'That ran into reality': Marco Rubio condemns 'terrible MISTAKE' made by US lawmakers decades ago



U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the foreign policy and economic worldview of the Trump administration in a speech in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.

Rubio and others in the Trump administration were introducing the Foundry School, a national program to train Americans in manufacturing and design.

'The nation-state still does matter, nationalism is real, national borders still matter, and ... countries are going to always in act in their best interest.'

Rubio asserted that the policies of the Trump administration were just the first steps in undoing the errors of American economic policies of the last 35 years or so.

"Let me put it to you this way. I think we made a terrible mistake in this country many years ago, under people that were in charge at the time, especially at the end of the Cold War, and that was the idea that the ability to make things no longer mattered," said Rubio.

"That it didn't matter any longer where things were made. They were to be made in the most efficient place at the lowest possible cost. That meant more profits for the company, lower costs for the consumers, and that was the way the world would work," he added.

"There was this fantasy, really, that the whole world would become ... free-enterprise democracies and that everyone would look like us. That ran into reality," Rubio said, "the reality that that is not how human events have ever worked, that the nation-state still does matter, nationalism is still real, national borders still matter, and that countries are going to always act in their best interest."

He said it would take multiple administrations to undo the errors of those policies.

"The result of it is that it de-industrialized America. We lost our ability and our capacity to make things. And not just big things. Not just the kinds of big machinery and things that we normally identify with industry," Rubio continued.

"But even some of the most basic components that are necessary, that underpin economic life, especially in the 21st century," he added, "and we woke up to the reality, just a few years ago, that we are, suddenly, as a nation, dangerously dependent, dangerously dependent on other nations for all sorts of things that we need ... for our national security and our very survival as a prosperous nation-state."

He concluded, "And so now, we are involved in this endeavor across the board to try to reverse those mistakes."

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Economic expert and Blaze News contributor Carol Roth responded in comments to Blaze News.

"The dollar being the global reserve currency was always about trade-offs. The U.S. received cheap government financing, cheap consumer financing, and cheap access to goods, which raised our standard of living. As Secretary of State Rubio noted, the flip side is that it hollowed out a large part of our manufacturing base, which was devastating for communities across the U.S. Ultimately, though, we transformed our economy to service-dominant and became the largest, most powerful country on the planet," she said.

"Rubio is also correct in noting that our movement away from manufacturing has created economic and national security issues by being over-reliant on other countries for important goods and components, which we should be prioritizing making within the U.S.," Roth continued. "However, there are many goods that we will likely never make again in the U.S., based on issues related to labor, laws, costs, and infrastructure. We should be focused on bringing back manufacturing specifically in areas like defense, pharmaceuticals, and other industries and sectors where dependence on other countries is particularly risky."

Rubio is considered a possible Republican presidential contender in 2028, but Vice President JD Vance is widely seen as the current front-runner.

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Pro-MAGA Mexican union head: America needs a richer Mexico



Mexico should be rich. It shares a 2,000-mile land border with the largest consumer market on earth, coastlines on two oceans, abundant natural resources, and a young workforce. Prosperity should have arrived decades ago.

The industrial boom did. Mexico is now America’s largest trading partner for the third consecutive year, selling the United States $534 billion in goods in 2025. It has become a major manufacturing power, and the nearshoring wave that followed the trade war with Beijing made it one of the world’s most sought-after industrial destinations.

‘We are not applying to be the world’s next sweatshop. We are applying to be America’s trusted factory floor.’

But too little of that prosperity reached the people doing the work. For decades, Mexico’s biggest export was not cars or electronics. It was Mexicans: More than 12 million now live abroad, most of them in the United States. A thriving country does not export its own children by accident.

Alejandro Martínez Araiza, national general secretary of the National Trade Union for Food and Commerce, Mexico’s oldest private-sector union, has an explanation economists rarely say out loud.

“Cheap labor was never an accident. It was the design,” Martínez Araiza told me. “Investment came for the low wage, and the system was built to guarantee the wage stayed low. Protection unions were the lock on the door. Corruption was the guard. The worker was never meant to prosper, because his poverty was the product being sold.”

That diagnosis is relevant today because the old design now stands between North America and its goal of competing more effectively with China. Martínez Araiza is candid about the scale of the challenge: China still dwarfs Mexico in manufacturing output.

“Can Mexico replace China? In volume, never, and anyone who promises otherwise is selling you something,” Martínez Araiza said. “You do not defeat China by trying to be China. You defeat it by being the neighbor China can never be: next door, with shared interests, and rules you can actually verify. We are not applying to be the world’s next sweatshop. We are applying to be America’s trusted factory floor."

That is why he treats labor enforcement as supply-chain security. A real factory with real workers, better wages, and an independent union able to walk the floor is harder to disguise as a front company. In his formulation, labor enforcement becomes a certificate of origin that paperwork alone cannot fake.

His proposals for the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement review follow from there: automatic consequences for violations, enforcement covering warehouses and logistics as well as factories, a regional wage floor of $7.25 an hour, and a verification alliance of democratic worker organizations across all three countries.

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Daniel Cardenas/Anadolu/Getty Images

Martínez Araiza is equally candid about Mexico’s vulnerability. More than 80% of Mexican exports go to the United States.

“China can survive a trade war with America. Mexico cannot, and I will not pretend otherwise,” he told me. “That is exactly why Mexico’s only rational strategy is a USMCA so credible and so enforceable that no one ever needs a trade war. Certainty is the cheapest stimulus that exists."

Then comes the part Washington rarely considers. Mexico maintains trade agreements with about 50 countries. “Everyone talks about Mexico as somebody's back door,” Martínez Araiza said. “I want the opposite: Mexico as America’s front door. Build it together in North America, and sell it to the world through our agreements. Close the back door. Open the front door. Made in North America, sold to the world.”

When work pays, people stay. "Pay a real wage, and Mexico’s biggest export goes back to being products, not people," he says. Border security, in his telling, begins on the payroll.

American readers may be skeptical of a Mexican union leader offering trade advice. But the incentives line up. His program raises the cost of the labor arbitrage that moved American factories south while reducing one of the pressures that drives migration north. President Trump’s trade agenda seeks both outcomes.

Martínez Araiza proposes to pursue them with something the American taxpayer does not have to create: organized workers already inside the supply chain, using secret-ballot elections and replacing the old protection-union system workplace by workplace.

The design that kept Mexico poor is breaking. The question is whether North America can replace it with something that lets workers, manufacturers, and both countries prosper together.

“There is no fair trade on poverty wages,” Martínez Araiza said. “The best tariff is a good wage.”

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Steelworkers need a future, not another merger war



Roxanne Brown, the head of the United Steelworkers, must recognize the reality of her members and consider the recent history of the steel industry. If she remembers what happened when steel mills closed and factory towns devolved into ghost towns, she must distinguish herself from her predecessor, David McCall, whose intransigence during his tenure was neither shrewd nor productive. To set her union on a renewed path forward, Brown must distance herself from McCall’s troubling legacy and avoid jeopardizing the very workers she claims to represent.

Brown has reportedly rejected U.S. Steel’s initial contract offer, setting the stage for the next round of negotiations beginning July. If talks go south again this summer, workers could face lost wages, disrupted health benefits, and uncertainty over retirement security. Their families would feel the pressure through tighter household budgets, delayed bills, strained child care and health care decisions, and the emotional toll that comes with prolonged economic uncertainty.

Steelworkers deserve leadership focused on jobs, wages, benefits, and retirement security — not reputation management or corporate alliances.

In steel towns and surrounding communities, the impact would ripple through local businesses, schools, churches, charities, and public services that depend on steady paychecks and a stable industrial base. A lockout would not just pause production; it would threaten livelihoods, family stability, and the economic backbone of communities built around American steel.

McCall's reckless efforts to tank the Nippon-U.S. Steel merger led to a revolt among steelworkers, and his alliance with competitor Cleveland-Cliffs’ CEO Lourenco Goncalves showed he prioritizes his own reputation and corporate alliances over his members. In the next round of contract talks, McCall should not be allowed anywhere near the negotiating table from the union side.

For decades, steelworkers have been heavily affected by market swings and fluctuating steel production demands. 2026 has been a welcome relief of slow but steady growth, aided by investments like those from Nippon, shifts toward modernization, and economic tailwinds, but history shows this tide can turn anytime.

When the steel industry turns down, it faces facility idling, facility closures, layoffs, and industry upheaval. Despite recent upturn, this volatility has contributed to a public perception that blue-collar jobs like those of steelworkers are unstable, making the upcoming contract negotiations in July that much more significant.

The past tells us quite a bit about what could be ahead for steelworkers. Last year’s high-profile Nippon-U.S. Steel merger carried major consequences for American steel production and steelworkers’ jobs. Yet as the deal progressed through the approval process, McCall chose to advance his own interests rather than champion union members’ security and prosperity, revealing deeply troubling behavior.

In 2023, when the merger was proposed, U.S. mills produced about 89.7 million net tons of raw steel, supporting 70,000 workers in iron and steel manufacturing. The deal promised substantial benefits to American steelworkers, including: $2.7 billion in capital investments exclusively dedicated to USW facilities; a 10-year commitment to maintain steel production levels at existing facilities, protecting union jobs; a $5,000 signing bonus for union workers and eligible nonunion employees below the senior-manager level upon deal closure; and written, enforceable commitments to honor existing union contracts and labor agreements.

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Just_Super/Getty Images

Despite clear support among many rank-and-file members for the merger’s approval, McCall staked out firm personal opposition that did not reflect union workers’ input. In a February 2024 phone interview, McCall stated bluntly: “I want to kill this deal.”

McCall also took advantage of the Biden administration’s likely politically partisan, election-driven opposition to the merger. A lawsuit alleged that Biden sought to kill the deal to “curry favor with the USW leadership in [Pennsylvania] in his bid for re-election ... motivated by ‘purely political reasons.’”

Perhaps most damning is that McCall’s opposition clashed with the interests of steelworkers.

This is a pivotal time for the future of the American steel industry. The industry can only thrive if USW and the companies that employ its members can reach a commonsense agreement that both protects workers and allows companies to continue operating.

Brown must capitalize on this unique opportunity to move the union past the destructiveness of McCall’s leadership by participating in good faith in the upcoming negotiations and avoiding prolonging the contract talks at the expense of her members’ well-being. America’s steelworkers deserve better than their fate still being in the shadows of David McCall.

Congress may be quietly seeking to integrate US and Israeli militaries — but critics have taken notice



The House Armed Services Committee released its first draft of the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization bill last week.

Section 224, a provision buried hundreds of pages into the $1.15 trillion defense policy legislation that outlines the "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative," has generated some controversy on the fringes of Capitol Hill.

'This provision would flip the script on the current bilateral relationship.'

Committee member Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) is among those who rushed to characterize section 224 as benign, stating that it amounts to a "security agreement" that "will allow for the US to leverage advanced Israeli technologies."

Some, however, have expressed concerns that the initiative will effectively mean a politically consequential integration of the U.S. and Israeli militaries along with their respective industrial supports.

The legislative proposal

Section 224 of the 2027 NDAA draft would have the secretary of war designate a Pentagon official to oversee the synchronization of "cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel, to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation."

The designee would, among other things,

  • identify Israeli-origin or jointly developed technologies that the U.S. could integrate into its systems and programs;
  • facilitate the transition of such technologies from research and development into procurement and acquisition pathways;
  • establish "frameworks for joint ventures, licensing agreements, and United States-based co-production or manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry"; and
  • promote "joint training exercises and information-sharing mechanisms to enhance operational readiness to deploy jointly developed technologies."

The section clarifies that the "cooperative efforts" pursued under this technology initiative can be carried out through numerous domains including: counter-unmanned systems; anti-tunneling and subterranean threats; missile and air defense technologies; AI; directed energy; cyber warfare; biotechnology and biomanufacturing; network integration; and defense industrial base cooperation, manufacturing, and co-production.

Backlash

Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, claimed in a recent analysis for Responsible Statecraft that "if fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the U.S. has with any other country in the world."

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YOAV LEMMER/AFP/Getty Images

While acknowledging that the U.S. has worked closely "with its NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains, most notably via the Defence Production Action Plan," Freeman said that section 224 would not only "fuse the U.S. and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future" but afford the foreign power "the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in U.S. politics: jobs in the U.S."

Beyond potentially setting the stage for more Israeli influence over American politics and fusing together the two nations' military-industrial complexes at a time when the majority of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, Freeman — echoing a colleague at the Quincy Institute — suggested that the initiative will shield the relationship from public scrutiny by migrating it from a visible aid vote in Congress "into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal."

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Pentagon did not respond to Blaze News' requests for comment.

Responding to Freeman's report, departing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) tweeted, "If the provision in the NDAA to integrate/synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries (section 224) makes it out of committee, I’ll offer an amendment to strip it from the bill on the floor."

"We are a sovereign country," Massie added in a post Rep. Van Orden suggested was the "dumbest possible take."

Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.), who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said that he will introduce an amendment in committee to axe section 224. Khanna noted further that "Trump can't kill the Massie/Khanna partnership no matter how much he posts on Truth Social."

A New Policy, the PAC founded in 2024 by a pair of Biden staffers who quit over the administration's support for Israel, is campaigning against section 224.

"At a policy level, this provision would flip the script on the current bilateral relationship, shifting the leverage we currently hold because of our security assistance to Israel over to the Government of Israel who would be able to hold key [Department of Defense] capabilities hostage through the integration of Israeli technologies into the DOD supply chain," states the PAC's template letter to members of the House Armed Services Committee. "Section 224 also assumes a commonality of national security interests between Israel and the U.S., which, as the current conflict with Iran clearly demonstrates, does not exist."

Code Pink, the leftist group co-founded by former Democrat political activist Jodie Evans, has also seized upon section 224 as a cause du jour, calling upon Congress to reject "US integration with the Israeli military."

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Fixing Government Waste And Fraud Starts With Giving Power Back To States

The founders would be astonished to know the federal government now regulates education, health care, finance, energy, and practically every business in America.

Wake-Up Call for a Sleeping Giant

China is engaged in the largest military buildup in modern history. It has both Washington and world domination in its sights. To prevent the cataclysm of great power war, the United States must revamp its industrial base and once again prioritize manufacturing.

The post Wake-Up Call for a Sleeping Giant appeared first on .

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Your laptop is about to become a casualty of the AI grift



Welcome to the techno-feudal state, where citizens are forced to underwrite unnecessary and harmful technology at the expense of the technology they actually need.

The economic story of 2025 is the government-driven build-out of hyperscale AI data centers — sold as innovation, justified as national strategy, and pursued in service of cloud-based chatbot slop and expanded surveillance. This build-out is consuming land, food, water, and energy at enormous scale. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright bluntly put it, “It takes massive amounts of electricity to generate intelligence. The more energy invested, the more intelligence produced.”

Shortages will hit consumers hard in the coming year.

That framing ignores what is being sacrificed — and distorted — in the process.

Beyond the destruction of rural communities and the strain placed on national energy capacity, government favoritism toward AI infrastructure is warping markets. Capital that once sustained the hardware and software ecosystem of the digital economy is being siphoned into subsidized “AI factories,” chasing artificial general intelligence instead of cheaper, more efficient investments in narrow AI.

Thanks to fiscal, monetary, tax, and regulatory favoritism, the result is free chatbot slop and an increasingly scarce, expensive supply of laptops, phones, and consumer hardware.

Subsidies break the market

For decades, consumer electronics stood as one of the greatest deflationary success stories in modern economics. Unlike health care or education — both heavily monopolized by government — the computer industry operated with relatively little distortion. From December 1997 to August 2015, the CPI for “personal computers and peripheral equipment” fell 96%. Over that same period, medical care, housing, and food costs rose between 80% and 200%.

That era is ending.

AI data centers are now crowding out consumer electronics. Major manufacturers such as Dell and Samsung are scaling back or discontinuing entire product lines because they can no longer secure components diverted to AI chip production.

Prices for phones and laptops are rising sharply. Jobs tied to consumer electronics — especially the remaining U.S.-based assembly operations — are being squeezed out in favor of data center hardware that benefits a narrow set of firms.

This is policy-driven distortion, not organic market evolution.

Through initiatives like Stargate and hundreds of billions in capital pushed toward data center expansion, the government has created incentives for companies to abandon consumer hardware in favor of AI infrastructure. The result is shortages that will hit consumers hard in the coming year.

Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are retooling factories to prioritize AI-grade silicon for data centers instead of personal devices. DRAM production is being routed almost entirely toward servers because it is far more profitable to leverage $40,000 AI chips than $500-$800 laptops. In the fourth quarter of 2025, contract prices for certain 16GB DDR5 chips rose nearly 300% as supply was diverted. Dell and Lenovo have already imposed 15%-30% price hikes on PCs, citing insatiable AI-sector demand.

The chip crunch

The situation is deteriorating quickly. DRAM inventory levels are down 80% year over year, with just three weeks of supply on hand — down from 9.5 weeks in July. SK Hynix expects shortages to persist through late 2027. Samsung has announced it is effectively out of inventory and has more than doubled DDR5 contract prices to roughly $19-$20 per unit. DDR5 is now standard across new consumer and commercial desktops and laptops, including Apple MacBooks.

Samsung has also signaled it may exit the SSD market altogether, deeming it insufficiently glamorous compared with subsidized data center investments. Nvidia has warned it may cut RTX 50 series production by up to 40%, a move that would drive up the cost of entry-level gaming systems.

Shrinkflation is next. Before the data center bubble, the market was approaching a baseline of 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSDs for entry-level laptops. As memory is diverted to enterprise customers, manufacturers will revert to 8GB systems with slower storage to keep prices under $999 — ironically rendering those machines incapable of running the very AI applications they’re working on.

Real innovation sidelined

The damage extends beyond prices. Research and development in conventional computing are already suffering. Investment in efficient CPUs, affordable networking equipment, edge computing, and quantum-adjacent technologies has slowed as capital and talent are pulled into AI accelerators.

This is precisely backward. Narrow AI — focused on real-world tasks like logistics, agriculture, port management, and manufacturing — is where genuine productivity gains lie. China understands this and is investing accordingly. The United States is not. Instead, firms like Roomba, which experimented with practical autonomy, are collapsing — only to be acquired by the Chinese!

This is not a free market. Between tax incentives, regulatory favoritism, land-use carve-outs, capital subsidies, and artificially suppressed interest rates, the government has created an arms race for a data center bubble China itself is not pursuing. Each round of monetary easing inflates the same firms’ valuations, enabling further speculative investment divorced from consumer need.

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Grafissimo via iStock/Getty Images

Hype over utility

As Charles Hugh Smith recently noted, expanding credit boosts asset prices, which then serve as collateral for still more leverage — allowing capital-rich firms to outbid everyone else while hollowing out the broader economy.

The pattern is familiar. Consider the Ford plant in Glendale, Kentucky, where 1,600 workers were laid off after the collapse of government-favored electric vehicle investments. That facility is now being retooled to produce batteries for data centers. When one subsidy collapses, another replaces it.

We are trading convention for speculation. Conventional technology — reliable hardware, the internet, mobile computing — delivers proven, measurable utility. The current investment surge into artificial general intelligence is based on hypothetical future returns propped up by state power.

The good old laptop is becoming collateral damage in what may prove to be the largest government-induced tech bubble yet.

Roomba maker iRobot files for bankruptcy, putting it in Chinese hands



Autonomous vacuums could go extinct unless they are made in the United States.

This is the harsh reality affecting companies like iRobot, the creator of Roomba, which just filed bankruptcy.

'... with no anticipated disruption to its app functionality.'

Despite the company generating over $680 million in 2024, iRobot has been crippled by U.S. tariffs. Due to a 46% import tariff on Vietnam, iRobot's costs were raised by $23 million in 2025, according to Reuters, which reviewed the court filings.

The court filings also reportedly noted that while Roomba is still dominating in U.S. and Japanese markets, it lost too much money on price reductions and investments in technological upgrades in order to maintain pace with its competitors.

According to the Verge, the company said it will continue to operate "with no anticipated disruption to its app functionality, customer programs, global partners, supply chain relationships, or ongoing product support."

Simply put, after more than 20 years on the market, the Roomba is able to operate without online connectivity.

The bankruptcy will put iRobot under Chinese control moving forward, with the manufacturing company that controls its debt.

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Photo by: Andrew Lipovsky/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images

Court documents reportedly showed that Picea, a Chinese manufacturer, purchased iRobot while taking its debt on board, which is estimated to be about $190 million. The vacuum company took on the debt in 2023 to refinance its operations, Reuters claimed.

The debt came even after Amazon paid a $94 million termination fee after backing out of a $1.7 billion acquisition deal in 2024, according to the New York Times.

It has not been that long since iRobot had a massive market value at $3.56 billion in 2021; it is now estimated to be worth just $140 million.

New owners Picea will take 100% ownership of the company and cancel the $190 million in debt, while also canceling a $74 million debt that iRobot owed through a manufacturing agreement.

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Not only did iRobot need to deal with Vietnamese tariffs, other manufacturing that was established in Malaysia in 2019 was also likely affected.

It was not announced that Roomba had cut manufacturing from the country, and if it remained, would likely have been subjected to a 24% tariff rate from the Trump administration, which included taxing machinery and electronics.

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