It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
How a Chinese delicacy, and Suquamish Tribe got caught in the crossfire of Trump's trade war
The escalating trade war between the U.S. and China is now crippling an entire industry that hand-harvests geoducks, leaving Washington state divers without work
Daniel McRae unloads a bag of harvested geoduck clams from his brother, Derrick McRae, on their boat near Illahee State Park in Bremerton, Wash., on Tuesday, April 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
MAY 12, 2025 Sally Ho and Manuel Valdes Associated Press
SUQUAMISH, Wash. — For over two decades, Suquamish tribal member Joshua George has dived into the emerald waters of the Salish Sea looking for an unusually phallic clam that's coveted thousands of miles away.
George is a geoduck diver. Pronounced "gooey-duck," the world's largest burrowing clam has been harvested in tidelands by George's Indigenous ancestors in the Pacific Northwest since before Europeans arrived.
In recent years it has also become a delicacy in China, with Washington state sending 90 percent of its geoducks there, creating a niche yet lucrative American seafood export.
But the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China is now crippling an entire industry that hand-harvests geoducks, leaving Washington state divers without work, Seattle exporters without business and Chinese aficionados with fewer of these prized clams.
"It's the first time in 24 years where I don't know when or if we'll be going back to work or if I have to find another job or what we're going to do," George said.
U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff-driven economic feud with China, which dates back to his first term in office, swiftly resumed in February within weeks of taking back the White House. By April, Trump had placed tariffs of at least 145 percent on China, which led China to retaliate with tariffs of 125 percent on the U.S.
Top U.S. officials are set to meet with a high-level Chinese delegation this weekend in Switzerland in the first major talks between the two nations since the latest tariffs were imposed, but it is unclear where those talks will lead.
Enter the geoduck, weighing about 2 pounds and so entrenched in local culture that it is the mascot for Evergreen State College in Olympia. The meaty mollusk is best described as sweet and briny, and it's often sliced raw for crisp sashimi out west while China consumers prefer it chewy in stir-fries or hot pot soups. Pre-tariff costs were as high as $100 per pound in restaurants, so it's a dish generally reserved for special occasions like Chinese New Year, or to celebrate a business gathering.
Unlike other products with long-lasting shelf life and standing inventory, the trade war has had an immediate, direct effect on the delicate geoducks, which are shipped alive the same day of harvest.
"The whole market, everybody just had to stop," said Jim Boure, general manager of Suquamish Seafoods, an enterprise of the Suquamish Tribe. "We started getting phone calls from buyers saying orders are canceled."
Fewer geoducks are being harvested
The millions of pounds of geoducks shipped annually to China come from two main sources: wild harvests on tracts of seafloor that are split between the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and Puget Sound Treaty Indian Tribes, and tideland farms. The state's share is auctioned to private exporters that often hire contract divers to harvest them.
As of late April, Washington state divers had only pulled about half of the expected harvest from the state tracts, said Blain Reeves, an aquatic resources division manager for the state's Department of Natural Resources. Last year, the state and tribes collectively harvested about 3.4 million pounds of wild Washington geoduck for sale. The state generated $22.4 million in revenue for their half of the clams, which went toward paying for aquatic restoration projects locally. The state doesn't track how much is harvested by private farmers.
"If only half the pounds that were contracted are harvested, then our revenue is halved," Reeves said.
The Suquamish operation has no orders to harvest for at the moment, but it still must keep up with the maintenance to stay ready for business if and when China comes calling.
On a recent April day, George's team made a quick trip to collect a handful of the clams for state lab testing.
"When we're doing the job, and it's not all this other political stuff behind the scenes and everything else, we love this," said George, adding that diving, which takes place early in the day so that the geoducks are on an airplane by evening, has allowed him to watch his kids grow up.
Fellow diver Kyle Purser said he cherishes his underwater job, but now fears it's being taken away.
"When you're watching your money disappear and you've got families to feed and not knowing when you're going to get your next paycheck, (it's) very stressful," he said.
America's loss is Canada's gain
The geoduck import market was already facing weaker demand in recent years due to the Chinese economy's struggle to regain post-pandemic momentum. While the tariffs have only exacerbated troubles for geoduck sellers in Washington, there's also been an unintended consequence: The American trade war has inadvertently boosted the Canadian geoduck business, which is facing a mere 25 percent tariff from China in comparison to the 125 percent for the U.S.
Washington state in the U.S. and Canada's British Columbia province are the two primary places where the wild geoducks grow naturally for commercial harvest. The two countries did healthy business primarily serving Chinese appetites for decades, in part because quantities are limited. It's a labor-intensive and heavily-regulated harvest, as divers must go several feet below the surface to dig for them.
"They love the fact that it tastes like the sea," said James Austin, president of Canada's Underwater Harvesters Association. "It's a product that's really a hit with the Chinese. It's all about the wild coastline. It's really prestigious."
Austin said he expects there will be 2.75 million pounds of Canadian geoducks harvested in 2025, worth approximately $60 million Canadian dollars ($43.4 million USD) in revenue.
While demand has been relatively low but still steady for Canadian's geoducks, Austin said they're now the leading exporters for China, which has helped them negotiate higher prices as a result. For example, after Canada got hit with a 25 percent tariff in March, export sale prices dropped to $12 per pound, and after the U.S. got hit with a 125 percent tariff in April, Canadian geoducks are now being sold for $17 a pound.
"We have no competitors right now," Austin said.
Yang Bin at Beihai Huaxiashougang Health Industry Company in Beihai city of Guangxi province in China said their seafood wholesale important business no longer gets geoduck from the U.S.
"We don't care about U.S. tariffs because we can get geoduck from other countries with stable prices," Yang said.
Waiting for geoducks
On their first week back to work since the tariff fight brought business to a standstill in Washington state, Derrick McRae and his brother pulled up about 800 pounds of wild geoducks in just one April day.
He donned a full-body diving outfit with an oxygen line tethered to his boat to dive under the cold waters of an inland sea channel west of Seattle. Kneeled on the seafloor, McRae used a water spray gun to move the sand covering the geoducks. In the cloud of sediment, he felt for the neck with his hand, pulling the clam and stuffing it in a net attached to him.
"We're just kind of waiting on the edge of our seats to see what happens next," McRae said.
At one of the southernmost inlets, farmer Ian Child said the tariff disruption is not just hurting his bottom line but the entire farming process. He usually places young geoducks in the sand in the summer, but he can't mix new crops with any existing unharvested clams.
"I think that the demand is still over there for the product," he said of China. "I think they still want it. It's just a matter of where the tariffs will land."
Associated Press researcher Yu Bing contributed from Beijing.
The European Union Still Can’t Shake the Austerity Habit
These are desperate times. As the rancorous Trump administration is turning away from Europe, accusing its “pathetic” nations of “free-loading,” and withdrawing support for thankless Ukraine, which Donald Trump blames for having “started the war” with Russia, dumbfounded European Union leaders are struggling to free up hundreds of billions of euros to increase defense expenditures.
The stress is palpable. Following decades of neglecting their own military budgets while remaining under the US defense umbrella and reaping the post–Cold War “peace dividends,” EU countries suddenly find themselves in a new, colder reality of having to fend for themselves. They are urgently exploring new ways to rapidly reinforce their defense infrastructure.
The biggest obstacle to this revival of “military Keynesianism,” reminiscent of the Cold War era, is the fact that the immediate step-up in public spending (to at least the NATO norm of 2 percent of GDP) requires deficit financing and higher public debts. This conflicts with the (self-imposed) fiscal discipline under the EU Stability and Growth Pact (SGP).
As the world is burning, many European macroeconomists, for whom safeguarding the credibility of the eurozone’s macroeconomic framework is a matter of life and death, are losing sleep over the risks to Europe’s fiscal sustainability and the credibility of its fiscal rules. Or when they sleep, they are having nightmares about the remarks made by French president Emmanuel Macron, according to whom the SGP is “obsolete.”
Stability and Growth Pact
Stringent rules on fiscal policy have been hardwired into the policy architecture of the common currency area, the eurozone, which consists of twenty EU member economies (see table below). The currency union has from the outset been a neoliberal political project intended to free up Europe’s markets for private business and finance while restricting space for public policy and regulation.
Its structures rest upon a hierarchy of policymaking actors, in which monetary policy by the supranational European Central Bank (ECB) serves only to maintain price stability. Member states are to pursue policies promoting employment and economic growth at the national level by means of deregulated, flexible markets (first and foremost, the labor market), while rigid rules strictly circumscribe the scope for states to use fiscal policy in support of those objectives.
The fiscal situation in the Eurozone countries, 2024
Encoded in the SGP, these rules force eurozone governments to maintain balanced budgets (over the business cycle), limit a (temporary) budget deficit to a maximum of 3 percent of GDP, and restrict their country’s public-debt trajectory to a maximum of 60 percent of GDP. The avowed purpose of these fiscal rules is to avoid potentially unsustainable public-debt trajectories that would result from “irresponsible” fiscal policy at the national level, because of their implications for the financial and monetary stability of the eurozone as a whole.
In reality, these one-size-fits-all rules have not prevented such unsustainable trajectories from developing, as illustrated by the cases of France, Spain, and Belgium. But they have ingrained austerity into the hearts and minds of policymakers in economies as diverse as Italy and Germany and led to grindingly slow growth, crumbling public infrastructure, and weakened social protection. Due to the SGP, the eurozone has become trapped in a deliberately depoliticized austerity mode and a corresponding democratic deficit.
The rigid fiscal rules became untenable in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent energy crisis, as public spending was essential to navigate the recession caused by the breakdown of global supply chains, the lockdowns, and the Ukraine war. In effect, the SGP was suspended from 2020 until the end of 2023.
The pact was reinstated in April 2024, after a modest reform of the rules that offered eurozone countries some flexibility and respite to deal with “exceptional” emergencies in the form of “escape clauses.” Under these (general or national) escape clauses, eurozone countries subject to the excessive deficit procedure (EDP) may obtain permission to deviate temporarily from the standard fiscal rules and agreed-upon medium-term fiscal adjustment plans, in case of a severe economic downturn in the EU and/or a negative, temporary exogenous shock.
In 2024, twelve eurozone member countries have public debts in excess of 60 percent of GDP. Five countries (Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, and Spain) have a public-debt-to-GDP ratio higher than 100 percent; in Portugal, public debt is equal to 95 percent of GDP. Even Germany is breaking the rule with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 63 percent.
Governments in six countries have a fiscal deficit higher than 3 percent of GDP. Belgium and Italy have deficits in excess of 4 percent of GDP, while Macron’s government in France is struggling, in a tense political situation, to rein in a fiscal deficit of 6.2 percent of GDP.
Guns and Butter
France and the other countries cannot borrow more without paying much higher interest rates; their governments are significantly exposed to an increase in sovereign interest spreads and volatility or a reduction in growth. None of these countries has leeway for the kind of massive expenditure increase on remilitarization that is believed to be necessary today. For them, the SGP rules are close to irrelevant, as bond markets decide.
In Europe, defense spending falls short of the NATO norm (2 percent of GDP or higher) in all eurozone member states, with the exception of Greece and the Baltic nations. If defense expenditures are to increase, and assuming that Trump’s tariffs will cause a global recession, most eurozone countries will have to cut other items of public expenditure — on social security, pensions, education, climate change, and health care — if they have to adhere to the letter of the SGP. The “guns versus butter” trade-off is raising its ugly head again in Europe’s macroeconomic regime built on a dogged adherence to fiscal austerity.
Enter President Trump, whose confrontational retributive approach gave Europe an “electroshock,” in Macron’s words. The French president insists that Europe needs to boost its defense industries in the face of a reconfigured geopolitical world order:
We must also develop a fully integrated European defense, industrial, and technological base. This goes far beyond a simple debate about spending figures. If all we do is become even bigger clients of the US, then in twenty years, we still won’t have solved the question of European sovereignty.
For once, the European Commission concurs, declaring that the security emergency facing Europe in the wake of Russia’s war against Ukraine constitutes a set of “exceptional circumstances” that justify proclaiming a “state of exception.” At the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced that she wants “to activate the escape clause for defence investments.”
In fact, no such specific escape clause exists. Hence the European Commission proposed instead to activate the temporary national escape clause available for individual countries under the SGP to accommodate defense spending without triggering the excessive deficit procedure. The national escape clause can be activated for a period of maximum of four years, starting in 2025, and is limited to an increase in only defense expenditure — up to a maximum of 1.5 percent of GDP.
It is for national governments to decide whether or not to use the extra room for budgetary maneuver. The four-year period seems rather short, however, given that defense expenditure now has to be ramped up for a long time, and contracts in this area stretch out over many years.
Deferring Responsibility
In effect, the European Commission is deferring responsibility (and funding) to national governments. This is where the trouble starts. Eurozone countries such as the Netherlands, Estonia, and Lithuania, which meet the SGP conditions, do not need to activate the national escape clause, since they have the policy space for higher military spending.
The escape clause is therefore relevant mainly for fiscally constrained countries with high public debts and/or high fiscal deficits. However, for Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain in particular, the availability of the national escape clause may not be enough.
These high-debt countries may fear that using the extra fiscal space created by the escape clause could result in negative reactions from bond-market investors who are already shaken to the bone because of Trump’s tariffs. In other words, these countries may hesitate to incur the extra risk associated with additional borrowing, however limited, for the sake of rearmament.
This particular fear is probably exaggerated, because the ECB will protect the face value of these bonds by duly making “secondary market purchases of securities issued in jurisdictions experiencing a deterioration in financing conditions not warranted by country-specific fundamentals, to counter risks to the transmission mechanism to the extent necessary.”
The backstop provided by the ECB, in turn, raises serious concerns that the use of national escape clauses will hollow out the credibility of the SGP and lead to problems of moral hazard. It will become more difficult to hold countries to the rules, once the exception becomes the rule and a bailout is all but guaranteed.
Europe’s high-debt countries may nonetheless prefer the safer option of common EU borrowing to finance extra defense spending. In lieu of euro bonds, the European Commission proposed to set up the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) financial instrument, worth €150 billion, from which member states can borrow (until the end of 2030) to fund additional defense expenditure, according to common criteria — most important, joint procurement and exclusive sourcing from European producers.
The proposed facility will be attractive only for those countries that cannot access the financial markets on more favorable terms than the commission. The proposed facility is surprisingly limited in size relative to the challenge posed by rearmament. However, a larger facility would likely have increased opposition from the (fiscally less constrained) EU countries that do not expect to benefit from it.
The German Debt Brake
The commission’s fiscal proposals have been overshadowed by the overhaul of Germany’s constitutional fiscal rule, known as the “debt brake,” in March 2025. In particular, Germany’s reform will do away with the borrowing constraint on defense-related spending (and includes a one-off spending package on infrastructure, climate protection, and the green transformation of the economy on the order of 10 percent of GDP).
The German reform does not rely on activating an escape clause, which by definition entails a merely temporary suspension of the normal functioning of the existing rules. Instead, it replaces the existing rules, specifically, by modifying permanently the upper limit on Germany’s deficit. The new limit would be essentially determined by the amount of defense expenditure (in excess of 1 percent of GDP). The interest rate on German bonds rose sharply in response to the debt-brake reform.
Germany’s debt-brake reform breaches the rules of the SGP: having a public-debt-to-GDP ratio in excess of 60 percent (in 2024), Germany should credibly adjust its fiscal policy to ensure that its debt is put on a “plausible downward path” in the medium term. Removing the borrowing constraint on defense expenditure will do the opposite.
Germany’s public-debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to rise to 90 or 100 percent in 2035 by economists including Lars Feld and Jeromin Zettelmeyer who assume that the higher public spending will not lead to a faster rate of (nominal) GDP growth. In contrast, according to Peter Bofinger, the debt ratio would increase to just 73 percent in 2035 if the reform generates additional economic momentum. Even in the latter case, however, since the overhaul of the debt brake is meant to apply permanently, the inconsistency between Germany’s new rules and the rules of the SGP will be hard to ignore.
Other member states, including those with less fiscal space, may follow suit and break the deficit and debt norms. Hence one way or the other, the conflict between the revamped German fiscal rules and the rule-based system that underpins fiscal policy coordination in the eurozone will have to be resolved in order to sustain the currency union.
One option would be to restore the ECB as the arbiter imposing a robust no-bailout rule, which would generate a strong incentive for fiscal discipline at the national level. However, pressure on the ECB to intervene in bond markets on behalf of countries facing difficulties in refinancing their debts will inevitably mount. This is especially likely once the larger, systemically vital eurozone member states — such as France, which is already in trouble — end up in distress. Another option would involve a further reform of the SGP along the lines of Germany’s reconstituted debt brake, permanently exempting defense expenditures from the fiscal rules.
Fiscal Futures
What is likely to happen next? Does the permanent reform of Germany’s constitutional debt brake and the temporary exemption of defense spending from Europe’s deflationary fiscal rules augur a fundamental reform of the policy architecture of the eurozone? Does the turn to military Keynesianism portend a more sensible fiscal policy approach that will contribute to a renaissance of European growth instead of causing self-harm as was the case with the SGP?
It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. But the following inferences can be safely drawn. First, while the neoliberal logic underlying the policy framework of the eurozone can accommodate a temporary suspension of its fiscal rules (as a “state of emergency”), especially at times of critical threat to the system, it cannot cope with a permanent abandonment of these rules.
The dominance (or autonomy) of fiscal policy vis-Ã -vis monetary policy will only be possible in a political union that has monetary sovereignty — and even then, it will not have the blessing of establishment macroeconomics, which dogmatically mistrusts the fisc and worships the technocratic paternalism of “politically independent” central bankers. Hence at some point, we will see the reactivation of fiscal rules, probably somewhat modified, obliging eurozone countries to cut other items of public expenditure — assuming that the defense outlays will continue to remain elevated for a long time to come.
Austerity will not go away for as long as state finances remain structurally dependent upon bond markets. As a result, the capacity of the state to adequately and progressively tax incomes, corporate profits, and wealth remains constrained by neoliberal ideology (and political money) that legitimates the existing huge inequalities in income, wealth, and political power.
Second, it is difficult to consider the reform of the fiscal policy straitjacket to allow for higher military spending as a sensible macroeconomic strategy. The higher military spending will without doubt raise demand, create jobs, and generate additional growth in Europe, although the exact impacts will depend on how much of the equipment, software, and armaments will have to be imported.
Things are not looking bright in this respect. Of the approximately €75 billion in European aid pledged to Ukraine, around 80 percent had to be sourced from outside Europe — of which about 80 percent came from the United States. The economic benefits of European remilitarization are further constrained by the fragmented nature of public defense procurement in the European Union, as national interests continue to dominate decision-making and domestic defense industries are fiercely protected, with a lack of standardization of weapon types as the obvious result.
European defense companies are relatively small, leading to costly duplication of research and development and a lack of economies of scale. They are also far behind their American, Israeli, and Chinese competitors on AI-enhanced weaponry, cybersecurity, satellite and missile technology, and advanced armor technology. The €150 billion allocated to SAFE looks pathetic in light of the strategic military investments required.
However, the revival of military Keynesianism will lead to “crowding out” of the fiscal policy space for critical, forward-looking public investments in the renewable energy transition, (social) housing, education, health care, and climate mitigation and adaptation. The relative ease and speed with which the European Commission and member states have responded to Trump’s electroshock is remarkable — but equally remarkable is the deafening silence on the Green Deal and on Europe’s mounting socioeconomic problems.
The renewed military Keynesianism will do nothing to remove the democratic deficit at the heart of EU decision-making. However, it will twist technological progress toward defense, AI, and surveillance, all in the name of national security interests, which in combination with the prevailing income and wealth inequalities will have corrosive societal effects.
In a worst-case scenario, the EU may manage to build up sufficient military capabilities to ward off (real or perceived) foreign threats but will fail to resolve the real economic insecurities, financial difficulties, societal corrosion, and inequalities that distress large sections of its population. All this will further fertilize the breeding ground for far-right populism that has already been prepared by means of funding from billionaires. In the end, the “enemy within” could prove to be more dangerous than any external adversaries.
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
The End Of US Empire Is Not The End Of The World
As American hegemony unravels, the Global South must resist both nostalgia and passivity. Multipolarity won’t arrive on its own—it must be built through struggle.
Car burning during protest in Washington DC during May of 2020. Photo: Eric Lee
There is no doubt that the world has entered a new era of multipolarity. While the United States remains powerful, it is increasingly counterbalanced by a China-led global order. This isn’t just about alternative trade routes, supply chains, or state-backed investments in the developing world. It also reflects the emergence of a global coalition between the structurally marginalized in the West and the postcolonial South.
Together, these overlapping groups form what is now called the Global South. Unlike the Third World project of the mid-20th century, which emerged from anticolonial struggles and sought to navigate a shifting Cold War order, the Global South project that began taking shape in the early 1990s confronts a different pressure: neoliberal restructuring. In this sense, the Global South is not a coherent geographic or class-based formation, but a shifting space of struggle—where elements of the North appear in the South, and vice versa.
This is why moments like Occupy Wall Street (2011) and Black Lives Matter (2013) resonated beyond US borders. Occupy challenged neoliberal economic organization; BLM took aim at America’s racial regime. Both revealed a fracture in the West that spoke to the experiences of the global majority. And while a China-led order is far from utopian, it gestures toward a more pluralistic political terrain—where multiple configurations of democracy and capitalism coexist, and no single power dictates the terms of modernity.
This, precisely, is what makes it so threatening to the West. The dominance of the US has been about not only material power but maintaining a definition of humanity grounded in whiteness. The West’s current configuration of democracy and capitalism is entangled with this racial vision. As the American philosopher Lewis Gordon reminds us, “a true, new beginning stimulates anxiety because it appears, at least at the level of identity, as suicide.”
We are seeing this anxiety take form: Existential fractures in the transatlantic alliance, resurgent white nationalism, and a frantic attempt to reassert control through trade wars and isolationist policies. Recall how the British historian Arnold Toynbee once put it, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
From Obama to Biden, and especially under Trump, the US has struggled to manage its decline. Trump’s approach, however, is more unilateral and maximalist: He has abandoned traditional alliances in an effort to reimpose American hegemony through economic coercion. But this is no longer possible. The United States cannot continue to play both global leader and imperial overlord. Its postwar architecture of international governance—designed to stabilize the world while preserving US dominance—has exhausted its financial and moral legitimacy.
Yet the West’s strategic imagination remains locked in a binary worldview. For the US, multipolarity has always signaled danger. In 2010, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned that multipolarity meant “rivalry, competing interests, and—at its worst—competing values.”
This helps explain the ongoing anxiety about BRICS. In Western analysis, BRICS is framed as a geopolitical bloc, a threat to the liberal international order. But that view risks missing something more interesting: that BRICS is a transitional formation, a forerunner of a multipolar world that may, eventually, render such blocs obsolete.
Even so, the transition is far from smooth. In February 2025, The Washington Post ran a headline declaring, “Trump Revives Monroe Doctrine in U.S. Relations with Western Hemisphere.” In this framework, multipolarity is not an opportunity but a threat to be managed through spheres of influence and containment.
But containment will not work. The world has already outgrown the US vision of liberal order. The empire is collapsing under the weight of its contradictions—unable to offer peace, prosperity, or even ideological coherence. The Global South, in contrast, offers the outline of a different vision: one free of empire, more open to pluralism, and capable of naming corporate and state violence as forms of domination.
Still, we should not be naive. Multipolarity is not automatically emancipatory. It can reproduce the same hierarchies under different banners. The Global South, if it is to be more than a rhetorical device, must hold new powers to account—rejecting both Western imperialism and new forms of authoritarian capitalism.
We must contend with a sobering reality: The US may be willing to destroy the world before it surrenders its imperial self-image. This suicidal impulse—visible in its economic warfare and cultural nihilism—should not be underestimated. If empire cannot imagine a future in which it does not lead, it may instead choose to make that future unlivable for everyone else.
We are entering a new terrain of struggle, not a utopia. And that terrain demands clarity, coordination, and vision. If the US empire is willing to end the world before it ends itself, then our challenge is not only to survive its decline but to shape what comes next.
That task will not fall to states alone. African governments, through institutions like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), must move with speed. If they are to shape multipolarity, they must build new regional institutions, assert economic sovereignty, and humanise Africans, not just as an anti-Western posture, but as a constructive project rooted in the context Africa finds itself in. Multipolarity will not be given. It must be made.
This will require struggle—not only against imperial holdovers, but against our own inertia. The end of the US empire is not the end of the world. But what kind of world emerges next will depend on what we are prepared to fight for.
“Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by. . . choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.”
-Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, The Rise of End Times Fascism
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have written a timely and important article published recently in The Guardian, The Rise of End Times Fascism. Clearly well researched, they have gone deep into what is the plan for the world of the Trumpfascists and their billionaire co-conspirators.
Two thoughts came to me as I reflected on the article. One is how much of what they say dovetails with the brilliant, satirical movie, Don’t Look Up, which ends with a rocket ship taking billionaire types and their front people in government to a supposedly safe planet light years away as a massive asteroid pulverizes the Earth because a billionaire prevented the action needed to neutralize it. Spoiler alert: it turns out that the safe planet wasn’t, which was a great ending.
The other thought was a remembrance of what I heard being said about 30 years ago by a decades-long, career military man who at the time had a high-level job at the Pentagon. In the quiet backyard of a northern Virginia house, he volunteered his belief, one clearly shared by others he worked with, that the earth’s population needed to be reduced to about ½ billion people. He was completely serious about this point of view, as if he saw himself working toward that objective.
End Times Fascism deepens our understanding of the abject depravity of those who right now have life and death power over what kind of a future humankind and many living things will experience. And they’ve chosen death or the risk of it for everything except for a very small elite which has an objective of “splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.”
Klein and Taylor identify three “recent material developments” that have “accelerated” this end times, fascist effort: the climate crisis, Covid-19 and the real possibility of future pandemics, and “the rapid advancement and adoption of AI. . . All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.”
Why is this happening? On a recent call a good friend of mine gave a concise, accurate answer: because their corporate-dominated and grossly unjust system is threatened by the refusal of tens of millions of us around the world to capitulate and give up. We who believe in freedom are not resting until we’ve turned this world around.
Klein and Taylor summarize the situation this way: “We must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world—on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. . . In this moment, when end times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are essential.”
One example of what we need is something happening in the state where I live, in New Jersey. For the last six months, since Trump’s election, an African American led, multi-racial and multi-issue coalition of almost 300 organizations has come together. Our first action was on January 18th, a Martin Luther King March for Justice and Resistance in Newark. Out of the success of that action, we initiated work which led to a hopeful, positive MLK People’s Convention attended by hundreds on April 26 which successfully adopted a comprehensive and substantive People’s Agenda putting forward solutions on a wide range of issues.
The successes of this newly-formed, statewide alliance has given us new energy to keep moving forward together, with plans developing for a series of actions into next year.
Alliance-building right now is the key, and it’s happening all over. Thousands of local, state and national groups have joined together in the HandsOff/50501/MayDayStrong network that over the last three months has mobilized millions of people in coordinated street actions in every single state in the US. These actions have strengthened the resolve of those participating and emboldened others—lawyers, judges, media figures, schools like Harvard, a wide and growing swath of US society—to resist and fight, nonviolently.
Next up for this national mass movement: June 14th, Flag Day, Trump’s birthday, the day of a Trumpfascist organized military parade of thousands of armed troops, tanks and more along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. In response, we need many millions of us to come out in actions all around the country, more than the three million who participated in Hands Off actions around the country on April 5.
Step by step, action by action, locally and nationally, we are building the progressive political force which can change this country and world. Si, se puede!
Ted Glick has devoted his life to the progressive social change movement. After a year of student activism as a sophomore at Grinnell College in Iowa, he left college in 1969 to work full time against the Vietnam War. As a Selective Service draft resister, he spent 11 months in prison. In 1973, he co-founded the National Committee to Impeach Nixon and worked as a national coordinator on grassroots street actions around the country, keeping the heat on Nixon until his August 1974 resignation. Since late 2003, Ted has played a national leadership role in the effort to stabilize our climate and for a renewable energy revolution. He was a co-founder in 2004 of the Climate Crisis Coalition and in 2005 coordinated the USA Join the World effort leading up to December actions during the United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal. In May 2006, he began working with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and was CCAN National Campaign Coordinator until his retirement in October 2015. He is a co-founder (2014) and one of the leaders of the group Beyond Extreme Energy. He is President of the group 350NJ/Rockland, on the steering committee of the DivestNJ Coalition and on the leadership group of the Climate Reality Check network.
