The Extraordinary 7 Year Restructuring and Transformation of China: 2018-2025.

 The US? On the precipice of Disaster and Ruin. What Does the Future Hold? 

From Navdeep Singh

12-16-25

 

2018: Trump decides to punish China from accessing US semi-conductors. Instead of folding, capitulating and surrendering like Japan did in 1985 and ruined their economy for decades, China doubles down with intransigence. China starves the real estate industry, popping the emerging real estate bubble; equities-IPOs-stock market collapses. Prices for equites plummet by 66%; prices for houses collapse 33%. Hell, even the Chinese birth rate has collapsed, from 18 million births a year in 2018 to 9 million births in 2025. 

 

China orders all the state-owned banks to plough everything into industry, industrial supply chains,with the goal of making the country entirely self-sufficient for every aspect of material production, productive forces and industrial supply chains. Every regional and large municipal area changes course, mountains move on a dime, so-to-speak. Everything has become and is becoming further de-westernized, so it can control every aspect of production. 

 

Meanwhile, the US suddenly wants to de-Sinophie their own supply chains, making big claims to build their own rare earth industry, chemical compound and pharmaceutical industry, shipping industry, aluminum industry. But these processes take decades and trillions of dollars. Meanwhile, government debt is at record highs, budget deficits are at 6% of GDP (now roughly $2 trillion a year). How are they going to do this? Especially when most big US firms are much more concerned about stock buybacks and dividends, speculation and the casino economy. Economic growth iin the US is entirely dependent on artificial asset inflation and the leveraging of the same. The market cap of the US firms is twice as big as US GDP. So if equity prices collapse, here comes a big recession. So, once again, how are they going to do this?? Print the money? Or will the stock market and real estate market collapse, like it did in China? No US policy maker wants to see a 33% drop in real estate and 66% drop in equities. 

 

The interesting thing is these sectors did collapse in China, but it was no big deal for them, as a societal whole. Chinese households own their own home (90%), most of them debt free, without mortgages; they don’t pay real estate taxes to the state for the homes they own. Chinese households accumulate much more personal savings than US families, and it’s not even close. The economic storms were weathered. 

 

China now has a trillion dollar trade surplus, even as 80% of its economy is entirely domestic. 87% of the cars made by Chinese firms are sold in..China. Their biggest trader is no longer the US or EU. It’s the countries of ASEAN. Which, with 700 million residents, has a bigger population than North America and the EU combined. 

 

30 years ago, China graduated 350,000 university students a year. Now it’s 12 million university graduates a year, and half of these are in STEM-engineering-math, physics. 20 years ago, nobody wanted to buy a BYD car. Now, Chinese cars are vastly superior and cheaper than US and EU and Japanese cars, in every way. Ask the CEO of Ford. It’s not by some magic slight-of-hand. BYD employs 120,000 scientists and engineers in R&D alone. Tesla’s entire workforce is 80,000. 

 

How did Silicon Valley emerge? From largely Chinese and Indian immigrant engineers. Go to Google and Meta and take a look at the workforce. There’s a a reason why Google makes Chinese and Indian meals at their canteens, every week. Immigrants are no longer welcome here, especially brown-Black-“yellow” ones; explosive racism-xenophobia-bigotry is on the rise. It’s no longer affordable to live in the US, even for professionals on six-figure salaries. One more thing about the Bay Area: 80% of new tech startups now use Chinese LLMs. Not only is it much cheaper, they can modify them as needed. 

 

There are all sorts of serious planning happening in China, not just codified in the Five-Year Plans. Made in China 2025 was promulgated in 2015, focusing on upgrading manufacturing capabilities, reducing reliance on foreign technologies, and fostering home-grown innovation, including localization of supply chains. China Standards 2035 is about setting the global technical standards that will define global standards for decades (ie, surpassing the US0. Made in China 2025 laid the groundwork for technical innovation in China, with a very strong domestic focus. Global Standards 2035 aims to set global industry rules, especially in the Global South. 

 

Semi-conductor self-reliance and de-coupling are still works-in-progress. The “Big Fund” represents the multiple decade like plan to create a wholly separate and independent Chinese production of the most advanced microprocessors. We have already reached the 3rd stage, with all the infrastructure in place, including new funding ($50 billion), whereby companies like Huawei will surpass NVidea in a few years. There are more or less peer competitors at this point, strictly through Chinese work-arounds. 

 

The Made-in-China 2025 program has largely met its targets. China computing is now world class, with massive technical applications for industry. Chinese EVs now dominate (Ford just took a $19 billion hit, exiting the EV sector altogether!), accounting for 58% EV of sales in 2023. Rapid rollout of 5G was a huge success, rolling out 4.2 million 5G bases (60% of global totals). All these technologies are applied to industry, healthcare, education. Made in China 2025 focused on advanced IT, automated machine tools and robotics, aerospace equipment, maritime equipment and high-tech shipping, modern rail transport, new energy vehicles, power equipment, agricultural equipment, biotech and pharmaceuticals. 

 

China Standards 2035 focuses on global cooperation and influence, to create international best-practices, predicated on developing new innovations in technologies and externalizing them, through the Belt-and-Road Initiative, to the Global South, shaping how automation AI ethics, quantum computing, and machine learning are deployed on a worldwide basis. China envisions becoming the worldwide tech power by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. 

The lobby is milking the Bondi Beach attack to silence critics of Israel's genocide

Reprinted from Johnathan Cook on Substack.

The lobby is milking the Bondi Beach attack to silence critics of Israel's genocide

It is years of dedicated work by the Israel lobby that has ensured the mass murder of Palestinians is viewed by governments, the media and parts of the Jewish community as entirely legitimate

JONATHAN COOK DEC 16

I, for one, am struggling to stomach the spew of hypocrisy from pro-Israel groups like the Community Security Trust and its policy director, Dave Rich, in the wake of Sunday’s Bondi Beach attack.

Establishment media, on the other hand, appear to have a bottomless appetite for efforts by Israel apologists to exploit the genuine fear and grief of the Jewish community to advance a political agenda – one designed to silence criticism of Israel over its two-year slaughter and maiming of Palestinian children in Gaza.

Predictably, the supposedly liberal Guardian once again gave Rich a prominent slot in its comment pages, this time to spin the attack in Sydney into a demand for silencing opposition to Israel’s genocide.

Here are extracts from Rich’s piece in italics, followed by my observations. His all-too-obvious double standards and his glaring misdirection ploys should have disqualified this piece from publication. But the British media simply can’t get enough of this kind of bilge.

Rich: “The mobile phone footage of two gunmen calmly taking aim at families enjoying a Hanukah party is utterly chilling. It takes a special kind of dehumanisation, an ideology of pure hatred and self-righteous conviction, to do that.”

If Rich is so troubled by issues of dehumanisation, why has he remained so steadfastly mute about the long and utterly chilling dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israel and by its lobby groups, including his own organisation? Remember, Israeli leaders called the Palestinians “human animals”. It is decades of that kind of dehumanisation that laid the ground for Israel’s genocide. It is precisely because of such dehumanisation that the live-streamed horrors of the past two years made barely any impact on the Israeli public or on opinion among Israel’s supporters.

The truth is it is Rich and his fellow pro-Israel lobbyists who are the ones in the grip of an “ideology of pure hatred” – one that chooses to excuse the mass murder of children when they are Palestinian, blown to pieces and starved for months on end by the very state he identifies with.

Rich: “The whole basis of western liberal democracy, the belief in shared values within a diverse society, is endangered by these attacks.”

No, it’s not the Bondi Beach attack that has endangered “western liberal democracy”. That was irreversibly hollowed out when western leaders chose to actively collude in Israel’s genocide and defy the rulings of the world’s most respected legal institutions, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Western liberal democracy was hollowed out when these leaders chose to side with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and prioritise his exterminationist agenda over the rule of law.

Rich: “Some people react as if this terrorism is akin to a natural disaster or unforeseen tragedy: blind hatred with no cause or purpose, and therefore no deeper explanation needed. But terrorism does not emerge from a vacuum. It is merely the most violent, lethal expression of a set of attitudes and beliefs that are much more widely held than just by those who wield the gun or the knife.”

How true! Terrorism does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it is the weapon of the weak, and it feeds off a festering hatred that derives from having one’s community abused and a parallel, suffocating feeling of powerlessness to stop it. That doesn’t justify the Bondi Beach attack, but it does provide us with the “deeper explanation” Rich claims to be searching for.

But even before we read on, we know where he wants to take this.

Rich: “When it comes to antisemitic terror, the ideas that some take as justification for murder are popularised and normalised through the language of much of the anti-Israel movement that has marched up and down our city streets and through our university campuses these past two years.”

And sure enough, there it is. The “antisemites”, according to Rich and the rest of the pro-Israel lobby, are British families marching though their towns and cities to protest a genocide in which the British govermment is actively colluding. They are the criminals, not Israel’s genocide machine.

The “antisemites”, Rich wants you to believe, are those incensed by witnessing Israel slaughter children day after day for more than two years; those incensed at seeing Israel bomb the hospitals needed to treat those children; those incensed at hearing Israel and its supporters deny what we have all seen happening with our own eyes; and those incensed that our governments have not only failed to stop this horror show but have actively demonised their own populations for highlighting their complicity in these crimes.

Rich: “After rapper Bobby Vylan, one half of the group Bob Vylan, chanted “Death, death to the IDF” during a set at the Glastonbury festival in June, it became the rallying cry of anti-Israel protesters everywhere. It got Bob Vylan invited to the Irish parliament and Bobby Vylan on to Louis Theroux’s podcast. Far from a call for death putting the rapper beyond the pale, it made him a celebrity.”

It takes extraordinary chutzpah to exploit the blood spilled in Sydney by special pleading for an Israeli army that is recognised by all major human rights groups, the United Nations, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the International Criminal Court to have been routinely committing crimes against humanity in Gaza over the past two years.

If Dave Rich and the Community Security Trust are really so concerned about the dangers faced by Jews because of the many documented, and unpunished, crimes committed by the Israeli army, then maybe he should dedicate a little space to distancing himself and his organisation from that military rather than denying its criminality at every opportunity.

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Rich: “Is there a connection between this embrace of a call for death in the name of Palestinian rights, and people inflicting actual death apparently in the name of the same cause? As soon as you ask the question, the answer seems obvious.”

Both sides can play this game. Is there a connection between the embrace of calls for genocide in the name of Jewish supremacy, and Israeli soldiers inflicting actual death in the name of that cause? Remember Israel’s head of the military said he would deny the people of Gaza food, water and fuel, supposedly in “self-defence”, and that’s exactly what Israel did. Remember Netanyahu himself described the people of Gaza as “Amalek”, a people condemned to genocide by God, and genocide is exactly what Israel did.

Indeed, as soon as you ask the question, the answer seems obvious. But in the case of Gaza, the death toll is many thousands of times greater than anything inflicted by two twisted gunmen in Sydney.

Rich: “The devastation in Gaza is real and lots of people involved in pro-Palestinian activism do not support antisemitic violence against Jews, whether in Britain or Australia. But like it or not, it seems this movement has generated and sustained a political culture in which violence is both conceivable and enacted.”

Even were this true, it cannot compare to the political culture generated by Rich and his pro-Israel lobbyists. That political culture has not only made violence against Palestinians conceivable but a daily reality for them decade after decade. It is years of dedicated work by the Israel lobby that has ensured the mass murder of Palestinians is viewed by governments, the media and parts of the Jewish community as entirely legitimate.

Rich: “This is now a global emergency of antisemitism, and it is the consequence of two years of turning a blind eye, taking the easy path and ignoring the warnings. Make no mistake: alongside the grief and the defiance, Jews are angry. And they have every right to be.”

No, that is not the global emergency. The real emergency is a rampant anti-Palestinian racism that has utterly normalised genocide and been given institutional support across the West. It is anti-Palestinian racism, not “antisemitism”, that is the consequence of “two years of turning a blind eye, taking the easy path and ignoring the warnings”. Make no mistake: alongside the grief and the defiance, people with a conscience are angry at the two-year genocide endorsed by our governments. And they have every right to be.

Trump's Sanction War, Just Another Weapon in the Rogue State's Arsenal

 

Johnathan Cook wrote:

 

“Edward Snowden blew the whistle on illegal mass surveillance by US authorities of their own population – and had to flee into permanent exile.

 

Julian Assange published details of the US military's war crimes – and spent years locked up in a high-security jail, denied his most basic rights.

 

Francesca Albanese has documented US government and corporate complicity in Israel's genocide in Gaza – and now, thanks to US sanctions, cannot have a bank account. As she explains here, anyone who deals with her faces up to 20 years in a US jail.

 

Notice a pattern? The US is the ultimate rogue state, destroying anyone who tries to hold it to account. It is utterly lawless. Its methods are those of the gangster, ruling a world where there are no police who can bring it to heel.

 

Trump is different only in that he no longer bothers to hide the fact.” 

End

 

The point about Trump is well taken. We should be grateful that he has taken the mask off US imperialism’s activities and openly do what all US presidents do. The interference in the political life of other nations, bribing foreign leaders openly and threatening entire nations that if they don’t elect his supporters they will be denied aid or finances and worse, be sanctioned. Sanctioning is economic warfare and for poor nations it can mean a matter of life and death. 

 

The oil the US has just stolen from Venezuela was, I understand, heading for Cuba that desperately needs it for heating among other things. The US has starved this small island for over 60 years simply for defending its own interests as a nation state. 

 

The CIA, that Trump claims is on the ground in Venezuela, is the largest terrorist organization in the world and has a long record of assassinations, murder and drug dealing, particularly in Latin America but also Africa, the murder of leaders like Lumumba, for example.  The first American’s in Vietnam were CIA. 

 

The Trump Administration is not the first one to meddle in the affairs of Honduras, or other Central American countries spending billions destabilizing the region, undermining any attempts at self-determination and supporting right wing death squads in the process. Trump is simply following a long tradition; we are seeing it as it is. Richard Mellor

It's going to take a bit of time. But the fightback Against the Gangsters in the White House is Growing

 

Richard  Mellor

Trump and co are clearly on the defensive. They have a lot of options to disrupt and display presidential power. That's what having this office can do. But, contrary to what a lot of people are arguing, we are not in a fascist society and the Trump regime is not a fascist regime.

We are starting from a low level. We have not seen a mass movement since the Civil Rights movement in the 50's and 60's. We saw an uptick in labor struggles in the 1980's with some mass strikes and in the case of the P9 strike at Hormel, flying pickets and attempts to shut down other plants like the 1930's. We had two greyhound strikes that took on a mass character as well as a strike at Eastern Airlines that drove the company in to bankruptcy.  Unfortunately, the trade union hierarchy tried to paint this as a victory But how is a whole group of workers losing their jobs a victory? The head of Eastern, I think his name was Lorenzo, simply moved his capital. These people don't lose like we do. What should have happened was the taking over of that airline and the entire industry under workers control and management.

These battles in the eighties were defeated through a powerful combination of the trade union hierarchy and the bosses. In the nineties we had the Pittston Miners strike, another strike that could have been won and I remember Jacky Stump running as a write in candidate for office put forward by the miners. This strike was defeated not becasue we are weak but because the trade union leadership are supporters of the market and capitalism and when capitalism enters a crisis they immediately move to rescue it, at the workers expense. 

In the same mid nineties there was a huge labor battle in Decatur Illinois, three strikes and a lockout. Workers lost that too. You can read about that in many places, here's a quick link.  Dan Lane who I have known a long time and Early Silbar were very involved in that battle. I think maybe Navdeep Singh was as well. Earl was there as a supporter as he has been of other workers' struggles all his life. 

There are too many opportunities when workers rose up against capital to mention, but the Battle in Seattle is one. In 1999 when the US bourgeois overconfident as they can be at times, agreed to a WTO meeting in Seattle. There were massive protests with some 50,000 unionised workers involved, many of them younger workers. The Anarchists and socialists and other radicals were participants in a mass protest that shocked the US and global bourgeois. The global capitalists responded in following WTO meetings with extreme violence and one young worker was killed in Genoa. 

Finally, so as not to go on too long and also because I am only writing from memory here, not referring to my notes or books for the period, we had occupy in 2011 and I have to mention the educators strikes in 2018-19. These were strikes that took place in mostly red states (Republican led) where unions are illegal and striking is illegal. Those events were the largest number of strike days in 30 years. 

This movement terrified the union hierarchy, in the teachers' unions and the AFL-CIO in general and what could have been a springboard for a major uprising of organized labor was lost. In two contract disputes after those battles, in Oakland and LA, it was back to normal. I think it's fair to say that the unofficial strikes in the red states, against the trade union leaders position, could not have happened and did not happen in a similar way in Oakland and LA where the bureaucracy was more powerful and entrenched. They were able to contain the movement and prevent the mood and militancy of the red state strike within a framework that is acceptable to the bosses and in particular their friends in the Democratic Party.

That's it.

Trump administration switches from murdering fishermen to piracy

Note: I do not agree with the author that Maduro and his regime is transitioning to socialism no matter what he said. Socialism cannot be built in one country and one of the problems with Venezuela's version of it even under Chavez, was that bourgeois property was not appropriated and there was not an attempt to appeal to workers of the region to join in a wider revolutionary movement against international capital. Socialism cannot be built by an authoritarian regime "transferring power" to workers councils. In socialism, workers councils are the power both economic and political and this wasn't the case under Chavez or Maduro.  I am not fully aware of the all the details of the situation in Venezuela at the moment but Maduro is an autocratic head of state and his regime an authoritarian one.  As one Venezuelan worker put it, we're fighting the US and Maduro here.

Regardless of this, it is the role of the Venezuelan workers, and workers throughout the region, to settle accounts with the Maduro regime and oppose US imperialism's efforts to plunder its resources under the false claim of spreading democracy. In Latin America, the indigenous movements are in the forefront of the struggle against the savagery of capitalism and the market.  RM Admin. 

Trump administration switches from murdering fishermen to piracy

RICKY HALE AND COUNCIL ESTATE MEDIA DEC 11

After the bother Pete Hegseth got in by ordering the killing of fishermen, you would think the Trump administration would be less blatant in its violations of international law, but we are not dealing with the brightest people here.

We were told for weeks that the military build up in the Caribbean was about drug traffickers and was honestly nothing to do with oil, but the US has only gone and stolen a Venezuelan oil tanker. 

Even worse, that tanker was en route to Cuba where it would have been a lifeline for people who only have three to four hours of power a day. Remember how the US keeps telling us that socialism doesn’t work? Well, it does everything it can to ensure it fails and this is a case in point.

On 10 December, US forces consisting of the Coast Guard, FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and US Navy seized a vessel carrying 1.8 million barrels of Venezuelan oil in the Caribbean. The crew were mostly Indian nationals, making this an attack on India as well as Venezuela and Cuba.

The US claims it has the right to keep the oil due to the vessel’s alleged use in sanctioned activities, even without criminal conviction. In other words, they just have to accuse you of something and they get to steal your property. Isn’t that convenient?

The US argues the tanker had evaded US trade restrictions, but unilateral sanctions have no basis in international law and the seizure violates the non-intervention principles of UN Charter Article 2(4).

The US is using the excuse that the vessel was stateless, but 80% of Venezuelan oil exports are carried by stateless vessels because that is the only way to circumvent illegal sanctions. If those vessels carried the flags of other nations, those nations would be sanctioned as would anyone who bought the oil. This is one of the key problems with the US controlling the world’s monetary system and it’s why so many countries are attracted to BRICS. Everyone is sick of this crap.

The US is doing everything it can to prevent Venezuela from selling its own oil and to cripple the Venezuelan economy, so spare me the “Maduro is starving his people” talk. The US is starving the Venezuelan people to pressure them to overthrow their leader.

The Venezuelan government has issued a statement on the oil seizure which is impossible to argue against. Here is an excerpt:

“Under these circumstances, the true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been revealed… It has always been about our natural resources, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people.”

Trump openly boasted of his act of piracy, saying:

“We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela. Largest one ever seized actually. And other things are happening.”

When asked what the US would do with the seized oil, Trump simply replied:

“We keep it, I guess.”

The reporting in the mainstream media has been as dire as always with few outlets bothering to mention the illegality, instead regurgitating Trump’s disproven narrative about “narco-terrorists”. Their failure to hold the US government to account amounts to complicity in the starvation of Latin Americans.

Trump casually said: “I think you’re going to find that this is war.” That would be another war for oil. A war that is opposed by 70% of Americans.

Modern imperialism is essentially looting a country while pretending you’re spreading democracy and liberating people. If you claim the US concerns in Venezuela amount to promoting democracy, you deserve nothing but contempt. They want to install Maria Machado as a puppet so they can plunder Venezuela’s vast wealth. 

After calling for her country to be invaded by the US, Machado fled to Oslo where she had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She knows she will be safe from the bombs and bullets she wishes on her own people. Note that if the Venezuelan government were half as tyrannical as we’re told, this woman would not be walking free. We’re talking about someone who is a massive fan of the Gaza genocide who said: “Israel’s struggle is Venezuela’s struggle”.

In 2002, Machado signed an order by Pedro Carmona to dissolve the National Assembly, Supreme Court, and the Bolivarian constitution which had been approved via referendum just three years earlier. This is not the action of someone who cares about democracy.

If the US is successful in overthrowing Maduro, Machado could be installed as puppet dictator and be handsomely rewarded for selling out her people. Thankfully, Maduro is putting the mechanisms in place to prevent Venezuela from collapsing back into the neoliberal hell of the pre-Chavez era. 

Maduro said: “We declare ourselves a communal transition government toward socialism, of popular and neighborhood power, founded on the example of Christ the Redeemer.” He is in the process of transferring power to 49,000 communal councils and 4,,000 communal banks that would bypass dollar finance, building new power structures to permanently break away from the bourgeois state form. These are the actions of a man who knows his days are numbered and wants to ensure the liberation of his people. Whether he succeeds or not, only time will tell…

America Just Seized a Foreign Oil Tanker and Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

by Bruce Fanger

 

White Rose 

December 10, 2025

The United States has crossed a line today that most Americans will not even hear about unless someone forces them to look. Before sunrise, American forces boarded a massive Venezuelan oil tanker in international waters, took control of the vessel, and placed both ship and cargo under United States authority. The tanker, identified in multiple reports as the Skipper, was loaded with approximately two million barrels of heavy crude. Boarding teams fast-roped from helicopters launched off the USS Gerald R. Ford. The crew did not resist. The ship was taken.

 

Then President Donald Trump told the world what comes next.

According to Reuters, he said this directly:

 

“We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela, large tanker, very large, largest one ever, actually.”

 

He was then asked what would happen to the oil. His answer was not careful. It was not diplomatic. It was not the language of sanctions enforcement or maritime law. It was blunt.

 

“We keep it, I guess.”

 

Those are his exact words. Verified. Reported consistently. Not contested by the White House. No ambiguity. No context missing. The President of the United States said that America will keep another country’s oil.

 

The official rationale from Attorney General Pam Bondi is that the vessel was involved in a sanctioned network that handles oil traded between Venezuela, Iran and Cuba. But Trump himself did not speak in the language of legal procedure. He spoke in the language of entitlement. He treated the seizure as a moment of triumph, not as a difficult enforcement action. He framed it like a prize.

 

This matters because under the rules of the sea, foreign flagged commercial ships in international waters are not American property. They are not to be boarded without consent except under extremely narrow circumstances. Yet here we are. A carrier strike group in the Caribbean. A tanker taken in open water. A president gloating about the size of the prize and openly suggesting the United States will keep the crude for itself.

 

Venezuela has called it piracy. Cuba has called it theft. Those accusations no longer sound like propaganda when the American president goes on record saying exactly what they are accusing the United States of doing.

 

This is also happening alongside a pattern of lethal American strikes on small boats in the region. These strikes have been sold to the public as anti narcotics operations. Experts across the political spectrum point out that Venezuela is not a fentanyl source and only minimally involved in cocaine flows to the United States. Yet the narcotics story is being used as the catchall explanation for everything from missile strikes to maritime seizures.

 

Congress has not voted on any use of force in Venezuelan waters. There has been no debate. There has been no attempt to define what mission the United States is carrying out in the Caribbean. Power is being exercised first and justified later. The President is testing how far he can go without public pushback. So far the answer appears to be very far.

 

Will the American public notice any of this

No. Not unless someone points directly at the facts and refuses to let them be buried.

 

The United States just used a nuclear carrier group to seize a foreign nation’s oil on the high seas.

The President then confirmed the seizure and said the United States is keeping the oil.

These are documented facts.

These are verified quotes.

And they expose a truth that most Americans have been trained not to see.

 

When force is easy and accountability is optional, the distinction between enforcement and plunder collapses. Today we watched that collapse in real time. Most people will scroll past it. Most media will soft pedal it. But anyone still awake can see exactly what happened.

 

A country that once insisted it did not fight for oil just took oil and said so. 

Israel's biggest con trick: Hiding the true numbers it has killed in Gaza

Israel has penned us all into a 'debate', one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire – not the genocide it is waging by other means

JONATHAN COOK

DEC 10

The biggest con trick Israel has managed to pull off over the past two years is imposing entirely phoney parameters on a “debate” in the West about the credibility of the death toll in Gaza, now officially standing at just over 70,000.

It is not just that we have been endlessly bogged down in rows about whether Gaza’s medical authorities can be trusted, or how many of the dead are Hamas fighters. (Despite Israeli disinformation campaigns, the Israeli military itself believes more than 80 per cent of the dead are civilians.)

Or even that these “debates” always ignore the fact that, early on, Israel wrecked Gaza’s capacity to count its dead by destroying the enclave’s governmental offices and its hospitals. The 70,000 figure is likely to be a drastic under-estimate.

No, the biggest con trick is that Israel has successfully penned us all into a “debate”, one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire.

The truth is that far, far larger numbers of people in Gaza have been actively killed by Israel not through these direct means but through what statisticians refer to as “indirect” methods. 

These people were killed by Israel destroying their homes and leaving them with no shelter. By Israel destroying their water and electricity supplies and their sanitation systems. By Israel levelling their hospitals. By Israel starving them. By Israel creating the perfect conditions for disease to spread. The list of ways Israel is killing people in Gaza goes on and on.

Imagine your own societies levelled in the way Gaza has been. 

How long would your elderly parents survive in this hellscape? 

How well would your diabetic child fare, or your sister with asthma, or your brother with cancer? 

How well would you cope with catching pneumonia, or even a common cold, if you hadn’t had more than one small meal a day for months on end? 

How would your wife deal with a difficult childbirth if there were no anaesthetics, or no hospital nearby, or a barely functioning hospital overwhelmed with victims from Israel’s latest bombing run. 

And what would be the chances of your baby surviving if its mother could produce no milk from her starvation diet? And if you could not give the baby formula feed because Israel was blocking supplies from entry into the enclave? And if, anyway, the contaminated water supply could not be mixed into the formula powder? 

None of these kinds of deaths are included in the figure of 70,000. And all precedents show that many, many times more people are killed through these indirect methods than directly through fatal injuries from bombs and bullets.

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According to a letter from experts in this field to the Lancet, studies of other wars – most of them far less destructive than Israel’s on the tiny enclave – indicate that between three and 15 times more people are killed by indirect, rather than direct, methods of warfare.

The authors conservatively estimate an indirect death toll four times greater than the direct death toll. That would mean, at a minimum, 350,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza through Israel’s actions. 

The reality is likely to be even worse. That is without even mentioning the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been left with horrific injuries and psychological trauma. 

Israel’s war planners know exactly how this direct-to-indirect ratio works. Which is why they chose to destroy nearly every home in Gaza, to bomb the power, sanitation and water facilities, to level the hospitals, and to block aid month after month.

They knew this would be the way Israel could carry out a genocide while offering its allies – western governments and its army of lobbyists – a “get out of jail card” for their active complicity. 

Donald Trump’s so-called “ceasefire” is just another layer of deception in this endless game of smoke and mirrors. The UN’s child protection agency, Unicef, reports that less than a quarter of aid trucks are getting into Gaza, past Israel’s continuing starvation blockade, despite Israeli commitments agreed as part of the “ceasefire”. Apparently, this doesn’t register as a gross ceasefire violation. It goes unnoticed.

Unicef reports further that in October alone, at the start of the “ceasefire”, nearly 18,000 new mothers and babies had to be hospitalised in Gaza from acute malnutrition. 

The genocide isn’t over. Israel may have slowed the rate of direct killings it is committing by bombing Gaza, but the indirect killings continue unabated. And so does the Israeli-engineered “debate” in the West, one designed to obscure and excuse the mass murder of Gaza’s population. 

Extreme Inequality – And What To Do About It

By Michael Roberts

The latest World Inequality Report 2026 reveals the stark cleavage between rich and poor in the world – a division that is getting wider to the extreme. Based on data compiled by 200 researchers organised by the World Inequality Lab, the report finds that fewer than 60,000 people – 0.001% of the world’s population – control three times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity. 

In 2025, the top 10% of the global population’s income-earners earn more than the remaining 90%, while the poorest half of the global population captures less than 10% of total global income. Wealth – the value of people’s assets – was even more concentrated than income, or earnings from work and investments, the report found, with the richest 10% of the world’s population owning 75% of wealth and the bottom half just 2%.

In almost every region, the top 1% was wealthier than the bottom 90% combined, the report found, with wealth inequality increasing rapidly around the world. “The result is a world in which a tiny minority commands unprecedented financial power, while billions remain excluded from even basic economic stability,” said the report authors.

This concentration is not only persistent, but it is also accelerating. Since the 1990s, the wealth of billionaires and centi-millionaires has grown at approximately 8% annually, nearly twice the rate of growth experienced by the bottom half of the population. The poorest have made modest gains, but these are overshadowed by the extraordinary accumulation at the very top. The share of global wealth held by the top 0.001% has grown from almost 4% in 1995 to more than 6%, the report said, while the wealth of multimillionaires had increased by about 8% annually since the 1990s – nearly twice the rate of the bottom 50%.

Looking beyond strict economic inequality, the report found that this inequality fuels inequality of outcomes, with education spending per child in Europe and North America, for example, more than 40 times that in sub-Saharan Africa – a gap roughly three times greater than GDP per capita.

And inequality is creating more greenhouse gas emissions The report shows the poorest half of the global population accounts for only 3% of carbon emissions associated with private capital ownership, while the wealthiest 10% account for about 77% of emissions.

Income is distributed unequally everywhere, with the top 10% consistently capturing far more than the bottom 50%. But when it comes to wealth, the concentration is even more extreme. Across all regions, the wealthiest 10% control well over half of total wealth, often leaving the bottom half with only a tiny fraction.

These global averages conceal enormous divides between regions. The world is split into clear income tiers: high-income regions such as North America & Oceania and Europe; middle-income groups including Russia & Central Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East & North Africa; and very populous regions where average incomes remain low, such as Latin America, South & Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

An average person in North America & Oceania earns about 13 times more than someone in Sub-Saharan Africa and three times more than the global average. Put differently, average daily income in North America & Oceania is about €125, compared to only €10 in Sub-Saharan Africa. And these are averages: within each region, many people live with far less.

About 1% of global GDP flows from poorer to richer countries each year through net income transfers associated with high yields and low interest payments on rich-country liabilities, it said – almost three times the amount of global development aid. Inequality is also deeply embedded in the global financial system. Current international financial architecture is structured in ways that systematically generate inequality. Countries that issue reserve currencies can persistently borrow at lower costs, lend at higher rates, and attract global savings. By contrast, developing countries face the mirror image: expensive debts, low-yield assets, and a continuous outflow of income

The power of capital exerts itself internationally between nations. Excluding countries with a population of less than 10 million, the ten richest countries all receive positive net foreign income on their capital. In contrast, the world’s ten poorest countries are former colonies, most located in Sub-Saharan Africa. They display the opposite trends compared to the richest. Most of these countries pay significant net foreign income to the rest of the world. In other words, these countries are sending out more money than they are receiving from foreign investments. This drain limits their capacity to invest in areas such as infrastructure, healthcare, and education – key to lifting them out of poverty. No wonder they can never ‘catch up’ and close the gap with the Global North.

Can we do anything about reducing inequality?  First, in a preface to the report, the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz repeated a call for an international panel comparable to the UN’s IPCC on climate change, to “track inequality worldwide and provide objective, evidence-based recommendations”. The authors of the report then go on to argue that inequalities can be reduced through public investment in education and health and by ‘effective’ taxation and redistribution programmes. It notes that in many countries, the ultra-rich escape taxation.  Tax havens abound around the world.   A 3% global tax on fewer than 100,000 centimillionaires and billionaires would raise $750bn a year – the education budget of low and middle-income countries.

The report proposes some other policy measures. One important avenue is through public investments in education and health. Another path is through redistributive programs: “cash transfers, pensions, unemployment benefits, and targeted support for vulnerable households can directly shift resources from the top to the bottom of the distribution.”  Tax policy is another powerful lever: introduce fairer tax systems, where those at the very top contribute at higher rates through progressive taxes. Inequality can also be reduced by reforming the global financial system. “Current arrangements allow advanced economies to borrow cheaply and secure steady inflows, while developing economies face costly liabilities and persistent outflows.” Reforms here include adopting a global currency, with centralized credit and debit systems.

The report shows that redistributive transfers do reduce inequality, particularly when systems are well designed and consistently applied. In Europe and North America & Oceania, tax-and-transfer systems consistently cut income gaps by more than 30%. Even in Latin America, redistributive policies introduced after the 1990s have made progress in narrowing gaps. In other words, inequalities would be even worse without such measures.

But the report recognises a key problem. Effective income tax rates have climbed steadily for most of the population, but have fallen sharply for billionaires and centi-millionaires. The elites pay proportionally less than most of the households that earn much lower incomes. This regressive pattern deprives states of resources for essential investments in education, healthcare, and climate action. It also undermines fairness and social cohesion by decreasing trust in the tax system. The answer of the authors is a turn to progressive taxation as it “not only mobilizes revenues to finance public goods and reduce inequality, but also strengthens the legitimacy of fiscal systems by ensuring that those with the greatest means contribute their fair share.”

To summarise, the policy answers offered in the report are: 1) monitoring inequality 2) redistributing income through progressive taxation and social transfers; 3) more public investment in education and health 4) a global currency system.

What is missing here?  There is no policy to change radically the socio-economic structure of the world economy – in effect, capitalism is to remain. The owners of capital: the banks, the energy companies, the tech media companies, big pharma, and their billonaire owners – all these are not to be taken over.  Instead, we must just tax them more and governments must use the tax money to spend on investing in social needs. So the policy is one of redistribution of existing income and wealth inequality, not pre-distribution i.e changing the social structure that engenders these extreme inequalities, namely the private ownership of the means of production.

In previous studies I have found that the high inequality in personal wealth is closely correlated with inequality in incomes. I found that there was a positive correlation of about 0.38 across the data: so the higher the inequality of personal wealth in an economy, the more likely that the inequality of income will be higher. Wealth begets more wealth; more wealth begets more income. A very small elite owns the means of production and finance and that is how they usurp the lion’s share and more of the wealth and income. And wealth concentration is really about the ownership of productive capital, the means of production and finance. It’s big capital (finance and business) that controls the investment, employment and financial decisions of the world. A dominant core of 147 firms through interlocking stakes in others together control 40% of the wealth in the global network according to the Swiss Institute of Technology. A total of 737 companies control 80% of it all.

This is the inequality that matters for the functioning of capitalism – the concentrated power of capital. And because inequality of wealth stems from the concentration of the means of production and finance in the hands of a few; and because that ownership structure remains untouched, any redistibutive policy based on increased taxes on wealth and income will always fall short of irreversibly changing the distribution of wealth and income in modern societies.

At this point, it is often argued that public ownership of finance and key sectors of the major economies of the world is impossible and utopian – it will never happen short of some popular revolution – which in turn will never happen.  My reply would be the adoption of supposedly less radical policies like progressive taxation and/or a step change in public investment; or global cooperation to break the transfer of value and income from the Global South to the rich elite in the Global North, are just as ‘utopian’.  

What G7 government in the world is prepared to adopt such policies?  None.  How close have they got to adopting the report’s policies in the last ten or 20 years?  Not close at all – on the contrary, governments have cut taxes for the rich and corporations and raised them for the rest; while public investment in social needs has declined.  And is there any global cooperation on ending exploitation by the multi-nationals and banks in the Global South or in ending fossil fuel production and private jets?

The authors of the report say: “Inequality is a political choice. It is the result of our policies, institutions, and governance structures.”  But inequality is not the result of “our” policies, institutions and governance structures, but the result of the private ownership of capital and governments dedicated to sustaining that. If that does not end, inequality of income and wealth globally and nationally will remain and continue to worsen.