Redlines: May 15, 2025

Daily Dispatches from the Frontlines of Global Class and Anti-Imperialist Struggle
By Weaponized Information | May 15, 2025

Africa

Niger Tells France: Get Your Hands Off Our Uranium
For decades, France lit its cities with uranium ripped from Niger’s earth, while Nigeriens stayed in the dark—literally and politically. Now the government in Niamey has pulled the plug on Orano, the French nuclear company that treated Niger like a radioactive colony. The West is crying “rule of law,” but this isn’t about contracts. It’s about anti-imperialist sovereignty. The same empire that looted Niger’s wealth for decades now calls national control a “crisis.” But the real crisis is that the colonized are no longer playing along. They’re calling the bluff, tearing up the script, and refusing to power Europe’s future while living in its past.

Senegal’s Gold Rush Is Laced with Death
In the hills of Kedougou, women dig for gold with mercury in their bare hands, burning poison to feed their families. Their children breathe it in. Their rivers carry it downstream. This isn’t a horror story—it’s capitalism. The Senegalese state ratified the Minamata Convention, sure, but one “mercury-free” processing unit won’t detoxify an entire mining economy built on sacrifice. This is what we call necro-extractivism: where the Global South dies a little every day so the Global North can shine a little brighter. The gold leaves the village. The poison stays behind.

Ethiopia Inks $1.6 Billion in Mineral Deals—with China, Not the IMF

Ethiopia has signed over $1.6 billion in new energy and mining investments—most of it with Chinese firms, not Western lenders. Huawei Mining is investing $500 million in exploration and processing, Sequa Mining is putting $600 million into coal, and several solar tech companies are adding hundreds of millions more. Unlike IMF deals laced with austerity and financial piracy, these agreements build infrastructure, not debt servitude. This is multipolar development in action—proof that the Global South doesn’t need Wall Street’s permission to industrialize on its own terms.

Asia

India, Pakistan Slumbering Toward Total War

The imperial periphery is being lit like a fuse. India and Pakistan — two nuclear-armed neighbors, both targeted by U.S. arms dealers and geopolitical game theorists — are being slowly cornered into confrontation. As the U.S. recalibrates toward encircling China and bleeding BRICS, its Cold War blueprint is reactivated in South Asia. Pakistan’s re-mercenarization under Trump 2.0 and India’s comprador alliance with U.S. military logistics are not coincidences — they’re parallel subcontracting operations in a slow-motion march toward mass incineration. This is how hyper-imperialism recruits its pawns for global self-destruction.

Maori MP Suspended for Haka in New Zealand Parliament

Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke was suspended from New Zealand’s parliament for performing a haka — an Indigenous battle cry of defiance and identity. The settler regime wasted no time punishing her for “disorderly conduct,” proving once again that colonial “democracy” tolerates resistance only when it is symbolic, muted, and powerless. The moment Indigenous defiance becomes embodied, visible, or culturally rooted — the state reverts to what it always was: a settler-colonial machine of pacification, not participation. Maipi-Clarke’s haka didn’t disrupt order — it unmasked it.

Vietnam’s Vingroup Tests the Line of Socialism with Market Orientation

Vingroup, Vietnam’s corporate titan, is expanding across industries — from real estate and EVs to hospitals and private universities — raisingkey questions about the Party’s long-held principle of “socialism with market orientation.” But this isn’t neoliberalism — at least not yet. The state still directs macro-planning, controls key sectors, and limits foreign capital penetration. Still, the contradictions are sharpening: between monopoly formation and socialist transition, between consumer modernity and revolutionary legacy. The Vietnamese working class will decide if this is a temporary compromise — or the beginning of capitalist restoration. The world should pay close attention.

Middle East

Trump Touts $10 Trillion in “Middle East Investments” — The Empire Buys Its Future

Trump’s Middle East tour is being sold as a “historic investment summit,” but the real transaction is simpler: U.S. hegemony is for sale, and Gulf monarchies are footing the bill. From arms deals to energy partnerships, the region is being carved up into a privatized garrison of settler empire. The $10 trillion figure isn’t investment — it’s tribute. This isn’t diplomacy. It’s hyper-imperial consolidation through oil pipelines, surveillance platforms, and subcontracted repression — the kind technofascism prefers: tidy, digitized, and profitable. Sovereignty, in this model, is a commodity — and the empire sets the price.

Trump’s UAE Stop: Real Estate, Regime Deals, and Recolonization by Contract

Trump’s historic UAE visit wasn’t about diplomacy — it was about empire’s next business model. After securing $1.4 trillion in Gulf capital for AI, energy, and U.S. manufacturing, Trump landed in Abu Dhabi to deepen the merger between imperial militarism and private enrichment. What’s being sold here isn’t just helicopters and fighter jet parts — it’s influence, surveillance, and geostrategic compliance, wrapped in billion-dollar deals. The UAE’s ruling elite gets prestige, weapons, and White House proximity. Trump gets crypto backing, luxury development clients, and imperial subcontractors in the Gulf. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s logistics network expands across the region under the banner of “stability.” This is technofascist stabilization in practice: privatized repression fused with imperial coordination — and all of it legally wrapped in a handshake.

Nakba 77: Palestine’s Unending Expulsion

As Palestinians mark 77 years since their mass expulsion — the Nakba — the settler-colonial contradiction sharpens. Zionism, backed by the U.S. and its imperial bloc, continues its genocidal expansion while Palestinians are imprisoned, bombed, or exiled. But this is not history — it’s continuity. Every military base in the Negev, every bulldozer in the West Bank, every U.S. veto at the UN, is proof that the Nakba never ended — it simply became permanent policy. What Palestinians mourn today is not just their past, but a present shaped by settler-colonial pacification and imperialist impunity.

Central/South America and the Caribbean

Bolivia’s Left Fractures as Arce Withdraws from 2025 Election

President Luis Arce’s withdrawal from Bolivia’s upcoming election reveals the deeper crisis not just of leadership, but of imperial pressure, internal contradiction, and post-coup recovery. The Western press frames this as political drama — but behind the curtain is a war over the future of the MAS project. Arce’s economic mismanagement amid global inflation and structural sabotage gave the oligarchy ammunition, while Evo Morales faces both legal repression and an aggressive media psy-op campaign rooted in the legacy of the 2019 U.S.-backed coup. Andronico Rodríguez now emerges as a new pole — but the central question remains: can the Bolivian left unify not just against fascist restoration, but toward revolutionary renewal? Because the empire is watching — and so is lithium capital.

Venezuela and Colombia Deepen Ties — With Strategic Backing from China and Russia

In a bold multipolar move, Venezuela and Colombia are consolidating economic and energy cooperation — with explicit support from China’s BRI and Russia’s financial coordination. This is the future of the region: South-South integration with real material backing. What the U.S. calls “autocratic alignment” is actually anti-imperialist sovereignty in motion. This isn’t Cold War redux — it’s Cold World Realignment. And for Washington, the threat isn’t just socialism — it’s independence.

Colombian Senate Blocks Petro’s Labor Reform Amid Mass Mobilizations

The comprador class in Colombia struck again this week, with the Senate rejecting President Gustavo Petro’s modest labor reform proposal — a referendum backed by unions and working-class coalitions. It’s a familiar story: the ballot box opens the door, but the oligarchy slams it shut. Petro, for all his contradictions, faces the wrath of a class that would rather burn the country down than share power with its workers. But the street is speaking louder than the Senate: mass protests across Colombia are pushing the terrain beyond reform and into rupture. This is class struggle under a neocolonial shell — and it’s beginning to crack.

Europe

EU Seeks to Expand Article 42.7 — NATO 2.0 or European War Incubator?

The EU’s top military brass is pushing to “operationalize” its own mutual defense clause, Article 42.7 — a clause long considered symbolic next to NATO’s Article 5. But this is no redundancy. It’s imperialist layering. As the U.S. pivots to Asia, the EU is preparing to militarize its sovereignty under the same old umbrella. Brussels plans to funnel up to €800 billion into defense integration, AI warfare, missile systems, and “critical infrastructure” protection — with an extra €150 billion in debt-backed military loans. The goal? Technofascist stabilization through militarized federalism. EU imperialism is no longer just Atlanticist — it’s arming itself for autonomous intervention, with drones, data, and digital command. Europe’s dream of unity is being built with bomb parts.

Ukraine Peace Talks Resume — But Only Empire Gets a Seat at the Table

Russia and Ukraine are finally returning to peace talks — but you wouldn’t know it by the way Western officials are acting. While delegations arrive in Istanbul, the U.S. and NATO’s response is to downplay, delay, and discredit. Trump says the war “can’t end” without him. Rubio and Graham parachute in to manage the optics. And Zelenskyy’s plea for dialogue is drowned out by new threats of sanctions. This isn’t diplomacy — it’s imperial stagecraft. The goal isn’t peace — it’s permanent crisis management. The war must continue, because the war is the business model. That’s why every real opportunity for peace is met with distraction, deflection, and another Lockheed contract.

NATO Eyes 5% Defense GDP Target — Welcome to Fortress Europe

NATO’s latest summit isn’t about “defending democracy” — it’s about doubling down on war economics. Rubio and Trump are pushing Europe to spend 5% of GDP on militarization by 2032, with new infrastructure goals to militarize roads, ports, and digital architecture. This isn’t about Ukraine. It’s about integrating all of Europe into a permanent war economy. Europe, they say, must “match the threat” of Russia and prepare for China. But what they mean is: buy more American weapons, abandon welfare spending, and deepen dependence on U.S. strategic command. This is hyper-imperialist discipline in real time: fiscal austerity for the people, limitless credit for the bombmakers.

North America

US Tariffs Hit Auto Manufacturing — But That’s the Point

Washington’s escalating tariff war isn’t “protecting American workers” — it’s disciplining them. The Brookings analysis shows North American auto manufacturing is being destabilized by U.S. tariffs, but that’s precisely the function of technofascist labor recalibration: break supply chains, displace labor, then reshore production under hyper-exploitative conditions. Mexico’s factories get shuttered. Canada’s suppliers get axed. U.S. plants reopen with fewer jobs, lower wages, and militarized surveillance. This isn’t deglobalization — it’s recolonization. The USMCA is being gutted and retooled to serve monopoly-finance capital’s next phase of digital feudalism.

Canadian Factory Shipments Fall — Caught in the Crossfire of Empire’s Reset

Canada’s 1.4% drop in factory shipments is more than a supply-chain hiccup — it’s collateral damage from the broader U.S. economic recalibration strategy. As Trump’s technonationalist trade policies deepen, Canada is squeezed between U.S. tariff pressure and global overcapacity. The Empire no longer needs its junior partner to produce — it needs it to consume, comply, and clamp down. Canada’s “sovereignty” is outsourced through supply chains, and its labor market is being structurally weakened to ensure continental alignment with U.S. corporate restructuring. This is settler imperialism cannibalizing itself — politely, of course.

Mexico’s Telecom Law: Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty or Reinforcing Technofascism?

U.S. think tanks are sounding the alarm over Mexico’s proposed telecom law, branding it “anti-competitive” and a violation of USMCA—but what they really fear is a sovereign state daring to control its own digital infrastructure. Sheinbaum’s move to centralize regulation and challenge the telecom monopoly threatens decades of neoliberal extraction disguised as market liberalism. The West’s concern isn’t over fair bidding—it’s about losing control of data, propaganda pipelines, and spectrum access to BRICS-friendly alternatives like Huawei. While contradictions remain—especially around state overreach—the law signals a rupture in digital dependency. This isn’t censorship. It’s a battle over who governs Mexico’s digital future: the Mexican people, or the technofascist machinery of U.S. empire.

The United States

Trump to Tim Cook: Build iPhones in the Empire, Not the Colony

Trump’s public dressing-down of Apple CEO Tim Cook isn’t about economic nationalism—it’s technofascist stagecraft designed to rebrand imperial outsourcing as patriotic policy. After decades of corporate offshoring to maximize profit margins by exploiting labor in the Global South, Trump’s message is clear: keep exploiting—but bring the jobs to America’s own reserve army of the underpaid. What he’s really demanding is a return of imperial production under settler-colonial discipline. Apple’s shift from China to India isn’t resistance to tariffs—it’s recalibration. And Trump’s tariffs aren’t a move against capitalism—they’re protectionism for a crumbling empire trying to reshore its declining industrial base while still extracting superprofits abroad. The contradiction is imperialism itself: you can’t outsource the world and still cry about “bringing jobs home.” This is iPhone imperialism with a red hat on.

U.S. Expands Sanctions on Hezbollah in Financial War of Attrition

Washington has unleashed another round of sanctions on Hezbollah—but this isn’t about “terrorism.” It’s the imperialist war-by-other-means strategy we’ve come to expect: weaponizing finance to crush any force that resists Zionist occupation or U.S. hegemony in West Asia. Sanctions are the siege weapon of hyper-imperialism—silent blockades enforced by banks instead of bombs. Hezbollah is targeted not because of any real “threat,” but because it remains one of the few organized, armed, and politically rooted movements in the region unwilling to bow to settler colonialism and dollar diktats. Financial piracy disguised as foreign policy.

Trump’s Deregulation Bonfire: The Bankers’ Coup Returns

The Trump regime is preparing to gut post-2008 financial protections in what can only be described as Wall Street’s revenge on history. After bankers tanked the global economy in 2008, the world imposed mild constraints to stop them from doing it again. Now, with Trump back in the White House, those same bankers—Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, the whole crooked cartel—are lobbying to dismantle capital reserve rules so they can once again flood the market with risk. Trump’s promise of “10 regulations slashed for every new one” isn’t just rhetoric—it’s a technofascist green light for financial piracy at scale. This is neoliberal necromancy: resurrect the ghost of 2008, arm it with derivatives, and call it “economic growth.” But make no mistake—this is not deregulation, it’s organized looting. With Trump’s executive machinery now serving the interests of speculative capital, the question is no longer if another crash is coming—but who’s going to pay for it.