Donald Trump's latest barrage of tariffs—levied against imports from China, the EU, Mexico, Canada, and the UK—has triggered a global wave of panic. Stock markets are tumbling, trade relationships are unraveling, and the threat of recession is once again stalking the global economy. JPMorgan recently raised its probability of a U.S. recession to 60%, while the BBC notes that U.S. consumers are already facing higher prices on cars, electronics, and everyday goods.

UK business groups have warned that the tariffs will cause "untold damage" to exports and jobs. Market observers describe the mood as “carnage,” with Wall Street plunging and currencies in freefall. Economists, bewildered by the self-inflicted harm, are questioning the logic. As The Guardian succinctly put it: “In economic terms, Trump’s tariffs make no sense at all.”

But perhaps the key is to stop viewing them as economic policy at all.

Behind the official rhetoric lies a more disturbing pattern: the weaponization of the global economy to reshape alliances, weaken opposition, and consolidate elite control.

Instead, what we are witnessing is a shift in how political and economic power is wielded. Trump's tariffs are less about economic advantage than they are about “power.” They are the instruments of a broader authoritarian project—one that uses economic coercion not as a last resort, but as a first principle.

The Trump administration has framed this crisis as a defense of “national sovereignty,” declaring a state of emergency in order to impose sweeping new trade restrictions. But behind the official rhetoric lies a more disturbing pattern: the weaponization of the global economy to reshape alliances, weaken opposition, and consolidate elite control.

Crony Capitalism Disguised as Protectionism

Trump’s tariffs are not random acts of economic aggression. They are carefully placed tools of political leverage—intended to punish dissent and reward obedience. Want your country's exports to avoid a crushing levy? Then align your foreign policy with Trump's vision. Need your factory spared from punishing steel tariffs? Show loyalty, cut a deal, make a donation.

This is not free market capitalism. It is feudalism with a corporate gloss—where tariff exemptions and trade deals are handed out not on merit, but on allegiance. Indeed even before the announcement, corporations with the right connections in Washington have already begun receiving favorable treatment. The message is clear: if you want to survive in this economy, loyalty to the throne is not optional—it’s the business model.

This isn’t just Trump’s strategy. It is the strategy of an emerging capitalist class that thrives in the dark.

This marks a dangerous transformation. Trump is not merely using tariffs to "bring jobs home"; he is building a new global order in which power is centralized around his persona, and economic access becomes a form of tribute. Allies are not negotiated with, they are enlisted. Enemies are not competed against, they are sanctioned into submission.

Countries like Mexico and Canada are being strong-armed into renegotiating deals that favor Trump’s domestic base. China, meanwhile, has responded with its own retaliatory tariffs and accusations of “economic bullying.” The global trade system is no longer rules-based—it’s relationship-based, and Trump is the gatekeeper.

This dynamic has a name – what I refer to as the rise of the “authoritarian-financial complex”: a hybrid of autocracy and capital, in which markets are no longer neutral platforms of exchange but battlegrounds of loyalty and domination. State power is weaponized not to serve the public good but to enrich a loyal elite through coercive economic tools and manufactured crises. It marks a shift from an imperialist market-driven global capitalist system to a new era where authoritarianism itself becomes profitable —an industry of control that turns state repression, economic chaos, and political loyalty into revenue streams for the ruling elite.

Manufacturing Crisis as an Investment Opportunity

If the tariffs seem irrational through the lens of traditional economics, they make perfect sense when viewed through the lens of crisis capitalism. This is the playbook: manufacture a disruption, create volatility, and let the well-positioned profit from the fallout.

This is not new. Neoliberal elites have long used crises—whether natural, financial, or geopolitical—as opportunities to restructure economies in their favor. The goal is not to prevent crises but to own them, to turn social and economic catastrophe into a series of privatized gains.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, this model was on full display. Private equity and hedge funds disproportionately bought up distressed housing, healthcare companies, and struggling small businesses, consolidating enormous power under the guise of “recovery.”

Trump’s tariff war extends this logic to the international stage. The goal is not to fix the global economy—it’s to turn it into a distressed asset. As markets crash and trade routes collapse, investors tied to the Trump network can scoop up undervalued assets, exploit government stimulus, and re-sell them at massive profits. It's asset stripping on a global scale.

This moment demands clarity. Tariffs that punish enemies and reward friends are not about economic justice—they are tools of elite extraction.

This is why financial markets are not merely reacting to trade uncertainty—they’re anticipating a redistribution of power. The market’s negative response reflects not just fear of economic pain, but recognition that policy now depends on political favor, not stability or reason.

And who pays the price? Ordinary people—through inflation, layoffs, decimated pensions, and rising costs of living. These tariffs may be framed as populist, but they function as pipelines of wealth transfer from the working and middle classes to the ultra-rich.

The New Economy of Obedience

So what are we really looking at? A trade war? A nationalist economic pivot? No. We are witnessing the consolidation of a new form of capitalism—one that fuses state violence, elite finance, and populist spectacle into a coherent, brutal system of control.

Trump’s tariff policies are the scaffolding of a much larger project: to reshape the world economy in a way that rewards loyalty, crushes opposition, and turns crisis into capital. They are not the exception. They are the future—unless they are stopped.

This moment demands clarity. Tariffs that punish enemies and reward friends are not about economic justice—they are tools of elite extraction. The markets are not crashing because Trump miscalculated. They are crashing because the system is being reset. And when the smoke clears, the question is not who will pay the price, but who will own the wreckage.

What is needed is more than hand-wringing about GDP or interest rates. It requires a reckoning with the fact that our economic future is being deliberately reshaped by those who view democracy itself as a distressed asset. The true cost of Trump’s tariffs isn't measured in trade deficits or consumer prices. It’s measured in the dismantling of a rules-based global order in favor of a patronage-driven, authoritarian regime of elite extraction.

This isn’t just Trump’s strategy. It is the strategy of an emerging capitalist class that thrives in the dark. And unless we confront it directly, they won’t just own the crisis—they’ll own us too.

Streaming 10 AM Eastern & 8 AM Mountain time + Streaming Afterwards:

In this episode of “The TMI Show,” hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan tackle the escalating unrest in global securities markets following President Trump’s tariffs, announced last week on “Liberation Day,” April 1. The discussion centers on the dramatic overseas market reactions and the futures markets’ ominous signals. On Monday morning, Asian markets led the plunge: Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 nosedived 7.8%, its steepest drop in a decade, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng cratered 13.2%, the worst since the 1997 financial crisis. Shanghai’s Composite fell 7.3%, and Taiwan’s Taiex shed 9.7%, a record single-day loss. In Europe, the pain spread as Germany’s DAX and France’s CAC 40 each tumbled 5.8%, and Britain’s FTSE 100 slid 4.9%, reflecting widespread fears of a trade war spiral.

Futures markets amplified the dread: U.S. Dow futures dropped 1,246 points by early Monday, signaling more turbulence ahead. With financial expert Aquilles Larrea, Ted and Manila explore the global anxiety—overseas traders are bracing for retaliatory tariffs, supply chain chaos, and a potential recession. With markets reeling and uncertainty looming over the week, the hosts debate whether this is a temporary shock or the start of a deeper crisis.

The post TMI Show Ep 112: “Don’t Look Down: Stocks In Freefall” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On this question, you can take your pick:

1. They will lead to a destructive trade war.
2. They will lead to a massive economic depression, like the 1930s.
3. They will make prices and unemployment rise at the same time, like in the 1970s.
4. They will disappear our savings and pensions as the stock market craters, like in 1929.
5. And to save democracy, WE SHOULD NEVER SUPPORT TRUMP ON ANYTHING!

The United Autoworkers (UAW), one of the most progressive unions in the country, isn’t buying any of this. For now, it fully supports the Trump tariffs. As the UAW puts it:

This is a long-overdue shift away from a harmful economic framework that has devastated the working class and driven a race to the bottom across borders in the auto industry. It signals a return to policies that prioritize the workers who build this country—rather than the greed of ruthless corporations.

For more than thirty years, the UAW and other unions and progressives have fought free trade deals like NAFTA, adopted in 1994, which in the succeeding decades have decimated American working-class jobs and communities, especially in the industrial areas of the Midwest.

The argument against free trade was simple: Allowing corporations to flee easily and rapidly to low-wage countries put them in a competitive race to the bottom in pursuit of cheaper wages and less costly working conditions. This was especially true in the better-paid U.S. manufacturing industries. Company negotiators threatened job relocation or reductions in virtually every collective bargaining effort with industrial unions.

Corporations said it again and again: “Accept wage and benefit concessions or we’ll move the plant to Mexico.” For labor unions that was a lose-lose proposition. Take less money and benefits and undercut your standard of living or hold fast and lose your job.

The Democrats, led by President Bill Clinton, put together enough votes to pass the deal, and they have been paying the price ever since. Sherrod Brown, the former U.S. Senator from Ohio, says that what he repeatedly heard in his failed senatorial campaign last year was how the Democrats destroyed jobs via NAFTA.

Allowing corporations to easily relocate abroad has been a key element of the neoliberal march to rising inequality. Free trade involves a trade-off, it was argued. More workers would get jobs in growing export industries than would be lost in manufacturing. And the rise of cheap imports would lower the prices of goods workers bought, effectively giving them a pay raise.

Of course, the reality was that the new non-union working-class jobs pay far less than the unionized ones that were lost, and the working-class knows it. And while cheaper goods from Walmart likely offset some of the material sting, moving down the socio-economic ladder is painful and contrary to the American dream.

After years of railing against this Faustian bargain, progressives are now watching Trump claim he is protecting U.S. industries through massive tariffs. The goal, he sometimes says, is to bring back the jobs that were lost.

Progressive Democrats are stuck with a painful dilemma. If they oppose the tariffs across the board, they will be siding with the financiers and CEOs who have profited wildly from low or no tariffs, and have ushered in runaway inequality and increasing job insecurity. (See Wall Street’s War on Workers.)

But Democrats on the left so detest Trump, that it’s nearly impossible for them to join with the UAW to support the tariffs. Unless a new path is forged, progressives will find themselves in an unholy alliance with the Wall Street neoliberals and against the working-class, sounding the death knell for any kind of progressive-worker alliance to build an alternative to Trumpism.

What is a Progressive Trade Policy?

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is attacking the Trump tariffs by playing his Vermont card, since the state has extensive economic ties to Canada. His key is focusing on working-class jobs:

Given Vermont’s long-established economic ties with our Canadian neighbor, the impact on our state will be even greater. We need a rational and well-thought-out trade policy, not arbitrary actions from the White House. I will do everything possible to undo the damage that Trump’s tariffs are causing working families in Vermont and across the country.

But just what would a “well-thought-out trade policy” look like?

Boarder Adjustment Tax

The goal of a worker-oriented trade policy is to take wages out of competition. That could be most easily done through a tariff called a border adjustment tax. The tax covers the difference in wages between the low-wage and high-wage workers, something that is easily calculated. If wages are nearly identical there would be no need for a tariff.

Targeted Tariffs

When John Deere and Company announced last year it was moving approximately 1,000 jobs to Mexico, in effect to finance higher CEO pay and stock buybacks for Wall Street investors, Trump threatened to impose a 200 percent tariff on any subsequently imported Deere products from that country. That sent the exact message workers wanted to hear: You move our jobs away to fatten your pockets, you get hammered.

Hard to argue with that proposition, but the Democrats did just that. Instead of dealing with how the job shift to Mexico was being used to finance stock giveaways to Wall Street, they rolled out Mark Cuban, who called the tariffs “insane,” because they would hurt Deere.

What About Countries with High-wage Labor?

Workers in export industries in northern Europe, Canada, and Japan have wages and benefits as high or higher than U.S. workers. What’s the rationale, for example, to put tariffs on German-made cars? One reason would be to equalize tariffs in each country and in the long run move them towards zero. The other is to encourage them to increase production in the US.

Ironically, about 5,600 German corporations already have been moving to the U.S. as they seek access to bigger markets and lower production costs. As many set up in low-wage states in the U.S. South, they avoid the higher labor costs in Germany. Also, they have been taking advantage of lavish subsidies as states compete to attract jobs. Energy is also cheaper in the U.S. and transportation costs are lowered. And finally, Germany makes certain high-quality products, especially in green energy, that aren’t yet produced here.

This suggests that a “well thought-out trade policy,” a la Sanders, with Germany should be the result of negotiations, not unilateral actions.

But Trump doesn’t do “well-thought-out,” which means his tariffs are a colossal mess, perhaps even the product of quickly produced ChatGPT hallucinations.

Yet opposing Trump across the board isn’t a well-thought-out approach either. It leads to the tone-deaf reactions of people like Mark Cuban that protect the status quo and avoid dealing with actual job loss caused by plant relocations to low-wage countries and the impact of such threats on collective bargaining. Which, needless to say, is the real problem.

The UAW is trying to make the distinction between supporting pro-worker tariffs and opposing other anti-worker Trump actions. As UAW president Shawn Fain recently said:

But ending the race to the bottom also means securing union rights for autoworkers everywhere with a strong National Labor Relations Board, a decent retirement with Social Security benefits protected, healthcare for all workers including through Medicare and Medicaid, and dignity on and off the job. The UAW and the working class in general couldn’t care less about party politics; working people expect leaders to work together to deliver results. The UAW has been clear: we will work with any politician, regardless of party, who is willing to reverse decades of working-class people going backwards in the most profitable times in our nation’s history.

For progressive Democrats UAW’s approach will be hard swallow. First, it dilutes the all-out attack on Trump for every action he takes, each of which is viewed as an existential threat to democracy. And secondly, it forces the Democrats to deal with job destruction in the private sector, something they have failed to do for more than a generation.

A better approach would be for left politicians like Sanders to sit down with the UAW to hammer out a common progressive position. Where tariffs protect jobs and remove job relocation from negotiations, they should be supported. Where they kill jobs or simply attack high-wage countries for spite, they should be opposed and replaced by careful negotiations to create a low-tariff level playing field.

Let popular worker support for tariffs teach us that this issue requires problem solving, and support for any tariff should not signal failure on a leftist litmus test. The alternative, pure opposition to tariffs, which is where the entire Democratic Party and the left seems to be headed, is only likely to increase working-class support for MAGA.

Jesus, how did we get into this mess?

Maybe ask the Democrats who didn’t have the guts to challenge Biden’s decision to run again until it was far too late.

Millions of Americans were buoyed by the return of Major League Baseball (MLB) this spring. For the 50% of adults who follow the sport, it can serve as a welcome distraction given the dire news coming out of Washington these days.

But political reality can intrude even on the national pastime. It turns out that at least 17 of the 30 MLB teams are sponsored by companies that are exacerbating the climate crisis and the financial institutions that support them.

It’s called sportswashing, a riff on the term greenwashing. Companies sponsor leagues and teams to present themselves as good corporate citizens, increase visibility, and build public trust. According to a 2021 Nielsen study, 81% of fans completely or somewhat trust companies that underwrite sport teams, second only to the trust they have for friends and family. By sponsoring a team, companies increase the chance that fans will form the same bond with their brand that they have with the team.

Baseball club owners are much more concerned about their bottom line than their sponsors’ climate impacts.

Baseball teams are not alone in their pursuit of petrodollars. At least 35 U.S. pro basketball, football, hockey, and soccer teams have similar sponsorship deals that afford companies a range of promotional perks, from billboards and jersey logos to community outreach projects and facility naming rights, according to a survey conducted last fall by UCLA’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. U.S. sports leagues and teams also partner with banks and insurance companies that invest billions of dollars annually in coal, oil, and gas companies, all to the detriment of public health and the environment.

Most baseball aficionados are likely unaware that their favorite team is going to bat for the very companies and banks that are destroying the climate, but a growing number of fans in New York and Los Angeles are calling out the Mets and Dodgers, demanding that they sever their ties to the fossil fuel industry. And once they know, will fans in other MLB cities remain on the sidelines?

Shilling for the Biggest Polluters

Oil, gas, and coal are largely responsible for the carbon pollution driving up world temperatures and triggering more dangerous extreme weather events. Last year was yet another record hot year, and the last 10 years have been the hottest in nearly 200 years of recordkeeping, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Those warmer temperatures certainly played a role in producing the 27 weather and climate disasters in the United States last year that caused at least $1 billion in damages, one less than the record set in 2023. And just this week, violent storms and tornadoes ripped through a swath of the nation’s midsection in what The Associated Press said could be a “record-setting period of deadly weather and flooding.”

Regardless, baseball club owners are much more concerned about their bottom line than their sponsors’ climate impacts. But with today’s annual MBL payrolls averaging $157 million, it is not hard to understand why teams pursue corporate sponsorships.

The team with the highest payroll—the Los Angeles Dodgers at $321 million—has a longtime partnership with Phillips 66, owner of 76 gas stations, whose orange-and-blue logo hovers above both Dodger stadium scoreboards and is scattered throughout the facility. Phillips 66, which also sponsors the St. Louis Cardinals, is among the top 10 U.S. air and surface water polluters in total pounds, according to the 2024 edition of Political Economy Research Institute’s “Top 100 Polluter Indexes,” and the 14th-largest carbon polluter, emitting 30.2 million metric tons in 2022.

Arco, owned by Marathon Petroleum, also advertises in Dodger Stadium. The country’s largest oil refiner with more than 7,000 Marathon and Arco gas stations nationwide, Marathon Petroleum is among the top 20 air, surface water, and carbon polluters in the country, according to PERI’s 2024 report, and the company and its subsidiaries have been fined more than $900 million for federal environmental violations since 2014.

The Findlay, Ohio-based company has been one of the Cleveland Guardians’ major corporate sponsors since 2021, and the team has been wearing Marathon Petroleum’s logo on their sleeves since the summer of 2023. The logo also enjoys prime placement in the Guardians’ ballpark and, as part of the uniform patch agreement, it is featured on the souvenir jerseys given to fans on two game days every season through 2026.

The Guardians are not the only team that has inked an oil patch deal. The Houston Astros (Oxy), Kansas City Royals (QuikTrip gas stations), and Texas Rangers (Energy Transfer) also display oil industry logos on their sleeves.

Both Oxy—Occidental Petroleum’s nickname—and the Astros’ other oil industry sponsor, ConocoPhillips, are headquartered in Houston, home to more than 400 oil and petrochemical facilities and among the 10 worst places in the country for air pollution. Occidental is one of the top 30 U.S. air polluters, 40 surface water polluters, and 60 carbon emitters, releasing 10.5 million metric tons of heat-trapping gases in 2022, according to PERI’s 2024 report. ConocoPhillips, meanwhile, came in 88th in PERI’s top 100 carbon polluters list.

Fossil fuel-based utilities also partner with MLB teams. Detroit’s local electric utility DTE, for instance, sponsors the Tigers. More than 40% of DTE’s electricity comes from coal, another 26% comes from fossil gas, and only 12% comes from wind and solar. Although the company is committed to reducing its reliance on coal over the next decade, it plans to replace it with fossil gas, not renewables.

Shilling for Climate Crisis Financiers

Seven teams—and the league itself—have commercial tie-ins with financial institutions that have major fossil fuel industry investments.

The Milwaukee Brewers wear Northwestern Mutual patches on their sleeves. As of last year, the insurance company had $12.17 billion invested in 146 fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil, Marathon Petroleum, and Shell, according to a 2024 report by the German environmental nonprofit Urgewald. Meanwhile, the Toronto Blue Jays’ patch sponsor, TD Bank, had nearly twice that amount invested in fossil fuels last year. The Toronto-based bank sunk $21.37 billion in 201 fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil and Chevron, which, by the way, sponsors the Sacramento Athletics and San Francisco Giants.

The Washington Nationals partner with Geico, which underwrites a mascot race featuring U.S. presidents running around the outfield warning track every home game. Geico is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, a multinational conglomerate that, as of last year, had investments of a whopping $95.8 billion in Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, and six other fossil fuel companies.

The other four teams—the Braves, Diamondbacks, Mets and Pirates—have lucrative, multiyear stadium-naming-rights agreements with oil-soaked banks.

• The Braves play in Truist Park just outside of Atlanta. Truist Financial, borne out of the 2019 merger between BB&T and Sun Trust banks, had $1.89 billion invested in Chevron, ExxonMobil, and 100 other fossil fuel companies as of last year. In 2017, Truist predecessor Sun Trust spent $250 million on a 25-year naming rights deal.
• Chase Field in downtown Phoenix is the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks. JPMorgan Chase’s predecessor Bank One spent $66.4 million for the naming rights for 30 years when the stadium opened in 1998, and when JPMorgan Chase bought Bank One in 2004, the facility’s name changed to Chase Field. The biggest financier of fossil fuels worldwide from 2016—when the Paris climate accord went into effect—through 2023, JPMorgan Chase had $89.33 billion invested in fossil fuel companies last year.
• Citigroup paid $400 million for the honor of having the Mets call its then-new ballpark Citi Field for 20 years, from 2009 to 2029. The second-largest financier of fossil fuels between 2016 and 2023, Citigroup had investments totaling $4.37 billion in 150 fossil fuel companies last year.
• The Pirates’ PNC Park is named after the PNC bank, which paid $30 million for the stadium to bear its name from 2001, when it opened, though 2021. The Pirates and the bank extended their agreement until 2031 for an undisclosed sum. Last year, PNC Financial Services had $3.69 billion invested in 147 fossil fuel companies.

Finally, official MLB sponsors include two insurance companies—the aforementioned Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary Geico and New York Life—that have sizeable fossil fuel portfolios. Last year, New York Life had investments of $11.76 billion in 234 companies, including Duke Energy and the Southern Company.

More Fans Are Crying Foul

Last June, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres castigated coal, oil, and gas companies—dubbing them the “godfathers of climate chaos” for spreading disinformation—and called for a worldwide ban on fossil fuel advertising. He also urged ad agencies to refuse fossil fuel clients and companies to stop taking their ads. So far, more than 1,000 advertising and public relations agencies worldwide have pledged to refuse working for fossil fuel companies, their trade associations, and their front groups.

Major League Baseball is behind the curve, but fans, environmentalists, and public officials in New York and Los Angeles are trying to bring their teams up to speed.

Two years ago, a coalition of groups joined New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to urge Mets owner Steven Cohen to change the name of Citi Field. “Citi doesn’t represent the values of Mets fans or NYC,” Williams wrote in a tweet. “If they refuse to end their toxic relationship with fossil fuels, the Mets should end their partnership with Citi.”

Activists in New York and Los Angeles are hoping that more public officials—and more fans—will step up to the plate and pressure the teams to do the right thing.

Last summer, the groups that led the effort to persuade the Mets to drop Citigroup, including New York Communities for Change, Stop the Money Pipeline, and Climate Defenders, targeted Citigroup directly with their Summer of Heat on Wall Street campaign calling on the company to stop financing fossil fuels altogether.

In Los Angeles, more than 80 public interest groups, scientists, and environmental advocates signed an open letter last August calling on the Dodgers to cut its ties with Phillips 66. “Using tactics such as associating a beloved, trusted brand like the Dodgers with enterprises like 76,” the letter states, “the fossil fuel industry has reinforced deceitful messages that ‘oil is our friend,’ and that ‘climate change isn’t so bad.’” Since then, more than 28,000 Dodger fans have signed the letter, and last week the Sierra Club’s Los Angeles chapter held a rally outside of Dodger Stadium on opening day demanding that owner Mark Walter end his team’s Phillips 66 sponsorship deal.

The campaign has received support from some local public officials. Lisa Kaas Boyle, a former deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County’s environmental crimes division, was quoted in a L.A. Sierra Club press release in January. “Booting Big Oil out of baseball is up to the fans, because team owners won’t take responsibility,” she said. “This isn’t abstract. Bad air quality from wildfires has forced MLB teams to move games, a hurricane ripped the roof off of [Tampa’s] Tropicana Field, and the Dodgers had to give out free water in 103°F heat last summer. It’s almost becoming too hot to watch at Chavez Ravine.”

State Sen. Lena Gonzalez (D-33), a lifelong Dodger fan, also endorsed the campaign. “Continuing to associate these [fossil fuel] corporations with our beloved boys in blue is not in our community or the planet’s best interest,” she recently told the City News Service, a Southern California news agency. “Ending the sponsorship with Phillips 66 would send the message that it’s time to end our embrace of polluting fossil fuels and work together toward a cleaner, greener future.”

Such entreaties, thus far, have been ignored. Both the Mets and the Dodgers have balked at the idea of intentionally walking away from sponsorships worth millions. But activists in New York and Los Angeles are hoping that more public officials—and more fans—will step up to the plate and pressure the teams to do the right thing. As that baseball sage Yogi Berra astutely pointed out, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.

Do Americans who want to acquire Canada understand what we would be getting? Do they understand how much it would disadvantage Republican politicians?

Few of us know much about Canada. Teaching at a Michigan college less that 75 miles from Canada, I used to poll my freshman class to determine what they knew about the world. When I asked them to name the capital of Canada, most of them couldn't! Can you name it? If so, congratulations.

My students were intelligent, but just didn't know. But we would consider Canadians who can't identify our capital to be really dumb.

How many people in the U.S. know that Canada is a constitutional monarchy whose head of state is King Charles III of the United Kingdom?

Canadian statehood would make it much harder for Republicans to ever capture the White House again.

How many of us know that Canadians have national health insurance, a fact shared with nearly all other advanced countries other than the United States?

How many know that Canada is a federal system, with regional governments called provinces that are analogous to our states? How many of us can name even a few of those provinces? (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec are the largest ones by population. Then throw in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland/Labrador. )

If Canada were to become the 51st state, it would have a greater population than California, currently our largest state. If, instead, each of its provinces were to become states, only Prince Edward Island would have a smaller population than Wyoming, currently our smallest state.

Although Canada has conservative and liberal parties, most of its conservatives would be considered liberals in the United States.

If a united Canada became a single state, it would have the largest number of seats in our House of Representatives, and these seats would predominantly be held by people we would consider liberals. It would have two senators, who most likely would also be liberals.

On the other hand, if the ten Canadian provinces each became a state, each would have two seats in the Senate, mostly held by liberals, a total of 20 more senators.

Remember that the Electoral College through which our presidents are chosen gives each state one vote for each of its senators and members of the House. Canadians would have considerable leverage here.

Now consider the political situation in the U.S. if Canada, one way or the other, became part of our country. It would make it much less likely that we would ever elect another Republican president. And it would be a cold day in Honolulu before Republicans again controlled the House of Representatives.

If the ten Canadian provinces each became a state, each would have two seats in the Senate, mostly held by liberals, a total of 20 more senators.

It would require an act of Congress to admit Canada or its provinces into the Union. Congress has been unwilling to admit Washington, D.C. as a state, because Republicans fear—reasonably—that its two senate seats would always go to Democrats. How much would you bet that these self-same Republicans would support statehood for Canada? Under one scenario, statehood would probably add two safe senate seats for Democrats, and given the other scenario it could add as many as twenty seats for Democrats.

Let me repeat: Canadian statehood would make it much harder for Republicans to ever capture the White House again.

If you believe that Congress could ever support Canadian statehood, please contact me—I can offer you a great deal on a certain bridge.

If Mr. Trump really wants to incorporate Canada into the U.S., would he have recently decreed that English is our sole official language, given sentiments about language in Quebec, where French is the official language?

Given these political realities, what sense can we make of Donald Trump's persistent demands that Canada join the United States? My best guess is that he is trying to divert public attention from other things he is doing.

But I could be wrong. What do you think he is up to?

In a stunning revelation, Michael Waltz, a key U.S. national security figure, was caught using Gmail for sensitive government communications. Reports detail how Waltz and his staff discussed military positions and weapons systems via personal accounts, exposing exploitable data like schedules to potential foreign interception. This lapse follows his earlier blunder of leaking military plans via Signal. If top defense and intelligence officials handle secrets so recklessly, it raises a darkly ironic question: how will FSB agents justify their espionage roles? With U.S. officials practically handing over insights into operations and patterns, the Russian agency might find its job redundant—America’s own security missteps could be doing the work for them.

The post Hard Times at the FSB appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The return of Donald Trump to the presidency is revealing itself to be a time of significant national division and turmoil. He is pursuing policies that reflect international bellicosity and a frightening dedication to xenophobia, misogyny, and intolerance. I take him seriously when he promises retribution and punishment of his “enemies.”

More than ever before, Americans of conscience are being forced to answer the question: What does it mean to be a responsible citizen?

Throughout our national history, Americans have had to come to grips with national leaders bent on suppressing dissent, punishing those who disagree, and harnessing the power of government to enact legislation designed to restrict freedom and diminish equality. Citizens who find the moral courage to dissent, must ask themselves about the cost—professional, social, or personal—they are willing to pay. We know from bitter experience that silence in the face of evil aids the oppressor and neutrality often disguises indifference.

I had to redefine manhood, patriotism, duty, obligation, courage, honor—even when my definitions were bound to run up against opposition.

At its core, moral courage is the ability to stand up against wrong. Bayard Rustin said that moral courage happens when we speak truth to power, when we directly confront wrong, aware that our decision may result in harm to our personal well-being. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. exhorted us to act with principle. He said that the time is always right to do right. And Susan B. Anthony comforted those who felt that the fight may be endless: “Failure is impossible.”

Quiet moral courage may be invisible to many, unnoticed by louder voices, stridently demanding a stage for their protest. Moral courage does not belong exclusively to those with advanced degrees. As Bob Dylan noted, “You don’t need to be a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows.” At its best, moral courage is an act of selfless love.. a caring for community and an affirmation of the possibilities of a kinder, more compassionate world.

In my recently published memoir, 90: A Conscientious Objector’s Journey of Quiet Resistance, I try to describe how the moral courage I expressed personally ricocheted in larger arenas. Some 50 years ago, I had to face the prospect of fighting in a war I felt was morally repugnant. Resistance to a terribly misguided national policy meant alienating family members and facing the fact that refusing military service would be disgraceful to my recently deceased, beloved father. Then, as now, our nation was in a state of upheaval; the dislocations of the Vietnam War swirled in the tumultuous eddies of the civil rights movement and the emergence of a rebellious counterculture.

I was only 20 when the United States introduced a lottery to determine who would be called to don the uniform of our military. I drew 90, a number that placed me squarely in the crosshairs of being drafted. Naïve, traumatized by the recent death of my father, and idealistic, I made the decision to resist the war as a conscientious objector. I had little hope of gaining this status, as I didn’t belong to a religious sect that opposed all war and my draft board was in San Diego, California—a notoriously conservative, pro-war city. More and more, I became convinced that I would go to jail if the board rejected my application. This terrified me, despite knowing that scores of brave Americans have chosen prison as a means of expressing dissent.

Where did I find the moral courage to join some 170,000 other men who filed for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam era? I remembered my soft-spoken father whose example told me to never back down when faced with issues of right or wrong. I recalled my grandmother Rose, who fled czarist persecution to find meaning in an America that would welcome all comers, especially the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” I sat in awe-struck admiration of the men, women, and children of the civil rights movement who sacrificed even their lives for the ideals that America ought to represent.

I had to redefine manhood, patriotism, duty, obligation, courage, honor—even when my definitions were bound to run up against opposition. Somehow, I had to summon the strength to follow Henry David Thoreau’s model when he stopped paying taxes and was thrown in jail to protest slavery and an immoral, expansionist war that would expand that evil. He demanded, well over a century and a half ago, “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”

I became a CO and learned to live with the consequences of that act of quiet resistance. For two years, in lieu of serving in the military, I worked as a laboratory glassware washer at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital.

My decision to protest an unjust war derailed my dreams of a career in the law but opened my eyes to other possibilities for honoring my need to serve America.

More importantly, the most crucial lesson I learned was that a good American needs to obey the dictates of conscience rather than blindly follow the demands of their government.

The return of Donald Trump to the presidency is revealing itself to be a time of significant national division and turmoil. He is pursuing policies that reflect international bellicosity and a frightening dedication to xenophobia, misogyny, and intolerance. I take him seriously when he promises retribution and punishment of his “enemies.”

More than ever before, Americans of conscience are being forced to answer the question: What does it mean to be a responsible citizen?

Throughout our national history, Americans have had to come to grips with national leaders bent on suppressing dissent, punishing those who disagree, and harnessing the power of government to enact legislation designed to restrict freedom and diminish equality. Citizens who find the moral courage to dissent, must ask themselves about the cost—professional, social, or personal—they are willing to pay. We know from bitter experience that silence in the face of evil aids the oppressor and neutrality often disguises indifference.

I had to redefine manhood, patriotism, duty, obligation, courage, honor—even when my definitions were bound to run up against opposition.

At its core, moral courage is the ability to stand up against wrong. Bayard Rustin said that moral courage happens when we speak truth to power, when we directly confront wrong, aware that our decision may result in harm to our personal well-being. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. exhorted us to act with principle. He said that the time is always right to do right. And Susan B. Anthony comforted those who felt that the fight may be endless: “Failure is impossible.”

Quiet moral courage may be invisible to many, unnoticed by louder voices, stridently demanding a stage for their protest. Moral courage does not belong exclusively to those with advanced degrees. As Bob Dylan noted, “You don’t need to be a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows.” At its best, moral courage is an act of selfless love.. a caring for community and an affirmation of the possibilities of a kinder, more compassionate world.

In my recently published memoir, 90: A Conscientious Objector’s Journey of Quiet Resistance, I try to describe how the moral courage I expressed personally ricocheted in larger arenas. Some 50 years ago, I had to face the prospect of fighting in a war I felt was morally repugnant. Resistance to a terribly misguided national policy meant alienating family members and facing the fact that refusing military service would be disgraceful to my recently deceased, beloved father. Then, as now, our nation was in a state of upheaval; the dislocations of the Vietnam War swirled in the tumultuous eddies of the civil rights movement and the emergence of a rebellious counterculture.

I was only 20 when the United States introduced a lottery to determine who would be called to don the uniform of our military. I drew 90, a number that placed me squarely in the crosshairs of being drafted. Naïve, traumatized by the recent death of my father, and idealistic, I made the decision to resist the war as a conscientious objector. I had little hope of gaining this status, as I didn’t belong to a religious sect that opposed all war and my draft board was in San Diego, California—a notoriously conservative, pro-war city. More and more, I became convinced that I would go to jail if the board rejected my application. This terrified me, despite knowing that scores of brave Americans have chosen prison as a means of expressing dissent.

Where did I find the moral courage to join some 170,000 other men who filed for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam era? I remembered my soft-spoken father whose example told me to never back down when faced with issues of right or wrong. I recalled my grandmother Rose, who fled czarist persecution to find meaning in an America that would welcome all comers, especially the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” I sat in awe-struck admiration of the men, women, and children of the civil rights movement who sacrificed even their lives for the ideals that America ought to represent.

I had to redefine manhood, patriotism, duty, obligation, courage, honor—even when my definitions were bound to run up against opposition. Somehow, I had to summon the strength to follow Henry David Thoreau’s model when he stopped paying taxes and was thrown in jail to protest slavery and an immoral, expansionist war that would expand that evil. He demanded, well over a century and a half ago, “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”

I became a CO and learned to live with the consequences of that act of quiet resistance. For two years, in lieu of serving in the military, I worked as a laboratory glassware washer at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital.

My decision to protest an unjust war derailed my dreams of a career in the law but opened my eyes to other possibilities for honoring my need to serve America.

More importantly, the most crucial lesson I learned was that a good American needs to obey the dictates of conscience rather than blindly follow the demands of their government.

Tyrant Donald Trump, mega-violator of federal laws Wrecking America, has targeted Harvard University. Trump illegally threatens to cancel $9 billion in committed grants and contracts. One would think that the mighty Harvard Law School – loaded with professors having litigation and federal government experience – would be the vanguard of resistance and counterattack against the critical extortions of Trump, the fascistic dictator.

Wrong!

The Law School is under the control of the University’s Board of Overseers and the University Administration. This exalted edifice of higher education is quivering with fright and bending to the vicious Trumpsters instead of fighting back in the courts and enlisting their vast influential alumni. Such a Law School would have turned a deaf ear to Paul Revere’s Ride on the 18th of April in ’75.

I learned this firsthand as an alumnus of the Law School when I co-sponsored the first VIGOROUS PUBLIC INTEREST LAW DAY on April 1, 2025.

Here is the story in brief. Last December Interim Dean John Goldberg returned my call for a substantial conversation on the need to address the various forms of corporate power and corporate coercion over the rule of law. As a former Tort Professor (tort law deals with wrongful injuries) his awareness of corporate abuses was greater than his less learned predecessors.

I mentioned articles written by me for the Harvard Law Record in recent years that urged more attention by the Harvard Law School to the systemic lawlessness of these corporate supremacists along with more study of congressional surrender to the Executive Branch. He welcomed me sending materials on these topics and said he would read them over the Holidays and we would have another conversation.

A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy, wrote a best-selling book titled “Profiles in Courage.” I recommend it to the Dean and all the Harvard law faculty who looked the other way.

That was the last time I ever heard from him. Since that conversation came the second inauguration of Donald Trump and his tactics of winning through criminal intimidation. Many emails, voicemails, and requests in January and February through the Dean’s polite secretary for us to speak went completely unanswered.

Come March, my calls and emails became focused on informing him about the Vigorous Public Interest Law Day events, with speakers of great distinction for their contributions to a more just society. I wanted to invite him to greet the assembly and urge students and faculty to be part of this rare event at the heavily corporatized law school. After all the rule of law was under wholesale destruction because of Trump’s illegal, enforced executive orders.

No answers from his Deanship. Instead, the feedback from students revealed evidence of their anxiety, dread, and fear. Especially by foreign students and supporters of Palestinian rights against U.S. funding and co-belligerent support of Netanyahu’s mass murder genocide in Gaza. As April 1st neared, I sensed that the two large reserved lecture rooms would be too large.

What I saw unfolding was a quiet boycott, almost all the contacted faculty went incommunicado and those that showed some enthusiasm ended up being strange no-shows. The Law School has numerous student associations and over thirty legal clinics run by full-time directors. Students and staff overwhelmingly failed to attend.

It’s not that our organizers, a full-time person and several stalwart students, didn’t publicize these sterling presentations – some in-person and some by Zoom. There were posters and handouts everywhere. Emails, telephone calls, meetings, and word-of-mouth efforts were substantive. Burritos were provided as a free lunch. Requests to Dean Goldberg to meet with the speakers (mostly Harvard law alumni) with hundreds of experience years of pursuing and achieving justice went unanswered. The speakers wanted to share their views with him and the assistant deans as to how best to have the curricula, extracurricular experience, and admission criteria better reflect the law school’s own declared mission: “to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well-being of society.”

Sadly, there was not even the courtesy of a response from his Deanship.

What explains this crude and rude rebuff, unlike how the Administration lays out the red carpet for rich corporate alumni from Wall Street and other plutocratic venues?

The Law School is controlled by the overall University policy to shy from challenging Trump and demonstrate flexibility. Harvard retained Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with close ties to Trump. Astonishingly, the Harvard administration ignored antisemitism against the Palestinian slaughter, with U.S. tax dollars and military support in violation of the Leahy Law, instead adopting a definition of antisemitism closer to Netanyahu’s racist state coverup. Two leaders of Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies were discharged. This led the New York Times to report that: “To some faculty members, the move was more evidence that Harvard was capitulating at a moment of creeping authoritarianism.”

The Law School is part of this capitulation, notwithstanding its historical knowledge that yielding to newly installed tyrants emboldens their tyranny to move against other universities and colleges.

So here is what poor, frightened Dean Goldberg of the once mightiest law school in the world could have seen by looking at our program:

The first speaker was Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen which has already filed eight suits against the Trump regime’s illegal orders, such as the shutting down of serious humanitarian support by the life-saving U.S. Agency for International Development.

He was followed by John Bonifaz, president of Free Speech for People, who is starting an “Impeach Trump Again” national drive against Trump with more than 250,000 signatures. Then came Mark Green, a primary co-author with me of two books on Trump – one presciently called “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All.” Then James Henry, a strong advocate of justice for Palestinians, and so on. The Dean’s reaction was not to come within miles of this crowd. He made like this program didn’t exist. Follow the white flag of calculated surrender to Trump, a convicted felon, the most impeachable president in American history (See, Is any Member of Congress ready to impeach Trump? If so, we’ve drafted 14 articles of Impeachment, in the February/March 2025 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). Avoid strongly calling out Trump for his masked, ICE plainclothesmen kidnapping students and disappearing them to a Louisiana prison. Look the other way at this fast-emerging dictatorship and police state electing Napoleon in lieu of James Madison. Gloat over succeeding in keeping the audience down to about 40 people by going dark as if it never existed. Bruce Fein pointed out that the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence signed their death warrants on July 4, 1776, and we should be inspired by their example to rescue their handiwork from Trump’s mutilations.

Some Law School Deans are speaking up. A leader is Erwin Chemerinsky at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, who is networking with other Deans in standing tall and resolute. He wrote in the Washington Post that “… despite the risks of speaking out, silence itself comes at enormous cost. Giving in to a bully only makes things worse.”

It is not hard to feel sorry for Interim Dean Goldberg. He wants to become the permanent Dean. Toward that quest, you learn how to get along by going along with the wobbly Harvard president Alan Garber and his rubber stamp Board of Overseers.

A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy, wrote a best-selling book titled “Profiles in Courage.” I recommend it to the Dean and all the Harvard law faculty who looked the other way.

Former federal judge and now law professor Nancy Gertner did show up, did urge resistance and challenge to what she forthrightly called, on Democracy Now! Trump’s burgeoning coup d’état.

Aristotle would have liked Nancy Gertner. He once wrote that “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”

The entire Day’s proceedings were videotaped and will be streamed in due time for nationwide viewership. Watch it in a dark room, Dean.

Tyrant Donald Trump, mega-violator of federal laws Wrecking America, has targeted Harvard University. Trump illegally threatens to cancel $9 billion in committed grants and contracts. One would think that the mighty Harvard Law School – loaded with professors having litigation and federal government experience – would be the vanguard of resistance and counterattack against the critical extortions of Trump, the fascistic dictator.

Wrong!

The Law School is under the control of the University’s Board of Overseers and the University Administration. This exalted edifice of higher education is quivering with fright and bending to the vicious Trumpsters instead of fighting back in the courts and enlisting their vast influential alumni. Such a Law School would have turned a deaf ear to Paul Revere’s Ride on the 18th of April in ’75.

I learned this firsthand as an alumnus of the Law School when I co-sponsored the first VIGOROUS PUBLIC INTEREST LAW DAY on April 1, 2025.

Here is the story in brief. Last December Interim Dean John Goldberg returned my call for a substantial conversation on the need to address the various forms of corporate power and corporate coercion over the rule of law. As a former Tort Professor (tort law deals with wrongful injuries) his awareness of corporate abuses was greater than his less learned predecessors.

I mentioned articles written by me for the Harvard Law Record in recent years that urged more attention by the Harvard Law School to the systemic lawlessness of these corporate supremacists along with more study of congressional surrender to the Executive Branch. He welcomed me sending materials on these topics and said he would read them over the Holidays and we would have another conversation.

A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy, wrote a best-selling book titled “Profiles in Courage.” I recommend it to the Dean and all the Harvard law faculty who looked the other way.

That was the last time I ever heard from him. Since that conversation came the second inauguration of Donald Trump and his tactics of winning through criminal intimidation. Many emails, voicemails, and requests in January and February through the Dean’s polite secretary for us to speak went completely unanswered.

Come March, my calls and emails became focused on informing him about the Vigorous Public Interest Law Day events, with speakers of great distinction for their contributions to a more just society. I wanted to invite him to greet the assembly and urge students and faculty to be part of this rare event at the heavily corporatized law school. After all the rule of law was under wholesale destruction because of Trump’s illegal, enforced executive orders.

No answers from his Deanship. Instead, the feedback from students revealed evidence of their anxiety, dread, and fear. Especially by foreign students and supporters of Palestinian rights against U.S. funding and co-belligerent support of Netanyahu’s mass murder genocide in Gaza. As April 1st neared, I sensed that the two large reserved lecture rooms would be too large.

What I saw unfolding was a quiet boycott, almost all the contacted faculty went incommunicado and those that showed some enthusiasm ended up being strange no-shows. The Law School has numerous student associations and over thirty legal clinics run by full-time directors. Students and staff overwhelmingly failed to attend.

It’s not that our organizers, a full-time person and several stalwart students, didn’t publicize these sterling presentations – some in-person and some by Zoom. There were posters and handouts everywhere. Emails, telephone calls, meetings, and word-of-mouth efforts were substantive. Burritos were provided as a free lunch. Requests to Dean Goldberg to meet with the speakers (mostly Harvard law alumni) with hundreds of experience years of pursuing and achieving justice went unanswered. The speakers wanted to share their views with him and the assistant deans as to how best to have the curricula, extracurricular experience, and admission criteria better reflect the law school’s own declared mission: “to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well-being of society.”

Sadly, there was not even the courtesy of a response from his Deanship.

What explains this crude and rude rebuff, unlike how the Administration lays out the red carpet for rich corporate alumni from Wall Street and other plutocratic venues?

The Law School is controlled by the overall University policy to shy from challenging Trump and demonstrate flexibility. Harvard retained Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with close ties to Trump. Astonishingly, the Harvard administration ignored antisemitism against the Palestinian slaughter, with U.S. tax dollars and military support in violation of the Leahy Law, instead adopting a definition of antisemitism closer to Netanyahu’s racist state coverup. Two leaders of Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies were discharged. This led the New York Times to report that: “To some faculty members, the move was more evidence that Harvard was capitulating at a moment of creeping authoritarianism.”

The Law School is part of this capitulation, notwithstanding its historical knowledge that yielding to newly installed tyrants emboldens their tyranny to move against other universities and colleges.

So here is what poor, frightened Dean Goldberg of the once mightiest law school in the world could have seen by looking at our program:

The first speaker was Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen which has already filed eight suits against the Trump regime’s illegal orders, such as the shutting down of serious humanitarian support by the life-saving U.S. Agency for International Development.

He was followed by John Bonifaz, president of Free Speech for People, who is starting an “Impeach Trump Again” national drive against Trump with more than 250,000 signatures. Then came Mark Green, a primary co-author with me of two books on Trump – one presciently called “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All.” Then James Henry, a strong advocate of justice for Palestinians, and so on. The Dean’s reaction was not to come within miles of this crowd. He made like this program didn’t exist. Follow the white flag of calculated surrender to Trump, a convicted felon, the most impeachable president in American history (See, Is any Member of Congress ready to impeach Trump? If so, we’ve drafted 14 articles of Impeachment, in the February/March 2025 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). Avoid strongly calling out Trump for his masked, ICE plainclothesmen kidnapping students and disappearing them to a Louisiana prison. Look the other way at this fast-emerging dictatorship and police state electing Napoleon in lieu of James Madison. Gloat over succeeding in keeping the audience down to about 40 people by going dark as if it never existed. Bruce Fein pointed out that the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence signed their death warrants on July 4, 1776, and we should be inspired by their example to rescue their handiwork from Trump’s mutilations.

Some Law School Deans are speaking up. A leader is Erwin Chemerinsky at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, who is networking with other Deans in standing tall and resolute. He wrote in the Washington Post that “… despite the risks of speaking out, silence itself comes at enormous cost. Giving in to a bully only makes things worse.”

It is not hard to feel sorry for Interim Dean Goldberg. He wants to become the permanent Dean. Toward that quest, you learn how to get along by going along with the wobbly Harvard president Alan Garber and his rubber stamp Board of Overseers.

A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy, wrote a best-selling book titled “Profiles in Courage.” I recommend it to the Dean and all the Harvard law faculty who looked the other way.

Former federal judge and now law professor Nancy Gertner did show up, did urge resistance and challenge to what she forthrightly called, on Democracy Now! Trump’s burgeoning coup d’état.

Aristotle would have liked Nancy Gertner. He once wrote that “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”

The entire Day’s proceedings were videotaped and will be streamed in due time for nationwide viewership. Watch it in a dark room, Dean.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s political attack on the legal profession has entered a realm we have never seen before. The campaign of intimidation against firms that represent clients and causes he does not like shows no signs of stopping.

The battle is at a turning point. From the outside, it appears the profession is divided, with two firms caving in to Trump’s demands and three firms fighting in court. Trump has promoted his success in bringing two large firms to heel so that he is viewed as holding the upper hand and his power is enhanced.

That is not what is happening in court. The momentum has shifted, and the president has the losing hand. Lost amid the shock that accompanied the initial wave of punishing executive orders is that those fighting back are winning in court and those cutting deals with the White House are suffering irreparable damage behind the scenes where law firm reputations, clients, and the best legal talent are won and lost.

Firms that have yet to be targeted have to ask themselves the question: When the law has dealt you a winning hand, why would you fold?

It is critical right now that the next firms targeted choose to fight and not fold. To understand why, law firms should take a close look at what has been happening in the three cases where firms are standing and fighting, and the fallout facing the firms that have folded.

So far, Trump has issued five executive orders against leading law firms. Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps capitulated, agreeing to provide as much as $100 million in free legal services to support Trump initiatives. Three other large firms—Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block—are fighting in federal court, with remarkably quick and unanimous success.

Perkins, Wilmer, and Jenner all claimed that the retaliatory orders terminating all federal contracts with the firms, barring their employees from access to federal buildings, and subjecting the firms’ clients to onerous and punitive disclosure requirements constituted retaliation for protected “viewpoint” speech that violated the firms’ First Amendment, due process, and equal protection rights.

Judge Beryl Howell (appointed by Obama) was the first to rule, striking down the Perkins executive order and finding that it threatened “the very foundation of our legal system.” Her ruling was followed March 28 by similar decisions in the Wilmer and Jenner cases.

Judge Richard Leon, (appointed by George W. Bush), held that the retaliatory nature of the Wilmer order was “clear from its face” and that there was “no doubt” it “chills speech and legal advocacy or that it qualifies as a constitutional harm.” He also found that the retaliation would cause the firm “irreparable injury,” noting that “at least 21 of the firm’s 25 largest clients in 2024 have contracts with federal agencies.” With the firm handling more than “100 open government contracting matters involving various federal agencies,” Judge Leon concluded the order threatened the firm’s “very existence.”

Judge John Bates (also a Bush appointee) moved within hours of receiving Jenner’s complaint to stop enforcement of the executive order targeting that firm, specifically directing the government to rescind parts of the order designed to intimidate the firm’s clients.

The speed and unanimity with which these decisions were reached by federal judges appointed by both political parties is remarkable. All have found the constitutional violations obvious. There is no reason to believe the Supreme Court will find differently.

Lawyers are officers of the court. We take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the law. Entering into a deal that has been held to violate the Constitution violates our oaths as lawyers. That alone should be reason for firms targeted by Trump to fight these orders and not cave as Paul Weiss and Skadden have done.

Beyond the clear legal duty to oppose an unconstitutional practice, why would any firm capitulate when it can fight and win? All of Trump’s potential targets have the ability and resources to defend themselves. Firms that have yet to be targeted have to ask themselves the question: When the law has dealt you a winning hand, why would you fold? Surely, they would not advise their own clients to fold in similar circumstances.

Contrast these legal victories with the badge of infamy that is being applied to Paul Weiss and Skadden. Behind the scenes, lawyers and in-house corporate counsel at many of America’s largest and most influential corporations are talking. Many are shocked and disgusted by the craven and cowardly way these two firms have responded, and how they have sold out their own principles and those of the legal profession. Most recently, over 1,650 alumni of the United States Department of Justice signed a statement opposing the executive branch attacking lawyers and law firms, and the number continues to grow.

This is a decision that goes to the core of an institution, that defines it in ways that will not be forgotten. For many years, Skadden was defined by the prestigious public interest fellowship that it pioneered decades ago and has used as a recruiting tool for decades. When the news broke that Skadden might be signing a deal, close to 400 former Skadden Fellows opposed any deal, and urged the firm to stand up for the rule of law, fight unjust actions by the government, and speak publicly about the critical role lawyers play in defending democracy.

More than the Skadden Fellowship has now been tarnished. The brand of both Skadden and Paul Weiss has been irreparably damaged in ways that may well impair their ability to recruit quality attorneys and clients in the years to come. The decision these firms have made is already being discussed in law school classrooms where Paul Weiss and Skadden compete with the rest of Big Law for legal talent. The attention focused on these two firms is withering and threatens to drag them down.

No matter how one looks at it—from a legal, ethical, or pragmatic business perspective—it is increasingly clear Paul Weiss and Skadden have made a grievous mistake for which they will pay a price much larger than the ransom they have agreed to pay Trump. The next firm to face an executive order would be wise to take a page from the Perkins-Wilmer-Jenner playbook. It is far better for them, and the entire profession, to fight than fold. If law firms stand up for themselves and their clients, the campaign of intimidation can be shut down.

Almost no one who knew her can find a bad word to say about Rumeysa Ozturk, the doctoral candidate who was abducted by masked ICE agents on March 25. Tufts University President Sunil Kumar has come to her defense, as well as religious leaders such as Rabbi Dan Slipakoff, and numerous alumni. Her closest defender is her colleague and advisor Reyyan Bilge, who regards Ms. Ozturk’s abduction as “a betrayal of American values.” So do I—and for me, it’s personal. Not because I’m Turkish or an academic, but because I’m an American writer whose main subject is the anti-Nazi resistance in the Netherlands. And I live in Vermont, which shouldn’t have had anything to do with it.

The video of Ms. Ozturk’s abduction is the worst nightmare we might have about what could happen to someone we love, or to us. She is walking along the street in broad daylight, on her way to break the Ramadan fast at an interfaith center. It all happens so fast—first a few masked officers; she screams; then she is surrounded by both women and men who slip out of unmarked cars. They forcibly take her phone, and handcuff her behind her back to ensure that this dangerous scholar of child study and human development cannot harm them. A Fulbright scholar invited to the United States because of her exceptional abilities, Rumeysa Ozturk’s high, terrified voice tells us that she wasn’t watching for these thugs to come after her, on the clean streets near her university.

I’ve seen all this happen in historic photo after photo, but having it come to life in Medford, Massachusetts slips us in time from one era to another, from one place to another. It takes me back to an idyllic stay in Amsterdam in 2001, when I found a 1941 photograph showing Jewish neighbors being rounded up on my doorstep. That changed my relationship to the city forever, and launched 13 years of research and writing about how good people colluded with the Nazis by doing nothing, and how a courageous handful resisted.

The authoritarian playbook will target writers and thinkers first.

When one of the five masked officers who surrounded Rumeysa Ozturk said, “We’re police,” was that supposed to reassure her? Does any common criminal have the capacity to kidnap someone across state lines and hold her for days in prison? Would that not be a federal crime if the federal government were not committing it? What was it that made her say, “OK, OK?” Was she making the transition from fearing that she would be robbed or raped to realizing that these people, even if masked, might actually be legitimate? Are they?

Rumeysa Ozturk is being persecuted because she is a writer who exercised her right of free speech. The government which transported her from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, then to Vermont, then to Louisiana, has brought no specific evidence that she was supporting Hamas. Her only “crime” is coauthoring an op-ed urging her university to acknowledge the genocide of more than 50,000 Palestinians, and to divest from related investment. The piece does not mention Hamas. While these positions may be offensive to the Trump administration, they are examples of the free speech people come to this country to secure—and which our ancestors fought to establish. PEN USA has taken a stand along with free speech organizations, but even more individual writers and others should demand that Ms. Ozturk be released.

Within hours, thousands gathered to protest what happened right there, on their streets. In the background of the security video, someone seems to be asking, “Why are you wearing masks?” Now we know. There are so many steps where Ms. Ozturk was denied equal protection under the law: when her visa was revoked without her knowledge, when she was accosted by masked ICE agents, when she was abducted, and now that she is being held without her consent. No one has put forward evidence that Ms. Ozturk ever spoke at a rally or even attended one, although she would have been within her rights to do so. She simply wrote what she believed.

Because of a court filing, we know that her lawyer wasn’t quite fast enough to get a judicial order to prevent Ms. Ozturk from being moved out of Massachusetts until she was already gone—or so the government claims. They whisked her across multiple state lines almost immediately, no doubt with this very thing in mind. It’s less than 40 miles to the New Hampshire border, then about an hour and a half to Lebanon, where they held her temporarily. But within a few hours, she was 26 miles north of my city of Burlington, Vermont, in the ICE holding tank in St. Albans, Vermont. The next morning, they took her to the airport which is only two miles from my home, and transported her to Louisiana. The highway they took her on—to St. Albans and then back to the Burlington airport—is so close that I can walk there in 15 minutes. In summer, I can hear the cars passing on it.

Until the last few weeks, my biggest fear has been for people like Vermont’s dairy workers who don’t have the class privilege that will motivate others to take up their cause with resources and alacrity. People who don’t have a lawyer they can call. I still fear for them, but now I realize that the authoritarian playbook will target writers and thinkers first. They don’t even have to be brown to be persecuted. We see it across the country now: Russians, French, Turkish, Palestinian.

For years, I’ve been speaking about collusion and collaboration with the Nazis. Now I feel the weight of those dilemmas intimately and personally. Is it OK for me to enjoy a beautiful meal or the coming of spring? I must, if only for my own sanity. But I must also think every day of Rumeysa Ozturk and what I can do about and for her. Otherwise, I might as well be the woman who obeyed the Nazis and drew the curtains of my Amsterdam apartment as the Jews were being rounded up on her doorstep.

Flashback to a pivotal moment in global politics.

It was a crisp evening in December 2021 when Donald Trump stepped onto a gilded stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida. The former president—reduced to a kingmaker, still without access to his Twitter account, and seething over his defeat in 2020, yet still nursing ambitions for a return—spoke to a raucous crowd about the need for a global “populist revival.”

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, another showman was making his mark.

In Buenos Aires, Javier Milei, then a fiery congressman with a penchant for theatrics and unfiltered invective, was delivering his own bombastic address on live television. Clad in his signature leather jacket and gesturing wildly, Milei railed against the political elite, vowing to obliterate the “parasitic state” with his ever-present chainsaw prop.

As the world braced for this new era of racist and xenophobic leadership, the intertwined fates of Trump and Milei offered a potent lens through which to examine the volatility of contemporary politics.

For a brief moment, the right-wing populist figures seemed like ideological satellites orbiting the same disruptive axis. Trump, sidelined but scheming, watched as the conservative media anointed him the leader of an imagined international populist alliance. Milei, meanwhile, was steadily building a cult following in Argentina, his rise to power hastened by a corporate media landscape eager for controversy and spectacle. Though separated by continents and cultures, Trump and Milei’s shared disdain for establishment politics and a mutual affection for shock value linked their trajectories in the imaginations of their supporters.

Fast forward three years to 2024, and the political world was turned on its head.

Milei, once dismissed as a fringe outsider, seized the presidency of Argentina in a landslide—a triumph of style over substance, fueled by promises of radical economic reform steeped in austerity and deep cuts to public interest spending. Trump, who had clawed his way back to power with a surprise 2024 election victory, eking by with a slimmer popular vote margin and narrower victory than any other in over a century, was mere weeks away from reclaiming the Oval Office.

The unlikely duo became the poster boys of a resurgence of right-wing, white nationalist populism. Trump, emboldened by his razor-thin victory, described Milei as a “brother in arms” during a congratulatory phone call. Milei, ecstatic, became the first world leader to congratulate Trump in person at the 2024 CPAC convention, claiming to be a mutual part of a blessed mission: “Today the world is a much better place because the winds of freedom are much stronger… A true miracle and proof that the forces of heaven are on our side,” Milei jovially proclaimed during his CPAC speech.

Yet, beneath the mutual admiration and bluster lay cracks in their respective facades. While Trump was busy assembling a cabinet that hinted at renewed chaos, Milei’s honeymoon phase was already crumbling under the weight of his own policies. Both men had ascended by exploiting dissatisfaction and anger, but their ability to govern was increasingly in question. And in Milei’s case, his credibility recently took an even greater hit as more details have surfaced that he had once enthusiastically promoted a now-collapsed cryptocurrency scheme, raising the question of whether Argentina’s self-proclaimed libertarian savior had been duped or, even worse, did the duping himself.

For Milei, the exhilaration of victory quickly gave way to mass protests (including ones covered by Unicorn Riot from last May and January / February 2024), economic stagnation, and plummeting public approval. For Trump, the looming challenges of his second presidency—a divided country, international skepticism, and mounting legal troubles—threatened to turn triumph into turmoil.

But if Milei and Trump seemed destined for a political bromance, the rest of Latin America wasn’t nearly as enamored.

While Milei threw himself into Trump’s embrace, other regional leaders responded with defiance. In Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum made it clear she would not be bullied into Trump’s hardline immigration policies, standing firm in early diplomatic confrontations even as economic pressures forced some concessions. Colombia’s Gustavo Petro was even more direct in his opposition, warning that Trump’s return signaled renewed imperial aggression and pledging to resist the right-wing tide sweeping the hemisphere. Even Brazil, governed by the more pragmatic Lula da Silva, showed little enthusiasm for Trump’s reemergence, wary of his influence over the continent’s far-right.

Milei, in contrast, found himself increasingly isolated—Trump’s most reliable ideological ally in Latin America, but an outlier rather than the harbinger of a broader regional shift. As he struggled to implement his radical libertarian agenda amid economic turmoil and mounting protests it became clear that his populist revolution was already faltering.

As the world braced for this new era of racist and xenophobic leadership, the intertwined fates of Trump and Milei offered a potent lens through which to examine the volatility of contemporary politics. The parallels were impossible to ignore: two men, propelled to power by mainstream-media-manufactured personalities and plenty of controversy, now tasked with delivering on promises that many deemed impossible. The question wasn’t just whether they would succeed, but whether their respective nations—and the world—could withstand the consequences if they failed.

Milei’s Corporate Media-Facilitated Rise and Apparent Fall from Grace with Argentinians

In Buenos Aires on April 23, 2024, hundreds of thousands of people protested deep austerity cuts by Milei to Argentina’s education budget. (Photo: Matías Cervilla)

Javier Milei first gained notoriety as a radio talk-show host in the 2000s, and by the 2010s, he became a television personality and a regular guest on nationally known programs such as Intratables, A Dos Voces, and Todo Noticias (TN). Mainstream media took to Milei, as his propensity to yell and use inflammatory—and often profane—language lent itself toward viral social media distribution, with such antics gaining particular exposure among younger generations.

By November 2021, then, Milei was barely able to garner just a few congressional seats for both himself and his current vice president through a rag-tag and thrown together coalition called La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances) which wound up only garnering 17.3% of the vote. That was Milei’s first foray into Argentinian politics.

By 2023, mainstream news media ran one image-driven, personalized story after another, ranging from pieces exploring his haircut and fashion sense to images distributed far and wide of Milei wielding a chainsaw, symbolizing campaign promises to slash through any number of the previous government’s policies.

Milei’s upset victory probably shouldn’t have been seen as a big surprise, given the global drift toward reality show politicians.

The chainsaw symbolism was covered at the expense of more serious coverage, like evaluating Milei’s idea of dumping the Argentinian peso for a dollarized economy—a promise he’s since walked back and will likely never implement.

The media brushed past the impact that cuts to government spending may have on the poverty rate, which rocketed higher throughout 2024. Milei’s characterization of social programs as being nothing more than bureaucracies without any benefit to the public was uncritically noted in passing, if that, while obsession over his “rock star M.O.” and “ loco”ways. Both narratives stemmed from coverage dominated by Clarin, Argentina’s largest newspaper.

In one sub-headline, Milei was generously quoted as saying, “I don’t brush my hair, the wind does,” with the main head asking, “ Who cuts Milei’s hair?”

Thus, instead of covering concerns about Milei taking heartfelt advice from one of his three dogs, whom he claimed transmitted the thoughts and ideas of yet another deceased pet dog, media accounts depicted this as just one of Milei’s many quirky ways, for which he has been long known with a nickname of “El Loco” first being given during his adolescence and lasting through the present.

Argentinian intellectuals, analysts, and critics alike have pointed to Milei’s firebrand public persona playing well to mainstream news coverage as a crucial factor in his quick rise to a viable, and eventually successful presidential candidate. Ricardo Foster, an Argentine philosopher and intellectual, argued that sensationalism and populism were given inordinate airtime without sufficient scrutiny, with an over-prioritization on personality over actual policy viability.

Forrest Hylton, columnist for the London Review of Books and professor of history at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, told Unicorn Riot that Milei cultivated a “cult-like persona,” which helped to obfuscate that he was an “ideological fanatic” who was armed with proposals, as opposed to chainsaws, that, “will only serve to worsen the continuing economic crisis.”

Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, a foreign policy analyst and critic with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) who’s intimately familiar with Milei supporters also spoke to Unicorn Riot.

Sánchez-Garzoli is originally from Argentina, and much of her family still resides there, and she assured Unicorn Riot that she “gets” Milei’s surprising and quick political rise all the way to the Casa Rosada (Argentina’s White House). Sánchez-Garzoli pointed to a good chunk of her family in Argentina as “all pro-Milei [and] just people who were very tired with the status quo, which is somewhat understandable, given that a whole generation has been raised on one economic crisis after another.”

Argentina’s status quo has been characterized by several decades of chaotic ups and (mostly) downs in its long-beleaguered economy. An entire generation of ordinary Argentinians has grown up “without a stable middle class or trade unions to turn to” and without first-hand awareness of Argentina’s dictatorial past, Sánchez-Garzoli explained. Many of the concerns about Milei’s autocratic tendencies were at least sometimes quoted in the media, but nevertheless fell on the deaf ears for a large chunk of the populace desperate for any kind of change.

Nonetheless, Milei’s inexperience with national politics still shocked the country after a very strong showing in the first round of presidential voting, with the threshold for winning outright nearly being cleared by Milei, even with support being split between him and a third-placed candidate. Milei’s push in the second round of voting got boosted by a poor and befuddling choice by his opponents. Although his opponent hailed from the incumbent party whose candidates had been in power for 16 of the last 20 years, the choice was, to say the least, a highly questionable one.

2023 was indeed a far cry from the days of Néstor Kirchner, the founding father of the 21st-century embodiment of “Peronists,” later dubbed the “K’s.” Néstor was widely credited with helping the country navigate through the extremely tricky waters of a debt crisis provoked by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Kirchner consequently became one of Argentina’s most popular presidents ever, with as many as 200,000 Argentinians attending his funeral in the wake of his unexpected death shortly after the end of his second term.

This was how the “K” legacy began as the country happily elected Kirchner’s wife, Cristina, after Néstor passed away shortly after his two terms in office.

In the long run, Argentina never really fully recovered from its IMF-induced meltdown. The “K”s became immersed in a quagmire as neoliberal opposition parties lobbed one accusation of corruption after another and endlessly embroiled Cristina with lawsuits (incidentally, a similar strategy was employed in neighboring Brazil against current president Lula and his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff).

Thus, matters couldn’t have been better for Milei as a challenger, as the Peronist and “K” loyalists witlessly nominated its minister of the economy, the often wooden Sergio Masa, as its presidential candidate. Sánchez-Garzoli remarked, “There was a superiority thing going on with the ‘Ks’ in Argentina that turned a lot of ordinary Argentinians completely off.”

Milei, who deftly established himself as a media darling thanks to an all-too-pliant corporate press, only had to beat the rather uncharismatic Masa. The “K” presidential candidate was saddled by an economy falling yet again into hyperinflation under his administration. Under Masa, inflation rose to levels that rivaled those of the most economically plagued African economies and thus also eclipsed even previous high inflation rates that had long plagued Argentina.

Argentinians found themselves counting away their drastically devalued currency in transaction after transaction, as bill denominations couldn’t keep up with raised prices and one-thousand peso notes were barely worth a U.S. dollar. Meanwhile, the Ks stubbornly refused to print up and distribute currency notes of higher denominations and no one wanted to deal with credit and debit card transactions, with traumatic historical memories of countless Argentianians having their savings wiped out in the wake of the first IMF-caused economic meltdown.

This is how cash became king in Argentina. After all, one cannot know with any degree of security how long their money will be worth anything, which only furthers the spiral of hyperinflation. This cash economy rests on top of a prevalent black market exchange for U.S. dollars, which the wealthiest of Argentinians regularly avail themselves of, causing further damage.

In response to a move by the “Ks” that smacked of hubris, Argentinian voters mercilessly punished the Peronists by electing Milei in a landslide victory against the party’s leading economic manager who oversaw the country’s descent into its worst inflationary recession.

Milei’s upset victory probably shouldn’t have been seen as a big surprise, given the global drift toward reality show politicians. Candidates the world over, ranging from India’s Narendra Modi to Brazil’s Jair Bolosonaro and Donald Trump, prefer to court media spectacles with jaw-dropping and often racist, sexist, and classist remarks via social media, instead of well-thought-out white papers and policy details.

Milei’s Apparent Decline After Hardline Reforms

In Buenos Aires on April 23, 2024, hundreds of thousands of people protested deep austerity cuts by Milei to Argentina’s education budget. (Photo: Matías Cervilla)

Less than a year into Milei’s presidency, Argentina erupted in its largest protests in decades. On May 9, 2024, a nationwide general strike brought as many as a million people into the streets, according to organizers, marking the second mass mobilization against his government in just a matter of months. The message was unmistakable: The country was on the brink, and its people were not backing down.

What prompted such extraordinary levels of political resistance and opposition to a president who had won a landslide electoral victory not even a year ago? Sánchez-Garzoli told Unicorn Riot that Milei has a sustainability problem, which presented a challenge considering that the overwhelming majority of the electorate put him into office to gain stability.

“Milei’s economic plans and austerity packages are having a devastating effect on the middle and lower classes in Argentina. Milei has brokered austerity packages with the IMF but has not compensated that with anything else. Cutting all of these public programs is one thing, but leaving the people out on the street without enough food is another. It isn’t sustainable,” explained Sánchez-Garzoli, and increasingly more and more Argentinians seem to agree.

Many observers were left wondering whether Milei had merely been an oblivious front man or something worse: a willing participant in a financial scam.

Milei not only slashed funding for public education but also managed to overcome a veto override attempt by the overwhelmingly opposition-based Congress. In both the lead-up to and in the wake of these events, Milei’s popularity has precipitously dropped, according to public opinion polls. Several sources indicate that his popularity has been steadily falling since the start of his presidency, with one mainstream outlet headlining and questioning, “Is the honeymoon over? Milei’s popularity dips while worry over poverty is on the rise,” even before the mass protest of early October 2024.

For example, one Zuban Córdoba poll highlighted that 57.3% of Argentines disapprove of his performance as of September 2024, a significant increase from the already high 52.5% in April of the same year (the first of two mass protests against Milei’s stance on public education also took place in April 2024). Over that same period, Milei’s “full support” dropped from 38.2% to just 20.3%. A survey from Torcuato Di Tella University showed a sharp decline in public trust in Milei’s government, down to 2.16 points out of a possible 5 as of September, the lowest level since he assumed office. Yet another poll showed only 33% of Argentines as having general confidence in Milei, reflecting growing disillusionment with the president’s lofty campaign promises, particularly as inflation has only been slightly stymied at best while 66% of those surveyed strongly believed unemployment and poverty rates continue to rise.

Results like these point to a slow but steady decline in support of Milei’s image, largely driven by doubts about his ability to resolve the nation’s economic woes while cutting public resources and a political movement lacking any foundation.

Milei’s party is only a recent creation of his own and not linked in any way to a popular movement of any sort. As a result it failed to capture a significant number of seats in Argentina’s legislature. In fact, no other Argentinian president since the U.S.-backed dictatorship was finally toppled in 1983 had been elected with their party receiving as little support as Milei’s, which received just 15% of the seats in the lower house and 10% in the Senate.

Finally, Milei made a slew of campaign promises, chainsaw in hand, that were virtually impossible to deliver on, ranging from dollarization to public spending cuts solving the economy’s woes. He fashioned himself as an evangelist for free markets by exalting cryptocurrencies as a pathway to economic freedom. In recent days (February 2025) it emerged that he’d promoted $LIBRA, a cryptocurrency that collapsed similar to a “pump and dump” (PDF) or Ponzi scheme, leaving countless investors in financial ruin. Videos surfaced of Milei, then a rising political firebrand, endorsing the company in slickly produced ads, describing it as a revolutionary financial opportunity. The coin’s implosion sparked investigations, a pinned tweet got deleted by Milei himself, and over a hundred lawsuits were immediately filed. Many observers were left wondering whether Milei had merely been an oblivious front man or something worse: a willing participant in a financial scam. Either way, the scandal added yet another layer of volatility to his already embattled presidency, fueling doubts about both his judgment and the sincerity of his right-wing populist rhetoric, adding damage to his already low public approval ratings and triggering calls for his impeachment.

Bygone U.S. Policies Cloud Argentina’s Past and Present

Argentine President Javier Milei speaks at the World Economic Forum in 2024 (Photo: WEF via Flickr/ Creative Commons)

The U.S. is widely accepted as the leading influencer, benefactor, and supporter of the IMF. Similarly, the IMF is widely seen as being a key catalyst for Argentina’s first economic downturn at the turn of the century, which it never fully recovered from. Thus, the question is unavoidable: Does the U.S. bear responsibility for Argentina’s continuing economic rut and subsequently Milei’s meteoric rise and apparent fall?

Unicorn Riot turned to Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a household name in Argentina and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, to get some answers. He did not mince words when it came to sizing up IMF and U.S. policy toward Argentina during an interview.

“[T]he U.S. continues to treat Latin America as a whole as its ‘backyard,’” Pérez Esquivel said, harkening back to a description first coined by Thomas Mann, a prominent State Department official who served during the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations. U.S. planners continued to refer to Latin America as America’s “backyard,” particularly Ronald Reagan’s officials who also actively supported an array of Latin American dictatorships in the 1980s, a campaign capped by the Iran-Contra scandal that broke in 1986.

An array of U.S.-supported IMF officials have acknowledged failing Argentina and leaving its economy in tatters for decades.

One high-ranking U.S. official after another, from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration, to Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan administration, to the late President Jimmy Carter, supported Argentina’s despotic 1970s regime directly or otherwise.

Pérez Esquivel thus approvingly mentioned one of Latin America’s most famous writers, Eduardo Galeano, the author of The Open Veins of Latin America, and his well-known criticism of so-called third world debt to the U.S. and the IMF working hand-in-hand together and its devastating impact on the continent: “The more the poor countries pay, the more they owe [to the IMF], and the less they have [for themselves],” Pérez Esquivel told Unicorn Riot.

In the midst of Argentina’s first IMF-provoked crisis, Paul Krugman, when he was The New York Times leading economic columnist, acknowledged that “much of the world, with considerable justification, views [the IMF as being a] branch of the U.S. Treasury Department.”

Even the IMF itself would come to admit wrongdoing and has, time and time again, been more a part of the problem than the solution to Argentina’s economic suffering. An array of U.S.-supported IMF officials have acknowledged failing Argentina and leaving its economy in tatters for decades: In 2002, Anne Krueger, the IMF’s first deputy managing director, admitted to the IMF’s strategies having backfired; in 2003, IMF Managing Director Horst Köhler acknowledged that its economic prescriptions were poorly designed; and in 2016, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde expressed regret over IMF failures in Argentina, merely saying the IMF did the “best we could.”

Milei’s Domestic “Trajectory”

Recently inaugurated President Milei poses with his cabinet on December 20, 2023, at the event signing decrees to slash hundreds of public interest laws and protections. (Photo: casarosada.gob.ar )

It was dinner time during a pleasantly mild spring night in December 2023; Argentina, far south of the equator, has opposite seasons to North America, and Buenos Aires was buzzing with spontaneous protest. Winter vacationing tourists from the Northern Hemisphere looked on with curiosity and confusion, but locals were plenty familiar with what was happening.

As is customary for many Latin American countries during spontaneous resistance, people drummed on pots and pans with kitchen utensils or whatever they could get their hands on. Some joined from their apartment balconies while others gathered in front of restaurants and other public places. This is known in Spanish as a cacerolaz and it was happening in the wake of Milei’s inauguration and one of his very first acts as president.

During one of Milei’s first public speeches, he immediately warned Argentinians of “tough times” to follow—a stark contrast to his enthusiastic campaign promises to instantly transform the economy. In one of the first presidential actions of the still newly minted administration, Milei issued a megadecreto (a mega decree, like an “executive order” in U.S. political parlance), giving credence to the many warnings sounded about Milei’s authoritarian bent.

Civil society has persisted and continued to resist, with more people in Argentina expecting additional mass protests happening before any semblance of poverty reduction and stability is brought to Argentina’s IMF debt plagued economy.

Milei did choose to deliver on a hostility he openly brandished toward civil society and political resistance throughout his campaign by having chosen Victoria Villaruel for his vice presidential candidate. Villaruel is the daughter of one of Argentina’s military generals who hailed from its dictatorial period of the 1980s; she and Milei have both expressed open admiration for the bygone era. Such nostalgia was made concrete just one day after Milei’s inauguration, as he created a national registry tracking a swath of political resistance against his administration, which facilitated increased surveillance by federal forces.

But it was the megadecreto that provoked spontaneous protest in the streets for months on end and up to the present as mass protest after mass protest has been successfully organized. The executive order—known in Spanish as the decreto de necesidad y urgencia—or DNU for short—is a far-reaching presidential decree which eliminated over 300 hard-fought and won domestic laws by civil society with the stroke of a pen and without congressional approval. The brushed-aside laws were mostly public-interested oriented ones, which slashed severance pay, significantly undermined collective bargaining rights, deregulated the rental market, and undermined dozens upon dozens of previously existing protections.

At the end of the day, the megadecreto wound up being reduced to a handful of about 60 executive orders, a significant decrease from the over 300 initially issued.

As Sánchez-Garzoli told Unicorn Riot, however, this was likely what Milei was banking on, in what amounted to a brazen and eventually partially successful “attempt to push his entire agenda onto Congress.”

It was a “a tangible example of his authoritarianism and an extraordinary measure to use to push one’s own agenda through, which is only supposed to be used for specific and limited, emergency purposes. What wound up actually going through were still some 64 laws and thus was a blitzkrieg strategy to make sure as much unilateral imposition as possible could stand,” Sânchez-Garzoli said.

All the while, civil society has persisted and continued to resist, with more people in Argentina expecting additional mass protests happening before any semblance of poverty reduction and stability is brought to Argentina’s IMF debt plagued economy.

“Libertarian” or a “Mecca for the West”?

Just hours after the official presidential election results reached Milei’s campaign, the White House called President-elect Javier Milei to congratulate him and assure him of U.S. support, emphasizing potential bi-national collaboration.

Such congratulations came despite Milei becoming the world’s first self-proclaimed “libertarian” president. Critics argue the label is questionable, given his hostility toward protest and mass assembly rights, as well as his hard-line stances against abortion. Additionally, he has shown little interest in decriminalizing drugs or supporting policies that promote immigration and free movement—stances traditionally associated with so-called “libertarianism.” Instead, critics contend that Milei’s so-called “anarcho-capitalism” stops short of meaningful political and social reforms and claim his agenda prioritizes enlarging the power and wealth of corporations over expanding individual freedoms.

These contradictions were pointed out in an interview with Time reporter Vera Bergengruen, as she questioned Milei’s stances on abortion.

What are the implications of this political backslapping between Milei and leading Wall Street-friendly politicians and Silicon Valley CEOs when it comes to Argentina’s future?

As has been duly acknowledged by Milei, his priorities are more toward attracting foreign investment as opposed to passing domestic legislation to relieve the battered Argentinian economy. He has tried to court powerful political and economic elites through policy stances, rhetoric, and an ideology which caters to them. This has been reflected by Milei’s travel itinerary.

“Milei has spent more time abroad than he has spent in the provinces of Argentina,” Pérez Esquivel told UR. Indeed, the contrast with Milei’s Argentinian presence is one that attracts the ire of civil society in resistance, with Esquivel pointing to these jaunts abroad as evidence of Milei not caring about Argentinians.

Milei has personally met with some of the most powerful billionaires in the world such as Elon Musk, resulting in Musk encouraging his millions of followers to invest in Argentina on his X platform. Other Silicon Valley magnates, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and his peers at Apple, Alphabet (Google), and OpenAI—which is backed by Microsoft—have also been on Milei’s itinerary during his trips to the U.S. This cozying up to billionaire CEOs has attracted the enthusiasm of investors: One U.S.-based financier wrote that the “economic overhaul” by Milei is “not just refreshing, but essential.” Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller announced investments in five Argentinian companies after hearing Milei speak at Davos.

And while Milei has held two in-person meetings within a month of each other with Musk, he had only visited 5 out of 23 of Argentina’s provinces as of September 2024. In one of those provinces, Tierra del Fuego, Milei raced off to meet with Laura Richardson, the commander of United States Southern Command at the time, for a ceremony to announce the construction of a joint naval base, a stark contrast to prior “K” policies distancing the country from U.S. military relations.

U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Republican representing Florida’s 27th district, endorsed Milei even before the election. Salazar declared Argentina to be a country with “only one culture, only one religion, and only one race, completely homogenous.” Milei himself went so far as to fire an Argentinian Football Association official who merely criticized the Argentinian national soccer team after Manchester City star and national team standout, Julian Alvarez, uploaded an excerpt of its Copa America final winning celebrations to his Instagram account. The video featured racist chants against the French national soccer team, whom it had beat in December 2022’s World Cup final. (Milei wound up meeting with Prime Minister Emanuel Macron in France, in the aftermath of the scandal and shortly before France played against Argentina in an Olympics soccer match in which a brawl happened at the conclusion of the match.)

The affinity between Milei and Trump has not been lost on Salazar, as she has proudly told Politico that “extensive conversations” between the Biden administration and Milei have occurred. “[Argentina is] going through a very bad moment, but they are supported, and they are helped by the big guys, meaning us,” Salazar said.

Cozying up to both CEOs as well as leading public officials from both sides of the aisle in Capitol Hill and the White House is certainly part of how Milei has set out to make Argentina a “Mecca for the West,” as he put it in a during an address he gave in Los Angeles. However, foreign policy experts have expressed concerns about such warming up to the U.S. and the West in general.

Foreign policy expert Alejandro Frenkel wrote that the guiding doctrine of Milei’s foreign policy is a confused “Westernism,” subordinated to the United States and Israel. Others have described “an [outright] open subordination to Washington.”

Cynthia Arnson, an expert on Latin America from the Wilson Center, told Unicorn Riot that, “If Trump wins the White House, there will be an ideological affinity with Milei and there probably will be White House visits, even though there will likely be very little to offer by a Trump White House,” adding that “Milei has been mostly playing ‘footsy’ with the IMF, is looking for postponed payments, and has bent over backwards not to be hostile.”

It’s a strong contrast with past Argentinian efforts to combat the IMF’s corrosive influence on its economic struggles. Thus, this begs the question, what are the implications of this political backslapping between Milei and leading Wall Street-friendly politicians and Silicon Valley CEOs when it comes to Argentina’s future?

Given that Milei has centered his administration on inflation-reduction efforts to address Argentina’s economic woes, the leading economists who voiced concerns in a public letter before his victory are likely still uneasy about the country’s prospects for recovery. In the letter, one renowned economist after another who signed the critique took issue with the idea that “a major reduction in government spending would” help matters for ordinary Argentinians and thought instead that a likely “increase [to] already high levels of poverty and inequality [will ensue], and could result in significantly increased social tensions and conflict.”

In hindsight, this is exactly what has transpired: Argentina’s bleak prospects for improvement now hinge on further change—this time, in service of the public interest rather than against it.

As the world braces for another Earth Day, the environmental justice movement is at a critical juncture. While much of the climate conversation continues to focus on Big Oil and other corporate polluters, there is a glaring, often overlooked, contributor to the climate crisis: the U.S. military.

In a bold statement of solidarity and urgency, several leading environmental justice organizations—including 350.org, Sunrise Movement, Climate Defenders, and National Priorities Project as well as frontline groups like NDN Collective, Anakbayan, and Diaspora Pa'Lante—have signed onto an open letter initiated by CODEPINK, urging the world to take the arduous baby step of recognizing the deadly intersection of war and environmental destruction. It's time for more environmental justice groups to join this critical call.

The open letter is clear: The U.S. military is the world's largest institutional polluter. With its staggering consumption of 4.6 billion gallons of fuel yearly, the Pentagon accounts for 77-80% of all U.S. government energy use. If the U.S. military were a country, it would rank as the world's 47th largest greenhouse gas emitter. Yet the environmental consequences of militarism are still not a significant part of mainstream climate conversations.

The military-industrial complex must be held accountable for its role in the climate crisis.

The letter's signatories are speaking out against the catastrophic impact of U.S. military operations on our planet. Beyond the immediate environmental degradation of war zones—such as the release of harmful chemicals like PFAS into soil and water—U.S. military presence around the globe has caused irreparable harm to ecosystems, agricultural lands, and local communities. There are 800 U.S. military bases around the world, many built on Indigenous lands or in violation of national sovereignty. These bases don't just exist in isolation; they are part of a larger, profoundly interconnected war economy that fuels environmental destruction.

Take the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, for example. The devastation wreaked by the genocide in Gaza released more carbon emissions in its first two months than 20 countries combined. In Ukraine, the war has already emitted more than 119 million tons of carbon dioxide while destroying vast swaths of forest. The environmental toll of the conflict is horrific, yet the conversation about militarism's role in climate change is woefully absent in most climate spaces. It's time to change that.

Everyone should be alarmed that the use of nuclear weapons—an existential threat to the survival of humanity—is not out of the question. As we inch closer to potential nuclear war in places like Ukraine and the South West Asia and Northern Africa (SWANA) region, the implications for the climate are terrifying. Sustained warfare in both areas has the possibility of escalating to the use of nuclear weapons. A global "nuclear winter" can cause unprecedented disruption to the Earth's systems, food production, and biodiversity, directly tying geopolitical violence to the climate crisis.

Recent failures of global climate negotiations, such as COP, further underscore the urgency of this message. Countries in the Global South continue to bear the brunt of climate devastation. Not only is the Global North the main contributor to the pollution and environmental segregation that excavates climate disasters, but it also fails to provide the necessary funding for climate reparations. But beyond financial inequities, these summits fail to recognize one of the most significant threats to global environmental health: militarism. The climate crisis will never be solved while war and militarism are allowed to continue unchecked.

This is why the open letter signed by a coalition of environmental justice groups, frontline communities, and anti-war activists matters. It calls for a shift in how we view the climate crisis, acknowledging that the war economy is directly responsible for some of the most egregious environmental destruction we face today. The public must realize that the environmental degradation caused by war is not a separate issue from climate justice work but rather an integral part of it.

This movement needs more allies. The organizations already signed on are committed, but more environmental justice organizations must join this call. It is no longer enough only to target Big Oil or corporate interests. The military-industrial complex must be held accountable for its role in the climate crisis.

The letter's closing statement is a simple, common-sense statement. Yet it calls for a radical shift in the current landscape of political, economic, and non-governmental structures that our peace and environmental movements need to unite in: "We reject militarism, war, occupation, genocide, and degradation. Instead, we choose our continued global existence: peace, sovereignty, diplomacy, and liberation!"

This is not just a vision for a peaceful world but the only way forward for a planet that can sustain life. We all must start working for a future where climate justice isn't just about protecting ecosystems in isolation but understanding what causes the destruction of these ecosystems that we rely on and rely on us as well. We must start working for a future beyond war, empire, and militarism. The time to act is now.

You can read the full letter and/or sign on here.

Chairman of the Democratic National Committee DNC Chair Ken Martin on Friday announced the launching of a People’s Cabinet! This is potentially exciting news. As I wrote about last month, a People's Cabinet is a powerful way to combat the latest unlawful, unconstitutional, cruel, and downright stupid action from the Trump-Musk administration.

And it's a great way to lift up leaders who can propose common sense, people-centered alternatives.

One proposal that may be a stretch for the DNC, though: Instead of the same old top-down decision making, please make this an open process. Invite everyone to help select cabinet members—Democrats, Independents, and even non-MAGA Republicans (MAGA already has a cabinet).

The Democratic Party’s approval ratings are very low and there is a lot of ground to make up after the party first insisted Joe Biden would be the 2024 presidential candidate and then anointed Kamala Harris as the presidential candidate—with no public input. This mistake was in addition to their failure to understand the pain experienced by so many non-billionaire Americans, the marginalizing of Sen. Bernie Sanders, and their unconscionable neglect of the horrors taking place in Gaza.

Instead of choosing the People's Cabinet behind closed doors, the cabinet should be selected through an open process based in local caucuses. Allowing "we the people" to select the People's Cabinet could draw tremendous energy and excitement, bring fresh ideas into the process, give people at the grassroots a reason to gather in their communities to build power and momentum for the midterms and beyond, and it would generate ongoing local and national news coverage.

We need locally based, sustained grassroots work to build the power for change. The Democratic Party could find this is exactly the reboot it needs to get beyond the stale and the stuck politics of its current form—a way to gather the many voices and populations that have felt left out until now.

Please, DNC, open the doors, bring in fresh air and new voices, and you’ll see the energy unleashed by the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour multiplied across the nation.

Thank you, Senator Cory Booker. In your record-breaking Senate talk-a-thon, you sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump’s increasingly blatant threats to Social Security, and the devastating impacts for ordinary people who count on it.

Ninety years ago, our three grandfathers created Social Security. It’s the most popular, efficient and effective government program ever, ensuring financial security for 73 million Americans today. Now, appallingly, America's workers and seniors must get ready to fight like hell.

The first draft of Social Security was written by a small committee including Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace and top FDR advisor and Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, chaired by legendary Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. FDR had insisted that Social Security be funded by a system of payroll taxes, with both worker and employer contributing. He expressed great confidence that this would give workers an unquestionable “legal, moral and political right” to collect benefits.

Save Social Security. Don't "outsource" it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

President Dwight Eisenhower got it. There may be “a tiny splinter group” of politicians who want to mess with Social Security, he wrote, but “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Now comes Trump and Musk. They’ve fired 7,000 Social Security Administration staffer, citing a “bloated” workforce (actually severely overstretched at 50-year lows), made it harder to access their benefits, and closed most of the regional and field offices, guaranteeing chaos. Musk has called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" (it’s NOT), and shared a post calling Social Security recipients “the parasite class.” Trump has lied that Social Security benefits are being collected by illegal immigrants (they actually strengthen Social Security by paying payroll taxes while being barred from collecting benefits) and by tens of millions of people over 120 years old (nobody in the world is over 120 years old, and in fact, only 89,000 people over age 99 receive Social Security benefits). Musk says fraud in "entitlement spending … is the big one to eliminate".

Now, after whipping up anger at imaginary Social Security abuses, Trump is proposing to end all federal taxes on people earning less than $150,000—the largest category of taxes for people in that bracket being the payroll taxes that sustain Social Security— which, when combined with the current payroll tax cap of $176,000, would leave Social Security with virtually no revenues. Trump previously promised to completely end payroll taxes.

Could their intentions be any clearer? Trump campaigned on a promise that Social Security "will not be touched, it will only be strengthened" (and Musk has recently promised that benefits will be increased, unbelievably, without congressional action and without worsening the government spending he enjoys slashing with his chainsaw).

Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It's an outrage against all working people.

But remember how a previous President, George W. Bush, wanted to "strengthen" Social Security? By privatizing it. Trump's acting Social Security Commissioner now prefers to frame it as "outsourcing."

The Washington Post reports that with seniors “beside themselves” with uncertainty stoked by all the cutbacks, “many current and former [Social Security] officials” fear that the ultimate goal is privatization. And they’ve got plenty of company among Democrats in Congress. (Trump’s Treasury Secretary recently suggested that the goal was to privatize everything government does.) And Trump’s likeliest argument is that the only way to prevent benefit cuts driven by the system’s looming solvency crisis, and strengthen retirement security, is to put Social Security’s money in Wall Street (rich financiers would surely love the extra $3 trillion in investments).

The fact is that there is absolutely no way for Musk and Trump to reach their goal of eliminating $2 trillion in federal spending without either 1) raising revenues or 2) decimating the largest federal spending program in America: Social Security (Medicare and Medicaid are not far behind).

What could avert such stupidity? Revenues. Make the wealthy pay their fair share. One no-brainer example: eliminate the current $176,000 cap on payroll taxes. Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It's an outrage against all working people.

What related outrages should we expect? Start with Trump’s promised $5 trillion of tax cuts for billionaires (like Trump and Musk). That’s the justification for all of Trump’s cuts to programs that help ordinary people, from veterans to children to health care to preventing terrorism. And don’t imagine for a second that the privatization of Social Security can be blocked in Congress, as it was under President George W. Bush. Trump’s reign of boundary-pushing executive orders has made a supine Congress irrelevant and the Constitution a technicality.

Save Social Security. Don't "outsource" it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Don’t count on “guardrails” like Congress or the courts. It will take a movement of ordinary Americans shouting to protect FDR’s greatest legacy of financial security for working people.

Thank you, Senator Cory Booker. In your record-breaking Senate talk-a-thon, you sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump’s increasingly blatant threats to Social Security, and the devastating impacts for ordinary people who count on it.

Ninety years ago, our three grandfathers created Social Security. It’s the most popular, efficient and effective government program ever, ensuring financial security for 73 million Americans today. Now, appallingly, America's workers and seniors must get ready to fight like hell.

The first draft of Social Security was written by a small committee including Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace and top FDR advisor and Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, chaired by legendary Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. FDR had insisted that Social Security be funded by a system of payroll taxes, with both worker and employer contributing. He expressed great confidence that this would give workers an unquestionable “legal, moral and political right” to collect benefits.

Save Social Security. Don't "outsource" it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

President Dwight Eisenhower got it. There may be “a tiny splinter group” of politicians who want to mess with Social Security, he wrote, but “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Now comes Trump and Musk. They’ve fired 7,000 Social Security Administration staffer, citing a “bloated” workforce (actually severely overstretched at 50-year lows), made it harder to access their benefits, and closed most of the regional and field offices, guaranteeing chaos. Musk has called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" (it’s NOT), and shared a post calling Social Security recipients “the parasite class.” Trump has lied that Social Security benefits are being collected by illegal immigrants (they actually strengthen Social Security by paying payroll taxes while being barred from collecting benefits) and by tens of millions of people over 120 years old (nobody in the world is over 120 years old, and in fact, only 89,000 people over age 99 receive Social Security benefits). Musk says fraud in "entitlement spending … is the big one to eliminate".

Now, after whipping up anger at imaginary Social Security abuses, Trump is proposing to end all federal taxes on people earning less than $150,000—the largest category of taxes for people in that bracket being the payroll taxes that sustain Social Security— which, when combined with the current payroll tax cap of $176,000, would leave Social Security with virtually no revenues. Trump previously promised to completely end payroll taxes.

Could their intentions be any clearer? Trump campaigned on a promise that Social Security "will not be touched, it will only be strengthened" (and Musk has recently promised that benefits will be increased, unbelievably, without congressional action and without worsening the government spending he enjoys slashing with his chainsaw).

Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It's an outrage against all working people.

But remember how a previous President, George W. Bush, wanted to "strengthen" Social Security? By privatizing it. Trump's acting Social Security Commissioner now prefers to frame it as "outsourcing."

The Washington Post reports that with seniors “beside themselves” with uncertainty stoked by all the cutbacks, “many current and former [Social Security] officials” fear that the ultimate goal is privatization. And they’ve got plenty of company among Democrats in Congress. (Trump’s Treasury Secretary recently suggested that the goal was to privatize everything government does.) And Trump’s likeliest argument is that the only way to prevent benefit cuts driven by the system’s looming solvency crisis, and strengthen retirement security, is to put Social Security’s money in Wall Street (rich financiers would surely love the extra $3 trillion in investments).

The fact is that there is absolutely no way for Musk and Trump to reach their goal of eliminating $2 trillion in federal spending without either 1) raising revenues or 2) decimating the largest federal spending program in America: Social Security (Medicare and Medicaid are not far behind).

What could avert such stupidity? Revenues. Make the wealthy pay their fair share. One no-brainer example: eliminate the current $176,000 cap on payroll taxes. Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It's an outrage against all working people.

What related outrages should we expect? Start with Trump’s promised $5 trillion of tax cuts for billionaires (like Trump and Musk). That’s the justification for all of Trump’s cuts to programs that help ordinary people, from veterans to children to health care to preventing terrorism. And don’t imagine for a second that the privatization of Social Security can be blocked in Congress, as it was under President George W. Bush. Trump’s reign of boundary-pushing executive orders has made a supine Congress irrelevant and the Constitution a technicality.

Save Social Security. Don't "outsource" it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Don’t count on “guardrails” like Congress or the courts. It will take a movement of ordinary Americans shouting to protect FDR’s greatest legacy of financial security for working people.

The ranks of global billionaires has grown by 247 in the past year, bringing up the total worldwide to 3,028, according to Forbes’ annual survey of the wealthy published April 1.

The combined wealth of the nine-figure club is now $16.1 trillion, up $2 trillion from a year ago.

There are 902 billionaires in the United States as of the newest survey, up from 813 in 2024. However, the Forbes data release is dated March 7, 2025, and there has been significant market volatility since then.

There are now three billionaires in America with more than $200 billion in estimated wealth: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.

And there are 15 billionaires with more than $100 billion each and combined wealth of $2.4 trillion. For comparison, that’s more wealth than the “poorest” 1,500 billionaires combined.

The oligarchy continues to rig the rules of the economy to get more wealth and power, meaning we should anticipate the first trillionaire within a decade.

As Forbes observes about Donald Trump: “He’s giving the billionaire class more control over the government than ever before. His right-hand man is the planet’s richest person. His administration includes at least ten billionaires and billionaire spouses.”

Trump — who Forbes fawningly calls “America’s billionaire-in-chief” — saw his personal fortune more than double over the last year, from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion. Forbes reports that “before moving back into the White House, [Trump] padded his cash piled with a very lucrative move into crypto. Between that and his Trump Media & Technology Group going public just after Forbes locked in its 2024 rankings, the president’s net worth has more than doubled.”

The top four billionaires are U.S. nationals, and their individual wealth are:

1. Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $342 billion (up from $252.5 billion in September 2024, but down from $428 billion on January 1, 2025). It’s worth noting that prior to the 2020 pandemic, Musk’s wealth was valued just under $25 billion.
2. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $216 billion, up from $113 billion from the 2020 survey.
3. Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $215. billion.
4. Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $192 billion.

This is what oligarchy looks like!

The ranks of global billionaires has grown by 247 in the past year, bringing up the total worldwide to 3,028, according to Forbes’ annual survey of the wealthy published April 1.

The combined wealth of the nine-figure club is now $16.1 trillion, up $2 trillion from a year ago.

There are 902 billionaires in the United States as of the newest survey, up from 813 in 2024. However, the Forbes data release is dated March 7, 2025, and there has been significant market volatility since then.

There are now three billionaires in America with more than $200 billion in estimated wealth: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.

And there are 15 billionaires with more than $100 billion each and combined wealth of $2.4 trillion. For comparison, that’s more wealth than the “poorest” 1,500 billionaires combined.

The oligarchy continues to rig the rules of the economy to get more wealth and power, meaning we should anticipate the first trillionaire within a decade.

As Forbes observes about Donald Trump: “He’s giving the billionaire class more control over the government than ever before. His right-hand man is the planet’s richest person. His administration includes at least ten billionaires and billionaire spouses.”

Trump — who Forbes fawningly calls “America’s billionaire-in-chief” — saw his personal fortune more than double over the last year, from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion. Forbes reports that “before moving back into the White House, [Trump] padded his cash piled with a very lucrative move into crypto. Between that and his Trump Media & Technology Group going public just after Forbes locked in its 2024 rankings, the president’s net worth has more than doubled.”

The top four billionaires are U.S. nationals, and their individual wealth are:

1. Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $342 billion (up from $252.5 billion in September 2024, but down from $428 billion on January 1, 2025). It’s worth noting that prior to the 2020 pandemic, Musk’s wealth was valued just under $25 billion.
2. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $216 billion, up from $113 billion from the 2020 survey.
3. Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $215. billion.
4. Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $192 billion.

This is what oligarchy looks like!

The presidential announcements and outrage come at us so viciously fast that it is difficult to keep up with the latest assault on governance, our intellect, decency, or humanity.

Much of the perceived chaos is planned and judiciously meted out to keep our heads spinning leaving little time or energy to respond to anything before something new intrudes the space. Their goal is to produce as much confusion and chaos as possible so the public will struggle to keep up and lose the ability to pay close and constant attention to the important things of democratic and constitutional order. Our national setting has become a mixture of reality TV with the sensationalism of that genre, where mean-spirited sound bites emanate from those in power who smirkingly stare into the cameras knowingly creating the next news cycle. There is a racist, hate-filled, untruthful, and vindictive blanket covering this government and suffocating the country under its weight. We have never seen anything like this before.

There has been one attack followed by another. The announcement of tariffs has sent financial markets into a tailspin. Those who are reliant upon 401K plans and the likes are feeling anxious wondering how fall the markets will fall, and how deep it will cut into their retirement. Consumers already worried about the costs of everyday living are frightened by the possible consequences of this latest announcement.

Sparks begin to fly when we become angry, frightened, and distressed enough to stretch beyond ourselves and touch the mysterious fires that power movements that will save us and our loved ones.

Meanwhile, we are continuing to reel from the attacks on federal employees, the Department of Education, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Consumer Protection Financial Bureau, the Courts and law firms, media, colleges and universities, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and The Smithsonian Museums (particularly The National Museum of African American History and Culture). Each have fallen under the axe of DOGE or the accusation of promoting "Woke" ideology.

Immigrants have been a favorite target of this administration. The undocumented have been hounded, hunted, arrested, and transported to prisons in El Salvador and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba which are known for human rights violations. But the long authoritarian arm of government is not only extended to the undocumented, but also against scholars and students legally here. We were shocked when Mahmoud Khalil was kidnapped. He was a graduate student at Columbia University and had been a spokesperson during that school's 'stop the genocide' demonstrations.

Rumeysa Oztur was recently picked up by plain-clothed goons and transported to Louisiana while on her way to an Iftar near Tufts University in Massachusetts. She is a doctorate student and, like Khalil, legally in the country. Each is apparently guilty of decrying the genocide in Gaza and indicting the white supremacy of Zionism for those atrocities. These two names have been widely reported, but we should not assume that these are the only names. These arrests however signal a First Amendment crisis where it appears that anyone can be criminalized for supporting Palestinian rights. My fear is that these seem to be a trial runs that start with those with the undocumented, then moves on to those with vulnerable legal status, and finally is used against citizens who express points of views critical of and unsanctioned by the government. Where does the creep towards totalitarianism end?

If you are not already weary from the list of head spinning encroachments on democratic order, there is much more to add to the list of insults. There is the re-installation of Confederate statues, renaming bodies of water and land to fit an imperialistic paradigm, and the removal of photographs and references to Black people and women, and any image or phrase that speaks to diversity, inclusion, or equity. Even the word "Gay" emblazoned on the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, the Enola Gay, came under attack. There are no-so-funny teases about the annexation of Canada, Greenland, and taking back the Panama Canal that adds to the dizziness of any day. In Washington, D.C., the city government was ordered to dismantle "Black Lives Matter" plaza that was erected during the George Floyd unrest and after first-term Trump held a bible up in front of a church after the crowds had been tear-gassed and attacked by police and military.

The callous war criminality of this administration in collaboration with other war criminals have quipped about removing the population from Gaza and turning the devastation produced by that illegal war into a coastal resort. And now there is the insinuation that Trump may try to extend his time in office.

Some of the news and reports from this government are real and some are not. It is difficult to tell what is real from what is not. But one thing we understand with these demagogues and anti-democratic criminals in office or serving the government is that we need to take everything as real. We have discovered that there is nothing beyond the pale for these gangsters let loose on the world stage.

Since the strategy is to wear us down and out, keep our heads spinning, and make us feel powerless in the face of these avalanches of rumors, innuendoes, and news means simply that we cannot lose our focus, let ourselves become weary or tired, or stop paying attention. We must pay attention to all the mess, all the rumors, and all the insanity coming from this group of White Supremacists, Zionists, and Christian Nationalists.

The plan of this government is to change the discussion daily, create a new issue, a new controversy, and orchestrate a new debate to fill the media's bandwidth. It is their way of moving things in and out of the public scrutiny so fast that you can't deal with one thing before the next thing comes along.

But no matter what they do or say Palestinians are still struggling and dying every day. Israel is still bombing Gaza, Lebanon, and Israeli settlers are still attacking Palestinians in the West Bank. The U.S. is still bombing Yemen and Syria. Children are still being exploited for their labor in the mineral pits of Africa. Federal workers still have been fired or are in danger of losing their jobs. And we the people are still trying to remain plugged in and aware of what is going on at home and around the world. But we need to do more than being aware.

We need to find ways from the reserves of our strength to do what we can to hold up and onto the light, bring the hope, and maintain a very vocal and very loud demand for justice. We need to remind ourselves that we need to keep our focus and watch over everything and continue to stand, march, demonstrate and confront the wrongs that abound with a strength drawn deep from the reservoirs of our being.

Yes, we are weary, tired, and frightened. Yet in times like these when our lives or the lives of loved ones are endangered people have been known to find a Herculean strength that has lifted cars, fought bears, and turned ordinary strength into incredible power.

We have the surprising ability to reach beyond ourselves to muster the strength and power in moments of fear and great distress. We know the histories of the many movements that produced extraordinary results, brought down mighty systems, freed people, and changed the outcomes of the human story. The movements of labor, civil rights, climate change, LGBTQIA, and every other movement was sparked by a faint flicker in vast darkness when the heaviness of the moment felt unbearable, frightening, and too threatening.

When a new outrage, the proverbial final straw of insults and injury is thrust upon us that is when the small amber of resistance begins to spread into the great fires of change. Sparks begin to fly when we become angry, frightened, and distressed enough to stretch beyond ourselves and touch the mysterious fires that power movements that will save us and our loved ones.

We are in those moments now and may the sparks that ignite the flames of hopefulness and light drive out the heaviness and darkness and grow into something large and fierce enough to save us from this madness.