ANTI-NEOLIBERALISM

JOAQUIN FLORES—‘No Kings’, they chanted. In attempting to delegitimise a popular president who won not only the electoral college by a wide margin, but also the popular vote, the NGOs, Soros philanthropy, and Democrat Party funded protests through the Indivisible organization, were attended by a predictable assortment of left and center-left activists. Critical to the organizers’ approach is to leave aside the real issues of war and economy; issues that most Americans care about, and focus instead on the notion that Donald Trump is a ‘King’, or a Tyrant, a dictator, or an autocrat; the differences and distinctions matter not, for one thing to them is clear: the orange man is bad. And when the issue of war is raised, they present as little more than as the Zelensky fan club. The very powerful interests from among America’s oligarchy supporting the anti-Trump movement, are contrasted to similar very powerful oligarchic interests supporting Trump’s populist agenda. This highlights both the nature and the reality of the inter-elite conflict which rages inside the United States, with impact and significance globally.

BEN NORTON—Greece’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis explains the US system of “neo-imperialism” based on the dollar, an “IOU issued by the hegemon”, which finances a huge trade deficit by letting foreign capitalists “extract colossal surplus value from their workers and then stash it away in America’s rentier economy”.

ERIC BLAIR—Why should the Saudis now export their oil only in USD today? Why should they accumulate more US bonds, stored in US banks, when the US could seize them at any moment, just as the Europeans and the US seized $300 billion equivalent of Russian foreign reserves in 2022? Why should they invest in US bonds when the US bond market is declining and even the vassal Japanese in 2025 started to shed US bonds (as soon as the Trump tariffs started to go pear-shaped)? What can the Saudis buy with devaluing US bonds, what material goods and commodities does the USA produce other than overpriced, underperforming military paperweights and Iron Sieve phoney missile defence systems? US bonds represent trillions of dollars of irredeemable US debt, which anyone with two functioning brain cells knows that the USA will, in due course, hyperinflate away to make their irredeemable debt vanish.

J. MACFARLANE—The conversation delves into the political and economic motivations of Trump and his administration, emphasizing how war sustains lucrative military contracts and NATO spending commitments, which benefit Trump’s business interests and political power. Helmer further explores the role of oligarchs in Russia and their diminished influence amid war and sanctions, contrasting this with the U.S. deep state’s ideological and economic incentives to perpetuate conflict.

ED CURTIN—It was in 1985, the year of “amusing ourselves to death,” that Donald Trump, a fake-estate developer, acquired the Atlantic City Hilton Hotel and renamed it Trump’s Castle, a sign of his obsessive megalomania. Trump’s homage to himself went into bankruptcy seven years later, forecasting the future fate of the USA. It was the first year of the second term of Ronald Reagan, a former actor who was called the acting President by his critics. But Reagan himself was proud of his acting; he thought it served him well in the White House, as Gary Wills writes in Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home.