US urges partners and allies to increase critical minerals supply chain resiliency

Reuters | January 12, 2026 | 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent with ministers from US partners and allies. Credit: Scott Bessent’s official X page

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent held a meeting on Monday with ministers from different US partners and allies, urging those nations to increase their supply chain resiliency, the Treasury Department said.

Bessent hosted his counterparts in Washington “to discuss solutions to secure and diversify supply chains for critical minerals, especially rare earth elements,” the department said in a statement.

A US official said on Sunday that Bessent was going to urge those countries to step up their efforts to reduce reliance on critical minerals from China, which has imposed strict export controls on rare earths.

Bessent expressed optimism nations will pursue “prudent derisking over decoupling,” and that they understand the need to remedy current deficiencies in critical minerals supply chains, the department said.

The meeting had representatives from Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea and the United Kingdom, the Treasury Department said.

Together, they account for 60% of global demand for critical minerals.

China dominates the critical minerals supply chain, refining between 47% and 87% of copper, lithium, cobalt, graphite and rare earths, according to the International Energy Agency. These minerals are used in defense technologies, semiconductors, renewable energy components, batteries and refining processes.

Last week, China banned exports of items destined for Japan’s military that have civilian and military uses, including some critical minerals.

(By Kanishka Singh; Editing by Jamie Freed)

The Critical Minerals Conundrum: Why Reducing Reliance on China is So Hard

By Haley Zaremba - Jan 14, 2026

• A global competition for critical minerals, essential for energy and tech sectors, has become a central concern for national security and is redefining global geopolitics.
• 
  
• China maintains a near-monopoly on the refining of rare earth minerals, supplying 85–95 percent of the world's refined supply, a position it has used as a geopolitical bargaining chip.
• 
  
• In response to China's leverage, countries like Japan and the United States are accelerating efforts to develop alternative supply chains, including deep-sea mining trials and increased resource diplomacy in emerging economies.

A race for critical minerals is redefining global geopolitics as world powers rush to shore up supply chains of the finite materials that power the energy and tech sectors. Demand for rare earth metals and other critical minerals has seen a meteoric rise in recent years as the world increasingly electrifies and the tech sector becomes ever more robust and omnipresent. Due to the central role of these ingredients in global and national economies, competition for these supply chains is far more than just a commercial concern – it’s become a central platform for national security for many countries.

According to Lexology, this shift from private to public went into overdrive in 2025, and shows no signs of slowing down. “Governments are stepping directly into project development, deploying public capital, tightening investment controls and forming new alliances to secure access to key minerals,” reports the law business research and information platform. “These developments are reshaping how projects are financed, regulated and progressed and are creating a more complex landscape for developers, investors and advisers navigating critical minerals markets,” the brief goes on to say.

These projects are being prioritized on a global scale because the current critical minerals landscape is characterized by an extreme level of concentration. China alone has dominated the global market since the late 1990s, and now supplies about 85–95 percent of the world’s refined rare earth minerals thanks to a near-monopoly on refining capacities. At a global level, Chinese refineries supply 68 percent of cobalt, 65 percent of nickel, and 60 percent of EV-battery-grade lithium. A handful of other countries are also sitting on significant reserves of critical minerals, but lack infrastructure to process them in an efficient or cost-effective manner.

And China is not afraid to weaponize this geopolitical leverage for political gain. Beijing has used its critical minerals trade as a bargaining chip throughout the ebbs and flows of Donald Trump’s trade war with Xi Jinping, and is now threatening to cut off supplies to Japan due to the latter country’s support for a free Taiwan – a hot-button issue for China, which seeks to annex the independent island nation. 

In response, Japan is looking for innovative ways to ease its dependence on Chinese supply chains. This month, Japan launched the world’s first deep-sea mining trial to extract rare earth minerals from 6 kilometers below sea level. This ambitious project has been a long time in the making, but couldn’t be setting sail at a more critical time. "After seven years of steady preparation, we can finally begin the confirmation tests. It's deeply moving," Shoichi Ishii, the head of the government-backed project, recently told Reuters. "If this project succeeds, it will be of great significance in diversifying Japan's rare earth resource procurement," he added.

Japan is not the only country trying to reduce its dependence on Chinese supply chains. China has also threatened to cut off supplies to the United States amid an ongoing trade dispute, and the United States is expected to retaliate. Semafor reports that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to apply pressure to other G7 nations – together representing 60% of global rare earths demand – to ramp up their own efforts to wean themselves off of Chinese imports. 

However, reducing reliance on Chinese supply chains is far easier said than done. Until alternative supply chains are developed, Chinese rare earths are essentially the only (affordable) game in town. Plus, these minerals are only available in certain geographies, and establishing access can be a political minefield. While Japan is endeavoring to find new ways of producing these materials domestically, China and the United States are focusing on working their ways into emerging economies that have rich deposits of these increasingly valuable materials.

China, for its part, has spent decades building up relationships and industries across the globe through its expansive Belt and Road program. The United States, by comparison, lags far behind in such traditional trade relations and economic diplomacy, leading to Trump’s current “takeover” approach to catching up, as seen in the case of Greenland and Venezuela. 

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

 

French Exploration Cruise Ship Exploris One to Hit Auction Block

Exploris One is due to hit the auction block this month after the exploration cruise line went into liquidation (Exploris)

Published Jan 14, 2026 4:01 PM by The Maritime Executive

The small exploration cruise ship Exploris One, which had started service in 2023 for a French company of the same name, is now set to hit the auction block at the end of January. A previous attempt at a court-supervised sale of the vessel failed to proceed.

The company Exploris Croiseres & Expeditions was launched in 2023 by a former executive of another French cruise company, Ponant, and had promoted that they would be “the best an expedition cruise has to offer.” The ship was refurbished and registered in France for a launch in 2023. The website shows cruises currently scheduled from Ushuaia to the Antarctic Peninsula and Chilean fjords. It was due to transit to Europe in April. For the summer of 2026, it was scheduled to operate cruises under charter to Adventure Canada as well as trips for Exploris from Iceland.

Exploration cruising is one of the hottest segments in the cruise industry. It is enjoying rapid growth and an increased influx of luxury offerings to appeal to travelers seeking unique experiences.

 

Exploris One was offering a French-speaking exploration cruise product (Exploris)

 

Exploris acquired the ship in 2023 from Royal Caribbean Group’s Silversea Cruises. Built in 1989, the ship, which is 6,158 gross tons with accommodations for a maximum of 144 passengers, was promoted as “a global benchmark” in exploration cruising. The ship has operated under 10 different names in her career, but in 2008 was relaunched as Prince Albert by Silversea as the brand's first ice-class luxury cruise ship. In 2011, the company renamed her Silver Explorer, but she was sold in 2022 as the brand introduced new, luxury ships.

Despite the strong interest in the exploration cruise segment, media reports said Exploris operated at just 50 percent occupancy. The founder of the company told the French media they had over 2,000 passengers but were forced to cancel 500 advance bookings in September as the company fell into financial trouble. They had hoped to refinance, but said the cancelltion of the charter by Adventure Canada severely impacted cash flows.

Exploris was ordered into a court administration in September. The court rejected the refinancing plan and ordered the company into liquidation. The ship was laid up in Caen, France, where it remains.

Reports said negotiations were underway with several potential buyers for Exploris One under a court-supervised process. Bids were due to the court by late November.

The ship is now posted online in an auction with Interencheres. Bids are due by January 30, with no minimum price indicated.

Dingbat Imperialism, the Lowest Stage of Capitalism

Reading Lenin Today

John Ganz
Jan 13, 2026

SUBSTACK

“Holy Shit, these guys are dumb.”

Many commentators have noted that Trump’s conduct in foreign affairs is as if you took the most simplistic and reductionist left-wing critiques of American foreign policy and decided what they described—a rapacious, oligarchical empire systematically stripping poorer and smaller nations of their resources—was what we should be doing. Matt Yglesias recently tweeted about a Trump post where he described a system of American companies dumping surplus goods into a pliant Venezuelan market: “This is like Lenin’s account of imperialism, but with ‘— and that’s good!’ added to the end.” The natural riposte to this line of thought is perhaps that the left-wing critiques of American imperialism weren’t so stupid after all, and Trump just has the bad manners to tell the truth. And you could just as easily imagine an impatient liberal response to some on the anti-alarmist left in reply: “Here is the guy who is actually what you said America was all along: a vulgar fascioid businessman who is using state power to enrich himself and his friends, but for some reason he offended and worried you less than the other guys.” But rather than attend to this squabble, I’m actually curious about how well Lenin’s account of imperialism fits what Trump is doing or trying to do.

Interestingly enough, “Lenin’s idea of Imperialism, but we should do it,” is pretty much how Vladimir Putin thinks, if you take the word of his former advisor Gleb Pavlosky:


It was a game and we lost, because we didn’t do several simple things: we didn’t create our own class of capitalists, we didn’t give the capitalist predators on our side a chance to develop and devour the capitalist predators on theirs…Putin’s idea is that we should be bigger and better capitalists than the capitalists, and be more consolidated as a state: there should be maximum oneness of state and business…

This makes sense, since Putin would’ve had Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy drilled into him in his training as a KGB officer. But what is the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy on imperialism exactly?

Vladimir Lenin’s pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was written during the First World War. Subtitled “a popular outline,” it was meant to explain to the working class the nature of the war taking place and to polemicize against the reformist, “opportunist” socialist and social democratic parties, that, in many cases, had gone along with it, and that Lenin believed were inextricably tied to the imperialist system. It’s not a fully developed theory nor is it entirely original: it’s largely based on the works of the Marxist Rudolf Hilferding and the liberal J.A. Hobson, and is directed against the earlier theories of Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg. It was written in the heat of battle, as it were: Lenin is struggling to win over the European proletariat to his vision of world revolution. But it is a work of bold vision and compelling claims.

Lenin writes, “the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.” According to Lenin, capitalism has left behind its old liberal, laissez-faire competitive mode; the process of competition itself has given rise to monopoly as the winners devour the losers. Industry has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few great cartels, and these cartels, requiring vast supplies of credit for their operations, come under the control of banks. This combination of heavy industry and banking Lenin calls “finance capital.” In the pamphlet, he quotes Hilferding to describe the nature of this finance capital:


“A steadily increasing proportion of capital in industry…ceases to belong to the industrialists who employ it. They obtain the use of it only through the medium of the banks which, in relation to them, represent the owners of the capital. On the other hand, the bank is forced to sink an increasing share of its funds in industry. Thus, to an ever greater degree the banker is being transformed into an industrial capitalist. This bank capital, i.e., capital in money form, which is thus actually transformed into industrial capital, I call ‘finance capital’.” ….“Finance capital is capital controlled by banks and employed by industrialists.”

This financial oligarchy, seeking profitable investments in shrinking markets it already dominates, seeps into the nation-state itself and directs it to look abroad, grabbing colonies. The world becomes divided up by big monopolies with the help of their pliant government hosts. Lenin helpfully breaks this down into four points:


(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.

I want to focus on these, particularly number 3, but first, we have to answer why Lenin calls imperialism “the highest stage of capitalism,” by which it often appears he means the last stage. For Lenin, monopoly capitalism is almost socialism; the concentration and socialization of production have happened, and it just remains in private ownership:


Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialisation of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialised….

Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation…

Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few.

The capitalists have done the socialists a great favor by organizing things like this: it makes the seizure of the means of production much easier! But as Lenin and Hilferding both thought, the jockeying for domination of the world by these combines would tend towards war between the imperialist powers. This created another opportunity for the militant working class. As Hilferding put it in his 1910 Finance Capital, "the policy of finance capital is bound to lead towards war, and hence to the unleashing of revolutionary storms.” As I’ve written about before, this is contra Kautsky, who imagined the possibility of intermonopolist cooperation and a peaceful transition to socialism.

In 1917, Lenin’s account of the world looked pretty plausible. There was, in fact, a war raging between the imperialist powers, and soon, revolution would break out, first in Russia, and then all over Europe. But how well does Lenin’s Imperialism explain today, in particular, Trump’s neo-imperialism in Venezuela?

The first thing to note is the anachronism of Lenin’s picture of monopoly capitalism. Yes, there is the word “finance” there, but finance capital is not identical with “financialization,” as we’ve come to know it. For all the rentier and “parasitic” behavior Lenin describes in the imperial core, he emphasizes the importance of capital exports, that is to say, of fixed capital, machinery, and plant. The world we are dealing with there is much more “steampunk,” if you’ll permit me. As I quoted above, “the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance.” This is because the capital’s rate of profit is sagging in the core. Trump’s vision of dumping commodities into Venezuela doesn’t fit that model. In this case, the big capitalist combines, the oil cartels, really don’t want to invest capital abroad. They are doing fine, thank you, and don’t really want to sink all this fixed capital into the mire of Venezuela. It’s not some easy colonial backwater ripe for the picking, but a very tumultuous and unstable environment, and they’ve been burned before. While other big oil company execs appeared ready to humor Trump, ExxonMobil’s CEO was frank: he called Venezuela “uninvestable” without major changes. As a result, Trump threatened to block them. But, of course, they don’t wanna go anyway! Even a close backer of Trump like oil tycoon Harold Hamm has “declined to make commitments,” while making some superficially enthusiastic noises. When the oil bosses asked for guarantees, Trump said he would guarantee their security. But he’s not gonna be around forever! We’re talking multiple-year investments. To make matters more difficult, the type of crude in Venezuela is tough and costly to refine.

So, Lenin’s vision of the financial oligarchy finagling the government to fund adventures abroad? Not quite the case here. Here we have the government trying to finagle the cartels. To be fair to the Leninists, Vladimir Ilyich makes clear that the foreign intrigues of the monopolists are often “secret” and “corrupt” manipulation of government, so we may not have the full picture. And perhaps there is a different dynamic in the case of raw materials and extraction. Lenin writes:


The principal feature of the latest stage of capitalism is the domination of monopolist associations of big employers. These monopolies are most firmly established when all the sources of raw materials are captured by one group, and we have seen with what zeal the international capitalist associations exert every effort to deprive their rivals of all opportunity of competing, to buy up, for example, ironfields, oilfields, etc. Colonial possession alone gives the monopolies complete guarantee against all contingencies in the struggle against competitors, including the case of the adversary wanting to be protected by a law establishing a state monopoly. The more capitalism is developed, the more strongly the shortage of raw materials is felt, the more intense the competition and the hunt for sources of raw materials throughout the whole world, the more desperate the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.

What the oil companies might like is a “complete guarantee” of a colonial situation, but they seem skeptical that Trump can really provide that. But is there a shortage in this case? On the contrary, there is a bit of a glut in oil at the moment, although the lack of investment might contribute to a future shortage. Analysts say that even a major crisis in Iran—imagine such a thing!—would not seriously affect global supply.

Now, a Leninist might object that I’m misreading the text in too conspiratorial a way and that I have to take into account a structural impulse built into financial capital to force investment. But if anything, we’ve seen financialized capital is very averse to risky fixed assets, preferring liquidity and easier profits.

I don’t want to suggest that capitalists are totally uninterested in Venezuela. Some are very enthusiastic, but they have a very different profile than the big oil majors that could actually redevelop Venezuela’s infrastructure. Politico reports:


“One of the things that has been incorrectly reported is that the oil companies are not interested in Venezuela,” Bessent told an audience at the Economic Club of Minnesota, according to a transcript supplied by the department. “The big oil companies who move slowly, who have corporate boards are not interested. I can tell you that independent oil companies and individuals, wildcatters, [our] phones are ringing off the hook. They want to get to Venezuela yesterday.”

As one industry insider noted, “The most enthusiastic are among the least prepared and least sophisticated.”

These types of firms are very well-connected to this administration. A Reuters report on the small and medium participants in the oil summit noted, “Several of the companies have connections to Denver, Colorado, the home turf of Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and a relatively small hub for oil and gas activity compared to other parts of the United States.”

Interestingly, the enthusiasm of small and medium capital vs. the big, publicly-traded corporate behemoths matches closely Melinda Cooper’s analysis of Trump’s business coalition, which is made up of “the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.” A 2025 analysis of the oil investment market reflected this as well: “Capital is shifting from traditional institutional investors to more flexible and opportunistic players, driven by attractive valuations, tax incentives, and infrastructure opportunities.”

This picture of a rag-tag private capital wanting to follow Trump’s filibuster into quick riches leads me to posit the very speculative theory of “dingbat imperialism,” where it’s not the big cartels, but their little cousins leading the charge down south. But in that case, it is not monopolization but a very competitive environment that is driving these risky moves. One might say this is capitalism not at its highest stage of development, but its lowest; indeed, it’s as if these firms want their chance at “primitive accumulation,” which is to say, robbery and plunder.

To add some meat to my theory of dingbat imperialism, consider the previous behavior of the majors. Rather than hawks for oil wars and free flowing crude, they’ve either wanted to lift sanctions to make their businesses easier (Chevron, Gulf refiners) or keep sanctions in place to get their legal claims from nationalization taken care of (ExxonMobil.) In this respect, they are much more like Kautsky’s “ultra-imperialists,” working within the normative structure of international agreements and treaties to cement the interests of their oligopoly, rather than pursuing destructive wars.

To a certain extent, imperialism may have always been dingbat imperialism. Historians have chipped away at Lenin’s empirical account of the origins of the colonial scramble in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Imperial Germany, for example, the government had difficulty getting the big German banks, although highly cartelized as Lenin demonstrated, to invest in developing its colonial ventures, mostly because they were not very profitable. German banks preferred to invest in relatively safe places, like the United States, Britain, or France. British banks, much more accustomed to imperialist ventures, were willing to chip in. The government had to practically force German finance capital into Southwest Africa to prevent its colony from being totally dominated by British banks.1 Sometimes the Kaiser himself provided financial support to the endeavors. The German companies that were enthusiastic about colonial expansion tended to be speculative, “get-rich-quick” schemes. The German colonial empire was driven more by a politics of prestige and a sense of being lesser than Britain and France than by the pressure of surplus capital looking for an outlet. In this sense, perhaps, we are behaving more like the imperial upstart Germany than the hegemon Britain. Why? Maybe because Trump is himself an upstart. Dingbats all the way down.

In any case, that’s all I have of this “theory” for the moment.
1


Feis, Herbert. Europe: The World’s Banker 1870-1914: An Account Of European Foreign Investment And The Connection Of World Finance With Diplomacy Before The War. With Internet Archive. Council On Foreign Relations, 1961. 181-182 http://archive.org/details/europeworldsbank0000unse.

'Disgrace': Furor as Pete Hegseth's Pentagon partners with Elon Musk

Stephen Prager,

 Common Dreams
January 13, 2026 


Elon Musk and U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth laugh at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 21, 2025 in this screengrab obtained from a video. REUTERS/Idrees Ali

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the owner of the social media app X, has faced a mountain of outrage in recent weeks as his platform’s artificial intelligence chatbot “Grok” has been used to generate sexualized deepfake images of non-consenting women and children, and Musk himself has embraced open white nationalism.

But none of this seems to be of particular concern to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Despite the swirl of scandal, he announced on Monday that Musk’s chatbot would be given intimate access to reams of military data as part of what the department described as its new “AI acceleration strategy.”

During a speech at the headquarters of SpaceX, another company owned by Musk, Hegseth stood alongside the billionaire and announced that later this month, the department plans to “make all appropriate data” from the military’s IT systems available for “AI exploitation,” including “combat-proven operational data from two decades of military and intelligence operations.”

As the Associated Press noted, it’s a departure from the more cautious approach the Biden administration took toward integrating AI with the military, which included bans on certain uses “such as applications that would violate constitutionally protected civil rights or any system that would automate the deployment of nuclear weapons.”

While it’s unclear if those bans remain in place under President Donald Trump, Hegseth said during the speech he will seek to eschew the use of any AI models “that won’t allow you to fight wars” and will seek to act “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications,” before adding that the Pentagon’s AI will not be “woke” or “equitable.”

He added that the department “will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI. He added that ”we will become an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all domains.

Hegseth’s embrace of Musk hardly comes as a surprise, given his role in the Trump administration’s dismantling of the administrative state as head of its so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) last year, and his record $290 million in support for the president’s 2024 election campaign.

But it is quite noteworthy given the type of notoriety Grok has received of late after it introduced what it called “spicy mode” for the chatbot late last year, which “allows users to digitally remove clothing from images and has been deployed to produce what amounts to child pornography—along with other disturbing behavior, such as sexualizing the deputy prime minister of Sweden,” according to a report last month from MS NOW (formerly MSNBC).

It’s perhaps the most international attention the bot has gotten, with the United Kingdom’s media regulator launching a formal investigation on Monday to determine whether Grok violated the nation’s Online Safety Act by failing to protect users from illegal content, including child sexual abuse material.

The investigation could result in fines, which, if not followed, could lead to the chatbot being banned, as it was over the weekend in Malaysia and Indonesia. Authorities in the European Union, France, Brazil, and elsewhere are also reviewing the app for its spread of nonconsensual sexual images, according to the New York Times.

It’s only the latest scandal involving the Grok, which Musk pitched as an “anti-woke” and “truth-seeking” alternative to applications like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

At several points last year, the chatbot drew attention for its sudden tendency to launch into racist and antisemitic tirades—praising Adolf Hitler, accusing Jewish people of controlling Hollywood and the government, and promoting Holocaust denial.

Before that, users were baffled when the bot began directing unrelated queries about everything from cats to baseball back to discussions about Musk’s factually dubious pet theory of “white genocide” in South Africa, which the chatbot later revealed it was “instructed” to talk about.

Hegseth’s announcement on Monday also comes as Musk has completed his descent into undisguised support for a white nationalist ideology over the past week.

The billionaire’s steady lurch to the far-right has been a years-long process—capped off last year, with his enthusiastic support for the neofascist Alternative for Germany Party and apparent Nazi salute at Trump’s second inauguration.

But his racist outlook was left impossible to deny last week when he expressed support for a pair of posts on X stating that white people must “reclaim our nations” or “be conquered, enslaved, raped, and genocided” and that “if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered,” necessitating “white solidarity.”

While details about the expansiveness of Grok’s use by the military remain scarce, Musk’s AI platform, xAI, announced in July that it had inked a deal with the Pentagon worth nearly $200 million (notably just a week after the bot infamously referred to itself as “MechaHitler”).

In September, reportedly following direct pressure from the White House to roll it out “ASAP,” the General Services Administration announced a “OneGov” agreement, making Grok available to every federal agency for just $0.42 apiece.

That same month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Hegseth warning that Musk, who’d also used Grok extensively under DOGE to purge disloyal government employees, was “gaining improper advantages from unique access to DOD data and information.” She added that Grok’s propensity toward “inaccurate outputs and misinformation” could “harm DOD’s strategic decisionmaking.”

Following this week’s announcement, JB Branch, the Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, said on Tuesday that, “allowing an AI system with Grok’s track record of repeatedly generating nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children to access classified military or sensitive government data raises profound national security, civil rights, and public safety concerns.”

“Deploying Grok across other areas of the federal government is worrying enough, but choosing to use it at the Pentagon is a national security disgrace,” he added. “If an AI system cannot meet basic safety and integrity standards, expanding its reach to include classified data puts the American public and our nation’s safety at risk.”

Pentagon Partners With Musk’s AI Chatbot Despite Child Porn Scandal and Owner’s Embrace of White Nationalism

“If an AI system cannot meet basic safety and integrity standards, expanding its reach to include classified data puts the American public and our nation’s safety at risk,” said a tech expert at Public Citizen.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stands with Elon Musk at the headquarters of his company SpaceX in Starbase, Texas on January 12, 2025.
(Photo from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth)

Stephen Prager
Jan 13, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the owner of the social media app X, has faced a mountain of outrage in recent weeks as his platform’s artificial intelligence chatbot “Grok” has been used to generate sexualized deepfake images of nonconsenting women and children, and Musk himself has embraced open white nationalism.

But none of this seems to be of particular concern to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Despite the swirl of scandal, he announced on Monday that Musk’s chatbot would be given intimate access to reams of military data as part of what the department described as its new “AI acceleration strategy.”

During a speech at the headquarters of SpaceX, another company owned by Musk, Hegseth stood alongside the billionaire and announced that later this month, the department plans to “make all appropriate data” from the military’s IT systems available for “AI exploitation,” including “combat-proven operational data from two decades of military and intelligence operations.”

As the Associated Press noted, it’s a departure from the more cautious approach the Biden administration took toward integrating AI with the military, which included bans on certain uses “such as applications that would violate constitutionally protected civil rights or any system that would automate the deployment of nuclear weapons.”

While it’s unclear if those bans remain in place under President Donald Trump, Hegseth said during the speech he will seek to eschew the use of any AI models “that won’t allow you to fight wars” and will seek to act “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications,” before adding that the Pentagon’s AI will not be “woke” or “equitable.”

He added that the department “will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI. He added that ”we will become an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all domains.




Hegseth’s embrace of Musk hardly comes as a surprise, given his role in the Trump administration’s dismantling of the administrative state as head of its so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) last year, and his record $290 million in support for the president’s 2024 election campaign.

But it is quite noteworthy given the type of notoriety Grok has received of late after it introduced what it called “spicy mode” for the chatbot late last year, which “allows users to digitally remove clothing from images and has been deployed to produce what amounts to child pornography—along with other disturbing behavior, such as sexualizing the deputy prime minister of Sweden,” according to a report last month from MS NOW (formerly MSNBC).

It’s perhaps the most international attention the bot has gotten, with the United Kingdom’s media regulator launching a formal investigation on Monday to determine whether Grok violated the nation’s Online Safety Act by failing to protect users from illegal content, including child sexual abuse material.

The investigation could result in fines, which, if not followed, could lead to the chatbot being banned, as it was over the weekend in Malaysia and Indonesia. Authorities in the European Union, France, Brazil, and elsewhere are also reviewing the app for its spread of nonconsensual sexual images, according to the New York Times.

It’s only the latest scandal involving the Grok, which Musk pitched as an “anti-woke” and “truth-seeking” alternative to applications like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

At several points last year, the chatbot drew attention for its sudden tendency to launch into racist and antisemitic tirades—praising Adolf Hitler, accusing Jewish people of controlling Hollywood and the government, and promoting Holocaust denial.

Before that, users were baffled when the bot began directing unrelated queries about everything from cats to baseball back to discussions about Musk’s factually dubious pet theory of “white genocide” in South Africa, which the chatbot later revealed it was “instructed” to talk about.

Hegseth’s announcement on Monday also comes as Musk has completed his descent into undisguised support for a white nationalist ideology over the past week.

The billionaire’s steady lurch to the far-right has been a years-long process—capped off last year, with his enthusiastic support for the neofascist Alternative for Germany Party and apparent Nazi salute at Trump’s second inauguration.

But his racist outlook was left impossible to deny last week when he expressed support for a pair of posts on X stating that white people must “reclaim our nations” or “be conquered, enslaved, raped, and genocided” and that “if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered,” necessitating “white solidarity.”

While details about the expansiveness of Grok’s use by the military remain scarce, Musk’s AI platform, xAI, announced in July that it had inked a deal with the Pentagon worth nearly $200 million (notably just a week after the bot infamously referred to itself as “MechaHitler”).

In September, reportedly following direct pressure from the White House to roll it out “ASAP,” the General Services Administration announced a “OneGov” agreement, making Grok available to every federal agency for just $0.42 apiece.

That same month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Hegseth warning that Musk, who’d also used Grok extensively under DOGE to purge disloyal government employees, was “gaining improper advantages from unique access to DOD data and information.” She added that Grok’s propensity toward “inaccurate outputs and misinformation” could “harm DOD’s strategic decisionmaking.”

Following this week’s announcement, JB Branch, the Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, said on Tuesday that, “allowing an AI system with Grok’s track record of repeatedly generating nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children to access classified military or sensitive government data raises profound national security, civil rights, and public safety concerns.”

“Deploying Grok across other areas of the federal government is worrying enough, but choosing to use it at the Pentagon is a national security disgrace,” he added. “If an AI system cannot meet basic safety and integrity standards, expanding its reach to include classified data puts the American public and our nation’s safety at risk.”

Municipal socialism

How Can Socialists Run Cities – will Mamdani show us the way?

Tuesday 13 January 2026

by Iain Bruce



Zohran Mamdani’s election to Mayor of New York has been a badly-needed boost to the confidence of the left in the U.S. and beyond. It has also reignited debate about the strategic choices facing socialists elected to local government, and eventually to national governments too. A special, end-of-year issue of Jacobin, the U.S. left magazine, was devoted to lessons of municipal socialism, from Red Vienna and Milwaukee’s ‘sewer socialists’ in the first half of the 20th century, to Communist-run cities in Italy or France after the defeat of fascism and Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council in the 1980s, facing off, quite literally across the River Thames, against what was then the far-right, Margaret Thatcher, in government.


These are debates that we, too, need to take seriously, as we seek to build Your Party Scotland as a real, socialist alternative, here in Glasgow and across the country.

One of the most suggestive contributions to the discussion draws on experiences of participatory democracy in Latin America and elsewhere, to argue that as mayor, ‘Zohran Needs to Create Popular Assemblies’ (Jacobin 12.22.2025. https://jacobin.com/2025/12/mamdani-popular-assemblies-democratic-socialism) to build a bottom-up political culture that empowers working people. In this article, Gabriel Hetland, who has done a lot of work with social movements in Venezuela and Bolivia, and Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin, point to the positives of governing with such assemblies. In the short term, it enables the social base to keep mobilising, which is vital to sustain a progressive administration that will inevitably be hemmed in by hostile elites and procedural roadblocks, hindering its attempts to implement even its core, immediate, ‘affordability’ policies. In the process of these fights over housing and transport, childcare and the cost of groceries, it also begins to create new structures of power, increasing “the capacity of workers to collectively shape the decisions that shape their lives”, and “to lay the basis for a society beyond capitalism”.

Even without the aid of a crystal ball, it is not hard to see how a socialist administration in Glasgow City Council, or even in Holyrood, would confront many of the same obstacles, and need similar solutions, as it sought to seize back the cost-of-living agenda hijacked by Reform in Scotland, or even confront a far-right, Reform government in Westminster.

As Hetland and Sunkara make clear, the key point of assemblies or other forms of mass, participatory democracy, is to change the relationship between the governed and their government, shifting power back to the former. The forms this can take vary greatly. Even within Latin America, the early participatory budgets (PBs) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in the 1990s and early 2000s – cited here as one of the most successful examples – were very different from the communal councils and communes developed in Venezuela, or the more sporadic assemblies used in Bolivia, a few years later. Although not part of a wider revolutionary process, the scope of the powers in Porto Alegre was in fact much greater.

It would be foolish, from so far away, to pretend to offer much of an opinion on exactly what might work best in New York City. As these authors point out, it is more important to identify the underlying principles. It is these that will determine whether a given form of assembly democracy can effectively change the relations of power, and whether it really can, or even wants to, open up possible paths to a different kind of society.

The problem is that the principles they do identify are quite slight and could lead in a rather different direction. This is not semantic quibbling: the gap between ‘affecting decisions’ and exercising sovereign power is the gap between supplicants and rulers, between consultation theatre and the embryo of workers’ self-government. They are significantly weaker than the four core principles adopted by the founders of Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting. For example, Hetland and Sunkara talk about ordinary people having “real and meaningful opportunities to affect the decisions that shape their lives”, and counterpose this to the “participation without influence” that breeds cynicism about many exercises in participation that are merely consultative. This distinction is important, because many later versions of participatory budgeting were indeed consultations without real power. But the original Porto Alegre version was stronger still. Its second and third core principles were that (2) the PB should have sovereign decision-making power, and (3) that it should discuss the whole budget, not just a sliver of it. This sounds like a lot more than just ‘affecting’ decisions.

The first of the Porto Alegre core principles was that (1) the PB should be based on direct, universal participation. The basic building block was mass, local assemblies, where all citizens could take part – there were no delegates at this level of the process, and certainly no algorithms performing random selection or sortition – and where they could debate and decide on the main priorities. An elected PB Council would then work out the nuts and bolts. This partly overlaps with Hetland and Sunkara’s second principle, where they talk about creating spaces “to foster meaningful deliberation”. As they rightly observe, this “is how non-elites learn to govern themselves”, bringing working-class communities together across the divides of race, gender and language that often separate them. This is the essence of collective action, and it upends the isolation and atomisation that underpins most of our capitalist societies.

The fourth Porto Alegre principle was that (4) the PB process should be self-regulating. Its shape and procedures, its rules, would not be decided by anyone else or laid down in legislation by some other body. The assemblies and their elected council would work out the rules and keep changing them along the way as needed. There is at least a potential contradiction between this fundamental autonomy and the third principle our authors suggest for the new Mamdani administration. They talk about the need for a “deliberate design” to avoid the participatory space reproducing inequalities of confidence and political experience, or becoming dominated by existing activists.

These are issues that have drawn attention within our own process of launching Your Party. Certainly, most would agree on the importance of taking steps to make political spaces – in this case the assemblies of participatory democracy – as accessible as possible, in relation to physical accessibility, child care, procedures, language, tone and so on. The problem is that these needs have also been used to justify a ‘deliberate design’ drawn up somewhere else according to criteria decided by no-one quite knows who. And this in turn raises suspicions of algorithms shaping representative samples, sortition and digital plebiscites. Such instruments, whose roots lie more in marketing and management studies, tend to reproduce the prevailing isolation of individuals, rather than foster the kinds of collective action that alone can begin to reverse the relations of power.

It is worth remembering that most of the core group that ‘invented’ the Porto Alegre experience saw themselves as revolutionary socialists. They were members of the Democracia Socialista current in the Workers Party (PT), which was then the Brazilian section of the Fourth International. When they suddenly found themselves at the head of the city hall administration in a medium-sized state capital, they asked themselves how they could use this to move towards a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state. And the first experience they turned to for possible inspiration was the Paris Commune.

Their conception of the participatory budget, and more broadly of direct, assembly-based democracy, was developed with this in mind. As a co-thinker of theirs in France, Catherine Samary, later put it, participatory democracy can be revolutionary if it permanently challenges the existing structures of the bourgeois state. If it ceases to challenge them, if it merely complements or ‘extends’ the processes of existing representative democracy, it becomes merely reformist and can easily be co-opted as a block to radical change and in effect a prop for the status quo.

Anyone who has endured a local council’s ‘community engagement’ session already knows where this leads: sticky notes on flip charts, facilitators with lanyards, and outcomes decided months ago by officers now nodding gravely at your contributions. That is why, not long after the successes of the early, radical participatory budget in Porto Alegre, the World Bank was soon promoting a watered-down, consultative version as a pillar of ‘good governance’ in the Global South. Although the situation in New York today may be very different, similar dilemmas, and dangers, are likely face any attempts by the new mayor to open up popular assemblies and spaces for participatory democracy. We should pay close attention because, with a bit of luck, we might later have to deal with parallel problems here in Glasgow.

1 January 2026

Source: Ecosocialist Scotland.


Attached documentshow-can-socialists-run-cities-will-mamdani-show-us-the-way_a9361.pdf (PDF - 1.1 MiB)
Extraction PDF [->article9361]

Iain Bruce is a journalist and eco-socialist activist living in Glasgow, member of Your Party. He is author of “The Porto Alegre Alternative: Direct Democracy in Action” (IIRE - International Institute for Research and Education).

Libcom.orgfiles.libcom.org/files/C. L. R. James-A New Notion_ Two Works by C. L. R. James_ Every Cook Can Govern and The Invading Socialist Society -PM Press (2010) (1).pdf

every cook can govern - Libcom.org

A New Notion: Two Works By C.LR. James. Introduction by Noellgnatiev. C> PM Press 2010. This edition © PM Press 2010. The Invading Socialist Society and ...

Theanarchistlibrary.orgtheanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-municipalization

Municipalization | The Anarchist Library

Murray Bookchin Municipalization Community Ownership of the Economy February ... socialism and anarchism, an era that dates back to the first workers ...

Greeneuropeanjournal.euwww.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/municipalism-murray-bookchins-legacy/

Libertarian Municipalism & Murray Bookchin's Legacy

Nov 6, 2018 ... Debbie Bookchin: Municipalism is taking various forms today as it evolves in practice. For my father it was part of a profoundly revolutionary ...

Unam.mxconceptos.sociales.unam.mx/conceptos_final/654trabajo.pdf

MURRAY BOOKCHIN´S LIBERTARIAN MUNICIPALISM - IIS

Aug 20, 2019 ... Born to socialist revolutionary parents in the Bronx, New York, he joined the international Communist movement as a Young. Pioneer in 1930, then ...

Sagepub.comjournals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14748851221128248

Murray Bookchin and the value of democratic municipalism

Oct 11, 2022 ... Finally, this association must make regular efforts to both control or maintain control of municipal decision-making institutions and to build ...