by Claudiu Secara
At this point I would say that we are past the peak of Trump’s pro-Zionist power grab. The defeat in Iran is unmistakable. Venezuela is not up for grabs despite the very murky circumstances of the kidnapping of President Maduro. No one in Venezuela was arrested for collaborating with the US in that operation, which, I would say, indicates that what the former Colombian president asserted was/is true. Maduro became a liability for the Venezuelans themselves and they handled him over to the US.
Greenland is also circling the wagons, so to speak, with the Europeans firmly standing in defense of Denmark. No 51st state for Trump.
Internally, more chaos. The execution style crime perpetrated by ICE against Ms Good in Minneapolis and the following public lies by Kristi Noem and others are subject to congressional impeachment. The Zionist training of the paramilitary forces like ICE throughout the Western hemisphere might come to be seen as toxic. Even the British canceled their 2 billion ponds contract with Israeli Elbit Systems security, apparently as a victory for the Pro-Palestinian movement and the pro-Palestinian hunger strikers.
Even the top US banking executives rallied against Trump’s claim to have the power to set the interest rate for credit card balances as an overreach of the executive powers.
Never mind Trump’s claim of peace-making in Ukraine in 24 hours…
The country is skeptical of the story of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, as well as of the Zionists horrendous genocide in Gaza.
Mr. Trump has only one way to go from here and that is to go only down, down downhill. And then we’ll have the midterm elections.
He might be lucky if he is not referred to the International Criminal Court. And the Zionists are getting more and more desperate.
by Chris Hedges via https://www.unz.com/article/the-machinery-of-terror/
I have seen the masked goons who terrorize our streets before. I saw them during the “Dirty War” in Argentina, where 30,000 men, women and children were “disappeared” by the military junta. Victims were held in secret prisons, savagely tortured and murdered. To this day, many families do not know the fate of their loved ones.
I saw them in El Salvador, when death squads were killing 800 people a month. I saw them in Guatemala under the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt. I saw them in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I saw them in Iran under the rule of the ayatollahs where I was arrested and jailed twice and once deported in handcuffs. I saw them in Hafez al-Assad’s Syria. I saw them in Bosnia, where Muslims were herded into concentration camps, executed and buried in mass graves.
I know these goons. I have been a prisoner in their jails and spent hours in their interrogation rooms. I have been beaten by them. I have been deported, and in several cases banned, from their countries. I know what is coming.
Terror is the engine that empowers dictatorships. It eliminates dissidents. It silences critics. It dismantles the law. It creates a society of timid and frightened collaborators, those who look away when people are snatched off streets or gunned down, those who inform to save themselves, those who retreat into their tiny rabbit holes, pulling down the blinds, desperately praying to be left in peace.
Terror works.
The iron doors have not yet shut. There are still protests. The media is still able to document state atrocities, including the Jan. 7 murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross. But the doors are closing fast. ICE has deported over 300,000 people and detained nearly 69,000 others — as well as been involved in 16 shootings, including four killings — since Trump began his campaign against immigrants.
ICE, our Americanized Gestapo, is being birthed.
Resistance must be collective. We must assert not only our individual rights, but economic, social and political rights — without them we are powerless. Resistance means organizing to disrupt the machinery of commerce and government. It means preventing arrests by patrolling neighborhoods to warn of impending ICE raids. It means protesting outside detention facilities. It means strikes. It means blocking streets and highways and occupying buildings. It means providing photographic evidence. It means sustained pressure on local politicians and police to refuse to cooperate with ICE. It means providing legal representation, food and financial assistance to families with members detained. It means a willingness to be arrested. It means a nationwide campaign to defy the state’s inhumanity.
If we fail, the dimming flames of our open society will be snuffed out.
Authoritarian states are constructed incrementally. No dictatorship advertises its plan to extinguish civil liberties. It pays lip service to liberty and justice as it dismantles the institutions and laws that make liberty and justice possible. Opponents of the regime, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist. They throw up temporary roadblocks, but they are soon purged.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago” notes that the consolidation of Soviet tyranny “was stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed.” He called the process “a grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now.”
“What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?” Solzhenitsyn asks. “Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
Czesław Miłosz, in “The Captive Mind,” also documents the creep of tyranny, how it advances stealthily, until intellectuals are not only forced to repeat the regime’s self-adulating slogans but, as our leading universities did when they caved to false allegations of being bastions of antisemitism, embrace its absurdism.
Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes a population — often unconsciously — conform outwardly and inwardly. It conditions citizens to relate to those around them with suspicion and distrust. It destroys the solidarity vital to organizing, community and dissent.
The historian Robert Gellately, in his book “Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany,” argues that state terror in Nazi Germany was effective not because of omnipresent state surveillance, but because it fostered a “culture of denunciation.”
Rat out your neighbors and coworkers and survive. If you see something, say something.
The worse it gets, the more established institutions, desperate to survive, silence those who warn us.
“Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people emerges, people who are that and nothing more,” Solzhenitsyn writes of those who see what is coming. “And how they were laughed at! How they were mocked!”
The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, whose early warnings about the rise of fascism were largely dismissed, and who told fellow intellectuals to stop naively appealing to “the remains of a European conscience,” saw his books tossed into the bonfires in the spring of 1933 during the Nazi book burnings. So far, we have not burned books, but have banned nearly 23,000 titles in public schools since 2021.
The authoritarian state cannibalizes the institutions that foolishly aid and abet the witch hunts. It replaces them with pseudo-institutions populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts, pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-citizens. Columbia University is a shining example of this willful self-immolation. Nothing is as it is presented.
There are increasing numbers of violent kidnappings by masked ICE agents in unmarked cars on our city streets. People are ripped from their vehicles and beaten. They are arrested outside schools and day care centers. They are raided at work, thrown onto the floor, handcuffed, driven away in vans and shipped off to concentration camps in countries such as El Salvador. They are seized when they appear at court for a green card application or interview to finalize a visa.
Once detained, they disappear into the labyrinth of over 200 detention centers, where they are moved from one facility to the next to hide them from family, lawyers and the courts. Due process, once a constitutional right afforded to everyone in the United States, no longer exists.
“Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”
The FBI, in an example of how justice is perverted, refuses to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies in Minneapolis, blocking access to any evidence that would allow them to file criminal charges against Jonathan Ross.
Killing of unarmed citizens by the state is carried out with impunity.
ICE has more than doubled the size of its force since early 2025 — to 22,000 agents — hiring 12,000 new officers in four months from a pool of 220,000 applicants. It plans to spend $100 million over a one-year period to hire even more recruits, part of the $170 billion for border and interior enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE, to be spent over four years. Salaries for these new recruits, poorly trained and often haphazardly vetted, will range from $49,739 to $89,528 a year, along with a $50,000 signing bonus — split over three years — and up to $60,000 in student loan repayments.
ICE is building new detention centers nationwide in 23 towns and cities. It promises that once it is fully operational, it will go door-to-door as part of the largest deportation effort in American history.
ICE agents, intoxicated by the license to kick down doors while wearing body armor and firing automatic weapons at terrified women and children, are not warriors as they imagine, but thugs. They have few skills, other than weapons training, cruelty and brutality. They intend to remain employed by the state. The state intends to keep them employed.
None of this should surprise us. The repressive techniques used by ICE and our militarized police were perfected overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Occupied Palestine, and earlier in Vietnam. The ICE agent who murdered Good was a machinegunner in Iraq. A night raid in Chicago, with agents rappelling from a helicopter to storm an apartment complex filled with terrified families, does not look any different from a night raid in Fallujah.
Aimé Césaire, the Martinician playwright and politician, in “Discourse on Colonialism” writes that the savage tools of imperialism and colonialism eventually migrate back to the home country. It is known as imperial boomerang.
Césaire writes:
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
During the interregnum between the last gasps of a democracy and the emergence of a dictatorship, the nation is gaslighted. It is told the rule of law is respected. It is told democratic rule is inviolate. These lies mollify those being frog-marched into their own enslavement.
“The majority sit quietly and dare to hope,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!”
Maybe, the fearful say, Trump and his minions are only being bombastic. Maybe they don’t mean it. Maybe they are incompetent. Maybe the courts will save us. Maybe the next elections will end this nightmare. Maybe there are limits to extremism. Maybe the worst is over.
These self-delusions prevent us from resisting while the gallows are being constructed in front of us.
Authoritarian states start by targeting the most vulnerable, those most easily demonized — the undocumented, students on college campuses who protest genocide, antifa, the so-called “radical left,” Muslims, poor people of color, intellectuals and liberals. They strike down one group after the next. They blow out, one by one, the long row of candles until we find ourselves in the dark, powerless and alone.
by Pepe Escobar via https://strategic-culture.su/news/2026/01/05/barbaria-strikes-again/
Still, neo-Caligula won’t stop – mimicking his motormouth. The Empire of Chaos under the Donroe Doctrine is about strategic dominance, at all costs, over energy and trade corridors.
Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful good society’ which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean ‘more money, more ease, more security, more living flatly at the expense of the industrious’.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The Raging Twenties started with a murder: Gen. Soleimani, Baghdad, January 3, 2020. Ordered by Trump 1.0.
The second part of the Raging Twenties starts with a bombing/kidnapping. Mini-Shock’n Awe on Caracas, Delta Force raid. January 3, 2026. Ordered by Trump 2.0.
Raging Donald Trump said he will run Venezuela.
This trashy neo-Caligula, self-proclaimed Emperor of Barbaria, in the end may not run anything, starting with his own motormouth.
The Venezuela op unrolled via a classic imperial playbook. Murderous sanctions for years blocking trade and capital movement, causing hyperinflation and an out-of-control humanitarian crisis. The target: to cause so much suffering to Venezuelans that a military coup would be inevitable.
The Venezuela kidnapping of a President in his bedroom deep into the night unrolled via a classic CIA playbook. They managed to bribe the head of Maduro’s security detail and his close circle, but not (italics mine) the Venezuelan military.
Maduro was protected only by Venezuelan forces, not Russians, as confirmed by independent Caracas sources. When a Russian command got to Maduro’s residence, at first they met resistance by some of Maduro’s own corrupt security.
When they were neutralized and the Russians got inside the residence, Maduro had already been extracted by the Delta Force, with key internal help. The chief of Maduro’s security detail was then apprehended – and duly executed.
The day after the kidnapping, Venezuelan soldiers revealed how Delta Force wanted to establish a beachhead at one of their units in Caracas as an operational base for a Bay of Pigs-style ground invasion. But in the words of a soldier, “We fought, we opened fire, and we forced the helicopter to leave without taking the military unit.”
The Venezuelan Defense Ministry then stated that most of Maduro’s security detail was actually killed during the operation, not specifying by whom. And Cuba announced the deaths of 32 of its fighters – certainly not among those in the compromised security detail.
The Chavista government remains in power – led by the formidable Delcy Rodriguez, constitutionally appointed as interim President. No Fifth Columnists inside the government have been unmasked so far.
An article on the propaganda rag Miami Herald, using as the single source a dodgy former vice-President of Colombia, Santos Calderon, and no evidence whatsoever from Venezuela, spread the fiction that Delcy Rodriguez made a pact with Trump 2.0 to hand Maduro over.
It took less than 48 hours for the bombastic Caligula White House narrative to start falling apart. Investigative journalist Diego Sequera, on the ground in Venezuela, has already largely debunked the tsunami of nonsense drowning mainstream and social media.
Additionally, forget about 28 million Venezuelans cheering a loudmouth neo-Caligula gringo as “liberator”. He’s now forced to issue personal threats against Delcy Rodriguez and – what else is new – promise that the Empire of Chaos may bomb Venezuela again.
The Donroe Doctrine, decoded
Let’s cut to the chase. Apart from the notorious “largest oil reserves on the planet”, essential for an Empire in financial trouble to build collateral, there are several main rasons for the Venezuela hit.
1. Bellum Judaica. Apart from developing close relations with BRICS members Russia, China and Iran, Caracas unmistakably sided with Palestine and called out the Zionist plague. So in one swoop, we have not only the practical application of the “corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”, explicit in the new National Security Strategy, but most of all the “Donroe Doctrine” deployed as the “Zionroe Doctrine” by a Zionist court jester, who happens to be the neo-Caligula.
What better way to teach yet another lesson to the whole Global South on the limitless Pax Judaica – actually Bellum Judaica, because they are now on non-stop Forever War mode against all “amalek”: and everybody not genuflecting in their altar may be branded “amalek”. It’s no wonder Delcy Rodriguez went straight to the point, qualifying in her first speech the “Zionist tinge” of neo-Caligula’s kidnapping operation.
2. Heavy metal thunder. Only less than 24 hours after the bombing/mini-Shock’n Awe/kidnapping, and for a mere $8 billion, Washington wrapped up a massive smelter deal to process no less than $1 trillion of Venezuelan precious metals.
The deal was financed by J.P.Morgan – which happens to be in big trouble because of the their massive physical silver short position. The beauty is that Venezuela happens to be smack in the middle of the Arco Minero (“The Mineral Arc”) which concentrates untold trillions in still unmined gold and silver.
3. The petrodollar angle. The heart of the matter is not Venezuela’s humongous – untapped – oil reserves per se, complete with neo-Caligula salivation. The key is petrodollar-denominated oil. Printing endless – intrinsically worthless – green toilet paper to finance the industrial-military complex implies the US dollar as the global reserve currency, petrodollar included.
The Empire of Plunder simply could not allow Venezuela’s oil to be sold in yuan, ruble, rupee or a basket of currencies, or in the near future, a BRICS-sanctioned mechanism backed by oil and gold. Red alert was already on as Venezuela integrated into China’s CIPS cross-border payment system.
Then, on the oil front, there’s the matter of stealing Venezuelan oil from Citgo – the Hudson-based subsidiary of PDVSA – to profit Zionist billionaire Paul Singer and his hedge fund, Elliot Investment Management. A “proud Zionist” and AIPAC board member, Robert Pincus, was court-appointed to facilitate the scam, derived from Citgo owing over $20 billion to creditors: another toxic effect of years of sanctions.
Additionally, and contrary to neo-Caligula’s fiction that “this is our oil”, Venezuelan historian Miguel Tinker Salas conclusively proved how the country nationalized the oil industry in 1976: “It was controlled by Venezuelans. It was run by Venezuelans”. Foreign companies, including ExxonMobil’s “most profitable subsidiary” were fully compensated, “much above and beyond what they had already extracted”.
Then there’s the crucial Chinese angle.
There has been a tsunami of splendidly stupid speculation that China did not do anything to “save” Venezuela. China is way too sophisticated to engage in brawls. Beijing will fight the Empire of Chaos in court.
Silently, with no fanfarre, Beijing has made it very clear that any American attack on Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects sealed by contract around the Global South – 150 participating nations at least – will be met with international arbitration in every court from Caracas to Jakarta. Translation – in the only way Western barbarians understand: the legal cost of American regime change operations will become prohibitive.
A test may be coming pretty soon. Assuming neo-Caligula “runs” Venezuela – and that’s a major “if” – all that Beijing needs is to successfully enforce a single contract claim against a Trump-run Venezuela. Let’s see whether neo-Caligula would have the balls to stop Venezuelan oil being sold to China. Good luck on imposing regime change after that.
My Might is Right
Still, neo-Caligula won’t stop – mimicking his motormouth. The Empire of Chaos under the Donroe Doctrine is about strategic dominance, at all costs, over energy and trade corridors. There’s no way neo-Caligula can be forced to cease and desist about Venezuela’s oil. Because that will be the supreme strategic precedent of the new paradigm: My Might is Right rules the new international disorder based on no rules whatsoever.
So whatever happens next in Venezuela directly concerns the whole Global South/Global Majority.
At least now things are crystal clear. International law is for suckers. We search and destroy, bomb, kidnap, whatever – because we can. There are no limits for the Barbaria/ Bellum Judaica combo.
What’s next?
Iran. The war criminal in Tel Aviv has already issued the Bellum Judaica orders. Even if the only “war” Trump 2.0 and his Secretary of Forever Wars can conduct amounts to a bunch of Special Forces trying to get a “beachhead” and indiscriminately hurling loads of stand-off weapons. Washington is woefully incapable of launching a large-scale combined arms operation anywhere.
Greenland. Not for “defense reasons”, as neo-Caligula boasted, but for plunder of natural resources in imperial lebensraum mode and War for the Arctic reasons. Trump has given puny Denmark just enough time to digest it: “We will worry about Greenland in two months.”
Then there’s Cuba – the pet project of gusano Marco Rubio, who in his shady past was quite close to narco-terrorist elites.
Several extra nodes of the Global South – Colombia, Mexico. And if they don’t “behave”, several nodes of BRICS. It’s now Totalen Krieg. And the Empire of Chaos/Bellum Judaica combo “will be watching it like a TV show”. The Global South better get their act together – fast.
via MoA
There are a number of indicators which lets one predict that the Trump administration, during the next election, will use government forces to severely attack and disrupt all opposition to it.
Trump has send the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into the cities to harass and arrest alleged illegal immigrants. Due cause is disregarded and the methods used by the agents are brutal.
Trump has also sent National Guard troops into cities where, he claimed, riots were taking place. There were no riots or ‘terrorist incidents’ but the presence of troops is used to create a militarized atmosphere.
A new National Security Presidential Memorandum, NSPM-7 issued by Trump has defined new classes of internal enemies:
With the mainstream media distracted by the made-for-TV drama of James Comey’s indictment, Trump has signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views as indicators of radical left violence.
…
In NSPM-7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” President Trump directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to fight his version of political violence in America, retooling a network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on “leftist” political violence in America. This vast counterterrorism army, made up of federal, state, and local agents would, as Trump aide Stephen Miller said, form “the central hub of that effort.”
…
The Trump administration isn’t only targeting organizations or groups but even individuals and “entities” whom NSPM-7 says can be identified by any of the following “indicia” (indicators) of violence:
anti-Americanism,
anti-capitalism,
anti-Christianity,
support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
extremism on migration,
extremism on race,
extremism on gender,
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.
“The United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts,” the directive states (emphasis mine).
That all may sound laughable but these are unfortunately serious policies . The target list includes organizations which do not exist:
There are no ‘antifa’ organizations. ‘Antifa’ is the idea of fighting indications of fascism. From time to time local interest groups may claim to do so for this or that reason. This category ‘antifa’ was likely chosen because it can be applied to any group that opposes government policies.
Today Yves Smith reports of another enforcement agency that Trump will use to destroy opposition to him:
The war against Trump’s perceived political enemies keeps escalating. The Wall Street Journal provides new detail on how the Trump Administration intends to use an IRS criminal unit, whose members bear arms, as part of his campaign against “left-leaning” organizations. This fallows a Reuters account describing how the Trump Administration intends to use the Department of Justice and DHS to pursue “left wing” groups that allegedly fomented violence.
…
Now to the press accounts. Key sections from the Journal’s report:
The Trump administration is preparing sweeping changes at the Internal Revenue Service that would allow the agency to pursue criminal inquiries of left-leaning groups more easily, according to people familiar with the matter.
A senior IRS official involved in the effort has drawn up a list of potential targets that includes major Democratic donors, some of the people said.
The undertaking aims to install allies of President Trump at the IRS criminal-investigative division, or IRS-CI, to exert firmer control over the unit and weaken the involvement of IRS lawyers in criminal investigations, officials said. The proposed changes could open the door to politically motivated probes…
Among those on the list are the billionaire Democratic donor George Soros and his affiliated groups…
Many on the left will not mind any attack on George Soros as his organization is well know for financing foreign color revolutions against legitimate leftist rulers. We can however be assured that Trump wont stop with them:
The list includes Soros’ Open Society Foundations; ActBlue, the funding arm of the Democratic Party; Indivisible, a grassroots coalition opposed to Trump policies and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, a Los Angeles-based group.
…
Other groups on the list include two Jewish nonprofits that oppose Israel’s war in Gaza – IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace.
There is unfortunately little institutional or political opposition that can restrain Trump:
The push against domestic groups and their donors comes amid Trump’s attacks on law firms, universities and the media, and his deployment of National Guard troops to some Democratic-run cities.
…
Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and former director of the Richard Nixon presidential library, said Trump and Nixon were similar in their desire to punish political enemies and silence critics, but a pliant Republican-controlled Congress and a cabinet packed with loyalists are enabling Trump to go further.
“That’s why this particular moment is more dangerous for the rule of law in the United States than the 1970s were,” Naftali said.
All these are ominous signs that Trumps war on the political opposition will escalate further. Seymour Hersh’s sources are warning of this:
What’s happening now may be a trial run for the use of those forces to interfere on the behalf of the president and the Republican Party in states where the Democratic Party has a chance to win crucial seats in next fall’s Congressional elections. I’ve been told by someone with inside knowledge that planning for such action is now under way in the White House.
The ‘coerced dominance’ that has marked Trump’s brutal approach to foreign policy will now being applied to domestic issues and legitimate opposition.
Russell Vought, Trumps’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, are the men behind this.
The scary thing is that there is, so far, little or any opposition to these plans and only few warnings about their consequences.
U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed tariffs under the false claim that certain trade imbalances with other countries created a national emergency.
This is contested in courts and should have no legal standing. As the U.S. constitution explicitly says:
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, …
Congress has not been asked to and has not consented to the arbitrary tariffs imposed by Trump since he, on April 2, declared his fake ‘Liberation Day’.
Moreover, Trump did not impose tariffs to balance trade. He immediately weaponized them by trying to to impose (archived) U.S. policy goals, as well as interests of individual companies, on foreign countries:
This month, State Department officials considered demanding that U.S. trading partners vote against an international effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the oceangoing container ships that are the backbone of global trade. In a draft “action memo,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio was told that department officials had sought “to inject this issue into the ongoing bilateral trade negotiations” with maritime nations such as Singapore.
That move came after administration officials this past spring debated broadening trade negotiations with more than a dozen nations, including by requiring Israel to eliminate a Chinese company’s control of a key port and insisting that South Korea publicly support deploying U.S. troops to deter China as well as Seoul’s traditional rival, North Korea, the documents said.
Administration officials saw trade talks as an opportunity to achieve objectives that went far beyond Trump’s oft-stated goal of reducing the chronic U.S. trade deficit. In the first weeks after the president paused his “reciprocal” tariffs April 9 to allow for negotiations, officials drew up plans to press countries near China for a closer defense relationship, including the purchase of U.S. equipment and port visits, the documents said.
Tariff impositions have thus become a form of blackmailing at large.
This was not only done to pursue general U.S. foreign policy interests but also in favor of individual, U.S. owned companies:
In Lesotho, a poor southern African nation that Trump had threatened with 50 percent tariffs, negotiators wanted the government to finalize deals with “multiple U.S. firms.”
OnePower, a renewable energy start-up, should be granted “a five-year withholding tax exemption” and a license to develop a 24-megawatt project. Regulators should waive a legal requirement for Starlink, Musk’s satellite-based internet provider, to provide a physical address in Lesotho before conducting business there, the document said.
To do so is not illegal, some may argue. Why shouldn’t the U.S. use its heft to press foreigners to make good deals?
One counter is that such mafia like behavior by a government against foreigners, once allowed, will come back to hit at home.
We did not have to wait long for that to happen. As the Financial Times headlines:
Nvidia and AMD to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US government (archived)
Chipmakers agree to unusual arrangement to secure export licences from Trump administration
Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15 per cent of the revenues from chip sales in China, as part of an unusual arrangement with the Trump administration to obtain export licences for the semiconductors.
The two chipmakers agreed to the financial arrangement as a condition for obtaining export licences for the Chinese market that were granted last week, according to people familiar with the situation, including a US official.
The US official said Nvidia agreed to share 15 per cent of the revenues from H20 chip sales in China and AMD will provide the same percentage from MI308 chip revenues. Two people familiar with the arrangement said the Trump administration had not yet determined how to use the money.
The U.S. under Trump is imposing export duties on U.S. companies. This is, like the arbitrary imposing of tariffs on imports, highly illegal. Under the U.S. constitution not even Congress would be allowed to do this:
Section 9 Clause 5
No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
Trump arbitrarily imposed export restrictions on certain computer chips made by Nvidia and AMD on national security grounds. He then used these export restrictions to blackmail the companies into agreeing to pay a certain ‘kick back’ tax to the U.S. government. Once they did the export restrictions were lifted.
As the NY Times reports (archived):
While the Trump administration publicly said a month ago that it was giving the green light to Nvidia to sell an A.I. chip called H20 to China, it did not actually issue the licenses making those sales possible.
On Wednesday, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, met with President Trump at the White House and agreed to give the federal government its 15 percent cut, essentially making the federal government a partner in Nvidia’s business in China, said the people familiar with the deal. The Commerce Department began granting licenses for A.I. chip sales two days later, these people said.
…
The deal agreed to last week could funnel more than $2 billion to the U.S. government. Nvidia was expected to sell more than $15 billion worth of its H20 chip to China through the end of the year, and AMD was expected to sell $800 million, according to Bernstein Research.
If I were a Nvidia shareholder I would immediately sue the U.S. over this.
That such a deal was agreed to by Trump proves that the export restrictions previously imposed on H20 chips arbitrary and were never for national security reasons. (By the way: the $2 billion the U.S. is gaining from this deal is couch lint compared to the Pentagon budget.) The restrictions on sales were solely imposed to extort Nvidia, illegally, into paying additional taxes:
Christopher Padilla, a top export control official in the George W. Bush administration who is now a senior adviser with the Brunswick Group consulting firm, echoed those fears, describing the deal as “unprecedented and dangerous.”
“Export controls are in place to protect national security, not raise revenue for the government,” Padilla said. “This arrangement seems like bribery or blackmail, or both.’’
If this holds for chips one has also to ask about other items (archived):
The deal to license A.I. chips caused immediate outcry among national security experts who have been opposed to A.I. chip sales to China. They worry that the Trump administration’s decision to leverage export licenses for money will encourage Beijing to pressure other companies to make similar arrangements to loosen restrictions on other technology like semiconductor manufacturing tools and memory chips.
National security hawks, via FT, are enraged by the deal:
“Beijing must be gloating to see Washington turn export licences into revenue streams,” Liza Tobin, a China expert who served on the National Security Council in the first Trump administration, now at the Jamestown Foundation.
“What’s next — letting Lockheed Martin sell F-35s to China for a 15 per cent commission?”
Hmm – China would not F-35s as it is already making better planes. Nor will it use H20 chips from Nvidia for any security related activity. It has good ground to believe that those chips were specifically made for China with a backdoor to be hacked.
The Trump administration, like its boss personally, has obviously no qualms about making deals against U.S. interests, as long as they guarantee a large sounding income.
I wonder how much President Putin of Russia will have to offer on Friday to regain control of Alaska.
via FT
by Tabby Kinder and George Hammond in San Francisco and Alex Rogers in Milwaukee
Excerpt
The name of JD Vance’s venture capital firm is a homage to fantasy author JRR Tolkien — and billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel.
Co-founded by Vance in 2020, Narya Capital is a reference to one of the “rings of power” in The Lord of the Rings and a nod to Thiel’s penchant for companies with Tolkien-inspired monikers.
The PayPal co-founder’s influence has marked Vance’s career, seeding him millions of dollars to launch Narya, before funding a successful campaign to win a US Senate seat in 2022.
Donald Trump’s choice of Vance as his vice-presidential running mate this week further extends Thiel’s political reach, who as a Silicon Valley kingmaker has a network of devoted technologists and investors so vast it has been dubbed the “Thielverse”.
Meanwhile, Vance’s brief career in venture capital also encapsulates how a libertarian strand within Silicon Valley represented by Thiel has come to align with Trump’s MAGA Republican fans.
Vance and his co-founder led Narya’s investment in Rumble, a video platform favoured by the political right for its free speech ethos, and at his previous fund, Rise of the Rest, he invested in Anduril Industries, an artificial intelligence defence and weapons group whose early funding came from Thiel — and whose name is also a Tolkien reference.
Vance’s VP candidacy has been cheered by prominent tech figures such as Tesla and X chief executive Elon Musk and Jacob Helberg, a Palantir executive and Trump donor.
“JD attracts support from people like Peter and Elon because he is the rare policymaker who is both tremendously smart and who thinks deeply about the future,” Blake Masters, another Thiel protégé who is running for US Congress, told the Financial Times.
“As a venture capitalist, JD’s job was . . . to imagine a different and better future and to help make it happen. And the American future the Trump-Vance agenda will usher in is very bright indeed.”
Vance’s ties to Thiel began more than a decade ago. In 2011, Thiel gave a talk at Yale Law School, where Vance was a student, about the “stagnation” of technological innovation in the US. “He was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met,” Vance later wrote about that day.
Vance soon abandoned a planned career in law, and even credited Thiel for his subsequent conversion to Christianity. “He defied the social template I had constructed — that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists,” Vance wrote.
In 2016, the same year Vance published his best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, he joined Mithril Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm founded by Thiel and another veteran investor, Ajay Royan — and which has yet another Tolkien-inspired name.
Two years later, Vance was recruited by AOL co-founder Steve Case for a new venture: a $150mn Washington-based fund that tapped big investors such as Jeff Bezos and Ray Dalio to jump-start young companies in overlooked American cities.
That philosophy would also become the foundation of Narya Capital. Vance relocated to Cincinnati in his home state of Ohio to launch the fund with a former colleague from Mithril, Colin Greenspon.
Narya was backed with about $100mn from Thiel and a cadre of his acquaintances, including former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Scott Dorsey.
As well as Rumble and Anduril, Vance had a financial interest in dozens more private companies. Narya also invested in Strive Asset Management, an investment fund started by former Republican presidential candidate-turned-Trump backer, Vivek Ramaswamy — who was also a former Vance classmate at Yale. Strive has built stakes in corporate giants such as Apple and Disney to urge them to keep “woke” politics out of their businesses.
Read more here
I personally believe that this is about Trump betraying Ukraine and his willingness to accept Russia’s demands, possibly including the tacit support for Netanyahu in continuing his atrocities in Gaza and now beyond.
This just happened to occur the next day after a 2 hour phone conversation between Trump and Putin. Also, strange coincidence, the Netanyahu coalition and government are just in the process of collapse.
And I think that Elon Musk is getting his instructions from higher ups than Trump. Bannon is a convinced criminal, having served time in prison.
I would say the odds are in favor of Elon Musk.
More up-to-date information on Telegram.
Etc.