Archeologists Join Geologists In The Quest To Define The Age Of Humans

• by: Deborah Barsky

Deborah Barsky

05-09-2025 ~ A new archeology is being developed based on evidence of human activity in the Earth’s sedimentary record, and archeologists are helping to define the Anthropocene as a new stage in the geological record.

The evolution of the human mind has allowed us to transcend our modern understandings of time and expand into the realm of “deep time thinking.” One example of this is the Geologic Time Scale (GTS), a human construct that traces the astrophysical events that have affected the composition and structure of the Earth since it was formed some 4.6 billion years ago.

Scientists have assembled bits and pieces of this huge temporal scale into periods of relative climatic and biotic stability based on geological and fossil data. By ordering these events sequentially in time, they have been able to reconstruct when, how, and under what conditions life emerged on the planet. Under the aegis of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) is charged with defining geological epochs based on fundamental changes registered in the Earth’s geological formations. The GTS is often depicted with spiraling concentric branches divided into segments representing distinct geological epochs defined by periods of relative geobiological stability.

These epochs are named, dated, and ordered, and the length of each segment is proportional to its duration relative to the other phases. As we progress toward the outer rings of the spiral, we notice that the time segments gradually become smaller, especially around 500 million years ago after the unprecedented proliferation of complex life forms that appeared during the Cambrian explosion, which accelerated the pace of global ecological changes registered in the Earth’s layers.

The emergence of the first humanoid species has been traced back to only around 7 million years ago and is placed at the extreme tip of the last branch of the spiral, underscoring how little time has passed, relatively, since our ancestors appeared on the planet. Based on global climatic data, the evolutionary story of the genus Homo has taken place throughout the Quaternary Period that began around 2.58 million years ago during the Pleistocene Epoch. This period roughly overlaps with the invention of the first breakthrough human technologies made from stone. A global warming event that began 11,650 years ago around the same time as the emergence of early sedentary civilizations in the Fertile Crescent signals the start of the Holocene Epoch, in which we currently live.

The Anthropocene (The Age of Humans) has been proposed as a new geological epoch after or within the Holocene, and, if formalized, would be the first to be introduced based on geologically observable effects of human activity on the planet. This compelling proposal spurred the establishment of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), which is tasked to evaluate whether the geophysical signature of human behavior is sufficient to justify placing this new epoch at the apex of the spiraling branches of the GTS. While many scientists agree on the idea in principle, a major point of contention is when exactly the Anthropocene began.

Not surprisingly, pinpointing a precise threshold when human activity caused recognizable global geological alteration has proven to be a very difficult task that geologists and archeologists are working together to resolve. Some archeologists consider the Anthropocene as an incremental process, whose genesis can be identified diachronically in the Earth’s strata as early as tens of thousands of years ago, when modern humans consolidated planetary dominance, appropriating and transforming landscapes and biotic resources in archeologically detectable ways. Read more

Trump Defends Far Right AfD Party After German Intelligence Calls It “Extremist”

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

C.J. Polychroniou

05-08-2025 ~ The Trump administration’s alliance with the racist political party signals the rise of a far right international.

Last week, Trump administration officials blasted Germany after a 1,100-page report from that country’s intelligence agency found that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a racist and anti-Muslim organization, labelling it “a proven right-wing extremist organization.”

The report was compiled by experts and was years in the making. Among its key findings is that the AfD poses a threat to Germany’s constitution by propagating xenophobia, Islamophobia and an “ethnicity-and-ancestry-based conception of the people.” The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution submitted the report to the interior ministry in the final days of the outgoing center-left government, prompting the AfD to claim that the move was political in nature and to file a lawsuit against the agency. But the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, whose mission is to safeguard the German constitution, had long held suspicions that the AfD and its youth organization were engaged in right-wing extremist activities and now feels convinced that the confidential report has justified its suspicions; hence the agency’s designation of Alternative for Germany as “a proven right-wing extremist organization.”

The Trump administration, however, is actively defending the extremist party.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on X: “What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD—which took second in the recent election—but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.”

Vice President J.D. Vance also rushed to the defense of the AfD, sharing a post on X asserting that “the AfD is the most popular party in Germany” and accusing the German political establishment of rebuilding a “Berlin Wall.”

So what if the AfD’s activities seek to “undermine or abolish the free democratic order,” in violation of Article 21 of the German constitution? For Trump and his minions, this is an insignificant detail as AfD’s vision for the future of Germany resonates with the Trump administration’s vision for the future of the United States.

The Trump team has been trying to boost Europe’s far right since day one. Elon Musk has openly supported the AfD and even held a livestreamed conversation on X with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel in which he encouraged Germans to vote for the party ahead of the federal elections. As for Trump himself, he is obsessed with strongmen and has gone out of his way to embolden far right and white supremacist groups, including by issuing pardons to all those convicted in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Indeed, Trump 2.0 is carrying out an all-out anti-democracy project inside the United States the likes of which the country has not seen since the end of Reconstruction. His racist and xenophobic vision for “making America great again” echoes the history of Nazi Germany, building a platform based on the rejection of social justice and the embrace of a socioeconomic order in which the rich and powerful thrive by taking as much as they can from the poor and weak.

The infantile narcissist at the helm of the world’s most powerful nation is a menace to anything and everything decent. The alleged concerns for the future of democracy in Germany by some of Trump’s top officials would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous. For the fact of the matter is that Trump and his ilk despise democracy precisely because of the ideals and values, such as equality and tolerance, that are granted in the democratic state.

The AfD blames immigrants for weakening the German culture and way of life and regards Muslims in the country, specifically, as “a danger to our state, our society, and our values.” In November 2023, senior members of the AfD even attended a meeting with neo-Nazis and other extremists to discuss a “master plan” for the deportation of millions of immigrants and native citizens. Trump and his flunkies would obviously find nothing objectionable about such moves, and would see any legal attempts by the current German government to ban such activities not as protecting democracy but rather as “tyranny in disguise.” Read more

United Steelworkers Lead Mobilization Drive As American Unions Face Growing Vulnerability

• by: John P. Ruehl

John P. Ruehl – Independent Media Institute

05-07-2025 ~ The USW must navigate factionalism while championing labor rights amid rising anti-union pressures and global trade fragmentation.

In March 2025, hundreds of workers at the JSW Steel facility in Ohio became the latest to unionize under the United Steelworkers Union (USW). Though not the country’s largest union, its full name—the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied and Industrial and Service Workers International Union—reflects its expansive reach across multiple industries.

Recent organizing campaigns show the union’s growing reach across key sectors. In 2022, 700 manufacturing workers at a Bobcat plant in North Dakota voted to join the USW, while around 12,000 academic employees at the University of Pittsburgh have joined the USW as of 2024. In 2023, 1,500 school bus builders at Blue Bird Corporation in Georgia and 600 miners in Minnesota’s Iron Range also unionized, joining the 1.2 million active and retired USW members, alongside the union’s international allies.

In the last few years, the USW and other unions have grown more active through grassroots mobilization, with education and retail emerging as major sectors witnessing unionization. British Columbia Starbucks workers joined the USW in March 2025, Philadelphia Whole Foods workers aligned with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International Union in January, and the first Chipotle store, located in Michigan, unionized with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 2022, indicating a major change for previously resistant workplaces.

According to a 2025 Economic Policy Institute article, public support for unions is at 70 percent, a 60-year high, and millions of Americans want to join one. Yet membership remains historically low, with just six percent of private sector workers unionized. The USW’s scale and international reach position it to lead a unionization comeback, but coordinated resistance from companies and the government continues to pose serious obstacles.

Formation and Evolution
Formed in 1942 during World War II by merging smaller unions, the USW’s centralized structure helped it negotiate wages, contracts, price controls, and legal arbitration, leveraging steel’s critical role in the war effort. This “service model,” based on cooperative labor-management relations, helped it drive the postwar unionization boom, expanding into industries like aluminum, paper, rubber, and chemicals in the 1950s and 1960s. The USW also became a strong supporter of civil rights and the Democratic Party’s labor coalition.

However, the service model faltered in the 1980s as deindustrialization, Reagan-era policies, and global competition erased U.S. manufacturing jobs and union membership. In response, the USW switched toward a mobilization model by the 1990s, encouraging more organizing, protests, and rank-and-file participation, while merging with smaller unions and industries in health care, public services, and education.

Under former USW President Leo Gerard (2001-2019), the union expanded further, merging with the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers (PACE) International Union in 2005, becoming the largest industrial union in North America. Today, the union operates as a hybrid, retaining centralized leadership for bargaining and administration while encouraging grassroots mobilization. Recent USW initiatives, like the 2022 launch of its oil bargaining program and the successful 2023 Blue Bird union drive in Georgia, show its increasing emphasis on direct action. Read more

From Tragedy To Farce, From Farce To Grotesque

• by: Jorge Coulon

07-05-2025 ~ ‘History repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce” – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

From Tragedy to Farce, from Farce to Grotesque

If Marx had lived to see the 21st century, he might have added a third form: grotesque comedy, or worse, self-parodying farce with special effects and private sponsorship.

Napoleon Bonaparte seized power as a tragic figure, sword in hand, backed by armies and the glory of a republic in ruins. Louis Bonaparte imitated him as a caricature: without epic, without ideas, but with a surname and plebiscites. Javier Milei, on the other hand, needs no sword or lineage: all he needs is a Twitter account, a stuffed animal, and the promise to blow everything up.

Is he president because of his program? No. Because of his ability to articulate a social majority? No. He is president because he embodies pure hatred of politics, a desire to raze everything to the ground in the face of the decomposition of everything that came before.

And so, what Marx called ‘farce’ has today become libertarian horror comedy, where the powers of the state are not concentrated in an imperial palace, but in the algorithm that rewards the most viral cry.

The new Bonaparte does not ride a white horse, but a streaming stage, amid the barking of imaginary dogs and harangues against ‘the caste’.

We are witnessing an experiment that is as Argentine as it is universal: a formal democracy that destroys itself with applause, voting for those who promise to annihilate it in the name of the ‘free market’, as if the market were a jealous and vengeful god demanding human sacrifices in exchange for stability.

Milei or Algorithmic Bonapartism
Louis Bonaparte came to power in 1851, promising order, stability, and past glory. He had no ideas of his own, but he did have a symbolic legacy: the Bonaparte surname, a distant echo of the Empire. His strength lay not in his thinking, but in his image: the emperor’s nephew, the ‘providential man’.
Javier Milei also lacks new ideas, but he offers a powerful image: the lion roaring against ‘the caste’, the economist shouting truths on television programs, the furious outsider who promises to destroy the state as an act of national redemption.

But where Bonaparte had sabres and soldiers, Milei has cameras, likes, bots, and influencers. His army is not regiments, but algorithms that guarantee him visibility; he does not take power by storm, but by engagement.

He is the first Argentine president entirely manufactured in the age of digital spectacle, the son of prime-time television and memetic radicalisation. His language does not seek to convince, but to go viral. He does not articulate majorities: he encapsulates them emotionally. Read more

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What Does Trump’s Economic Chaos Mean For The Global Financial System?

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and a founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

05-04-2025 ~ Progressive economist Gerald Epstein says global capitalists may no longer see the US as a “safe haven” under Trump.

The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second presidency have brought about big, destructive changes in U.S. society and culture as well as on the environment. They have also caused real damage to the economy, which has gone on reverse on almost all fronts since Trump took office. By talking out of both sides of his mouth on tariffs, Trump has managed in a very short time to harm U.S. businesses, weaken the dollar and compel investors to dump U.S. government bonds. No wonder why he has the lowest 100-day approval of a president in 80 years.

In the interview that follows, renowned progressive political economist Gerald Epstein delves into the impacts that Trump’s economic policies are having on the U.S. economy and its currency, the once-mighty dollar. He also explains the reasons why Trump keeps attacking the Federal Reserve and ponders the future of international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank as Trump’s economic policies threaten global stability. Epstein is professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His most recent book is Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity.

C.J. Polychroniou: Trump’s erratic reciprocal tariffs represent an unprecedented shift in U.S. trade policy and are having dramatic impacts on both the U.S. and global economies. The U.S. dollar has also experienced a sharp decline due to the Trump administration’s tariffs chaos. Why are tariffs weakening the dollar? And isn’t this bad news for the average U.S. consumer and a slam for the working-class voters that support Trump?

Gerald Epstein: Trump’s tariffs are creating havoc in the world economy and for U.S. businesses, consumers and workers. Part of the problem lies in the nature of the tariffs themselves, and part of it results from the huge uncertainty generated by the on-again-off-again, maybe-maybe-not quality of them. With respect to the issue of uncertainty, economists of many stripes, from John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman, have argued that for capitalism (and capitalists) to prosper, uncertainty must be held in check. The main reason is that long-term investment drives the economy. Mainstream economists extol the economic importance of consumers, but we have known from at least the time of Marx that it is investment (what Marx called “accumulation of capital”) that underpins the system. But since most useful investment is relatively long lasting and requires significant upfront expenses, capitalists are reluctant to make such commitments when uncertainty is through the roof, as it is now. The result is not only a likely reduction in investment in plants, equipment and technology, but, through a downward multiplier process, a reduction in demand and employment spread throughout the economy.

Then there is the structure of the tariffs themselves.

Here there are at least two issues of relevance to the impact on the economy. The first is the massive, indeed prohibitive level of tariffs on China, in combination with high tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Together, these countries account for more than one-third of U.S. trade, so the tariffs are obviously extremely disruptive to their economies and ours. The second issue is the fact that the U.S. tariffs did not distinguish between imports of final goods and imports of parts and other intermediate products. If Trump wants to reshore manufacturing production and jobs, he is making that goal more difficult by slapping tariffs on products that these firms will have to use to produce their newly onshored final goods like cars.

Together, these policies are tanking expected corporate profits in the U.S., threatening unemployment for U.S. workers and slashing plans for corporate investment.

In this environment, profit prospects for U.S. companies based in the U.S. are way down. As a result, financial investment into the U.S. is less profitable and riskier. Hence, there is less demand for U.S. dollars to invest in the U.S. This is one main reason why the value of the dollar is going down and shows a direct connection between Trump’s tariffs and the dollar.

But there is a further reason why the dollar is falling. And this relates to a possible disruption of the trust by global capitalists in the United States as a “safe haven” in times of trouble and turmoil. Read more