Abby Martin’s New Documentary Takes On ‘Earth’s Greatest Enemy’

Making the film taught Martin that “it is completely undeniable” that the US military “is the greatest threat to all living things on Earth.”


Military equipment is shown in a still from the film Earth’s Greatest Enemy.
(Image via Empire Files)

Olivia Rosane
Jan 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

It’s a commonly repeated statistic that the US military is the world’s largest institutional polluter, but what exactly does that mean?

The quest to find a real answer to that question led journalist and documentary filmmaker Abby Martin and her husband and co-director Mike Prysner on a five-year journey from defense contractor conferences and international climate gatherings to the Rim of the Pacific military training exercises and the fight against the construction of a military base in Okinawa that would fill in its iconic Oura Bay.

The result is Earth’s Greatest Enemy, released this year independently through Martin and Prysner’s own Empire Files, with editing by Taylor Gill and an original score by Anahedron. The film uses personal narrative, research, investigative reporting, interviews, and live footage to detail all the ways in which the Pentagon poisons the planet, including greenhouse gas emissions, the ecocide of war, and the toxins left behind long after the fighting has stopped."When you combine all of this, it is completely undeniable that this force that is upheld by extreme violence is the greatest threat to all living things on Earth,” Martin told Common Dreams.

World’s Largest Polluter?

RIMPAC training exercises are shown in a still from Earth’s Greatest Enemy. (Image via Empire Files)

Toward the beginning of the film, Martin sets out to explain how the Pentagon can count as the world’s largest institutional polluter, and why the numbers behind that fact actually undersell its impact.

It turns out, Martin told Common Dreams, that this statement is only based on the amount of oil the US military purchases on paper, which comes to 270,000 barrels per day. This puts its emissions at 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, more than 150 countries.

This itself is a staggering amount of carbon pollution.

As Martin explains in the film: “It would take the average American driver over 40 years to burn as much fuel as a single flight of a Boeing Pegasus. The US flies more than 600 of these tankers.”

“You have to look at the military as actually the institution that’s actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”

But it’s also only the tip of the melting iceberg. Through an interview with scientist Stuart Parkinson, Martin reveals how that 55 million keeps ballooning when considering life cycle emissions from military equipment and from the equipment purchased by NATO allies, projected to reach 295 million metric tons by 2028, or more than half of all countries. And that figure excludes the use of military equipment in war, or the emissions from reconstructing cities leveled by US-made bombs.

In one particularly candid interview, a major general tells Martin that it’s great to develop alternative energy sources, “but let’s not walk away from what fuels today’s national security, which is oil. You have to have it.”

And until something is developed that can completely replace oil, “I think you need to keep the alternatives in check,” he says.

Statements like these give the lie to the idea that the US can have a “green military empire,” Martin said.

They also show how difficult it is to separate the US military’s carbon footprint from that of the fossil fuel industry itself.

“Everything has really been wrapped up into securing the fossil fuel, building the infrastructure for fossil fuel, and maintaining that infrastructure empire in order to maintain a fossil fuel economy,” she told Common Dreams. “So you have to look at the military as actually the institution that’s actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”

'Human Detritus'

A helmet and dog tag are seen in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina in a still from the film Earth’s Greatest Enemy. (Image via Empire Files)

The film also makes clear that carbon pollution isn’t the only kind of pollution the military generates.

“Once you get into the research, you realize every stone unturned is an entire other documentary because it’s not just emissions, it’s the totality of pollution that the military is emitting on a daily basis, the dumping of toxic waste, the legacy contamination, that alone is still killing people every day,” Martin said.

The film spends much of its run time digging into the landfill of military waste, from melted down pucks of plastic dumped off Navy boats and unused munitions exploded in the desert to decades of water contamination at Camp Lejeune, the 26 million marine mammals the US Navy is permitted to harm or kill over five years of training, and the more than 250,000 bullets left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan for every person killed.

Martin said that almost every fact or anecdote she unearthed surprised her.

“We’re fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”

“No matter what you think you know, it’s worse. It’s actually worse because of how big it is and how every face is a story, every victim is a story,” she said.

One of the most devastating stories comes at the film’s beginning, as viewers spend time with Lavon Johnson, an Iraq War veteran who once starred in a US Army commercial and is now living on Veterans Row, a stretch of tents bearing American flags lined up outside the Veterans Affairs hospital in Brentwood, Los Angeles. “My life is so fucked!” he declares as he lifts his hands from the piano he furiously plays despite the nerve damage caused by exposure to hydraulic fluid while in the Army.

In the next scene, viewers see the camp being demolished by police, juxtaposed with images of war, pollution, and environmental destruction, such as soldiers breaking down doors or dumping trash off of boats, oil pump jacks working, and beachside homes collapsing into a rising tide.

Martin said she was inspired to open the film with Johnson because of a letter that late Iraq War veteran Tomas Young wrote to former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney before he died, referring to himself and other victims of the invasion as “human detritus your war has left behind.”

“That always stuck with me, that line, ‘the human detritus,’” Martin told Common Dreams. “And that is exactly what they do to veterans. That is exactly what they do to veterans… they’re churned up and spit out. They’re the cannon fodder of the system. And for what?”

Prysner is an Iraq veteran who spoke out against the war, and Martin is very clear that veterans are not the target of the pairs’ critique.

“This isn’t about service members,” she said. “This isn’t about hating the military. This is about accountability and justice for them. We’re fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”

The demolition of Johnson’s camp cut through with clips of war and weather disaster illustrates this point, and could serve as a sort of thesis for the film, showing that the US military ultimately turns everything it touches into detritus, including, if it’s not stopped, the planet itself.

“Everything on Earth is in Lavon’s tent,” Martin said.

A Movie and a Movement

People march against US militarism at COP26 in Glasgow, in a still from Earth’s Greatest Enemy. (Image via Empire Files)

This sense of connection is ultimately why Martin decided to keep Earth’s Greatest Enemy as a two-hour feature documentary rather than pivoting to a documentary series, despite the fact that, the more she dug, the more she realized “it could be 10 documentaries.”

She also ran into roadblocks when seeking Hollywood distribution. While environmentalist distributors would praise the film and compare it to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, they also said frankly, “You’re never going to be able to get anyone to buy this stuff.”

But, Martin said, “I was so committed to making a movie because movies were what radicalized me,” citing inspiration from films like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, War Made Easy, and Michael Moore’s filmography.

Ultimately, her stubbornness paid off.

“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire.”

“It shows that everything from ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to Gaza to the climate, that everything is connected,” she said. “Veterans, soldiers, the Indigenous people on the receiving end of this. If you care about cold water and good air, you can’t walk away from this not being impacted. And that was the goal. The goal is to lock people in and explain the totality and to bring you down to the depths of hell.”

She added: “We have to understand those depths, and you can’t get that with a 20-minute segment. You just can’t. You have to go through the pain of all the victims in this community and come out the other side empowered with the truth and the resolve that we have to change this.”

Change is a large part of Martin’s motivation for making the film, by educating people about the scope of the military’s destructive force and connecting them into a broader coalition.

Martin speaks in the film about coming to political consciousness and beginning her career as a journalist during the Iraq War, meeting Prysner through their shared opposition to war and empire, and developing “profound climate anxiety” following the birth of the pairs’ first child. She lamented that the climate and anti-imperialist movements have been largely siloed over the past two decades, though that is beginning to change.

Through local screenings, she said she wanted to “try to build the environmental movement with the anti-war movement together because… even though the consciousness is expanding, it’s not happening fast enough. And we are simply out of the luxury of time.”

The sense of urgency has only increased with President Donald Trump’s second term. While the film does not cover this period, it points to many developments that have shaped the past 12 months, including Trump’s claim that he attacked Venezuela for oil, his imperialist push to control Greenland, and his deployment of ICE to terrorize US cities.

Toward the end of the movie, Martin includes a segment on the militarization of US policing and warns that “this is our system’s big plan for the climate crisis.” She also films a panel on “Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic” in which the generals speaking tell US companies they have an “open invitation” to experiment in Alaska.

“We know what they want the Arctic for, and it’s to pillage every last drop,” Martin said. “So if environmental organizations are not thinking this together, we have to do it for them. We have to do it for them quickly.”

So far, she has seen encouraging signs, with several Sierra Club chapters stepping up to host screenings and enthusiasm from the mainstream environmental groups, parks departments, and other city officials she has invited to attend.

But education is not her only goal.

“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire,” Martin said.

For Martin, that doesn’t mean not having a military for self-defense, but rather decommissioning the 800 or so bases the US military maintains around the world and transforming the infrastructure into something that could help local communities in a climate-friendly way. It also means accountability for harm caused and redirecting military spending toward basic needs like housing and healthcare, and certainly not giving the Pentagon another $600 billion as Trump desires.

While that may seem like an impossible task given the current political climate, Martin maintains a sense of revolutionary optimism, encouraged by the global mobilization against the genocide in Gaza and the way that people are increasingly seeing the links between the multiple crises and struggles around the globe.

“There’s so many of us,” Martin told Common Dreams. “We care about the planet. We have a vested stake in life. And that’s our vision.”

“It’s like they have a vision of death and destruction for profit,” she continued. “Our vision is life, and we have to fight for it with every fiber of our being. And let this movie assist you however you can do that.”

To attend a screening of Earth’s Greatest Enemy, see the schedule here. To host a screening of your own, email theempirefiles@gmail.com.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY

Resisting the monstrous trifecta of war, genocide and ecocide

By Markela Panegyres

Published date 26 January, 2026

Everywhere, especially the Global South, is suffering from the ongoing effects of the imperialist carve up of the world in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This was achieved by war, genocide, colonisation and semi-colonialism, and the expropriation and theft of the Global South’s wealth. 

As the damaging legacies of historic imperialism continue to play out, today’s United States-led imperialism and global capitalism has wrought even more destruction of peoples and planet; it has increased economic inequality between the Global North and South, as well as between workers and oppressed people and capitalists.

US-led imperialism and global capitalism are now reaching ever-higher levels of depravity; this is evidenced by more than two years of genocidal war on Gaza, the US’ recent illegal military assault on Venezuela and the global rolling back of already inadequate climate protections, led by US President Donald Trump.

We are now facing a monstrous trifecta of genocide, war and ecocide.

But at the same time, we are witnessing a resurgence in popular resistance to imperialism, particularly in the global movement for Palestine solidarity, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s and the Democratic Socialists of America’s success in New York, the rise of Your Party and the Greens in Britain, the Gen-Z uprisings, pro-democracy protests in Iran and, potentially, an upsurge in anti-imperialist organising after the events in Venezuela.

Unlike earlier US administrations, the Trump administration no longer keeps up even the pretence of following “international law” because it either no longer deems that necessary, or worth the political or economic cost.

Israel and the US’ genocide in Gaza have already paved the way for the complete flouting of post-World War II institutions — the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. While each is incredibly flawed, they were set up to purportedly prevent war and promote international human rights.

Trump’s recent actions in Venezuela, and elsewhere, are a big middle finger to these institutions and to humanity in general. When asked on January 9, if there were any limits to his power, Trump said: “Yeah … My own morality. My own mind. I don’t need international law.”

The current international situation is shaped by US imperialism’s (and particularly Trump’s) desire to shed all pre-existing fetters and solidify the US’ global hegemony. 
Jason Hickel put it well on X:

Bombing Venezuela while coordinating a genocide in Palestine while threatening to attack Iran (Again) while destabilising Somalia, while carrying out a heist in the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo]. US imperialism is the greatest threat to peace and security in our world today.

Leaders in the Global North have largely failed to condemn the US, although French President Emmanuel Macron and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier have criticised its aggression and denounced “new colonialism”, although without naming the attack on Venezuela.

If anyone was doubtful that there is a direct, causal link between US-led imperialism and capitalism on the one hand, and war, ecocide and genocide on the other, you only have to read one of Trump’s recent tweets:

I am pleased to announce that the Interim Authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America. This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America!

It’s clear: war and invasion for the purpose of grabbing resources (in this case oil) to make profits, control the market and create economic “growth”. Oil emissions will increase global warming and ecocide; the profits from oil sales will then be used to fuel and fund further wars and genocides, and the cycle continues.

Threat to ecosystem

We know that capitalism is incompatible with human life and the planet’s ecosystem, but the question is how much longer before it becomes uninhabitable. Many parts of the Earth are already uninhabitable. We have just experienced a record breaking heat wave in the South and Eastern states of Australia, and another bushfire season has started in Victoria. A Lancet climate change report published in October said that “heat-related deaths have risen by 63% since the 1990s, causing, on average, 546,000 deaths annually in 2012–21”.

The World Weather Attribution Annual Report said in 2025 that “human-driven greenhouse gas emissions meant global temperatures were exceptionally high [causing] … prolonged heat waves, worsened drought conditions and fire weather” as well as increasing extreme rainfall and winds associated with severe storms and floods. These have led to thousands of fatalities and displaced millions of people.

“The events of 2025 demonstrate the growing risks already present at approximately 1.3°C of anthropogenic warming and reinforce the urgent necessity of accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels,” it said.

We should note that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said global warming must be limited to a 1.5°C rise by 2030 to avoid “ catastrophic climate breakdown”. 
Global South countries are the most badly impacted, despite being the lowest emitters, historically and currently, as well as being victims of the colonial extractivism of resources.

Recent research by Hickel reveals that the Global North is responsible for 86% of all emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary, which is set by scientists as 350 parts per million. This figure refers to the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Global North governments, such as Australia, are driving global climate change to seek profits. They are often paid off or supported by billionaire oil and gas magnates. Currently Australia is the second-biggest exporter of greenhouse gas emissions through coal and gas. Climate Analytics says that its global fossil fuel carbon footprint is three times larger than its domestic footprint.

Capitalism incompatible with sustainability

The logic of the capitalist mode of production itself — the need for ongoing economic growth, ever increasing rates of profit and ongoing capital accumulation — is at the root of today’s ecocide.

As John Bellamy Foster states:

Economic growth, based on non-stop capital accumulation, is the main cause of the destruction of the earth as a safe place for humanity.

Renewables are necessary, but in a capitalist system they cannot provide a solution for two main reasons.

First, renewables are attractive for some capitalists, however they are utilising renewables for their own profit-making, rather than to seriously ameliorate the climate crisis.

Secondly, capitalists do not see renewables as capable of providing maximum ongoing profits. Fossil fuels are a better option because they are more marketable. There are significant costs to set up and production of renewables and the profits they return are not deemed high enough to outweigh the costs.

Economist Brett Christophers argues that solar and wind projects are simply not financially viable in a capitalist economy. 

Rather than being able to thrive in the free market, renewables projects are still almost entirely reliant on some extent of state support to remain commercially viable.

The Trump administration has declared war on climate protection policies. Trump’s mantra “We will drill baby drill” is not only applied to the US, but most dramatically, in recent times, to Venezuela.

The news that Trump has withdrawn the US from the IPCC follows a litany of attacks on climate protections after he returned to office. The Trump administration withdrew from the Paris agreement for the second time; ramped up oil and gas production; massively cut funding to climate science; scrapped major offshore wind projects, and rolled back more than 140 environmental rules and regulations including pollution and greenhouse gas emission restrictions. Cutting rules and regulations on pollution and emissions will make whole communities sick.

Trump has also successfully pressured other Global North countries to back track on their existing already too weak climate targets. Following trade pressures, last year Canada agreed to boost oil and gas production. Last December, European Council and European Parliament negotiators caved under pressure from the fossil fuel industry, business associations and the Trump administration, agreeing to major rollbacks of their climate obligations.

COP30 was a cop-out. The climate conference was dominated by fossil-fuel lobbyists, and failed to secure any commitment to cut fossil fuels, protect forests, or commit to adequate financial reparations to Global South countries.

Wellthon Leal, a member of the Global Ecosocialism Network reported from COP30 that the “sustainable solutions” that lobbyists from the Global North were pushing “in reality, deepen the exploitation of Global South countries.

“Never before had the South been so sought after as a carbon-offset zone, a sacrifice area for data centers, and a region targeted for rare-earth extraction — all disguised as investment promises.”

As Hickel explained in a recent article for TriContinental:

The disaster that is being wrought is a direct continuation of colonial violence … when we understand that this is the trajectory that our ruling classes are currently planning to achieve (and which could very easily be avoided), it is difficult to see it as anything other than genocidal.

Although the organised climate movement seems to be at a low ebb in the Global North, indigenous activists are leading actions in Global South countries.

In Belem, Brazil, a People’s Summit was organised in parallel to the official COP; it brought together more than 1000 climate organisations and culminated in a 70,000 strong Global Climate March. Protesters held signs which read “agribusiness is fire”, “there is no climate justice without popular agrarian reform”, and “environmental collapse is capitalist”.

Ecocide: no longer a byproduct of war

The legal use of the term “ecocide” began with scientists raising alarm about the US’ deployment of environmental warfare during the Vietnam War, with Agent Orange and the purposeful destruction of agricultural crops.

From the mid 20th Century onwards, ecocide is no longer just a byproduct of genocide and war, but is increasingly used a weapon in itself.

This has been made painfully clear in Gaza, where Israel has embarked on a systematic process of environmental destruction involving polluting weapons: Gaza is now polluted by 40 million tonnes of debris and hazardous material, much of it containing human remains, which the UN estimates will take decades to clear. On top of this, Israel has purposefully destroyed sewage treatment plants allowing seawater to become contaminated.

Israel has fundamentally altered Gaza’s landscape through a process of forced topographic change caused by constant bombardment and bulldozing, the destruction of about 90% of agricultural land and the large-scale extraction of water.

All this is deliberately aimed at making Gaza uninhabitable. The winter storms there were extremely severe due to the effects of climate change. Israel lost no time in weaponising the storms to kill more Palestinians by preventing them accessing appropriate shelters for wet and cold weather as well as the aid blockade.

The apocalypse in Gaza continues. Israel has violated the fake ceasefire agreement, brokered by Trump in October, by up to 900 times. At least 425 Palestinians have been killed and 1158 injured since the so-called ceasefire began.

Israel has suspended more than 48 humanitarian organisations, including Medicine San Frontiers and the Norwegian Refugee Council “for failing to meet its new rules for aid groups working in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip”.

There is no doubt that the Trump administration has given Israel the green light to do what it wants in Gaza and the West Bank, which is turning increasingly into another Gaza.

Trump also gave Israel the go ahead to attack at least six countries last year, including Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria and Yemen. Israel also carried out strikes in Tunisian, Maltese and Greek territorial waters on the Sumud aid flotillas heading for Gaza.

The US brokered “Peace Plan” is a new colonial project; a Mandate 3.0. It means Gaza will be dominated, occupied and under the military, economic and political control of Israel and the US. It means that Palestinians will lose any possibility of self-determination.

The UN Security Council, on November 17, 2025, endorsed this Peace Plan, with China and Russia abstaining, rather than using their veto power. This seems to confirm that China and Russia, along with other BRICS countries, do not have the political will to stand up against US hegemony on behalf of the Global South.

While the global Palestine solidarity movement continues, with key highlights being the Sumud Flotilla and the general strikes for Palestine in Italy and Spain, the trend is for Global North governments to pass new laws allowing for severe repression of the anti-genocide movement.

The weaponisation of antisemitism has led to the curtailing of basic civil liberties and the right to protest, especially in Britain and Australia. In the latter, the federal and NSW Labor governments are weaponising the Bondi attack to attack anti-genocide activists.

The unceasing horror of Israel’s genocide in Palestine has sharpened anti-colonial consciousness, including that US imperialism needs Israel as its bulwark in the Middle East.

Sudan genocide

In addition, the genocides in Sudan and the Congo are equally horrific. The so-called civil war in Sudan is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. This genocide is visible from the air—dark spots of blood appear on satellite images.

Since 2023, when the war between Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and RSF (Rapid Support Forces) began, more than 150,000 have been killed, 13 million have been displaced, and half the population is facing famine.

Sidgi Kaball, of the Sudanese Communist Party, says the war in Sudan is not a civil war in the traditional sense but a counterrevolutionary war, conducted by a parasitic comprador elites in the military, who are using the war to completely crush Sudan’s pro-democracy revolution of 2018.

At the same time, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is bankrolling the RSF, has already extracted and profited from Sudan’s gold and wants to continue to do so.

US allies in the region — Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — have formed the “Quad” group to supposedly take charge of negotiating an end to the ongoing war. They are not neutral actors; all are working to maintain their contracts in Sudan with corporations such as Caltex and BP.

The Quad countries have a direct economic stake in continuing the violence, because they make profits from the resources extracted during the war in Sudan.

Meanwhile, there is now evidence that Australia is involved in the genocide in Sudan. The UAE (which is arming the RSF), purchases most of its military equipment from the US and its Western allies, including Britain, France, Germany, Israel and Australia. According to the UN’s Comtrade database, over the last five years, the UAE has been the single biggest customer for Australian arms exports and Australia was UAE’s fourth-largest supplier of weapons over that same period.

The people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are also dealing with a genocide, which has been ongoing for more than 30 years. The wars are being fought over minerals, such as cobalt and gold, and now the various rare-earth minerals used for high tech industry and electronic devices.

The situation escalated in 2025 when the Rwanda-backed M23 militia drove the national Congolese army out of Goma. The ensuing conflict has caused record levels of violence against the civilian population. At the same time rare-earth minerals continue to be extracted providing super profits for capitalists in the Global North and China.

Constant wars the corollary to genocide

US imperialism needs war. A new war with Venezuela and the threat of conflict with the rest of Latin America and Greenland shows up Trump’s hollow claim to want to end all wars.

US-led imperialism faces, but can’t resolve, threats to US hegemony from China’s growing economic strength, the environmental crisis and capitalism’s recurring economic crises.

To counter these threats, the Trump administration is making sure its military domination is unchallenged. Its solution is more war. At the same time, the global imperialist ruling class is falling over itself to defend US hegemony.

The US National Security Strategy (NSS) 2025 document, released in December, unabashedly describes the new policy as a return to unchallenged domination of the Western Hemisphere through a revival of the Monroe doctrine. Trump calls his Monroe doctrine the “Donroe doctrine”.

Rise of the far right

US-led imperialism, in combination with four decades of neoliberal policies, are fuelling the rise of the far right. The ruling class is using the far right to enlist a part of the working class in its battle to defend US hegemony. This is very different to the ways in which fascism was used to crush a huge socialist and communist working class, and its real power, in the 1930s.

The contradiction here is that the ruling class is making more profits than ever; recent statistics show the top 0.001% own three times more wealth than the poorest half of the world’s population combined. US imperialism is still the world’s dominant economic, military and cultural power.

An article in Foreign Affairs early in 2025 noted its corporations still control the commanding heights of the global economy. But, despite this, ideologically their power is uncertain, as is their economic hegemony.

Trump’s demand on NATO countries to increase their military spending proves the point that war is necessary to Trump’s project. It is akin to Hitler’s move to make re-armament a national economic priority before World War II.

But because the US already spends more than any other country on the military, his announcement reveals a certain desperation to hold onto global power and to cement it by any means necessary. Trump claims tariffs will pay for this, but we all know the US’ own working class and oppressed groups are the ones who will pay.

Trump eyes off oil

Although Venezuela is Trump’s key target, he has threatened Colombia and Mexico, and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has threatened Cuba. Trump wants full domination of the Americas to the exclusion of rival capitalist powers.

The attack on Venezuela was Trump’s most aggressive foreign military action yet, striking Caracas, as well as other parts of the country and kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores.

While for more than 20 years, the US has been trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government and has backed coups in Latin America throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, there is a difference in the level of audacity.

This was not a covert operation, but one announced with pride and fanfare. The US military build-up, including warships, planes and soldiers in the Caribbean, was at first posed as necessary to fight drug trafficking and narcoterrorism, despite no evidence being produced.

Trump has since made clear the attack is all about Venezuela’s oil and economic control of the region. Tellingly, Trump tipped off oil CEOs about the attack before he consulted anyone else in his administration. Trump said that, as part of the takeover, major US oil companies would move into Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, and refurbish supposedly badly degraded oil infrastructure, a process experts said could take years.

While Socialist Alliance has expressed criticism of Maduro for failing to publicly show the 2024 election results and for his suppression of dissent, it has always condemned the brutal US sanctions and blockade, which has led to the deaths of thousands of Venezuelans and destabilised the country. We demand the US leave Venezuela and allow Venezuelans their right to self-determination.

Latin American unity is unraveling as far-right governments are elected, including Argentinean President Javier Milei, a Trump supporter, and José Antonio Kast in Chile, the son of a Nazi Party member and an admirer of Pinochet.

The attack on Venezuela raises the question of how this will affect Russia’s war on Ukraine, the US’ rivalry with China and other global conflicts. 

The US’ policy of “containing” China and expanding NATO to encircle Russia has not changed.

However, Trump has made clear he wants NATO members and the EU to take greater fiscal responsibility for the Ukraine war. In June they succumbed to pressure and agreed to increase their military spending to 5% of GDP annually. Trump is likely to broker a deal for Ukraine, where Ukraine loses more.

The aggression of countries, including Russia and China, on their neighbours should not be seen as inter-imperialist rivalry, but as attempts to pursue their own independent economic projects and military strategies — which are not in the interests of working people.

However, the ultimate domination of US-led imperialism exacerbates the conflicts and antagonisms of non-imperialist states, with often horrific repercussions. The situation for the Kurds in North East Syria epitomises this.

Kurds have been the target of slaughter at the hands of competing countries, such as Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, for decades. Now, the Ahmed al-Sharaa Syrian regime, backed by Turkish armed forces and allied mercenary militias, are attacking and destroying Kurdish neighbourhoods of Aleppo, in northern Syria.

Diplomacy, not more war

Four years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with loss of life and environmental destruction in the extreme, it is evident that it is a catastrophe for both countries. According to the British Ministry of Defence, more than one million Russian troops have been killed or injured since February 24, 2022 and between 60–100,000 Ukrainian personnel have been killed with total casualties reaching approximately 400,000.

Diplomacy, rather than more war, is needed to resolve the conflict. But war is profitable, and means that the United States and its Western allies’ can continue to dominate the global capitalist world order. Russia’s war on Ukraine is also profitable for Putin and Russian elites, and for big oil companies which have made billions since the invasion.

China’s response to Venezuela has, so far, been lukewarm and primarily shaped by its desire to protect its economic interests, which include oil, in the country.

China, like other members of BRICS, have been incapable of condemning the US. They are not a real counter to US-led imperialism because they too want to maintain their own capitalist interests; they need to maintain growing profits in the global market and balance their own sovereignty with maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship with the US.

China does not play the role the former Soviet Union (with all its flaws) once did.

US-led imperialism and global capitalism is at the root of ecocide, genocides and constant wars.

What is the antidote? The only force capable of making meaningful cracks in the imperialist and capitalist armour is a mass movement of international ecosocialism. And this is what we need to build.

 Dr. King’s Forgotten Warnings About “the Rise of a Fascist State in America”

Paul Street

January 16, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

Image by History in HD.

As Americans gather next Monday to celebrate the legacy of the great martyred civil rights and social justice leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a time of fascist rule in the United States, it is important to remember seven interrelated parts of King’s thought and activism that have been largely forgotten and deleted:

+1. The Dr. King who in 1963 (“Letter From a Birmingham Jail”) wrote that the primary obstacle to overcoming American racial oppression wasn’t the open racism of segregation’s brutal enforcers but the tepid incrementalism of white moderates who counseled excessive patience and discouraged the mass direct action required to overthrow the Jim Crow regime.

+2. The King who spoke out against American imperialism, most particularly against the US War on Vietnam, and who said (on April 4, 1967, in New York City’s Riverside Church) that a society that spent more money on military empire than on programs of social uplift was “approaching spiritual death.”

+3. The King who said that the defeat of de jure segregation and racist voter disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South needed to be understood as an elementary prelude to the overcoming of deeply entrenched racism, de facto segregation, and economic inequality across the entire nation.

+4. The King who placed the primary blame for the US race riots of 1965-67 on a “white power structure…seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality intact” and a “white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change,” that told Black people “they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor.”

+5. The King who denounced what he called “the interrelated triple evils” of racism, economic injustice/poverty (capitalism) and war (militarism and imperialism, and who said that the “real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters was “the radical reconstruction of society itself” – the King who argued that “only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in man or faulty operations.” ( “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the South, a little change here, a little change there,” King told the journalist David Halberstam April 1967. “Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”)

+6. The King who said that poor Black, white, and brown masses “must organize a revolution” that would be “more than a statement to the larger society” and more than periodic “street marches” – a movement that would employ regular “mass civil disobedience” to “dislocate the functioning of a society.” The “storm .. rising against the privileged minority of the earth,” King added, “will not abate until [there is a] just distribution of the fruits of the earth…”

+7. Last not but not least, the officially forgotten King omits his warnings on the “FASCISM” he expected to rise to power in the United States if it failed to undertake this revolution. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?: Chaos or Community (1967), King offered a sobering take on the white legal backlash to the racial progress achieved by the struggle for Black equality. Many white Americans, King wrote, “have declared that democracy isn’t worth having if it involves [racial] equality…[their] goal is the total reversal of all reforms with the reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism” whereby the law is wielded to guarantee white supremacy.

How haunting it is to re-read those words five years after January 6, when the fascist leader Donald Trump and his neo-Confederate backers tried to overthrow an election they viewed as illegitimate largely because its outcome depended on nonwhite voters and as the Trump47 fascist regime including the US Supreme Court’s rolls back one anti-racist civil and voting rights victory after another.

After his final national sermon in Washington DC 58 years ago, five days before his execution (which took place exactly one year to the day after he spoke out against the US War on Vietnam in Riverside Church in New York City), King stepped outside the National Cathedral and said that, on its current trajectory, the United States would become a “fascist state”:

“I am convinced we cannot stand two more summers like last,” King said during a post-sermon press conference, referring to the violent racial conflagrations that took place in US cities (most lethally in Detroit and Newark) in 1967. He predicted that more such violence would “bring only a rightist takeover of the government and eventually a fascist state in America….But I have to admit,” King added, “that the conditions that brought the violence into being last summer are still notoriously with us.”

That last sentence is important. Consistent with the enumerated points above (see especially #4), King did not blame the violence on American streets on Black rioters; he blamed it on “the triple evils that are interrelated,” that is on the racism, economic/class exploitation, and imperialism that reflected the perverse functioning and structures of a society that needed to be transformed by a great revolution “for the just distribution of the earth’s fruits.”

King’s April 4^th 1968 extrajudicial racist execution triggered a Black uprising that may have helped fuel the 1968 presidential victory of the proto-fascistic war criminal Richard Nixon, who ran a white-supremacist “law and order” campaign and launched a vicious repression campaign targeting Blacks, the New Left, and antiwar protesters.

Fifty-eight years later, we are in the middle of the “rightist takeover of the government” that King prophesied – a coup driven largely by white racist backlash. We are on the whole too passively (see point #1 above) witnessing the attempted full-on consolidation of “a fascist state in America” under the command of Donald Trump (the genocidal racist son of a Queens Klansman) with Trump’s fellow arch-racist Hitler fan Stephen “We are the Storm” Miller running much of the sick show, and with the racist RepubliNazis JD Vance and Marco Rubio fighting in the wings to claim Mein Trumpf’s mantle. King’s “triple evils” must be expanded to (at least) five to include militant misogynist patriarchy and capitalogenic ecocide and these five evils must be understood as a malignant simultaneous equations system that has given rise to a fascist regime atop the most lethal superpower in world history — a supremely dangerous development that poses a grave existential menace to all humanity.

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).

Dr. King’s Warning Are More Prescient Than

Ever

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad

January 16, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

Photo by Jimmy Woo

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words from his “Beyond Vietnam” speech still ring true.

“When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people,” he warned, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Those words, delivered in 1967, still summarize today’s political moment. Instead of putting the lives of working Americans first, our leaders in Congress and the White House have prioritized advancing corporate profits and wealth concentration, slashing government programs meant to advance upward mobility, and deploying military forces across the country, increasing distrust and tension.

This historic regression corresponds with a recessionary environment for Black America in particular. That’s what my organization, the Joint Center, found in our report, “State of the Dream 2026: From Regression to Signs of a Black Recession.”

The economic landscape for Black Americans in 2026 is troubling, with unemployment rates signaling a potential recession. By December 2025, Black unemployment had reached 7.5 percent — a stark contrast to the national rate of 4.4 percent. This disparity highlights the persistent economic inequalities faced by Black communities, which have only been exacerbated by policy shifts that have weakened the labor market. The volatility in Black youth unemployment, which fluctuated dramatically in the latter months of 2025, underscores the precariousness of the situation.

The Trump administration’s executive orders have systematically dismantled structures aimed at promoting racial equality. By targeting programs such as Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Equal Employment Opportunity executive order and defunding agencies like the Minority Business Development Agency, the administration has shifted federal support away from disadvantaged businesses.

As a result, Black-owned firms risk losing contracts and resources tied to federal programs, potentially resulting in job losses and reduced economic growth. These changes threaten billions in federal revenue for Black-owned firms and undermine efforts to move beyond racial inequality in the workforce.

The GOP’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed in 2025, further entrenches inequality by providing tax cuts that disproportionately benefit high-income households and corporations — while simultaneously slashing investments in programs like Medicaid and SNAP, limiting access to essential services for low-income households.

The technology sector, a critical component of the American economy, is also affected by this disregard for civil rights. Executive orders like “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” have stripped away protections that could advance inclusion in this rapidly growing field. As a result, the future of the American economy risks reinforcing past inequalities.

Dr. King’s call for strong, aggressive federal leadership in addressing racial inequality remains highly relevant. However, instead of eradicating structures of inequality, our current leadership is implementing policies that destroy government jobs and dismantle agencies responsible for preventing predatory economic practices. These choices undermine longstanding efforts to combat racial and economic disparities — and exemplify the regressive economic policies that coincide with rising Black unemployment.

As Dr. King stated, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” But urgent action is required. Unless we act deliberately, economic and racial inequalities will become entrenched, resulting in generational loss. The core question is whether we will move beyond our nation’s history of racism, materialism, and militarism, and — as Dr. King urged — embrace “the fierce urgency now” to advance equity.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is host of the Race and Wealth Podcast and Director of the Racial Wealth Divide Initiative at the Corporation for Economic Development.