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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to a crowd at a campaign event Tuesday in Claremont, N.H. (Photo: Jim Cole/AP)
When the late Chalmers Johnson introduced the word "blowback" to describe the adverse consequences of Washington's actions in the world, he wasn't referring simply to the victims of U.S. imperial interventions striking back on American soil. More importantly, he saw the resulting destabilization of the American democratic process as the most dangerous blowback of all.
Seen in this light, Donald Trump's "M&Ms campaign" -- which relies heavily on broadsides against Mexicans and Muslims -- is unquestionably a disturbing blowback from Washington's policies abroad.
Trump launched his campaign with a plan to build a wall along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border while summarily deporting undocumented migrants and their families. After the San Bernardino shootings on December 2, in which a Muslim couple killed 14 people, Trump has pushed for the U.S. to stop accepting Muslim migrants and visitors to the United States.
These two proposals run directly against the U.S. self-image as a country of migrants, threatening to unleash a tide of hatred against Mexican-Americans and Muslims, and putting them on notice that their rights are fragile. Yet Trump's calls have resonated with large sectors of the Republican base, with extremist rhetoric now a staple not only of Trump's campaign but of his rivals' as well.
The Blowback from Iraq
The U.S. foreign policy blunders that created ISIS -- popular fear of which now drives U.S. domestic and foreign policy alike -- are relatively well documented.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq blew the lid off Iraqi society, which had been a pressure cooker of sectarian rivalries contained by the regime of Saddam Hussein. As a Shia-dominated regime took over in Baghdad, an extremist Sunni movement -- al-Qaeda in Iraq, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- rose to fight the government and its American sponsors.
Zarqawi found many receptive recruits among the hundreds of thousands of Sunni soldiers in Saddam's army, which had been disbanded by the Americans shortly after their takeover. Adherents were also nurtured in U.S. prison camps, among them future ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. After Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike, Baghdadi emerged as the leader of the group, which broke from al-Qaeda during the Syrian civil war and began calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS -- later shortened to just the Islamic State.
At first, ISIS was seen by western intelligence as focused mainly on establishing a caliphate in the Middle East, for which it undertook a sophisticated international recruitment campaign online. Then concern developed that ISIS was not simply recruiting young people from Europe and the U.S. to fight in Iraq or Syria, but training them to be sent back to perform terrorist acts in their home countries.
The Paris massacre in mid-November, which saw a handful of shooters and bombers kill some 130 people in a sophisticated coordinated operation, was seen as the ultimate blowback. That is, until the San Bernardino shooting two weeks later, which U.S. authorities saw as the scariest blowback of all: shooters carrying out uncoordinated individual actions inspired by ISIS propaganda disseminated online.
The Mexican Blowback 1: The CIA Connection
The blowback process from Mexico is less well known but equally well documented. One trigger, as in Iraq, was political intervention.
The Mexican drug syndicates were relatively small-time affairs until the 1980s. It was the Central Intelligence Agency that made them big-time during the Reagan administration's efforts to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, where it engaged in unconventional fundraising operations to evade congressional scrutiny.
One was the so-called Iran-Contra deal, where top Reagan administration officials facilitated the sale of weapons to Iran -- then the object of a U.S. arms embargo -- and then diverted part of the proceeds to fund the anti-Sandinista guerrillas known as the Contras.
Another method was to use Mexican drug syndicates.
In her brave expose on the rise of Mexican drug cartels, Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers, the celebrated Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernandez writes that when the U.S. Congress prohibited the use of government money to fund the overthrow of the Sandinistas, the CIA made a deal with the cartels to allow large-scale cocaine sales into the United States, but on condition that part of the proceeds would be diverted to support the Contras.
Indeed, the CIA's complicity in fostering the rise of the Mexican cartels, which eventually displaced the Colombian cartels as the main transporters of cocaine to the United States, has also been documented by a number of U.S. journalists. Among the key beneficiaries of the CIA connection was the Sinaloa Cartel, which eventually produced the lord of drug lords: "El Chapo" Guzman.
The Mexican Blowback II: NAFTA
The other source of the Mexican blowback was economic.
Following the Third World debt crisis in the early 1980s, the United States -- via the International Monetary Fund and World Bank -- began an ambitious effort to restructure the Mexican economy along free-market lines. The cutting back of government support for many agricultural services, along with a program of privatization designed to reverse communal ownership of land institutionalized by the Mexican Revolution, resulted in widespread suffering in the countryside, with many peasants thrown off their lands.
But even more devastating was Mexico's integration into the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which quickly became a program for dumping subsidized U.S. corn and other agricultural products into Mexico. According to a 2003 report of the Carnegie Endowment, imports of U.S. agricultural products under NAFTA threw 1.3 million farmers out of work.
For these peasants, the choice became either the shantytowns of Mexico City or "El Norte," with vast numbers opting for the latter. By 2006, roughly 10 percent of Mexico's population was living in the United States, 15 percent of its workforce was working there, and one in every seven Mexicans was migrating to the U.S. There was a strong element of truth in the sardonic comment that, owing to NAFTA's savage impact on peasant agriculture, Mexico's peasantry simply moved to the United States.
U.S. policies in Mexico and Central America thus had a dramatic dual blowback effect. On one side, the CIA godfathered a powerful cartel whose massive exports of cocaine devastated inner cities from Los Angeles to Washington, DC -- and whose violence has now killed or displaced tens of thousands of Mexicans. On the other side, U.S.-sponsored structural adjustment and NAFTA ruined Mexican peasant agriculture, leading to the migration of millions to the north, where they've become scapegoats for U.S. economic troubles.
Study after study has refuted claims that migrants take jobs away from non-migrant workers, or that they don't pay their taxes. Yet Mexican migrants are continually blamed by opportunistic politicians on the make, like Trump and his Republican colleagues.
The Ultimate Blowback
It's unfortunate that this opportunistic, demagogic game of playing on physical fear ("Muslim terrorists out to take your life") and economic fear ("Mexican workers out to steal your jobs") has resonated among so much of the country's white population. Trump, whose anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican rhetoric is most brazen, leads his opponents in the Republican presidential race by a wide margin in the surveys.
Instead of aggressively challenging the Republican candidates' inflamed rhetoric and pointing to U.S. political and economic programs as the cause of the blowback, most liberal leaders are on the defensive. Only Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, is pointing to the real roots of America's foreign policy and domestic crises. In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, his opponent, Hillary Clinton, continues to push for more military intervention in the Middle East and is reluctant to finger Wall Street as the source of the country's economic troubles.
The country seems headed towards an even less liberal democratic order than now exists -- one marked by more religious intolerance, more restrictions on civil liberties, and more immigration rules designed to keep out migrants. And that, as Chalmers Johnson so presciently warned, was really the ultimate blowback.
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next. It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk. Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. |
When the late Chalmers Johnson introduced the word "blowback" to describe the adverse consequences of Washington's actions in the world, he wasn't referring simply to the victims of U.S. imperial interventions striking back on American soil. More importantly, he saw the resulting destabilization of the American democratic process as the most dangerous blowback of all.
Seen in this light, Donald Trump's "M&Ms campaign" -- which relies heavily on broadsides against Mexicans and Muslims -- is unquestionably a disturbing blowback from Washington's policies abroad.
Trump launched his campaign with a plan to build a wall along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border while summarily deporting undocumented migrants and their families. After the San Bernardino shootings on December 2, in which a Muslim couple killed 14 people, Trump has pushed for the U.S. to stop accepting Muslim migrants and visitors to the United States.
These two proposals run directly against the U.S. self-image as a country of migrants, threatening to unleash a tide of hatred against Mexican-Americans and Muslims, and putting them on notice that their rights are fragile. Yet Trump's calls have resonated with large sectors of the Republican base, with extremist rhetoric now a staple not only of Trump's campaign but of his rivals' as well.
The Blowback from Iraq
The U.S. foreign policy blunders that created ISIS -- popular fear of which now drives U.S. domestic and foreign policy alike -- are relatively well documented.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq blew the lid off Iraqi society, which had been a pressure cooker of sectarian rivalries contained by the regime of Saddam Hussein. As a Shia-dominated regime took over in Baghdad, an extremist Sunni movement -- al-Qaeda in Iraq, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- rose to fight the government and its American sponsors.
Zarqawi found many receptive recruits among the hundreds of thousands of Sunni soldiers in Saddam's army, which had been disbanded by the Americans shortly after their takeover. Adherents were also nurtured in U.S. prison camps, among them future ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. After Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike, Baghdadi emerged as the leader of the group, which broke from al-Qaeda during the Syrian civil war and began calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS -- later shortened to just the Islamic State.
At first, ISIS was seen by western intelligence as focused mainly on establishing a caliphate in the Middle East, for which it undertook a sophisticated international recruitment campaign online. Then concern developed that ISIS was not simply recruiting young people from Europe and the U.S. to fight in Iraq or Syria, but training them to be sent back to perform terrorist acts in their home countries.
The Paris massacre in mid-November, which saw a handful of shooters and bombers kill some 130 people in a sophisticated coordinated operation, was seen as the ultimate blowback. That is, until the San Bernardino shooting two weeks later, which U.S. authorities saw as the scariest blowback of all: shooters carrying out uncoordinated individual actions inspired by ISIS propaganda disseminated online.
The Mexican Blowback 1: The CIA Connection
The blowback process from Mexico is less well known but equally well documented. One trigger, as in Iraq, was political intervention.
The Mexican drug syndicates were relatively small-time affairs until the 1980s. It was the Central Intelligence Agency that made them big-time during the Reagan administration's efforts to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, where it engaged in unconventional fundraising operations to evade congressional scrutiny.
One was the so-called Iran-Contra deal, where top Reagan administration officials facilitated the sale of weapons to Iran -- then the object of a U.S. arms embargo -- and then diverted part of the proceeds to fund the anti-Sandinista guerrillas known as the Contras.
Another method was to use Mexican drug syndicates.
In her brave expose on the rise of Mexican drug cartels, Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers, the celebrated Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernandez writes that when the U.S. Congress prohibited the use of government money to fund the overthrow of the Sandinistas, the CIA made a deal with the cartels to allow large-scale cocaine sales into the United States, but on condition that part of the proceeds would be diverted to support the Contras.
Indeed, the CIA's complicity in fostering the rise of the Mexican cartels, which eventually displaced the Colombian cartels as the main transporters of cocaine to the United States, has also been documented by a number of U.S. journalists. Among the key beneficiaries of the CIA connection was the Sinaloa Cartel, which eventually produced the lord of drug lords: "El Chapo" Guzman.
The Mexican Blowback II: NAFTA
The other source of the Mexican blowback was economic.
Following the Third World debt crisis in the early 1980s, the United States -- via the International Monetary Fund and World Bank -- began an ambitious effort to restructure the Mexican economy along free-market lines. The cutting back of government support for many agricultural services, along with a program of privatization designed to reverse communal ownership of land institutionalized by the Mexican Revolution, resulted in widespread suffering in the countryside, with many peasants thrown off their lands.
But even more devastating was Mexico's integration into the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which quickly became a program for dumping subsidized U.S. corn and other agricultural products into Mexico. According to a 2003 report of the Carnegie Endowment, imports of U.S. agricultural products under NAFTA threw 1.3 million farmers out of work.
For these peasants, the choice became either the shantytowns of Mexico City or "El Norte," with vast numbers opting for the latter. By 2006, roughly 10 percent of Mexico's population was living in the United States, 15 percent of its workforce was working there, and one in every seven Mexicans was migrating to the U.S. There was a strong element of truth in the sardonic comment that, owing to NAFTA's savage impact on peasant agriculture, Mexico's peasantry simply moved to the United States.
U.S. policies in Mexico and Central America thus had a dramatic dual blowback effect. On one side, the CIA godfathered a powerful cartel whose massive exports of cocaine devastated inner cities from Los Angeles to Washington, DC -- and whose violence has now killed or displaced tens of thousands of Mexicans. On the other side, U.S.-sponsored structural adjustment and NAFTA ruined Mexican peasant agriculture, leading to the migration of millions to the north, where they've become scapegoats for U.S. economic troubles.
Study after study has refuted claims that migrants take jobs away from non-migrant workers, or that they don't pay their taxes. Yet Mexican migrants are continually blamed by opportunistic politicians on the make, like Trump and his Republican colleagues.
The Ultimate Blowback
It's unfortunate that this opportunistic, demagogic game of playing on physical fear ("Muslim terrorists out to take your life") and economic fear ("Mexican workers out to steal your jobs") has resonated among so much of the country's white population. Trump, whose anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican rhetoric is most brazen, leads his opponents in the Republican presidential race by a wide margin in the surveys.
Instead of aggressively challenging the Republican candidates' inflamed rhetoric and pointing to U.S. political and economic programs as the cause of the blowback, most liberal leaders are on the defensive. Only Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, is pointing to the real roots of America's foreign policy and domestic crises. In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, his opponent, Hillary Clinton, continues to push for more military intervention in the Middle East and is reluctant to finger Wall Street as the source of the country's economic troubles.
The country seems headed towards an even less liberal democratic order than now exists -- one marked by more religious intolerance, more restrictions on civil liberties, and more immigration rules designed to keep out migrants. And that, as Chalmers Johnson so presciently warned, was really the ultimate blowback.
When the late Chalmers Johnson introduced the word "blowback" to describe the adverse consequences of Washington's actions in the world, he wasn't referring simply to the victims of U.S. imperial interventions striking back on American soil. More importantly, he saw the resulting destabilization of the American democratic process as the most dangerous blowback of all.
Seen in this light, Donald Trump's "M&Ms campaign" -- which relies heavily on broadsides against Mexicans and Muslims -- is unquestionably a disturbing blowback from Washington's policies abroad.
Trump launched his campaign with a plan to build a wall along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border while summarily deporting undocumented migrants and their families. After the San Bernardino shootings on December 2, in which a Muslim couple killed 14 people, Trump has pushed for the U.S. to stop accepting Muslim migrants and visitors to the United States.
These two proposals run directly against the U.S. self-image as a country of migrants, threatening to unleash a tide of hatred against Mexican-Americans and Muslims, and putting them on notice that their rights are fragile. Yet Trump's calls have resonated with large sectors of the Republican base, with extremist rhetoric now a staple not only of Trump's campaign but of his rivals' as well.
The Blowback from Iraq
The U.S. foreign policy blunders that created ISIS -- popular fear of which now drives U.S. domestic and foreign policy alike -- are relatively well documented.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq blew the lid off Iraqi society, which had been a pressure cooker of sectarian rivalries contained by the regime of Saddam Hussein. As a Shia-dominated regime took over in Baghdad, an extremist Sunni movement -- al-Qaeda in Iraq, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- rose to fight the government and its American sponsors.
Zarqawi found many receptive recruits among the hundreds of thousands of Sunni soldiers in Saddam's army, which had been disbanded by the Americans shortly after their takeover. Adherents were also nurtured in U.S. prison camps, among them future ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. After Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike, Baghdadi emerged as the leader of the group, which broke from al-Qaeda during the Syrian civil war and began calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS -- later shortened to just the Islamic State.
At first, ISIS was seen by western intelligence as focused mainly on establishing a caliphate in the Middle East, for which it undertook a sophisticated international recruitment campaign online. Then concern developed that ISIS was not simply recruiting young people from Europe and the U.S. to fight in Iraq or Syria, but training them to be sent back to perform terrorist acts in their home countries.
The Paris massacre in mid-November, which saw a handful of shooters and bombers kill some 130 people in a sophisticated coordinated operation, was seen as the ultimate blowback. That is, until the San Bernardino shooting two weeks later, which U.S. authorities saw as the scariest blowback of all: shooters carrying out uncoordinated individual actions inspired by ISIS propaganda disseminated online.
The Mexican Blowback 1: The CIA Connection
The blowback process from Mexico is less well known but equally well documented. One trigger, as in Iraq, was political intervention.
The Mexican drug syndicates were relatively small-time affairs until the 1980s. It was the Central Intelligence Agency that made them big-time during the Reagan administration's efforts to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, where it engaged in unconventional fundraising operations to evade congressional scrutiny.
One was the so-called Iran-Contra deal, where top Reagan administration officials facilitated the sale of weapons to Iran -- then the object of a U.S. arms embargo -- and then diverted part of the proceeds to fund the anti-Sandinista guerrillas known as the Contras.
Another method was to use Mexican drug syndicates.
In her brave expose on the rise of Mexican drug cartels, Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers, the celebrated Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernandez writes that when the U.S. Congress prohibited the use of government money to fund the overthrow of the Sandinistas, the CIA made a deal with the cartels to allow large-scale cocaine sales into the United States, but on condition that part of the proceeds would be diverted to support the Contras.
Indeed, the CIA's complicity in fostering the rise of the Mexican cartels, which eventually displaced the Colombian cartels as the main transporters of cocaine to the United States, has also been documented by a number of U.S. journalists. Among the key beneficiaries of the CIA connection was the Sinaloa Cartel, which eventually produced the lord of drug lords: "El Chapo" Guzman.
The Mexican Blowback II: NAFTA
The other source of the Mexican blowback was economic.
Following the Third World debt crisis in the early 1980s, the United States -- via the International Monetary Fund and World Bank -- began an ambitious effort to restructure the Mexican economy along free-market lines. The cutting back of government support for many agricultural services, along with a program of privatization designed to reverse communal ownership of land institutionalized by the Mexican Revolution, resulted in widespread suffering in the countryside, with many peasants thrown off their lands.
But even more devastating was Mexico's integration into the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which quickly became a program for dumping subsidized U.S. corn and other agricultural products into Mexico. According to a 2003 report of the Carnegie Endowment, imports of U.S. agricultural products under NAFTA threw 1.3 million farmers out of work.
For these peasants, the choice became either the shantytowns of Mexico City or "El Norte," with vast numbers opting for the latter. By 2006, roughly 10 percent of Mexico's population was living in the United States, 15 percent of its workforce was working there, and one in every seven Mexicans was migrating to the U.S. There was a strong element of truth in the sardonic comment that, owing to NAFTA's savage impact on peasant agriculture, Mexico's peasantry simply moved to the United States.
U.S. policies in Mexico and Central America thus had a dramatic dual blowback effect. On one side, the CIA godfathered a powerful cartel whose massive exports of cocaine devastated inner cities from Los Angeles to Washington, DC -- and whose violence has now killed or displaced tens of thousands of Mexicans. On the other side, U.S.-sponsored structural adjustment and NAFTA ruined Mexican peasant agriculture, leading to the migration of millions to the north, where they've become scapegoats for U.S. economic troubles.
Study after study has refuted claims that migrants take jobs away from non-migrant workers, or that they don't pay their taxes. Yet Mexican migrants are continually blamed by opportunistic politicians on the make, like Trump and his Republican colleagues.
The Ultimate Blowback
It's unfortunate that this opportunistic, demagogic game of playing on physical fear ("Muslim terrorists out to take your life") and economic fear ("Mexican workers out to steal your jobs") has resonated among so much of the country's white population. Trump, whose anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican rhetoric is most brazen, leads his opponents in the Republican presidential race by a wide margin in the surveys.
Instead of aggressively challenging the Republican candidates' inflamed rhetoric and pointing to U.S. political and economic programs as the cause of the blowback, most liberal leaders are on the defensive. Only Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, is pointing to the real roots of America's foreign policy and domestic crises. In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, his opponent, Hillary Clinton, continues to push for more military intervention in the Middle East and is reluctant to finger Wall Street as the source of the country's economic troubles.
The country seems headed towards an even less liberal democratic order than now exists -- one marked by more religious intolerance, more restrictions on civil liberties, and more immigration rules designed to keep out migrants. And that, as Chalmers Johnson so presciently warned, was really the ultimate blowback.
"Imagine if federal worker unions and Democratic Party officials showed up at the plant gate of a company that was about to close its doors," said one labor advocate recently. "Why aren't the Democrats doing this?"
Congressman Ro Khanna is raising the alarm over mass layoffs in the U.S. economy resulting from the failed economic policies of President Donald Trump, including over 4,000 factory workers who lost their jobs this week due to firings or plant closures.
On Thursday, automaker Stellantis, citing conditions created by Trump's tariffs, announced temporary layoffs for 900 workers, represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW). "The affected U.S. employees," reported CNN, "work at five different Midwest plants: the Warren Stamping and Sterling Stamping plants in Michigan, as well as the Indiana Transmission Plant, Kokomo Transmission Plant and Kokomo Casting Plant, all in Kokomo, Indiana."
In a social media thread on Saturday night, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—a lawmaker who has advocating loudly, including in books and in Congress, for an industrialization policy that would bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States—posted a litany of other layoffs announced recently as part of the economic devastation and chaos unleashed by Trump as well as conditions that reveal how vulnerable U.S. workers remain.
"This week," Khann wrote, "19 factories had mass layoffs, 15 closed, and 4,134 factory workers across America lost their jobs. Cleveland-Cliffs laid off 1,200 workers in Michigan and Minnesota as they deal with the impact of Trump's tariffs on steel and auto imports."
"We need jobs and currently at this time, the majority of the companies that we work with and represent our members at are not hiring." —Mark DePaoli, UAW
For union leaders representing those workers at Cleveland-Cliffs, they said "chaos" was the operative word. "Chaos. You, know? A lot of questions. You've got a lot of people who worked there a long time that are potentially losing their job," Bill Wilhelm, a servicing representative and editor with UAW Local 600, told local ABC News affiliate WXYZ-Channel 7.
The United Auto Workers says the layoff fund set aside for those losing their jobs won't last long and find them new jobs of that quality will not be easy. "Our first concern will be to look around at all the companies where we have members and see if we can find jobs," said the local's 1st vice president Mark DePaoli. "I mean, jobs are going to be the key. We need jobs and currently at this time, the majority of the companies that we work with and represent our members at are not hiring."
The pain of workers in families in Dearborn, as indicated by Khanna's thread, is just the tip of the iceberg. In post after post, he cataloged a stream of new layoffs impacting workers nationwide and across various sectors:
With public sector workers being fired in massive numbers nationwide due to the blitzkrieg unleashed by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, private sector workers are no stranger to mass layoffs within a U.S. economy dominated by corporate interests and union density still at historic lows.
Les Leopold, executive director of the Labor Institute who has been sounding the alarm for years about the devastation associated with mass layoffs, wrote recently about how the situation is even worse than he previously understood. On top of existing corporate greed and the stock buyback phenomena driving many of the mass layoffs in the private sector, Trump's mismanagement of tariff and trade policy is almost certain to make things worse, triggering more job losses in addition to higher costs on consumer goods.
In order to combat Trump, Leopold wrote last month, "Democrats should take a page from Trump and put job protection on the top of their agenda. As tariffs bite and cause job destruction, the Democrats should show up and support those laid-off workers."
Instead of simply calling Trump's tariffs "insane," which many rightly have, the Democrats "should call them job-killing tariffs," advised Leopold. "As prices rise, they can blame Trump for that as well."
With Trump's economic policies coming into fuller view this, the picture is bleak for businesses large and small—and that means more pain for workers.
As Axios' Ben Berkowitz reported Saturday. "When everything gets more expensive everywhere because of tariffs, that starts a cycle for businesses, too — one that might end with layoffs, bankruptcies, and higher prices for the survivors' customers," he explained. "The cycle is just starting now, but the pain is immediate."
The "big picture," Berkowitz continued, is this:
The stock market is not the economy, but if you want a decent proxy for Main Street businesses, look at the Russell 2000, a broad measure of the stock market's small companies across industries.
—It's down almost 20% this year alone.
—That in and of itself doesn't make a business turn the lights off, but it says something about public confidence in their prospects.
—"The market is like a real time poll ... this is going to impact all businesses in one way or another undoubtedly," Ken Mahoney of Mahoney Asset Management wrote Friday.
On the question of silence and who will stand up for American workers—whether in the public or private sector—it's not clear who will emerge as their true defender.
"Imagine if federal worker unions and Democratic Party officials showed up at the plant gate of a company that was about to close its doors to finance hefty stock buybacks for its billionaire owners," Leopold wrote in early March. "A show of support for their fellow layoff victims and a unity message aimed at stopping billionaire job destruction would be simple to craft and easy to share. It would be news."
"Why aren't the Democrats doing this?" he asked.
"Thank you to the hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country who are standing up and speaking out for our voting rights, fundamental freedoms, and essential services like Social Security and Medicare."
In communities large and small across the United States on Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people collectively took to the streets to make their opposition to President Donald Trump heard.
The people who took part in the organized protests ranged from very young children to the elderly and their message was scrawled on signs of all sizes and colors—many of them angry, some of them funny, but all in line with the "Hands Off" message that brought them together.
"Thank you to the hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country who are standing up and speaking out for our voting rights, fundamental freedoms, and essential services like Social Security and Medicare," said the group Stand Up America as word of the turnout poured in from across the country.
A relatively small, but representative sample of photographs from various demonstrations that took place follows.
Demonstrators gather on Boston Common, cheering and chanting slogans, during the nationwide "Hands Off!" protest against US President Donald Trump and his advisor, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, in Boston, Massachusetts on April 5, 2025. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP)
"Everyone involved in this crime against humanity, and everyone who covered it up, would face prosecution in a world that had any shred of dignity left."
A video presented to officials at the United Nations on Friday and first made public Saturday by the New York Times provides more evidence that the recent massacre of Palestinian medics in Gaza did not happen the way Israeli government claimed—the latest in a long line of deception when it comes to violence against civilians that have led to repeated accusations of war crimes.
The video, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), was found on the phone of a paramedic found in a mass grave with a bullet in his head after being killed, along with seven other medics, by Israeli forces on March 23. The eight medics, buried in the shallow grave with the bodies riddled with bullets, were: Mustafa Khafaja, Ezz El-Din Shaat, Saleh Muammar, Refaat Radwan, Muhammad Bahloul, Ashraf Abu Libda, Muhammad Al-Hila, and Raed Al-Sharif. The video reportedly belonged to Radwan. A ninth medic, identified as Asaad Al-Nasasra, who was at the scene of the massacre, which took place near the southern city of Rafah, is still missing.
The PRCS said it presented the video—which refutes the explanation of the killings offered by Israeli officials—to members of the UN Security Council on Friday.
"They were killed in their uniforms. Driving their clearly marked vehicles. Wearing their gloves. On their way to save lives," Jonathan Whittall, head of the UN's humanitarian affairs office in Palestine, said last week after the bodies were discovered. Some of the victims, according to Gaza officials, were found with handcuffs still on them and appeared to have been shot in the head, execution-style.
The Israeli military initially said its soldiers "did not randomly attack" any ambulances, but rather claimed they fired on "terrorists" who approached them in "suspicious vehicles." Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an IDF spokesperson, said the vehicles that the soldiers opened fire on were driving with their lights off and did not have clearance to be in the area. The video evidence directly contradicts the IDF's version of events.
As the Times reports:
The Times obtained the video from a senior diplomat at the United Nations who asked not to be identified to be able to share sensitive information.
The Times verified the location and timing of the video, which was taken in the southern city of Rafah early on March 23. Filmed from what appears to be the front interior of a moving vehicle, it shows a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck, clearly marked, with headlights and flashing lights turned on, driving south on a road to the north of Rafah in the early morning. The first rays of sun can be seen, and birds are chirping.
In an interview with Drop Site News published Friday, the only known paramedic to survive the attack, Munther Abed, explained that he and his colleagues "were directly and deliberately shot at" by the IDF. "The car is clearly marked with 'Palestinian Red Crescent Society 101.' The car's number was clear and the crews' uniform was clear, so why were we directly shot at? That is the question."
The video's release sparked fresh outrage and demands for accountability on Saturday.
"The IDF denied access to the site for days; they sent in diggers to cover up the massacre and intentionally lied about it," said podcast producer Hamza M. Syed in reaction to the new revelations. "The entire leadership of the Israeli army is implicated in this unconscionable war crime. And they must be prosecuted."
"Everyone involved in this crime against humanity, and everyone who covered it up, would face prosecution in a world that had any shred of dignity left," said journalist Ryan Grim of DropSite News.