Musings

 

The masses of people will one day shout "Enough!" & storm the gates of wealth, power & privilege & take back everything that was stolen....just a matter of time...

Why Trump is Waging War on Academia by David Schultz

 

Source: CP

There are a multitude of reasons why Donald Trump and his supporters are waging war against colleges and universities.  But among the reasons is a simple one–historically conservative reactionary regimes hate intellectuals.

Trump and his supporters hate higher education for obvious reasons.   Those with college degrees are not his supporters and voted against him in 2024.    Colleges are full of students and professors who vote for Democrats and they have visibly protested  against his policies or  embraced issues such as opposition to Israel’s war against the Palestinians,  support for transgender rights, or DEI in general.  One could argue that Trump’s populism is rooted in what historian Richard Hofstadter labeled “anti-intellectualism” in American life.  Americans generally hate smart people, labeling them as Alabama Governor did as “pointy-headed  intellectuals,” or  in the words of Vice-President Spiro Agnew who lumped them together with the media to call them “An effete core of impudent snobs.”

But there is something here and it is the traditional hatred of intellectuals by  reactionary regimes.  There is a story regarding the trial of Italian Marxist  intellectual  Antonio Gramsci who was part of the opposition party in the parliament to Benito Mussolini and the fascists.  Gramsci was  arrested and at his trial  the prosecution declared: “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.”  Gramsci’s crime was providing the intellectual ideas to challenge the ruling power.  Despite his punishment. His Prison Notebooks were secretly written and disseminated.

Gramsci’s thesis was that the battle against fascism was in part an ideological fight for the hearts and minds of the people.  Battles for power may take place in parliament or in the streets but they are also fought in mass pop culture  as well as in universities and colleges to influence and counter  the propaganda of the ruling class and government.  Controlling intellectuals and what they think and say is part of how the fascists, the nazis, and other authoritarian and reactionary regimes maintain power.

Education and learning are about critical thinking.  It is about subjecting power and dogma to truth.  It is about questioning, challenging, and imagining alternative  realities or unmasking facades.  It  is as philosopher Immanuel Kant declared:  “Dare to Know.”  College is where one learns to reject authority for the sake of authority, to ask “Why not?” in response to “Why?”  It is to reject what is accepted as a matter of fact and suggest that what is traditionally accepted as truth may not be so.  If done right, a liberal arts education is inherently subversive and in the spirit of John Dewey, that task is not to produce the next generation  of  docile uneducated workers, but instead to foster the next generation of democratic citizens.  By its very nature, higher education should produce the antithesis of political passivity and blind obedience.

This is why every  authoritarian  regime seeks to control what people think.  It does that in its  school curriculum and via book bans.  But it also does that in terms of who is hired to teach and what they teach.  It is a battle over indoctrination.  Universities and intellectuals, for Gramsci, lead the charge to counter this battle for hearts and minds.  It should come as no surprise why Trump and many Republicans before him have hated higher education.  Arguing that there are more than two sexes, that gender roles are socially constructed, that perhaps capitalism exploits workers or that  the rich do  not deserve their fortunes, is not what  they want to hear.  Education is not to serve the interests of democracy, self-discovery, or personal enrichment, it is to teach  subservience to the status quo.

Trump’s efforts to eliminate the Department of Education and crackdown on higher education may be intensely personal and vindictive.  But it is also part of a predictable agenda to control and eliminate the intellectual seeds of opposition.

Smash & Grab:Trump’s Shockingly Lawless Second Term by Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng

 

Source: Rolling Stone

There were less than four days to go until Donald Trump was sworn into office for a second time. In those final days of the presidential transition, Trump and his team were busy finalizing their blitz of executive actions, which included a widespread crackdown on civil rights, trans Americans, and diversity programs. Trump’s government-in-waiting was putting the finishing touches on plans for a startlingly nativist propaganda campaign, which would soon feature an “ASMR” video of officials preparing to fly migrants to camps at Guantánamo Bay.

Trump had preemptively allocated an astounding amount of power to the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, giving him near free rein to desecrate the federal workforce. And the president-elect was giddy about one of his more depraved opening acts still to come: the mass pardons and commutations for his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Amid all of this, the incoming president had something else on his mind: his meme coin. The Friday night before his inauguration, Trump announced he was launching his own cryptocurrency called “Trump Meme” — a purely speculative asset, comparable to a digital baseball card, with no inherent value or use. The price of $TRUMP quickly blew up, surging from around $6 to $74, generating billions of dollars on paper for the Trump family.

The launch was so successful that First Lady Melania Trump quickly raced her own meme coin out the door, too, less than 24 hours before Trump’s inauguration — a move that caused $TRUMP to begin crashing. By late February, the coin was trading at around $13. The earliest investors likely made huge profits; hundreds of thousands of suckers appear to have lost big. The Trump family will make a killing no matter what: By early February, his family and their partners had made nearly $100 million on trading fees.

In the final days of the transition and even during his early presidency, Trump privately encouraged close allies — in big business and on Capitol Hill — to buy his meme coin, according to a source familiar with the matter and one Republican lawmaker. He’d even do this over dinner.

“Of course he did,” the GOP lawmaker recounts. “He told the whole country to do it [via an X post], so why wouldn’t he tell the people he knows? There’s nothing wrong with that.” The lawmaker refused to say whether they invested — though if they bought any Trump coin more than an hour or two after it launched, they would have lost big.

The meme coin was a blatant cash grab, to the point that one of Trump’s former White House communications directors denounced it as “Idi Amin-level corruption.” It wasn’t even the Trump family’s first foray into crypto — during the 2024 campaign, his family announced the creation of their own cryptocurrency platform, World Liberty Financial.

As he promised on the campaign trail, Trump has worked aggressively to push the crypto industry’s interests in Washington and ensure the incredibly risky assets operate with little regulation, signing an executive order to promote crypto, announcing a “crypto strategic reserve,” and naming an industry ally to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission. At the end of February, Trump’s SEC moved to throw out its prosecution of Justin Sun — who had been charged with marketing unregistered crypto securities and manipulating the market for a crypto token — after Sun’s investments in World Liberty Financial reportedly netted the Trump family $56 million in fees.

The crypto caper is a perfect encapsulation of the bold-faced graft at the heart of the new Trump presidency: Uber-wealthy elites are poised to cash in, while ordinary people get hosed. And public policy will be designed to encourage this exact outcome.

“Compared to other major corruption scandals since the 1870s, this administration is shaping up to be the most corrupt of them all, because never before has a president been willing and able to blatantly use the office to make massive personal profit,” says Kedric Payne, the Campaign Legal Center’s general counsel and senior director for ethics. “Compared to his first term, he’s more strategic and more prepared to engage in corruption — and he’s taken big steps to wipe out any possible enforcement against his actions. An example of this is his financial interest in crypto, while at the same time shaping the policy to allow that very industry to flourish.”

Payne adds: “The blatant nature of this is genuinely new, which I think a lot of people have trouble wrapping their heads around. Normal corruption involves lobbyists providing gifts and perks and campaign contributions to lawmakers in hopes they will receive beneficial legislation. These are acts that directly benefit Trump’s bottom line.” (The Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment.)

“This administration is shaping up to be the most corrupt of them all.”

WHILE STILL IN its infancy, Trump’s second administration has been a shocking expression of corruption, lawlessness, and cruelty, with an even higher level of chaos than Americans had grown to expect from the former game-show host. It’s clear now his critics were correct about what a Trump win would mean; if anything, many of them undersold the threat he would pose.

At the center of the horror show is Elon Musk, who spent $290 million boosting Trump and Republicans in the last election cycle. In return, Musk was put in charge of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump and Musk have used this not-so-legitimate office to blitz through constitutional checks and balances and long-standing federal laws in order to consolidate and expand presidential power, so they can dismantle whole agencies and purge the workforce to make it more MAGA.

With Musk and his team of young far-right helpers at DOGE leading the way, the Trump administration has moved to fire tens of thousands of federal employees with no basis at all — ranging from the vast majority of workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development, America’s foreign aid bureau; some health care workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs; staffers who take care of our great national parks; and employees at the Federal Aviation Administration who keep the skies safe. (They also fired hundreds of staffers at the agency that manages America’s nuclear weapons before attempting to hire them back.)

Veterans make up 30 percent of the federal workforce — so Americans who served our country are all but assured to absorb the brunt of Trump and Musk’s mass firings. Moreover, Musk and DOGE specifically sought to cancel hundreds of Veterans Affairs contracts that would eviscerate the department’s ability to provide promised care and benefits; according to Washington Technology, a magazine for government contractors, most of the contracts targeted were held by service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses.

“Congress estimates 50,000 veterans will lose jobs, homes, and more,” says Michael Embrich, a former policy adviser to the secretary of Veterans Affairs, adding: “Those who swore to defend democracy will now have their pursuit of happiness stripped by two of the richest and most powerful men ever to skirt serving in the public interest.”

‘Paying to See the President’
In a short time, the ethical quandaries of Trump’s first term have begun to look comparatively small. Outside of the crypto space, there are so many different ways for businesses — or foreign interests — to put money directly in the coffers of the president and his family.

During the campaign last year, Trump privately discussed jacking up the price for membership at his private Florida club and estate Mar-a-Lago, because members are “paying to see the president.”

After Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris, top CEOs and corporate executives amped up their visits to the president’s Palm Beach club — with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, suits from the pharmaceutical industry, and many others making a show of kissing the ring.

Senior staff at lobbying outfits and a variety of corporate giants immediately began planning retreats, galas, and annual meetings at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump-branded golf resorts and event spaces — so they could shovel cash to Trump. One longtime D.C. lobbyist referred to these payments as “tips” for the president. Wired separately reports Trump’s Super PAC has charged $1 million per seat at Mar-a-Lago events with the president; one-on-one meetings cost $5 million.

Even the first lady has been making deals — including an outlandish agreement with Amazon. The company signed a $40 million deal with Melania Trump for a documentary film that, as one Amazon source puts it, “nobody asked for.” Other studios, to the extent they were interested, reportedly offered far lower sums. It’s expected that most of the money will go directly to Melania. She personally pitched Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, about the film project, directed by disgraced filmmaker Brett Ratner, over dinner at Mar-a-Lago in December, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Becoming president again has given Trump leverage to resolve his often frivolous lawsuits against Big Tech companies and large corporate-owned media outlets, and to walk away with multimillion-dollar payouts. In one case, he has already wielded the weight of the Federal Communications Commission against a media company he’s suing.

ABC, owned by Disney, announced in December it would pay $15 million to resolve Trump’s lawsuit over George Stephanopoulos’ claim that Trump had been “found liable for rape” in civil lawsuits from E. Jean Carroll. (Trump was found liable for “sexual abuse.”) In late January, Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit over Facebook suspending his social media accounts after he fomented the Jan. 6 riot.

The Facebook and ABC payments went to Trump’s new presidential library and museum slush fund. In the case of Trump’s settlement with X, Musk didn’t even bother with the library fund, and instead negotiated a $10 million deal with Trump that will reportedly benefit the president personally. Trump has claimed he gave Musk “a big discount.”

Obvious Conflicts
The $10 million deal with Trump might be smart for Musk after all, given that his relationship with the president has made him one of the world’s most powerful people and put him in a position to profit off the government even more.

Musk’s DOGE team has demanded sweeping access across the federal government to sensitive data and systems in order to enact firings, cancel projects, and cut off payments to entities that Trump and Musk don’t like. The upshot for Musk is he now has access to an unparalleled trove of data about every American as well as his competitors. The opportunities for conflicts of interest are endless, given Musk’s businesses.

As Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at the Stetson University College of Law, puts it, “The number of potential conflicts of interest are legion.”

The Trump White House has argued that Musk can police his own activities — and choose to excuse himself from DOGE’s work overseeing certain contracts or funding if he believes it poses a conflict. Musk, for his part, has suggested that the public will hold him accountable regarding any conflict — people won’t “be shy about saying that,” he said in a press conference with Trump.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy
“We would not let him do that segment or look in that area if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest,” Trump volunteered, before waving away any concerns: “He’s a successful guy. That’s why we want him doing this.” Trump later publicly added one potential restriction: “Anything to do with possibly even space, we won’t let Elon partake in that,” he said.

That would make sense, since Musk’s company SpaceX has received billions in contracts from NASA.

When it was reported in February that the Trump administration was targeting NASA for a round of painful cuts — potentially 10 percent of the space agency’s workforce — the agency was abruptly let off the hook. Within hours of those reports emerging, NASA staff were told that they could take a breath: At least for the moment, those cuts were postponed, or maybe called off for good.

The reason? Musk and his allies personally intervened to forestall the reported haircut, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.

As he tears through the federal workforce, Musk is cashing in on new and existing contracts, including with agencies that regulate his businesses.

After Musk and DOGE cut hundreds of jobs at the FAA, an agency that previously fined Musk’s SpaceX for regulatory and safety violations, news outlets reported the agency was preparing to hire Starlink, owned by SpaceX, to upgrade the systems it uses to manage America’s airspace. As Rolling Stone reported, before anything was official, FAA officials quietly directed staff to find tens of millions of dollars to fund a Starlink deal.

“If Musk is in charge of hiring and firing workers at the FAA, then getting a no-bid FAA contract to provide services would be an epic conflict of interest,” says Torres-Spelliscy. “If this is the case, then he is basically paying himself with taxpayer funds through a part of the government he partially controls through his ability to fire people.”

Talk of hiring Starlink has come up elsewhere. According to a source familiar with the matter, during the first few weeks of the second Trump era, DOGE personnel reached out to officials at the FBI and Justice Department — and asked if the bureau had ever thought about adopting Starlink for sensitive operations and surveillance.

“I wanted to vomit,” this source says, adding that there is no conceivable reason the FBI would need Starlink.

The administration has also shielded Musk’s X platform from potential oversight, pausing the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which polices big banks and other financial institutions, such as peer-to-peer payment apps. Musk is working with Visa to offer a peer-to-peer payment service called X Money Account.

Other agencies scrutinizing Musk’s businesses have faced steep job cuts — including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has been investigating Tesla’s self-driving technology.

“To the extent that Musk is hiring and firing people all over the U.S. executive branch, he is not in arm’s-length transactions with ­government regulators,” Torres-­Spelliscy says. “With respect to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, he would be both the regulator [NHTSA] and the regulated [Tesla].”

Lawlessness is core to Musk’s DOGE project and Trump’s slash-and-burn agenda for his second administration. The president’s mass-­firing campaign and efforts to expand executive power depend on his and his cronies’ willingness to ignore the Constitution, existing federal laws passed by Congress, and any expectations of transparency.

Musk has not been appointed or confirmed; he is a “special government employee,” a designation that allows him to bypass a Senate confirmation process and avoid publicly disclosing his vast financial holdings.

“Special government employees do not go around directing people in agencies and telling them what to do,” says Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. “If you’re directing people in agencies and telling them what to do, under the appointments clause of the Constitution, you need to be appointed and confirmed by the Senate.”

The office Musk has led, DOGE, was created by rebranding the U.S. Digital Service — a technology unit that was housed within the president’s Office of Management and Budget. Musk and Trump have attempted to bestow the office with expansive authorities never granted by Congress. (They also moved DOGE into the executive office of the president, to shield it from open-record laws.)

In court, the Justice Department has claimed that “Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself” — even as Musk publicly threatened to fire any federal employees who failed to respond to his HR emails asking them, “What did you do last week?”

Meanwhile, DOGE has worked to help the Trump administration claw back funds appropriated by Congress, including $80 million taken right out of New York City bank accounts. Those funds, meant to help the city house asylum seekers, were removed after Musk falsely claimed that DOGE had “discovered” that disaster-relief funds were “being spent on high-end hotels for illegals.”

There’s a term for this type of act: impoundment. Trump pledged to try this during the 2024 campaign. However, the Constitution does not give the president the power to impound, freeze, or refuse to spend funds appropriated by Congress.

“It’s pretty clear as a textual matter, and the history is even clearer, that the president needs to defer to Congress, and cannot override Congress’ specific appropriations,” says Jed Shugerman, a Boston University law professor and expert in executive power. He notes that Musk “has deputies who are directly pushing the buttons that are blocking payments,” thanks to DOGE’s unprecedented access to America’s payment systems.

Trump is challenging the Constitution in other ways. The president has attempted, via executive order, to end birthright citizenship — the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States. (A judge appointed by Ronald Reagan found Trump’s order “blatantly ­unconstitutional.”)

“He who saves his country does not violate any law.”

Donald Trump
Compounding the constitutional threat, Vice President J.D. Vance has suggested Trump can ignore judges’ rulings, and Trump has publicly threatened to “look at” judges who rule against DOGE’s efforts to gut federal agencies and freeze their funds.

“At this point, there’s enough reporting to suggest that Elon Musk is exercising invalid power that the Constitution doesn’t allow,” says Shugerman. “He should not have executive power at all if it hasn’t been established by Congress,” Shugerman continues. “The executive power he’s exercising is that of a department head or principal officer, and he has not been confirmed. Elon Musk is unconstitutional.”

‘What Are You Gonna Do About It?’
Since the dawn of his first administration, Trump has told his followers: “Promises made, promises kept.” One 2024 vow he’s kept was his pledge to make the federal government as autocratically MAGA and cultish as possible.

During the Presidents’ Day weekend in mid-February, Trump screamed the quiet part out loud, writing online: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” In paraphrasing an apparently fake Napoleon quote, Trump effectively declared that he thinks he can break any law he wants.

In a more sane time, this sort of expression from the U.S. commander in chief would be a scandal. After all, the president is — due to the American Revolution — not a king. Trump and his staff soon doubled down, outright calling him “THE KING.”

It would be easier to dismiss these words as mere trolling if Trump were not seeking to consolidate unchecked power. In his first month back in office, Trump moved to purge the FBI and Justice Department as vengeance for the criminal investigations he’s faced. He’s quickly turned the DOJ into a political arm of the White House and a protection racket for him, his friends, and allies — and a weapon against his enemies, real or perceived.

Almost as soon as he was sworn in, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone there was a sudden, jarring information clampdown at the DOJ. Senior career officials at the Justice Department were suddenly cut out of daily conference calls and meetings to go over top-line threats or prime suspects that the feds were focusing on. Trump’s political appointees repeatedly warned Justice Department career officials and attorneys that failure to comply with Trump’s interpretation of the law — however illegal it may sound — is grounds for removal.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump told several confidants that his new Justice Department would not be conducting any more, in his framing, “illegal” federal investigations of Trump’s Republican pals. Already, the president and his administration are following through on that.

Ed Martin, Trump’s new interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has publicly pledged to “protect DOGE,” and described his team as “President Trump’s lawyers.” More ominously, in February, his office reportedly declined to sign off on an arrest warrant for MAGA Florida Rep. Cory Mills, after he was accused of physically assaulting a 27-year-old woman. At the same time, Martin has publicly threatened to investigate Democratic lawmakers over their criticisms of Musk and the conservative Supreme Court.

After Trump took office again, the Justice Department’s interest in corruption-busting quickly evaporated, and the department announced it was ending its focus on foreign bribery and influence. The DOJ also moved to throw out its corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams so that he could more fully devote his “attention and resources” to assisting Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The ensuing scandal triggered a wave of resignations at the Department of Justice that included prosecutors who had clerked for staunchly conservative justices. In another presidency, it would have been the defining, darkest episode. In Trump 2.0, it was another day, another week, another chance for the president and his people to practice their guiding, Sopranos-style legal principle, which is simply — in the words of one conservative attorney close to Trump and his inner sanctum — “What are you gonna do about it?”

Stay Silent and Stay Powerless Against Trump’s Tyranny? by Ralph Nader

 

Source: Nader

There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.

Start with the once-powerful Bush family dynasty. They despise Trump as he does them. Rich and comfortable George W. Bush is very proud of his Administration’s funding of AIDS medicines saving lives in Africa and elsewhere. Trump, driven by vengeance and megalomania, moved immediately to dismantle this program. Immediate harm commenced to millions of victims in Africa and elsewhere who are reliant on this U.S. assistance (including programs to lessen the health toll on people afflicted by tuberculosis and malaria).

Not a peep from George W. Bush, preoccupied with his landscape painting and perhaps occasional pangs of guilt from his butchery in Iraq. His signal program is going down in flames and he keeps his mouth shut, as he has largely done since the upstart loudmouth Trump ended the Bush family’s power over the Republican Party.

Then there are the Clintons and Obama. They are very rich, and have no political aspirations. Yet, though horrified by what they see Trump doing to the government and its domestic social safety net services they once ruled, mum’s the word.

What are these politicians afraid of as they watch the overthrow of our government and the oncoming police state? Trump, after all, was not elected to become a dictator—declaring war on the American people with his firings and smashing of critical “people’s programs” that benefit liberals and conservatives, red state and blue state residents alike.

Do they fear being discomforted by Trump/Musk unleashing hate and threats against them, and getting tarred by Trump’s tirades and violent incitations? No excuses. Regard for our country must take precedence to help galvanize their own constituencies to resist tyranny and fight for Democracy.

What about Kamala Harris — the hapless loser to Trump in November’s presidential election? She must think she has something to say on behalf of the 75 million people who voted for her or against Trump. Silence! She is perfect bait for Trump’s intimidation tactics. She is afraid to tangle with Trump despite his declining polls, rising inflation, the falling stock market and anti-people budget slashing which is harming her supporters and Trump voters’ economic wellbeing, health and safety.

This phenomenon of going dark is widespread. Regulators and prosecutors who were either fired or quit in advance have not risen to defend their own agencies and departments, if only to elevate the morale of those civil servants remaining behind and under siege.

Why aren’t we hearing from Gary Gensler, former head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), now being dismantled, especially since the SEC is dropping his cases against alleged cryptocurrency crooks?

Why aren’t we hearing much more (she wrote one op-ed) from Samantha Power, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under Biden, whose life-saving agency is literally being illegally closed down, but for pending court challenges?

Why aren’t we hearing from Michael Regan, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Biden about saboteur Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of EPA, who is now giving green lights to lethal polluters and other environmental destructions?

These and many other former government officials all have their own circles – in some cases, millions of people – who need to hear from them.

They can take some courage of the seven former I.R.S. Commissioners — from Republican and Democratic Administrations — who condemned slicing the I.R.S staff in half and aiding and abetting big time tax evasion by the undertaxed super-rich and giant corporations. I am told that they would be eager to testify, should the Democrats in Congress have the energy to hold unofficial hearings as ranking members of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees.

Banding together is one way of reducing the fear factor. After Trump purged the career military at the Pentagon to put his own “yes men” at the top, five former Secretaries of Defense, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, sent a letter to Congress denouncing Trump’s firing of senior military officers and requesting “immediate” House and Senate hearings to “assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.” Not a chance by the GOP majority there. But they could ask the Democrats to hold UNOFFICIAL HEARINGS as ranking members of the Armed Services Committees!

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker can be one of the prime witnesses at these hearings – he has no fear of speaking his mind against the Trumpsters.

On March 6, 2025, the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, put her rare byline on an urgent report titled, “‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.”

She writes: “The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents [one exception is Wesleyan University President Michael Roth] fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.”

To be sure, government employees and other unions are speaking out and suing in federal court. So are national citizen groups like Public Citizen and the Center for Constitutional Rights, though hampered in alerting large audiences by newspapers like the Times rarely reporting their initiatives.

Yes, Ms. Bumiller, pay attention to that aspect of your responsibility. Moreover, the Times’ editorial page (op-ed and editorials) are not adequately reflecting the urgency of her reporting. Nor are her reporters covering the informed outspokenness and actions of civic organizations.

Don’t self-censoring people know that they are helping the Trumpian dread, threat and fear machine get worse? Study Germany and Italy in the nineteen thirties.

The Trump/Musk lawless, cruel, arrogant, dictatorial regime is in our White House. Their police state infrastructure is in place. Silence is complicity!

Chris Hedges: Trump’s War on Education

Source: Chris Hedges Report

The attacks on colleges and universities — Donald Trump’s administration has warned some 60 colleges that they could lose federal money if they fail to make campuses safe for Jewish students and is already pulling $400 million from Columbia University — has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism. 

Antisemitism is a smoke screen, a cover for a much broader and more insidious agenda. The goal, which includes plans to abolish the Department of Education and terminate all programs of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), is to turn the educational system, from kindergarten to graduate school, into an indoctrination machine.

Totalitarian regimes seek absolute control over the institutions that reproduce ideas, especially the media and education. Narratives that challenge the myths used to legitimize absolute power — in our case historical facts that blemish the sanctity of white male supremacy, capitalism and Christian fundamentalism — are erased. 

There is to be no shared reality. There are to be no other legitimate perspectives. History is to be static. It is not to be open to reinterpretation or investigation. It is to be calcified into myth to buttress a ruling ideology and the reigning political and social hierarchy. Any other paradigm of power and social interaction is tantamount to treason.

“One of the most significant threats that a class hierarchy can face is a universally accessible and excellent public school system,” writes Jason Stanley in Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future:

“The political philosophy that feels this threat most acutely — and that unites hostility toward public education with support for class hierarchy — is a certain form of rightwing libertarianism, an ideology that sees free markets as the wellspring of human freedom. These kinds of libertarians oppose government regulation and virtually all forms of public goods, including public education. The political goal of this version of libertarian ideology is to dismantle public goods.

The dismantling of public education is backed by oligarchs and business elites alike, who see in democracy a threat to their power, and in the taxes required for public goods a threat to their wealth. Public schools are the foundational democratic public good. It is therefore perfectly logical that those who are opposed to democracy, including fascist and fascist-leaning movements, would join forces with right-wing libertarians in undermining the institution of public education.”

I taught Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in a New Jersey prison classroom. Zinn’s book is one of the primary targets of the far-right. Trump denounced Zinn in 2020 at the White House Conference on American History, saying, “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.”

Teaching Zinn in Prison

Zinn implodes the lies used to glorify the conquest of the Americas. He allows readers to see the United States through the eyes of Native Americans, immigrants, the enslaved, women, union leaders, persecuted socialists, anarchists and communists, abolitionists, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and the poor.

He holds up the testimonies of Sojourner Truth, Chief Joseph, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

As I gave my lectures I would hear students mutter “Damn” or “We been lied to.”

Zinn makes clear that organized militant forces opened up democratic space in American society. None of these democratic rights — the abolition of slavery, the right to strike, equality for women, Social Security, the eight-hour work day, civil rights — were given to us by a benevolent ruling class. It involved struggle and self-sacrifice. Zinn, in short, explains how democracy works.

Zinn’s book was revered in my cramped prison classroom. It was revered because my students intimately understood how white privilege, racism, capitalism, poverty, police, the courts and lies peddled by the powerful, deformed their communities and their lives.

Zinn allowed them to hear, for the first time, the voices of their ancestors. He wrote history, not myth. He not only educated my students, but empowered them. I had always admired Zinn. After that class I too revered him.

Zinn, when he was teaching at Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college in Atlanta, became involved in the civil rights movement. He served on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He marched with his students demanding civil rights. Spelman’s president was not amused.

“I was fired for insubordination,” Zinn recalled. “Which happened to be true.”

Learning to Question Dogma

Education is meant to be subversive. It gives students the ability and the language to ask questions about reigning assumptions and ideas. It questions dogma and ideology. It can, as Zinn writes, “counteract the deception that makes the government’s force legitimate.”

It lifts up the voices of the marginalized and oppressed to honor a plurality of perspectives and experiences. This leads, when education works, to empathy and understanding, a desire to right historical wrongs, to make society better. It fosters the common good.

Education is not only about knowledge, it is about inspiration. It is about passion. It is about the belief that what we do in life matters. It is about, as James Baldwin writes in his essay “The Creative Process,” the ability to drive “to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”

The rightwing attacks on programs such as critical race theory or DEI, as Stanley points out in his book,

“intentionally distort these programs to create the impression that those whose perspectives are finally included — like Black Americans, for instance — are receiving some sort of illicit benefit or unfair advantage. And so they target Black Americans who have risen to positions of power and influence and seek to delegitimize them as undeserving. The ultimate goal is to justify a takeover of the institutions, transforming them into weapons in the war against the very idea of multi-racial democracy.”

The integrity and quality of public higher education in America has been under assault for decades, as Ellen Schrecker documents in her book The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s.

The protests on college campuses in the 1960s, Schrecker points out, saw “the enemies of the liberal academy” attack its “ideological and financial underpinnings.”

Tuitions, once low, if not free, have soared, and with them tremendous student debt. State legislators and the federal government have slashed funding to public universities, forcing them to seek support from corporations and reduce most faculty to the status of poorly paid adjuncts, often lacking benefits, as well as job security. 

Nearly 75 percent of the instruction at colleges and universities is in the hands of adjuncts, part-time lecturers and non-tenure-track full-time faculty, who have no hope of being granted tenure, according to the American Federation of Teachers.

Public institutions, which serve 80 percent of the nation’s students, are chronically short of funding and basic resources. Higher education has evolved, even at major research universities, into vocational training, no longer a vehicle for learning but economic mobility. 

The assault sees elite schools, where tuition can run over $80,000 a year, cater to the wealthy and the privileged, locking out the poor and the working class.

“The current academy functions primarily to replicate an increasingly inequitable status quo, it is hard to imagine how it could be restructured to serve a more democratic purpose without external pressure for something like universal free higher education,” Schrecker writes.

Totalitarian societies do not teach students how to think but what to think. They churn out students who are historically and politically illiterate, blinded by an enforced historical amnesia. They seek to produce servants and apologists who conform, not critics and rebels. Liberal arts colleges, for this reason, do not exist in totalitarian states.

Book Bans

PEN America has documented nearly 16,000 book bans in public schools nationwide since 2021, a number, PEN writes, “not seen since the Red Scare McCarthy era of the 1950s.” These books include titles such as The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Maus, the graphic novel on the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman.

The most important human activity, as Socrates and Plato remind us, is not action, but contemplation, echoing the wisdom enshrined in eastern philosophy. We cannot change the world if we cannot understand it. By digesting and critiquing the philosophers and realities of the past, we become independent thinkers in the present. 

We are able to articulate our own values and beliefs, often in opposition to what these ancient philosophers advocated. A capacity to think, to ask the right questions, however is a threat to totalitarian regimes seeking to inculcate a blind obedience to authority.

Unconscious civilizations are totalitarian wastelands. They replicate and embrace dead ideas, captured in José Clemente Orozco’s mural “The Epic of American Civilization” where skeletons in academic robes bring forth baby skeletons.

“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism. 

“The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda — before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world — lies in the ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

As bad as things are, they are about to get much worse. The nation’s educational system is being dragged into the slaughterhouse, where it will be dismembered and privatized. The corporations profiting from the charter schools system and online colleges — whose primary concern is certainly not with education — replace real teachers with non-unionized, poorly trained instructors. 

Students, rather than being educated, will be taught by rote and fed the familiar tropes of authoritarian playbooks — paeans to white supremacy, national purity, patriarchy and the nation’s duty to impose its “virtues” on others by force. 

This mass indoctrination will not only ensure ignorance, but obedience. And that is the point.

The US Is Undergoing a Corporate Coup - Sudan Shows How Dangerous It Can Become by Suad Abdel aziz

Source: Z

As billionaire Elon Musk seizes control over vast swaths of the U.S. government, blurring the line between his private business empire and the state, some analysts have begun to call this takeover what it is: a coup. This corporate coup may not look like the military coups we are familiar with — often backed by the U.S. itself — but it is not without precedent. The unfolding crises in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo show just how quickly this kind of unchecked corporate power can lead to state takeover and widespread violence. As the U.S. descends further down this path by the day, these examples hold a crucial warning.

The Corporate Coup

In 2019, in response to widespread protests demanding regime change, long-time Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir contracted a private militia group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) to act as the presidential palace’s personal security. The choice backfired: Al-Bashir was himself deposed in a coup in partnership with the very militia that he had hired. Later that year, in a violent crackdown, the militia publicly massacred protestors staging a sit-in calling for civilian, not military, rule. With every coup comes a power vacuum and, with the help of Emirati and Israeli backers, the RSF seized the power vacuum, overtook the Sudanese military and violently established control over much of the country.

The militia’s founder and leader is Chadian billionaire warlord Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo. His forces function as a corporate entity, profiteering off war, controlling state resources and using violence as a business strategy. The RSF began as a transnational corporation that dealt in war crimes globally, hired as mercenaries in counterinsurgency campaigns throughout the Middle East and North African region. In 2014, they were contracted by Saudi Arabia to massacre Houthis in Yemen. In 2017, they were deployed by the European Union as mercenary border patrol to violently stop migrants attempting to make their way to Italy. In 2019, they were hired by the former Libyan military commander to aid in his military campaign targeting civilians in Libya.

Now, in the U.S., another corporate coup is unfolding. In recent months, Elon Musk has increasingly acted as an unelected power broker, using his economic and political might — including his influence in the spheres of telecommunications, militarism and artificial intelligence — to undermine democratic institutions and reshape the government in his own image.

Musk’s influence extends far beyond the private sector. His power manifests through private ventures that dictate public policy — from X’s (formerly Twitter) control over the public conversation to Starlink’s role in global conflicts. His satellites control critical military and civilian communications. His companies, including Tesla, StarLink, SpaceX and StarShield, SpaceX’s military subsidiary, are deeply embedded in national security infrastructure, while his growing AI and data collection through X gives him unprecedented political sway. Now, Musk is openly using his wealth and influence to stage what can only be described as a corporate coup.

Musk is effectively seizing federal spending and usurping the congressional power of the purse with his newly created “Department of Government Efficiency.” Just as Hemedti used the RSF to consolidate his control over Sudan, Musk is positioning his private empire as the backbone of an authoritarian takeover in the U.S. With Starlink increasingly playing an outsized role in critical communications infrastructure, Tesla’s surveillance systems tracking intimate data and AI-driven disinformation sourced from X flooding the media landscape, Musk’s coup is not coming in the form of tanks on the White House lawn — it is happening in boardrooms, data centers and the back channels of government contracts.

Hemedti has managed to operate the RSF at its current scale primarily due to external support, with most of the funding and weaponry for the RSF coming from the United Arab Emirates. And much like Hemedti in Sudan, Musk is not acting alone. He is coordinating with a network of people who see democracy as an obstacle to their control.

The Legal Black Hole: Corporate War Crimes and Private Militias

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. United States laid the groundwork for a bleak future in the U.S. The dissenting judges raised the hypothetical that a president could deploy the Navy’s Seal Team 6 as his personal militia. In a broad expansion of presidential immunity from criminal consequences, the justices warned that the ruling functionally permitted a sitting president to wield state violence for private gain. The court quietly greenlit the type of corporate coup that has already engulfed Sudan.

One of the fundamental principles of a functioning nation-state is the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. When that monopoly dissolves — whether in Sudan, where the RSF now controls entire regions, or in the U.S., where a sitting president could theoretically deploy private mercenaries with legal impunity — chaos follows. The rise of private militias is not just a symptom of state collapse; it accelerates it.

Consider how private armies operate: They are not bound by the same rules as national militaries. They answer not to a constitution or a civilian government but to the highest bidder. The RSF, for example, sustains itself through gold smuggling, foreign contracts and exploitation of Sudanese resources. In the U.S., entities like Erik Prince’s former Blackwater (now Academi) have already demonstrated the dangers of privatized warfare, from civilian massacres in Iraq to clandestine counterterrorism operations. Musk’s SpaceX is already actively being used to coordinate military operations, with its military subsidiary StarShield. Recent reports have found that nearly 100 private mercenaries from an American private company, UG Solutions, are contracted to be used in Gaza. The difference between a mercenary force in a foreign war and one used domestically to suppress dissent is merely a matter of time and political will. This reality might come sooner than we think, as Erik Prince and his fellow mercenaries pitch the Trump administration on a plan to establish “processing camps” on U.S. military bases and deploy a private force to arrest migrants within the U.S.

Prince, a close ally of Donald Trump, played a key role in backchannel diplomatic efforts, including a secret 2017 meeting in the Seychelles that was reportedly intended to establish a covert line of communication between the Trump administration and Russia.

While the parallels between Musk’s corporate overreach and Hemedti’s warlord capitalism are striking, it is crucial to acknowledge the fundamental differences between the U.S. and Sudan. The conditions that enabled Hemedti’s rise — decades of colonial extraction, neocolonial meddling and the deliberate destabilization of Sudan’s political institutions — are not identical to the factors driving Musk’s consolidation of power. Sudan’s trajectory was shaped by imperialist forces that systematically dismantled its ability to maintain state sovereignty, while the United States, as an imperial core, has long been the architect of such destabilization elsewhere. However, the concept of the imperial boomerang — the idea that tactics of control developed in the periphery inevitably return to the center — helps explain how forms of corporate authoritarianism refined in places like Sudan and Congo are now manifesting in the U.S. The analogies must therefore be drawn carefully: Musk is not Hemedti, and the United States is not Sudan. But the underlying mechanism — unaccountable private power overtaking public governance — is the same.

While Sudan provides the most direct warning, another unfolding crisis underscores the global nature of this phenomenon: the resurgence of the M23 militia in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Much like the RSF, M23 is not simply a rebel group — it is a corporate-backed paramilitary force acting as an occupying power. Supported by Rwanda, M23 has seized key mining regions in eastern Congo, displacing thousands and securing access to vast deposits of coltan, gold, and other critical minerals essential to the global tech supply chain. M23’s purpose is not ideological but economic. It secures strategic resource hubs, brokers deals with foreign actors and sustains itself through transnational networks of financing. In the same way that Hemedti profits from Sudan’s gold and RSF-controlled trade routes, M23 functions as a business venture in addition to wielding a military faction.

The deeper problem is that both private militias and the entities who fund them exist in a legal gray zone. Under international law, war crimes and crimes against humanity are prosecutable when committed by state actors or state-backed forces. But what happens when the actors are corporate entities?

The International Court of Justice cannot hear cases involving private corporations in genocide. Whilst the International Criminal Court may prosecute individuals, it has historically focused on heads of state, not corporations or billionaire executives. The United Nations has repeatedly failed to regulate private military companies beyond issuing toothless condemnations. This legal vacuum is not accidental; it is the result of decades of lobbying and legal maneuvering to ensure that the world’s most powerful economic actors remain beyond the reach of justice.

Despite the atrocities committed by the RSF — including mass executions, forcible displacement, ethnic cleansing and sexual violence — there is no clear international legal mechanism to hold them accountable as a corporate entity. Hemedti himself remains not just free but powerful, using his wealth to shield himself from justice. The same impunity extends to M23’s leadership in Congo, which continues its operations despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes.

Sudan as a Warning, Not an Exception

An unelected plutocrat seizes government infrastructure, wields control over telecommunications and raids the treasury for personal gain. A billionaire-backed political strongman uses a loyal militia to usurp democracy. These are not the hallmarks of rogue states; they are the logical outcome of corporate authoritarianism.

What is happening in Sudan is not an isolated crisis — it is a warning. The fusion of private capital, military power and unchecked corporate immunity is not just a problem for “fragile” states; it is a global threat. Sudan and Congo are the testing grounds. The United States could be next. If a private security force massacres civilians on behalf of a political leader, if a corporate-funded militia stages a coup — who is held responsible? As of now, no one.

When private militias operate with immunity, when billionaires dictate government policy, and when corporate leaders wield military power without consequence, democracy ceases to function. The only way to stop this slide into corporate authoritarianism is to confront the legal black hole that allows it to exist. That means pushing for international accountability mechanisms for corporate war crimes, breaking the legal immunity of billionaires who fund paramilitary violence and reinforcing the principle that no private entity can wield the power of a state.

The question is not whether the U.S. is immune to the fate of Sudan or Congo. It is whether Americans will recognize the warning signs before it is too late.

Yes, Trump is Vulgar. But the US Global Shakedown is the Same One As Ever by Johnathan Cook

Source: MiddleEastEye

 If there is one thing we can thank US President Donald Trump for, it is this: he has decisively stripped away the ridiculous notion, long cultivated by western media, that the United States is a benign global policeman enforcing a “rules-based order”.

Washington is better understood as the head of a gangster empire, embracing 800 military bases around the world. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been aggressively seeking “global full-spectrum domination”, as the Pentagon doctrine politely terms it.

You either pay fealty to the Don or you get dumped in the river. Last Friday Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was presented with a pair of designer concrete boots at the White House.

The innovation was that it all happened in front of the western press corps, in the Oval Office, rather than in a back room, out of sight. It made for great television, Trump crowed.

Pundits have been quick to reassure us that the shouting match was some kind of weird Trumpian thing. As though being inhospitable to state leaders, and disrespectful to the countries they head, is unique to this administration.

Take just the example of Iraq. The administration of Bill Clinton thought it “worth it” – as his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, infamously put it – to kill an estimated half a million Iraqi children by imposing draconian sanctions through the 1990s.

Under Clinton’s successor, George W Bush, the US then waged an illegal war in 2003, on entirely phoney grounds, that killed around half a million Iraqis, according to post-war estimates, and made four million homeless.

Those worrying about the White House publicly humiliating Zelensky might be better advised to save their concern for the hundreds of thousands of mostly Ukrainian and Russian men killed or wounded fighting an entirely unnecessary war – one, as we shall see, Washington carefully engineered through Nato over the preceding two decades.

Henchman Zelensky

All those casualties served the same goal as they did in Iraq: to remind the world who is boss.

Uniquely, western publics don’t understand this simple point because they live inside a disinformation bubble, created for them by the western establishment media.

Henry Kissinger, the long-time steward of US foreign policy, famously said: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

Zelensky just found that out the hard way. Gangster empires are just as fickle as the gangsters we know from Hollywood movies. Under the previous Joe Biden administration, Zelensky had been recruited as a henchman to do Washington’s bidding on Moscow’s doorstep.

The background – the one western media have kept largely out of view – is that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US tore up treaties crucial to reassuring Russia of Nato’s good intent.

Viewed from Moscow, and given Washington’s track record, Nato’s European security umbrella must have looked more like preparation for an ambush.

Keen though Trump now is to rewrite history and cast himself as peacemaker, he was central to the escalating tensions that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In 2019, he unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. That opened the door to the US launching a potential first strike on Russia, using missiles stationed in nearby Nato members Romania and Poland.

He also sent Javelin anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, a move avoided by his predecessor, Barack Obama, for fear it would be seen as provocative.

Repeatedly, Nato vowed to bring Ukraine into its fold, despite Russia’s warnings that the step was viewed as an existential threat, that Moscow could not allow Washington to place missiles on its border, any more than the US accepted Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba back in the early 1960s.

Washington pressed ahead anyway, even assisting in a colour revolution-style coup in 2014 against the elected government in Kyiv, whose crime was being a little too sympathetic to Moscow.

With the country in crisis, Zelensky was himself elected by Ukrainians as a peace candidate, there to end a brutal civil war – sparked by that coup – between anti-Russian, “nationalistic” forces in the country’s west and ethnic Russian populations in the east. The Ukrainian president soon broke that promise.

Trump has accused Zelensky of being a “dictator”. But if he is, it is only because Washington wanted him that way, ignoring the wishes of the majority of Ukrainians.

Reddest of red lines

Zelensky’s job was to play a game of chicken with Moscow. The assumption was that the US would win whatever the outcome.

Either Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bluff would be called. Ukraine would be welcomed into Nato, becoming the most forward of the alliance’s forward bases against Russia, allowing nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to be stationed minutes from Moscow.

Or Putin would finally make good on his years of threats to invade his neighbour to stop Nato crossing the reddest of red lines he had set over Ukraine.

Washington could then cry “self-defence” on Ukraine’s behalf, and ludicrously fear-monger western publics about Putin eyeing Poland, Germany, France and Britain next.

Those were the pretexts for arming Kyiv to the hilt, rather than seeking a rapid peace deal. And so began a proxy war of attrition against Russia, using Ukrainian men as cannon fodder.

The aim was to wear Russia down militarily and economically, and bring about Putin’s overthrow.

Zelensky did precisely what was demanded of him. When he appeared to waver early on, and considered signing a peace deal with Moscow, Britain’s prime minister of the time, Boris Johnson, was dispatched with a message from Washington: keep fighting.

That is the same Boris Johnson who now breezily admits that the West is fighting a “proxy war” against Russia.His comments have generated precisely no controversy. That is particularly strange, given that critics who pointed this very obvious fact out three years ago were instantly denounced for spreading “Putin disinformation” and Kremlin “talking points”.

For his obedience, Zelensky was feted a hero, the defender of Europe against Russian imperialism. His every “demand” – demands that originated in Washington – was met.

Ukraine has received at least $250bn worth of guns, tanks, fighter jets, training for his troops, western intelligence on Russia, and other forms of aid.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian men have paid with their lives – as have the families they leave behind.

Mafia etiquette

Now the old Don in Washington is gone. The new Don has decided Zelensky has been an expensive failure. Russia isn’t lethally wounded. It’s stronger than ever. Time for a new strategy.

Zelensky, still imagining he was Washington’s favourite henchman, arrived at the Oval Office only to be taught a harsh lesson in mafia etiquette.

Trump is spinning his stab in the back as a “peace agreement”. And in some sense, it is. Rightly, Trump has concluded that Russia has won – unless the West is ready to fight World War III and risk a potential nuclear war.

Trump has faced up to the reality of the situation, even if Zelensky and Europe are still struggling to.

But his plan for Ukraine is actually just a variation of his other peace plan – the one for Gaza. There he wants to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population and, on the bodies of the enclave’s many thousands of dead children, build the “Riviera of the Middle East” – or “Trump Gaza” as it is being called in a surreal video he shared on social media.

Similarly, Trump now sees Ukraine not as a military battlefield but as an economic one where, through clever deal-making, he can leverage riches for himself and his billionaire pals.

He has put a gun to Zelensky and Europe’s head. Make a deal with Russia to end the war, or you are on your own against a far superior military power. See if the Europeans can help you without a supply of Washington’s weapons.

Not surprisingly, Zelensky, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron huddled together at the weekend to find a deal that would appease Trump. All Starmer has revealed so far is that the plan will “stop the fighting”.

That is a good thing. But the fighting could have been stopped, and should have been stopped, three years ago.

Money, not peace

It is deeply unwise to be lulled into tribalism by all this – the very tribalism western elites seek to cultivate among their publics to keep us treating international affairs no differently from a high-stakes football match.

No one here has behaved, or is behaving, honourably.

A ceasefire in Ukraine is not about peace. It’s about money, just as the earlier war was. As all wars are, ultimately.

An acceptable ceasefire for Trump, as well as for Putin, will involve a carve-up of Ukraine’s goodies. Rare earth minerals, land, agricultural production will be the real currency driving the agreement.

Zelensky now understands this. He knows that he, and the people of Ukraine, have been scammed. That is what tends to happen when you cosy up to the mafia.

If anyone doubts Washington’s insincerity over Ukraine, look to Palestine for clarity.

In his earlier presidency, Trump tried to bring about what he termed the peace “deal of the century” whose centrepiece was the annexation of much of the Occupied West Bank.

The hope was that the Gulf states would ultimately fund an incentivisation programme – the carrot to Israel’s stick – to encourage Palestinians to make a new life in a giant, purpose-built industrial zone in Sinai, next to Gaza.

That plan is still simmering away in the background. At the weekend, Israel received a green light from Washington to revive its genocidal starvation of Gaza’s population, after Israel refused to negotiate the second phase of the original ceasefire agreement.

The Trump administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are now spinning their own bad faith as Hamas “rejectionism”.

They and the echo chamber that is the western media are blaming the Palestinian group for refusing to be gulled into an “extension” of what was never more than a phoney ceasefire – Israel’s fire never ceased. Israel wants all the hostages back, without having to leave Gaza, so that Hamas has no leverage to stop Israel reviving the full genocide.

The people of Gaza are still being fed into the Washington mafia’s meatgrinder, just as the Ukrainian people have been.

Trump wants them out of the way so he can develop a Mediterranean playground for the rich, paid for with Gulf oil money and the so-far untapped natural gas reserves just off Gaza’s coast.

Unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t pretend that Ukraine and Gaza are anything more than geostrategic real estate for Washington.

The big shakedown

Zelensky’s shakedown did not come out of the blue. Trump and his officials had been flagging it well in advance.

Two weeks ago, the industrial correspondent for Britain’s Daily Telegraph wrote an article headlined “Here’s why Trump wants to make Ukraine a US economic colony”.

Trump’s team believes that Ukraine may have rare-earth minerals under the ground worth some $15 trillion – a treasure trove that will be critical to the development of the next generation of technology.

In their view, controlling the exploration and extraction of those minerals will be as important as control over the Middle East’s oil reserves was more than a century ago.

And most important of all, the US wants China, its chief economic – if not military – rival excluded from the plunder. China currently has an effective monopoly on many of these critical minerals.

Or as the Telegraph puts it, Ukraine’s “minerals offer a tantalising promise: the ability for the US to break its dependence on Chinese supplies of critical minerals that go into everything from wind turbines to iPhones and stealth fighter jets”.

A draft of the plan seen by the Telegraph would, in its words, “amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity”.

Washington wants first refusal on all deposits within the country.

At their Oval Office confrontation, Trump reiterated this goal: “So we’re going to be using that [Ukraine’s rare earth minerals], taking it, using it for all of the things we do, including AI, and including weapons, and the military. And it’s really going to very much satisfy our needs.”

All of this means that Trump has a keen incentive to get the war finished as quickly as possible, and Russia’s territorial advance halted. The more territory Moscow seizes, the less territory is left for the US to plunder.

Self-sabotage

The battle against China over rare-earth minerals isn’t a Trump innovation either – and adds an additional layer of context for why Washington and Nato have been so keen over the past two decades to prise Ukraine away from Russia.

Last summer, a Congressional select committee on competition with China announced the formation of a working group to counter Beijing’s “dominance of critical minerals”.

The chairman of the committee, John Moolenaar, noted that the current US dependence on China for these minerals “would quickly become an existential vulnerability in the event of a conflict”.

Another committee member, Rob Wittman, observed: “Dominance over global supply chains for critical mineral and rare earth elements is the next stage of great power competition.”

What Trump appears to appreciate is that Nato’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has, by default, driven Moscow deeper into Beijing’s embrace. It has been self-sabotage on a grand scale.

Together, China and Russia are a formidable opponent, and one at the centre of the ever-growing Brics group – comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They have been seeking to expand their alliance by adding emerging powers to become a counterweight to Washington and Nato’s bullying global agenda.

But a deal with Putin over Ukraine would provide an opportunity for Washington to build a new security architecture in Europe – one more useful to the US – that places Russia inside the tent rather than outside it.

That would leave China isolated – a long-time Pentagon goal.

And it would also leave Europe less central to the projection of US power, which is why European leaders – led by Keir Starmer – have been looking and sounding so unnerved over the past few weeks.

The danger is that Trump’s “peacemaking” in Ukraine simply becomes a prelude to the fomenting of a war against China, using Taiwan as the pretext in the same way Ukraine was used against Russia.

As Moolenaar implied, US control over critical minerals – in Ukraine and elsewhere – would ensure the US was no longer vulnerable in the event of a war with China to losing access to the minerals it would need to continue the war. It would free Washington’s hand.

Trump may be behaving in a vulgar manner. But the gangster empire he now heads is conducting the same global shakedown as ever.