While Putin relentlessly continues his war of aggression against Ukraine despite the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Russia committed to respecting the country’s territorial integrity, in the United States Trump is proposing a “peace plan” that seems to have been dictated by the Kremlin: it is the aggressed country — Ukraine — that is forced to make all the concessions and, to top it all off, the plan provides that the United States would receive 50% of the 100 billion dollars in war damages. No profit is too small.
At the same time, we learn that Nvidia, the American company that is the only one capable of designing and manufacturing the electronic components required for artificial intelligence, has just broken through the ceiling of 5 trillion dollars in market value. The company made a profit of 31.9 billion in the last quarter. As Christian Sautter notes in his letter, nothing can justify such a dizzying rise except unrestrained speculation, which will eventually come to an end.
We also learn that Trump has a project — named, with his usual modesty, the Genius Act — to authorize major American corporations to issue their own currency (New York Times, 19.06.25). As Christian Sautter points out, this is a huge step backward to the era of President Jackson (1832), when multiple currencies coexisted in the United States and caused spectacular bankruptcies.
All barriers to the most ruthless capitalism have been lifted. We can see why Silicon Valley and tech industry leaders have rallied behind Trump. Tesla’s board of directors has just promised Elon Musk, if he enables the company to reach its targets, compensation that could reach one trillion dollars over ten years. It seems unreal… What does such a sum even mean for a single person? Spending one million euros a day, it would take him 2,740 years to use it all.
The so‑called elite of today’s world lives outside reality, which is why it is frightening. While they juggle billions of dollars, the United Nations is paralyzed, war, poverty and injustice are spreading, and the climate emergency is forgotten. This disastrous situation should not discourage us but, on the contrary, strengthen our commitment to shared governance, the social economy and international solidarity with the poorest. I have already left Twitter, and I have just decided to boycott Amazon. I am still using Google for now, but I am looking for an equivalent in the world of the social and solidarity economy. Let us fight for cooperative and solidarity‑based approaches.
