People carry signs during a “Hands Off!” protest against US President Donald Trump on April 5, 2025, in New York
DEMONSTRATIONS across the United States over the weekend give the lie to claims that all is lost in the struggle for people’s rights and social justice against the conservative right and its far-right allies.
Of course, there are always the defeatists — notably the “centre-left” intellectuals — who insist that the working classes on both sides of the Atlantic are too stupid, lazy, selfish and racist to resist injustice.
In the words of Private Frazer: “We’re all doomed!” Fascism is inevitable.
Meanwhile, millions of protesters of all colours, creeds and political affiliations, from the centre-right to the real left, from Los Angeles to Washington DC, marched in defence of jobs, women’s rights, the US constitution, the young, the elderly, the sick, black communities, the world’s poor and the Palestinians against the Trumpian onslaught.
They face a deeply reactionary Republican administration backed by a sizeable section of ruthless monopoly capital and a powerful state apparatus. The US working class, the labour and progressive movements and the people will need all the unity they can muster to block the advance of the resurgent right and its proto-fascist elements.
But as the worldwide pushback grows against Donald Trump’s global trade war, cracks will open up within the ruling Republicans, the monopoly capitalist class and even within and between the agencies of the state. Provided the insurgents put not their trust in Democratic Party politicians on the big-business payroll, they can generate their own vision, strategies and leadership to turn back the Maga maniacs.
In Britain, too, the “centre left” must not be allowed to divert or demoralise the emerging opposition to Keir Starmer’s treacherous regime and its pro-City, pro-Nato policies.
In many local communities, people are beginning to mobilise to defend their public services, their social facilities and their rights. Never have such policies as a wealth tax, public-sector housebuilding and public ownership of energy and public transport been so popular. The Alternative Economic Strategy is making a welcome comeback.
Protesters march every week against the British government’s sickening silence about — and complicity in — the Israeli genocide. Britain’s armed forces can blast the Houthis and defend Israel against incoming rockets, can bomb and invade Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen — yet not a finger can be lifted to protect defenceless Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Public cynicism about the West’s real motives for pouring yet more weapons into the Ukraine war cauldron instead of genuinely seeking the end to a conflict that did not begin with Russia’s brutal incursion three years ago.
In Britain, we can build a people’s mass movement around these burning issues and, in the process, expose the anti-working-class politics of Reform UK, whose four top officers made their millions in banking, property development or the City.
Again, though, we need unity to be built on solid foundations.
These cannot include demands for Britain to align itself with the EU in a trade war against the US and even China. Nor should there be illusions that deep-seated problems which festered during decades of EU membership can somehow be more readily resolved by rejoining the big-business club or its capital and labour markets.
Nato rearmament must be opposed. The US-led cold war anti-socialist alliance has now outlived the Warsaw Pact by more than 30 years.
Clasping these two serpents to its bosom would spell suicide for any people’s movement that stands for public services, social justice, peace and solidarity.
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Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Inmates the Trump administration alleges are linked to criminal organizations are lined up by guards in their cells at the Terrorism Confinement Center, a maximum security prison, on March 16, 2025 in Tecoluca, El Salvador. (Photo: Salvadoran Government via Getty Images)
“How the government reacts will tell us so much about how far down the road to autocracy we are,” said one lawyer.
A U.S. judge on Friday ordered the return of a Maryland resident who the Trump administration mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador last month, according to The Associated Press.
Prior to issuing the ruling, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis called the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia “an illegal act.”
The judge, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, gave the Trump administration end of the day of the day on Monday to bring him back to the United States.
Supporters outside the courtroom cheered as the judge handed down her order, according to The Washington Post.
Responding to the ruling on social media, U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said: “This is a big win. Now Trump must comply with the judge’s order.”
Immigration lawyer Ava Benach wrote: “The right decision. How the government reacts will tell us so much about how far down the road to autocracy we are.”
The right decision. How the government reacts will tell us so much about how far down the road to autocracy we are.
Abrego Garcia was among hundreds of people the administration expelled in mid-March to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador after targeting them for alleged gang ties.
In a court papers filed earlier this week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting field office director admitted that the removal of Abrego Garcia on March 15 “was an error.”
Abrego Garcia was deported despite the fact that in 2019, a U.S. immigration judge ruled that he could not be deported to his native El Salvador because he would likely face gang persecution there.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during morning trading on April 3, 2025 in New York City. (Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Instead of strategically imposing tariffs, Trump has chosen to “give the country the most massive tax increase in its history, possibly exceeding $1 trillion on an annual basis.”
As stocks “nosedived” on Thursday, economists, policymakers, and campaigners around the world continued to warn about the impacts of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war, which includes a 10% universal tariff for imports and steeper duties—that he claims are “reciprocal”—for dozens of countries, set to take effect over the next week.
“This is how you sabotage the world’s economic engine while claiming to supercharge it,” wrote Nigel Green, CEO of the international financial consultancy deVere Group. “Trump is blowing up the post-war system that made the U.S. and the world more prosperous, and he’s doing it with reckless confidence.”
As Bloomberg detailed after the president’s “Liberation Day” remarks from the White House Rose Garden:
China’s cumulative tariff rate of 54% includes both the 20% duty already charged earlier this year, added to the 34% levy calculated as part of Trump’s so-called reciprocal plan, according to people familiar with the matter. The European Union’s rate is 20% and Vietnam’s is 46%, White House documents showed. Other nations slapped with larger tariffs include Japan with 24%, South Korea with 25%, India with 26%, Cambodia with 49%, and Taiwan with 32%.
In Europe on Thursday, “the regional Stoxx 600 index provisionally ended down around 2.7%,” while “the U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 1.6%, with France’s CAC 40 and Germany’s DAX posting deeper losses of 3.3% and 3.1%, respectively,” according to CNBC.
In the United States, CNBC reported, “the broad market index dropped 4%, putting it on track for its worst day since September 2022. The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 1,200 points, or 3%, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 5%. The slide across equities was broad, with decliners at the New York Stock Exchange outnumbering advancers by 6-to-1.”
However, as Economic Policy Institute (EPI) chief economist Josh Bivens noted last week, “because most households depend overwhelmingly on wages from work as their primary source of income and not returns from wealth-holding, the stock market tells us nothing about these households’ economic situations.”
And Trump’s tariffs are expected to hit U.S. households hard, as the cost of his taxes on imports are passed on to consumers.
“Tariffs can be a legitimate and useful tool in industrial policy for well-defined strategic goals, but broad-based tariffs that significantly raise the average effective tariff rate in the United States are unwise,” Bivens and EPI senior economist Adam Hersh stressed in a Thursday statement—which also called out Trump for mischaracterizing one of the think tank’s 2022 analyses.
“Further, the second Trump administration’s rationale, parameters, and timeline for tariffs have been ever-shifting,” Bivens and Hersh continued. “As the original post cited by the administration argues, tariffs should not be a goal unto themselves, but a strategic tool to pair with other efforts to restore American competitiveness in narrowly targeted industrial sectors.”
Instead of strategically imposing tariffs, Trump has chosen to “give the country the most massive tax increase in its history, possibly exceeding $1 trillion on an annual basis, which comes to $7,000 per household,” warned Center for Economic and Policy Research co-founder and senior economist Dean Baker. “And this tax hike will primarily hit moderate and middle-income families. Trump’s taxes go easy on the rich, who spend a smaller share of their income on imported goods.”
Baker—like various other economists and journalists—also took aim at Trump’s claims that the tariffs are reciprocal, explaining:
Trump’s team calculated our trade deficit with each country and divided it by their exports to the United States. Trump decided that this figure was equal to that country’s tariff on goods imported from the U.S.
Trump’s method of calculating tariffs is comparable to the doctor who assesses your proper weight by dividing your height by your birthday. Any doctor who did this is clearly batshit crazy, and unfortunately so is our president. And apparently none of his economic advisers has the courage and integrity to set him straight or to resign.
However, outside Trump’s administration, the intense criticism continued to mount, including from groups focused on combating the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, which also endangers the global economy.
Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and Campaigns at 350.org, said Thursday that “Trump’s tariffs won’t slow the global energy transition—they’ll only hurt ordinary people, particularly Americans.”
“Despite his claims he ‘gets’ economic policy, his record tells a different story: Tariffs are tanking U.S. stocks and fueling inflation,” Sieber added. “The transition to renewables is unstoppable, with or without him. His latest move does little to impact the booming clean energy market but will isolate the U.S. and drive up costs for American consumers.”
Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. campaign manager at Oil Change International, similarly emphasized that “Trump’s tariffs will hurt working families first and foremost, raising costs for essentials we depend on and threatening to plunge the U.S. economy into a recession. Though Trump pretends to care about the cost of living for ordinary people, his real loyalties lie with his fossil fuel industry donors.”
“If he actually cared about energy affordability, he would stop bullying other countries into buying more U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG), which boosts the fossil fuel industry’s profits, but results in increased prices for domestic consumers and pushes us further toward climate catastrophe,” she asserted. “The one step countries can take to hit Trump where it hurts most is wean off their dependency on fossil fuels from the United States.”
The impact of Trump’s new levies won’t be limited to working-class people in the United States. Nick Dearden, director of U.K.-based Global Justice Now, pointed out that “Trump has set light to the global economy and unleashed a world of pain, not least on a group of developing countries that will suffer tremendous impoverishment as a result of his punitive tariffs.”
“All those affected must come together and stand up to this bully by building a very different international economy that promotes the interests of ordinary people rather than the oligarchs standing behind Trump,” he argued. “For all its scraping and crawling, the U.K. got no special treatment here, and the government should learn this lesson fast: They need to stop giving away our rights and protections in a futile effort to appease Donald Trump.”
Leaders in the United States are also encouraging resistance to Trump. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Wednesday that “this week you will read many confused economists and political pundits who won’t understand how the tariffs make economic sense. That’s because they don’t. They aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.”
Murphy made the case that “the tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship. Why? So that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears.”
“But as long as we see this clearly, we can stop him. Public mobilization is working. Today, a few Republicans joined Democrats to vote against one set of tariffs,” he added, referring to a resolution that would undo levies on Canadian imports. “The people still have the power.”
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
A destroyed mechanic’s shop in downtown Swannanoa, North Carolina, US, December 2024, nearly three months after Hurricane Helene in late September. Photograph: Mike Belleme/The Guardian
Floods, heatwaves and supercharged hurricanes occurred in hottest climate human society has ever experienced
…
The world is already deep into the climate crisis, with the WMO report saying that for the first time, the 10 hottest years on record all occurred in the last decade. However, global carbon emissions have continued to rise, which will bring even worse impacts. Experts were particularly critical of the purge of climate scientists and programmes by the US president, Donald Trump, saying that ignoring reality left ordinary people paying the price.
“Leaders must step up – seizing the benefits of cheap, clean renewables for their people and economies – with new national climate plans due this year,” said the UN secretary general, António Guterres.
Dr Luke Parsons, of the Nature Conservancy, said: “Every year, we venture further into uncharted territory, with 2024 the hottest year modern human society has ever experienced. Yet the coming decade is expected to be even hotter, pushing us deeper into this unprecedented climate.”
Previous research determining the role of the climate crisis in what are now unnatural disasters has shown that at least 550 heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts and wildfires had been made significantly more severe or more frequent by global heating.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Mourners gather around the bodies of 8 Red Crescent emergency responders, recovered in Rafah a week after an Israeli attack, as they are transported for burial from a hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, March 31, 2025
The massacre of Red Crescent and civil defence aid workers has elicited little coverage and no condemnation by major powers — this is the age of lawlessness, warns JOE GILL
IT IS difficult to be shocked after 18 months of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza.
Brazen crimes against humanity have become the norm. World powers do nothing in response. At best, they put out weak statements of concern. Now the US does not even bother with that. It is fully on board with genocide.
Israel and the US are planning the violent ethnic cleansing of Gaza, knowing full well that no-one will stop them. The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court are sitting on their hands, despite what appeared to be significant rulings last year on Israeli war crimes by the ICC, and on the “plausible risk” of genocide by the ICJ.
As Israeli anti-zionist commentator Alon Mizrahi wrote this week:
“As Israel and the US announce and begin to enact plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, let’s remember that the International Court of Justice has not even convened to discuss the genocide since May 24 2024, when it was using very blurry language about the planned Rafah action. Tens of thousands have been exterminated since then, and hundreds of thousands have been injured. Babies starved and froze to death, and thousands of children lost limbs. Not a word from the ICJ.
“Zionism and US imperialism have rendered international law null and void. Everyone is allowed to do as they please to anyone. The post-World War II masquerade is truly over.”
Under the Joe Biden administration, secretary of state Antony Blinken and the smirking US spokesperson Matt Miller would make performative statements about “concern” over the killing of Palestinians (they would never use a word as clear as “killing,” always preferring the perpetrator-free “deaths”).
Today, under the Donald Trump regime, the mask of respect for the rituals of international diplomacy has been thrown aside. This is the law of the jungle, and the winner is the government that uses superior force to seize what they believe is theirs, and to silence and destroy those who stand in their way.
