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‘One Big Military Theft’: Trump Announces Deal for US Control of Venezuelan Oil Fields

August 30, 2026

Trump shakes hands with Woods following Venezuelan invasion.

US President Donald Trump shakes hands with ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, during a meeting with US oil companies executives in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on January 9, 2026.

(Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)

“This is proof Trump put our service members at risk to get Venezuelan oil for his billionaire buddies,” one Democratic senator said. “Putting our soldiers’ lives on the line for private profit is a gross dereliction of his constitutional duty.”

Olivia Rosane, Common Dreams, Aug 29, 2026

President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social on Friday that his government had “secured majority US control” of Venezuelan oil reserves containing 65 billion barrels of oil.

The announcement followed on reporting from Axios that a deal was in the works, prompting criticisms that such a move would be “colonial” and calls for Congress to reject any such proposal.

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“Let’s be clear: This isn’t a win,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) wrote on social media in response to the announcement. “This is proof Trump put our service members at risk to get Venezuelan oil for his billionaire buddies. Putting our soldiers’ lives on the line for private profit is a gross dereliction of his constitutional duty.”

When US forces invaded Caracas and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife First Combatant Cilia Fores on January 3, Trump’s own words following the invasion confirmed suspicions that he acted largely to gain access to the country’s oil.

“These are some of the largest crimes of our lifetimes.”

“We’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be,” he said in a press conference following the attack.

Friday’s deal, which seems like an attempt to make good on that promise, was also announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez, who provided more details.

According to Venezuelanalysis:

Rodríguez stated that the deal will involve private corporations developing 17 “strategic fields” with 65 billion barrels of proven reserves. She echoed Rubio’s $100 billion investment claim and pledged that the projects would yield $209 billion in tax revenues. According to the acting president, the announced agreement “ushers in a new era of growth and prosperity.”

However, economist Francisco Rodríguez, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued that the agreement was actually a bad deal for Venezuelans.

“President: According to your figures, this agreement will generate tax revenues of just $3.22 per barrel of Venezuelan oil. This represents 4.7% of the current price, and less than half of the royalty rate contemplated in concessions granted by Juan Vicente Gómez,” he wrote on social media, addressing the current Venezuelan leader and referring to a Venezuelan dictator from the early 20th century.

Joseph Bouchard, a journalist and researcher who focuses on Latin America, agreed with Rodriguez’s criticism of the deal, writing on social media that “Trump [was] ‘generously’ buying billions of barrels of Venezuelan oil at less than 5% its market price. He’s stealing their oil for his own family and cronies’ profit. Guessing this may be used as a chip to manipulate the midterms. These are some of the largest crimes of our lifetimes.”

Francisco Rodriguez had earlier pointed out that the deal violated the Venezuelan Constitution, which holds that all minerals and hydrocarbons are “inalienable public domain,” according to Venezuelanalysis. For the deal to go through, therefore, Venezula would have to alter its Constitution.

Former head of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth noted on social media that “senior Venezuelan officials, all fearing arrest, are hardly in a position to negotiate vigorously, making the whole thing seems like one big military theft.”

Trump is under pressure to lower gas prices that have spiked due to the fallout of his war on Iran, which entered its sixth month on Friday, and promised in his announcement, “This Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future.”

However, The Associated Press pointed out: “A significant drop in US gas prices tied to the agreement should not be expected immediately. Experts have repeatedly warned that a substantial boost in Venezuelan oil production will not happen quickly as repairing and expanding infrastructure takes years and requires billions of dollars.”

Exploiting Venezuela’s oil reserves would also exacerbate the climate crisis, which just this summer intensified a deadly heatwave in Europe and is supercharging an El Niño that could contribute to a significant increase in food prices in 2026 and 2027.

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Olivia Rosane

Olivia Rosane is the opinion editor and a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Trump begins deporting Venezuelans, Colombians, Cubans and other migrants to Liberia

August 23, 2026

Andrea Lobo, WSWS, 21 August 2026

Migrants being loaded into US Air Force C-17s, January 2025 [Photo: White House]

A US deportation flight carrying 20 people landed shortly before 1 p.m. local time Thursday at Roberts International Airport outside Monrovia, Liberia. The reported nationalities of those aboard included Venezuelans, Cubans and Colombians, according to Reuters. 

Five men refused to leave the plane. The New York Times reported that American federal agents forced them off, and that all five were eventually returned to the aircraft. A video verified by the Times shows deportees sitting on the tarmac beside the plane, surrounded by roughly 20 agents. The Liberian government has not clarified their status.

This is the first flight under an agreement permitting Washington to transfer up to 1,200 people to Liberia over the next year. Liberia is the 26th country to receive them. Some 23,000 people have already been sent abroad under at least 35 bilateral arrangements, according to Third Country Deportation Watch. 

The three nationalities named in Thursday’s flight are not incidental. Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba today face three of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in the Western Hemisphere that have been greatly worsened by the recolonization drive by US imperialism.

In Venezuela, the confirmed death toll from the June 24 earthquakes stands at 6,438, with 86,358 injured. The site Venezuelareporta.org counts 41,334 still missing. In Colombia, the August 10 earthquake has killed 319, with 4,611 injured and 290 missing. In both countries, thousands of buildings collapsed and thousands more were structurally compromised—revealing that entire cities were built to engineering codes wholly inadequate to meet the known seismic risk.

In Cuba, UN officials have described the effects of the US economic and fuel blockade as a “silent Gaza.” In 2025, registered deaths reached double the births, even as millions have migrated in recent years. Infant mortality rose 148 percent between 2018 and 2025, from 4.0 to 9.9 per thousand.

These are not separate disasters. Venezuela’s economy was strangled by 15 years of US sanctions before Washington invaded outright on January 3, abducted the president and impounded its oil revenues. Colombia absorbed over $10 billion in US military aid across a quarter century of Plan Colombia, financing an ongoing civil war before helping install the President Abelardo de la Espriella, a lawyer associated with fascist paramilitaries. Cuba has been blockaded for six decades, and the Trump administration has cut off its oil supply and sanctioned investors across multiple sectors this year.

US imperialism manufactured the conditions that drove millions from these countries and caused the current devastation. It is now deporting those who escaped to US soil to one of the ten poorest countries in the world. 

Liberia: the disposal ground

Liberia is not a random destination. It was founded in 1822 by freed American slaves and became a de facto US colony within decades—rich in minerals and heavily exploited by American capital after the Second World War and throughout the Cold War. When Cold War support ended, the country collapsed into civil war; the 1989–2003 conflicts alone killed some 300,000 people.

Its health system never recovered from the 2014–15 Ebola epidemic, and the US State Department currently maintains a Level 2 travel advisory for Liberia, citing crime, civil unrest and health infrastructure concerns.

The arrangement is completely venal. Following Liberia’s October 2025 agreement to accept Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who continues to fight his deportation in the US, Washington extended Liberian business and tourism visas from 12 to 36 months and signed a $124 million health sector memorandum. Reuters reports $5 million allocated for Liberian “immigration management.”

The conditions awaiting deportees across Africa follow a consistent pattern of indefinite confinement. In Congo, deportees told the Associated Press they were held behind locked gates, forbidden to leave alone, and permitted outside roughly once a week under IOM escort. In Equatorial Guinea, the AP found deportees confined in a hotel owned by the family of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, barred from leaving, given uneven access to medical care, and subjected to repeated pressure to return to the countries they had fled—of at least 32 people held there, 25 had been sent home by May. An international coalition sued Ghana in June on behalf of 27 deportees, alleging that most were rapidly returned to their home countries in defiance of US protection orders, some having been held under armed guard. 

Thousands of miles from any court with jurisdiction over their captivity, this amounts to indefinite imprisonment without charge, trial, or sentence—cruel and unusual punishment by any honest definition, permitted only because US law pretends immigration detention is “civil” rather than punitive. 

The apparatus of disappearances

Third-country deportation flights are the end point of a machinery being built across the United States. Politico reports that in the past year, judges have ruled against ICE’s detention tactics more than 16,000 times, roughly two-thirds of those cases stemming from a single two-page memo reinterpreting a 1996 statute to permit the detention of people who had lived in the country for years.

Third-country deportation exists precisely to circumvent the courts. When a judge rules a person cannot be returned home because they face persecution or torture, they are stationed 7,000 kilometers away instead, where no US court has jurisdiction and no one is watching.

The precedent was set much earlier. Beginning February 4, 2025, the administration flew Venezuelan detainees to Guantánamo Bay—the site built expressly to hold prisoners where US constitutional protections were said not to apply. In March 2025, 238 Venezuelans were flown to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, 137 of them under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, in open defiance of a federal court order to turn the planes around. They were imprisoned without charge, trial or sentence on allegations of Tren de Aragua membership that rested in many cases on nothing more than tattoos. Held incommunicado for four months, they were released only in a July 2025 prisoner exchange. 

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What is the historical origin of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, and why is it significant that it’s being used against Venezuelan migrants today?Is there a historical precedent for a capitalist state testing repressive measures on immigrants before extending them to citizens, as described with Guantánamo and CECOT?How does the treatment of migrants under Democratic and Republican administrations compare, and what does that say about the two-party system’s relation to immigration policy?

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Asked in April 2025 about sending US citizens to the same prison, Trump told El Salvador’s Bukele that “homegrowns are next,” adding that he would need “five more places.” In other words, what is being tested on migrants—detention without charges, imprisonment abroad, defiance of the courts—is being prepared for citizens and political opponents. 

These agreements are being challenged in U.T. v. Bondi, which contests whether the contracted third countries provide the “full and fair” asylum procedures US law requires.

Deportation flights continue to Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba

While Washington opens new routes to third countries, the flights going directly to Venezuela, Cuba and Colombia carry their own lethal consequences. On June 24, a flight carrying 146 Venezuelans deported from the United States landed hours before the earthquakes. Venezuelan authorities locked them inside the Hotel Sanitario Negra Hipólita in La Llanada—as they had thousands of others arriving on more than 160 flights coordinated between Washington and Caracas since 2025. When the building collapsed that evening, 134 of them died. 

Oswadeliz Núñez, whose son Daniel died there, told El País: “They were locked in those rooms, under key. The night of the earthquake I wrote to the numbers on the Vuelta a la Patria page and nobody answered me.” Daniel had been stopped while driving in Jacksonville. “I fixed up his room as nicely as I could, but he never arrived. I received the little box with his ashes.”

The deportation flights have since resumed through an airport in eastern Venezuela while Maiquetía remains disabled, with two landing in August.

Colombia’s experience follows the same pattern. The country accepted 475 deportation flights from the United States between 2020 and 2024. When former President Gustavo Petro briefly suspended them last year after migrants arrived in chains, the pause lasted only days before Washington forced their resumption—and there has been no announcement suggesting they will be discontinued after the earthquake. 

Whether a deportee is flown to Caracas, Bogotá, Havana or Monrovia, the underlying principle is the same and it is indefensible: workers are being forcibly removed from places where they had built lives and sent to places where their safety cannot be guaranteed. This reality is summed up by the 20 agents surrounding five men who refused to get off the plane, on a tarmac in a country none of them had chosen or to which they had the slightest connection.

The right of workers to live and work where they choose, without fear of persecution or deportation, is not a concession to be granted by any government. It requires the independent political mobilization of the international working class on a socialist program that abolishes the outmoded capitalist nation-state system.

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The Deplorable Extremism of the So-Called “Moderates”

August 22, 2026

Chicago PD Superintendent Eddie Johnson Holds News Conf. On Record Weekend Shootings

Former Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson listens as former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel speaks about Chicago’s weekend of gun violence during a news conference at the Chicago Police Department 6th District station August 6, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois.

(Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

The Democratic base is fed up with a system that gives inordinate power to the wealthy and to large corporations.

Norman Solomon

Aug 17, 2026, Common Dreams

We’ve been hearing a lot of panicky warnings lately after Democratic primary voters chose socialists and other leftists instead of “moderates” in several major elections. The alarm bells got louder this month after Michigan’s progressive Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens—who was, the New York Times reported, “the moderate establishment-backed candidate.”

The soothing “moderate” label routinely goes to candidates like Stevens who’ve supported continual arming of Israel. She “benefited from about $62 million in advertising spending from half a dozen outside groups,” the Times noted. “Over half of that sum came from the super PAC arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the country’s most influential pro-Israel group.”

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What’s so “moderate” about supporting genocide?

Politicians are also routinely dubbed “moderate” when they’re running interference for extreme income inequality and deadly healthcare inequities – helping to block popular policy options like tax hikes on the rich and Medicare for All, which is supported by three-quarters of Democrats.

The Democratic base is fed up with a system that gives inordinate power to the wealthy and to large corporations. In the real world, the so-called “moderates” are aligned with a status quo that continues to inflict widespread suffering and preventable death at home and abroad.

To hear timeworn party strategists like James Carville and Paul Begala tell it, leftwing candidates are duping the Democratic electorate. As this month began, Carville threatened to leave the party. Begala made headlines by declaring, “I don’t like the socialists. I can’t stand them.”

But last month, a CNN poll found that “about a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as democratic socialists.” At a time when defeating the fascistic Republican Party is imperative, any strategist’s prescription that would denigrate or seek to exclude them amounts to political malpractice.

Treating so many Democratic voters like interlopers to be scolded might play well with corporate donors. But it’s a feeble swim against the political current. Polling shows that the younger Democratic voters are, the more favorable they’re apt to be toward socialism. “Younger adults are more likely to be in groups on the left, while older adults tend to cluster in more conservative groups,” the Pew Research Center noted.

Drawing on the results of its new public opinion survey, Global Strategy Group just reported that “socialist Democrats skew younger, with 57 percent of them being between the ages of 18 and 44.” Another poll, released a month ago by Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research, found that two-thirds of young people “said that their political views have changed in some way in recent years”—and “youth whose views did shift were almost twice as likely to become more liberal/progressive instead of more conservative.”

As socialists and others on the left prevail in many high-profile races, the refrains of condemnation coming from some of the Democratic Party establishment are potshots in a losing battle. By definition, young voters are the future of the party. Its prospects for winning elections are diminished to the extent that younger voters are made to feel unwelcome, or even vilified.

To the ears of many young Democratic voters, derision about how they cast their ballots is coming from out-of-touch party elders who treat crucial problems as abstractions or matters worthy only of lip service. Millions of Americans in early adulthood are facing financial stress with bleak outlooks for jobs and careers. College tuitions are often prohibitive, and college debt can be debilitating. Rents and mortgages are high. Everyday expenses are worse than a challenge. The climate crisis is real.

Such realities cast a shadow over the future. The last thing those voters want is arrogant leadership that refuses to grasp the urgency of this political moment.

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Hegseth: Honor Lindsey Graham by Giving Pentagon $1.5 Trillion

August 11, 2026

Key federal officials attended the renaming ceremony for Joint Base Lindsey Graham

Key federal officials attended the renaming ceremony for Joint Base Lindsey Graham in South Carolina on August 10, 2026.

(Photo by DOW Rapid Response/X.com)

“Lindsey himself said to me, in his office, ‘This is the best military budget I’ve seen since I’ve been in Congress,’” the Pentagon chief claimed.

Jessica Corbet, Common Dreams, Aug 10, 2026

Aug 10, 2026

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “can’t persuade Republicans to back his big budget,” but that didn’t stop him from pushing the $1.5 trillion proposal during a Monday event to rename Joint Base Charleston after the late Sen. Lindsey Graham.

When Graham, who served in the Air Force, unexpectedly died last month, critics remembered the South Carolina Republican as someone who “never met a war he didn’t want to send your kids to,” as well as “a bloodthirsty bastard who cheered the killing of Muslims and sold his soul to the fascists.”

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On Monday, Hegseth—who deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq—fondly recalled meeting with Graham while part of the group Vets for Freedom. Joined at the base by the senator’s replacement, his sister Darline Graham, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is from South Carolina, the Pentagon chief declared that “it falls to us to complete the work that Lindsey Graham began and advocated for for decades.”

“As we gather here today, the War Department is seeking a historic, generational investment of $1.5 trillion for America’s warriors, and Lindsey himself said to me, in his office, ‘This is the best military budget I’ve seen since I’ve been in Congress,’” Hegseth claimed, using President Donald Trump’s preferred name for the Department of Defense.

“This department pays tribute to Lindsey Graham in the naming of this base, but there could be no greater tribute than for Congress to give and invest in our warriors for the full $1.5 trillion,” he added.

The GOP narrowly controls both chambers of Congress, but as Politico reported just hours before the event, “Hegseth hasn’t persuaded Republicans to steamroll Democrats and advance the record-breaking plan, despite regularly trekking to the Hill in recent weeks and hobnobbing with lawmakers. Instead, an increasingly vocal group of GOP lawmakers argue the administration hasn’t explained why Republicans should burn valuable political capital in pursuit of Trump’s vision—especially with the midterms just months away.”

“Several top Republicans are skeptical about the Trump administration’s two-track approach to clinching $1.5 trillion. This relies on the GOP using the partisan reconciliation process—which allows the majority to bypass Democrats entirely—to provide $350 billion, the bulk of the increase,” the outlet detailed. The Republican majority “has—mostly—had Hegseth’s back” since the battle to confirm him, despite widely condemned bombings of boats allegedly trafficking drugs on the high seas and the ongoing war on Iran.

Hegseth on Monday shared some supposed details from his last meeting with Graham, who chaired the Senate Budget Committee.

“Mr. Secretary, what do you need for a reconciliation?” Graham said, according to Hegseth. “I said: ‘Well, in total, sir, we’re going to need $350 billion for our military. That’s what we believe gets us to $1.5 trillion—$115 [billion] in the base budget, $350 [billion] in reconciliation, and we’ll be ready.’”

“He looked at me and said, ‘How’s $355 [billion] sound to you?’ He wanted to give even more than $350 [billion],” Hegseth continued. “I saw firsthand as a young first lieutenant, as a captain in a combat zone, and as a secretary, the unwavering commitment of Lindsey Graham.”

Hegseth’s recounting of their meeting isn’t the first time Graham’s pro-war ideology has been highlighted since he died. As Common Dreams reported late last month, footage filmed for a documentary that was in the works shows the then-senator joyfully reacting to Trump’s Iran War. He said: “I almost cried. I mean, like, how long have we been pushing this?”

Responding to the release of that footage, Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, said that “the warmonger got his wish and the result has been a catastrophe.”

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Marco ‘McCarthy’ Rubio: Wrong on Cuba & ‘Terrorism’

August 10, 2026

Consortium News, August 10, 2026

Those who challenge and protest U.S. policies are not foreign-paid terrorists; Rubio and other Trump appointees are using “McCarthy” tactics to stop dissent, says Ann Wright.

Downtown Minneapolis ICE-out demonstration on Jan. 23 following ICE agent Jonathan Ross’ fatal shooting of civilian Renée Good. (Lorie Shaull /Flickr/ Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)

By Ann Wright

Thin-skinned and heavy-handed, the Trump administration apparently feels like it is being singled out by those who dissent from its policies. As a result, Trump appointees are taking drastic “McCarthy” tactics to stop dissent.

In less than one month, alleging that dissent and protests are part of attempts of other governments “to overthrow the government of the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sponsored two major initiatives to frighten those who oppose the Trump administration’s policies.

The first salvo was orchestrating a conference with 60 countries participating over “Threats From Left-Wing Terrorists.” The second was the report on Cuba that alleged virtually every group that has ever visited Cuba is paid by the Cuban government.

If You Are Not Outraged, You Aren’t Watching

These allegations of paid protest and travelling on the dime of another country are unfounded, untrue, and fly in the face of the history of protests in the U.S. and travel by U.S. citizens to see the effects of U.S. polices on other countries.

President Donald Trump’s erratic foreign policy, including the disastrous attacks on Iran as a favor to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli war machine; attacks domestically cutting health and education; horrific treatment of migrants; daily outlandish statements on just about every subject; and disregard for facts in virtually every issue all provide good reasons for protests by outraged U.S. citizens.

I have not been paid by any country to protest U.S. policies, nor do I know anyone who has been paid.

No one needs to be paid to be outraged!!!

Dissent Is Not Illegal, Nor Paid by Other Countries

Sen. Joe McCarthy, center, confers with Roy Cohn, chief counsel for House Un-American Activities Committee, Aug. 23, 1953. (Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons)

In particular, Secretary of State and National Security adviser Marco Rubio, who has authored the latest “McCarthy” report to quell opposition to illegal, immoral policies of his department and the Trump administration in general, seems to have lost his grasp on the history of dissent in the U.S.

From his 15 years in the U.S. Senate, he should remember that many of each administration’s domestic and international policies have been lawfully and non-violently protested by U.S. citizens in the U.S. Congress.

Having been a part of many protests since I resigned from the State Department in March 2003 in opposition to a war policy, President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, I know that these protests are NOT a part of attempts of other governments to “overthrow the government of the United States,” but are legitimate shows of concern about specific policies.

Rubio’s allegations of other countries’ influence in these protests are unfounded and untrue.

I was not paid by a foreign government to resign. I resigned because I felt the war on Iraq was illegal, immoral, and a dangerous action jeopardizing the national security of the United States.

I have not been paid by any country to protest U.S. policies, nor do I know anyone who has been paid. Protest is a legitimate, time-consuming act of outrage about a policy that people use to bring attention to the policy, and hopefully effect change in the policy.

Rubio: Blame the Left, Ignore Right’s Violent Attack

The first attack against legitimate protest came in the U.S. Department of State sponsored conference on “Far-Left Terrorism” held in Washington, D,C,. in July, where Rubio and White House pit bull Stephen Miller harangued the representatives of 66 nations about terrorists from the left wanting to overthrow the U.S. government.

In his opening statement Rubio railed:

“This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Miller called left-wing extremism a growing threat aimed at “the overthrow of our system and form of government” that officials previously failed to sufficiently address. Miller railed:

“We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization. If the left is allowed to use the real or actual threat of violence to destabilize our institutions, then those institutions cannot and will not succeed.”

A White House press release stated,

“Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

Of course, neither Rubio nor Miller mentioned President Trump’s pardon of the over 1,500 persons who did try to violently overthrow the United States electoral process on Jan. 6, 2021 as they attacked the Capitol police and broke into and destroyed many offices in the U.S. Capitol.

The attempted overthrow of the 2020 election by seeking to nullify the election results through lawsuits in 62 federal and state courts was attempted by Trump’s loyal personal lawyers including the current acting U.S. attorney general and head of the U.S. Department of Justice Todd Blanche, and disgraced and disbarred lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Their cases of election fraud were stopped by rulings in all 62 federal and state lawsuits that no election fraud had occurred.

Untruthful Report About Cuba & Paid Protesters

Prisoners of the C.I.A,-backed Brigade 2506, after they were captured in the Bay of Pigs invasion, 1961. (Miguel Vinas / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)

The most recent and most ludicrous allegations of left-wing violence and protests being funded by other countries is in Secretary of Rubio’s 10- page report on “Cuba: the Capital of 21st Century Communism.”

Rubio accuses the National Network on Cuba, National Lawyers Guild, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, the People’s Forum, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, and the Democratic Socialists of America of being paid by the Cuban government whose goal, the report states, has been for 60 years the overthrow of the U.S. government.

Talk about turning the facts on their heads. As is well-documented, 13 successive U.S. presidential administrations since 1959 — Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama (first term, when C.I.A. policies were still in effect, but changing in Obama’s second term with diplomatic recognition), Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2 — have attempted to overthrow the Cuban government in the 60-plus years of its existence.

The current attempt of overthrow is centered on the U.S. brutal and total blockade of fuel going to Cuba, which has left Cuban citizens without electricity for operations in hospitals, for food preparation, and for the conduct of normal life.

Making life so miserable for the Cuban citizenry that they overthrow their government would fulfill the longstanding hopes of Cuban-American Rubio.

Rubio Dishonest About Cuban American Background

Marco Rubio has been less than forthright about his heritage as a Cuban American in his quest for the overthrow of the Cuban government.

Rubio, “Mr. Righteous against birthright citizenship,” is a “birthright citizen” born in the U.S. of noncitizen parents who had immigrated in 1956 from Cuba under the Batista dictatorship, not under the 1959 revolutionary government.

Rubio, “Mr. Tough on illegal immigrants,” ignores that his own grandfather entered the U.S. illegally and was ordered to be deported but was saved from deportation by an amnesty during the Cuban missile crisis.

Rubio, “Mr. Kill the Boat Drug Runners of the Caribbean,” disregards that his own brother-in-law was convicted of drug running and his sister implicated but never charged.

Rubio, “Mr. I Know All About Cuba Because I Am Cuban American,” has been to Cuba only once — where in Cuba did he go? A few hours at the U.S. prison on the U.S. Naval base at Guantánamo.

No doubt, more will come in the next two years as Rubio, Miller, and others in the administration seem to think they can get away with outrageous bullying of individuals and organizations that do not agree with them and that challenge them in non-violent ways, in contrast to the Jan. 6 gang.

In particular, there are always protests against the horrific effects of brutal sanctions that the U.S. government uses to make life so difficult for citizens of other countries that they will overthrow their own governments, whether it be Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, or Nicaragua.

Israel’s Paid Influence Seems OK With Rubio

 Rubio and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivering joint statements in Jerusalem on Feb. 16, 2025. (State Department/ Freddie Everett)

However, Rubio must be thinking that since his buddies in the Netanyahu government have paid Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, millions of dollars in a specific program to influence U.S. public opinion to stop the massive decline in Israel’s “likability,” that other countries have paid off U.S. persons to work clandestinely on the same scale.

Parscale’s firm was hired by Israel for $6 million in September 2025 and then signed a $15 million contract with Israeli firm Havas to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel, according to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Parscale and his team sent conservative influencers suggested positive language about Israel for posts on social media sites such as X, Instagram, and TikTok. The influencers are then compensated based on how many “likes” each post gets from readers.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government has dramatically increased spending on influence operations. Earlier this year, Israel increased by four times its “public diplomacy” influence budget from $150 million in 2025 to $730 million in 2026.

But even The Times of Israel says it’s too late for a “face lift” as a Pew Research Center poll reported that 60 percent of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37 percent viewing it favorably after Israel has committed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza; pillaged and plundered homes, farms, animals in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian West Bank; destroyed southern Lebanon; and got the Trump administration up to its neck in the war on Iran.

Keep Challenging Illegal, Immoral & Criminal Policies

The two recent major attempts of the Trump administration to quell dissent show how serious challenging illegal, immoral, and criminal policies has become and how important it is that we push back hard against these attempts to intimidate citizens to silence their dissent.

Despite these brutal, heavy-handed attempts, dissent is spreading to regular citizens. In a recent letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper Honolulu Star Advertiser, which serves a large U.S. military population, a resident of Hawaii summarized the challenge very well:

“The true domestic enemy includes those who monopolize political and economic power. The real enemy includes individuals who misinform, threaten, and disenfranchise the less powerful. The true enemy are those who are antidemocratic, have little or no concern regarding the welfare of others, and enrich themselves, family, and a few friends at the expense of the general population.”

Ann Wright served in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves for 29 years and retired as a colonel. She was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and served in U.S. embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia.  She is the co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience.  She has been with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition since 2010, has been put in Israeli prison twice for attempting to break the illegal Israeli naval blockade on Gaza and has been on segments of flotillas in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2024.

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CIA launches Cuba task force amid new sanctions and UN warnings of a “silent Gaza”

August 8, 2026

Andrea Lobo, WSWS, 8 Aug 2026
US Embassy in Havana [Photo: US Department of State]

Announcing a new round of sanctions against Cuba on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that President Donald Trump’s “resolve is ironclad: the United States will not tolerate a rogue state harboring hostile foreign military, intelligence, and terror operations just 90 miles from the American homeland.”

The threat was issued against a country whose electrical grid collapsed twice within 24 hours this week, whose hospitals operate without reliable power and whose population is being deprived of food, medicine and fuel by a deliberate US energy blockade. 

On Thursday, United Nations human rights rapporteurs condemned the US measures and warned of a “silent Gaza” unfolding on the island, declaring that food “must never be used as an instrument of political pressure,” and that measures knowingly depriving a population of the means to survive strike at the most basic guarantees of the right to life.

What the Trump administration is carrying out is an undeclared war of extermination against nearly 10 million people, criminal under international law and aimed at driving an entire society back a century in order to turn it into a colony.

The sanctions announced Thursday target five Cuban entities and eight individuals, including subsidiaries of the military conglomerate GAESA, Revolutionary Armed Forces Minister Álvaro López Miera, Chief of the General Staff Roberto Legrá Sotolongo and Cuba’s military attachés to Russia and China.

They came one day after the New York Times revealed that the CIA has secretly established a Cuba task force, adding case officers who recruit and manage spies, intelligence analysts, cyber-operations personnel and specialists in covert influence operations. According to the officials speaking anonymously to the Times, the task force seeks to create fissures among the Cuban political elite in the hope of replacing “hard-liners” with leaders more amenable to Trump’s demands.

The Times also revealed that the Trump administration has revised the National Intelligence Priorities Framework to designate Cuba a “Priority 1” target, alongside China, Iran and Russia. This has led the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and others to dedicate more intelligence collection assets, including satellites, toward the island.

The Times states plainly what this is for: the intelligence “will help the U.S. military update its options for potential military action against Cuba.”

These operations coincide with a sweeping reorganization of the US military across the hemisphere. At midnight on Monday, Southern Command retired Joint Task Force-Southern Spear—responsible for 63 strikes on fishing boats accused of carrying drugs in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific that have killed 221 people in eleven months—and replaced it with Joint Task Force-Western Hemisphere. 

SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis Donovan announced that the new command, “the action arm of US Southern Command,” would “apply total systemic friction on these networks,” operating alongside “our 18 other nations” in the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition. Its purpose is to extend joint strikes from international waters onto the sovereign territory of Latin American states. Cuba will figure among its principal targets, together with the coordination of repression against social opposition throughout the region.

With the debacle in the war against Iran and social anger mounting over ICE raids, healthcare cuts and the cost of living, an operation against Cuba is being contemplated as an “October surprise.” Some of Trump’s advisers believe the Cuban government “could be gone by the time of the midterm election in the United States in November,” according to the Times.  

Such a move would not be aimed at boosting popularity for the Republican Party—only 15 percent of Americans support a war against Cuba. It would provide the pretext to manipulate or even cancel the 2026 elections and criminalize opposition.

The last time the CIA established a Cuba task force was 1960. Its members oversaw the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, in which some 1,400 CIA-organized and financed exile mercenaries landed on the island. The operation was crushed by Cuban forces. When it failed, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drafted Operation Northwoods, a since-declassified proposal to stage false-flag terrorist bombings in American cities and hijackings of US aircraft to manufacture a pretext for invasion.

The Venezuelan precedent shows a more recent example. In October 2025, Trump publicly confirmed he had authorized the CIA to conduct covert and potentially lethal operations inside Venezuela. Three months later, on January 3, US Special Forces seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife without suffering a single casualty—his location known, his defenses mapped, the political ground prepared for Delcy Rodríguez and her brother to preside over a US protectorate that has handed Washington control over Venezuelan oil, finances and foreign policy.

Who infiltrated whom

On July 20 the State Department published a 100-page report, “Cuba: the capital of 21st century communism,” which it has promoted on social media several times a week since. Its thesis is that Havana has spent six decades infiltrating agents into American social movements and the US state itself—that the civil rights movement, the opposition to the Vietnam War, the protests following the police murder of George Floyd and the present movements against ICE and the Gaza genocide were, in substantial measure, directed from Cuba. 

Rubio told Fox News last week that Cuba is “a true superpower” of espionage and influence, and that of the recent protest movement, “there’s nothing organic about it.”

This week’s revelations establish the real direction of state penetration. American case officers, cyber-operatives and influence specialists are actively being inserted into Cuba, with satellites re-tasked overhead and military options under preparation.

The historical record admits of no ambiguity. Washington imposed its partial embargo in 1960, made comprehensive in 1962. In March 1960 the CIA bombed the La Coubre in Havana harbor, timing the charges in succession so that rescue workers responding to the first blast would be caught by the second; over 100 died. Cuban counterintelligence documented 638 separate schemes to kill Castro. Luis Posada Carriles, trained by the CIA at Fort Benning, organized the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73 aboard, including the national junior fencing team. Researchers place the toll of US-directed and US-linked terrorism against Cuba since 1959 at more than 3,000 killed. Not one perpetrator has been prosecuted.

ince Trump’s declaration of a national emergency over Cuba in January, US aggression has turned genocidal. Washington has imposed an energy embargo threatening punitive tariffs against any country selling the island oil, along with successive sanctions packages freezing the assets of dozens of Cuban entities and officials. 

In May, the US Department of Justice indicted the 94-year-old Raúl Castro on charges arising from the 1996 downing of two aircraft operated by CIA-linked provocateurs. Combined with a military buildup in the Caribbean and now covert operations on the ground, the indictment is a patently fabricated pretext to justify a military attack.

Havana’s answer: a country for sale

Confronted with this onslaught, the Cuban government has appealed not to the working class but to the American ruling elite.

On May 14, it received CIA Director John Ratcliffe in Havana, where he demanded “fundamental changes” in a meeting with senior Cuban officials, including Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the former president’s grandson. Havana has since announced the most radical economic restructuring since 1959—privatizations, the stripping of labor protections and open-ended invitations to foreign capital.

The character of these appeals is unmistakable. Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío told the New York Times that Havana would not oppose a Trump-branded resort on Cayo Santa María: “If he wants to do it peacefully, we see no specific reason to exclude him… If it is the Trump administration, in principle, we have no reason to refuse.” 

Deputy Foreign Trade Minister Carlos Luis Jorge Méndez told The National: “We want American businesspeople to know and understand that Cuba is a country open to investment… in sectors ranging from mining and tourism to real estate, banking and finance.”

The regime that survived 66 years of CIA terror campaigns and provocations now negotiates the terms of its own submission with the CIA’s director and offers the island back to the US oligarchy that ran it as a casino and brothel under Batista.

This is the dead end of bourgeois nationalism. Neither Havana nor the “left” governments of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia—complicit throughout in the fuel blockade—will defend the Cuban people.

The only force capable of halting this crime is the international working class. Dockworkers, transport, oil and logistics workers in the United States and internationally must refuse to enforce the blockade and demand its immediate end, along with the delivery of the fuel, food and medicine Cuba requires. The threat of war against Cuba, the buildup of dictatorship at home and the persecution of socialists are a single process and must be answered by the industrial and political mobilization of workers everywhere against war and fascism, on the basis of a socialist program.

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Trump Says US Has Taken “Billions and Billions” From Venezuela and Iran Is Next

July 28, 2026

Trump said that Congress should approve legislation to allow Venezuela’s funds to be rerouted to the US military.

By Sharon Zhang , Truthout, July 27, 2026

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks while aboard Air Force One for a trip to Michigan on July 27, 2026 in flight.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks while aboard Air Force One for a trip to Michigan on July 27, 2026 in flight.

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President Donald Trump claimed that the U.S. has seized over $13 billion in oil revenues from Venezuela and is using it for “running the country” in remarks on Monday in which he threatened to do the same to Iran.

Late last week, the Financial Times estimated that the U.S. has put roughly $13 billion of Venezuela’s oil revenues into a reported U.S. Treasury account ever since the Trump administration’s likely illegal coup operation in Venezuela in January. The report pointed out that the administration has said very little about the money it’s seized thus far, outside of claiming that it is being spent on helping the government.

The report also said that there are very few indications that it’s being spent to boost the ailing economy in Venezuela, which also suffered two devastating earthquakes last month, “a potential sign that the US has not sent all the revenues back to Caracas.”

Answering a question from a reporter on Air Force One on Monday, Trump claimed that the U.S. has actually seized more than $13 billion, and was tight-lipped in answering where the funds have gone. He suggested, however, that some of the revenues have gone toward paying the U.S. back for the strike operation on January 3 in which the U.S. abducted then-President Nicolás Maduro and killed dozens.

“Venezuela, we paid for that war many times over, and that’ll happen with Iran also,” Trump said.

Related Story

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright shakes hands with Venezuela's Acting President Delcy Rodriguez during a press conference after a meeting at the Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas, Venezuela, on February 11, 2026.

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The US May Not Have Troops on the Ground, But Venezuela’s Government Is Occupied

As Delcy Rodríguez capitulates to US demands, the Venezuelan left is calling for resistance. By Rodrigo Acuña , Truthout

June 13, 2026

When pressed again on where the money has gone, Trump repeatedly said it’s going toward “running the country.” However, he suggested that Congress should pass legislation to allow the funds to be rerouted to the U.S. military.

“It can’t go to the military, Congress has to approve it. Congress doesn’t like approving money for the military, they like giving it to things that shouldn’t be done. But we’re taking in a lot of money — billions and billions of dollars from Venezuela,” he said. “That’ll be done to Iran, too.”

Trump administration officials have previously said that the U.S. is using Venezuela’s money to fund the country, an account that some within the country have disputed. In an interview with NBC in February, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that Trump has “final say” over what funding is allowed to go back into Venezuela.

“The largest revenue source that funds the government … is now controlled by the United States,” Wright said at the time. “If they’re driving positive change that benefits Americans and is improving the life opportunities of people in Venezuela, that money will flow. If they steer off that path, we have, just simply, tremendous leverage.”

Meanwhile, Trump also threatened to use any potential funds seized from Iran to pay for damages that the country has done to American assets amid the U.S.-Israeli war on the country.

“We’re going to use Iran’s money to pay for the damage they did. The Iran money that we control,” he said.

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House Passes 2027 NDAA With Section to Integrate US and Israeli Militaries

July 23, 2026

The bill passed in a 216-212 vote, with six Democrats supporting it and seven Republicans voting no

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, | July 22, 2026 at 5:51 pm ET | Israel, ndaa

The House on Wednesday passed its version of the massive $1.15 trillion 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which includes Section 219 (formerly Section 224), a provision to further integrate the US and Israeli militaries, a scheme Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described as “my plan.”

The NDAA passed largely along party lines in a 216-212 vote. Seven Republicans voted against it, and two didn’t vote, meaning that the Democrats could have blocked the legislation, but six Democrats voted yes on the sweeping military spending bill despite President Trump’s continued war against Iran, which was launched without congressional authorization.

Screenshot from C-SPAN showing the vote tally

The Democrats who voted for the bill include Reps. Henry Cuellar (TX), Donald G. Davis (NC), Jared F. Golden (ME), Vicente Gonzalez (TX), Adam Gray (CA), and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA).

The Republicans who voted against the legislation include Reps. Thomas Massie (KY), Chip Roy (TX), Anna Paulina Luna (FL), Harriet M. Hageman (WY), Elijah Crane (AZ), Tim Burchett (TN), and Josh Brecheen (OK).

The vote came after the House Rules Committee didn’t allow a vote on an amendment introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to strip Section 219 from the NDAA. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who supported Massie’s effort, has said he would “fight to strip this amendment in the conference between the House and the Senate,” when the two chambers negotiate the final NDAA.

The Senate’s version of the NDAA also includes a provision to integrate the two militaries, but the legislation was blocked by Senate Democrats last week over President Trump’s war with Iran, which hasn’t been authorized by Congress and has continued despite both chambers passing a concurrent War Powers Resolution directing the president to end the conflict.

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Rubio Threatens to ‘Teach the ICC’—Which Prosecutes War Crimes—the ‘Full Meaning of American Resolve’

July 14, 2026

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio attends a meeting in Ankara, Türkiye on July 7, 2026.

(Photo by Yves Herman/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

“Is the secretary of state worried because he knows US personnel committed war crimes in Iran?”

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, Jul 13, 2026

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday announced what he characterized as a “campaign to dismantle” the International Criminal Court, the Hague-based tribunal tasked with investigating and charging individuals with war crimes and other violations.

In a video posted to social media, Rubio accused the international court of “waging a war against our country—not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts, and the force of so-called international law.” The top American diplomat threatened that the US “will teach the ICC the full meaning of American resolve.”

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The US State Department said in a statement that Rubio’s new campaign against the ICC would “feature a whole-of-government response to systematically disable” the court’s “ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.” The US is not party to the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty that established the ICC.

US President Donald Trump and his subordinates, who have been accused of myriad violations of international law, have adopted an increasingly aggressive posture toward the ICC since taking power last January.

In a February 6, 2025 executive order, Trump declared “a national emergency to address” the purported “threat” posed by the ICC and announced sanctions against court officials, including its judges. The president’s order cited the ICC’s “investigations concerning personnel of the United States and certain of its allies, including Israel,” which is also not party to the Rome Statute.

In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes committed in the Gaza Strip.

Rubio warned in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that US officials accused of international crimes could be next to face ICC action.

“Border Patrol agents working to remove violent criminals from our country, US Marines risking their lives to restore order in the Western Hemisphere, federal prosecutors working to dismantle terror networks plotting attacks on the American homeland—all would face the constant risk of persecution for the ‘crime’ of defending our country,” Rubio wrote. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.”

Raed Jarrar, advocacy director of the human rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), said in response to Rubio’s op-ed that “when the world’s most powerful country aims to dismantle the world’s only permanent international court, it sends the message that the powerful are above the law.”

“It is not the ICC that Rubio is dismantling brick by brick, but the rules-based international order that grew out of the ashes of World War II,” said Jarrar. “Rubio’s attack doesn’t just underscore US hypocrisy, but undermines access to justice across the globe, from Ukraine to Sudan and could amount to obstruction of justice, a crime under the Rome Statute in and of itself.”

In his op-ed, Rubio pointed to DAWN’s call earlier this year for Iran and other Middle East nations to grant the ICC jurisdiction to investigate apparent war crimes committed during the conflict launched in late February by Trump and Netanyahu.

Omar Shakir, DAWN’s executive director, said Monday that Rubio mischaracterized the group’s call as focusing solely on actions by US personnel. That move, said Shakir, “begs the question: Is the secretary of state worried because he knows US personnel committed war crimes in Iran?”

Under Rubio’s plan, the State Department is threatening to impose “increased sanctions against the ICC and affiliated organizations,” hit court personnel with “visa revocations and travel bans,” and pressure other nations that aren’t party to the Rome Statute to “leverage their diplomatic networks to take similar actions alongside” the Trump administration.

Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch who has demanded international accountability for the Trump administration over its illegal assault on Iran, wrote Monday that Rubio “can’t even make an honest case for attacking the International Criminal Court.”

“He makes it sound like the ICC acts out of the blue anywhere it wants when in fact it acts only against crimes committed on the territory of states that have invited it,” Roth wrote. “He never explains why the United States should be able to commit crimes on the territory of those states with impunity, contrary to the desire of their sovereign governments for an international backstop to reinforce justice for such crimes.”

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The U.S. oligarchy’s crime boss: Trump pocketed $2.2 billion in 2025

July 2, 2026
Barry Grey@wswsgrey WSWS, 2 July 2026

President Donald Trump speaks at a news conference, Monday, March 9, 2026, at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla. [AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein]

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump released his mandatory financial disclosure for 2025. It showed that he more than tripled his personal income during the first year of his second term, from $622 million in 2024 to at least $2.2 billion last year.

The scale of Trump’s self-enrichment renders the great corruption scandals of American history almost quaint by comparison. The Teapot Dome affair of the 1920s, which stood for a century as the byword for political criminality, centered on roughly $400,000 in bribes—about $8 million in today’s dollars—accepted by Interior Secretary Albert Fall in exchange for leasing naval oil reserves. Fall went to prison. Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in 1973 over kickbacks totaling perhaps $250,000, collected in envelopes of cash from Maryland contractors. By Trumpian standards, small potatoes.

The report provided some indications of the flagrant self-dealing and corruption that enabled the real estate swindler and media huckster-turned-US president to massively expand his fortune and that of his family. By last September, the collective wealth of the Trump family stood at an estimated $10 billion, having nearly doubled since the November 2024 election. Donald Trump Jr.’s wealth went from $50 million to $300 million, and that of Eric Trump rose tenfold to $400 million.

In the same year, labor’s share of the national income fell to its lowest level since records began. In the third quarter of 2025, labor’s share fell to 53.8 percent, down from 70 percent in 1947. These statistics translate in real life into poverty wages, impossibly high rents and living costs, and longer working hours for tens of millions of workers.

An annual income of $2.2 billion is equivalent to the incomes of 37,931 US autoworkers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ estimate of the average autoworker’s wage, based on a 40-hour workweek. An annual income of $2.2 billion computes to $251,000 per hour. At that rate, someone takes in $70 per second, more than twice what a UAW autoworker earns in an hour.

No wonder that at an Oval Office event this week Trump defended his refusal to sign a bill to increase low-income housing, demanding that Congress first pass his plan to disenfranchise millions of working class voters and calling the housing bill a “big yawn.”

In his first term, between 2017 and 2021, Trump broke with the practice of modern presidents who put their financial affairs in blind trusts. He refused to divest from his businesses and placed them in a trust he could still access. He used his Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C. as a cash cow, encouraging foreign delegations, lobbyists and Republican officials to spend money that flowed into his personal bank accounts. He granted his daughter Ivanka multiple Chinese trademarks while she served as a White House adviser, at the same time that US-China trade talks were underway.

That, however, pales in comparison to Trump’s second term. He refused to sign the ethics pledge he had taken in his first term, rescinded Biden’s presidential ethics rules, and fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics early in 2025, leaving it without a permanent director.

Trump made the bulk of his 2025 income from his cryptocurrency businesses, which accounted for some $1.4 billion. According to an analysis in the New York Times, his crypto venture World Liberty Financial, which sells a digital currency called $WLFI, took in $799 million last year, compared to $57 million in 2024.

Three days before his second inauguration, Trump helped launch a memecoin, $TRUMP, which has generated another $636 million. He made $77 million from Mar-a-Lago last year, compared to $50 million in 2024, and $122 million from his Trump National Doral golf club, an increase of $11 million. He holds shares in his Trump Media & Technology group worth $875 million. At the end of 2025, Trump had investment assets of at least $857 million, compared to $236 million the prior year.

Trump’s crypto businesses directly benefited from his policy decisions as president. In January 2025, three days before his inauguration, an investment firm tied to the government of the United Arab Emirates bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, generating $23 million in profits for the Trump family. Soon after, the Trump administration struck a deal for the US to export computer chips that power artificial intelligence to the UAE.

Trump’s memecoin business directly benefited from a February 2025 Securities and Exchange Commission statement notifying the industry that such tokens would no longer be subject to the agency’s oversight, reversing the position of the agency’s chairman during the Biden administration. And Trump signed legislation last July to promote a form of cryptocurrency called stablecoins four months after his family-backed firm introduced its own stablecoin.

Last October, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, the richest man in crypto, who had pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money laundering laws and served four months in prison. Binance has since become a critical business partner to the Trump family’s own crypto venture.

Crypto, however, is by no means the only area where Trump has used the White House to promote his business ventures and increase his personal wealth. He has licensed the Trump name to properties in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Those two deals alone generated more than $14 million for Trump in 2025.

Last Sunday, the New York Times published an exposé about a multi-billion-dollar deal between the US and Kazakhstan for the development of tungsten mines in the former Soviet republic. The project directly involves the sons of Trump and his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Billions in loans from the U.S. Commerce Department and the Export-Import Bank are being allocated to finance a venture that stands to generate untold millions in profits for the two families, as well as other billionaire cronies of the president.

Then there are the millions being made by members of the financial elite from bets in predictive markets on oil prices based on advance notice of White House announcements of bombings and/or peace talks with Iran. In a world dominated by oligarchs and their gangster representatives such as Trump, the lives of countless thousands become the stuff of profiteering from manipulated markets. Investigative reports have documented how Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has used his role in negotiations and Middle East policy to secure massive sums from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies for his private investment vehicles.

This is all in addition to the more mundane corruption of the Trump administration, including no-bid contracts to donors with business before the government for projects such as the White House ballroom and the Reflecting Pool.

Trump is not merely breaking the rules; he is rewriting them so that his enrichment ceases to be legally classifiable as crime. Corruption raised to the level of state policy—the legalization of the loot as it is looted.

These are not the crimes of a single individual. The staggeringly wealthy and parasitic financial oligarchy has installed Trump, a fascistic product of the New York real estate and gambling mafia, as the head of state. Nothing reveals the mores of this new aristocracy more than the Epstein scandal, which implicates the heights of official society and whose cover-up unites Trump, the corporate media and virtually the entire political establishment.

As for the nominal opposition party, the Democrats, they wring their hands and complain but do nothing to stop the plundering or hold the criminals accountable, because they are controlled by the same class of oligarchs and defend their system based on the private ownership of the means of production and production for profit.

This entire class must be expropriated, and the wealth produced by the working class must be used to meet social needs.

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