How Power Turns Chaos Into Currency

Immigration, LA Protests, Military Intervention: This isn’t a Crisis. It’s the Plan.

There are barricades on Sunset. Fire flickering in alleyways. Protestors in the streets, fists raised. Helicopters hammer overhead, drowning out chants that once felt like songs and now sound more like warnings. Police push through the crowd like they’re storming enemy lines, as if the city they claim to protect is a war zone and its people are the insurgents. Because to them, it is.

And now, Marines. Not metaphorical ones. Real boots. Real rifles. Brought in by a man who doesn’t even pretend to govern the people who live here. Trump calls California “lawless,” calls its sanctuary policies “treasonous,” threatens to pull federal funds and “take control.” He doesn’t mean through debate or democratic process. He means through force. Tanks in place of town halls. Threats in place of policy.

What we’re watching feels like chaos. In reality, it’s the logic of power doing exactly what it was built to do.

It’s all a preplanned choreography. A performance of control, complete with script, costumes, and cast. The president plays strongman. The media plays interpreter. The public is split—between those who recognize a police state unfolding and those who think it’s about “maintaining order.”

LA isn’t just rebelling against a president. It’s screaming from the bottom of a well dug by decades of neoliberal policy. Immigration raids, rising rents, decimated public services, militarized police—all symptoms of the same sickness.

The cure we’re offered by our political leaders is more of the disease.

Neoliberalism Didn’t Fail—It Was Never Meant to Serve You

People keep using the word failure. The economy fails. The system fails. The policies fail. As if we all signed the same social contract and someone somewhere just isn’t holding up their end of the deal.

But there was no deal.

Not for the people in East LA watching their rents triple while tech offices open across the street. Not for the janitors cleaning hospitals without health insurance. Not for the undocumented families sleeping six to a room while being told they’re the problem.

Neoliberalism didn’t fail. It worked. It did what it was always supposed to do.

Since the 1980s, this country (and most of the world) has been restructured to serve one class (more so than ever before). The tax codes were rewritten like weapons. Schools, public housing, mental health clinics, infrastructure—bled dry. In their place: private contracts, investor-owned clinics and schools, wealth extraction machines dressed up as services.

The story they told was efficiency. Innovation. The free market lifting all boats.

But the truth is carved into the street: only a few got boats. Everyone else is swimming with bricks in their pockets.

And while the middle class got slowly dismembered, the rich bought second homes, then third homes, then islands. CEOs raked in a thousand times what their workers made. Politicians on both sides of the aisle called it “growth.”

This was the plan. Strip the public of power. Starve communities until they beg for help, then sell them back scraps of what was once theirs. Convince people it was inevitable. That the market is nature. That nothing else is possible.

We could talk about all the ways neoliberalism has created the conditions leading up to this moment all day long. We could talk about tax policy, deregulation, privatization, union busting, free trade, globalization, etc. But let’s jump into how immigration ties into all of this.

Immigration Policy Was Never About Safety

This needs to be said first. People still talk about immigration policy like it’s about borders. As if this is about lines on a map. As if the state cares who comes in or out for any reason beyond labor control.

It was never about safety. Never about sovereignty. It’s about a system that needs cheap labor. A system that thrives on fear. One hand pulls people across the border with promises of work. The other hand punishes them for being here. It’s not hypocrisy. It’s design.

Immigrants weren’t let in and then betrayed. They were brought in to be betrayed. Used and discarded. And every law written since has been to keep that arrangement intact.

A Class Built to Be Broken

Let’s be clear. The empire doesn’t just need cheap labor. It needs labor that can’t say no. Labor that can be fired without paperwork, hurt without consequence, disappeared without headlines. That’s what undocumented workers are made to be—not by accident, but by design.

The laws aren’t there to protect us or them. They’re there to trap them. Every raid, every checkpoint, every ICE van outside a school is a message: your labor is wanted, but your life is not. Your body is useful, but only if it stays afraid.

This is how you build a workforce that never organizes. Never strikes. Never complains when the paycheck is light or the shift too long. It’s how you pit worker against worker—citizen against migrant—so they don’t see the real enemy standing above them both.

And it doesn’t stop with the undocumented. Their fear bleeds into every breakroom. Every factory. Every warehouse. Their silence becomes the standard. Their suffering sets the bar.

This isn’t immigration policy. It’s labor management.

And it works.

We Made the Fire, Then Blamed the Smoke

The same system that hunts immigrants here made them leave home in the first place. That’s the part they don’t teach in civics class.

It wasn’t some act of nature that pushed millions from their land. It was trade deals signed in boardrooms and enforced by banks.

Start with NAFTA. It wasn’t just a trade agreement—it was a death sentence for millions of small farmers in Mexico. U.S. agribusiness flooded the market with subsidized corn. Local farms collapsed. The land could no longer feed the people who lived on it. So they left.

But trade didn’t stop there. IMF loans came with instructions: cut your health care, cut your food programs, cut anything that helps the poor survive. And the debt never disappeared. It became the leash.

Then came the land grabs. Across Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, foreign companies took hold of millions of acres—once shared, once worked by families and communities—and turned them into monocropped factories for the global North. Palm oil. Soy. Coffee. Sugar. Crops not for nourishment, but for export.

These plantations poisoned rivers, stripped forests, displaced entire villages. They created jobs, sure—low-wage, temporary, dangerous jobs. The kind of jobs that come with broken backs and no contracts.

The forests were cleared for profit. The water was sold. The soil was drained. And when nothing was left but dust and debt, the people moved.

They didn’t come looking for opportunity. They came looking for survival. And when they arrived, the same countries that stole their land called them criminals. Accused them of exploiting the system. Built fences to keep them out of the world that took everything from them.

And now, climate chaos—also exported from the factories, planes, and fossil capital of the North—makes the old places unlivable. The storms are stronger. The droughts last longer. Crops don’t grow. Fires don’t stop.

So people move. They don’t migrate—they escape.

And when they get to the place that set the fire, they’re told they don’t belong. They’re called invaders. Criminals. Burdens.

We wrecked their countries. We poisoned their water. We helped install their dictators. And now we build a wall and call it justice?

No. That’s not justice. That’s empire trying to bury the evidence.

Why They Want to Build a Wall

Isn’t it ironic?

When it's money that wants to move—there’s no wall high enough to stop it. Trade flows, investment streams, capital jets around the globe at light speed. No customs checks. No holding cells. No one asks a hedge fund for its papers.

But let a farmworker cross a border to survive the trade deal that gutted his land, and suddenly the state remembers how to build walls.

This isn’t border security. It’s labor control. The lines aren’t drawn to keep people safe. They’re drawn to keep the powerful rich. To separate those allowed to move freely from those forced to crawl. To protect the movement of capital while criminalizing the movement of survival.

Factories offshore. Wages plummet. Communities collapse. And the people left behind are told to blame the migrants—not the executives, not the financiers, not the politicians who signed it all into law.

It’s not immigration policy. It’s a caste system. And it works.

For the people who built it.

A Profit Engine of Misery

Let’s not forget. There’s money in this.

While politicians spit panic into microphones about caravans and “illegals,” there’s a whole industry running in the background—quiet, automated, and very well-funded. It ain’t about their moral principles and rule of law. It’s about profit. Always follow the money.

GEO Group and CoreCivic don’t build cages out of civic duty. They do it for quarterly returns. They bill the government per body, per bed, per day. Human suffering becomes a business model, predictable and scalable.

Palantir writes the code. ICE buys the software. Algorithms decide who gets ripped from their family. Facial recognition, license plate scans, data mining—the digital infrastructure of a deportation state.

Raytheon and Northrop Grumman—those war contractors who made their fortunes bombing Iraq—now retrofit those same tools for use in immigrant neighborhoods. Surveillance balloons. Motion sensors. Heat-detecting drones. Robot dogs! The border becomes a testing ground for the tech that will soon patrol your city.

And here’s the trick—the deeper the crisis, the bigger the opportunity. Climate collapse? Expect more fences. Trade wars? More raids. Refugees? More funding for ICE, more drones in the sky, more overtime for contractors with ties to Capitol Hill.

It’s disaster capitalism in pure form. Misery monetized. And every new trauma becomes another revenue stream.

This isn’t about fixing the system. It’s about feeding it.

And as long as there’s money in displacement, displacement will continue.

Divide, Distract, Exploit

The working class got crushed. Unfortunately, they got lied to about who swung the hammer.

When wages collapsed, they said it was because of immigrants. When jobs disappeared, they pointed at the border. When schools failed and hospitals overflowed, the blame never reached Wall Street or Washington—it stopped in the fields, in the kitchens, in the backs of the delivery vans.

This is how the ruling class protects itself. Not with walls. With stories.

Stories that tell you your neighbor is the enemy. That the problem isn’t the billionaire who moved your job overseas—it’s the guy who crossed a border to pick fruit for less than minimum wage. That you’re poor because someone else got a crumb you didn’t.

It’s a con. A story with just enough truth to stick, but none to liberate.

And it works because the real history has been buried. The fact that wages have been stagnant for decades not because of migration, but because of union-busting, deregulation, and tax theft. The fact that your rent is high because your city sold itself to developers, not because a family moved in from El Salvador. The fact that your hospital is crowded because it was defunded into failure, not because it treated too many patients without insurance.

Capitalism has always relied on scapegoats. But neoliberalism weaponized it. It made it central. It made entire policies out of the lie. It broadcast it through cable news, social media, even school curricula. And the result? A fractured public. Workers fighting each other for scraps while the bosses toast to another record quarter.

It’s cheaper to divide than to serve. Cheaper to criminalize than to care. Cheaper to pit the suffering against each other than to risk them uniting.

Can We Stop Neoliberalism?

If you ask David Harvey, author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism, he is not overly optimistic about reform. He argues that neoliberalism has entrenched itself through both political and economic institutions in a way that makes conventional reform nearly impossible.

That said, Harvey does gesture toward alternatives. He suggests that resistance is possible, but it requires organizing at scale and rethinking fundamental assumptions about economy and governance. He warns that neoliberalism’s grip won’t loosen without real confrontation.

He doesn’t say collapse is inevitable, but he also doesn’t sugarcoat the trajectory we’re on. The system is eating itself—socially, ecologically, economically. If left unchallenged, it leads not just to collapse but to something worse: a world where collapse becomes profitable for those at the top.

This is also called disaster capitalism. This is exactly what we see on TV right now.

Would Collapse Help or Hurt?

It’s true that neoliberalism thrives on crisis. It turns collapse into profit. But collapse isn’t a uniform event—it’s a process, one that some have survived before.

Take the post-Soviet collapse in Russia. In the 1990s, “shock therapy”—looting state assets in a rush—didn’t lead to prosperity. It led to mass hardship, hyperinflation, loss of social safety nets, and the rise of a new elite class of oligarchs. That’s disaster capitalism at its rawest: a catastrophe used to hand power and wealth to a few while grinding the many underfoot

Dmitry Orlov maps collapse in five stages: financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural. Russia passed through financial and commercial breakdown, teetered on political collapse, then stabilized under authoritarian rule. The elite used collapse to entrench themselves.

That pattern is a warning, not fate.

Financial collapse—bank failures, debt crises—might drain the system, but it can also be contained. Commercial collapse—supply chain breakdowns, scarcity—threatens daily life, but sustainable community networks can buffer it. Political collapse—loss of faith in institutions—can lead to reassembly of democracy or authoritarianism. And only the deeper stages—social and cultural collapse—threaten to erase our capacity for empathy and cooperation. Ecological collapse can mean the end for life as we know it.

The wealthy make fortunes in stages one and two. They can absorb shocks because they’ve already looted public wealth. But if collapse deepens—if it fractures social fabric, disrupts culture, erodes solidarity—even the rich can't profit when there's no society left to exploit.

So here’s the threshold: between disaster and destruction is a moment where collapse becomes profitable. Beyond that, it becomes existential.

That raises the question: So what do we do now?

• Stop financing collapse. Reject privatization, end disaster profiteering, and close the contracts that feed on failure.

• Protect our commons. Resist dismantling public services and build resilience through community-controlled infrastructure.

• Build alternative power. In Russia, some communities survived collapse by relying on mutual aid. In the U.S., we must reclaim public control—from health and housing to education and water.

• Recognize the theater. Resist the scapegoating. Break the narratives that feed division—before they corrode us into stage four and five.

Reform won’t come from within the existing order. Neoliberalism has baked its crisis into the attic walls. The only hope lies in emergent systems—communities that rebuild, networks that resist, alliances that remember what we once dared to dream.

Because if these are the moments before total collapse, they are also the moments when something new can emerge.

This isn’t the end.

It’s our chance.