Holman, Bovino, Noem Three Peas in the Same Pod

It is important to recognize that the removal of Bovino, and Noem from Minneapolis is a product of the heroic resistance the people of that city have shown in the face of the assault by Trump’s neo-fascist ICE thugs. It is a small victory. But Tom Holman is no step forward as the author explains below. Admin

"Border Czar" Tom Holman

Holman, Bovino, Noem Three Peas in the Same Pod

 

By Mary Scully

 

To calm down the volatile situation created by ICE storm troopers in Minneapolis, Trump sidelined Homeland Security head Kristi Noem and removed Gregory Bovino from his role as head of the Minnesota operation. He also shut down Bovino's social media account where he portrayed immigrants as thugs and boasted of his crimes against them. To replace Bovino, Trump sent in Tom Homan, the former head of ICE whom Trump calls his 'border czar', to assume command of ICE in Minneapolis. It's an act that brings to mind the fable of the scorpion and the frog. Like the scorpion, Homan has a malevolent character and history that will bring no security to immigrants but perhaps some solace to the local politicians.

Homan has been with ICE since it was created in 2003 and was brought into federal immigration control in 2013 by then president Obama. He was brought in because as The Washington Post reported in 2017, "Thomas Homan deports people. And he's really good at it." The Obama White House even honored Homan in 2015 with some kind of award for deporting undocumented immigrants. Over his two terms, Obama deported at least 3 million immigrants--more than any other president in US history according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.

Homan's whole white supremacist schtick is the deportation of immigrants. It must be emphasized that it is a wretchedly anti-working class policy because immigrants with means have always been able to immigrate to the US without impediment. It was Homan who cooked up and formally proposed the policy of family separation, of tearing children from their parents and warehousing them in inhumane detention centers to deter people from crossing the border. In that policy, there was no accountability and parents lost contact with where their children were. In other words, Homan is a psychopath.

Homan did well under Obama. He is also the kind of psychopath that ideally suits the ethos of the Trump administration. Trump is a felon with a history of raping young girls. That's why it was no problem to hire a rapist to direct the 'Melania' documentary or to elevate the political status of Homan who in 2024 was caught in an FBI contracts-for-cash sting when he accepted a bag with $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen. He anticipated raking in millions by accepting bribes from border security companies in exchange for government contracts. The FBI sting was a part of investigating the allegations. In 2025, after Trump was elected, his Department of Justice closed down the investigation citing insufficient evidence. 

The 'border czar' was not sent to Minneapolis because Trump is reconsidering mass deportations or planning on toning down the assaults on immigrants. It's a temporizing gesture to calm down politicians and make it look like he's retreating somewhat. But Homan will not stop ICE agents from violating immigrant rights or flouting the Bill of Rights and continuing to hunt them down like wild animals. He will probably stop them from killing protesters.

Immigrants are not safe under the tenure of Tom Homan. They will only be safe when ICE is shut down and the Bill of Rights is enforced. That may take a revolution.

Ken Klippenstein: ICE's Secret Watchlists of Americans

ICE's Secret Watchlists of Americans

Sparta, Reaper and Grapevine track protesters, their friends (+ others) 

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN JAN 28

The common housefly

We’ve broken lots of major stories about ICE this month, but we’re just getting started (I have more leaked documents than time to write them up!) Help make sure we have the resources to get these stories out by becoming a paid subscriber.

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“We have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist,” a masked federal agent taunted a protester filming him in Maine last week. 

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin’s response was firm: “There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS.”

There’s just one problem: She’s lying.

Two senior national security officials tell me that there are more than a dozen secret and obscure watchlists that homeland security and the FBI are using to track protesters (both anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian), “Antifa,” and others who are promiscuously labeled “domestic terrorists.”

I can reveal for the first time that some of the secret lists and applications go by codenames like Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta (including the ominous sounding HEL-A and HEL-C reports generated by Sparta).

Some of these, like Hummingbird, were created to vet and track immigrants, in this case Afghans seeking to settle in the United States. Slipstream is a classified social media repository. Others are tools used to link people on the streets together, including collecting on friends and families who have nothing to do with any purported lawbreaking. 

There’s practically nothing available that further describes what these watchlists do, how large they are, or what they entail.

“We came out of 9/11 with the notion that we would have a single ‘terrorist’ watchlist to eliminate confusion, duplication and avoid bad communications, but ever since January 6, not only have we expanded exponentially into purely domestic watchlisting, but we have also created a highly secretive and compartmented superstructure that few even understand,” says a DHS attorney intimately familiar with the subject. The attorney spoke on the agreement that their identity not be disclosed.

Prior to 9/11, there were nine federal agencies that maintained 12 separate watchlists. Now, officially there are just three: a watchlist of 1.1 million international terrorists, a watchlist of more than 10,000 domestic terrorists maintained by the FBI, and a new watchlist of transnational criminals, built up to more than 85,000 over the past decade.

The new domestic-related watchlists—a set of databases and applications—exist inside and outside the FBI and are used by agencies like ICE and the Border Patrol to organize the Niagara of information in possession of the federal government. Collectively, they create ways to sort, analyze, and search information, a task that even artificial intelligence has failed to conquer (so far).

Among other functions, the new watchlists process tips, situation reports and collected photographs and video submitted by both the public and from agents in the field; they create a “common operating picture” in places like Minneapolis; they allow task forces to target individuals for surveillance and arrest; and they create the capacity for intelligence people to link individuals together through geographic proximity or what is labeled “call chaining” by processing telephone numbers, emails, and other contact information.

Administration officials have alluded to all of this, though contrary to the Hollywood idea of some all-seeing eye, actual government watchlists are more a patchwork system of lists and applications, each of which might have individual justification or even legitimate purpose to aid law enforcement but overall form the basis for massive violations of American civil rights.

“One thing I’m pushing for right now … we’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault, we’re going to make them famous,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News earlier this month.

Watchlists in general fly in the face of the spirit of the Constitution and the protections it’s supposed to embody against unreasonable search and seizure, and relating to the right of privacy.

“The very essence of the ‘list’ is its secrecy and its lack of any opportunity for the listed to be heard,” Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said of a Justice Department list of subversives during the Red Scare. “It is the shrouding of the process in a veil of secrecy that is the most offensive to our democratic traditions.”

Now, the national security community has developed an interlocking set of lists and applications that are secret not just to the public but opaque to most who toil in the federal agencies themselves. Asked about the watchlists, a Border Patrol agent recounted to me how they punch their data into their own proprietary application, not really knowing what happens after that.

Again, these watchlists aren’t the all-seeing eye of Sauron that many imagine. They’re more like the compound eye of a fly, a fragmented array of lenses (over 3,000 per eye in the common housefly!) that collectively form a mosaic. That mosaic—the ability to unify all the disparate lists into one master picture—doesn’t yet exist, sources tell me. That, however, is the direction we’re going, especially with software packages like Palantir that can be customized to aggregate all that is collected.

“We do of course monitor and investigate and refer all threats, assaults and obstruction of our officers to the appropriate law enforcement,” says McLaughlin. “Obstructing and assaulting law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime.”

Impeding federal law enforcement has emerged as the Trump administration’s primary justification for actions against people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

As part of its new effort to support its operations in places like Minneapolis and Los Angeles, the Homeland Security Department, working with the Justice Department, has started more methodically tracking what it calls “aggressive protesters.” According to one senior official, this is a new designation the agency uses to describe the supposed threat posed by people on the streets.

Both Good and Pretti were considered aggressive protesters; in Good’s case, for criticizing ICE officers while operating a vehicle; and in Pretti’s case, getting up close to immigration officers while filming them.

Alex Pretti filming a Border Patrol agent

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche alluded to the term in a recent CNN interview, saying: “He [Alex Pretti] was not protesting peacefully—he was screaming in the face of ICE, he had a phone up right into ICE’s face. You tell me: is that protesting peacefully?”

When the CNN host pointed out that Pretti wasn’t violent, Blanche actually agreed, but went on to argue that there’s a third category for protest that is neither violent nor peaceful.

“I did not say that he was violent,” Blanche interjected, adding: “I said that he was not protesting peacefully.”

When I asked civil liberties experts what might be the legal justification for the expanded watchlisting, Rachel Levinson-Waldman, the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program director said that NSPM-7 and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 5 memo implementing the presidential directive “might be their justification.”

Under the Privacy Act, Levinson-Waldman explains, the government is prohibited from collecting and retaining information about Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. There can exceptions to that, but the question is whether DHS and FBI have articulated which exceptions they believe apply here.

The DHS lawyer, who helped to reveal the many secret watchlists and applications that are now being built and used to create the new American dragnet, says that sorting out the data being collected—rather than some explicit order to collect the data—is what’s driving the process. 

“We over collect and everyone agrees we should create this or that list or application to wrestle the information to submission lest we miss something important,” the lawyer said. “So the data people do their thing and pretty soon you actually have Big Brother.”

A senior intelligence official, who confirmed the existence of the watchlists described earlier, characterized the problem another way. 

“Lists of this and that—this social media post, that video taken of someone videoing ICE, the mere attendance at a protest—gets pulsed by federal cops on the beat to check for criminality but eventually just becomes a list itself of criminality, with the cops thinking that indeed they are dealing with criminals and terrorists.”

“Watchlists, and the whole watchlisting process, should be as transparent as possible, not the other way around. If we don’t explore more why all of these secret lists exist, even more of an environment of paranoia on the ground and more tragic killings.”

Subscribe to stay off the watchlist(s) 

Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition

 From Michael Jochum on FB thanks to David Muir.

Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition

 

Michael Jochum

 

This is where we are now: a sitting member of Congress is physically attacked in public, at a town hall, in her own city, in front of her constituents, with a syringe of unknown liquid, and the White House responds with silence, smears, and conspiracy theories. Ilhan Omar is sprayed with a brown liquid by a grown man who walks straight up to her in Minneapolis, is tackled by security, arrested, booked, and instead of presidential condemnation, moral clarity, or even the bare minimum of human decency, we get Trump sneering that she probably staged it herself. Not even a dog whistle anymore, just a bullhorn of cruelty, stupidity, and moral rot.

 

Let’s be absolutely clear about the atmosphere this administration has engineered: months of dehumanizing rhetoric, racist caricatures, open contempt for Somali immigrants, public mockery of Omar by name, calling her community “garbage,” calling them “low IQ,” describing Somalia as not even a real country, accusing “Somali gangs” of terrorizing Minnesota, threatening protected status, ranting about them at Cabinet meetings, humiliating them on international stages, and turning an entire immigrant community into a political punching bag. This is not policy. This is incitement culture. This is narrative grooming. This is how you teach unstable people who already hate to feel justified, righteous, and heroic in their violence. This is how stochastic terrorism works, you don’t give the order, you create the permission structure.

 

And then it happens. A syringe. A public attack. A live-streamed assault on a congresswoman at a community meeting held in the shadow of another tragedy, the killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal officers, and the president of the United States responds not with leadership, not with condemnation, not with unity, not even with restraint, but with mockery, denial, and lies. “She probably had herself sprayed.” That’s the level of degeneracy we’re dealing with. A sitting president blaming the victim of a political attack. A man who has spent years calling Omar a fraud, a traitor, an outsider, and a target, now pretending innocence while soaking in the chaos he creates.

 

This is the ecosystem of violence Trump has cultivated: demonize, dehumanize, discredit, deny. Rinse and repeat. When violence follows, he shrugs, smirks, and pours more gasoline. His administration doesn’t govern, it radicalizes. It doesn’t lead, it provokes. It doesn’t protect, it targets. And every racist insult, every “low IQ” jab, every dehumanizing slur, every public humiliation of Somali immigrants, every lie about Omar is a brick in the road that leads directly to moments like this.

Ilhan Omar stood back up, unhurt, defiant, resilient, and said she wouldn’t be intimidated. Good. But the fact that she had to is the indictment. The fact that we’re watching elected officials get physically attacked while the president fuels hatred and mocks the victims is the indictment. The fact that entire communities are being painted as criminal, stupid, subhuman, and disposable by the highest office in the country is the indictment.

 

This isn’t politics anymore. It’s moral collapse. It’s leadership failure. It’s state-sponsored cruelty. It’s a culture of incitement masquerading as governance. And the most obscene part is the gaslighting afterward, the pretending that Trump’s words don’t matter, that rhetoric isn’t real, that dehumanization doesn’t translate into action, that violence just “happens” in a vacuum.

 

It doesn’t. It’s built. It’s fed. It’s cultivated. It’s encouraged. And it is owned.

You don’t get to spend months attacking a woman, her faith, her ethnicity, her community, her legitimacy, her humanity, and then act surprised when someone decides to act it out physically. You don’t get to poison the well and pretend the water didn’t make people sick. You don’t get to light the match and deny the fire.

This is what Trump’s America looks like: violence normalized, cruelty excused, racism mainstreamed, victims mocked, and leadership replaced by spite. A president who doesn’t calm the country, he destabilizes it. Who doesn’t protect communities, he weaponizes hatred against them. Who doesn’t condemn violence, he metabolizes it.

 

And a nation watching, horrified, grieving, angry, exhausted, knowing exactly where this came from, even as the man responsible keeps pretending his hands are clean while they drip with rhetorical blood.

 

Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition

More on Organized Labor's Response To Jeffrey Pretti Murder and Minneapolis Event

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

1-28-26

 

I posted a commentary to this blog last night on the ongoing state violence against the people of Minneapolis in the wake of the murder of Jeffrey Pretti by the Trump Administration’s neo fascist militia. I felt compelled to write something after seeing a Facebook post pointing out that the head of the North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey has issued a statement supporting some of the demands that the movement has put forward. The post is here.

 

I had little time to write last night for numerous reasons, one being my life has changed as I am a carer for a family member. But I was so disgusted with the McGarvey statement I had to say something.  I needed to be careful because as pathetic as the statement is, I did not what to be seen undermining what is support of a kind from the head of an organization that has tremendous potential social power. 

 

If you read yesterday’s post you will see that AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler has released a very similar statement. There was likely some collaboration here as labor bureaucrats at this level are careful not to “go off half cocked” as a delegate at my Central Labor Council yelled out once after another delegate seconded a motion I made.*

 

The pressure not to upset the apple cart held me back, after all, the class war is exposed for all to see in Minneapolis and our side is making some serious headway.  But I spent more than thirty years as a rank and file union activist and my anger increased the more I thought about the issue; I had trouble sleeping.

Then I woke up this morning, grabbed my phone next to the bed to check some of the headlines and see a video clip (above) of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar being attacked at a town hall meeting she was hosting.

 

This was too much for me. Watch what happens when this small woman, a Muslim Somali woman, has something sprayed in her face; she doesn’t hesitate to go after the attacker. I love this woman’s courage in the face of racist and sexist attacks from the degenerate serial sexual predator in the White House. I do not support her party but she is incredibly brave in the face of racist, sexist and religious bigotry. 

 

The most powerful figure in the world, like a child with new toys, the man who wants to build a resort over the bones of hundreds of thousands of genocide victims in Gaza, has launched a major assault against the American people centered at the moment in Minnesota.

 

And in response to this, two of the most powerful (potentially) union officials in the country representing 14 million workers in crucial industries, can do, is announce that they “mourn” the murdered victims of Trump’s fascist militia and support a call from a murdered victims union for an independent, transparent  investigation, and for accountability at every level. They are appealing to the US Congress and legislators to investigate themselves. 

 

These trade union officials are complicit in the sense that they refuse to build and use the resources they have, to defend working people under siege. Their pathetic response to this violence should be called out for what is, shameful.

 

The reason for this harmless gesture from organized labor’s leadership is easy to understand when we look at NABTU’s president Sean McGarvey’s resume. I pointed out in my earlier commentary that McGarvey idolizes one of the most powerful representatives of capital and enemy of working class people, the retired Nancy Pelosi. He proudly claims that Pelosi, “….has always been a working-class warrior.” She earned her working class warrior badge, McGarvey says, “growing up in Baltimore.”, where her father was Mayor. It’s very common for the children of established Congressional politicians and children of mayors of major industrial centers to hang out on the streets with the rest of us; that’s what freedom’s all about.

 

McGarvey’s resume reads, “Sean chairs the Democratic Treasurers Association Labor Council and co-chairs labor-management committees of the American Petroleum Institute, American Chemistry Council, Southern Company-NABTU LMCC, and the Nuclear Power LMCC. Sean has a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration”. From the NABTU website.

 

The union hierarchy is linked to the Democratic Party, and through it, big business interests in general.  This is particularly the case with the building trades that receive huge government contracts. These leaders at the highest level consider the unions as employment agencies with them as the CEO’s. They are, as De Leon once said, The Labor Lieutenants of capital.

 

I have consistently argued that the union rank and file are in a war on two fronts, one is against the offensive of big business and the other against the pro-market pro-capitalist policies of our leadership, the latter is the more complex one.

 

There are many decent leaders in smaller union locals and no doubt among the lower levels of the bureaucracy, but the rank and file of organized labor cannot avoid a confrontation with the present leadership over the direction of our organizations. It is impossible to deny that among many rank and file members these pathetic responses from top officials will anger them, will be seen as merely an attempt by the top dogs to cover their asses; to appear to be doing something. 

We must make it clear to these layers, some who have given up and others who have been influenced by right wing views that there is an alternative, a movement from below that relies only on our own strength and our independence from big business and its two political parties. Where there’s a vacuum, if the left doesn’t fill it, the right will. 

 

The points I made in the earlier post about building on what the people of Minneapolis and others around the country have learned in struggles against an increasingly repressive state and forming community/labor defense committees in other areas, rank and file union member activists on the ground can take these experiences in to their union bodies and unite workers along class lines; the immigrants being attacked now are our class allies not our enemies; we wouldn’t hang out with the likes of Pelosi. 

 

Those of us with some experience in the internal battles to transform our unions in to the fighting organizations they need to be have learned the hard way that the present union leadership will not take these steps and where they can, will place obstacles in our way; they are too wedded to the Team Concept and any movement from below will sever the relationship they have built with sections of the capitalist class based on class collaboration and labor peace.  They are also very aware it will most likely cost them their jobs and their obscene salaries.

 

*The sin committed here is that a second means the issue can be discussed on the floor.

Jeffrey Pretti Murder Forces Union Heads to Say Something

Source NY Times

Richard Mellor

AFSCME Local 444, retired

The murder of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an AFGE Local 366g member in Minneapolis, by Trump’s neo-fascist militia (ICE) has forced some important figures atop organized labor to speak out. 

 

Pretti was shot some 10 times while helping another person who was shoved to the ground by an ICE Agent. Pretti was in possession of a firearm but never took it from its holster or threatened the ICE officer with it. It should be pointed out, especially for readers abroad, that Minnesota is an open carry state which means Petti had a legal, constitutional, right to carry a firearm.

 

Petti was shot after he was disarmed and as he was pinned to the ground by numerous ICE Agents. He was shot in the back.

 

I don’t need to go in to detail here but we have seen the video’s and this is in my mind murder and it’s not the first murder by these masked thugs.

 

Petti’s murder comes after the murder of Renee Good who was shot three times by an ICE Agent as she was in her car. The third shot that was to the head is the one that killed her.

 

The heroic defense of our democratic rights, of immigrant rights and of the US constitutional right to protest by the people of Minneapolis has been lauded throughout the world not just in the US. If there is anything that makes Americans feel proud to be American it is the people of Minneapolis and Minnesota. What they have faced and are clearly winning is a war against a neo-fascist regime in Washington that is intent on driving the US working class back to an era before the rise of the CIO in the 1930’s. 

 

Lives have been lost in this battle that is being fought for all of us.

 

The people of Minneapolis put the Trump Administration on the defensive and Trump has removed the Head of Border Patrol Greg Bovino apparently not pleased with his handling of the Pretti murder. Trump is also sending border czar Tom Homan who also held the position under Obama who himself  was referred to as the “Deporter in Chief”. There are also calls for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to be impeached.

 

As far as the statements from AFL-CIO head Liz Schuler and National Union of Building Trades head  Sean McGarvey goes, we have to take them with a grain of salt and see them within the context of the massive resistance to the Trump Administrations action by the people of Minneapolis. I have included both statements.  McGarvey refers to Nancy Pelosi as a “working-class warrior” and is very closely allied with management in the Team Concept that is such a disaster for working people and all union members which gives us a little insight in to his world view.

 

The state violence, but more importantly, the resistance on the ground in Minneapolis has not only backed off the state somewhat, it has forced these conservative trade union leaders to say something. But for those of us that have spent years active in the trade union movement we are used to weak statements like these from the labor hierarchy. They are crafted in a way they cannot be opposed but will amount to nothing.

 

NABTU Statement

The statement from Sean McGarvey the president of NABTU is very similar to Liz Schuler’s statement as head of the AFL-CIO in that they “mourn the senseless killing” of another Minneapolis resident. “America’s unions join the call for ICE to immediately leave Minnesota before anyone else is hurt or killed. We demand local authorities conduct a full, transparent investigation that will lead to accountability for this tragic and violent act, and for Congress to use its power to hold ICE accountable.”

 

Supporting the demand for independent investigation and accountability from congress is safe and of course we would support it, but it is not enough.

 

Young workers in particular should consider that there are 14 million members in organized labor. The North American Building Trades Unions have three million workers affiliated to it most of them members of the AFL-CIO. These workers alone have the economic power to shut down the US economy.

AFL-CIO Statement

 

It is without doubt true that from the George Floyd murder to the present resistance to ICE the folks on the ground in Minneapolis have learned a great deal and honed their skills in dealing with this type of state repression. They have developed methods of communication, of how and when to appear and how to warn each area of impending danger and so on. I am not there so can only speculate but as a person who has been involved in some serious strikes and community battles, we learn a lot in these struggles. 

 

The need to spread the protests and activity to other cities and other areas of the country is crucial. My guess is they already have them in Minneapolis or they are in formation as the days go on, but community defense committees have to be expanded. As a friend pointed out to me today, many of those activists on the ground in Minneapolis are union members, it is crucial we take this struggle in to our unions and build these defense organizations, community and organized labor together. 

Those of that have been around a while are well aware that the labor hierarchy will not use the resources at their disposal to take this path and help spread the resistance to the present administration's violence beyond the harmless statements included here.They will, as they usually do, temper an independent movement of the working class and direct it in to the Democratic Party. 

 

Regardless of the immediate outcome the Trump Administration has been given a bloody nose and the people of Minneapolis have brought to the fore some of the great radical traditions of the US working class. 

The changing world order

Reprinted from the UK socialist website Left Horizons.

By Roger Silverman *

The world today is in a more disturbed state than at any time in the last eight decades. The global structure that came into being after the Second World War had divided the world into three sharply defined sectors: the industrially developed capitalist countries (“the West” plus Japan); the Stalinist states (the USSR and its East European satellites plus China); and the former colonial world.

The very description given to relations between “east” and “west” during this period as the “cold war” confirmed that each side had its own designated “sphere of influence” which was accepted by the other as forbidden territory – at first by a tacit understanding and later explicitly underwritten by formal agreements and mutual disarmament treaties.

Since 1991, this division of the world has been blown apart by a number of changes: the collapse of Stalinism, the effects of globalisation, the relative deindustrialisation of the USA and Western Europe, the meteoric growth of the Chinese economy, and the development of the “BRICS” nations.

The relative stability of the postwar epoch has given way to unprecedented turmoil. The 2008 economic crash precipitated a wave of turbulence worldwide: an upsurge of protests, uprisings, governmental crises, coups, civil wars, the collapse of reformist parties, the sudden eruptions of new left movements, soon to end in their equally sudden collapse, the coming to power of far-right governments east and west…

Intensified global conflict

We are living in an age of intensified global conflict. Hundreds of thousands have died in the Ukraine war, now entering its fifth year. Gaza has suffered outright genocide on a scale not seen since the world war, alongside systematic ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, outbreaks of war throughout the Middle East, and war, insurrection and a massacre in Iran. Civil wars have raged in Yemen, Sudan and Congo. The US raid on Venezuela and the abduction of its president constitute an act of blatant piracy, opening up a renewed era of naked imperial plunder in which all pretence of diplomacy is abandoned. And politicians and generals throughout the world are openly predicting and preparing for a new world war.

All these conflicts are violent manifestations of volatile changes in world relations. In 1960, the US economy was as big as all the next eight countries put together, but its nuclear-armed rival, the USSR, was in second place. By 1991 the USSR had collapsed and the USA had no economic or military rivals.

Following that collapse (an event rather prematurely celebrated by one Western academic as “the end of history”), the USA enjoyed a brief spell of uncontested global domination; but by the mid-2010s its supremacy was already coming under challenge from China, with its combination of state planning and a vast untapped supply of cheap labour, and also from a resurgent Russia, with the formidable military power accumulated during the cold war.

Today the balance of forces has once again shifted dramatically, with the unprecedented growth of China and the rise of the BRICS nations. The IMF lists the gross domestic product of the top ten countries in this order: USA, China, Germany, Japan, India; Britain; France; Italy; Russia; Canada.

However, taking into account purchasing power parity (considered by some a truer measure of an economy’s real size), the World Bank has compiled a very different ranking order: China at number one, followed by the USA; India; Russia; Japan; Germany; Brazil; Indonesia; France; and Britain. By either measure, Asian countries constitute three out of the top five economies.

The end of globalisation

The age of globalisation is over. The liberal dreams of eroding national borders have been shattered. The EU, NATO and the United Nations are all crumbling. The USA has cut $1 billion from United Nations-funded bodies and is busy assembling in its place an exclusive club of countries called the Board of Peace, membership of which is accessible only by Trump’s personal invitation or by a billion-dollar admission fee.

Trump has explicitly declared the postwar global order obsolete. He is a perfect personification of the vulgarisation of decadent capitalism. As a middleman who creates no value but simply buys and sells, he runs the state as “the art of the deal” (to quote the title of his ghost-written book) and treats the presidency as a sequel to his former TV “reality show”, approaching international diplomacy in much the same way as the property speculator he was before, salivating at any prospect of acquiring lucrative real estate. Now elevated to the most powerful player on the world stage, Trump’s foreign policy largely entails the acquisition of property: the oil of Venezuela, the minerals of Ukraine, the rare earth metals of Greenland, the “riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza, the Panama Canal, the wealth of Canada, etc…

Trump has said in so many words that he “doesn’t need international law”, since the only constraint on his exercise of power is “my own morality, my own mind”. The distinctions between the USA and Trump personally are continually blurred. For instance, after abducting the president of Venezuela, rather than installing in office as nominal president his ally Machado, he opted instead to leave Maduro’s deputy in office, out of pique that Machado had been awarded the Nobel Prize that he had felt was rightfully his.

This was confirmed once again when he justified his intention to annex Greenland by telling the Norwegian Prime Minister: “Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace.”

There are many more examples of his confusion between the interests of the American ruling class and his own personal ambitions. During the Israeli bloodbath in Gaza, Trump posted on social media an AI-generated video showing the territory transformed into a luxury seaside resort called “Trump Gaza”, which featured Trump and Netanyahu sunbathing, a golden statue of Trump, Trump cavorting with a belly dancer, and Elon Musk being showered with banknotes.

In other contexts, Trump complained that “China is operating the Panama Canal and we didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama and we’re taking it back“; “How stupid we were to give Greenland back to Denmark“; and “Venezuela’s oil will be sold at its market price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America.”

World’s greatest oil reserves

Incidentally, although Venezuela has the world’s greatest oil reserves, given the current world glut of oil and its consequently depreciated price, the “heavy” nature of its crude oil reserves, and the inefficiency of its oil technology, it is doubtful to what extent Trump’s seizure of its oil fields will be at all attractive to the USA’s oil companies.

World trade is reeling from completely arbitrary on-again-off-again US tariffs, imposed as purely punitive sanctions or bullying bargaining counters, yo-yoing from one day to the next, creating drunken volatility in world markets.That is the parasitic and predatory nature of capitalism today.

Of course coups and wars for plunder or for “regime change” to facilitate it have always been a staple of US foreign policy, from the invasion of the Philippines and Cuba in the Spanish/American war at the turn of the twentieth century, to the coups in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973, to the war on Iraq in 2003, or the kidnapping of foreign heads of state like Noriega from Panama in 1989, or Aristide in Haiti in 2004, to take just a few examples.

While such attacks are nothing new for US imperialism, the diplomatic hypocrisy that was habitually used in the past to justify them is now largely abandoned. In the brutal language of Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”

Redividing the world

US world dominance is nevertheless shrinking. That is what lies behind the White House’s publication of its “National Security Strategy”, which has officially pronounced the end of the “American century”: “After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” 

Even more explicitly, the day after the kidnap of Maduro, the State Department posted on X a message in capital letters: “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE” – an admission that the age of “unipolarity” (the short-lived “American century”) is over. As Russia reasserts the dominion of the Tsarist empire in Chechnya, Georgia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and (at the cost of a million soldiers killed or wounded) Ukraine; and as China reasserts its grip over Hong Kong and threatens the sovereignty of Taiwan; the USA is in practice acknowledging a new division of interests in the world, in which Latin America is brought firmly back under the heel of the USA, Europe is cut loose and much of its eastern wing left to the mercy of Russia, while the USA reserves the right to contend for control of the Middle East through its bloodthirsty surrogate Israel.

Trump favours the ceding of Donbass to Russia, and giving China a free hand regarding Taiwan: “He (Xi) considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing.“

For now, the USA is imposing what Trump himself has defined as “American pre-eminence in the western hemisphere”: a revived version of the “Monroe doctrine”. He has acknowledged this himself, calling it “the Donroe doctrine”. This means total domination of Latin America, exclusive control of the region’s strategic natural resources, and a new western-hemisphere supply chain cutting out China.

Recognising that manufacturing jobs will never return to the USA, instead its goal is now “near-shore” manufacturing in Latin America on the basis of a US-dominated supply chain. With a compliant regime already in place in Argentina, the USA is forcibly replacing Chinese ports around Panama and Peru and other “Belt and Road” projects. It has kidnapped the president of Venezuela and imposed a military regime in Honduras. It is trying to undermine and ultimately overthrow left governments in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua and even Cuba. And it has threatened to annex not only Greenland but even Canada.

Preparing for war

But empires rarely cede supremacy to a rising adversary without a last-ditch fight. The USA is gearing itself up for an inevitable future conflict with China. And one key element in its preparations is the need somehow to neutralise the potential military threat from the huge nuclear arsenal stockpiled by China’s current ally Russia.

The strategy of the traditional faction of the US ruling class, represented now mainly by the Democrats, had been to seek (at colossal cost and with diminishing returns) to exhaust Russia’s military, diplomatic and economic resources with economic sanctions and a proxy war in Ukraine. The new administration is supplanting this policy with an alternative strategy: to neutralise Russia rather than confront and provoke it.

A split is widening within the US ruling class between the Democratic faction, which is clinging to the old strategy of sapping the resources of China’s nuclear-armed ally Russia to exhaust its capacity, and the Trumpian Republicans who have opted instead for appeasement of Russia, and a return to the partition of the world into rival spheres of influence.

Trump’s Vice-President, Vance, calls for a “focus on East Asia, which is where our most significant competitor is for the next 20 or 30 years”. Even more clearly, his Secretary of State Rubio says: “We’re in a situation now where the Russians have become increasingly dependent on the Chinese…If Russia becomes a permanent junior partner to China in the long term, now you’re talking about two nuclear powers aligned against the United States…It’s not a good outcome for America or for Europe or the world.”

This explains Trump’s determination to end a war which it was already losing in any case, by conceding to Russia the neutrality of Ukraine and ceding to its jurisdiction the territory both of Crimea and Donbas, with their predominantly Russian ethnic populations.

But in foreign policy too, what counts nowadays is not just diplomacy or strategy but money. In return, Trump plans to commandeer the rich mineral, agricultural and energy resources of Western Ukraine. In effect, the outcome will be a partition of Ukraine, with Russia reoccupying the East, and the USA swallowing up the assets of the West.

While neither Russia nor even China at this stage have the means to challenge the USA’s role as pre-eminent global superpower – the USA has 800 overseas naval bases; China, just two – all three are giant regional powers, carving up a redivision of the world into spheres of influence, of which the USA is by far the most powerful militarily. This can only ultimately lead to increasingly dangerous global confrontations.

Concentration of wealth

The old capitalist economies of Europe are in irrevocable decline. In Western Europe, annual growth hardly reaches 1%. Europe’s strongest economy, Germany, actually contracted in 2023 and 2024, and remained stubbornly stagnant in 2025.

Apart from brief blips, the US economy too is slowing down relentlessly. Between 1945 and 1973 it grew by an annual average of 4%; since then it has hardly reached 2%. Over the past 15 years, the average growth rate of the US economy has slumped by nearly half compared to the previous 25 years.

Since the 1980s the US economy has suffered a process of deindustrialisation comparable to that of Britain. The economies of both countries are now largely based on parasitical speculation in finance, real estate, the stock market, etc.

American companies are currently burdened with the heaviest debts in their history, with a total outstanding debt amounting to five times their annual income. Over the past two years, corporate bankruptcies have soared by 87%.

At the same time, the world’s super-rich have enjoyed a colossal rise in their wealth. The world at the beginning of 2026 has more dollar billionaires than ever: 3,028 (247 more than one year earlier). They’re richer than ever, and their wealth is soaring at unprecedented speed. In the year 2000, the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires had amounted to just $1 trillion. In recent years it has swelled from £12.2 trillion in 2023, to £14.2 trillion in 2024, to $16.1 trillion in 2025. Elon Musk has just accepted a business deal whereby he is due to become the world’s first dollar trillionaire.

Within the five years 2020-2025, the collective wealth of the billionaires grew by 81% ($8.2 trillion), to $18.3 trillion – enough, according to Oxfam, to eradicate global poverty 26 times over.

This has compounded a colossal rise in inequality. The USA has the grossest income inequality of all the G7 countries, as well as the lowest life expectancy. In 2011, 400 people had owned more wealth than the bottom half of the whole American population; by 2019 this had shrunk to just three.

Globally, 60,000 people (just 0.001% of the world population) own as much wealth as the bottom half (over four billion people). Similarly, when it comes to earnings, the top 10% earn more than the other 90%, while the poorest half earn less than 10% of total earnings (World Inequality Report 2026).

While the wealth of the world’s richest 1% at one end of the scale has trebled since 1989, at the other, that of its poorest 50% had not grown at all in the same three and a half decades.

It is this gross concentration of wealth that explains the nature of US politics today.

Plutocracy – rule by the rich

In this grotesque nightmare society, every kind of monstrosity flourishes. Social life within the USA is rotting, resembling more and more the end days of the Roman empire. Over 48 million Americans have a drug- or alcohol-related disorder. In the year 2025 there were 425 mass shootings (defined as incidents in which at least four people were killed or wounded): that means more than one mass shooting every day. These and other horrific symptoms are hallmarks of a terminally sick society.

In the year since Trump took office, paramilitary troops have patrolled major cities, suspected migrants snatched from the streets, over 605,000 deported and almost two million driven by sheer terror to flee the country voluntarily. Hundreds of thousands of state employees have been furloughed or permanently sacked.

The threadbare tissue of constitutional legality has been ripped open, a process foreshadowed in the 2021 Capitol riot, and now in the occupation of one city after another by the paramilitary federal state terror army ICE, with its free licence to kidnap, incarcerate and murder.

The spectacle of ICE’s thugs rampaging through one US city after another, randomly rounding up innocent victims, incarcerating them indefinitely in concentration camps on US soil and abroad, assaulting and sometimes murdering bystanders, has invited comparison with the fascist gangs of pre-war Europe. How justified is this comparison?

Strikebreaking street armies

The ultimate victory of fascism means the physical destruction of the organisations of the organised working class at the hands of strikebreaking street armies. This entails the voluntary surrender by the ruling class of direct political power, in conditions of crisis and deadlock in the class struggle, to an agency of hired mercenaries, once traditional means of control have failed.

Trump and his entourage certainly have fascist ambitions. Musk’s sieg heil salute at Trump’s inauguration was no accident. The mercenary fascist gangs they do have at their disposal, so far relatively small, stand ready for deployment (the Proud Boys, the Oath Takers, the mob which stormed the Capitol in 2021).

But at this stage they are held in reserve. ICE is a terrifying paramilitary force, but so far it remains an agency under the control of the state which could be demobilised at any moment or even disbanded, like Hitler’s SA storm troopers were after his seizure of power.

Under classic fascist regimes, the capitalists and their traditional politicians surrendered political power to an unaccountable dictatorship as their best hope of preserving their property. Trumpism represents on the contrary the direct personal seizure of the functions of the state by a handful of capitalist oligarchs who have amassed into their hands such a vast accumulation of wealth and power that they feel able to dismiss the services of a professional elite to administer their affairs. The combined wealth of this, the richest cabinet in US history, comes to $7.5 billion. This is not a government for the rich – it is a government by the rich.

Far from ceding sovereignty to an unaccountable gangster clique over which it has no immediate control, the Trump regime represents the direct administration of affairs by a capitalist class which has become so concentrated that it has dispensed with an entire culture of statecraft.

The ruling corporations have amassed into their hands such a grotesque accumulation of wealth and power that they no longer require a professional elite to administer their affairs. Far from relinquishing direct power to a fascist dictatorship, they have even dispensed with the finesse, diplomacy and strategic planning of a classic bourgeois state.

So how do we define this new phenomenon? It’s time to retrieve the word plutocracy: literally “rule by the rich”.  Of course, the rich have always ruled; but up to now they have entrusted the administration of their rule to a special caste of professional mandarins, politicians and bureaucrats.

Society has become grotesquely polarised

Society today has become so grotesquely polarised, wealth so monstrously concentrated, capitalism so grossly monopolised that the plutocracy feels able to dispense with any requirement to assign its collective interests to a specialised political agency: it now rules directly in its own name.

Naked personal power is concentrated directly in the hands of the multi-billionaires: the venture capitalist Elon Musk (soon to become the world’s first trillionaire); the shopping tycoon Bezos; the social media mogul Zuckerberg; all under the banner of the property speculator Trump. The ruling corporations have amassed into their hands such a grotesque accumulation of wealth and power that they no longer require a professional elite to administer their affairs.

Trotsky commented that at its height the British ruling class was able to plan for decades and even centuries ahead. By contrast, Trump has the strategic foresight of a flea; he switches policy literally several times a day. Trump is the personification of the dominant get-rich-quick class of parasitic property speculators which has abandoned any long-term strategy in search of instant cash gains. Therein lies its imminent downfall.

The more perceptive of the world’s super-rich are alarmed at the dangers ahead. They see the writing on the wall: the imminent threat of a social explosion. There is even a group called the Patriotic Millionaires which conducted a poll showing that over 60% of the 3,900 millionaires they had surveyed were concerned that extreme wealth was a threat to democracy, and that two-thirds of them supported higher taxes on the super-rich to invest in public services. This is a measure not of their philanthropy but of their fear of revolution. Predictably, their call was ignored.

Nearly 400 millionaires and billionaires from 24 countries signed an open letter to the recent World Economic Forum meeting at Davos: “A handful of global oligarchs with extreme wealth have bought up our democracies; taken over our governments; gagged the freedom of our media; placed a stranglehold on technology and innovation; deepened poverty and social exclusion; and accelerated the breakdown of our planet.

“What we treasure, rich and poor alike, is being eaten away by those intent on growing the gulf between their vast power and everyone else. We all know this. When even millionaires like us recognise that extreme wealth has cost everyone else everything else, there can be no doubt that society is dangerously teetering off the edge of a precipice.” 

We can only agree. 

*Roger Silverman is a member of the Workers International Network (WIN)