The release of the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report got the usual suspects (a.k.a. “very serious people”) genuflecting about the large projected shortfall. As of 2034, the program is projected to be unable to pay full benefits. This would mean a 22 percent cut in benefits if no additional revenue is added.

There are three points worth making here.

1. As an economic matter, the projected depletion of the trust fund and resulting shortfall in the program means nothing;
2. The main reason for the projected shortfall is the upward redistribution of income over the last half-century;
3. The projected shortfall is far less money than the increase in military spending that Donald Trump is requesting for his 2027 budget.

Trust Fund Accounting

On the first point, the spending to repay the bonds held from the trust fund in 2033 comes from the Treasury. Its impact on the economy would be the same as the spending in 2034, when the trust fund no longer holds any bonds.

There is an issue that the law gives the program a claim to the funds needed to repay the bonds it holds. Social Security does not have a claim to the money needed to pay full benefits once the last bonds are sold and the trust fund is depleted.

This is an important legal point, but from an economic standpoint, it is money from the Treasury in both cases. If the country could afford to pay full benefits in 2033 when the trust fund held bonds. It can afford to pay full benefits after it has sold all its bonds, however the law would need to be changed.

Upward Redistribution Hurt Social Security’s Finances

In 1982, the last time the program had a major overhaul, just 10 percent of wage income went to high wage earners whose income escaped taxation by being over the cap (currently around $185,000) for wages subject to the 12.4 percent Social Security tax. In the last quarter century, close to 17 percent of wage income went over the cap.

This upward redistribution of wage income, coupled with the redistribution from wages to profits in the last quarter century, has substantially reduced the amount of revenue going into the trust fund. It shouldn’t be surprising that the people who engineered the upward redistribution of the last half-century — through trade policy, stronger patent and copyright protections, bank bailouts, and tech policy — now want to reduce people’s Social Security benefits.

Donald Trump’s Increase in Military Spending is Twice the Size of the Shortfall Projected for 2034

The media seem to take pride in reporting huge budget numbers without providing any context that would make them meaningful to their audience. The projected Social Security shortfall is a great example. The usual group of budget hawks is being brought out to tell us that it is a huge program, which we can’t afford, and requires cuts.

Yet, we did not hear the same chorus in response to Donald Trump’s proposed increase in the military budget from $864 billion in the last year of the Biden presidency to $1,500 billion in 2027. Even adjusting for inflation between the two years, the increase would still be close to $590 billion. There was no rationale given for why the country suddenly needs to spend so much more on its military. Trump certainly did not propose this sort of massive increase in spending in his campaign.

The proposed increase in military spending dwarfs the shortfall projected in the Social Security program for 2034.

Adjusting for inflation (assuming 2.5 percent annually), Trump’s requested increase would be just under $700 billion in 2034 dollars. By contrast, the Social Security Trustees project that the program will face a $314 billion shortfall in its annual budget in 2034.

We can argue about what should be considered big and what should be considered small, but there is zero doubt that Trump’s proposed increase in military spending is hugely larger than the projected shortfall in Social Security. If anyone thinks that Social Security poses a big problem for the budget, they must believe that Trump’s military spending poses a much bigger problem, since it is more than twice as large.

And, as noted earlier, we are already paying the money for Social Security; it is just coming out of a different pocket. The proposed increase in military spending, at 1.6 percent of GDP, will be newly committed funds coming from the Treasury, which will impose substantial demands on the economy. Any honest person who says funding Social Security poses a serious budget problem must believe that Trump’s military spending poses a far bigger problem.

When the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held confirmation hearings for current Department of Interior head Doug Burgum, he made it quite clear that he viewed public lands, lands belonging to the American public, as an asset on “America’s balance sheet.” His implication was pretty clear: These public lands should be used to turn a profit.

Public lands belong to all Americans and were set aside for their protection, not for profit. But, no surprise, Burgum fully supports exploitative industries like oil, gas, and mining on public lands, so who’s balance sheet will benefit? At an energy conference in Houston last year he noted, “If we’re going to drill, baby, drill, then we’ve got to be asked to also mine, baby, mine.”

So much for conservation and environmental protection of our public lands! But, like most members of the current administration, he acts like using your office to extract profit wherever possible is acceptable and “smart”—protecting the public trust takes a back seat. In 2024, President Donald Trump asked a gathering of oil and gas executives at his Florida estate hosted by Burgum to raise $1 billion for his campaign, for which in return he would roll back environmental protections requested by the oil industry. In his thinking, that’s smart, a win-win, personal profit for the president and windfall profits for energy companies.

But Burugm also knows there is profit to be made above ground on the public lands that cover large stretches of the Great Plains. Last month the Interior Department approved new grazing rules that revoke tribal rights to graze bison on federal land in favor of cattle, i.e. “production-oriented livestock.”

Aside from money made by extractive industries, administration officials, and ranchers—all at the expense of taxpayers and the environment—there are too few who question why the ongoing racism of the current administration is allowed to continue.

In the early 1800s, upward of 50 million bison roamed the Great Plains; by 1900, fewer than 1,000 were left. An organized campaign of commercial hunting, the government’s desire to subjugate the Native tribes by exterminating their food supply, and the perceived need to close the range for private cattle grazing nearly exterminated the American bison.

Déjà vu.

Tribal efforts to expand the herd, in cooperation with former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland during the Biden administration, prioritized efforts to manage the herd for traditional purposes of food, cultural heritage, and land conservation—and public land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was part of that partnership.

While fees charged for cattle grazing on BLM land are claimed to benefit the US Treasury, these fees do not help Secretary Burgum’s “balance sheet” either. Permitted grazing on BLM land actually costs taxpayers money, while it benefits a small number of mostly rich landowners. True, there are ranchers who use the privilege of grazing public lands responsibly, yet there are others who abuse the privilege, while the administration turns a blind eye and continues to roll back environmental enforcement. Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy continued to illegally graze BLM land in Nevada for years after piling up fees and fines of over $1 million.

Aside from money made by extractive industries, administration officials, and ranchers—all at the expense of taxpayers and the environment—there are too few who question why the ongoing racism of the current administration is allowed to continue. While the outright slaughter of Native tribes as seen in the 1800s is no longer occurring, the government is clearly denying the tribes the right to celebrate their culture, their heritage, and their right to a decent life on land that was once theirs, land where millions of bison grazed, animals that evolved with the native prairie and in effect managed it and put it to its highest use. Land that now, in addition to production-oriented livestock, is covered by millions of acres of corn and soy.

It is unlikely that cattle, corn, and soy will ever be replaced by bison herds on the Great Plains, because as the Coalition of Large Tribes (COLT), which represents more than 50 tribes managing 25,000 bison on land that accounts for about 95% of Indian Country noted, the new Interior Department rules are designed to protect cows and were published without prior consultation with tribes.

It is not nostalgia that bison should graze public lands, especially those adjacent to tribal reservations. Bison are far better environmental stewards than cattle and, for that matter, probably people as well. It is also, perhaps, a pipe dream that this administration would recognize the inherent cultural rights of Native Americans, or any minority for that matter. To them, the extraction of profit for themselves and their corporate cronies is all that matters. But this administration will someday end, and perhaps the next will be more enlightened and respectful of minority rights and common sense.

In October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and attendant assault on Lebanon, the Israeli army did a thing. It invited journalists from major Western corporate media outlets on an incursion into Lebanon’s ravaged south, accompanied by Israeli military personnel who would interpret the wreckage in Israel’s favor—not that the Western media have ever required much assistance in this regard.

Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Fox News and a handful of other special guests signed up for the cross-border sortie. It was, as Habib Battah and Christina Cavalcanti note in an investigation for the Public Source (8/27/25), an “awkward hybrid between a traditional embed and the kind of all-expense-paid publicity trip that journalists refer to as junkets, freebies and dog-and-pony shows.”

Never mind that it is entirely illegal for journalists or anyone else to enter Lebanon from Israel—what’s one more illegal invasion from a country that has been invading Lebanon pretty much since its founding? As Battah and Cavalcanti emphasize, these media professionals were also embedding themselves “within a national project of extraordinary transnational violence,” hosted by an “extrajudicial occupying military power—a critical point that all of them would fail to mention in their coverage.”

The Israelis certainly hit the jackpot with the coverage, as reporters excitedly discovered boots and helmets allegedly belonging to Hezbollah—clear proof that the group had been plotting a nefarious attack on Israel. New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner, an old pro at conducting preemptive journalistic strikes on Lebanon, did not disappoint with her dispatch (10/13/24), “Just Over the Border From Israel, a Hezbollah Cache of Explosives and Mines.”

And in report after embedded report, Israel’s chosen journalists faithfully transmitted the tiresome and counter-logical notion that Hezbollah was somehow the aggressor in the arrangement—as opposed to the army that was busily slaughtering thousands of people in Lebanon while implementing a scorched-earth strategy.

‘Urgent evacuation warnings’While the October 2024 embed was one of the more preposterous embodiments of Western corporate media’s special relationship with Israel, outlets continue to do a fine job of sanitizing Israeli brutality even when their reporters are not physically viewing the region from inside an Israeli armored vehicle. Since March of this year, Israel has killed at least 3,613 people in Lebanon and displaced 1.2 million, obliterating entire villages and otherwise expanding the ecocidal policy honed in the Gaza Strip.

There has been no remotely comparable destruction on the Israeli side, and a recent Reuters article (5/31/26) that had attempted to suggest some symmetry now comes with the preface: “This May 31 story has been corrected to remove a reference to tens of thousands of Israelis being displaced by Hezbollah fire, in paragraph 3.”

Like in Gaza, where genocide proceeds apace in spite of a declared ceasefire (FAIR.org, 10/21/25), the media tend to report “ceasefires” in Lebanon without caring to highlight the fact that it’s not a ceasefire when Israel is still pummeling the country and massacring people, all the while setting the stage for a massive land grab with its creeping so-called “evacuation orders.” These “evacuations” have been focused on the Shiite demographic, with Israel warning Christian and Druze communities not to allow Shiite neighbors to take refuge in their towns (New York Times, 4/1/26).

Lebanese journalist Habib Battah, co-author of the aforementioned Public Source investigation, suggested to me that such orders might be more accurately termed “ethnic cleansing directives.” But that, of course, would be way too much for corporate media outlets to handle—and so it is that we learn about Israel’s “urgent evacuation warnings” and “large-scale evacuation orders,” as though it’s some sort of public service announcement, fire drill or other fundamentally legitimate Israeli undertaking, rather than entirely illegal in addition to downright psychopathic. From a legal and moral perspective, after all, you can’t just go around ordering people in other countries out of their homes, oftentimes only to bomb them when they comply.

Then there’s the matter of the “Yellow Line” or “security zone”—more terminology borrowed from Gaza (FAIR.org, 5/19/26)—which denotes the portion of south Lebanon that Israel is currently illegally occupying. But Israel has never been very good at staying within the lines, and its latest “evacuation orders” spanned no less than one-fifth of the entire country, far beyond its own unilaterally appointed Yellow Line.

As Battah remarked to me, the media’s acceptance and deployment of such arbitrary vocabulary creates “artificial structures” and a sense of orderliness, when in reality “there’s no yellow lines, there’s no yellow, there’s no colors—these are just illegal invasions.” And because media are committed to sanitizing Israel’s behavior rather than questioning it, “colonization becomes normalized.”

‘A warning to residents’

The eagerness of journalists to do Israel’s bidding is all the more confounding given that Israel is currently the No. 1 killer of journalists in the world. A recent Associated Press article (5/29/26), for example, reduced the pulverization of Lebanon to simply “ongoing fighting in southern Lebanon between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters.”

A June 4 Reuters writeup blamed Hezbollah for having “rejected” the latest US-mediated “ceasefire” plan—which, mind you, would basically have given Israel the green light to seize south Lebanon outright. Reuters refrained from referencing the thousands of Lebanese casualties since March, but did allow Israel the usual space to defend its depredations: “The Israeli military, in a warning to residents of the south, said it was continuing to target Hezbollah facilities.”

This is not to say that corporate media do not report on the destruction, displacement and killing in Lebanon; they do—and sometimes even sympathetically. But the refusal to paint a consistent and properly contextualized picture of what is actually going on in the country means that they mostly just end up legitimizing Israel’s war crimes.

Imagine for a moment that Hezbollah had just killed thousands of Israelis in three months and occupied northern Israel. In doing so, it laid waste to 5,000-year-old cities, and bombed the fuck out of everything from homes to ambulances to World Heritage sites to university students to environmental activists who protect sea turtles. Suffice it to say we’d be hearing a lot more about the utter barbarity of it all—and that Hezbollah wouldn’t be allowed to claim ad nauseam that it was targeting “military facilities.”

Almost three years into a genocide that has officially killed nearly 73,000 Palestinians and given Israel every opportunity to blind the world with its true colors, it is no short of an abomination that Israeli officials are still permitted to insist—with little to no media pushback—that they only target “terrorists” and “terrorist infrastructure.” If Israeli officials were to claim that two plus two equals eight, or that Elvis Presley was living in a cave in Madagascar, would the corporate media also report such information with a straight face?

By taking Israel’s word for it, journalists wind up essentially validating mass killing and occupation—as in the corrected May 31 Reuters piece that straight up makes the case for Israel’s seizure of a 900-year-old castle that lies nowhere near the imaginary colored line:

The advance into Beaufort Castle has granted Israeli troops a vantage point over much of southern Lebanon and northern Israel, from which attacks have been launched ⁠towards Israeli residential areas.
‘Iranian proxy on its borders’

Of course, willful media decontextualization and omission of relevant history facilitates the conversion of Israeli propaganda into “news.” One handy trick is to always, always, always remind audiences that Hezbollah is a “powerful Shia group supported by Iran,” as the BBC (5/28/26) puts it.

On March 13, CNN ran an analysis datelined Tel Aviv that bore the headline: “The War That Never Ended: Israel Seizes Moment to Finish Fight Against Hezbollah, Iran’s Proxy in Lebanon.” The analyst proceeded to justify Israel’s belief that “it needs to establish a strong military defense to protect civilians from the Iranian proxy on its borders.”

But while invoking Hezbollah’s support by Iran is practically a requirement for Western media reports, it is never deemed necessary to qualify Israel’s own orientation in any way—like, I dunno, “The war that never ended: Genocidal psychostate backed to the hilt by global superpower seizes moment to finish fight against Hezbollah.”

As for why this fight started in the first place, the media can somehow never summon the energy to explain that Hezbollah owes its very existence to Israel’s apocalyptic 1982 invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, prompting the group’s formation. Indeed, Israel’s lengthy history of invading Lebanon—not to mention its 22-year occupation of the south of the country, which ended in its ignominious eviction by the Hezbollah-led Lebanese resistance—would seem to be pretty crucial context in terms of understanding the current war. But those journalists who do bother to provide a bit of background do so in as ambiguous and cursory a fashion as possible, as in the New York Times’ explanation (6/3/26) that “Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia group, has been in conflict with Israel, on and off, for decades.”

A May 13 NBC News intervention headlined “Amid Ceasefire, Israeli Forces Ramp Up Destruction of Homes in Southern Lebanon” offers a roundabout summary of Hezbollah’s origins: “The group, formed in the early 1980s as a civil war consumed Lebanon, was created with support from Iran and sought to expel Israeli forces from Lebanese territory.” The piece went on to discuss some details of the present destruction in south Lebanon, including footage from a video posted to X on April 24 in which

two excavators can be seen destroying solar panels in the Christian border town of Debel, where a photo last month showed a soldier taking what appeared to be an axe to a statue of Jesus.

In a statement to NBC News that can be safely filed under the can’t-make-this-shit-up category, the Israeli army “said…that the damage to the solar panels was not in line with its values, and that disciplinary measures had been taken.” Here’s praying that corporate journalists might someday have the balls to take Israel to task on more existential matters.

Here’s how Lee Raymond’s hometown paper, the Houston Chronicle, remembered him Thursday morning.

The Texas paper was more direct, and more accurate, than anyone else covering the story. The Times obit gave top billing to the fact that he led the acquisition of Mobil and “cut costs relentlessly;” the Wall Street Journal waited till paragraph six to note that he was “openly skeptical” of climate science (much like The Wall Street Journal). But the Chron had it right—when people think back in a hundred years or a thousand or ten thousand, the one thing worth remembering about him will be the crucial role he played in holding back action on climate change.

I’m going to recount the lowlights of the story here, and add one that gets very little notice in the obituaries, but that ties directly to the ongoing crisis.

Raymond was a research engineer who spent his whole career at what was then the world’s largest company. He joined its board in 1984, already a leading candidate for CEO, which means he was near the top during the 1980s, the period when (as we now know thanks to great investigative reporting) the company’s scientists correctly identified the dangers of global warming and linked them directly to Exxon’s products. That research, as Inside Climate News reported in 2015,

laid the groundwork for a 1982 corporate primer on carbon dioxide and climate change prepared by its environmental affairs office. Marked “not to be distributed externally,” it contained information that “has been given wide circulation to Exxon management.” In it, the company recognized, despite the many lingering unknowns, that heading off global warming “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”

Unless that happened, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered,” the primer said, citing independent experts. “Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.”

This was, of course, the same decade when Jim Hansen was carrying out his groundbreaking research at NASA (and I was writing The End of Nature). Exxon, as it turns out, was on precisely the same wavelength. Here’s, to me, one of the great historical what-ifs: Imagine that, on the night that Hansen made his remarks to Congress, an Exxon exec like Raymond had gone on the evening news and told Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, or Peter Jennings that “our research shows pretty much the same thing.” No one would have accused Exxon of climate alarmism; instead, we would have gotten to work as a civilization.

Instead, they chose denial. And it was Raymond who played a lead role, as Exxon helped form the Global Climate Coalition, first of the obfuscation fronts. He became the spokesman for anti-science in many ways: In 1997, as the world approached the first global climate talks in Kyoto, he gave what may be a speech second only in importance to Hansen’s original testimony. Speaking in Beijing to the Worl Petroleum Congress, he contended that the world was cooling, that there was no way to know if carbon dioxide was to blame, and that in any event “it is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now.”

These, of course, were exactly the things Exxon’s scientists had told them were not true. Indeed, they’d been explicitly warned that

man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.

And Exxon had believed its scientists. As a 2015 Los Angeles Times report made clear, they’d begun building drilling rigs higher to counteract rising sea levels, and plotting out what parts of the Arctic might be prime for oil drilling once they’d helped melt the ice.

Exxon, more than any single force on Earth, made sure that the planet didn’t address climate change while it had time. Given what it knew in the 1980s Exxon could have had a head start on building and owning the solutions like sun and wind. But, as one of Raymond’s successors said two years ago, that didn’t happen because “we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders” with clean energy. And he was right. You can make money putting up solar panels, but you can’t make Exxon money, because the sun delivers energy for free. It doesn’t offer the same scope for greed.

And greed was the word here. For his role in helping wreck the Earth’s climate system, Exxon paid him $686 million, or $144,573 a day, during his tenure as CEO. His retirement package was $400 million.

And even when he finally left Exxon in 2005 he continued on doing damage—this is the often overlooked part of his story. He was the lead independent director at JP Morgan Chase, which had been the Exxon house bank, and which, as I chronicled for Rolling Stone in 2020, became the fossil fuel industry’s biggest lender—the “doomsday bank.”

Many of us ginned up a campaign to get him off that board (along with Rev. Lennox Yearwood and other protesters, and with Jane Fonda looking in through the glass windows, I was arrested at a DC Chase branch to help kick off that fight in 2020). It was eventually successful—that summer he was demoted as lead director, and left the board in December.

But Raymond’s legacy lives on. Just as Exxon has gone on pumping out oil (and climate nonsense), Chase has kept pumping out money. As the brand new edition of the Banking on Climate Chaos report pointed out last week, Chase remains the No. 1 financier of fossil fuels around the world, besting Mitsubishi, Citigroup, and Bank of America; since 2021 they’ve pumped a quarter-trillion dollars into this effort. Asked by The Guardian for a comment, a Chase spokesman said, “As one of the world’s largest financiers of energy, we support the full range of energy solutions and technologies, with a focus on reliability, affordability, security, and long-term resilience.” That kind of bland corporate-speak hides an almost unimaginable multitude of sins.

Like a great many Christians, I don’t believe a loving God consigns people to eternal damnation. But I do believe that Lee Raymond, Exxon, and Chase have helped send the rest of us to a kind of hell. As Jeff Masters just reported:

The world recorded its highest burned area for any January-May during the past 15 years, with more than 150 million hectares burned globally—22% higher than the previous high set in 2020 and about double the recent average for this period. In the US, the burned area so far in 2026 has been the highest for at least the past 10 years—about double the 10-year average—according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• Is Donald Trump living in his personal fantasy world? For the 39th time in two months, he announces that a peace agreement is at hand in his and Netanyahu’s attack on Iran, only to have Iran deny his market-manipulating claims. Iran, he says, would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and disavow nuclear weapons—i.e., a return to the status quo ante bellum.

• U.S. Park Police, the D.C. fire department and members of the National Guard respond to large-scale etchings of the numerals “86 47” on the ‌grounds of the National ‌Mall. A spokesperson for the U.S. Interior Department described the markings as “deranged vandalism” and promised to “hold those responsible accountable.” Multiple emergency vehicles could be seen encircling the grass. A team of officers stood over brown patches in the grass, wearing gloves, and collected samples for testing from the grass with materials from a yellow case. Pedestrians were not permitted to walk on the grass, and a Park Service helicopter circled overhead.

• An man facing death by nitrogen gas is spared as the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to set aside a lower-court ruling that found the method is unconstitutionally cruel, issuing a brief order that came well after the hour Alabama originally planned to initiate Jeffery Lee’s execution, which violated the jury’s verdict.

MERCH STORE: https://www.deprogram.live

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JamarlThomas

LIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow

SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/2kdFlw2w8sSPhKI8NRx8Zu

APPLE MUSIC: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deprogram-with-ted-rall-and-jamarl-thomas/id1825379504

The post Plan 39 From Outer Space | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Gaza requires urgent international attention.

What is happening in the besieged and devastated strip at the moment by far exceeds an unfolding humanitarian disaster; it is a calculated geopolitical reshaping. Israel is actively executing a plan to permanently occupy the vast majority of Gaza, with consequences that require little elaboration considering what we already know about the ongoing genocide.

Currently, much of the international debate centers on a single official: Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov. The former United Nations special coordinator has been designated by the United States as the executive director of the Trump administration’s newly established ‘Board of Peace’—an international council founded to oversee the implementation of Washington's 20-point Gaza road map.

The issue, however, is much bigger than a single Washington-backed bureaucrat. A growing number of Palestinians and political analysts accuse Mladenov of manufacturing the very conditions that continue to obstruct progress on the agreement’s transition to its second phase.

With nearly the entire population of Gaza living in sub-standard tents and surviving on the meager rations permitted through Israeli checkpoints, it is the highest form of immorality to demand political concessions in exchange for basic sustenance.

Under the framework, the official transition to this second phase—which President Donald Trump and the Board of Peace declared to have begun in January 2026—demands sweeping, one-sided Palestinian concessions, most notably the total disarmament of armed factions.

This demand is a recipe for the failure of the entire project, especially given that Israel has completely failed to implement the most basic requirements of the agreement's first phase. It has refused to halt its routine military incursions, has failed to withdraw its forces to the originally mandated "Yellow Line" demarcation, and continues to deny entry permits to the technocratic committee slated to assume civil governance of the Strip.

Mladenov's insistence on Palestinian disarmament before the agreement can advance—without a single guarantee of Israeli compliance—conveniently flips the narrative. It cynically reframes systematic starvation and the blockade of medical and construction supplies as a Palestinian failure to honor commitments.

In reality, Mladenov holds no real cards; he is merely a cog in a larger machinery controlled by Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister has made it explicitly clear that he has no intention of following any peace road map, planning instead for the permanent incremental takeover of Gaza.

Speaking at a conference in an occupied West Bank settlement on May 28, Netanyahu explained his strategy with total clarity, abandoning all diplomatic doublespeak: "We are currently squeezing Hamas; we now control 60% of the territory of the strip—you know this. We were at 50, we moved to 60. My directive is to move to..." he said, pausing as an audience member shouted "100!"

Netanyahu smiled and responded: "Let's go step by step. First of all, 70. Let's start with that. We're pressing them from all sides, we'll deal with the remnants."

This is the actual blueprint of the Israeli government, declared openly to domestic audiences. The admission was so brazen that even US Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed frustration at Netanyahu's candor. Testifying before Congress on June 2, Rubio remarked, “We have a plan—it doesn’t call for that,” referring to further Israeli territorial expansion.

Yet, Rubio quickly reverted to Washington's standard line: “And at the end of the day, we understand that what we want, and I think what the Israelis would ultimately want, is a Gaza that is governed by a non-Hamas entity.”

While the immediate priority for Palestinians is not governance but lifesaving food, clean water, medicine, and basic survival, Netanyahu and Rubio view the entire crisis through a political lens. The US-Israeli plan is predicated on achieving, through diplomatic strangulation and engineered famine, what they failed to fully achieve through military might.

A rare, decisive answer came from United Nations spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, who summed up the UN position plainly: “One hundred percent of Gaza should be for the Palestinian people." The problem, however, is that the UN’s rhetoric is backed by no real enforcement mechanisms.

The international community has walked directly into a trap, outsourcing the future of the Gaza Strip to the Trump administration and its Board of Peace. Even the designated technocratic committee has been rendered entirely irrelevant, excluded from a decision-making process left solely to diplomats beholden to the White House.

The situation on the ground remains catastrophic. Since the fragile, heavily compromised ceasefire took effect on October 10, regular Israeli violations and airstrikes have killed nearly 1,000 Palestinians and wounded thousands more—the vast majority women and children. When added to the horrific toll of the initial two years of war, the official number of Palestinians killed has surpassed 73,000, with over 173,000 injured.

Furthermore, credible epidemiological studies and medical journals have concluded that the true death toll is vastly higher.

With nearly the entire population of Gaza living in sub-standard tents and surviving on the meager rations permitted through Israeli checkpoints, it is the highest form of immorality to demand political concessions in exchange for basic sustenance.

Netanyahu's "step-by-step" annexation does not hinge on what Palestinian factions decide to do; his expansionist timeline is shaped independently of Palestinian compliance.

Arab, Muslim, and allied nations must fundamentally shift their diplomatic strategy. They must firmly insist on completely delinking humanitarian aid from the future governance or demilitarization of the Gaza Strip.

Starvation cannot be tolerated as political leverage for war criminals. Netanyahu is emboldened by a history of international impunity, speaking openly of expanding his military footprint regardless of the consequences of such action.

The international community must remind Israel’s government that the survival of millions of Palestinians cannot be held hostage to the political ambitions of an extremist coalition.

Recent reporting has confirmed what many working people already feel every day: Companies are using personal data to decide the lowest wage someone will accept. What working people call exploitation, Silicon Valley calls innovation.

The seven largest gig platforms in the United States—Amazon Flex, DoorDash, Favor, Instacart, Lyft, Shipt, and Uber—are using data that tracks how long its users stay on an app, what jobs they accept, and how urgently they need income. This algorithm calculates what the employers can pay to get the job done at the lowest rate individuals will accept.

Not what their labor is worth. Not what is fair.

Gig work was sold as a way to make extra money on a flexible schedule. But that’s not what it looks like today. Nearly 1 in 4 people in the US now participate in some form of gig or freelance work. What was supposed to be a side hustle has become a main source of income for one-third of gig workers.

This isn’t just about gig work. It’s about whether we allow companies to rewrite the rules of the economy—or whether we demand a system that works for the people in it.

As layoffs rise and wages fall further behind the cost of living, more people are being pushed into this kind of work to keep up. Black people and other workers of color, who tend to be more dependent on this type of work than white people, have been especially hard hit. But these unfair practices can impact all workers.

“Under surveillance wage systems, different people may be paid different wages for largely the same work, and individual workers cannot predict their incomes over time,” the Washington Center for Equitable Growth reports. “Not only has pay for app-controlled jobs decreased over time,” but “people who work longer hours are paid less per hour.”

This is what happens when an economy limits options for some people, then funnels them into systems that take advantage of that lack of choice. Now they’re going even further—using data to predict what some experts call a “desperation wage,” or the lowest amount someone will accept based on their behavior.

And it’s not just happening in gig work. Similar systems are being used to set rent and adjust prices for goods and services in real time. The same idea applies: Use data to figure out the worst price or wage someone will tolerate, then charge just below that or pay just above it.

When you combine higher unemployment, lower wealth, and fewer protections, you get a system where some people have less room to say no—and are more likely to be taken advantage of. The message is simple: Take it or leave it. And for many, leaving it isn’t an option.

That’s why we’re starting to see pushback. Working people are demanding more transparency. Some are organizing. New models are emerging that promise fairer pay and more control. But these changes are happening because people are speaking up—not because companies chose to act.

So what needs to happen next is clear. If companies are going to use algorithms to shape pay and access to work, those systems should be transparent. People should know how their pay is calculated.

Workers should be able to see how much of each transaction goes to them compared with how much the company keeps. There should be rules that prevent companies from using personal data to quietly lower pay for some people while others earn more for the same work. And working people should have the ability to organize and push back.

Because this isn’t just about gig work. It’s about whether we allow companies to rewrite the rules of the economy—or whether we demand a system that works for the people in it. Technology should make work more stable, more fair, and more predictable. Right now, it’s doing the opposite. And that’s not inevitable.

It’s a choice.

We all know that Trump obsesses over attendance numbers for the big national events he throws. Which is why it’s curious that he has made clear half the country — Democrats — are not invited to the nation’s big 250th birthday party this summer.

The post No Show 250 appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In the midst of this week’s round of strikes and counterstrikes between the Trump administration and Iran, Iran’s IRIB News reported that on Tuesday the US had struck a reservoir and a water tank serving the inland town of Kuhestak as well as the port of Sirik on the Persian Gulf Coast.

Sirik is a small town of a few thousand inhabitants that serves as the capital for Sirik district of Hormozgan Province. It is not far from Bandar Abbas, the capital of the province. There is allegedly a base of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps at Sirik, which is likely why the town was targeted. (H/t to BBC Monitoring for some of these Iran media links.)

If, however, the strike on the water tanks was deliberate, it was a war crime. Iranian media alleged that it deprived 20,000 people of drinking water in 113°F (45°C) temperatures and 60% humidity. This affected men, women, and children. The reservoir held 70K cubic feet of water and the water tank 17K cubic feet. Drinking water was unavailable for 12 hours.

Fatemeh Jarareh, the female representative in parliament of Hormozgan Province, called the attack a “blatant war crime against humanity.” She accused what she called the “terrorist army” of the United States of deliberately targeting key infrastructure necessary to human life and livelihood.

Quite apart from the question of whether it is a war crime to hit civilian water facilities, it is a very dangerous move.

The government said that repair crews restored water transmission lines in 12 hours and said that over the following 24 hours drinking water would stabilize.

During the 39-day all-out war in March, Iran asserted that the US or Israelis had damaged a desalinization plant providing drinking water to residents. Bahrain likewise said that a desalinization plant providing water to 30 villages had been damaged by an Iranian drone.

Quite apart from the question of whether it is a war crime to hit civilian water facilities, it is a very dangerous move. If Iran felt its inhabitants were systematically being deprived of water, it could likely take out all the desalization plants in the territories of its Arab Gulf neighbors, without which none of those countries could survive more than three days. That is how long it takes for renal failure from lack of water to kick in and kill you; it is why rescue teams after an earthquake gradually stop searching in the rubble for survivors after 36 hours, since the likelihood of someone surviving longer than that without water is low.

Some 80% of water in the United Arab Emirates, a country of 11 million, comes from desalinization plants. Their total destruction would provoke a vast exodus of the population and raise questions about the survival of the country, where 88% of the residents are non-citizen migrant workers and expatriates. In turn, the Emirates’ ability to export petroleum would be drastically impeded, hurting the whole world.

Hence, the Trump administration should think long and hard before hitting such civilian infrastructure in Iran. The whole Gulf region is full of glass houses, and if they are all shattered, the energy crisis would be unprecedented.

Last week, Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, that would have cut $150 billion from the president’s proposed military budget. While it didn’t pass, 12 members of the House Armed Services Committee voted against advancing the bill, signaling a shift from decades of bipartisan support for unchecked spending on weapons and war.

Now the NDAA goes to the Senate, where resistance to unchecked military spending is also on the rise. The Senate Appropriations Committee has repeatedly delayed action on the budget because of disagreements between the parties over top-line numbers. This pushback is even more critical as the war in Iran again escalates. Congress must say no to more war and war funding.

The majority of people in the US don’t want endless wars that line the pockets of military contractors while making life harder for everyone else. If more lawmakers start following the will of their constituents, it could point the way to a brighter and safer future for all.

This year, the military budget soared past $1 trillion dollars, paid for by cuts made to Medicaid, food assistance programs, infrastructure funds, and more. Overall, nearly 72% of all discretionary spending went to pay for the military, homeland security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other related programs. The National Priorities Project estimated that on Tax Day this year, the average taxpayer paid over $4,000 for weapons and war.

A $1 trillion military will not save us from climate change, overdose deaths, or industrial accidents. It won’t even save us from another military.

If President Donald Trump has his way, those numbers will be even higher next year. The presidential budget released this April seeks $1.5 trillion for military spending.

The $500 billion increase exceeds the total combined amounts the US spent in 2025 on public health, education, job training, transportation, agriculture, and vital safety net programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and childcare. And even these massive cuts to lifesaving social programs are not enough to cover the massive proposed military expenditure. Trump’s budget would drive the country further into debt.

The president, the weapons company lobbyists, and most of Congress want us to believe that this money is a generational investment in our security. They want us to believe that there is no price too high for safety. But a $1 trillion investment in weapons won’t keep us safe in the same way that a $1 trillion investment in umbrellas won’t keep us dry in the ocean. The problems we face—in our communities, in the United States, and globally—require solutions that reduce violence rather than compounding it.

Over the past quarter century the US has spent trillions of dollars on wars and militarism, but global and national risks have only increased. The post-9/11 "War on Terror" resulted in up to 5 million direct and indirect deaths, yet the Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan, the destabilization of Iraq directly contributed to the creation of ISIS, and in 2025 there were more violent conflicts between states than any time since WWII.

The Trump administration’s unprovoked war against Iran is just the latest example of the spectacular failures of military force. While the US was able to quickly destroy key Iranian infrastructure, months later they are now in a weaker negotiating position than at the outset. The cost of continued war—both in dollars and lives—is unconscionable.

The US military is the most expensive, lethal, and technologically advanced the world has ever seen, and US military spending is more than 60 times that of Iran. The idea that we can, and should, resource an enormous military prepared to fight both Russia and China simultaneously is preposterous. Continuing to throw trillions of dollars away on weapons that we hope to never use in wars that we can never win makes no sense. Peace, not war, requires generational investments in security. Getting there will require courageous action from our elected officials.

A $1 trillion military will not save us from climate change, overdose deaths, or industrial accidents. It won’t even save us from another military. It is time for a new paradigm. Real generational security comes when people are housed, fed, healthy, and have hope for a better future.

This is not a call to turn inward, but to invest in international cooperation rather than international destruction. Addressing global problems through international investment isn’t a utopian vision. Spending even a fraction of the military budget to address the root causes of poverty and conflict would have a massive domestic and global impact. If the US reduced military spending, other countries would be likely to follow, freeing up global resources to meet human needs.

Internationally, the World Food Program estimates that it would cost $93 billion per year to end world hunger by 2030. Ending extreme global poverty would cost approximately $300 billion per year—a fraction of the US military budget. At home, the child tax credit gave $2,000 per child to all US families with children. That program could be continued with less than half of the increase sought for the military.

There are some signs of hope. Recent war powers votes have received far more support, across party lines, than previous ones. While congressional efforts to reign in military spending face steep odds of passing, growing pushback shows us that a different path is possible. Refusing to rubber stamp a deadly status quo takes courage and resolve. Congress must vote against military spending increases; continue to advocate for spending cuts; and invest in diplomacy, development, human rights, and human needs. That is where real security can be found.

SpaceX goes public Friday at around $1.7 trillion. Elon Musk owns enough SpaceX stock that, on top of everything else he holds, Musk becomes the first person in human history to cross the trillion-dollar line. The coverage will be all hype. Unprecedented. A genius. Where’s he going next? What does the future hold?

It wasn’t like Elon Musk invented some amazing capacity. He didn’t do something transformational for the world. He didn’t harness electricity. He didn’t invent the transistor. He didn’t invent rocket flight. He didn’t invent satellite technology. He didn’t even make them much better.

What he did was learn how to game the system. He took what America built through generations of investment and generations of hard work and turned it into a profit center for himself. He took American loans, American intellectual property, American space, American airwaves, and turned them into a wealth engine for one man.

In a purely capitalist system, SpaceX wouldn’t exist. It would’ve died in 2008. The company was broke, three rockets had failed, and Musk was burning the last of his money. Then NASA wrote a $1.6 billion contract.

Tesla exists because of a half-billion-dollar loan from the American government, handed over in 2010 when the banks wouldn’t touch him. The deal gave the government the right to buy three million shares of Tesla stock at a locked-in cheap price. That was our cut if the company took off. The company took off, and Musk rushed to pay the loan back nine years early, because under the deal, early repayment canceled the government’s shares. They were worth about $270 million the week he wired the money, and Tesla’s stock has multiplied many times over since. The press called the repayment a triumph. We got our money back with a little interest, and he kept the stock the American people were due.

SpaceX is the same story just bigger. In a purely capitalist system, SpaceX wouldn’t exist. It would’ve died in 2008. The company was broke, three rockets had failed, and Musk was burning the last of his money. Then NASA wrote a $1.6 billion contract for cargo runs to the space station, and that money built the Falcon 9. The people who study this industry say it plainly. NASA is what saved the company when it was on the brink of bankruptcy.

And NASA by then was an agency we’d been squeezing since the 1980s. We decided, instead of doing things ourselves as a nation, instead of demanding the lion’s share of what we’d developed over sixty years of rocketry and satellites and spaceflight, that we’d hand it off to billionaires and let them compete for the contracts. SpaceX now holds around $22 billion in federal contracts. Across the whole Musk empire the public money runs closer to $38 billion. The launch pads, the airwaves, the satellites overhead, the early customers, the technology our space program spent two generations developing. He built on all of it, and we kept no share of it.

I’m not saying SpaceX is bad at rockets. The rockets work. But outbidding Boeing and Lockheed, the most bloated contractors in America, is a low bar, and he cleared it with technology our space program developed, on contracts we paid for. And China is proving right now that none of it was one man’s miracle. They’re behind on reusable rockets and behind on launch rates, sure. They’re also closing fast, as a national project, with state companies and state-backed startups and satellite constellations in the tens of thousands. Getting to space is something a country can decide to build and own. We decided to hand it to one man instead.

The rest of his fortune sits in Tesla, and that deal is even worse. Tesla is worth more than every other major carmaker on the planet combined. Toyota, BYD, GM, Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, Mercedes, BMW, all of them together, still short of Tesla. Plenty of those companies earn more actual profit than Tesla does. Toyota alone makes several times Tesla’s money. The valuation isn’t a measure of the business. It’s an obvious bubble, one of those bubbles people will look back on like the tulip bubble and ask how anybody ever believed it.

SpaceX now holds around $22 billion in federal contracts. Across the whole Musk empire the public money runs closer to $38 billion. The launch pads, the airwaves, the satellites overhead, the early customers, the technology our space program spent two generations developing. He built on all of it, and we kept no share of it.

Meanwhile the tariffs are the only reason Chinese carmakers aren’t whipping us in our own market. BYD passed Tesla as the biggest seller of electric cars in the world, and it makes a good one for around ten thousand dollars. Musk has admitted himself that without trade barriers, Chinese automakers would demolish most of their rivals. The tariff wall protects the whole American industry, and Tesla is its single biggest beneficiary. We’re babying these companies instead of pushing them to get better, and we’re not taking a dime of ownership while we do it.

They’ll tell you the wall is national security. It isn’t. We haven’t kept our means of production. We don’t make enough steel even for ourselves, and that’s while we’re barely building anything. Start building at scale again and we’d be importing even more of it. We can’t build transmission lines or move energy around this country. We’ve lost the machine tools. We shipped the means of production to China and other countries, and now we’re handing what’s left to a handful of billionaires. National security would be making these companies better. It would be forcing them to share the patents we paid to develop. It would be forcing a universal charger. It would be making them earn their money through quality production that competes on the open market, not through bubble valuations.

Then they handed him our retirement accounts. When a company joins a major stock index, every fund tracking that index has to buy it. Nobody decides the company is worth the money. The rule says buy. So every two weeks tens of millions in paychecks pour in on autopilot. SpaceX wanted that money sooner than the rules allow, because Elon Musk is special, apparently. His advisers pushed the index providers to change the rules, and two of the three folded. Nasdaq rewrote its policy so a company like SpaceX can join in 15 trading days instead of three months. Russell cut its wait to five. Somewhere around $22 to $27 billion in automatic buying will hit a stock with almost no shares actually trading. The S&P 500, the biggest index of them all, refused. It said earn your way in, a company that loses money doesn’t qualify. One gatekeeper said no. Two said yes. The rules got bent for him, and that’s not speculation. It happened. One more handout, except this time the money is yours, pulled out of your paycheck and pointed at his stock whether the price makes sense or not.

We’ve watched this movie before. Amazon went a decade without real profits and the market funded it anyway, because everyone could see the government handing it advantage after advantage. Bezos planted the company in Washington State to dodge sales tax, and for twenty years Amazon skirted sales taxes across most of the country, a built-in discount on every order that local stores couldn’t match, because they had to charge the tax. It crushed them. Then cities lined up to hand the richest man alive billions more in breaks for a headquarters. We supported these guys, who then took everything and ran.

Now we’ve created a class of men who hold more wealth than many states. Musk holds more than many countries. That concentration gives one human incomprehensible power, and we will hand him more of it every year. We outsourced our production to China. Now we’re outsourcing our state itself to a few men, who just sub it back out to us.

Tax the oligarchy and the money flows back as rent to the same oligarchs, the medical ones, the housing ones, the tech ones, and we get nothing for it. No power, no stability, no better income. We get a company town as a national economy.

The answer is not a wealth tax. Tax Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg, pull the money into the government, push it back into broken systems, and you haven’t restructured a thing. Pull wealth from Musk and pour it into a healthcare system that already swallows a huge percentage of dollars before they reach a patient, and you don’t get better health or longer lives. You get more valuable healthcare companies. Pull it into housing allowances and down payment assistance, and you don’t get cheaper homes. You push the prices up, hand the gain to private equity firms that already own the housing, and make it harder for the next family that wants to own a home. A wealth tax spreads a little money around the top and leaves the same people owning the same things. It doesn’t move power. Tax the oligarchy and the money flows back as rent to the same oligarchs, the medical ones, the housing ones, the tech ones, and we get nothing for it. No power, no stability, no better income. We get a company town as a national economy.

The answer is ownership. Take back a stake in what was built with our money, our research, our protection. And before anyone says it can’t be done, Donald Trump has shown us it’s possible. His administration has taken a 10 percent stake in Intel, stakes in lithium and rare earth companies, and a golden share in US Steel. The taboo is broken. The government demanding equity for its support is now just a thing that happens.

But the golden share in US Steel is veto power with no money in it, a say with no stake. The Intel shares are also money with no say. None of it comes with the part that matters, which is input on where these companies go and what they do with the resources we let them use. We protect their intellectual property, most of which we developed. We protect their markets. We give them our military, our courts, our FBI, a stable country to get rich in. And what we’re getting back is poorer and sicker, with a shrinking share of the things that are ours.

Real public ownership means both. The profits and the say-so, together, the demands any investor would make. When the public builds the thing, the public owns a piece of the thing. Call it American Equity. We knew how to do this. The New Deal did it. The Arsenal of Democracy did it. The country that built the Transcontinental Railroad and the New York City subway did it. That system, the one Hamilton started with public credit behind American manufacturing, is the system China runs today. They took our playbook. We traded it for stock market rackets.

We can raise hospitals. We can send rockets into space. We can launch satellites, and we can do it for ourselves. There’s nothing particularly amazing about Elon Musk except his willingness to fleece the American people out of what’s theirs. So stop. Stop handing him the contracts. Strip the special treatment. Claw back the intellectual property and the advantages we built for him, and go to the moon ourselves again.

They stop existing because they fail to come together and remove the rot, the corruption, the inequality, and demand accountability from the people who’ve dodged it the longest. We’re at the part of the cycle where we take our stuff back, or we fail.

There’s a cycle to this. Countries in the spot we’re in generally stop existing. Not because they lack potential. Not because they have nothing worth producing. They stop existing because they fail to come together and remove the rot, the corruption, the inequality, and demand accountability from the people who’ve dodged it the longest. We’re at the part of the cycle where we take our stuff back, or we fail.

Today they crown the first trillionaire. They’ll say he earned it. The truth is simpler and uglier. He’s a welfare trillionaire. Half a billion in government loans, tens of billions in government contracts, sixty years of our research. We made him.

And a wealth tax won’t unmake him, because taxing the mega oligarch just funds the baby oligarchs. The only way to reclaim the power they’ve taken from us is to take back some of what’s ours, some of our capacity, some of our infrastructure, our share of the things we paid to build. Bernie Sanders said it this week, the public should own half of the big AI companies. We need to be thinking a lot more along those lines. If we want homes people can afford, healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt us, and work that pays, it starts with owning things again.

Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• The Trump administration’s policy of criminalizing criticism of Israel escalates dramatically as 8 people affiliated with the University of Michigan are charged with conspiring to threaten campus leaders and others into severing ties with Israel. An indictment unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, accused pro-Palestinian activists of crossing the line from campus protest to crimes that included threats and vandalism. The defendants face varying charges, but the indictment included federal counts of conspiracy to transmit threats, witness intimidation and destruction of property to prevent seizure.

• Rioters set houses, vehicles and a city bus ablaze in Belfast, torching neighborhoods after a video of a knife attack by a Sudanese asylum seeker went viral, igniting the latest anti-immigration violence to convulse the UK. Men in balaclavas and hoods shouted “foreigners out.” The riots spread from Belfast to towns across Northern Ireland and reached into Scotland and England by nightfall.

• The Canadian government introduces a new digital safety proposal that would require users to verify that they are at least 16 to access websites like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. A new regulator called the Digital Safety Commission of Canada would administer the proposed measures.

• U.S. airstrikes destroyed a drinking-water facility on Iran’s southern coast, near the Strait of Hormuz. Water was cut off to more than 20,000 people living in a town and villages nearby, where temperatures are above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure can constitute a war crime under international law.

• “Hopes were fading”: Unless lawmakers act by midnight Friday, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, will sunset. Democrats are angry, not at domestic spying, but that Trump named Bill Pulte, housing official without any national security experience, as acting director of national intelligence.

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The post Anti-Zionism Criminalized | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Since January 2026, when the intensification of US policies aimed at suffocating the Cuban people began, I have had the opportunity to travel to the island three times. Each time I return with my heart a little more broken, but also with a stronger conviction that we need to defend Cuba.

As a Mexican, I have received, on behalf of my compatriots, thousands of expressions of gratitude and hugs that the Cuban people send to the Mexican people. Every time I am there, I speak about the empathy and understanding we have toward Cuba, about the great efforts ordinary Mexicans make to bring a few kilos of rice to collection centers. And when I listen to Cubans, I learn a little more about the deep history that unites us.

But as a Mexican American and a binational activist, I also carry the weight of understanding the average US citizen. After many years of living in the United States, I continue to be surprised by how deeply the dream of democracy lives within people there, despite the fact that the country has been experiencing a deepening democratic crisis for years.

The deprivation imposed by Washington on the Cuban people for decades is now being reflected within the very core of the empire itself. It is suffered not only by migrants, Native Americans, Black communities, and the historically oppressed. Today, that same yoke has reached a white middle class that is beginning to feel the collapse of freedoms originally created for them.

Only the people of the United States—and no one else—can carry out the transformations their own country needs.

Fortunately, people in the United States can learn much here from Latin America—and Cuba in particular. They can learn from the region’s long history of struggle against Washington’s domination—and from the long construction of democratic processes from below that go far beyond just elections.

The resilience and social fabric the Cuban people have built are unique, just as unique as the oppression caused by the blockade the US government has maintained for all these decades. The United States needs public healthcare, free access to university education, and affordable housing. It needs to stop investing the billions it spends on war and instead invest that money in its own people. Cuba has done that.

The dream of democracy in any country is built beyond the ballot box alone, through projects that people themselves embrace and carry out. Today, the United States has the opportunity to prove to itself and to the world that the mistakes committed by its government do not reflect the desires of the US people. Today, as C. Wright Mills said 60 years ago, “Cuba’s voice must be heard in the United States, because the United States is too powerful and its responsibilities to the world and to itself are too great for its people not to hear the voices coming from the hungry world.”

The United States is preparing for another electoral cycle while its policies of war and interventionism throughout the Global South get reaffirmed.

At the same time, the island of 10 million inhabitants is preparing to continue resisting in the face of the possibility of an attack. In Cuba’s “Family Guide for Protection in Case of Military Aggression,” one can read recommendations for what to pack in a backpack: identification, a radio, candles, food, medicine, and toys to help distract children.

A recently published poll by the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a think tank based in Washington, DC, reveals that more than 60% of US citizens oppose a war with Cuba. At the same time, solidarity networks with Cuba in the United States—which have existed since the beginning of the blockade—are reactivating with renewed strength.

But can US citizens truly stop the madness their own empire imposes on them and on the rest of the world? Let us hope so, because only the people of the United States—and no one else—can carry out the transformations their own country needs. Only then will Cuba, the United States, Mexico, and the rest of the world be free.

Whoever designed President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department must be a fan of the Ocean’s Eleven movie franchise. The multi-act plot lines are strikingly similar: Put together a motley crew of risk takers; pick a seemingly invincible target rich in treasure; infiltrate the target; exploit its weaknesses; and get away with an improbable heist while the guards are asleep, distracted, or otherwise occupied.

Act One of Trump’s story arc began on January 29, when he and his eldest sons and the Trump Organization filed the lawsuit in federal district court in Miami. If only briefly, it seemed like the plan just might work. In 2019, an IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn leaked multiple years of the Trumps’ confidential tax records, along with those of over 7,000 other wealthy individuals, to The New York Times and ProPublica. The Trumps alleged in their complaint that the IRS and the Treasury Department had willfully failed to safeguard their tax information, and that each viewing of a news article mentioning the data constituted a separate $1,000 violation. The total—accounting for harm from embarrassment and reputational and financial injury—ran into the stratosphere.

There is no doubt that Littlejohn broke the law. In October 2023, he pleaded guilty to the unauthorized disclosures and was later sentenced to five years in prison.

But a few things stood in the way of a courtroom victory for Trump and his family: First and foremost, Trump filed his complaint in his individual capacity, placing himself, as the nation’s chief executive, on both sides of the litigation, with his former personal lawyer and now-acting Attorney General Todd Blanche representing the defense.

Neither Blanche nor Trump has backed away from the addendum to the settlement agreement reached in the Miami case that confers civil and criminal immunity on the president and his sons.

The arrangement came to the attention of various public watchdog groups that quickly filed amicus briefs in the case, decrying the litigation as collusive and riddled with irreconcilable conflicts of interest. Collusive litigation is illegal and, if proven, warrants dismissal and court-ordered sanctions. It could also conceivably lead to a future criminal prosecution for conspiracy to defraud the United States, in addition to other offenses. And, because Trump filed the case in his individual capacity, he would not be protected from future prosecutions by the immunity the Supreme Court accorded him two years ago for actions taken within the scope of his official duties.

Another problem for Trump: The case was assigned to Judge Kathleen Williams, a no-BS jurist appointed by Barack Obama. On April 24, Judge Williams ordered the parties to submit briefs on the collusion issue by May 20. The order specifically mentioned remarks made by Trump in press interviews that indicated he understood the nature of the case and that if the litigation were to be settled, he would be in the unique position of negotiating with himself, an admission that could prove critical in future investigations to establish criminal intent.

The order prompted Blanche, Trump, and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to open the second act of their Ocean’s Eleven ploy. Instead of filing the requested briefs, they submitted a request to voluntarily dismiss the case on May 18. Believing she no longer had jurisdiction over the case, Judge Williams granted the request.

Later that same day, Blanche announced that the lawsuit had been resolved with the DOJ entering into a “settlement agreement” that created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund to be drawn from the Treasury Department’s general “judgment fund,” created by Congress in 1956 as a permanent appropriation to pay litigation judgments entered against the United States. Under the agreement, Trump’s allies, including the January 6 insurrectionists, would be authorized to file claims for monetary compensation due to the alleged weaponization of President Joe Biden’s Justice Department against them. The claims would be adjudicated by a committee, selected by the attorney general, that would operate in secrecy with no public reporting requirements and whose members could be fired at will by the president.

The following day, Blanche tacked on an “addendum” to the settlement that ordered the IRS and the DOJ to permanently end all current and possible future tax audits and investigations into the Trump family that were or could have been pending at the time of the settlement. The actual language of the addendum is so nebulous, according to some analysts, that it could be read to immunize the Trumps from any future investigations, civil or criminal, initiated by any and all federal agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI.

The settlement prompted immediate and uncommon bipartisan criticism in Congress and outrage in the media. It also sparked additional litigation with new lawsuits aimed at blocking the anti-weaponization fund filed in Virginia and the District of Columbia. On May 29, District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema, sitting in Alexandria, Virginia, issued a temporary restraining order preventing the transfer of any money from the Treasury Department to the fund, and precluding the DOJ from taking any further action on the fund. The judge set a June 12 hearing date for oral arguments on the TRO.

Meanwhile, on May 27 in Miami, a group of 35 former federal judges filed a motion to reopen the case, urging Judge Williams to investigate whether the parties had perpetrated a fraud on the court. The judge responded swiftly with an order requiring Trump and his sons to submit a reply brief by June 12. This highly unusual step was necessary, she explained, in light of the “grievous allegations [raised by the 35 judges] that Plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed this litigation solely to avoid judicial scrutiny of a lawsuit that ‘was collusive from the start’ and was only filed to provide the imprimatur of legality for an unlawful settlement.”

We are now in Act 3 of the administration’s Ocean’s Eleven drama, the part where Trump and his minions back down and regroup. In a hearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee on June 2, Blanche said that the administration would not go forward with the anti-weaponization fund. On June 5, in filings in both the DC and Virginia cases, the DOJ put Blanche’s pledge in writing in motions requesting that both cases be dismissed as moot.

To date, however, neither Blanche nor Trump has backed away from the addendum to the settlement agreement reached in the Miami case that confers civil and criminal immunity on the president and his sons. That benefit, if implemented, would accord the Trumps even more protection than a presidential pardon. It may also have been the real goal of the litigation from the outset.

But the scheme is unlikely to succeed. Whether Judge Williams or her colleagues in DC and Virginia strike down the addendum, the granting of immunity remains an act of blatant corruption. There is no reason to believe a future Department of Justice in a Democratic administration will honor the grant. It may take a few years for the curtain to fall on the president’s Ocean’s Eleven heist, but in the end, he may emerge as the caper’s biggest loser.

Rock Solid Journalis

From teachers to the mothers searching for the forcibly disappeared, Mexico will be holding numerous, massive protests against the 2026 Men's World Cup as it kicks off in Mexico City on Thursday. This follows hundreds of protests and actions held over the past months as FIFA and governments prioritize tourists and corporations over urgent local needs and the environment.

The Scoreboard and Fouls

1. Take FIFA to forget that there is empire: The World Cup, being held in Mexico, the US, and Canada, will “unite the people,” said Canadian soccer player, Jonatha Osorio. “The world will be invading Canada, Mexico, and the USA with a big wave of joy and happiness,” said FIFA president Gianni Infantino, on a glitzy summer's evening in New York.

The same countries are also currently holding talks to renew the US-Mexico Canada (USMC) North American free trade agreement for another 16 years. The USMCA, an update to the North America Free Trade Agreement, is codified empire, depriving Mexico of corn sovereignty, institutionalizing the US' dominance and Mexico's structural and economic dependence, while sacrificing Mexico's rivers and soil to US and Canadian mines.

The giddy glamour of the World Cup spectacle is not unity but sedation, its stadium lights obscuring the negotiated details of imperialism and the unfestive realities of barbed borders, wage apartheid, and centuries of accumulated harm.

The US and Mexico are employing selective hospitality for the World Cup—or, more precisely, implementing racist and classist measures of city beautification for some, and social cleansing, deportations, raids, repression, and evictions for others.

2. A corporate exploitation bonanza: The soccer ball is the pretext. The World Cup is actually a giant advertising campaign—experiential marketing designed to drive sales for the corporate sponsors and move mass amounts of merchandise.

Behind those sales there is extreme exploitation. Adidas and the company Someone Somewhere paid 150 Indigenous Nahua embroiderers in Naupan, Puebla 36 pesos (US$2) an hour to hand-stitch the Mexico World Cup jersey—which Adidas then sold for 4,000 pesos. Diario Cambio reported that the women were also forced to abandon their traditional sewing techniques and use French knots and zigzag stitching instead to fill in commercial logos—a sidelining of cultural knowledge. The companies also promised the workers social security, in order to justify their "fair trade" branding (and pricing), but never kept the promise.

And while World Cup merchandise floods Mexico's street stalls and shops, an estimated 70% of Mexicans will watch the matches on television, with a corresponding increase in junk food purchases to go with that. Inside statidums, FIFA has prohibited the use of reusable water bottles in the three host countries, meaning spectators must buy water or soft drinks, generating huge amounts of rubbish as well as profits for corporations.

3. Coca Cup: The Cup trophy arrived in a Coca-Cola plane at Mexico City's airport in late February. The Mexican government rolled out the red carpet, with foreign affairs secretary Juan Ramón de la Fuente receiving the corporation and the trophy as though they were fellow officials. The trophy and massive Coca-Cola boards then toured the country, including a photo shoot at the sacred and world heritage site, Chichén Itza, and an appearance on the president's daily news show.

Coca-Cola has had advertising at every FIFA tournament since 1950. The promotions and sponsorship are a major part of its strategy to increase consumption during the games, and for acquiring new customers. Coca-Cola, along with companies like Pepsi and Nestle, extract (steal) over 133 billion liters of Mexico's water annually, and Mexico is already the biggest consumer of Coca-Cola globally, at an average of 163 liters of soft drink per person per year. The FIFA-Coca-Cola alliance is spoon-feeding more empire to a country it is already slowly poisoning.

4. Red carpet for tourists, disposable locals: The US and Mexico are employing selective hospitality for the World Cup—or, more precisely, implementing racist and classist measures of city beautification for some, and social cleansing, deportations, raids, repression, and evictions for others.

The US is promoting the World Cup as a way to "showcase" their "hospitality," while simultaneously violating a range of human rights with its closed border, Immigration and Customs Enforcement racial profiling, and illegal and cruel deportations.

In Mexico City over the past month, officials have also held anti-migrant raids, where police, the military, and migration authorities have detained people who are typically irregular precisely because of the closed border to the north and horrific wait times and unfair outcomes from Mexican institutions. Social cleansing for the World Cup also includes removing vendors from the area near the Mexico City stadium and homeless people from parts of the city where tourists are expected. Sex workers report that a new 17-kilometer bike lane built for the World Cup has left thousands of them without work, and local communities, who weren't consulted, said they support bike lanes, but this one cuts through bus stops, endangering pedestrians.

The government is also valuing Mexico's beautiful axolotls more as World Cup mascots than living creatures. It spent 62 million pesos adorning walls around the city and the light-rail with axolotl images, while nearby in Xochimilco, the animals are endangered due to contaminated runoff and public works.

Further, the government is staging Day of the Dead celebrations in June just for tourists, while erecting massive metal perimeters around Mexico City's main square. There is a two-kilometer exclusion zone around the stadium that is causing huge difficulties for locals as well as stopping protesters and protecting the tourists and wealthy who can afford expensive stadium seats.

The government has adorned the light-rail train with axolotls for the World Cup, while the animal itself lacks care and protection. (Photo by Tamara Pearson)

5. Street soccer: "The streets are our soccer fields, and we assert our right to the city, to protest, and to freedom of assembly," said members of the Assembly for the Common Good and Against the War. And indeed, billions of dollars and corporate sponsorships aren't necessary for sport or fun. Known as cascaritas in Mexico—and by other names around Latin America and much of the Global South—informal and improvised soccer games played in parks, parking lots, and in the streets can be easy, free, and truly inclusive.

This soccer is played with a few backpacks or empty water jugs as goal posts, a hand-painted or chalk-drawn court, and an empty can or an old plastic ball. The name, cascaritas, comes from orange peal, because even an orange can be a ball—though it will eventually become quite beaten up and the peal will come off. When the objective is to have fun, any genders and ages can join in, only a few basic rules are followed, and even those watching are more involved, as they are the neighbors and friends of the players.

6. Protest, organizing, and community is what actually brings people together: Over the past few months, movements and collectives around Mexico have held hundreds of events protesting the World Cup and its direct impact, as well as using it to draw attention to the reality in the country, and beyond.

People have held soccer against genocide and for Palestine, feminist soccer, soccer matches against the looting of water and against gentrification with US President Donald Trump's head as a ball, soccer in San Pedro Xolostoc to promote community building, and soccer matches against a rubbish dump on Indigenous lands. In Jalisco, collectives held an Anti-World Cup People's Cascarita to denounce that while the state and national governments prepare for the World Cup, they aren't doing anything about the water crisis, housing, and disappearances. Various groups stood in front of the World Cup Watch to announce the formation of an Assembly for the Common Good and a series of anti-World Cup actions. And of course there have been countless actions for the forcibly disappeared, and the massive education worker strikes and marches—mentioned below.

For Thursday, families looking for the forcibly disappeared have called for a national protest, and will be joined by teachers, retirees, transport workers, small farmers, healthcare workers, and other movements. Already, participants in this protest have faced problems, with a contingent of 17 buses from Guerrero state of student teachers and parents of the 43 Ayotzinapa students that were forcibly disappeared, being stopped by police from reaching Mexico City, Monday.

"The ball is coming home, when will they?" activists painted in massive letters on the road in Mexico City, in front of a wall of posters for the 133,00 forcibly disappeared. Our goals are bigger than getting a ball in net. We want justice, and the day Mexico has that, there will truly be something to celebrate.

7. Safety for the World Cup, but not for women, Indigenous communities, activists, or journalists: Mexico announced that it will deploy almost 100,000 security forces (including police, military, and private security) to the three cities hosting the World Cup. The national government also approved US Armed Forces' entry into the country, to train and prepare Mexican forces for the World Cup. Meanwhile, no such resources are deployed to prevent or solve femicides—with an impunity rate of 95%—nor to clean our dead rivers, monitor workplace abuses, and so on.

8. Students and educators come last: The Mexican government initially announced a massive three-month-long school holiday to accommodate the World Cup schedule, by bringing forward the usual holidays by six weeks. Many teachers are only paid for classroom hours and struggle during holidays, while parents and carers would have had to seek childcare, and children would have missed out on significant learning. After much criticism, the measure was retracted.

Teachers have also gone on strike and threatened to stop the World Cup, holding protests, marches, road blocks, and more since mid May to demand pension rights, among other worker rights, which President Claudia Sheinbaum promised in her campaign but hasn't delivered. Instead, these protests have been blocked with hundreds of police and repressed with tear gas and rubber bullets, with one teacher losing his left eye and sight in the other, as a result. Protesting teachers used rope to tumble three giant statues of soccer players that the government had erected on a key road in Mexico City.

9. Complicit venues: The venue in Mexico City, Azteca Stadium (technically called Banorte), the largest in Latin America, is owned by Televisa via Grupo Ollamani. Last year, the government granted Televisa a water concession next to the stadium for 450 million liters a year—thereby illegally privatizing local public water, and causing water shortages for those nearby. Not only does Televisa own the stadium, but it and TV Azteca are the companies with transmission rights.

In Guadalajara, clandestine mass graves have been found near the Akron Stadium, where four matches will be played. In Guadalajara too, the government is employing heavy machinery to renovate and clean up the city in preparation for the World Cup, but there is no digging equipment available to help searchers find the thousands of forcibly disappeared.

Less than a week after American bombs started to drop on Iran in late February, evangelical pastors famously gathered in the Oval Office to lay hands on a president unilaterally executing a war. It remains an emblematic moment, one of the more clarifying silhouettes of our political mood now sweeping through digital spaces.

That image and many more like it circulated instantly around the country and the world lifting the veil of a bigger story that's gone under-reported: Christian nationalism reshaping the moral language of US foreign policy and endangering pluralist democracy, as the Oval Office is transformed into a quasi-liturgical space in which war is cast as divine sanction, one that is specifically hostile to American Muslims in important ways.

The consecration of a president by a covey of clergy (eyes closed and heads bowed) in the heart of a secular and multicultural democracy illuminates a political culture in which narrow religious narratives are permitted to exert greater influence on how foreign conflicts are imagined and justified in the American public sphere. In our current context, Iran is cast not simply as a strategic adversary but as an apocalyptic antagonist that must be defeated because it is God’s plan. In other words, a major geopolitical event is refashioned into a scriptural caricature that prefigures war in the presumed theater of Armageddon.

What is hardly considered in our context at home is the domestic consequence of that caricature. The United States is not an evangelical nation, despite the bloated conceits of mega-churches, maudlin politicians, and rock star preachers. It is a pluralistic one—home to millions of Catholics, mainline Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, and nonbelievers. When a specific strand of evangelical eschatology is invited to run the theological grammar of American foreign policy, it shapes how Washington thinks about Iran, a Muslim country; and it also messages how Washington may think about the millions of American Muslims who share a religious tradition with the country being bombed and caricatured. The revival of Crusade-like language among those at the apex of American political and military authority thickens the margins of already marginalized and vulnerable communities. The San Diego mosque shooting, undoubtedly horrific, was one of several indicators of the rise of Islamophobia since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

An administration that reaches any agreement or capitulation with Iran must contend with a powerful domestic constituency for whom any settlement carries the implicit suggestion that the prophetic script was wrong.

These observations are not a call to police theological conviction. But those steering American power toward a militant democracy owe the public transparency about how directly end-times rhetoric about the Muslim world is shaping the foreign policy of a government that still boasts about its pluralism. It should also reckon with the domestic costs of the language of demonization, which places at great risk on the mosques and neighborhoods of American cities and towns.

This dynamic is precarious not merely because of the literalist theology itself but because of its digital velocity. Christian Zionist eschatology has interpreted Middle Eastern events through biblical end-times prophecy for decades; spread through pews, big tents, publishing houses, radio ministries, and cable television. What has changed is the infrastructure of mediation. Images that are dense with symbolism, such as those of evangelical pastors pressing their hands on a president whom they know is irreligious, traverse the globe, crossing denominational boundaries and reaching international audiences instantly.

Free of the guardrails of moral premises, algorithms now act as transnational religious authorities made not of flesh and intellect but of unseen codes, engineered to decide which images and voices are amplified and which are left behind. Algorithmic power does not operate with corrections—no scholarly review or denominational pushback. Its only function is to maximize attention. The meta-platform effect reinforces the frame that American power and divine providence are aligned, and that Iran and the larger Muslim world stand in opposition to both.

Evangelical militancy circulating through algorithmic feeds that reaches tens of millions is structural in a precise sense: Digital scale generates not merely larger audiences but a self-righteous zealotry that feeds on an epistemic apparition—rationales for war and self-defense narratives that present themselves as a well-reasoned, evidence-based mandate.

An administration that reaches any agreement or capitulation with Iran must contend with a powerful domestic constituency for whom any settlement carries the implicit suggestion that the prophetic script was wrong and that the prayers of the pastors who laid hands on the president spectacularly failed—an extraordinary sacred cost with no secular equivalent.

That cost is borne not only by strategists calculating political survival, but by every American citizen whose religious identity, ancestry, and moral convictions place them outside the religious consensus that currently holds the room and exposes their communities and institutions to the kinetic costs of pernicious public discourses.

Buried deep inside a 192-page intelligence authorization bill is Section 622, titled “United States-Israel Intelligence Sharing Enhancement.” It would require the president, acting through the director of national intelligence and as necessary the secretary of defense, to “expand and enhance intelligence sharing with the Government of Israel” on a list of subjects that encompasses almost every topic of intelligence interest in the Middle East.

The bill, put forward by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would prohibit any suspension, reduction, or limitation of such sharing “except on the basis of a specific and identifiable national security concern determined by the President.” Any such exception would require a report to Congress within 15 days detailing not only the reason for the change but also the categories of information involved. The same report would require an assessment of the anticipated impact on regional security and various other matters.

This proposal is one of several recent moves by those in Washington who carry the Israeli government’s water to keep the United States tied to Israel despite plummeting support for the country among the American public. The most salient form of US support to Israel has been more than $300 billion in economic and especially military assistance. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to get ahead of the declining public support and avoid embarrassing losses by suggesting it would be fine with him to phase out the military aid.

Israel’s strategy and that of its US supporters is now to rely on ties with, and support from, the United States that are not as salient as the military aid with its prominent price tag. The strategy includes forms of military integration that are less visible than congressionally appropriated grant aid and therefore less publicly accountable. Section 224 of a defense authorization bill currently in the House of Representatives embodies this form of integration.

Attacks that sabotage diplomacy are among the Israeli operations that might use shared US intelligence.

The mandating of intelligence sharing carries this strategy further by moving it into the shadowy world of relations between intelligence agencies. That world is even farther removed from public visibility and accountability than the defense integration, and even less likely to stimulate thoughts about American taxpayers’ money going to a foreign country. So far, Section 622 of the intelligence bill has received less attention than Section 224 of the defense bill.

The notion of legislating an intelligence liaison relationship in this way, with any foreign country, is bizarre. Liaison with counterpart foreign services, including exchanges of information, is an important but complex part of the intelligence business. The nature of a liaison relationship depends partly on the temperature of the overall political relationship with the country in question but also on other factors known mostly to intelligence officers. These include the collection requirements levied on them, their ability or inability to meet those requirements with national resources, their assessment of the foreign service’s ability and willingness to fill collection gaps, the role that any trading of information plays as quid pro quos in operational cooperation, and the risks of compromising intelligence sources and methods.

Moreover, no single liaison relationship exists in isolation. The US intelligence services need to consider possible implications for their other foreign relationships. For example, one generally does not share with country A information about country B if the United States has a relationship with B that is about at the same level as it has with A. Intelligence liaison involves a hierarchy of relationships, ranging from extensive cooperation with close allies to carefully limited ad hoc exchanges with adversaries. The intelligence community has a staff with the full-time job of monitoring and managing this set of relationships to prevent crossed wires. A congressional mandate regarding a single relationship increases the chance of crossed wires.

An irony is that the Congress considering this mandate is the same Congress that has in effect surrendered to the president its powers under Article I of the Constitution to set tariff rates and to decide whether to wage war. And yet, Section 622 would involve congressional micromanagement of a matter that by its nature needs to be the business of the executive branch and especially the intelligence agencies.

In intelligence, Israel is more of an adversary than an ally. Being an adversary in intelligence means indulging in the hostile act of espionage. Israel has a long record of conducting that type of hostile act against the United States. The best-known case involves the spy Jonathan Pollard, who stole such an overwhelming volume of US secrets that then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger stated to the court that sentenced Pollard that it was difficult “ to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the US, and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.”

When Pollard completed his prison sentence and parole in 2020, he was given a hero's welcome, led by Netanyahu himself, on his arrival at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. There was nothing noble in Pollard’s actions. Although he liked to say he was motivated by concern about Israel’s security, before selling his espionage services to Israel he offered to sell US secrets to three other countries and made the same offer to a fourth country even when spying for Israel.

The Israeli espionage threat to the United States has only intensified. Last week, NBC News reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency raised the threat level for such espionage, evidently a reflection mostly of US-Israeli differences over the Iran war. The New York Times quotes an official saying that Israeli intelligence operations aimed at senior US officials during the second Trump administration have become so aggressive as to be “unhinged.”

Any sensitive information, including intelligence secrets, shared with Israel entails a high risk of Israel passing it to other countries, including US adversaries. Israel has a long record of that, too, and not just because Israel probably passed some of the secrets Pollard purloined to the USSR, in exchange for Moscow allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate. Israel’s sharing of US-origin military technology with China has been an issue. That the partner may be a rogue state has not stopped Israel from military and technical cooperation, as demonstrated by its relationship with apartheid-era South Africa, which extended even to the development of nuclear weapons.

The risk of Israel passing sensitive US information to other states continues partly because Israel is hungry for cordial relationships—and especially establishment of new formal diplomatic relations—with any country willing to have such relations despite Israel’s continued subjugation of the Palestinians. Secrets from US intelligence would be very attractive to some of Israel’s partners or potential partners, and thus attractive to Israel as trading material. Those other countries may include China, with which Israel continues to have extensive technical cooperation, and Russia.

Even without any passing to third countries, Israel’s own use of much US intelligence is apt to be contrary to US interests and the interest of peace and security in the Middle East, and for many of the same reasons underlying the reduced popularity of Israel among the US public. Israel has started more wars and attacked more nations than any other country in the Middle East. In recent years it has inflicted more death and destruction on civilians through military operations than any other Middle Eastern state. It uses violence to seek regional hegemony and destroy Palestinian nationhood in ways that are inconsistent with US interests.

The current ill-advised war with Iran demonstrates the sharp divergence of US and Israeli interests. After being the principal influence on President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the war, Netanyahu’s government has been sabotaging efforts to end it. It currently is doing so mainly with relentless attacks in Lebanon that have killed thousands and displaced over a million people. The divergence of objectives was reflected in an expletive-laden phone call last week between Trump and Netanyahu that was mainly about those attacks.

Attacks that sabotage diplomacy are among the Israeli operations that might use shared US intelligence. The United States also will be blamed for aiding other violent Israeli operations because of the “enhanced” intelligence sharing, even if it were no longer paying for Israeli arms.

The supposed escape clause in Section 622 of the intelligence bill would in practice be so cumbersome as to be useless. The required report to Congress would dump the issue on Capitol Hill, where the Israel lobby would quickly depict it as a question of being for or against the security of Israel. The mandated intelligence sharing in the bill thus would tie the president’s hands and prevent any administration from using management of the intelligence liaison relationship as leverage to deter destructive conduct by Israel.

While little is reported about the role of the United Arab Emirates in provoking and supporting genocide in Sudan, the sheikdom is being celebrated at major sporting events here and abroad. I was reminded of this watching an interview with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani about the Knicks in the Athletic The New York Times sports website. During the interview I was alarmed to see he was wearing a sweater emblazoned with “Fly Emirates.”

I'm rooting for the Knicks and am a huge Mamdani fan, not only of the mayor but of his parents for many decades before Zohran caught my attention. It turns out that the sweater he was wearing is one a several outfits he wears in support of Arsenal, his favorite English Premier soccer team. During an Eid al-Adha celebration in the Bronx, he wore a kurta in the team’s blue and black colors. On it inscribed in large letters was “ Emirates—Fly Better.”

Emirates, the airline of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has its major hub in Dubai linking a vast network of connections to Asia and Africa from Europe and the USA. The NBA and Emirates entered into a multiyear global marketing agreement. It is the official airline and a major sponsor of the NBA. The league’s annual in-season tournament is now called the Emirates NBA Cup and referees at NBA games wear EMIRATES on the back of their uniforms.

Numerous international organizations and media have identified the UAE (aka The Emirates) as a major supplier of arms, training, mercenaries, and material support for the Rapid Support Forces. The New York Times stated that, “under the guise of saving refugees, the United Arab Emirates is running an elaborate covert operation to back one side in Sudan’s spiraling war—supplying powerful weapons and drones, treating injured fighters, and airlifting the most serious cases to one of its military hospitals, according to a dozen current and former officials from the United States, Europe and several African countries.”

Refugees International wants prominent companies and organizations like the NBA, Disney, and Warner Brothers to suspend their partnerships with the UAE until it has ended its armed support for the RSF.

Mayor Mandani while condemning Israeli genocide in Palestine wears apparel endorsing the foremost sponsor of genocide in Darfur. The UAE supplies arms, equipment, and finances for the Rapid Support Forces who have committed countless acts of brutality including genocide and systematic rape. United Nations’ Secretary General António Guterres described the Sudan civil war as a “crisis of staggering scale and brutality.” He told world leaders that “the external support and flow of weapons must end.”

US-based Refugees International “calls for immediate accountability for the United Arab Emirates as new evidence emerges that it continues to fuel genocide in Sudan.” The Conflict Insights Group (CIG) report, “BLOOD MONEY: How UAE Support and Foreign Mercenaries Enabled the Fall of El Fasher,” uncovers the extent of Emirati operational involvement in the war.

The investigation documented “how a UAE-backed network of Colombian mercenaries provided critical military support to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), enabling the October 2025 capture of El Fasher, North Darfur. Colombian mercenaries flew drones, trained soldiers, and were present during the RSF’s takeover of El Fasher, where the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has concluded that war crimes and crimes against humanity took place.” The report states that these mercenaries were associated with Global Security Services Group, a UAE company with documented ties to senior Emirati government officials, including links to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Donald Trump hosted a dinner for Sheikh Tahnoon on March 18, 2025. The sheikh met with the head of the CIA, various cabinet members, and CEOs including Jeff Bezos. The New York Times reported that leaked information indicated that Tahnoon sought Trump’s support “to shield the UAE from potential international sanctions and an ICJ (International Court of Justice) investigation into its alleged support for the RSF militia in Sudan.”

Ironically, on November 14, 2025, the BBC reported that “US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called for international action to cut off the supply of weapons to Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who are accused of mass killings in el-Fasher. At the end of a G7 foreign ministers meeting in Canada, Rubio said the RSF had committed systematic atrocities, including murder, rape and sexual violence against civilians.”

Refugees International wants prominent companies and organizations like the NBA, Disney, and Warner Brothers to suspend their partnerships with the UAE until it has ended its armed support for the RSF. Hopefully, in that spirit, Mayor Mandani will denounce the UAE and offer a mea culpa for wearing genocidal swag.

Cuba has been under a US trade embargo since the Eisenhower administration, although it was President John F. Kennedy who implemented a comprehensive embargo on all trade with Cuba. And while every subsequent administration has tried since to cause pain and suffering to the Cuban people for its support of a revolutionary government, it is the Trump administration that has made the collapse of the communist regime on the island a top priority by expanding sanctions against the island, blocking fuel deliveries, and threatening Cuba with military action.

Cuba is indeed on the brink and unlikely to survive since the inhumane and criminal actions of the second Trump administration have plunged the island into a deep humanitarian crisis.

In the interview that follows, Danny Shaw discusses President Donald Trump’s policy of strangling Cuba and offers an anatomy of the impact of the economic embargo on its people after having witnessed firsthand the existing conditions on the island. Danny Shaw is a scholar of Latin American and Caribbean studies and a longtime supporter of the Cuban revolution. He recently traveled across Cuba, where he documented for The Grayzone the harrowing conditions following the Trump administration's imposition of an energy blockade.

C. J. Polychroniou: US President Donald Trump has revived the Monroe Doctrine with a series of forceful actions in the Western Hemisphere, such as the attack on Venezuela, which resulted in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and conducting military strikes against fishing boats in the Caribbean. It may not be totally clear what’s driving the Trump administration’s gunboat diplomacy, but Cuba, which has endured perhaps the longest economic embargo in modern history, is next on the wannabe dictator’s hit list.

Danny, can you talk about the policy methods the second Trump administration has used in order to further isolate Cuba and, in the process, strangle its economy and its people?

Danny Shaw: On January 29, the Trump administration—the true spokesman of the billionaire class with global reach, as we’ve seen from Caracas to Tehran—took actions to completely shut down the Cuban economy. Threatening any country that sold oil to Cuba or continued to trade with them tightened the screws on an already long-existing, illegal, unilateral Economic War. Washington and their right-wing minions across the hemisphere also went after Cuban medical missions from Honduras to Jamaica, which brought much-needed foreign reserves for Cuba and most importantly afforded medical attention throughout the Americas and the world to marginalized populations. Ecuador and Costa Rica kicked out the Cuban embassies. The Trump administration has made it clear to the world: Any attempt to support the Cuban government will be severely criminalized. Concretely, this means Cuba is more isolated and desperate than it has ever been.

The US method of stoking “hunger” and “desperation” has completely crushed this fascinating, historical experiment in resistance and a people’s government.

We must see Trump’s energy blockade in the context of an economic blockade which has left Cuba on life support since 1991, the year the Soviet Union and the Socialist Block countries fell. Overnight, these measures cut Cubans’ average caloric intake in half. Periodically, under both Democratic and Republican presidencies, the US government has taken a scalpel to the Cuban economy. With a Gazaesque strategy of surgical precision, the State Department has cut off remittances, wiped out tourism, and penalized any foreign company that did business with Cuba. January 29 was yet another inflection point of what has truthfully been an ongoing “special period” and is now proving to be a death sentence for many Cuban families. Now the FBI and Homeland Security are going after those of us who have brought humanitarian aid to Cuba.

Every word I share, including my quotation of hungry and dispirited Cubans, has to be seen within the context of a 67-year-old war on a country that has sought to be sovereign from empire. As an ethnographer, an international affairs analyst for Cuban and Venezuelan television since 2014, and someone building fluency in Cuban Spanish for over three decades, I have had a lot of intimate contact with Cubans, their opinions, and their struggles. We have to go back to the original State Department memorandum as laid out by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Mallory on April 6, 1960:

..it follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

I quoted the ruling class’s thinking at length because that is precisely what has been happening in Cuba now since at least 1991. The US method of stoking “hunger” and “desperation” has completely crushed this fascinating, historical experiment in resistance and a people’s government. What I witnessed in Cuba in February, March, and April of this year was apocalyptic.

C. J. Polychroniou: The Trump administration forced a leadership change in Venezuela, but it is debatable whether there has also been a regime change. However, the plan for Cuba seems to be regime change even though its government is not doing anything to threaten the United States. Why is Trump after regime change in Cuba and to what end? Whose interests is he really serving?

Danny Shaw: Trump is the ultimate distraction. Like all billionaire bubble boys, there are no consequences for his lies, threats, and general clownishness. But behind the bombastic, arrogant billionaire are the true global power brokers, a small group of 2,800 billionaires who seek to preside over humanity’s destiny. They use Trump as their spokesman to carry out a fascist global agenda that was thought to be impossible prior to 2016 when he first came into power.

The War on Cuba and all states who represent any type of resistance—China, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Palestine, Russia etc.—is designed to convince us again and again of “the end of history.” The idea that cowing to the billionaires and soon-to-be trillionaires is inevitable.

The corporate media has long presented “Cuba” as a “failed socialist state.” This serves the empire’s ideological interests. They can showcase this “miserable island,” stripped of all contexts, and show this horrible place on CNN and Fox hemorrhaging their own people. Millions of Cubans are dying and migrating. Even before this crisis, the most extreme ever, the Cuban population shrank by 1.4 million between 2020 and 2024. The capitalist media can then propagandistically contrast this reality with a mirage of extreme abundance and excess that they parade in front of our faces through their ideological apparatuses. Think social media, Hollywood, the mainstream media etc.

We are all focused on US drones, bombs, and boots on the ground, but the invasion has already arrived.

The other interest the US has in Cuba is of course economic. The Cuban state has been the ultimate arbiter of questions of foreign trade and investment and an obstacle to unfettered penetration by private capital. Trump, his business partners, and cronies will cash in on land grabs, mineral deals, and the buying of shorefront hotels. Cuba has long had a big tourist economy that they can cash in on.

So these are some of their motivations. But I think your question is an interesting one that I have sat with for decades.

Truthfully, the Empire would only have to blow and the Cuban government would fall. In terms of being able to provide for and defend the Cuban people, the Cuban government fell long ago, arguably in 1991.

Private property is now ascendant in Cuba and has been arguably since 1991. Whatever leadership that is there now, though they put out daily patriotic statements, is not the leadership of Fidel, Che, and Camilo that we in the Western left came to love and defend since 1959. What I have seen over the past 31 years was a people left to fend for themselves. The ethos and general mindset in Cuba is not “Patria o Muerte” and “Venceremos,” (“Homeland or Death” and “We Shall Overcome”), the historic slogans of the Revolution; it is the “Law of the Jungle” and “Every Man For Himself.”

While leftist tourists maintain a glorified, outdated image of this museum of socialism, another mentality already reigns over Cuba, especially among the two generations born into the special period. For example, in the province of Sancti Spiritus I stayed with a family that was relatively stable. The father was a retired track coach and the mother a retired physical therapist. The son plays professional basketball in Brazil and, at 6 feet 9 inches, is one of the tallest Cubans in the country. They have given a plate of food to two elderly neighbors, Sonia and Francisco, for years now. They can no longer afford to do so as they can barely feed themselves and their immediate family. Sonia and Francisco are now hungry and malnourished. They will soon die, two more anonymous victims of this macabre US foreign policy. But who will record their deaths? Who will know their names? The local officials will just record that they died of old age.

And this happens everyday now in Cuba. Generalized hunger has become mass malnutrition, and everyday that passes there is more death. Many Cubans say there is already starvation in the most historically neglected areas like Guantanamo and Las Tunas.

So I think being able to point a finger and enact laws in Florida about "commemorating the victims of communism” serves the billionaires' interests. This begins to explain why they have sadistically sought to cause so much suffering in Cuba.

C. J. Polychroniou: As you already pointed out, you were recently in Cuba and traveled throughout the island. Describe the actual conditions that you encountered.

Danny Shaw: Let me take you deeper into the class contradictions that have long been surfacing in Cuba.

One of the first things a visitor to Cuba will notice is that as the people are dehydrated and starved, the private sector is growing. It is important to clarify that Marco Rubio, Trump, and the architects of the intensification of the economic war on Cuba are at the same time bolstering the private sector. So the owners of private businesses, the MIPYMES, are allowed to import gas, generators, food, etc. It is the Cuban masses that are completely cut off, as an emerging business sector continues to consolidate its economic power on the island functioning as Miami and Washington’s beachheads. But to access these private shops one has to have dollars, or big stacks of Cuban pesos. The 99% of Cubans have neither. The private MYPIMES also have more quality food, but they are private peninsulas of privilege, or Little Miamis, that very few Cubans can afford.

Four days after the guerrillas took power in Havana on January 1 1959, Fidel Castro asked a crowd of tens of thousands in Camaguey, “How can we call this our homeland, if the homeland gives us nothing?” Today, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that generation of Cubans circulate this heroic speech that grew out of their anti-imperialist and anti-dictatorship struggle and ask, “Why are we being shut out of our own country?”

Collectively, right now, Cuban children have less access to toys and food than what I have seen across Haiti since I first went there in 1998. Some of my friends in Cuba have asked me if there is any way for them to escape to Haiti. Haitian medical students I knew in Santiago and other Haitians were forced to flee Cuba and return to their besieged homeland because of how bad Cuba is. When Haiti is a reference for relative abundance, that is the ultimate indicator of how blockaded and dire Cuba is.

My responsibility is not to parrot Cuban government speeches and positions as the left does here in the West, but to give a voice to a population captured in a looming Economic Genocide, trapped between two bureaucracies,

Agricultural products cannot get from the countryside into the city. Every day there is more hunger, malnutrition, and encroaching starvation. The Cuban people say they have no voice. The most vulnerable, the elderly, children and prisoners, are already dying. There is a stark sense of generalized hopelessness. There are no functioning means of transportation. Yet as one waits for buses that never arrive, imported cars from Miami speed down the highways. The people say those are rich Cubans or government officials. The people do not trust their government and see them as a central ingredient in the genocidal campaign they are facing.

Let’s break down the math of starvation, CJ. Because we are all focused on US drones, bombs, and boots on the ground, but the invasion has already arrived. What will play out in the upcoming days and months is the consolidation of the umpteenth US intervention in the affairs of the people of the Caribbean, South America, and the world. And it will continue to exterminate a lot of lives. When Cubans say that today Cuba is the equivalent of Gaza without bombs, they are not exaggerating.

A liter of gasoline in Cuba costs more than 6,000 pesos ($10 US dollars), meaning a gallon of gas costs $40. The average Cubans’ salary or pension is 2,400 pesos ($4 dollars) monthly. A bottle of Turkish sunflower oil to cook costs 1,500 ($2.50), a pound of rice costs 350 ($0.60), and the electricity bill, regardless of whether there is any, is 400-500 pesos (less than $1 per month), meaning that alone consumes a Cuban’s money for the month.

In Cuba, no matter how much money you have in the bank, you can only take out $2 or $3 dollars. That is why you see long lines across Cuba of retirees and heads of family waiting all day in front of banks, trying to get their money out. Cuba is a country of lines, long lines.

Infant mortality rates have increased by 148% in Cuba. Center for Economic and Policy Research’s director of international policy Alexander Main: explains: “The Trump policy of 'maximum pressure' on Cuba has killed a lot of babies… it’s highly likely that more babies are dying now, and at an even higher rate than last year as a result of the current US fuel blockade targeting Cuba.”

Many families have to get up in the middle of the night because that is the only time they have access to a few hours of electricity. Measures of insomnia, depression, and all mental health indicators are skyrocketing. US terrorism comes in many different forms.

By the time we publish, the hyperinflation and devaluation of the Cuban peso will be even more extreme. Everyday, the peso is worth a fraction less than the dollar, damaging Cubans’ earning power even more. What Cubans have whispered to me since 1995 is that if they film their reality or try to speak out against the economic disparities, the authorities will arrest them immediately.

What if you have children? How do you feed them? Cuban families are weary of having children because they cannot feed them. The War on Cuba is a Demographic War, a War of Depopulation. From the perspective of capital, Cuba’s population is excessive and expendable, especially old people who are generally more loyal to the revolution because they can remember what it once was prior to 1991. Similar to Palestine and Haiti, masses of people can be displaced and exterminated. Why would capital care? And why would a Western public care, if they have never heard one positive word about these “sh^thole countries,” to quote the ever-eloquent Trump again.

Religion, alcohol and drug addiction all find a foothold among a population who cannot see beyond this bleak material reality. All of the ingredients for an Economic Genocide are in place. Cubans I met and hung out with in Las Tunas, Holguin, or Granma were not worried about imperialist drones or bombs. They said the bombs of thirst and hunger have long been their number one enemy. Colonial death comes in many different forms.

C. J. Polychroniou: Cuban government officials have said that the country will fight to death in the event of a US invasion. But is it realistic to expect a starving nation fight back in the event of a full-scale invasion of the island by the world’s most powerful and advanced military?

Danny Shaw: Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bruno Rodriguez, himself explained: “It seems that the US government has chosen a dangerous path, a path that could lead to unimaginable consequences, to humanitarian catastrophe, to a genocide.” He then says what every leader has to say but it is tough to take seriously: "Cuba will exercise its right for its legitimate defense to the very last consequences with massive, mass support of the people." These militant government statements are out of touch with mass sentiment.

Observing our movement of activists, Marxists, the left, or whatever we call ourselves, we pretend like it is 1959 or 1989 and Fidel and well-trained, honest revolutionaries are still at the helm of the state. If we cannot honestly reflect on this question of leadership, the Cuban state and the masses, aren’t we complicit in the ongoing strangling and starvation of today’s mambisado (the masses who fought for Cuba’s independence against Spain)? Do we judge a revolution by the objective and subjective conditions the people confront, or by the latest interview or speech of Diaz-Canel? Have any of these activists who defend Cuba ever gotten outside of the Hotel Nacional and outside of the government-guided tours? If we mischaracterize the objective and subjective conditions in Cuba, aren't we complicit in our own way in the war on Cuba, which Cubans say comes from both an internal and external blockade?

Capitalism is the accumulation of misery in one pole, and luxury in the other.

To think Cuba can resist in any way is ridiculous. How can a half-starved, unarmed people resist the largest military with the largest budget, $1.5 trillion, in the history of the world? Cubans overwhelmingly told me they are so sick of “resolving," “surviving," and “resisting." Besides some elderly veterans of the heroic war of liberation in Angola and that generation of fighters, I met almost no Cubans with any enthusiasm for the idea of fighting back against the United States. There’s a complete state of demoralization across Cuba. Hyperbolic leftist comparisons to “People’s War” in Vietnam under the direction of Ho Chi Minh and General Nygun Vo Giap are goofy and dishonest. Cubans see their government and police as complicit in everything that is happening. Why would they die for a process they long stopped believing in? The Western “left movement” is clueless about the objective and subjective conditions in Cuba because we uncritically take our cues from the Cuban government. The private sector could not be ascendant in Cuba if there was not collusion with high-level officials. The Cuban masses perceive that government officials are saying one thing publicly but behind the scenes are looking out for themselves. And if you listen to the statements on CNN by this generation of Castros, that is exactly what they say. They praise capitalism and position themselves to adapt to the inevitable reconquering of the island.

Cuban officialdom and their leftist counterparts have engaged in what we can call “high politics.” Spanish researcher of communes in Venezuela, Cira Pascual Marquina, explains that we often base our conclusion on “institutional declarations, negotiations, geopolitical responses—while overlooking the dense fabric of everyday political practice that sustains the process.” Look at the Venezuela General Vladimir Padrino and all of his rhetoric before January 3 about a “people's war” in Venezuela that would resist any efforts by the Trump administration. What resistance has there been in Venezuela? Today, six months after the US
occupation of Venezuela, Padrino is an agricultural minister.

All of these triumphant-sounding speeches mask the reality of the Cuban masses, and arguably do more damage than good. As a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, I waited years if not decades to say some of these things publicly. Because again, I am with David, not Goliath. But scholars and supporters of Cuba need to be vocal about the whole truth. My responsibility is not to parrot Cuban government speeches and positions as the left does here in the West, but to give a voice to a population captured in a looming Economic Genocide, trapped between two bureaucracies. Here is an essay by a Cuban student in Ireland which brilliantly captures how the Cuban people feel they are stuck between two competing rhetorics, which both ignore their interests.

C. J. Polychroniou: US imperialism never went away but has gone totally berserk under the second Trump administration. Can the beast be reformed?

Danny Shaw: In Cuba, the closest place to get Cuban food is Miami.

It’s surreal. After navigating dehydration and hunger across Cuba for one month, I returned, like other activists and friends of Cuba, to be detained and interrogated by the FBI in Miami. When I was released, after my third detention and interrogation in less than two years, I walked through an airport full of every last type of food and consumer good. Capitalism is the accumulation of misery in one pole, and luxury in the other. The Donroe Doctrine means US imperialism cuts off any attempt by China, Russia, Iran, etc., at building multipolarity in the hemisphere and recolonizes any bad example or “maroon state" that has escaped their hegemony. There is no reforming US imperialism. Only the unity of oppressed peoples as expressed through multipolar projects like the BRICS+ nations could ever defeat empire. That is the only hope right now for defeating this beast which will continue to starve, bomb, and genocide resistant populations until a knife is plunged into its neck.

Like the War on Haiti, first through the use of paramilitary gangs beginning in 2018, and now through Erik Prince and his private security companies to displace the once resistant population of Port-au-Prince and Latibonit (another department or province of Haiti), this constitutes the latest and most intense chapter of war on the Cuban people. Cubans are dying in silence as US government officials talk about bringing “freedom” to Cuba and Cuban government officials give speeches about Cuba’s “historic resistance.” What I have lived and witnessed in Cuba since 1995 constitutes an ongoing Economic Genocide against a defenseless, muzzled population.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• The U.S. and Iran trade attacks after the shoot-down of an American Apache helicopter while it was patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz. Khatam al-Anbiya, the operational headquarters of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, vowed there would be further “devastating and more wide-ranging strikes” if the U.S. continued to attack Iran. How did Iran score such a monumental achievement despite having had its military totally destroyed, according to Trump?

• Progressive Democrat Graham Platner is on course to earn about three-fourths of Maine rimary voters’ support. In South Carolina, Trump-endorsed Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette squeaks a win and will face Attorney General Alan Wilson in a June 23 runoff’s and Nancy Mace is trounced. Former Fox News host Steve Hilton advances to the general election in the California gubernatorial race, where he will face former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

• The New York Times reveals a deep split within the White House over whether or not to release the Epstein Files. The internal debate raged at the highest levels for months, leaving Trump’s reputation battered, and confirming a cover-up.

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