Pompeo’s tenure as CIA Director in 2017-2018 coincided with a significant expansion of the CIA’s involvement in Ukraine. The CIA set up 12 clandestine bases following the February 2014 CIA-backed Maidan coup that fueled the conflict with Russia.

In November, AP News reported that Pompeo had joined the advisory board of Ukraine’s leading defense company, Fire Point, which develops long-range drones capable of striking targets deep inside Russia.[2]

At a press conference announcing his appointment, Pompeo said that his mission with the company was to help Fire Point become an important supplier for Western hardware [i.e., drones].”[3]
[…]
Allegedly, Fire Point CEO Yehor Skalyha first developed the know-how with drones when he used them in camera work that he did in the film-making industry.

Emerging from Ukraine’s film and TV industry, Fire Point, according to the Times, performed location work for a 2016 romantic comedy in which current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky starred.

~ Full article…

According to Redfin, investors were responsible for buying 48 of the 119 lots for sale in the Pacific Palisades area during the third quarter. In nearby Altadena, investors purchased 27 of the 61 lots available, and in Malibu, 19 of the 43 lots for sale were bought by investors.

Redfin’s analysis indicates that many investors made lowball offers for lots in Altadena, where some of the destroyed homes had been built in the 1940s and 1950s. These lots have been selling in the $500,000 to $600,000 range. The report noted that while some owners rejected these offers, others were forced to sell as they lacked the money to rebuild.

By comparison, a typical empty lot sold for $1.6 million in Pacific Palisades, and for $1.3 million in Malibu.

~ Full article…

The commodification of reality and the manufacture of demand have had serious implications for the construction of human beings in the late 20th century, where, to quote philosopher Herbert Marcuse, “people recognize themselves in their commodities.” Marcuse’s critique of needs, made more than 50 years ago, was not directed at the issues of scarce resources or ecological waste, although he was aware even at that time that Marx was insufficiently critical of the continuum of progress and that there needed to be “a restoration of nature after the horrors of capitalist industrialisation have been done away with.”

Marcuse directed his critique at the way people, in the act of satisfying our aspirations, reproduce dependence on the very exploitive apparatus that perpetuates our servitude. Hours of work in the United States have been growing since 1950, along with a doubling of consumption per capita between 1950 and 1990. Marcuse suggested that this “voluntary servitude (voluntary inasmuch as it is introjected into the individual) … can be broken only through a political practice which reaches the roots of containment and contentment in the infrastructure of man [sic], a political practice of methodical disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values.”

~ Full article…

In an article this week, Fu Xiaoqiang, president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), said the world had entered a decisive phase of transition, marked by accelerating multipolarity, intensifying security concerns and growing strain on a global order shaped by Western dominance.
“Market appeal, technological innovation and institutional influence are becoming the core metrics of competition, reshaping how states pursue power and legitimacy,” he said in a review published on Tuesday by the Beijing-based think tank affiliated with the Ministry of State Security.
Fu attributed this shift to a new wave of technological and industrial transformation driven by advances in artificial intelligence, new energy, biotechnology and digital infrastructure.

He said these factors were rapidly reconfiguring global supply chains and innovation networks and exposing the limits of an international order built around Western industrial and financial dominance.

~ Full article…

Lifesaving items – including some medical and shelter equipment – appear on an Israeli blacklist of dual-use items, which the government says must be tightly restricted because they could be exploited and weaponized by Hamas or other terror groups in the Strip.

Despite this, Israeli authorities have, for at least a month, let private businesses bring several dual-use goods – including generators and metal pallets – through the same checkpoints that currently block such items for aid groups, the Guardian said.

The equipment is now being sold openly in Gaza markets, said the news outlet, citing military, diplomatic and humanitarian sources.

“It seems highly improbable that the Israelis don’t know about them,” the outlet quoted an unnamed diplomatic source as saying. “It’s very shocking that these things are able to enter through commercial channels.”

Gazan-born analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib told The Guardian regarding commercial deliveries to Gaza that “you’re not just paying fees and taxes to Hamas in Gaza, you’re paying fees and taxes to merchants on the Israeli side.”

~ Full article…

Scientific theories viewed the town-country antagonism as a hallmark of class society with capitalism intensifying the idiocy of rural life through isolation and exploitation. In India colonial rule disrupted pre-capitalist village communities imposing land revenue systems that facilitated primitive accumulation. Post-independence mixed economy policies prioritized urban-industrial development widening the divide. Neo-liberal reforms since 1991 accelerated uneven development bypassing classical agrarian transition and proletarianization.

The rural-urban divide represents a profound and enduring inequality, where rural areas – home to about 65% of the population- systematically subsidize urban prosperity through resource extraction, cheap food, migrant labour, while remaining deprived. This dynamic resembles internal colonialism, a concept where dominant urban centres exploit peripheral rural regions in a manner analogous to historical colonial extraction. The divide is also characterized by stark disparities in economic opportunities, political influence and access to health, education and life expectancy. These inequalities represent a structural, long-term system of internal colonization subsidizes urban prosperity through agricultural production, labour migration and resource transfers while enduring persistent deprivation.

~ Full article…

While U.S. policymakers escalate Cold War-style rhetoric and impose higher tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, most Americans remain unaware that the world’s best-selling EV isn’t a Tesla—it’s China’s BYD. Meanwhile, General Motors now sells more cars in China than in the U.S., and China is steadily expanding its influence across global industries, from technology to infrastructure. Washington’s response? Protectionist policies and economic nationalism that leave American consumers paying more for less.

In this eye-opening lecture, economist Richard Wolff explains how the U.S. has become the world’s largest debtor, borrowing from China even as it engages in proxy conflicts against Russia, China’s ally. Wolff reveals the contradictions of a capitalist system in decline: while foreign nations build railroads in Africa, Americans struggle with overpriced everyday goods. The global economic balance is shifting rapidly. BRICS countries now outpace the G7 in production, China and India grow at twice the U.S. rate, and Western governments lack a clear plan to regain competitiveness. According to Wolff, America’s challenges are not the result of foreign interference—they are the outcome of decades of corporate profit-driven decisions.

~ Full podcast…

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China’s BYD poised to overtake Tesla as world’s top EV seller for the first time

Chinese auto giant BYD on Friday is expected to dethrone U.S. rival Tesla

as the world’s biggest seller of electric vehicles on a calendar-year basis.

The milestone would cap an extraordinary rise for BYD, a company Tesla’s Elon Musk once dismissed by laughing at their products during a 2011 Bloomberg interview.

The two carmakers are poised to publish their final annual sales figures for 2025, although based on available sales data, it appears all but certain that BYD will officially surpass Tesla.

In a statement published Thursday, BYD said sales of its battery-powered cars rose nearly 28% to 2.26 million units. Tesla has not yet released its 2025 sales figures, although it is expected to do so later in the day.

On Monday, Tesla compiled an average estimate for 1.6 million vehicle deliveries in 2025, down roughly 8% from 2024, putting the company on track for its second straight annual drop.

How did the free-market ideas attain influence? It’s because capitalists and wealthy people in the United States pushed for a shift away from the welfare state for reasons that had nothing to do with the appeal of the ideas.

Why did they do it? It’s a response to a decade of economic stagnation in the 1970s. Under that stagnation, American businesses came to the conclusion that the only way they could come out of the economic malaise was by doing two things: rolling back the welfare state and dismantling the trade union movement. Why? The welfare state imposed a lot of costs on business along with the regulations that came with it, such as the demand for good pensions, the demand for safety, and the demand for a level of corporate taxation that could fund all the government programs.

When your margins are going down, when your rate of return on investments is being squeezed, now every little cost that you’re having to incur has a marginally greater impact on you than when you had high profits and high margins. And back then, you felt that you could absorb all the demands that the welfare state was making on you as a business.

Now, when your profit margins are shrinking, you’re desperate to reduce your costs. And the welfare state imposes a lot of extra costs on your normal business operations. So you’re trying to now strip down all your costs so it’s just the business operations.

The problem is, if you’re going to do that, you come up against the trade union movement, which has a place in the Democratic Party and has workplace power. If you try to take away the welfare state, you’re impacting and hurting workers. So they’re going to fight back.

This means that if you want to roll back the welfare state, you’ve got to dismantle the agency that’s been supporting it, which is the trade union movement. If you put this into economic language, you can say, “We want to return to free markets.”

How? First, you don’t want the regulations of the welfare state. You don’t want the demands that it’s making on you. You don’t want all the prohibitions that it’s put on your investment activity. And you don’t want high taxation.

Second, you want to free up the labor market. What’s the key word? “Flexibility.” You want labor market flexibility. That’s the justification; that’s not the reason you’re doing it. You don’t care about labor market regulation per se. What you care about is cheap wages and freedom to hire and fire.

~ Full article…

One of the classic effects of famine is that it intensifies the exploitation of women; the sale of women and girls, for example, tends to increase. The sexual exploitation of poor, rural, lower-caste, and tribal women by the tears (landlords) had been difficult to escape even before the crisis. In the wake of the cyclone and later famine, many women lost or sold all their possessions and lost a male guardian due to abandonment or death. Those who migrated to Calcutta frequently had only begging or prostitution available as strategies for survival; often, regular meals were the only payment. Anthropologist Tarak Chandra Das suggests that a large proportion of the girls aged 15 and younger who migrated to Calcutta during the famine disappeared into brothels; in late 1943, entire boatloads of girls for sale were reported in ports of East Bengal. Girls were also prostituted to soldiers, with boys acting as pimps. Families sent their young girls to wealthy landowners overnight in exchange for minimal amounts of money or rice or sold them outright into prostitution; girls were sometimes enticed with sweet treats and kidnapped by pimps. Very often, these girls lived in constant fear of injury or death, but the brothels were their sole means of survival, or they were unable to escape. Women who had been sexually exploited could not later expect any social acceptance or a return to their home or family. Bina Agarwal writes that such women became permanent outcasts in a society that highly values female chastity, rejected by both their birth family and their husband’s family.

An unknown number of children, some tens of thousands, were orphaned. Many others were abandoned, sometimes by the roadside or at orphanages, or sold for as much as two maunds (one maund was roughly equal to 37 kilograms (82 lb)) or as little as one seer (1 kilogram (2.2 lb)) of unhusked rice, or for trifling amounts of cash. Sometimes, they were purchased as household servants, where they would “grow up as little better than domestic slaves.” They were also purchased by sexual predators. Altogether, according to Historian Greenough, the victimization and exploitation of these women and children was an immense social cost of the famine.

~ Full article…

But according to Wolff, the rift developed after Trump went behind Epstein’s back and successfully bid on a property in Palm Beach worth tens of millions of dollars, as he told co-host Joanna Coles on the latest episode of their podcast Inside Trump’s Head.

“These guys… they’re devoted to their private plans, but the thing that really makes them crazy is real estate—their quest for real estate,” Wolff said. “If they get screwed in a real estate deal, that breaks up any rich guy relationship.”

~ Full article…