The price of eggs has more than doubled in the past eight years, which isn’t great, but at least you can eat eggs. The price of US government subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry has also more than doubled in that time, which is far, far less great. Welfare for an industry that makes billions of dollars in profits and pollutes the climate is worse than useless. It’s self-destructive.
The federal government gives oil, gas and coal producers at least $34.8 billion in subsidies each year, according to a new study by the research and advocacy nonprofit Oil Change International. In 2017, OCI estimated these gifts at $14.7 billion annually. This doubling in federal largesse has taken place under both Democratic and Republican political administrations, highlighting the difficulty of stopping its growth, much less reversing it.
In fact, some of the most recent extensions of federal aid have made it possible for these subsidies to explode in the future, threatening to reach trillions of dollars. When the world needs exponential growth in clean-energy investments to avoid the most catastrophic effects of global heating, the US government will be bankrolling fossil-fuel expansion and stoking the emergency.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Charlie Kirk was a founder of far right group Turning Point USA and a key Trump backer
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On 5 April 2023, Kirk told a rally, “I think it’s worth it to have the cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other god given rights.”
His podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, was a cesspit of far right lies, vile racism, transphobia and anti-abortion bigotry that he built his career on.
He has 1.8 million followers on Twitter/X. But even Twitter once blocked Kirk for “violating rules against posting misleading information about voting” when he tweeted lies about supposed election fraud in Pennsylvania.
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Nine months ago Luigi Mangione became a folk hero when he shot Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. The sector was notorious for declining to pay out policies for dying people.
The US establishment will wring their hands about political violence. But the US ruling class is responsible for far more violence, death and destruction than any political terrorist. They are complicit in the genocide in Gaza and in enabling the continuing horror of mass shootings in the US.
US President Donald Trump, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Photos via Presidential Press
The war drums beating in Washington are not just a threat to a distant nation; they are a symptom of a political system that thrives on the distraction of war abroad to cover its internal crises.
The sun glints off the gray hull of the USS Iwo Jima, a massive amphibious assault ship cutting through the Caribbean Sea. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, a key architect of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” policies, stands on deck before a group of sailors and marines. His voice, amplified by the ship’s public address system, is a low, serious rumble that carries across the choppy waters. “What you’re doing right now is NOT training,” he says, in a scene reminiscent of George W. Bush’s staged landing to declare victory in Iraq. “This is a REAL-WORLD EXERCISE on behalf of the vital national interests of the United States of America, to end the POISONING of the American people.” His words hang heavy in the air, a dramatic prelude to what some suspect is an impending invasion of Venezuela.
The history of the Caribbean is a bloody one, stained by the imperial ambitions of European powers and the United States. The region now sits on the verge of another bloody chapter. As the great writer and historian Juan Bosch once observed, this region of Latin America is a battleground where empires have fought to seize the rich lands of its peoples and to claim what other empires had already conquered.
Today, the Caribbean is again being transformed into a stage for imperial aggression.
In a dangerous and dramatic escalation, the government of the United States, through its aptly renamed Department of War, has amassed a formidable naval force and deployed advanced fighter jets to the waters off Venezuela. This military buildup, consisting of at least eight warships, 4,000 sailors and marines along with P-8 spy planes and at least one nuclear submarine, is a clear threat to Venezuelan sovereignty and a blatant crime against international law. Washington is hiding behind a well-worn, cynical pretext: the “war on drugs”.
A sordid history of manufactured pretexts
The latest act of lawlessness came on September 2, when US forces in the Caribbean allegedly interdicted a “drug trafficking” vessel. Instead of following international protocols, the US Coast Guard and DEA agents opened fire, destroying the boat and killing all 11 people on board. This extrajudicial execution at sea is a clear violation of international law, which mandates that law enforcement actions must prioritize arrest and the preservation of life. The use of lethal force is only permitted as a last resort in cases of immediate self-defense. Though the US is not a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the US military’s legal advisors have previously said that the US should “act in a manner consistent with its provisions”. To destroy a vessel and summarily execute its occupants without due process is not law enforcement; it is a state-sanctioned massacre, a crime that echoes other massacres in American military missions abroad. Recently, Professor Michael Becker of Trinity College in Dublin told the BBC that the US action “stretches the meaning of the term beyond its breaking point”.
This act of violence is not an anomaly but part of a deliberate pattern of provocation. The US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) has significantly bolstered its presence with additional destroyers and littoral combat ships. Meanwhile, the US Air Force has sent F-35 fighter jets, aircraft designed for air dominance and striking high-value targets – not for intercepting drug runners – to its base in Puerto Rico, an island under US colonial domination. This military posture has nothing to do with curbing narcotics flow and everything to do with encircling and intimidating a nation that has defiantly resisted Washington’s hegemony for over two decades.
The historical context is inescapable. The United States has a long and sordid history of fabricating justifications for military action to achieve its political ends. The sinking of the USS Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the non-existent “Weapons of Mass Destruction” used to justify the invasion of Iraq are all well-worn chapters in the same playbook. The current administration, with its bellicose rhetoric, is drafting a new one. Key architect of Trump-era maximum pressure policies, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has consistently agitated for regime change, framing the Venezuelan government as a “narco-state”.
Exposing the “narco-state” smokescreen
The “narco-state” narrative collapses under the weight of its own fiction. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the US State Department’s own annual reports, the vast majority of cocaine leaving South America originates from and passes through US-allied nations like Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Venezuela is not a significant producer of cocaine. The narrative is a convenient smokescreen, a lie sold to the public to manufacture consent for aggression. The hypocrisy is further exposed by Rubio’s recent tour of Ecuador, a nation with extremely high levels of collaboration with US anti-drug agencies. Despite this collaboration, Ecuador has been plunged into a devastating crisis of drug trafficking and gang violence, proving that US intervention solves nothing and only fuels instability.
The true goal of this military buildup is clearly the overthrow of Venezuela’s government and the seizure of its vast oil reserves. The threats emanating from Washington are not veiled. They range from scenarios of massive bombing campaigns to the outright kidnapping or assassination of President Maduro. Donald Trump’s past musings about a “military option” for Venezuela are now being operationalized.
The Venezuelan people prepare for resistance
In the face of this existential threat, the Venezuelan people are preparing to defend their homeland. President Maduro has called for a “people in arms”, and an estimated 8 million Venezuelans have joined citizen militias. Across the country, young people, students, workers, and retirees are training in basic combat, emergency response, and civil defense. Their resolve is a powerful testament to the spirit of resistance.
“We are not an army for aggression, but an army for peace, for the defense of our sacred land,” said Maria Delgado*, a 20-year-old university student and new militia member in Caracas. “They think that because we are young or because we are not professional soldiers, we will be afraid. They are wrong. We know what is at stake: our sovereignty, our future, and the project of justice that our parents built.”
President Maduro has framed this mobilization in stark terms: “Venezuela is facing its greatest threat in 100 years. Having defeated all forms of hybrid warfare, they [United States] have opted for the worst mistake.”
The war drums beating in Washington are not just a threat to a distant nation; they are a symptom of a political system that thrives on the distraction of war abroad to cover its internal crises. The billions spent on deploying F-35s and destroyers to the Caribbean are billions stolen from the right to healthcare, education, and housing of ordinary Americans at home.
*Name changed
Manolo De Los Santos is Executive Director of The People’s Forum and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His writing appears regularly in Monthly Review, Peoples Dispatch, CounterPunch, La Jornada, and other progressive media. He coedited, most recently, Viviremos: Venezuela vs. Hybrid War (LeftWord, 2020), Comrade of the Revolution: Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro (LeftWord, 2021), and Our Own Path to Socialism: Selected Speeches of Hugo Chávez (LeftWord, 2023).
Smoke rises from an explosion, allegedly caused by an Israeli strike, in Doha, Qatar, September 9, 2025. Photo: UGC via AP
QATAR condemned a blatant “violation” of international law by Israel after Tel Aviv’s military attacked a meeting of Hamas leaders in the capital Doha today, killing at least two of them.
A senior Hamas official told reporters that Israel had targeted the movement’s negotiating team while they were discussing the ceasefire “ideas” put forward by US President Donald Trump.
The Qatari Foreign Ministry said: “We condemn the cowardly Israeli attack that targeted residential quarters of several Hamas political bureau members.
“The criminal assault is a violation of all international laws” and Qatar “will not tolerate any action targeting its security or sovereignty.”
According to initial reports, political bureau head Khalil al-Hayya and financial officer Zaher Jabarin were killed in the strike.
Israeli Channel 11 reported that the Israeli attack had been co-ordinated with Washington.
Remember that letter Trump swore doesn’t exist? Well, the Epstein estate just released it.
At the height of Donald Trump’s scandal surrounding notorious late sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, the Wall Street Journal in July reported that the president had written a cryptic message wishing Epstein a happy 50th birthday in 2003. The note was reportedly contained within a marker drawing of a woman’s naked torso.
Trump insisted this was a “fake thing.” “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he told the Journal. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.” Vice President JD Vance called it “complete and utter bullshit.”
The president filed a lawsuit against the newspaper in hopes of, in his words, suing owner Rupert Murdoch’s “ass off, and that of his third rate paper.”
Murdoch and the Journal’s asses may live to see another day, as the paper on Monday released a photo of the letter.
WSJ: Lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein’s estate have given Congress a copy of the birthday book put together for the financier’s 50th birthday, which includes a letter with Trump’s signature that he has said doesn’t exist. pic.twitter.com/D07zIL4g2K
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Donald Trump decrees forbidden terms denying sexual diversity
Smoke rises from an explosion, allegedly caused by an Israeli strike, in Doha, Qatar, September 9, 2025. Photo: UGC via AP
