As President Donald Trump bragged about slapping tariffs on more than 180 countries and territories, there was one conspicuous omission: Russia.
It was yet another example of Trump’s bizarre obsession with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin as well as his disdain for Ukraine, which got slapped with a 10% tariff. News outlet NOTUS reported that a White House official said that “Russia is not on this list because sanctions from the Ukraine war have already rendered trade between the two countries as zero.”
(The) White House official flat-out lied to NOTUS. The U.S. does conduct some trade with Russia—and far more than some of the countries on its tariff list, like Norfolk Island, which had $655,000 in exports to the U.S. in 2023.
Last year, the U.S. traded an estimated $3.5 billion of goods with Russia, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. “U.S. goods exports to Russia in 2024 were $526.1 million,” the office says on its website. “The U.S. goods trade deficit with Russia was $2.5 billion in 2024.”
Remember, Trump stupidly sees any trade deficit as a country screwing the U.S. And yet, while Russia has a fairly significant one, Trump has remained mum.
So what is Russia sending to the U.S.? No. 1 on the list: fertilizer.
And therein lies the likely reason Trump exempted Russia.
American farmers get the vast majority of their potash fertilizer from Canada, which the U.S. has now heavily tariffed. Watch him try to replace Canadian potash with Russian fertilizer to both mollify furious farmers and their Republican legislators, and do a solid for his pal Putin.
BREAKING: Trump has announced that he has suspended the tariffs planned against the penguin occupied Heard and McDonald Islands. The penguins have agreed to triple their imports of American made egg warmers. A bubbling Trump made the following statement to a gaggle of reporters:
“This is the greatest deal with penguins ever made"
Written on .
The Polish government intends to prepare its entire population for a potential war with Russia, said Chief of the General Staff Wiesław Kukuła. The country has announced military training courses for both men and women, Politico reports.The plan includes short courses in civil defense and first aid for civilians with no military experience, firearms training programs for those with basic military background, and the expansion of a school program called “Education with the Army.”
“We are neighbors with the Russian Federation and its ally Belarus, so we don’t have a buffer between us and them, and we have only a limited time to prepare and respond,” Kukuła said.
Poland is strengthening its defense capabilities, and now has the largest army in Europe and is spending billions of euros on modern weapons – from fighter jets and tanks to missiles and artillery.
“[The] Russians are building a massive army in the rear. If peace is not reached and the split within NATO continues, Russia will attack the Baltic states,” said former Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces, General Leon Komornicki.
“This could happen at the end of this year or the beginning of next. An invasion is part of their plan,” Komornicki said.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk previously announced ambitious plans: to grow Poland’s regular armed forces to 500,000, and to train millions of reservists trained by the end of 2025.
“By the end of the year, we want to have a model ready so that every adult male in Poland is trained for war, and so that this reserve is adequate for possible threats,” Tusk said in parliament, adding that women can also sign up.
The military training will be voluntary and short-term: within just a few days, civilians will be introduced to the basics of civil defense, first aid, and self-defense skills.
Poland is expected to present the full plan for training soldiers, reservists, and civilians by the end of this month, after which legislative work on its implementation will begin.
The plan aims to train 100,000 people by the end of 2026 in its initial phase. However, the approach has already drawn criticism.
Former commander of Poland’s rocket and artillery forces, Jarosław Kraszewski, considers that number to be too low. He believes that Polish society has grown too comfortable and forgotten the importance of basic military preparedness.
“Training 100,000 people a year? Too few. We should bring back [the] draft,” the general said. “We have switched to a consumerist lifestyle, the joys of democracy, and traveling around the world without any problems, but we have forgotten that each of us should have basic knowledge in this area.”
In fear of a potential war, Poland also plans to begin preparing school students. Starting as early as September, civil defense subjects may be included in physical education classes.
That's not quite true. Only if the dead are reported missing, Putin can avoid paying indemnities to the families...
--ed
(Secretary of Defense Pete) Hegseth’s guidance acknowledges that the U.S. is unlikely to provide substantial, if any, support to Europe in the case of Russian military advances.
In a powerful interview on Politics Done Right, investigative journalist Greg Palast exposes the extensive and racially targeted voter suppression tactics that helped re-elect Donald Trump in 2024. Drawing from his film Vigilantes Inc: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitman, Palast lays out how millions of voters—especially Black, Brown, Indigenous, and young—were disenfranchised through purges, false challenges, and rejected ballots. He explains that had these votes been counted, Kamala Harris would have won the presidency. Palast’s findings are rooted in federal court data and collaborations with civil rights groups, highlighting a coordinated assault on democracy.
Key Bullet Points:
Mass Voter Suppression: Over 3.5 million voters, primarily people of color and youth, were disenfranchised in 2024 through purges, rejected mail-in ballots, and provisional ballot disqualifications.
Vigilante Challenges: Right-wing operatives, under groups like True the Vote, individually challenged hundreds of thousands of voters without evidence, reviving tactics used by the Ku Klux Klan.
Racial Targeting: African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and young voters were disproportionately targeted, with Black mail-in ballots four times more likely to be rejected.
Systemic Failures: Palast criticizes the Justice Department’s inaction and highlights bipartisan silence on these systemic abuses of voting rights.
Call to Action: If possible, voters must check their registration, avoid mail-in ballots, and support grassroots voting rights organizations to protect democracy.
Greg Palast’s investigation is a blistering indictment of a system that claims to be democratic while actively silencing millions of its most vulnerable citizens. Through meticulous research and a fearless commitment to truth, Palast exposes how the GOP, with complicity and indifference from key institutions, weaponizes bureaucracy and racism to suppress the vote. For progressives, the message is clear: the right to vote is under siege, and without a relentless defense of it, every other progressive cause—from healthcare to climate justice—is imperiled
In the aftermath of the 2024 election, many Americans asked how Donald Trump—who had consistently trailed in polls and faced widespread criticism for authoritarian leanings—could have clawed his way back into the White House. Investigative journalist Greg Palast has an unsettling answer: It wasn’t the people’s will that elected Trump. It was a coordinated campaign of mass voter suppression—legal trickery, bureaucratic barriers, and modern-day Jim Crow tactics—that engineered a stolen victory.
Palast, best known for his work with The Guardian and the bestselling The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has long sounded the alarm about attacks on voting rights. In his latest film, Vigilantes Inc: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitman, narrated by Rosario Dawson and produced by Martin Sheen with support from Leonardo DiCaprio, he reveals the chilling extent of the manipulation used to undercut democracy. His evidence is not speculative but backed by forensic analysis, federal court proceedings, and fieldwork conducted in partnership with civil rights organizations like Black Voters Matter, Rainbow/PUSH, the NAACP, and the ACLU.
Palast asserts that had no voter suppression in the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris would have defeated Trump by 3.56 million votes—enough to win both the popular vote and a decisive Electoral College majority. That’s not hyperbole; it’s math. Drawing from data supplied by the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) and verified by professional analysts, Palast tracks the disenfranchisement of voters—primarily Black, Brown, Indigenous, and young people—through purges, rejected mail-in ballots and discriminatory voter ID laws.
One of the most egregious tactics Palast exposes is the return of “vigilante” voter challenges, a method resurrected from Ku Klux Klan playbooks of the 1940s. In 2024, a right-wing group named True the Vote launched a campaign to challenge the eligibility of over 363,000 voters—often targeting people of color—without any governmental authority. Palast details how Major Gamaliel Turner, a Black military officer stationed in California, was among those wrongly challenged. Despite being a legal Georgia voter with a right to cast an absentee ballot, Turner’s vote was denied unless he physically traveled 2,700 miles to prove his citizenship and residency. He did—but thousands of others couldn’t.
This is not an isolated story. According to the EAC, 43% of all provisional ballots—typically given to voters facing registration issues—are rejected. The rejection rate for mail-in ballots is shockingly high: Black voters are 400% more likely to have their mail-in ballots disqualified than white voters. These numbers should be headline news, but instead, they are buried in obscure databases and ignored by mainstream narratives obsessed with political horse races.
Palast’s work shows that modern vote suppression is systemic, racially targeted, and executed with both high-tech precision and legal cover. Voter rolls are purged en masse based on flawed data. Ballots are disqualified for technicalities. Voters are misled or unaware they’ve been challenged until it’s too late. While Republicans frame these efforts as protecting “election integrity,” the actual result is the disenfranchisement of millions of legal voters.
Perhaps most infuriating is that this war on voting rights is openly supported—or at least tolerated—by Republican-controlled legislatures and secretaries of state. In Georgia, for instance, Palast and his team verified that 63% of the nearly 5 million voters purged from the rolls had not moved and were still eligible. These purges disproportionately affected Black voters, the Democratic base, and communities least likely to have the resources to fight back.
The film Vigilantes Inc. doesn’t merely diagnose the problem—it prescribes action. Palast urges voters to check their registration status months before any election. He recommends voting early in person if possible to avoid the pitfalls of mail-in ballots. Most crucially, he calls on Americans to support grassroots voting rights organizations that are doing the heavy lifting to inform, register, and protect marginalized voters.
At its core, Palast’s investigation reveals a disturbing truth: the United States does not suffer from voter fraud; it suffers from voter suppression. This isn’t a fringe theory. As legal scholars, civil rights advocates, and election data analysts consistently affirm, these tactics are deliberate, racialized, and antithetical to democracy. If left unchecked, they will continue to warp elections, silence communities, and keep power in the hands of those who fear a truly representative electorate.
The progressive movement must recognize that voting rights are not simply a civil rights issue—they are the linchpin of every other cause, from climate justice to economic equity. Without the vote, the people have no power to chart a different future. That is why exposing the crimes detailed in Vigilantes Inc. is not just important—it is urgent.
You can stream Vigilantes Inc for free at gregpalast.com and share the film widely. As Palast puts it, “It’s time to fight like democracy depends on it—because it does.”
It is obvious that we Europeans will have to look for new friends in the wake of Trump's anti-European policy. There is little choice: the only possible future allies are Russia, China and the BRICS states. Russia has excluded itself due to the war in Ukraine. The BRICS countries, which include Russia and China, are too heterogeneous and undisciplined to serve as partners for Europe. That leaves China. Why not a partnership with China? China does not have a disputed border with Europe. We are protected from China's expansionism by the existence of Russia, which is big enough to make China's drive for conquest come to nothing. Competition with China for the role of the world's largest economic and military power is America's problem, not Europe's. Our sole aim is to reorganize the ailing European economy so as not to fall by the wayside in the competition with China and the USA. American sawing at the roots of NATO has already led to the formation of a new coalition of the willing focused on Europe. This alliance should be in a position to negotiate with China on equal footing and discuss cooperating not only on climate issues, but also on armaments.
The aim could be to purchase US-free armaments: Chinese jets instead of US jets, for example. Why not?
They are obviously good and modern and could complement France's and Sweden's models.
Heinrich von Loesch
Beijing would of course try to influence how we govern Europe. Chinese technicians would work at European air bases, Chinese military personnel stay at European command posts: Beijing would know everything without having to spy. Washington would be forced to cut all ties to Europe for fear of Beijing's espionage. Sad, but: Tu l'as voulu, Donald Dandin.
China expert Wuttke warns that the European Union is distancing itself from the United States and moving closer to Beijing in response to Trump's tariffs. "China is still not just a partner, but a competitor and systemic rival. The USA, on the other hand, remains an irreplaceable partner for Europe," says Wuttke.
WELTSpain will pursue closer trade ties with China in the interests of its citizens and of the EU, its agriculture minister Luis Planas said, rejecting a U.S. warning that moving closer to the Asian country would be "cutting your own throat". "We have excellent trade relations with China which we intend to not only continue having, but expanding," Planas told reporters from Ho Chi Minh City, where he was accompanying Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on a trip to Vietnam and, on Friday, China.....key U.S. allies are already considering declaring “independence” from Washington—pursuing nuclear weapons, building new regional groupings, challenging the dollar’s role. Some, spurred by domestic reactions to U.S. pressure, are contemplating moving closer to China, even at enormous peril to their industries or security. The United States risks fracturing the free world and closing its best path to scale...As some in the United States talk about creating divisions among China’s partners by executing a “reverse Kissinger” with Russia, Beijing is determined to exploit fissures in Western alliances, notably between the United States and Europe.UpdateTrump to strong-arm EU into splitting from China
Trade deals with US will hinge on president’s tough demands on cheap Chinese imports. Donald Trump plans to strong-arm the EU into splitting from China in return for lower tariffs
Xi Jinping urged the EU to stand up to “bullying” and signalled he was ready to work with leaders in the bloc. The Chinese leader’s comments came as China publicly confirmed for the first time it was suspending sanctions against some European politicians. Xi said: “China and the EU should uphold multilateralism, defend fairness and justice, oppose unilateral bullying.”
As the US bond market faces turbulence, China appears to be accelerating a strategy of divestment from Treasuries. Beijing, for years the United States' largest foreign creditor, is seeking to reduce its exposure to an asset once considered a safe haven. Behind this development lies a major geopolitical issue: can China really do without the dollar, and what would be the macroeconomic consequences for the United States? Economist Alexandre Delaigue explains.
Since Chinese President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, China's spies no longer seem to fear the U.S., according to former diplomat Jim Lewis, whose direct experience with China's intelligence agencies spans more than 30 years. China's Ministry of State Security, or MSS, is the largest and most active spy agency in the world, according to Lewis. Toward that end, China secretly opened an overseas police station in the middle of New York City. Chinese expats could renew government documents at the station, discovered in 2022, but federal prosecutors said the main purpose of the outpost was to target and harass Chinese dissidents. "They've done it in the Netherlands, they've done it in Canada. But the idea that you'd open a police station in another country, that's a signal disrespect of the sovereignty of that nation," Lewis said. "This is – in scale and in scope and in brazenness – the biggest espionage operation against the U.S. in its history," Lewis said. According to the latest assessment from America's intelligence agencies, China is the most active and persistent cyber threat to the U.S., but hacking has not replaced Beijing's pursuit of old-fashioned human intelligence. China's Communist Party leverages a worldwide network of covert agents to monitor and influence events outside its own borders. It's also surveilling and intimidating Chinese dissidents in the U.S. A Ministry of State Security propaganda video posted on China's largest social network, WeChat, last year boasts that the spy agency "senses things before they happen" and "fights against evil." The video serves as a public message to both foreign adversaries and China's own citizens about the ministry's growing power. The MSS might have as many as 600,000 employees, according to one estimate - CBS
Michael Bociurkiw--This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
....China will likely demand the EU lift tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles or even reopen the bilateral trade treaty, the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. Either or both would send a powerful signal to Washington.
But China’s main goal is ensuring the EU remains an accessible and affluent market for goods that might not reach the U.S. because of Trump’s tariff blitzkrieg. Despite a truce in the trade war, Chinese businesses are widening their global reach to be less dependent on the U.S.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has further disaffected Europe from China. Despite Beijing’s claims of neutrality, Europe largely sees China as complicit in, if not covertly supporting Russia’s war machine.
The EU recently cancelled a high-level economic and trade dialogue with China, due to a lack of progress on trade disputes. It also has moved to restrict Chinese participation in EU medical devices procurement.
Who is helping Ukraine? Who is ignoring its struggle? Who is harming Ukraine?
Questions to which there are no clear answers. Since March 13, the USA is again supplying war materiel to Ukraine, although it is urging Ukraine -- currently at negotiations in Riyadh -- to yield in "peace" talks with Russia.
Europe's Ukraine policy is mixed: the further east a country is located, the more vigorously it supports Ukraine (with the exception of Hungary and Slovakia). Italy and Spain apparently do not feel threatened by Russian boots and provide little beyond verbal support. Who is harming Ukraine? Mainly the USA:
By talking to Russia over Ukraine's (and Europe's) head. Secondly, by having blocked materiel deliveries during some time before March 13 and also temporarily shutting down satellite imagery information.
This was a warning to Kiev of what could happen if Ukraine did not obey President Trump's wishes.
Europe's assistance to Kiev is also affected: since a large part of the war materiel supplied by Europe to Ukraine is of American origin, Washington can block the delivery of spare parts and servicing at any time and thus render the equipment useless. Even if Europe were prepared (which it is at best partially) to tread in America's footsteps, it would only be able to supply Ukraine with suitable materiel if America is benevolently acquiescent. But that is only half of the problem.
The other half is the predictable reaction of the American arms industry. Europe has been a large and patient customer for them for decades. Donald Trump has shattered this practice with a powerful blow. Europe is shocked and, under France's leadership, wants to separate itself from American armaments and US satellite imagery (which is suspected to have helped Russia in regaining Kursk).
This new policy is doubly dangerous for the US armaments industry, the world's largest: not only is it losing what were probably its most important international customers, but it is also facing new competition.
For many years, European armaments companies had kept their concepts for new and better weapons in drawers; weapons that were never built because US industry products dominated the market, served as NATO standard, and were relatively inexpensive due to mass production.
Now the European arms industries are being cuddled and rewarded with exclusivity by a range of furious and frightened governments. Europe's armaments' companies -- already growing explosively due to the Ukraine war demand -- will not restrict themselves to serving the local market.
Just as Europe's initially small aviation conglomerate Airbus managed to successfully compete with America's giants Boeing & Co, Europe's companies Rheinmetall, Leonardo & Co could wrest major global market shares from US arms manufacturers. President Trump had obviously not understood this possibility.
By urging Europe that it should massively rearm to protect itself without US support, he probably thought he would create a bonanza for the US arms industry. Instead, he created a headache for them.
Heinrich von LoeschHegseth’s guidance acknowledges that the U.S. is unlikely to provide substantial, if any, support to Europe in the case of Russian military advances, noting that Washington intends to push NATO allies to take primary defense of the region.Washington Post"European countries simply do not have the military and technological resources to immediately replace what has been supplied by the United States—precisely because Washington made it clear to them for decades that building up such capacities was duplicative and wasteful. In some areas, such as nuclear weapons, the United States may even prefer remaining involved with NATO, if the alternative is more European nations building up their own nuclear capabilities."Ivo H. Daalder -- Foreign Affairs
US is going to lose so much from this idiotic reorientation. They had such an incredibly good deal where European countries would buy weapon systems from them in bulk for a lot of money. As a result the US had an outsized say when it comes to selecting US-based companies for government contracts in Europe even outside of the defense sector. All of that is going away. Instead, Europe is going to develop its own independent military capability and then take it to work. Europe's entire foreign policy will get untangled from the US. Europe will be able to pursue its interests rather than pursue US interests first then its own interests second.
The US has reportedly signaled to Europe that it wants European nations to keep purchasing US arms and not exclude US arms makers from European tenders.
