Source: In These Times
President Donald Trump stood behind a podium in a large clearing of the Rose Garden, American flags hanging vertically between each White House column, to lambast a global trade system in which “our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.”
It was April 2, which Trump deemed “Liberation Day,” and he was declaring “economic independence” from the rest of the world.
The message was that of an underdog finally standing up against abuse. Workers have “watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream,” the president said. “We had an American dream that you don’t hear so much about.”
The headlines were dramatic. “Trump’s tariffs mark the end of an era for free trade in North America,” the Washington Post proclaimed.
But what were the president’s actual grievances? About five minutes into the announcement, Trump started waving what he called a “special book” back and forth, like a prosecutor holding up evidence in a courtroom. The misdeeds against the United States, he said, are “detailed in a very big report by the U.S. Trade Representative.”
At President Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed “Liberation Day” event on April 2, he waves a 377-page report on “trade barriers” to tout his regime’s increase on tariffs, or import taxes.
The document, the 2025 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, is a 377-page laundry list of what the United States views as “trade barriers” but what people in other countries might see as legitimate protections and regulations. These barriers, for example, include a bird-flu food safety measure in Morocco and a requirement in Nigeria that certain imports are certified “safe for human use and consumption.” They also include Canada’s “comprehensive agenda to achieve zero plastic waste by 2030” and Colombia’s requirements that imports of U.S. milk powder meet lactic acid and other quality standards.
The barriers Trump cited in his Liberation Day address are, in many cases, measures that protect working-class people in the United States and around the world.
There is little clarity about the trade deals Trump claims to be pursuing; his administration says he wants to negotiate 90 deals in 90 days. But there is every reason to be concerned he is using tariffs as leverage to advance some of the most coercive aspects of U.S. power: to undermine national sovereignty of other countries, trample on public goods and expand the brute power of the United States and its multinational corporations. Put another way: Behind all the lunch pail rhetoric, antiestablishment posturing and feigned concern for the working class, what Trump is proposing is more heavy-handed, anti-worker, military-driven economic policies.
But the situation is not just “free trade” as usual. It is an agenda to expand corporate power, in the hands of a president who takes coercion to new heights. In the same executive order that established “reciprocal tariffs” on April 2, Trump was explicit about setting up a protection racket. The order states that the United States may decide to reduce tariffs if a country changes its policies to “align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters.”
For Trump’s Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), it’s a problem that South Korea prioritizes domestic technology for its own weapons production. South Korea is a close U.S. ally and hosts 80 U.S. military base sites and nearly 29,000 American troops. Yet, for this administration, South Korea must also keep its doors perpetually open to purchases from the American weapons industry, which is already the largest in the world.
Among the unfair trade barriers that must be torn down, the USTR report says, are “policies that prioritize local technology and products over foreign defense technology.”
Cathi Choi, executive director of Women Cross DMZ, which organizes for peace in Korea, explains that the idea aligns “with all of the vested financial interests in maintaining the forever war in Korea. Weapons manufacturers profit from this war, and it’s everyday people who are losing out.” The Korean War, to which the United States is officially a party, never formally ended, which has led to a dangerous demilitarized zone littered with landmines, as well as peretual, forced family separations.
The report’s mention of these “defense” barriers is no small thing, as the document provides guidance for trade policy under Trump. “This report lays out both the type of policies and the exact policies that the United States is trying to dismantle around the globe,” says Arthur Stamoulis, executive director of the Citizens Trade Campaign, a coalition of environmental, labor and other civil society groups. It’s “one of the best indicators we have right now of the Trump administration’s trade priorities.”
The annual report typically skews pro-corporate. It’s been published every year since 1985, and the reports have purveyed “free trade” dogma under both Democratic and Republican administrations. But Trump’s national trade estimate is more extreme than in recent years, especially when it comes to opposing big tech regulations, like privacy protections, and pushing back against most anything that would limit profits for the weapons industry. The report reads like a corporate wish list, identifying environmental protections and public health and safety measures as barriers to trade. And Trump is using tariffs as a bludgeon, to force other countries to agree to these demands.
“It’s really the coercion of the tariff threat that’s new,” says Léa Auffret, a Brussels-based leader with the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, a network of 76 consumer and digital rights groups.
Trump’s national trade estimate is more extreme than in recent years, especially when it comes to opposing big tech regulations, like privacy protections, and pushing back against most anything that would limit profits for the weapons industry.
The 2025 report marks an escalation from previous years when it comes to the U.S. weapons industry, and the barriers to U.S. weapons companies in South Korea it mentioned were never brought up under Biden. The report also charges that measures around the world that limit the purchasing of American arms are barriers to trade, from Brazil’s prioritization of domestic defense manufacturing to Colombia’s requirement of “government-to government agreements for some defense procurements.” In all, there are 62 mentions of “defense” in the 2025 report, up from 29 in 2024 and 33 in 2023. It also mentions more jurisdictions (countries and regions) — 17 in 2025, versus 11 in 2024 and 15 in 2023.
But the USTR is not just protecting American weapons companies. The new report also targets environmental policies, including Thailand’s renewable energy incentive, which “aims to increase biofuel and renewable energy consumption to 30% by 2037.” Climate change poses an immediate existential threat to Thailand: Bangkok is sinking into the sea as ocean levels rise, and the capital could be 40% flooded by 2030, according to the World Bank.
The report also names a European Union plan to reduce deforestation as a trade barrier, as well as an EU regulation to protect public health and the environment from toxic chemicals, including carcinogens. Labor unions supported the regulation, known by its acronym REACH, when it was first implemented in 2007; workers had a stake in ensuring they were not exposed to hazardous chemicals on the job.
It’s not the first time the EU’s chemical regulations have been in the crosshairs of the United States. When the Obama administration tried, in 2013, to negotiate the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a massive trade deal, the administration also took issue with the EU’s chemical regulations, along with a host of other protections, from “reimbursement of medicines to how we treat food safety,” Auffret recalls. In light of Trump’s national trade estimate report, she is bracing for more.
A worker packages garments for Chinese e-commerce giant Temu. Faced with worldwide economic calamity, the Trump administration walked back its trade war with China on May 12, at least temporarily.
“When your laws are listed, you’re under pressure,” Auffret says. “It’s a signal from the U.S., ‘We’re watching this issue and we’re going to bring it up and up and up all over again.’ ” Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, says “there can be no doubt” that the Trump administration is going to use trade deals to undermine protections around the world.
“We are calling on the [European] Commission not to give in to this type of bullying,” Lynch says.
The report lists public health and safety measures, too, as barriers to trade, including higher standards and regulations on vehicle safety in Japan, Taiwan and Egypt. Egypt has one of the highest rates of deadly road traffic accidents in the world, killing around 12,000 people a year.
The so-called barriers continue into, for example, price caps on coronary stents and knee implants in India. The report also identifies the Indian Patents Act that imposes limits on frivolous patents, which thereby helps ward off pharmaceutical monopolies, as a barrier. This law helps keep the cost of medicines down in a country where 7% of the population—or 100 million people — are thrown into poverty every year because of healthcare spending.
K.M. Gopakumar is a New Delhi-based legal advisor and senior researcher with the Third World Network, which promotes just and sustainable development in the Global South. He says this language is concerning, because “price control offers an important tool to protect people from the exploitation of commercial actors.”
When it comes to the regulation of big tech, Trump’s report has more corporate giveaways to “commercial actors” than the Biden administration. Trump’s USTR identifies “digital trade barriers” in 35 countries plus the European Union, and takes aim at the regulation of artificial intelligence, privacy protections and digital services taxes, which allow countries to tax big tech companies that aren’t physically located within their borders. “In essence, President Trump has declared a trade war on countries who have the temerity to regulate Big Tech in the interests of their people,” Public Citizen, a watchdog organization, asserted in a statement.
The 2024 report recognized that countries have “a sovereign right to adopt measures in furtherance of legitimate public purposes,” wording that had given some social justice organizations hope that the USTR, under Katherine Tai, would take a different tack. Melinda St. Louis, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, says, “Last year’s report under President Biden had a more nuanced approach, removing a number of public interest laws from the list. But now they’re back in.” Canada’s policy to decrease plastic waste, for example, was included in 2022 but then omitted in 2023 and 2024. Now it’s back.
The very concept of a “non-tariff barrier” to trade has been used since the Nixon administration as a euphemism for steamrolling basic public goods and regulations to make way for corporate profits, David Dayen points out in The American Prospect. Stamoulis, of the Citizens Trade Campaign, is concerned that the concept is now at the center of Trump’s trade policy. “This is the most powerful country on Earth dictating what governments are and aren’t allowed to do to protect the health and well-being of their populations on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “This impacts food safety, access to medicine, online safety. Real stuff with real life-and death consequences.”
On Liberation Day, Trump announced a 10% baseline tariff on all countries, as well as dramatically steeper “reciprocal tariff ” rates for dozens of countries from South Korea to Taiwan to China. The steeper rates were soon suspended for 90 days, except on China, to allow Trump to negotiate trade deals — an open strategy to use tariffs as a stick to extract concessions. (Though on May 12, the United States reached an agreement to temporarily reduce its tariffs on China to 30%, while China cuts its import duty to 10% on U.S. goods.)
We already know that Trump has a propensity toward using tariffs to reward friends. He did so during his first term, when he imposed tariffs on some imports from China in 2018, yet granted exemptions to donors and associates. A 2024 study in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis found that companies had a 1 in 5 chance of getting an exclusion from the tariffs if they had donated to Republican candidates, versus a 1 in 10 chance if they had given to Democrats.
There is reason to think that this trend is continuing into the present. ProPublica found that firms with political connections, or those that heavily lobby the Trump administration, “might be winning carve-outs” from sanctions. And the Washington Post found that, amid tariff trade talks, U.S. embassies and the State Department are pressing countries to license with Starlink, the satellite internet company owned by Elon Musk, Trump’s powerful associate and largest donor.
The Liberation Day tariffs are far more sweeping than any in Trump’s first term, and any concessions will be extracted at gunpoint.
The guns are not just metaphorical. There are signs that Trump will try to use tariffs, or trade more broadly, to fortify the U.S. military, which is by far the most heavily funded on the planet, with an estimated 750 military bases around the globe. Bloomberg reported April 21 that Trump has “raised the financial contribution Tokyo makes to support U.S. military bases in Japan as an issue of concern, including before a meeting with Japanese trade negotiator Ryosei Akazawa last week.” (There are at least 50,000 U.S. troops stationed in Japan, where U.S. military bases have faced local protests for decades over environmental pollution, sexual assaults and other issues.)
“China is clearly the number-one target of these tariff policies,” says Lindsay Koshgarian, program director for the National Priorities Project, which produces research about military spending. “Diplomatic relationships between the U.S. and China have fallen apart. This is a key ingredient setting us up for actual military conflict.”
In response to the “reciprocal tariffs,” China is stepping up its own efforts to cultivate trade and investment deals with other countries, a move that could ultimately weaken the U.S. empire. But even this tit for tat has consequences. “This is the classic Cold War arrangement of lack of diplomacy and aligning countries against each other,” says Koshgarian. “There’s the possibility not just of direct war, but proxy wars and military buildup.”
Trump has used tariffs to bolster other violent aspects of the U.S. security state. Even before declaring Liberation Day, he used the threat of tariffs to press countries into participating in his imprisonment and deportation of immigrants, or escalating their own border militarization. In January, for example, Trump successfully used the threat of tariffs to pressure Colombia into accepting flights of deported migrants. (Colombia had initially resisted to protest the administration’s poor treatment of migrants.) In February, Trump threatened tariffs unless Mexico deployed its military to parts of the border with allegedly high rates of border crossing.
Trump already has one major domestic policy proposal we can review to understand his trade priorities. His proposal of a $1 trillion military budget is the most bloated domestic industrial policy we have in this country (and is actually higher when militarized spending in other budgets is included). Every year, around half of the military budget goes to military contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, which are manufacturing the bombs being dropped on Yemen and Gaza or loaded onto the warships encircling China.
In turn, Trump’s USTR does the bidding of the U.S. weapons industry, giving countries black marks for measures limiting U.S. weapons industry profits.
“I think what we’re witnessing is an embrace of all the tools of U.S. imperialism,” says David Vine, a political anthropologist and author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. According to Vine, we are seeing this imperial bent with Trump’s territorial claims, “threatening to invade and seize Greenland,
Gaza, Canada, Panama.
“He is embracing forms of economic imperialism that certainly have been part of past administrations, but he’s embracing them in profoundly broader ways and deeper ways.”
No doubt, capital was not happy with Trump’s announced reciprocal tariffs. The stock market tanked near bear market territory, and millionaires and billionaires took the rare step of speaking out against Trump’s policies. But just because the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock vocally denounced them doesn’t mean they’re somehow a bulwark against the excesses of capital; the pushback likely came against uncertainty, day-to day volatility and caprice, rather than against the ultimate goal of maximizing American corporate power.
“Trump is trying to use the failures of the system to win workers’ votes,” says Manuel Pérez-Rocha, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, who has spent nearly three decades researching trade. “But workers are being defrauded.”
There is a debate to be had about the role sectoral tariffs could play in a larger industrial policy to protect wages and working conditions. United Auto Workers, for example, has argued in favor of certain tariffs and even praised Trump’s auto tariffs in late March, parting with the Canadian auto union Unifor. Labor journalist Luis Feliz Leon has suggested there are more internationalist frameworks for labor to take up, like cross-border coordination focused on protecting workers throughout corporate supply chains.
But perhaps Trump’s reciprocal tariffs are not, functionally, tariffs at all. As David Dayen argued in The American Prospect on April 3, they’re best understood as sanctions, “only he’s doing it against the whole world, all at once, for the assumed harm of ‘ripping off ’ the United States for decades.”
As Dayen wrote: “It is no different from a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business.”
“It is no different from a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business.”
One major thing Trump’s tariffs have in common with sanctions: On Liberation Day, Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 as the authority for his reciprocal tariffs. For decades, the act has been used by presidents to impose sweeping— and devastating — economic sanctions on countries from Venezuela to Cuba to Iran to Vietnam. Before Trump took office, it had been used by presidents 69 times, according to the Congressional Research Service, and it “sits at the center of the modern U.S. sanctions regime.”
But there are also key differences. Sanctions are framed as punitive against “enemy” countries, whereas reciprocal tariffs are ostensibly aimed at trade relations with the entire world. And they are being used against U.S. allies, raising questions about whether Trump is pursuing empire in traditional terms, by expanding spheres of American influence.
Whether or not reciprocal tariffs constitute formal sanctions, Trump is using them (or the threat of them) as a cudgel against other countries in what appears to be a bid to project American strength. They should be viewed as part of a longer history of the United States using economic pressure to achieve might. Even should Trump ultimately be bluffing, his bluffing has tremendous economic and policy implications, as we are seeing with the global frenzy to respond to tariff threats. This is true even as U.S. courts question the fundamental legitimacy of the “Liberation Day” tariffs, with the chance that they could be overthrown for good, though the Trump administration is digging in its heels.
Does this moment mark a break from neoliberalism, or an intensification of it? Are we closer to a 19th- or 20thcentury colonialism, or a more modern form of economic nationalism coupled with imperialism? Trump himself has been erratic: He has presented himself as a defender of American workers despite waging an unprecedented war on the basic rights of workers to collectively bargain, meanwhile gutting public programs for the poor at a headspinning pace. He bemoans the free trade system while embracing its most destructive components, such as opposition to public health, environmental protections and welfare programs, and his own renegotiation of NAFTA during his first term ended up being a huge disappointment for workers. And there are reasons to think there are divisions within the Trump administration, as Elon Musk parts with Trump on tariffs while some advisors, like Peter Navarro, double down.
Ultimately, it’s not rhetoric or buzzwords that are important, but the material policies the most powerful person on Earth is advancing. And while it is difficult to know what is going on in the president’s psyche, there is a consistent throughline that runs throughout his actions: marrying trade and militarism as a means to undermine other countries’ sovereignty and democratic decision-making, and projecting an image of American strength that is rooted in violent domination and the erosion of the welfare state.
On Liberation Day, Trump stood on the Rose Garden lawn and called out “American steelworkers, auto workers, farmers and skilled craftsmen, we have a lot of them here with us today. They really suffered gravely.” And they have, in the United States and around the world, due to decades of pro-corporate measures that have battered workers and left them without basic protections.
It’s a trend Trump is by no means reversing, but escalating — complete with new, faux-populist branding — at a breakneck pace.
Source: The Atlantic
As they scramble to keep their systems online, AI companies are making things expensive for the rest of us. Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude are so resource-hungry that tech companies may be purchasing 70 percent of the world’s supply of high-end computer memory, causing a shortage. As a result, the prices of computer memory and storage are skyrocketing: Hard drives that I bought for my reporting two years ago for $350 each were $800 when I checked two weeks ago, and are now out of stock. The prices of some laptops have gone up as much as 50 percent, and low-cost computers are being hit the hardest. Affordable entry-level computers may “disappear by 2028” according to one forecast. And the memory shortage is expected to continue for years.
The memory is being put into data centers, which tech firms are expanding at incredible speed. They are planning to multiply total U.S.-data-center capacity by a factor of eight over the next few years. The demand for electricity at these sites is already so great that some companies are repurposing jet engines to power them.
The problem is not simply that AI is being deployed so widely or quickly. Other computer technologies have seen similarly massive growth without triggering such a large spike in electricity or a shortage of computer components: Video and music are now streamed around the globe, accounting for many terabytes of internet traffic daily; the smartphone boom required the manufacturing of billions of devices that are now transferring huge amounts of data; billions of household devices are also now part of the Internet of Things; and whole industries have moved their operations to cloud software, which is hosted not in the sky but in, yes, data centers.
AI is the center of conversation in many circles these day.Folks are using it in various ways, from school essays to solving mathematical problems to coming up with creative ways to bake or cook something different. I use it for delving deeply into various spheres of knowledge & expanding my knowledge in novel ways. In fact, that is the strength & exciting promise of AI - expanding our knowledge of our world, generally speaking. Of course, one would have to ask creative, intelligent & detailed questions in order to get the most out of it. So recently I asked ClaudeAI to synthesize the philosophical ideas of James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morisson, Eduardo Galeano, Thich Nhat Hanh, Malcom X & Arundhati Roy & it gave me quite a bit of eye-opening detail. The more detail you input, the more interesting the results.:
A Synthesis: On Witness, Love, and Liberation
1. Truth-telling as a moral obligation, not a choice
Baldwin insisted that to be aware and human in an unjust world is to be in a "rage almost all the time" — and that the writer's task is to bear witness regardless of comfort. Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America did the same for a continent's plundered history. Roy has called silence, in the face of power, itself a political act — one she refuses. The throughline: looking away is a betrayal, and naming injustice precisely is the first act of resistance.
2. History is not past — it lives in bodies and structures
Morrison's fiction (especially Beloved) insists that trauma is inherited, that the past is not dead but "rememory" — something that literally waits in places for people to return to it. Galeano's work is built on the same premise: colonial extraction didn't end, it just changed shape. This is a rejection of tidy progress narratives in favor of reckoning.
3. Love as a radical, disciplined practice — not sentiment
Baldwin: "Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." Walker's womanism centers love — of self, of other women, of the earth — as inseparable from justice work. Thich Nhat Hanh grounds this same idea in engaged Buddhism: compassion isn't passive feeling but active practice (his concept of "interbeing" — that no self exists separate from others, so harming another is harming yourself).
4. The oppressor is also unfree
Both Baldwin and Malcolm X (especially post-Mecca, later Malcolm) arrived at versions of this: systems of domination damage everyone within them, though radically unequally. Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching that "the wave does not need to die to become water" — that liberation isn't destroying the other but recognizing a shared condition — offers a spiritual register for what Baldwin argued politically.
5. Dignity and self-definition against imposed narratives
Malcolm X's insistence on self-determination ("by any means necessary") and Walker's insistence on defining Black womanhood on its own terms (against both white feminism and Black patriarchy) share a refusal to let others narrate your existence. Morrison put it simply: she wrote the books she wanted to read because no one else was writing them for her.
6. Interconnection as both spiritual and political fact
Roy's essays on globalization, dams, and nationalism argue that the fates of the poor, the environment, and democracy are inseparable. Thich Nhat Hanh's "interbeing" makes the same claim metaphysically — you cannot have a flower without the rain, the sun, the soil; you cannot have yourself without everyone and everything else. Political solidarity and spiritual insight converge here.
One condensed line, if you wanted it in a sentence: Seeing clearly, telling the truth about what you see, and loving fiercely — including the parts of the world and the self that resist being loved — is the whole of the work, and it is never finished.
(NOTE: I am no hokey pokey optimist with regards to AI. I see the destructive potential & the out of control greed &power tripping of these Tech Bros. Honestly, it's not looking too good for the planet if serious questions about it are not resolved very soon. )
Source: TRNN
A few weeks ago, we argued the Trump administration was seeking to invent new ways to punish Americans. The idea was that the authoritarian impulses of the MAGA-run government will need to dial up the cruelty in order to sow chaos and pave the way for a broader assault on democracy.
Well, this week a rule was issued by Medicare and Medicaid services that shows just how proficient the Trump administration is at inflicting pain. And the consequences for poor, seriously ill Americans could be devastating.
Before we explain the rule, it’s worth contemplating the often destructive role healthcare — both the lack of it and exorbitant costs associated with it — play in the lives of working-class Americans.
Poll after poll shows that working people rank anxiety over healthcare costs at the top of the list of high-priority concerns. Unpaid medical bills are the most likely cause of personal bankruptcy in the US. Unlike any other wealthy nation on earth, when Americans lose their jobs, they often lose access to a doctor as well.
Source: GrahamPeebles
The football has been brilliant, because football is brilliant. But the 2026 World Cup—hosted across the US, Canada, and Mexico—mainly in America—is the most corrupt, polluted tournament in the tournament’s 96-year history.
Let’s start with discrimination: Omar Artan, the first Somali referee ever invited to officiate at a World Cup, was refused entry at Miami airport—having been issued a US visa—based on spurious claims of “terrorist connections.” He flew home to a hero’s welcome, celebrated for his dignified response to a humiliating ordeal.
Source: BAR
A single working mother could once take her child to a Yankees game for $40, but today that money would not even cover the online service fees. Sporting events have been stolen from poor and working class people and are now reserved only for the wealthy elite.
Capitalism has a way of rendering what was once accessible to, and tactile for the masses into distant memories that themselves become the only thing that can be possessed, which is not a bad thing until said memories become the only thing that can be possessed due to profound wealth and income iniquity. For myself, I remember a time when my single, working class mother and I could impulsively decide to go to a Yankees game or a Knicks game the same day they were being played. Moms would head to the Chemical Bank ATM, take out $40, and have the ability to purchase two decent seats along with refreshments for both of us to enjoy. Today, $40 would not even be enough to pay for the service charges that are tacked onto online ticket sales, which demonstrates the fact that attending sporting events are included in the growing list of things including, but not limited to, quality housing, healthcare, education, and access to healthy and nutritious foods that have been pillaged from poor and working class people as racial capitalism continues to solidify the obscene idea that only the bourgeois and elements of the petty bourgeois have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The use of sporting events by empires to appease, mollify, and distract the masses as well as act as a tool to demonstrate the superiority and exceptionalism of a given society is nothing new. For instance, in 1936 when the Olympic Games were hosted in Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler aimed to use the games as a massive propaganda tool to showcase the “superiority” of the Aryan race. To accentuate the propaganda tool, Hitler ordered over $30 Million in state spending to subsidize travel, build grand venues such as the Olympiastadion Berlin, and lower lodging and railway costs by as much as 50% - and even put measures in place to prevent price gouging and keep costs artificially low for tourists. By doing so, Hitler successfully engendered a pastiche of the so-called age of enlightenment, which provided a propaganda palette that portrayed a society of equal rights and liberal values which could not possibly carry out the litany of atrocities we now know took place during and after the 1936 Olympic Games. And centuries before the Third Reich, the Roman Empire instituted a similar praxis for its gladiatorial games by making them free for its citizens. The games were actually funded by the emperor and wealthy elites to provide “bread and circuses” as a form of propaganda to keep the masses happy and distracted from the empire’s decadence and perpetual imperialism.
You can’t have capitalism without racism.
–Malcolm X
Elon Musk is less an aberration than the grotesque byproduct of a capitalist order that converts inequality into virtue, exploitation into spectacle, and mistakes its own deepest failures for its greatest successes. The media frenzy surrounding the prospect of Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire is not a celebration of human progress or individual initiative. It is a symptom of a deeper social and political crisis, one that exposes the power of class privilege, the corrupting forces of gangster capitalism, and a culture increasingly incapable of distinguishing wealth from worth or exploitation from human flourishing.
Musk is symptomatic of the rot of a capitalist system that generates staggering inequalities while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite whose fortunes depend not simply on markets, but on public subsidies, collective labor, social institutions, and shared resources, all sustained by an authoritarian culture animated by white supremacy, ultranationalism, and the mobilizing passions of fascist politics, especially in the age of Trump. As Dan Dinello argues, Musk has become an “avatar of chaos, cruelty, and death.” The description is difficult to dismiss. How else are we to understand his role as Trump’s chief enforcer?
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Source: CHR
During the two years I spent writing “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” I encountered numerous mini-Trumps. These self-proclaimed pastors — very few had any formal religious training — preyed on the despair of their congregants. They were surrounded by sycophants and could not be questioned. They merged fact with fiction, peddled magical thinking and enriched themselves at the expense of their followers. They claimed their wealth and ostentatious lifestyle, including mansions and private jets, was a sign of being blessed. They insisted they were divinely inspired and anointed by God. They were, within their hermetic circles of their megachurches, omnipotent.
These cult pastors promised to use their omnipotence to crush the demonic forces that had created misery in the lives of their followers — unemployment and underemployment, evictions, bankruptcies, poverty, addiction, sexual and domestic abuse, and crippling despair. The more power the cult leaders possess — according to their followers — the more certain is a promised paradise. Cult leaders stand above the law. Those who desperately place their faith in them want them to be above the law.
