If you have opinions about the subject matter of posts on this blog please share them. Do you have a story about how the system affects you at work school or home, or just in general? This is a place to share it.
This is a free documentary. about oil and the people of the Niger Delta. It's staggering when you think of the amount of profit the oil companies make and yet that wealth does not benefit the communities that live around it. The ecological and human catastrophe that is the product of this industry is staggering. As you will see, the pirates have no means of subsistence other than to piracy. This is capitalism working is it? The so-called free market at work
Humanity has the means to produce energy in a different way and use human labor power in a different way, but what drives production in the capitalist system is profit. No profit, no sewer system, no profits, no health care system, no profit, no investment in a safe drinking water system. Africa, and the world in general doesn't lack the means to change all this, but capitalism and those that propagate it will not leave the stage of history without being forced. We either change the system or it will drive us in to the abyss.
A 29-year-old California man has been arrested for allegedly causing $500 million in damage when he set fire to a Kimberly-Clark warehouse to protest the cost of living and the Iran War.
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live,” the Justice Department’s indictment alleges he said in video posted to Instagram. “[T]hey had it coming … fucking eight hours, six days … stuck paying rent on a bullshit ass apartment that I can’t afford to fucking live … pedophiles out here fucking children, profiting off … fucking wars.”
In a press conference, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli went out of his way to stress that the defendant had “compared himself to Luigi Mangione” in a comment to a witness.
No one was injured in the early morning fire, but Justice wants to make a point: Chamel Abdulkarim’s target was the system of capitalism itself.
Arson, and admittedly a serious case (if the government is correct); and politically motivated, given the remarks Abdulkarim made.
But Mangione? The FBI and the national security machine is going to jump on this, affirming for them that a “copycat” terrorist points to a bigger trend lurking in society.
That fact is at the very center of NSPM-7 — national security presidential memorandum 7 — signed by President Trump last September, that identifies “anti-capitalism” as a so-called indicator of domestic terrorism. The directive opens with a section that mentions “the 2024 assassination of a senior healthcare executive” — i.e. Luigi Mangione — as indicative of a growing threat.
Take a look at what the federal indictment focuses on, alleging Abdulkarim said:
“[S]hould have paid us enough to fucking live.”
“1% is a fucking joke.”
“If you’re not going to pay us enough to fucking live or afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this shit.”
“Billionaires profiting off of war ...”
[Y]ou know, we may not get paid enough to fucking live, but these bitches dirt cheap”
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Pay us more of the value WE bring. Not corporate. Didn’t see the share holders picking up a shift.”
“[T]hey had it coming … fucking eight hours, six days, [unintelligible] stuck paying rent on a bullshit ass apartment that I can’t afford to fucking live … pedophiles out here fucking children, profiting off [unintelligible] fucking wars.”
US Attorney Essayli goes on to cast the arson attack as a sign of anti-capitalist sentiment, promising to “aggressively” pursue anyone who attacks capitalism — or “our way of life,” as he put it:
“Look, America is founded on free enterprise and capitalism. Anyone who attacks our values, our way of life, our system, which provides the best goods and services to the most people, we’re gonna come after aggressively.”
Get used to stuff like this. As I reported in January, a leaked draft copy of the Department of Homeland Security’s upcoming annual Homeland Threat Assessment introduced a new “extremism” threat category: “class-based or economic grievances.”
Screenshot of leaked Homeland Threat Assessment
By contrast, state authorities did not portray the crime as some sort of threat to capitalism. In fact, San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson seemed to not understand it at all.
“Arson, to me, is a real head scratcher; I do not understand that somebody who is suspected of arson does something where they get no value out of it,” Anderson said at the press conference.
They still don’t get it.
While reporting on this, when I tried to figure out what exactly the suspect’s job entailed while working for Kimberly-Clark — the company whose 1.2 million square foot facility he allegedly set on fire — I realized that he didn’t actually work for them, but for a third-party contractor, something called “NFI Industries.”
The dreary name reminds me of reporting on Amazon warehouses and hearing one worker after another bitterly refer to its much-hyped $15 minimum wage as not applying to them because they worked for similar subcontractors. This two-step is also how Amazon can claim it’s not them but rather the contractors responsible for the infamous practice of workers having to pee in bottles to meet their punishing quotas.
NFI has been accused of similar practices and was sued in 2015 by New Jersey port and warehouse truckers who said the company systematically misclassified them as “independent contractors” while exercising full employer‑style control. In 2022, a federal judge ruled in the driver’s favor, ordering NFI to pay them over $5 million in a class action settlement.
The obscene price of gasoline as a result of the Iran war (part of our hallowed “way of life,” which allows oil companies to price gouge even in emergencies) has once again thrust the cost of living into the spotlight. Millions of Americans resonate with Mangione and Abdulkarim.
Isn’t anyone in power curious why that is?
As a friend told me today when I brought up the Kimberly-Clark fire: Who that’s worked a shitty job hasn’t fantasized about burning it all down? (This is literally the plot of the cult classic movie Office Space!)
Democrats and Republican politicians alike mouth “affordability” but do nothing. Civil government is also starved, bled of resources by our national security colossus that devises more and more ways to spy on anyone opposed, or drowns out their voices by flooding the media with security-speak.
There are basically two ways the government can respond to things like the Kimberly-Clark fire: (1) treat them as national security threats to be monitored and preempted forever; or (2) address the underlying grievances causing them.
Sounds like a real “head-scratcher.”
Subscribe if you would’ve left Milton’s stapler alone
Former organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP).
Member of 230 Fightback
I see a group of psychiatrists arguing that Trump shows signs of being a 'malignant narcissist' and the calls for him to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment are coming in thick and fast.
I don't do mental health diagnoses but I fully accept that Trump is an exceptionally cruel and selfish man who seems devoid of decent human feelings. He also appears to be increasingly unstable and dangerous.
The problem with treating Trump as utterly exceptional and focusing on his personal characteristics, however, is that it serves to conceal the bigger and far more important issues.
Two questions leap out at us. What kind of an economic, social and political system would elevate a person like Trump to power? What has happened within that system that generates the basis for the Trump administration at this time?
In general, we may view US imperialism as a global system of violent exploitation. The people who play the directing role in this operation have copious quantities of blood on their hands.
Most of them appear more rational and personable than Trump but they all have to come to terms with the unspeakable crimes they are implicated in. They are drawn from a ruling stratum that has received the training and ideological preparation necessary for them to justify and accept the death and suffering they inflict and to do so with a sense of moral superiority. They are shaped primarily by social forces rather than personal psychology.
If Trump is an 'extreme' representative of this layer, he is very much the product of a particular stage of development. His administration represents an attempt to reverse the relative decline in US power by throwing the rulebook out the window and taking a path of reckless predation. Trump's crude and brutal inhumanity makes him the candidate of choice to head up such an exercise in gangsterism.
Psychological factors are by no means irrelevant but the social foundations out of which they arise are decisive. Trump and the collection of thoroughly warped human beings he has gathered around himself have to be understood in such terms if they are to be properly understood.
The era of disinflation is over. By disinflation, I mean a rise in overall prices of goods and services, but at a slowing rate. Deflation means an actual fall in prices. That has not been the case for many decades, not really since the end of money as a physical commodity, namely gold and the arrival of what are called fiat currencies, ie money as coined, or ‘printed’, or digitally created by national states to replace gold. Only in rare occasions have states so restricted the supply of fiat money that it has caused deflation and really only happened when there was already a slump in capitalist production.
For the last 70 years or more, governments have controlled the issuance of currency and so the direct relationship between production of value in an economy and its representation by the supply and turnover of money has become separated. Inflation of prices has become the norm, but the pace of that inflation is now the issue.
In our (forthcoming) paper on inflation, Guglielmo Carchedi and I identified two separate periods of US price inflation in the post-1945 period to now. The first was from 1948-81 and the second was from 1981-2019. In the first period, the rate of inflation rose, constituting an inflationary period. In the second period, the rate of inflation fell, constituting a disinflationary period.
Between 1948 and 1981, the average annual rate of inflation was 4.3%; from 1981 to 2019 it slowed to 3.0%.
If we look at the annual average rate by decade, we can see the change even more clearly.
From the 1980s onwards, the US (and other major economies) entered a period of progressive disinflation, culminating in the Long Depression of the 2010s , a decade with an average rate of just 1.8% (and a rise of just 0.1% in 2015). But now in the 2020s, starting with the post-COVID pandemic inflationary spike in 2022, the major economies appear to have entered a new period of inflation ie. a rising rate of price change.
In various posts, I have argued, contrary to the mainstream theories that inflation is supply, not demand driven. What determines the rate of inflation in a modern capitalist economy with fiat currencies, is the rate of growth in the production of value relative to the rate of growth in the supply of money. The latter excludes the supply of money that is hoarded in banks or used for speculation in financial assets (fictitious capital, to use Marx’s term). The supply of money rose sharply in the 2010s as central banks tried to keep interest rates low and provide liquidity for the financial sector after the Global Financial Crash. This monetary injection was called ‘quantitative easing’. Mainstream monetarist theory argued that this would lead to a big rise in inflation. No such thing happened – on the contrary, price inflation slowed almost to zero, because a large portion of central bank monetary injection never left the banking system.
As unemployment fell to lows not seen since the 1960s, Keynesian monetary theory also argued that high government spending (large budget deficits) and ’tight’ labour markets would create ‘demand-led’ inflation. However, the empirical evidence for this theory – the famous Phillips curve that supposedly revealed the inverse trade-off between falling unemployment and rising inflation rates – was missing. The Phillips curve was flat. Low unemployment did not lead to high inflation. That’s because the differential between the rate of growth in money supply created by the banking system into the economy and the growth in value production had narrowed.
The post-COVID inflation spike was clearly supply-driven as the closing down of production and trade that produced the pandemic slump of 2020 was accompanied by a lingering breakdown of global supply chains and the squeezing up of prices in energy and key commodities by multi-national companies. A new Fed paper confirms that “underlying inflation dynamics have shifted since COVID.” The share of the consumption basket experiencing inflation above 3 percent remains well above the 2014–2019 average in the major economies, more than doubling in the euro area and the UK. The Fed still wants to blame this on ‘excessive wage increases’, but this is not born out by the evidence. Real hourly earnings roughly doubled between 1940 and 1970, but have barely risen since 1980.
Central banks have been at sixes and sevens in trying to control inflation. In the 2010s, they lowered interest rates to zero and raised money supply to new heights, but inflation slowed. Then in the post-pandemic period they hiked interest rates and introduced ‘quantitative tightening’ of the money supply. But that failed to stop inflation heading above 10% a year, a rate not seen since the supply-driven oil crisis of the 1970s. The story then was that 1970s US inflation subsided because the US Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker hiked its policy interest rate to an unprecedented high. The reality was that Inflation only dropped because the US economy went into a major slump in 1980-2 that decimated its manufacturing industry. The Fed’s high interest policy just added to that investment and production collapse. Stagflation turned into slumpflation. Indeed, the annual inflation rate stayed above the average of the 1960s until at least the 1990s.
Now with the Iran conflict and the reduction in oil and other commodity exports, inflation is back on the agenda. Global supply chain pressure was building even before the Iran conflict.
The signs of a return to inflation are already there in the rise in inflation rates so far in 2026. The latest March CPI data for the US show that another inflation spike is underway. Consumer price inflation rose to 3.3% in March, a near 1% pt leap from February. And there will be a further rise ahead towards 4% or more this year as the lasting impact of the energy and trade blockage feeds through.
Trump’s tariff tantrums are only adding to the inflationary pressure. Based on 2025–2026 data, the US Federal Reserve reckons that tariffs have resulted in a “near-complete pass-through to consumer prices, contributing roughly 0.8 percentage points to core PCE inflation and explaining the excess inflation in core goods.”
Goods inflation was +0.84%, a huge month-over-month increase (10.6% annualized) and the largest since Jan 2022.
And the Euro area is experiencing a similar spike.
Again, the major central banks are in confusion. Federal Reserve policymakers sparred during the central bank’s March meeting over how to respond if the Iran war triggers a prolonged period of high energy prices. Minutes of the March meeting showed “most” members of the Federal Open Market Committee fretted that a lengthy war could warrant cutting rates to support the jobs market, while “many” suggested it might require raising them to counter higher prices.
Before the war, the ECB had been expected to keep rates steady in 2026. However, the war-driven surge in energy prices revived inflation concerns. ECB governing council member Olaf Sleijpen warned that sustained energy disruptions could still feed into broader price pressures. “Persistently high oil prices will ultimately feed through to the prices of other products, and thus also to wage formation, which could amplify inflationary effects,” he said. “In that case, the ECB will naturally intervene to keep inflation around 2% in the medium term”.
Divisions within the Bank of England have emerged. Andrew Bailey, the bank’s governor, indicated that he expects depressed UK demand and labour markets to make “second round” effects from surging energy and food prices less dangerous than in 2021-22, reducing the risk of another wage-price spiral. But other Monetary Policy Committee members including chief economist Huw Pill and deputy governor Clare Lombardelli sounded less sanguine.
This confusion could be resolved if central banks recognised that monetary policy has little influence over price inflation, which depends first and foremost on the pace of value creation. If economies’ output slows and the monetary authorities react by increasing money supply and lower the ‘price’ of money (interest rates), then inflation will accelerate. If money supply growth stays close to value growth, inflation subsides.
Having seen monetarism and Keynesian monetary policies fail, central banks economists have diverted to a psychological theory of ‘consumer expectations’ of inflation, namely that inflation rises because consumers expect it and act accordingly by buying more to beat price rises. But as Federal Reserve economist Rudd concluded in 2021: “Economists and economic policymakers believe that households’ and firms’ expectations of future inflation are a key determinant of actual inflation. A review of the relevant theoretical and empirical literature suggests that this belief rests on extremely shaky foundations, and a case can be made that adhering to it uncritically could easily lead to serious policy errors.” But central banks are not going to admit this because it would remove their perceived role in the macro-management of the capitalist economy and reduce it to just acting as a ‘lender of last resort’ for the banking system.
In its latest World Economic Outlook, the IMF reckons that economic growth will not slow much if the Iran conflct is shortlived. But it sees global inflation rising significantly. Moreover, this time the ‘supply shock’ won’t be easy to contain. IMF: “the 2022 surge reflected an unusually steep aggregate supply curve, with strong demand running into supply bottlenecks, allowing central banks to achieve disinflation with limited output losses. Evidence now suggests a return to a flatter supply curve, making disinflation more costly.” Nevertheless, the IMF advocates that central banks must be prepared to hike interest rates because “if medium- or long-term inflation expectations drift up as prices and wages pick up, restoring price stability must take precedence over near-term growth, with a swift tightening.”
The Iran war and ensuing oil and commodity price rises are clearly a supply-side problem. Falling supply will raise prices but it will also lower growth, as it will cut into the wages and savings of households and raise costs for companies. High energy prices are a regressive tax,falling heavily on middle- and lower-income consumers. Weaker non-energy consumption and rising costs beget pressure on corporate margins which beget lay-offs, and the job market cracks. US fourth-quarter real GDP growth was just 0.5% (quarter-over-quarter annualised) and the consumer sentiment index just hit an all-time low.
The major economies are not in ‘slumpflation’ yet. In the US, corporate profit margins remain at record highs. And corporate earnings for the first quarter of 2026 are expected to be very strong. Trump’s planned fiscal handouts to US companies are substantial with tax incentives for businesses investing in machinery and factory equipment. And a weaker dollar in the latter half of 2025 will help boost dollar earnings from foreign investment revenues.
But the bulk of these earnings gains are concentrated in the US silicon valley tech giants. The rest of the corporate sector is struggling. Profits for the whole of the non-financial corporate sector fell in 2025.
And the impact of the Middle East conflict on profits has yet to be fully felt.
The FBI has designated an online group, many of its members adolescents or children younger than 13, as an “extremist” threat.
Called “764,” the FBI has labeled the group “Nihilistic Violent Extremists,” a new classification for domestic terrorists created by the Bureau last year, as I first reported.
Publicly, the FBI casts these investigations as a crusade to protect the children from predatory adults. What they rarely mention is that many of the suspects are children themselves. To obscure this ugly reality, law enforcement portrays itself as merely focused on social media and gaming platforms — ones that just so happen to be popular among children, like Roblox.
The focus on child gamers is so great that law enforcement are privately employing Gen Z slang like “clout chasing” and “aura farming” in its intelligence reporting (see below).
Screenshot of Connecticut Intelligence Center bulletin. Credit: Daniel Boguslaw
Because minors’ identities are not disclosed in court records, we have no idea how many children the FBI is investigating. (The Bureau has not responded to my request for comment at the time of this writing.)
One rare acknowledgement of the presence of children in these groups came from the FBI’s Boston Field Office, which in February issued a statementreferring to 764’s “juvenile predators”; another FBI public service announcement described a similar group’s (“The Com”) members as “between 11 and 25 years old.”
Screenshot of FBI PSA
The Com — short for “the community” — is an umbrella term for the decentralized online networks like 764, known for coordinating harassment, extortion, and the coercion of minors into producing violent or sexually explicit content.
Sick stuff, no doubt, but with much of it carried out by minors themselves (some originally victimized by the groups before joining them), is this really terrorism?
The FBI thinks so.
The Bureau defines Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVEs) as those inspired by “a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.” This represents a departure from not just past FBI counterterrorism categories, but from the dictionary, which defines terrorism as politically-motivated and nihilists as not believing in anything, politics or otherwise.
Strange as it may seem, this is not some fringe program. The FBI has seen a 300% increase in domestic terrorism investigations, “a large chunk of which are nihilistic violent extremism,” as Director Kash Patel testified to Congress last year.
The FBI also says that all 56 of its field offices are involved in investigating 764 alone, of which it is investigating at least 350 members in the United States. The group was founded in 2021 by then 15-year-old Bradley Cadenhead of Texas.
The reticence of the government to speak openly about all of this is partly constitutional. In the United States, the First Amendment sharply limits the government’s ability to target people based on ideology, association, or demographic characteristics — including age.
Federal counterterrorism law requires a nexus to violence or material support for it; “being a radicalized child” is not a crime. So rather than acknowledging that it is effectively targeting a juvenile population, the FBI routes its investigations through platforms where they congregate. Gaming platforms — Roblox, Minecraft, Discord — have become the main target of government scrutiny. The FBI says it isn’t investigating children; it’s investigating violent criminal networks that happen to recruit on children’s platforms.
The distinction is real obscures the truth: the domestic terrorism apparatus is being trained on pre-teens.
The gulf between how the U.S. government describes its targets became concrete in April 2025, when the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging two 764 leaders — Leonidas Varagiannis, known online as “War,” and Prasan Nepal, known as “Trippy.”
The affidavit listed five co-conspirators identified only by their online aliases. One of them, listed simply as “Slain764,” was named in the document as a key participant in the network. Swedish investigative reporting by SVT subsequently identified Slain764 as a 14-year-old boy from a Stockholm Suburb.
In other words, the FBI was investigating a 14-year-old for terrorism.
U.S. court filing
The U.S. government’s court filing made no mention of his age. To read it, you would have no idea that one of the named co-conspirators in a federal “terrorist” indictment (or how many of the other co-conspirators are as well).
The FBI’s public tallies of NVE investigations — 350 subjects, 56 field offices, a 300% increase in domestic terrorism cases — tell you almost nothing about how many of those subjects are children. The government is simultaneously claiming a massive juvenile victim crisis while running a parallel investigative apparatus targeting minors that it is, by law and by practice, almost entirely shielded from public scrutiny.
But that’s not the case in other countries that have no First Amendment.
The Five Eyes — the intelligence-sharing alliance comprising the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — in 2024 issued a statement titled, “Young people and violent extremism: a call for collective action.”
The statement is possibly the only example in which the U.S. government plainly links terrorism with “minors,” warning even of cases in which the suspect is “not carrying out an attack.” It singles out “seemingly innocuous social media and gaming platforms” like “Discord, Instagram, Roblox and TikTok” as particularly concerning.
Per Five Eyes:
“ … the development of online content and environments has facilitated the entry of minors and young people into violent extremist pathways. This is concerning, as minors are particularly vulnerable to online radicalisation. Online environments provide an avenue for first approaches to minors, including through seemingly innocuous social media and gaming platforms, such as Discord, Instagram, Roblox and TikTok.”
The Five Eyes statement goes on to include several case studies in different member countries.
In the United States, there’s the case of a 14-year-old arrested by local police in Arizona on state terrorism charges. In New Zealand, another case exists where “The individual made racist, misogynistic and anti-authority comments.” And in Canada, “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) received information that a social media user had been promoting involuntary celibate (incel) ideology online.”
That last example gets sad fast.
“Through judicial authorizations and subsequent interviews, the RCMP located the minor who had no documented history of violence and no criminal record,” the Five Eyes statement says of the incel case. “The parents stated their son suffered from a developmental disorder, but noted no other health concerns.”
The numbers in these other countries are striking. In Australia, the domestic intelligence agency ASIO reported that one in five of its priority counterterrorism cases now involves a minor — and in the most recent annual reporting period, every single disrupted terrorist attack or plot involved a minor or young person. ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess put it plainly: “As a parent, the numbers are shocking; as an intelligence officer, the numbers are sobering.”
Since 2020, Australian Federal Police and their partners have investigated around three dozen counter‑terrorism cases involving minors. The youngest subject was just 12 years old.
Europe tells a similar story. Europol’s 2025 terrorism trend report found that of the 449 people arrested for terrorism-related offenses across EU member states in 2024, 133 were between the ages of 12 and 20 — nearly one in three. The youngest was 12, arrested for planning an attack. Belgium’s intelligence service reports that roughly one in three individuals in its recent terrorism cases is a minor. A cross‑national analysis drawing on the 2026 Global Terrorism Index concludes that youth and minors accounted for 42% of all terror‑related investigations in Europe and North America in 2025, a threefold increase since 2021.
Seamus Hughes, a senior research faculty member at the University of Nebraska Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, says that even many federal agents in the U.S. are uneasy with the shift.
“Interviews with FBI agents around the country reveal a recurring theme: They feel they can’t arrest their way out of this problem, and, even if they could, they didn’t join the counterterrorism section of the FBI to lock up confused kids for decades.”
Pre-teen terrorism is what Europe and the commonwealth have embraced; and it’s what the Trump administration has signed onto with its war on Nihilistic Violent Extremism.
What’s next, toddler terrorism?
Subscribe if you agree toddler terrorism brings a whole new meaning to the “terrible two’s”
Subscribed
