Michael Roberts: US mid-terms: AI stuck in the middle

 

US mid-terms: AI stuck in the middle

The Democrats won the 2026 US mid-term Congressional elections by a landslide. Before the vote, President Donald Trump told voters to think of him and his record when they voted – it seems that they did so.

About 124 million people voted in the elections, according to preliminary data from the University of Florida Election Lab. That’s up from the 112 million in 2022 and 118.6 million in 2018. But while the overall number of votes cast was up, the voter turnout rate for 2026 still lagged behind both the 2022 and 2018 mid-terms.  So that means that more than half of Americans eligible to vote failed to do so in this drubbing of Trump and the Republicans.

Of the less than 50% that did vote, there was massive swing to the Democrats.  On the national vote, the Democrats led by around a huge 13% points, the largest lead recorded since 1982. It was biggest congressional landslide in 50 years, marking the heaviest Republican defeat since the 1974 Watergate era. The Democrats will end up with up to 255 seats in the lower House of Representatives, marking their largest majority in nearly two decades (218 seats is the pass mark). And they will take 55 seats in the 100 seat Senate and thus control the upper house too.

In every state and every demography the Democrats led.  This was particularly the case with those voters aged 18-29.  Whereas there was a small majority of white males who voted Republican, that was not the case with the under 30s, where white males polled 57-40 for the Democrats. In every other category the lead was higher, with 96% of black females under 30 years voting Democrat. 

Moreover one-third of ALL voters under 30 self-identified as themselves as “democratic socialist” according to NBC’s exit poll — three times as many as those under 30 who considered themselves as Trumpist-MAGA supporters. 

And the issues were clear. According to data compiled by the Pew Research Center in October 2026, the economy was the number one priority for 84% of all voters, followed by 47% of all voters who ranked the Iran conflict started by Trump.  Healthcare was also high up the scale of issues. The vote for the Democrats was against Trump’s unnecessary war against Iran; the rising cost of living in food and energy; his brutal attacks on immigrants in the streets; and disgust at his corruption, lies and bombastic hubris. Opinion polls showed that Trump has the lowest approval rating for a US President ever.

So a Congress now controlled by the Democrats is in a position to investigate and challenge Trump’s activities and policies and to propose alternatives.  Leftist liberal economist Daren Acemoglu saw the Democrat victory as ”a lifeline for US democracy”.But only a lifleline, because voters who took Trump to power in 2024 and have now turned against him, could easily swing back if the Democrats cannot deliver on the issues of the “obscene levels of inequality in this country, with the real affordability crisis and with the vexing problem of creating good jobs for Americans of all skills..” Acemoglu reckons that “neither progressive Democrats’ reliance on taxes, transfers and traditional regulations, nor centrists’ attachment to the status quo, nor the wishful thinking of those banking on AI-driven “abundance” is radical enough.” That’s because things are going to get worse under the AI-led economy. 

What is the answer, according to the Nobel prize winner?  Americans need “well-paid, career-building jobs for all workers, and especially those without a college degree, who have been left behind in the postindustrial economy of the last half century.”  There should be a “workable plan for redirecting AI, so that this promising technology isn’t shaped by the dreams of a small cadre intent on artificial superintelligence and automation of most of what humans do. We must instead articulate why it is feasible and desirable to build pro-worker AI and how this can create jobs and decent incomes for workers.”

Meanwhile, the ‘affordability crisis’ is acute, not just in the US. Households worldwide are struggling with cost-of-living increases due to the wars and the aftermath of the Covid-19 outbreak, with wages struggling to keep up with persistent price pressures. Global prices for many commodities have remained elevated for several years, fuelled first by the pandemic-induced supply chain shortages and then by the wars in Ukraine and Iran.The war in the Middle East, which began last February, has raised the annual global rate of inflation towards 5%, well above the 2% target set by many central banks around the world. Price increases in necessities like food and energy have been particularly sharp. The global food price index is up 42% since the pandemic-led slump of 2020. And in just the last year, crude oil prices are up 57% while diesel is up 50%. The danger is that inflation could accelerate further next year if the Middle East conflicts continue until the end of this year and beyond. The global supply chain is already under renewed pressure and international trade growth is dropping back.

There are many areas of spending for American consumers like health, education and child care where costs have been racing past wage increases in the last 20 years. But now, since the pandemic, price inflation in food, fuel and other necessities are also shooting past wage increases. One year ago, consumer prices in the US were rising by 2.7% year-over-year. US workers’ average hourly pay was growing by 4%. Fast forward to now: prices are now rising 3.5% yoy, but wage growth has slowed to just 3.2%. Pay after accounting for inflation turned negative back in April. In the last year before the election, average real hourly earnings decreased 0.7%.

Average mortgage rates have doubled since the end of the pandemic to over 7% a year. As a result, in the US (and across Europe), the housing market has dived. The IMF’s mortgage-based affordability index (which measures the ratio of actual income to required income for a typical home loan) shows sharp declines. In the US, the index fell from roughly 150 down to the mid-80s (where values above 100 represent affordability).

In contrast, under Biden and Trump, the richest 10% of households saw their median net worth jump from $2.8M to $3.67M, about $872k or 30% up, from 2022 to 2025. The bottom 40% of households (by income) lost ground. Then Trump signed his ‘big beautiful’ bill handing the biggest tax cuts to those at the very top.

No wonder Americans voted out Trump’s Republicans. But what now? The Democrat leaders are now in control of Congress, but what are they proposing to do? What are the chances that the Democrats have any idea how to stop the rise in inflation and the cost of living? And can or will they end the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine that have contibuted to the affordability crisis? 

Democrats claim they will roll back Trump’s tariffs, reverse cuts to Medicare, lower healthcare and housing costs, and increase regulation on tech sectors like AI. But there will be no cuts in the grotesque level of ‘defence’ spending. Indeed, support for Ukraine in the war against Russia will probably be increased. In his new book, Twilight of American Imperialism, Jack Rasmus calculates the astounding rise in US government ‘defence’ spending and costs. According to his estimates, total US defence spending has more than doubled from 2019 at $1.5trn to a staggering $3trn next year. 

It seems the Democrats have no idea about how to control accelerating inflation except to rely on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates – a policy that will only increase the likelihood of a recession. And there are no proposals to reverse accelerating inequality.

Much is made in the mainstream media and among mainstream economists that the US economy is motoring along.  It’s true that US real GDP growth is stronger than in Europe or Japan, but that is hardly a high benchmark. US real GDP increased at an annual rate of 3.4% in the third quarter of 2026 – a seemingly big bounce from Q2. But this hides the trend. Year-on-year real GDP growth is slowing. At 2.1% in Q3 2026, it was near a low since the pandemic. The US economy is still growing, but at no more than 2% a year.

Moreover, US real GDP growth, investment and with it, jobs, are almost totally dependent on the AI investment boom. As former White House economic adviser Jason Furman showed: “The only big real construction increase in the United States over the last year has been data centers, up 64 percent. The power plants that feed them are up a more modest 4 percent, and everything else is down—with a particularly large decline in manufacturing, down 24 percent, which is off what had been a very high peak in 2024.”

These mega investments are managing to drive up output per worker.  The productivity of labour rose 3.6% in the third quarter. That meant the trend growth in productivity now matches the long-run postwar average and is well ahead of the 1.5% pace of the 2007–2019 cycle.

But will this last?  There are already signs that the AI investment boom/bubble is beginning to leak, if not burst – at least in Asia. And now the Democrat victory has sparked a sell-off in broad-based tech and AI stocks, with the Nasdaq sinking 5.5% in a single session, as investors worry that a Democrat Congress will stop or slow data center builds.

The question now is whether investor fears about over-investment and declining prospects for profits from AI will spread. Unless the massive investments in data centers and other AI-connected equipment, chips and software start delivering increased profitability, then a bust is not far away.

Iran: The Story The West Does Not Want You To Know

August 1953 Mohammed Mosaddegh, arrested after CIA/M16 coup

The Story The West Does Not Want You To Know

By Lim Tean*

 

I will be honest about why I wrote this article.

 

Across my social media platforms, I encounter daily a particular brand of ignorance that I find increasingly impossible to ignore. Iran is dismissed as a crazy country ruled by medieval mullahs, its people caricatured as fanatics who chant “Death to America” for no coherent reason. And from that caricature flows a conclusion that should horrify any person of conscience — that it is therefore perfectly justifiable for America, Israel, or any other country to bomb Iran, kill its people, and destroy its infrastructure.

 

This is not analysis. It is the recycling of propaganda as a substitute for thought. And it has real consequences — because populations that are kept ignorant of history can be mobilised to support atrocities committed in their name.

 

Iran is not a cartoon. It is one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilisations. And its anger at America is not irrational. It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.

 

Let me show you why.

 

The Original Theft

 

To understand Iran today, you must begin not in 1979, but in 1908.

 

In that year, on the sun-baked plains of Khuzestan, workers drilling for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company struck black gold at Masjid-i-Suleiman — the first great oil discovery in the Middle East. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and ultimately British Petroleum — the BP that today trades on the London Stock Exchange as a pillar of corporate respectability — had found the resource that would not merely enrich its shareholders, but change the course of world history.

 

The discovery was not merely commercially significant. It was strategically transformative. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had made the fateful decision to convert the Royal Navy’s warships from coal to oil before the First World War — giving Britain’s fleet superior speed and range, but making it utterly dependent on a secure oil supply. Iranian oil did not merely enrich British shareholders. It powered the British Empire’s ability to wage and win the greatest war in human history. The Iranian people received almost nothing in return.

 

For decades, Britain extracted Iran’s oil under terms of stunning inequality. Iranian workers toiled in dangerous conditions for poverty wages. Iranian communities near the oilfields lived without electricity, running water, or basic sanitation — while British staff enjoyed swimming pools, clubs, and comfortable salaries. The Iranian government received a pittance in royalties, and was denied even the right to audit the company’s accounts. Iran’s greatest natural treasure was being systematically looted, and the Iranian people knew it.

 

A man arose who decided to say: enough.

 

Mosaddegh and the Crime of Democracy

Mohammed Mosaddegh was everything the West claims to want in a Middle Eastern leader. He was democratically elected. He was secular. He was a constitutional lawyer steeped in European liberal tradition, who had studied in Paris and Neuchâtel. He wore suits, not robes. He believed in parliamentary democracy, the separation of powers, and the rule of law.

 

In 1951, as Prime Minister, he did something unforgivable. He nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, returning Iran’s oil to its rightful owners — the Iranian people. The Iranian parliament voted for it unanimously. The Iranian street erupted in celebration. For the first time in their modern history, Iranians dared to believe that the wealth beneath their feet might actually benefit them.

 

Britain was apoplectic. The Americans were alarmed. And so, in August 1953, the CIA and MI6 launched Operation Ajax — one of the most consequential covert operations in modern history. They bribed Iranian generals, hired thugs to create street chaos, spread disinformation, and toppled the democratically elected government of a sovereign nation. 

 

Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He died in 1967, never having been broken, never having recanted — a man of extraordinary dignity whose only crime was wanting his country’s wealth to belong to his country’s people.

 

In his place, the West reinstalled Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi — and handed him SAVAK, one of the most feared secret police forces in the world, to keep his people in line.

 

This is the original sin. This is where the story truly begins.

 

The Shah’s Gilded Cage

The Shah that America restored and sustained was not a moderniser, whatever his propaganda claimed. He was a man of spectacular vanity and profound disconnect from his own people.

 

Consider this extraordinary fact: Mohammed Reza Shah held his coronation not once, but effectively twice. He had been on the throne since 1941, but waited until 1967 — twenty-six years — to hold his formal coronation, because he felt the circumstances had never been grand enough for a ceremony befitting his self-image. When he finally crowned himself, in a ceremony of breathtaking opulence, ordinary Iranians watched from a distance that was not merely physical.

 

But the coronation was merely a rehearsal for the true performance of imperial delusion — the celebrations at Persepolis in October 1971.

 

To mark the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, the Shah staged a spectacle that remains one of the most extraordinary acts of self-aggrandisement in modern political history. Heads of state and royalty from across the world were flown in. A tent city of fifty lavish pavilions was constructed in the desert near the ruins of Persepolis, the ancient Achaemenid capital. 

 

The tents themselves — along with virtually everything else — were imported from France. Maxim’s of Paris catered the meals. Guests dined on quail eggs stuffed with caviar, crayfish mousse, and roast lamb, washed down with vintage Bordeaux. Iranian culture was largely absent from a celebration ostensibly honouring Iranian civilisation. The Iranian people were spectators at a party thrown in their name, to which they were not invited.

 

The estimated cost was anywhere between $100 million and $300 million — at a time when millions of Iranians lived in poverty, lacking clean water, adequate healthcare, or basic education.

 

The Iranian people drew their conclusions.

 

Khomeini’s Rational Revolution

When Ayatollah Khomeini offered the Iranian people his theory of velayat-e-faqih — the guardianship of the Islamic jurist — and proposed an Islamic Republic as the vessel for a new Iranian order, he was not offering them theology alone. He was offering them dignity. He was offering them the promise that Iran’s sovereignty, Iran’s resources, and Iran’s future would belong to Iranians — not to the Shah’s court, not to Western oil companies, not to American strategic planners in Washington.

 

The Iranian revolution of 1979 was a mass movement of extraordinary breadth. Secular nationalists, leftists, intellectuals, bazaar merchants, students, and the religious poor all marched together. They had different visions of what would come after — but they were united in what they were marching against. A corrupt, repressive monarchy sustained by American power and serving American interests, which had delivered neither freedom nor prosperity to its own people.

 

When the American Embassy was seized and diplomats taken hostage, the West erupted in outrage. But behind that act was a simple, searing Iranian fear — that America would do in 1979 what it had done in 1953. That Washington would organise another coup, reinstall the Shah, and extinguish the revolution. The hostage crisis was many things — chaotic, counterproductive, damaging to Iran’s own interests — but it was not irrational. It was the desperate act of a people who had already been betrayed once by American power and were determined not to be betrayed again.

 

When America Armed the Man Who Gassed Iranian Children

If the 1953 coup was the original sin, the Iran-Iraq war was the confirmation — the moment that removed any remaining doubt in Iranian minds about what American power truly meant for their people.

 

In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran. It was an act of naked aggression against a revolutionary government that was still finding its footing, launched with the tacit encouragement of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran as an opportunity to be exploited. The war that followed lasted eight years. It consumed perhaps one million lives. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the twentieth century’s second half — and it has been almost entirely erased from Western historical memory.

 

What has been even more comprehensively erased is America’s role in sustaining it.

 

As the war ground on and Iranian forces began pushing back Iraqi advances, Washington made a decision of breathtaking cynicism. It could not allow Iran to win. 

 

And so America began providing Saddam Hussein with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions, military equipment, and — most damningly of all — with the precursor chemicals for the weapons that Saddam would use to commit one of the most documented war crimes of the modern era.

 

Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian forces on a massive scale — mustard gas, tabun, sarin. Thousands of Iranian soldiers died in agonising chemical attacks. And Washington knew. American officials knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons. The intelligence community reported it. And the Reagan administration made a deliberate policy decision to continue supporting Saddam regardless — because an Iranian victory was deemed strategically unacceptable.

 

The most haunting chapter came not on a battlefield but in a Kurdish village. In March 1988, Iraqi forces attacked Halabja with chemical weapons, killing thousands of Kurdish civilians — men, women, and children — in a single day. It was the largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in history. And even then, Washington’s response was muted, carefully calibrated to avoid jeopardising its strategic relationship with Baghdad.

 

Iranian mothers who lost sons to American-supplied chemical weapons are still alive today. Iranian veterans who survived those attacks carry the physical scars — destroyed lungs, ravaged skin, broken bodies — into old age. Iran has never forgotten. Iran will never forget.

 

And yet Western commentators express bewilderment at the “Death to America” chant.

Consider for a moment what that chant actually represents, stripped of its theatrical staging. It represents the voice of a mother whose son was gassed with chemicals whose precursors passed through American hands. It represents the voice of a nation that had its democracy stolen in 1953, its resources plundered for decades before that, its revolution encircled and sanctioned, and its sons killed in a war that America prolonged deliberately to prevent Iranian victory.

 

If any Western nation had suffered a fraction of what Iran has suffered at the hands of a foreign power, that chant would be taught in schools as an anthem of righteous resistance. It would be celebrated in films and memorialised in monuments. Instead, because it is directed at American power, it is presented as evidence of Iranian irrationality. The arrogance required to sustain that position is staggering.

 

47 Years of Punishment

Since 1979, the United States has imposed on Iran some of the most comprehensive and punishing sanctions ever inflicted on any nation in modern history. Sanctions on oil. Sanctions on banking. Sanctions on technology. Sanctions on medicine. Sanctions that have impoverished ordinary Iranians, denied patients access to life-saving drugs, and strangled an economy of 93 million people.

 

And surrounding Iran on all sides — in the Gulf, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Arabian Peninsula — America has built a vast archipelago of military bases, projecting power and telegraphing threat. Iran has been encircled, economically strangled, and subjected to covert warfare including the assassination of its nuclear scientists on its own streets.

 

Throughout all of this, Iran has survived. It has adapted. It has built regional influence through patient statecraft, cultivating allies across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It has advanced its nuclear programme not out of theological ambition but out of the entirely rational calculation that the only nations America does not attack are those that possess nuclear deterrence.

Justice Delayed

 

When analysts speak of America’s strategic defeat in its confrontation with Iran, they reach for the language of geopolitics and military balance. But there is another language that must be spoken — the language of history.

 

For 47 years, a people of ancient civilisation, extraordinary intellectual depth, and justified grievance have been punished for the crime of reclaiming their own sovereignty. They were punished for Mosaddegh’s ghost. They were punished for daring to say no to a superpower that had grown accustomed to treating the Middle East as its private strategic estate.

 

The “Death to America” chant that so offends Western sensibilities did not emerge from the Quran. It emerged from Operation Ajax. It emerged from SAVAK’s torture chambers. It emerged from Persepolis while children went hungry. It emerged from sanctions that killed patients who could not obtain medicine. It emerged from chemical weapons whose precursors passed through American hands. It emerged from a history that the West has studiously refused to confront — because confronting it would require acknowledging that the rage it provokes is not irrational.

 

It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.

 

Understanding this does not require endorsing every act of the Islamic Republic. It requires only honesty — the willingness to read history as it actually happened, rather than as Western convenience has chosen to remember it.

 

Iran is not a cartoon. It is a civilisation. And civilisations have long memories.

 

Much of the historical foundation of this piece draws on two remarkable books that I commend to every serious reader: Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran — Axworthy served as Head of the Iran Section at the British Foreign Office before becoming one of the foremost academic authorities on modern Iran — and Scott Anderson’s Shah of Shahs. They changed how I understand this civilisation. They may change how you understand it too.

 

The picture below is of Mohammed Mosaddegh, August 1953- at the moment of his arrest in a coup plotted by MI6 and the CIA

 

*Lim Tean is the founder and Secretary General of the People’s Alliance for Reform (Singapore) 

Israeli Occupation Forces Continue To Attack Palestinian Journalists in West Bank

Israeli soldier shares a dehumanizing photo of the arrest of Palestinian journalist Marah Awad

Andy Worthington*

Nov 2 2026

An Israeli soldier has shared a dehumanizing photo of the Palestinian journalist Marah Awad, blindfolded and handcuffed, after soldiers raided her family home in Beit Ummar, north of Hebron, on October 26.

 

According to her brother Hamouda, Israeli soldiers broke into the home in the early hours of the morning, violently ransacked it, and, after confirming Marah’s identity, asked her, “What do you write about Israel?”, accused her of incitement against the occupying regime, seized her phone and computer, and then tied her hands, blindfolded her, and took her to an unknown location. She is one of around 40 Palestinian journalists, mostly from the West Bank, who are currently held in Israel’s grotesque torture prisons for Palestinians.

 

Marah’s arrest took place during ten days of Israeli aggression in Hebron (Al-Khalil) and the surrounding area, which came to an end today. Over 3,300 people were displaced, schools were closed, homes were destroyed, and the entire area was placed under military lockdown, following an attack on a military checkpoint on October 23 in which two Israeli soldiers were killed. 

 

Over the course of its brutal ten-day occupation, approximately 540 homes were appropriated and used as military barracks by Israeli forces, while at least 115 Palestinians were arrested.

 

*Andy Worthington is a Journalist, activist, photographer, singer & songwriter, based in London UK. He is recognized as an authority on Guantánamo.  His website is here.

Capitalism and the State. Is it Really All Trump's Fault?

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED
5-17-26

The System Is the Problem

Every political crisis produces its villains. Today, the dominant figure in that story is Donald Trump without doubt a distasteful, degenerate human being. The anger directed at him is understandable. But there is a danger in making any single individual the center of our analysis. When we do, we lose sight of something more important: the system that produced him, that accommodates him, and that will outlast him.

This is not an accident. In the political struggles between different factions of the ruling class, the focus on individuals is actively welcomed because it is a useful distraction from the root cause of the crises we face. That root cause is not a person. It is the system of production we call capitalism.

What capitalism actually is

In a capitalist system, the means of producing the necessities of life — factories, land, technology, financial institutions — are owned by a small group of private individuals. What sets those forces of production in motion is not the needs of society, but profit. The machine turns on when there is money to be made. It turns off when there isn't — regardless of what people need.

Marx explained it beautifully: "A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation." *

The point is simple: under capitalism, what matters is not what is produced or who benefits — it is whether the owner of the operation turns a profit. Education, healthcare, housing, food — all of it is subordinated to profit and the accumulation of capital.

What exactly is the state?

In my youth, had someone asked me to describe the state I would have said simply that it is the government.; I had never given it much thought. We are accustomed to thinking of government as a neutral institution — a referee that stands above competing interests in society and serves the common good. This is a comforting idea. It is also wrong.  

The modern state is not neutral. It is an organ of class rule and the ruling class in our situation are capitalists and we live in a capitalist or bourgeois democracy. Its laws, its institutions, its police, its courts, its military — all of these have been shaped over time to protect and reproduce the existing order: the order in which a small class of people own the productive wealth of society and the rest of us work for them. 

This does not mean that every politician is consciously conspiring, or that nothing can be won through political struggle. It means that the state, as a structure, exists to manage the affairs of the class that owns and controls the economy; Marx wrote in 1848 that, “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

When we watch the battles between the Republicans and Democrats (the two major capitalist parties) over which party gets to govern society for the next four years, we are witnessing different factions of the ruling class compete for control of the state apparatus, we are watching a fight over who manages the system, not a fight over whether the system should continue. When it comes to the working class, they are united against us.

Contradictions, not villains

This brings us back to the question of crisis. Capitalism is an exploitative system, and suffering, poverty, war, hunger etc. is integral to it. As capitalist crisis intensifies, we are told the cause is greed, incompetence, or the moral failings of particular leaders. If only we had better people at the top, the story goes, things would be different.

But greed is not a cause. It is a feature. Capitalism does not merely tolerate the single-minded pursuit of profit — it requires it. A business that fails to compete and accumulate will be swallowed by one that does. If individuals can’t pay for health care they don’t get it. If less developed nations, (the former colonies plundered by the advanced capitalist states) can’t afford the costs of infrastructure development, sewage, drinking water, etc.; they don’t get it. 

In the global competition between nations, there is no such thing as fair trade. Trade disputes and tariffs are actual wars. When the competition becomes acute. When capitalist states cannot resolve disputes over trade and markets, they go to war. Both WW1 and WW2 were a product of the competition between nation states over resources, markets and global plunder.The system produces this scenario but the capitalist education system and mass media blames it on individuals.

The real causes of crisis are structural. Capitalism contains internal contradictions — built-in tensions between the drive to accumulate and the limits of what any society can absorb — that periodically produce exactly the kind of economic and political instability we are living through now. These crises will recur, under different leaders, with different villains, until the structure itself is changed.

Why this matters

None of this means that individuals don't matter, or that who holds power is irrelevant. It means that changing the individuals without changing the system is not a solution — it is a reset that leads back to the same place.

Understanding that the state is an instrument of class power, and that crises are produced by the system rather than by the moral character of its managers, is not pessimism. It is clarity. And clarity about the nature of the problem is the first condition for doing something about it.

* Marx Capital, Vol 1 Chap. 16 Absolute and Relative Surplus Value

Michael Roberts and Jack Rasmus: The Twilight of American Imperialism

Richard Mellor

Marxist economist, Michael Roberts interviews Jack Rasmus about his latest book; The Twilight of American Imperialism. This is a fascinating discussion about the decline of US imperialism on the world stage and its causes. It is a short discussion packed with information about the decline and the level of it. 

It would be incorrect to refer to this decline as a collapse but a gradual decline that is, as the speakers point out, cased by the inability of the Empire to fund its operations, similar to the cause of the decline of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century.

Order this book here

The book covers the period from the early 1990's to the present Trump Administration and, if the discussion above is anything to go by, will be easily accessible to the working class reader interested in the causes of the events that are occurring in the world today. 

Both authors feel confident that if the Democrats are successful in the Mid-Terms it will not significantly affect US foreign policy and it could be worse. As Jack Rasmus points out, " the Deep State" controls foreign policy.

As readers on this blog know, I publish and most of Michael Roberts economic writings, and blogs at https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/

Jack Rasmus also has a blog here: https://jackrasmus.com/

Order the book:  The Twilight of American Imperialism

Abdul El Sayed is Not a Capitalist.

Richard Mellor

 

I wanted to post the short version of this but could not find  a way of doing it.  Fortunately, I found this longer version and the comments I am responding to below are at the very beginning. I certainly have no interest in watching the rest of it as Fox is not a news channel and the woman is not a journalist. I do not support the Democratic Party and I'm certainly not a Republican Party supporter. I feel the utmost sympathy for Abdul El Sayed having to suffer the racism and religious bigotry being thrown at him in this country with the Orange thing in the White House leading the charge. If I lived in Michigan I'd vote for him just to stick it to these racist, nationalist market loving ideologues.

 

Anyway I am responding here to Abdul El Sayed's response to this Fox propagandist on whether he is concerned as a capitalist, about the rise of Democratic Socialism in the U.S. She means DSA and social democratic political views. He answers it with dignity but there is more that should be said.

 

This is how poor the political discourse is in the US not to mention the class consciousness. It's quite staggering. As far as I know, Abdul El Sayed is not a capitalist, he is a worker. He gets paid a wage for his labor power and he gets paid quite well for it. It costs a lot to produce a doctor. I think he is a public servant.

Given that he earns a good living, he may well put some of that capital to work and have some sort of side business therefore acting as a capitalist in some way. I don't know. But I worked with guys (I had a good union civil service job) who owned a couple of properties, some of them it was what their parents left to them when they died. So they were landlords. But their basis for survival was their jobs. We had good pay, the opportunity to work a lot of overtime and we had very good benefits by American standards, especially health care. These essentials were covered by the jobs we had and that we were public sector workers and we had a union. So they could play capitalists for a bit, having a certain amount of security.

But landlordism, a section of the capitalist class whose means of subsistence is based solely on owning shelter (homes), is different than a worker who has some spare capital, having a decent job, and earns enough to borrow money and buy a place they can rent out. Some workers might earn enough that the moneylenders will lend them money to buy two or three properties, maybe enough to quit their regular job. Then they join (albeit at the lower rungs), of that section of the capitalist class we call landlordism. But as soon as hard times hit, small capitalists like that can quite easily end up back among the ranks of the working class or the unemployed or indigent.

So what my co-workers meant when they said they were capitalists, was they support capitalism. And generally they meant as opposed to socialism or particularly communism which they believed was the system in the Soviet Union or China. Though neither of these states are or were communist.

Of course they support capitalism and the right of the boss to lay off workers until it was their jobs that were on the chopping block.

I don't fault Abdul El Sayed for responding the way he does, he is a doctor not a political person to my knowledge. I don't know if he knows much about Eugene Debs or Karl Marx but it is important to point out the lack of clarity in the US that has come about due to the failure of the heads of organized labor on the one hand coupled with the absence of a national working class party and the power of the mass media. 

Just because you vote for a capitalist party (we only have two options here and they are both capitalist parties) doesn't mean you're a capitalist. But, let's be honest, workers refer to ourselves a middle class here, well paid union workers anyway. That reflects the power of the capitalist class and their media in this country in the post world war 2 era, that we can call ourselves what we're not.

US Threats Push Dependent Smaller States to Support the US Blockade on Cuba.

Trita Parsi*

Sad to see countries keep complaining about the lawlessness Trump is bringing to the international arena, but when push comes to shove, they not only don't dare to push back; they acquiesce to US pressure.

 

See, for instance, the annual resolution at the UNGA condemning the US's decades-long embargo on Cuba.

 

This resolution gets huge support every year. But this year, the US's strong-arming tactics moved the needle significantly in Washington's direction.

 

Support for the Cuban resolution fell from 165 countries in 2025 to 130 in 2026, while opposition rose from 7 to 17 and abstentions more than doubled, from 12 to 25.

 

Colombia, Slovenia, Trinidad and Tobago and the UAE went from voting for it to voting against it.

 

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Costa Rica, Czechia, Ecuador, Lithuania, and Morocco moved from abstention in 2025 to an outright NO vote in 2026.

 

Then these countries went from supporting the resolution to abstaining:

 

Bahrain, Chile, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Italy, Jamaica, Montenegro, Netherlands, Palau, Peru, Qatar, South Korea, Solomon Islands.

 

The main common denominator for these states that have abandoned their longstanding opposition to an illegal embargo is their vulnerability to and dependence on the US. As US foreign policy grows more aggressive and unforgiving, the cost of defying it on this vote has become too high. For some of the smaller states, this is understandable given their near-total dependence on the US. 

 

But this does not apply to states such as Germany, Italy, South Korea, and the Netherlands. They don't have this excuse. Their failure is beyond embarrassing. 

 

Germany is particularly noteworthy. Germany, for the first time, lost a bid earlier this year for an elected seat at the UNSC. This is particularly embarrassing for Germany since it has long sought a permanent seat on the Council. The overarching reason for this failure is the common view that Germany has abandoned international law - it insisted on it in Ukraine, but abandoned it in Gaza, Venezuela, and Iran.

 

Add Cuba to that list. Rather than restoring its standing, Germany dug a deeper hole for itself with this vote.

 

* Trita Parsi is a co-founder and Executive VP of the Quincy Institute.