“Think about it: What if that was your child, your mother, your aunt, living along that transportation corridor from the port to the warehouse? What if one of the premature deaths policymakers attribute to pollution was your child?”

Dr. Nemmi Cole posed those questions in a conversation with Sierra magazine about the impact of air pollution from heavy-duty truck emissions. Dr. Cole is a researcher at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.

What if it was your family member indeed?

That is the question regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) need to ask themselves as they consider an updated emissions rule for heavy-duty trucks.

Federal regulators have a moral obligation to use their power to make it easier and healthier for people to breathe.

Pollution from vehicle emissions is a major cause of health issues in communities across America. The diesel exhaust from heavy-duty vehicles like trucks and buses is especially toxic. Beyond asthma and other respiratory illnesses, the pollution particles are so small that they penetrate tissue and get into the bloodstream. From there, these poisons attack the heart, kidneys, liver, and even the brain.

Decades of redlining and environmental racism have disproportionately placed Black and brown communities alongside the highways that serve as America’s major ground shipping routes. The rise of e-commerce has increased the traffic. And it has increased the number of warehouses and distribution centers, which have also sprung up disproportionately in Black and brown neighborhoods.

For example, the Sierra Club found that 79% of people who live within a half mile of a warehouse in the Houston metro area are people of color. One of those people is Cyrus Cormier of Pleasantville, a heavily industrialized neighborhood where most of the residents are Black.

“Pleasantville is right at the intersection of Interstate 10 and Highway 610, which is a major route from the port. It was one of the few places where Black people could buy a home, so we are a predominantly Black community,” said Cormier.

“Our community is in the top 90th to 95th percentile for diesel particulate matter, the 80th to 90th percentiles for asthma rates. It’s in the 95th percentile for low life expectancy, the top 90th to 100th for heart disease when you compare it to the rest of the nation.”

This is what the EPA is here for. Federal regulators have a moral obligation to use their power to make it easier and healthier for people to breathe.

According to the American Lung Association, the estimated benefits of moving to zero-emission trucks and power by 2050 include: $735 billion in public health benefits due to cleaner air; 66,800 fewer premature deaths; 1.75 million fewer asthma attacks; and 8.5 million fewer lost workdays.

Further, the urgency of the climate crisis demands action now. Transportation is the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. Roughly a quarter of those emissions are from trucks and buses, even though they are only 4% of the vehicles on the road. Emissions from trucks are also the fastest growing source of emissions, and trucking is forecast to increase even more in the coming years.

Americans get that this is just common sense. A new poll shows 72% of voters support stronger limits from the agency on heavy-duty vehicle pollution. And it is long overdue. The clean air standards for heavy-duty trucks have not been updated in over 20 years.

States also get the urgency. As of March 2024, 11 states have adopted the Advanced Clean Trucks rule, requiring manufacturers to sell an increasing number of zero-emission trucks and buses. These states are home to more than 20% of the U.S. medium- and heavy-duty vehicles in use. And even more states are expected to adopt these standards this year.

The market can meet the demand. There are already about 150 existing medium- and heavy-duty zero-emission truck models that are commercially available in the U.S. today.

This is a no-brainer for the EPA. A strong emissions standard for heavy-duty trucks that pushes trucking fleets towards electric vehicles is a win for the country, our bodies, and our kids.

Intel, the largest chip maker in America, with 2023 revenues of $54 billion, has just been awarded an $8.5 billion grant from the federal CHIPS and Science Act, plus $11 billion in favorable loans.

In addition to badly needed microchips, Intel produces totally useless stock buybacks. On its website the company proudly proclaims to have spent $152 billion on stock buybacks since 1990. That’s not a typo: $152,000,000,000. Which is why I call it "Stock Buybacks Я Us."

Intel took $152 billion of its revenues, some portion of which could have been used for R&D and building new microchip facilities in the U.S. as well as paying workers more, and instead funneled it to its largest Wall Street stockholders and corporate executives, enriching the top fraction of the top one percent.

A company repurchasing its own shares sees earnings per share rise because there are fewer shares in circulation. Share prices rise, though nothing new is made, and the largest stockholders, including top Intel executives, cash out with eye-popping profits. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger hauled in $179 million in 2021, most of it coming from stock-related compensation.

How can you tell if such a large company is using CHIPS money or other money to conduct its buybacks? You can’t.

Stock buybacks are a form of stock manipulation, which is why they were outlawed by the Securities and Exchange Commission after the Great Depression, up until deregulation in 1982, that limited buybacks to two percent of profits. Now it’s all the buybacks your corporation can eat, with nearly 70 percent of all corporate profits going to this form of stock manipulation.

So, why are we giving Intel another $8 billion?

National security is at risk, we are told. Semi-conductors are far too important to our defense and to our economy to be produced overseas, especially in or anywhere near China, our communist enemy de jure. If we don’t bribe Intel to build here, the argument goes, they just might go elsewhere. They are in business to produce profits (and stock buybacks) not national security.

But the biggest selling point, as always, from politicians of both parties, is Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! The White House calculates that Intel will generate 20,000 temporary construction jobs and 10,000 more permanent manufacturing jobs because of this grant.

But what’s to stop Intel from shoveling taxpayer grants into more stock buybacks?

Not much. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) writes:

“While the legislation specifically prohibits the use of CHIPS funds for stock buybacks and dividend payments, these restrictions do not explicitly prohibit award recipients from using CHIPS funds to free up their own funds, which they can then use for those purposes.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is already worried that BAE Systems, a much smaller CHIPS recipient, but also a buyback recidivist, has not said it would refrain from stock buybacks for the duration of its CHIPS money.

Intel hasn’t made that pledge either. In fact, Intel’s website states it still has authorization to conduct another $7.24 billion in stock buybacks.

How can you tell if such a large company is using CHIPS money or other money to conduct its buybacks? You can’t.

Doesn’t the CHIPS Act prohibit Intel from conducting mass layoffs?

Not a chance.

Intel could very well increase jobs in some locations while cutting jobs in other locations. And there is evidence that they are doing that right now.

As the CHIPS Act was moving through Congress in 2022, strongly lobbied for by CEO Gelsinger, Intel laid off approximately 2,000 employees in California. Now, the company says, it “is working to accelerate its strategy while reducing costs through multiple initiatives, including some business and function-specific workforce reductions in areas across the company."

What that word salad means is that by the time Intel creates 10,000 new manufacturing jobs, it will have laid off more workers than that. And they know there’s nothing the government will do about it.

Why are most politicians so gutless about preventing mass layoffs?

That’s a longer story that I cover in Wall Street’s War on Workers. Simply put, our political system refuses to acknowledge that mass layoffs are the ruination of working people.

By the time Intel creates 10,000 new manufacturing jobs, it will have laid off more workers than that. And they know there’s nothing the government will do about it.

More than 30 million working people have suffered through mass layoffs since 1996. Last year there were more than 260,000 jobs lost in the highly prosperous tech sector, with another 50,000 so far this year. In January 2024, there were 82,000 layoffs across the economy. Many of those workers will suffer greatly both from financial loss and deterioration of their health. (For those worried about the catastrophic impact of artificial intelligence, the Challenger Report claims AI killed only 381 jobs in January 2024.)

It should be a no-brainer for the government to make a simple regulation:

If you are supping at the taxpayer trough, you can’t conduct compulsory layoffs of taxpayers. All your layoffs must be voluntary. That is, you have to buy workers out. No forced layoffs!

Most elected leaders believe that regulating corporations about how they can and can’t destroy jobs is blasphemy, an attack on sacred capitalist freedoms, something that only the Communists would do! In addition to the ideological blowback, the political establishment actually buys the corporate line that halting mass layoffs would make corporations uncompetitive, which is total nonsense.

Here’s a telling piece of evidence.

In 2021, Siemens Energy, the German-based company with 90,000 employees globally, decided to stop making equipment used in oil extraction and fracking. In Germany, 3,000 workers were to lose their jobs, and another 1,700 in the U.S.

In Germany, companies must live within a legislated system of codetermination, meaning that half the seats on a company’s board of directors are held by worker representatives, and labor-management committees run the day-to-day operations of each facility. (As an aside, this system was urged upon German businesses by the U.S. after WWII, because we believed unionized workers were less likely than their bosses to cozy up to fascists.)

The political establishment actually buys the corporate line that halting mass layoffs would make corporations uncompetitive, which is total nonsense.

In Germany, the workers used their power to persuade Siemens management to agree to no forced layoffs. On top of that, Siemens agreed not to shut down six facilities and instead put other production lines in them.

In the United States? All 1,700 workers lost their jobs AND the president of Siemens USA was invited to the infrastructure bill signing ceremony. In honor of the legislation she had the gall to say, “This is a historic moment in America – one that sets the stage for decarbonizing the economy, boosting U.S. manufacturing, creating jobs, and increasing equity.”

Moral of the story: In addition to fabricating hypocritical public statements, global corporations have incredible flexibility and resources to modify production, employment, wages, and working conditions. “No forced layoffs” would not put Siemens or Intel or any other global corporation out of business. Instead, there might be a microscopic dip in stock buybacks!

Every single company that is getting a CHIPS grant has the capacity to modify its operations to avoid forced layoffs, just as Siemens has done in Germany. In fact, every company that gets a federal contract should agree to do the same, as well as forswearing stock buybacks.

There’s only one way out of this non-stop shakedown: expand labor unions and build a powerful mass movement.

The second moral of the story: Wall Street and corporate America are so accustomed to getting their way that they will only pursue national goals when they are bribed. No matter how rich, no matter how large their stock buyback scams, they want our tax dollars with no strings attached. And very few politicians have the nerve to resist.

There’s only one way out of this non-stop shakedown: expand labor unions and build a powerful mass movement. Until we, the people, rise up and demand it, no one will derail the Wall Street gravy train that runs from our pockets to theirs via stock buybacks and pink slips.

And we wonder why so many Americans think the system is rigged and that democracy isn’t working for us.

The White House released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025 on March 11, and the news was depressingly familiar: $895 billion for the Pentagon and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. After adjusting for inflation, that’s only slightly less than last year’s proposal, but far higher than the levels reached during either the Korean or Vietnam wars or at the height of the Cold War. And that figure doesn’t even include related spending on veterans, the Department of Homeland Security, or the additional tens of billions of dollars in “emergency” military spending likely to come later this year.

One thing is all too obvious: a trillion-dollar budget for the Pentagon alone is right around the corner, at the expense of urgently needed action to address climate change, epidemics of disease, economic inequality, and other issues that threaten our lives and safety at least as much as, if not more than, traditional military challenges.

Americans would be hard-pressed to find members of Congress carefully scrutinizing such vast sums of national security spending, asking tough questions, or reining in Pentagon excess—despite the fact that this country is no longer fighting any major ground wars. Just a handful of senators and members of the House do that work while many more search for ways to increase the department’s already bloated budget and steer further contracts into their own states and districts.

The biggest driver of overspending is an unrealistic, self-indulgent, and—yes—militaristic national defense strategy.

Congress isn’t just shirking its oversight duties: These days, it can’t even seem to pass a budget on time. Our elected representatives settled on a final national budget just last week, leaving Pentagon spending at the already generous 2023 level for nearly half of the 2024 fiscal year. Now, the department will be inundated with a flood of new money that it has to spend in about six months instead of a year. More waste, fraud, and financial abuse are inevitable as the Pentagon prepares to shovel money out the door as quickly as possible. This is no way to craft a budget or defend a country.

And while congressional dysfunction is par for the course, in this instance it offers an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re spending all this money for. The biggest driver of overspending is an unrealistic, self-indulgent, and—yes—militaristic national defense strategy. It’s designed to maintain a capacity to go almost everywhere and do almost anything, from winning wars with rival superpowers to intervening in key regions across the planet to continuing the disastrous Global War on Terror, which was launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and never truly ended. As long as such a “cover the globe” strategy persists, the pressure to continue spending ever more on the Pentagon will prove irresistible, no matter how delusional the rationale for doing so may be.

Defending “the Free World”?

President Joe Biden began his recent State of the Union address by comparing the present moment to the time when the United States was preparing to enter World War II. Like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941, Joe Biden told the American people that the country now faces an “unprecedented moment in the history of the Union,” one in which freedom and democracy are “under attack” both at home and abroad. He disparaged Congress’s failure to approve his emergency supplemental bill, claiming that, without additional aid for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin will threaten not just that country but all of Europe and even the “free world.” Comparing (as he did) the challenge posed by Russia now to the threat that Hitler’s regime posed in World War II is a major exaggeration that’s of no value in developing an effective response to Moscow’s activities in Ukraine and beyond.

Engaging in such fearmongering to get the public on board with an increasingly militarized foreign policy ignores reality in service of the status quo. In truth, Russia poses no direct security threat to the United States. And while Putin may have ambitions beyond Ukraine, Russia simply doesn’t have the capability to threaten the “free world” with a military campaign. Neither does China, for that matter. But facing the facts about these powers would require a critical reassessment of the maximalist U.S. defense strategy that rules the roost. Currently, it reflects the profoundly misguided belief that, on matters of national security, U.S. military dominance takes precedence over the collective economic strength and prosperity of Americans.

As a result, the administration places more emphasis on deterring potential (if unlikely) aggression from competitors than on improving relations with them. Of course, this approach depends almost entirely on increasing the production, distribution, and stockpiling of arms. The war in Ukraine and Israel’s continuing assault on Gaza have unfortunately only solidified the administration’s dedication to the concept of military-centric deterrence.

Contractor Dysfunction: Earning More, Doing Less

Ironically, such a defense strategy depends on an industry that continually exploits the government for its own benefit and wastes staggering amounts of taxpayer dollars. The major corporations that act as military contractors pocket about half of all Pentagon outlays while ripping off the government in a multitude of ways. But what’s even more striking is how little they accomplish with the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars they receive year in, year out. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), from 2020 to 2022, the total number of major defense acquisition programs actually declined even as total costs and average delivery time for new weapons systems increased.

Take the Navy’s top acquisition program, for example. Earlier this month, the news broke that the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine is already at least a year behind schedule. That sub is the sea-based part of the next-generation nuclear (air-sea-and-land) triad that the administration considers the “ultimate backstop” for global deterrence. As a key part of this country’s never-ending arms buildup, the Columbia is supposedly the Navy’s most important program, so you might wonder why the Pentagon hasn’t implemented a single one of the GAO’s six recommendations to help keep it on track.

As the GAO report made clear, the Navy proposed delivering the first Columbia-class vessel in record time—a wildly unrealistic goal—despite it being the “largest and most complex submarine” in its history.

Acquisition failures of the past never seem to financially impact the executives or shareholders of America’s biggest military contractors.

Yet the war economy persists, even as the giant weapons corporations deliver less weaponry for more money in an ever more predictable fashion (and often way behind schedule as well). This happens in part because the Pentagon regularly advances weapons programs before design and testing are even completed, a phenomenon known as “concurrent development.” Building systems before they’re fully tested means, of course, rushing them into production at the taxpayer’s expense before the bugs are out. Not surprisingly, operations and maintenance costs account for about 70% of the money spent on any U.S. weapons program.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 is the classic example of this enormously expensive tendency. The Pentagon just greenlit the fighter jet for full-scale production this month, 23 years (yes, that’s not a misprint!) after the program was launched. The fighter has suffered from persistent engine problems and deficient software. But the official go-ahead from the Pentagon means little, since Congress has long funded the F-35 as if it were already approved for full-scale production. At a projected cost of at least $1.7 trillion over its lifetime, America’s most expensive weapons program ever should offer a lesson in the necessity of trying before buying.

Unfortunately, this lesson is lost on those who need to learn it the most. Acquisition failures of the past never seem to financially impact the executives or shareholders of America’s biggest military contractors. On the contrary, those corporate leaders depend on Pentagon bloat and overpriced, often unnecessary weaponry. In 2023, America’s biggest military contractor, Lockheed Martin, paid its CEO John Taiclit $22.8 million. Annual compensation for the CEOs of RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing ranged from $14.5 and $22.5 million in the past two years. And shareholders of those weapons makers are similarly cashing in. The arms industry increased cash paid to its shareholders by 73% in the 2010s compared to the prior decade. And they did so at the expense of investing in their own businesses. Now they expect taxpayers to bail them out to ramp up weapons production for Ukraine and Israel.

Reining in the Military-Industrial Complex

One way to begin reining in runaway Pentagon spending is to eliminate the ability of Congress and the president to arbitrarily increase that department’s budget. The best way to do so would be by doing away with the very concept of “emergency spending.” Otherwise, thanks to such spending, that $895 billion Pentagon budget will undoubtedly prove to be anything but a ceiling on military spending next year. As an example, the $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that passed the Senate in February is still hung up in the House, but some portion of it will eventually get through and add substantially to the Pentagon’s already enormous budget.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has fallen back on the same kind of budgetary maneuvers it perfected at the peak of its disastrous Afghan and Iraq wars earlier in this century, adding billions to the war budget to fund items on the department’s wish list that have little to do with “defense” in our present world. That includes emergency outlays destined to expand this country’s “defense industrial base” and further supersize the military-industrial complex—an expensive loophole that Congress should simply shut down. That, however, will undoubtedly prove a tough political fight, given how many stakeholders—from Pentagon officials to those corporate executives to compromised members of Congress—benefit from such spending sprees.

Ultimately, of course, the debate about Pentagon spending should be focused on far more than the staggering sums being spent. It should be about the impact of such spending on this planet. That includes the Biden administration’s stubborn continuation of support for Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, which has already killed more than 31,000 people while putting many more at risk of starvation. A recent Washington Post investigation found that the U.S. has made 100 arms sales to Israel since the start of the war last October, most of them set at value thresholds just low enough to bypass any requirement to report them to Congress.

Before our government moves full speed ahead expanding the weapons industry and further militarizing geopolitical challenges posed by China and Russia, we should reflect on America’s disastrous performance in the costly, prolonged wars already waged in this century.

The relentless supply of military equipment to a government that the International Court of Justice has said is plausibly engaged in a genocidal campaign is a deep moral stain on the foreign-policy record of the Biden administration, as well as a blow to American credibility and influence globally. No amount of airdrops or humanitarian supplies through a makeshift port can remotely make up for the damage still being done by U.S.-supplied weapons in Gaza.

The case of Gaza may be extreme in its brutality and the sheer speed of the slaughter, but it underscores the need to thoroughly rethink both the purpose of and funding for America’s foreign and military policies. It’s hard to imagine a more devastating example than Gaza of why the use of force so often makes matters far, far worse—particularly in conflicts rooted in longstanding political and social despair. A similar point could have been made with respect to the calamitous U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost untold numbers of lives, while pouring yet more money into the coffers of America’s major weapons makers. Both of those military campaigns, of course, failed disastrously in their stated objectives of promoting democracy, or at least stability, in troubled regions, even as they exacted huge costs in blood and treasure.

Before our government moves full speed ahead expanding the weapons industry and further militarizing geopolitical challenges posed by China and Russia, we should reflect on America’s disastrous performance in the costly, prolonged wars already waged in this century. After all, they did enormous damage, made the world a far more dangerous place, and only increased the significance of those weapons makers. Throwing another trillion dollars-plus at the Pentagon won’t change that.

On March 8, the 50th anniversary of International Women’s Day, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I participated in the Lazo de Amor Contra la Violencia Machista—the Ribbon of Love Against Sexist Violence. Six hundred people came together to take a loving stand against violence against women and against all forms of violence based in the traditional “machista” masculine gender role. Together, we called for the promotion of education, not the penal system, as the primary way to eradicate it.

The demonstration was organized by a team of seasoned activists, and sponsored by the Teachers’ Association of Puerto Rico (AMPR), the main teachers’ union. It took place on the grounds of the historic El Morro fort, symbol of Spanish colonization. We listened to a series of impassioned speeches from educators, activists, and students, decrying the epidemic of sexist violence in all its forms; calling out the failures of the penal system to rehabilitate offenders and to address the roots of violence; and calling on educators, the school system, and each of us, to take up the challenge of ending sexist violence.

Then we donned purple Lazo de Amor T-shirts, provided by the organizers, and formed the shape of a bow, similar to the ribbons people wear to represent commitment to a cause like AIDS awareness, MIA’s, and cancer survivors. We were photographed from the sky, taking our stand together. The organizers’ announced goal, represented by the Lazo, was to create an ongoing campaign for educating against sexist violence in the schools, to be expressed in yearly demonstrations.

The demonstration provided one of a multitude of potential answers to the core question that we progressive activists face as we work to shift the paradigm from fear to love: How can we use the power of love to transform our violent, fear-based practices and institutions?

Participating in the Lazo was a powerful experience for me. As an elder anti-racist, leftist feminist who has attended many demonstrations organized by many types of progressive movement over the past 50 years, I found it to be unusually empowering, uplifting, and inspiring. A demonstration against violence on the grounds of an historic colonial fort. The act of actually taking a stand together and being photographed doing felt like a work of political art. The presence of many men, also taking a stand against sexist violence. The sponsorship by a teachers’ union and preponderance of teachers and students, embodying the process being advocated for. And the naming, and calling on, of love as the true antidote to violence—rather than the greater violence of the state and the penal system. Fifty years after the declaration of the first International Women’s Day, feminism had come a long way from demonstrations where we marched in the streets to take back the night—without feminist men at our sides as our allies, and calling on the police as the main solution.

I was particularly excited by the naming of our ribbon as a ribbon of love. I am a retired professor of economics whose research has focused on the emergence, alongside of and within capitalism, of the solidarity economy—economic practices and institutions centered in cooperation, equity, democracy, sustainability, and pluralism. These new institutions are part of and require the emergence of a new paradigm of social life which is based on mutuality, unity amidst diversity, and love, within a crisis-ridden, dying paradigm based on competition, separation, violence, and fear.

So many of the metaphors and memes we use on the left to describe our work are conceptualized as a process of fighting against something, a violent activity that brings to mind traditional, macho masculinity. The naming of love as a powerful force, embodied in a purple ribbon against violence, captured my imagination, representing as it did the power of the strong feminine. Women and feminist men standing up for themselves and for others, against all forms of violence, using the power of love, caring, education, good mothering and fathering. The demonstration provided one of a multitude of potential answers to the core question that we progressive activists face as we work to shift the paradigm from fear to love: How can we use the power of love to transform our violent, fear-based practices and institutions?

I was extremely impressed by the ability of a small team of lead organizers to manifest this demonstration very quickly and beautifully. The Lazo de Amor was the brainchild of my friend Margarita Ostolaza Bey, a retired women’s studies professor and former senator, and her friend Gretchen Coll-Marti, a retired appellate judge and former executive director of Legal Services of Puerto Rico. On Valentine’s Day, only three weeks before, the two had the idea to create a Lazo de Amor Contra la Violencia Machista on International Women’s Day. Gretchen had created an AIDS Awareness Ribbon campaign during the 1990s. Held annually for eight years, it grew from 500 people to a campaign organized in all of the island’s schools that brought together 8,000 men, women, and children. The idea was to use the same method to mobilize energies to fight sexist violence.

Margarita and her wife, Ivelisse Rivera Almodovar, a retired public relations director, presented the proposal for the Lazo de Amor Contra la Violencia Machista to Professor Victor Bonilla Sanchez, the president of the Association of Teachers of Puerto Rico. He immediately and enthusiastically committed to the project. Ivelisse took on the huge task of quickly coordinating permits, sponsorships, media announcements, and the participation of spokespersons in radio, press, television, and social networks, along with the design of the ribbon. Essentially these three women came up with the idea, engaged the head of the teachers’ association, and started a campaign for feminist education against sexist violence which they hope to be ongoing and growing yearly, like Gretchen’s AIDS Awareness campaign, in the space of three weeks. Their story makes me wonder what other kinds of campaigns could be created to help bring the paradigm shift we all need.

Another interesting aspect of the Lazo de Amor Contra la Violencia Machista that I would like to flag is the involvement of corporate sponsors. In my experience, left and progressive circles have tended to avoid funding from for-profit businesses, focusing instead on non-profits. But for-profit firms inhabit a spectrum of positions on the value scale from “low-road,” narrowly profit-motivated firms—union-busting, polluting, price-gouging, etc.—to high-road businesses that embody the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profits. Students from the School at the University of Puerto Rico designed the Lazo, but Goya de Puerto Rico stepped up to provide financial support, and El Nuevo Dia, the main newspaper on the island; Channel 2 TV; and Radio Isla all provided free air time to promote it. We need to remember that progressive, for-profit businesses and social enterprises can be valuable allies in the paradigm shift, even though they are capitalist, and can and should be called upon for support.

One question you may be asking—how did this demonstration relate to the political parties of the island, and to the question of the island’s political status? Puerto Rico’s people have been deeply divided into political parties based on the issue of how to relate to the U.S.: the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP), aligned with the U.S. Republican Party); the pro-Commonwealth Popular Democratic Party (PPD), aligned with the U.S. Democratic Party; the pro-independence Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), aligned loosely with the left in the U.S.; or the new Citizens’ Victory Movement (MVC) party. This demonstration attempted to bridge these political divides and was not affiliated with any political party.

There were other demonstrations across the island commemorating International Women’s Day’s 50th anniversary. A coalition of left feminist groups, the Coalition of the 8th of March, put on a press conference. One of their members, the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción (Feminist Collective Under Construction), held a demonstration and blocked a highway, protesting against a wide range of oppressions, including the occupation of Palestine, Puerto Rico’s colonial status, and racism, along with sexism, violence against women, and anti-trans violence. Is there a place in our feminist imaginations and strategizing both for this show of force and courage, and for the Lazo de Amor? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each in terms of shifting the paradigm?

For the 2.2 million Muslims in Gaza, Ramadan has historically been a time of joyous social gatherings, spiritual reflection, faith renewal, and cherished family reunions.

However, over the past decade, recurring Israeli wars on the strip have cast a dark shadow over this once-vibrant tradition. The ongoing genocidal assault, which has claimed more than 32,000 Palestinian lives and has laid waste to Gaza, made this a most devastating month.

Even when I encounter passersby on the street, I am unable to politely wish them, "Ramadan Kareem."

The once-colorful lights and lanterns that used to adorn the roads have been replaced by the harsh flashes of bombs and utter destruction.

Such greetings feel inappropriate and almost shameful, as all the jubilant celebrations of Ramadan have been replaced by quiet mourning—punctuated only by the echoes of war, grief, and hardship.

Last year, I was delighted to secure a job with a decent salary for the first time in my career. Filled with a sense of abundance, I surprised each of my 22 nieces and nephews with a colourful lantern, or "fanoos," to usher in the holy month.

Their happiness was infectious, and I vowed to make this gift a yearly ritual. Little did I know that circumstances beyond my control would brutally crush this promise of joy.

Today, the reality of life in Gaza has drastically changed. Many of my nieces and nephews find themselves living in tents, facing hunger, and displaced by the ravages of war. Others have left Gaza entirely, seeking refuge elsewhere.

Reduced to Ruins

Under "normal" conditions—as normal as they could be during a blockade—the weeks leading up to Ramadan are filled with anticipation and preparation.

The streets of Gaza would come alive as households and businesses adorned their balconies and storefronts with lanterns to welcome the holy month. I remember my sisters-in-law helping me decorate the balcony of our home with these small lanterns.

This cherished tradition, led by young mothers and enthusiastic youth, created a vibrant atmosphere throughout the neighbourhoods. The sight of Gaza's illuminated streets, powered by generators, solar panels, or even sporadic electricity, would fill my heart with joy.

But this year, Ramadan is a sad month.

While most people fasting around the world may experience headaches and fatigue from the lack of food and caffeine, this year we did not feel the exhaustion from that first day of Ramadan since we have already been enduring food deprivation and a lack of basic necessities for months.

The vibrant nighttime streets of Gaza have fallen into sombre silence. Where there was once life, there is now rubble. The joyous sounds of children playing have been replaced by the heart-wrenching cries of those trapped beneath it.

On the first day of Ramadan, I ventured through the streets in search of some semblance of the past. The scant hope I had instead became a painful realization of just how much we have lost.

Only a few stalls remained in what used to be lively outdoor markets—offering meager quantities of lemons, eggplants, tomatoes, and homemade laundry soap. The faces I encountered were filled with grief and despair. At that moment, I couldn't help but weep for the loss of those cherished memories.

The once-colorful lights and lanterns that used to adorn the roads have been replaced by the harsh flashes of bombs and utter destruction.

Mosques, once crowded with worshippers, either stand empty or lie in ruins. Imams now appeal to individuals to worship within the confines of their own homes or makeshift tents.

And yet the devastation extends beyond the visual landscape.

The atmosphere of Ramadan nights, filled with Tarawih prayers in mosques and Quranic recitation, has been replaced by the sounds of explosions from Israeli bombs.

The aromas that permeated Gaza's streets and shops are now distant memories. The bustling markets, like al-Zawya, Gaza's oldest market, were stocked with buckets of sour pickles and olives, cartons of various dates, pyramids of spices, dried fruits, jams, and other colourful food items.

Everything has been reduced to ruins.

'Even in Ramadan'

When I was young, I used to navigate the narrow and cramped alleys of the Deir al-Balah refugee camp on my walk home from school.

The air was filled with the sounds of women cooking, accompanied by the clattering of spoons and cooking utensils. Each house emitted a distinct aroma unique to the meals being prepared inside.

My dear friend, Hamda, who recently was tragically killed in an air strike on her home along with her husband, could identify dishes based on the fragrance that each home was emitting during the preparations, as we walked together toward our homes. I cherished the hour leading up to sunset and the Maghrib prayer.

The spirit of Ramadan in Gaza has been reduced to a mere shadow of its former self. Sprawling banquets and gatherings have given way to canned meals.

When the first day of Ramadan would come, many of us never had to think of what to cook for iftar, as the answer was evident: molokhia. This thick and flavorful stew, made from the leaves of the jute mallow plant, had always served as the traditional "opener" for Ramadan meals in Gaza. Like other Palestinian mothers and grandmothers, my mother believed that the vibrant green colour of molokhia instilled optimism and brought good fortune during the month.

This year is different. We no longer have the luxury of choice when it comes to our meals. Instead, we rely on a few cans of food received in aid parcels.

While most people fasting around the world may experience headaches and fatigue from the lack of food and caffeine, this year we did not feel the exhaustion from that first day of Ramadan since we have already been enduring food deprivation and a lack of basic necessities for months.

Today, people in Gaza fast through iftar not out of choice, but because they lack food and water.

My brother, who works at a hospital, remarked: "We have been fasting for five months, so I do not know if we will get a headache on the first day." We did not.

Our first suhour was accompanied by Israeli air strikes and artillery shelling in Deir al-Balah. My mother sighed: "Even in Ramadan."

We used to treat ourselves to qatayef, a beloved dessert popular in Ramadan that is no longer available. One kilogram of sugar, which used to cost only 8 NIS ($2), is now a staggering 85 NIS ($23).

The spirit of Ramadan in Gaza has been reduced to a mere shadow of its former self. Sprawling banquets and gatherings have given way to canned meals.

Families no longer gather in celebration but in mourning.

The destruction of homes, markets, schools, the loss of loved ones, and the disruption of daily life have left us grappling with unimaginable pain and loss.

For more than five months, Gaza has endured massacres, disease, starvation, displacement, expulsion, and thirst. I desperately waited for Ramadan in the hope that this sacred month would be different from its predecessors. However, the violence and brutality of the situation have not ceased or lessened with the arrival of Ramadan.

We used to recite a prayer in which we would ask God for Ramadan to arrive without losing any of our loved ones.

However, this Ramadan, we have lost many, many friends, family members, and relatives. We lost homes. We lost our lives. We lost memories. We have lost everything.

This month, we are fasting from everything, whether it is food, talking, smiling, or spiritual experiences. Only grief and despair are in abundance.

Our economic model generates and conflates two conditions that burden working people. The first is “economic adversity.” The second is “economic anxiety.’’

Economic Adversity

The data shows that our economic model produces chronic economic adversity for large numbers of working-class and working-middle class people every four to seven years.

The corporate media often presents incomplete numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

For example, functional unemployment numbers from the Ludwig Institute of Shared Prosperity (LISEP) tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week), but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $20,000 annually before taxes. In February 2024, the functional unemployment rate was 24.9 percent.

The BLS number was 3.7 percent.

Our economic model creates the conditions for large swaths of working middle-class and working-class people to live with chronic anxiety that they will lose their employment and their lives will plunge into crisis.

Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE) measures household essentials for families in the U.S. In 2021, their index reported 41 percent of households in the U.S. were below the ALICE Threshold of Poverty; 29 percent of ALICE households earned just above the federal poverty level.

Compare the ALICE numbers to a BLS report in November 2023. It stated that 12 percent of Americans lived below the official poverty level in 2021.

The Census Bureau published a report in September 2023. It stated that the number of Americans living in poverty was 12 percent in 2022.

ALICE reported the percentage of American households living below or just above the poverty line is an unconscionable 70 percent.

Economic Anxiety

Economic anxiety is more subtle and ubiquitous than economic adversity. To better understand economic anxiety, it is important to review Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs.”

Psychologist Abraham Maslow created a “Hierarchy of Needs” in 1954. In the hierarchy, one element stands out as foundational in developing a healthy society. That element is “safety.” Safety is a need that must be fulfilled before other elements of living can be addressed. Maslow asserted that people want to experience order, predictability, and control in their lives.

At the foundation of the hierarchy is basic “Physiological Needs.” These are breathing, food, water, shelter, and sleep.

The next level that lists the first social association is “Safety and Security.” This level lists health, employment, property, family, and social ability.

Clearly, the principal need that allows all other needs to be realized is employment. For most working people, a job must provide the requisite conditions to reach the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy.

Feeling safe allows people to think about other aspirations. In our country, working-middle class and working-class people are feeling increasingly unsafe.

It is plausible that some working people support Mr. Trump’s views because he promises a return to tradition and stability. Unfortunately, that iteration of tradition and stability was often realized with considerable measures of discrimination, exclusion and inequality. Stability without inclusion is impossible. Accepting social differences without necessarily approving of them is considered healthy by psychological standards, but is absent in the MAGA worldview.

Exclusion is foundational to white, Christian, male supremacy. It is Mr. Trump’s scabrous version of tradition and stability. It is antithetical to the traditional written values in the Constitution. Stability is a promise in that extraordinary document for its time.

The effects of economic anxiety are different from economic adversity.

For example, millennials are a highly educated demographic that identify as working middle class. A report in June 2023 from the Real Estate Witch concluded that 90 percent of millennials have nonmortgage debt, owing an average of $90,590. About 70 percent of millennials are currently “living paycheck to paycheck.”

Yet, another example of economic anxiety that permeates through working-middle class demographics was in a report by Statista in November 2023; it showed that 40 percent of college graduates were underemployed.

Lastly, a study published this January in The Lancet journal reported that people who attained a higher level of education extended their life expectancy. What stood out is that people who attained a higher level of education were able to earn more which allowed them to afford a lifestyle that was healthier. Again, economic anxiety was largely removed from people with adequate resources.

The study also found that: “Married individuals benefit in terms of emotional and social support, pooled economic resources, engagement in preventive care, and healthier lifestyles.” It is pooled resources that allow couples to live healthier lifestyles.

This raises the issue of our economic model excluding masses of Americans from healthy lifestyles; no one should be denied the opportunity to be healthy and live a long life.

Losing Status Implications

The best-known study of status loss was published in the estimable “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (PNAS) in April 2018.

The PNAS study concluded that “losing status” was the determining factor for much of Mr. Trump’s support by white working people in the 2016 election.

However, the conclusions do not address the wider ramifications of “losing status.”

Status in this context has an undeclared economic basis. In our culture, it is primarily about material acquisition. Material acquisition brings some status; without it often brings subtle or not so subtle derision from others, and self-loathing. The idiom “keeping up with the Joneses” reflects the sentiment of conspicuous consumption by acquisition.

Our economic model creates the conditions for large swaths of working middle-class and working-class people to live with chronic anxiety that they will lose their employment and their lives will plunge into crisis.

Poverty Assistance Context

An issue rarely questioned is the occasional legislation that appears to improve the lives of considerable numbers of working people. For example, the Biden Administration proclaims the success of the Child Tax Credit among several programs that benefit working people.

In January Congress passed a revision of the Child Tax Credit.

According to estimates, it would lift approximately 16 million children out of poverty which is a considerable number.

However, there is an issue ignored by the corporate media and often the small numbers of progressive media. That is the actual living conditions of those 16 million children and their families. It is not exactly worth throwing a parade as a real accomplishment.

As we see from the numbers above, many millions of Americans live below or just above the poverty line. Government programs, however well-intentioned, temporarily ameliorate people’s lives but serve to maintain a structure of near poverty and poverty in perpetuity.

An excellent program that exposes the paucity of programs for poor Americans is the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) Family Budget Calculator. The Calculator shows the amount of income required to live a modest lifestyle in any area of the country by housing, food, childcare, transportation, other necessities, and taxes.

For example, in the Springfield, Massachusetts metro area, a working family of two parents and two children would require $110,472 to meet an “adequate” standard of living.

In the Selby County, Alabama area, the amount required is $107,568.

In the Charleston/North Charleston, South Carolina area, the amount is $102,369.

In the Dallas, Texas Metro area, the amount required is $101,877.

In the Fresno, California area, the amount required is $100,676.

In the Portland/Vancouver/Hillsboro, Oregon area, the amount required is $128,808.

An “adequate” cost of living across the United States is beyond the reach of a massive majority of Americans.

Health care is particularly devastating for Americans. The Commonwealth Fund published a report inOctober. It found that in the U.S. 51 percent of adults between 19 and 64 years of age and their families had difficulties in affording health care costs.

Remedy

We must think beyond the narrow, obvious interest of "economic adversity" and include "economic anxiety.”

Economic anxiety appears to be a chronic component for both demographics.

Any study not addressing the subtle question of what economic anxiety actually means to working people is truncated.

We must think beyond the narrow, obvious interest of "economic adversity" and include "economic anxiety.”

Union negotiations traditionally concentrate on wages, salaries, and healthcare. These negotiations are essential and act as vital pressure points on our economic model. Perhaps it is time to recognize the undemocratic components our economic model and its chronic dehumanizing results for so many.

Don’t Mourn, Organize

History does not travel in a straight line. Our economic model is failing working people in many ways, all readily documented.

To borrow the title from a powerful Russian novel in 1863, What Is To Be Done?

There is no magic formula or singular plan that will turn the present trajectory of our economic model to sudden epiphanies of justice, fairness and morality.

Progressives from particularly faith-based organizations must form alliances and coalitions with each other and secular organizations. The downward trajectory of our economic model continues below the surface despite the distracting clamor from the corporate media. Regardless of those distortions and politicians’ puffery, the U.S. economy is no longer the hegemonic world economy. That appears to be China or will be soon.

The strategy of the obscenely wealthy is simple: control the media, the courts, and political system with scads of resources. Just read the Republican Party’s Project 2025.

Another indication of U.S. economic declension is the developing BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), with more countries requesting to join that bloc.

If the underlying economy of the U.S. continues its decline, it is guaranteed that U.S oligarchs will use every legal mechanism available to scam American working people of everything they can.

Information distributed to working people must explain the underlying nature of its economic relationships; chronic economic adversity and anxiety have become so normalized that practical consideration of other economic models appear to be chimerical.

The strategy of the obscenely wealthy is simple: control the media, the courts, and political system with scads of resources. Just read the Republican Party’s Project 2025. It’s a blueprint to implement autocratic political constructs based on a neoliberal economic model devoid of our historical democratic values.

That model maintains the power and privilege of U.S. oligarchs while scapegoating minorities, undocumented immigrants, labor unions, government programs and LGBT people. It is a cynical distraction to hoodwink working people while padding their bank accounts and financial portfolios.

James Madison, a founder warned us in Federalist 10 about powerful factions that could dominate civil society. U.S. oligarchs fit that description.

The message that our economic model is the only realistic choice is constantly pounded into our heads or subtly whispered by the corporate media and both major political parties.

Progressives must work to elect candidates whose agenda is to advocate for all working people. It must work in tandem with peaceful mass movements.

This can result in serious political reform to begin to break the cadaverous economic grip of U.S. oligarchs on our political system.

The United Nations Security Council has finally passed a cease-fire resolution for Gaza, from which the U.S. abstained, so it was passed by the other 14 members. Although UNSC resolutions are binding, and countries like Iraq and Iran have been severely punished for disobeying them, the U.S. is running interference for the Netanyahu government by insisting that the resolution is “non-binding.”

Israel’s government was so furious at President Joe Biden for abstaining rather than vetoing the resolution that it has canceled a planned trip to Washington. But this intransigence in the face of international law and international institutions could end up hurting Israel severely. Since the state is already under scrutiny for committing genocide by the International Court of Justice, its truculence and defiance of the UNSC can only harm its case.

In a further blow to Israeli policy, Francesca Albanese, the special papporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 of the U.N. Human Rights Council, issued a report Monday entitled Anatomy of a Genocide.

One of the problems for the Israeli government’s attempts to defend itself against charges of genocide is how openly and volubly Netanyahu and his cronies have proclaimed their intentions and the racist bases for them.

Albanese, an attorney with degrees from Pisa and SOAS in London, has worked for a decade with the U.N. on human rights law. She is also at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University as an affiliate scholar.

Her report begins, “After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza.” She points out that the Israeli military has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, included over 13,000 children, and has wounded 71,000. She says that not only has 80% of the population been made refugees but 70% of the areas where people lived have been destroyed. So they have no place to return to. Corpses have decayed “in homes, in the street, or under the rubble.”

The report concludes that Israel’s policies in Gaza give “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”

The special rapporteur finds that Israeli authorities are misusing and distorting the international law governing the prosecution of war (jus in bello), disregarding their function in protecting innocent civilian noncombatants, “in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.” In other words, Israeli officials’ invocation of international humanitarian law is nothing more than a “camouflage.”

The special rapporteur argues that genocidal projects are inherent in settler-colonial states. She cites the mass killings of the Native Americans in the U.S., the First Nations in Australia, and the Herero in Namibia. Since the settler-colonial state covets the land and the resources of the native people, it has a motive for provoking the disintegration of the native people’s social institutions and very identity.

The report alleges, “Israel’s settler movement and leaders have framed Gaza as a territory to be ‘re-colonized’ and its population as invaders to be expelled. These unlawful claims are integral to the project of consolidating the ‘exclusive and unassailable right of the Jewish people’ on the land of ‘Greater Israel,’ as reaffirmed by Prime Minister Netanyahu in December 2022.”

One of the problems for the Israeli government’s attempts to defend itself against charges of genocide is how openly and volubly Netanyahu and his cronies have proclaimed their intentions and the racist bases for them.

Turning to the charges of genocide, the report notes that in just the first few months of the current Israeli campaign against Gaza, the Israeli army deployed

a) over 25,000 tons of explosives (equivalent to two nuclear bombs) on countless buildings

b) that these targets were chosen using Artificial Intelligence

c) that the Israeli military dropped 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs in “densely populated areas” and even on the “safe zones” declared by that very Israeli military.

d) The Israelis killed an average of 250 people a day in this period, including 100 children a day, destroying entire neighborhoods and necessary infrastructure.

Albanese points out that by early December, the Israeli government was alleging that it had killed “7,000 terrorists” in Gaza. But at that point only 5,000 adult males had been killed, so it is clear that the Israeli authorities considered all of them terrorists.

In a compelling bit of reasoning, she points out that “this is indicative of an intent to indiscriminately target members of the protected group, assimilating them to active fighter status by default.” That is, the Israeli government’s triumphalist statistics are themselves genocidal.

She estimates moreover that 10 children are dying of acute malnutrition daily, that over 500,000 Palestinians could die from malnutrition and poor health conditions in 2024.

So that’s the first element of genocide, “killing members of the group.”

The report then goes down the other criteria for genocide. “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group?” Check. This includes depriving them of needed medicines and inflicting psychological harm.

Then there is “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Check.

Here she mentions the destruction of 77% of healthcare facilities, 68% of telcoms, almost 50% of roads, and 60% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, all the universities, 60% of schools, etc.

What about “genocidal intent”? Check.

The Israeli officials have made this one a no-brainer. Albanese writes:

In the latest Gaza assault, direct evidence of genocidal intent is uniquely present. Vitriolic genocidal rhetoric has painted the whole population as the enemy to be eliminated and forcibly displaced. High-ranking Israeli officials with command authority have issued harrowing public statements evincing genocidal intent, including as follows: (a) President Isaac Herzog stated that “an entire nation out there… is responsible” for the 7 October attack, and that Israel would “break their backbone”; (b) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Palestinians as “Amalek” and “monsters.” The Amalek reference is to a biblical passage in which God commands Saul, “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (c) Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals,” and announced “full offense” on Gaza, having “released all the restraints…”

Finally, the Israeli military has subverted basic principles of international humanitarian law, which makes a key distinction between combatants and noncombatants. In essence, Israel’s government has treated all Palestinians in Gaza as combatants. Moreover, the Israeli military has declared all civilian institutions to be Hamas “power centers,” obliterating the distinction between hospitals and military garrisons. While such “objects” can be legitimate targets if they are used by the enemy for military purposes, they are only targets while they are so being used. Israel’s army is treating them as legitimate targets if they ever were or potentially might be used by Hamas. It is thus ignoring the distinction between military and civilian objects.

In 2015, Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Leon Lederman had to sell off his Nobel Prize to pay his medical bills, following a diagnosis of dementia. His medal ended up selling for $765,000.

In the debate about single-payer healthcare, there is a lot of anxiety around the question of “how do we pay for it?” The emphasis is always on a big, scary number: $650 billion annually, $30 trillion over 10 years, etc. This is a relatively common tactic of private interest groups that oppose new legislation—fear-mongering about costs, and implying such-and-such policy will bankrupt the country.

Actually, it’s been demonstrated a number of times that single-payer healthcare would save money. Taxes would go up, but private healthcare premiums would be eliminated, so the average American would pay substantially less, it would just be in the form of a tax, instead of a premium.

Instead of viewing healthcare as simply a matter of pricing, we should recognize that we are needlessly losing lives every day by keeping things the way they are.

This is supported by findings from our own government. In 2021, the Congressional Budget Office did a study on the potential economic impacts of Medicare For All, and found that we could have universal coverage with no copays or deductibles, and overall healthcare spending would decrease. This is not a new discovery. It’s been understood for decades. As far back as 1991, the Government Accountability Office reported that if we adopted a Canadian-style system, “the savings in administrative costs alone would be more than enough to finance insurance coverage for the millions of Americans who are currently uninsured. There would be enough left over to permit a reduction, or possibly even the elimination, of copayments and deductibles.”

We don’t have to look far to see this in action. We can simply look to the rest of the world. In every other developed country on Earth, there is some form of single-payer, and those countries pay substantially less for healthcare. Health spending is the one area where America unquestionably leads the world. We have, by far, the most expensive system on Earth, with about twice the per-capita costs of other industrial nations.

But even the premise of this question about cost employs a one-sided framework. To get a full picture, we need to ask a second question: What does it cost not to have single-payer?

According to a 2020 study by Yale epidemiologists for The Lancet, around 68,000 people a year die in America because they don’t have access to healthcare. Simply put, we let large numbers of people die from illnesses that could be treated. No other rich country tolerates that kind of inequality. It’s basically unheard-of in places like the U.K. and Canada. In 2022, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) released a study estimating that the U.S. could have seen around 338,000 fewer deaths from Covid-19 if we’d had single-payer.

A second consideration that’s not included is medical bankruptcies. A 2009 study by The American Journal of Medicine found that 62% of bankruptcies in the U.S. are medical bankruptcies (roughly 500,000 annually). In 1981, that number was 8%. Healthcare costs have risen to the point that many Americans simply can’t afford health insurance, and many who can are underinsured. So people can have their savings wiped out because of a medical emergency, or a healthcare crisis in their family, without warning.

You almost never hear these factors (deaths from treatable diseases, medical bankruptcies) brought up in media discussions about healthcare reform. They’re effectively censored out of public debate. In reporting about Medicare For All, chances are you’ll only hear the price tag. As a consequence, we think of healthcare exclusively in terms of financial costs. This framework, which is used by most major outlets, encourages us to think of the status quo as, essentially, cost-free, and hides these external considerations in places that are easy to ignore. Instead of viewing healthcare as simply a matter of pricing, we should recognize that we are needlessly losing lives every day by keeping things the way they are. This gives us a more accurate picture.

There’s a way out of this. Healthcare could be established as a basic human right, the way it is in every other developed country, by replacing our for-profit system with a single-payer system, which would both dramatically reduce costs and save tens of thousands of lives per year. Our current way of doing things is inhumane and unsustainable, and it is essential that we transition to a system which prioritizes patient care over profit. The cost of not doing this is other people’s pain and lives.

What are the greatest needs of the moment? Progressives are most concerned about ending the genocide in Gaza and avoiding the threat that former President Donald Trump may return to the White House and shred democracy in the United States.

Since it is the Biden administration that has funded Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, some on the left see these two priorities pulling in opposite directions. However, while I agree with the sharp criticism of the Biden administration’s policy on Gaza, Trump offers no alternative. He showed no sympathy for the Palestinian plight while in office and none since the genocide began.

Activists raising their voices for an end to the genocide in Gaza have been putting pressure on the Biden administration. Many Jewish individuals and organizations joined in protest actions, including in acts of civil disobedience. Demonstrators, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, reject charges that criticism of Israel’s military assault of Gaza and the deaths of over 30,000 civilians is antisemitic.

Two historical examples hint at why centrism leads to failure while radical activism promotes basic change.

Adding weight to the demonstrators’ appeals, public opinion polls for the past few months show most people in the U.S. favor a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. Three months ago, the United Nations General Assembly voted by 153 to 10 for an “Immediate Humanitarian Cease-Fire in Gaza, Parties’ Compliance with International Law, Release of All Hostages.”

The campaign to end the genocide in Gaza has begun to affect electoral politics. I was among Massachusetts voters who entered the Democratic primary this month to vote for a slate of uncommitted delegates. In doing so, I joined about 9% of those voting in the state’s Democratic primary; we sought to send a message to President Joe Biden about the need for a cease-fire to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The percentage of Democratic primary voters choosing uncommitted delegates was 10% in Washington state, 13% in Michigan, 19% in Minnesota, and 29% in Hawaii. In taking this course, we followed the lead of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and of organizations like Massachusetts Peace Action (MPA), of which I’m a member, and Democratic Socialists of America.

Although Biden has clinched the nomination, Michigan campaign organizer Layla Elabed declared: “We aren’t backing down until we achieve a permanent cease-fire. Voting uncommitted in a democratic primary election is voters’ way to tell Biden to listen to us.”

In response to the demonstrations, the primary votes, and public opinion, the Biden administration and leading Democrats have begun to shift their approach. Peace advocates remain dissatisfied that the response is inadequate, but the steps take so far are not insignificant. They include a call by Biden for an immediate cease-fire, arrangement for the delivery of some necessities to the people of Gaza, a call by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for elections in Israel to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the drafting of a U.N. Security Council cease-fire resolution last week, and the decision to abstain from rather than veto another U.N. Security Council cease-fire resolution that passed on Monday. Continued pressure is needed to end the genocide and to secure full Palestinian rights. As Israel’s chief arms supplier and political supporter, the U.S. has the power to compel Israel to end its genocidal assault on the people of Gaza.

Two other foreign and defense policy issues are high on the list of concerns of peace advocates. Most voters and peace groups want the Biden administration to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine War; left-progressive activists favor a substantial cut in military spending. Not only peace groups like MPA, Code Pink, Peace Action, and Veterans for Peace, but organizations like the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft have emphasized the need for the U.S. to shift from conducting endless war to diplomacy and reducing the risk of nuclear war.

Foreign policies often play an important role in U.S. elections, but voters generally give more attention to domestic issues. How can progressives help mobilize a decisive vote for far-reaching change at home and abroad? Instead of pursuing the chimera of bipartisanship with a far-right and Trumpist Republican Party, advocates of change need to pursue a radical agenda to make significant improvements in the lives of working people.

Two historical examples hint at why centrism leads to failure while radical activism promotes basic change.

Centrism by the Democratic Party standard-bearer did not begin with former President Bill Clinton. Midway through his single term, former President Jimmy Carter saw that former President Ronald Reagan was his likely opponent and moved to the right to fend off the conservative challenge. Carter abandoned détente, cancelled U.S. participation in the Moscow Olympics, and renewed registration for the draft. Domestically, he shifted spending from social programs to the military, withdrew a proposal for national health insurance, and failed to conduct an effective campaign to support the Labor Law Reform bill.

The Iran hostage crisis and high unemployment and inflation certainly contributed to Carter’s defeat. The rightward policy shifts and low turnout were also factors. Low-income voters were less motivated to go to the polls than usual. Reagan prevailed in the popular vote by 51-41% (with 7% for John Anderson). Polling results showed that non-voters (almost half the eligible voters) preferred Carter over Reagan. In a post-election New York Times-CBS poll, certainly a conservative moment, 58% of non-voters and 51% of voters agreed “that the country needed more radical change than was possible through the ballot box.”

The second example is of former President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection campaign. The incumbent responded aggressively to Republican attacks and argued for continuing the New Deal path. Although unemployment remained high, the New Deal had stimulated a significant degree of recovery from the low point of the depression, provided relief and government employment to millions of Americans, and instituted substantial social and regulatory reforms, most important the establishment of Social Security and a labor relations system designed to assist workers in establishing unions and winning collective bargaining rights.

Am I exaggerating when I associate Roosevelt with radical activism? The Democrat worked with independent left-of-center political parties and with the leaders of the labor movement. He campaigned as a champion of workers, farmers, and the unemployed and effectively communicated his caring philosophy in person and on the radio.

What was at stake in the 1932 presidential election, Roosevelt argued in his final 1936 campaign speech, was “the restoration of American democracy.” He made clear that his concept of democracy was about majority rule, or people’s power. He maintained that in 1932 “the American people were in a mood to win” and “did win.” The issue in 1936 is “the preservation of their victory,” not going back to rule by the economic royalists.

In the most famous sentences of that Madison Square Garden address, Roosevelt personalized the struggle. He said that the monopoly forces were “united against one candidate” as never before. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” The president declared, “I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match” and then, in the most controversial passage, “I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.” The Madison Square Garden crowd was thrilled by that declaration while moderate advisers were worried by it and Republicans attacked him for wanting to be dictator.

Is wanting to limit the power of the upper 1% to control our government dictatorial? How else are we going to achieve the radical changes that we need?

Some on the left view voting for one of the two major parties as a trap that distracts from the need to change our social system. Howard Zinn once commented that voting takes “two minutes,” and thus for activists it’s only a small part of what one needs to do to fight for a more just society. “But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, as concerned citizens, should be spent in educating, agitating, and organizing in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools.”

For those on the left who think that voting in general, or in the 2024 election in particular, is important, I suggest our work for a fundamental change in foreign policy toward peace be combined with advocacy for sweeping economic and social policies in the domestic arena.

Among the priorities that the new Congress and the new administration should enact are two structural reforms:

1. End the Senate filibuster. When the new Senate convenes in January 2025, a simple majority of members can do so. Right now, Republican senators represent about 155.5 million people while Democratic senators represent 201 million people. It would take a constitutional amendment to change the undemocratic character of the Senate, something difficult to achieve. We can, however, demand that the stranglehold that 41 senators have on legislation supported by the House of Representatives and the public be ended. Is there a risk that the Republicans may one day regain a majority of both houses and that the Democrats will regret ending the filibuster? The Democrats failure to eliminate the filibuster in 2025 will not ensure that Republicans will not do so later. Ending this obstacle to fundamental reform is the only way to move forward with needed legislation and to keep faith with the American people.
2. Expansion of the Supreme Court so that basic rights are protected and the power of corporations and the rich to control the government is strictly regulated. The packing of the court with far-right conservatives can only be ended by adding more members to the court. Congress has the power to establish regulations for the courts, including changing the number of members of the Supreme Court.

The adoption of these structural reforms will enable the Congress to break the gridlock in our polarized politics, enact fundamental legislation in the interest of working people, and prevent the Supreme Court from undoing these democratic achievements and continuing to undermine democratic rights.

Key legislative goals that the Congress should move ahead on include:

1. A Medicare for All program. This is a long overdue expansion of the popular program, supported by the public.
2. As part of basic healthcare, guaranteed access to reproductive services including contraception and abortion.
3. Expanded federal protection of workers’ rights to join unions and bargain collectively. A majority of both the House and the Senate favored labor law reform at several times in the past. Ending the filibuster can lead to enactment of such legislation. Most workers would like to join a union, but employer threats and punishments have prevented workers from gaining the say in their work lives that they seek. A labor law reform bill should return the country to the promise of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act that the federal government encourages “the practice and procedure of collective bargaining” and protects “the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.”
4. A restored Voting Rights Act and Equal Marriage Rights Act.
5. Expanded funding for public quality education from pre-kindergarten to university so that teachers are supported and students are funded and can reach their potential. President Biden has taken steps in this direction by reducing some of the burden of student debt.
6. We need to tackle homelessness and the high cost of housing for working people, especially low-income families. We need at least 7 million new housing units, which the federal government can do by building public housing. In addition, the Congress should adopt a version of the New York state law, the Housing Our Neighbors with Dignity Act, so that the homeless and “housing providers, and cities... are able to convert distressed buildings into permanent homes for the homeless.”
7. We need to fully restore the child tax credit enacted as part of the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan in 2021 and enact the high quality federally funded child care program adopted by Congress but vetoed by President Richard Nixon in 1971.
8. The long-term interests of the people of the U.S. and the planet demand the U.S. take seriously commitments made under the Paris agreement and go further to get to net zero emissions. The United Nations points out that “getting to net zero requires all governments—first and foremost the biggest emitters—to significantly strengthen their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and take bold, immediate steps towards reducing emissions now.”
9. A dramatic increase in the tax rates on the rich and the corporations and a dramatic reduction in the military budget to fund social needs at home and humanitarian and economic aid to the needy of other countries through the United Nations.

Biden has proposed increasing the corporate tax rate to 28%, below the level of 35% it was before the Trump tax cuts reduced it to 21%. The highest corporate tax rate during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations was 52%. From 1987 to 1986 the rate dropped to 46%. It did not drop below 40% until 1988. Increasing the corporate tax rate to the level of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years would provide far greater funds for needed infrastructure projects and social programs and begin to reduce the huge gap between the richest 10% and the rest of the population.

The administration’s budget proposal calls for increasing the highest individual income tax rate from 37% to 39.6%. The latter rate was the one established in Clinton’s 1993 budget and allowed for expansion of the earned income tax credit. Given the need to reduce inequality and for infrastructure development, housing, health, education, and environmental protection, returning to the higher tax rates of the past can be justified. The highest individual tax rate was 50% from 1982 through 1986, 70% from 1971 through 1980, 91% from 1954 through 1963, and 94% in 1944 and 1945. There is far more wealth and high incomes at the top than ever before. We should think big and demand the same from our representatives.

To overcome the twin disasters of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the possible return of Trump to the White House requires a multi-tactic struggle for peace, social justice, and meeting the needs of the working people of the U.S. and the planet. We have a world to win.

Five and half months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza with more than 32,000 Palestinians already killed, six weeks after the International Court of Justice found Israel plausibly committing genocide and ordered it to stop, and after four earlier tries, the UN Security Council on Monday finally passed a resolution submitted by all ten elected members aiming to stop the slaughter. The resolution has lots of weaknesses and shows the effects of U.S. pressure—but it demands an end to the bombing and a massive influx of food and medicine. And that means the possibility of saving lives.

The resolution demanded an immediate ceasefire leading to a lasting and sustainable ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and compliance with international law in treatment of all those detained. The Council also demanded “the lifting of all barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance at scale,” reminding the world of the need for massive expansion of that aid and for protection of Palestinian civilians across the entire Gaza Strip.

The resolution’s passage was uncertain until the very last moment. An hour before the vote, U.S. diplomats won a final concession—replacing the original demand for a “permanent” ceasefire” to the squishier, less clear “lasting.” And there are significant other weaknesses in the resolution.

When U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield claimed that the Council vote was “nonbinding,” she was setting the stage for the U.S. government to violate the UN Charter by refusing to be bound by the resolution’s terms.

The most important flaw in the Council’s text is that it calls for a ceasefire only “for the month of Ramadan.” This most important of Muslim holidays began on March 11, so the demand for a ceasefire is only for about two weeks. And while it does demand that the immediate halt lead to a lasting ceasefire, two weeks is still a much too-short time.

Other problems reflect deliberate obfuscation of language. The demand that all parties treat “all persons they detain” in compliance with international law clearly refers to the thousands of Palestinian detainees Israel is holding, many in administration detention without even the pretense of legitimate legal procedures, whom international law requires to be immediately released. Their detention violates a host of those laws, but by not naming them directly, diplomatic wrangling always threatens to deny them their rights.

And in the paragraph focusing on the catastrophic humanitarian situation across Gaza, the Council’s demand for “lifting all barriers to provision of humanitarian aid at scale” should be a clear and straightforward message to Israel that it must open the gates, end its rejection of goods on the spurious grounds of potential “dual use,” replace its deliberately complex and time-consuming inspection processes and more. But that reference to “lifting all barriers” is hidden in a long sentence within a reference to an earlier resolution. The first part of the sentence merely “emphasizes” the need for more humanitarian aid and protection for Palestinian civilians. And in UN diplo-speak, especially in the Security Council that actually has the right to enforce its resolutions, “emphasizing” something ain’t even close to “demanding” that it happen.

Israel was still not pleased, of course. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately announced his delegation, expected in Washington tomorrow to discuss Tel Aviv’s planned escalation against Rafah, will stay home instead.

But even if the resolution is not all it should be, its passage (14 in favor, the U.S. abstained) still represents a powerful global rejection of the U.S.-backed Israeli assault against Palestinians in Gaza, and an important expression of support for the South African-led intervention at the International Court of Justice designed to prevent or stop Israeli genocide and to hold Israel accountable for its crimes. Importantly, and despite U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s false claim following the vote, all decisions of the Council, as stated in Article 25 of the UN Charter, are binding on Member States.

That puts a big obligation on the U.S. and global movements for ceasefire, massive escalation of humanitarian aid, and resumption of funding UNRWA. Left to its own devices, the Council will almost never move to enforce its own decisions. That responsibility, that obligation, lies with our movements—and, in the UN context, with the General Assembly. The legacy of the South Africa anti-apartheid movement, especially through the 1970s and 80s, and into the early 1990s, shows that model. The U.S. and Britain over and over again vetoed resolutions in the Security Council for sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Over and over again the General Assembly passed the resolutions—for banking, trade, and other sanctions, for arms embargoes and much more. Eventually, public pressure against Washington and London forced a pull-back, and eventually, reluctantly and grudgingly, those governments gave in, stopped vetoing the Council resolutions and started abiding by the calls of the Assembly. It all played a huge role in ending South African apartheid.

Left to its own devices, the Council will almost never move to enforce its own decisions. That responsibility, that obligation, lies with our movements—and, in the UN context, with the General Assembly.

When U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield claimed that the Council vote was “nonbinding,” she was setting the stage for the U.S. government to violate the UN Charter by refusing to be bound by the resolution’s terms. But enforcement of Council decisions can take shape in many forms—protest movements around the world can demand their governments move to pressure Israel to abide by the Council’s demands. The General Assembly can urge Member States to impose some of those same sanctions it used so successfully against apartheid South Africa. Maybe the Assembly and global movements together can escalate the call urging boycotts of Israeli products, divestment from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation or apartheid, and sanctions on banking transactions or trade, and the imposition of arms embargoes.

First things, of course, an immediate ceasefire, release of hostages and Palestinian detainees, and a flood of emergency humanitarian aid. Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll see this Security Council resolution lead to the United Nations joining the global BDS movement. It’s never too late.

Back in 1928, the bold and brassy mobster Al Capone spent $40,000—about $851,000 in today’s dollars—on “a stately Spanish Colonial-style villa” that sat on an isle right off Miami’s coast.

Local historic preservationists would end up cherishing that villa for years after Capone’s 1947 passing. They apparently didn’t cherish it enough. The property’s current corporate owner demolished Capone’s villa last summer and now has the empty lot on sale for $23.9 million.

Meanwhile, in nearby Miami Beach, deep pockets are buzzing about a $125-million “two duplex penthouse” that’s going to be topping a brand-new 15-story luxury tower. The co-developer on the project expects no problems selling off his tower’s 30 opulent abodes. And why should he? Luxury dwellings are selling quite nicely in America’s most fashionable rich people-friendly neighborhoods.

Proposals to either enact or expand mansion taxes have so far passed into law a remarkable 86% of the times they’ve appeared on local ballots.

Greater Miami—in 2023’s last quarter alone—saw its typical luxury-home sale price jump nearly 9% over the year before. In the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, last-quarter prices for luxury dwellings in 2023 rose 9.5% over 2022. The sellers of those dwellings pocketed a median $4,559,500 after having their homes on the market for just 15 days.

In New York City, luxury realtors are flashing even broader smiles. One Manhattan property sold for $75 million in 2023’s last quarter, with another topping $65 million and still another grabbing close to $50 million. Out west, Colorado’s Aspen registered two last-quarter sales in the nation’s top 10, one at $60 million and another at a mere $40 mil.

What do deep pockets spend their time doing once they’ve closed on one of these super deals? They start concentrating, The Wall Street Journal reports, on their closets. Today’s rich are hiring “closet designers” and then throwing “closet reveal” parties to share their favorite new storage spots with friends and family. One elite closet designer, Design Galleria CEO Matthew Quinn, has collected over $1 million “for a two-story closet” that features “both an elevator and a spray-tan booth.”

An outrageous display of out-of-control conspicuous consumption? Sure. But the proud owner of that manse with the two-story closet also figures to get that million-plus back—and then some—when that luxury abode goes back on the market. The demand for housing fit for billionaires is simply exploding. Four decades ago, the United States hosted just 13 billionaires. Now we have some 735.

Fabulous mansions, in other words, figure to be fetching top dollar deep into the foreseeable future. Could these sales possibly have any redeeming social value for the rest of us? A growing corps of progressive local lawmakers believe they most certainly could.

Some 17 local governments, the Washington, D.C.-based Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) details in a just-released report, are now levying a “mansion tax” on the sale of high-end residential properties. Most all of these levies have gone into effect since 2018.

The mansion sale levies enacted so far, ITEP researchers calculate, are currently raising “nearly $3 billion” in annual revenue. Big cities are collecting the bulk of that revenue. In New York, home to the original modern mansion tax, luxury home sales over $25 million face a special 4.58% tax. San Francisco’s top tax rate on over $25-million transactions sits at 6%.

Other cities are taxing mansion sales at more modest levels. The city in the heart of Silicon Valley, San Jose, subjects mansion sales over $10 million to a 1.5% tax.

Still other cities are looking overseas to nations like Denmark for their mansion tax inspiration. Local lawmakers in the District of Columbia, for instance, are considering a higher “new marginal tax bracket on homes worth more than $2 million.” Across most of the United States today, by contrast, “flat-rate” property taxes currently rule. The predictable result: Low- and middle-income homeowners pay a higher share of their income in property taxes than America’s most affluent.

Moves to change that reality, the new Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy Local Mansion Taxes report suggests, would be enormously popular. Proposals to either enact or expand mansion taxes have so far passed into law a remarkable 86% of the times they’ve appeared on local ballots.

But those appearances remain relatively rare. That could change. You could help change it. How best to begin that change effort? How about emailing your favorite local lawmakers a copy of ITEP’s fascinating new deep dive into what could become our mansion tax future.

Guys in white shirts and ties in Washington and their counterparts in Israel are sitting around tables making plans for what they want to see after Israel ends its genocidal assault on Gaza (if they ever end it). From what I’ve read, their plans are either cruelly insensitive or downright delusional because they fail to consider that at issue here isn’t who runs what and how it will be run. What must be understood is that the wounds inflicted by this war will last and will define reality for a generation or more.

These are the personal, not the political, consequences of this war. The loss and trauma inflicted in so many ways on millions of Palestinian victims are never factored into the calculations by the Israelis or their enablers in Washington. To them Palestinians have always been mere pawns on a chessboard, objects to be moved or cast off, at will.

In a real sense, herein lies the root of the entire conflict. From the beginning, neither the British nor the early Zionist leaders saw the indigenous Arab population as full human beings. When learning of the British plans to secure a Mandate and turn it over to the Zionist movement for a Jewish colony in Palestine, the Americans sent a team to survey the opinions of the Arabs. What they found was a near total Arab rejection of both the Mandate and the Zionist enterprise. On hearing of the results, the British Lord Balfour was quoted saying, “In Palestine, we do not propose…consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is…of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

The founders of the Zionist movement shared this sentiment. At first, they said they sought “a land without a people…for a people without a land.” When they found natives there, Herzl wrote that they would be used to clear the area exterminating any dangerous animals, and then evacuated to other lands.

These early Zionists wrote that the Jewish people were “more industrious and more able than the average European, not to speak at all of the inert Asiatic and African.” And they believed that the colony they would build would be a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”

This deeply racist mindset found its best expression in the 1960 film “The Exodus” that transposed the American “cowboys and Indians” storyline onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—with Israelis as pioneers seeking freedom for themselves and their families, facing hordes of savages who sought only to kill them. The conflict was thus reduced to “Israeli humanity versus the Palestinian problem.” And what was needed was a way to defeat, subdue, or solve the “problem” so that Israeli humanity could realize their dreams.

This remains the thinking of too many policymakers in Washington. As they grieved with the Israelis over the trauma of October 7th, they could see the Israelis as real people with whom they identified and for whom they mourned, while Palestinians remained an abstraction receiving little sympathy. This is why it has taken months for any real expressions of compassion for tens of thousands of Palestinians dead and the attendant devastation of Palestinian homes and cities.

Early in this war, I spoke with a senior White House official. After he expressed his pain at the horrors of October 7th, I told him that I understood and asked him to also consider Palestinian trauma. He angrily dismissed my appeal as “whataboutism,” suggesting that my intent was to justify or diminish the suffering of Israelis. I reminded him that it wasn’t either Palestinian suffering or Israeli suffering. It was both.

Five months later, with 32,000 dead Palestinians and Gaza on the brink of famine, attention is finally being paid by the administration. But it’s too little and too late.

Despite the White House focus on the humanitarian crisis—lack of food, water, medicine, and housing—there is still no appreciation for the deeper toll inflicted on Palestinian lives. If they recognized the true toll, they wouldn’t be dropping boxed lunches from the sky or building a pier, nor thinking that a reformed Palestinian Authority doing Israel’s dirty work was an acceptable “day after” scenario.

If they saw Palestinians as equal human beings, they would tell the Israelis to stop bombing. They would remove the block on UNWRA. They would support a UN resolution that would send international forces into Gaza and the West Bank, ending the illegal Israeli occupation of both. And they would set up an international relief and reconstruction effort not only to rebuild Gaza, but also to send in teams of doctors to address the physical and psychological wounds of this war. They would, in other words, demonstrate the sense of urgency, compassion, and care that human beings deserve.

My recommendation to the guys in the white shirts and ties sitting around the tables in the White House is: “Before you start, think of how you would want your families treated if they have been subjected to the horrors of the past five months. Think of what they would need so that their wounds can heal and not fester. The losses they’ve endured can’t be forgotten, nor can the trauma they’ve experienced be erased. How would you want your families to be treated? If you are able to do that, then proceed. If you can’t, then step aside and find someone who can.”

I’ve been describing this world of ours, such as it is, for almost 23 years at TomDispatch. I’ve written my way through three-and-a-half presidencies — god save us, it could be four in November! I’ve viewed from a grave (and I mean that word!) distance America’s endlessly disastrous wars of this century. I’ve watched the latest military budget hit almost $900 billion, undoubtedly on its way toward a cool trillion in the years to come, while years ago the whole “national security” budget (though “insecurity” would be a better word) soared to well over the trillion-dollar mark.

I’ve lived my whole life in an imperial power. Once, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was even “the lone superpower,” the last great power on planet Earth, or so its leaders believed. I then watched how, in a world without great-power dangers, it continued to invest ever more of our tax dollars in our military. A “peace dividend“? Who needed that? And yet, in the decades that followed, by far the most expensive military on planet Earth couldn’t manage to win a single war, no less its Global War on Terror. In fact, in this century, while fighting vain or losing conflicts across significant parts of the planet, it slowly but all too obviously began to go down the tubes, or perhaps I mean (if you don’t mind a few mixed metaphors) come apart at the seams?

And it never seems to end, does it? Imagine that 32 years after the U.S. became the last superpower on Planet Earth, in a devastating kind of political chaos, this country might indeed reelect a man who imagines himself running a future American “dictatorship” — his very word for it! — even if, publicly at least, just for a single day.

And yes, in 2024, as chaos blooms on the American political scene, the world itself continues to be remarkably at war — think of “war,” in fact, as humanity’s middle name — in both Ukraine and Gaza (with offshoots in Lebanon and Yemen). Meanwhile, this country’s now 22-year-old war on terror straggles on in its own devastating fashion, with threats of worse to come in plain sight.

After all, 88 years after two atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, nukes seem to be making a comeback (not that they were ever truly gone, of course). Thank you, Kim and Vlad! I’m thinking of how North Korean leader Kim Jong-un implicitly threatened to nuke his nonnuclear southern neighbor recently. But also, far more significantly how, in his own version of a State of the Union address to his people, Russian President Vladimir Putin very publicly threatened to employ nukes from his country’s vast arsenal (assumedly “tactical” ones, some of which are more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II), should any European countries — think France — send their troops into Ukraine.

And don’t forget that, amid all of this, my own country’s military, eternally hiking its “defense” budget, continues to prepare in a big-time fashion for a future war with — yes — China! Of course, that country is, in turn, rushing to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal and the rest of its military machine as well. Only recently, for instance, the U.S. and Japan held joint military maneuvers that, as they openly indicated for the first time, were aimed at preparing for just such a future conflict with China and you can’t get much more obvious than that.

Another World War?

Oh, and when it comes to war, I haven’t even mentioned, for instance, the devastating civil war in Sudan that has nothing to do with any of the major powers. Yes, we humans just can’t seem to stop making war while, to the tune of untold trillions of dollars globally, preparing for ever more of it. And the truly strange thing is this: it seems to matter not at all that the very world on which humanity has done so forever and a day is now itself being unsettled in a devastating way that no military of any sort, armed in any fashion, will ever be able to deal with.

Let’s admit it: we humans have always had a deep urge to make war. Of course, logically speaking, we shouldn’t continue to do so, and not just for all the obvious reasons but because we’re on a planet that can’t take it anymore. (Yes, making war or simply preparing for it means putting staggering amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and so, quite literally, making war on the planet itself.) But — as both history and the present moment seem to indicate all too decisively — we just can’t stop ourselves.

In the process, while hardly noticing, it seems as if we’ve become ever more intent on conducting a global war on this planet itself. Our weapons in that war — and in their own long-term fashion, they’re likely to prove no less devastating than nuclear arms — have been fossil fuels. I’m thinking, of course, of coal, oil, and natural gas and the greenhouse gases that drilling for them and the use of them emit in staggering quantities even in what passes for peacetime.

In the previous century, of course, there were two devastating “world” wars, World War I and World War II. They were global events that, in total, killed more than a hundred million of us and devastated parts of the planet. But here’s the truly strange thing: while local and regional wars continue in this century in a striking fashion, few consider the way we’re loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane while, in the process, heating this planet disastrously as a new kind of world war. Think of climate change, in fact, as a kind of slow-motion World War III. After all, it couldn’t be more global or, in the end, more destructive than a world war of the worst sort.

And unlike the present wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which, even thousands of miles away, continue to be headline-making events, the war on this planet normally gets surprisingly little attention in much of the media. In fact, in 2023, a year that set striking global heat records month by month from June to December and was also the hottest year ever recorded, the major TV news programs of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox actually cut their coverage of global warming significantly, according to Media Matters for America.

“If I Don’t Get Elected, It’s Going to Be a Blood Bath”

I live in New York City which, like much of the rest of the planet, set a heat record for 2023. In addition, the winter we just passed through was a record one for warmth. And I began writing this piece on a set of days in early March when the temperature in my city also hit records in the mid-60s, and when, on March 14th (not April 14th, May 14th, or even June 14th), it clocked 70-plus degrees. I was walking outside that afternoon with my shirtsleeves rolled up, my sweater in my backpack, and my spring jacket tied around my waist, feeling uncomfortably hot in my blue jeans even on the shadier side of the street.

And yes, if, as my wife and I did recently, you were to walk down to the park near where we live, you’d see that the daffodils are already blooming wildly as are other flowers, while the first trees are budding, including a fantastic all-purple one that’s burst out fully, all of this in a fashion that might once have seemed normal sometime in April. And yes, some of what I’m describing is certainly quite beautiful in the short run, but under it lies an increasingly grim reality when it comes to extreme (and extremely hot) weather.

While I was working on this piece, the largest Texas fires ever (yes, ever!), continued to burn, evidently barely contained, with far more than a million acres of that state’s panhandle already fried to a crisp. Oh, and those record-setting Canadian forest fires that scorched tens of millions of acres of that country, while turning distant U.S. cities like New York into smoke hells last June have, it turns out, festered underground all winter as “zombie fires.” And they may burst out again in an even more devastating fashion this spring or summer. In fact, in 2023, from Hawaii to Chile to Europe, there were record wildfires of all sorts on our increasingly over-heated planet. And far worse is yet to come, something you could undoubtedly say as well about more intense flooding, more violent storms, and so on.

We are, in other words, increasingly on a different planet, though you would hardly know it amid the madness of our moment. I mean, imagine this: Russia, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, clearly doesn’t consider climate change a significant issue, is on pace to achieve an oil-drilling record for the second year in a row. China, despite installing far more green power than any other country, has also been using more coal than all other nations combined, and set global records for building new coal-fired power plants.

Meanwhile, the third “great” power on this planet, despite having a president dedicated to doing something about climate change, is still the largest exporter of natural gas around and continues to produce oil at a distinctly record pace.

And don’t forget the five giant fossil-fuel companies, BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies, which in 2023 produced oil, made profits, and rewarded shareholders at — yes, you guessed it! — a record pace, while the major petrostates of our world are still, according to the Guardian, “planning expansions that would blow the planet’s carbon budget twice over.”

In sum, then, this world of ours only grows more dangerous by the year. And I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence, have I? As Michael Klare has written in an analysis for the Arms Control Association, the dangers of AI and other emerging military technologies are likely to “expand into the nuclear realm by running up the escalation ladder or by blurring the distinction between a conventional and nuclear attack.”

In other words, human war-making could become both more inhuman and worse at the same time. Now, add just one more factor into the global equation. America’s European and Asian allies see U.S. leadership, dominant since 1945, experiencing a potentially epoch-ending, terminal failure, as the global Pax Americana (that had all too little to do with “peace”) is crumbling — or do I mean overheating?

What they see, in fact, is two elderly men locked in an ever more destructive, inward-looking electoral knife fight, with one of them warning ominously that “if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath… for the country.” And if he isn’t victorious, here’s his further prediction: “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.” Of course, were he to be victorious the same could be true, especially since he’s promised from his first day in office to “drill, drill, drill,” which, at this point in our history, is, by definition, to declare war on this planet!

Unfortunately, Donald Trump isn’t alone. All too sadly, we humans clearly have trouble focusing on the world we actually inhabit. We’d prefer to fight wars instead. Consider that the definition not just of imperial decline, but of decline period in the age of climate change.

And yet, it’s barely news.

Last week, Variety reported that “more than 1,000 Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals have signed an open letter denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ Oscar speech.” The angry letter is a tight script for a real-life drama of defending Israel as it continues to methodically kill civilians no less precious than the signers’ own loved ones.

A few ethical words from Glazer while accepting his award provoked outrage. He spoke of wanting to refute “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,” and he followed with a vital question: “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Those words were too much for the letter’s signers, who included many of Hollywood’s powerful producers, directors and agents. For starters, they accused Glazer (who is Jewish) of “drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”

Ironically, that accusation embodied what Glazer had confronted from the Academy Awards stage when he said that what’s crucial in the present is “not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’”

But the letter refused to look at what Israel is doing now as it bombs, kills, maims and starves Palestinian civilians in Gaza, where there are now 32,000 known dead and 74,000 injured. The letter’s moral vision only looked back at what the Third Reich did. Its signers endorsed the usual Zionist polemics—fitting neatly into Glazer’s description of “Jewishness and the Holocaust” being “hijacked by an occupation.”

The crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany against Jews are in no way exculpatory for the crimes against humanity now being committed by Israel.

The letter even denied that an occupation actually exists—objecting to “the use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years.” Somehow the Old Testament was presumed to be sufficient justification for the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, most of whose ancestors lived in what’s now Israel. The vast majority of 2.2 million people have been driven from their bombed-out homes in Gaza, with many now facing starvation due to blockage of food.

Israel’s extreme restrictions on food and other vital supplies are causing deaths from starvation and disease as well as enormous suffering. In early March, a panel of U.N. experts issued a statement that declared: “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.” (So much for the anti-Glazer letter’s claim that “Israel is not targeting civilians.”)

Last weekend, on Egypt’s border at the crossing to Rafah, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: "Here from this crossing, we see the heartbreak and heartlessness of it all. A long line of blocked relief trucks on one side of the gates, the long shadow of starvation on the other. That is more than tragic. It is a moral outrage."

But there is not the slightest hint of any such moral outrage in the letter signed by the more than 1,000 “creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals.” Instead, all the ire is directed at Glazer for pointing out that moral choices on matters of life and death are not merely consigned to the past. The crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany against Jews are in no way exculpatory for the crimes against humanity now being committed by Israel.

What Glazer said in scarcely one minute retains profound moral power that no distortions can hide. Continuity exists between the setting of “The Zone of Interest” eight decades ago and today’s realities as the United States supports Israel’s genocidal actions:

Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?

Much of the movie’s focus is on the lives of a man and a woman preoccupied with career, status and material well-being. Such preoccupations are hardly unfamiliar in the movie industry, where silence or support for the Gaza war are common among professionals—in contrast to Jonathan Glazer and others, Jewish or not, who have spoken out in his defense or for a ceasefire.

“What he was saying is so simple: that Jewishness, Jewish identity, Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust, the history of Jewish suffering, must not be used in the campaign as an excuse for a project of dehumanizing or slaughtering other people,” the playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner said in an interview with an Israeli newspaper days ago. He called Glazer’s statement from the Oscars stage “unimpeachable and irrefutable.”

Yet even without signing the open letter that denounced Glazer’s comments, some in the entertainment industry felt compelled to assert their backing for a country now engaged in a genocidal war. Notably, a spokesperson for the financier of Glazer’s film, Len Blavatnik, responded to the controversy by telling Variety that “his long-standing support of Israel is unwavering.”

How many more Palestinian civilians will Israel murder before such “support for Israel” begins to waver?

Although the slogan, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” has become one of the most controversial protest chants of the day , and numerous students, activists, and political figures, including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, have been penalized and/or censured for merely uttering the slogan, university leaderships and America’s political establishment have yet to seriously engage the policies that have made this slogan a rallying call for a new protest generation. Meanwhile, in January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement that Israel would retain full security control over the entire area west of Jordan did not as much illicit a single response from America’s political establishment.

Ultimately, no matter how we parse the protest slogan, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” or which interpretation we choose, one reality remains: Between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, not a single Palestinian is free. From Israel, to the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), to the Gaza Strip, Israel has put in place a complex system of laws, policies, and regulations that fundamentally curtail the rights and freedoms of nearly every Palestinian and Arab (approximately 7.4 million people) in this territory.

Even among its own citizens, Israel has established different tiers of citizenship, only according full citizenship to its Jewish population. Currently, 67 laws discriminate against the Palestinian and Arab citizens of Israel (Adalah), including laws that authorize Jewish-only screening committees to select land and home purchase applicants based on their “social suitability,” effectively denying applicants on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity. In 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed the Jewish-Nation State Law which reserves the right of national self-determination to its Jewish citizens only, and advocates for the development of Jewish settlement as a national value. Effectively, the law denies the collective rights of 2.1 million Palestinian and Arab Israelis- 21% of its population. The underfunding of Palestinian towns in Israel and employment discrimination against Palestinians and Arabs is commonplace.

Of the 46 Bedouin villages in Israel, home to a population of 200,000 to 250,000 (some of which identify as Bedouin and not necessarily Palestinian), only 11 are legally recognized by the state. “Unrecognized” villages are not included in state planning or government maps, receive almost no state services such as water, sewage electricity, or health and educational services, and cannot obtain building permits to accommodate natural population growth, and are under constant threat of state demolition orders. These communities are regularly at risk of being forcibly removed from their ancestral homes.

June 2024 will mark the 57-year anniversary of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and each year since 1967 has more or less marked a retrenchment of rights for Palestinians living under Israel’s military rule. Collective punishment measures, such as arbitrary and administrative detention (arrest without charge or trial), criminalization of peaceful protest and freedom of expression, curfews, use of tear gas, house demolitions, deportations, and routine disproportionate use of force are everyday features of Israel’s military occupation.

Although in the post-1993 Oslo era, the Palestinian Authority attained limited self-rule in the oPt, Israel has remained in control of airspace, borders, security, movement of people and goods, and registry of the population (source: 40% of terrHuman Rights Watch). Moreover, the legalization of nationalist symbols, such as the Palestinian flag and its colors, and more open political affiliation with the PLO was accompanied by a new crippling system of movement restrictions throughout the territory. In 1993, Israel put in place the first permanent military checkpoint separating Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank and imposed a general closure with checkpoints over the Gaza Strip. As of early 2023, there were approximately 645 such movement obstacles in the West Bank, which included 77 full-time staffed checkpoints, 139 occasionally staffed checkpoints, 304 roadblocks, and 73 earth walls (source: UNOCHA). These movement restrictions severely prevent or restrict access to services, main roads, urban centers, and agricultural areas, and have in short devastated the Palestinian economy.

More than 750,000 Jewish Israeli settlers now live in the West Bank. These settlement zones constitute approximately 40% of the territory to which Palestinians have no or minimal access (source: B’Tselem). Israeli Jewish settlers have preferential treatment in every aspect of life from access to natural resources, economic privileges, freedom of movement, to guaranteed military protection and although the settlers are subject to Israel’s civil laws, Palestinians are subject to Israel’s military laws.

After Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem in 1980, approximately 372,000 Jerusalem Palestinians became non-citizen permanent residents of Israel. Along with permanent residency status, Israel granted them access to state health insurance and state services, and the right to vote in municipal elections, and unlike Palestinians in the rest of the oPt, they can travel freely throughout the territory. As Israel’s non-citizen permanent residents, however, the Palestinians of Jerusalem are not allowed to vote in national Israeli elections (and more recently Israel decided that they cannot vote in Palestinian national elections as well). The municipality routinely under serves the Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem, resulting in insufficient educational facilities and services and subpar infrastructure, and denies building permits to these communities. The movement restrictions have cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, severing critical organic economic ties, again devastating the economy of Arab East Jerusalem.

Jerusalem Palestinians are required to regularly prove that their “center of life,” or primary residency, is in Jerusalem. Failure to confirm continuous residency leads to the revocation of residency status. Since 1967, Israel has revoked the residency and forcibly displaced more than 14,000 Jerusalem Palestinians (source: B’Tselem).

Israel closed off the tiny enclave that is the Gaza Strip and placed it under complete siege beginning in 2007. Since then, Israel severely restricts the movement of goods and prevents Gaza’s residents from traveling to the West Bank or through Israel, denying most of the population critical medical treatment, and educational and professional opportunities that could only be obtained outside of the Strip. The closure policy has suffocated Gaza’s economy, leading to unemployment rates of approximately 46 percent in 2023, one of the highest in the world, and making 80 percent of the population reliant on humanitarian assistance. The 141 squared mile enclave is best described as an open-air prison, and as I pen this article, Gaza’s captive population is being subjected to Israel’s genocidal war.

Regardless of how we choose to interpret the slogan, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” this is the reality on the ground in terms of freedom for Palestinians, and this article does not even address the daily violence to which Palestinians are subjected. Ultimately if there is any hope for a just resolution to this conflict, two questions will need to be addressed by the the political establishment in the United States: Can Israel’s allies continue denying basic human rights to Palestinians—rights that should be inherent to all human beings? And should Israel remain above international law and the laws of nations that underpin a rules-based order?

While calling this year’s presidential election against Der Fuhrer Donald Trump the most critical ever, the Democratic Party is using the same old playbook for this year’s campaigns.

The same old obsession with raising record amounts of money at the expense of presenting an authentic, vibrant agenda that will motivate millions of voters to vote for Democratic candidates.

The same old corporate-conflicted political and media consultants are controlling what the candidates say and do so as not to upset the monied interests and the lucrative consulting business for corporate clients.

It’s enough that the Dems are against Trump and the GOP—assuring a race to the bottom in the presidential election.

We will see the same old exclusion of experienced grassroots and national citizen groups, with millions of members, who just might have some good ideas about policies, strategies, tactics, messaging, rebuttals, slogans, and ways to get out the vote, that the “politicians” have never thought of or, in their arrogance, ignored. (See winningamerica.net).

Expect the same old retention of Party apparatchiks wallowing profitably in their sinecures, never looking themselves in the mirror and asking themselves why they can’t landslide the worst GOP in history. Republican candidates are openly anti-worker, women, children, consumers, and the environment. If your name ends in INC the GOP might be on your side.

Get ready for the same old resistance to infusing the party with energetic young leaders to start replacing older, smug bureaucrats who lose to the GOP in eminently winnable races at local, state, and national levels, yet have victory parties when their losses are less than the pundits or polls had predicted. (They celebrated their 2022 loss of the House of Representatives to the vicious, cruel, ignorant GOP.)

The same old scapegoating of Third Party candidates, spending gobs of money and filing frivolous lawsuits to block them from the ballot so as not to give voters more voices and choices, and to stifle any voters who might choose Third Party candidates, is in full swing. Instead of focusing on getting more of the 120 million non-voters to vote for Democratic candidates this year, the Democratic Party is focused on denying the First Amendment rights—free speech, petition, and assembly—of Third Party candidates and their minuscule number of voters.

As Bishop William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, so cogently points out, just getting out 10-15% more low-wage and poor voters would easily help the Democrats win the national presidential election. Instead, the Democrats feed reporters material that leads newspapers to feature stories like The New York Times March 21, 2024 article titled “Democrats Prepare Aggressive Counter to Third-Party Threats.” What they mean is being heavy on obstructing their access to the ballot.

The same old plans to waste huge amounts of money that allow media consultants to reap 15% on campaign ad buys instead of really going for the ground game are underway. For example, one pro-Democratic Party PAC announced it would spend $140 million to put real-life voter testimonials on television praising President Joe Biden and his party. They think that’s a winner, right out of the practice of dramatized testimonials by Madison Avenue advertising firms.

Note the same old stories reporting periodic fundraising totals fed to eagerly waiting reporters comparing the Dems and the Reps money totals unattached to any programs, agendas, or commitments to the people. Thus, the March 20, 2024, New York Times dreary headline: “Outside Groups Pledge Over $1 Billion to Aid Biden’s Re-Election Effort.”

They include environmental groups, labor unions, and other “liberal PACs” that shell out the money without asking the Democratic Party to commit to any reforms or to address long-avoided necessities for the people. It’s enough that the Dems are against Trump and the GOP—assuring a race to the bottom in the presidential election.

The lengthy Times article goes on and on reporting announcements by assorted Democratic moneypots and their GOP counterparts. Similar dreary “cash-register politics” articles will appear in the coming weeks and months with ever more frequency.

Heaven forbid that reporters start writing about how all this money inhibits candidates from reforming the campaign finance system that is rotten to the core. Congress and the White House are for sale or rent! For example, the Democrats could—but do not—advance a much overdue agenda to curb the corporate crime wave; repeal anti-labor laws (like the notorious Taft-Hartley Act); junk the corrupt tax system written by big corporate tax escapees; debloat the vast, wasteful, redundant military budget; and push for the popular Medicare-for-All legislation languishing for years in Congress—for starters.

Don’t look for resignations from poor performers like the managers of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). Imagine barely winning the Senate in 2022, when twice as many GOP Senators were up for reelection as Democratic Senators? How are these losers, given an encore, going to do this year when more than twice the number of Democratic Senators are up than GOP solons?

The same old inability to confront shrinking support or turnout from their base—African Americans and Hispanic Americans—is inexcusable. The Democrats can’t seem to convincingly say that the party is not taking them for granted and to build the relationships that could motivate these voters to return to the fold.

How about not being able to recover the loss of many unionized workers to Trump, of all demons, and show all workers why their livelihoods would improve with a Democratic victory? The Dems don’t even know how to use LABOR DAY to showcase their sincerity with events on the ground in every locality.

Same old Empire of lawless military forces, now growing with unconditional weapons shipments to Ukraine and Israel—the latter’s genocidal war taking us into co-belligerent status under international law against defenseless Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

For a majority of American voters who reject Trump as a law-violating, unstable, narcissistic, liar weaving fantasies and fabrications that service what Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) calls “dangerous extremists” in Congress and state legislatures, this is what the Democratic Party and the two-party duopoly offer in November.

At the least, concerned, engaged voters should demand that unresponsive party campaigns return their calls to receive their input. That’s how primordial the situation is these days.

The same playbook will produce the same failed Democratic efforts. Change course before it is too late.

In February, California faced a “monster storm.” This storm was the second atmospheric river storm to hit the state within a week, leaving nine confirmed dead in its wake. While this storm was record breaking, California saw similar weather patterns and severe flooding last year, and we can only expect these occurrences to continue and increase in intensity as climate change fuels a rise in extreme weather events.

In 2023, a series of storms created Tulare Lake in a previously dry basin near Corcoran, California. Protected only by a levee in need of repairs, the highest concentration of incarcerated people in the state were left at risk of flooding. Last spring, flooding caused by storms affected visitors’ access to the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison at Corcoran and forced the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to stop accepting transfers.

Despite no news yet on the effects of California’s most recent storm on people in carceral facilities, it is only a matter of time before these stories come to light. California’s disaster response plans fail to account for its incarcerated population. Over and over again across the country, weather-related disasters have threatened the lives and well-being of people behind bars. Still, this problem remains unmitigated—state and federal government entities are not equipped or prepared to protect the 1.9 million people in our nation’s jails, prisons, and detention facilities during these disasters.

As medical professionals, we implore lawmakers and prison administrators to take proactive measures to prevent the health risks of freezing winters and scorching summers from becoming recurring nightmares in the years ahead.

These extreme weather incidents extend beyond just flooding in California. During the 2023 summer of record-breaking heat, states and the federal government put hundreds of thousands of lives at risk by confining people to carceral facilities that lack universal air conditioning and air filtration equipment—we saw extreme heatwaves and raging wildfires in Canada cause widespread panic and lethal ramifications for people behind bars, including reports of at least 41 heat-related deaths in the Texas summer alone. Over 30% of California’s wildland firefighting crews are made up of incarcerated people, putting them directly in harm’s way. Increasing frigid winter temperatures have also caused suffering and death in facilities ill-equipped with adequate heating systems. During the brutal winter storm Uri of 2021, people incarcerated in Texas prisons faced freezing temperatures and power blackouts, described by one person as “being in a meat locker.”

Correctional facilities are often situated in geographically vulnerable areas, susceptible to a gamut of natural disasters, from floods and hurricanes to blizzards and wildfires. And incarcerated people, devoid of the agency to evacuate, are left unprotected. The impacts of the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina in 2005 serve as a stark reminder of these consequences. Major flooding left prisons under water and without food and water for days due to a lack of coordination to plan and evacuate facilities, highlighting the critical need for including prisons in emergency preparedness planning. Yet almost two decades later, states still rarely incorporate jails and prisons into their emergency disaster response plans, rendering incarcerated individuals an afterthought even under emergency evacuation orders. They are often left stranded in dire circumstances, used as free labor, and denied access to critical medical treatment for weeks, if not months, during these emergency events.

As medical professionals, we implore lawmakers and prison administrators to take proactive measures to prevent the health risks of freezing winters and scorching summers from becoming recurring nightmares in the years ahead. We call upon them to develop comprehensive strategies for the threat of extreme weather, such as creating evacuation plans and implementing temperature reporting and standards for indoor temperatures—planning ahead for the weather extremes that will certainly occur can save lives.

With predictions of increasingly frequent and severe temperatures and natural disasters on the horizon, safeguarding one of society’s most vulnerable and rapidly-aging populations must be a paramount concern.

Over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded on February 29, when Israeli snipers opened fire on people approaching a convoy of trucks carrying desperately needed supplies of flour. The attack was quickly dubbed the flour massacre.

Corporate media reporting was contentious and confused, mired in accusations and conflicting details that filled the news hole, even as media downplayed the grave conditions in Gaza created by Israel’s engineered famine. With headlines layered in verbal opacity, the massacre prompted yet another egregious moment in media’s facilitation of Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza.

Linguistic Gymnastics

On the day of the massacre, The New York Times (2/29/24) published this contrivance:

As Hungry Gazans Crowd a Convoy, a Crush of Bodies, Israeli Gunshots and a Deadly Toll

It was met with ridicule as it slid across online platforms. Assal Rad (Twitter, 3/1/24), author and research director at the National Iranian American Council, called the piece of work “a haiku to avoid saying Israel massacres Palestinians that they’re deliberately starving in Gaza.”

Another Times headline (2/29/24) read, “Deaths of Gazans Hungry for Food Prompt Fresh Calls for Cease-fire.” Nima Shirazi, co-host of the podcast Citations Needed (Twitter, 3/1/24), noted that “The New York Times just can’t bring itself to write clear headlines when Israeli war crimes are involved.” Shirazi offered this revision: “Israel Slaughters Starving People as It Continues Committing Genocide.”

Professor Jason Hickel (Twitter, 2/29/24), along with Mint Press‘s Alan MacLeod (2/29/24), flagged the use of the neologism “food aid-related deaths” when it turned up in a Guardian headline (2/29/24): “Biden Says Gaza Food Aid-Related Deaths Complicate Cease-Fire Talks.” MacLeod noted, “Virtually the entire Western media pretend they don’t know who just carried out a massacre of 100+ starving civilians.”

Media have failed to inform the U.S. public on the horrific conditions experienced by starving civilians in Gaza.

Linguistic gymnastics—a longstanding plague pervading Western media coverage of Palestine (FAIR.org, 8/22/23)—were so popular in news headlines and reporting that Caitlin Johnstone (Consortium News, 3/1/24) compiled a list of them, adding “chaotic incident” (CNN, 2/29/24) and “chaotic aid delivery turns deadly” (Washington Post, 2/29/24) to those already mentioned.

Sana Saeed, media critic for Al Jazeera, decoded the latter kind of construction for AJ+ (3/29/24), arguing that such passive language has been used “consistently to sanitize the violence that a powerful state is unleashing against civilian populations.”

As the genocide enters its sixth month, media analysts, investigative reporters, and social media users have become adept at recognizing pro-Israeli contortions and patterns of language that justify Israel’s war on Gaza. This has become an essential aspect in exposing Israel’s genocide.

‘Anarchy Rules in Gaza’

The Economist (2/29/24), under the headline, “A New Tragedy Shows Anarchy Rules in Gaza: A Shooting and Stampede Kill 122 and Injure Hundreds,” went into the worst pro-Israel spin, with reporting that seemed to blame Palestinians for their own murders. Parroting Israeli press directives, the piece claimed Palestinians were killed by “trampling” each other in their own “stampede.”

The piece was written in literary prose: “Death descended on a coastal road in Gaza,” the reporter (not present at the scene) wrote. Then “catastrophe befell an aid convoy,” as if it merely happened upon bad luck.

Then the writer made a prediction: “As with many events in the war between Israel and Hamas, the facts are destined to remain fiercely contested.” That’s likely to come true, especially when major media outlets abdicate their responsibility for evaluating claims.

Timeline of Changing Denials

Many other writers and journalists have documented the string of vacillating Israeli statements that help explain the contorted reporting. Al Jazeera reporter Willem Marx (Twitter, 3/1/24) traced a timeline of how the Israeli military changed its story over the course of the day.

The IDF began by claiming there had been trampling and pushing that led to injuries around the aid truck. Then, hungry Palestinians had “threatened their soldiers,” or “appeared in a threatening manner,” so the IDF shot at them. Later that day, Israeli officials claimed there were two separate incidents, one that involved trampling and the other that led to shooting. By the end of the day, they alleged only to have provided support to a humanitarian convoy, and that no shots were fired at all by the military.

When the BBC (3/1/24) verified that a video released by the Israeli military exhibited four unexplained breaks in the footage and was therefore invalid, the outlet still used the passive voice, referring in the headline to “Gazans Killed Around Aid Convoy.” One sentence of the detailed, confused article quoted Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Awadeyah: “Israelis purposefully fired at the men… They were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour.” Earlier, however, Awadeyah was problematized when identified “as a journalist for Al Mayadeen, a Lebanon-based news station whose broadcasts are sympathetic to groups fighting Israel.”

Independent and International Media

If we compare corporate outlets to independent media, in which reporting was based on ground sources, humanitarian actors, and aid workers, we find very different content.

Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul (2/29/24), who was at the scene of the massacre, said that “after opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies. It is a massacre, on top of the starvation threatening citizens in Gaza.”

EuroMed staff (2/29/24) on the scene confirmed that the Israeli military had fired on starving Palestinians. EuroMed’s findings were summarized in a videotape by Palestinian news agency Quds News Network and posted by the Palestine Information Center (3/4/24).

Mondoweiss (3/4/24) reported details of the massacre from eyewitness accounts. One survivor recounted how an Israeli checkpoint “split the crowd in two,” preventing those who had entered the checkpoint from passing back to the northern side. Then Israeli soldiers opened fire on the crowd. International observers visited the injured survivors at al-Shifa’ Hospital, “confirming that the majority of wounds from the hundreds of injured people were due to live ammunition.”

In Context of Famine

Reporting in the alternative press also placed the massacre within the context of the rapidly increasing famine in Gaza.

The headline for the Electronic Intifada (2/29/24) read, “Palestinians Seeking Food Aid Killed as Israel Starves Gaza.” The outlet said an “engineered famine has taken hold in Gaza, with people resorting to eating wild plants with little nutritional value and animal feed to survive.”

Middle East Eye’s reporting (2/29/24) included the dire condition Palestinians are currently facing: “Much of Gaza’s population is on the brink of famine as a result of the Israeli blockade, according to the U.N. and other humanitarian organizations.”

The day of the massacre, Democracy Now! (2/29/24) opened its broadcast with a clear statement and the relevant context: “Israel Kills 104 Palestinians Waiting for Food Aid as U.N. Expert Accuses Israel of Starving Gaza.” Its first guest, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food Michael Fakhri, said, “Every single person in Gaza is hungry.” He accused Israel of the war crime of intentional starvation. He emphasized that famine in the modern context is a human-made catastrophe:

At this point I’m running out of words to be able to describe the horror of what’s happening and how vile the actions have been by Israel against the Palestinian civilians.

Common Dreams (3/3/24) reported on Israel’s obstruction of aid convoys, and cited UNICEF on the deaths of children who

died of starvation and dehydration at a hospital in northern Gaza as Israeli forces continue to obstruct and attack aid convoys, fueling desperation across the territory… People are hungry, exhausted, and traumatized. Many are clinging to life.

It concluded, “These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable, and entirely preventable.”

In the days before the massacre, numerous outlets had been documenting the growing famine looming over Gaza. This is the material independent media made use of for contextualizing the massacre.

The New York Times, on the other hand, put the massacre into an entirely different context. A piece (3/2/24) headlined “Disastrous Convey Was Part of New Israeli Effort for More Aid in Gaza,” cited as confirmation “Western diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity.” It said that international aid groups “suspended operations” because of “rising lawlessness,” as well as Israel’s refusal to “greenlight aid trucks.” It blamed starving Gazans by claiming that aid convoys had been looted either by “civilians fearing starvation” or by “organized gangs.”

‘How Is This Not a Bigger Story?’

As Common Dreams and Mondoweiss reported, the flour massacre was not the first time the IDF killed starving Palestinians, and it would not be the last. As Mondoweiss (3/4/24) put it: “In less than a week, Israel has committed several massacres against the hungry. On Sunday, March 3, Israel bombed an aid convoy, killing seven people.”

Quds News Network (3/2/24) reported that Israel targeted hungry civilians again at Al Rasheed Street in northern Gaza while they were waiting for humanitarian aid. And Quds (3/4/24) reposted Al Jazeera footage that captured the moments when Israel’s military opened fire at other hungry Gazans, this time at the Al Kuwait roundabout, as they looked for food aid.

Al Jazeera (3/6/24) continues to document the murders of Palestinians desperate for aid as they come under Israeli fire. On a longer videotape, a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch says these attacks violate ICJ orders:

The idea that these people are being killed as they scavenge for meager rations of food is just appalling, and is a reminder why there must be international immediate action to prevent further mass atrocities.

Following the Al Jazeera report, Assal Rad (Twitter, 3/6/24) expressed dismay:

Israeli attacks on Palestinians waiting for or attempting to get aid have repeatedly happened this week, yet there has been no media coverage since the massacre that killed over 100 people. Israel is attacking civilians it’s deliberately starving. How is this not a bigger story?
Normalizing Starvation and Massacres

Sana Saeed (Twitter, 3/4/24) observed:

So just to be clear: Much like how Israel normalized attacking and destroying hospitals, and it was accepted by the international community, Israel is now normalizing shooting and killing the people it is starving as they seek food.

Media have failed to inform the U.S. public on the horrific conditions experienced by starving civilians in Gaza. They blamed Palestinians for their own deaths, covering for the Israeli military as it carried out a massacre. They further dehumanized Palestinians by characterizing starving people as an unruly mob who trampled one another.

To paraphrase Patrick Lawrence (Floutist, 11/16/23) on the distortion of language in defense of Israel’s violence against Palestinians: It corrupts our public discourse, our public space, and altogether our ability to think clearly. This corruption is as vital as U.S. bombs to the Israeli genocide against Palestine: Without these verbal distortions that justify, distract, deny, and consume corporate information spaces, the genocide could not be carried out.

It was once said that when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.

For years, Americans have watched the troubling rise of the Tea Party/Make-America-Great-Again (MAGA) Republican Party’s thinly-veiled authoritarianism—fervent Christian nationalism, voter suppression, gerrymandering, disinformation and propaganda, dark money, corruption, intolerance, international isolationism, idolatry of world dictators, anti-regulation zealotry, self-interest over national interest, contempt for civil rights and the rule of law, coercion, intimidation, repression, misogyny, homophobia, racism, false morality, ethnic homogeneity, demagoguery, fear-mongering, pathological lying, denial of science, delusional conspiracy theories, personality cult, fomenting hatred, encouraging political violence, book banning, protecting corporate greed, declaring a free press “the enemy of the people,” packing the courts with far-right ideologues, dismantling the “administrative state” (aka, democratic institutions), vilifying opponents as “vermin,” claiming immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and use of government mainly to enhance their own wealth and power.

Yet all the while, they have publicly pretended to still believe in democracy and the Constitution. Until now.

The MAGA goal is indeed to overthrow our constitutional democracy and replace it with their own dystopian dream.

At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), MAGA Republicans—paying homage to their deranged “dear leader,” who is beholden to the Kremlin, and if reelected promises to be a dictator on day one, release convicted felons who support him from prison, order mass deportations, and to selectively terminate the Constitution—finally said the quiet part out loud. The conference opened with this astonishingly candid statement:

“Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this, right here.”

The fanatic crowd erupted with glee. The only thing missing (we presume) were the jack boots and black arm bands.

There it is, in plain sight—full-blown fascism as a major political movement in America—precisely what our nation’s founders worried about, and what America and its allies fought WWI and WWII to prevent. This is an overt admission that January 6 was not a “demonstration that got out of hand,” but a failed coup (as most already knew), and that the MAGA goal is indeed to overthrow our constitutional democracy and replace it with their own dystopian dream.

Ironically, as lies and propaganda (including from foreign intelligence services) have been so effective with MAGA devotees, they could even succeed this November using the very electoral democracy they seek to overthrow. If they are not successful that way, they promise to keep trying.

Poet Maya Angelou once said: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” The MAGA movement has now shown us who they really are, and we should believe them.

Fortunately, there are some principled Republicans who are not onboard the MAGA train. Unfortunately, they remain a minority in the neo-fascist Republican party today.

America’s political fault line is now crystal clear. This is a dangerous, existential moment for our nation. The question is which side “we the people” are on—democracy or fascism?

We’ll soon see.