represented at the dinner, have seen their share of the S&P 500 stock index rise from just over 7 percent in 2012 to 34 percent.
In 2012, their market capitalization stood at just $1.1 trillion. Today, their combined market capitalization has surged over 15-fold, to $19 trillion.
https://mronline.org/2025/09/09/trumps- ... oligarchy/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
nice...
https://sonar21.com/wp-content/uploads/ ... 2.5798.jpg
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HOWDY DOODY AND PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP – WHICH ONE OF THEM IS DOING THE THINKING, THE TALKING?
By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
Howdy Doody was the most famous puppet in US history who was made of wood. He lived between 1937 and 1978.
He reappeared on a New York radio station this week in what the White House confirms was this dialogue:
“And Putin, when he looks at you, President Trump, he looks at you like you’re a matinee idol, which you are by the way. He loves you; he loves you. And then he leaves, or he hangs up the phone and then he sends another bomb…I mean, what is this guy thinking? [Donald Trump]: I don’t know…But it seems that every time I think we’re close, he goes and drops another bomb on somebody and it’s just no good. It’s no good. I’m very surprised. Actually, I’m very surprised…Well, you know what, I’m going to have almost three and a half years and that’s a long time and we can get things solved. We can get almost, I think, everything — I think everything is solved in that period of time.”
That evening, just before sitting down to dinner at Joe’s Seafood, a Washington, DC, restaurant, Trump came face to face with several women who sang six times: “Free DC, free Palestine. Trump is the Hitler of our time. Free DC, free Palestine. Trump is the Hitler of our time.” Trump used hand gestures to have the chorus removed.
The next day, the White House social media office directed by Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller published this: “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!”
https://johnhelmer.net/howdy-doody-and- ... e-talking/
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Now how about a million is the DC street chanting that?
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Trumponomics in trouble
By John Clarke (Posted Sep 11, 2025)
Originally published: Counterfire on September 8, 2025 (more by Counterfire) |
As he pursues his mission to ‘Make America Great Again,’ Donald Trump has embraced an approach that has come to be known as ‘America First.’ His administration has jettisoned a concept of U.S. world leadership that has held sway since the days immediately following the Second World War. Trump isn’t interested in the role of cornerstone of a global order but rather he seeks to use the waning but still formidable economic strength of the U.S. and its huge military superiority to obtain the greatest possible immediate benefits in matters of trade and geopolitical rivalry.
An MSNBC opinion article that was published in June attempted to come to terms with ‘Trumponomics’ and assess the economic strategy that the Trump administration is implementing. Pointing, with some justification, to the erratic and unpredictable conduct to which Trump is prone, the article nonetheless identified some of the key elements that are shaping this administration’s actions.
MSNBC notes that:
So far this year, Trump has enacted tariffs on nearly every country on the planet; started major trade wars with China, Canada and Mexico; and launched an enormous deportation campaign with still-unfolding consequences for industries such as farming, construction and hospitality. The Republican megabill that includes most of his domestic agenda would slash taxes for the wealthy and cut benefits for the poor, while massively increasing the national debt.
Trump’s political approaches are very much based on notions of a U.S. ‘greatness’ that has been undermined by hostile forces which must be defeated. Immigrants are to be rounded up and deported, liberal political rivals and meddling federal bureaucracies to be subdued and a regime of centralised executive power is to be established.
In matters of trade, the central proposition is that the U.S. has been cheated by both rivals and avowed allies alike. The remedy is an aggressive turn to protectionism and tariff measures that will tilt the balance of trade and force competitors to establish manufacturing facilities in the U.S. The restoration of unrivalled manufacturing dominance is a central element of Trumponomics and the broader America First strategy.
Raid on Hyundai factory
The economic dangers involved in Trump’s drive against migrant workers were highlighted by an immigration raid that was conducted last week on a major Hyundai facility in Georgia. According to National Public Radio, ‘U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals, in a raid Thursday at a massive electric vehicle battery plant under construction in Ellabell, Ga., near Savannah. The plant is a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution.’
It appears that roughly 300 of those arrested were Koreans and the government of that country, an ally and major trading partner of the U.S., was taken by surprise and deeply shocked by the raid. South Korean President, Lee Jae Myung, stressed ‘that the rights and interests of South Korean nationals and the business operations of South Korean companies investing in the United States must not be infringed upon.’ Following negotiations, the Trump administration agreed to release the detained Koreans and a plane has been chartered to bring them home.
In assessing the significance of the raid, Steven Schrank, special agent in charge of homeland security investigations for Georgia and Alabama, declared that: ‘We are sending a clear and unequivocal message that those who exploit our workforce, undermine our economy and violate federal laws will be held accountable.’ He stressed, moreover, that the operation was the result of months of careful planning.
For his part, Trump came out clearly in support of the action that was taken by his immigration enforcers, stating that: ‘I would say that they were illegal aliens, and Ice was just doing its job.’ It appears that the investigation that led to the raid found that some of the detained workers ‘had expired visas or had entered on a visa waiver that prohibited them from working’ but the bigger question is the political choice that was made to conduct such a high-profile and large-scale operation at this facility.
A statement issued by Hyundai in March, noted that it was engaged in a ‘$12.6 billion investment in Georgia and the largest economic development project in the state’s history.’ There would be, moreover, ‘an additional $21 billion investment from 2025 to 2028 to drive U.S. manufacturing growth.’
Given the scale of Hyundai’s investments and the degree to which they conform to Trump’s avowed aim of having foreign rivals establish manufacturing facilities in the U.S., it seems quite remarkable that this carefully prepared and massive enforcement operation was undertaken. Certainly, a more discreet resolution of the matter was entirely possible and it seems that xenophobic zeal is overriding sound judgement, when it comes to Trump’s economic agenda.
The Hyundai raid, moreover, is only a particularly sharp expression of the degree to which the administration’s conduct is problematic from the standpoint of major capitalist interests. Workers without legal status have long been a major part of the U.S. workforce and a ruthless and repressive immigration system has worked to keep them as vulnerable as possible. Trump, however, threatens to take things to a level that cuts into the profits of some of the most exploitative employers.
In June, CNN Business quoted ‘Rebecca Shi, the CEO of American Business Immigration Coalition, a group representing employers with immigrants.’ She complained that recent ‘immigration enforcement raids on businesses nationwide are creating serious challenges for local economies, communities, and industries that depend on immigrant labor to operate and prosper.’
The concerns of Shi and the interests she speaks for are hardly surprising, given that undocumented ‘immigrants make up 4% to 5% of the total U.S. workforce, but 15% to 20% or more in industries such as crop production, food processing and construction, according to Goldman Sachs.’
Economic downturn
On 5 September, Al Jazeera reported that the ‘United States labour market has begun to stall as employers face economic uncertainty due to tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump and an immigration crackdown that has softened the labour pool.’ The massive U.S. economy was only able to add 22,000 jobs in August and the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%. ‘So far this year, employers have cut more than 892,000 jobs, the highest total since 2020.’
Responding to this news, Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America and a former Federal Reserve economist, spoke of another ‘poor jobs report thanks to tariffs. With the benefit of revisions, it’s increasingly clear that tariffs are weighing on hiring and jobs. Manufacturing jobs are falling sharply, and so are other trade-sensitive sectors like mining and wholesale trade.’
It is clear that the Trumponomics component of the present U.S. administration’s America First approach is running into very major problems. The crude effort to expel the undocumented workers who play such a key role in the functioning of the U.S. economy is producing disruptive effects and economic shocks. The trade-war approach is generating global instability and a dangerous risk of economic slump and it is most certainly not bringing the economic benefits to the U.S. that Trump has predicted.
Having said this, however, it is important to stress that we are dealing with very much more than the failed approaches of a single presidential administration. Trump, after all, is responding to a decline in the hegemonic power of the U.S. and its reduced ability to maintain its leading role within the global order.
It must also be stressed that Trump returned to the White House on the basis of the failures of the Biden administration. That political regime was touted in terms of a restoration of responsible U.S. world leadership and, both domestically and internationally, it failed on its own terms. Biden was unable to save the decades-long role the U.S. has played and simply provided a warm-up act for Trump’s second term.
Now back in power, a more determined and focused Trump regime tries to offer its reactionary solutions to the travails of a declining United States. It is a very dangerous administration that needs to be challenged and defeated but the hopes and assumptions on which its bid to restore U.S. ‘greatness’ are based are proving to be extremely dubious. As a response to the decline of U.S. imperialism, the America First turn is going very badly.
https://mronline.org/2025/09/11/trumpon ... n-trouble/
https://sonar21.com/wp-content/uploads/ ... 2.5798.jpg
******
HOWDY DOODY AND PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP – WHICH ONE OF THEM IS DOING THE THINKING, THE TALKING?
By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
Howdy Doody was the most famous puppet in US history who was made of wood. He lived between 1937 and 1978.
He reappeared on a New York radio station this week in what the White House confirms was this dialogue:
“And Putin, when he looks at you, President Trump, he looks at you like you’re a matinee idol, which you are by the way. He loves you; he loves you. And then he leaves, or he hangs up the phone and then he sends another bomb…I mean, what is this guy thinking? [Donald Trump]: I don’t know…But it seems that every time I think we’re close, he goes and drops another bomb on somebody and it’s just no good. It’s no good. I’m very surprised. Actually, I’m very surprised…Well, you know what, I’m going to have almost three and a half years and that’s a long time and we can get things solved. We can get almost, I think, everything — I think everything is solved in that period of time.”
That evening, just before sitting down to dinner at Joe’s Seafood, a Washington, DC, restaurant, Trump came face to face with several women who sang six times: “Free DC, free Palestine. Trump is the Hitler of our time. Free DC, free Palestine. Trump is the Hitler of our time.” Trump used hand gestures to have the chorus removed.
The next day, the White House social media office directed by Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller published this: “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!”
https://johnhelmer.net/howdy-doody-and- ... e-talking/
*****
Now how about a million is the DC street chanting that?
******
Trumponomics in trouble
By John Clarke (Posted Sep 11, 2025)
Originally published: Counterfire on September 8, 2025 (more by Counterfire) |
As he pursues his mission to ‘Make America Great Again,’ Donald Trump has embraced an approach that has come to be known as ‘America First.’ His administration has jettisoned a concept of U.S. world leadership that has held sway since the days immediately following the Second World War. Trump isn’t interested in the role of cornerstone of a global order but rather he seeks to use the waning but still formidable economic strength of the U.S. and its huge military superiority to obtain the greatest possible immediate benefits in matters of trade and geopolitical rivalry.
An MSNBC opinion article that was published in June attempted to come to terms with ‘Trumponomics’ and assess the economic strategy that the Trump administration is implementing. Pointing, with some justification, to the erratic and unpredictable conduct to which Trump is prone, the article nonetheless identified some of the key elements that are shaping this administration’s actions.
MSNBC notes that:
So far this year, Trump has enacted tariffs on nearly every country on the planet; started major trade wars with China, Canada and Mexico; and launched an enormous deportation campaign with still-unfolding consequences for industries such as farming, construction and hospitality. The Republican megabill that includes most of his domestic agenda would slash taxes for the wealthy and cut benefits for the poor, while massively increasing the national debt.
Trump’s political approaches are very much based on notions of a U.S. ‘greatness’ that has been undermined by hostile forces which must be defeated. Immigrants are to be rounded up and deported, liberal political rivals and meddling federal bureaucracies to be subdued and a regime of centralised executive power is to be established.
In matters of trade, the central proposition is that the U.S. has been cheated by both rivals and avowed allies alike. The remedy is an aggressive turn to protectionism and tariff measures that will tilt the balance of trade and force competitors to establish manufacturing facilities in the U.S. The restoration of unrivalled manufacturing dominance is a central element of Trumponomics and the broader America First strategy.
Raid on Hyundai factory
The economic dangers involved in Trump’s drive against migrant workers were highlighted by an immigration raid that was conducted last week on a major Hyundai facility in Georgia. According to National Public Radio, ‘U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals, in a raid Thursday at a massive electric vehicle battery plant under construction in Ellabell, Ga., near Savannah. The plant is a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution.’
It appears that roughly 300 of those arrested were Koreans and the government of that country, an ally and major trading partner of the U.S., was taken by surprise and deeply shocked by the raid. South Korean President, Lee Jae Myung, stressed ‘that the rights and interests of South Korean nationals and the business operations of South Korean companies investing in the United States must not be infringed upon.’ Following negotiations, the Trump administration agreed to release the detained Koreans and a plane has been chartered to bring them home.
In assessing the significance of the raid, Steven Schrank, special agent in charge of homeland security investigations for Georgia and Alabama, declared that: ‘We are sending a clear and unequivocal message that those who exploit our workforce, undermine our economy and violate federal laws will be held accountable.’ He stressed, moreover, that the operation was the result of months of careful planning.
For his part, Trump came out clearly in support of the action that was taken by his immigration enforcers, stating that: ‘I would say that they were illegal aliens, and Ice was just doing its job.’ It appears that the investigation that led to the raid found that some of the detained workers ‘had expired visas or had entered on a visa waiver that prohibited them from working’ but the bigger question is the political choice that was made to conduct such a high-profile and large-scale operation at this facility.
A statement issued by Hyundai in March, noted that it was engaged in a ‘$12.6 billion investment in Georgia and the largest economic development project in the state’s history.’ There would be, moreover, ‘an additional $21 billion investment from 2025 to 2028 to drive U.S. manufacturing growth.’
Given the scale of Hyundai’s investments and the degree to which they conform to Trump’s avowed aim of having foreign rivals establish manufacturing facilities in the U.S., it seems quite remarkable that this carefully prepared and massive enforcement operation was undertaken. Certainly, a more discreet resolution of the matter was entirely possible and it seems that xenophobic zeal is overriding sound judgement, when it comes to Trump’s economic agenda.
The Hyundai raid, moreover, is only a particularly sharp expression of the degree to which the administration’s conduct is problematic from the standpoint of major capitalist interests. Workers without legal status have long been a major part of the U.S. workforce and a ruthless and repressive immigration system has worked to keep them as vulnerable as possible. Trump, however, threatens to take things to a level that cuts into the profits of some of the most exploitative employers.
In June, CNN Business quoted ‘Rebecca Shi, the CEO of American Business Immigration Coalition, a group representing employers with immigrants.’ She complained that recent ‘immigration enforcement raids on businesses nationwide are creating serious challenges for local economies, communities, and industries that depend on immigrant labor to operate and prosper.’
The concerns of Shi and the interests she speaks for are hardly surprising, given that undocumented ‘immigrants make up 4% to 5% of the total U.S. workforce, but 15% to 20% or more in industries such as crop production, food processing and construction, according to Goldman Sachs.’
Economic downturn
On 5 September, Al Jazeera reported that the ‘United States labour market has begun to stall as employers face economic uncertainty due to tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump and an immigration crackdown that has softened the labour pool.’ The massive U.S. economy was only able to add 22,000 jobs in August and the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%. ‘So far this year, employers have cut more than 892,000 jobs, the highest total since 2020.’
Responding to this news, Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America and a former Federal Reserve economist, spoke of another ‘poor jobs report thanks to tariffs. With the benefit of revisions, it’s increasingly clear that tariffs are weighing on hiring and jobs. Manufacturing jobs are falling sharply, and so are other trade-sensitive sectors like mining and wholesale trade.’
It is clear that the Trumponomics component of the present U.S. administration’s America First approach is running into very major problems. The crude effort to expel the undocumented workers who play such a key role in the functioning of the U.S. economy is producing disruptive effects and economic shocks. The trade-war approach is generating global instability and a dangerous risk of economic slump and it is most certainly not bringing the economic benefits to the U.S. that Trump has predicted.
Having said this, however, it is important to stress that we are dealing with very much more than the failed approaches of a single presidential administration. Trump, after all, is responding to a decline in the hegemonic power of the U.S. and its reduced ability to maintain its leading role within the global order.
It must also be stressed that Trump returned to the White House on the basis of the failures of the Biden administration. That political regime was touted in terms of a restoration of responsible U.S. world leadership and, both domestically and internationally, it failed on its own terms. Biden was unable to save the decades-long role the U.S. has played and simply provided a warm-up act for Trump’s second term.
Now back in power, a more determined and focused Trump regime tries to offer its reactionary solutions to the travails of a declining United States. It is a very dangerous administration that needs to be challenged and defeated but the hopes and assumptions on which its bid to restore U.S. ‘greatness’ are based are proving to be extremely dubious. As a response to the decline of U.S. imperialism, the America First turn is going very badly.
https://mronline.org/2025/09/11/trumpon ... n-trouble/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
“Inflaming Tensions, Trump Threatens Political Left With Retribution Over Killing of Charlie Kirk”
Posted on September 12, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. To state what may seem obvious, the assassination of Charile Kirk has the potential to considerably deepen already large schisms in American politics. Kirk, as the circumstances of his death show, made a point of going to college campuses and as a youngish man, was a “relatable” figure. Even though he stood for conservative ideas that many abhor, he was opposed to the war in Ukraine and even though he had been a staunch Israel supporter, he had started questioning Netanyahu’s conduct. But what set him apart from most political commentators and activists in the US was that he was willing to speak across doctrinal lines and (by reputation, I have not watched him enough to have an independent point of view) remained civil and would even concede that the other side had a point. He was also apparently genuinely outgoing and solicitous and was extremely well-liked by media professionals and elected officials; their grief about his death is apparently genuine.
Despite, as we’ll see below, calls from many prominent conservatives to punish the “radical left,” as in domestic enemies, the workings of the right wing hive mind may be diffusing this impulse. Early report focused on markings on the bullets found with the assailants gun. For instance, see the most recent Wall Street Journal headline: Early Bulletin Said Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology; Some Sources Urge Caution. The reason for the later Journal caveat (earlier headlines weren’t qualified) was that the information on the markings came via an internal police report.
But the bigger reason is a lot of conservatives aren’t buying it. It seems too tidy even in light of Kirk’s final exchange with the crowd. From the Independent:
[Kirk] responded to a question from an audience member who asked: “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?”
Mr Kirk responded “too many”, which resulted in some cheers from the crowd. After the individual said there had been five, they then asked the conservative political activist how many mass shootings there had been in the US in the last decade.
Uttering his last words, Mr Kirk asked: “Counting or not counting gang violence?” before a sniper’s bullet hit him in the neck.
A conservative contact who monitors its media intently focused on the fact that Trump and others almost immediately depicted the shooting as the involving more than one person (and this was separate from condemnations of lefties as stokers of “terrorism”). The emerging consensus in right mass opinion seems to be that the shooter was a foreign operative, The fact that as of this writing, he remains free suggests a certain level of tradecraft. At this point, he could have gotten to Mexico. If this belief gets traction, it will take some of the air out of the campaign to use this tragedy to the advantage of authoritarians and censors.
Ken Klippenstein provides confirmation:
Today on 9/11, it occurs to me that both the attack 24 years ago and the one that took Charlie Kirk’s life yesterday are plagued by many of the same wild allegations. Foreign intelligence involvement, federal coverup, a manufactured false flag; the parallel conspiracy theories are surreal.
Before the assassin has even been identified, countless people (including the president) have concluded it must have been a group effort, with Fox News alluding to unspecified “foreign intelligence” involvement. Others on the left, meanwhile, insist that the killing was orchestrated by Donald Trump to divert attention away from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
The reason behind the insta-theories is simple: nobody trusts what the authorities have to say. That’s understandable. Consider how almost a quarter of a century after the 9/11 attacks, there are still key documents that haven’t been declassified. This despite Trump’s repeated promises to declassify them (and even references to a Saudi Arabian role in the attack).
For instance, if you click through to the comments on this video clip, you’ll see a lot of questions about it:
Trump: "For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of
At the same time, the usual suspects are not letting this crisis-of-sorts go to waste. From Chris Hedges:
The assassination of Charlie Kirk presages a new, deadly stage in the disintegration of a fractious and highly polarized United States. While toxic rhetoric and threats are lobbed across cultural divides like hand grenades, sometimes spilling over into actual violence — including the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump — Kirk’s killing is a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration.
His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.
Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming.
“We have to have steely resolve,” said conservative political strategist Steve Bannon on his show “War Room,” adding, “Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.”
“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die,” wrote Elon Musk on X.
“The entire Right has to band together. Enough of this in-fighting bullshit. We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” wrote commentator and author Matt Walsh on X. “Put the personal squabbles aside. Now’s not the time. This is existential. A fight for our own existence and the existence of our country.”
Republican Congressman Clay Higgins wrote that he will use, “Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk…” He further states “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”
There’s more of that sentiment in Hedge’s post, and even more in the wild. Doxxing has begun, along with threats to the DNC (soon deemed “not credible”) and some historically black colleges.
Now to the main event.
By Julia Conley. Originally published at Common Dreams
Despite the fact that the murderer of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk remained unidentified and still at large, President Donald Trump declared the “radical left” as “directly responsible” for the assassination in remarks from the White House on Wednesday night—comments that critics say shows Trump is more than willing to exploit the killing for his own purposes while sowing more, not less, political violence in the future.
In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump said that criticism of Kirk from the left was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
The president didn’t specify which opponents of Kirk he believed contributed to his killing; over the years the influencer, who frequently visited college campuses to debate students, clashed with and was criticized by supporters of abortion rights, gun control, and immigrants’ rights. But Trump said his administration would “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
Trump did not detail how the White House would determine what groups “contributed” to Kirk’s killing.
“Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” he asserted, though he did not mention any of the political violence—which is statistically more pervasive—on the political right.
The president was echoing sentiments expressed by far-right influencer Laura Loomer who has played a key role in shaping the Trump administration, lobbying for the hiring and removal of certain aides.
“It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single leftist organization,” Loomer said Wednesday, even before Kirk was publicly pronounced dead. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The left is a national security threat.”
In a Thursday op-ed for Common Dreams, author and journalist Christopher D. Cook laments how “Kirk had barely been declared dead when President Trump hideously used his killing to falsely blame and attack the left.”
The president, writes Cook, “seized the moment of widespread mourning to spread more hatred and division, in a reckless, angry televised speech that hurled blame at the left despite not a scintilla of evidence about Kirk’s assassin or their politics.”
Trump named a number of victims of political violence in recent years, including US Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was shot in 2017 by a man who opposed the president; and Trump himself, who survived two assassination attempts last year.
The president did not mention the killing earlier this year of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat. The suspect in Hortman’s killing was an evangelical Christian who strongly opposed abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) also asserted without any evidence that critics of the far-right agenda that Kirk embraced were to blame for his killing, specifically suggesting that her Democratic colleagues were implicated in the assassination.
“Democrats own what happened today,” she told reporters. “Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck.”
Mace added that it was “ridiculous” to suggest that by her logic, Republican lawmakers “own” Hortman’s assassination.
The comments from Trump and Mace, wrote Cook, only show that these are “not the people who are going to lead us out of this ugly toxic pit” of political violence now pervasive in the United States.
At Zeteo, journalist Mehdi Hasan listed several other recent acts of political violence in which the suspected or confirmed perpetrators held right-wing ideologies, including the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro earlier this year; the assault of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022; and the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.
“There is no equivalent or even similar list of Obama or Biden supporters who have carried out murders, attempted murders, or violent attacks against Republicans or conservatives in recent years,” wrote Hasan. “In fact, according to statistics compiled by the ADL’s Center on Extremism, 2024 was the third year in a row in which all of the extremist-related killings in the United States were carried out by… right-wingers.”
On the social media platform X, Texas Monthly senior writer Robert Downen pointed out that some far-right white supremacists had also “reviled” Kirk.
“I’m not speculating about the shooter,” said Downen. “I just have been stunned how quickly people have jumped with certainty to partisan conclusions. Because in extremism spaces, the Charlie Kirk Hater-to-Nazi pipeline is canon. It’s how we got a generation of antisemitic extremists.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was quick to rebuke the suggestion that Democrats or left-wing groups are to blame for the rise in politically motivated attacks or the emergence of violence as a commonplace, acceptable occurrence in American culture.
“Oh, please,” she said when a reporter asked her whether Democrats should tone down their rhetoric. “Why don’t you start with the president of the United States, and every ugly meme he has posted, and every ugly word.”
In a podcast put together Wednesday evening in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, journalist David Sirota said that “what we desperately need right now in this country are leaders who lower the temperature, leaders who will try to pull us back from the brink.”
Instead, Sirota warned, “we have a president right now who seems mostly interested in using the bully pulpit to actually bully people. Inflaming every cultural conflict he can stick his nose into—all for the cause of grabbing more power and money for himself and his family.”
In place of more anger, hatred, and calls for political retribution, Sirota told his audience he wanted to offer a different message.
“It’s a simple message whether you are a leftist, a liberal, a centrist, a conservative, or a MAGA fan,” said Sirota. “Your life has value and your political opponents’ lives have value too. You can hate your adversaries’ ideas, and you can fight hard for your cause, but the moment we stop seeing each other as human beings and we start concluding that violence is the answer, that’s the moment we let the soulless corporations, the ruthless authoritarians, and the sociopathic demagogues win.”
The “nihilism” and “greed” of too many, he added, “are creating the conditions for a civil war—one that we must all do our part to stop. Before it becomes unstoppable.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/09 ... -kirk.html
Makes me nuts when anyone confuses left with liberal. Some might considerate it a continuum but that is superficial and wrong. There hasn't been a 'radical left' in the USA since the Weathermen.(And their 'politics of the deed' was a counter-productive fail.)
PS - David Sirota is a philistine wanker.
PPS _ Want some tin-foil? Here ya go: besides a martyr creating false flag the shooting of Kirk eliminates a potential competitor for Trump's ear, now dominated by Stephen Miller, what with the Mid-terms and the youth vote...As has been noticed Kirk wasn't racist enough for the hard core, of which Miller is one.
Posted on September 12, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. To state what may seem obvious, the assassination of Charile Kirk has the potential to considerably deepen already large schisms in American politics. Kirk, as the circumstances of his death show, made a point of going to college campuses and as a youngish man, was a “relatable” figure. Even though he stood for conservative ideas that many abhor, he was opposed to the war in Ukraine and even though he had been a staunch Israel supporter, he had started questioning Netanyahu’s conduct. But what set him apart from most political commentators and activists in the US was that he was willing to speak across doctrinal lines and (by reputation, I have not watched him enough to have an independent point of view) remained civil and would even concede that the other side had a point. He was also apparently genuinely outgoing and solicitous and was extremely well-liked by media professionals and elected officials; their grief about his death is apparently genuine.
Despite, as we’ll see below, calls from many prominent conservatives to punish the “radical left,” as in domestic enemies, the workings of the right wing hive mind may be diffusing this impulse. Early report focused on markings on the bullets found with the assailants gun. For instance, see the most recent Wall Street Journal headline: Early Bulletin Said Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology; Some Sources Urge Caution. The reason for the later Journal caveat (earlier headlines weren’t qualified) was that the information on the markings came via an internal police report.
But the bigger reason is a lot of conservatives aren’t buying it. It seems too tidy even in light of Kirk’s final exchange with the crowd. From the Independent:
[Kirk] responded to a question from an audience member who asked: “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?”
Mr Kirk responded “too many”, which resulted in some cheers from the crowd. After the individual said there had been five, they then asked the conservative political activist how many mass shootings there had been in the US in the last decade.
Uttering his last words, Mr Kirk asked: “Counting or not counting gang violence?” before a sniper’s bullet hit him in the neck.
A conservative contact who monitors its media intently focused on the fact that Trump and others almost immediately depicted the shooting as the involving more than one person (and this was separate from condemnations of lefties as stokers of “terrorism”). The emerging consensus in right mass opinion seems to be that the shooter was a foreign operative, The fact that as of this writing, he remains free suggests a certain level of tradecraft. At this point, he could have gotten to Mexico. If this belief gets traction, it will take some of the air out of the campaign to use this tragedy to the advantage of authoritarians and censors.
Ken Klippenstein provides confirmation:
Today on 9/11, it occurs to me that both the attack 24 years ago and the one that took Charlie Kirk’s life yesterday are plagued by many of the same wild allegations. Foreign intelligence involvement, federal coverup, a manufactured false flag; the parallel conspiracy theories are surreal.
Before the assassin has even been identified, countless people (including the president) have concluded it must have been a group effort, with Fox News alluding to unspecified “foreign intelligence” involvement. Others on the left, meanwhile, insist that the killing was orchestrated by Donald Trump to divert attention away from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
The reason behind the insta-theories is simple: nobody trusts what the authorities have to say. That’s understandable. Consider how almost a quarter of a century after the 9/11 attacks, there are still key documents that haven’t been declassified. This despite Trump’s repeated promises to declassify them (and even references to a Saudi Arabian role in the attack).
For instance, if you click through to the comments on this video clip, you’ll see a lot of questions about it:
Trump: "For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of
At the same time, the usual suspects are not letting this crisis-of-sorts go to waste. From Chris Hedges:
The assassination of Charlie Kirk presages a new, deadly stage in the disintegration of a fractious and highly polarized United States. While toxic rhetoric and threats are lobbed across cultural divides like hand grenades, sometimes spilling over into actual violence — including the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump — Kirk’s killing is a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration.
His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.
Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming.
“We have to have steely resolve,” said conservative political strategist Steve Bannon on his show “War Room,” adding, “Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.”
“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die,” wrote Elon Musk on X.
“The entire Right has to band together. Enough of this in-fighting bullshit. We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” wrote commentator and author Matt Walsh on X. “Put the personal squabbles aside. Now’s not the time. This is existential. A fight for our own existence and the existence of our country.”
Republican Congressman Clay Higgins wrote that he will use, “Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk…” He further states “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”
There’s more of that sentiment in Hedge’s post, and even more in the wild. Doxxing has begun, along with threats to the DNC (soon deemed “not credible”) and some historically black colleges.
Now to the main event.
By Julia Conley. Originally published at Common Dreams
Despite the fact that the murderer of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk remained unidentified and still at large, President Donald Trump declared the “radical left” as “directly responsible” for the assassination in remarks from the White House on Wednesday night—comments that critics say shows Trump is more than willing to exploit the killing for his own purposes while sowing more, not less, political violence in the future.
In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump said that criticism of Kirk from the left was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
The president didn’t specify which opponents of Kirk he believed contributed to his killing; over the years the influencer, who frequently visited college campuses to debate students, clashed with and was criticized by supporters of abortion rights, gun control, and immigrants’ rights. But Trump said his administration would “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
Trump did not detail how the White House would determine what groups “contributed” to Kirk’s killing.
“Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” he asserted, though he did not mention any of the political violence—which is statistically more pervasive—on the political right.
The president was echoing sentiments expressed by far-right influencer Laura Loomer who has played a key role in shaping the Trump administration, lobbying for the hiring and removal of certain aides.
“It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single leftist organization,” Loomer said Wednesday, even before Kirk was publicly pronounced dead. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The left is a national security threat.”
In a Thursday op-ed for Common Dreams, author and journalist Christopher D. Cook laments how “Kirk had barely been declared dead when President Trump hideously used his killing to falsely blame and attack the left.”
The president, writes Cook, “seized the moment of widespread mourning to spread more hatred and division, in a reckless, angry televised speech that hurled blame at the left despite not a scintilla of evidence about Kirk’s assassin or their politics.”
Trump named a number of victims of political violence in recent years, including US Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was shot in 2017 by a man who opposed the president; and Trump himself, who survived two assassination attempts last year.
The president did not mention the killing earlier this year of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat. The suspect in Hortman’s killing was an evangelical Christian who strongly opposed abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) also asserted without any evidence that critics of the far-right agenda that Kirk embraced were to blame for his killing, specifically suggesting that her Democratic colleagues were implicated in the assassination.
“Democrats own what happened today,” she told reporters. “Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck.”
Mace added that it was “ridiculous” to suggest that by her logic, Republican lawmakers “own” Hortman’s assassination.
The comments from Trump and Mace, wrote Cook, only show that these are “not the people who are going to lead us out of this ugly toxic pit” of political violence now pervasive in the United States.
At Zeteo, journalist Mehdi Hasan listed several other recent acts of political violence in which the suspected or confirmed perpetrators held right-wing ideologies, including the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro earlier this year; the assault of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022; and the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.
“There is no equivalent or even similar list of Obama or Biden supporters who have carried out murders, attempted murders, or violent attacks against Republicans or conservatives in recent years,” wrote Hasan. “In fact, according to statistics compiled by the ADL’s Center on Extremism, 2024 was the third year in a row in which all of the extremist-related killings in the United States were carried out by… right-wingers.”
On the social media platform X, Texas Monthly senior writer Robert Downen pointed out that some far-right white supremacists had also “reviled” Kirk.
“I’m not speculating about the shooter,” said Downen. “I just have been stunned how quickly people have jumped with certainty to partisan conclusions. Because in extremism spaces, the Charlie Kirk Hater-to-Nazi pipeline is canon. It’s how we got a generation of antisemitic extremists.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was quick to rebuke the suggestion that Democrats or left-wing groups are to blame for the rise in politically motivated attacks or the emergence of violence as a commonplace, acceptable occurrence in American culture.
“Oh, please,” she said when a reporter asked her whether Democrats should tone down their rhetoric. “Why don’t you start with the president of the United States, and every ugly meme he has posted, and every ugly word.”
In a podcast put together Wednesday evening in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, journalist David Sirota said that “what we desperately need right now in this country are leaders who lower the temperature, leaders who will try to pull us back from the brink.”
Instead, Sirota warned, “we have a president right now who seems mostly interested in using the bully pulpit to actually bully people. Inflaming every cultural conflict he can stick his nose into—all for the cause of grabbing more power and money for himself and his family.”
In place of more anger, hatred, and calls for political retribution, Sirota told his audience he wanted to offer a different message.
“It’s a simple message whether you are a leftist, a liberal, a centrist, a conservative, or a MAGA fan,” said Sirota. “Your life has value and your political opponents’ lives have value too. You can hate your adversaries’ ideas, and you can fight hard for your cause, but the moment we stop seeing each other as human beings and we start concluding that violence is the answer, that’s the moment we let the soulless corporations, the ruthless authoritarians, and the sociopathic demagogues win.”
The “nihilism” and “greed” of too many, he added, “are creating the conditions for a civil war—one that we must all do our part to stop. Before it becomes unstoppable.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/09 ... -kirk.html
Makes me nuts when anyone confuses left with liberal. Some might considerate it a continuum but that is superficial and wrong. There hasn't been a 'radical left' in the USA since the Weathermen.(And their 'politics of the deed' was a counter-productive fail.)
PS - David Sirota is a philistine wanker.
PPS _ Want some tin-foil? Here ya go: besides a martyr creating false flag the shooting of Kirk eliminates a potential competitor for Trump's ear, now dominated by Stephen Miller, what with the Mid-terms and the youth vote...As has been noticed Kirk wasn't racist enough for the hard core, of which Miller is one.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Trump's Korean Ice Fallout
'"Nightmare!" South Korean workers detained by the United States: I don't think anyone still wants to stay in the United States'
Karl Sanchez
Sep 13, 2025
“We’re Friends! Aren’t We? An excellent depiction by Koreans.
A week ago on 4 September, Ice agents and local militarized police descended on an under-construction major Hyundai battery factory in Ellabell, Georgia, and they just returned to South Korea on the 12th. The following story is multi-sourced and reported by Guancha in Chinese. It goes in excellent tandem with a new Dr. Hudson essay about it and the phenomenon behind Team Trump’s crude, gangster-like behavior, “Trump’s Tariff Wars Hit Europe, Korea & Japan.” As I’ve commented, this was a big blunder by Team Trump since most of the workers were legal and vital to the plant’s construction and the investor’s interest. This builds on my earlier “No Customers” report and illustrates a great ineptness onto Team Trump and his entire MAGA conception. One wonders how badly the World Bank would rank the Empire based on the criteria ASI used as noted in my pervious article. After the transcript and post-commentary, please read the good doctor’s essay as it provides vital additional detail. Now for “Nightmare”:
At what point will South Korean business determine its time to stop throwing money away with America—trading with it, investing in it, and hosting its military? As Dr. Wolff suggests: Capital will look for the best return and stable, predictable conditions to operate within, and that’s not the USA; for South Korea, it’s its regional neighbors and the ASEAN and BRICS beyond.
https://karlof1.substack.com/p/trumps-k ... ce-fallout
******
Unemployment documentation from Michigan and Nevada, 2025.
Jobless claims highest in 4 years as tariff-driven layoffs, price hikes wreak havoc on U.S. workers
Originally published: World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on September 12, 2025 by Tom Hall (more by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)) | (Posted Sep 13, 2025)
More than 260,000 Americans filed initial unemployment claims last week, the highest level in four years, according to data released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This is a sign of the deepening social crisis confronting the U.S. working class, driven increasingly by the trade war measures of the Trump administration and the use of AI to slash jobs.
The mounting unemployment portends an eruption of class struggle under conditions where Trump is escalating his drive toward dictatorship. Seizing on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the administration is accelerating political repression.
The new report comes just after the BLS massively revised downward employment figures for the 2024 fiscal year. It now says that 911,000 fewer jobs were created than previously estimated. Figures for August show only 22,000 jobs were added, while June was revised into negative territory. Manufacturing jobs overall are in the negative for the year.
The latest layoff figures underline the scope of the devastation. Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported a 39 percent increase in announced layoffs last month, to 85,979, with the steepest cuts in pharmaceuticals. Some of the more notable recent announcements include:
1,000 at grocery giant Kroger’s technology and digital team. One worker posted to thelayoff.com: “The big bosses, Yael the CIO and Rana the Senior HR Director, couldn’t even bother to show up live for the announcement. Nope, they dropped a pre-recorded video on everyone like it was a bad Zoom prank. “Hey team, you’re fired—cut! That’s a wrap!”
Oil and gas producer ConocoPhillips is cutting up to one quarter of its global workforce, equal to around 3,200 jobs. “These layoffs aren’t going to end,” one worker wrote on thelayoff.com. “They say the end of 2027 but let’s face it. All of us will slowly be phased out up until 2030.” Another worker wrote: “There are very few oil and gas jobs out there as well as the same in other industries.… I am not a big backer of AI, OSDU, and AWS but it looks like those are here to stay”;
Insurance company State Farm is rolling out voluntary buyouts;
Tech firm Oracle is cutting 254 jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area;
More than 200 layoffs have been announced at electric vehicle startup Rivian;
150 cuts at BlueCross BlueShield in Chattanooga, Tennessee; and
4,000 layoffs at Salesforce, whose CEO declared frankly: “I need less heads with AI.”
In addition, the takeover of Walgreens by private equity firm Sycamore Partners is set to break up the company into five separate entities, a move which will likely lead to massive layoffs.
Amid the rising cost-of-living crisis, Trump’s tariff measures are beginning to manifest in higher inflation figures. Tariffs, which are taxes paid by importers, function as a regressive sales tax because costs are eventually passed on to consumers. This process is now clearly underway.
CPI inflation was around 2.9 percent for August, the BLS reported Thursday. Among the basket of goods used to calculate the index, the highest increases were in coffee (21.7 percent) and raw beef steaks (16.6 percent). Home gas prices jumped 13.6 percent year-on-year, motor vehicle repair was up 15 percent, and furniture rose 9.5 percent.
For some time, inflation had fallen from its historic 9 percent peak in 2022, but it has now stopped declining and is beginning to rise again. Last month’s figures were the highest since January. Moody’s economist Mark Zandi told CNBC:
I think we should expect a further acceleration in inflation over the next 6 to 12 months.
Trump’s claim—parroted by the union bureaucracy—that tariffs would benefit American workers and bring back jobs has been exposed as a lie. The opposite is taking place. Through mass layoffs and price increases generated by tariffs, American capitalism aims to make workers pay for the mounting economic crisis, the growth of public and private debt, the uncontrolled rise in share values, and the diversion of resources toward war.
For the ruling elite, the main significance of the numbers is to what extent they impact the likelihood of an interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve next week, ensuring continued access to cheap money to fuel speculative bubbles and unimaginable personal fortunes.
On Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended trading above 46,000 for the first time ever. The day before Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison increased his wealth by $100 billion in a single day, surpassing Elon Musk as the world’s richest person.
Significantly, General Motors CEO Mary Barra sold 40 percent of her stock in the company, worth tens of millions of dollars.
For workers, however, the picture is disastrous. A majority of Americans are already living paycheck to paycheck, and a significant portion cannot afford the unexpected expense of even a few hundred dollars. Personal bankruptcies rose 11.8 percent between June of 2024 and June of 2025, according to Newsweek.
Officially, the unemployment rate remains at 4.3 percent. But this is a massive underestimation of the real toll. The labor force participation rate, a measure of those of working age either employed or actively looking for work, has been falling for the last two years from its post-lockdown high of 62.8 percent in August 2023 (a figure far below pre-pandemic levels, which had already declined to their lowest since the 1980s). This is a sign that millions are dropping out of the labor force, including those who have given up looking for jobs.
Youth unemployment stands at 10.8 percent, more than double the national figure.
The economic war on the working class finds its political reflection in preparations for civil war, with the deployment of troops to Washington, DC and soon to Chicago and dozens of other cities.
The aim is to suppress all opposition to policies which are already generating significant opposition. In particular, they are aimed at the working class, which is being thrust into struggle by the impossible cost of living and brutal working conditions. The death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. five months ago was followed by a string of major industrial accidents, including explosions at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works near Pittsburgh and a fireworks factory in southern California, and the death of a food processing worker in a meat grinder.
Signs of opposition include strikes by defense workers at Boeing and GE Aerospace. Boeing, no doubt with the blessings of the White House, is moving to replace striking workers. The International Association of Machinists (IAM) bureaucracy, which earlier urged Trump to intervene, has said nothing about the move.
Trump’s response to the recent jobs figures has been to attack the BLS, falsely claiming it was rigging data to make him look bad. Last month he fired the head of the agency. His nominee for replacement is loyalist EJ Antoni, who has reportedly floated ending publication of the monthly job reports altogether.
At the same time, the jobs data are a sign of the deepening crisis in the U.S. economy. The dollar is down 10 percent since the start of the year and the gold price has nearly doubled since 2023. There are growing concerns about the U.S. Treasury market, as government debt, already the largest in history, continues to balloon.
Trump’s tariff policies, while aimed at finding new sources of revenue and attempting to address the balance of trade deficit, are wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy, and on the world economy of which the U.S. and every other country is a component part. Postal volumes into the U.S. have declined by 80 percent due to the reversal of de minimis tariff exemptions, as many companies suspend shipping to the U.S. Consumers are reporting hundreds of dollars in tariffs for relatively small purchases, such as computer equipment.
These developments are leading to explosive class struggles. “I’m worried we are repeating conditions right before World War Two. We are on the path toward an explosion,” one striking nurse in Michigan told the WSWS this week. “The whole working class needs to strike. We need to put the rich people in their place,” a striking Libbey Glass worker in Toledo, Ohio said.
The working class must become the center of the fight against dictatorship, which is impossible without a struggle against the capitalist system itself.
https://mronline.org/2025/09/13/jobless ... s-workers/
******
Recolonizing the Core: Trump, Imperial Decline, and the Race to the Bottom
Trump isn’t restoring American greatness—he’s dismantling the imperial core to recreate Global South conditions at home, using austerity, surveillance, and shock therapy to reposition U.S. labor as a cheap resource in the twilight of empire.
By Prince Kapone, Weaponized Information
Implosion as Strategy
Trump is not mismanaging the U.S. economy—he is deliberately detonating it. Beneath the buffoonery, beneath the white nationalist bravado, Trump’s economic project is as ruthless and calculated as any IMF structural adjustment program ever imposed on the Global South. This time, however, the target isn’t Bolivia or Ghana. It’s Michigan. It’s Mississippi. It’s middle America. The empire is coming home to roost, and its new colony is you.
The Crisis of Imperialism
The post-WWII world order—built on Bretton Woods, NATO, and unchallenged U.S. supremacy—is collapsing. U.S. imperialism, once global landlord of the capitalist world-economy, is now overleveraged, overstretched, and overexposed. The contradictions of empire have turned inward. The dollar’s dominance is being challenged by BRICS+ de-dollarization. The U.S. military can’t even occupy Haiti, let alone reassert dominance over the Middle East or Eurasia. Meanwhile, China is building high-speed railways and trade zones while America debates banning TikTok.
This is what we at Weaponized Information call the Crisis of Imperialism—the unraveling of the U.S.-led capitalist world-system. And Trump, far from resisting this crisis, is riding it like a cowboy on a burning horse, steering America into the abyss on purpose. Because for capital, crisis is not tragedy—it’s opportunity.
Trump’s Imperial Recalibration
Trump’s strategy is a recalibration of empire by other means. If the U.S. can no longer rule the world by consensus, then it will do so by coercion. Exit the façade of multilateral diplomacy. Enter trade war, sanctions, and tech bans. Exit the NGO and enter the drone. Exit the State Department and enter BlackRock. This is a scorched-earth foreign policy doctrine: withdraw from global institutions, sabotage China’s rise, and consolidate a fascist base at home to crush dissent.
Trump’s economic nationalism is not about protecting American workers—it’s about breaking them. His trade policies are crafted not to protect domestic industry but to punish China while using the ensuing chaos to justify massive tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks, and the handover of public infrastructure to private capital.
Domestic Recolonization: The New Structural Adjustment
Here lies the heart of the matter: Trump is recolonizing the United States. He is applying the same logic that U.S. imperialism used to break the back of the Global South—debt, austerity, deregulation, surveillance—but now he’s applying it to Cleveland, Bakersfield, and Birmingham.
This is structural adjustment for the empire’s core:
Slash environmental and labor protections
Privatize schools, water, transportation, and housing
Destroy unions and public services
Militarize police and surveillance to preempt rebellion
Capital is preparing to reinvest—but only under the right conditions. The goal is to recreate the conditions of the Global South—low wages, minimal rights, and zero accountability—right here at home. The MAGA voter thinks Trump is bringing jobs back. In reality, he’s bringing the maquiladora model to Indiana.
Technofascism and the Infrastructure of Repression
This is not your grandfather’s fascism. This is technofascism: the fusion of monopoly capital and the state, administered by big data, enforced through algorithmic discipline, and optimized for labor exploitation. Think Elon Musk’s robot workforce meets ICE raids. Think Palantir’s predictive policing meets Amazon warehouses. Think Peter Thiel’s surveillance capitalism meets the Pentagon.
Trump’s regime is building an AI-driven austerity machine to manage collapse and convert the U.S. into a secure investment zone. It’s Silicon Valley fascism dressed in cowboy boots.
Multipolarity and the Threat to Empire
What truly terrifies the U.S. ruling class is not China’s rise alone—but what it represents: the end of Western supremacy. The BRICS+ bloc is building institutions, trade corridors, and digital systems that bypass U.S. control. Latin America is turning left. Africa is pushing back. The Gulf is drifting eastward. Even Europe, in its own way, is beginning to hedge.
The multipolar world is not utopia—but it is a threat to U.S. imperial monopoly. And Trump’s scorched-earth response is to burn it all down—at home and abroad—if America can’t own it.
The Weaponization of Decline
We are not witnessing America’s revival—we are witnessing the weaponization of its decline. The technofascist regime emerging under Trump 2.0 is a final stage mutation of imperial capitalism, where the last profits are squeezed from a collapsing empire by turning its own people into a new internal colony.
It is no longer just Haiti or Honduras that must be made poor to preserve Wall Street’s dominion. It is also Pennsylvania. It is also rural Texas. The U.S. working class is being stripped, subdued, and offered up to capital as a final sacrifice in a desperate attempt to remain a relevant node of imperial accumulation.
And unless we build a revolutionary alternative, Trump’s race to the bottom will drag us all there—chained, surveilled, and told to be grateful for the job.
https://weaponizedinformation.wordpress ... he-bottom/
'"Nightmare!" South Korean workers detained by the United States: I don't think anyone still wants to stay in the United States'
Karl Sanchez
Sep 13, 2025
“We’re Friends! Aren’t We? An excellent depiction by Koreans.
A week ago on 4 September, Ice agents and local militarized police descended on an under-construction major Hyundai battery factory in Ellabell, Georgia, and they just returned to South Korea on the 12th. The following story is multi-sourced and reported by Guancha in Chinese. It goes in excellent tandem with a new Dr. Hudson essay about it and the phenomenon behind Team Trump’s crude, gangster-like behavior, “Trump’s Tariff Wars Hit Europe, Korea & Japan.” As I’ve commented, this was a big blunder by Team Trump since most of the workers were legal and vital to the plant’s construction and the investor’s interest. This builds on my earlier “No Customers” report and illustrates a great ineptness onto Team Trump and his entire MAGA conception. One wonders how badly the World Bank would rank the Empire based on the criteria ASI used as noted in my pervious article. After the transcript and post-commentary, please read the good doctor’s essay as it provides vital additional detail. Now for “Nightmare”:
If you’ve ever been detained/arrested for nothing as these people were, you’ll appreciate the stress and anxiety it generates—horror even. To raid the very people you asked to help you is nuts. Do note the rank of those who met those workers at the airport; this is a very Big Deal in South Korea, which was already leery of Trump from the first go-round. It’s clear again that Trump’s policies and actions are driving borderline allies to look at other options. I’d really like to see the Russia, PRC, DPRK trio woo the Rok’s Lee into a trade and normalization treaty and SCO partner status. I’m sure all that was talked about in Tianjin and Beijing recently. Levering away South Korea and finally combining Korea would be a huge coup for Eurasian security and sovereignty. That would leave Japan and Taiwan with little choice. The Philippines would still need to revolt against its compradors, and they’d have good reason.On September 12, 330 people arrested in the United States finally flew to South Korea. At this time, it had been eight days since they were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on the 4th. Among those returning was a pregnant woman.
People are back, but the diplomatic friction between the United States and South Korea and the "suspicion of the United States" in South Korea are far from over.
According to Yonhap News Agency, Chosun Ilbo and Reuters, on the afternoon of the 12th, the terminal of Incheon International Airport in South Korea was crowded with journalists, company and government officials, and families of released personnel. At the same time, protesters displayed homemade banners demanding an apology from US President Donald Trump.
"We were handcuffed and anklets", "the US dispatched armored vehicles and helicopters to carry out raids", "the police pointed guns at us", "70 of us were crammed into a small room"...... Upon stepping into South Korean territory, the workers complained about their arrest and the nightmares they had during their detention.
According to the report, a South Korean official said that Trump encouraged released South Korean workers to stay in the United States to train Americans. However, the released workers and their families still had lingering fears and resolutely refused. Some family members said that after all this, "I will never let my family step into the United States again." Some workers bluntly said that he did not think anyone still wanted to stay in the United States, "I'm not sure if we will go back."
More details exposed: like a military operation
At 3:52 p.m. on the 12th, when the released personnel entered the arrival hall of the airport, warm applause erupted at the scene.
Reporters, company representatives, government officials and family members waiting at the scene cheered "Hard work!" "Come on!".
Images from the scene show a protester displaying a banner. The banner depicted Trump in an ICE uniform and wielding a rifle, with the words "We are friends." Aren’t We ”
"It was like a military operation," said a worker at South Korean battery maker LG New Energy, recalling the nightmare of the arrest. He added that at that time, US ICE agents deployed the entire plant in less than 10 minutes.
LG New Energy employee Choi Young-hee (44 years old) has a haggard face and a stiff beard.
"I didn't realize it was serious until I saw them handcuff me and chains," Choi recalled, "I felt like ICE was tough at first and treated us like criminals." But now their attitude has changed, and they seem to think 'something is wrong'. ”
Choi Young-hee was sent to a U.S. factory on a B-1 (short-term business) visa to work as a facility engineer. "They even sent armored vehicles and helicopters to conduct raids, but I face it calmly because there is no problem with visas," he said. I didn't expect to be detained.”
A family member revealed: "My son told me that five or six police officers pointed guns at him from behind, ordered him to 'lie down' and confiscated all his belongings, including his mobile phone, before arresting him. ”
The released workers also revealed the poor conditions of detention. Jeon Sang-hyuk (56 years old, transliteration) said: "At first, 70 people were crammed into one room, but there were only five or six bathrooms, and all the bathrooms were open. He added that they were handcuffed and shackled before being transferred to a two-person room.
"I don't know when I'll actually leave, that's the hardest part," one of the workers said when asked about life while in detention, adding that fear of worry was "the worst."
Others complain about the quality of the food and say that the drinking water tastes like bleach.
The families of the released workers could not hide their anger and relief. "I can't even ask my husband if they were really tied up with chains and zip ties and taken away, which is what makes me most heartbroken and angry," one woman said. She said she hoped the government could handle the matter properly.
According to Reuters, South Korean officials said on the 12th that Trump encouraged released South Korean workers to stay in the United States to train Americans.
"If this happens, which family will allow their children to go to the United States again?" The wife of a contractor employee told reporters, "I will never let them go to the United States again."
Choi Young-hee said: "I don't think anyone wants to stay...... After all this, I'm not sure if we'll ever go back. ”
"The U.S. Embassy has promised that there is no problem in opening a factory like this."
According to Yonhap News Agency, more than 300 South Korean citizens who were released after being arrested by the United States have flown to Incheon International Airport in South Korea on the afternoon of the 12th. 330 of the crew members were detained by U.S. immigration authorities and released, including 316 Koreans, 10 Chinese, 3 Japanese and 1 Indonesian.
Japanese media Nikkei Asia reported on the 12th that 330 people arrested in the United States returned to South Korea, bringing an end to the week-long story. However, the farce has raised questions about the promise of "Trump's dream high-tech investment."
On September 5, local time, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said that ICE agents arrested 475 workers at a Hyundai motor plant in Georgia, USA. The United States called these people "illegal immigrants". The South Korean side said that about 300 of those arrested were South Korean citizens.
The New York Times pointed out that the operation was part of Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration, triggering a diplomatic alarm. Just over a week ago, Trump hosted South Korean President Lee Jae-myung at the White House, who pledged to invest an additional $150 billion in the United States, including battery manufacturing.
According to reports, the factory involved is a joint venture between battery manufacturer LG New Energy and Hyundai Motor Group, and is expected to start operating next year. Hyundai Motor said: "As a result, (plant construction) will be postponed for at least two or three months.”
LG New Energy said it will provide paid holidays to all returning employees and arrange physical examinations and psychological counseling services.
According to Reuters, before leaving for China, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun met with US Secretary of State Rubio in Washington. Rubio said he understands South Korea's sensitivity to the issue. According to the report, the United States and South Korea agreed to discuss visa rules for South Korean workers. Prior to this, South Korean companies had complained about the small quota for business work permits provided by the United States.
According to data submitted to the National Assembly by the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, most of the 316 South Korean citizens arrested and detained by the United States this time are B-1 visa or ESTA (Electronic Travel Authorization) holders, with a ratio of about 1:1.
The head of LG New Energy Corporation, who greeted the released workers at the airport, said, "The U.S. Embassy in South Korea has always said that even if you have a B-1 visa, you can open a factory in the United States. I have been starting a business in the United States for more than three years and this is the first time I have encountered this situation. I thought there would be no problem because getting a B-1 visa is much more difficult than getting an ESTA permit.”
Kang Hoon-sik, chief of staff of the South Korean presidential office, who greeted the released people on the same day, also admitted that there are differences between South Korea and the United States on the interpretation of B-1 visas. "In the long run, we need to quickly discuss within the working group (with the United States) to eliminate fundamental sources of mistrust," he added.”
Kang Hoon-sik told reporters that now, South Korea's dealings with the United States are in a "new normal". "Standards change every time, and there must be constant agreements, not only tariffs, but also security," he complained.”
Nikkei Asia believes that this incident highlights the obvious conflict between two key policies of the Trump administration: one is immigration policy, and ICE agents are currently strictly focusing on immigration issues and deporting illegal immigrants; the second is the issue of investment, after Trump has been pressuring foreign companies with advanced technology to open factories or expand operations in the United States, provide jobs for American workers and strengthen US supply chains.
After the incident, Lee Jae-myung expressed concern about South Korea's business relations with the United States.
On the 12th, Lee Jae-myung admitted at a press conference on his 100th day in office: "From a company's point of view, establishing a local factory in the United States may bring various disadvantages or difficulties...... This could have a significant impact on (South Korea's) future direct investment in the United States.”
At what point will South Korean business determine its time to stop throwing money away with America—trading with it, investing in it, and hosting its military? As Dr. Wolff suggests: Capital will look for the best return and stable, predictable conditions to operate within, and that’s not the USA; for South Korea, it’s its regional neighbors and the ASEAN and BRICS beyond.
https://karlof1.substack.com/p/trumps-k ... ce-fallout
******
Unemployment documentation from Michigan and Nevada, 2025.
Jobless claims highest in 4 years as tariff-driven layoffs, price hikes wreak havoc on U.S. workers
Originally published: World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on September 12, 2025 by Tom Hall (more by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)) | (Posted Sep 13, 2025)
More than 260,000 Americans filed initial unemployment claims last week, the highest level in four years, according to data released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This is a sign of the deepening social crisis confronting the U.S. working class, driven increasingly by the trade war measures of the Trump administration and the use of AI to slash jobs.
The mounting unemployment portends an eruption of class struggle under conditions where Trump is escalating his drive toward dictatorship. Seizing on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the administration is accelerating political repression.
The new report comes just after the BLS massively revised downward employment figures for the 2024 fiscal year. It now says that 911,000 fewer jobs were created than previously estimated. Figures for August show only 22,000 jobs were added, while June was revised into negative territory. Manufacturing jobs overall are in the negative for the year.
The latest layoff figures underline the scope of the devastation. Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported a 39 percent increase in announced layoffs last month, to 85,979, with the steepest cuts in pharmaceuticals. Some of the more notable recent announcements include:
1,000 at grocery giant Kroger’s technology and digital team. One worker posted to thelayoff.com: “The big bosses, Yael the CIO and Rana the Senior HR Director, couldn’t even bother to show up live for the announcement. Nope, they dropped a pre-recorded video on everyone like it was a bad Zoom prank. “Hey team, you’re fired—cut! That’s a wrap!”
Oil and gas producer ConocoPhillips is cutting up to one quarter of its global workforce, equal to around 3,200 jobs. “These layoffs aren’t going to end,” one worker wrote on thelayoff.com. “They say the end of 2027 but let’s face it. All of us will slowly be phased out up until 2030.” Another worker wrote: “There are very few oil and gas jobs out there as well as the same in other industries.… I am not a big backer of AI, OSDU, and AWS but it looks like those are here to stay”;
Insurance company State Farm is rolling out voluntary buyouts;
Tech firm Oracle is cutting 254 jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area;
More than 200 layoffs have been announced at electric vehicle startup Rivian;
150 cuts at BlueCross BlueShield in Chattanooga, Tennessee; and
4,000 layoffs at Salesforce, whose CEO declared frankly: “I need less heads with AI.”
In addition, the takeover of Walgreens by private equity firm Sycamore Partners is set to break up the company into five separate entities, a move which will likely lead to massive layoffs.
Amid the rising cost-of-living crisis, Trump’s tariff measures are beginning to manifest in higher inflation figures. Tariffs, which are taxes paid by importers, function as a regressive sales tax because costs are eventually passed on to consumers. This process is now clearly underway.
CPI inflation was around 2.9 percent for August, the BLS reported Thursday. Among the basket of goods used to calculate the index, the highest increases were in coffee (21.7 percent) and raw beef steaks (16.6 percent). Home gas prices jumped 13.6 percent year-on-year, motor vehicle repair was up 15 percent, and furniture rose 9.5 percent.
For some time, inflation had fallen from its historic 9 percent peak in 2022, but it has now stopped declining and is beginning to rise again. Last month’s figures were the highest since January. Moody’s economist Mark Zandi told CNBC:
I think we should expect a further acceleration in inflation over the next 6 to 12 months.
Trump’s claim—parroted by the union bureaucracy—that tariffs would benefit American workers and bring back jobs has been exposed as a lie. The opposite is taking place. Through mass layoffs and price increases generated by tariffs, American capitalism aims to make workers pay for the mounting economic crisis, the growth of public and private debt, the uncontrolled rise in share values, and the diversion of resources toward war.
For the ruling elite, the main significance of the numbers is to what extent they impact the likelihood of an interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve next week, ensuring continued access to cheap money to fuel speculative bubbles and unimaginable personal fortunes.
On Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended trading above 46,000 for the first time ever. The day before Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison increased his wealth by $100 billion in a single day, surpassing Elon Musk as the world’s richest person.
Significantly, General Motors CEO Mary Barra sold 40 percent of her stock in the company, worth tens of millions of dollars.
For workers, however, the picture is disastrous. A majority of Americans are already living paycheck to paycheck, and a significant portion cannot afford the unexpected expense of even a few hundred dollars. Personal bankruptcies rose 11.8 percent between June of 2024 and June of 2025, according to Newsweek.
Officially, the unemployment rate remains at 4.3 percent. But this is a massive underestimation of the real toll. The labor force participation rate, a measure of those of working age either employed or actively looking for work, has been falling for the last two years from its post-lockdown high of 62.8 percent in August 2023 (a figure far below pre-pandemic levels, which had already declined to their lowest since the 1980s). This is a sign that millions are dropping out of the labor force, including those who have given up looking for jobs.
Youth unemployment stands at 10.8 percent, more than double the national figure.
The economic war on the working class finds its political reflection in preparations for civil war, with the deployment of troops to Washington, DC and soon to Chicago and dozens of other cities.
The aim is to suppress all opposition to policies which are already generating significant opposition. In particular, they are aimed at the working class, which is being thrust into struggle by the impossible cost of living and brutal working conditions. The death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. five months ago was followed by a string of major industrial accidents, including explosions at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works near Pittsburgh and a fireworks factory in southern California, and the death of a food processing worker in a meat grinder.
Signs of opposition include strikes by defense workers at Boeing and GE Aerospace. Boeing, no doubt with the blessings of the White House, is moving to replace striking workers. The International Association of Machinists (IAM) bureaucracy, which earlier urged Trump to intervene, has said nothing about the move.
Trump’s response to the recent jobs figures has been to attack the BLS, falsely claiming it was rigging data to make him look bad. Last month he fired the head of the agency. His nominee for replacement is loyalist EJ Antoni, who has reportedly floated ending publication of the monthly job reports altogether.
At the same time, the jobs data are a sign of the deepening crisis in the U.S. economy. The dollar is down 10 percent since the start of the year and the gold price has nearly doubled since 2023. There are growing concerns about the U.S. Treasury market, as government debt, already the largest in history, continues to balloon.
Trump’s tariff policies, while aimed at finding new sources of revenue and attempting to address the balance of trade deficit, are wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy, and on the world economy of which the U.S. and every other country is a component part. Postal volumes into the U.S. have declined by 80 percent due to the reversal of de minimis tariff exemptions, as many companies suspend shipping to the U.S. Consumers are reporting hundreds of dollars in tariffs for relatively small purchases, such as computer equipment.
These developments are leading to explosive class struggles. “I’m worried we are repeating conditions right before World War Two. We are on the path toward an explosion,” one striking nurse in Michigan told the WSWS this week. “The whole working class needs to strike. We need to put the rich people in their place,” a striking Libbey Glass worker in Toledo, Ohio said.
The working class must become the center of the fight against dictatorship, which is impossible without a struggle against the capitalist system itself.
https://mronline.org/2025/09/13/jobless ... s-workers/
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Recolonizing the Core: Trump, Imperial Decline, and the Race to the Bottom
Trump isn’t restoring American greatness—he’s dismantling the imperial core to recreate Global South conditions at home, using austerity, surveillance, and shock therapy to reposition U.S. labor as a cheap resource in the twilight of empire.
By Prince Kapone, Weaponized Information
Implosion as Strategy
Trump is not mismanaging the U.S. economy—he is deliberately detonating it. Beneath the buffoonery, beneath the white nationalist bravado, Trump’s economic project is as ruthless and calculated as any IMF structural adjustment program ever imposed on the Global South. This time, however, the target isn’t Bolivia or Ghana. It’s Michigan. It’s Mississippi. It’s middle America. The empire is coming home to roost, and its new colony is you.
The Crisis of Imperialism
The post-WWII world order—built on Bretton Woods, NATO, and unchallenged U.S. supremacy—is collapsing. U.S. imperialism, once global landlord of the capitalist world-economy, is now overleveraged, overstretched, and overexposed. The contradictions of empire have turned inward. The dollar’s dominance is being challenged by BRICS+ de-dollarization. The U.S. military can’t even occupy Haiti, let alone reassert dominance over the Middle East or Eurasia. Meanwhile, China is building high-speed railways and trade zones while America debates banning TikTok.
This is what we at Weaponized Information call the Crisis of Imperialism—the unraveling of the U.S.-led capitalist world-system. And Trump, far from resisting this crisis, is riding it like a cowboy on a burning horse, steering America into the abyss on purpose. Because for capital, crisis is not tragedy—it’s opportunity.
Trump’s Imperial Recalibration
Trump’s strategy is a recalibration of empire by other means. If the U.S. can no longer rule the world by consensus, then it will do so by coercion. Exit the façade of multilateral diplomacy. Enter trade war, sanctions, and tech bans. Exit the NGO and enter the drone. Exit the State Department and enter BlackRock. This is a scorched-earth foreign policy doctrine: withdraw from global institutions, sabotage China’s rise, and consolidate a fascist base at home to crush dissent.
Trump’s economic nationalism is not about protecting American workers—it’s about breaking them. His trade policies are crafted not to protect domestic industry but to punish China while using the ensuing chaos to justify massive tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks, and the handover of public infrastructure to private capital.
Domestic Recolonization: The New Structural Adjustment
Here lies the heart of the matter: Trump is recolonizing the United States. He is applying the same logic that U.S. imperialism used to break the back of the Global South—debt, austerity, deregulation, surveillance—but now he’s applying it to Cleveland, Bakersfield, and Birmingham.
This is structural adjustment for the empire’s core:
Slash environmental and labor protections
Privatize schools, water, transportation, and housing
Destroy unions and public services
Militarize police and surveillance to preempt rebellion
Capital is preparing to reinvest—but only under the right conditions. The goal is to recreate the conditions of the Global South—low wages, minimal rights, and zero accountability—right here at home. The MAGA voter thinks Trump is bringing jobs back. In reality, he’s bringing the maquiladora model to Indiana.
Technofascism and the Infrastructure of Repression
This is not your grandfather’s fascism. This is technofascism: the fusion of monopoly capital and the state, administered by big data, enforced through algorithmic discipline, and optimized for labor exploitation. Think Elon Musk’s robot workforce meets ICE raids. Think Palantir’s predictive policing meets Amazon warehouses. Think Peter Thiel’s surveillance capitalism meets the Pentagon.
Trump’s regime is building an AI-driven austerity machine to manage collapse and convert the U.S. into a secure investment zone. It’s Silicon Valley fascism dressed in cowboy boots.
Multipolarity and the Threat to Empire
What truly terrifies the U.S. ruling class is not China’s rise alone—but what it represents: the end of Western supremacy. The BRICS+ bloc is building institutions, trade corridors, and digital systems that bypass U.S. control. Latin America is turning left. Africa is pushing back. The Gulf is drifting eastward. Even Europe, in its own way, is beginning to hedge.
The multipolar world is not utopia—but it is a threat to U.S. imperial monopoly. And Trump’s scorched-earth response is to burn it all down—at home and abroad—if America can’t own it.
The Weaponization of Decline
We are not witnessing America’s revival—we are witnessing the weaponization of its decline. The technofascist regime emerging under Trump 2.0 is a final stage mutation of imperial capitalism, where the last profits are squeezed from a collapsing empire by turning its own people into a new internal colony.
It is no longer just Haiti or Honduras that must be made poor to preserve Wall Street’s dominion. It is also Pennsylvania. It is also rural Texas. The U.S. working class is being stripped, subdued, and offered up to capital as a final sacrifice in a desperate attempt to remain a relevant node of imperial accumulation.
And unless we build a revolutionary alternative, Trump’s race to the bottom will drag us all there—chained, surveilled, and told to be grateful for the job.
https://weaponizedinformation.wordpress ... he-bottom/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."