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colonialism
We Should Fear More Than Ebola
While we should all fear and work to stop this outbreak, we should also be willing to fear and confront the conditions that enabled its devastation.
Jun 21, 2026
As Congo faces the world’s third-largest Ebola outbreak, treatment centers have been attacked, masks and boots are running out, and entire communities are left vulnerable amid ongoing conflict and international neglect. This disaster is possible due to centuries of exploitation that amplifies the spread. The trail of inhumanity and structural violence is very scary and needs to end.
History shows that this country has been ravaged by colonial violence and foreign profiteering. Under King Leopold II of Belgium, an estimated 10 million Congolese people were murdered, mutilated, and terrorized as rubber and ivory were extracted for enormous profit. As a matter of policy and to enforce quotas, colonizers cut off limbs and heads.
Congo was also plundered by the transatlantic slave trade, which kidnapped, displaced, and enslaved millions of Congolese people.
Later, global demand for diamonds, gold, coltan, and other conflict minerals remade the region into a site of ongoing wars and labor exploitation. Much of this extraction still occurs through artisanal mining, a form of labor whereby individuals risk their lives to extract these valuable and raw natural resources under dangerous conditions.
The extreme situation in Congo did not develop in a vacuum; rather, it has formed from centuries of cruel and callous structural-based and enduring violence.
Cobalt, a rare and toxic metal essential to smartphones, electric vehicles, AI, and other technologies, reveals this contradiction at the center of our global economy. Our demand for these goods relies on the same brutal dynamics that have played out for centuries in this land: environmental harm, contamination of land and water, child labor, gender and sexual-based violence, and the exploitation of class under-resourced people of color in Congo. Wealthier people get the goods while the output biases in our systems of production allow us distance and plausible deniability in the face of untold suffering. When we look at our own commodity chains, the often hidden trails of our batteries and other electronic products in time and space before they got into our hands, we can trace many of our products to Congo. We are materially connected, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Congo has an estimated $24 trillion in untapped natural reserves. It is one of the most inherently valuable places on Earth. Yet, due to these longstanding and asymmetrical power relations, it is simultaneously extremely vulnerable. In 2020, 85.3% of the population in Congo lived on less than $3 a day. By 2026, projections estimate that fully 94.9% of the population will be at or below this international poverty threshold.
But, it doesn't have to be this way. We can do more than express fear and enforce travel bans and restrictions.
We can understand the Ebola outbreak as a medical crisis shaped by structural violence in which we are all complicit.
If we can recognize how we are connected to these systems, then we can take responsibility and action to change them. We can reinvest in funding the United Nations and support long-term healthcare infrastructure. We can become more socially and environmentally sustainable by holding corporations and governments accountable for exploitative labor and harmful environmental practices. We can demand more ethical and transparent supply chains. We can recognize that racism and environmental racism enable this disproportionate harm and take steps to do better. We can vote for people who have a world systems view, who understand that global trade, politics, and public health are connected. Leaders of this era need to understand that what we do, and how we do it, matter in life-and-death ways for people beyond our local contexts.
The extreme situation in Congo did not develop in a vacuum; rather, it has formed from centuries of cruel and callous structural-based and enduring violence. This cycle can end, if only we can align our shared values of more sustainable and equitable practices with our political will.
A virus with a potential mortality rate of 90% should concern us all. We should all fear and work to stop this outbreak. We should also be willing to fear and confront the conditions that enabled its devastation. And, we need to engage in the transformative justice required to facilitate sustainable social and environmental ways rather than those of depravity.
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After Eliminating USAID, Trump Is Exploiting Need To Steal Africa’s Resources
From Ghana to South Africa, the Trump administration maliciously leverages human suffering to continue the centuries-long exploitation and systematic theft of Africa’s resources.
May 13, 2026
On May 4, Zambian Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe announced that negotiations with the US regarding critical health services and minerals have been suspended due to the Trump administration’s “unacceptable” terms.
For Haimbe, this includes: first, the Trump administration’s proposed health memorandum of understanding (MOU) requires that Zambia turn over health data to the US “in violation of our citizen’s right to privacy.”
Second, the US demands “preferential treatment of US companies over Zambia’s critical minerals.” Haimbe rejects this. He contends, “the Zambian government rightfully takes the view, first and foremost, that Zambians must have a say on how her critical minerals are used, and second that no one strategic partner is to be treated preferentially to others.”
Third, and perhaps most crucially, is “the coupling of the two agreements and frameworks to one another such that the conclusion of the minerals agreement is made conditional to the conclusion of the Health MOU.” The US is effectively demanding privileged access to Zambia’s abundant supply of copper, lithium, and cobalt—all critical for the development of AI and modern technologies—in exchange for health funding.
The only ones who benefit from forcing Zambia to trade raw minerals and data for health services are tech companies and the Trump family businesses.
This is not an isolated incident. As of March 2026, at least 24 African countries have agreed to similarly controversial health agreements with the US. Zambia, Ghana, and Zimbabwe are the only African nations thus far to reject the Trump administration’s coercive demands.
In those cases, concerns about data management and control similarly derailed negotiations. Arnold Kavaarpuo, executive director of Ghana’s Data Protection Commission, explained, “The proposed data sharing agreement looked at access not only to health data sets, but also to metadata, dashboards, reporting tools, data models, and data dictionaries.” It would have allowed up to 10 US entities access to this data without any prior approval from the Ghanese government.
Similarly, the US was demanding that Zimbabwe turn over any data it collects about pathogens causing outbreaks. Zimbabwe would not, however, be guaranteed access to any vaccines, treatments, diagnostics, or medical innovations that might result from this shared data. As Ndabaningi Nick Mangwana, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information, Publicity, and Broadcasting Services, remarked: “In essence, our nation would provide the raw materials for scientific discovery without any assurance that the end products would be accessible to our people should a future health crisis emerge. The United States, meanwhile, was not offering reciprocal sharing of its own epidemiological data with our health authorities.”
These kinds of take-it-or-leave-it proposals represent the Trump administration’s strong-arm approach to global health funding. Instead of foreign aid, President Donald Trump offers two options: a crooked deal or death.
This has been their goal from the start. Throughout his second term, President Donald Trump has taken several measures aimed at weakening foreign aid and humanitarian programs. This includes: dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID); withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO) and 66 international organizations, including the United Nations Population Fund, which addresses sexual and reproductive health; as well as diverting funds away from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which supports HIV prevention, care, and treatment worldwide. Each of these actions deliberately endangers the lives of millions of people around the world—the cruelty really is the point.
From Ghana to South Africa, the Trump administration maliciously leverages human suffering to continue the centuries-long exploitation and systematic theft of Africa’s resources. Here, foreign aid has only one value: an exchange value.
Indeed, on April 27, at an event hosted at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and attended by major corporations including Google, Goldman Sachs, and Palantir, US Ambassador to the UN Michael Waltz formally announced the launch of the “Trade Over Aid” initiative. This is a self-described “international economic development vision built on free markets.” It is premised on the idea that, unlike capitalism, humanitarianism and providing direct aid only create “dependency, inefficiency, and corruption.” As Waltz remarked, “free market principles remain the best proven path to lasting prosperity with better and more permanent results than any of the alternatives.”
On April 30, outgoing US Ambassador to Zambia, Michael Gonzalez, echoed these remarks. He accused the Zambian government of widespread corruption and “nationwide theft of US provided medicines.” He contended that, “For decades, the US relationship with Zambia was one centered around aid.” This “unrequited relationship” is no longer tenable—“going forward, the benefits of our relationship must be mutual.” Gonzalez continued, “We know that while you pursue a Zambia First agenda and we pursue America First, we are still able together to achieve something notably better for our countries.”
This emphasis on market solutions overlooks that capitalist exchanges always produce winners and losers. Competition, not cooperation, is the ethos of the proverbial free market. There is no “together” when “America First” is pitted against “Zambia First.” Instead of “lasting prosperity,” the only “permanent results” are widening inequalities between the haves and the have-nots.
And to be clear, the winners here are neither Americans nor Africans. Americans will be forced to bear the social, economic, and environmental costs of more data centers, AI-driven layoffs, and AI-powered surveillance. Zambia and other African nations will see their natural resources stolen and the bodies of their citizens exploited.
No, the only ones who benefit from forcing Zambia to trade raw minerals and data for health services are tech companies and the Trump family businesses. It is worth noting that Trump and his children have raked in billions from their investments in cryptocurrency, AI, and data centers.
What the Trump administration is offering is no more than colonialism dressed as humanitarianism. Foreign aid should never be manipulated for profit or political power. We must reject capitalist schemes like “Trade Over Aid.”
Instead, we must focus on building institutions that guarantee the right to healthcare for all. This is not simply an act of charity. As every pandemic makes patently clear, ensuring that everyone has access to health services benefits everyone. In the end, we must recognize that healthcare is a human right and a collective good. Ignoring this puts us all at risk.
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7 Nonnegotiable Demands to Confront the New Scramble for Africa
As Macron launches his "green" charm offensive in Nairobi, Africa must move beyond being a passive host.
May 10, 2026
In a maneuver dripping with historical irony and geopolitical desperation, French President Emmanuel Macron is set to land in Nairobi on May 11. He will be in Kenya to co-host the “Africa Forward Summit: Africa-France Partnership for Innovation and Growth.” To the uninitiated, the title suggests a progressive leap into a shared future.
However, to those who have watched the sun set on Françafrique in the West, the subtext is clear: Having been unceremoniously evicted from its traditional "stomping grounds" in the Sahel, Paris is pitching its tent in East Africa, hunting for new deals to cover the hemorrhaging fortunes of a dying empire. Ahead of his arrival—incidentally on the Ides of March—three French warships docked at the port of Mombasa, carrying with them over 800 military personnel. They were riding on the wave of newfound defense cooperation between the governments of Kenya and France.
The pact focused on maritime security, intelligence cooperation, peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and “any other defense or security-related areas of cooperation defined by mutual agreement between parties.” Through this pact, France now has a new hunting ground in East Africa, complete with boots on the ground, sea, and air. Kenya’s 142,400 square kilometers of Exclusive Economic Zone in the Indian Ocean, reputed for riches in fish, oil and gas, is in for a rude shock.
The irony is almost pathological. For over a century, France treated West Africa as a private warehouse. It did not merely colonize; it plundered, looted, and systematically attempted to dismantle the resilient African civilizations that predated its arrival. Its "assimilation" policy remains the most abhorrent, ignoble of colonial concepts; a cultural and political mis-philosophy designed to supplant African languages, customs, and identities with French surrogates.
Africa must stay circumspect. The convergence of military signalling and corporate presence must worry all countries participating in Nairobi. They must watch out for unequal relationships under new language.
When other colonial powers were loosening—however reluctantly—their grip, France was tightening its hold through a web of lopsided financial and military pacts.
With the rising tide of political "wokeness" across the continent, however, France now finds itself sorely ostracized, and endangered. Yet, rather than offering atonement, the French leadership has chosen to grandstand. The mask slipped definitively earlier this year when Macron, frustrated by the anti-French revolts sweeping through former colonies, dropped the pretense of diplomacy. “I think someone forgot to say thank you,” he remarked, with the chilling entitlement of a landlord demanding gratitude for a house he broke into.
Fast forward five months, and this same "savior" is now knocking on East Africa’s door, hat in hand, seeking a "new partnership built on equal ground."
The sudden pivot is driven by a cold reality: France’s "green" future is powered by African minerals. While the lights of Paris stayed bright on the back of Niger’s uranium, Africa remained in the dark.
But as the Nairobi summit approaches, Africa must move beyond being a passive host. If Macron and his European contemporaries truly seek a partnership of equals, they must meet a set of nonnegotiable demands that protect African interests, specifically within the environment and energy sectors.
First, a mandate for local beneficiation and value addition. Africa will no longer be a mere pit stop for raw material extraction. The Nairobi summit must establish a framework where no critical mineral—lithium, cobalt, or uranium—leaves the continent in its raw state.
Africans must demand that French and European companies invest in local processing plants and refineries. If the "Green Transition" requires African minerals, then the "Green Industrialization" must happen on African soil, creating African jobs and keeping the value chain within our borders.
Second, total reform of the financial architecture and the CFA Franc. For a nation that has enforced financial slavery through the CFA Franc since 1945, Macron’s talk of "financial reform" must be met with skepticism.
Africa must demand the total dismantling of the colonial financial umbilical cord. Africa requires a global financial system that does not penalize African nations with "sovereign risk" premiums that make green energy projects three times more expensive here than in Europe. It must demand the unconditional return of foreign reserves held in Paris and a shift toward independent, African-led monetary policies.
Third, energy sovereignty over "green exportation." France proposes to "decarbonize" Africa, yet many of our nations have barely "carbonized" to begin with. African “partners” must demand energy justice. This means the right to achieve universal electrification. Africa must reject a "Green Deal" that forces Africa to export its renewable energy (like green hydrogen) to Europe while her own hospitals and schools remain off the grid.
African energy needs must be met first; European exports come second.
Fourth, technology transfer, not just licensing. True innovation is not found in buying French software; it is found in owning the source code. The Nairobi summit must secure commitments for the unconditional transfer of green technologies. Africa should not be a "market" for European patents; it must be a co-owner of the intellectual property that will define the 21st century.
Fifth, climate reparations and debt cancellation. Already, France is active in "debt-for-development" swaps. Africa must demand that these are not treated as "gifts" but as partial down payments on a century of ecological and economic debt. Africa should also insist on total cancellation of debts that were accrued through colonial-era structures. Climate finance must be provided as grants, not loans that further burden Africa’s children for a climate crisis they did not create.
Sixth, accountability for multinational conglomerates. Total Energies, Orano, and Eramet—over 60 CEOs from French corporations will be attending—must answer tough questions at the summit. They ought to answer for their extractive interests that have historically disadvantaged the continent. Across Africa, communities have borne the environmental, social, and economic costs of such operations, with countries like Mozambique offering stark reminders of the consequences.
The companies must agree to be held to African environmental standards, not just French ones. Africa should pitch for a legal framework that allows communities to sue French corporations in both African and French courts for environmental degradation and human rights abuses.
There can be no "partnership" where companies operate with impunity in the Global South while preaching "environmental and social governance" values in the North.
Seventh, an end to paternalistic "security" pacts. Finally, Africa demands an end to the "policing" of the continent. True peace and security come from economic dignity, not from the over 60 military interventions France has conducted since 1960 to protect its interests. Africa must demand the closure of foreign military bases that serve extractive interests and a shift toward supporting African-led, autonomous security architectures. If partnership means equality, then reciprocity is simple—every French troop granted access and immunity in Africa should be matched by an African troop with the same rights in France
The "New Scramble" is couched in the language of "climate resilience" and "debt-for-development swaps." But beneath these green platitudes lie a hidden quest: to re-establish unfettered access to Africa’s critical minerals.
Africa must stay circumspect. The convergence of military signalling and corporate presence must worry all countries participating in Nairobi. They must watch out for unequal relationships under new language.
What France and its European partners fail to realize is that the "disinherited" continent has found its voice. Africa is no longer interested in being a marginal chapter in a European story, not even with a thousand summits. If President Macron wants a "thank you," he should start by returning what was stolen from Africa and respecting the sovereignty he so arrogantly claimed to have authored. The era of the "political orchestra" directed from Paris is over. The music has changed, and Africa is finally playing its own tune.
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'Territorial Theft With Better Branding': Israel Keeps Advancing Its 'Yellow Line' in Gaza
One Palestinian American researcher warned that Israel is seeking "annexation without legal burden."
Apr 22, 2026
Israel's gradual advancement of its "yellow line" to occupy more territory in the Gaza Strip is fueling concerns that it is seeking to effectively annex and colonize the majority of the territory without any formal agreement.
The Guardian reported on Wednesday that Israel has been steadily pushing the truce line to take control of more Palestinian territory in the six months since a "ceasefire" was reached in October.
The yellow line drawn on the ceasefire maps had Israeli troops in control of about 53% of Gaza's territory, cramming nearly 2 million displaced Palestinians into a territory less than half the size of the one they inhabited before.
But an analysis by Forensic Architecture shows Israel has unilaterally shifted the line westward over the past six months to the point where it controlled about 58% of the strip by December in an occupation zone that continues to grow.
(Graphic by The Guardian. Source: Planet Labs PBC, March 6, 2026.)
Palestinians living in Gaza reportedly woke up to learn that large yellow concrete blocks denoting the ceasefire line had suddenly moved and that they were now living in a free-fire area, where the Israeli military considers any Palestinian person or vehicle a legitimate target.
The Associated Press found in January that at least 77 Palestinians have been shot on sight when they've found themselves on the wrong side of the yellow line or even just near it, even though the line's boundaries are ill-defined and fluid.
They are among more than 730 Palestinians who have been killed since the "ceasefire" began in October, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which has accused Israel of thousands of violations.
According to The Guardian, some displaced people, such as those who lived near the Salah al-Din road, which spans the length of Gaza from north to south, suddenly found themselves targeted by Israeli forces, who also began demolishing homes and other buildings and constructing new ones.
Though the yellow line was supposed to be set up as a temporary measure under US President Donald Trump's "peace plan" for Gaza before control of the strip is transferred back to Palestinians, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff Eyal Zamir described it as a "new border" with Gaza back in December, around the time it reportedly began to move.
Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect and the head of Forensic Architecture’s research agency, recently wrote that the IDF appears to be turning this portion of Gaza into a permanent occupation zone.
The group found that seven new military outposts have been built along the yellow line, including one on what was once a cemetery.
While these areas began as "piles of earth and rubble" organized into crude enclosures, Weizman said that in recent months the roads leading to them have been asphalted, electricity poles have been erected, and buildings and communications towers have gone up inside the bases.
"The bases no longer appear to be the provisional arrangements that Trump’s ceasefire plan claims them to be, but permanent instruments of occupation," he wrote. "The newly paved roads connect the bases to a matrix of control that is linked to Israel’s road network and communications grid."
He noted that Israel's illegal settler movement, which has several powerful representatives in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been "lobbying hard for the Israeli government to start constructing settlements within the vastly expanded buffer zone."
Defense Minister Israel Katz said in December that Israel would "never leave Gaza" and spoke of plans to turn IDF military outposts into civilian settlements similar to those that have gradually taken over the West Bank through the violent displacement of Palestinian residents.
Ahmad Ibsais, Palestinian American law student and author of the newsletter State of Siege, wrote for the Al-Shabaka Palestinian Policy Network that by drawing a yellow line, Israel is seeking to consolidate its control over Palestinian land without formally annexing it—in other words, "annexation without legal burden."
"Borders are typically established through bilateral agreements, adjudication, or mutual recognition under international law," he wrote. "By contrast, the so-called Yellow Line in Gaza functions as a de facto military demarcation associated with ceasefire arrangements and enforced through Israeli operational control."
"It shapes civilian movement and territorial control without constituting a formally delimited boundary," he continued. "In effect, it constitutes territorial theft with better branding, operationalizing US President Donald Trump’s plan for the continued colonization of Gaza."
Israel declared a similar yellow line about 5-10 kilometers into Lebanese territory, giving the IDF effective control over around 55 towns and villages. The military has reduced many homes and entire villages south of this line to rubble in what Katz has described as a "Gaza model" being applied to Lebanon.
Assistant editor Maya Rosen recently wrote for Jewish Currents that the policy of conquering and settling Lebanon has become "mainstream" in Israeli politics and enjoys broad public support.
Ahmad Baydoun, an architect and open-source intelligence researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, has warned that with this land grab, Israel was seeking to take control of the valuable Qana Gas Field, which is estimated to be capable of producing between $20 billion-$40 billion worth of natural gas exports for Israel. In 2022, a maritime agreement brokered by the US established that control of the field belonged to Lebanon.
Like in Gaza, the Israeli military has forbidden the more than 600,000 Lebanese inhabitants of villages below the line or within a newly established "buffer zone" from returning indefinitely. Katz has said they'll be allowed to return once the "safety and security of the residents of the north [of Israel] is ensured."
Given that Israeli settler groups have already begun mapping out new settlements and advertising plots of land for sale in southern Lebanon, Weizman said Katz was making what is by design "an impossible demand" meant to entrench the land grab.
"This exemplifies the circular logic of Zionist settler-colonialism: settlements are built to mark and protect the state’s border, but that makes them vulnerable to attack, and so a buffer zone is established to protect them," he said. "Afterward, this buffer zone is itself settled to mark and protect the newly expanded borders, at which point another buffer zone becomes necessary."
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Esencia No Va: Protesting Neocolonial Capitalist Development in Puerto Rico
A movement is forming to defend the community and island against a project that would turn over a significant piece of Puerto Rico’s land to foreign billionaires, to serve their needs, not the needs of the Puerto Rican people.
Apr 08, 2026
On Saturday, March 28—No Kings Day in the US—an estimated 50,000 people marched in the streets of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico to protest plans for “Esencia,” a proposed huge, gated, luxury ocean-side development in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. The protest was spear-headed by Defiende a Cabo Rojo, a coalition of community, scientific, and cultural organizations, and was joined by 66 co-sponsoring groups from all over the island. A retired US professor of (radical) economics, I attended the protest with my friend Dimaris Acosta-Mercado, an activist in the anti-Esencia movement and professor of ecology at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez.
The $2.5 billion Esencia project, first proposed in May 2024, is a quintessential example of neocolonial capitalist development. It would create a tropical enclave for super-rich foreigners on 2,000 acres of land along a 3-mile stretch of beach in the southwest of the island, including 1,200 homes, 500 hotel accommodations, two golf courses, its own school, and an airport. Although it does not yet have building permits, the proposed project has already received generous tax credits and exemptions.
The Movement to Stop Esencia
The movement to stop Esencia views this issue in both class and territorial terms. Its goal is to defend the community and island against a project that would turn over a significant piece of Puerto Rico’s land to foreign billionaires, to serve their needs, not the needs of the Puerto Rican people. It builds on a history of successful struggles against previous development projects such as the Northern Corridor, mining in Adjuntas, and beachside construction in Rincon.
One of the movement’s core critiques of Esencia is the loss of public access to the beaches, which has happened with previous developments such as Dorado Beach and Palmas del Mar. Bad Bunny’s song, “What Happened to Hawaii,” has become a theme song for the movement, with its powerful chorus:
Thеy want to take my river and my beach too
They want my neighborhood and grandma to leave
No, don't let go of the flag nor forget the lelolai
'Cause I don't want them to do to you what happened to Hawaii
A second set of criticisms of the project focus on its negative ecological and environmental impact. As part of a team of academic researchers involved in the movement, my friend Dimaris’ critique focuses on the harm Esencia will do to endangered species, including birds, reptiles, snails, and plants that exist only in Puerto Rico, and to the critical habitat system that supports them. Other movement researchers predict that Esencia will cause shortages in the region’s water, already in short supply. A third critique emphasizes the area’s importance as an archaeological site.
The March Against Esencia: A Celebration of Life and Love
The march began at El Escambron, another public beach threatened with privatization. From there we marched along the coast of Old San Juan, stopping to rally at the Capitol Building, where the Puerto Rican Senate and House of Representatives meet, and then marched to the Governor’s mansion, La Fortaleza, for more protesting.
It is hard to capture in words the powerful anti-Esencia presence and statement that the march created. At the front of the protest were huge flags of Puerto Rico and Cabo Rojo. Soon after came a large paper mache model of a guabairo, a rare bird endangered by the project, carried overhead for the length of the protest, wings flapping. Marchers carried and wore a variety of printed and homemade posters denouncing the proposed project. Percussion—including drums, folding fans, kitchen pots, guiros—was omnipresent. The call and response chant of “Esencia No Va… Que No Va, Que No Va” (Esencia is a no-go, it shouldn’t go, it shouldn’t go) echoed throughout the march. Continual rhythmic chanting, drumming, singing, and dancing made the protest come alive as a potent force opposing the project. As a North American, I was touched to join in the familiar “El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido” chant and to sing “No Nos Pararon” (“they won’t stop us”) to the tune of “We shall not be moved.”
If we in the US and elsewhere are to use social strikes to retake control of our governments... we have much to learn from the joyful, creative protests of our Puerto Rican comrades.
Puerto Rican peoples are a mixture of African, Indigenous, and European heritage, and, as Dimaris put it, “It’s as if all our ancestry (was) coming alive and making peace in this land to protect it.” Indigenous heritage took center stage when the march stopped in front of the Capitol building, with the blowing of conch shells, chanting, calling in the directions, and leading an areito dance. And Afro-Puerto Rican ancestry was omni-present in the bombas and drumming.
One group wore purple T-shirts announcing “anti-patriarchal, feminista, lesbiana, trans, Caribena, Latinoamericana.” Another T-shirt depicted a plant and the words “sembrando rebeldias” (planting rebellions). Gay protesters snapped fans for percussion (one of their signature acts). The Puerto Rico Sierra Club was there, along with Para la Naturaleza, and AFSCME, and many other groups.
The protest had something I hadn’t experienced in the many many US demonstrations I have participated in since the 1960s: It was fun! It was actually a party, with masses of people dancing, drumming, chanting, singing, and reveling in the streets. It was a celebration of life—not only of Puerto Rico and being Puerto Rican, but also of standing up for Mother Earth, an affirmation of love, cooperation, art, and beauty by a diverse community organizing in self-defense and defense of nature, against the greed, displacement, ecological destruction, and extreme wealth inequality that Esencia embodies. Dimaris later told me that the protest resembled the spirit of Verano 2019, the 15-day protest strike which used creativity, art, and fun to topple Gov. “Ricky” Rosello, including evening dance parties in front of the governor’s mansion. If we in the US and elsewhere are to use social strikes to retake control of our governments, as Jeremy Brecher suggests, we have much to learn from the joyful, creative protests of our Puerto Rican comrades.
A final note. The Solidarity Economy movement uses the motto, “Resist and Build.” Movements such as the one opposing Esencia, which resist the take-over of our lands and lives, are key. Equally important are a growing number of efforts to build non-capitalist, community-based alternatives, which are sprouting up all around the world, such as Casa Pueblo and Plenitud in Puerto Rico, or, in the US, land development projects such as those of the Peoples’ Network for Land and Liberation.
In these dark times, here’s to inspiring one another as we resist and build, and to having fun as we do so! Esencia No Va!!!!!!
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More 'Beef' With Bobby: Meat and Masculinity
In 2026, the federal government is telling us how men should be men, with devastating effects on our health and planet.
Mar 17, 2026
In January 2026, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the Food and Drug Administration’s new inverted food pyramid to replace the Michelle Obama's “myplate” visualization. There is some good in the change: promoting whole foods and minimizing processed foods, as I noted in My “Beef” with Bobby. But the science ends here as RFK instead relies on bro-science. Taking his cue from the “manosphere” and MAHA wellness influencers, he emphasizes animal proteins over plant proteins. More on that in a moment.
Just one month after releasing the new food pyramid, RFK released a workout video with Kid Rock where the pair eat steaks, pump iron, and then drink raw milk in a hot tub together. It’s difficult to watch, but even more difficult to describe. Comedian Stephen Colbert called it “senior softcore that feels like dropping acid.”
RFK has long sought to prove his manliness. He has admitted to taking testosterone, while insisting, unconvincingly, that he’s not on steroids. The administration more broadly seems to have an obsessive and desperate need to demonstrate its masculine prowess. In fact, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s warrior mentality may have contributed to the US attacks on Iran. It has certainly contributed to his callous dismissal of human casualties. Both meanwhile defer to President Donald Trump’s allegedly off-the charts levels of testosterone.
These food policies and performative workouts might appear unrelated. But, a closer connection exists between beef, masculinity, and the American nation, one that has, in fact, twined since the country’s earliest days. RFK’s effort to Make American Healthy Again is mere revival of a longstanding American narrative.
For all its chest-thumping certainty, this administration’s relationship to masculinity looks less like confidence than anxiety, much like the frontier myth itself.
The idea that meat is manly can be traced to the cultural founding of the nation on the actual frontier. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the struggle to conquer the wilderness had fostered American virtues of independence, self-reliance, and democracy. Proving your manly virtue on the frontier made immigrants into American men as America became a virtuous nation. Declaring the closing of the frontier, Jackson lamented America’s ability to grow and innovate. Men would wither without the opportunity to test their mettle as the nation expanded.
Beef was central to imperial expansion on the frontier. Ranching not only justified the expropriation American Indian land, but beef products supplied to the US Army made expansion possible. By slaughtering to the brink of extinction the 50 million bison that roamed the Great Plains, they settled the “Indian question.” Historian Joshua Specht calls cattle “mobile colonizers.” Culturally, ranchers and cowboys justified the violence against American Indians in the interests of civilization. Central to this myth was the frontier man, bringing civilization to the feminized “vanishing Indian,” a curious paradox, to be sure, where Native Americans could be at once docile and violent.
Today we are left with an embarrassing historical echo. Protein as the final frontier of fitness influencers ironically returns us to the actual frontier in American history. Now we can see why RFK’s two provocations in the culture war of 2026 are related. Food has always been gendered and tied to nothing less than the ideals of the nation and what it means to be an American.
Today we see the same gendering of meat wrapped up with big business. Only un-American soy boys refuse to eat meat. Meat advertisements often demonstrate the masculinity of meat consumption by displaying oversexualized women cooking meat, implying that both women and animals are to be dominated and consumed by men.
There is of course no evidence that soy intake affects male hormones, or that meat consumption is required for elite athletic performance. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose character once said, “You hit like a vegetarian,” has more recently called for cutting back on meat, noting that it isn’t necessary for athletes and harms the planet. James Cameron’s documentary The Game Changers challenges the myth that animal protein is needed for physical strength and elite athletic performance. Cameron follows tennis stars, Olympians, and even the ultimate fighter James Wilks to see how plant protein permeates their diets. But the myth lives on, perpetrated by RFK’s shirtless workouts and emphasis on eating meat. And because the old adage “follow the money” seems to be guiding light for this administration, it should come as no surprise that the meat industry is also a major donor.
Still, the science on red meat consumption and its effects on our planet and health are clear. Red meat consumption reduces life expectancy by increasing risks of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and cancer. Cattle also consume much of the world’s arable land, leading to deforestation and increased greenhouse gas emissions. While beans and legumes make it into the dietary guidelines, they are entirely absent from the pyramid.
Despite the eagerness of the administration, Kid Rock, and MAHA followers to heed RFK’s food and exercise advice, many of these same figures recoiled when Michelle Obama tried to move toward nutrient-dense fruit and vegetables in school lunches. Republicans accused her of trying to impose a “nanny-state,” and bristled at her impudent attempt to shape what Americans choose to eat. Again, gender is at work in our food policies.
Despite claiming to restore “scientific integrity” and “common sense,” RFK ignores the government’s own "Scientific Report of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee," which consistently advocated plant-based sources of protein, especially beans and lentils while reducing the intake of red meat. The committee even suggested moving the “Beans, Peas, and Lentils Subgroup from the Vegetables Food Group to the Protein Foods Group.”
Cultural tropes can be hard to break, but it is time for a new generation of athletes and influencers to confront the wellness-to-fascism pipeline. Our secretary of health should not be making policy decisions on the basis of pseudoscience for the sake of winning a culture war. Nor should his leadership parrot “manosphere" talking points that openly embrace a hostility toward women and decry the feminization of Western society. This is nothing short of what one nutritionist called a "vibes-based policy disaster." For all its chest-thumping certainty, this administration’s relationship to masculinity looks less like confidence than anxiety, much like the frontier myth itself. Still, these performances should not require the rest of us to pay with our health and our planet for their fragile egos.
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Trump's White Nationalism Will Only Lead to Division, Poverty, and Mass Violence
The advice of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the European Union to adopt a white nationalist domestic and foreign policy and attempt to initiate a new round of colonialism is monstrous, both morally and in practical terms.
Mar 12, 2026
Under President Donald J. Trump, the United States has now become an engine for the promulgation of white nationalism. Not since the 1930s has such an ideology, which exalts those ethnic groups it codes as “white,” while denigrating all others, underpinned the domestic and foreign policies of a major world power.
Typically (for our moment), Trump’s recent National Security Strategy (NSS) depicted Europe as in distinct “civilizational decline” because of the European Union’s commitment to multiracial democracy and international humanitarian law. These days, thanks to its racial policies, the Trump team even finds a way to inject racial hatred into dry economic statistics, complaining that “Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP [gross domestic product]—down from 25% in 1990 to 14% today.”
A Mayor Named Khan
As it happens, though, on a per-person basis, Europeans are more than twice as wealthy today in real terms as they were 36 years ago. The dictum once cited by Mark Twain that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics” is exemplified in Trump’s National Security Strategy. In 1991, just two years before the European Union (EU) was first formed, the per-capita GDP there was $15,470 (in today’s dollars). In 2024, that figure was $43,305. What changed since then wasn’t that Europe began decaying, but that the well-being of the people in the global South, in what Trump dismisses as “shithole countries,” has actually also improved significantly, whether he likes it or not, changing Europe’s share of global GDP.
In his National Security Strategy, Trump admits, however, that Europe’s supposed economic degradation doesn’t bother him nearly as much as another issue: “This economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” thanks to Europe’s migration policies. In short, Trump’s government has now adopted a modernized version of the Nazi Great Replacement ideology, slamming “migration policies that are transforming the [European] continent and creating strife,” along with “cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”
The only thing that outstrips Trump’s Islamophobia is his horror of Black people.
Trump claims that he’s no longer sure Europeans will even remain European. He supposedly worries that, two decades from now, the continent will be unrecognizable and EU countries no longer capable of being Washington’s “reliable allies.” That barb is, of course, clearly aimed at Muslim immigrants to Europe, even though they are a distinct minority of those arriving there. In an interview about his NSS, Trump snidely remarked, “If you take a look at London, you have a mayor named Khan.” And he then went on to exclaim in horror that immigrants aren’t just coming from the Middle East, “they’re coming in from the Congo, tremendous numbers of people coming from the Congo.” In other words, the only thing that outstrips Trump’s Islamophobia is his horror of Black people.
Of course, he’s completely misinformed about immigration to Europe, which means his NSS is as well. As a start, the largest influx of people into the EU in recent few years has been 4.3 million Ukrainians. The major sources of immigration to Germany in 2024 were Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Syria, and India. For Spain, it was Colombia, Morocco, Venezuela, Peru, and Argentina. As for Europe’s future reliability, Trump has already said that he “can’t trust” Denmark, no matter that its population is solidly Lutheran and predominantly blond, because that country won’t give him Greenland. And since the president has expressed a willingness to break up the NATO alliance, if necessary, to add 57,000 Greenlanders to his feudal domains, his doubting of European dependability should be considered richly ironic.
Aryan Reliability
The underpinnings of Trump’s reasoning can (or at least should) be described as Nazi in style. After all, he’s assuming that the immigrants he loathes are inherently incapable of becoming Europeans and will make those countries intrinsically untrustworthy as allies of the United States. Of the EU countries, he recently asserted that “they’ll change their ideology, obviously, because the people coming in have a totally different ideology.” Yet British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, born in Southampton to an immigrant Indian-East African family of Hindu faith, was widely viewed as having restored British-US diplomatic relations after years of strain.
In reality, studies show that socioeconomic status, not national origin, best predicts how immigrants will vote. In Germany, the better-off Russian Germans, who far outnumber largely working-class Turkish Germans, tend to vote for right-of-center parties. Both groups, however, seem happy to participate in European politics in accordance with local norms. If, for Trump, the term “immigrants” in this context is a dog whistle for Muslims, it might be noted that 9 of the 22 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, that have been formally designated by Trump as “major non-NATO allies” are Muslim majority.
His foreign policy reasoning in that NSS eerily mirrors the crackpot logic of Adolf Hitler, who saw France as an enemy of Germany’s because it had allegedly fallen irretrievably under non-Aryan Jewish influence, and who held out hope in the 1920s and early 1930s that Aryan elements would prevail over Jewish ones in Britain, a country he preferred as a strategic partner because of the Germanic ancestry of part of its population. In Trump’s NSS, immigrant Europeans from Africa and the Middle East play the role that Jews did in Hitler’s thinking—that is, non-Aryan underminers of national integrity. Hitler’s conspiratorial racism was, of course, all too grimly insane, and so, too, is that of Trump’s NSS.
“Mongols and Negroes”
Central to the NSS is the Great Replacement. The idea, though not the phrase, goes back to 1900 when the French nationalist parliamentarian and novelist Maurice Barrès wrote, “Today, new French have slipped in among us… who want to impose on us their ways of feeling.” He warned of Jewish, Italian, and other immigrants. “The name of France might well survive,” he commented, but “the special character of our country would nevertheless be destroyed.” Amid a political crisis over the wrongful conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (of Jewish and Alsatian heritage) for supposed espionage for the German embassy, Barrès denounced the famed French novelist Émile Zola, a supporter of Dreyfus, as “not French” but a rootless cosmopolitan from a Venetian background.
Fifty years later, the French Nazi René Binet (1913-1957) coined the phrase “Great Replacement.” An ex-Communist, he had served as a Nazi collaborator during World War II in the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the Charlemagne paramilitary Protection Squadron (Schutzstaffel or SS). After the war, in his 1950 book Theory of Racism, he wrote in dismay about how Western Europe had been invaded by “Mongols and Negroes”—that is, by the Soviets and the Americans. He lamented that Jewish-dominated capital also supposedly controlled Europe (it didn’t, of course) and falsely alleged that Jewish CEOs were bringing in immigrants in a deliberate attempt to replace civilized white Europeans.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had it right when he said that Spain faces a choice between “being an open and prosperous country or a closed and poor one.”
Sadly enough, Binet’s ideas have been revived in this century by French thinkers and politicians. Renaud Camus published his 21st century version of the theory in 2010, entitling his book The Great Replacement. Such falsehoods were echoed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when American Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us” (and President Trump called the assembled protesters, as well as those who opposed them, “very fine people”). Camus came around to supporting like-minded politicians in the far-right French National Rally (formerly the National Front) party, led by Marine Le Pen, who also became a Trump ally. When a French court convicted her of embezzlement in 2025 and excluded her from politics for five years, Trump denounced the verdict and launched the slogan, “Free Marine Le Pen.” Holding Le Pen, a far-right racist politician, accountable to the rule of law is part of what Trump was complaining about in his NSS when he cited European “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”
Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had been a paratrooper in the ruthless Algerian War (1954-1962) that killed between half a million and a million Algerians in a bid to keep that country under French colonial domination. The elder Le Pen came to lead the newly founded National Front in 1972 and was surrounded by far-right figures who had collaborated with the Nazis. While the party reinvented itself under Marine Le Pen in 2017 as the National Rally and has moved slightly toward the center, many of its supporters harbor neo-Nazi ideas about racial purity, now typically aimed at Arab and Amazigh Muslims.
Forget 1776 and All That
The central concerns of that National Security Strategy now animate the Trump administration’s foreign policy. At the annual Munich Security Conference in early February, for instance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took up what the Victorian jingoist writer Rudyard Kipling once termed the White Man’s Burden, crowing that “for five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding.” He neglected to mention all the massacres, destruction, and looting that European colonialists perpetrated over those centuries. Belgium’s King Leopold II alone, for instance, instituted policies in the Congo from 1885 to 1908 that may have killed as many as 10 million people. That bloody episode inspired Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, in the final sentence of which the protagonist utters, “The horror! The horror!“
After the end of World War II in 1945, Rubio lamented, a Europe in ruins contracted. “Half of it,” he added, “lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.” He mourned that “the great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”
He also displayed a striking mixture of white nationalism and colonial nostalgia—and with it, an ignorance of the history of decolonization, which neither occurred only after 1945, nor was in the main communist led. After all, the United States launched its anti-colonial struggle in 1776. Most of Latin America was liberated from the Spanish Empire in the early 19th century by Simón Bolívar and other fighters who would have been characterized at the time as liberals. As for the post-World War II liberation movements, most leaders of former colonialized countries, including India, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal, and Sudan, among other places, tilted either to capitalism or to social democracy.
Marco Rubio’s mixing of white nationalism and colonial nostalgia is, of course, nothing new. A return of German colonies in Africa, lost in World War I to Britain and France, was among the Nazi regime’s most insistent demands in the late 1930s, and dreams of a new version of German imperialism in Africa were part of what was meant by the Third Reich.
Rubio has depicted decolonization as a failure of the European will to power. Most historians, on the other hand, point to the way their colonies mobilized for independence. Political scientists point to two crucial kinds of mobilization. The first was “social mobilization,” which involved urbanization, industrialization, and increased literacy. By 1945, ever more Asians and Africans were no longer illiterates living in small, disconnected villages. As for political mobilization, parties, chambers of commerce, and labor unions put millions of the previously colonized in the streets. New social classes of entrepreneurs, professionals, and workers demanded the right to control their own destinies.
And in the wake of World War II, attitudes were changing even among the colonial powers. The British public, for instance, could no longer be persuaded to spend money in an attempt to quell an India where the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had brought millions into the streets demanding independence. And while the Netherlands did fight viciously to roll back Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 (despite having itself been occupied by Germany during World War II), after four years of massacres, it was forced out. The impoverished French had no choice but to give up most of their African possessions, but in a sanguinary failure attempted to keep their colonies in Algeria and Vietnam by military force. American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a wiser man than Rubio, twisted French President Charles De Gaulle’s arm to get him out of Algeria lest the revolutionaries there turn to Moscow and Communism.
Kinder, Küche, Kirche
Given that history, the advice of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the European Union to adopt a white nationalist domestic and foreign policy and attempt to initiate a new round of European colonialism in the global South is monstrous indeed, both morally and in practical terms. Without immigration today, Europe would soon face Japan’s dilemma of rapid population loss, along with the loss of international economic and political power.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had it right when he said that Spain faces a choice between “being an open and prosperous country or a closed and poor one.” As for the white nationalist pronatalist dream of keeping women barefoot and pregnant in accordance with the old German slogan, Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church), it’s a chimera given the electoral power of women in today’s Europe (and the United States).
In reality, the European Union’s project of multicultural democracy has yielded enormous prosperity, while expanding and deepening human rights.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s cruel, heavily ICED anti-immigrant campaign has already hurt the American economy and Europeans would be deeply unwise to emulate it in any way, including colonially. The neoconservative project of rehabilitating American colonialism crashed and burned in this country’s disastrous 21st-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and won’t be aided by the present assault on Iran either) for reasons similar to those that made European colonialism impossible in the post-World War II period.
In reality, the European Union’s project of multicultural democracy has yielded enormous prosperity, while expanding and deepening human rights. Trump’s white nationalism, on the other hand, is a formula for division, poverty, and mass violence, as was demonstrated in the 1930s and 1940s when a form of that ideology was last tried in Europe.
And count on this: Trump and crew are going to give the phrase “the white man’s burden” a grim new meaning.
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Britain Is Complicit in US Imperial Aggression
Britain’s role in US wars during the Trump administration has been much more significant than many people realize.
Mar 12, 2026
Britain’s role in the recent machinations of the US empire has been central, despite going underreported and little criticized. Britain has a significant hand in the ongoing US war of aggression against Iran and its recent invasion of Venezuela. Britain’s empire and overseas bases, and associated intelligence and surveillance capabilities, are cornerstones of its contribution to these ongoing wars.
Just as Britain’s colonial bases in occupied Cyprus served an intelligence and surveillance role in the Gaza genocide, so to did they help surveil Iran and prepare intelligence in preparation for US attacks, and are now being used as a staging post for those attacks. The ongoing United Kingdom-Mauritius Chagos Islands deal and subsequent US-UK rift over Diego Garcia’s use in the attack on Iran show the potential for decolonial practice in international law and is a case that the US-UK Bases off Cyprus campaign can learn from.
Royal Air Force (RAF) Akrotiri has been very important in the US attacks on Iran to date. For example, it provided a base for air refueling planes that refueled the bombers that struck Iran’s nuclear sites in June last year, and the bases likely provided intelligence and surveillance support for this operation too. Between March and May last year, the base also refueled US bombers, which attacked Yemen, an attack in which the RAF also directly participated. The base is used for all UK bombing of Iraq and Syria, which still happens sometimes, and it was almost certainly an intelligence hub for the American support for the successful counterrevolution in Syria. British F-35s are currently stationed in Akrotiri, reportedly to conduct ELINT (electronic intelligence) against Iran, essentially to use their advanced sensors to gather intelligence on Iranian air defenses as part of the current war. Any strike on Iran would commence with SEAD (suppression of enemy air defense) operations, necessitating mapping those air defenses out beforehand, which is what the F-35s are doing.
Now the British government has allowed the use of the bases on Cyprus for attacks on Iran, despite earlier denying this. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the National Security Agency’s (NSA) main Middle Eastern intelligence base is in the British base area, which is extremely important to any military operations in the region. The NSA controls part of these bases more than GCHQ, meaning that there would be no oversight of US intelligence operations by the UK, let alone democratic accountability for the people of Britain or Cyprus to decide if they want this kind of thing happening on their land and in their political jurisdictions.
In the UK, we are facing the trumping of our own government and legal system by US imperial diktats, and our military and certainly this government, are choosing to actively promote it.
Britain’s role in US wars during the Trump administration has been much more significant than many people realize. Britain actually suspended Caribbean and Eastern Pacific-related intelligence sharing with the US in November 2025 because of the US strikes on fishing boats, which killed innocent people. The British state was briefing, ie, telling journalists anonymously, that this was because the strikes were illegal murders that Britain didn’t want to be implicated in legally, which was, of course, a self-interested position, not a moral one.
Yet by the start of this year, Britain had started to contribute to the Southern Spear mission directly, this time in relation to the oil blockade of Venezuela. Essentially, the UK drew a line between these different parts of US actions in the area, even though the tanker seizures are clearly illegal too. There were at least four examples where this is evidence of a direct British role in the seizure of tankers. Britain helped the US seize three tankers in the Caribbean with a total of 2.5 million barrels of oil—the M Sophia, the Olina, and the Sagitta—between January 7 and January 20. Britain contributed to this with surveillance flights, probably operating from British colonies in the Caribbean, from Florida, and from the Azores.
So once again, we see the intelligence and surveillance role that Britain plays in the imperial alliance; in lieu of a powerful navy, Britain seems to have specialized to an extent in its role. This type of activity is by its nature quite secretive—it would be politically difficult to have sent navy ships to interdict ships off Venezuela. But the surveillance contribution, enabled by the remaining empire’s geographical footprint, has not been picked up by the media here at all, and is also pretty unaccountable to parliament, and not subject to much democratic oversight. This, of course, mirrors Britain’s role in the Gaza genocide, where its surveillance contributions have been shrouded in secrecy and the details hidden even from members of Parliament who are supposed to have some oversight of the military or at least its participation in foreign wars.
The other case is that of the ship, the Bella 1, renamed the Marinera, which the US seized in the North Atlantic, between Iceland and Scotland, on January 7. This was a Russian-flagged tanker sailing from Venezuela to Russia. What happened here was more direct—US special forces flew to Britain, which was tracked by flight trackers following known special ops planes. Then, they undertook the seizure operation after flying from Britain in helicopters, and meeting US Navy ships. Britain provided more intense logistical and surveillance help in this instance, as it happened so close to Britain. The ship was stolen and brought to Scotland, and the 26 crew were kidnapped and falsely imprisoned in Scotland, with most being able to leave after the US had determined they were allowed to.
The captain and first mate of this ship, the captain being a Georgian citizen, were not allowed to go home by the US once detained in Scotland. The wife of the captain made an appeal to the Scottish courts, arguing that her husband was being illegally detained without the right to the proper extradition procedures. A Scottish court granted an interim interdict, an emergency injunction, prohibiting the removal of the captain from Scotland, while the case was heard and the courts made their decisions. However, immediately after that court decision, the very same night, the two men were taken from Scotland to a US Navy ship, which set sail for the US. A couple of days ago, the captain had his first court hearing in Puerto Rico, where he will be transferred to DC and put on trial for "preventing a lawful seizure" and failure to stop the vessel during the Coast Guard chase. The Scottish government condemned the US actions, but the Green Party of Scotland led a more serious analysis of the situation in the Scottish parliament, arguing that the US had basically illegally kidnapped people from Scotland, ignoring the courts.
There are a few things to pick up on here. Firstly, like all the US actions around Venezuela and the tankers, there was no legal basis for them to do any of this. A ship isn’t "illegal" or part of a "dark fleet" just because it’s "sanctioned" by one country. Venezuela and Russia are, in theory, sovereign nations that can conduct trade and sail ships between them; no one gets to randomly call any of that illegal. There is this pretense that somehow these sanctions represent international law, but they are just edicts by one country, with no relation to international law, treaties, the United Nations, or any multilateral decision-making body. In fact, Bella 1 was not even sanctioned by the UK, so what was the possible legal justification for the UK’s involvement in this?
The second part is the US flouting of Scottish and British law. Scotland has its own judicial system that is separate from the rest of the UK. It is under the UK Supreme Court and the British Parliament, but it can exercise judicial authority otherwise. Likewise, the Scottish government has a high level of autonomy within the UK, with its own elected parliament and government. The US violating the law of places where its troops are based is pretty normal—take all the murders and rapes that go along with US bases abroad, cases that have come to prominence in Japan and Korea, especially. A US diplomat’s wife killed a young man in a car crash near a US base a few years ago in England, and flew back to the US, never to face any consequences.
So, regardless of UK law and international law, the US is allowed, and even invited, to do whatever it wants in Britain, and can commission the British military to help. The British military is helping the US commit crimes in Britain, crimes under British law, in the case of the kidnapping of the sailors from Scotland. The British military is literally helping a foreign power defy civilian courts here. In the UK, we are facing the trumping of our own government and legal system by US imperial diktats, and our military and certainly this government, are choosing to actively promote it.
It is a serious crisis of sovereignty for the UK. It is more important to think of the imperial violence that we are dishing out to others rather than ruminating too much on the implications of that violence in the metropole, but there are the seeds of a domestic political and legal crisis here, which could one day help to undermine Britain’s role in all of this.
There was relatively big news in mid-February about the UK denying the US the use of its bases for their coming renewed war on Iran. Namely, bases in England and Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. President Donald Trump posted angrily about this and again withdrew his support for the Chagos Islands deal. To summarize the current situation regarding the Chagos Islands, there’s a UK colony in the middle of the Indian Ocean called the British Indian Ocean Territory. After World War II, the US leased the main island, Diego Garcia, as an airbase, and it's now one of the most important US bases in the world due to its location. It was one of the CIA's black sites and has supported attacks on the region before, including on Iran. Mauritius went through international courts to force the UK to give it back to them and won, so, in 2025, the UK government made an agreement to hand over the territory but lease the base back from Mauritius for 99 years, guaranteeing the base’s status is basically unchanged.
The fact that the bases are a colonial relic is important because it gives our campaign the leverage to say that this is obviously wrong and obviously contradicts the international law that you, the imperial powers, set up, and this gives us the opportunity to build alliances based on that.
This is good news that there is some kind of rift between Britain and the US on this, but it does raise some interesting questions, and these denials have been rescinded anyway. Namely, can the UK always exercise this right of denial, because then it would proactively have had to have proactively approved US use of bases for attacking Iran last year, or did they approve the torture black site on Diego Garcia, do they approve the use of UK bases as transit for all this equipment to the Middle East which will be used to attack Iran anyway? Secondly, Trump posting that he "may have to use" the Fairford and Diego Garcia bases to attack Iran, despite apparently being told he can’t, should be a big deal! Again, the question of UK sovereignty over its own land and military resources comes up—can we even say no to the US, is it possible at all? And will this government do anything about it if their request is ignored? Highly unlikely.
However, it turns out that this whole issue may have originated in an order to the civil service in the foreign office, telling them to act as if the Chagos Islands deal had already gone through. In this case, it seems that the UK government asked the Mauritian government about the US request, and they must have said no, and so Britain said no. Alternatively, the foreign office may have said no based on the specific wording of the deal, where Britain must consult Mauritius on an attack on a third state from Diego Garcia, and have judged Trump’s intended actions to be an attack on the Iranian state, rather than self-defense, which would not require consultation.
This then makes it seem all the less benevolent. This government and the previous government, which started negotiations with Mauritius over this deal, have faced attacks from the right in the UK for giving away British land and throwing away an important base. The government has justified the deal not because it is the right thing to do, or by accepting any of the principles of the arguments around it, but instead, they justify it because they say it is the only way to keep the base operating. They claim that because of the International Court of Justice ruling, they would be forced to cede the territory very soon, and so it was best to make a deal first.
We don’t typically have much faith in these organs of international law, as they were set up to enforce the imperial order. However, it is possible for the subjects of that order to assert some agency and attempt to use that system in an insurgent manner. In this case, it is Mauritius and much of the world supporting it, which has forced this to happen, and indirectly has caused this rift and may prevent the base from being used for these attacks.
I don’t think this will ultimately work, and the US would probably just use them anyway, but these are all interesting things to consider in relation to the base question. It seems that the UK is now allowing the use of Diego Garcia for attacks on Iran, which it deems "defensive" even though that definition includes strikes on ground targets. The potential utility of this model of handover deal, despite keeping the base open, does then seem to restrict the uses of the base in line with aspects of Mauritian sovereignty, disrupting the bases in some way or another, which is a big decolonial win the left has not yet fully grasped.
We could then conclude that a big concerted international campaign against blatant colonial practices may actually work in damaging the effectiveness of these colonial overseas bases to some extent. Mauritius exploited the inherent contradictions between international law on the one hand and the bases’ colonial nature on the other, to build a campaign, get almost everyone onside, and force a reckoning in the international courts, which is binding. So for Cyprus, although it is a different situation in many ways, we can see similarities, and we can learn from what’s happened around Diego Garcia.
The fact that the bases are a colonial relic is important because it gives our campaign the leverage to say that this is obviously wrong and obviously contradicts the international law that you, the imperial powers, set up, and this gives us the opportunity to build alliances based on that. That is actually much easier and much less radical than talking about the bases’ role in genocide, which seems wholly exempt from the international law system, which shows how dehumanized Palestinians and Gaza are.
The US-UK Bases Off Cyprus Campaign that CODEPINK is running has those two integral parts to it, working on the bases in Cyprus’ contribution to genocide and imperial wars, and their inherent status as a colony on occupied land. Linking those two parts of the base question is the central point of what we’re trying to do and trying to expose, as a step toward practical change to the bases’ status.
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Bad Bunny Turned the Super Bowl Into a Call for Land Sovereignty
Bad Bunny didn’t just choose a lush set design. He intentionally made history visible, reminding millions of viewers that colonial power doesn’t only claim territory, it reorganizes our whole environment.
Mar 09, 2026
On the world’s biggest stage, amid fireworks and spectacle, there stood the crop that enriched empires while eroding Puerto Rico’s land, labor, and sovereignty.
When Bad Bunny opened his halftime performance walking through what looked like a living sugarcane field, millions simply saw a striking stage design. But those of us involved in agricultural communities saw a protest.
The Link Between Land, Culture, and Self-Determination
Sugarcane once powered Puerto Rico’s economy. Under Spanish rule and later as a territory of the United States, vast plantations consumed the island’s most fertile lands. Once diverse farming systems created by Taíno Indigenous communities gave way to monocultures designed for export. As with all colonial systems, wealth made in Puerto Rico has long flowed outward while the ecological and social costs remain for local people to have to bear.
Across colonized lands, colonial agriculture prioritized single crops for distant markets at the expense of ecological and social prosperity and resilience—a historical legacy that today ripples through communities and commodity markets. In Puerto Rico, as in other Latin American and Caribbean countries—including my own home country, Mexico—forests were cleared and watersheds were destabilized to power the colonial economic machine. Soil health declined. Local communities' cultural ties to land were fractured, and, without power over local resources anymore, they could no longer steward landscapes as they once did. In Puerto Rico, US policies favoring industrialization over agriculture from the early 20th century onward were the final straw. Although Puerto Rico once produced most of its own food on the island, it now imports over 80%.
The image of sugarcane at the Super Bowl reminds us that land is political. It carries memories of exploitation, resilience, and identity.
What appear today as “degraded land” and disempowered communities are the ecological and social residue of economic models designed for extraction. So, in a very real sense, Bad Bunny didn’t just choose a lush set design. He intentionally made history visible, reminding millions of viewers that colonial power doesn’t only claim territory, it reorganizes our whole environment and, in doing so, reshapes culture, labor, and identity itself.
For many Puerto Ricans, the performance summoned the figure of the jíbaro—the smallholder farmer of the island’s mountainous interior, living from and with the land during colonial rule. More than a rural archetype, the jíbaro is a cultural touchstone, carried through generations in music, poetry, and oral tradition. They represent resilience and dignity, and an enduring bond between people and place—a vision of land not as commodity, but as home, heritage, and self-determination. Framed within Bad Bunny’s creative vision, land is not an asset class: It is identity and community.
Restoring Nature-Positive Farming Traditions Isn’t a Luxury—It’s Basic Risk-Management
Modern agricultural practices, many rooted in colonialism, have long degraded land by plundering natural ecosystems and extracting their value, often concentrating ownership in a few powerful hands. This has left us in a dire situation: At least 40% of the world’s land is now degraded, driving increasing food and water insecurity, contributing to climate change, and fueling climate migration.
To ensure our future on the planet, we must urgently prioritize land restoration and transitioning to regenerative agricultural practices. But for restoration to work, the governance model colonialism installed must be inverted. Landscapes cannot be regenerated without local decision-making power. Ecological repair and political agency go hand in hand.
As climate pressures intensify and public budgets shrink, we are seeing governments and businesses alike continue to act like ecological and social resilience is a luxury, an add-on after economic profit has been achieved. But safeguarding agricultural and ecological heritage, and placing power in the hands of local communities to be able to do this on their own terms, is a scientifically sound investment in economic resilience.
If we are serious about healing degraded landscapes—in Puerto Rico, in Mexico, across Latin America and the Caribbean, and beyond—we must ensure that the finance being used to restore does not become a new form of enclosure.
Research shows us that when communities have ownership and governance over local resources, restoration lasts. Yes, this demands real upfront investment—in soil, water, agroforestry, local enterprise, and strong community institutions. But the returns are massive: Every dollar invested in restoration can generate up to $30 in benefits.
If finance continues to channel value outward while communities carry the risk, we simply repackage (neo)colonialism in a greener language. Restoration funding must, therefore, anchor ownership and governance locally, positioning communities as architects of change, not passive recipients. And there are models already demonstrating what this can look like.
In Mexico’s Sierra Gorda, the Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda (GESG) has built a system where conservation and livelihoods are inseparable. Working alongside the state government, GESG has designed and implemented a public policy within the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve where "forest owners" are compensated to steward forests, manage grazing responsibly, and protect biodiversity.
In simple terms, communities receive compensation for maintaining ecosystems that provide measurable public benefits—carbon sequestration, clean water, biodiversity conservation. Instead of extracting value from the land, value is generated by caring for it.
In the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, more than 300 people directly benefit from a PES (payment for ecosystem services) program covering over 14,000 hectares. GESG operates through a co-management model between civil society and the federal government, grounded in strong local participation and recognition. The goal is not short-term subsidy, but long-term institutional self-sufficiency through sub-national public policy—creating funding streams that sustain conservation while advancing community-led development.
It is a powerful example of conservation that reinforces, rather than erodes, local sovereignty. But PES alone cannot finance restoration at landscape scale; this requires a different kind of financial architecture. Regenerative blended finance offers one pathway. By combining public funds, philanthropic capital, and private investment, it can reduce risk and unlock larger flows of capital for landscape recovery. When designed well, blended finance mechanisms can accelerate ecological restoration while (and by) giving communities control.
A regeneratively-designed blended finance model treats communities as owners and co-investors, not beneficiaries. It embeds social and ecological returns alongside financial ones. It builds local financial capacity, enabling communities to negotiate, manage, and reinvest capital themselves, and strengthens local institutions so landscapes can ultimately generate their own sustainable revenue.
The image of sugarcane at the Super Bowl reminds us that land is political. It carries memories of exploitation, resilience, and identity. If we are serious about healing degraded landscapes—in Puerto Rico, in Mexico, across Latin America and the Caribbean, and beyond—we must ensure that the finance being used to restore does not become a new form of enclosure. Only then will restoration break from the patterns of the past.Keep ReadingShow Less
How Deadly Are Dying Animals? Trump, Netanyahu, and War Against Iran
Carnage in Iran can't stop the inevitable decline of the US and Israel.
Mar 03, 2026
When I was small my mother warned me never to approach a sick animal. The dying ones, she said, are the deadliest of all.
That hasn’t been my experience; most of the dying creatures I’ve encountered just want a quiet place to pass their final hours. The source of my mother’s anxiety was closer to home than she had yet to recognize, but her fear was palpable. She was haunted by the vision of her curly-haired child falling prey to some sickly, snarling, yellow-eyed feral creature with nothing left to lose. That’s a mother’s worst nightmare.
Flash forward to February 28, 2026. Dozens of schoolchildren were reported dead in “one of two strikes that appear to have hit schools since US and Israeli warplanes launched their attack on Iran around 10:00 a.m. local time.” It was a mother’s worst fear come true, many times over.
Why would Israel and the United States kill children? The genocide in Gaza has made it clear that neither country is shy about the systematic extermination of the very young when it serves their strategic interests. These deaths, however, seem to be the products of tactical indifference rather than intentional annihilation. The girls’ school was near an Iranian naval base, and the high school was in the neighborhood where former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lived and was targeted by bombers.
Every empire in history has eventually turned against its own people, and always at the same historical moment: right before it dies.
This is how dying animals behave in a mother’s nightmare. They’re not looking for human children to kill—not the way an airborne raptor or an Israel Defense Forces soldier would. They simply lash out blindly in a desperate fight against the inevitable. Sometimes children get in the way.
Yes, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. Big deal. Others like him were already prepared to step in.
Our political culture is naive, almost childlike, in its attachment to the “great man” theory of history, with the “evil man” as its shadow side. Powerful figures do sometimes alter history, but only within those timeworn channels Alfred Tennyson called the “ringing grooves of change.” Khamenei’s power began with the US overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, which set the stage for Iran’s current theocracy. The brutality of the Shah only hardened the steely resolve of Khamenei’s predecessor, who cast aside pro-democracy Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri to put Khamenei in power. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone equally hard-lined.
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are merely the latest leaders to be vomited up from a groove whose name is “colonialism.” Its source is not the culture or beliefs of ancient Jewish tribes. This groove traces back to the chieftains and pagan shamans of pre-Christian Europe. It rings with the sound of cauldrons and cannons and the church bells of the inquisitor. If some of its own children must be sacrificed, too, so be it.
Once again, pro-democracy protesters have been betrayed by US-made bombs. Attacks by foreign countries almost always strengthen their current leadership and weaken protest movements. There’s no reason to think this time will be any different. Khamenei is almost certainly more powerful in martyrdom than he was in the last months of his life. The protesters must now wait for the inevitable betrayal. May they find solidarity in just people around the world.
As-yet-unconfirmed reports suggest that the bombers have targeted some of the leaders who are best positioned to form an independent government. That wouldn’t be surprising. The US and Israel don’t want an independent Iran. They want a vassal.
But wait, you say. Israel and the United States aren’t dying animals. They’re very much alive and will be for the foreseeable future. Don’t be so sure. Netanyahu has been clinging to power for years to avoid prosecution for a litany of corruption charges. Trump was also threatened by multiple prosecutions before winning re-election. Both men, having feasted lavishly on ill-gotten gains, were desperate to avoid the consequences of their own actions.
For Netanyahu, Israel’s future looks grim. Much of the world has turned against it. Public opinion is evolving from revulsion over its actions to doubts about its very legitimacy as a theocratic ethno-state. Public support for Israel, once considered immutable, has plummeted in the US and Western Europe, especially among younger people who are more likely to consider it an “apartheid state.”
Israel, dependent on Western largesse, is likely to face a critical decision when these generations assume power: become a truly democratic state that ends radicalized privilege or remain an unsustainable international pariah. Either way, the clock is almost certainly ticking on the era of Eretz Israel envisioned by Zionism’s founders. It may take decades, with great bloodshed along the way, but this change seems increasingly likely.
Trump and Netanyahu may parade before the cameras like winners, but they carry the stink of losers—moral, spiritual, and tactical losers.
This is not an outré idea. Israel’s military and political leaders see this future almost as clearly as independent observers do. No wonder they’ve become increasingly open in their violence. It’s a sign of desperation as well as hate.
The United States may not disappear as a nation in the foreseeable future. But its global dominance and that of its elites will end, and probably soon. That prospect fills its current leaders with existential dread. Billionaires build airstrips in the Hamptons and rehearse the apocalypse in mountaintop retreats. Politicians try to seize control of oil-rich nations through brute force and feed the fantasy that exorbitant military spending can crush the spirit of independent peoples.
As the philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this twilight, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Richard Nixon said this when he tried selling an equally delusional war to the American people: “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world."
The “forces of totalitarianism and anarchy” are us. Every war the US has fought in the intervening half century has been a strategic and military failure. The United States has become a pitiful, violent giant—lethal and proud, but pitiful just the same. It spends itself into social oblivion for military machinery. It turns the technology of human suppression against its own population with increasing ferocity. As inequality surpasses that of the Gilded Age, software surveils our every move as drones and helicopters hover in the sky.
Every empire in history has eventually turned against its own people, and always at the same historical moment: right before it dies.
Trump and Netanyahu may parade before the cameras like winners, but they carry the stink of losers—moral, spiritual, and tactical losers. They’re pitiful because they’re desperate, and they’re desperate because their realms are dying. The grief of mothers and fathers means nothing to creatures such as these.
Here’s silent whisper for the wounded and discouraged, the grim-faced and the grieving, the unseen victims in Palestine and Yemen and Iran and around the globe: May they see with their hearts that time is running out for the Trumps and Netanyahus of their hearts. May they take comfort in the inevitability of their fall.
Yes, they’re still deadly. Of course they are. They’re killers. But so was John Wayne Gacy, and he was a clown.
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