The Tragic Optimist's Guide to Surviving Capitalistic Nihilism

 

......because surviving capitalism isn't just about existing—it's about finding meaning amidst the madness.

The Dream of Life

“This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief." ~~~Rumi

“Kenshō : A Japanese term from the Zen tradition. Ken means “seeing,” shō means “nature, essence”

Aaron Paradox created this beautiful visual interpretation of “The Dream of Life” by Alan Watts. In the film, the “dreaming hero wakes up and sees the Dreamer himself. Time dissolves and we are seeing things as they are.”

Poet's Nook: "Tell Me Something Good" by Margaret Atwood

Tell me something good,

just one good thing, just tell me

something that will get me through

the hours the days the weeks that bring

nothing of any goodness, just more

news of other things like

spoiled meat or else raw

bones the dogs keep dragging in from god

knows where, what bombed-out car or ocean

wreck, whose child’s ribs wrenched

open, what woman’s torso torn like

bread, whose sons now head-

less, what trashed home, what

oily sludge a hundred miles

wide on which we feed, the words pour in, the door

won’t close. O stop, go mute,

just one good thing instead is all I ask.

So let’s say green

buds. Or wait, there aren’t a lot of those, just one

green bud might do, despite.

No. Wait. Let’s say a person said

Hello, and not unkindly. No. Let’s say

that it got cooler, or else warmer, or the rain

finished, or else it rained, whichever one

was needed. No. Instead say breakfast.

That could do it.

A faint shimmering

of plates and pearly spoons, a tender cup, what comfort!

There. That’s thirty minutes passed, at any

rate. The gate defended

for a little space, and wasn’t that

enough? No. Wait.

Something in You Hungers for Clarity: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Writing by Maria Popova

 

Source: The Marginalian

“Words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on,” Mary Shelley wrote in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars that laid the template for the colonialist power structure of the modern world, in an era when her chromosomes denied her the authority of her natural powers.

Who gets to write shapes what gets to be written, which shapes what is remembered — that is the making of the collective selective memory we call history, and it is made of words. We invented words to name the world and invented power to apportion the named. It is our inventions that tell the fullest story of our nature. The range of them — the range between chocolate and racism, between the Benedictus and the bomb — is the measure of what James Baldwin called “the doom and glory” of what we are, metered by the words that tell the story of our self-creation.

“What I have always wanted is to expand the frame of humanity, to shift the brackets of images and ideas,” Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects in The Message (public library) — his soulful and sobering reckoning with the power of words and the power structures roiling beneath the landscape of permission for making the images and ideas we call art. What emerges is a manifesto for reexamining who gets to word the world’s story and render human the worlds within the world, pulsating with the urgency of the writer’s job to clarify in order to galvanize — for “you cannot act upon what you cannot see.”

Writing, Coates recalls, was one of the great “obsessions” of his childhood — he relished the “private ecstasy” found in “the organization of words, silences, and sound into stories,” in “the employment of particular verbs, the playful placement of punctuation,” this mysterious alchemy of skill and vision with the power to “make the abstract and distant into something tangible and felt,” to dismantle the myths told by the wardens of the status quo and tell a different story about the world and its horizons of possibility. An epoch after John Steinbeck insisted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that a writer ought to bear the torchlight of clarity in humanity’s “gray and desolate time of confusion,” Coates considers what it takes to do that, in all its ecstasy and power:

There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own.

Permeating the book is Coates’s countercultural courage not to mistake for reality what he so aptly terms “the haze” of his own experience — a needed reminder that we lens everything before us through everything behind us and bow to the image in the lens, calling it the world. And yet what the visionary physicist John Archibald Wheeler wrote of the nature of reality — “this is a participatory universe [and] observer-participancy gives rise to information” — is true of the nature of writing. Coates reflects:

There are dimensions in your words — rhythm, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside. The accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with angle, color, and curve… But the color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between that world and your consciousness — in your interpretation, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself.

Just as the writer writes with all of themselves, the reader reads with all of themselves, adding another layer of subjectivity in the act of interpretation. Sylvia Plath understood this when she was only a teenager: “Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.” So too with all creative work, much as a child enters the world to become their own person. “Your children are not your children,” Kahlil Gibran wrote in one of his most poignant poems. “They come through you but not from you.” Echoing Plath and Gibran, Coates reflects on his own writing:

I imagine my books to be my children, each with its own profile and way of walking through the world… It helps me remember that though they are made by me, they are not ultimately mine. They leave home, travel, have their own relationships, and leave their own impressions. I’ve learned it’s best to, as much as possible, stay out of the way and let them live their own lives.

This is not, however, a recusal from responsibility — over and over, Coates celebrates, demands even, the power of the written word to change the life of the world and the course of what will one day be history by changing the present landscape of possibility and permission we call politics. He writes:

History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order… A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths.

[…]

Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics… Novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality.

Half a century after Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her forgotten poem “Book Power” that “books feed and cure and chortle and collide,” that they are “flame and flight and flower,” Coates considers the singular power of writing among the other tendrils of the creative spirit — the power of revelation and self-revelation:

Film, music, the theater — all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that even its authors don’t always comprehend it.

"The Apprentice": The Film DJT Doesn't Want the Public to See

 

A young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), eager to make his name as a hungry scion of a wealthy family in 1970s New York, comes under the spell of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the cutthroat attorney who would help create the Donald Trump we know today. Cohn sees in Trump the perfect protégé - someone with raw ambition, a hunger for success, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to win.

Civil Rights Lawyer Bryan Stevenson on James Baldwin’s Courage

 

 

In this episode, host Razia Iqbal sits down with the celebrated civil rights lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson, a man as dedicated to his chosen profession as James Baldwin was to his. 

Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Alabama, which has not only transformed the conversation about the disproportionate numbers of incarcerated Black Americans, but has also challenged how we think about the criminal justice system and the system’s treatment of children in particular. He's been described by the late South African bishop and civil rights activist Desmond Tutu as “America's Nelson Mandela.” 

 Stevenson also initiated the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, and continues to make us all think about the lived legacy of more than 200 years of slavery in the U.S. By Stevenson’s own admission, Baldwin has had a profound impact on his life, professionally and personally. When asked to choose a single Baldwin quote that inspires him, Stevenson chose three, and an exception was made in the interest of an exceptional conversation.

Thom Hartmann: Trump Is Likely Plotting to Succeed Where South Korea’s Yoon Failed

 

Source: CommonDreams

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose declaration of a state of emergency yesterday shocked the world, has often been referred to (both within and outside of his country) as “South Korea’s Donald Trump.” A political outsider, he came to power with anti-establishment and often outrageously inflammatory rhetoric, trash talking women’s rights, “reforming” their healthcare system, and pushing hard for a neoliberal agenda that included raising the workweek from 52 to 69 hours.

In that, he reflects a growing trend among advanced democracies around the world, as decades of neoliberalism have weakened multiple nations’ abilities to sustain middle-class lifestyles while enriching an oligarch class that’s now reaching out—worldwid—to seize control of democratic governments to their own financial benefit.

Of all the events in world news over the past weeks—even more than the escalation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous crimes against Ukraine—President-elect Donald Trump and his authoritarian colleagues down at Mar-a-Lago are probably carefully watching what’s happening to Yoon and gaming out how a similar “emergency” action here in America might be recalibrated to have ultimate success.

If he wants to imitate Yoon’s initial declaration and successfully follow through on it, Trump will need to intimidate and bring to heel any Republicans who still think of themselves as more loyal to the nation and our Constitution than to him.

Yoon has now backed down in the face of opposition from the South Korean parliament; he couldn’t get one single vote from his own party in Parliament, and is now facing demands that he resign or be impeached.

The challenges Yoon faced included a 17% approval rating, the legislature having been captured by the opposition party, and, most importantly, that he had never forced the members of his own party to degrade themselves and perform acts of obedience in front of him.

Thus, when he tried this strongman move of declaring a state of emergency but had not, in fact, first set himself up as a strongman, it failed.

Trump’s goal will be to avoid Yoon’s outcome and instead—like Putin and Viktor Orbán did in Russia and Hungary—ensure there won’t be any meaningful opposition within the GOP to his most extreme measures when they come.

Yoon’s rightwing populist People Power Party (PPP) had lost control of parliament in the April elections to the more progressive Democratic Party of Korea (DPK); Trump will not have such a constraint in a few weeks when he takes the White House. Instead of fighting Democrats, Trump must figure out how to deal with opposition to his most extreme impulses from within his own Republican Party.

Thus, his putting forward outrageous, unqualified, and even occasionally anti-American candidates for cabinet positions is Trump’s first big step in the classic strongman move of softening up Republicans in the House and Senate so when the real fights—like over a state of emergency (and the martial law that could accompany it)—happen, his party members and the handful of “problem solver” quislings in the Democratic Party will have already surrendered their ability to resist him.

This, as I noted but our media seems to be ignoring, is where Yoon failed. Trump—if he’s successful at cowing Republicans in the Senate into rubber-stamping his picks or allowing recess appointments—may not have those constraints, since he will have ended opposition in the Senate, and his MAGA-seized GOP now also controls the House and the Supreme Court.

Nonetheless, if he wants to imitate Yoon’s initial declaration and successfully follow through on it, Trump will need to intimidate and bring to heel any Republicans who still think of themselves as more loyal to the nation and our Constitution than to him. Will they still exist by next February?

Yoon’s behavior serves as both a warning and a call to action: Democracies must stand vigilant against the creeping authoritarianism that threatens their core principles.

This is not a new strategy, as Timothy Snyder, Heidi Siegmund Cuda, or Ruth Ben-Ghiat will tell you in their excellent Substack newsletters.

One of the big points Fritz Thyssen made in his book I Paid Hitler was to note how he and other industrialists and politicians were required to scrape and bow before Adolf Hitler in the early months and years. There was a competition among the industrialists and German politicians alike after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor to see who could be the most publicly obsequious, slavish, and unctuous toward the new German leader.

Today in America we see a similar spectacle as politicians, media figures, business leaders, and foreign dignitaries flock to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s golden ass.

It was that exact behavior that paved the way for Hitler to shut down the German press, subserviate the Reichstag, and essentially shatter all opposition to his regime in less than half a year.

And it wasn’t just the political class who bowed to him; so, too, did most average Germans, who had become exhausted by the conflict exploding across the political spectrum and so tuned out, immersing themselves instead in sports, family, and entertainment.

As a result, every day brought a new outrage, a new norm destroyed, a new red line crossed, but each was small enough—like appointing an accused rapist and drunk or drug user to run the Justice Department or the Pentagon—that it created a buzz in the political media but wasn’t sufficient to bring even a dozen people out into the streets.

Fascism comes in on cat’s feet, step by gradual but inexorable step. It never starts with one great clashing explosion of evil or corruption that causes an entire nation to suddenly wake up and pour into the streets. There are no trumpets, drums, or cymbals. As Hemmingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises using the metaphor of bankruptcy, it happens “gradually, and then suddenly.”

It’s usually the story of an insidious gradualism, like what a German professor told Chicago reporter Milton Mayer about in 1954:

But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.

Yoon’s declaration of emergency and martial law was explicit: It banned all political activities of the National Assembly, local councils, political parties, and associations; prohibited gatherings, protests, and labor strikes; and placed the media under the authority of the Martial Law Command.

Trump has made similar threats to our media and promised to use the state’s power of guns and jails to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” claiming, like Yoon did, that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

Yoon’s effort to quickly convert South Korea into an autocratic state has so far backfired, in large part because of public opinion, a still-free press, and the courage of opposition and his own PPP politicians alike. The lesson Trump should learn from Yoon’s unsuccessful attempt is the need to avoid authoritarianism and instead embrace coalition-building, transparent governance, and a balanced approach to both domestic and foreign policy challenges.

Instead, it’s a virtual certainty that Trump is thinking Yoon should have acted before April, before the more progressive DPK took back over the parliament, and should have helped friendly oligarchs to seize the media in advance of his proclamation. And that he needs to move fast, before Democrats can regain power in the 2026 midterms that will be only 22 months away.

The resilience of democracy depends on the strength of its institutions, the vigilance of its citizens, and the commitment of its elected leaders of all parties to uphold democratic values. Yoon’s behavior serves as both a warning and a call to action: Democracies must stand vigilant against the creeping authoritarianism that threatens their core principles. As Trump’s return looms, these lessons cannot be ignored.

The Philosopher Who Solved The Meaning of Life?

 

Leo Tolstoy, celebrated as one of the greatest writers in history, is best known for masterpieces like War and Peace and Anna Karenina. However, beneath his fame and success lay a deep personal struggle with the most fundamental questions of existence: What is the meaning of life? Why do we live if death is inevitable? At the peak of his career, Tolstoy experienced a profound existential crisis. Despite his literary achievements, wealth, and admiration, he was haunted by a sense of emptiness and despair. These feelings pushed him to search for answers beyond the material world. His journey took him through philosophy, science, and religion as he sought to reconcile life's transience with its deeper significance. Ultimately, Tolstoy found solace and purpose through spiritual awakening, rejecting materialism and embracing faith, simplicity, and a life of moral responsibility. He famously declared, "The meaning of life is to serve humanity and align with divine will." This transformation not only reshaped his personal life but also influenced his later works, which became deeply spiritual and reflective.

Musings

@highlyvibey

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Alfred McCoy: Requiem for an Empire

Some 15 years ago, on December 5, 2010, a historian writing for TomDispatch made a prediction that may yet prove prescient. Rejecting the consensus of that moment that U.S. global hegemony would persist to 2040 or 2050, he argued that “the demise of the United States as the global superpower could come… in 2025, just 15 years from now.”

To make that forecast, the historian conducted what he called “a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends.” Starting with the global context, he argued that, “faced with a fading superpower,” China, India, Iran, and Russia would all start to “provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.” At home in the United States, domestic divisions would “widen into violent clashes and divisive debates… Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.” But, that historian concluded, “the world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

Now that a “far-right patriot,” one Donald J. Trump, has indeed captured (or rather recaptured) the presidency “with thundering rhetoric,” let’s explore the likelihood that a second Trump term in office, starting in the fateful year 2025, might actually bring a hasty end, silent or otherwise, to an “American Century” of global dominion.

Making the Original Prediction

Let’s begin by examining the reasoning underlying my original prediction. (Yes, of course, that historian was me.) Back in 2010, when I picked a specific date for a rising tide of American decline, this country looked unassailably strong both at home and abroad. The presidency of Barack Obama was producing a “post-racial” society. After recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. was on track for a decade of dynamic growth — the auto industry saved, oil and gas production booming, the tech sector thriving, the stock market soaring, and employment solid. Internationally, Washington was the world’s preeminent leader, with an unchallenged military, formidable diplomatic clout, unchecked economic globalization, and its democratic governance still the global norm.

Looking forward, leading historians of empire agreed that America would remain the world’s sole superpower for the foreseeable future. Writing in the Financial Times in 2002, for instance, Yale professor Paul Kennedy, author of a widely read book on imperial decline, argued that “America’s array of force is staggering,” with a mix of economic, diplomatic, and technological dominance that made it the globe’s “single superpower” without peer in the entire history of the world. Russia’s defense budget had “collapsed” and its economy was “less than that of the Netherlands.” Should China’s high growth rates continue for another 30 years, it “might be a serious challenger to U.S. predominance” — but that wouldn’t be true until 2032, if then. While America’s “unipolar moment” would surely not “continue for centuries,” its end, he predicted, “seems a long way off for now.”

Writing in a similar vein in the New York Times in February 2010, Piers Brendon, a historian of Britain’s imperial decline, dismissed the “doom mongers” who “conjure with Roman and British analogies in order to trace the decay of American hegemony.” While Rome was riven by “internecine strife” and Britain ran its empire on a shoestring budget, the U.S. was “constitutionally stable” with “an enormous industrial base.” Taking a few “relatively simple steps,” he concluded, Washington should be able to overcome current budgetary problems and perpetuate its global power indefinitely.

When I made my very different prediction nine months later, I was coordinating a network of 140 historians from universities on three continents who were studying the decline of earlier empires, particularly those of Britain, France, and Spain. Beneath the surface of this country’s seeming strength, we could already see the telltale signs of decline that had led to the collapse of those earlier empires.

By 2010, economic globalization was cutting good-paying factory jobs here, income inequality was widening, and corporate bailouts were booming — all essential ingredients for rising working-class resentment and deepening domestic divisions. Foolhardy military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed by Washington elites trying to deny any sense of decline, stoked simmering anger among ordinary Americans, slowly discrediting the very idea of international commitments. And the erosion of America’s relative economic strength from half the world’s output in 1950 to a quarter in 2010 meant the wherewithal for its unipolar power was fading fast.

Only a “near-peer” competitor was needed to turn that attenuating U.S. global hegemony into accelerating imperial decline. With rapid economic growth, a vast population, and the world’s longest imperial tradition, China seemed primed to become just such a country. But back then, Washington’s foreign policy elites thought not and even admitted China to the World Trade Organization (WTO), fully confident, according to two Beltway insiders, that “U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking.”

Our group of historians, mindful of the frequent imperial wars fought when near-peer competitors finally confronted the reigning hegemon of their moment — think Germany versus Great Britain in World War I — fully expected China’s challenge would not be long in coming. Indeed, in 2012, just two years after my prediction, the U.S. National Intelligence Council warned that “China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030” and this country would no longer be “a hegemonic power.”

Just a year after that, China’s president, Xi Jinping, drawing on a massive $4 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves accumulated in the decade after joining the WTO, announced his bid for global power through what he called “the Belt and Road Initiative,” history’s largest development program. It was designed to make Beijing the center of the global economy.

In the following decade, the U.S.-China rivalry would become so intense that, last September, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall warned: “I’ve been closely watching the evolution of [China’s] military for 15 years. China is not a future threat; China is a threat today.”

The Global Rise of the Strongman

Another major setback for Washington’s world order, long legitimated by its promotion of democracy (whatever its own dominating tendencies), came from the rise of populist strongmen worldwide. Consider them part of a nationalist reaction to the West’s aggressive economic globalization.

At the close of the Cold War in 1991, Washington became the planet’s sole superpower, using its hegemony to forcefully promote a wide-open global economy — forming the World Trade Organization in 1995, pressing open-market “reforms” on developing economies, and knocking down tariff barriers worldwide. It also built a global communications grid by laying 700,000 miles of fiber-optic submarine cables and then launching 1,300 satellites (now 4,700).

By exploiting that very globalized economy, however, China’s industrial output soared to $3.2 trillion by 2016, surpassing both the U.S. and Japan, while simultaneously eliminating 2.4 million American jobs between 1999 and 2011, ensuring the closure of factories in countless towns across the South and Midwest. By fraying social safety nets while eroding protection for labor unions and local businesses in both the U.S. and Europe, globalization reduced the quality of life for many, while creating inequality on a staggering scale and stoking a working-class reaction that would crest in a global wave of angry populism.

Riding that wave, right-wing populists have been winning a steady succession of elections — in Russia (2000), Israel (2009), Hungary (2010), China (2012), Turkey (2014), the Philippines (2016), the U.S. (2016), Brazil (2018), Italy (2022), the Netherlands (2023), Indonesia (2024), and the U.S. again (2024).

Set aside their incendiary us-versus-them rhetoric, however, and look at their actual achievements and those right-wing demagogues turn out to have a record that can only be described as dismal. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro ravaged the vast Amazon rainforest and left office amid an abortive coup. In Russia, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, sacrificing his country’s economy to capture some more land (which it hardly lacked). In Turkey, Recep Erdogan caused a crippling debt crisis, while jailing 50,000 suspected opponents. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte murdered 30,000 suspected drug users and courted China by giving up his country’s claims in the resource-rich South China Sea. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has wreaked havoc on Gaza and neighboring lands, in part to stay in office and stay out of prison.

Prospects for Donald Trump’s Second Term

After the steady erosion of its global power for several decades, America is no longer the — or perhaps even an — “exceptional” nation floating above the deep global currents that shape the politics of most countries. And as it has become more of an ordinary country, it has also felt the full force of the worldwide move toward strongman rule. Not only does that global trend help explain Trump’s election and his recent reelection, but it provides some clues as to what he’s likely to do with that office the second time around.

In the globalized world America made, there is now an intimate interaction between domestic and international policy. That will soon be apparent in a second Trump administration whose policies are likely to simultaneously damage the country’s economy and further degrade Washington’s world leadership.

Let’s start with the clearest of his commitments: environmental policy. During the recent election campaign, Trump called climate change “a scam” and his transition team has already drawn up executive orders to exit from the Paris climate accords. By quitting that agreement, the U.S. will abdicate any leadership role when it comes to the most consequential issue facing the international community while reducing pressure on China to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. Since these two countries now account for nearly half (45%) of global carbon emissions, such a move will ensure that the world blows past the target of keeping this planet’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Centigrade until the end of the century. Instead, on a planet that’s already had 12 recent months of just such a temperature rise, that mark is expected to be permanently reached by perhaps 2029, the year Trump finishes his second term.

On the domestic side of climate policy, Trump promised last September that he would “terminate the Green New Deal, which I call the Green New Scam, and rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.” On the day after his election, he committed himself to increasing the country’s oil and gas production, telling a celebratory crowd, “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world.” He will undoubtedly also block wind farm leases on Federal lands and cancel the $7,500 tax credit for purchasing an electrical vehicle.

As the world shifts to renewable energy and all-electric vehicles, Trump’s policies will undoubtedly do lasting damage to the American economy. In 2023, the International Renewable Energy Agency reported that, amid continuing price decreases, wind and solar power now generate electricity for less than half the cost of fossil fuels. Any attempt to slow the conversion of this country’s utilities to the most cost-effective form of energy runs a serious risk of ensuring that American-made products will be ever less competitive.

To put it bluntly, he seems to be proposing that electricity users here should pay twice as much for their power as those in other advanced nations. Similarly, as relentless engineering innovation makes electric vehicles cheaper and more reliable than petrol-powered ones, attempting to slow such an energy transition is likely to make the U.S. auto industry uncompetitive, at home and abroad.

Calling tariffs “the greatest thing ever invented,” Trump has proposed slapping a 20% duty on all foreign goods and 60% on those from China. In another instance of domestic-foreign synergy, such duties will undoubtedly end up crippling American farm exports, thanks to retaliatory overseas tariffs, while dramatically raising the cost of consumer goods for Americans, stoking inflation, and slowing consumer spending.

Reflecting his aversion to alliances and military commitments, Trump’s first foreign policy initiative will likely be an attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. During a CNN town hall in May 2023, he claimed he could stop the fighting “in 24 hours.” Last July, he added: “I would tell [Ukraine’s president] Zelenskyy, no more. You got to make a deal.”

Just two days after the November election, according to the Washington Post, Trump reputedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin in a telephone call, “not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe.” Drawing on sources inside the Trump transition team, the Wall Street Journal reported that the new administration is considering “cementing Russia’s seizure of 20% of Ukraine” and forcing Kyiv to forego its bid to join NATO, perhaps for as long as 20 years.

With Russia drained of manpower and its economy pummeled by three years of bloody warfare, a competent negotiator (should Trump actually appoint one) might indeed be able to bring a tenuous peace to a ravaged Ukraine. Since it has been Europe’s frontline of defense against a revanchist Russia, the continent’s major powers would be expected to play a significant role. But Germany’s coalition government has just collapsed; French president Emmanuel Macron is crippled by recent electoral reverses; and the NATO alliance, after three years of a shared commitment to Ukraine, faces real uncertainty with the advent of a Trump presidency.

America’s Allies

Those impending negotiations over Ukraine highlight the paramount importance of alliances for U.S. global power. For 80 years, from World War II through the Cold War and beyond, Washington relied on bilateral and multilateral alliances as a critical force multiplier. With China and Russia both rearmed and increasingly closely aligned, reliable allies have become even more important to maintaining Washington’s global presence. With 32 member nations representing a billion people and a commitment to mutual defense that has lasted 75 years, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is arguably the most powerful military alliance in all of modern history.

Yet Trump has long been sharply critical of it. As a candidate in 2016, he called the alliance “obsolete.” As president, he mocked the treaty’s mutual-defense clause, claiming even “tiny” Montenegro could drag the U.S. into war. While campaigning last February, he announced that he would tell Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay what he considered its fair share.

Right after Trump’s election, caught between what one analyst called “an aggressively advancing Russia and an aggressively withdrawing America,” French President Macron insisted that the continent needed to be a “more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in this new context.” Even if the new administration doesn’t formally withdraw from NATO, Trump’s repeated hostility, particularly toward its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to eviscerate the alliance.

In the Asia-Pacific region, the American presence rests on three sets of overlapping alliances: the AUKUS entente with Australia and Britain, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (with Australia, India, and Japan), and a chain of bilateral defense pacts stretching along the Pacific littoral from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. Via careful diplomacy, the Biden administration strengthened those alliances, bringing two wayward allies, Australia and the Philippines that had drifted Beijing-wards, back into the Western fold. Trump’s penchant for abusing allies and, as in his first term, withdrawing from multilateral pacts is likely to weaken such ties and so American power in the region.

Although his first administration famously waged a trade war with Beijing, Trump’s attitude toward the island of Taiwan is bluntly transactional. “I think, Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he said last June, adding: “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.” In October, he told the Wall Street Journal that he would not have to use military force to defend Taiwan because China’s President Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f—— crazy.” Bluster aside, Trump, unlike his predecessor Joe Biden, has never committed himself to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack.

Should Beijing indeed attack Taiwan outright or, as appears more likely, impose a crippling economic blockade on the island, Trump seems unlikely to risk a war with China. The loss of Taiwan would break the U.S. position along the Pacific littoral, for 80 years the fulcrum of its global imperial posture, pushing its naval forces back to a “second island chain” running from Japan to Guam. Such a retreat would represent a major blow to America’s imperial role in the Pacific, potentially making it no longer a significant player in the security of its Asia-Pacific allies.

A Silent U.S. Recessional

Adding up the likely impact of Donald Trump’s policies in this country, Asia, Europe, and the international community generally, his second term will almost certainly be one of imperial decline, increasing internal chaos, and a further loss of global leadership. As “respect for American authority” fades, Trump may yet resort to “threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.” But as I predicted back in 2010, it seems quite likely that “the world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

Gratitude Revealed

 

Russia Unveils Black Jesus: Shattering America's Faith and Historical Lies

 

Yuval Noah Harari: “We Are on the Verge of Destroying Ourselves”

 

 

In Yuval Noah Harari's new book "Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI," the bestselling author and historian looks at the unique challenges that artificial intelligence represents for our time.

Project 2025 Explained in Schoolhouse Rock Style!

 

Jason Hickel: Why a Liberated Palestine Threatens Global Capitalism

 

How are capitalism and the ecological crisis linked? Who really benefits from the exploitation of resources in the Global South? At the Transnational Institute's Ignite Festival in 2024, Jason Hickel argues that the Global North—the “Imperial Core”—is responsible for the excess emissions and resource extraction driving the climate breakdown. He believes that achieving economic democracy and sovereignty in the South is essential to dismantling the colonial power structures at the root of both climate change and imperial exploitation.

Lifting from the Bottom: How to Survive Donald Trump’s America by Liz Theoharis & Shailly Gupta Barnes

 

Source: TomDispatch

"If they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:31)

Before November 5th, millions of us were already struggling with poverty, extreme storms, immigration nightmares, anti-trans bills, criminalized reproductive health, the demolition of homeless encampments, the silencing of freedom of speech on campuses… and, of course, the list only goes on and on. Since Donald Trump and J.D. Vance were elected, more of us find ourselves in a state of fear and trembling, given the reports of transgender people attacked in broad daylight, misogynist social media posts threatening “your body, my choice,” Black college students receiving notes about returning to enslavement, and the unhoused beaten and battered.

In the wake of the election results, there has also been a flurry of activity in anticipation of the extremist policies Donald Trump and crew are likely to put in place to more deeply harm the nation’s most vulnerable: mass Zoom meetings with MoveOn, the Working Families Party, Indivisible, and more; interfaith prayer services for healing and justice organized by various denominations and ecumenical groups; local actions pulled together by the Women’s March; community meetings with the hashtag #weareworthfightingfor; and calls to mobilize for inauguration day and beyond.

Although some were surprised by the election outcome, there were others who saw it coming and offered comfort and solidarity to their communities even before the results were in. On the eve of election night, a public elementary school in West Harlem, New York, sent this message to its families:

“We know emotions are running high. Today, and last week at school, many conversations in PreK through 5th grade were had and heard regarding how voting happens… worry from some students about whether they will be safe after tomorrow… We assured all children that our school, no matter what, will always be a safe place for them and their families… It is so hard feeling that this election and its outcomes could have such a huge impact on any person based on their status, race, gender identity, sexuality, religion, country of origin and so many other identities which make our school so beautifully diverse…It is not easy being a parent/caregiver on a good day, let alone when it feels like times are so turbulent and uncertain and even, scary.  We are here for you, parents, caregivers, and we are in this together. No matter what!”

That message came from a Title 1 school, nearly 60% of whose students qualify for free school meals. If Trump keeps up with his promise to close the Department of Education, tens of thousands of public schools across the country, like the one in West Harlem, could lose critical funding and programs that sustain tens of millions of students and their families — that is, if public education isn’t completely privatized in some grim fashion.

Of course, not all communities approached Trump’s election with such trepidation. On November 6th, the Bloomberg Billionaire Index reported that the 10 richest men in the world added $64 billion to their own wealth after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 election. Since then, the stock market has had some of its best days in recent history.

An Impoverished Democracy

After inciting an insurrection at the Capitol, being indicted in state and federal court, convicted of 34 felony counts, and using racist, sexist, and hateful rhetoric prolifically, Donald Trump has gone down in history as the only convicted felon to become an American president, receiving more than 74 million votes and securing 312 electoral college votes. Although an undisputed victory, the outcome relied heavily on a weakened democracy and a polarized economy, drawing on discontent and disarray to regain political power.

Indeed, although Donald Trump has the distinct “honor” of being the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years, he has done so after more than a decade of assaults on voting rights, unleashed in 2013 when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Over the next 10 years, nearly 100 laws were passed in 29 states that restrict voting access, from omnibus bills to polling location closures, limits on mail-in and absentee voting, harsh ID requirements (including eliminating student ID cards as a valid form of identification), and more. Since 2020, at least 30 states have enacted 78 restrictive laws, 63 of which were in effect in dozens of states during this election. And in 2024 alone, nine states enacted 18 restrictive voting laws, alongside purges of thousands of voters in the days leading up to November 5th.

In addition to such prolonged attacks on the right to vote, widespread poverty and economic precarity have become defining characteristics of our impoverished democracy: more than two of every five of us are poor or low-income, and three in five are living paycheck-to-paycheck without affordable healthcare, decent homes, or quality education.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 report Poverty in the United States: 2023, 41% of this country’s population has a household income either under the poverty threshold or just above it, precariously living one emergency away from financial ruin. That translates into approximately 137 million people who are struggling every day to make it through without falling even further behind. Those tens of millions of people include a disproportionate percentage of people of color, including 56.5% of Black people (23.4 million), 61.4% of Latino people (40.2 million), 55.8% of Indigenous people (1.4 million), and 38% of Asian people (8.5 million). They also include nearly one-third of white people, 60 million, and nearly half (49%) of all children in the United States. Such rates are slightly higher for women (42.6%) than for men (39.8%), including 44.6% for elderly women.

When tallied up, these numbers mirror pre-pandemic conditions in 2018 and 2019, during which poverty and low-income rates stood at about 40%, impacting 140 million people in every county, state, and region of the country.

In other words, in this sick reality of ours, poverty is clearly anything but a marginal experience — and yet, as in the last election, it’s repeatedly minimalized and dismissed in our nation’s politics. In the process, the daily lives of nearly one-third of the electorate are discounted, because among that vast impoverished population, there are approximately 80 million eligible voters described by political strategists as among the most significant blocs of voters to win over.

Case in point: In 2020 and 2021, there was a significant dip in the overall number of people who were poor or low-income. Covid pandemic programs that offered financial help also expanded access to health care, food stamps, free school meals, and unemployment insurance, while monthly support from the Child Tax Credit lifted over 20 million people out of poverty and insecurity while increasing protection from evictions and foreclosures. Such programs made millions of people more economically secure than they had been in years.

Nonetheless, instead of extending and improving them and potentially gaining the trust of millions of poor and low-income voters, all of these anti-poverty policies were ended by early 2023. By 2024, not only had the gains against poverty been swiftly erased, but more than 25 million people had been kicked off Medicaid, including millions in battleground states like Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In that same time period, the Biden administration approved an $895 billion budget for war and another $95 billion in additional aid to Ukraine and Israel.

Rather than speaking to such economic crises or pledging to address such pervasive insecurity, over the course of the election season, the Democrats emphasized a rising GDP, a strong job market, and important infrastructure investments made in recent years — macro-economic issues that had little effect on the material well-being of the majority of Americans, especially those struggling with the rising cost of living. For instance, pre-election polling among Latino voters showed that three-quarters (78%) of them had experienced an increase in food and basic living expenses; two-thirds (68%) emphasized the high costs of rent and housing; and nearly three in five (57%) said that their wages weren’t high enough to meet their cost of living and/or they had to take second jobs to make ends meet.

When you consider the grim final results of election 2024, such realities — and the decision of the Democrats to functionally disregard poor and low-income voters — should be taken into account.

When the Wood Is Green/When the Wood Is Dry

With just over 74 million votes (to Harris’s 71 million), among a voting-eligible population of more than 230 million, Trump actually received only one-third of the possible votes in this election. Nearly 85 million eligible voters simply chose not to turn out. In reality, he won’t enter office with a popular mandate.

However, buoyed by a Republican-controlled Senate and House of Representatives, his second term brings with it a profound sense of dread, based on a heightened awareness of the policies that Trump 2.0 is likely to carry forward (laid bare in the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 900-page pre-election Project 2025 mandate). From mass deportations to assaults on social-welfare programs, housing programs, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ families, and public education, millions of people could be thrown into crisis, with alarmingly fewer ways to resist or express dissent, especially given Trump’s long-time willingness to use military force to quell protest. With the passage of the “non-profit killer bill” in the House of Representatives (before Trump even takes office), the infrastructure of resistance is also under threat. Add to all this: Trump has already started talking about overhauling the Medicaid and food-stamp programs that benefit at least 70 million poor and low-income people to offset the costs of extending tax cuts to billionaires and corporations. 

All of this brings us to the Bible.

Poverty was both severe and all too common in Jesus’s day. Ninety percent of the population in the Roman empire was believed to have been poor, with a class of expendable low-wage workers (to which some historians suggest Jesus belonged) so poor that many only lived remarkably brief lives in utter precarity. Shifts in farming and fishing had catapulted some people into great new wealth but left the vast majority struggling for basics like food and housing. Many of the impoverished subjects of the Roman Empire joined political and religious renewal movements, which took various forms and used various tactics to resist these and other injustices.

Some readers may be familiar with the decadence and violence of the Roman Emperor Nero. Popularly known as the anti-Christ, he came to power after Jesus walked the earth, but as is clear from his nickname, had a grave impact on many of Jesus’s followers. Nero was, of course, the one who was accused of “fiddling while Rome is burning” — holding lavish banquets, using and abusing (even possibly raping) some of his poor subjects, persecuting Christians, and bringing about the decline and eventual fall of the Roman empire through his authoritarian rule and decadent overspending.

As detailed in Luke’s Gospel, during the last week of his life, Jesus turned to the people of Jerusalem and wept. He described the profound suffering they had been enduring and instructed them to brace themselves for the suffering still to come, saying, “For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” This line foreshadows Jesus’s death on the cross (an execution reserved for those who dared to challenge the Roman Empire and its emperors), the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, and the persecution of his poor followers who continued to practice mutual solidarity, even after that crucifixion.

Writing decades later, the author of Luke’s gospel may have been offering a warning about emperors like Nero that would foreshadow later times. Luke had the benefit of hindsight in the wake of Jesus’s life and death in which there was not exactly a lot of good news about the canceling of debts, the release of those enslaved to unjust structures, or the prosperity of the poor (of the sort Jesus had called for when he started his public ministry). Rather, those who dared to stand up to Rome were being persecuted, while so many others were being overworked and underpaid in a society that was faltering.

Two thousand years later, this sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it?

Looking at Donald Trump’s new appointments and his (and his cronies’) plans for “making America great again,” you really have to wonder: if the poor and our democracy were suffering before Trump was reelected, what will happen now? If, amid relative abundance, the poor were already being abandoned, what will indeed occur when those with the power to distribute that abundance, and protect our air, water, and land, openly disdain the “least of these,” who are most of us, and instead favor the wealthy and powerful?

Donald Trump may liken himself to Jesus in his media appearances and election rallies, but his words and actions actually resemble those of Nero and other Roman emperors. With claims that “I alone can fix your problems” and bread-and-circus rallies like the pre-election one he held at Madison Square Garden, perhaps a more accurate parallel with the incoming administration may, in fact, be Nero and his cronies who stood against Jesus and his mission to end poverty.

If so, then for those committed to the biblical call for a safe and abundant life for all, such times demand that we focus on building the strength and power of the people. During the fall of the Roman Empire, poor and dispossessed communities banded together to build a movement where everyone would be accepted and all needs would be met. Don’t you hear echoes of that in the words and actions of that school in West Harlem, so deeply concerned about its families, and the community actions proclaiming that “we are worth fighting for”?

Such communities of yesteryear knew a truth that is all the more important today: lives and livelihoods will be saved, if at all, from below, rather than on high. As we approach a new year and the inauguration of Donald Trump (on Martin Luther King Day, no less), let us take to heart a favorite slogan of the authors: “When we lift from the bottom, everybody rises.” This is the only way forward.

Fintan O'Toole: Donald Trump’s Openly Authoritarian Instincts Are About to be Unleashed

 

Source: Irish Times

This is America now. It is a country that sees its authentic self reflected most clearly in the figure of a sexual predator, a racist, a misogynist, a fraudster, a felon, a coup monger, an inveterate liar and a senescent spewer of increasingly deranged and vulgar nonsense. The world must now come to terms with the undeniable fact that the US has freely and fairly chosen to embody its values in a man it knows damn well to be all those things.

This is not like 2016, when Donald Trump lost the popular vote but won the presidency because of the way a relative handful of votes fell in a small number of swing states. It is not even like the four years that followed when all the signs were that Trump was historically unpopular.

Back then, it was possible to say that many Americans voted for Trump without really having a clear idea of how he would govern, that many others imagined that he would be safely controlled by responsible adults and that, after all, most Americans didn’t vote for him. It was possible to think that, however grim his tenure might be, it would be a passing phase, a temporary derangement.

There is nothing temporary in the meaning of Trump’s comprehensive victory over Kamala Harris. The widely touted belief that this was a pivotal election in US history was not overblown. That history has taken a turn, not just because of Trump himself but because of the new majority that either embraces his fascistic rhetoric or is at the very least not seriously repelled by it.

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The turn is not, as promised, towards a renewed American greatness. On the contrary, America will be diminished, both internally and externally. The vigour of America’s society and of its economy are fundamentally dependent on the health of its democratic traditions, the strength of the rule of law, the quality of its scientific and educational cultures and its openness to new people and new ideas.

All of these will be weakened. Trump’s Supreme Court has already cleared the way for him to act with virtual impunity and his control of Congress (certain in relation to the Senate, probable for the House of Representatives) will be further enhanced by the crushing nature of his victory. His openly authoritarian instincts will not be constrained.

As for the rule of law, it was not one of his enemies who described Trump as “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.” It was his own former chief of staff John Kelly. Not only is Trump already a convicted felon, but he now does not even have to consider re-election. It will be open season for both personal corruption and for the weaponisation of the justice system against his opponents and critics.

The scientific culture that is so vital to American prosperity has already had a taste of Trump’s glorification of ignorance in his appalling indulgence of crackpot “cures” during the Covid pandemic. With the brain-addled conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr and the enthusiastic spreader of disinformation Elon Musk now by Trump’s side, the assault on science will be all the more fundamental. Its primary aim will, of course, be the enhancement of climate change denial to the benefit of the fossil fuel industries.

Educational policy, meanwhile, will almost certainly be handed over to the religious fanatics who have, in many states, already started to remove books they don’t like from schools and libraries. Musk’s enthusiasm for firing “obsolete” public school teachers will be a great start to the project of making America ignorant again.

And the openness to migration that has given the US its social, cultural and economic dynamism is threatened by Trump’s plans to terrorise immigrant communities by unleashing a military-led campaign of mass arrests and deportations. But it is also undermined by the spectacular electoral success of Trump’s violently anti-immigrant rhetoric. Every opportunist politician now knows that there are no limits to how far you can go in your attacks on non-white migrants. The long-term consequences are obvious.

For the outside world, Trump’s win is a triumph for dictators and authoritarians everywhere. But it is specifically a victory for Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. For Putin, it means that US backing for Ukraine will likely cease in the new year, raising the stark question of whether the European Union is willing and able to assume the burden of funding and supplying its resistance to invasion. Since the answer to that question is most probably no, the chances of an end to the war on Russia’s terms are now very high. That in turn would leave Putin free to throw his weight around the rest of the former Soviet empire.

As for China, Trump will almost certainly hand it global leadership on the single most important issue facing humanity: climate change. By reversing Joe Biden’s progress towards a green transition for the world’s biggest carbon polluter, Trump will offer China the opportunity to leap ahead with green technologies, take the moral high ground and present itself as the sane and responsible superpower. That ought to be a staggering prospect.

It is no longer possible to batten down the hatches and think “this too will pass”. For all his chaotic and instinctive impulses Trump has already created huge long-term changes in the US: completely altering the nature of the Republican Party, unravelling reproductive rights, installing a militantly right-wing Supreme Court. He now has the chance to follow the other right-wing authoritarian leaders he so admires and create a semi-permanent hegemony.

He has a mandate to do this. His agenda has been not so much spelled out as roared across the entire landscape of American politics. He was very clear in his intention to redefine those who are not loyal to him as the “enemy from within” who must be crushed, by state-controlled violence if necessary. The America he has conjured in his own image is okay with that.