Trump helps BlackRock buy Panama Canal ports (Uncut) 03-05-2025

If you want to understand U.S. foreign policy, it will get you a long way if you realize that the main goal of the U.S. government is to weaken China. This is the stated policy of not just Republicans and the Trump administration, but also Democrats. What unites them is that they see China as the biggest threat to U.S. global dominance, and so much of U.S. foreign policy is aimed at trying to weaken China.

However, that’s not the only goal. Another major mission of U.S. foreign policy is to expand business opportunities for large U.S. corporations, allowing them to get access to more markets abroad. The U.S. government has also been dedicated to protecting especially big tech companies in Silicon Valley from foreign competition by sabotaging or imposing sanctions or tariffs on foreign competitors, especially when those competitors happen to be Chinese companies.

And the U.S. government has gone out of its way to help U.S. companies buy foreign assets. And a great example of all of this is what the U.S. government has been doing with the Panama Canal. It brings together both the China element, the anti-China element, and it brings together the U.S. government’s commitment to expanding business opportunities for large U.S. corporations and especially big financial firms on Wall Street.

And the latest news as of March is that the Trump administration helped the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, buy ports on both sides of the Panama Canal. And as the Associated Press put it, this essentially puts the Panama Canal under U.S. control. In fact, Trump delivered a speech to Congress on the 4th of March in which he boasted that he is reclaiming the Panama Canal.

And he announced that a large American company had bought the ports around the canal. To further enhance our national security, my administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal. And we’ve already started doing it.

Yesterday, a large American company announced they are buying both ports around the Panama Canal and lots of other things having to do with the Panama Canal and a couple of other canals. Now, Trump intentionally did not name what that company is, but it’s BlackRock, one of the most powerful corporations on Earth. BlackRock has $11.6 trillion in assets under management.

It invests the wealth of oligarchs and the elites, not only in the U.S., but around the world. And it buys up assets around the world. And BlackRock is so powerful and it controls so many assets that BlackRock itself is more powerful than many countries on Earth.

And this case is the perfect example of exactly what I was emphasizing, that U.S. foreign policy fundamentally aims at weakening China and then expanding business opportunities for U.S. corporations, especially on Wall Street. So for this analysis today, I’m going to start with China and then later I’ll talk about Wall Street. The Trump administration has made it clear as day that it considers China to be the so-called biggest threat to the United States.

To oversee foreign policy as secretary of state, Trump appointed the hardline neoconservative war hawk Marco Rubio. And in his Senate confirmation hearing in January, he said China is much more of a so-called threat than the Soviet Union was during the original Cold War. And Rubio argued that in the future, the history of the 21st century will be entirely dominated by Washington’s new Cold War against China.

The Communist Party of China leads PRC, is the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted. They have elements that the Soviet Union never possessed. They are a technological adversary and competitor, an industrial competitor, an economic competitor, geopolitical competitor, a scientific competitor now in every realm.

It’s an extraordinary challenge. It’s one that I believe will define the 21st century. When they write the book about the 21st century, there’s going to be some chapters in there about Putin, there’s going to be some chapters in there about some of these other places.

But the bulk of that book about the 21st century will be not just about China, but about the relationship between China and the United States and what direction it went. This is the same position that was argued by Donald Trump’s CIA director, John Ratcliffe. During Trump’s first term, Ratcliffe was Trump’s director of national intelligence.

Now he’s CIA director. And he referred to China as the national security threat number one in an article in the Wall Street Journal. And the Wall Street Journal also used some of the same Cold War rhetoric saying, you can never, ever trust the communists.

So of course, they’re talking about China today. It sounds exactly like the same rhetoric we heard during the original Cold War against the Soviet Union. Here we are once again, in a new Cold War.

We heard the same message in the Senate confirmation hearing for Trump’s CIA director, John Ratcliffe. In January, he said that China is the greatest so called threat to the US. And he vowed that the CIA will be massively expanding its operations to try to weaken China.

But much more has to be done. Because our adversaries and one in particular that I will discuss now, understand that the nation who wins the race of emerging technologies of today will dominate the world of tomorrow. Which brings me to the need for the CIA to continue and increase in intensity the focus on the threats posed by China and its ruling Chinese Communist Party.

As DNI, I dramatically increase the intelligence community’s resources devoted to China. I openly warned the American people that from my unique vantage point as an official who saw more intelligence than anyone else, I assessed that China was far and away our top national security threat. President Trump has been an incredible leader on this issue and it is encouraging that a bipartisan consensus has emerged in recent years.

Of course, we know that the CIA has meddled in countries around the world organizing coups overthrowing foreign governments. So when the CIA director says that China is a so called threat, what he’s really doing is he’s threatening China. It’s a very clear message.

And we’ve also heard this very aggressive anti China rhetoric from Donald Trump himself. In fact, during his inauguration speech, Trump falsely claimed that China is controlling the Panama Canal, and he vowed that the US will take it over. And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal, and we didn’t give it to China.

We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back. Trump said that on the 20th of January, and just a month and a half later, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, announced that it had come to an agreement to buy ports on both sides of the Panama Canal. The way the Associated Press reported this is quote, BlackRock strikes deal to bring ports on both sides of Panama Canal under American control, end quote.

This case in Panama is a perfect example of how the Trump administration is trying to reinforce the so called Monroe Doctrine, which is a 202 year old colonial doctrine, going back to the early 19th century, you know, when the European empires were expanding and colonizing many countries, the US empire was telling the European empires that Latin America is the US colonial sphere of influence. And today, the Trump administration is bringing back this kind of 19th century style colonialism. And Trump is telling China that it’s not allowed to have bilateral consensual relations with countries in Latin America.

Instead, Trump says, essentially, this is our colonial so called backyard. And it’s not just Latin America. It’s the entire Western Hemisphere that Trump is claiming as the US imperial sphere of influence.

This is why Trump also wants to colonize Greenland. And the US government propaganda outlet Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, which was created by the CIA, and is funded by the US government. They published an article that admitted that the US wants to take over and colonize Greenland to prevent China from getting access to the Arctic region.

And also, Greenland just so happens to have billions dollars worth of critical minerals, potentially trillions dollars worth of critical minerals. And the US government wants to get control of those critical minerals, because the US is trying to cut China out of international supply chains, and especially for military technology, because the US is preparing for a potential war with China in the future. And the fact that Donald Trump chose Marco Rubio to be his Secretary of State is a clear sign of him trying to reimpose the colonial Monroe doctrine in Latin America.

Because of course, Marco Rubio is a notorious neoconservative war hawk. He strongly supported every major US war. And he grew up in Florida, and he hates the Latin American left.

And Marco Rubio has dedicated his life to overthrowing independent, anti-imperialist left-wing governments in Latin America, and colonizing Latin America and imposing right-wing puppet regimes in the region, who will obediently follow US orders. And this is why in his first official trip abroad as Secretary of State, where did Marco Rubio go? He went to Latin America. What was the first country that Rubio went to? It was Panama.

And then he went to El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. And Rubio was asked about this trip in an interview on Fox News. And Rubio and the Fox News host used colonial language referring to Latin America as the so-called backyard of the US empire.

And they complained about China’s influence in Latin America. I mean, this isn’t a crime. China is allowed to have political and economic relations with countries in Latin America.

They’re independent. They’re sovereign. But Fox News and Marco Rubio don’t see it that way.

They see Latin America as the US colonial backyard. And in this interview on Fox News, Rubio boasted that while he was in Panama, he forced the Panamanian government to withdraw from China’s global infrastructure program, the Belt and Road Initiative. Have we allowed over decades China to make their way into Central South America? And is Panama an example of that? We’ve just not put enough attention in our own backyard.

Is that what you heard when you went there? It is. And I’m very happy that after our visit, I think the same day I was there, Panama became the first country in Latin America in the Western Hemisphere to get out of the Belt and Road Initiative. And I think there’ll be more news coming up soon with regards to Panama, all positive for America.

In the same interview in Fox News, Rubio emphasized that he considers China to be the most dangerous adversary ever faced by the US empire. You’ve called China the most dangerous near-peer adversary the US has faced ever. So we need concrete steps to face off with them who clearly are building up their military to face off with us as sophisticated as possible.

Also in this Fox News interview, Secretary of State Rubio reiterated that the US government, the Trump administration strongly supports Taiwan separatists and that the US government has to rebuild its own domestic manufacturing, especially for weapons. He wants to create a new supply chain without China in order to create military technology to prepare for war on China. We have a longstanding position on Taiwan that we’re not going to abandon.

And that is we are against any forced, compelled, coercive change in the status of Taiwan. That’s been our position since the late 1970s and that continues to be our position and that’s not going to change. But we have to have military capabilities that allow us to respond to the threat that China is posing.

And we need to be concerned. We have our aircraft manufacturing, our ship manufacturers, they are not keeping pace. China can build 10 ships before we can build one.

That’s a very serious vulnerability that cannot continue. So we’re obviously in a new Cold War. You can see that very clearly from the statements by the US government.

This is not true of just Republicans, but also Democrats. But, you know, the Trump Republicans, unlike the Democrats, which use rhetoric of human rights and democracy, the Trump Republicans are more explicitly colonial and they say everything they’re doing, it’s not about democracy and human rights, that they don’t care about all of that marketing, which, you know, the Democrats are very cynical. They don’t care about it either, but they use that marketing.

The Republicans say very clearly, no, this is about maximizing US power, not only geopolitical power, but the economic power of US corporations, especially Wall Street firms like BlackRock. And essentially what we see is in this new Cold War, Panama found itself right in the middle of this new Cold War as a target of the US empire. And what happened? It immediately gave in and basically surrendered its sovereignty to the US.

And now BlackRock has bought up these ports on both sides of the Panama Canal. And again, as the US media is boasting, this assures US control over the Panama Canal, one of the most important geostrategic trade routes on earth. And in this context, BlackRock is essentially acting as a kind of privatized outsourced arm of the US government.

And in the future, the US government could decide, okay, we’re going to use BlackRock, its control over these ports to prevent Chinese ships from going through the Panama Canal if the US wants to cut off Chinese trade with Latin America. And if there’s a war between the US and China, the US can ban Chinese ships from ever passing through the Panama Canal or try to ban foreign ships with Chinese goods from passing through the Panama Canal. So the US government can now do exactly what it was falsely accusing China of because as you know, it is often said, every accusation that the US government makes is actually a confession about what it would like to do.

This case with BlackRock is a perfect example because, you know, the US government constantly falsely claims that China is taking over the world by buying up foreign infrastructure and all this nonsense. But in reality, as this article in the Associated Press points out, this consortium led by BlackRock that bought the ports on both sides of the Panama Canal, this BlackRock led group now controls more than 43 ports in 23 countries, including Panama, Mexico, the Netherlands, Egypt, Australia, Pakistan, and beyond. So while the US fears about China buying up foreign assets, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with $11.6 trillion in assets, is buying up infrastructure and other assets around the world with the backing of the US government.

And this is bipartisan. It’s not just the Trump administration. It’s also Democrats like the former Biden administration.

In fact, under Biden, the White House created something called the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. This was meant as Washington’s alternative to China’s global Belt and Road Initiative. However, a major difference between the US program and the Chinese program is that China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the BRI, is largely overseen by state-owned enterprises.

These are companies that are not operating for profit, so they can operate in countries and build infrastructure that is not profitable. Whereas this US program, the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, is being driven by for-profit private corporations. Because of course, the US basically has no state-owned enterprises.

China has a socialist system. The US has a neoliberal capitalist system driven entirely by profit. And what are the companies that are overseeing this investment in global infrastructure? They are BlackRock and some other asset managers.

So when the White House announced this program, the main company overseeing this global infrastructure initiative is BlackRock and also JP Morgan Chase, the largest US bank, Alphabet, which owns Google, one of the most powerful monopolies on earth, and Microsoft, another massive Silicon Valley monopoly. And then another company backed by the US government back in the Biden administration that was involved in this project was called Global Infrastructure Partners. Now, who owns Global Infrastructure Partners? You guessed it, BlackRock.

So all of these US government programs not only aim to try to weaken China, but also to benefit big asset managers like BlackRock and other investment companies on Wall Street. And BlackRock and Global Infrastructure Partners have been working very closely with Microsoft to build AI infrastructure and to invest in data centers and power grids. And a day after Donald Trump returned to office, he held a press conference at the White House in which he announced the US government backed AI investment program, which is called the Stargate Project, which is being led by OpenAI, the big AI company that is half owned by Microsoft.

So we can see at every single level here how US government policy is meant to benefit these big corporate monopolies on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. Trump has made this absolutely clear as day by filling his administration with 13 billionaires. Trump himself is, of course, a billionaire.

And then you have the world’s richest oligarch, Elon Musk, who has hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth. And, you know, people kind of semi-jokingly, but not so jokingly, call him the de facto co-president of the United States. And then, of course, there’s the fact that Donald Trump invited the world’s most powerful billionaire oligarchs to sit with his cabinet members at his inauguration, which once again just symbolically showed how deeply tied the US government is to this corporate oligarchy.

But although Trump has made it absolutely obvious that the US is not a democracy, it’s an oligarchy controlled by these big corporate elites. At the same time, I should point out this is not just Trump and the Republicans. This is bipartisan.

The Democrats had many similar policies benefiting Silicon Valley and Wall Street at the expense of the working class. A good example of this was in 2024 at the G7 summit, which, you know, consists of the seven colonial countries that colonize most of the world. It’s North America, Western Europe and Japan.

Well, who was invited to sit with Western leaders, heads of state at the G7 summit? No other than the billionaire oligarch CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink. And at the G7 summit, he gave a speech talking about how BlackRock, with the backing of Western governments, is buying up infrastructure around the world. The IMF and the World Bank were created 80 years ago when banks, not markets, financed most things.

Today, the financial world is flipped. The capital markets are the biggest source of private sector financing, and unlocking that money requires a different approach than the bank balance sheet model of yesterday. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but reform over the past eight months have resulted in billions of dollars of new dollars for the developing country’s infrastructure.

That’s what you saw last week with the announcement of the investor coalition. BlackRock, GIP, KKR and other major firms will deploy $25 billion into Asia’s emerging economies. This is why building new infrastructure is critical, especially through public-private partnerships.

Infrastructure investments is a counterforce to the high-debt, low-growth economies. Now, that program in which the U.S. government is going to help BlackRock buy up infrastructure around the world and become this kind of new feudal lord that controls roads and ports and infrastructure everywhere, that program was launched by the Biden administration. But here we are under the Trump administration, and BlackRock has continued buying up infrastructure.

With Trump’s help, they’re now buying up the ports at the Panama Canal. This is the perfect illustration of why the CEO of BlackRock, the billionaire Larry Fink, said before the presidential election in 2024, he said, quote, it really doesn’t matter, end quote, who wins the election. He said, whether it’s the Republicans or the Democrats, Trump or Kamala Harris or Biden or whomever, he emphasized that Wall Street always benefits from U.S. government policy because the U.S. is not a democracy.

It’s an oligarchy, and U.S. government policy is made on behalf of the capitalist oligarchs on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. What we’re seeing today is that rich capitalists around the world are investing in asset managers, investment managers, and they’re buying up not only stocks and bonds and other debt instruments and such around the world, but they’re buying up infrastructure and real estate. And together, the 500 largest asset managers in the world have $128 trillion in assets under management.

I mean, this is the kind of global capitalist oligarchy we’re seeing where there’s more and more wealth inequality. Working class people are struggling to buy a house because all of the assets, including the houses, are being bought up by these corporate oligarchs. Well, they’re being bought up by these asset managers who invest the wealth of the corporate oligarchy.

In fact, a perfect example of this is Blackstone, which is the world’s largest alternative asset manager, not to be confused with BlackRock. In fact, it’s even more complicated because BlackRock, the world’s largest conventional asset manager, actually owns about 7% of a stake in Blackstone. But Blackstone, which is largely, it runs a private equity fund, which is what it’s most known for.

And Blackstone is the largest landlord in the United States. Blackstone owns more than 300,000 housing units in the U.S. and it’s notorious for buying up housing units and then ratcheting up rents. So one of the main reasons, not the only reason, but one of the reasons why there’s so much homelessness in the U.S. and people cannot afford housing is because housing is an investment.

It’s no longer seen as just a place to live. It’s an asset that is bought up by rich investors, including institutional investors on Wall Street like Blackstone and increasingly BlackRock, but also simply the rich in general, because they say, you know, I have a bunch of sitting around. What am I going to do with it? Well, you know, stocks are very overvalued right now.

Bonds are not offering great yields. Instead, I’m just going to buy up a bunch of real estate. I’m going to buy up 20 apartments and then rent them out and make more money.

So the U.S. has become increasingly a country of landlords. And the U.S. government has been promoting this because U.S. politicians have been bought off by the corporate oligarchs. I mean, the U.S. has the best so-called democracy that money can buy.

In more than 90 percent of the congressional races in the House of Representatives, the candidate who has more funding, big corporate donations, wins the election. And in the Senate, the story is the same. About 80 percent of candidates who have more corporate donations win the election.

And we can basically see the same thing with the presidency. Donald Trump is serving the interests not only of himself and his friends. Of course, Trump is a billionaire.

And again, there are 13 billionaires in his administration. But not just that. You know who one of the main donors was for Trump’s campaign for president? It was the CEO of Blackstone, the powerful billionaire oligarch, Stephen Schwartzman.

And as Bloomberg pointed out, this Blackstone CEO is now well positioned to influence Donald Trump’s policies on corporations and on taxes. And of course, Trump is pledging to massively cut taxes on the rich and corporations and to deregulate corporations. So again, this is the best so-called democracy that money can buy.

On Wall Street, you have these billionaires who donate millions and millions of dollars to basically buy politicians. Those politicians come into office. Then they also get lobbied by big corporations.

And then they pass tax breaks on the rich and in corporations. So it’s basically an investment. Blackstone and these other big corporations, they invest some money in campaign contributions, and then they make much more money through US government policy.

And by the way, you know how much money this billionaire Blackstone CEO, Stephen Schwartzman, got paid in 2024? Again, this is one of the main donors to Trump. In one year, he made $1.6 billion in pay and dividends just for his work at Blackstone. This is not considering his other investments.

I’m sure he made billions more. Again, this is one of the most powerful billionaire oligarchs on earth and one of the main donors to Trump. Along with, of course, Elon Musk, who not only was the biggest donor to Trump, but he was actually the biggest political donor in the entire United States, according to the Washington Post.

Elon Musk donated $288 million to support the Trump campaign in the 2024 election. And this was a huge investment for Musk because, of course, after Trump won the election, Tesla stock skyrocketed. Stock in other companies run by Elon Musk skyrocketed.

So, of course, not only did Musk get much, much richer, he’s, again, the richest man on earth, but not just that. Musk is not just benefiting from Donald Trump’s policies. He is helping Trump to make those policies in the Trump administration itself on behalf of oligarchs like him.

So, you know, under Democrats, they often create policies on behalf of billionaires. Now, the Republicans and Trump, they’ve cut out the and they are directly making policies by billionaires for billionaires at the expense of the working class. And before I conclude today, I want to briefly look at analysis that was written by a financial analyst named Sem Carson.

This guy is not in any way a political activist. He’s certainly not a left-wing activist at all. He’s a financial speculator.

He’s very wealthy. And he wrote this analysis on Twitter. And I think it’s actually a very accurate description of what the Trump administration is doing, again, from not a political activist, not a journalist, from a financial analyst whose job is to make money to understand what is happening in the U.S. economy.

And he’s saying, if you listen to what Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Besant, is saying, the message is clear. By the way, who is Scott Besant? He is a billionaire hedge fund manager. And Donald Trump chose him despite the fact that, ironically, Scott Besant worked for the billionaire oligarch George Soros, who’s one of the main adversaries, the boogeyman of the Republican Party.

But again, it’s all a big club of billionaires and we’re not in it. Anyway, getting back to this analysis, he made it clear that the Trump administration’s economic policy is Reaganism on steroids. It’s the same old trickle-down economics that we saw under Ronald Reagan, but with the pedal to the metal.

So here, this is this financial analyst summarizing what the Trump administration is trying to do. They want to slow down demand in the real economy and therefore slow inflation by distributing less money to average working people, to slow down wage growth and cut social services, to bring down median income. So this is a class war.

The Trump administration wants to reduce your wages. If you’re listening to this, it’s very likely that you’re working class. You’re not a millionaire or a billionaire.

The Trump administration is trying to bring down your wages, cut government spending that benefits you, cut social services. So the Trump administration is cutting government employment, cutting Medicaid. It’s actually a typo, cutting Medicaid.

Trump claimed he’s not going to cut Medicare. He might actually, but we’ll see. They’re cutting snap food assistance and school lunches.

That’s cutting, you know, food for children in schools and cutting food stamps and they’re cutting low income housing assistance. Meanwhile, they plan in equal amounts to increase supply side stimulus. This is just trickle-down economics.

And this financial analyst points out that this will send money to the top 0.1% of the top wage earners. So the richest of the rich, not just the 1%, the 0.1% are going to benefit from Trump’s policies. And this won’t increase inflation, he argues, because it only benefits a small minority of the population.

Whereas the vast majority of people have their purchasing power crushed, which will demand, which will bring down inflation. And meanwhile, Trump will impose massive corporate tax cuts. He’s going to gut the IRS and gut corporate financial oversight and regulation.

He’s going to deregulate to allow corporations to do whatever they want to maximize profitability. And he’s going to drill baby drill. And then he estimates that this will lead to deflation because demand will be crushed faster than supply will increase.

So he predicts that the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Central Bank will end its quantitative tightening policy, which is restricting money supply and will return to quantitative easing, QE, which will increase the money supply, which basically means money printing. So the Trump administration is doing everything it can to smash purchasing power, to reduce wages, to gut social spending that benefits people. The Trump administration is doing everything it can to benefit the 0.1% of the elites who are the richest people in the U.S. and with tax cuts and corporate tax cuts and deregulation.

So this is a class war. They’re all going to benefit. And at the end, these financial analysts are predicting that the Federal Reserve will print more money in order to reinflate asset prices because there’s likely going to be a recession because the vast majority of people are going to see their purchasing power crushed.

They’re not going to be able to buy many goods and services. So demand will fall. There will be a recession and then asset prices will fall.

At least risk on assets like stocks will fall. So then what will happen? The Trump administration will push the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, to go back to quantitative easing, to reinflate the bubble of assets, which once again benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else. So this is a full-on class war.

It’s Reaganism on steroids. And just like Ronald Reagan was a cold warrior dedicated in the original Cold War to doing everything he can to try to weaken and eventually overthrow the Soviet Union, the Trump administration is continuing Reagan’s economic policies and many of Reagan’s political policies, his foreign policy, focused not on the former Soviet Union, but instead on China. Basically everything that the Trump administration is doing and before him, the Democrats, but with Trump, it’s on steroids.

He’s trying to weaken China in everything that he’s doing. And as I explained in a recent video and a report, this also explains why Trump is trying to improve relations with Russia because he thinks, I think it’s going to fail, but he thinks that he can separate Russia from China. And this is why Marco Rubio proposed that the U.S. could partner with Moscow against Beijing.

If you want to learn more about that, I will link to that report in the description below. But I’m going to conclude here. I am Ben Norton.

I’m the editor-in-chief of Geopolitical Economy Report. I want to thank everyone for joining me today. Please like and subscribe.

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