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Marlins Spiral Away from Playoff Contention

After having played great baseball for a month and a half, the Miami Marlins have reversed course to drop a team record 12 straight games, shifting their record from ten games over .500 to two games under. The turn of events is a surprise to just about everyone following the team, but in my mind does not negate the overall positives of the 2026 season. Even with a 52-54 record, the Marlins have demonstrated the growth of a core group of players who are keys to future success. At the same time, the team is still not out of the race, though the odds have dropped dramatically, which is a shame considering the momentum built.

First, the positives: the middle infield of Otto Lopez and Xavier Edwards remains elite, despite Edwards’ recent struggles, his underlying numbers look very solid and projectable. Kyle Stowers could be a fixture at 1B, but also could be a trade chip if Bendix gets the right offer to fortify the future at key positions of need, but it would take a very strong offer. Joe Mack has cemented his position as catcher of the present and the future. LF Heriberto Hernandez has become one of the better hitters in baseball the past couple of months and RF Griffin Conine has played exceptionally well on both offense and defense, earning more playing time against lefties. Javier Sanoja remains a very versatile and valuable utility man. The anchors of the starting rotation, Sandy Alcantara and Eury Perez, are not going anywhere.

The negatives: the holes on this team are a lack of production in CF, where Jakob Marsee has struggled ever since putting up great numbers his first month of his career in late 2025. There is also a glaring hole at 3B, which could eventually be filled by upcoming prospect Aiva Arquette or by moving Otto Lopez to 3B when premium SS prospect Starlyn Caba gets the call-up. However this is an area the team will likely want to address sooner with a proven major leaguer. There is also a lack of depth on the bench and too much reliance on pet projects that are not adequate for giving the Marlins more offensive firepower, such as Leo Jimenez, though OF Esteury Ruiz has been a pleasant surprise. Liam Hicks was a great rule V draft pick, but lacks the consistent power and catching skills necessary to make him a versatile and valuable backup, besides being left handed, which the team is too top-heavy with.

There is lack of depth in the starting rotation and the front office has been late in addressing what was apparent early on. The injury to all-star starter Max Meyer has contributed to the crisis here. This needs to be addressed through a combination of trades, free agent signings and the eventual arrival of young pitching depth from the minors, which the Marlins player development system will help with. The bullpen statistically was one of the best, but has had too many implosions and key pitchers are fading. This is not just a Marlins issue but an issue connected with all bullpens: they are erratic and volatile by nature. Here the President of Baseball Operations, Peter Bendix, has proven skillful in remaking the pen on the cheap, something he will need to fortify the way he has in the past. That means selective waiver acquisitions and trades as well as relying on player development to deliver the next batch of quality arms.

What is happening now tends to feed on itself psychologically. This is the area I worry most about with the managerial and coaching leadership. Are they willing to loosen the rigid adherence to platooning players to get their best performers more at bats? And to shake up the lineup so that the hot hands are rewarded? Overall I like the manager and the coaching staff but more of these loses makes it a difficult environment to justify staying the course with the same leadership. Hopefully the team turns it around, especially since a big part of the problem is a collective offensive slump, exacerbated no doubt by trying too hard to do too much, which then makes it worse.

The good news is there continues to be strong player development is the minors, led by the emergence of the best prospect the Marlins have had in a while: CF Cam Cannarella, whose offensive numbers have skyrocketed this season after being drafted in 2025. Likewise, SS prospect Starlyn Caba, already stellar defensively, has seen significant growth in offensive production this year. Those are two players who could be strong fixtures of future Marlins major league rosters. First round draft pick from 2025, Aiva Arquette, could move fast toward the majors, given his progress so far, and could eventually slot in at either SS or 3B, depending on the mix of talent on future Marlins big league rosters. However his progress has been stalled by several minor injuries that have periodically landed him on the injured list.

But this slump remains tough to take for the timing, with fans having clearly renewed interest in going in larger numbers to the games. Laura Leigh and I celebrated our final year in Miami and our 33rd wedding anniversary by inviting a group of 18 friends to share a luxury box with us on July 10. We had a great time, even with the loss to Cleveland. The problem is the Marlins have not won a game since!

Owner Bruce Sherman brought in Peter Bendix to lead the team, which remains a great choice. The turnaround from the pre-Bendix era has been overwhelmingly positive and the owner is fully committed to the new leadership. That has not changed. The Fish are in fact “for real” despite the losing streak. The future is bright. Let’s turn it around soon. Go Fish!

The Silicon Valley Global Warriors: From Neoliberalism to Geopolitics

Two books have been published over the past five years that analyze the political and economic relationship between the big tech corporate sector and the U.S. national security state. The first, written by Ho-fung Hung, Clash of Empires, offers an explanation for why the U.S. national security state pivoted away from an economic engagement strategy with China toward a strategy of militarized confrontation. Hung points out that there was always a push from the U.S. national security state, or the military-industrial complex, to categorize China as a security threat and to oppose renewal of China’s most-favored nation status as early as the 1990s. The geopolitical interests of the U.S. state was reinforced by the interests of firms in the U.S. that perceived themselves to be especially vulnerable to trade with China, such as steel and aluminum, and those firms that did not have any investments or plans for investments in the China market. They were joined by U.S. labor federations such as the AFL-CIO, which also opposed renewing China’s MFN status. However this coalition during the 1990s was out-financed and outmaneuvered by a much more powerful cohort of domestic lobbyists representing leading sectors of global capital. This group of transnational capitalists spent big and worked with Chinese political officials to mount an effective lobbying campaign that included ATT, GE, IBM, ExxonMobil, Automobile companies, farm businesses and even sectors of the military-industrial complex that were interested in pursuing more aggressive sales of aircraft (Boeing) and satellites (Hughes) to China.

However, this balance of political forces favoring economic engagement with China changed dramatically after the global capitalist crisis of 2008, for reasons that are detailed and analyzed by Nick Srnicek in his book, Silicon Empires, Polity Press, 2026. Both Hung and Srnicek locate this shifting political landscape to a calculation by transnational capitalists that the engagement strategy with China was becoming too costly by the 2010s, a realization that emerged gradually but ultimately explains why the U.S. national security state pivoted toward a strategy of militarized confrontation.

What is most striking from Srnicek’s book is the careful documentation of how both the U.S and Chinese governments facilitated the rise of their respective big tech sectors by policies that enabled these sectors to consolidate into large-scale oligopolies and to expand their reach as global powerbrokers. The U.S. took the lead here by handing big tech decades of publicly subsidized telecommunications infrastructure for free in the 1990s, then encouraging big tech’s global expansion through aggressive backing from the U.S. government, which included domestic and global support for deregulation of the big tech sector.

This tech-state relationship was initially built around U.S. support for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization by 2001, which provided added momentum to transnational capital to expand foreign direct investment in China, which emerged as the global leader in the production of a wide range of manufactured goods, but was initially quite dependent on U.S. global tech firms for investment in high-tech global value chains. U.S. foreign investors adapted well to their circumstances, massaging their political relationships to the Chinese political and economic elites to pave the way for billions of dollars in annual profits.

At the same time, the Chinese government was adopting a very light regulatory touch to their own big tech sector, whose product innovation and extreme consolidation of ownership was encouraged and facilitated by the state. From the mid-2000s, as growth began to slow in traditional manufacturing sectors, “local governments, especially in coastal provinces, began to take up a model of development based around science and technology” (Srnicek, 83). Srnicek goes on to add:

“Tech firms increasingly became a core part of the restructuring of the Chinese economy as the focus became to develop into an innovation-driven economy. This approach solidified in 2015, with support for the digital economy becoming the core priority of the state, and in 2016, China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) deemed ICT to be the highest priority sector and placed innovation at the forefront of its strategy. As in the United Stares, a coalition of interests solidified between the tech elites and the political elites over this period. The merger of state and platform capitalists can be seen, for instance, in the growing inclusion of tech leaders into the governing bodies of the state-with a number of tech CEOs becoming members of the National People’s Congress” (84).

Chinese policy of state subsidies, light regulation, and promotion of rapidly consolidated tech sectors in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis accomplished many of the same outcomes already established in the U.S. Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft grew into global mega-giants in a deregulated and permissive legal structure backed by U.S. global geostrategic power. Likewise, the Chinese state did not apply the new Chinese antitrust law of 2008 against its large-scale domestic big tech platforms, but instead encouraged and facilitated their massive consolidation into domestic and global tech mega players. On the other hand, antitrust law was used against foreign investors, who were faced with more competition in China and upscaling by Chinese mega tech firms on a global scale. This was assisted by massive investments from Chinese firms such as Alibaba ant Tencent, who “spent between 80 and 100 percent of their revenue on investing between 2014 and 2019, whereas the largest big five U.S. tech firms invested only 30-66 percent of their revenue” (86).

This shifting geoeconomic landscape led to a pivot by U.S. mega-tech giants from cooperation with China toward a more confrontational approach, though there are still divisions within this sector as to how confrontational and how non-cooperative the U.S. should be regarding applying sanctions to the China market. The give and take between heightened militarized competition, increased U.S. sanctions by both the Trump and Biden Administrations and the willingness of exceptions to be carved out to ease or remove sanctions that negatively affect big tech firms is readily apparent in the Trump Administration’s decision to allow Nvidia to continue to sell its H200 AI chips to approved Chinese firms. However, the Chinese government refused to approve the purchases, opting instead to prioritize its own domestic chip technology.

The aggressive geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China is thoroughly interdependent with the global tech war between consolidated blocs of transnational capitalists who are aggressively competing for global market share. This has resulted in a shift from neoliberal strategies of transnational global integration of capital toward militarized geopolitical competition between imperial states that back competing blocs of transnational capital. Many of the same big tech firms that were critical of Trump’s China strategy during his first term have shifted in favor during his second term, due to both their reliance on the U.S. state to promote a deregulatory agenda at home and abroad and due to the fact that military spending is proving to be a lucrative way to support some of the enormous costs associated with large-scale and long-term investments in general purpose technologies associated with AI (Srnicek does a masterful job distinguishing among the different types of AI investments and the costs involved). As was the case with neoliberal capitalism, and all forms of capitalism, the U.S. and global publics are expected to bear the costs of these investment expansions, with the domestic and global battles over the construction of data centers emerging as a key arena of future class conflict. More on that topic to come in future blogs.

Transnational Capitalism and Global Crises

The race among dominant transnational corporations for ownership and control of AI technologies is a defining characteristic of the latest phase of the geoeconomics and geopolitics of global capitalism. This phase accelerated after the global capitalist crisis of 2008, which has resulted in several trends that have been driven by a systemic crisis of neoliberal capitalism. The first is the stagnation of global value chains reflected by global trade statistics, as the volume of global trade dramatically fell in the aftermath of the 2008 capitalist recession and has failed to rebound to pre-crisis levels if adjusted as percentage of GDP. The biggest factor behind the global trade slowdown has been the slower growth rates of trade within global value chains. In response, transnational corporations reduced the complexity of global value chains (incorporating fewer suppliers) in favor of greater capital-intensity and greater consolidation of those value chains around the most important global markets. As part of this process, transnational corporations have reorganized their global capitalist employees more rigidly around two categories: production supervisors and managers that oversee the logistical and supply operations of the global value chains and are relatively well-paid, and workers who produce within these chains at wages that continue to stagnate and decline relative to capitalist revenues.

Second, the gap between the profits of the dominant transnational corporations and the wages of the global capitalist workforce has grown wider, as more wealth is concentrated at the top. This has resulted in a further “hollowing out” of the industrial workforce in the core capitalist states, often expressed as a shrinking “middle class,” alongside the increased exploitation of the global working class. These class tensions have resulted in further deligitimacy of capitalist governments in the West, contributing to the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. and other neo-fascist political figures and parties in Western Europe, and also in several countries in the global South. The increased intra- and inter- class tension is a long-term byproduct of the contradictions of a capitalist political project that has steadily increased the power of transnational interest blocs while reducing the political influence of workers and ordinary citizens, whose political marginalization and alienation have steadily increased.

Third, the global value chains that were previously dominated by North-South linkages, with the dominant transnational corporations concentrated in the Northern states, have increasingly been challenged by the dramatic rise of China and the policies of the Chinese state, particularly in the area of high-technology, which has helped to shift global value chains in a South-South direction, with countries of the global South, led by China, reorienting global value chains toward production, marketing and consumption within the global South, driven by the global expansion of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. At the same time, the Chinese state has enacted policies that have contributed to a greater emphasis on domestic production and accumulation and to more stringent requirements for foreign transnationals investing in high-technology manufacturing in China in an attempt to assert greater control over some of the most lucrative global value chains.

The business and political coalitions in U.S. foreign policy that once advocated political and economic cooperation with China have been eclipsed from the mid-2010s to the present. Global capitalist crises, starting with the 2008 global recession, have sharpened the tensions between U.S. corporations which have long benefitted from locating their global value chains within the China market and those corporations who have long felt threatened by the competition posed by Chinese exports. Meanwhile the Chinese government has sought to extract more concessions from foreign investors and to increase the scope and scale of state intervention toward an upscaling of Chinese capacity in 5G technology and artificial intelligence.

An acceleration of Chinese nationalist political strategies in recent years, combined with the global political and economic crises of the covid pandemic, have increased the costs of foreign direct investments for Western corporations in China. Western corporations that have long been in competition with China, have been joined by a broader coalition of transnational investors that have aggressively led the campaign for heightened sanctions against China. This coalition has been bolstered by defections of some transnational firms in the information technology sector away from supporting cooperation with China and toward support for a more militarized competition with China. In fact, as I have documented elsewhere, there is a growing marriage between several powerful Silicon Valley firms and the military-industrial-surveillance complex reflected in the ascendancy of military contracts secured by the big tech sector, especially driven by the AI arms race.

Interest groups within the military-industrial-surveillance complex, which have long sought to identify China as a threat justification for higher military budgets, have identified an expansion of Chinese military capacity and utilization, especially in the South China Sea, as a threat to U.S. extra-regional hegemony in Asia. The rise of China’s economic and military capacity in Asia and its long-term claim to the island of Taiwan, with newly rising military maneuvers and tensions in recent years, has accelerated an increasing confrontational posture between the U.S. and China. The heightened competition between the U.S. and China, filtered through transnational capitalist competition for AI supremacy in global markets, is driving much of the geoeconomic maneuvering between transnational firms and the geostrategic competition between the U.S. and China.

My 2019 book, Corporate Power, Class Conflict and the Crisis of the New Globalization, is where I develop many of the these arguments (this blog includes material updated from that book). See also two excellent books that provide more recent analysis of how transnational capitalist competition is fueling geostrategic rivalry between the U.S. and China, including Clash of Empires by Ho-fung Hung, Cambridge Press, 2022, and Silicon Empires by Nick Srnicek, Polity Books, 2026. The key battles revolve around how surplus value will be extracted from global value chains, which transnational interest bloc coalitions will benefit the most from the political economy of value extraction and, most importantly, how will ownership and control over high-technology processes be determined in this phase of global capitalism? In my next two blogs, I will review the books referenced here and provide further reflections on how to understand our current configuration of global corporate and class power.

The Miami Marlins at Mid-Season in 2026

When the new front office under Peter Bendix was brought in to start the 2024 season, I expected positive results from a complete overhaul of the minor league and major league system. Now with just two and a half years behind them, it is fair to say that this front office has exceeded my expectations. Starting as early as 2025, just a year after a complete overhaul of the player development system, extensive trades, new player acquisitions, and new rosters at every level of the organization, the Bendix team was able to both “rebuild” and compete at the same time. How many rebuilds allow a team to compete for a wild card so early? Typically, rebuilds are a 4-5 year process before a team is competitive enough to make a playoff spot or even compete for a playoff spot. Not in this case.

What is most impressive about this current run of 13-4, the best record in Major League Baseball in June, is that the streak is happening with only two full-time starting pitchers healthy, Sandy Alcantara and Max Meyer, with Alcantara being solid but not great and Meyer becoming the recent “ace” of the staff. The rest of the starting rotation has been bullpen by committee or relying on former reliever Tyler Phillips and minor league option Ryan Gusto to provide some additional innings. Despite that, the team has excelled in large part due to outstanding work from a bullpen whose early struggles centered around walking too many hitters, despite displaying consistently good metrics in other areas. The walks have come down, performances have improved from Anthony Bender, who has been stellar, as well as Michael Peterson, Calvin Faucher and free agent acquisition Pete Fairbanks, who is starting to pitch like the closer they thought they were getting in the offseason.

The offense has been sparked by the remarkable tandem of SS Otto Lopez, a career year so far at the plate, and 2B Xavier Edwards, who has shown rare extra base power early in the year. A case can be made that this is the best middle infield in the game, with Lopez being one of the earliest waiver wire pickups by Bendix and Xavier Edwards acquired as a former minor leaguer in the Tampa Rays system before Bendix took over. Liam Hicks, a rule 5 draft pick, is also surging with the best numbers of his career, posting both great contact numbers and newfound power—he worked extensively with the coaching staff in the offseason to generate more lift and bat speed from his swing.

This type of player development simply did not happen under previous Marlins regimes, but now it is quite common. Another player who has excelled with the Marlins, but not with his previous teams, is Esteury Ruiz, who was acquired in an offseason trade that I was skeptical of, but once again this new regime has found a way to help Ruiz display power that has never been part of his game until now. Couple that with the emergence of top prospect C Joe Mack, whose stellar defense has altered game momentum and whose bat has been very good in June, and you have an emerging core of up-the-middle talent for the Fish. Jakob Marsee has clearly been an exception in that his offensive numbers have seen a decline, but even there the underlying metrics of contact rate, hard hit rate, and on-base ability suggest that his fortune will turn. He also provides stellar defense in CF to compensate for struggles at the plate. If Kyle Stowers can show more consistency of approach and more power, then this offense could take off. Offseason prospect acquisition OF Owen Caissie has also started to show more consistency, and the power potential is very real.

So how good is this team? Right now the underlying numbers are in line with a .500 winning percentage, so their record is essentially what it should be. But they could be a little better than this, and will be getting a boost from the return of starter Eury Perez and outfielder Griffin Conine from the injured list probably this week. If things continue to go well and the team sticks around .500 or moves beyond, the front office will likely make modest additions at the trade deadline if not sooner, especially to acquire a starter. I would not expect major moves here, but also do not expect the team to sell, despite the obsession of some Marlins fans for acquiring more prospects regardless of how the team is performing. Bendix has been clear on this from day one: the goal is to both develop the system by continuing to add potential impact players to the minors while also trying to compete for a playoff spot in the majors. Fan thinking has not quite caught up to this, so too many have an either/or attitude that does not reflect how the organization sees things. Also, from a baseball culture standpoint, you don’t want to trade away valuable pieces mid-season when you have a chance to make the playoffs. It’s a slap in the face to the major league players, and the Bendix team gets that, which is why the team stood pat last year and stayed in the playoff race well into September.

More reasons to feel encouraged? The minor league system of player acquisition and development has taken huge steps forward under this new regime. At just about every level of the organization, the Marlins have improved in statistical rankings relative to where they were under the previous front office. They also have much greater balance of good players and potential major leaguers on both the hitting and pitching side. In other words, they have a deep system of useful players, some of whom could be good to very good big leaguers. What they lack are high upside players, especially hitters. Their best hitters may not have enough production to put them in the elite category anytime soon. That, along with a lack of power, both at the majors and in the minors, is something the front office recognizes they will need to address.

There has been the typical chirping from Marlins fans on social media about how bad the manager and coaching staff are with the Marlins. Their record suggests a picture that is the opposite of this portrayal. One of the earliest attempts I’ve seen to measure how well a manager makes in-game bullpen and bench decisions suggests that Clayton McCullough has been one of the best managers in baseball at adding “win probability impact” with his decision making. True, this measurement greatly simplifies what a manager does but it also offers some evidence at the very least that much of the fan base is clueless when it comes to assessing decision-making, a point that I did not need a statistical evaluation to make. One of the things this statistical assessment does not include, but the new Marlins regime has excelled at: player development in the majors and the minors. The coaching staff throughout the Marlins system know what they are doing.

in the meantime, let’s enjoy this ride, Marlins fans! It’s close to mid-season and your fighting Fish are in the hunt.

A Long History of Elite Domination: Haiti and Imperial Power

The following is the Preface that I just wrote for the forthcoming book by Professor Guy Metayer, titled The Role of Foreign and Domestic Elites in the Destruction of Haiti, to be published in hardback by Brill and in paperback by Haymarket Books. Guy’s peer-reviewed article written for the academic journal that I edit, Class, Race and Corporate Power (linked below), is being used as part of the documentation defending the legal case for retention of Haitian Temporary Protected Status in the Trump v. Miot case currently being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court.

https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/record/2369?ln=en

Here is my Preface to Dr. Metayer’s book:

When I first met Guy Metayer as a PhD student at Florida International University, where I teach, I was impressed by his intellect, his passion and his longstanding commitment to social justice. He has demonstrated these qualities throughout his life, as a legislator in Haiti struggling against very difficult odds, as a graduate student at FIU working to understand how the global political economy has kept Haiti trapped, and most recently as a Haitian diplomat speaking truth to power regarding the kind of far-reaching changes that are needed in Haiti (and the world) for ordinary people to have a chance at a sustainable and livable existence.

This book is a culmination of Guy’s work and determined resilience over the past few decades. It shines a bright light over the historical power structures that have subjected Haiti to centuries of pillage by global and national elites, most recently through the rise of Haitian gangs closely tied to the long-standing domination of the upper one percent in Haiti over the country, a group whose position in power has been reinforced, enabled and propped up by U.S. Presidents and transnational capitalists willing to sacrifice Haiti’s domestic economy for the sake of expediting more profit opportunities for themselves.

Only the tactics of the U.S. and global elites have changed over the years. Their objectives have remained incredibly consistent. At first, when Haiti struggled mightily and successfully for their political independence from France by waging an heroic revolutionary war that became the envy of anti-colonial movements everywhere, the global powers that had a stake in maintaining a hierarchy of plunder and privilege waged a war on Haiti to punish it for having the temerity to defy the rule of the powerful. This meant oppressive debts and isolation combined with a “divide and conquer” strategy that relied on propping up dictators, courtesy of foreign interventions, the most lasting and impactful coming from an imperial U.S. that occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. During this time, the U.S. helped construct the military architecture in Haiti that would be further entrenched by U.S. military aid during the Cold War, where the U.S. worked closely with a Haitian elite that repressed its domestic population.

As sections of this Haitian elite grew richer after decades of U.S. assistance, they outgrew their ties to Haiti itself and became part of larger networks of transnational power and privilege—at least that was the case for the richest of the Haitian elite, representing far less than one percent of the Haitian population. In this way, Haitian society was sacrificed in favor of those whose profits tied them to ventures that either bypassed Haiti entirely or were connected to Haitian impoverishment.

The rise of a transnational class of capitalists, whose wealth and power includes a narrow section of Haitian elites and powerbrokers, is a central theme of this important book. This includes Guy’s detailed account of how the U.S. deployed U.S. aid in the 1980s as part of a strategy to insert Haiti within a transnational system of capitalist accumulation that was to be accompanied by a “managed democratic” transition from military rule to elections. The U.S. never wanted Haiti to stray very far from its agenda here, having always been quick to block efforts by Haitians themselves to mobilize for electoral alternatives that went beyond the narrow confines of U.S. preferences.

In 1990, Haitians elected populist Jean Bertrand Aristide in an historic repudiation of the U.S. preferred outcomes of “managed democracy,” with Aristide representing what many Haitians saw as an opportunity to redistribute wealth and power from the Haitian elites to the masses. Haitian militarists, who alongside Haitian economic and political elites, opposed Aristide’s promotion of economic redistribution, overthrew Aristide in a military coup in 1991. Both Aristide and the military coup against him proved problematic for the U.S., Aristide with his support for redistribution of wealth and the coup for the instability that it posed to the U.S., triggering a refugee crisis that led to a U.S. political backlash in the important electoral state of Florida.

The Clinton Administration pressured an exiled Aristide to agree to several preconditions for his return, which included many of the neoliberal measures that are carefully documented in Guy’s book: a radical opening of the agricultural sector in Haiti by slashing tariffs, further decimating the rural economy and encouraging more internal migration to Port-au-Prince, an expansion of the industrialization strategy for Haiti with the expansion of assembly factories designed to insert parts of the Haitian economy within a transnational global production system dependent on cheap and exploited labor, and a pact with Haitian militarists and police forces to “keep the lid” on popular struggles for social justice in Haiti.[1]

What has emerged since has been an unrelenting war on capacity of the Haitian state and society by a global economic, political and security architecture that has continued to work for the benefit of the upper one percent of Haitian and global elites while deepening the crisis inside Haiti. What some have called the global NGO-industrial complex has seen foreign aid to Haiti funneled through a vast network of large-scale international aid organizations, bypassing Haitian grassroots groups in favor of perpetuating a dependency on bureaucratic non-profits whose goals are perpetual growth of their own organizations, not on improving Haitian resource distribution or governing capacity.[2]

Guy has written this book to carefully map out the consequences of centuries of plunder of Haiti, but also to offer hope for far- reaching economic, political, and social change that is necessary to reverse these dynamics. The importance of creating an alternative power structure in Haiti in which ordinary people have the capacity to make a living, to govern themselves and to break free of the constraints of elite rule, is developed extensively in these pages. The latest expression of the urgency of change is the rise of criminal gangs in Haiti, which as Guy shows cannot be separated from the larger structures of power that have long decimated the country. Guy’s book is intended to be part of efforts to challenge these power structures so that Haitian society can finally break free of the constraints that have long bound them. This is a necessary and critical intervention to be a part of. I am proud to contribute in a small way to this effort.

[1] I traveled to Haiti after Aristide’s return to power, which resulted in this publication: “Private Interests and U.S. Foreign Policy in Haiti and the Caribbean,” in David Skidmore, ed., Contested Social Orders and International Politics, Vanderbilt University Press, 1997.

[2] Ronald W. Cox, “U.S. Foreign Policy, Business NGOs and Low-Intensity Democracy,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, 2016, Vol. 4, No. 2.

MLB Owners Push for Salary Cap

With echoes of 1994, the baseball owners are once again proposing to cap player salaries. Precedent suggests that this will not be a good outcome for the sport. In 1994, the owners provoked a 232-day work stoppage that cost the league 938 games and cancellation of the postseason and World Series. According to the Los Angeles Times, the total combined financial damage of that fiasco was $1 billion for owners and $350 million for players. But these figures understate the longer-term damage to the sport: fan disillusionment caused per game attendance to plummet by 20% in 1995 and ticket sales to remain severely depressed into 1996. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it took four full seasons for stadium attendance to recover to pre-strike levels.

With their proposed salary cap, owners are pursuing their interests in profit maximization, especially their calculation that a salary cap and a salary floor are the best routes to increase the market valuation of their franchises. The gap between top spending and bottom spending major league baseball teams is vast: from the top payroll of the LA Dodgers at $398 million to the lowest payroll of the Miami Marlins at $74 million (current Fangraph projections for the 2026 season). The disparity is a cause for concern, as payroll is an important factor that contributes to winning seasons and postseason success. That being said, sports economists who have studied these payroll gaps, starting with the classic work of Andrew Zimbalist Jr., have long concluded that payroll explains only about one-third of team success. The other factors include how well an organization does in “player acquisition (scouting, draft, trades, signings); development (turning prospects into major leaguers as well as continuing to develop major league talent); governance (how free is baseball ops from owner meddling); and finally: luck.” (Ken Rosenthal, The Athletic, May 29, 2026, citing a former major league executive, whose observations track the work of sports economists in the factors that predict winning in baseball).

The complexity of what determines winning outcomes in major league baseball is accentuated by the fact that successful teams depend on not just a talented 26-man roster, but on having talent and depth in 40-man rosters, as well as waves of talent in the minors. No baseball team, not even the Dodgers, can be successful just buying the most expensive free agents. That’s an approach that, by itself, will not work to produce a winning team.

The biggest issue, then, for fans of teams that spend very little, such as the Miami Marlins, is what financial model achieves the best competitive balance outcome. Is it necessary to have a salary cap that requires players to take less money for the sake of better revenue distribution? That appears to be the instinctive reaction of fans of low-to-mid market teams right now, who feel that player salaries are a significant obstacle to their teams having a chance. The problem with salary caps is that they take money from the players as a “solution” for competitive imbalance, when there are better ways to address the problem. Players, after all, are the ones that generate value for the sport. Owners invest their money as capital, but without players producing on the field, there would be no surplus value added to owners’ investments.

Players drive the sport and their opposition to the owners’ push for a salary cap is significant. The MLB Players Association noted that the owners’ proposed salary cap would have cut player compensation by $500 million had it been in effect in 2026, namely because the proposed salary cap and floor figures of $245.3 million and $171.2 million, respectively, include major league player salaries, as well as player benefits and amateur draft and signing bonuses. The owners want to use the cap to rigidly reduce salaries by counting as payroll a wider range of team obligations. A primary goal of the owners is to reduce salary obligations, player benefits and spending on amateur draft picks as a way toward leveling the cost obligations of all teams. The owners of large-revenue teams apparently agreed to a salary cap and floor proposal as a precondition for their willingness to share their local media revenue.

Major league baseball teams exist in radically different revenue ecosystems, especially regarding variations in local media revenue, and the latter contributes the most (by far) to competitive imbalance in the sport. Dan Skidmore-Hess and I wrote a book in 2006, Free Agency and Competitive Balance in Major League Baseball, which argued that the best periods of competitive balance have coincided with periods of lucrative national media deals, which have always been divided equally among the major league teams. The problem has been that local revenues, including local media revenue, have not been distributed equally. Both the owners and the players are now in favor of an equal distribution of local revenues. This could be accomplished without a salary cap, and it would be sufficient to significantly improve competitive balance, provided it is coupled with an enforcement mechanism designed to require small revenue teams to spend their revenue sharing money on player payroll. The players’ proposal attempts to provide stronger incentives for this to happen, without a salary cap.

The fundamental issue with a salary cap is how deceptive it is. On surface appearances, a salary cap levels the playing field by purporting to share revenues equally between players and owners. However, owners have long diverted their revenues into debt and tax shell games to enable them to reduce taxes on their other businesses. IRS tax law allows owners to write off 6.67% of the purchase price of the team every year over a 15-year period. This is in addition to the lavish public subsidies that owners are provided, which they get to pocket as part of their revenue stream. Unless there is a willingness of owners to expand their definition of “revenues” toward a more realistic assessment of earnings year to year, salary caps would most certainly restrict players to a 50-50 distribution of only the revenues that are most visible on the baseball side, without touching the larger revenue schemes of the ownership class.

In short, owners have advantages that are baked into our current political and economic system. Don’t let them peddle these advantages as a willingness to “share” for the betterment of the sport. What is driving the owners in their initial salary cap proposal is a scheme to make the players pay the overwhelming costs for greater “competitive balance,” while focused on the goal of further increasing the market valuation of their teams. At a time when all objective measurements say the sport has been doing very well (attendance is up, viewership is up, fan interest is increasing), the last thing this sport needs is to be held hostage by a group of billionaires with another scheme to consolidate more power and privileges. There are better ways to do competitive balance, without a salary cap.

Muskism as a Systematic Expression of Big Tech Weaponization

I just finished an important new book by two of my favorite authors, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. The book, Muskism, is directly relevant to understanding the contemporary dynamics of corporate power and the military-industrial complex. The authors make the case that multi-billionaire oligarch Elon Musk has long embraced “technocracy” as an all-encompassing system of corporate power that aspires to merge private ownership of technology with a militarized techno-state underpinned by white supremacy, xenophobic border restrictions and a (futher) deregulation of capitalist accumulation facilitated by heightened surveillance and repression of labor and social movements. The influences that shaped Musk are traced extensively in the book, from his childhood in South Africa and the system of racial apartheid to his fascination with science fiction novels such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, from which Musk identifies with the efforts of mathematician Hari Seldon to create a Second Empire inside the decay of the Galactic Empire.

In fact, Musk’s ambitions to secure and expand his power by destroying and recreating a government that is more accountable to himself has echoes of the science fiction characters he most admires. Musk sees himself as leading the creation of a new empire of technocracy, where capitalist power and state power will be more intertwined to facilitate the path to a technocratic society governed by the owners of big tech. As the authors explain, Musk’s pivot toward the far right and in support of the Trump presidential campaign was a direct outgrowth of his perceptions of “wokism” as a “mind virus” and a threat to the capitalist ambitions of big tech oligarchs like himself. Toward that end, in the aftermath of the pandemic, when the profits of big tech were threatened by societal protections and regulations, Musk railed against the so-called enemies of advanced civilization, embodied by government regulators, labor unions, BlackLivesMatter protestors, and transgender activists. He memed in favor of a “workerist” ethos, a society in which the “virus” of “wokism” would be eliminated in favor of a social order predicated on accelerating capitalist profit making, subsuming labor to the dictates of the technocracy, disciplining social movements by declaring war on Black Lives Matter, MeToo and civil rights.

Musk purchased Twitter as part of a larger effort to use its data and its social media infrastructure to facilitate the further development and testing of Grok AI, an “anti-woke” AI assistant built by Musk’s xAI and since incorporated into SpaceX. Grok AI intersects with Musk attempts to integrate artificial intelligence into a mind-body ecosystem dominated by far right ideology. To those on the left that somehow think that the culture wars were simply a distraction for the left, this book, Muskism, has plenty of ammunition against that notion. Musk and other big tech leaders have long seen any social movements fighting for labor rights, civil rights and human rights as a product of a kind of “woke” mind virus. The belief in natural racial and gender hierachies as a conduit to unfettered capitalist accumulation has taken root politically in the big-tech alliance with Trump in his second term.

This relates directly to the alliance between big tech and the longstanding military-industrial complex in the U.S. As recently as May 1 of this year, “the Pentagon announced an agreement with eight leading artificial intelligence companies: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon Web Services. As part of this pact, the U.S. Department of Defense budgeted tens of billions of dollars for purchasing technologies from these firms related to intelligence, drone warfare, classified and unclassified information networks, and $54 billion for the development of autonomous weapons systems” (The Guardian, May 1, 2026). This is on top of the expansion of big tech militarization that was already being subsidized by the U.S. Department of Defense over the past decade, totaling at least $53 billion between 2019 and 2022 alone (Costs of War Project 2024). This level of integration of big tech with militarized capital accumulation is perceived by the tech industry as a backstop to their unsustainable stock market valuations.

The problem is that this level of government subsidization is nowhere close to the massive investments being made in the private sector by a few dominant firms whose revenues will not be able to cover their colossal cost overruns. J.P. Morgan Chase analysts anticipate $5 trillion of spending on AI infrastructure between now and 2030. “This year alone, four tech companies–Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft–have plans to invest $670 billion on AI infrastructure. When measured by U.S. GDP, this is more than the Apollo space program, the U.S. interstate highway system, railroads, and every other major capital spending program in U.S. history, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yet OpenAI and Anthropic have annualized revenues of about $25 billion and $19 billion, respectively. Unless AI revenues grow by orders of magnitude soon, there’s a Grand Canyon-sized gap that will be hard to cross (Time, March 26, 2026).”

What makes this dramatic overleveraging especially dangerous to the public is that this investment money is coming from a wide range of sources, impacting most financial markets including 401ks that house life insurance and pension plans, alongside “the record levels of corporate bonds, leveraged private credit, junk bonds, structured financed, asset-backed securities and more” (Time, March 26, 2026). This overleveraging feeds the aggressive lobbying of the big tech sector to increase their cash flow with more aggressive military subsidies and a push for more deregulation to expedite a radical expansion of big data centers. Large segments of the public oppose these data centers and will lose from the kind of hyper-militarism being proposed by the Trump Administration in its latest discretionary budget proposal, which sets military spending at 80 percent of the budget allocation, up from between 50 and 60 percent in recent years.

The clash between an emerging economic populist current in U.S. politics and an entrenched big tech oligarchy is evident in analyzing campaign expenditures by big tech, especially the flows of wealthy dark money donations to the Super PAC “Majority Democrats” that is coming disproportionately from big tech donors (The Lever Podcast, “The Democratic Party’s New Dark Money Machine,” May 21, 2026). These tech oligarchs are attempting to use their wealth and power to defeat populist Democrats pledging to regulate AI data center expansion (even modest regulation is opposed by the tech titans). The fact that economic populists are gaining ground is epitomized by efforts of corporate Democrat groups like Third Way to fund an upcoming campaign, backed by billionaire money, to target the Democratic Socialists of America as “enemy number one.” The big tech oligarchs already are working with Trump to further deconstruct and demobilize an already gravely weakened regulatory state. Their overleveraged bets on the future profits of AI have put us on the ledge of another economic crisis. Financial investors who see this crisis coming are already preparing to leverage the crisis as an opportunity for enrichment at public expense. The political battles ahead will determine who will pay for the crisis and on what terms.

On the Relevance of C. Wright Mills for the Contemporary Military-Industrial Complex

I have been re-reading a book by sociologist C. Wright Mills from 1958 titled The Causes of World War III. Mills is famous for developing the power elite theory of U.S. politics. Mills identified three pillars of elite power concentrated in the political, economic and military spheres of U.S. society. Driven by what Mills called a “permanent war economy,” this elite power structure reinforced a “march to war” as a central feature of its existence. The linkages between the political, corporate and military elites were solidified within the U.S. during World War II, reducing politics to a hollow shell game of unaccountability with the growth of corporate power, the imperial presidency and a globalized military-industrial complex.

There is much to learn from Mills in assessing today’s military-industrial complex. An important caveat is that the power elite identified by Mills has always been more fractured and divided than his framework would allow for. I have been part of a group of scholars that have advanced a business conflict or, more recently, a transnational interest bloc conflict theory of capitalist power. This perspective argues that transnational corporations compete with each other based on on their sectoral and territorial location within global capitalism, a framework closely tied to the investment theory of political parties developed by Tom Ferguson, and advanced in various iterations by me and my frequent co-author Daniel Skidmore-Hess, as well as David Gibbs and James H. Nolt, to name a few. During Mills time, there was certainly an interdependency between the profits of dominant global corporations and the expansion of the military-industrial complex, but there was also business conflict around the extent, scope and purposes of military spending. This became especially evident with the Vietnam War escalation from 1965 to 1968, which fractured corporate blocs between those advocating for military escalation and those advocating for deescalation. The former were concentrated within sectors producing for the military or sectors benefiting directly from war spending versus financial sectors that had come to view the escalation of the Vietnam War as damaging to their portfolios.

My caveats aside: Mills did understand the exent to which the elite power structure served to drive the U.S. toward a permanent war economy. The accelerating growth of the military-industrial-intelligence-surveillance complex and the imperial presidency in recent decades has served to highlight the relevance of Mills’ power elite theory long after his passing in 1962. The ascendancy of the permanent war economy has reached new heights in current U.S. politics. Today the U.S. is spending more on global militarization than it did at the height of the Cold War, a trend enabled by a bipartisan political elite, a big tech investment bloc, an acceleration of private equity investment, and a highly consolidated bloc of military contractors that has globalized production and sales of military weapons with the support of powerful institutional investors such as BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, who collectively hold stakes as high as 17 to 25 percent in the top five U.S. defense contractors. As William Robinson has noted, there is a push toward militarized capital accumulation on a global scale that transcends the old contours of the military-industrial complex analyzed by C. Wright Mills.

The permanent war economy has become even more central to capitalist accumulation of profits. This is especially evident when examining the extent to which the big tech sector in the U.S., Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and Anduril Industries, have become heavily invested within the military-industrial-intelligence-surveillance complex. As was the case during the Cold War, U.S. military spending is used to subsidize leading sectors of the global capitalist economy, providing sources of finance for big tech firms whose militarization of capital accumulation is providing them with greater concentration of power and privilege. It’s here that we see the clearest relevance of the work of C. Wright Mills to the present global expansion of U.S. militarism. As Mills would have expected, absent guardrails of popular dissent, this current system of militarized accumulation is driven by a constellation of elite interests whose positions within the hierarchy of state and capitalist power structures contribute to unchecked wars and genocide.

In my next blog post, I will talk about the political and economic instability of this global system of militarized accumulation, which rests on a shaky foundation of imperial overreach, rising domestic and global opposition to U.S. empire, and an unsustainable balance sheet of overvalued stocks that portend a market crash of the big tech sector that has been so central to the hyper-growth of the stock market. Once this economic crisis manifests itself as a deepening political and social crisis, the battle over who will pick up the costs and who will seize distressed assets will shape the political fights ahead. As Mills would have understood, the role of intellectuals here is not to engage in “business as usual” but to use their positions as advocates for the public good, positioning us with popular struggles capable of checking corporate power and securing more resources and political/economic capital for the vast majority that have been exploited and oppressed by this global capitalist system.

Trump the Grifter Idiot

Here are just a few thoughts about what it’s like for those of us in the U.S. to be in a country that is literally being led by the equivalent of a stupefying and mind-numbing infantile asshole. How can anyone doubt that Trump the Idiot’s rule is both an extension of a system that has long been plutocratic, corrupt, venal and self-destructive and one that has degenerated into an Onion-like parody of its historically most rapacious, uncaring and venomous tendencies. Even attempts at rational analysis, such as I have tried with my blog, fail to capture the full amount of the head-slapping, cringe inducing headlines that reflect the priorities of a deranged lunatic whose proclivities for self-enrichment are aided and abetted by Nazi symbols and music being deployed by a domestic occupying army whose activities of death and destruction are being celebrated by inside the beltway grifters and propagandists. Meanwhile, some Democrats look at this and only call for better training?

Regarding the so-called “ruling class,” they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the tech billionaire sector whose wealth and power far exceeds any other coherent expression of unified interests. Therefore any analyst has to recognize that the marriage of Trump gangster capitalism and big tech gangsterism has taken ludicrous turns, illustrated by the economic and military threats to take Greenland. Reuters News reported during the 2024 Presidential campaign that Trump addressed his corporate donors about his Greenland plans, supported by members of the billionaire venture capitalist and big tech profiteers, as a way to expand their zones for super wealthy capitalist enrichment as a kind of plutocratic paradise free of any regulation or accountability. Grifters everywhere who want to shield their wealth from public scrutiny applaud this as a victory for global con men and mafioso elites who now have their closest friend in the White House.

The historian Quinn Slobodian has long chronicled the rise of the anarcho-capitalist big tech billionaires in the U.S. whose plans for tech monarchy freed from democratic accountability has a lengthy history. Trump’s alliance with these big tech billionaires has been starkly evident in his administration’s global threats to U.S. state governors and foreign leaders that there will be consequences if regulation blocks unbridled tech expansion of energy guzzling data centers. Rachel Adams in The New Empire of AI and Karen Hao in Empire of AI both detail the neo-colonial domination of the tech billionaire class, leveraging its wealth and resources to force concessions on taxation, regulation and subsidies on governments and localities around the world.

Meanwhile capitalist political parties in the U.S. and elsewhere, who have long lost much of their power of the purse to become heavily dependent on capitalist financiers to finance government debts and carry out government programs, channel public money through the big tech sector without asking much in return. Whether Democrat or Republican in the U.S., the answer is not accountability of big tech to the public, but instead how can the government lavish big tech with resources to be even more dominant, under the guise of global competition with China. This is competition that allows the already super rich to get richer still, and take down the globe with them, fueling climate degradation, increased militarism and resource grabbing imperialism.

The “left”, to the extent we exist, have to be as nimble as possible in maneuvering through a corporate-dominated system by broadening the tent to include all activities that have a chance to shine a spotlight on the costs and consequences of this corporate plutocracy: diminishing living and working conditions, environmental devastation, and even larger gaps between rich and poor. We need to work with everyone fighting back against this, but not with politicians aiding and abetting a neo-fascist party whose rhetoric of “populism” is merely a cover for their rapacious and authoritarian political project.

The Trump Regime Tries to Cut a Mafia-Style Deal with the Venezuelan Regime

To fully understand what is happening in Venezuela, analysts should watch the Venezuelan bond markets, as they’ve soared in the past few days, as U.S. investors close to Trump are expecting deferential treatment in collecting on debts that they have held for a long time. That’s where the real action is, and the oil markets are connected to this, but not with the goal of owning Venezuela oil production—there’s little interest in that right now. But instead, wealthy bondholders in the U.S., several very close to the Trump administration, hope to benefit in the long term from revenues generated by increased production, which some U.S. oil companies would help service. Remember that all of the big global oil corporations make money in a lot of different ways, partly by placing derivative bets on oil markets, rather than owning facilities that produce oil.

Trump is an extension of a longtime U.S. tradition when it comes to protecting massively wealthy U.S. bondholders who are looking for the best political solution for extracting payments on debts held: authoritarian rulers who agree to cooperate in paying bondholders and increasing accessibility and protection for foreign investors. At the same time, the Trump Administration is accelerating and expanding the close relationship between the U.S. state and the U.S. oil sector by leveraging the U.S. military to appropriate assets that will be delivered to private U.S. oil corporations, investors and service companies at taxpayers’ expense. This follows existing power dynamics whereby the U.S. government has long subsidized the costs of foreign direct investments by the U.S. oil corporation supermajors. What many analysts miss when they reference oil executives’ verbal hesitancy in investing in Venezuela, due to the expense, uncertainty and long-term payback for their investment, is the way that the oil sector continues to rely on U.S. tax breaks and state subsidies to underwrite their costs and expand their short- and long-term profit margins. The return of a more militarized and interventionist U.S. imperialism is designed to expand U.S. state and corporate power, discourage and reverse oil nationalizations and displace Chinese and Russian investments in favor of preferred U.S. investments. The Venezuelan bond markets are a useful starting point for understanding how this imperialism is operationalized.

At the time of the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by the Trump Administration, there were as many as nine corporate lawsuits pending against the Venezuelan government alleging damages owed to U.S. corporations from the instability and termination of their operations in Venezuela. Several prominent investment firms that had stakes in extractive industries in Venezuela, including oil, natural gas and mining, are included in the list of litigants. Other corporate parties had previously sued Venezuela through the World Bank’s International Settlement of Investment Disputes, such as ConocoPhillips, which won nearly $9 billion dollars from the World Bank arbitration court. ExxonMobil has filed multiple claims against Venezuela, claiming $20 billion in payments owed by the Venezuelan state. Oil services firms such as Halliburton have also filed claims that are based on what the firm describes as instability that forced them to abandon investments in Venezuela. Halliburton’s litigation claimed that both U.S. sanctions and the Venezuelan government were to blame for the firms losses, but are currently suing only the Venezuelan government. Multi-billionaire investor Paul Singer, founder, President and Co-CEO of Elliott Management, is attempting to buy an ownership stake in Citgo, the downstream petroleum firm that was fully acquired by Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA in 1990.

Collectively, these investors hope to leverage the U.S. intervention to collect billions of dollars in claims from U.S. acquisition of Venezuelan assets. In turn, the Trump Administration would provide these firms with a potential avenue to expand profit-making opportunities in Venezuela. This could involve Elliott Management’s energy firm Amber Energy purchasing CITGO, which owns an oil refinery in Lake Charles, Louisiana that is equipped to refine Venezuelan oil. This could also involve a return to Venezuela of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, alongside service companies such as Halliburton who would be in line for infrastructure projects. Chevron, which is the one U.S. oil firm that stayed in Venezuela and has been allowed to export to the U.S., also could emerge as a long-term winner.

The Venezuelan bond market brings together the interests of U.S. investment firms, U.S. oil corporations and the U.S. state in an imperialist project, designed to expand the power of the U.S. throughout the Western Hemisphere at the expense of China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. U.S. intervention would be directed at protecting and expanding the role of U.S. investors and crowding out/excluding Chinese investors. The Trump Administration would also leverage a direct appropriation of oil from Venezuela as a piggybank for crony capitalist allies, whose riches would expand based on accelerated control and leverage of oil reserves. This brazen expansion of U.S. imperialism in its most overt and militaristic form would intensify the climate crisis, increase inequality between rich and poor throughout the Hemisphere and subject any government that wants to exercise control over its own resources to mafia-like extortion.

Following this playbook, what the Trump administration is doing now is attempting to cut a political deal on mafia terms with the Venezuelan state. The reason that Trump’s advisers have decided to keep the current Venezuelan regime intact is they think the Venezuelan military is a necessary precondition for ensuring stability and protection for any financial and investment deal they can negotiate. The outlines of any political deal would be: agreement by the Venezuelan regime to pay debts owed to bondholders, though percentages and who would be favored would have to be worked out (here the U.S. hopes to crowd out Chinese investors); opening Venezuela to more foreign investment across a range of productive and portfolio type investment options; oil concessions to the U.S. government; and commitments by the Venezuelan military to provide investment guarantees through security, police and contractual provisions. In return, the Trump administration would lower sanctions.

It’s a mafia state attempting to cut a deal with another mafia state: the Trump Administration with the Venezuelan military, which has been identified by Trump as the most powerful institution in Venezuelan politics. Indeed, the Venezuelan military cannot easily be dislodged without triggering a large-scale civil war, according to a CIA report which concluded that retention of the Venezuelan military, alongside senior Maduro loyalists, offered the best option for governing the country. Trump is currently pressuring Venezuelan officials to offer oil concessions to the U.S., reported to involve as much as $2 billion of Venezuelan oil concessions. If the U.S. acquires such quantities cheaply, at below market rates, profits from sales would likely be distributed to U.S. creditors, many of whom have ongoing lawsuits against the regime.

U.S. imperialism is designed to enrich wealthy investors, who are hopeful of being bailed out by U.S. militarism. The Trump Administration is the latest manifestation of brazen illegality in the expansive use of military force in the Western Hemisphere, intervening in ways reminiscent of late 19th and early 20th century U.S. military invasions, which at the time were concentrated in Central America and the Caribbean. The use of militarized violence on a large-scale is a symptom of an empire in decline, gasping at lowest-common denominator tactics to extract wealth by force, without bothering to address the larger systematic reasons for its decay.