Stephen Malagodi

Photographer, Former Radio Producer, Lover of Modern Music. Activist for human and civil rights. Blogging at

[Stephen Malagodi @malagodi]

I don’t want to eat the rich.
I just want to liberate their property.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Three Shocks that Shook the World in 2025

https://t.co/vbvJBuLSvl

This was the year that the remaining pillars of the late-20th-century order were shattered, exposing the hollow core of what passed for a global system. Three blows sufficed.

The first was Russia’s impending victory in Ukraine over Europe’s combined leadership. For almost four years, the European Union and NATO engaged in a perilous double game. On one hand, they committed rhetorically to a Ukrainian victory they were unwilling to bankroll. On the other hand, they exploited this never-ending war to advance a new political and economic domestic consensus: military Keynesianism would be their last-ditch stand against Europe’s deindustrialization.

In a continent where debilitating political constraints forbade significant deficit-funded green investments or social policies, the war in Ukraine provided a powerful rationale for funneling public debt into the defense-industrial complex. The unspoken truth was that a forever war served a critical function: it was the perfect engine for Keynesian pump-priming of Europe’s stagnating economy.

The contradiction was fatal: If the Ukraine war ended with a peace deal, it would be hard to sustain this economic pump-priming. Yet to achieve a victory that would justify the spending was deemed too expensive financially and too risky geo-strategically. Thus, Europe settled on the worst possible strategy: sending just enough equipment to Ukraine to prolong the bleeding without altering its course.

Now that Russia is set to prevail (a predictable result that US President Donald Trump merely brought forward), the EU’s best-laid plans lay in ruins. Europe has no Plan B for peace because its entire strategic posture had become dependent on the war’s continuance. Whatever grubby peace deal the Kremlin and Trump’s men ultimately impose on Ukraine will do more than redraw a border. Whether or not Russia remains a threat to Europe or not, Europe is about to lose the pretext for its nascent military-industrial boom and thus foreshadows a new austerity.

The second shock was that China won the trade war against the United States. The US strategy, initiated under Trump’s first administration and intensified under Joe Biden, was a pincer move: tariff barriers to cripple Chinese access to markets, and embargoes on advanced semiconductors and fabrication tools to cripple its technological ascent. In 2025, this strategy met its Waterloo, and Europe was again the primary collateral damage.

China responded with a masterful two-part response. First, it weaponized its dominance over rare earths and critical minerals, triggering a supply-chain seizure that paralyzed not so much American, but European and East Asian green manufacturing. Second, and most injuriously for America’s standing as the global tech leader, China mobilized its “whole-nation system” toward a single goal: technological autarky. The result was a staggering acceleration in domestic chip production, with SMIC and Huawei achieving breakthroughs that rendered the US-led Western embargo not just obsolete, but counterproductive.

This is probably the shock with the longest-lasting repercussions. In 2025, the US proved incapable of slowing China’s rise and, instead, unwittingly propelled its tech sector toward full independence. And Europe, having dutifully imposed on China the sanctions dictated by the White House, was left with the worst of all worlds: increasingly shut out of the lucrative Chinese market for its high-value goods, yet receiving none of the lavish subsidies and on-shoring benefits of the now rescinded US Inflation Reduction Act. By choosing to act as a strategic subcontractor to the US, the EU accelerated its own deindustrialization. This was not a loss in a trade war; it was a geopolitical checkmate, and Europe featured only as the losing side’s pawn.

The third shock was the ease with which Trump won his tariff war with the EU. At the end of their meeting at one of Trump’s golf clubs in Scotland, choreographed by his men to maximize her humiliation, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, struggled to portray a surrender document as a “landmark agreement.” Tariffs on European exports to the US jumped from 0.5% to 15% and in some cases to 25% and 50%. Long-standing EU tariffs on US exports were canceled. Last but not least, the Commission committed to $700 billion of European investment in US industry on US soil – money that can come only from diverting mainly German investments to chemical factories in Texas and car plants in Ohio.

This was more than a bad deal. It was an unprecedented capital extraction treaty. It formalizes the EU’s transition from an industrial competitor to a supplicant. Europe is to be a source of capital, a regulated market for US goods, and a technologically dependent junior partner. To add insult to injury, this new reality was codified in a binding commitment, stripping the EU of any pretense of sovereignty. Part of the capital Trump needs to consolidate his vision of a G2 world structured around the Washington-Beijing axis is now contractually obligated to flow from Europe westward.

These three shocks form a synergistic trilogy. Europe’s defeat in Ukraine has revealed its strategic blind spots and punctured its military Keynesian project. Trump’s acquiescence to Chinese President Xi Jinping has triggered a flood of Chinese exports to the EU. The shakedown in Scotland has cost Europe its accumulated capital and any lingering hope of parity.

In the G2 world, the imagined global village is a gladiatorial arena where the European Union and the United Kingdom now wander aimlessly. A new, harder, colder world order has been erected on the grave of European ambition. The year’s enduring lesson is that in an age of existential contests, strategic dependency is the prelude to irrelevance.

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

While Cuomo and Adams were fighting over who loved Israel more, Mamdani was running ads like this.

Hope this helps.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

It's so silly how American politics is just nonstop fake revolutions now.

Millions flooded the US streets for the "No Kings" protests over the weekend to oppose a monarchy which does not exist without making a single tangible demand. Power was not challenged in any meaningful way. The status quo wasn't disrupted in the slightest. People held up some signs saying the president is orange and that if Kamala were president they would be at brunch, and then went home.

The whole thing was just one big pep rally for the Democratic Party, designed to accomplish nothing beyond getting American liberals excited about the prospect of someday voting for Gavin Newsom. A bunch of boomers showed up to dance around and hold signs and feel as though they are fighting the power in their feely bits, while drumming up support for the same status quo which gave rise to Trump in the first place.

You see the same fake revolutionary astroturf zeitgeist on the Republican side. American rightists are constantly pretending they're fighting some kind of populist rebellion against an oppressive establishment even while their party controls every branch of the US government. They act like Trump is ending the wars and fighting the Deep State even as he stomps out free speech on behalf of Israel, rolls out a Palantir surveillance system, pours weapons into facilitating Israel's genocidal atrocities, bombs Iran and Yemen, ramps up for war with Venezuela, and perpetuates the horrific proxy war in Ukraine.

It's two plutocrat-owned warmongering imperialist parties whipping their respective bases into the mass delusion that they are participating in a heroic act of revolutionary defiance by voting Democrat or Republican. They get everyone fighting a fake revolution so that nobody thinks about fighting a real one.

[Stephen Malagodi @malagodi]

@peterdaou @borzou Doesn’t matter. The question ought to be who should replace the Democrats.

[Stephen Malagodi @malagodi]

@InsideLowell @CityofLowellMA @EconomyUrban @UMassLowell @MIT Glad to see you’re on board with the goals and objectives.

[Stephen Malagodi @malagodi]

@tomtipagolden Good work on the Frontrunner City effort.

[Stephen Malagodi @malagodi]

Isn’t it great that a man, the Secretary of Defense, who can’t even organize a parade, will now lead us through yet another mid-east war.

[Stephen Malagodi @malagodi]

@weeklyshowpod @jonfavs @jonlovett Jon, all these insider Democrat shows are really tiresome. Ezra Klein and his “Abundace” agenda promo was quite irritating. These two seem aren’t nearly as be clever (despite the jokes) and just as maddening.

It’s all beneath your intelligence.

[A Left-Wing Account ™️ @PushDemsLeft]

There it is.

[Frantz Duval @Frantzduval]

L'avion transportant les troupes du Salvador (El Salvador 🇸🇻) vient d'atterrir à l'aéroport international Toussaint Louverture de Port-au-Prince ce 4 février 2025, a constatéune equipe du @nouvelliste. Le contingent du Salvador vient renforcer la Mission multinationale d’appui à la sécurité
📷 @Marctimephotog1

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

We're live: https://t.co/jzQdiYP809

[Christina @thatgirltinak]

Dear @paramountplus please call your camera guy and tell them they can follow multiple players at one time. Love Trinity, but would love to see the whole game. #NWSLChampionship #ParamountPlus #trinityrodman #whosthiscameraperson

[Stephen Malagodi @malagodi]

#NWSLChampionship @CBSSports FIX THE GODAMN FEED!

[Stephen Malagodi @malagodi]

Come on @CBSSports - One camera on the #NWSLChampionship game? What’s wrong with you?

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

"I did amputations on people who just had to take paracetamol after the operation as pain relief.. one of my colleagues took maggots out of a childs throat in intensive care"

Yesterday Professor Mamode explained to MPs how Israel blocks medical aid from entering Gaza

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

https://t.co/DffnYeYgx1

[Robin Monotti @robinmonotti]

A Nobel Prize winning propagandist, sorry, correction: "expert", Paul Krugman, confronted by a real representative of the people at CUNY.

Well said Jose Vega. Hero.

[Pelham @Resist_05]

“No nation, no aggressor is allowed to take a neighbours territory by force”…

- Joe Biden