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Trump’s inaugural speech avoided direct war rhetoric with China but signaled dangerous trends: a growing alliance between corporate elites and government, imperialist ambitions, climate denial, and authoritarian overreach. With tech CEOs at the forefront and Musk in a key government role, the fusion of state and corporate power mirrors Mussolini-style corporatism. From threats to seize the Panama Canal to deploying emergency powers domestically, Trump’s vision risks U.S. democracy and global stability. This analysis unpacks the implications of a presidency rooted in power, profit, and peril.

Despite being (mis)characterized by the IMF as a free-market "success story," South Korea's development model involved state planning and import controls for decades prior to the 1997 East Asia debt crisis. Economist Martin Hart-Landsberg, Professor Emeritus at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, explains how capitalist globalization materialized and morphed in East Asia, often to the detriment of its worker population. With Trump's inauguration nearing, Hart-Landsberg sheds light on why contemporary U.S.-China hawks view China as a threat rather than a technological competitor.

Trump’s interest in Greenland is closely tied to his plan to build a nationwide anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system, which he calls the "American Iron Dome." It could trigger a nuclear war.

In part two, political economist Dr. Devaka Gunawardena outlines the political dynasties in Sri Lanka that governed the country until the National People Power’s (NPP) recent electoral victory. Gunawardena discusses how NPP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake has garnered widespread support across different ethnic and class lines despite being a political outsider.

In November 2024, Anura Kumara Dissanayake's National People's Power (NPP) coalition won a two-thirds majority in Sri Lanka's general elections, marking a historic win for the Sri Lankan left. NPP's victory came at a time of prolonged economic crisis exacerbated by the crushing terms of Sri Lanka's IMF agreement. Political economist Dr. Devaka Gunawardena traces the factors leading to Sri Lanka's economic woes and how international sovereign bonds (ISBs) held by private equity firms such as BlackRock constitute a large segment of Sri Lanka's debt. Given the government's recent private creditor debt restructuring agreement, can the NPP still deliver on its campaign promises of wealth redistribution and reversing austerity?

Steven Donziger, an American environmental and human rights lawyer, won a landmark case against Chevron, requiring it to pay 9.5 billion USD in damages to indigenous communities in Ecuador for destroying and polluting their land. In retaliation, Chevron launched a suit against Donziger, accusing him of fabricating evidence in the case. In an unprecedented move, a U.S. judge appointed a corporate prosecutor, paid for by Chevron itself, to litigate a case against Donziger after the U.S. Justice Department refused to prosecute the case. Donziger was released after spending a total of 993 days under house arrest for a bogus criminal contempt of court charge but has yet to be pardoned. Donziger urges viewers to call the U.S. White House at (202) 456 - 1111 and demand a pardon from President Biden to undermine Big Oil's corporate prosecution of climate justice.

How did a Cold War nuclear planner become one of its biggest critics? Paul Jay traces Daniel Ellsberg's journey from nuclear war planner to discovering the lies behind the "missile gap" with the Soviets. Jay exposes how defense industry executives and government officials manufactured the Cold War to keep military spending flowing after World War II. While the Soviet Union posed an ideological challenge, its military threat was deliberately exaggerated. The real goal? Using massive defense spending to stimulate the American economy while suppressing domestic opposition. The nuclear systems Ellsberg warned about remain active today. Jay's upcoming film exposes how Cold War thinking continues to endanger us all - and what we can do about it.

In part two, Petra Molnar, anthropologist and human rights lawyer, speaks about the dangers of high-risk AI systems and state efforts to sabotage its regulation, as seen in the recent watering down of the European Union’s AI Act. Molnar explains how Israeli and U.S. surveillance tech firms market their drone technology and other AI products as “solutions” to state “problems.” The lucrative border and surveillance tech sector has grown exponentially as a result of governments deploying these technologies to experiment on the world’s most marginalized populations – from Palestinians in Gaza to migrants at the U.S. and EU’s deadliest land and sea borders.

In part two, historian and genocide scholar Omer Bartov discusses the U.S.' gross rejection of numerous human rights organizations’ reports substantiating Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, as well as France’s comical rebuttal of the ICC arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Bartov contends that the West’s dangerous sabotage of international legal norms flies in the face of the very post-WWII edifice of international conventions established in response to the Nazi genocide of the Jews and designed to prevent state actors from committing such atrocities. He also discusses Trump’s victory, highlighting Biden/Harris’ Middle East policy as a thorn in the side of the Democratic Party, which greatly alienated young voters.

According to recent Lebanese Health Ministry figures, Israel has killed a total of 4,047 people in Lebanon since October 2023, with 3,402 people killed in the past few months alone. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared Israel’s invasion of Lebanon a political victory for his coalition of right-wing fanatics. Omer Bartov, Israeli American genocide scholar and historian, characterizes Israel’s war crimes in Lebanon as a political exercise in saber-rattling for Bibi’s domestic audience, while the IDF prioritizes the elimination of Palestinians from northern Gaza and the starvation of Gaza’s besieged population. Will the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire— now on shaky ground after numerous Israeli violations— actually hold?