By Ralph Nader May 17, 2024 A recent newspaper article reports that GEICO, one of the largest auto insurers in the U.S., has amassed a staggering $189 billion in cash, apart from the reserves required by law to insure the volume of potential claims by its policyholders. Angry consumers have cried out about auto insurance…

The headline in this week’s Fortune reads:

“Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is ‘on the brink’ and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war”

Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6th in apparent support of Donald Trump‘s attempt to overthrow our government.

Americans for Tax Fairness reports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system — the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump — in an effort to maintain enough control of our political system that their taxes won’t go up. And that total is just what’s reported: it doesn’t count the billions in unknowable dark money that’s sloshing around the system thanks to Citizens United.

Back in the day, the late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned us:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”

The number one movie in America last month was Civil War. Rightwing militias are on the march. More than half of Republicans say they are “expecting” a civil war.

How did we get here? And what does oligarchy have to do with civil war?

The clear result of five corrupt Republicans on the 1978 and 2010 Supreme Courts legalizing political bribery of politicians (and Supreme Court justices) by both corporations and the morbidly rich is that America is now well past the halfway mark of a fatal-to-democracy slide into oligarchy and the strongman autocracy typically associated with it. And the conflict that can follow that.

You can see the consequence in any contemporary survey. The majority of people want things — gun control, a strengthened social safety net, a cleaner and safer environment, quality, free education, higher taxes on the rich — that Congress refuses to do anything about because it is in thrall to great wealth.

As President Jimmy Carter told me eight years ago:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

For example, just last week, Donald Trump solicited a $1 billion bribe from a group of fossil fuel executives in exchange for undoing all of President Biden’s climate regulations.

In a testament to how today’s form of transactional oligarchy has become normalized in America, the only national news organization that reported this shocking story was MSNBC; every other news outlet thought it was entirely normal for an American politician to have their hand out in exchange for legislative or policy changes. As Media Matters reported this week:

“CNN, Fox News Channel; ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week; CBS’ Mornings, Evening News, and Face the Nation; and NBC’s Today, Nightly News, and Meet the Press” all completely ignored the story.

What we are watching is the final stage of the 40-year neoliberal transition of our nation from a forward-looking and still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs.

Some years ago, Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore (before he was Trump’s advisor) was a guest on my radio/TV program. I asked him, “Which is more important, democracy or capitalism?“

Without hesitation, Moore answered, “Capitalism.” He went on to imply this was how the Founders wanted things. After all, as George Orwell said:

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

That philosophy and a phony American history have held the Republican Party in its thrall for the past 40+ years and have brought America to this moment of great crisis and danger.

It has transformed America from a democracy into a late-stage oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible. Which presents a true crisis for America, because oligarchy is almost always merely a transitional phase in the evolution to full-blown tyranny and/or fascism, and often civil war.

Oligarchies are inherently unstable forms of government because they transfer resources and power from working people to the oligarchs. Average people, seeing that they’re constantly falling behind and can’t do anything about it, first become cynical and disengage, and, when things get bad enough, they try to revolt.

That “revolution” can either lead to the oligarchy failing and the nation flipping back to democracy, as happened here in the 1860s and the 1930s, or it can flip into full-blown strong-man tyranny, as happened recently in Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, and nearly happened here on January 6th.

Oligarchies usually become police states, where any average person who dares seriously challenge the ruling oligarchs is squashed like a bug either legally or financially; the oligarchs themselves are immune from prosecution and get to keep their billions regardless of how many people’s lives are ruined or die because of their crimes.

Oligarchic governments almost always do a few predictable things, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy:

— They change monopoly laws and regulations so their rich buddies can take control of most of the nation’s businesses and media.
— They stack the courts and regulatory agencies with oligarch-friendly ideologues or outright corrupt toadies, while eliminating regulatory protections for average citizens.
— They cut taxes on the rich and drive wages low on working people while criminalizing and cracking down on dissent, particularly if it involves any sort of direct action or property damage.
— They distract voters from their own looting by demonizing minorities and encouraging racism, religious/gender conflict, and regionalism.
— They reinvent history to argue that the country was “always an oligarchy and that’s the way the nation’s founders wanted it. It’s what works best.”
— They actively suppress the vote among people inclined to oppose them (typically minorities and the young), or outright rig the vote to insure their own victory.
— And they transform their nations into police states, heavily criminalizing demonstrations, nonviolent resistance, or “direct action” while radicalizing and encouraging rightwing vigilante “militias” to put down the inevitable pro-democracy rebellions as people realize what’s happening.

To the end of cementing their own oligarchy here, the billionaires who own the GOP are now actively promoting the same sort of revisionist history the Confederacy did, claiming that the Founders were all rich guys who hated taxes, wanted rich men to rule America, and wrote the Constitution to make that happen. It was a story popular in the South leading up to the Civil War, now part of the “Lost Cause” mythology.

To that end, they’re purging our schools and colleges of books and history courses; professors and teachers who don’t toe their line that America was designed from its founding to be an oligarchy are being fired as you read these words. In this, they’re promoting — for their own benefit — a dangerous lie.

A lie that rationalizes oligarchy.

While there were some in America among the Founders and Framers who had amassed great land holdings and what was perceived then as a patrician lifestyle, Pulitzer Prize winning author Bernard Bailyn suggests in his brilliant 2003 book To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders that they couldn’t hold a candle, in terms of wealth, to the true aristocrats of England.

With page after page of photographs and old paintings of the homes of the Founders and Framers, Bailyn shows that none of those who created this nation were rich by European standards. After an artful and thoughtful comparison of American and British estates, Bailyn concludes bluntly:

“There is no possible correspondence, no remote connection, between these provincial dwellings and the magnificent showplaces of the English nobility...”

Showing and describing to his readers the mansions of the families of power in 18th century Europe, Bailyn writes:

“There is nothing in the American World to compare with this.”

While the Founders and Framers had achieved a level of literacy, creativity, and a depth of thinking that rivaled that of any European states or eras, nonetheless, Bailyn notes:

“The Founders were provincials, alive to the values of a greater world, but not, they knew, of it – comfortable in a lesser world but aware of its limitations.”

As Kevin Phillips describes in his masterpiece book Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich:

“George Washington, one of the richest Americans, was no more than a wealthy squire in British terms.”

Phillips documents that it wasn’t until the 1790’s — a generation after the War of Independence — that the first American accumulated a fortune that would be worth one million of today’s dollars. The Founders and Framers were, at best, what today would be called the upper-middle-class in terms of lifestyle, assets, and disposable income.

In 1958, one of America’s great professors of history, Forrest McDonald, published an extraordinary book debunking Charles Beard’s 1913 hypothesis that the Constitution was created exclusively of, by, and for rich white men. McDonald’s book, titled We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, bluntly states:

“Economic interpretation of the Constitution does not work.”

Over the course of more than 400 meticulously researched pages, McDonald goes back to original historical records and reveals who was promoting and who was opposing the new Constitution, and why. So far as I can tell, he is the first and only historian to do this type of original-source research, and his conclusions are startling.

McDonald notes that a quarter of all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had voted in their own state legislatures for laws that would have helped debtors and the poor and thus harmed the interests of the rich.

“These [debt relief laws] were the very kinds of laws which, according to Beard’s hypothesis, the delegates had convened to prevent,” says McDonald. He adds: “Another fourth of the delegates had important economic interests that were adversely affected, directly and immediately, by the Constitution they helped write.”

While Beard theorizes that the Framers were largely drawn from the class of wealthy bankers and businessmen, McDonald shows that wasn’t true at all:

“The most common and by far the most important property holdings of the delegates were not, as Beard has asserted, mercantile, manufacturing, and public security investments, but agricultural property.”

Most were farmers or plantation owners and, as noted earlier, owning a lot of land did not always make one rich in those days, particularly compared to the bankers and mercantilists of New York and Boston.

“Finally,” McDonald concludes, “it is abundantly evident that the delegates, once inside the convention, behaved as anything but a consolidated economic group.”

After dissecting the means and motivations of the Framers who wrote the Constitution, McDonald goes into an exhaustive and detailed state-by-state analysis of the constitutional ratifying conventions that finally brought the U.S. Constitution into law.

For example, in the state of Delaware, which voted for ratification:

“[A]lmost 77 percent of the delegates were farmers, more than two-thirds of them small farmers with incomes ranging from 75 cents to $5.00 a week. Slightly more than 23 percent of the delegates were professional men – doctors, judges, and lawyers. None of the delegates was a merchant, manufacturer, banker, or speculator in western lands.”

In other states, similar numbers showed up. Of the New Jersey delegates supporting ratification, 64.1 percent were small farmers. In Maryland, “the opponents of ratification included from three to six times as large a proportion of merchants, lawyers, and investors in shipping, confiscated estates, and manufacturing as did the [poorer] delegates who favored ratification.”

In South Carolina it was those in economic distress who carried the day: “No fewer than 82 percent of the debtors and borrowers of paper money in the convention voted for ratification.” In New Hampshire, “of the known farmers in the convention 68.7 percent favored ratification.”

But did farmers support the Constitution because they were slave owners or the wealthiest of the landowners, as Charles Beard had guessed back in 1913?

McDonald shows that this certainly wasn’t the case in northern states like New Hampshire or New Jersey, which were not slave states.

But what about Virginia and North Carolina, the two largest slave-holding states, asks McDonald rhetorically. Were their plantation owners favoring the Constitution because it protected their economic and slave-holding interests?

“The opposite is true,” writes McDonald. “In both states the wealthy planters – those with personality interests [enslaved people] as well as those without personality interests – were divided approximately equally on the issue of ratification. In North Carolina small farmers and debtors were likewise equally divided, and in Virginia the great mass of the small farmers and a large majority of the debtors favored ratification.”

After dissecting the results of the ratification votes state by state — the first author in history to do so, as far as I can determine — McDonald sums up:

“Beard’s thesis — that the line of cleavage as regards the Constitution was between substantial personality interests [wealth and slave ownership] on the one hand and small farming and debtor interests on the other — is entirely incompatible with the facts.”

Here we find the explanation for James Madison sealing his notes on the Constitutional Convention until every man who participated was dead (they were finally published more than 50 years later in 1840). He and many others at the convention were essentially betraying their own economic class in favor of democracy. Something today’s wealthy Americans apparently can’t imagine doing.

No matter how hard Republicans try to reinvent the Founders and Framers of this nation in the image of their libertarian billionaire patrons, and no matter how imperfect and even brutal their time was, the simple reality is that in 1770’s America this nation’s Founders undertook American history’s first truly great progressive experiment.

And they all put their lives on the line to do it: when they signed their names on the Declaration, a death warrant was issued against each one of them by the largest and most powerful empire in the world.

And then, four generations later, we backslid.

The only other time in American history when an entire region of America was converted from a democracy into an oligarchy was the 1830-1860 era in the South. It’s why Republicans are so fond of the Confederate flag and Civil War memorial monuments.

The invention of the Cotton Gin made a few hundred families of southern planters richer than Midas; they seized political control of the region and then destroyed democracy in those states. Even white men who dared stand up to them were imprisoned or lynched, ballot boxes were stuffed, and social mobility came to a standstill.

By the 1840s, the South had become a full-blown police state, much like Trump and his acolytes would like America to become in the near future.

Offended and worried by the democratic example of the Northern states, the Confederacy declared war on the United States itself with the goal of ending democracy in America altogether. Almost 700,000 people died defending our form of government.

And now, for a second time in American history, we’re confronted with a near-complete takeover of about half of our nation by America’s oligarchs.

And with it has come not just the threat of political violence, but the reality, from the death of Heather Heyer to the George Floyd protests to January 6th and the assault on Paul Pelosi.

All driven by oligarchs determined to pit us against each other so we won’t recognize how they’re robbing us blind.

Unless and until our tax laws are changed and the Supreme Court’s legalization of political bribery is reversed, we’ll continue this disintegrative slide into fascism and the danger of domestic armed conflict.

This fall we’ll have the opportunity to elect politicians who actively oppose oligarchy and fascism while embracing the true spirit of American egalitarianism.

President Biden is the first president in 80 years to consequentially raise taxes on both rich people and corporations. That political bravery has brought him powerful enemies: this fall’s election will be hard fought.

Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, and if you live in a Republican-controlled state double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org.

America’s future — and the integrity of our history — depend on it.

On November 3, 2020, Republican Senator Josh Hawley (R, MO) tweeted: “We are a working-class party now. That’s the future.”

I wrote Wall Street’s War on Workers, in part, to figure out if that is true.

Long before Trump came on the scene, working-class voters, especially the white members of the working class, were abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1976, Jimmy Carter received 52.3 percent of the white working-class vote. Bill Clinton won 50.0 percent in 1996, Obama 40.6 percent in 2012, and Biden only 36.2 percent in 2020.

There are two schools of thought about the causes of this decline. One emphasizes economic hardship. The other focuses on rising illiberalism.

Hillary Clinton in 2016 gave voice to the illiberal account with her famous “basket of deplorables” comment that labeled half the Trump voters as racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic. Recently, the authors of the book White Working Class Rage have extended that argument to virtually all rural white people. The more polite critics of the working class, like NYT columnist Paul Krugman, use “resentment” as the dog whistle for deplorables.

There are two major problems with this angle. The first is that it’s wrong. Data from long-term voter surveys used in my book reveal that the white working class is becoming more liberal, not less, on key social issues.

A progressive working-class movement is both possible and necessary. Just ask Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers, who has been bringing just such a movement to factories in the South.

For example, should gay and lesbian couples be able to adopt children? In 2000, only 38.2 percent of the white working class agreed. By 2020, an astounding 76.0 percent said “yes.” Similar increases in liberal attitudes can also be seen on questions concerning citizenship for undocumented workers and racial resentment questions. (Twenty-three hot button social issues are tracked in the book.)

The second major problem is that attacks on the white working class drive these voters into the arms of the Republicans. If Democrats write off white working-class voters, they are saying that a progressive working-class movement is not possible. My book argues that this kind of self-destructive politics must end. A progressive working-class movement is both possible and necessary. Just ask Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers, who has been bringing just such a movement to factories in the South.

Mass Layoffs and the Decline of the Democratic Vote

Job instability, not racial resentment, is the key to understanding the decline of the working-class Democratic vote. I looked closely at counties in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and found that the higher the mass layoff rate between 1996 and 2012, the greater the defections from the Democratic Party. In each of these states, more than one-in-five workers suffered through a mass layoff during that period. And in the more rural counties, the mass layoff rate was one-in-three workers. That’s a massive amount of job instability. That’s a staggering amount of suffering.

Those of us who are fortunate to have relatively secure, well-paid jobs too often have difficulty relating to the pain and suffering caused by mass layoffs. Study after study shows that losing your job is one of life’s most traumatic events. One in-depth report found that job loss ranks seventh among the most stressful life eventse most stressful life events, more stressful than “divorce or a sudden and serious impairment of hearing or vision, or the death of a close friend.”

Job instability, not racial resentment, is the key to understanding the decline of the working-class Democratic vote.

This makes sense. Just imagine you live in rural Pennsylvania and your facility shuts down. You and 1,000 of your co-workers are suddenly out scrambling for the few remaining jobs at Wal-Mart and the Dollar Store. That makes for a difficult life that can lead to disappointment, frustration, and anger.

But why blame the Democrats?

To answer that question, we need to understand the man-made causes of mass layoffs. They are not acts of God or the inevitable results of new technologies. Most are caused by three pernicious features of modern financialized capitalism: stock buybacks, leveraged buyouts, and government negotiated, corporate-oriented trade deals.

In a stock buyback, a corporation uses its earnings or borrowed money to purchase its own shares on the open market. That causes the price per available share to increase and enriches the largest Wall Street shareholders and corporate executives who receive most of their compensation through stock incentives. Before their deregulation in 1982, stock buybacks were limited by the Securities and Exchange Commission to two percent of corporate profits. More than that was considered stock manipulation. Since deregulation, their use has soared, and now nearly 70 percent of all corporate profits go to purchase back their own stock. Mass layoffs are often used to cut costs to pay for stock buybacks.

A leveraged buyout consists of a private equity firm purchasing a company relying largely on borrowed money. The PE firm then places the new debt on the purchased company’s books. Layoffs are used to cut costs to help service that debt. For example, after Elon Musk purchased Twitter with billions in borrowed money, Twitter’s debt service jumped from $50 million a year to $1 billion. Mass layoffs quickly followed.

Government trade deals, designed with an enormous amount of corporate input, make it easier for corporations to move facilities abroad to take advantage of lower-wage labor. They often allow products made with less expensive labor to enter the US market and undercut domestic workers. Although the Democrats did not originate the North American Free Trade Agreement, it would not have passed without President Bill Clinton pushing for Democratic votes and getting enough of them. A few years later, Clinton initiated China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which led to a flood of Chinese imports and the loss of several million U.S. manufacturing jobs.

As a result, the Democrats have come to be identified with Wall Street and trade deals. This is a far cry from the period lasting from FDR’s launch of the New Deal until about 1980, when the Democrats were viewed as the defenders of the working class. When times were tough, workers could count on the Democrats to create jobs and take care of the jobless. Even Jimmy Carter, a centrist Democrat, created more than 700,000 public jobs in 1978 to combat the recession.

Since then, combating job loss by creating public sector jobs is no longer part of the Democratic agenda. Instead, the Democrats offer public-private partnerships to create jobs in the future. Meanwhile, many Democrats compete with the Republicans for Wall Street donations, and few are willing to stop the lucrative stock buyback process. While neither party has shown the nerve to directly hinder mass layoffs, it was the working-class expectation that the Democrats would at least try. As mass layoffs have continued unabated (more than 30 million since 1996), the Democrats are losing working-class votes. Even in the booming high-tech sector, 263,000 jobs were cut in 2023, and another 80,000 so far this year.

Will the Democratic infrastructure investments turn this around? It’s too early to say. But losing your job right now due to a mass layoff is not addressed by creating new jobs in the future that likely will go to someone else. My book suggests that if the Democrats want to regain working-class support, they will need a more direct approach to stop compulsory layoffs.

So Why Write this Book?

My primary goal was to convince readers that mass layoffs and their underlying causes are a major problem – perhaps the most critical economic problem working people and the nation face today. And it is a problem that both political parties and the major media are more than willing to ignore.

As corporations increasingly toss workers away to enrich their CEOs and Wall Street investors, working people experience job instability. In our country, life for workers has become extremely difficult as they are buffeted from job to job, no matter the unemployment rate. That’s just a hard, hard way to live.

As corporations increasingly toss workers away to enrich their CEOs and Wall Street investors, working people experience job instability.

As a result, I’m arguing for the creation of a mass movement to expose the issue of mass layoffs. For example, I think a vast majority of workers would support a bill that said that if a corporation takes taxpayer money via federal contracts, it shouldn’t be able to lay off taxpayers during the life of that contract. No forced layoffs, only voluntary arrangements in which the corporations have to provide adequate compensation so that workers choose to leave rather than be forced out.

But it’s impossible to help build a progressive worker movement if the white working class is constantly under attack for illiberal beliefs that the vast majority of its members do not hold. My book proves conclusively that the white working class does not belong in a “basket of deplorables.”

The book also pleads, cajoles, harangues, and virtually begs the Democrats to have the courage to directly intervene to stop mass layoffs and curtail Wall Street’s job-destructive ways.

Josh Hawley is wrong. The Republicans will not be the party of the working class until it ceases to be the unabashed party of the anti-union bosses, like the Kochs and Richard Uihlein. Walking a picket line or two will not suffice. The Republicans have a long way to go before they can credibly defend workers from the plague of mass layoffs.

But that could change if the Democrats continue to back away from their historic role of defending the jobs of working people, black, white, brown, and otherwise.

Of course, the book is meaningless unless it gets out. Because it defies the standard narrative of major media outlets, it will take a grass roots reader effort to spread the word. Many thanks for whatever you can do. (All royalties go to the Labor Institute’s political economy for workers programs.)

This article first appeared at Power at Work and is republished here with permission.

Affordable rental housing policy fails to provide sufficient affordable rental housing decade after decade, yet policymakers continue to do largely the same things. A researcher at the Joint Center for Housing Studies recently observed that in 1960, about 45% of renters in the bottom income quintile spent more than 50% of their income on housing costs. Today, it is about 65%. Renters below the official poverty line spend on average 78% of their income on housing. At what point will policymakers admit that their policies have failed renters?

It Doesn’t Make Sense: The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit

Affordable rental housing policy now primarily relies on the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). LIHTC seems like a rather bad idea if one is interested in addressing the affordable rental housing crisis. LIHTC has a number of problems, but two of them should be considered fatal flaws. First, LIHTC is not very good at providing low-income rental housing. The Joint Center for Housing Studies states, “LIHTC does not necessarily protect a renter from cost burdens” and that “lower-income renters living in LIHTC units often require additional subsidies to make this housing affordable.” The primary policy to create affordable rental housing does not do a very good job at creating affordable rental housing, yet policymakers rely on it more and more.

The second major problem is that LIHTC rentals typically convert to market rate after 30 years (in some cases 15 years). This transition rate might be reasonable if there were an adequate supply of affordable rental housing, but there isn’t. The National Low-Income Housing Coalition estimates that the United States has a shortage of 7.3 million rental homes for the lowest-income renters. The Joint Center for Housing Studies finds that the country lost 2.1 million rental units for these lowest-income renters between 2012 and 2022. Affordable rentals are too scarce to allow them to be converted to market-rate housing.

The current estimate is that 325,000 LIHTC rental units will transition to market rate by 2029. LIHTC creates a rental housing bucket with a hole in the bottom. Since more and more of our affordable rental housing is created by LIHTC, the amount of affordable rentals lost to market conversion will increase over time. The United States already does not build enough affordable rental housing to keep up with demand, but policymakers have created a system that will lead to accelerating losses of affordable rental housing over time. This doesn’t make sense.

Affordable Rental Policy Is Working Well for Corporations and Investors

Current affordable rental housing policy doesn’t make sense if the goal is to provide affordable housing. If the goal is to create market conditions beneficial to real estate developers and investors, it appears to be working quite well.

Public housing, especially when adequately funded, is a far more effective method of providing affordable rental housing than LIHTC. The rate of cost-burdened renters is quite low in public housing—much lower than in LIHTC housing. Because of this fact, there are very long waiting lists and tremendous demand for public housing.

From the private real estate industry’s perspective, public housing is a serious threat. “From the beginning, the real estate industry bitterly fought public housing of any kind,” Richard Rothstein stated in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Rothstein adds that the industry later lobbied to structure public housing so that it would be underfunded. Today, after the passing of the Faircloth Amendment, Congress has prohibited the increase in the number of public housing units built by the federal government in spite of the fact that people are, in some cases, waiting for decades to get into public housing.

In addition to investors receiving more and more via tax credits from the LIHTC program, the Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that corporate owners make up a growing share of the rental housing market. (The corporate share of rental properties ranging from 5 to 24 units nearly doubled between 2001 and 2021.) More private equity firms have also moved into the rental housing market. While more and more renters are being cost-burdened, it appears that more corporations and investors are making good profits.

It is possible to create affordable rental housing policies that work well for renters. There are good social housing models in Europe and Asia. Social housing is nonprofit housing. In the European models, it is not restricted to just the lowest income households, which tends to provide it with a stronger political and economic base. The good news is that U.S. city and state governments are beginning to explore these models. In Congress, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), and Becca Balint (D-Vt.), Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), and other members of Congress have recognized the need to repeal the Faircloth Amendment. Once that amendment is gone, the federal government can move toward constructing affordable, quality social housing.

A New York Times poll released this week found that 13% of voters defecting from U.S. President Joe Biden, those who voted for him in 2020 but will not do so in November, cite his handling of foreign policy and Israel’s war in Gaza as the reason for pulling their support. But an investigation by Responsible Statecraft finds that those same policies likely benefit the president’s re-election campaign in a different way: his biggest funders happen to support them.

A review of campaign contributions, philanthropy, and public statements reveals that over one third of the president’s top tier funders—those giving in excess of $900,000 to the Biden Victory Fund—appear to see little nuance in the conflict and show overwhelming sympathy for Israel, at times verging into outright hostility to Palestinians and anti-Muslim bigotry.

That’s in sharp contrast with 13% of defecting 2020 Biden voters who say they won’t vote for the president’s reelection—a group that could tip the scales this November toward former President Donald Trump—only 17% of whom sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians.

Biden’s most important campaign funders appear to offer a very different coalition than those in the broader electorate: donors with a one-sided support for Israel even as it wages a brutal war in Gaza that’s incurring a steep political cost on Biden’s reelection effort.

“I think many Victory Fund members are in a bubble and out of touch with political reality, but they also seem indifferent to the suffering of over 1 million children in Gaza whose lives are treated by Netanyahu and Biden as worth far less than those of Israeli children,” said Amed Khan, a former Victory Fund donor who resigned in November over Biden’s handling of the war. “The American people see these policies as morally repugnant.”

Thus, Biden likely isn’t hearing those voices opposing Israel’s brutal war in Gaza at fundraisers with his top donors.

Take for example, billionaire Haim Saban, who contributed $929,599 to the Victory Fund. Saban also serves on the board of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and contributed $1 million to the United Democracy Project, the independent expenditure arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, that runs ads supporting pro-Israel candidates and ads criticizing candidates deemed insufficiently supportive of Israel.

Last week, in an email to Biden apparently forwarded by an intermediary, Saban slammed the president’s decision to hold a weapons shipment to Israel, warning, “Let’s not forget that there are more Jewish voters, who care about Israel, than Muslims [sic] voters that care about Hamas,” suggesting that putting conditions on U.S. weapons transfers to Israel is akin to supporting Hamas.

Saban made his priorities clear in a 2004 New York Times interview, saying, "I'm a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”

Saban’s wife, Cheryl Saban, also donated $929,600 to the Victory Fund, gave $2.18 million to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces in 2022 (a gift made alongside her husband), and cheered on pro-Israel provocateur Ben Shapiro’s statement that, “If Israel put down its guns tomorrow there would be a second holocaust. If the Palestinians put down their arms tomorrow there would be a Palestinian state.” “Bravo,” said Cheryl Saban last November.

Mobile gaming pioneer Mark Pincus offered even more blunt statements. Pincus, who contributed $929,600 to the Victory Fund, is outspoken on Israel on social media.

“Why do we only see pro palestinians [sic] in acts of violence? Why has this become an accepted form of protest,” he asked in a March 8 post on X.

“[T]heres [sic] no mention by nyt of baby beheading or Biden speech about it. [B]ut continued coverage of destruction in Gaza and Israeli military failures. [T]hey should rename as ‘the new hamas times,’” wrote Pincus in an October 11 post, referencing the claim, walked back by the White House on October 12, that Biden had seen photographic evidence of babies beheaded by Hamas on October 7.

LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman also has a history of praising elite Israel Defense Forces (IDF) units. At the 2022 Aspen Security Forum, Hoffman said the U.S. needed a “digital ROTC” and used the Israeli 8200 signal intelligence unit as an example of what was necessary. (As it turned out, the 8200 unit was not active on October 7 because it doesn’t operate on nights and weekends.)

Hoffman currently funds a “one-year full scholarship executive excellence program” that is “specially tailored for outstanding alumni of IDF Elite Units,” via the Hoffman Kofman Foundation.

Attorney and political pundit George Conway, who also contributed $929,600 to the Victory Fund, regularly posts pro-Israel commentary on X while expressing little concern for Palestinians and expresses skepticism about the organizing behind college protests against Israel’s actions.

Other donors were less vocal, but their recent philanthropy and political giving suggests a strong pro-Israel bent in their foreign policy views.

Real estate and casino magnate Neil Bluhm contributed $929,600 to the Victory Fund, $200,000 to the United Democracy Project, and $225,000 to the American Israel Education Foundation—the fundraising arms of AIPAC that arranges for congressional junkets to Israel, among other activities—via his family’s charitable foundation in 2022.

Entertainment and sports mogul Casey Wasserman donated $929,600 to the Victory Fund and $25,000 in 2022 to Israel Emergency Alliance (also known as Stand With Us), a pro-Israel group that works to oppose boycotts against Israel. Stand With Us, earlier this month in a press release, called for the resignation of Northwestern University president Michael Schill after he “announced a set of concessions to [student encampment protester] organizers Monday that included pledging to implement full-ride scholarships for Palestinian students and faculty positions for Palestinian academics.”

Pete Lowy, son of Australian-Israeli billionaire Frank Lowy, contributed $929,600 to the Victory Fund and maintains close ties to hawkish pro-Israel groups.

“Retail industry tycoon Peter Lowy inspired and delighted over 100 IAC Supporters at a donor reception toasting Israel’s 70th Independence Day on Tuesday, April 24,” read a 2018 press release from the Israeli-American Council, a group that describes itself as “wholeheartedly support[ing] the State of Israel.”

And until 2020, Lowy served as a senior vice president at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israel think tank formed by AIPAC.

Another Biden Victory Fund supporter, developer Eli Reinhard, who is listed as giving $1.84 million, also contributed $300,000 to WINEP and $50,000 to Friends of the IDF via his foundation in 2022.

In total, 9 out of the 25 donors who gave more than $900,000 to the Biden Victory Fund had either contributed funds to staunchly pro-Israel groups or made statements that showed a strong pro-Israel bias. Other donors were largely silent on the Israel-Gaza war or, like film director Steven Spielberg, have responded to the conflict by denouncing both antisemitism and anti-Muslim views.

The New York Times warned that, “yearning for change and discontent over the economy and the war in Gaza among young, Black, and Hispanic voters threaten to unravel the president’s Democratic coalition.” But Biden’s most important campaign funders appear to offer a very different coalition than those in the broader electorate: donors with a one-sided support for Israel even as it wages a brutal war in Gaza that’s incurring a steep political cost on Biden’s reelection effort.

The Sabans, Pincus, Hoffman, Conway, Bluhm, Wasserman, Lowy, and Reinhard did not respond to requests for comment.

In the face of an increasingly terrible conflict, political leaders, academic scholars, engaged officials, and media experts tend to explain how the conflict arose and is escalating badly. This has the effect of making the conflict appear inevitable and insurmountable short of totally defeating the adversary. Such thinking is evident in many of the current disorders in the United States and in many other countries. Such tendencies unfortunately fuel the intensity and gravity of the Israeli-Hamas war. Less attention tends to be given to constructive alternatives.

Fortunately, there are alternative approaches, deeds. and consequences. Attention might be given to what various actors might have done or failed to do to avert or transform tragic conflicts. These alternatives can point to ways of averting escalation and transforming the conflict constructively. In this way, some officials, non-governmental intermediaries, critics, and conflict resolution workers can eventually succeed in transforming tragic conflicts.

For example, consider the transformation of the Israeli-Egyptian conflict. In 1970, Egyptian President Gamal Nasser died, and Vice President Anwar El Sadat became president. In 1973, Sadat led Arab nations to another defeat in a war against Israel. Consequently, Israel took control of the Sinai peninsula. Sadat began to envision a different path to retrieving the Sinai. He reduced his dependence on the Soviet Union and improved his ties with the United States. In 1974, Yitzhak Rabin succeeded Golda Meier as the Israeli prime minister. Then in June 1977, Menachem Begin became the newly elected Israeli prime minister.

Each of the possible changes in the current conflict in Gaza looks improbable, until steps are taken to make it happen.

In a surprising gesture, Sadat flew to Jerusalem and spoke to the Israeli Knesset in November 1977. Despite this, Israeli-Egyptian negotiations regarding an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai failed again and again, including U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s efforts in 1978 at Camp David. Finally, during Richard Nixon’s presidency, Henry Kissinger undertook mediation between the Egyptian and Israeli governments. Three agreements were reached for partial Israeli withdrawals from the Sinai, with United Nations monitoring. In March 1979, Egyptian and Israeli leaders signed a Treaty of Peace that endures. Egypt regained the Sinai, and Israel is secure from Egyptian military attack.

Presently, in regard to the Hamas-Israeli war, a succession of similarly incremental changes could open a path to the constructive transformation of the war. One possible change is being negotiated right now: a cease-fire that includes the exchange of Hamas-held hostages for Israeli-held Palestinian prisoners. Another imaginable change is a restructuring of the Palestinian Authority to play a major role in the governance of Gaza and the West bank, aided by the United Nations and a few Arab nations. A third possible change is a new Israeli government recognizing the security and other benefits of a Palestinian state. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and a few other Arab states might then openly proclaim their readiness to work with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to govern and rebuild Gaza. Finally, the political wing of Hamas might become dominant, recognize Israel, and foreswear violent attacks against it.

Any one of these changes would be more likely if it were understood to be met by the adversary’s move toward a constructive transformation. Many different non-governmental organizations, engaged citizens, government officials, and political leaders can act to make this change happen.

Not possible, you say? The same was said of the Israeli-Egyptian détente, until it happened. Each of the possible changes in the current conflict in Gaza looks improbable, until steps are taken to make it happen.

Tuesday’s Democratic Party primary in Oregon’s vast 5th congressional district just might hold the key to defeating MAGA Republicanism and renewing American democracy.

Sounds like hyperbole, but it’s not. If one of the two top contenders in the race, Jamie McLeod-Skinner, wins next Tuesday and in November, she will transform the Democratic Party for the better – and, by doing so, alter the 50/50 balance that defines American politics.

The reason for this is simple, the Democratic Party has all-but-abandoned small town and rural America. This is evident to anyone paying attention, but it is still a somewhat absurd state of affairs. After all, on balance, things have not been going well across small town and rural America for many decades. So, you’d think that the more progressive of the two major partes would be responsive to the needs of so many people and communities in distress, but that simply hasn’t been the case. Rather, small town and rural America is effectively ruled by one party: the GOP.

The Democratic Party has all-but-abandoned small town and rural America. This is evident to anyone paying attention, but it is still a somewhat absurd state of affairs.

This is doubly confounding since things, on balance, have been going so badly for so long. For rural and small-town Americans, the past four decades have been defined by: the hallowing out of thousands of small towns, the precipitous decline in social services, widespread poverty, epidemics of drug addiction; and about as much free-floating anger and despair about the wholesale implosion of family farming from the 1970s onward that it matches the ire of the residents of industrial towns whose factories were offshored. When things are that bad, you’d think the party out of power would have a huge opportunity to suggest a different path. But nope, the “mainstream” of the Democratic Party seem content to continue writing off the vast majority of the country’s geography.

That is, until now. Jamie McLeod-Skinner is trailblazing the effort to forge a new path for the Democratic Party, with detailed plans to address the concerns of the many rural and small-town constituents in her district.

As it turns out, there are compelling proposals that address the myriad problems facing small towns and rural America. Yet there is no current Member of Congress or high-profile candidate elsewhere in the country who champions such ideas more than Jamie McLeod-Skinner.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation magazine, one of the linchpins of American left-liberalism (and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party), wrote an article highlighting a recently published proposal designed to lift up the economies of small town and rural America, called The Rural New Deal. This detailed document speaks to the crises impacting tens of millions of Americans, and their root causes – and proposes a set of solutions, all of them readily achievable, drawn from listening to the concerns of actual small town and rural Americans.

Jamie McLeod-Skinner was a prominent consultant on the drafting of the Rural New Deal. I know because I helped draft the document.

The Nation summarizes the Rural New Deal’s transformational potential this way: by “championing bold solutions… Democrats could inaugurate a progressive renaissance in places that have been misconstrued as irretrievably lost—and bolster enthusiasm among core voters:

Imagine networks of family-owned farms, powered by solar panels, plowed by workers earning a livable wage, all organized around iconic small-town courthouse squares. Imagine students at the local school taking vocational courses to pursue a trade—future carpenters, mechanics, and electricians getting free training that they can supplement with online research via universally available high-speed broadband.

This is what life could look like after a Rural New Deal… (which) consists of 10 pillars of fearless but practical policy proposals.

If Jamie enters congress in January, she will find a broad base of support for the Rural New Deal; but currently, there is no Democrat in Congress as well suited to lead the effort than McLeod-Skinner.

In other words, right now, Jamie McLeod-Skinner is the key. This is not surprising. If you read Jamie’s campaign website, you’ll see that she’s the right person to carry this forward. Her entire career reflects a deep commitment to the hard-working people of small town and rural America, in the best tradition of American progressivism.

So, as you see, simply electing this one member of the U.S. House of Representatives could dramatically alter the entire Democratic Party’s approach to small town and rural America.

Detractors will counter by saying, there are many reasons why small town and rural Americans votes overwhelmingly Republican. But, at the end of the day, no reason is greater than the mere fact that the Democratic Party doesn’t compete there; and the mainstream of the party seems to have no impulse to even try.

Of course, there are other reasons, most notably what are usually referred to as “cultural issues.” These are real. But it is absolutely contemptuous of the people of rural and small-town America to hide behind cultural differences and effectively say there’s no point in addressing their economic hardships and proposing an agenda for revival and prosperity that matches the scope of the problems.

Let’s be real: Compared to what they’re doing now, the Democratic Party will attract support if it addresses the crises of small town and rural America in the manner of the Rural New deal and Jamie’s platform proposals – thereby reversing the ever-downward performance of the party across the American outback.

This would spark a compound victory of the highest significance: 1) it would generate hope that tangible improvements for the long-suffering communities of small town and rural America are possible and; 2) even a 5% shift in voting to the Democrats across small towns and rural America would swing the national balance in their favor—which would, in turn, almost certainly engender the demise of the MAGA GOP’s offensive against our democracy.

So, Democrats in Oregon’s 5tdistrict, please cast your primary ballot for Jamie McLeod-Skinner.

A victory for Jamie on Tuesday will pressure the Democratic Party to return to working for all Americans, thereby helping tens of millions of our fellow citizens and residents across this vast land, and, by doing so, preserve our democratic republic.

That’s of, by, and for the people, exactly what we always need in America.

Even as he funnels tens of billions of dollars in weapons to Israel to help it bomb the Gaza Strip, President Biden lectures college students about being too violent as they try to protect themselves from riot police.

The post No Place for Violence first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

While in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves for 29 years, I thought I had seen some pretty stupid things the military was told by politicians to do. It always begins with politicians deciding the easiest, most sensible solution to a problem would have too much political baggage and cost them votes in the next election. So, they look for a politically expedient solution, one that is invariably very expensive and convoluted.

Attempting a Military Solution for a Political or Diplomat Problem—AGAIN!!!

In this vein, all too often, politicians turn to the U.S. military for a solution to a non-military problem. Then some A-type personality in the military presents a hair-brained idea to the politicians, probably never thinking that the idea would be accepted. Then it is accepted to get the politicians out of a jam, and the next thing you know is that the Rube Goldberg, crazy idea is being funded.

This unbelievable scenario is what has happened with getting humanitarian aid into Gaza for the starving survivors of the Israeli genocide of Gaza. Instead of U.S. President Joe Biden marking a red line in the Israel/Gaza/Egypt sand demanding that Israel allow into Gaza the miles of tractor-trailer loads of food and medicine that have been stalled for months at the Rafah border crossing, Biden's inept diplomatic team sent out a plea for help to the U.S. military.

Palestinians in Gaza and citizens around the world will not forget that miles of supplies are just feet away from Gaza at the Rafah crossing and the U.S. will not use its pressure on Israel to open the gates at Rafah.

And the U.S. military, always looking for validation of its immense "capabilities," seized the opportunity to use one of its little-known assets—the Army's Joint Logistics Over the Shore, or JLOTS, system that provides bridging and water access capabilities—to help out the failed U.S. diplomatic efforts to get the U.S.'s "strongest ally in the Middle East" to end the starvation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza by letting the massive truck convoys filled with food and medicines into Gaza.

Normally used to move military equipment across rivers where bridges have been blown up—many times by the U.S. military itself—and sometimes to transfer military equipment from a ship onto shore, the U.S. Army's small navy swung into action and began sailing to the Mediterranean in U.S. Army ships filled with barges that can be locked together to form landing docks and causeways.

Rube Goldberg Complex of Construction and Transportation Ideas

In a Rube Goldberg complex of construction and transportation ideas, the U.S. military anchored to the sea floor three miles off the northern coast of Gaza a floating dock system onto which large cargo ships can dock.

Cargo ships will off-load pallets and possibly container loads of humanitarian assistance—long-life packaged food and medical supplies—on the three-mile off-shore dock. This cargo will have undergone inspection by Israeli authorities in the port of Larnaca, Cyprus, 200 miles from Gaza.

The inspection process involves Cypriot customs, Israeli teams, the U.S., and the United Nations Office for Project Services. The U.S. Agency for International Development has set up a coordination cell in Cyprus.

Two-thousand trucks to offload ONE ship driving 1,800 feet on a causeway that will be dangerously affected by tides, winds, and waves is a recipe for disaster.

From the cargo ships, food and medical supplies will be transferred into the backs of U.S. Army trucks (probably 2.5-ton trucks) that have arrived on the floating pier brought there by two types of smaller Army boats—Logistic Support Vessels, or LSVs, and Landing Craft Utility boats (LCUs). LSVs can hold 15 trucks each and the LCUs about five.

The loaded 2.5-ton trucks will be driven back onto the LSVs and motored three miles to the second floating pier system constructed by the U.S. military.

The trucks will then be driven off the LSVs onto the second pier and down a two-lane, 1,800-foot (six U.S. football fields long) causeway anchored onto Gaza land by the Israeli military. The causeway will be anchored onto Gaza shores by the Israeli military because the U.S. military is forbidden to have "boots on the ground" in Gaza.

The truckloads of food and medical supplies will then be driven somewhere... and supplies distributed by some organization... yet to be determined according to the latest news reports.

The empty trucks will then be driven back along the two-lane, 1,800-foot causeway to the floating pier where they will be driven into the small LSVs, and the LSVs then sailed back three miles to the larger off-shore pier and the process begun again. The long causeway should be a cause of alarm for drivers, as the winds and waves so dramatically affected the construction of the causeway that most of the causeway was put together in the calm waters of Ashdod, an Israeli harbor, after winds and waves made construction of the causeway in place off Gaza impossible. Parts of the causeway are now being towed 20 miles from Ashdod harbor to northern Gaza to be linked into place.

While Thousands of Truck Loads of Cargo Wait at the Rafah Border Crossing, It Will Take 2,000 Truck Loads to Empty Each 5,000 Ton Cargo Ship  

if a large cargo ship has 5,000 tons of food and medical supplies to be off-loaded, and if each truck can hold 2.5 tons of cargo, it will take 2,000 trucks to take the cargo from one ship. If there are 15 trucks on each LSV, then the LSVs will have to make 133 trips to get the trucks to the 1,800 foot causeway.

If the LCUs that hold only five trucks are mostly used, then it would take 400 trips to get the cargo to shore.

Two-thousand trucks to offload ONE ship driving 1,800 feet on a causeway that will be dangerously affected by tides, winds, and waves is a recipe for disaster.

Will Israel Bomb the Docks, Piers, and Causeway? Remember the USS Liberty!

The possibility of probability is high that Israeli military jets, drones, and artillery may "mistakenly" target the pier complex... or Hamas or other militant groups may decide that the U.S. complicity in the genocide of over 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza outweighs the meager food and medical supplies the U.S. is bringing into Gaza, which presents another aspect of the recipe for disaster for the U.S. Rube Goldberg pier.

U.S. military personnel should remember the Israeli attack on a U.S. military ship, the USS Liberty. In 1967, the Israeli military bombed and torpedoed a U.S. ship off Gaza, killing 34 and wounding 171, and almost sunk the ship. The U.S. cover-up for its ally Israel's brutal, lethal attack on a U.S. military ship continues to this day, as does the U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza.

The World Will Not Forget

Palestinians in Gaza and citizens around the world will not forget that miles of supplies are just feet away from Gaza at the Rafah crossing and the U.S. will not use its pressure on Israel to open the gates at Rafah, instead offering an expensive, idiotic solution to an easily solvable problem.

Next year, when key provisions of President Trump’s 2017 tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations expire, we have an opportunity to get our money back.

I’m not just talking about all the foregone tax revenue we’ve lost because the rich have paid so little since 2017—though we should get that back, too. I’m talking about the money families have lost to corporate price gouging.

Let me explain.

In 2017, Republicans slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, giving massive corporations their biggest tax windfall since Ronald Reagan was president. A few years later, as Americans emerged from a global pandemic, these same corporations drove up prices for families.

Congress raising the corporate tax rate in 2025 is an opportunity to recoup some of the truly obscene profits corporate America raked in during this period of economic upheaval for American families.

While inflation hamstrung workers and families, it didn’t make a dent in corporate profits. In fact, as many CEOs boasted themselves, it’s been a boon. Companies simply passed rising costs along to consumers—and then some, bringing in record profits as a result.

All told, corporate profit margins skyrocketed to 70 year-highs. And by the end of 2023, when Americans were beyond fed up, after-tax corporate profits hit an all-time record high of $2.8 trillion. My organization, Groundwork Collaborative, recently found that corporate profits drove over 50% of inflation in the second and third quarters of last year.

But why would a change in the corporate tax rate unleash the kind of rampant corporate profiteering we saw in the aftermath of the pandemic? Simple: It’s a lot more fun to gouge customers when you get to keep more of what you pull in.

Look at Procter & Gamble, which has raised the price of everything from toothpaste to diapers. Last year, the company pulled in more than $39 billion in profit.

If they had to pay the 35% statutory tax rate, they would have sent nearly $14 billion to Uncle Sam. Instead, they paid a 21% rate and, using loopholes, got to keep an extra $10 billion—which helped with their combined $16.4 billion worth of dividends and stock buybacks for shareholders.

Corporations did well from Trump’s corporate tax cuts, with executives getting big raises and shareholders receiving big buybacks. But the real bonus came when inflation hit. Corporations used the cover of supply chain issues and broader inflation to hike prices more than their higher input costs justified—and they didn’t have to worry about their tax bill.

Our tax code is exacerbating some of the worst corporate excesses, effectively “subsidizing corporate price gouging,” as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) described it recently. But it’s not only that low tax rates incentivize companies to overcharge. Rock-bottom tax rates also make collusion more profitable, as we saw with Pioneer Oil.

Recently, the Federal Trade Commission barred former Pioneer Oil CEO Scott Sheffield from joining the board of ExxonMobil following their merger, because Sheffield allegedly colluded with OPEC to raise oil prices. As families struggled with higher energy costs, the oil and gas industry banded together to keep prices high, which according to one analyst accounted for 27% of inflation in 2021.

When the reward is higher with lower corporate taxes, executives like Sheffield are more willing to take the risk. Higher corporate taxes are both crucial for accountability and for ensuring that there’s far less incentive for executives to squeeze as much as they can from their customers.

Wall Street tycoons and CEOs didn’t take the heat of inflation—they fanned its flames and families got burned. It’s no wonder people overwhelmingly favor a tax code that’s no longer rigged for corporations, especially as they struggle with high prices.

Congress raising the corporate tax rate in 2025 is an opportunity to recoup some of the truly obscene profits corporate America raked in during this period of economic upheaval for American families. It’s time Americans got their money back.

In one of the gigglier moments in modern movie history, Dr. Evil, awakening from 30 years of cryogenic sleep, threatens the world with utter destruction unless it pays him… one million dollars. (His criminal accomplices explain inflation to him, and he ups his price to $100 billion; happily, Austin Powers saves the world, and the cash).

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has his own number—a clean billion, which is what he told fossil fuel executives they should pay in return for giving them literally anything they want in his next administration. That they would use that power to once-and-for-all overheat the Earth is a given; the level of corruption and danger here is so over the top that it almost seems like a movie—but not a comedy, unless you run ExxonMobil.

That’s not the only valuation we’ve gotten in recent weeks. In a largely overlooked story a few weeks ago, a Reuters team obtained the report that Citibank had prepared for the Federal Reserve, outlining its exposure to climate risk—or, more exactly, the risk of the world actually taking this problem seriously and tackling it head-on. The report said that

The analysis said that if efforts to combat climate change ramped up enough to put the world on a path to bringing greenhouse gas emissions down to zero on a net basis by 2050, the bank would suffer $10.3 billion in loan losses over 10 years, more than the $7.1 billion in losses expected if those efforts did not speed up…

While the estimated hit to Citigroup would be small in relation to the $730 billion wholesale loan book assessed, the analysis provides rare insight into how the transition away from fossil fuels could affect a top Wall Street bank in a key area of its business.

The losses would occur because some of Citigroup’s borrowers in the oil, gas, and real estate sectors would take a financial hit if the world was immediately put on track to curb overall greenhouse gas emissions to zero on a net basis by 2050, the document reviewed by Reuters showed.

One way of reading this is to say that Citibank values the Earth at something less than the $3.2 billion it would lose if we stopped climate change. We can make this assumption because Citibank—along with its confreres in the big banking world—continue to pour huge amounts of money into the fossil fuel sector, completely ignoring the advice of scientists, and of the International Energy Agency which called for a halt to all new investments in 2021. The latest evidence of their incredible disregard for the future came this week, when Rainforest Action Network and partners issued the 2024 version of the invaluable Banking on Climate Chaos report. The 2024 edition shows that Citi has tossed just shy of $400 billion at the industry since the Paris climate accords were signed, good for second place on the all-time list just behind Chase and just ahead of Bank of America.

This explains why, among other things, there will be a Summer of Heat on Wall Street, starting soon—with civil disobedience centered on Citibank. (There’s even an Elders Week, which Third Act is helping coordinate—if you can remember banking before ATMs, we’ll see you July 8-13.)

But there have been other estimates recently, far more realistic.

I wrote a few weeks ago about a new study that found global incomes would fall by a fifth. Now there’s an even newer study that goes that one better. It comes from economists at Harvard and Northwestern, and instead of using the traditional method of examining how much damage climate change will do country by country and then adding it up, they attempt to model the effects of global climate shocks—big disasters. There’s an excellent summary by one of the authors on Twitter, but I will highlight just a couple of points. Assuming the temperature increases 3°C—which is more or less the track we’re on, and I think pretty much guaranteed if Trump and his ilk succeed in slowing the transition to a clean energy economy—then there will be

a 31% welfare loss in permanent consumption equivalent in 2024, that grows to nearly 52% by 2100. Our results also indicate that world GDP per capita would be 37% higher today had no warming occurred between 1960 and 2019 instead of the 0.75°C observed increase in global mean temperature.

Those numbers to those who know how to read them are stark and staggering—the world would be far richer today were it not for global warming, and that number will just keep going up. But here’s the line that sticks in my mind:

“These magnitudes are comparable to the economic damage caused by fighting a war domestically and permanently.”

That is to say, we are buying ourselves, and everyone who comes after us, a life in endless wartime, all because we can’t be bothered to rapidly transform our energy system. And when I say “can’t be bothered,” I mean it. The oil companies are treacherous, but that makes venal sense: They’ve got no other business to fall back on (Well, except for Shell, which is learning to market completely bogus carbon credits). The banks are, in a sense, even more venal: Citi would lose a small fraction of its business if it behaved with any kind of moral clarity, but that is clearly too much to ask.

But others are… just ridiculous. In a remarkable piece of reporting, Bloomberg’s Ben Elgin details how the California Restaurant Association put the kibosh on the city of Berkeley’s plan to prevent new restaurants from using gas, and instead getting them to use induction cooktops. Read it and weep:

When Berkeley became the first city in the country to ban the extension of gas pipes into new buildings, it targeted a contentious source of climate pollution. The combustion of gas inside of homes and businesses to power things like furnaces, water heaters, and stoves accounts for 9% of California’s emissions, or 33 million metric tons of heat-trapping gases per year, equivalent to the entire climate footprint of Hong Kong.

With the U.S. gas system continuing to expand—the industry connects one new customer to the gas grid each minute—Berkeley was the first to try to stop this climate problem from becoming bigger. Since it enacted its ordinance in 2019, more than 100 cities, counties, and states across the country have followed.

Today, these efforts are reeling. The California Restaurant Association took the city to court in November 2019, arguing that its 20,000-plus members preferred cooking with a gas flame and that, even though the rule wouldn’t require changes to existing buildings, such an ordinance would limit their options when opening new locations. Moreover, they argued, federal energy laws preempt these aggressive local ordinances.

After a see-sawing legal battle, the restaurants prevailed. When Berkeley’s last-ditch request for a rehearing was rejected earlier this year, the city in March canceled its ordinance, prompting a jubilant CRA to declare it a “significant triumph for chefs and restaurateurs.”

Now, Bloomberg Green has learned, a coalition of gas companies and their supporters are planning to wield the restaurants’ legal victory to beat back similar rules across the western U.S. This puts restaurants directly at odds with a hospitable planet, as there’s no feasible pathway to avert catastrophic warming if places like California don’t sharply reduce gas combustion in buildings, according to climate experts.

I’m the cook in our household, and I’ve used induction cooktops for years—$60 from Amazon. They work better than gas—boil faster, finer temperature control—but even if they worked worse, who cares? We’ve got to actually make some changes or we can’t actually have a working world. Who’s going to go out for dinner on a melting planet. It’s incredible to have perfectly fine substitutes for fossil-powered technology and then refuse to use it: Take, for example, the automakers, who a new study this week found to be united in their efforts to sabotage the transition to EVs

An analysis of climate policy advocacy in seven key regions (Australia, EU, India, Japan, South Korea, U.K., and the U.S.) finds that auto associations are leading efforts to delay and weaken key climate rules for light-duty vehicles.

In the U.S., the Alliance for Automotive Innovation has led opposition to ambitious fuel economy (CAFE) and GHG emissions standards, while in Australia, the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI) led a strategic campaign to weaken fuel efficiency standards.

Of the eight automotive industry associations included in this study, every automaker (except Tesla), remains a member of at least two of these groups, with most automakers a member of at least five of these associations globally.

If all of this seems overwrought to you—how could climate change actually do that much damage to our economy?—then finish off by reading a report by the veteran climate reporter Chris Flavelle in today’s Times. It delineates what global warming is currently doing to the home insurance market in the U.S.—which is to say, threatening to collapse it:

The insurance turmoil caused by climate change—which had been concentrated in Florida, California, and Louisiana—is fast becoming a contagion, spreading to states like Iowa, Arkansas, Ohio, Utah, and Washington. Even in the Northeast, where homeowners insurance was still generally profitable last year, the trends are worsening.

In 2023, insurers lost money on homeowners coverage in 18 states, more than a third of the country, according to a New York Times analysis of newly available financial data. That’s up from 12 states five years ago, and eight states in 2013. The result is that insurance companies are raising premiums by as much as 50% or more, cutting back on coverage or leaving entire states altogether. Nationally, over the last decade, insurers paid out more in claims than they received in premiums, according to the ratings firm Moody’s, and those losses are increasing.

The growing tumult is affecting people whose homes have never been damaged and who have dutifully paid their premiums, year after year. Cancellation notices have left them scrambling to find coverage to protect what is often their single biggest investment. As a last resort, many are ending up in high-risk insurance pools created by states that are backed by the public and offer less coverage than standard policies. By and large, state regulators lack strategies to restore stability to the market.

As the former state insurance commissioner of California put it, “I believe we’re marching toward an uninsureable future.”

And since the insurance industry is the part of our capitalist system that we task with understanding risk, that’s saying something.

When the Republican House Majority lacked the votes to defeat Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to remove Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House, 163 House Democrats voted to keep him in office.

What was their thanks? Only a week later, Johnson showed up at Trump’s hush money trial to proclaim Trump’s innocence, to falsely attack the Judge’s daughter, and to denounce the American justice system as corrupt.

Recently M. Steven Fish wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Trump Knows Dominance Wins. Someone Tell Democrats.” As Mr. Fish wrote, “The American National Elections Studies has polled voters on presidential candidates’ traits since the 1980s, and the candidates who rated higher on ‘strong leadership’ has never lost. The one who more people agree ‘really cares about people like you’ loses half the time.” Fish also writes, “Today’s Republicans are all about dominance. They embrace us-versus-them framing, double down on controversial statements and take risks. Today’s Democrats often recoil from “othering” opponents and back down after ruffling feathers. They have grown obsessively risk-averse, poll-driven, allergic to engaging on hot-button issues…”

What could be more risk averse than House Democrats voting to support an election-denying MAGA man for Speaker of the House, the person second in line to the Presidency, in the name of “stability”?

If they want to win, House Democrats should have let House Republicans depose their own leader for the second time this year and demonstrate to voters the chaos of keeping Republicans in charge. Rather than bailing them out, they should have let the GOP drown.

In light of Johnson’s appearance at the Trump trial, House Democrats, if they have the courage, still have a chance to fix this drastic mistake. Let a new motion to depose Johnson come to the floor and don’t give him a single Democratic vote. Let the country see the chaos wrought by MAGA Republicans.

            Your boss can’t fire you because of the color of your skin. He can’t get rid of you because he doesn’t like your religion. Federal law protects you against employment discrimination based on your sex, race, pregnancy status, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, genetic information or (if you are over 40) age.

            Should he be able to deprive you of your ability to pay your rent because you’re a Democrat? Or a Republican? Of course not—yet he can.

It’s time to add another protected class to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: political expression.

            Every year, especially during election years, American employers fire, demote and/or retaliate against loyal workers because they disagree with their constitutionally-guaranteed right to hold a political opinion. While a company may well have a reasonable interest in keeping politics out of the workplace—the owner of a restaurant might not want a waiter to engage in a political debate with their customer, for example—many employees get let go despite never having expressed a political opinion on the job. In most states, they can’t sue.

Going after a person over their politics is unfair. But it’s a much bigger problem than a violation of common decency. Because threatening a person’s livelihood over their opinions has a chilling effect on the expression of other workers as well, allowing such thuggish behavior stifles the speech necessary for a vibrant political system and is thus profoundly undemocratic.

“Most important,” a 2022 New York Times editorial opined, “freedom of speech is the bedrock of democratic self-government. If people feel free to express their views in their communities, the democratic process can respond to and resolve competing ideas. Ideas that go unchallenged by opposing views risk becoming weak and brittle rather than being strengthened by tough scrutiny.” Most Americans, however, do not feel that they live in a Land of the Free. Only a third of voters said they felt free to express their political views freely, according to a contemporaneous poll.

Nowhere is speech circumscribed more than at work—unless you’re a government employee, where you’re protected by the First Amendment, or you live in one of the handful of states that protect private-sector workers who express political opinions. Private employers are authoritarian dictatorships where it’s best to keep your views to yourself. Your boss’ harsh governance should end at the end of your work shift.

Yet it does not.

            Employment discrimination in response to political expression is not limited to victims with fringe political views, like the pizza-shop and hot-dog-joint workers who got fired after online sleuths discovered that they had attended a far-right white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, or the white-collar workers canned for their presence at the January 6th Capitol riot. To be clear, however, there was no evidence that the doxxed-and-dumped employees in these situations had expressed their views while on the job. They should not have been let go.

            Citizens with vanilla affiliations within the duopoly are targeted too.

            An Alabama woman was famously fired from her job at an insulation company in 2004 for being a Democrat, and more specifically the Kerry-Edwards bumpersticker on her car, which she parked in the employee parking lot. (Her boss, a Bush supporter, had passed out GOP flyers to his workers.) She had no right to sue.

            In 2022 a woman who co-founded a non-profit organization that provides financial stipends for Congressional interns was fired by her own board after it learned she was a conservative Republican. She filed a long-shot federal lawsuit, which is pending.

            More recently, antiwar activists who oppose Israel’s war against Gaza have found themselves the victims of retaliation. People have been fired for personal social-media posts supporting the Palestinians. Pro-Palestine college students have been doxxed, suspended, expelled and blacklisted by prospective employers. Google fired 50 employees for staging a protest against the company’s contracts with Israeli tech firms; the company said they lost their jobs for causing a disruption rather than their opinions. A baker’s dozen of federal judges went so far as to declare that they wouldn’t hire any student who graduated from Columbia University—my alma mater and ground zero for a wave of campus encampment protests—regardless of their views, or lack thereof, about the Israel-Hamas War.

            Corporations routinely discriminate based on politics. A 2019 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that employers are less likely to hire a job applicant when they become aware that they favor different parties. And workers are well aware that they face political discrimination. A 2020 Cato Institute/YouGov poll found that 32% of workers were “personally are worried about missing out on career opportunities or losing their job if their political opinions became known.” Only 32%?

            We have a choice. We can build a politically permissive society where a wide range of views and opinions may be freely expressed (with exceptions for defamation or calling for specific violence) without fear of being discriminated against, understanding that we will frequently take offense at what is being said. Or we can continue to push politics underground, keeping our views so secret that some “shy” voters won’t even admit their party affiliation to pollsters. We may feel more comfortable in a seemingly politics-free zone but, as the Times editorial argued above, censorship and self-censorship will encourage the spreading of outlandish, stupid and demonstrably wrong ideas that occasionally become the law of the land.

            (Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

The post Age. Race. Sexual Orientation. Should Political Expression Be a Protected Class Too? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

When your time to die comes, it will come regardless of whether you're in a war zone or your comfort zone.

That's what I told myself and my family when I decided to travel from the safety of our home in Virginia to a besieged hospital in Gaza for a medical relief mission organized by the Palestinian American Medical Association. Because God has power over all things, Muslims believe, we should do what is right even if it's risky and then put our trust in God.

For me, I had no doubt that traveling to Gaza was the right thing to do. As an anesthesiologist who has spent over 45 years serving patients in Virginia and other States, I had a unique skill set that hospitals in Gaza desperately needed: the ability to put patients to sleep before surgery. I learned of a doctor in Gaza who had to amputate his own little daughter’s shredded leg without anesthesia after an Israeli missile destroyed his house and killed other members of his family. I could not imagine a surgeon cutting the leg off of his wide-awake patient, much less his own child. Yet that has been the reality of life in Gaza, where the Israeli government's limits on aid trucks, attacks on hospitals, and killing of medical professionals have forced doctors to operate without basic medical tools that the rest of us take for granted.

Before my journey to Gaza, I gathered with other volunteering doctors in Cairo, where officials from the World Health Organization warned us of the risks to our safety.

"You're going to a war zone. We don't guarantee anything, and anything can happen to you."

Undeterred, we traveled to Gaza in vans. The journey from Cairo to Gaza should have taken less than 6 hours, but it lasted 15 hours because of the constant stops at Egyptian checkpoints.

We saved many of our patients in Gaza and we watched many of them die.

Over the last 15 to 20 miles before entering Rafah, we drove by seemingly thousands of backed-up aid trucks—eighteen-wheeler after eighteen-wheeler on both sides of the highway full of food and other supplies that the Israeli government was barring from entry into Gaza as the population starved.

When we finally reached the European Hospital in Khan Younis, one of the last functioning medical facilities in Gaza, we realized that the hospital was essentially a refugee camp. Patients, their families and refugees packed the halls and stairways, many sleeping on the floors and even in small tents made of plastic sheets and blankets.

We spent our entire days treating a stream of mangled patient after mangled patient, the overwhelming majority of them women and children. Many of them had shrapnel wounds caused by the pellets thrown in every direction by exploding Israeli missiles. Limbs blown off. Blinded eyes. Scarred faces.

We saved many of our patients in Gaza and we watched many of them die. As we fought to heal our patients, we could hear and feel the shuddering impact of bombs exploding in the city around us, sometimes nearby and sometimes far away.

During brief breaks, we slept on side-by-side cots in a cramped room and shared a single bathroom. That was luxury compared to what most Palestinians in Gaza experience. The local doctors and technicians sleep on the floor in the hallways, working around the clock without pay.

By the time my two-week mission in Khan Younis ended, I had seen more horror than I had in forty-five years of my medical practice.

For months, doctors and aid workers have been courageously risking—and sometimes losing—their lives to treat patients in Gaza. It's time for President Biden to show just a small amount of their courage.

Now that horror has spread to Rafah. The Israeli military has entered the city, shutting down aid deliveries, and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee under threat of death. Israeli soldiers even filmed themselves using a tank to bulldoze both the popular "I heart Gaza" sign and the Gaza entry sign where many other visiting doctors, including me, took photographs upon arriving and departing.

The Israeli invasion has also trapped at least twenty foreign doctors, including Americans participating in the same medical mission as me, in Khan Younis, where some are already suffering from dehydration.

As I think about those doctors risking their lives to save patients, the question I must ask is: when will President Biden force the Israeli government to stop this slaughter?

That's what most Americans want him to do. A recent Gallup poll showed that a majority oppose the Israeli government's actions in Gaza, including most Democrats and independents. More Americans also support sending aid to Gaza than those who support sending more military aid to the Israeli government, according to Pew Research Center. President Biden's decision to delay one shipment of weapons hasn't stopped Benjamin Netanyahu from attacking Rafah. As a medical professional who saw the impact of Israeli attacks on another city firsthand, I hope President Biden will admit that Netanyahu has crossed all of his red lines, freeze the flow of weapons, demand full humanitarian access, and secure a permanent ceasefire deal.

Otherwise, I expect more injured patients will stream into ever-more cramped hospitals with fewer supplies and fewer surviving doctors in Khan Younis, Rafah and elsewhere. For months, doctors and aid workers have been courageously risking—and sometimes losing—their lives to treat patients in Gaza. It's time for President Biden to show just a small amount of their courage. People like me can only treat the victims of violence. President Biden is the one who must stop the violence.

Speaking to a reporter in the aftermath of a police raid on a pro-Palestinian solidarity encampment at UNC-Chapel Hill, David Boliek, a current member and former chair of UNC’s board of trustees, said, “I think faculty certainly have their right to show [sic] freedom of speech and have their opinions. But to engage in what I would believe is radicalization of students, I think is out of bounds. And quite frankly, I would say I would be in favor of disciplinary action.”

This is an alarming and revealing statement. Boliek would like to punish faculty for teaching students things that inspire protests against genocide. Though I can’t be sure, Boliek seems to think a substantial number of professors are less concerned with educating students than with causing trouble by “radicalizing” them. Given their track record, I suspect other members of UNC’s right-wing board of trustees feel the same way.

But what is it that these politically appointed overseers imagine professors are teaching that results in radicalization? What lessons, real or imaginary, do they think are being taught and warrant punishment? Again, I can’t be sure, but based on their support for repressive action by university administrators, I can guess. What they are bothered by, what they fear, it seems, are the lessons of higher education that threaten authoritarian control everywhere.

What authoritarians are right to fear are the cumulative lessons of higher education when education goes beyond the vocational to critically examine how the social world works, how we participate in it, and how it can be made more peaceful, just, and equitable.

These aren’t lessons about specific policy issues, such as climate change, gun control, reproductive rights, or military spending. They are lessons about the state of the social world, about how the social world works and how it can be changed—lessons more likely to be taught in social science and humanities courses. Which is why, when authoritarians attack faculty, they don’t usually target faculty in STEM or professional fields. They almost always target faculty in the social sciences and humanities.

What is it, then, that students learn in these fields that scares authoritarians and provokes right-wing attacks on academia? Below is a list of ten such lessons, not all of which are likely to be taught in a single course, nor even taught explicitly. They are perhaps more often learned implicitly as students study anthropology, history, political science, economics, sociology, social psychology, literature, and related fields. The cumulative effect, the effect that authoritarians fear, is that students become less controllable and more willing to challenge unjust social arrangements.

1. Injustice can be built into how a system routinely operates. Examples include tax codes that levy lower rates on capital gains than on wages; public school funding that depends on the wealth of local communities instead of being equalized across a state; the federal law-making apparatus that gives sparsely populated states, such as Wyoming, as much power in the Senate as hugely populated states, such as California; and capitalism itself, which enriches the owners of capital by extracting value from workers’ labor. This lesson is threatening because it implies that justice requires changing not just individual feelings but the laws, policies, and practices from which authoritarians disproportionately benefit.

2. Great suffering is often caused by indifference, fear, and obedience. The paradigm 20th-century example is the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis against Jews, Romani, homosexuals, the disabled, communists, and other political dissidents. The Nazis killed millions because too many Germans were indifferent to the plight of those defined as Others, because they feared speaking up against their government, and because they followed orders and did their jobs efficiently. Many so-called crimes of obedience happen, on smaller scales, for similar reasons. Students who learn this lesson are less likely to mindlessly follow orders, less likely to accept authoritarian claims about who is an enemy, and more willing to oppose state violence.

3. People of different times, places, and cultures are human, too. This might be called the lesson against ethnocentrism (the belief that only people of one’s own group are fully human or represent the human norm). To learn this lesson is to learn that people everywhere have hopes and dreams, experience love, pain, and joy, and think rationally, though perhaps within a different frame of reference. When students learn this lesson, they are likely to be skeptical of the tribalist and nationalist claims that authoritarians typically use to mobilize support for pogroms and wars. Students might even put themselves in peril to stop violence against the fellow humans whom authoritarians try to brand as Others.

4. People in power lie to protect their interests. Examples abound, from lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident at the start of the Vietnam War, to lies about incubators being toppled by Iraqi soldiers during the first Gulf War, to lies about “weapons of mass destruction” told to justify the US attack on Iraq in 2003. We can also point to tobacco companies lying about the harms of smoking, energy companies lying about climate change, Israeli propagandists lying about beheaded babies and mass rapes on October 7, and university administrators lying about disorder at pro-Palestinian solidarity encampments to justify arresting protesters. Students who learn about this pattern of lying by the powerful wisely become skeptical of official accounts of events, especially when those accounts seek to justify the use of violence to control others.

5. Social change is made through organized collective action. Teaching about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela as courageous agents of change is only mildly threatening to authoritarians. The threat is mild as long as these figures are portrayed as moral heroes able to make change because of their exceptional qualities. The real threat arises when students study labor history or social movements and learn that social change happens when ordinary people organize, refuse to go along with business as usual, perform a lot of unglamorous tasks, and stay in solidarity with each other. When students learn this lesson they can become a threat to the authoritarians who would prefer students to see themselves as too weak or uncharismatic to accomplish much by way of social change.

The real threat arises when students study labor history or social movements and learn that social change happens when ordinary people organize, refuse to go along with business as usual, perform a lot of unglamorous tasks, and stay in solidarity with each other.

6. Mainstream institutions are not neutral. When there is no challenge to the status quo, which means no challenge to existing distributions of power in society, it is easy to imagine that mainstream institutions—the media, the police, the courts, universities—are politically neutral, treating all sides impartially. This illusion of neutrality is often shattered when dissidents and protesters discover that these institutions almost always side with those who control the purse strings and the means of violence. Again, students can learn this by studying labor history and social movements. Some students are learning it now as they see university administrators bending to control by wealthy donors and right-wing legislators. Either way, to learn this lesson is to acquire a healthy distrust of institutional authorities who claim to be unprejudicially looking out for everyone’s best interests.

7. Power ultimately depends on ideas. Even the coercive power that proverbially comes from the barrel of gun depends on ideas in the heads of those who wield guns and obey orders to use them. In fact, all power—the ability to make happen what one wants to make happen, even in the face of resistance—depends on instilling and propagating ideas that induce people to cooperate. One implication of this lesson is that power is always tenuous; it can be undermined by challenges to old ideas and the force of new ones. When students learn this, they begin to realize the potential power they can exert by putting into doubt the ideas that lead most people to accept the status quo. Authoritarians, of course, would prefer that people do not acquire the idea that the ideas on which their legitimacy rests are often fictions.

8. Inequalities are connected. This is the key insight associated with the concept of intersectionality. The insight is that systems of inequality in U.S. society—racism, sexism, capitalism—are mutually reinforcing. Racism, for example, thrives in a capitalist economy because it makes some categories of workers vulnerable to super-exploitation and helps to divide and weaken the working class, thereby strengthening capitalism. Inequalities in political power also track the inequalities in income and wealth that capitalism inevitably produces. Students who learn this lesson are less likely to allow their justice concerns to be compartmentalized and more likely to question the whole structure of society. Authoritarians may then justly worry that no form of inequality from which they benefit is safe from challenge.

Authoritarians, of course, would prefer that people do not acquire the idea that the ideas on which their legitimacy rests are often fictions.

9. Without justice there is no peace. This lesson underlies the familiar chant, “No justice, no peace!” But this is more than a slogan; it is history in a nutshell. Whenever people have been exploited and oppressed, whenever they have been denied the right to govern themselves, they have resisted, in ways large and small. To learn this historical lesson is to recognize that what authoritarians call “peace” is often merely temporarily suppressed resistance. It is also to recognize that the kind of peace that allows people to flourish depends on ending exploitation and oppression and creating truly equitable political and economic arrangements. Students who learn this lesson may be less inclined to accept minor concessions intended to tamp down dissent while leaving its root causes intact. Authoritarians are again right to worry when people who resist injustice are less easily placated.

10. The social world as it now exists is just one possibility. Authoritarians benefit if people believe the existing social world is the only possible social world, the implication being that striving for change is futile. This stultifying idea underlies the claims that there is no alternative to capitalism, that a winner-take-all electoral system is the best form of democracy one can hope for, and that racial divisions and tribal conflicts are simply etched into human existence. Yet the study of different times, places, and cultures belies these claims and teaches that other forms of life are possible. Students who learn this lesson are more likely to envision a better world and to see such a world as within our collective ability to create. Authoritarians who want to preserve the world that now privileges them are right to fear this lesson.

Authoritarians benefit if people believe the existing social world is the only possible social world, the implication being that striving for change is futile.

Although I have said these are lessons of higher education, universities are not the only places where they can be learned. They can also be learned outside universities through reading, firsthand experience, and activist apprenticeship. It is also possible to spend years in a university and not learn them; it depends on what is studied and absorbed. As noted earlier, these are lessons most clearly derived from the social sciences and humanities, which is why these disciplines are so often slandered and vilified by authoritarians.

It is also possible to learn these lessons in the abstract and fail to put them into practice. This is probably the case with most students, regardless of their fields of study; the reality that sets in after graduation is that it is hard to make a living in a capitalist society through the full-time pursuit of social and economic justice. It is even more discouraging to see some graduates use these lessons to aid their selfish pursuit of wealth, status, and power. On the bright side, there remains the possibility that when these lessons, latent in the minds of a good many others, meet with opportunities to work for justice and a strong moral imperative to do so, great change can follow.

Are authoritarians—those who want to preserve the inequalities that benefit them by maintaining control over others—right to worry about what professors are teaching students? Yes, but not because professors are urging students to go to the barricades and take up arms for the revolution; that’s not what’s happening. Most university faculty, across the board, are more concerned with preparing students to find comfortable places in society than with preparing them to overhaul it.

What authoritarians are right to fear are the cumulative lessons of higher education when education goes beyond the vocational to critically examine how the social world works, how we participate in it, and how it can be made more peaceful, just, and equitable. These are not lessons, as the fevered imaginings of right-wing politicians would have it, that impel students toward radicalization for radicalization’s sake, or even to liberal positions on every policy issue. They are liberating lessons, anathema to authoritarians everywhere, about how to be more fully human.

By granting its 2024 World Press Freedom Prize to Palestinian journalists covering the Israeli war on Gaza, UNESCO has acknowledged a historic truth.

Even if the decision to name Gaza's journalists as laureates of its prestigious award was partly motivated by the courage of these journalists, the truth is that no one in the world deserved such recognition as those covering the genocidal war in Gaza.

"As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression," Mauricio Weibel, Chair of the International Jury of media professionals, which made the recommendation for the award, truthfully described the courage of Gaza's journalists.

Most people all over the world want the war to end. But how did they acquire the needed information that made them realize the extent of horror in Gaza? Certainly not through Israel's cheerleaders in mainstream media, but through Palestinian journalists on the ground who are using every means and every channel available to them to tell the story.

Courage is an admirable quality, especially when many journalists in Gaza knew that Israel was seeking to kill them, often along with their families, to ensure the horror of the war remains hidden from view, at worst, or contested as if a matter of opinion, at best.

Between October 7, 2023, and May 6, 2024, 142 Palestinian journalists in Gaza were killed in Israeli bombardment, assassinated or executed. It is higher than the total number of journalists killed in World War II and the Vietnam wars combined.

This number does not include many bloggers, intellectuals and writers who did not have professional media credentials, and also excludes the many family members who were often killed along with the targeted journalists.

But there is more to Gaza's journalists than bravery.

Whenever Israel launches a war on Gaza, it almost always denies access to international media professionals from entering the Strip. This go-to strategy is meant to ensure the story of the crimes that the Israeli army is about to commit goes unreported.

The strategy paid dividends in the so-called Cast Lead Operation in 2008-9. The true degree of the atrocities carried out in Gaza during that war, which resulted in the killing of over 1,400 Palestinians, was largely known when the war was over. By then, Israel had concluded its major military operation, and corporate mainstream western media had done a splendid job in ensuring the dominance of the Israeli political discourse on the war.

Israel's behavior since that war remained unchanged: barring international journalists, placing a gag order on Israeli journalists and killing Palestinian journalists who dared cover the story.

The August 2014 war on Gaza was one of the bloodiest for journalists. It lasted for 18 days and cost the lives of 17 journalists. Palestinian journalists, however, remained committed to their story. When one fell, ten seemed to take his place.

Occupied Palestine has always been one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist. The Palestinian Journalists' Union reported that between 2000 - the start of the Second Palestinian Uprising and May 11, 2022 - the day of the Israeli murder of the iconic Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, 55 journalists were killed at the hands of the Israeli army.

The number might not seem too high if compared to the latest onslaught in Gaza, but, per international standards, it was a terrifying figure, based on an equally disturbing logic: killing the storyteller as the quickest way of killing the story itself.

For decades, Israel, an occupying power, has managed to depict itself as a victim in a state of self-defense. Without any critical voices in mainstream media, many around the world believed Israel's deceiving discourse on terrorism, security and self-defense.

The only obstacle that stood between the truth and Israel's engineered version of the truth are honest journalists – thus, the ongoing war on the media.

What Israel did not anticipate, however, is that by blocking international media access to Gaza, it would inadvertently empower Palestinian journalists to take charge of their own narrative.

"Interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place," late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said wrote in 'Covering Islam.'

Like any other form of intellectual interpretation, journalism becomes subjected to the same rule of positionality in academia, as in the relationship between the identity of the researcher and the social or political context of the subject matter.

Palestinian journalists in Gaza are themselves the story and the storytellers. Their success or failure to convey the story with all its factual and emotional details could make the difference between the continuation or the end of the Israeli genocide.

Though the war is yet to end, the Gaza journalists have already proven to be deserving of all the honors and accolades, not only because of their courage, but because of what we actually know about the war, despite the numerous and seemingly insurmountable obstacles created by Israel and its allies.

Most people all over the world want the war to end. But how did they acquire the needed information that made them realize the extent of horror in Gaza? Certainly not through Israel's cheerleaders in mainstream media, but through Palestinian journalists on the ground who are using every means and every channel available to them to tell the story.

These journalists include self-taught youngsters, like 9-year-old Lama Jamous, who wore a press vest and conveyed the details of life in displacement camps in southern Gaza, reporting from Nasser Hospital and many other places with poise and elegance.

As for the accuracy of information provided by these journalists, they were certainly professional enough to be verified by numerous human rights groups, medical and legal associations and millions of people around the world who used them to build a case against the Israeli war. Indeed, all we know about the war—the death toll, the degree of destruction, the daily human suffering, the mass graves, the famine, and much more—is possible because of these Gaza-based reporters.

The success, and the sacrifices of Gaza journalists should serve as a model for journalists and journalism around the world, as an example of how news about war crimes, sieges and human suffering in all its forms should be conveyed.

Over the past four years, election denialism has transformed American democracy. What was once a small, fringe, extremist belief is now a growing and increasingly dangerous enclave of the population that includes election officials among them. As the 2024 election nears, a significant portion of the American electorate still questions the legitimacy of our elections. Although claims of “election interference” have been thrown out in court time and time again, election denial this November may be coming directly to your ballot box. The only way to stem this tide is for educated voters to engage in democracy at all levels.

Election denialism and attacks on voting rights prevent key portions of the electorate—namely low-income communities, voters of color, queer people, and young voters—from having a voice in our democracy. However, these dynamics are not new. In states across the country—including Wisconsin, Missouri, North Dakota and Arkansas—lawmakers have introduced anti-voting legislation. These are resolutions that insert election denial into the constitution. The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC) is tracking 65 voting- and election-related measures in 22 states and Washington D.C. that could end up before voters in 2024. Of those, roughly one-third could make voting or election administration more difficult.

In North Dakota, one such proposal may appear on the ballot as a citizen-initiative constitutional amendment in 2024. If passed by voters, it would prohibit early voting, voting by mail, ranked-choice voting, the use of voting machines and electronic processing devices, among other restrictions. Similar efforts are underway in Arkansas. One proposal would require hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots, and the other would create more restrictive vote-by-mail procedures, asserting that absentee voting is “not a right but a privilege”. Questioning the security of vote tabulators has prompted at least six state legislatures and citizen-initiated initiatives in at least three South Dakota counties to propose banning their use—despite the fact that 90% of U.S. election jurisdictions currently use electronic tabulators, and studies have found that ballot scanners are more accurate than hand counts. North Dakota’s Secretary of State Michael Howe has denounced his state’s prospective initiative to require hand-counting, saying that it “does nothing to secure our election; it does the exact opposite.” This spring, Wisconsin voters passed two measures rooted in allegations of fraud during the 2020 election. Referred to the ballot by state lawmakers, one measure prohibits acceptance of non-governmental funds to help cover election administration costs while the other requires that any election tasks be performed only by those legally designated, potentially barring volunteers and municipal staff from providing much-needed Election Day support.

On the surface, many of these proposals like “citizen-only” voting or prohibiting private funding for elections administration seem benign. Instead, election denial and conspiracy uses strategically convoluted language to make these initiatives as confusing as possible for voters. What they’re not expecting is an electorate that has grown savvier over the past eight years.

At the local level and across the country, voters—especially young voters—are more engaged and informed than ever before. Voters have already begun to catch onto these efforts and are responding by rejecting attempts to undermine the will of the people like they did last year during Ohio’s August special election. The defeat of Ohio’s Issue 1 kept in place a simple majority threshold for passing future constitutional amendments, instead of the 60% supermajority that had been proposed. If Issue 1 had passed, it would have made it harder for abortion-rights supporters to amend the Ohio state constitution three months later during the November 2023 election. Ohio voters went on to approve that constitutional amendment, ensuring Ohioans have access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care.

Additionally, BISC’s research from earlier this year shows that despite escalating attempts to undermine direct democracy, citizen-led ballot initiatives enjoy broad support across party lines: 92% of voters agree that the process is an important way for citizens to pass policies they care about and 93% agree that legislators have an obligation to carry out the will of the people. This has meant that in state after state, voters know what keeps them safe, what benefits them individually, and what benefits us collectively.

The future of democracy IS coming to a ballot near you. This November, bad actors will try to roll back the progress we’ve made in states across the country. While not all of these measures are likely to qualify for the ballot, many will, and the risks of not paying attention can have long-term consequences. It’s what makes the work of grassroots organizers, who work day in and day out to educate and engage their communities, so vitally important. They understand that if we are going to preserve our democracy, we must use every tool at our disposal in the fight against denialism and authoritarianism.

Defending direct democracy takes a collectively-engaged electorate. Your voice, your vote, and your investment count in building the infrastructure to transform power, now, in November, and for generations to come.

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss a wide range of topics from around the globe, including the Trump hush money trial, Egypt-Israel relations, and more. 

Tyler Nixon – Counselor-at-law Robert Fantina – Author, Journalist, and Activist Craig ‘Pasta’ Jardula – Co-host and Co-founder of The Convo Couch John Kirakou – Former CIA Whistleblower   The show begins with Tyler Nixon analyzing the implications of Michael Cohen’s testimony in the Trump hush money trial.   Then, Robert Fantina provides an in-depth look at the recent Israeli invasion of Rafah.   The second hour starts with Craig ‘Pasta’ Jardula weighing in on Rumble’s lawsuit against Google regarding fairness in digital advertising.   The show closes with former CIA whistleblower John Kirakou delving into the case of an Australian whistleblower who was sentenced to five years for exposing war crimes in Afghanistan.    

 

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I’ve spent most of my life as an advocate for a more peaceful world. In recent years, I’ve been focused on promoting diplomacy over war and exposing the role of giant weapons companies like Lockheed Martin and its allies in Congress and at the Pentagon as they push for a “military-first” foreign policy. I’ve worked at an alphabet soup of think tanks: the Council on Economic Priorities (CEP), the World Policy Institute (WPI), the New America Foundation, the Center for International Policy (CIP), and my current institutional home, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (QI).

Most of what I’ve done in my career is firmly rooted in my college experience. I got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Columbia University, class of 1978, and my time there prepared me for my current work — just not in the way one might expect. I took some relevant courses like Seymour Melman’s class on America’s permanent war economy and Marcia Wright’s on the history of the colonization of South Africa. But my most important training came outside the classroom, as a student activist.

Student Activism: Columbia in the 1970s

As I look at the surge of student organizing aimed at stopping the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, I’m reminded that participation in such movements can have a long-term impact, personally as well as politically, one that reaches far beyond the struggle of the moment. In my case, the values and skills I learned in movements like the divestment campaign against apartheid South Africa of the 1970s and 1980s formed the foundation of virtually everything I’ve done since.

I was not an obvious candidate to become a student radical. I grew up in Lake View, New York, a rock-ribbed Republican suburb of Buffalo. My dad was a Goldwater Republican, so committed that we even had that Republican senator’s “merch” prominently displayed in our house. (The funniest of those artifacts: a can of “Gold Water,” a sickly sweet variation on ginger ale.)

Although I fit in well enough for a while, by the time I was a teenager my goal had become all too straightforward: get out of my hometown as soon as possible. My escape route: Columbia University, where I expected to join a vibrant, progressive student movement.

Unfortunately, when I got there in 1973, the activist surge of the anti-Vietnam War era had almost totally subsided. By my sophomore year, though, things started to pick up. The September 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Chile’s Salvador Allende and the ongoing repression of the Black population in apartheid South Africa had sparked a new round of student activism.

Even as we rally against the crises of the moment, suffering both victories and setbacks along the way, we need to prepare ourselves to stay in the struggle for the long haul.

My first foray into politics in college was joining the Columbia University Committee for Human Rights in Chile. It started out as a strictly student organization, but our activities took on greater meaning and our commitment intensified when we befriended a group of Chilean exiles who had moved into our neighborhood on New York’s Upper West Side.

In 1974, I also took time off to work in the New York branch of the United Farm Workers‘ boycott of non-union grapes, lettuce, and Gallo wine. I ran a picket line in front of the Daitch Shopwell supermarket at 110th and Broadway in Manhattan. One of my regulars on that picket line was an older gentleman named Jim Peck. It took a while before I learned that he had been a central figure in the Freedom Rides in the South during the late 1940s and early 1950s. He had first been arrested for civil rights organizing in 1947 in Durham, North Carolina, alongside the legendary Bayard Rustin. He and his fellow activists, black and white, went on to ride buses together across the South to press the case for the integration of interstate transportation. On a number of occasions, they would be brutally beaten by white mobs. In my own brief career as a student activist, I faced no such risks, but Jim’s history of commitment and courage inspired me.

When I got back from my stint with the United Farm Workers, the main political activity on the Columbia campus was a campaign to get the university to divest from companies involved in apartheid South Africa. We didn’t win then, but we did help put that issue on the map. Ten years later, a student divestment movement finally succeeded, and Columbia became the first major university to commit to fully divesting from South Africa. That modest victory, part of sustained anti-apartheid efforts on college campuses and beyond, would be followed nationwide by Congress’s passage of comprehensive sanctions on the apartheid regime, despite a veto attempt by then-President Ronald Reagan.

Many of us kept working on the anti-apartheid issue after graduation. I remained a member of the New York Committee to Oppose Bank Loans to South Africa and, for a while, was also a member of the collective that put out Southern Africa Magazine in support of the anti-apartheid struggle and liberation movements in southern Africa. In New York, our mentors and inspirations in the anti-apartheid movement were people like Prexy Nesbitt, a charismatic organizer from Chicago, and Jennifer Davis, a South African exile who edited our magazine and went on to run the American Committee on Africa. For that magazine, I helped track companies breaking the arms embargo on South Africa as well as multinational corporations propping up the regime, an experience that served me well when I went on to become a researcher in the world of think tanks.

From Student Activist to Think-Tank Expert

By that time, I was fully engaged politically. As I approached the end of my four years at Columbia, however, it slowly dawned on me that I was going to have to get a real job. The good news was that, in my brief career as a student activist, I had learned some basic skills, including how to craft an article, give a speech, and run a meeting.

The bad news was that I had absolutely no idea how to find gainful employment. So, I went home to Lake View for a while and my mom, who was a member of the International Typographical Union, gave me a crash course in proofreading and how to use official proofreading symbols. On the strength of those lessons, I got a job at a New York print shop, where I spent a miserable year proofreading magazines like Psychology Today, Modern Bride, Skiing, Boating, and pretty much any other publication ending in -ing.

Then I got lucky. A friend had just turned down a job, mostly because the pay was so lousy, at the Council on Economic Priorities (CEP), a think tank founded to promote corporate social responsibility. But my expenses at the time were, to say the least, minimal, so I took the job.

The focus of my first CEP project was economic conversion, a process designed to help communities reduce their dependency on Pentagon spending. It had been launched by Gordon Adams (now Abby Ross), then finishing The Iron Triangle, their immensely useful analysis of the military-industrial complex. While at CEP, I wrote about the top 100 Pentagon contractors, the top 25 arms exporting firms, and the economic benefits of a nuclear weapons freeze. My goal: produce research that would help activists and advocates make their case.

And so it went. Other than a stint in New York State government from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, I’ve been a think-tank analyst ever since. At the moment, most of the issues I’ve advocated for, from reducing the Pentagon budget to cutting nuclear arsenals, are heading in exactly the wrong direction. By contrast, though, the issues I worked on as a student did indeed make progress, though only after years of organizing. South Africa’s apartheid regime actually fell in 1992. In 1975, California Governor Jerry Brown pushed through a state law guaranteeing the right of farmworkers to organize. In Chile, Pinochet was ousted thanks to a 1988 national referendum and lived his last years as an international pariah, even spending 503 days under house arrest in the United Kingdom on charges of “genocide and terrorism that include murder.”

The main difference between the successful solidarity movements I participated in and the other political movements in which I’ve played some small part was that both the South Africa divestment campaign and the United Farm Workers (UFW) boycott took their leads from people and organizations on the front lines of the struggle. Solidarity movements contributed in a significant fashion to those victories, but the central players were those front-line organizations, from the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa to UFW organizers working in the fields of California.

The Student Movement for Gaza

Which brings me back to the state of current student activism. I live 10 blocks from the main gates of Columbia University, the site of one of the more active student organizations pressing for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to government and institutional support for Israel’s brutal military campaign there, which has already killed nearly 35,000 people and left many others without medical care, adequate food, or clean water. The International Court of Justice has already suggested that a plausible case can be made for the Netanyahu government being guilty of genocide. Whether you use that term or simply call Israeli actions “war crimes,” the killing has to stop, which makes me proud of those Columbia student activists and deeply ashamed of the way the leadership of my former university has responded to them.

This April, when the president of Columbia called in the riot police to arrest students engaged in a peaceful protest, she inadvertently brought a whole new level of attention to activism about Gaza. Students at scores of campuses across the country started similar tent cities in solidarity with the Columbia students and protests that had largely been ignored in the mainstream media are now drawing TV cameras from outlets large and small.

Opponents of the student demonstrators, whose real goal is to get them to stop criticizing Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, have hurled claims of antisemitism at them that largely haven’t distinguished between actual acts of discrimination and cases of students feeling “uncomfortable” due to harsh — and wholly justified — criticisms of the Israeli government. As Judd Legum underscored at his substack Popular Information, there was no evidence of antisemitic acts by the students running the pro-ceasefire encampment at Columbia. Individuals and organizations outside the student movement seem to have been responsible for whatever hate rhetoric and related incidents have occurred.

Genuine antisemitism should be roundly condemned but confusing it with criticism of Israeli policies in Gaza will only make that job harder. And keep in mind that the Republican politicians hurling charges of antisemitism at students protesting repression in Gaza are, ironically enough, closely linked to actual antisemites.

To cite just one example, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who visited the Columbia campus last month in a purported effort to express his concern about antisemitism, has long promoted the racist “great replacement theory,” which holds that welcoming non-white immigrants is part of a plot to undermine the culture and power of white Americans. That theory has been cited by numerous perpetrators of racial and antisemitic violence, including the attacker who murdered 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.

Despite attempts to slander those student activists and divert attention from the devastation being visited on the people of Gaza, activists associated with groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine continue to bravely build a vibrant movement that refuses to back down in the face of attacks by both college leaders and prominent donors. Such leaders have, in fact, interfered with student rights of assembly and free speech, suspended them for making statements critical of Israel, and used the police to break up protests. As the repression accelerates, with a surge of campus expulsions of protesters and the arrest of more than 2,500 students at more than 40 universities nationwide, the student activists continue to show courage under fire of a kind I was never called on to exhibit in my days in college. In the process, they have echoed the even larger protests of the anti-Vietnam War era.

If you were to look at a list of what the administrations at Columbia and other colleges and universities have done to student protesters in these weeks, without identifying the institutions doing it, you might reasonably assume that theirs was the work of autocratic regimes, not places purportedly dedicated to free inquiry and freedom of speech.

A number of universities — including Brown, Evergreen State, Middlebury, Rutgers, and Northwestern – have agreed to meet various student demands, from making formal statements in support of a ceasefire in Gaza to providing more transparency on university investments and agreeing to vote on divestment. Meanwhile, President Biden has pledged to impose a partial pause on arms transfers to Israel if it launches a major attack on the residents of the vulnerable enclave of Rafah. But far more needs to be done to end the killing and begin to provide reparations for the unspeakable suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, including a cutoff of the supply and maintenance of all the American weaponry that has been used to support the Israeli military effort. Student organizing will continue, even in the face of ongoing efforts to smear the student rebels and divert attention from the mass killing of Palestinians. Those students remain remarkably (and bravely) determined to end this country’s shameful policy of enabling Israel’s devastating assault and they are clearly not about to give up.

Today’s Campaigns and Tomorrow’s

One thing is guaranteed: the commitment of this generation of student activists will reverberate through the progressive movement for years to come, setting high standards for steadfast activism in the face of the power of repression. Many of the activists from my own years on campus have remained in progressive politics as union organizers, immigration reform advocates, peace and racial justice activists, or even, like me, think-tank researchers. And don’t be surprised if the ceasefire movement has a similar impact on our future, possibly on an even larger scale.

Face it, we’re living through difficult times when fundamental tenets of our admittedly flawed democracy are under attack, and openly racist, misogynist, anti-gay, and anti-trans rhetoric and actions are regarded as acceptable conduct by all too many in our country. But the surge of student activism over Gaza is just one of many signs that a different, better world is still possible.

To get there, however, it’s important to understand that, even as we rally against the crises of the moment, suffering both victories and setbacks along the way, we need to prepare ourselves to stay in the struggle for the long haul. Hopefully, the current wave of student activism over the nightmare in Gaza will prove to be a catalyst in creating a larger, stronger movement that can overcome the most daunting challenges we face both as a country and a world.

Shameful fact: the plight of U.S. retirees is a global exception. In their pursuit of lower taxes, America’s wealthiest individuals support policies that make it extremely difficult for seniors to manage the increasing costs of healthcare, housing, and basic necessities. Not so in other rich countries like Germany, France, and Canada, where robust public pensions and healthcare systems offer retirees stability and dignity. After a lifetime of hard work, older citizens in the U.S. find their reward is merely scraping by, as savings diminish under the weight of soaring medical costs in the most expensive healthcare system in the developed world.

The solution from America’s elites? Suck it up and work longer.

An example of this mindset appeared in a New York Times op-ed by C. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and Glenn Kramon, a Stanford Business School lecturer. The two accused older folks of robbing economic resources from the young through Social Security and Medicare—never mind that workers fund these programs with their own lifelong payroll contributions. They paint a picture of 65-year-old Americans jauntily playing “pickleball daily” and jet-setting “far and wide,” proposing to increase the age to collect Social Security and Medicare benefits, essentially forcing future retirees to work longer. (Curiously, they overlook how this move robs young people—too young to vote—of future retirement years. This echoes 1983, when the Reagan administration and Congress pushed the Social Security age from 65 to 67, impacting Gen X before they could even vote on it).

Steuerle and Kramon prop up their plan with studies that extol the health and wellbeing perks of working into old age, adding that “each generation lives longer” and therefore, it’s a patriotic duty for the elderly to stay on the job.

Are we all really living longer? Let’s first point out that Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, noted for their research in health and economics, recently showed that many Americans are not, in fact, enjoying extended lives. As they stated in their own New York Times op-ed, those without college degrees are “scarred by death and a staggeringly shorter life span.” According to their investigation, the expected lifespan for this group has been falling since 2010. By 2021, people without college degrees were expected to live to about 75, nearly 8.5 years shorter than their college-educated counterparts.

Overall life expectancy in America dropped in 2020 and 2021, with increases in mortality across the leading causes of death and among all ages, not just due to COVID-19. In August 2022, data confirmed that Americans are dying younger across all demographics. Again, the U.S. is an outlier. It was one of two developed countries where life expectancy did not bounce back in the second year of the pandemic.

So the argument that everyone is living longer greatly stretches the truth—unless, of course, you happen to be rich: A Harvard study revealed that the wealthiest Americans enjoy a life expectancy over a decade longer than their poorest counterparts.

Could the idea that working into our seventies and beyond boosts our health and well-being hold true? Obviously, for those in physically demanding roles, such as construction or mining, prolonged work is likely to lead to a higher risk of injury, accidents, and wearing down health-wise. But what about everybody else? What if you have a desk job? Wouldn’t it be great to get out there, do something meaningful, and interact with people, too?

Perhaps it’s easy for people like Steuerle and Kramon to imagine older people working in secure, dignified positions that might offer health benefits into old age – after all, those are the types of positions they know best.

But the reality is different. Economist Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor at the New School for Social Research, focuses on the economic security of older workers and flaws in U.S. retirement systems in her new book, Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy. She calls those praising the health perks of working longer “oddballs” – those fortunate folks in cushy positions who have a lot of autonomy and purpose. Like lawmakers or tenured professors, for example.

She points out that academic researchers often base their theories about the benefits of working longer on a hypothetical person who just tacked on a few extra years in the same position, noting that researchers often make the faulty assumption that people are not only living longer, but can also easily choose to work longer, keep their jobs without facing pay cuts, and continue stacking up savings into later life.

That’s not really how it plays out in real life for most folks. Ghilarducci found that most people don’t actually get to decide when they retire, noting that “the verb ‘retire’ isn’t a verb that really belongs to the agency of the worker – it’s the employers’ choice.” Retirement often means somebody above you telling you it’s time to go. You’re ousted—laid off or pushed out because your productivity’s slipping or your skills are aging like last year’s tech. Or simply because of biases against older workers. Age discrimination is a huge issue, with two-thirds of job seekers aged 45 to 74 reporting it. In fact, people trying to find a job say they encounter significant biases as early as age 35. For the high-tech and entertainment industries, this is particularly true.

So there’s that.

There’s also the fact that continuing to work in an unfulfilling job might be hazardous to your health. The reality is, a lot of us are grinding in jobs that are stressful and insecure, and that constant stress ties into a whole host of health issues — hypertension, heart problems, messed up digestion, and a weaker immune system, not to mention it can kickstart or worsen mental health troubles like depression and anxiety.

Many are stuck in what anthropologist David Graeber memorably dubbed “bullshit jobs” — roles that feel meaningless and draining. Graeber described these jobs as a form of ‘spiritual violence,’ and found them linked to heightened anxiety, depression, and overall misery among workers. His research found strong evidence that seeing your job as useless deeply impacts your psychological well-being.

The link between job dissatisfaction and poor health has been found to be significant in study after study. Unrewarding work can demotivate people from staying active, eating well, or sleeping regularly, potentially leading to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other health issues. In contrast, retiring from such a job could free up time and energy for wellness activities, enjoyable hobbies, and a healthier lifestyle overall.

Ghilarducci points out that reward-to-effort ratios, crucial for job satisfaction, are declining due to factors like stagnant real wages. She also highlights the problem of subordination, explaining that it can be “lethal” to remain in a job where you lack control over the content or pace of your work. According to her, such factors can lead to higher morbidity and lower mortality rates.

Okay, what about social engagement? That’s crucial for seniors, right? True, but demanding or unfulfilling jobs can make it hard to find the time and energy to socialize, leading to isolation and loneliness, which are major factors in declining mental health and quality of life for the elderly.

Also, when talking about delaying retirement, we can’t ignore cognitive decline. Sure, working longer might keep your mind sharp if the job is stimulating. However, research indicates the opposite for dull jobs. Florida State University researchers found that not only can tedious work accelerate cognitive decline, leading to increased stress and reduced life satisfaction, but “dirty” work does as well. They show that jobs in unclean environments with exposure to chemicals, mold, lead, or loud noises significantly impact brain health as we age.

Even university professors can suffer the effects of dirty jobs: North Carolina State University has recently come under fire for knowingly keeping faculty and staff working for decades in a building contaminated with PCBs, resulting in dire health consequences, including nearly 200 cases of cancer among those exposed.

Finally, it’s not a coincidence that those talking about raising the age for Social Security and Medicare are usually white men. They would suffer less from it than women, especially women of color. Women typically outlive men but earn less over their lifetimes, which already means smaller Social Security checks. It’s even tougher for Black women who often earn way less than their white peers and are more likely to have unstable jobs with skimpy benefits. Plus, women frequently take breaks from their careers for caregiving, shaving off years of paid work and further slicing their Social Security benefits. Pushing the retirement age higher forces women, especially Black women, to either toil longer in poor-quality jobs or retire without enough funds, making them more vulnerable to poverty and health problems as they get older.

Ghilarducci observes that for women in low-paying jobs with little control and agency, “working longer can really hasten their death, and the flip side of that is that retirement for these women really helps them.”

Bottom line: The whole “work longer, live healthier” spiel doesn’t fly for most. In the U.S., the well-off might be milking the joys of extended careers, but lower-income folks, particularly women and people of color, often endure the slog of thankless jobs that negatively impact their health and well-being. Elites shout from their comfortable positions that we need to push retirement further back as if it’s the magic fix to all economic woes. But when such people fantasize about happy seniors thriving at work, they’re missing the harsh reality many face—painful, boring, insecure jobs that speed death.

The myth that we’re all living longer and healthier is just that—a myth belied by life expectancy stats showing not everyone’s in the same boat. What America desperately needs is a beefed-up, fair Social Security and Medicare system that serves all Americans, not just the ones who can afford to retire without a worry. No one should be stuck choosing between a crappy job and retiring into penury.

Yet Republicans are on the warpath against Social Security and Medicare. Senator Mike Lee has explicitly stated his goal to completely eliminate Social Security, aiming to “pull it up by the roots, and get rid of it.” His fellow Republicans are enthusiastically getting the ball rolling: House Republicans have released a new proposal to weaken Social Security by raising the retirement age. For his part, former and possible future president Donald Trump indicates a willingness to consider cuts to Medicare and Social Security, despite previously criticizing his primary rivals on the issue, who were almost wall to wall demanding drastic cutbacks.

Democratic lawmakers typically show more support for Social Security and Medicare in public, though their track record has not fully alleviated concerns about the present and future vulnerability of these programs. In his recent State of the Union speech, President Biden advocated for the expansion and enhancement of Social Security and Medicare, declaring that “If anyone here tries to cut Social Security or Medicare or raise the retirement age, I will stop them!” But it’s important to keep in mind that he supported raising the retirement age during the 1980s and again in 2005.

Polling shows that voters, whether Democrats or Republicans, do not want to cut these programs. Actually, they want to expand Social Security and Medicare. That’s because those who face the realities of daily life understand that working endlessly is a cruel and unreasonable – not to mention unhealthy — expectation that no society should endorse. The idea that America can’t afford to do this is outlandish when the evidence is so clear that American billionaires pay historically low tax rates that are now lower than those for ordinary workers.

What America can’t afford is the super-wealthy and their paid representatives working the rest of us to death.