Australia and EU sign comprehensive trade deal amid global tensions

The European Union and Australia struck a long-awaited free trade deal on Tuesday, while also agreeing to boost defence cooperation and access to rare earth minerals, in the face of global uncertainty over trade.


Issued on: 24/03/2026 - RFI

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, left, and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese shake hands after signing a joint statement during a ceremony at Parliament House in Canberra, Tuesday, 24 March 2026. © Lukas Coch / AP


European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen's visit to Australia comes as the 27-nation bloc and the import-reliant nation navigate renewed energy vulnerability, sparked by the war in the Middle East.

The accord is the latest agreed by Brussels in a push to diversify trade as Europe faces challenges from the United States and China.

Key sticking points on Australian use of European geographical names as well as how much beef can be exported to the continent were overcome to reach the deal, following eight years of negotiations.

Another compromise will see Australian winemakers allowed to use the term "prosecco" domestically, but they must stop using it for exports after 10 years.

Australia will also be allowed to keep using some geographically linked names, such as feta and gruyere, in cases where producers have used the name for at least five years.

And European car makers will benefit from Australia raising the threshold for a luxury car tax on electric vehicles – three-quarters will now be exempt.

The two sides also agreed to step up defence cooperation as well as critical raw materials.
'Harsh' world

Addressing the Australian parliament on Tuesday, von der Leyen described a world that was "brutal, harsh and unforgiving".

In that context, she said the EU and Australia were bound by common values and must work together to mitigate over-reliance on countries such as China for critical minerals.

"We cannot be over dependent on any supplier for such crucial ingredients, and that is precisely why we need each other," she said. "Our security is your security, and with our new security and defence partnership, we have each other's back."

She told lawmakers Tuesday's agreement on trade was a "fair deal, and one that delivers for your businesses and one that delivers for our businesses".

Under the deal, the EU said it expected exports to Australia to grow by a third over a decade.

The quota of Australian beef allowed into the bloc will increase more than 10 times the current level over the next decade, although that falls short of what Australian farmers had been seeking.

Australia's National Farmers' Federation said it was "extremely disappointed" by the outcome of the deal.

"What the Australian government has accepted today appears to offer no material change for key agricultural commodities as what the government rightly rejected in October 2023," president Hamish McIntyre said.

EU firms exported €37 billion of goods to Australia last year, and €31bn of services in 2024.

And Australia said the deal could add AU$7.8bn (€4.6bn) to its gross domestic product by 2030.

Vulnerabilities

Australia's largest export market is China and the US is its largest source of investment.

But Canberra has redoubled efforts to diversify export markets for farmers since a 2020 dispute with Beijing saw agriculture shipments blocked for several years, and last year's global imposition of US tariffs.

Likewise, the EU is on a drive to strike new partnerships in the face of US levies and Chinese export controls.

Von der Leyen's visit was overshadowed by the war in the Middle East, which has sent oil prices soaring.

The EU chief this month said the conflict had served as a "stark reminder" of Europe's vulnerabilities. And on Tuesday she called for an immediate end to hostilities in the face of a "critical" situation for energy supply chains globally.

Australia – which is heavily reliant on fuel from abroad – has also felt the pressure from the global energy squeeze.

(with AFP)

EU-Australia trade deal draws ire of farmers and lawmakers

Copyright AP Photo

By Peggy Corlin

Published on 24/03/2026 - EURONEWS

The new EU-Australia trade deal has drawn criticism from farmers and MEPs, who argue that it will open the door to additional imports of sensitive products on top of those already agreed under the contentious Mercosur deal, while not providing full protection for certain EU regional products.

Copa-Cogeca, the EU’s influential farmers’ lobby, said in a statement on Tuesday that the EU’s concessions to Canberra in the newly signed trade deal with Australia are “unacceptable” as they fail to sufficiently protect European farmers.

“In a post-Mercosur context, the cumulative impact of successive trade agreements makes these concessions unacceptable,” the lobby said, adding: “European farmers cannot continue to absorb the cost of bilateral trade liberalisation without adequate and truly effective safeguards.”

The EU-Australia agreement sets quotas for sensitive products including beef (30,600 tonnes a year phased in over 10 years), sheep meat (25,000 tonnes a year over seven years), sugar (35,000 tonnes) and rice (8,500 tonnes phased in over five years).

But Copa-Cogeca warned that these figures add to quotas already allocated to Mercosur countries — Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay — including 99,000 tonnes for beef and existing sugar quotas with Brazil and Paraguay.

The Commission included a safeguard mechanism allowing the EU and Australia to impose temporary measures within the first seven years if a sudden increase in imports leads to major market disruption in either partner’s market.

However, the lobby described these measures as mere “communication tools,” with one representative telling Euronews that “they will be slow to activate if a market crisis occurs.”

Relate

• Von der Leyen clinches Australia trade deal

Some MEPs already voiced concern

Before ratification, the deal must run the gauntlet of EU member states and MEPs, who have already challenged the legality of the Mercosur deal before the EU Court of Justice, delaying its ratification.

Some lawmakers have already come out against the Australia deal.

“A rude awakening this morning on learning that, once again, Ursula von der Leyen went it alone in the trade deal with Australia,” Belgian farmer and liberal MEP Benoît Cassart said, adding: “We’re set to face additional imports in sensitive sectors such as beef and sugar, even though we already raised concerns about this situation in the case of Mercosur.”

There were also concerns about the safeguarding of protected regional food names.

The EU protects “Geographical Indications” (GIs) for food and drink products linked to their place of origin.

Under the deal, 165 EU agri-food GIs and 231 EU spirit drink GIs are protected.

However, for cheeses such as the Greek "Feta" and French "Gruyère," Australian producers who have used these names in good faith and continuously for at least five years prior to the agreement will be allowed to keep using them.

These products will be “put at risk”, Cassart said.

Meanwhile, Italy's "Prosecco" wine triggered strong reactions from Italian lawmakers.

According to an EU official, under the agreement, Australian producers can continue using “Prosecco” to designate a grey grape variety in Australia, provided it is used as a variety name and tied to Australian geographical indications. This rule applies solely within Australia, which has also agreed to halt exports of such wines after 10 years.

But Italian Five Star MEP Carolina Morace argued that “with this decision, the European Commission is legalizing ‘Italian sounding,’ that is, the imitation of our agri-food excellence around the world.”

“As a Venetian, I can only reject this latest attack on our traditions, which weakens rather than strengthens Italy’s wine sector.”

EU chief in Australia with eyes on trade deal


By AFP
March 23, 2026


European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (2nd L) participates in a traditional Aboriginal smoking ceremony along with Australia’s Governor-General Sam Mostyn (C) during a visit at Admiralty House in Sydney on March 23, 2026. - Copyright AFP Saeed KHAN

EU chief Ursula von der Leyen arrived in Australia on Monday, with hopes a free trade deal can be struck after years of negotiations.

It is the EU chief’s first trip to Australia since taking office and comes as the bloc and import-reliant nation navigate renewed energy vulnerability sparked by the war in the Middle East.

She arrived in Sydney on Monday for a meeting with Australia’s head of the state, the Governor-General, and a traditional welcoming ceremony.

From Sydney, the EU chief will head to Canberra, where she is expected to meet Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and address the country’s parliament.

Von der Leyen is joined by EU trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic — sparking speculation the two sides may finally put pen to paper on a long-awaited free trade deal.

Both are still ironing out the details of the agreement, with improved access to the European market for Australia’s lamb and beef a key source of contention.

Australia has previously said it could drop a luxury car tax on European vehicles in return for greater access to the EU agriculture market.

The country’s use of geographical indicator names for cheese and wine products was also a sticking point.

Australia’s largest export market is China and the United States is its largest source of investment.

But Canberra has redoubled efforts to diversify export markets for farmers since a 2020 dispute with Beijing saw agriculture exports blocked for several years, and then last year’s global imposition of US trade tariffs.

The European Union is Australia’s third largest two-way trading partner and second largest source of foreign investment.

Trade Minister Don Farrell last week said that an EU deal would add Aus$10 billion (US$7.1 billion) in trade for Australia in the first year.

“They are potentially our second largest trading partner if we can pull this off, and we’ve just got to get over those last few hurdles,” he told Sky News Australia.

Front and centre in meetings will also likely be the war in the Middle East, which has sent oil prices soaring.

In Canberra, International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol said on Monday the world faced an energy crisis not seen in decades if the conflict was not resolved.

And Von der Leyen this month said the conflict had served as a “stark reminder” of the continent’s vulnerabilities.

Australia — which is heavily reliant on fuel from abroad — has also felt the pressure from the global energy squeeze.

While conceding that some petrol stations had run out of fuel, Energy Minister Chris Bowen said Monday the country was a “long way” from rationing.

As the US and Israel Escalate in Iran, Europe Trades Alignment for Strategic Autonomy

Europe is no longer prepared to be drawn, by default, into an open-ended military operation in the Middle East.


People demonstrate in Madrid, Spain, on March 21, 2026, against the war involving Iran.
(Photo by Tomas Calle/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Hana Saada
Mar 23, 2026

Common Dreams


What is unfolding across European capitals is not merely dissent over a particular conflict; it is the quiet reconfiguration of alliance behavior under conditions of escalating risk. The refusal voiced in Madrid—most starkly articulated by Spain’s Transport Minister, Óscar Puente, who declared that his country would not go “even around the corner” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—signals something more consequential than diplomatic disagreement.

Delivered in unusually blunt terms, his remark crystallized a broader political reality: Europe is no longer prepared to be drawn, by default, into an open-ended military escalation against Iran. It marks, in effect, the visible boundary of a strategic threshold the continent is no longer willing to cross.

For decades, transatlantic alignment functioned on the presumption of convergence: that when Washington moved, Europe would calibrate—but ultimately align. That presumption is now under strain. The prospect of a US-Israeli military aggression against Iran has exposed a widening gap between American strategic impulses and European risk tolerance.

The divergence is not ideological. It is structural. European governments are confronting a scenario in which escalation offers limited strategic clarity but immediate systemic exposure. They are being asked, in effect, to underwrite a conflict defined by uncertain objectives, fluid escalation dynamics, and a disproportionate economic burden—without corresponding influence over its conduct or conclusion.

The era of automatic convergence is giving way to one of selective alignment, where interests are weighed more carefully, risks are more openly acknowledged, and participation in conflict is no longer the default expression of alliance.

Spain’s position, far from anomalous, crystallizes this dynamic. The refusal to facilitate or politically endorse escalation reflects a broader European instinct toward insulation. Berlin’s caution, Paris’s distance, and the European Union’s emphasis on deescalation all point in the same direction: a deliberate effort to decouple European stability from the volatility of a conflict it neither initiated nor controls.

At the center of this recalibration lies energy vulnerability. The Strait of Hormuz—through which between 17 and 20 million barrels of oil pass daily—remains the most immediate point of systemic exposure. Any disruption, even partial, would transmit shockwaves through European economies already navigating inflationary pressures and fragile growth trajectories. Oil prices hovering around $115 per barrel, with credible projections reaching $150-$175 under sustained disruption, are not abstract indicators; they are policy constraints.

This economic dimension has begun to reshape strategic language. Where earlier discourse emphasized deterrence and enforcement, current formulations increasingly prioritize stability, containment, and the avoidance of escalation spirals. The postponement of strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure, following what Washington described as “productive” engagement, underscores the extent to which strategic decisions are now bounded by economic risk.

Equally significant is the absence of decisive outcomes on the ground. The escalation has yet to produce the structural breakthroughs that would justify its expansion. Assertions of operational success coexist with the persistence of institutional continuity within Iran, where governing structures remain intact and operationally coherent. In strategic terms, the conflict has generated pressure without resolution—a condition that complicates both escalation and exit.

Under these circumstances, Europe’s posture begins to take on a different meaning. It is not hesitation, nor is it disengagement. It is a recalibration of agency. By declining automatic alignment, European states are asserting a form of strategic autonomy that had long been subordinated to alliance cohesion. The message is not framed in declarative terms, but its implications are unmistakable: Participation is no longer assumed; it is contingent.

This shift does not dissolve the transatlantic relationship, but it does redefine its operational boundaries. It introduces friction where there was once fluidity, and conditionality where there was once reflex. Most importantly, it signals that the costs of alignment—economic, political, and strategic—are now subject to explicit calculation rather than implicit acceptance.

The significance of Spain’s stance, therefore, lies not in its rhetoric, but in what it reveals about the evolving architecture of Western power. The era of automatic convergence is giving way to one of selective alignment, where interests are weighed more carefully, risks are more openly acknowledged, and participation in conflict is no longer the default expression of alliance.

In that sense, Europe’s refusal to go “even around the corner” is not a momentary divergence. It is an early indicator of a deeper transformation—one in which the boundaries of Western cohesion are being redrawn in real time.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Hana Saada
Dr. Hana Saada is an Algerian university lecturer and journalist, and Editor-in-Chief of the English edition of Dzair Tube. She holds a PhD in Media Translation and writes on geopolitics, media narratives, and international affairs.
Full Bio >

The Dead and the Dying in Trump’s American Gulag

A system of concentration camps is being built and it’s time the nation reckon with this monstrosity before any more people are killed.


Activists rally against the North Lake Correctional Facility, which has just been reopened as the largest immigrant detention center in the Midwest. The rural Michigan facility is owned by the GEO Group and will house immigrants detained by ICE.
(Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Rebecca Gordon
Mar 24, 2026

TomDispatch

The March 4, 2026, edition of the Arizona Daily Star put the facts succinctly: “A Haitian asylum seeker held for four months at Florence Correctional Center died Monday at a Scottsdale hospital due to complications from an infected tooth.” It seems the infection spread from his tooth to his lungs, and he developed the pneumonia that killed him.

In other words, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allowed a prisoner to die of a toothache. His name was Emmanuel Damas. He was 56 years old and the father of two.

And we can only expect medical treatment at ICE centers to deteriorate further. As Judd Legum at Popular Information reported in January 2026:
“ICE… has not paid any third-party providers for medical care for detainees since October 3, 2025. Last week, ICE posted a notice on an obscure government website announcing it will not begin processing such claims until at least April 30, 2026. Until then, medical providers are instructed ‘to hold all claims submissions.’”

Emmanuel Damas’s unnecessary death would be outrageous enough, were it the only one of its kind. In fact, 32 people died in ICE custody during 2025, the most in two decades. Another six died in January 2026 alone, among them Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban father aged 55, at Camp East Montana detention center in El Paso, Texas.

Although ICE initially claimed Lunas Campos had attempted suicide, the American Immigration Council reports that “the El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide arising from asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” Of course, it’s pretty hard to strangle yourself to death. Witnesses, however, described his murder this way: “Mr. Lunas Campos was handcuffed, while at least five guards held him down and one guard squeezed his neck until he was unconscious.” At least one other man has died at the Camp East Montana detention center, where tuberculosis and measles are also spreading.

Damas and Lunas Campos were among the roughly 73,000 people whom ICE currently holds in a tangle of detention camps sprawled across the country. And more centers are under construction. Many of them are former warehouses designed to function, as ICE acting director Todd Lyons put it last year, “like Amazon Prime for human beings.” (Like many Trump appointees, Lyons has not received Senate confirmation. His actual title, according to ICE, is “Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”)

What Is a Concentration Camp?

Taken together, this network of prisons or, more accurately, concentration camps, constitutes an American gulag. “Gulag” is not so much a word as a Russian initialism that came to stand for the Soviet Union’s concentration camp program, originally developed under Joseph Stalin. The term stands for “Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps” and originally referred to the officials running the camps. Later, “gulag” came to indicate the camps themselves, which were a central instrument of Soviet political repression. Most Americans first learned about those camps through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 internationally bestselling memoir, The Gulag Archipelago.

As Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, has written, such institutions are a relatively recent phenomenon. While human beings have long contrived ways to isolate groups they identify as enemies — for example, in the enclosed Jewish ghettos of medieval Europe — the modern concentration camp evolved thanks to two key inventions: barbed wire and the machine gun. That pair of technological advances made it possible for a small number of guards to control and contain a large number of people in one place.

Concentration camps have a number of defining features:Concentration camps exist outside regular legal structures. The people they hold are not prisoners, but detainees. So, we find people of all ages, from infants to ancients, in concentration camps. In most cases, they have not been tried or convicted of any crime. Rather, they are held because of their status, for example, as non-citizens, or in the case of Japanese-American citizens imprisoned during World War II, because of their ethnicity or national origin. This is true for the people held in ICE detention today. Their alleged offenses are against U.S. civil, not criminal law, and their detention exists outside of any court system, including the immigration courts run by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Immigration judges, who are really administrative employees, can’t order anyone detained. That’s up to ICE and its umbrella agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).Concentration camp inmates are civilians, not soldiers, which places them conveniently outside the strictures of the Geneva Conventions. That’s why the U.S. has never recognized the men it has held and, in the case of 15 prisoners, continues to hold as prisoners of war in the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In the 1990s, almost a decade before the naval station at Guantánamo was first used to house detainees in the “global war on terror,” the U.S. held immigrants there, including as many as 50,000 Haitians and Cubans. Trump’s January 29, 2025, executive order entitled “Expanding Migrant Operations Center At Naval Station Guantánamo Bay To Full Capacity” directed the Defense and Homeland Security departments to prepare to hold as many as 30,000 migrant detainees there. As of July 2025, the camp held detainees from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean.Concentration camps are associated with authoritarian regimes. They function both as a direct form of repression and, no less importantly, as a warning to the rest of the population about what could happen to those who resist the regime. In this sense, concentration camps are very much like another tool of repression, institutionalized state torture, about which I wrote in my book Mainstreaming Torture. Like state torture, concentration camps perform a kind of national security theater, made all the more entrancing by its quasi-secret nature. In the case of ICE detention camps, the DHS has made a show of not permitting local officials or members of Congress to enter those facilities. But such detention centers can’t fulfill their full repressive function if people don’t know anything about what goes on in them. So, we have the spectacle of a hearing in which a congresswoman asked then-DHS secretary Kristi Noem about a double amputee who “has to crawl through mold and feces and bodily fluids just to take a shower.” Knowing that this is happening to people who have almost no recourse is intended to have a chilling effect on political action.Concentration camps are not death camps, but people do die there. Many Americans tend to think that all German concentration camps were sites of direct extermination. In fact, the Nazis constructed six camps specifically designed for the industrialized murder of their inhabitants. But for a decade before the first death camp was even opened, prisoners had already been concentrated in thousands of “labor” camps. In fact, they were not there to be killed directly, but to be removed from society. As the National World War II Museum in New Orleans explains, “Initially, the population of these concentration camps were not usually Jews, but Communists, socialists, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s witnesses, gay men, and ‘asocial’ elements (alcoholics, criminals, people with mental disabilities, the poor).” Notably, like undocumented people in the U.S. today, these were groups who then received little sympathy from the larger German population. The conditions they encountered — lack of food and medical care, crowding, and unsanitary conditions — sickened and killed as many as a third of those who passed through them.

A Brief History of U.S. Concentration Camps

The Soviet gulag was not the world’s first concentration camp, although such institutions are, in fact, a relatively recent phenomenon. Human beings have long contrived to isolate groups they identify as enemies, as Americans at times did with enslaved Africans and the native peoples of this continent. Indeed, when the Cherokee nation was evicted from its lands under the 1830 Indian Removal Act and forced to travel the “Trail of Tears,” many of them were kept for some time in “emigration depots” in Alabama and Tennessee.

Almost everyone in this country has heard of Nazi Germany’s camps, but the history of the modern concentration camp really began at the end of the nineteenth century. As Andrea Pitzer recounted in a recent interview, Americans first became aware of such camps in the 1890s, when Spain instituted a policy of reconcentración in its efforts to put down a rebellion in Cuba. As has happened in ICE detention camps today, malnourished men, women, and children were shoved into holding camps there, where crowded conditions and poor sanitation led many to sicken and die. News of the horrifying conditions in Cuba led Americans to organize material aid for those being held.

The United States then dispatched the battleship Maine to accompany the ships carrying relief supplies to Cuba. When the Maine sank in Havana harbor under murky circumstances, the U.S. government had the pretext it needed to mount a military campaign against the remnants of Spanish colonial control in the Americas and the Pacific. That relatively short war ended with the U.S. in possession of most of Spain’s remaining colonies, including the island of Puerto Rico, and what would eventually become the nation of the Philippines. Almost immediately, the new American colonizers reproduced in the Philippines the kind of reconcentración camps they had supposedly gone to war to eradicate in Cuba. In another parallel with the twenty-first century, it was during the occupation of the Philippines that U.S. forces invented the form of torture we have come to call “waterboarding.”

Most Americans know about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1942 executive order creating 10 concentration camps to hold people of Japanese descent, about two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens mostly living in the western United States. Over 120,000 men, women, and children were interned for the duration of World War II. Many lost their homes, farms, businesses, and other property (often seized by their non-Japanese neighbors). A much smaller number of Italian and German nationals were also interned, as Germans had also been during World War I.

The Japanese camps were constructed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the same federal agency that provided mass employment for millions during the Great Depression under Roosevelt’s New Deal program. Few Americans know that, in addition to building roads, schools, dams, and the occasional zoo, the WPA also built the barracks and strung the barbed wire that enclosed World War II internees.

ICE’s predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), ran about 20 of those camps, primarily ones imprisoning Japanese, German, and Italian non-citizens. Three of them were built in Texas to hold people from those countries who had been deported from Latin America. (Most of them were Japanese from Peru.) Those camps were guarded by the Border Patrol, rather than the military police. In other words, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have a long history of running the U.S. version of concentration camps. They’re used to it.

American Gulag

It’s no exaggeration to say that ICE detention camps now threaten to become a central instrument of repression under the Trump administration. As many as 40 people have died in the camps since Trump returned to office in January 2025. And those are only the deaths that have been publicly acknowledged.

If Camp East Montana is the biggest ICE camp in the country, the most notorious may well be the Florida site in the Everglades that has come to be known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” Constructed hastily over just a week, according to Amnesty International, it “houses” people in horrific conditions:
“Inside, people are crammed into overcrowded cages around bunk beds with little room to move. Food is spoiled and maggot-infested. Mosquitoes swarm constantly, showers are scarce, and extreme heat and humidity make the center unbearable. There appear to be almost no reliable or confidential means for detainees to communicate with their attorneys or family members.”


That description is echoed in the testimony of people held in ICE detention camps nationwide. A complete report on the conditions at all of those camps would run to hundreds of thousands of words. Indeed, it’s hard to get a handle on the full scope of ICE’s concentration camp program, since reports on the number and size of such camps change quickly as new ones are proposed or come online. The organization Freedom for Immigrants maintains an interactive immigration detention map which identifies at least 200 separate locations where immigrants (and the occasional U.S. citizen) are detained. And the Trump administration is not done. According to the Guardian, DHS plans to spend $3.8 billion “upgrading” 24 existing warehouses to implement ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons’s dream of treating immigrants like human widgets.

And that brings us back to the point of all this. Concentration camps exist to support and expand the power of an authoritarian regime. They make everyone afraid of being treated like the current targets of the regime. Like state torture programs, concentration camps accelerate the process of dehumanizing groups of people in the public imagination. Such a process often begins by describing the target group as non-human, as “vermin” or “garbage” (as Trump has, of course, done). Ironically, the very act of placing people in inhumane conditions can amplify the public’s perception of their inhumanity. After all, would genuine human beings submit to such treatment? Would our good nation treat genuine human beings that way?

One other significant aspect of all this: the enrichment of a few corporations. President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gave ICE upwards of $45 billion to spend on those camps, which meant that there was a lot of money to be made. Today most of them are run by two private prison companies, CoreCivic and the GEO Group. The president’s Big Beautiful Bill also allows the Department of Homeland Security to expedite that money-making by using the U.S. Navy’s Supply Systems Command program, which serves as an end-run around the usual bidding process for federal contracts.

This morning, I asked my partner whether she thought that the Trump administration could make the transition from concentration camps, where people die as a “side effect” of their internment, to actual death camps. “I think it’s possible,” she responded — and so, horribly — do I.

It’s possible, but not yet inevitable. To date, local actions have provided the most effective means of resisting the creation of the American gulag our federal government is constructing. These have included organizing to oppose siting camps in specific communities, efforts to leverage local zoning laws to stop them, and attempts to generate state-level political opposition to them. (The Washington Post had an excellent roundup of recent efforts in one county in Maryland to block such a camp.)

We know what’s at stake. We know we can dismantle the American gulag, because some of us are already doing it. It’s time for the rest of us to get to work.


© 2023 TomDispatch.com


Rebecca Gordon
Rebecca Gordon is an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco. Prior to teaching at USF, Rebecca spent many years as an activist in a variety of movements, including for women's and LGBTQ+ liberation, the Central America and South Africa solidarity movements and for racial justice in the United States. She is the author of "American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes" (2016) and previously, "Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States" (2014). She teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. You can contact her through the Mainstreaming Torture website.
Full Bio >

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for INTERNMENT

Trump Once Again Votes by Mail in Florida Election—But He Doesn’t Think You Should

The president is pushing the Senate to pass new voting restrictions, including on mail-in ballots.


US President Donald Trump walks toward the White House upon his arrival in Washington, DC on March 23, 2026.
(Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Mar 24, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

President Donald Trump has been escalating his push for the US Senate to pass sweeping legislation that would ban universal mail-in voting, spreading misinformation about mailed ballots, and slamming the system as “cheating”—but amid his efforts, he found time recently to cast his own ballot by mail for the latest time in Florida’s special legislative election.

Voter records in Palm Beach County showed Trump cast his ballot by mail before early voting ended Sunday in state House and Senate races in Florida.

It’s at least the second time that the president has voted by mail in Florida; he did so in 2020 as well.

“I can vote by mail,” he told reporters at the time. “I’m allowed to.”

That same year, he aggressively promoted the baseless notion that voting by mail—a system long used in states run by both Republicans and Democrats, including Utah and Washington—would lead to election fraud.

Numerous US courts found no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, in which more voters relied on voting by mail due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The president has said he aims only to prohibit universal mail-in voting rather than stopping individual voters from using mailed ballots; one of the new anti-voting rights bills he’s proposed, the Make Elections Great Again Act, would prohibit universal mail voting and limit the system to a select few people by requiring voters to submit an application to receive a mail-in ballot.

Trump referred to voting by mail as “mail-in cheating” in Memphis on Monday, and said for the second time in a week that the US is “the only country that does mail-in voting.”



He made a similar comment last week when hosting Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, whose country is one of dozens that allow voting by mail for some voters. Countries with universal mail-in voting include Canada, Iceland, Switzerland, and Germany.

Trump’s use of mail-in voting led House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to denounce him as a “complete fraud” on Tuesday.

“Don’t ever believe a word he has to say about election integrity,” said Jeffries.

Republican senators on Monday agreed to include portions of the SAVE America Act, a new version of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, in a reconciliation bill that would also include funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The bill passed in the House last month.

Under the SAVE America Act, photo ID would be required for all voters, including copies of a voter’s ID with mail-in ballots.

“For voters who register by mail, the SAVE America Act requires documentary proof of citizenship to be delivered in person to an election office, effectively nullifying the benefits of mail registration,” said the Bipartisan Policy Center last month.

Trump said last August that Democrats want mailed ballots to be available to voters because “it’s the only way they can get elected,” despite the fact that such ballots are used by voters in both parties. He has also expressed confidence that Republicans “will never lose a race” if the GOP moves to restrict voting access.

Also on Monday, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in a case from Mississippi regarding ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and received within the state’s five-day grace period. The court’s right-wing majority appeared poised to ban states from accepting ballots after Election Day.

‘A Declaration of War Against the Working Class’: Sanders Demands Bezos Testify Over AI Robot Plan

“Our job is to ensure that this new technology benefits working families and is not simply used as another tool to make the wealthiest people in the world unimaginably richer.”



Humanoid robots are seen lined up as an engineer works on a robot in the production facility of X-Humanoid on March 20, 2026 in Beijing, China.
(Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Mar 24, 2026
COMMON DRFAMS

Sen. Bernie Sanders is demanding that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos testify about plans to use robots powered by artificial intelligence to replace human workers.

In a Monday announcement, Sanders (I-Vt.) cited a report published by The Wall Street Journal outlining Bezos’ ambitions “to raise $100 billion for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation.”



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The Journal obtained investor documents describing the new Bezos initiative as a “manufacturing transformation vehicle” that would buy up firms in key industries such as chipmaking, defense, and aerospace, and use AI to boost the efficiency of their operations.

Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, warned that such a plan would risk putting millions of blue-collar manufacturing workers out of jobs.

Because of this, he asked Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chairman of the HELP Committee, to demand that Bezos testify about his new project’s impact on the working class.

“We must demand that Mr. Bezos come before our committee to explain to the American people why he believes it’s a good idea to replace millions of American workers with robots,” Sanders said. “We need to understand what will happen to these workers... will they simply be thrown out on the street in order to make Mr. Bezos even richer?”

Sanders emphasized the vital role of government in ensuring that advancements in technology are not used to further impoverish workers and erode their collective bargaining power.

“Our job is to ensure that this new technology benefits working families and is not simply used as another tool to make the wealthiest people in the world unimaginably richer,” Sanders said. “The American people are increasingly apprehensive about the impact that AI and robotics will have on the economy and their lives. Congress needs to act.”

In a separate social media post, Sanders described Bezos’ plan as “a declaration of war against the working class.”

Sanders for months has been raising alarms about the impact of AI on the global working class and democracy itself.

In December, Sanders called upon the US to impose a nationwide moratorium on the construction of AI data centers, warning of a future envisioned by tech moguls such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who has said that humans won’t be needed “for most things” thanks to advancements in AI.

“Do you believe that these guys, these multibillionaires, are staying up at night, worrying about what AI and robotics will do to working families of our country and the world?” Sanders asked. “Well, I don’t think so.”

Remembering Fukushima... the Other Road to Nuclear Nightmare

With nine nuclear-armed nations and roughly 12,000 nuclear warheads on this planet, worries about nuclear war are unavoidable. However, the danger of a nuclear disaster at a seemingly “peaceful” nuclear facility is often ignored.


In this satellite view, the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power plant is shown after a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 14, 2011 in Futaba, Japan.
(Photo by DigitalGlobe via Getty Images via Getty Images)

Joshua Frank
Mar 23, 2026

TomDispatch


Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons and we have just seen the start of a new war in the Middle East over one more nation supposedly trying to acquire them. While we consider the dangers of such weapons and their capacity to cause massive destruction, we often overlook the risks associated with what still passes for “peaceful” nuclear power. With that in mind, let me revisit a moment when that reality should have become far clearer.

I had crawled into bed on March 10, 2011, opened my phone, and scrolled through my Instagram feed. The app was still fairly new then, and I was only following a dozen or so accounts, several from Japan. One amateur photographer there had posted photos minutes earlier of a fractured sidewalk and a toppled bookshelf. A massive earthquake had just rattled Tokyo.




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A news article confirmed that a magnitude 7.9 quake had indeed struck 80 miles off the coast of Japan. Later, it was upgraded to 9.0, 1,000 times more powerful in terms of energy released. Holy shit, I thought. That’s huge! Worried, I emailed my old college friend Ichiro, who lived in Tokyo, to make sure his family was safe. A short while later, he replied that they were fine, but that a massive tsunami had indeed flooded the Tohoku region north of Tokyo. Many were dead.

“It’s horrible. It’s chaos,” he wrote me.

The nuclear industry has a reasonably polite name for a disaster like the one that was rocking Fukushima. They refer to it as a “beyond design-basis accident” because no single nuclear plant design can account for every possible problem it might encounter in its lifetime.

By the time Ichiro’s message arrived, distressing images of the tsunami were already circulating online and the death toll was rising fast, though the floodwaters were by then receding. As I watched heartbreaking videos of screaming onlookers, capsized boats, floating debris, and cars submerged like toys in a bathtub, another tragedy was unfolding that few, even inside the Japanese government, were aware of. A nuclear plant in Fukushima, operated by TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company), had been swamped by the tremendous flooding and lost all power.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, built by General Electric (GE) in the mid-1960s, was designed to withstand natural disasters, but its creators never foresaw an earthquake like that. When the plant’s sensors detected the quake, its reactors automatically shut down. That emergency shutdown (or scram) halted its fission process, triggering backup power to keep cold seawater flowing through the reactors and spent-fuel containers to prevent overheating. Things at Fukushima were going according to plan until that massive tsunami battered the plant, washing away transmission towers and damaging electrical systems. There were backup generators in the basement, but those, too, had been inundated by waves of seawater, and an already bad situation was about to get far worse.

A power outage at a nuclear power plant is known as a “station blackout.” As you might imagine, it’s one of the worst scenarios any nuclear facility could possibly experience. If all electricity is lost, that means water is no longer being pumped into the reactor’s scalding-hot core to cool it down. And if that core isn’t constantly being cooled, one thing is certain: Disaster will ensue. The fission process itself may be complicated, but that’s basic physics. To make matters worse, there were three operating reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Luckily, three others had already been shut down for maintenance. If power wasn’t restored in short order, that would mean that all three of Fukushima’s reactors were in very big trouble.

We would later learn that no one—not at TEPCO, GE, or among Japanese regulators—had ever considered the possibility that all the reactors might lose electricity at once. They had only drawn up plans for one reactor to go down, in which case the others could keep the plant running. But all of them offline, and every generator out of commission? There was no precedent or playbook for that.

The nuclear industry has a reasonably polite name for a disaster like the one that was rocking Fukushima. They refer to it as a “beyond design-basis accident” because no single nuclear plant design can account for every possible problem it might encounter in its lifetime. The fact that there’s a term for this should make you anxious.
Meltdowns and Fallout

Over the next several days, the emergency at Fukushima Daiichi only worsened. Every effort to restore power to its reactors hit a dead end. On-site radiation-detection equipment, which would have triggered warnings and guided evacuation efforts for those in danger, was no longer functioning. Plans to pump water into the reactors to cool them had faltered. Their cores kept overheating, and the boiling pools of spent fuel were at risk of drying out, potentially triggering a massive fire that would release extreme amounts of radiation.

Within three days, following a series of fires, hydrogen explosions, and panic among those aware of what was happening, Fukushima’s Units 1, 2, and 3 experienced full-scale core meltdowns. Over 150,000 people within an 18-mile radius had already been forced to evacuate, and radiation plumes would take two weeks to spread across the northern hemisphere, although the Japanese government wouldn’t admit publicly that any meltdown had occurred until June 2011, three months later.

The only good news for the 13 million people living 150 miles south in Tokyo was that, during and immediately after the meltdowns, prevailing winds carried much of Fukushima’s radioactive material away from the smoldering reactors and out to sea. It’s estimated that 80% of the fallout from Fukushima ended up in the ocean, meaning most of it headed east rather than toward population centers to the south and west. The other fortunate news was that the spent fuel containers had somehow survived it all. If their water levels in the pools had been drained, far more radiation would have been released.

But Tokyo wasn’t completely spared. After years of research, scientists discovered that cesium-rich microparticles had blanketed the greater Tokyo area, an unpopular discovery that drew backlash and threats of academic censorship. Areas around the Fukushima exclusion zones recorded the highest radiation levels. Japanese government officials continually downplayed the dangers of the accident and were reluctant to even classify the event as a Level 7 nuclear disaster, the highest rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale, which would have placed it on a par with the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Japanese officials have also failed to conduct long-term epidemiological studies that would include baseline measurements of cancer rates, which has cast doubt on thyroid screenings that found troubling incidents of cancer far higher than researchers expected.
Radioactive Fish

Prior to the earthquake, the ocean’s cesium-137 levels near Fukushima were 2 Becquerels (a unit of radioactivity) per cubic meter, well below the recommended drinking water threshold of 10,000 Becquerels. Just after March 11, 2011, cesium-137 levels there spiked to 50 million before decreasing as sea currents dispersed the radioactive particles away from the coast. The ocean, however, had been poisoned.

In the years that followed the Fukushima nuclear disaster, researchers documented a frightening, yet predictable trend. Radioactive isotopes in seawater were taken up by marine plants (phytoplankton), which then moved up the food chain into tiny marine animals (zooplankton) and, eventually, to fish. Cesium-137 consumed by fish can reside in their bodies for months, while Strontium-90 remains in their bones for years. If humans then eat such fish, they will also be exposed to those radioactive particles. The more contaminated fish they eat, the greater the radioactive buildup will be.

In 2023, over a decade after the incident, radiation levels remained sky-high in black rockfish caught off the Fukushima coast. Other bottom-dwelling species have been found to be laden with radioactivity, too, including eel and rock trout. Further concerns have been raised about the treated radioactive water that TEPCO continued to release into the ocean, prompting China to suspend seafood imports from Japan. Aside from those findings, there have been very few studies examining the effects of Fukushima’s radiation on ecosystems or on the people of Japan.

The world is unpredictable, and even the safest nuclear power plant can’t guarantee that it will hold up against whatever tragedy is coming next.

“Japan has clamped down on scientific efforts to study the nuclear catastrophe,” claims pediatrician Alex Rosen of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. “There is hardly any literature, any publicized research, on the health effects on humans, and those that are published come from a small group of researchers at Fukushima Medical University.”

Recognizing such levels of radiation, even if confined to the waters near Fukushima, would cast the country’s nuclear industry as a significant threat—not only to Japan but globally. Any admission that Fukushima’s radiation is linked to increased cancer rates would raise broader concerns about nuclear power’s future viability. Radiation exposure is cumulative and, although Fukushima didn’t immediately cause mass casualties, it wasn’t a benign accident either. It took decades before it was accepted that Chernobyl had caused tens of thousands of excess cancer deaths. It may take even longer to completely understand Fukushima’s full effects. In the meantime, the still ongoing cleanup of the burned-out facilities may cost as much as 80 trillion yen ($500 billion).

It’s been 15 years since Fukushima’s reactors experienced those meltdowns, and we still don’t fully understand their long-term repercussions. Nuclear power advocates will argue that Fukushima wasn’t a serious incident and that nuclear technology is still safe. They’ll minimize radiation threats, remain optimistic that new reactor designs will never falter, dismiss the fact that there’s simply no permanent solution for radioactive waste, and overlook the inseparable connection between nuclear power and atomic weapons. After all, among other things, we’ll undoubtedly need nuclear energy to help power the artificial intelligence craze, right?

The operators and regulators at Fukushima were wholly unprepared for what unfolded on that fateful day in 2011. They never imagined that an earthquake of such magnitude could trigger a tsunami so immense that it would destroy the power grid, knock out water pumps, and disable backup generators. Likewise, no one can guarantee that nuclear plants or radioactive storage tanks are safe in war zones, or that the rivers and lakes needed to cool reactors globally won’t one day run dry or become too hot to do so—something that has already happened in Europe. Ultimately, we can’t anticipate every mishap, human error, or—especially in the age of climate chaos—every natural disaster that may come down the pike. The world is unpredictable, and even the safest nuclear power plant can’t guarantee that it will hold up against whatever tragedy is coming next.

Fifty miles south of where I live in Southern California, an old nuclear facility sits idle on the Pacific Coast in an earthquake-and-tsunami-hazard zone, not unlike the site where Fukushima was built. It’s not the only such plant in California, but it’s the one I often visit. When I’m there, I think about Fukushima and imagine what would happen if a similar, unexpected disaster reached California’s shores and how such an event would forever alter this land.
Searching for Solace at San Onofre

The morning light was peaking over the sandstone bluff, and the offshore breeze was soft and brisk. I’m barefoot in a wetsuit, trudging my surfboard down a dirt road at San Onofre, a state park in northern San Diego County, for a “dawn patrol” surf session. A series of high tides—likely made more extreme by rising sea levels—has eroded a large portion of the parking lot below, so the beach can only be reached on foot or by bike. I’m not complaining. It’s worth the short trek. The absence of vehicles down here also means fewer surfers in the water.

San O, as it’s lovingly referred to, has a rich surf history spanning 100 years. Duke Kahanamoku, the “father of modern surfing,” who popularized the ancient Hawaiian sport in Southern California and often visited San O in the 1940s, helped to solidify it as one of the region’s premier breaks and an early hub of SoCal surf culture. The waves are long and rolling thanks to an extensive cobblestone reef. It’s a magical place.

Things around here have changed quite a bit, however, since “The Duke” first paddled his heavy wooden board into the surf. Just down the beach, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station sits precariously perched 100 feet from the water. Its two large domes are an ominous sight. Constructed in the 1960s, the plant is no longer producing electricity, but the station’s 123 large concrete-and-steel storage vessels remain, housing 3.6 million pounds of highly radioactive waste. Since nobody wants the toxic stuff, it just sits there, looming, awaiting the next big earthquake like the one that shook Fukushima. San Onofre is designed to withstand a 7.0 shaker, but scientists believe the area is capable of producing one 10 times larger and 32 times stronger. With 8.4 million people living within a 50-mile radius, any geological upheaval at San O could make a hell of a mess. It’s a worrisome thought I’d rather not dwell on.

Although it is a state park, the ground that San Onofre sits upon is leased from the federal government because it lies within the 195-square-mile boundary of the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base. More than a base, Camp Pendleton is a testing ground, where heavy artillery often booms in the distance. An occasional mock raid can occupy the beaches; helicopters sometimes swarm, and Amphibious Combat Vehicles crawl ashore. There’s even a faux Afghan village that was built at Camp Pendleton, costing taxpayers $170 million, where Marines can imagine terrorizing towns from Iran to Gaza. So strange that amid all this madness, San Onofre is where I search for solace.

In 2013, a radioactive gas leak from one of the nuclear plant’s steam generators, which are also within the military reserve, led to its closure. Southern California Edison (SCE), which operates the facility, reassured the public that there was nothing to be concerned about. Few, however, would consider SCE a trustworthy source. Over the years, the company has been caught in a series of lies about the safety of San Onofre, including falsifying firewatch records and grossly mishandling waste. Not dissimilar to TEPCO’s Fukushima deceit.

Like all nuclear power plants, San Onofre needed a lot of water to cool its three reactors, sucking in an astonishing 2.4 billion gallons of seawater a day. As you can imagine, that thirst had a serious impact on ocean ecology, killing fish and wrecking kelp beds. It’s taken over a decade, but some of what was destroyed is finally coming back to life after years of restoration. Despite the progress, discharge pipes still release radioactive effluent laced with cesium-137, cobalt-60, and tritium—a mile offshore 170 times a year. But SCE says there’s nothing to worry about. They also insist they don’t have much of a choice. All that leftover waste needs to be kept from overheating, and using seawater is the only option available.

It’s better not to think too much about a future Armageddon or what might be swimming beneath me while I’m out there bobbing between sets of waves. Surfing is supposed to help relieve my anxiety, not exacerbate it. It’s a little like backpacking in the wilds of Montana, which I also love to do, without constantly worrying about being chomped by a grizzly bear while in my sleeping bag. There are hazards to living in this crazy world—the worst of which, I’ve come to believe, are of the man-made variety.

As I slide my surfboard into the back of my van and peel off my wetsuit, I glance at San Onofre’s domes, which will start to be dismantled this year, and ponder the horrors still affecting Japan, fearing that someday a destructive tsunami may batter this beach, too. Sadly, it’s almost inevitable.

With nine nuclear-armed nations and roughly 12,000 nuclear warheads on this planet, worries about nuclear war are unavoidable. However, the danger of a nuclear disaster at a seemingly “peaceful” nuclear facility is often ignored. The future of atomic energy remains uncertain, but it is our duty to eliminate this hazardous energy source before another Fukushima triggers a war-like catastrophe all its own.


© 2023 TomDispatch.com


Joshua Frank
Joshua Frank is an award-winning California-based journalist and co-editor of CounterPunch. He is the author of the new book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Haymarket Books).
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