It was the jokes about former President Donald Trump’s rumored flatulence in the courtroom that pushed me toward despair. And don’t think it was disgust with the subject matter either. After all, I’ve lived with teenagers and I wasn’t all that surprised by yet another Trump-inspired trivialization of a critical civic institution. What appalled me was the possibility that—let’s be clear here—such stories would somehow humanize the monster, that his alleged farting and possible use of adult diapers would win him sympathy. I even wondered whether such rumors could be part of a scheme to win him votes.

So, yes, Trump can make you that crazy.

Or maybe it’s something about important trials, about the slow unspooling of evidence and our hunger for resolution that makes us simultaneously twitchy and increasingly catatonic. I experienced this once before on a national level, just a little less than 30 years ago, when lawyers for another adored psycho tested the American justice system with what could only be called a sleazy brilliance. They put racism on trial. This time around, democracy may be at stake and it’s possible the defense lawyers may win again (as they just did with another monster, Harvey Weinstein).

Last month, for instance, the Los Angeles Times mistakenly inserted Trump for O.J. in an obituary of the former football star, claiming that the former president had served the former football player’s sentence in prison.

Since the first day of Trump’s trial, I’ve been remembering bits of the O.J. Simpson extravaganza, especially the moment when he was declared not guilty of killing his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman, outside her condominium in Los Angeles. I recall that moment vividly. I was eating lunch in a Boston sports bar on Tuesday, October 3, 1995, when the verdict was suddenly trumpeted on what seemed like a dozen giant TV sets. The diners, predominantly white, froze in shock. As we sat there, silent, we slowly became aware of a presence surrounding us and then raucous sounds filled the dining room. The kitchen and wait staff, mostly Black, were on the perimeters of that room, clapping and shouting. I was stunned. I had never before witnessed, close up, such irreconcilable factions.

Other Divisions

There certainly have been other examples of the cleaving of America. The Revolution and the Civil War come to mind, not to speak of the half-century-old Boston school-busing controversy and, of course, the insurrection of January 6, 2021. Still, the division over the O.J. decision was so simple, focused, and emotional that it remains for me a dangerous symbol of intransigence. O.J. may have been more representational than real as a national influence, but he was enough of a force to make me wonder what his story presaged and what a verdict in the current trial might provoke in this far shakier time of ours, especially from former president and MAGA goon Donald Trump, a man eager to intimidate those trying him as well as everyone else.

Looking for parallels between Orenthal J. Simpson and Donald J. Trump may produce shaky outcomes, but it could also help sharpen our sense of their symbolic meanings. They were born 13 months apart in the post-World War II boom years. Although Trump was a white, rich New Yorker and O.J. a poor, Black Californian, they were both driven throughout their lives by a desperation to be admired. Both of them were also large men, gabby and good-looking. Their social cunning, however, wore distinctly different masks. Trump is crude in an entitled frat boy way, while O.J. was smooth and ingratiating, particularly with white men (though distinctly rough with women).

In my years as a sports reporter for The New York Times, I dealt with both of them. In one-on-one situations, I always felt I was being played but never threatened. With O.J., it was hard not to be overwhelmed by his neediness to be liked, but I must admit that I was flattered by the attention. With Trump, I knew I was being manipulated by his unctuousness, but he was good copy, too. Early on, it was easy to write Trump off as a buffoon and assume O.J. was a harmless, sweet-natured guy (although the broadcaster Howard Cosell dubbed him “the lost boy”). That either of them might go beyond being an entertainer seemed a silly notion at the time.

The division over the O.J. decision was so simple, focused, and emotional that it remains for me a dangerous symbol of intransigence.

In some ways neither did. For all Trump’s power to energize crowds, it’s never been thanks to an overwhelming idea, an inspiring example, or even an alluring promise. He merely gives his followers permission and justification to enjoy the short-term energy of hate. Eventually, it will undoubtedly turn against him, but not soon enough for the rest of us.

O.J., in contrast, made us feel good, reveling in his phenomenal skill on the football field—he was a beautiful player there and anything but a brute—while taking pleasure in his comedic skills. He was genuinely funny and willing to mock himself. With his 11-year Hall of Fame football career behind him, he began carefully crafting a Hollywood career, avoiding quick-buck blaxpolitation movies for lovable supporting roles. As sportswriter Ralph Wiley put it, white people came to consider Simpson a “unifying symbol of all races.”

The Counter-Revolutionary

O.J. was easy to like, a charming, charismatic, talented athlete and actor who conveniently served to offset much of the growing African-American activism in the world of sports.

The 1968 Olympic demonstrations of John Carlos and Tommie Smith, the hard anger of pro football superstar Jim Brown, the political rants of Muhammad Ali, among others, frightened the owners, broadcasters, and corporate executives who had just gotten a handle on making big money out of sports. O.J. was a welcome counterrevolutionary. And unlike most other Black stars, he was sociable and accessible. It was fun to play golf with him and cavort under his testosterone shower.

When O.J. died last month of prostate cancer at 76, the first image that came to my mind was of that divided Boston sports bar, but it was replaced fairly quickly by images of O.J. himself, iconic ones that shaped our notions of him and of America then, most of them offering a false promise of a color-blind country. Even more memorable than O.J. dancing with the football through whatever defensive line opposed him was O.J. clowning adorably on the movie screen or charging through an airport in a Hertz commercial.

His delusion like Trump’s (until the first of his court cases began recently) was nourished by being treated as if he and he alone could get away with anything.

As for me, I’ll never forget him sitting across a table one night in 1969, the self-defined essence of a figure somehow beyond race in this divided country of ours. That night in Joe Namath’s trendy midtown Manhattan bar, Bachelors III, left me with my basic sense of who that delightful and delusional man was. He was then a 22-year-old former college superstar holding out for more money in his rookie pro-football contract. I was a New York Times sports columnist who had been asked to introduce him to Namath, the recently famous New York Jets Super Bowl quarterback. The introductions had originally been Cosell’s night mission, but as the evening stretched on (and on), it simply got too late for him, and the task fell to me. (I’d been tagging along to cover the first meeting of those two football heroes.)

O.J. on O.J.

Well after midnight in that crowded bar, it became clear that Namath was taking his sweet time in some ritual of celebrity one-upmanship. Before he left, Cosell had offered to drag Namath over, but O.J., ever cool, shook his head. “You don’t rush the great ones,” he said. He started telling me stories to pass the time, ever gracious and clearly fearing I might get bored and leave.

One he told me that night I never forgot—and subsequently retold in the Oscar-winning ESPN documentary “O.J.: Made in America,” directed by Ezra Edelman. It took place at a teammate’s wedding. O.J. overheard a white woman at an adjoining table say, “Look, there’s O.J. Simpson and some [N-words].”

I was appalled. O.J. was amused by my reaction. He said, “No, it was great. Don’t you understand? She knew that I wasn’t Black. She saw me as O.J.”

Now, here’s the quantum O.J. leap: Why do so many people think the 2016 election of Donald Trump was an appropriate response to social and economically wounding decisions imposed by “the elites”?

Other stories followed, though I don’t remember them. All I could think about was how clueless poor O.J. was. He didn’t understand that he was traveling under the protection of an honorary white pass, revocable at any moment. While he could delude himself, I thought, maybe even carry others along in his fantasy, there would undoubtedly be a reckoning someday. Soon enough, Joe Namath did indeed arrive and I was able to slip away, pondering what had already become a disturbing memory, even as O.J. got that rookie football money he demanded and later became a successful movie actor.

His delusion like Trump’s (until the first of his court cases began recently) was nourished by being treated as if he and he alone could get away with anything. (No better example of such a belief was Trump’s 2016 comment that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”) Since his time at the University of Southern California, where he won the Heisman Trophy, college football’s highest award, the police, responding to the domestic violence complaints of his various girlfriends, would rarely stay longer than to collect an autograph. His second wife, Nicole Brown, called for help many times during and after their marriage, sometimes bruised and bleeding. O.J. was arrested once, in 1989, convicted of spousal abuse, and let off with a fine.

If any good came from any of this, including her death, it was the attention that domestic violence finally got.

Paybacks

As to her murder, it’s hard to believe that anyone who paid attention to the evidence brought out in the trial could actually have believed O.J. innocent (though, of course, the jury did exactly that). However, it’s easy to believe someone could think that the not-guilty verdict from a mostly Black jury was payback for all the racist police decisions that had killed so many Black men without any justice in sight. Both Americas expressed in that Boston sports bar could understand that—the only difference being that the exulting kitchen staff might think the payback appropriate, a rare win, while the stunned diners found it morally reprehensible and an implicit threat.

Both Americas might, however, agree on this: the verdict proved that the justice system worked—for anyone with the will and the money to take it all the way.

Now, here’s the quantum O.J. leap: Why do so many people think the 2016 election of Donald Trump was an appropriate response to social and economically wounding decisions imposed by “the elites”? Just as O.J. became symbolic of the false promise of a color-blind America, so has Trump masqueraded as the champion of Americans underserved by democracy, left behind by the exclusionary progress of technology, and likely to be replaced (so he claims) by immigrants of color.

And here’s the big question: What impact will that role of his have on the current Trump jury and, in effect, the 2024 election?

Tackling Trump

Is there any possibility that the Donald Trump chapter in American history is finally ending amid a chorus of farts, done in by a paper-chasing trial that couldn’t be more banal in its particulars? Should it be considered the latest form of ironic payback? After all, O.J. was finally brought down not by beating or even possibly murdering his wife, but by an almost comical armed robbery caper in which he tried to steal back some of his own memorabilia. For that, he would end up serving nine years in prison.

The possibility of a future Trump in prison, the very thought that no one is above the law could in any way apply to him, is, of course, the primary draw of this latest trial of a delusional psycho. Admittedly, it has yet to capture our attention as thoroughly as O.J.’s murder trial did, but it’s still early days in a courtroom where, without live camera and audio coverage, we can’t satisfy our digital-age need for that streaming TV experience. Maybe the fart jokes or some higher level of Trumpian comedy will engage our interest, or perhaps one of his future trials (if they ever take place) will do the trick. It’s hard, of course, for a parade of misdemeanors, including a presidential theft of national security documents, to compete with the memory of a violent murder.

Or maybe, as with so much else in American history, everything will simply start to run together. Last month, for instance, the Los Angeles Times mistakenly inserted Trump for O.J. in an obituary of the former football star, claiming that the former president had served the former football player’s sentence in prison. Republican lawyer and gadfly George Conway commented, “Understandable mistake. It can be hard to keep all these clearly guilty sociopaths straight.”

How true. And now, as we await the first of four possible juries on the former president, hold your nose. Odor in the court.

Earlier this week Israel marked the Holocaust in an official memorial day ceremony. Sirens blared for one minute across the country, as all Israelis were urged to drop everything, pull their cars to the sides of the road, and observe a minute devoted to ruminating about the Holocaust and its lessons.

Growing up in Israel, as a youth whose grandmother and great grandmother survived Auschwitz, I felt the burden of that moment and concentrated deeply while two different commitments brewed within me. On the one had my commitment to my country, Israel, the safe haven of all Jews; on the other, my promise to myself to act as “chasidei umut ha’olam” did. This title, sometimes known in English as the Righteous Among the Nations, is a special honor bestowed by the state of Israel upon those few non-Jews who during the Holocaust risked their lives and their families’ lives to help save Jews without any promise of recompense. “In a world of total moral collapse,” notes the central museum for the memory of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, “there was a small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values.” As part of its commitment to instill the universal ideal of humanism, Yad Vashem has championed these individuals as lightning rods of humanism that should offer all of us an example and model.

Israel is a contradictory place. It holds itself as a model of enlightened democracy, even as it carries out what most human rights organization by now recognize as an apartheid regime. Even in its Declaration of Independence it declared itself to be both democratic and Jewish, clearly a contradiction. This spirit of contradiction animates the most important event in Israel’s public memory, the Holocaust and in the lesson it draws from it. On the one hand stands the particular lesson, the Holocaust as a reminder that only an independent Jewish state, Israel, can offer true safety to the Jewish people. On the other hand, Israel tries—at least some of the time—to assert a universal lesson from the Holocaust: If a nation like Germany that viewed itself as the most enlightened nation in the world could carry out a genocide, it can happen everywhere, and if we don’t watch out any one of us can get caught up and become complicit in it. Thus, as humans we must pledge to constantly ask ourselves, “What I would have done during the Holocaust?” and follow the example of the Righteous among the Nations.

Jews and Palestinians must find a way to live together in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as true and equal partners, and we must find justice for all who were impacted by this ongoing tragedy.

Most people and most nations live with contradictions. However, there comes a time when contradictions can no longer—indeed must no longer—abide together in both humans and nations. For Jews across the world such a time has clearly arrived. Now more than ever we are witnessing a confrontation between the two lessons of the Holocaust, with an increasing number of Jews outside of Israel recognizing in the slogan “never again” a deeply universalist commitment to humanity—especially Palestinians oppressed and killed in their name. Organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now (whose name is a very reference to this conviction), and others consist of Jews who refuse to stand idle while Israel, a state that views itself as the exclusive embodiment of Jewish aspirations, is carrying out genocidal violence in their name.

At the same time, unfortunately, within Israel the Jewish population has doubled down on the particular memory of the Holocaust. Having endured the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on October 7, Jewish Israelis appear more committed than ever to a siege mentality that does not offer any room for humanism. Refusing to recognize the humanity of the Palestinian people in Gaza and elsewhere and the spirit of the slogan “never again,” they are largely in support of this mass murder of civilians and of an ultra-aggressive stance toward Israel’s perceived enemies. Similarly, in the United States and elsewhere, both Jewish and non-Jewish Zionist organizations, private individuals, and even states like Germany appear consumed by their commitment to the particular memory of the Holocaust. This is no coincidence. Israel and its allies over more than 75 years have successfully weaponized the particular memory of the Holocaust to deflect attention from Israeli atrocities.

The response to campus protests across the U.S. marks a new stage in the campaign to quash any legitimate criticism of Israel. In some of the most liberal universities in the country, the site of some of the most iconic free speech campus struggles during the 1960s, we are now witnessing yet again the repression of universal humanism. Once more, cynical Zionist voices, this time in collusion with the Republican Party, have managed to undercut universalist humanist messages by insisting on centering the supposed antisemitism of the anti-war activists. This particularly insidious use of the specter of antisemitism is not only a tacit support of genocide, but a dangerous cheapening and misappropriation of the very real rise of antisemitism—most of it not emanating from anti-war circles, but from rabid white supremacists who have increasingly taken control of the Republic Party.

As an Israeli who served in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and who once thought he could hold the contradictions of Zionism and of the dual lessons of the Holocaust, I think it is time to settle this question once and for all. When it comes to universalism versus particularism, to human interest versus self-interest, to moral clarity versus moral bankruptcy, there is only one appropriate resolution.

I believe that as Jews we must embrace the universal lessons of the Holocaust and declare the ongoing events in Gaza a genocide and resist an out-of-control right-wing government that is increasingly drawing the whole region into a war. We must renounce the Zionist interpretation of the Holocaust that has turned out to be not only morally compromised, but also ineffective—it has not provided protection for Jews. In fact, in no place in the world are Jews more likely to be harmed en masse than in Israel today, be it from Palestinian resistance groups or drones from Iran. The Jewish refuge has turned out to be a nightmare to both Palestinians and Jews.

We must search for better alternatives to the question of Jewish safety, ones that refuse to compromise the safety and well-being of other people. Indeed, by now the Jewish tragedy has also become so enmeshed in the Palestinian tragedy that they are inseparable; the Nakba and the Shoah have become tragic parallels, nightmarish rhymes, part of what one recent book has referred to as a shared “grammar of trauma and history.” Jews and Palestinians must find a way to live together in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as true and equal partners, and we must find justice for all who were impacted by this ongoing tragedy.

Lastly, the onus to find this solution is not reserved to Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians, or even the United States and Britain, the two empires who have offered the most support over the years to the Zionist project. The Western world at large has been the arbiter of this ongoing tragedy since they have declared Jews to be a racial enemy in their midst hundreds of years ago. it is therefore in no small part up to the international community—it is their obligation—to force Israel into stopping the ongoing genocide and to provide the means to reach a just solution for all.

Author's Note: The following are remarks I delivered on Saturday, May 4, 2024 at the 55-year reunion of the Stanford University antiwar movement, in which I participated. On April 3, 1969, an estimated 700 Stanford students voted to occupy the Applied Electronics Laboratory (AEL), where classified research on electronic warfare was being conducted at Stanford. That spawned the April Third Movement (A3M), which holds reunions every five to 10 years. The sit-in at AEL, supported by a majority of Stanford students, lasted nine days. Stanford moved the objectionable research off campus, but the A3M continued with sit-ins, teach-ins and confrontations with police in the Stanford Industrial Park.

This reunion comes at an auspicious time, with college campuses erupting all over the country in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Once again, 55 years later, Stanford students are rising up for peace and justice. They have established a "People's University" encampment and they are demanding that Stanford: (1) explicitly condemn Israel’s genocide and apartheid; (2) call for an immediate ceasefire, and for Israel and Egypt to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza; and (3) immediately divest from the consumer brands identified by the Palestinian BDS National Committee and all firms in Stanford’s investment portfolio that are complicit Israeli war crimes, apartheid and genocide.

At this moment in history, there are two related military occupations occurring simultaneously – 5,675 miles apart. One is Israel’s ongoing 57-year occupation of Palestinian territory, which is now taking the form of a full-fledged genocide that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians. The other is at Columbia University, where the administration has asked the New York Police Department to occupy the school until May 17. Both occupations are fueled by the Zionist power structure. Both have weaponized antisemitism to rationalize their brutality.

The students at Columbia are demanding that the university end its investments in companies and funds that are profiting from Israel's war against the Palestinians. They want financial transparency and amnesty for students and faculty involved in the demonstration. Most protesters throughout the country are demanding an immediate ceasefire and divestment from companies with interests in Israel. More than 2,300 people have been arrested or detained on U.S. college campuses.

Israel has damaged or destroyed every university in Gaza. But no university president has denounced Israel’s genocide or supported the call for divestment.

The U.S. government continues to fund Israel’s occupation and genocide, and protect the Israeli regime from any accountability.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement was launched in 2005 by 170 Palestinian civil society organizations who described BDS as “non-violent punitive measures” to last until Israel fully complies with international law. That means Israel must (1) end its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantle its barrier wall; (2) recognize the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and (3) respect, protect and promote the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their land as mandated by UN General Assembly Resolution 194.

Boycotts are the withdrawal of support for Israel, and Israeli and international companies that are violating Palestinian human rights, including Israeli academic, cultural and sporting institutions. Divestment occurs when universities, churches, banks, pension funds and local councils withdraw their investments from all Israeli and international companies complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights. Sanctions campaigns pressure governments to stop military trade and free-trade agreements and urge them to expel Israel from international fora.

“A particularly important source of Palestinian hope is the growing impact of the Palestinian-led nonviolent BDS movement,” according to Omar Barghouti, co-founder of BDS. It “aims at ending Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid and defending the right of Palestinian refugees to return home.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the BDS movement an existential threat to Israel – an absurd claim in light of Israel’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Stanford University encampment on May 5, 2024. (Photo by Christine Mrak)

The BDS movement is modeled largely on the boycott that helped end apartheid in South Africa. As confirmed by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Israel also maintains a system of apartheid. Israel’s system is “an even more extreme form of the apartheid” than South Africa’s was, the South African ambassador told the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the recent hearing on the legality of the Israeli occupation.

The U.S. has a long, proud history of boycotts – from the civil rights bus boycott to the United Farm Workers Union’s grape boycott. But at the behest of Zionists, anti-boycott legislation has been passed at the federal and state levels to prevent the American people from exercising their First Amendment right to boycott.

“The genocide underway in Gaza is the result of decades of impunity and inaction. Ending Israel’s impunity is a moral, political and legal imperative,” Palestine’s Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki told the ICJ. “Successive Israeli governments have given the Palestinian people only three options: displacement, subjugation or death; these are the choices, ethnic cleansing, apartheid or genocide.”

“Israel restricts every aspect of Palestinian life, from birth to death, resulting in manifest human rights violations and an overt system of repression and persecution,” al-Maliki said. “Through indiscriminate killing, summary execution, mass arbitrary arrest, torture, forced displacement, settler violence, movement restrictions and blockades, Israel subjects Palestinians to inhumane life conditions and untold human indignities, affecting the fate of every man, woman and child under its control.”

The Israeli military is poised to compound its genocidal campaign by ethnically cleansing 1.4 million people sheltering in Rafah, who have nowhere to flee. The violence in Gaza did not start on October 7, 2023, with the killing of some 1,200 Israelis by Hamas. It is the continuation of Israel’s brutal Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) that began 75 years ago.

The Ambassador of Belize told the ICJ, “No state reserves to itself the right to systematically violate the rights of a people to self-determination — except Israel. No state seeks to justify the indefinite occupation of another’s territory — except Israel. No state commits annexation and apartheid with impunity, except — it seems — Israel.” He said that “Israel must not be allowed such blatant impunity.”

Yet the U.S. government continues to fund Israel’s occupation and genocide, and protect the Israeli regime from any accountability. The U.S. also provides Israel with diplomatic cover, consistently vetoing resolutions in the Security Council that call for an enduring ceasefire.

Israeli officials believe that the International Criminal Court is about to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli government officials, including Netanyahu, for their crimes, including the obstruction of humanitarian aid to the people starving to death in Gaza. Hamas leaders also reportedly face arrest warrants. The Biden administration is taking steps to shield Israelis from ICC arrest warrants.

Meanwhile, Francesca Albanese, United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory, called for an arms embargo and sanctions on Israel. The amazing student movement that only promises to grow will hopefully be a game changer in stopping Israel’s US-backed genocide.

To the brave students following in our noble tradition, I say, you are on the right side of history. Dare to struggle, dare to win!

It is time we—the left in social movements as well as the left in unions or political parties—come to terms with our own failures and face the present and future head-on, with courage and confidence. If we don't organise for revolt and rebel now, there very simply might not be a chance to do it in the future.

The left is facing tremendous crises. These crises are visible in its lack of vision, its lack of excitement for the future, its lack of plans for power, its lack of confidence in the possibility of victory, and an overall fear of taking risks. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: The less we believe and the less we risk, the less chances we have of actually succeeding. These crises then manifest in reduced mobilization capacity, mobilizing without transformational objectives, poor electoral results, and simply accepting to play within the rules of a game which we were never supposed to play, a game we were historically responsible for breaking. General alienation, apathy, and poor material analysis in regards to the meaning of our combined crises is of huge concern. This isn't a pathway to move forward; it has no possibility of succeeding.

Decades have gone by since we have first heard about the environmental and climate crises and the need for a productive transition away from fossil fuels and the destruction wreaked by constant expansion and intensification of production. Almost 20 years have gone by since the financial crisis of 2007-2008 shook the world and the neoliberal hegemony, and since we witnessed and joined with hope, rage, and excitement the beginning of years full of popular discontentment turned into rebellions, uprisings, occupations, mass protests, and other mobilizations, calling for structural changes, from the Arab Spring to Occupy and Indignados. In that period we needed more ambition and less compromise, more radical vision and bold proposals, revolutionary programs and practices. We had almost none of it. We were lulled by the siren's song of incremental change and got pushed further back than in decades. We are still being pushed back, but this time toward a cliff.

The elites of capitalism have declared a war to the death on humanity by perpetuating an economic system dependent on fossil fuels.

After the pandemic, a cost of living crisis structurally connecting the climate emergency to the socioeconomic crises hit working people and the poor while corporations and energy companies declared the biggest profits in history. They not only filled their pockets with our money, they have never filled their pockets with so much profit as now, while we are starving, being displaced, persecuted, and, in many places, killed. Yet, once again, the political and social left is utterly failing to respond appropriately to the moment. The far-right occupied the anti-system space and rhetoric that has been left mostly vacant. It is irrelevant that the far right is the frontline of the defense of capitalism; narrative power is power and it has a material expression. They have taken an important part of that rhetoric, with the left standing defending decrepit institutions of late capitalism and letting itself be equated with the status quo.

The years ahead will be years of mass social discontent and unrest. The only way for that to not become fuel for fascism and the far right is if new power arises on the left, setting up ruptural programs of social and productive transformation and adopting compatible strategies and tactics, pushing for system change and the revolution required to achieve it. If the political and social left doesn't step up, any existing polarization will be between the far right and the extreme center, which will result in the collapse not only of capitalism, but of the material conditions for large scale human civilization.

The environmental and climate emergency is not a secondary question in the pathway we choose going forward. The climate crisis is a climax of all the crises of capitalism, a humanitarian global crisis that is already threatening human rights, lives, and environmental balances as never before. This crisis must directly define the strategy and programs that will shape the future. Either we tackle this crisis, or no program of transformation will be viable. Whatever we make of the left over the next years will define not only the future of the left, but the future of humanity.

An ecosocialist left must emerge now, ready to step-up and plan for power, articulated at the global scale. This must be an internationalist ecosocialist left, which is anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-racist, and trans-feminist. It must be a left that is not willing to give up on a new future and is ready to imagine and build the pathways to win it.

The struggle continues, but it won't continue forever. The environmental and climate crises set deadlines for change to happen. We must be honest and serious about what climate collapse means to our struggles for justice, peace and wages, bread, housing, education, and health for all: It means we need strategies to win these battles in the short term, not in the long run. These strategies are beyond the horizon of elections and electoral cycles, they must refuse any role of mere conciliator of class interests.

The struggle ahead is a class struggle. The elites of capitalism have declared a war to the death on humanity by perpetuating an economic system dependent on fossil fuels. No other war will bring about as much death, destruction, and violence as the war waged by them on the working people, under fossil-fueled capitalism. No amount of propaganda around green transition can hide the simple fact that there is no transition happening, there is only a share of renewables entering a continuously expanding energy system used to destroy everything, while pushing many territories over the threshold of livability.

The task ahead is system change—a full and radical transformation of our socioeconomic system in the short term. For that, an ecosocialist revolutionary left is essential. This is the task of the generations alive today, that needs to happen not in an unforeseen future, but in the short term. The organisational effort to bring this response into existence will be gargantuan, and it will require true commitment by an unwithered revolutionary left that stands to lose everything if it doesn't dare to win.

Even casual followers of energy and climate issues have probably heard about the alleged wonders of small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. This is due in no small part to the “nuclear bros”: an active and seemingly tireless group of nuclear power advocates who dominate social media discussions on energy by promoting SMRs and other “advanced” nuclear technologies as the only real solution for the climate crisis. But as I showed in my 2013 and 2021 reports, the hype surrounding SMRs is way overblown, and my conclusions remain valid today.

Unfortunately, much of this SMR happy talk is rooted in misinformation, which always brings me back to the same question: If the nuclear bros have such a great SMR story to tell, why do they have to exaggerate so much?

What Are SMRs?

SMRs are nuclear reactors that are “small” (defined as 300 megawatts of electrical power or less), can be largely assembled in a centralized facility, and would be installed in a modular fashion at power generation sites. Some proposed SMRs are so tiny (20 megawatts or less) that they are called “micro” reactors. SMRs are distinct from today’s conventional nuclear plants, which are typically around 1,000 megawatts and were largely custom-built. Some SMR designs, such as NuScale, are modified versions of operating water-cooled reactors, while others are radically different designs that use coolants other than water, such as liquid sodium, helium gas, or even molten salts.

To date, however, theoretical interest in SMRs has not translated into many actual reactor orders. The only SMR currently under construction is in China. And in the United States, only one company—TerraPower, founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates—has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a permit to build a power reactor (but at 345 megawatts, it technically isn’t even an SMR).

The nuclear industry has pinned its hopes on SMRs primarily because some recent large reactor projects, including Vogtle units 3 and 4 in the state of Georgia, have taken far longer to build and cost far more than originally projected. The failure of these projects to come in on time and under budget undermines arguments that modern nuclear power plants can overcome the problems that have plagued the nuclear industry in the past.

Regulators are loosening safety and security requirements for SMRs in ways which could cancel out any safety benefits from passive features.

Developers in the industry and the U.S. Department of Energy say that SMRs can be less costly and quicker to build than large reactors and that their modular nature makes it easier to balance power supply and demand. They also argue that reactors in a variety of sizes would be useful for a range of applications beyond grid-scale electrical power, including providing process heat to industrial plants and power to data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations, petrochemical production, and even electrical vehicle charging stations.

Here are five facts about SMRs that the nuclear industry and the “nuclear bros” who push its message don’t want you, the public, to know.

1. SMRs Are Not More Economical Than Large Reactors.

In theory, small reactors should have lower capital costs and construction times than large reactors of similar design so that utilities (or other users) can get financing more cheaply and deploy them more flexibly. But that doesn’t mean small reactors will be more economical than large ones. In fact, the opposite usually will be true. What matters more when comparing the economics of different power sources is the cost to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity, and that depends on the capital cost per kilowatt of generating capacity, as well as the costs of operations, maintenance, fuel, and other factors.

According to the economies of scale principle, smaller reactors will in general produce more expensive electricity than larger ones. For example, the now-cancelled project by NuScale to build a 460-megawatt, 6-unit SMR in Idaho was estimated to cost over $20,000 per kilowatt, which is greater than the actual cost of the Vogtle large reactor project of over $15,000 per kilowatt. This cost penalty can be offset only by radical changes in the way reactors are designed, built, and operated.

For example, SMR developers claim they can slash capital cost per kilowatt by achieving efficiency through the mass production of identical units in factories. However, studies find that such cost reductions typically would not exceed about 30%. In addition, dozens of units would have to be produced before manufacturers could learn how to make their processes more efficient and achieve those capital cost reductions, meaning that the first reactors of a given design will be unavoidably expensive and will require large government or ratepayer subsidies to get built. Getting past this obstacle has proven to be one of the main impediments to SMR deployment.

The levelized cost of electricity for the now-cancelled NuScale project was estimated at around $119 per megawatt-hour (without federal subsidies), whereas land-based wind and utility-scale solar now cost below $40/MWh.

Another way that SMR developers try to reduce capital cost is by reducing or eliminating many of the safety features required for operating reactors that provide multiple layers of protection, such as a robust, reinforced concrete containment structure, motor-driven emergency pumps, and rigorous quality assurance standards for backup safety equipment such as power supplies. But these changes so far haven’t had much of an impact on the overall cost—just look at NuScale.

In addition to capital cost, operation and maintenance (O&M) costs will also have to be significantly reduced to improve the competitiveness of SMRs. However, some operating expenses, such as the security needed to protect against terrorist attacks, would not normally be sensitive to reactor size. The relative contribution of O&M and fuel costs to the price per megawatt-hour varies a lot among designs and project details, but could be 50% or more, depending on factors such as interest rates that influence the total capital cost.

Economies of scale considerations have already led some SMR vendors, such as NuScale and Holtec, to roughly double module sizes from their original designs. The Oklo, Inc. Aurora microreactor has increased from 1.5 MW to 15 MW and may even go to 50 MW. And the General Electric-Hitachi BWRX-300 and Westinghouse AP300 are both starting out at the upper limit of what is considered an SMR.

Overall, these changes might be sufficient to make some SMRs cost-competitive with large reactors, but they would still have a long way to go to compete with renewable technologies. The levelized cost of electricity for the now-cancelled NuScale project was estimated at around $119 per megawatt-hour (without federal subsidies), whereas land-based wind and utility-scale solar now cost below $40/MWh.

Microreactors, however, are likely to remain expensive under any realistic scenario, with projected levelized electricity costs two to three times that of larger SMRs.

2. SMRs Are Not Generally Safer or More Secure Than Large Light-Water Reactors.

Because of their size, you might think that small nuclear reactors pose lower risks to public health and the environment than large reactors. After all, the amount of radioactive material in the core and available to be released in an accident is smaller. And smaller reactors produce heat at lower rates than large reactors, which could make them easier to cool during an accident, perhaps even by passive means—that is, without the need for electrically powered coolant pumps or operator actions.

However, the so-called passive safety features that SMR proponents like to cite may not always work, especially during extreme events such as large earthquakes, major flooding, or wildfires that can degrade the environmental conditions under which they are designed to operate. And in some cases, passive features can actually make accidents worse: For example, the NRC’s review of the NuScale design revealed that passive emergency systems could deplete cooling water of boron, which is needed to keep the reactor safely shut down after an accident.

In any event, regulators are loosening safety and security requirements for SMRs in ways which could cancel out any safety benefits from passive features. For example, the NRC has approved rules and procedures in recent years that provide regulatory pathways for exempting new reactors, including SMRs, from many of the protective measures that it requires for operating plants, such as a physical containment structure, an offsite emergency evacuation plan, and an exclusion zone that separates the plant from densely populated areas. It is also considering further changes that could allow SMRs to reduce the numbers of armed security personnel to protect them from terrorist attacks and highly trained operators to run them. Reducing security at SMRs is particularly worrisome, because even the safest reactors could effectively become dangerous radiological weapons if they are sabotaged by skilled attackers. Even passive safety mechanisms could be deliberately disabled.

Considering the cumulative impact of all these changes, SMRs could be as—or even more— dangerous than large reactors. For example, if a containment structure at a large reactor reliably prevented 90% of the radioactive material from being released from the core of the reactor during a meltdown, then a reactor five times smaller without such a containment structure could conceivably release more radioactive material into the environment, even though the total amount of material in the core would be smaller. And if the SMR were located closer to populated areas with no offsite emergency planning, more people could be exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation.

But even if one could show that the overall safety risk of a small reactor was lower than that of a large reactor, that still wouldn’t automatically imply the overall risk per unit of electricity that it generates is lower, since smaller plants generate less electricity. If an accident caused a 250-megawatt SMR to release only 25% of the radioactive material that a 1,000-megawatt plant would release, the ratio of risk to benefit would be the same. And a site with four such reactors could have four times the annual risk of a single unit, or an even greater risk if an accident at one reactor were to damage the others, as happened during the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan.

3. SMRs Will Not Reduce the Problem of What to Do With Radioactive Waste.

The industry makes highly misleading claims that certain SMRs will reduce the intractable problem of long-lived radioactive waste management by generating less waste, or even by “recycling” their own wastes or those generated by other reactors.

First, it’s necessary to define what “less” waste really means. In terms of the quantity of highly radioactive isotopes that result when atomic nuclei are fissioned and release energy, small reactors will produce just as much as large reactors per unit of heat generated. (Non-light-water reactors that more efficiently convert heat to electricity than light-water reactors will produce somewhat smaller quantities of fission products per unit of electricity generated—perhaps 10 to 30%—but this is a relatively small effect in the scheme of things.) And for reactors with denser fuels, the volume and mass of the spent fuel generated may be smaller, but the concentration of fission products in the spent fuel, and the heat generated by the decay products—factors that really matter to safety—will be proportionately greater.

Therefore, entities that hope to acquire SMRs, like data centers that lack the necessary waste infrastructure, will have to safely manage the storage of significant quantities of spent nuclear fuel on site for the long term, just like any other nuclear power plant does. Claims by vendors such as Westinghouse that they will take away the reactors after the fuel is no longer usable are simply not credible, as there are no realistic prospects for licensing centralized sites where the used reactors could be taken for the foreseeable future. Any community with an SMR will have to plan to be a de facto long-term nuclear waste disposal site.

4. SMRs Cannot Be Counted on to Provide Reliable and Resilient Off-the-Grid Power for Facilities, Such as Data Centers, Bitcoin Mining, Hydrogen, or Petrochemical production.

Despite the claims of developers, it is very unlikely that any reasonably foreseeable SMR design would be able to safely operate without reliable access to electricity from the grid to power coolant pumps and other vital safety systems. Just like today’s nuclear plants, SMRs will be vulnerable to extreme weather events or other disasters that could cause a loss of offsite power and force them to shut down. In such situations a user such as a data center operator would have to provide backup power, likely from diesel generators, for both the data center AND the reactor. And since there is virtually no experience with operating SMRs worldwide, it is highly doubtful that the novel designs being pitched now would be highly reliable right out of the box and require little monitoring and maintenance.

It very likely will take decades of operating experience for any new reactor design to achieve the level of reliability characteristic of the operating light-water reactor fleet. Premature deployment based on unrealistic performance expectations could prove extremely costly for any company that wants to experiment with SMRs.

5. SMRs Do Not Use Fuel More Efficiently Than Large Reactors.

Some advocates misleadingly claim that SMRs are more efficient than large ones because they use less fuel. In terms of the amount of heat generated, the amount of uranium fuel that must undergo nuclear fission is the same whether a reactor is large or small. And although reactors that use coolants other than water typically operate at higher temperatures, which can increase the efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity, this is not a big enough effect to outweigh other factors that decrease efficiency of fuel use.

Some SMRs designs require a type of uranium fuel called “high-assay low enriched uranium (HALEU),” which contains higher concentrations of the isotope uranium-235 than conventional light-water reactor fuel. Although this reduces the total mass of fuel the reactor needs, that doesn’t mean it uses less uranium nor results in less waste from “front-end” mining and milling activities: In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true.

If the nuclear bros have such a great SMR story to tell, why do they have to exaggerate so much?

One reason for this is that HALEU production requires a relatively large amount of natural uranium to be fed into the enrichment process that increases the uranium-235 concentration. For example, the TerraPower Natrium reactor which would use HALEU enriched to around 19% uranium-235, will require 2.5 to 3 times as much natural uranium to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity than a light-water reactor. Smaller reactors, such as the 15-megawatt Oklo Aurora, are even more inefficient. Improving the efficiency of these reactors can occur only with significant advances in fuel performance, which could take decades of development to achieve.

Reactors that use uranium inefficiently have disproportionate impacts on the environment from polluting uranium mining and processing activities. They also are less effective in mitigating carbon emissions, because uranium mining and milling are relatively carbon-intensive activities compared to other parts of the uranium fuel cycle.

SMRs may have a role to play in our energy future, but only if they are sufficiently safe and secure. For that to happen, it is essential to have a realistic understanding of their costs and risks. By painting an overly rosy picture of these technologies with often misleading information, the nuclear bros are distracting attention from the need to confront the many challenges that must be resolved to make SMRs a reality—and ultimately doing a disservice to their cause.

A great, novel experiment in political physics is under way in the United States, as the unstoppable moral force of youth-led protests against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza runs into the immovable object of the American power elite’s support for it.

In this clash, two critical forces have been weaponized: the U.S. mainstream media that heavily disseminates Israeli propaganda and shapes many local, state and national policies, and the scourge of antisemitism that has been unfairly used to demonize and silence Palestinians and shift attention away from the U.S.-enabled Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Since Israel launched its assault on Gaza, President Joe Biden’s steadfast support for it has galvanized young Americans and pushed them to mobilize.

They have formed decisive coalitions with Muslim and Arab Americans, Jewish, Black, Hispanic and Native communities, labor unions, and churches. They have given notice that if the U.S. continues to support the war, they will abandon Democratic candidates in the November elections, which would likely be fatal for the party.

[The power elites] fear the growing coalition of Americans who are not afraid to challenge the falsehoods and distortions of staunch Israel supporters or ignore biased media offerings.

The American power elite largely ignored the initial criticisms of the young and the marginalized, until student encampments started springing up at universities across the country three weeks ago. The students demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, a halt to U.S. government financial and military aid to Israel, and the divestment of university investments from military industries that enable the Israeli genocide.

The mainstream media’s coverage of the campus encampments and the violence against them has exposed it as a central actor in the power elite that sustains Israel’s war and simultaneously tries to silence Palestinians and criminalize anyone who supports them.

As I closely followed U.S. media outlets in recent weeks, I was shocked to see reporters, commentators and hosts use the exact same words and phrases that Biden and US and Israeli officials have used to smear the protesters. The mainstream media gives the impression of circling the wagons with Israeli and American officialdom to prevent at all costs an open, honest, comprehensive and contextualized public discussion on Israel’s behavior while trying instead to focus public attention on spurious accusations.

The mainstream media has widely condemned students and accused them of using “hate speech and hate symbols” (in the words of the US president), endorsing terrorism, advocating for Israel’s destruction, resorting to antisemitic slurs and threatening and frightening Jewish students. Everywhere they look in the student protest encampments, the media oracles have seen “terrorists” in training, “anti-Semites” at work, “Jew-haters” being groomed, universities collapsing, and “Nazi mobs” in the making.

Prominent TV hosts have unleashed passionate, vicious diatribes against the students who have camped out to demand an end to America’s role in Israel’s genocide against Gaza, and peace and justice for all in Palestine.

MSNBC’s Morning Joe show – reportedly a Biden favorite – is one glaring example of systematically biased TV programming that sometimes veers into incitement against the student protests and the university administrators. One of its hosts, Joe Scarborough, has claimed that students want “to wipe out all Jews”; “they are Hamas on college campuses”; and they are “not helping those of us who want to fight fascism in America.” His co-host Mika Brzezinski has said that the campus protests “look like January 6,” referring to the riot by Donald Trump supporters on Capitol Hill in January 2021.

Such unsubstantiated allegations against the protesters are common to varying degrees across all the major networks, including ABC, CNN and NBC.

Most of the “expert” analysts I have heard on mainstream TV in the last few weeks commenting on the protests have been former U.S. government or security officials, or people close to the Israeli viewpoint, including former Israeli officials. They have also offered variations on the themes of terrorism, radicalization and antisemitism.

Except for some interviews I have seen on MSNBC, networks have avoided inviting Palestinians and knowledgeable Americans who could explain the actual meaning of expressions that the media and officialdom find offensive or threatening, and could address the actual nature and extent of the fears of those Jews who sincerely worry about how the protests impact them.

Unsurprisingly, most media outlets have covered U.S. officials’ statements against peaceful protesters on campuses without much scrutiny as well.

By reporting the many accusations against the protesters without seriously questioning or verifying them, the mainstream media itself appears to adopt the conflation of antisemitism with valid criticism of Israeli policies...

This was apparent, for example, when Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and heads of several key congressional committees gave a press conference on April 30 where they threatened universities for allegedly allowing antisemitism to thrive on campus.

“We will not allow antisemitism to thrive on campus, and we will hold these universities accountable for their failure to protect Jewish students on campus,” Johnson said.

By reporting the many accusations against the protesters without seriously questioning or verifying them, the mainstream media itself appears to adopt the conflation of antisemitism with valid criticism of Israeli policies, which many scholars have warned is a dangerous practice. Israeli policies that warrant criticism include patently illegal ones that contravene international law, like expanding settlements, laying siege to Palestinian territories, and carrying out the genocidal attack on Gaza.

While mainstream media has struggled with its biases in covering the campus protests, there have been reports and commentaries by serious and knowledgeable people who actually have spent time among the defiant students, understood their motivations and their cause, and have not been beholden to domestic or foreign lobbies. Everyone I encountered – in person at universities or in the more honest, independent and progressive media outlets that do not see their job as supporting the power elites’ war-making frenzies – has reported calm, harmonious, often joyous gatherings of many faiths, aiming for a common goal of equal justice for all.

The alignment of mainstream media with the American political elites’ stance and all the exaggeration, misinterpretation, hysteria, lies and hallucination is unprecedented. It begs the question, why American officials and media leaders who traditionally parroted the Israeli line and simply ignored Palestinian voices are all up in arms now? Why would a gentle old man like Biden knowingly transform the Arabic word “intifada” (uprising) into what he calls “tragic and dangerous hate speech”?

I suspect this fanatical rhetoric reflects the power elite’s fear of being challenged in the domestic political arena for the first time ever by an issue related to Palestinian rights that also exposes and opposes Israel’s military extremism and genocide. They fear the growing coalition of Americans who are not afraid to challenge the falsehoods and distortions of staunch Israel supporters or ignore biased media offerings. They should worry, as a CNN poll last week suggested that 81 percent of Americans aged 18-35 disapprove of the American-backed Israeli war policy in Gaza.

Many young protesters have spoken of the U.S.-enabled genocide in Gaza as “the moral issue of our age.” They feel they cannot stay silent in the face of Israeli-made starvation and American-made bombs ravaging Gaza.

But when this principled stance is distorted by the U.S. mainstream media into an “antisemitic” and “pro-terrorist” frenzy, then it becomes clear that the commitment to truth-telling in large swaths of the media is far weaker than their desire to be close to the imperial seats of war-making power in the U.S. and the Middle East.

When water pressure blew a gaping hole in the Mountain Valley Pipeline on May 1, folks living near the right of way must have had many mixed reactions—anger, fear, outrage, I told you so, even relief. Relief that it happened now before the pipeline becomes highly pressurized with methane gas.

If the 42-inch pipeline ever explodes at 1,480 pounds per square inch of gas pressure, it will be like nothing we have ever seen. Anyone nearby will likely not survive.

It will probably also mark the end of Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s political career because he oversees the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) whose job it is to make sure MVP gets built safely. Of course, ultimately, it is President Joe Biden who is in charge. His path to reelection, already not easy, will become much harder if MVP ruptures prior to November 5.

It’s 2024, and we know we need to get off fossil fuels ASAP. Why are we building a giant pipeline to suck a climate change accelerant out of America’s biggest deposit of contained methane?

One thing we know for sure is that MVP’s corrosion-proof coating is “no longer fit for purpose.” We don’t know it because we’re experts. We know it because we understand English and we can read. That quote is from a study done by…TC Energy, the company that wanted to build the Keystone XL pipeline (and may still try to if former President Donald Trump wins again).

The picture of the truck hauling away the ruptured section of MVP pipe is alarming, to say the least, but to the untrained eye it offers no clue as to why the steel separated. Hopefully, there will be transparency regarding the investigation and we’ll be able to trust its findings.

Although we know the pipe coating is no good, up until now we’ve had no reason to necessarily question the quality of the pipe itself. But the company that manufactured the pipe, Welspun, has some history that people should be aware of.

In what seems like a weird combination of products lines, besides manufacturing heavy steel pipe, the company also manufactures fine linen. In 2016, Target and Walmart cut ties with Welspun and hundreds of thousands of bed sheets were pulled off store shelves because they were falsely labeled and not as luxurious as advertised.

In 2010, Plains Justice released a report titled Use of Substandard Steel by the U.S. Pipeline Industry 2007 TO 2009. It begins with this: “Between 2007 and 2009 a number of pipe mills produced substandard steel pipe for U.S. pipeline companies. This pipe failed to comply with the American Petroleum Institute Grade 5L X70 standard (API 5L X70 Standard).”

A few paragraphs later: “A number of companies are implicated in producing defective pipe, but it appears that Welspun Corp. Ltd (Welspun), an Indian steel pipe manufacturer, produced most of it. For example, according to released documents, Welspun was responsible for 88% of pipe with expansion anomalies provided to Boardwalk,” which was one of the pipeline building companies.

In 2009, pipeline company Kinder Morgan sued Welspun because pipe that had been purchased was “defective and would not hold up under the required pressure load.”

So has MVP been built with bad pipe? We don’t know, and we need to find out. But regardless, what we do know is MVP’s pipe coating is shot and “no longer fit for purpose.” That alone is more than enough reason to finally throw in the towel and cut our losses on this insane boondoggle.

It’s 2024, and we know we need to get off fossil fuels ASAP. Why are we building a giant pipeline to suck a climate change accelerant out of America’s biggest deposit of contained methane? How much do we want our grandkids to hate us in coming years? How hard do we want to make their lives?

To understand how we know that MVP’s pipe coating is no good, read this. It also tells about three-year-old Delaney Tercero’s death in a hospital burn unit two days after a gas pipeline (which was minuscule compared to MVP) exploded near her home. The cause of the explosion was corrosion due to defective pipe coating. Her parents and younger sister escaped with their lives, but they’ll never get over their loss.

Shares of Apple lost 10% of their value in the first four months of the year. This may explain why Apple announced on Thursday that its board authorized $110 billion in stock buybacks, the largest buyback in U.S. history. It may also explain why, on Saturday, Warren Buffett—the “Oracle of Omaha”—announced that his company, Berkshire-Hathaway, would sell a big portion of its stake in Apple.

It is impossible to understand what’s happening to the American economy without considering the surge of stock buybacks—in which a corporation buys back shares of its own stock to artificially boost its share price, by creating fewer outstanding shares.

Large corporations are now devoting nearly 70% of their profits to buybacks.

Abbott Labs spent $5 billion on stock buybacks while allowing plant conditions to deteriorate to the point where bacterial contamination of baby formula resulted in infant deaths and a nationwide formula shortage.

Stock buybacks have also become a major force behind widening inequality. They mostly benefit CEOs and the richest 1% of the public, who own more than half of all shares of stock owned by Americans.

There is no reason for them. Before Ronald Reagan’s Securities and Exchange Commission allowed them in 1982, buybacks were treated as illegal stock manipulations in violation of the 1933 and 1934 Securities and Exchange Acts.

Yet they’re still stock manipulations. By using inside knowledge of when and how buybacks are scheduled, corporate executives can time when they exercise their own stock options—which now constitute most of their compensation—to reap maximum benefits for themselves.

Buybacks also impose a huge cost on the economy.

Every dollar spent lining the pockets of CEOs and investors is a dollar less to upgrade equipment and protect workers and the public.

Boeing failed to follow through with a promised $7 billion safety redesign of its 737 aircraft while it was spending roughly that much each year on stock buybacks.

Norfolk Southern Railroad paid investors $18 billion in buybacks and dividends over the five years before its equipment malfunctioned in the disastrous derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which released over 300,000 gallons of toxic and flammable chemicals into the air and soil.

Abbott Labs spent $5 billion on stock buybacks while allowing plant conditions to deteriorate to the point where bacterial contamination of baby formula resulted in infant deaths and a nationwide formula shortage.

Money spent on buybacks also means less money for research and development, which hobbles American competitiveness at a time when China is breathing down our necks.

Apple now spends twice as much on stock buybacks as on R&D. Over the last fiscal year, Apple doled out $78 billion on buybacks.

Intel, the largest chip maker in America, with revenues last year of $54 billion, was recently awarded an $8.5 billion grant from the federal CHIPS and Science Act, plus $11 billion in subsidized loans.

But Intel fritters away its profits on stock buybacks. Its website proudly touts that it has spent $152 billion on stock buybacks since 1990.

There’s no way to be sure Intel isn’t using CHIPS money for stock buybacks. As Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen noted: “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.”

As if all this weren’t bad enough, stock buybacks provide an added incentive for companies to monopolize their industries and keep prices high.

A new Roosevelt Institute analysis found that the 10 largest publicly traded fast-food corporations spent $6.1 billion on buybacks last year. At the same time, they hiked prices to consumers. The average markup in the fast-food industry jumped 8.4% last year, while markups for firms across all industries grew 6.2%. Fast-food corporations lasts year charged prices 27% above the marginal cost of production.

According to Oxfam’s recent report, America’s 200 largest corporations are more profitable than ever. Net profits soared to $1.25 trillion in 2022, a 63% increase over 2018. But 90% of that sum was paid out to shareholders ($448 billion as dividends and a record $681 billion as stock buybacks).

And because CEO pay is linked to share prices, CEO pay is through the roof. The typical worker’s pay is higher than it was two years ago, adjusted for inflation, but it is still in the cellar.

In sum, the social costs of stock buybacks continue to surge.

What’s the answer to all this?

Ban stock buybacks—as they were banned before 1983.

In an emotionally jarring and disorienting week where you might wake up to a televised, tear-gas haze of cops firing rubber bullets into a crowd of college students in the blackness of a Southern California night, the scariest thing came wrapped in the cover of a magazine.

Donald Trump, locked in as GOP presidential nominee even as he spends his days in a Manhattan courtroom in the first of his four felony trials, spoke at length to a reporter for Time magazine for a piece headlined, “How Far Trump Would Go” — aimed at addressing the growing talk that a second presidential term would look more like a dictatorship.

Trump’s way of addressing the dictatorship controversy was essentially to confirm it.

A 47th presidency under Trump, he told Time’s Eric Cortellessa, would start with dead-of-night raids to round up as many as 12 million undocumented immigrants currently scattered across the United States, some of whom might be placed for a time in mass-detention camps. He only encouraged red states empowered by the Trump-flavored Supreme Court to step up their abortion bans and punishment for women who seek them. Trump’s Washington would be solely populated by loyalist zealots in the remaining government jobs that haven’t been eliminated. Justice in the wannabe president’s vision for 2025 and beyond would mean prosecution for his political enemies and freedom for the thugs who attacked police officers and tried to stop the certification of election results on Jan. 6, 2021.

Pragmatism means a painful moral choice of ignoring Biden’s near-fatal blind spot on sending bombs to Israel by clinging to the good — such as his support for reproductive rights — and voting for him in November as the only real option for stopping Trump.

Of course, Trump tried to have it both ways by claiming that his remark to Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator, “on day one” of his presidency was only a joke — just like in 2016 when he asked “Russia...if you’re listening” to find Hillary Clinton’s emails (which wasn’t really a joke). But the ex-president also explained that he can get away with such comments about an American dictatorship because, “I think a lot of people like it.”

— (@)

Indeed. The never-ending barrage of polls continues to show Trump in a virtual dead heat with President Joe Biden, perhaps leading slightly in the key swing states, despite the almost daily embarrassment of his Manhattan trial pegged to paying hush money to an adult-film star, as well as growing awareness of his open desire for autocracy. Trump’s shocking oratory of retribution, coupled with his recent promise in Wisconsin not to accept the 2024 election result there if he loses, prompted Argentine historian Federico Finchelstein to declare: “This is how fascists campaign.”

And yet, two of the most tumultuous weeks in American society in over a half-century have only brought the nightmare of a second, more authoritarian Trump presidency closer to becoming a reality. The violent crackdown on campus protests against Israel’s U.S.-backed campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 34,000, many of them women or children, has dominated TV screens with scenes of domestic strife not seen since the 1960s and early 1970s. In the most shocking clash, at the University of California-Los Angeles, a generation raised on active-shooter drills looked up to see its own government firing rubber bullets at its pro-Palestinian encampment.

In the alternate world of a Trump victory, the necessity for continued protest, for accountability journalism, and for future fair elections will be crushed.

The police-state repression of college protests with more than 2,000 arrests sharply divided Americans yet also brought us together in one sense: No one is happy. Many Americans — myself included — are shocked and dismayed by images such as New Hampshire state troopers in riot gear storming a small, peaceful protest at Dartmouth College, tossing a 65-year-old Jewish studies professor to the ground, and arresting her.

But that sense of alarm over the threats to free speech has little support from either Republican or Democratic leaders appealing to a not-particularly-silent-majority — some who say the police response was needed because of antisemitism, real or perceived, in the encampments, and some who simply prefer law and order and disdain protests. This was the group that Biden appealed to Thursday when he told the nation that “dissent must never lead to disorder.”

— (@)

Seen through the lens of politics, Biden’s statement felt like an effort to avoid another 1968, when that year’s Republican, Richard Nixon, ran ads showing campus chaos and promising “law and order,” and narrowly won. The 1968 analogies seem apt, especially as Biden’s Democrats prepare again to gather for a Chicago convention and large-scale protests loom. But I’m thinking an even better comparison is the year 451, when another morally decadent empire stood on the brink of collapse.

Much like the end of ancient Rome’s long run as the world’s lone superpower, the fight to save American democracy is foundering not because of outside agitators but from the decay of corrupt institutions, not just on Capitol Hill. Universities, the news media, and police departments that are supposed to protect a civil society are failing miserably. An utterly broken nation that’s currently firing tear gas and pepper spray to shut up its own children is easy prey for the various Vandals and Visigoths poised on the outskirts to sack the American empire, much like Attila in 451, and perhaps to eventually topple it. Trump is merely the barbarian at the gate.

In 2024, the chickens that were hatched in a response to the late 1960s upheaval — privatized universities that would be run more like corporations than academies of free thought, militarized police forces to rapidly crush protests, and a media cowed by the right-wing assaults that began with Spiro Agnew — have finally come home to roost before our disbelieving eyes.

The crackdown has revealed that the cherished collegiate notion of faculty governance is as quaint as freshman beanie hats and stuffing telephone booths. Dozens of college presidents, led by Columbia’s Minouche Shafik, completely shut out their distinguished professors in rapidly calling riot cops to shut down encampments — to get the new McCarthyism of Republican pols off their backs, to satisfy billionaire donors who see protests as a threat to their wealth and unearned prestige, and to hang onto their fabulously lucrative jobs. This has exposed the modern university as the fundamentally right-wing institutions — glorified hedge funds and real-estate companies with an academic wing for branding purposes — that many have become.

— (@)

The helmeted storm troopers these cowardly college presidents are calling onto campus are like a living embodiment of this weekend’s May 4 conflation of Star Wars (”May the 4th be with you”) and the 54th anniversary of the Kent State massacre. The New York Police Department — which sent a D-Day sized expeditionary force onto campuses at Columbia and City University of New York, nearly caused another Kent State by firing a gun in a Columbia building, and then celebrated itself on right-wing media and in a propaganda movie that channeled the ghost of Leni Riefenstahl — revealed a public agency that has spiraled into unchecked authoritarianism.

In a healthy society, the news media might have voiced alarm at such a rapid, heavily armed clampdown on campus free speech, especially when some of the worst treatment from police — or, at UCLA, from club-wielding pro-Israel counter-protesters — has been to journalists, and especially student reporters.

The last two weeks have been awful but also a moment of clarity. People of good conscience should stop deluding themselves that saving American democracy is only a matter of defeating Trump at the ballot box.

But most mainstream coverage has been nearly as authoritarian as the cops, buying without question “copaganda” about “outside agitators” and whipping up alarm at “violent protests” when, just like in 1968, most of the violence is coming from police. Particularly shocking was Wednesday’s anti-student rant by CNN’s Dana Bash who said demonstrators were “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe” — totally ignoring the fact that the violence her network had been covering all morning was executed by that pro-Israel mob, not the campers.

That kind of twisted coverage made it easy for Biden — who was personally revulsed by student protest when he was a 1960s law student — to issue his Nixon-lite White House appeal for law and order. In doing so, the president was often disingenuous and loose with the facts; for example, he blamed students for canceling commencements even though the only canceled commencement, at the University of Southern California, was to bar a pro-Palestinian valedictorian from speaking, and had nothing to do with student protests.

Biden’s performance on this issue was profoundly disappointing, especially to those of us who fantasize about an American president who might actually condemn slamming an economics professor to the pavement for questioning police brutality, or firing rubber bullets at unarmed college students. There is one thing even more disturbing, however. That is the knowledge that a second term for Trump would be much, much worse.

— (@)

A Trump 47 presidency would be even more supportive of Israel’s extreme right-wing government and its militarism, and would not hesitate to abuse the Insurrection Act to call up tanks and soldiers to crush anyone who dares to protest. Some of the newsrooms doing a lousy job of covering the protests could be shut down this time next year by a POTUS who has openly declared the media as “the enemy of the people.” Trump’s McCarthyite minions on Capitol Hill are already determined to carry out funding cuts to finish the job of killing the American dream of a true higher education for all.

Nobody is going to like the way out of this mess, because it requires the nearly impossible — mixing pragmatism with an almost hopeless idealism. The pragmatism means a painful moral choice of ignoring Biden’s near-fatal blind spot on sending bombs to Israel by clinging to the good — such as his support for reproductive rights — and voting for him in November as the only real option for stopping Trump. In the alternate world of a Trump victory, the necessity for continued protest, for accountability journalism, and for future fair elections will be crushed.

The hopeless idealism is using the four years of constricted breathing space that a Trump defeat would offer to start rebuilding our shattered America from the ground up, and begin electing some candidates who believe that the First Amendment is paramount, who see that higher education — when it can be done right — is a public good, and who can build a society that isn’t reined in by repressive warrior cops. I don’t know if that’s possible, but I know the horror that awaits if we do nothing.

The last two weeks have been awful but also a moment of clarity. People of good conscience should stop deluding themselves that saving American democracy is only a matter of defeating Trump at the ballot box. It turns out that those who pay the greatest lip-service to freedom — overpaid college presidents and news anchors, or self-serving members of Congress — are also the first to call in the riot police on those trying to exercise it. Trump is wrong about almost everything but he was 100% right about this: When it comes to dictatorship, there are a lot of people who like it.

It has been 212 days since the beginning of the Gaza genocide. Over 34,200 civilians have been killed, including 14,500 children and 10,000 women. Over 10,000 people are still buried under the rubble. Mass graves have been uncovered at hospitals in the north and the south of Gaza. At the time of writing, hundreds of dead bodies have just been discovered in a huge mass grave at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Mothers are still trying to identify the bodies of their sons and daughters. Two thousand people are still missing.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has documented 140 mass and unmarked graves so far in Gaza. The barbarity by Israel is unprecedented. Among the deceased in the mass graves at al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals, some people had been stripped of their clothes and buried with their hands tied. According to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a child is killed every 10 minutes in Gaza on average. Ghebreyesus paints a gloomy picture: “Nowhere and no one is safe.”

Almost all Gazans have been displaced, waiting for the day when they will return home as a first step towards their return to the towns and villages from which they and their parents were ethnically cleansed in 1948. Now, nothing is left. The beautiful coastal strip is no longer recognizable. Two-thirds of its houses have been destroyed; roads, hospitals, schools, universities, factories, shops, cemeteries, libraries, mosques, churches, restaurants, stadiums, farms, water wells, electricity generators…all have been erased.

Yet that does not seem to be enough for genocidal Israel, the United States of America, and the colonial West! They have decided to starve the people of Gaza by closing all the crossings and banning all kinds of food, clean water, and medicines. Even UNRWA has been defunded — despite an independent UN commission saying that Israel had failed to offer evidence for its smears against the aid agency — and for one reason only: to kill more Gazans.

The decision taken by major colonial powers to defund UNRWA has led the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention to sound the alarm and state:“[This] represents a shift by several countries from potential complicity in genocide to direct involvement in engineered famine.”

It is then a clear intent to get rid of the indigenous population of Palestine. In 1948, heads of the Zionist gangs made the mistake of “not finishing the job,” according to Israel’s leading right-wing historian Benny Morris, who has recently written an op-ed for the New York Times calling for the slaughter (genocide) of the Palestinians of Rafah: “it’s crucial for Israel to conquer Rafah.” Just like that!

In her report for the UN Human Rights Council, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese wrote:

“[There are] reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the following acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to groups’ members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.

In fact, the threshold for genocide by Israel against the Palestinians was met years ago. Although the recent campaign in Gaza leaves little doubt, Zionism has always been a genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people. The Palestinian has become the “other” of the flourishing white Ashkenazi “self,” whose very existence necessitates the annihilation of the “non-existent” natives.

And why has the colonial West decided, through Israel, to carry out these horrific crimes? Perhaps a hint can be found in Edward Said’s Orientalism, where he argues that “the major component in European culture is precisely what made [Western civilization] hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.” Compare the colonial West’s reaction to the Ukrainian crisis to what is happening in Gaza. Palestinians at the end of the day are not part of “us”, whereas Ukrainians are white Europeans.

Apartheid Israel, then, is committing genocide because it is a settler colony. But, as argued by some critical historians (Ilan Pappe and Joseph Massad amongst them), the final years of all settler colonies are marked by more protracted savagery by the colonizers, including genocide.

Apartheid Israel, then, is committing genocide because it is a settler colony. But, as argued by some critical historians (Ilan Pappe and Joseph Massad amongst them), the final years of all settler colonies are marked by more protracted savagery by the colonizers, including genocide. The realization that the loss of settler-colonial privilege is close at hand drives colonial forces to use the most savage methods to defeat the revolt of the indigenous people. It happened in Algeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and other formerly colonized countries where the colonizing powers carried out massacres even as colonialism was in its death throes.

The more resistance the colonized indigenous population shows, the more brutal the colonizer becomes. Genocidal Israel’s fascist political elite cannot tolerate any form of resistance on the part of native Palestinians. So far, at least 608 Israeli soldiers have been killed by Palestinian fighters — this is unprecedented in the history of the “conflict.” And there are consequences that Palestinian civilians are being forced to pay. This was the same logic in all settler colonies on their deathbed. But the horrific question remains, how long will the genocide continue? And how many more dead bodies of innocent Palestinian children, men, and women do the international community want to see in order to act?

Peaceful protest, violent response—that says it all.

Human politics—from global to local—remain mixed with hatred, dominance and... well, dehumanization. We've organized ourselves across the planet around one primary principle: the existence of an enemy. The division between "us" and "them" can be based on anything: a difference in race, language, culture—or simply a difference of opinion, which is beginning to happen on campuses across the country, as peaceful, intensely determined protesters, demanding their institutions divest from the Israeli war machine, face violent resistance from police and/or counter-protesters.

Yes, the peaceful protesters are interrupting the status quo—setting up encampments, even occupying university buildings. For instance, at Columbia University, students actually renamed the occupied Hamilton Hall, declaring its new name to be Hind's Hall, after Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli armed forces, along with the rest of her family (and several aid workers), as they were fleeing their home in Gaza. The point of the protests is, indeed, to change the world: to stop U.S., including university, support of the devastating "war" (i.e., carnage). They’re not trying to eliminate an enemy but, rather, illuminate the situation—putting themselves on the line to do so.

Some of the responses to the protests are definitely illuminating. A statement from UCLA's Palestine Solidarity Encampment, for instance, noted:

The life-threatening assault we face tonight is nothing less than a horrifying, despicable act of terror. For over seven hours, Zionist aggressors hurled gas canisters, sprayed pepper spray, and threw fireworks and bricks into our encampment. They broke our barriers repeatedly, clearly in an attempt to kill us.

Furthermore, the account continued: "Campus safety left within minutes, external security the university hired for 'backup' watched, filmed, and laughed on the side as the immediate danger inflicted upon us escalated. Law enforcement simply stood at the edge of the lawn and refused to budge as we screamed for their help. . . .

"The university would rather see us dead than divest."

In other words, those damn students are the enemy. Even when the response to the protests isn't outright violence, it's often rhetorically violent, such as GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee calling the protesters terrorists and declaring that "any student who has promoted terrorism or engaged in terrorist acts on behalf of Hamas should be immediately added to the terrorist watch list and placed on the [Transportation Security Administration] no-fly list."

This is utterly linear, minimalist thinking. Critics aren't engaging in a debate on the nature (and necessity) of war, plunging, with the protesters, into a complex discussion of global politics, military industrialism, and the morality of killing. That's too much trouble! They're simply calling the outraged protesters "the enemy"—just a bunch of terrorists, same as Hamas. And yeah, no doubt part of that good old Axis of Evil.

This is the thinking the protesters are trying to disrupt! Alas, it's also solidly part of the infrastructure of the status quo. Militarism is baked into the American core. When we're not waging our own wars, we're enabling various allies to do so.

As Heidi Peltier, writing at Brown University's Costs of War Project, points out, regarding this country's annual budget of nearly $2 trillion: "Almost half of the U.S. federal discretionary budget is allocated to the Department of Defense and more than half of the discretionary budget goes to 'defense' overall, which includes not only the Pentagon but also nuclear weapons programs within the Department of Energy and additional defense spending in other departments."

"As a result, other elements and capacities of the U.S. government and civilian economy have been weakened, and military industries have gained political power," Peltier continued. "Decades of high levels of military spending have changed U.S. government and society— strengthening its ability to fight wars, while weakening its capacities to perform other core functions. Investments in infrastructure, healthcare, education, and emergency preparedness, for instance, have all suffered as military spending and industry have crowded them out."

The campus protests around the country, at which, so far, more than 1,000 students have been arrested, primarily address the twisted irony of money. Universities have multi-billion-dollar endowments—donation money—which they then invest in the stock market, in various companies, including... well, yeah, weapons manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and many more. Oh, the mysterious, ironic flow of money!

At New York University, a spokesman there informed protesting students that the university is not divesting from such companies because it needs to maximize its investment returns in order to "help the university fulfill its research and educational mission." You know, to bring truth and knowledge into the world—for the sake, among others, of the protesters themselves.

American college students are facing this irony head-on—at a personal cost. But the cost, as they say, is minimal, compared to the one being paid by Palestinians, and by victims of war all around the world.

The media is doing all it can to de-legitimize the students protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the U.S.’ complicity in it. It is a sign of just how fragile, and threatened, is the existing order that promotes the genocide.

Besides diverting attention from the genocide itself, the media is calling the protests “Pro-Palestinian,” instead of “Anti-genocide.” That framing, itself, is revealing of the need to obfuscate. The media are also suggesting the students are being led by outside agitators, that they are antisemitic, even “terrorists.” Anything except the fact of the genocide.

There are three simple tests we can conduct to answer whether the students’ protests are legitimate. They start with this: “Does a government—any government—have the right to murder tens of thousands of its own innocent, defenseless women and children?” Because that is undeniably what is happening in Gaza.

The Israeli government is murdering tens of thousands of innocent, defenseless women and children. And it is doing so without any remorse and with the seeming conviction that it is going to get away with it; impunity. Is that acceptable? If it is not, then the students’ protests are legitimate.

A second simple test of the students’ legitimacy is this: “Should a government be able to ethnically cleanse millions of people from land their ancestors lived on for 2,000 years so that it (the government) can steal that land and keep it as its own?” Because that is undeniably what is happening in Gaza.

Israel was granted 55% of Palestine by U.N. resolution 181, in 1948. It took 78%, making itself immediately in violation of international law. And then, in 1967, it took the rest. That’s why the Palestinians now live in what are termed “occupied territories:” Gaza; the West Bank; East Jerusalem. Those were all seized by an illegal—and still illegal—military occupation. Is that acceptable? If it is not, then the students’ protests are legitimate.

A third simple test of the students’ legitimacy is this: “Should the U.S. government be assisting in this, the most open and notorious ethnic cleansing and genocide of the twenty-first century?” Because that is undeniably what is happening in Gaza.

The U.S. government is doing everything it can—providing money, weapons, diplomatic cover, military cover, media cover—to help the government of Israel murder tens of thousands of innocent, defenseless women and children and ethnically cleanse millions more so that the Israeli government can steal the land and keep it as its own. Is that acceptable? If it is not, then the students’ protests are legitimate.

Those are the only three tests you need to ask to determine whether the students’ protests are legitimate.

The reason the students are being savaged in the media is because their protests are spotlighting, as the media itself will not, the horrific immorality of what Israel is doing, the craven complicity of the U.S. government in helping them do it, and the deep entwinement of so much of U.S. society in those immoral, craven acts: the government; the universities; the military-industrial complex; the media; and more. And, to be clear, it is not antisemitic to say this.

It is not antisemitic to say that a government cannot murder tens of thousands of innocent, defenseless women and children. It is not antisemitic to state that no government has the right to ethnically cleanse millions of native people from their land so that it can steal that land and keep it for itself. It is not antisemitic to say that the U.S. government should not be helping a government—any government—commit such savagery.

The students are one of the few classes of actors remaining in the society that are not bought, or sold out. Congress is laughably, tragically bought by money from the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC). The travesty is that everybody knows this but is not supposed to say it, and most do not. But it is not antisemitic to say it. It is simply a clinical description of how money and power works in a society that has abandoned its ideals and principles and worships only money and power.

The universities are bought by their dependence on large donations from wealthy Jewish donors, which we saw when the presidents of Harvard and Penn were run out of their jobs because wealthy Jewish donor demanded their heads. And no, it is not antisemitic to say that. It is simply a clinical description of how money and power works in a society that has abandoned its ideals and principles and worships only money and power.

In these ways, as it was in the Vietnam War, the students may yet be the society’s salvation. Back then, the U.S. government was “bombing back to the stone age” a society of pre-industrial-age rice farmers who simply wanted to be left alone to choose their own form of government, which the U.S. government was determined they would not be allowed to do.

Four million Vietnamese were killed against 58,000 Americans. That’s a 69-to-1 kill ratio. That’s not a war. That’s an industrialized slaughter. It’s the same in Gaza, today, except worse.

The Israeli government has herded the Palestinians into what is called “the largest open-air concentration camp in the world” and is massacring them with surgically targeted, industrial abandon. It is the Holocaust redux, lacking only the gas chambers. And, this time, all the world is watching.

The problem the students pose to the Powers That Be is that they will not submit to and recycle the Officially Sanctioned Narrative, which holds that “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Israel does have the right to defend itself—within its internationally recognized legal borders. Gaza is not within those borders. It is an illegally occupied territory, so that “right to defend itself” does not apply.

Let’s be clear. Israel is the fourth mightiest military power in the world. For more than seven decades it has been carrying out the ethnic cleansing which it is now hoping to finish. Its actions have nothing to do with defense. It is simply slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent, defenseless women and children so that it can steal their land.

Thank God for the students back in the Vietnam era. They pulled the U.S. back from an abyss of apocalyptic violence, suicidal immorality, and industrialized genocide. We can only hope that the students, today, can do the same. But that depends on our willingness to listen to simple truths, and the courage to abide by the obvious answers.

Whether we have such willingness, and the courage to do what the answers compel, is not at all clear. What is clear is that the media will do everything it can to prevent us from arriving at the right answers, and the right action.

Goldman Sachs, the infamous Wall Street “vampire squid” (aptly so dubbed by Matt Taibbi), wants to scare the hell out of us. It reports that more than 300 million jobs worldwide could be affected negatively by artificial intelligence programs and that “roughly two-thirds of U.S. occupations are exposed to some degree of automation by AI.”

How convenient! Wall Street is off the hook. They aren’t job killers – AI is. And there’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it, because there’s no stopping science and technology from their god-like domination of society. AI will gobble up your job and you will just have to make do.

Big finance knows we’ll eat this up because we always do. Since the dawn of the industrial era, we’ve been fascinated by the power and prowess of modern machinery. We love stories about robots and computers taking over the world, fighting us to the finish. It is, after all, truly amazing what we, the recent descendants of chimpanzees, are capable of inventing. We have to marvel when making a phone call to the other side of the world in a split second. And it is indeed chilling to have AI programs write us a heartfelt love poem in an instant.

So yes, we are inclined to believe that AI is the most powerful, far reaching job killer to ever have roamed the planet. But it isn’t. In terms of jobs loss, it’s just a distraction, the shiny object that gets our attention while Wall Street picks our pockets.

More than 300 Wall Street hedge funds feasted at the trough. There’s your job killer.

The same Wall Street firms and their media cousins that want us to marvel at the shock and awe of AI, are destroying jobs the old-fashioned way – through stock buybacks. They kill jobs in order to stuff more money into their pockets and they’d greatly prefer us not to notice.

There is a direct connection with most mass layoffs and stock buybacks, but seldom if ever is that reported. Hell will freeze over before Goldman Sachs issues a report that shows how stock buybacks are destroying the jobs of millions of working people while enriching the already wealthy.

For those new to this game, a stock buyback is when a company uses its revenues to buy back its own shares to boost their price. Yes, this is stock manipulation, and it was once outlawed. Now it’s legal and companies are using nearly 70 percent of all their earnings to buy back and boost the price of their own shares.

Why? Reason number one is that Wall Street firms, usually big hedge funds, will buy up a company’s stocks with borrowed money, gain a certain amount of control, and then demand the company buy back stock so the hedge fund makes a killing in a hurry.

Reason number two is that CEOs receive most of their compensation through stock incentives. Boost the price of shares through stock buybacks and CEOs instantly get richer.

How to pay for all this? Through mass layoffs, orders of magnitude greater than AI. In January 2024 there were 82,307 job cuts in the economy. Only 381 were due to AI.

But wait. That’s right now. In the future might not the numbers reverse? After all, AI’s journey has just begun.

Indeed, it has, but as I detail in Wall Street’s War on Workers, virtually every study of the job impact of automation shows that it’s a very slow process. Also, the entry of automation doesn’t necessarily mean that the number of jobs in an automated industry will decline. After robots marched through the auto industry, overall employment actually increased. In Japan, the world’s leader in automotive robotics, the auto industry provides lifetime guaranteed employment.

Sure, this time it could be different, with AI proving to be an exceptional job killer. But that belief is based on fantasy and fear, amplified by the media, and not by actually examining the causes of job loss. In our economy, the big job killer is stock buybacks.

In 2023, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft announced 43,000 layoffs. Yet just before those announcements, in the third quarter of 2022 alone, these companies conducted $28 billion in stock buybacks. In the past five years, they have used $383 billion in stock buybacks to boost their stock prices. More than 300 Wall Street hedge funds feasted at the trough. There’s your job killer. (For the gory details see Chapter 11 of Wall Street’s War on Workers.)

How do we stop them?

The policy part is easy to imagine. Once again prohibit stock manipulation by outlawing stock buybacks. Also, attach one simple clause to every corporation getting a federal contract – no compulsory layoffs during the life of the contract. You can’t take taxpayer money (amounting to approximately $700 billion a year) if you’re going to force taxpayers out of their jobs. If you want to lay someone off it must be voluntary, which means you have to buy them out. You don’t want to do that? Don’t take the federal money.

The hard part is building a movement big enough to force politicians to take on Wall Street. We estimate that 30 million of us have gone through a mass layoff since 1996. Count the families of laid off workers and probably half of the U.S. workforce has been negatively affected by mass layoffs. The labor movement needs to make mass layoffs a major cause and build a new organization that mobilizes this constituency – something like Workers United Against Mass Layoffs! If millions join, maybe politicians will start to listen.

To get there, however, we first need to defeat the technological fatalism that make layoffs feel inevitable and unstoppable.

Financial looting, not AI = Mass Layoffs!

As the fourth negotiating session on the United Nations plastics treaty comes to a close, pressing questions loom: Will world leaders finalize a robust agreement by the end of this year that effectively halts plastic pollution at its source? Despite the fortitude of countries within the High Ambition Coalition like Rwanda and Peru, negotiations on the agenda of intersessional work leading up to the final session in November in Busan, Korea, left the crucial aspect of reducing plastic production off the table.

Divergence surrounding the root causes of plastic pollution was ignited by the overwhelming presence of the fossil fuel and chemical industry. And their impact was not hard to miss, with pro-plastic campaigners outside the Shaw Center where negotiations were held and nearly 200 lobbyists registering for the talks, even joining country delegations, according to a Center for International Environmental Law analysis. Their influence is far-reaching. Notably, the U.S., being the world’s largest contributor to plastic waste, has not taken a stance on production.

The full plastic lifecycle—from creation to waste—represents an ocean justice crisis.

I conveyed this message on Earth Day during a youth coalition meeting with U.S. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Welch (D-Vt.), and Representative Jared Huffman (D-Calif.). I advocated for the negotiators to prioritize increasing protections for human rights and ocean health by centering justice.

Despite widespread discussions on the environmental and human health risks of plastics, there is still a noticeable gap in recognizing the interconnected injustices they perpetuate—though the Global Youth Coalition on Plastic Pollution and Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus were adamant about these connections in their plenary statements. While plastics impact everyone—microplastics are in our air, food, water, soil, and bodies, even human placentas—disproportionate negative impacts occur across race, occupation, ethnicity, class, gender, and age.

Outside the plastics context, voices like Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson have brought justice to the forefront of ocean conservation, while Leah Thomas is the leading activist for Intersectional Environmentalism. As a Gen Z advocate deeply immersed in ocean advocacy, in my view, this is what the plastics conversation still needs: utilizing an intersectional approach to shed light on how the full plastic lifecycle—from creation to waste—represents an ocean justice crisis.

Ocean Health

Upon returning from the fourth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment (INC-4), I went to the beach for rest and was, paradoxically, as usual, immediately picking up plastic waste. And still, I acknowledge my privileged position–that ocean currents are naturally not bringing as much pollution to the North Carolina coast as they are to vulnerable island countries. Each year 11 million metric tons of plastic enter the seas, devastating wildlife, contaminating seafood, and polluting beaches. But, those most severely affected are often the least culpable: island countries, Indigenous Peoples, and the Global South. This pollution is compounded by the plastic loads high GDP countries export to the Global South, a trend called “waste colonialism.”

Undeniably, the ocean is profoundly impacted by plastic pollution, evident in the vast gyres twice the size of Texas and the grim prediction that by 2050, 99% of seabirds will have ingested plastics.

Not only does this pollution entangle marine life and release toxic chemicals, scientists are beginning to worry it is threatening the ability of the ocean to sequester carbon. Zooplankton are microscopic animals that are now replacing their plant diet with microplastics, and this trend on a large scale is hypothesized to hinder the release of carbon to the deep sea.

Human Rights

Despite widespread support by countries for including human rights in the plastics treaty, there are no obligations to protect the rights of Indigenous Peoples, of informal waste pickers whose livelihoods depend on plastic collection, or of anyone. In a report, Earth Law Center reviewed nearly 400 statements across 175 member states to the INC and mapped support by country. Unsurprisingly, regions across the Global South experiencing the brunt of plastic pollution and human rights injustices demonstrated the highest support.

Right now, the word “justice” is not in the plastics treaty text at all.

Many people don’t know not to microwave plastic. Just as many are not aware that there are 16,000 chemicals associated with plastics and over 1 in 4 are hazardous to people. Or that microplastics are found in human blood and we don’t know the consequences yet. However, this awareness is largely not the fault of the public. The plastic industry intentionally keeps us in the dark, having us thinking that plastic is non-toxic and safe to use, and even fooling us that recycling is the end-all solution. Banning and phasing out concerning chemicals and single-use plastics while increasing plastic literacy is key to protecting human rights, ensuring industries are transparent, and empowering everyone to make informed decisions.

Justice

According to U.N. Environment Program, the plastic lifecycle is a barrier to every Sustainable Development Goal. Without immediate action to reduce plastic production, we risk our chance to keep the 1.5°C target within reach. Much like the case of climate change, those who bear the worst impacts of plastics gain the fewest benefits from their production or use. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities are disproportionately harmed by toxic chemicals and emissions from unfair proximity to petrochemical and incineration facilities. Women and people who menstruate are exposed to microplastics within period products. The bottom line is plastics exacerbate inequities and harm those most vulnerable among us.

Right now, the word “justice” is not in the plastics treaty text at all. As the outcomes of negotiations unfold, I hope that plastics will be reframed as what they truly are: an ocean justice crisis. The treaty, slated for finalization by the end of 2024, represents a pivotal opportunity to safeguard human rights and address injustice. There are undeniable implications for people, the ocean, and truly, the planet at stake.

Earlier this year, thousands of New Hampshire voters received robocalls with audio of what sounded like President Joe Biden's voice telling them to stay home during the state's primary election. But the recording wasn't really Biden: It was a "deepfake" generated with AI technology. The state Attorney General's Office Election Law Unit ultimately identified the source of the false AI-generated recording as two Texas-based companies, Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom. In response to the incident, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) banned robocalls with AI-generated voices.

Deepfakes are fraudulent audio, video, or images created or edited with AI. As the technology becomes more accessible, advocates fear that attempts to mislead voters will become more common. "The political deepfake moment is here. Policymakers must rush to put in place protections or we're facing electoral chaos," said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, in a statement. "The New Hampshire deepfake is a reminder of the many ways that deepfakes can sow confusion and perpetuate fraud."

In addition to swaying voters' attitudes toward candidates, AI could be used to undermine the administration of elections by spreading disinformation to curb voter turnout. The disenfranchising effects of high-tech deception will likely be compounded in the South, a region with a troubled history of election-related deception, and voters already face growing obstacles to participation.

Voter suppression rooted in disinformation is nothing new in the South, but the emergence of new technologies has the potential to add harmful burdens for already marginalized groups of voters. These suppressive efforts are increasing as communities of color have grown in political power. Right-wing lawmakers have weaponized disinformation by deploying allegations of widespread election fraud to stoke distrust in the U.S. electoral system and to sell policies that suppress the vote to their advantage. Many of these tactics have roots in Jim Crow-era efforts to disenfranchise people of color through blatant voter intimidation strategies. Policies like poll taxes mandated Black voters to pay to register to vote, and literacy tests required them to read a passage of the constitution, while "grandfather clauses" spared whites from such requirements.

New technologies historically bring more systematic attempts to suppress voters of color through "racialized disinformation" via mailing, robocalls, and other forms of mass communication. For example, in 1990, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms's campaign sent 150,000 postcards targeting Black North Carolinians that included incorrect voting information and threatened arrests for voter fraud. More recently, in 2016, Black voters were directly targeted by Russian bots in online efforts to spread disinformation, according to a report by Deen Freelon from the University of North Carolina. The research showed that false social media accounts masked as Black users during the 2016 presidential election exploited racial tension in the United States to suppress voter turnout in Black communities.

In 2018, social media accounts published misleading voting information, including directions to vote by text and claims that voters of one party were instructed to vote the day after Election Day. During the 2020 presidential election, widespread incidents of digital disinformation occurred. For instance, on election day in Texas's presidential primary, robocalls misleadingly instructed some people that voting would occur a day later in an attempt to deceive voters into showing up at polling locations too late to cast a ballot lawfully.

With the rise of AI, voting advocates worry that the lack of effective protections against digital disinformation will influence this fall's election. "While it remains unclear how much AI will change the face of vote suppression in the 2024 general election, new developments in AI use and capabilities lend fresh urgency to long-standing efforts to abate attempts to subvert elections", wrote Mekela Panditharatne, who serves as counsel for the Brennan Center's Elections & Government Program.

Regulating AI

A flood of new legislation across the South is attempting to address the growing concerns about the ways AI can be used to influence elections. As of April, 44 states have either introduced or enacted legislation regulating election-related deepfakes. The majority of bills have been passed with bipartisan support.

In 2019, Texas became the first state to ban deepfake videos that intend to "injure a candidate or influence the result of an election" within 30 days if an election. Updates to the measure are now being considered after a recent "deepfaked" mailer paid for by the Jeff Yass-financed Club for Growth Action PAC, targeted House Speaker Dade Phelan and former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, falsely depicting the pair hugging. State lawmakers are now calling for the law to be expanded to include radio, sound, speech, and text. Earlier this year, Florida's General Assembly passed a measure mandating that political ads that include deepfake content have a disclaimer. Recently, in Alabama, the state House passed a bill that bans the distribution of deepfakes within 90 days before an election unless the content includes a disclaimer. The bill is now awaiting passage in the Senate.

Bipartisan legislation has been introduced in Congress that would ban the dissemination of false AI-generated content to influence an election, but no federal laws have been passed. Two Democrats, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Chris Coons (Del.), and two Republicans, Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Susan Collins (Maine), are currently pushing legislation that would ban deceptive AI content in political ads. Recently, at a Senate subcommittee hearing titled "Oversight of AI: Election Deepfakes," Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) showed how artificial intelligence can be used to subvert the democratic process. Blumenthal, who serves as the chair of the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, said deepfake images and videos are "disturbingly easy" for anyone to create.

In his remarks, Blumenthal referenced the New Hampshire deepfake call as a stark example of how rampant digital disinformation can interfere in elections. "That's what suppression of voter turnout looks like," he said.

At many college campuses, students are protesting in opposition to the Biden Administration’s unconditional backing, with weapons and diplomatic cover, of Netanyahu’s continuing serial war crimes slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, most of them children and women. Hundreds of faculty members are defending these valiant youngsters and criticizing excessively harsh crackdowns by failed University presidents who are calling in outside police.

With graduations approaching, pro-Netanyahu lobbies and cowed University heads (like Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, who makes a salary of over $2,000 an hour) expect the students to disperse from campus for the summer and end their demonstrations.

The Israeli genocidal crimes against Gazans will continue and intensify if Israel invades Rafah. Millions of refugees will suffer. What will become of the organized student calls for a permanent ceasefire, greatly increased humanitarian aid and cessation of U.S. weapons shipments? The students who leave their campus protests can and should focus on members of Congress in their Districts and in Washington.

Our government is fueling an Empire producing disasters that are conducted in the name of the powerless American people, whose sovereign powers under our Constitution are delegated to Congress and the Executive Branch. The abuse of this power starts with Congress.

In two weeks, hundreds of Congressional summer student interns will begin arriving to work in Congressional offices. Congress is the decades-long reservoir for Israeli colonial aggression. Moreover, Congress, under AIPAC’s extraordinary pressure, has blocked testimony by prominent Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates since 1948. Not once have any of these peace advocates, many of whom are Israeli retired cabinet ministers, mayors, security and military leaders been invited to a Congressional Committee Hearing.

This power center for the U.S. Empire – Capitol Hill – presents serious students with an opportunity to educate their elders. Such an opportunity materialized during the Vietnam War when Congressional interns in the late 1960s organized a highly visible petition drive and engaged in peaceful protests.

Back in the Congressional Districts, the access is easier and available to many more students and faculty. Because Congress is in “recess” for much of the summer – Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and the entire month of August to Labor Day – students and citizens can demand public meetings preceded by formal summons to Senators and Representatives. (See my column “Sending Citizens Summons to Members of Congress”).

Five hundred to a thousand clearly legible signatures with the individuals’ occupations and emails should get these politicians to your well-prepared community meetings.

There would be no more notorious incommunicado behavior, laced with robo-letters to inquiring constituents. Instead, there would be person-to-person questioning, dialogue, and responses where evasions and sweet talk will be more difficult for the lawmakers to utilize.

The subject matter of these public meetings can extend beyond ghastly scenes of dead, dying, sick, and starving families in Gaza to Biden’s foreign and military policies. Our government is fueling an Empire producing disasters that are conducted in the name of the powerless American people, whose sovereign powers under our Constitution are delegated to Congress and the Executive Branch. The abuse of this power starts with Congress.

Nothing can compare to face-to-face meetings with the lawmakers. Letters, phone calls, and emails rarely can be relied on to reach them directly – that is if you are not a big campaign contributor. Besides, unlike in the past, today’s legislative staffers are much more likely to ignore these missives without even an acknowledgment. (See The Incommunicados report: https://incommunicadoswatch.org/).

A people’s town meeting has an agenda set by the people. Some suggestions follow:

1. There have been no Congressional hearings since before October 7th on the overall policies in the Middle East pursued by the White House and Congress. The House and Senate Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees have not been active. Instead, there have been show hearings berating University presidents to stifle free speech on their campuses and answer hypothetical questions about anti-semitism against Jews but not the other ongoing Congressionally weaponized anti-semitism against Gazan Arabs, who are Semites, being annihilated in that tiny enclave. Disgraceful! Demand public hearings for the citizenry.

2. Make U.S. engagements in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a major electoral campaign issue for November. This is a major opportunity to get the direct attention of the 535 lawmakers and to push them to stop kicking the can down the road. The decades-long control of Congress by the “Israeli-government-can-do-no-wrong lobby” must end. There is too much massive, preventable suffering being ignored in the Middle East, too much danger of wider regional wars involving the super-powers, and too much damage to civil liberties and democratic processes in our own country to avoid these matters any longer.

3. The students and teachers will find allies in their Congressional Districts from long-time advocates like the American Friends Committee (Quakers), the Unitarians, united Jewish, Christian, and Muslim peace groups, the increasing numbers of outspoken labor union leaders, and just plain Americans fed up with the costly U.S. Empire and its military-industrial complex (remember President Eisenhower’s warnings).

People want their tax dollars returned to the crucial public necessities back home. They don’t like big business controlling Congress and getting away with looting Uncle Sam by their out-of-control greed and power. Over 70% of Americans believe these big companies have too much control over their lives including many liberal and conservative families.

The laser-focused citizen pressure should be on those 535 members of YOUR Congress, their local offices, and their staff.

Larger reforms, redirections, and horizons of society often start with one compelling abuse or outrageous travesty of justice. This has occurred in the labor, farmer, consumer, environmental, and civil rights movements throughout our history.

There will be high-visibility protests outside the National Democratic Party Convention in Chicago and probable demonstrations at the National Republican Party Convention in Milwaukee this summer. But the laser-focused citizen pressure should be on those 535 members of YOUR Congress, their local offices, and their staff.

Change Congress and you change America! That is leverage!

In his 2024 State of the Union Address, President Joe Biden told America, “I want competition with China, not conflict.” He went on to say that, by his doing, the U.S. is now “in a stronger position to win the conflict of the 21st century against China.” The U.S. is not at war, but Biden warns of conflict. He is talking, I believe, about climate change, and he is declaring America’s involvement in a New Cold War. His climate policies, governed by a metaphor of competition between the U.S. and China, bode terribly for the world’s future.

The conflict of the 21st century that Biden refers to has already begun, and the president’s conflation of climate policy and foreign policy reflects that. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act marked the largest climate mitigation investment in American history, but its purpose was to serve as a shield for American workers in a trade war with China. While the bill subsidizes domestic green energy production and manufacturing in order to transition toward sustainability, its stated goal is to “advance America’s economic and foreign policy objectives.” The U.S. has since moved to build up domestic manufacturing, invest in green technologies, and shelter American workers from Chinese efficiency. Weeks ago, Biden threatened to triple tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum imports, and his treasury secretary called China’s excess of green energy exports “unacceptable from the U.S. point of view.” In the Climate Cold War, American profit matters more than global prosperity.

Another Cold War will gloss over the inequalities that have existed before and since the last one—and leave the world hotter too.

I’m 19, and I really, really don’t want to live through a Climate Cold War. I don’t want my future to be limited by minute technology changes and market solutions. I don’t want green energy to be weaponized for profit, and U.S. industry to be prioritized over the global climate. I find myself asking: What price is America willing to pay for a livable climate? Why doesn’t the rest of the world get a say? And why is it always a price? While the U.S. and China have contributed disproportionately to global warming, climate change impacts everyone—and everyone, not just American and Chinese politicians, should be involved in solutions. There is so much more than economic competition—so many more solutions than conflict. China is not the enemy, and global warming isn’t either. It’s the corporations that make the planet hotter, and the structures they’ve built to get us hooked on fossil fuels.

The last Cold War was a struggle between capitalism and communism. And just as in the last, American politicians see capitalism as the only solution to a global crisis. Climate change, however, is caused by endless extraction and unsustainable production. A New Cold War will divide the world just like the first one. The winners will be the same governments and corporations that can profit from a war machine, the losers the same poor nations and people who will be left to scramble in an uncertain world. A trade war between the U.S. and China amid the backdrop of global warming will ignore these people, who are in many cases the least responsible for climate change and yet the most affected.

People around the world are still recovering from the damage done to them since the last Cold War. It’s no coincidence that previous sites of American imperialism have been left particularly vulnerable to climate change. Left politically unstable from decades of American intervention, Afghanistan is facing and will continue to face its worst droughts yet. Devastated by the U.S. war, Vietnam is at risk of coastal flooding and is vulnerable to severe tropical storms. And Grenada, site of a Cold War invasion, lacks the resources to adapt to rising sea levels, degrading ecosystems, and frequent hurricanes. Another Cold War will gloss over the inequalities that have existed before and since the last one—and leave the world hotter too.

Neither conflict nor competition will mitigate the effects of climate change. True change will come from global cooperation, not trade wars between the two largest emitters. Even truer change won’t come from Washington or Beijing, but through local communities and ground-level changes. Climate change affects us all, some specifically more than others. As in the last Cold War, humanity is faced with some ultimate choices. This time around, we already pressed the big red button. While the world needs the U.S. and China’s efforts, a Climate Cold War between the two superpowers will only end in a nuclear summer. It’s hot enough already.

The United Auto Workers recently scored the largest union victory in decades in the South. Their success at a Tennessee Volkswagen plant could be a turning point for labor in a region long known for governmental hostility to unions.

The next test will be a UAW election scheduled for the week of May 13 at a Mercedes-Benz factory in Alabama, a state that has attracted so much auto investment it has earned the nickname “the Detroit of the South.”

If the roughly 5,000 Mercedes workers vote to unionize, the ripple effects could empower workers nationwide.

We need a New South economic structure based on fairness and equity.

For decades, Southern states have pursued “low-road” development strategies, luring investors with massive public subsidies and repressive labor policies. This has pitted workers across the country against each other, undercutting everyone’s ability to secure fair compensation.

Alabama has spent $1.6 billion to woo Mercedes, along with Toyota, Hyundai, and Honda. All these foreign companies’ operations in the South are non-union, in contrast to the unionized Big Three of Ford, GM, and Stellantis.

This foreign investment has created thousands of Alabama jobs—but with weak worker protections, the state remains one of the nation’s poorest. And while these companies have enjoyed rising corporate profits, they have left workers behind.

An in-depth report by the nonprofit group Alabama Arise found that inflation-adjusted average pay for the state’s autoworkers has dropped by 11% over the past 20 years to $64,682. Meanwhile, CEO pay stands at $13.9 million at Mercedes and $6.9 million at Toyota.

The foreign-owned firms’ payrolls also reflect Alabama’s long history of racial discrimination, with Black and Latino workers earning substantially less than their white counterparts. By contrast, the Economic Policy Institute has found that union workers make 10.1% more on average than non-union workers.

The benefits are even greater for workers of color. Unionized Black workers make 13.1% more than non-union Black workers in comparable jobs—and Latino union members make 18.8% more than non-union Latino workers.

Equitable pay practices boost local economies by putting more money in workers’ pockets for groceries, housing, and other goods and services from local businesses. And that’s good for families of every color.

But Alabama Governor Kay Ivey doesn’t see things that way. Before the UAW vote in Tennessee, she joined GOP governors from Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas to discourage VW workers from voting yes with unfounded threats of mass layoffs.

When 73% of those autoworkers voted for the UAW, it was a strong rebuke of the region’s low-road, anti-worker model. So corporate lobbyists in the region have enlisted state legislators and cabinet officials in a sustained campaign to blunt organizing momentum.

How will the election turn out in Alabama?

A new poll indicates that 52% of residents in this deep-red state support the autoworkers’ union drive, while just 21% are opposed. This echoes a 2022 poll commissioned by the Institute for Policy Studies in Jefferson County, Alabama, where workers were attempting to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer. That survey showed nearly two-thirds support.

While the Alabama Amazon campaign fell short in the face of aggressive anti-union tactics, increased public approval of unions is a testament to many years of community and labor organizing.

The fact that a large majority of workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant signed petitions earlier this year in support of the election is encouraging. We need a New South economic structure based on fairness and equity. Organized labor is an essential partner in that mission.

The $95 billion military and foreign aid package Congress passed was a remarkable feat of bipartisanship—and a calamity for decency and humanity.

That’s primarily because of the $15 billion in military aid to Israel. Unless President Joe Biden’s State Department recognizes Israel’s egregious violations of humanitarian law and withholds that aid, those U.S. funds will directly help the Israeli military perpetuate its assault on the people of Gaza—in which the International Court of Justice four months ago ordered Israel to “prevent death, destruction, and any acts of genocide.”

The Israeli military’s operations have caused more than 34,000 deaths in Gaza, most of them women and children. And it will get worse: Gaza is on the brink of famine, due in large part to the Israeli military’s blockading of humanitarian aid, despite the Biden administration’s repeated (and ineffective) demands to allow more aid.

Providing material support to Israel even as it carries out a war violating international orders makes us complicit, too.

U.S. weapons have played a key role in this devastation. The U.S. was already slated to send $3.8 billion to the Israeli military in 2024, which it’s given annually for years. The new $15 billion package multiplies that sum.

The Israeli military has used U.S. weapons systems, including F-16s and Apache helicopters, in recent operations in Gaza. Less than a month ago, even as the Biden administration claimed to oppose a planned Israeli military operation in the city of Rafah, the administration nevertheless approved a transfer of 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and other munitions that the Israeli military has been using to devastate Gaza for months.

All of this is a moral outrage—and also a legal one. And that’s why President Biden still has the power to stop this.

Following its January ruling, in March the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to allow the free flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza. But that still hasn’t happened. Providing material support to Israel even as it carries out a war violating international orders makes us complicit, too.

U.S. aid also may violate our own domestic laws: For example, the Leahy Laws prohibit providing weapons or military aid to forces that commit human rights violations. The U.S. is belatedly considering placing limits on one Israeli military battalion for its violations of human rights, but the misery in Gaza isn’t the fault of one “bad apple” battalion. It’s the express policy of a far-right government enabled by U.S. aid.

The Israeli government, of course, welcomed the new military aid and announced that the U.S. relationship with Israel is now “ironclad.” The truth is that while the Biden administration has made some largely rhetorical efforts to mitigate the disastrous humanitarian impact of Israel’s war, those attempts have largely rung hollow—and the Israeli government has shown that it doesn’t much care what the Biden administration thinks.

Sending a massive new aid package now will only compound that dynamic.

Still, there is widespread public support—and growing support in Congress—for conditioning or withholding aid. A recent CBS News poll found that 60% of Americans would prefer President Biden encourage Israel to decrease or stop military actions in Gaza. And a recent Pew poll found that among Americans aged 18-29, the largest segment strongly opposed sending more military aid to Israel.

That opposition by young Americans has become crystal clear as hundreds of student demonstrators against the war have been arrested at college campuses around the country—and yet they keep on protesting.

With most Americans telling pollsters they support a cease-fire in the war, the students’ demands are quite popular. And so are the domestic programs we could fund with money lawmakers want to send Israel.

After all, funds reclaimed from military aid could be reinvested in desperately needed domestic programs. One example is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which puts money in the hands of low-income workers—and which President Biden has proposed expanding by $15 billion in 2025. That would be a much better use of $15 billion than potentially breaking U.S. and international law to fund a deadly, unpopular war.

No matter how much money Congress sets aside for Israel, President Biden has the authority—and the responsibility—to enforce U.S. law to withhold that aid for as long as rampant human rights abuses are occurring.

It’s still the right thing to do—and likely to be a political winner.

Common Dreams Editor's Note: This is a transcript of remarks made by Professor Rashid Khalidi just outside the gates of Columbia University on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, just hours after NYPD officers raided Hamilton Hall to remove demonstrators who had occupied the building in protest of Israel's ongoing military assault on the people of Gaza.

My name is Rashid Khalidi. I am the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. I've been teaching here for a total of 22 years.

When I was a student back in the 60s, we were told we were "led by a bunch of outside agitators" by politicians nobody remembers the name of today. We were the conscience of this nation when we opposed the Vietnam War and racism back in 1968 and 1969 and 1970. The Vietnam War stopped because the people opposed it, and the people who led that were students, and the students who led that were here at Columbia and at Berkeley and a few other campuses on this fair Turtle Island.

This is not about Columbia or CCNY or Berkeley or UCLA or any other place where the students have risen up. This is the conscience of a nation speaking through your kids—through young people who are risking their futures, who are risking suspension, expulsion, and criminal arrest in order to wake people up in this country.

Students have been on the right side of history at Columbia and at other universities ever since the 1960s. We today honor the students who in 1968 opposed a genocidal, illegal, shameful war. Columbia University honors them. They're on the Columbia website; you can check it out yourself—1968 is commemorated. And one day what our students did here will be commemorated in the same way.

They are—and they were—on the right side of history, and that will go down in history, that when the change finally came and finally the American people who have already opposed this war—who've already opposed this genocide—are able to force their craven politicians to stop it, which we can do.

The United States is part of this war. Every plane bombing Gaza is an American plane: F-16s, F-15s, F-35s. Every Apache helicopter is American. Every bomb dropped is American. Those are our taxes. Those are our representatives. Shame on them and shame on the administration of this university. They will go down in infamy for having done what they did the other night.

Columbia Prof’s Fiery Speech—Students opposed Vietnam War in '68, fighting against Gaza genocide now www.youtube.com

Today, nobody remembers the names of the administrators and the trustees who ordered the police onto the Columbia campus in 1968. They have gone down in ignominy and so will these leaders, President [Minouche] Shafik and the Board of Trustees.

And the students will be remembered one day on a Columbia website as the people who helped change the course of this country, together with the brave students up at CCNY. We should shout out to them—together with the students at NYU, FIT, and all over this country.

What we are witnessing in terms of police repression is a tiny fraction of what people under occupation in Palestine have been experiencing for 56 years: the kettling, the checkpoints, the blockades, the police dragging students out (many of them were injured last night), the lies [about] outside agitators. Wait until the numbers come out from One Police Plaza. They were all students. They were our students. And we are ashamed of our university for instead of continuing the negotiations—that many faculty were happy to be part of—decided to bring in the NYPD.

This administration has brought disgrace on Columbia University. Shame on them. Shame on them.

This is not and was not about safety and comfort, which is what they claimed. Do we feel safer today now that 100 of our students have been processed down at One Police Plaza? Do we feel safer today that faculty and students cannot get onto their own campus? Of course not.

Public opinion is already with us. It's just the politicians, the media, and the trustees and administration of this university who are blind, death, and dumb to the demand of a moral imperative coming from our students.

This was a craven capitulation to external pressure. The students didn't want it. The faculty didn't want it. Outside forces wanted it: the politicians; the media—which has shamefully failed to report so much of what's actually happening here and which has exaggerated incidents instead of looking at the whole picture.

I don't want to talk more about the media. This is not about safety and comfort. This is about a genocide being carried out with American money and with American weapons against a people that has been living under occupation for generation after generation after generation. That's what it's really about. That's what the students were about and that's what Faculty and Staff for justice in Palestine are about.

What we are witnessing in terms of police repression is a tiny fraction of what people under occupation in Palestine have been experiencing for 56 years.

We are faculty and staff who believe that our students should be safe—all of our students should be safe. But the right to protest, the right to free speech, and academic freedom—which is being infringed as we speak. University protocols, the arrangements that this university made since 1968 to deal with these things, have been swept aside in an arbitrary fashion by this administration in response to external pressure. Shame on this administration.

I repeat one more time: This is not about Columbia or CCNY or Berkeley or UCLA or any other place where the students have risen up. This is the conscience of a nation speaking through your kids—through young people who are risking their futures, who are risking suspension, expulsion, and criminal arrest in order to wake people up in this country. It's absolutely essential.

Public opinion is already with us. It's just the politicians, the media, and the trustees and administration of this university who are blind, death, and dumb to the demand of a moral imperative coming from our students. Thank you very much.