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)
Rescue efforts in Caracas, Venezuela. (Photo: Rome Arrieche)
On 24 June, Venezuela was celebrating two important holidays: the 205th anniversary of the Battle of Carabobo, the battle that sealed the country’s independence, and the feast of St. John the Baptist, declared by UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a celebration with deep spiritual significance, especially for the Afro-descendant communities of Venezuela. A day of celebration that was cut short at 6:04 and 6:05 p.m. by two earthquakes measuring 7.2 and 7.5 on the Richter scale, respectively, with 39 seconds between them.
At the time of this writing, the official information released by the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, reports 1,719 deaths, 5,034 injured, 15,866 displaced, 855 damaged buildings (of which 189 collapsed completely), 38 affected hospitals, and 1,645 other structures—such as bridges and roads—damaged. This level of destruction is unprecedented in the country.
The earthquakes that occurred on 24 June constitute a unique event known as a seismic doublet. It involves the rupture of one fault (in this case, the Boconó Fault), which in turn triggers the rupture of another (the San Sebastián Fault). This phenomenon produces a highly asymmetrical, overlapping, and chaotic wave field. The rupture occurred from west to east, which is why the most severe effects were observed to the east of the epicenter. What makes this ‘double earthquake’ so deadly is that the waves produced by the second earthquake overlap with those of the first, amplifying its destructive power. The overlap also caused an earthquake that normally lasts 30-40 seconds to extend for 2 to 3 minutes, triggering a ‘perfect geodynamic storm.’ So far, 609 aftershocks have been recorded. A monster for which no one could have been prepared.
Immediately, like vultures, the media and so-called ‘influencers’ launched a campaign to dismiss the Venezuelan government’s response, arguing that the collapsed buildings were those constructed by the Venezuela Housing Mission—a program unique in the world that has provided housing to more than 4 million families (the reality is that 80 percent of the collapsed buildings were constructed by the private sector), and that civil protection agencies, firefighters, and rescue workers had failed to show up—all in an attempt to generate more distress and uncertainty among the population.
This is a truly dirty campaign that should put to shame those who, from the comfort of their computers, profit from the suffering of others and—lacking any serious proposals—criticize the government by spreading lies and causing chaos in an already highly delicate situation.
The reality is that as of 29 June, there were 30,000 rescue workers deployed—including military personnel, police, firefighters, civil protection personnel, and Red Cross staff—and 75,238 families have been assisted. 7,237,000 kilos of food have been distributed, 222,478 food bags have been distributed in La Guaira state (the hardest-hit area), 4,200 people have received medical assistance, 90 percent of the power supply has been restored, and even five days after the tragedy, the search for survivors continues. This effort has been joined by 10,834 volunteers who have been accredited to prevent disorder that would hinder rescue operations.
It is important to note that all of this mobilization and effort is taking place despite the more than 1,000 unilateral coercive measures (erroneously called ‘sanctions’) that the U.S. government has imposed on Venezuela, measures to which the European Union has also adhered. Both the U.S. and some EU countries offered ‘humanitarian aid’ to address the tragedy, but there could be no greater cynicism and hypocrisy on the part of those who have subjected the country to hardship for more than a decade with the sole aim of bringing about a change in government and plundering Venezuela’s many resources, including the world’s largest oil reserves. In fact, unilateral coercive measures are designed to undermine the will of the people through attacks on the economy, restrictions that prevent free trade with other countries, the export of the country’s products, and the import of everything that is not produced domestically but is needed—including not only spare parts and machinery but also food and medicine. It is a fact that, during the pandemic, for example, Venezuela was prevented from accessing the COVAX fund to purchase vaccines—a situation that could easily be characterized as an attempt at genocide.
Unilateral coercive measures are a perverse mechanism. A recent study published in the Lancet demonstrates, using rigorous statistical techniques and databases from the United Nations and the World Bank, that coercive measures—especially those implemented unilaterally by the U.S. (without United Nations authorization)—have a direct impact on public health, resulting in 564,258 deaths annually, a figure comparable to those caused by wars. The U.S. has killed more than 28 million people over the past 50 years through the imposition of unilateral coercive measures. These measures are illegal and violate international law and the Charter of the United Nations. A report issued in 2021 by the United Nations Special Rapporteur describes the grave situation Venezuela was facing that year as a result of these coercive measures, confirming the findings of the study we just cited.
It is this country, battered by these illegal and criminal measures—with hospitals and emergency systems compromised by years of attacks—that today faces a tragedy of superlative proportions. Fortunately, there has been sincere solidarity from countries such as Cuba, Mexico, and Nicaragua, among others, which are providing rescue workers, heavy equipment, medicines, and a great deal of compassion, and are supporting the arduous work carried out by Venezuelan teams. As for the United States—the country that, on January 3 of this year, bombed and kidnapped the president—we can only demand the immediate withdrawal of the coercive measures it has imposed and the release of President Nicolás Maduro and Congresswoman Cilia Flores. The hypocritical aid they offer is not welcome. In Venezuela, the government, the armed forces, and the people—organized with the help of true friends—are working tirelessly to save as many lives as possible and restore normalcy as soon as possible.
Guillermo R. Barreto is Venezuelan and holds a Ph.D. in Science (University of Oxford). Retired professor at Simón Bolívar University (Venezuela). He served as Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, president of the National Fund for Science and Technology, and Minister of Ecosocialism and Water (Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela). He is currently a researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Transformations-IVIC.
Trump and the Structural Crisis of Liberal Democracy: Capital, Legitimacy, and the Limits of Representation
Image by istolethetv/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 2.0
Introduction: Beyond the Illusion of Democratic Normality
The political phenomenon of Donald Trump is often interpreted through the lens of exceptionality. In mainstream liberal discourse, his presidency is framed as an anomaly—a disruption of democratic norms produced by an unusually disruptive individual. Yet such an interpretation obscures more than it reveals.
From the standpoint of critical political economy, Trump is better understood not as an aberration of liberal democracy, but as a symptom of its long-developing structural contradictions.
Liberal democracy under capitalism has always rested on a fundamental tension: formal political equality coexists with deep and widening economic inequality. While electoral systems produce the appearance of popular sovereignty, the material conditions of political life are increasingly shaped by concentrated capital, corporate power, and transnational financial structures.
In this sense, Trump did not initiate a crisis. He rendered visible a crisis already embedded in the institutional architecture of the capitalist state.
The State and the Illusion of Neutrality
A central ideological claim of liberal democracy is the neutrality of state institutions. The judiciary, the media, and the administrative apparatus are presented as autonomous spheres operating above class interests.
However, Marxist state theory—from Marx to later developments in the work of Nicos Poulantzas—has consistently challenged this assumption. The state does not stand outside class relations; it is a material condensation of them.
Trump’s open confrontation with judicial and bureaucratic institutions is often described as an unprecedented attack on the rule of law. Yet what his presidency revealed was not the collapse of institutional neutrality, but its ideological function.
The American judiciary has long been embedded in political and economic structures: judicial appointments are shaped by partisan struggle, legal careers are structured by elite networks, and access to justice remains deeply stratified along class lines.
What Trump disrupted was not neutrality itself, but the cultural and institutional forms that sustain its appearance.
Media Power and the Production of Consent
A similar dynamic is visible in the relationship between political power and the media system.
Liberal democratic theory treats the press as an independent watchdog of power. Yet the structure of contemporary media—corporate ownership, advertising dependence, and capital concentration—places clear structural limits on this autonomy.
Trump’s hostility toward mainstream media did not rupture this relationship. It made explicit a pre-existing condition: media institutions are not external observers of power, but integral to the reproduction of political legitimacy.
The production of consent is not neutral communication; it is embedded in material relations of ownership, funding, and ideological alignment.
Trump’s rhetoric—denouncing journalists as “enemies of the people”—is often read as authoritarian deviation. While this characterization is not unfounded, it risks obscuring a more structural truth: liberal media systems are already deeply entangled with elite interests.
Imperial Continuities and the Language of Power
Nowhere is continuity beneath apparent political rupture more visible than in foreign policy.
Across successive administrations, the United States has supported authoritarian regimes, facilitated regime change, and engaged in military interventions whenever strategic interests required it. From Latin America during the Cold War to the Middle East in the post-2003 order, democratic discourse has frequently functioned as ideological legitimation for imperial practice.
Trump’s specificity lies not in deviation, but in discursive transparency. Unlike his predecessors, he often abandoned the language of democracy promotion in favor of explicit appeals to national interest, strategic advantage, and coercive power.
This includes continued reliance on sanctions regimes, military deterrence, and economic coercion against states such as Iran and Venezuela—forms of power that operate through containment and structural pressure rather than direct territorial occupation.
What appears as rhetorical vulgarity is, in fact, the stripping away of ideological mediation that historically helped reconcile imperial practice with liberal normative claims.
Populism, Class Fragmentation, and Neoliberal Capitalism
Trump’s domestic political success reflects broader transformations within capitalist social structure.
His ability to mobilize segments of the white working class through anti-elite rhetoric appears paradoxical, given his position within the upper strata of capitalist wealth. Yet this paradox is better understood through the lens of class decomposition under neoliberalism.
The decline of organized labor, restructuring of industrial employment, and expansion of precarious labor markets have weakened traditional forms of class consciousness.
In their absence, political discontent is increasingly rearticulated through cultural, racial, and national identities rather than class-based organization.
Right-wing populism thus emerges not as an external threat to neoliberal capitalism, but as one of its political expressions.
Trumpism, in this sense, is not a rupture with capitalist modernization, but a reconfiguration of political subjectivity under conditions of social fragmentation.
Crisis of Legitimacy and the Limits of Liberal Recovery
The dominant liberal response to Trump has been to frame him as an exceptional threat to democratic order. This narrative preserves institutional legitimacy by locating crisis in individual pathology rather than structural contradiction.
However, this explanation is increasingly insufficient.
The deeper crisis of liberal democracy is not electoral instability, but a crisis of legitimacy rooted in material inequality and political exclusion. As wealth becomes more concentrated and policy increasingly responsive to corporate and financial interests, the gap between formal democratic participation and substantive political influence continues to widen.
Political volatility, polarization, and the rise of anti-establishment movements are not anomalies; they are systemic expressions of this contradiction.
Conclusion: After Trump, the Question of Political Possibility
Trump should therefore be understood not as the origin of democratic decay, but as a figure who illuminated its structural foundations.
His presidency revealed the extent to which liberal democratic institutions depend on fragile norms that conceal deeper relations of economic and political power.
The central question that remains is not whether liberal democracy can restore legitimacy through institutional reform, but whether a political system structurally embedded in capitalist social relations can reconcile economic inequality with democratic equality at all.
From a critical left perspective, this moment signals not only crisis, but a reopening of fundamental political questions:
What would democracy look like if it were no longer subordinated to capital accumulation?
How might political institutions be reorganized to enable substantive collective control over economic life?
And what forms of organization are capable of transforming passive citizenship into active democratic agency?
These questions now define the horizon of any serious political thought in the present conjuncture.Email
Majid Maleki Meighani, (sometimes writing under the name Majid Maleki), is an Iranian political analyst, writer, and translator. He was imprisoned for his political activities. His work focuses on critical analysis of Iran’s labor movement, the political left, anti-imperialist critiques of geopolitics, and social movements in West Asia and the Global South. His analysis is grounded in direct fieldwork and interviews within local communities. He has translated into Persian Walter LaFeber’s Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America and the collection Voices of the Arab Spring. He has been a contributor to ZNetwork, Tribune Zamane, and Akhbar-e Rooz. You can access his full body of work on his author page on ZNetwork.
Escape From Capitalism: Clara Mattei Seeks Transcendence
In recent years, the news media has often reported polls suggesting that majorities of segments of the American population–for example, Democrat voters or young adults–”prefer” socialism to capitalism. It is not completely clear how these poll respondents define the term “socialism”–but it seems likely that most envision the word to mean a capitalism subjected to substantial government regulation in the interest of the common good and heavy taxation on business and the wealthy to provide a generous welfare state. In other words a socialism of the sort advocated by Bernie Sanders.
Of course, there have been a long line of famous thinkers and activists whose socialist visions have been much more radical: persons like Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Emma Goldman have called for the complete abolition of the capitalist system of private property and exploitative wage labor and their replacement by an economic system that produces commodities based on peoples’ needs rather than capitalist profit.
The Marxists Lenin and Trotsky led history’s first anti-capitalist revolution: Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This revolution featured soldiers and workers across Russia establishing soviets (workers’ councils) with the goal of expropriating Russia’s economic enterprises from their owners and handing them over to the democratic control of the enterprises’ workers.
The Bolshevik party led by Lenin and Trotsky gained the support of Russia’s workers by promising to support worker control of industry through the soviets. However, soon after they assumed power, they crushed the soviets, reducing them to mere rubber stamp bodies and established what became a notorious totalitarian dictatorship: the Soviet Union.
The Bolsheviks justified their dictatorship on national security grounds: they needed to centralize power in their own hands in order to defend their revolution from the subversion of the western imperialist powers which were backing the civil war launched against the Bolsheviks by Czarist remnants and Russia’s bourgeoisie.
This article does not intend to offer a full assessment of the justice ( or lack thereof) of Bolshevik actions under the circumstances they faced. Suffice it to note that by the early 1920s, as Isaac Deutscher wrote in his magisterial biography of Trotsky: “if the Bolsheviks had permitted free elections to the soviets, they would have certainly been swept from power.”
As Deutscher (an admirer of Trotsky) explained it, the Bolesheviks felt justified in holding power against the wishes of the vast majority of Russia’s population. For one, most of that population were illiterate peasants of extremely low culture. The peasants were so backward that they might support a return to Czarist feudalism. In the 1920s, in Deutscher’s words, Trotsky conceived of the Bolshevik dictatorship as a “trusteeship” for the Russian people who would be eventually granted more democratic freedom once it was determined they had reached a sufficient level of civilization.
The Bolsheviks saw themselves as the only progressive force in Russia, whose dictatorship was a thin line standing between the well-being of Russia’s masses and a return to power of monstrously oppressive czarist feudalism. Deutscher conceded that, among the Bolsheviks’ anti-capitalist rivals, “anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists…seemed far more popular” than the Bolsheviks among Russia’s working class. But Deutscher claimed that they had no coherent political program or organization with which to advance their ideas; in any case, the Bolsheviks were determined to keep them far away from political power.
Escape from Capitalism
Persons wishing to discredit communism or other forms of anti-capitalism often point to the failure of the Soviet Union. Indeed, for the most part, there was not much admirable about the USSR. It was a giant prison camp with good welfare benefits, as Noam Chomsky once put it.
However a new book by a prominent academic does a credible job in attempting to rejuvenate the anti-capitalist ethos. In Escape FromCapitalism: An Intervention, Clara Mattei, a Professor of Economics at the University of Tulsa, seeks to revive the spirit of democratic control of workplaces present at the outset of the Bolshevik revolution. She clearly seeks to transcend a definition of anti-capitalism that is limited by the experiences of “actually existing” communist societies like the USSR, Mao’s China or Castro’s Cuba: in fact her book has virtually nothing to say about such regimes except to note that they prominently featured the economic inequality and exploitation anti-capitalist revolution is supposed to transcend.
Her previous book–The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the way to Fascism–focused in part on what seems to be her primary anti-capitalist lodestar: the so-called Red Biennium in her native Italy of 1919-20 when workers seized control of factories and peasants seized control of agricultural land in an effort to establish democratically run workplaces. The Capital Order–which was listed by the Financial Times as among its 10 best books of 2022–describes how Mussolini came to power with the support of Italy’s ruling class as an attempt to put down this anti-capitalist movement.
Escape From Capitalism covers some of the same ground as The Capital Order: not just the
Red Biennium but a favorite theme of the author: how professional economists see themselves as an elite class possessed of specialized knowledge who, ensconced in central banks and treasury departments in the US and around the world, exercise the levers of fiscal and monetary policy in order to maximize the conditions for capital accumulation. This maximization of conditions for capital accumulation usually takes the form of fiscal and monetary austerity: the repression of union organization, the slashing of government spending on social welfare, deregulation, privatization of government assets and higher interest rates. Her description of how these professional economists, in post-World War I Europe and in the present day United States, see themselves as implementing policy for the well being of the masses (but without any democratic input from said masses) had echoes for me in Trotsky’s concept (in Isaac Deutscher’s words) of the Bolshevik Party’s “trusteeship” on behalf of the Russian masses.
In the last part of the book, the author gives modern day examples of people around the world trying to advance models of economic development that replace capitalist exploitation with worker cooperation–but what is most interesting is her account of her personal activism in this vein:
“In my own efforts, here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation (FREE), we hold monthly discussions with citizens from all walks of life to connect our daily problems to the economic structures that create them and envisage courageous alternatives. The Forum is structured as a council and is the product of a collective endeavor to spread economic knowledge, both locally and internationally, that fortifies the organization of effective systems of economic solidarity. It connects existing realities on the ground, such as Cooperation Tulsa, which, inspired by Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, collectively owns and organizes the production and distribution of food in a peripheral urban setting, and the Really Really Free Market, which organizes the exchange of essential goods without the intermediation of money. The path toward concrete transformation begins with real transformation and conversation.”
Much of Escape from Capitalism contains useful statistics proving that capitalism is bad: for example that a majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and much of the world is impoverished and starving as a result of free market economics. She argues that starvation and misery in the third world is rooted in exploitation and robbery by advanced industrial powers: she devotes an interesting section on this theme to the case of Palestinian immiseration by Israel.
It is not news to radical leftists of course, that capitalism is bad or that western imperialism has preyed on the Third World. But her combination of statistics proving capitalism’s perfidy and real world models that suggest ways of beginning to transcend it makes for an effective presentation of her viewpoint.
Union strength or weakness is often seen only through the light of a strike or lockout. Phil Cohn’s memoir, Maximum Leverage, tells a different story. Union building is on-going, from organizing to win a first contract, to maintaining and strengthening that contract over time, from grievance handling to arbitration, from safety and health to pension rights. And in every situation there is a need to build membership participation, develop and support local leadership, strengthen mutual support, ensure understanding of rights, understanding of power and how to wield it (or lose it). Cohn demonstrates as much as he explains, how every aspect of the above is at the heart of a union’s ability to improve conditions on the job, improve pay and benefits, and ultimately be able to win on the picket line if it comes to that.
A chapter recalling fighting back against a union-busting attorney during bargaining is emblematic. BTR Sealing Systems in Reidsville, NC – a factory making wiper blades for auto companies – negotiated a first contract with workers after the plant was organized in 1995. Frequent grievances and conflicts with supervisors were part of the reality where both workers and frontline supervisors were unfamiliar with negotiating day-to-day disputes via a contract; nonetheless, eventually issued were resolved and a working relationship developed between the union and the company.
The developing good workplace environment turned poisonous when the second contract came up and management’s proposal included eliminating the union’s right to file NLRB or discrimination charges, eliminating past practice as an argument during a grievance procedure, requiring the union to resign all members at the end of each calendar year, amongst other poison pill provisions. Complicating matters, some union members were pushing for wage demands beyond what the union could win or the company could pay. For Cohn this meant waging a no-holds-barred campaign against management while educating the membership about what would or would not be possible to achieve. He makes clear, too, that while compromises are necessary in any battle, these ought not compromise rights or unity, and that while maintaining a good relationship with managers can be helpful, but members interests and needs always must come first.
Key in all of this, however, was aggressively resisting management’s assaults, winning improvements in conditions, pay, benefits wherever there was an opening, while all the while maintaining workplace unity. As Cohn tells a manager who wants him to support an inadequate contract, “One thing you’ve got to understand about me. My goal isn’t to ratify by fifty percent plus one. I’ve got good instincts about a local’s threshold. If I don’t sense a nearly unanimous ratification, I’ll get out in front of the militants and recommend the contract be voted down. A split vote means a divided local for the next three years. I’d rather walk a picket line.” Ultimately, none of the company’s anti-union proposals were in the final contract, the union won some wage gains and improved contract language – and strengthened the local’s in-plant leadership.
Similarly, Cohn describes the strategy he employed in 1998 engaging a vastly different workforce when winning a first contract with newly organized Starlite Bedding (a company manufacturing mattresses) in Greensboro, North Carolina and again when resisting a decertification attempt at a Kmart distribution center (also in Greensboro) in 2002. Other fights he recounts address potential layoffs/threatened closure at a textile mill in White Oak, NC; overcoming KKK influence at a foam manufacturing plant in Cornelius, NC; resisting concessions at a large clothing manufacturer in Philadelphia.
Yet his memoir is not just a recitation of war stories. When describing how he successfully defended a warehouse worker unfairly fired, Cohn explains the difference between non-union “employment-at-will” and union contract “just cause” protections. So too in a chapter on helping a worker at a textile mill (making carpets) get compensation for a workplace injury, he explains how employers try to get around fairly paying workers’ compensation claims.
Although each situation is different, each situation similarly involves total awareness of the personalities and economics involved, each situation requires judgement of how to involve local communities, media, utilize union legal and research resources. Cohn’s approach, even when holding a seemingly weak hand, is to go on the offensive while maintaining realism about objective, while never losing sight of the goal – be it a good contract, saving pensions, ensuring workplace safety.
There are good books that explain how unions function, that discuss the role of the NLRB or OSHA, that discuss labor strategy and cite examples of what has or has not worked in the past. What gives Cohn’s book a substance most “how to” or theoretical accounts lack, is that he is writing about his own experience, giving names and faces to vivid personalities with all their quirks and contradictions that is the living reality of a union. Thus readers see the range of experiences that embodies labor organization, in a way no textbook can provide.
One lesson that comes through always be aggressive on behalf of the membership – even (or especially) when under attack. Union building for Cohn is rooted in understanding points of strength and weakness on both sides, thereby discovering where the union has “maximum leverage”. His own life experience informed his practical and moral understanding of where the difference between the boss and workers lies:
“Management investigations tend to be little more than an exercise in rubber-stamping previously made decisions. They seldom take time to scratch beneath the surface of what appear to be straightforward incidents, in search of the whole truth. Employees are considered expendable and the impact on human beings and their families isn’t a corporate consideration.
“Human resource directors, even the few who actually give a damn, understand that keeping their job depends on maintaining levels of productivity that won’t tolerate distractions motivated by compassion or justice.”
Cohn became a union activist when working as a bus driver in Chapel Hill, NC, in the early 1980s at a facility where the workers were represented by a do-nothing local. Success there took him on the path to become a union rep for ACTWU (Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union) on through its various iterations as UNITE, UNITE HERE, and continuing into its current incarnation as Workers United-SEIU. From first to last (the final campaign noted in his memoir was in 2018) it was the culture and the militance of the southern textile workers that he embraced.
Life experience before moving South, however, prepared Cohn for the union organizing to come. On the streets of New York from 1967 (when he was 16) through the late 1970s, Cohn was part of New York’s East Village scene during a time when the counter-culture was collapsing into survival mode, where life was cheap in every sense of the word. During those years he frequently drove cabs which, in pre-gentrified times, was considered the most dangerous job around. He washed dishes, lived in and “managed” a hotel for people who fell through the porous cracks of the city. It is a world vividly described in the first section of Maximum Leverage — bringing to mind my own memories of those times and neighborhoods.
Being part of the world with people who were handed a bad deck, every day on the knife’s edge, set the framework for how Cohn approached unionism as he notes in the prologue: “I always had an instinct for survival and playing the system, sometimes using it to keep other street kids alive or out of prison … I had the soul of an outlaw but was never a criminal. An outlaw ignores the rules in favor of his own code but doesn’t prey upon the weak and innocent.”
Similarly, life where food, shelter, safety were always in question helped shape the convictions that made him a unionist — as he writes “Living on the fringes of society did far more to shape my views about social justice and how the system really works than any classroom could have.”
Kurt Stand has been a member of DSA since 1983, and has been long active in the labor movement in various capacities. He spent 15 years in federal custody and after his release, he worked as a bookseller for 10 years and then two years for Progressive Maryland focused on reentry issues. A Portside Moderator his articles have appeared in the Washington Socialist, Stansbury Forum, Socialism & Democracy, Socialist Project; The Bullet and elsewhere.
How Jeffrey Epstein’s Israeli Network Shaped Congo’s Deadly Mineral Trade
Leaked documents reveal how military contractors linked to Israeli intelligence secretly trained a special operations strike force in mineral-rich eastern Congo.
A photograph of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein in an undated photograph released by the U.S. Department of Justice
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak coordinated closely with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in pursuit of mineral, oil, and gas resources in Africa after Barak’s resignation as Israel’s defense minister in 2013, according to documents published by the U.S. Department of Justice and hacked emails from Barak’s Gmail account reviewed by Drop Site News.
Epstein played a pivotal role in Barak’s transition from the military to the private sector by packaging privatized Israeli intelligence services for sale to police states around the world. Together, the two men marketed security and surveillance products to foreign governments seeking to stabilize civil conflicts during the tumultuous early 2010s.
Email correspondence shows that Barak also drew on his lifelong Israeli intelligence connections to help expand his business footprint in Africa, including the services of former Mossad chief turned private military contractor Danny Yatom. Yatom served as director of the Mossad from 1996 to 1998, and became Barak’s top security adviser, followed by time in the Knesset until 2008. Since then, he has consulted for and served on the boards of various private security firms such as Global Strategic Group, a small outfit operating in central Africa led by several Israeli intelligence veterans from the Mossad and Shin Bet.
A proposal for a “Night Warfare Special Operations Unit” that was included in Barak’s Gmail account reveals that Global Strategic Group trained an elite special operations unit in the mineral-rich eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2013. The proposal, marked “classified,” included a case study of the Kivu conflict in which Yatom boasted that their firm’s training had turned the tide against the rebel March 23 Movement (M23) and ended the war.
The Congo case study and other communications from Barak’s inbox showing his contacts with Epstein and Yatom were published by non-profit whistleblower Distributed Denial of Secrets, as part of a series of document dumps from Handala, a hacking group with suspected ties to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The cache has been independently vetted and verified by Drop Site News.
Yatom, who has denied that he ever met Epstein, did not respond to a request for comment. Aside from their mutual connection with Barak, no public information connects Yatom to Epstein.
From a July 2014 “Night Warfare Special Operations Unit” proposal by Danny Yatom’s Global Strategic Group, in a section entitled, “General Capabilities of the Unit (Night and Day).”
“Isn’t This Perfect For You”
While Africa has garnered little attention in news coverage of Epstein’s sexual misconduct, the continent was central to his and Barak’s joint mission of obtaining and exploiting elite political access, cutting-edge artificial intelligence infrastructure, and energy and mineral resources. Drop Site has previously reported on Epstein’s role in brokering a security deal between Israel and Cotê d’Ivoire, and a logistics deal between Nigeria and the Dubai-based shipping conglomerate DP World.
The Handala files contain thousands of records concerning Barak’s and Epstein’s efforts to control oil, gas, and minerals across the African continent during the 2010s by leveraging Barak’s credentials as the widely respected head of the Israel Defense Forces. “With civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia, libya, and the desperation of those in power,” Epstein wrote in a 2014 email to Barak, “isn’t this perfect for you.” Barak replied, “You’re right [in] a way. But not simple to transform it into a cash flow.”
That cash flow came from the financial interests fueling the wars. As an Israeli-trained force fought M23 in the hills of North Kivu in the spring of 2013, emails show that Epstein’s Emirati associate Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem was opening a separate channel to Joseph Kabila, then Congolese president, over investments in mining, oil, gas, and transport infrastructure. By 2018, in the year before his death, Epstein was quietly involved in sanctions diplomacy around the U.S. Treasury Department’s crackdown on an Israeli mining kingpin profiting from Congo’s conflict minerals.
In the summer of 2014, with close guidance from Epstein, Barak was engaged with security officials in Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire, while simultaneously negotiating strategic investments in ports and petroleum assets across West Africa. On July 28, 2014, emails show that Yatom supplied Barak with sales materials to promote Global Strategic Group as a private-sector provider of military training and operational support.
Yatom’s company offered a special operations unit that had been provided to Congo’s army during the first war against M23 from 2012 to 2013. The program trained a “Tier One Strike Force” counter-terror squad, a 150-person elite unit trained for night raids, ambushes, counter terrorism, hostage rescue, sniper operations, thermal observation, and direct-action missions.
The Congo case study claimed the Israeli-trained unit had carried out repeated night operations under fire in North Kivu and that those raids helped shift the battlefield in favor of the Congolese army. Emails published by Wikileaks show that Nir and Omer Yatom, Danny’s sons, had also engaged Italy’s notorious Hacking Team to purchase cyberweapons “for state use” in the Congo during the same period, in the spring of 2013.
Since Epstein’s death, the conflict over Africa’s natural resources has entered a new chapter, as the United States seeks to actively counter China’s dominant role in the Congo’s mining sector. On April 27, 2026, Congo’s mining agency announced the creation of a new paramilitary army to secure mines and mineral supply chains.
The mining security program was described as a $100 million initiative in partnership with the United States and the United Arab Emirates, with a target of more than 20,000 personnel by the end of 2028. The U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa has denied that Washington was funding the mine security force. Separately, Congo also agreed to accept people deported from the United States.
Washington is now eyeing Congo’s rich deposits of coltan ore. Coltan is used to manufacture tantalum capacitors, capable of delivering power to electronics in hot environments, like e-cigarette vape pens and densely packed servers in data centers. The Rubaya coltan mines in North Kivu, near the city of Goma on Congo’s eastern border with Rwanda, are controlled by the M23 Movement, the Rwandan-backed coalition that has seized large parts of eastern Congo.
On April 30, 2026, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Kabila for his alleged support for the M23 rebels. But, more than a decade ago, Kabila was leading the Armed Forces of the DRC in the fight against the M23 Movement. The war in eastern Congo has become one of the world’s deadliest and most intractable conflicts—one which multinational mining companies and private military contractors tied to Israeli intelligence have been eager to exploit.
Administrative map of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2021. Image: CIA.
Africa’s World War
Epstein and Barak’s interest in the Congo emerged from a long history of American and Israeli intelligence agencies seeking to extract valuable minerals from the former Belgian colony. To prevent the Congolese independence movement from seizing the country’s mining resources, the CIA and Belgian officers helped assassinate Congo’s first prime minister in 1961. The new Belgium-backed government formally nationalized the mining sector, but allowed foreign firms to maintain influence through loans and technical expertise, and invited the Israeli military to train the army.
Amid rampant corruption and state-sponsored looting, Congo’s mining production collapsed in the 1990s. In the aftermath of a genocide in neighboring Rwanda, Congo became the site of a multi-sided civil conflict that became known as “Africa’s World War.” The war drew in the armies of nine African nations, and many more armed militias, leading to millions of deaths. As the conflict expanded and threatened the rule of the central government, foreign mining interests stepped in to support then-Congolese ruler Laurent Kabila, turning mining deals into a bargaining chip for his regime’s survival.
Among those investors was Dan Gertler, an Israeli diamond trader whose grandfather had founded the Israel Diamond Exchange. A UN report from 2001 claimed that Gertler made a deal to help Kabila access Israeli weapons and military training in exchange for a monopoly on Congo’s diamonds—a deal based on the “special ties” the report said that Gertler enjoyed with “some generals in the Israeli army.”
Reached for comment, lawyers representing Gertler denied that he had helped Kabila obtain Israeli military support and claimed that the deal was merely made to help boost the Congolese treasury and help the country fight smuggling by militia groups. The same UN report noted that the agreement turned out to be “a disaster for the local diamond trade,” citing sources that claimed no military support was ultimately provided.
In 2001, Kabila was assassinated by his own bodyguard in the presidential palace, and his son Joseph took power. During the spring of 2002, the younger Kabila appointed Gertler as his special emissary to the U.S. government, and Gertler met with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to seek the Americans’ help in ending the war. In July 2002, a peace agreement was signed in Pretoria mandating the withdrawal of Rwandan troops—but the conflict in the Kivu region of the country was never fully settled.
After the war, Congo’s state-owned mining company, Gécamines, still controlled the mines in the southeastern copperbelt, but the company was insolvent and needed funding to make the mines profitable. Kabila’s government sold off a large share of the copper-cobalt belt to Gertler and his French-Israeli business partner, Beny Steinmetz, to rehabilitate the mines. Chinese state-owned companies also provided financing and built infrastructure through a new mining joint venture called Sicomines.
During the 2008 global financial crisis, mineral prices fell sharply as global demand collapsed, and Gécamines was forced to sell off more of the copperbelt. In February 2009, Glencore gave a secret $45 million loan to Gertler’s company in exchange for political access to Kabila’s camp, according to a contract published in the Paradise Papers leak. Glencore used that access to buy more of the mines in the Katanga region, increasing its ownership stake to nearly 80%.
Glencore declined to comment for this story.
The market crash also put pressure on Kabila’s government to make peace with the rebels in eastern Congo. The month after Glencore’s bailout, on March 23, 2009, the National Congress for Defense of the People (CNDP), a major North Kivu armed movement, struck a deal with Kabila’s government to form an official political party and integrate into Congo’s national army.
Kabila broke up the CNDP structure, but he struggled to discipline and control the ex-CNDP officers within the national army. Facing redeployment away from the Kivus, and loss of control over checkpoints and mineral routes, a group of ex-CNDP officers broke away and formed the “March 23 Movement” in 2012. The M23 forces humiliated the army and briefly took control of Goma in November 2012.
A U.N.-backed offensive against M23 began in March 2013, splitting the rebels’ forces across roads, hills, and towns, pressured by artillery, rockets, and helicopters.
The tactical unit trained by Israeli mercenaries, according to Yatom’s report that was shared with Barak, gave the Congolese army an elite strike force able to move after dark, identify rebel positions, and conduct raids under fire, while the broader U.N.-backed campaign pushed the rebels back toward the Rwandan border.
Stabilizing the security situation opened investment opportunities that a network of individuals connected to Jeffrey Epstein was keen to exploit.
As the tide turned in the Kivu war, emails show that Epstein asked Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, his close friend and chairman of the U.A.E. logistics conglomerate DP World, to arrange a meeting with Kabila. At the time, DP World was steadily advancing conversations with Kabila for investment in a deepwater port on Congo’s short western coastline. “He wants to give us investment in mining and oil and gas,” Sulayem wrote to Epstein in May 2013, two months after the U.N. offensive began. “I mentioned to him that I have an American fund manager who will visit with me next time; he welcomed that very much.”
Map of North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
“Strong Men”
In December 2013, the M23 Movement surrendered and laid down arms. Soon after the end of the war, in March 2014, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry went to Kinshasa, pledging $30 million to support Congo’s elections and encourage a peaceful transition of power. Russ Feingold, Kerry’s special envoy for Africa, issued a clear warning to Kabila that stabilizing the country depended on a succession plan and enforcement of term limits. “President Obama, when he was here last year made a very important statement,” Feingold said, “What Africa needs is not strong men but strong institutions.”
But Kabila refused to leave. His family’s wealth was inextricably tied to the state, with stakes in more than 80 companies across mining, banking, agriculture, telecoms, and logistics sectors. Kabila’s camp delayed elections for three years by proposing constitutional changes, initiating a new census, and de-funding the electoral process.
In 2016, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned several police and military officials responsible for violently suppressing popular street demonstrations against Kabila. The U.S. Justice Department filed a conspiracy case against a New York hedge fund linked to Gertler, and collected nearly $1 billion in criminal penalties related to bribery cases across Africa under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Glencore quickly began buying out Gertler’s stake in its copper-cobalt mines in Congo’s far southeastern copperbelt.
Epstein jumped into a small circle of players engaged in privatized sanctions diplomacy around Congo’s mineral economy, which began immediately after Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory over Hillary Clinton.
In December 2016, Kabila hired an Israeli defense-security and surveillance firm, Mer Security and Communication Systems, to lobby the new administration against additional sanctions. In the first year of Trump’s first term, the Treasury Department ratcheted the pressure on Kabila by sanctioning Gertler, who had become an indispensable political intermediary to Congo’s mineral economy. Treasury officials claimed Gertler used his friendship with Kabila to manipulate mining and oil deals, causing the Congo government to lose more than $1 billion from underpriced asset sales.
Kabila tried to show outside investors and Washington that his government remained the essential custodian of Congo’s mineral wealth. In March 2018, he asked Sulayem, the chairman of DP World, to immediately come to Kinshasa to sign a concession agreement for the Banana port at the mouth of the Congo River on the Atlantic coastline. The sudden meeting caused Sulayem to cancel a planned appointment with Epstein in New York that week.
One month later, in April 2018, Glencore’s Africa business was impacted again by the Treasury Department when an additional round of sanctions was imposed on Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch accused of money laundering, extortion, and bribery. Deripaska’s aluminum conglomerate, United Company Rusal, was formed through a merger with Glencore’s alumina assets and the Siberian aluminum assets of Viktor Vekselberg, another Russian oligarch with Israeli and Cypriot citizenship.
Barak and Epstein were intimately familiar with the circle of aluminum titans behind Rusal. After his retirement from Israeli government service in 2013, Barak became an adviser to Vekselberg, and Epstein helped him leverage the relationship to engage in backchannel diplomacy with Vladimir Putin during the Syrian civil war. Barak’s business partner in Africa ventures, Gary Fegel, had led the aluminum unit at Glencore, and served on the board of directors for Rusal after the merger.
Fegel did not respond to a request for comment.
One month after sanctions landed on Deripaska, Epstein was approached by Jide Zeitlin, then-head of Nigeria’s sovereign wealth fund, about helping Glencore navigate the crisis. At the time, Glencore was making bribe payments to the Nigerian government for favorable terms on commodity deals.
The Treasury Department’s move against Deripaska had major consequences for Ivan Glasenberg, the Israeli-South African CEO of Glencore, who was forced to resign from Rusal’s board of directors. “Do you know Oleg Deripaska or Ivan Glasenberg?” Zeitlin wrote to Epstein on May 4, 2018. “Easy,” Epstein replied.
Epstein suggested an “approved sanction structure” to lift U.S. sanctions on Deripaska’s companies by diluting his ownership. The oligarch would need the Treasury Department’s blessing to divest, such that his ownership did not look like a strawman arrangement. “If you had a meeting with the appropriate division of treasury,” Epstein replied to Zeitlin, “im sure you can structure around it.”
Epstein had personally advised the Treasury Department on the topic of sanctions evasion in the past, and he floated a few options that could preserve Deripaska’s economic value in Rusal, while satisfying the Office of Foreign Assets Control that Deripaska no longer controlled the assets: trusts, swaps, options, or debt. On May 11, 2018, Zeitlin wrote to Epstein from Zug, the location of Glencore’s global headquarters in Switzerland: “Good lunch today in Zug re sanctions solution. Interest piqued.” Epstein wrote back, “No surprise,” and congratulated Zeitlin, “Great work.”
Ten days later, Zeitlin sent Epstein an article about Glasenberg’s predicament in the Congo, as fears mounted that Gertler’s assets would be targeted and seized by regulators in the U.S. and the U.K. “Unfortunately for Ivan, he finds himself in an uncomfortable place,” Zeitlin wrote, on May 21, 2018. “This is complex and requires additional digging in Washington.” Epstein wrote back, warning Zeitlin, “This channel is NOT secure.” Later, he explained why it would take time to untangle Deripaska’s holdings: “Who owns what is not simple.”
By August, the eventual corporate restructuring of Rusal and its parent company, En+ Group, looked similar to Epstein’s proposal. Lord Greg Barker, a former British Tory politician and chairman of En+, authored a proposal that resembled the structures Epstein had floated to Zeitlin. Zeitlin forwarded the news to Epstein in August 2018, with a note: “Interesting that key aspects [of] their approach now mirror my proposal.”
In December 2018, the Treasury Department announced it was terminating sanctions on Rusal and En+, while keeping the sanctions on Deripaska in place. Deripaska’s divestiture solved Glencore’s sanctions problem by letting the company keep its ownership in Rusal and En+, and resume its Rusal-related aluminum trading. Epstein shared the Treasury notice with Ehud Barak on New Year’s Day in 2019, just months before his arrest and death in a Manhattan jail cell. In 2020, Rusal approved a $16 billion contract to supply aluminum to Glencore.
The AI “Treasure Map”
Israeli and American security channels in Congo have matured further in recent years.
Félix Tshisekedi was sworn in as Congo’s new president on January 24, 2019 in the first peaceful transfer of power in the country’s post-independence history. The election was highly contested, however, with widespread accusations of fraud and tampering, and the African Union casting “serious doubt” on the validity of the result. Foreign Policy reported that Kabila had reached a secret power-sharing agreement with Tshisekedi to maintain behind-the-scenes influence over the country’s legislature, cabinet, and security apparatus.
According to reporting in Bloomberg, Yossi Cohen, then-director of the Mossad, traveled to Congo in June 2019, accompanied by Gertler, to meet with both Tshisekedi and Kabila. Some of Tshisekedi’s aides became concerned that the Mossad was helping Kabila acquire arms for a possible coup d’état. (Lawyers for Gertler denied the meeting took place and claimed that Gertler has “no relationship whatsoever” with the former Mossad chief.)
After Cohen visited Kinshasa a second and third time in the following months with an even larger delegation, Tshisekedi ordered him to leave the country. The Guardian later reported that Kabila had agreed to support Cohen’s campaign to pressure the International Criminal Court to drop its investigation into Israel’s alleged war crimes in occupied Palestine.
By the end of 2019, the United Nations Group of Experts identified Israeli military instructors training Congo’s national army in the Goma area, while tracing vast sums of illegal gold smuggling to the United Arab Emirates from a nearby province in northeastern Congo. The U.N. received testimony from diplomatic and military sources and photographs of the instructors, in the same Kivu battlefield where Danny Yatom’s group had helped defeat M23 six years earlier.
In January 2021, after intensive lobbying from Epstein’s longtime lawyer Alan Dershowitz, the Treasury Department quietly eased the sanctions on Gertler in the final days of Trump’s first term. Two months later, the new Biden administration reversed the move, saying the decision was inconsistent with U.S. foreign-policy interests in combating corruption in Congo.
The unresolved status of Gertler’s sanctioned assets are now entangled in Tshisekedi’s new minerals-for-security channel with Washington. On February 3, 2026, Glencore and the U.S. and U.A.E.-backed Orion consortium announced a non-binding memorandum for Orion to acquire 40% of Glencore’s Congo platform, putting an American-Emirati investment group in line to acquire Gertler’s former copper and cobalt interests.
In a press release, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation described the Orion investments as an opportunity to close “gaps in financing” that have allowed China to dominate mineral supply chains.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley titans are taking advantage of the opportunity to harden the supply chain for America’s artificial intelligence boom. In the first three months of 2026, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta spent more than $100 billion on new capital projects, mostly large data centers powering artificial intelligence. The American tech giants have committed close to $700 billion for new capital projects this year, while the UAE has committed to support a $1 trillion investment framework in U.S. energy, AI, and manufacturing sectors over the next ten years.
KoBold Metals, an exploration company backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, launched a $50 million lithium exploration campaign in Congo in April, targeting extensive mining licenses from the Congo government. The company says it uses artificial intelligence to create a “treasure map” to find new deposits of copper, lithium, cobalt, and nickel.
In February, Kinshasa also added the rebel-held Rubaya coltan mine to the shortlist of strategic assets being offered to Washington. The private army of Blackwater founder Erik Prince recently worked with Israeli advisers to again train Congolese special-forces battalions to fight M23 in the Kivus. A source told Africa Mining Union that Prince’s security and logistics firm, Vectus Global, will likely be used to enforce revenue collection on the mines in the southeastern copperbelt.
The money and weapons flowing into the Congo signal no end in sight to the scramble for Africa’s precious minerals fueled by foreign militaries. And with the sale of Congo’s mines to foreign interests, including members of Barak’s and Epstein’s extended network, little of the wealth from the extraction of Congo’s vast resources will flow to the Congolese people.
This article was originally published by Dropsite; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email
Originally from the US, Alexandria has lived most of her life in the Caribbean, as well as in Egypt and Central America. A sailor, writer, organizer, and street medic, she has been involved in community organizing, media, and education for over 20 years. Alexandria is currently a staff member of ZNetwork.org, a writer for Extinction Rebellion, and is active with Caracol DSA and Food Not Bombs. Her work has appeared on ZNet, Common Dreams, Foreign Policy in Focus, CounterPunch, LA Progressive, Waging Nonviolence, Antiwar.com, The African, The Socialist Project, mέtaCPC, DiEM25, PeaceNews, Green Left, Popular Resistance, Resilience.org, Grassroots Economic Organizing, Shareable, Dissident Voice, Democratic Underground, and various other outlets.
