Thursday's oral argument before the Supreme Court about Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution for inciting an insurrection was a farce and a ruse.

A farce because the Republican appointees to the court suggested that presidents have some level of immunity — certainly for official actions well within the duties of the office. But this case clearly isn’t about official action within the duties of the office. This case is whether presidents have immunity for instigating an insurrection seeking to overturn the results of an election.

No matter. The Republican appointees to the court then explored how to decide which actions are official and which are purely private.

It was a ruse because the Republican appointees to the court know full well that if they return the immunity case to the lower courts to decide whether instigating an insurrection is within the official duties of a president, and whether a test should consider Trump’s motives or purely objective facts, they’ll delay the underlying case so long that it won’t be tried before the election. This would give Trump the opportunity, if elected, to appoint as attorney general a loyalist who will drop the charges against him.

Justice Samuel Alito — the most dangerous and deceitful Republican appointee on the court (he wrote the Dobbs decision, brazenly reversing Roe v. Wade) — said that “a stable, democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully.”

True. But then Alito had the chutzpah to claim that if a president thought he might be prosecuted for whatever he did to cling to office — including inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol — he would likely keep clinging by any means possible. Ergo, according to Alito’s upside-down logic, the possibility of post-presidential prosecution could “lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy.”

Hello? Surely Trump’s insurrection destabilized American democracy more than special prosector Jack Smith’s attempt to hold Trump accountable for it.

The case before the justices is whether inciting an insurrection is a prosecutable offense. Of course it is. By blowing it up into something else, the Republican justices are blowing up Trump’s trial — which is exactly their intention.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Columbia University yesterday and demanded that President Biden call in the National Guard to college campuses to quell mass protests over the Israel-Hamas war.

Johnson called the protests “dangerous,” and warned that “if this is not contained quickly and if these threats and intimidation are not stopped, there is an appropriate time for the National Guard.”

Rubbish. Failure to hold accountable a president who instigated a violent insurrection is dangerous to the future stability of American democracy. Peaceful protests on college campuses about America’s complicity in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza reflect the strength of American democracy.

The people of Ecuador have given a resounding NO to the return of secretive, foreign corporate courts suing the Ecuadorian state for democratic decisions.

In a referendum held last week, Ecuador voted to keep its constitutional ban on using international arbitration and investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms (ISDS) to settle disputes between foreign corporations and the state.

This was the second time that the Ecuadorian people have voted No to ISDS and its international arbitration courts by means of a direct vote at the ballot box. The first time was in the 2008 constitutional referendum when a new constitution, including article 422 banning ISDS, was submitted to a popular vote. Then came the task of exiting ISDS commitments which the government and legislators managed to do, taking 8 years to fully achieve, in the face of powerful lobby groups doing their utmost to uphold ISDS. Ecuador first withdrew from ICSID (the ISDS court within the World Bank) and then terminated 24 bilateral investment treaties which contained ISDS provisions.

Congratulations to Ecuador, who voted No to the primacy of capital over human beings.

Ecuador has been on the receiving end of several costly compensation awards by ISDS tribunals in favour of investors. For example, in 2012, a tribunal ordered Ecuador to pay the US oil company Occidental over USD 1.5 billion, one of the largest amounts a state had ever been ordered to pay.

Remarkably, Ecuador's right-wing government tried to overturn the constitutional prohibition and reintroduce these anti-democratic courts. Companies owned by Ecuadorians but registered abroad and large transnational corporations were eager to return to a system which allowed them to evade Ecuadorian laws—and dodge Ecuadorian tax liabilities.

But 63% of voters said No: a hard blow to the ISDS system, which will have important repercussions for the global struggle to dismantle the ISDS system. And reinforcing the importance of Honduras' recent decision to withdraw from ICSID.

Congratulations to Ecuador, who voted No to the primacy of capital over human beings. And Yes to people, the environment, sovereignty, and democracy.

The recent exchange of aerial attacks between Israel and Iran was a salient enough event to stimulate much commentary about the episode being a turning point in Middle Eastern affairs. The attacks were indeed sufficiently significant to have implications wider than the physical damage they caused. But it is important not to overstate how much turned at this turning point as well as to understand lessons the episode holds for future U.S. policy toward the Middle East.

Although Iran’s missile barrage on April 13 has been highlighted as the first direct Iranian attack on Israeli territory, it is best understood as part of a graduated response to repeated Israeli use of violence, including sabotage and assassinations, on Iranian territory. Considering the provocations, the overall Iranian response has been restrained.

Even the Iranian response two weeks ago — although impressive in terms of the number of drones and missiles employed — was more restrained than it would have been had Iran intended to inflict significant damage and casualties. That the great majority of the projectiles were shot down cannot have been a surprise to Iranian leaders. They are aware of the capabilities of Israel’s repeatedly used air defense systems. The Iranians telegraphed their intentions. And they began the attack with slow-moving drones, giving both Israel and the United States time to activate an effective defense.

The horrors taking place in the Gaza Strip alone constitute some of the worst violence and suffering the region has seen in recent decades

An Iranian operation intended to inflict a more damaging blow would have been much different, probably featuring a large, unannounced barrage of ballistic missiles, which would have given only a few minutes of warning. Iranian leaders felt obliged to respond somehow to Israel’s escalation in attacking the equivalent of Iranian territory — the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus, which Israel bombed two weeks earlier, inflicting multiple casualties — but had no desire to escalate the overall conflict further.

Another theme heard in commentary about the exchange of attacks between Israel and Iran is that it brought closer to reality a U.S.-backed anti-Iranian alliance that includes Israel and key Arab states. That theme is overstated. Differences between Israel and the Gulf Arabs regarding policy toward Iran remain stark, with Arab states’ rapprochement with Tehran contrasting sharply with Israel’s continued policy of promoting maximum isolation of Iran. Moreover, anger over Israel’s infliction of mass suffering in the Gaza Strip remains intense throughout the Arab world, and the Israeli assault on Gaza shows no sign of ending.

The severe limitations of any U.S.-backed anti-Iran alliance were underscored by Gulf Arab states warning the United States not to use their territories or airspace to launch any attacks against Iran. The prime objective of Arab governments during the whole Israeli-Iranian crisis of the past two weeks has been to avoid escalation into the sort of regional war that could significantly harm their own economic and security interests. The assistance that Jordan and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia rendered in defending against the Iranian drones and missiles was in pursuit of this objective. Far from denoting any increased fondness for Israel, the aid was aimed at minimizing Israeli damage and casualties so that Israel would not feel obliged to up the ante further with a devastating attack on Iran.

Several implications can be more confidently drawn from the events of the past two weeks and hold lessons for U.S. policy:

The U.S. disinclination to say “no” to Israel encourages reckless and destabilizing Israeli behavior. The most destructive such behavior during the past year has been what Israel has been doing to the Gaza Strip, but the attack on the Iranian embassy compound was an extension of that. Failure to flash any red lights to Israeli decision-makers gets taken as an implied green light. Lavishing aid without conditions has conditioned those decision-makers to expect that Israel will not suffer any consequences no matter what it does.

Using military force to change the narrative works, and the technique probably will be used again. Probably a primary objective of Israel’s attack on the Iranian embassy was to provoke an Iranian counterattack that would divert the international spotlight from the catastrophic Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip and turn it to what other regional states, especially loathed Iran, do to Israel. The tactic succeeded. Media coverage and political discussion about the Middle East promptly became much less about what was happening in Gaza and more about Iranian missiles fired at Israel. Much of that coverage and discussion treated the Iranian action as if it were a bolt out of the blue, barely mentioning that it was retaliation for an Israeli attack on an Iranian embassy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government must be pleased with that result, and have been given reason to use the tactic again.

Except for Israel, Middle Eastern states do not want a wider war. Arab states do not want it, and clearly Iran does not either. Discussion in general terms about whether the United States is staying in the Middle East, whether it is leaving a “vacuum,” and how regional states are dissatisfied with the level of U.S. commitment often overlooks this fact. Middle Eastern states generally want serious U.S. engagement to address problems of the region but generally do not want (again with the exception of Israel) more U.S. military activity in their backyard and with it more war.

Offense is different from defense. The former is likely to be destabilizing in ways that the latter may not be. Although many military capabilities can be applied to either offensive or defensive purposes, the Biden administration, to its credit, drew a clear distinction between the two in the recent crisis. It reaffirmed U.S. commitment to Israel’s security and even participated in shooting down Iranian missiles and drones while making clear it wanted no part in any offensive action against Iran. Unfortunately, U.S. military aid to Israel, including the additional $14 billion that is part of the aid package that President Biden just signed, is likely to be used more offensively than defensively, especially as long as the Israeli assault on Gaza continues.

The unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to be a major source of violence and instability in the Middle East. The horrors taking place in the Gaza Strip alone constitute some of the worst violence and suffering the region has seen in recent decades, but such violence also metastasizes into other problems, including the attention-diverting Israeli attack in Damascus that touched off the Israeli-Iranian exchange of aerial attacks this month.

Last week, the United States cast the lone dissenting vote in the UN Security Council, thereby vetoing Palestine’s application to join Israel and the world’s other 192 countries as a full members state of the United Nations. While Biden has praised the UN for admitting Israel in 1949 over the objections of the indigenous Palestinian population and its Arab neighbors, he insists that the UN must not recognize Palestine unless it is approved by Israel, which categorically rules out ever doing so.

According to Biden’s Deputy UN Ambassador Robert Wood “The issue of full Palestinian membership is a decision that should be negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians,” insisting “it will only come from direct negotiations between the parties.”

Israel’s UN ambassador Gilad Erdan, not surprisingly, categorically rejects Palestinian membership, claiming that it would threaten Israel’s survival. The representative of that far-right government thanked the United States and President Biden in particular “for standing up for truth and morality.”

Biden’s UN ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield also defended the decision on the grounds that the Gaza Strip, part of what would become Palestinian, is “being controlled by a terrorist organization.” When ISIS controlled a significantly larger portion of Iraqi and Syrian territory, however, there were no U.S. objections to those countries being members of the United Nations.

Currently, Palestine is recognized by the United Nations as non-member observer state, the same status as the Vatican. On April 8, the Security Council asked its membership committee to review the Palestinian Authority’s application to become a full member state, which has been on hold since 2011 as a result of U.S. opposition. Full membership would not only give Palestine the right to vote on UN resolutions, but it would strengthen the legal case against the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and other Palestinian lands initially seized in the June 1967 war.

The United States was determined not to allow that to happen.

This is yet another indication of the insincerity of the Biden administration’s claim that it supports a “two-state solution” — a Palestinian state on at least some portion of the West Bank and Gaza Strip alongside a secure Israel. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the Biden administration and Congress have been working hard to ensure that that does not come about.

The State of Palestine was declared in 1988 and has since been recognized by 140 countries. France, Ireland, Spain, and Slovenia have recently announced their intention to recognize Palestine as well. The U.S. State Department, however, insists that UN recognition would be “premature.”

Why do Biden and Democratic congressional leaders still claim to support a two-state solution when they are going to such great lengths to prevent one?

The Palestinian Authority (PA), the recognized Palestinian government, controls most of the urban areas in the West Bank with some limited administrative control of larger areas, though Israel controls security for most of the territory it initially seized in 1967, and its armed forces routinely enter even the nominally PA-run urban areas with impunity. (Hamas, the rebel Islamist faction that forcibly seized the Gaza Strip in 2007, is not recognized as legitimate government by any country.)

Unlike most governments that support a two-state solution, the United States only recognizes Israel, not Palestine. Indeed, U.S. policy is to refuse to open any correspondence with Palestinian officials which includes their national emblem or anything else referencing the “State of Palestine.”

And, while the Biden administration and the Democratic Party recognize Jerusalem as the undivided “capital of Israel,” they deny such an acknowledgement for Palestine, despite Jerusalem for many centuries serving as the center of Palestinian cultural, academic, political and religious life. President Joe Biden has even refused to reopen the U.S. Consulate in occupied East Jerusalem, which had served Palestinian interests since the 1930s until Donald Trump ordered it closed in 2019.

The entire Palestinian government has recognized Israel for decades. To ensure that doesn’t change, U.S. law says all assistance to the Palestinian Authority will be eliminated unless “all its ministers publicly accept Israel’s right to exist and all prior agreements and understandings with the United States and Israel.” However, despite the fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s entire cabinet refuses to accept Palestine’s right to exist and does not accept many of the prior agreements and understandings with the United States and the PA, U.S. aid to Israel is at an all-time high.

All Arab states have agreed to recognize Israel in return for Israel recognizing Palestine. To remove that leverage, bipartisan legislation passed by Congress and signed by Biden in 2022 requires the State Department to develop “a strategy on expanding and strengthening” efforts to convince countries which have not done so already to unilaterally recognize Israel and to “leverage diplomatic lines of effort and resources to encourage normalization.” By contrast, the United States has actively discouraged countries from recognizing Palestine, even using the Foreign Assistance Act and other measures to pressure them not to.

Unlike the Republican Party, which rejects any kind of Palestinian statehood, the 2020 Democratic Party platform claims to support “the right of Palestinians to live in freedom and security in a viable state of their own.” However, Biden’s representatives blocked inclusion of any language that would condemn or even mention the ongoing Israeli occupation and colonization of the West Bank. The platform does, however, reject calls for the United States to pressure Israel to allow Palestinian statehood through conditioning military aid, insisting such taxpayer-funded arms transfers remain unconditional. It also criticizes international civil society campaigns to boycott companies and other entities supporting Israeli occupation and settlements.

Though Biden, in his 2024 State of the Union address, reiterated that “the only real solution to the situation is a two-state solution over time,” he has given no indication that he is willing to take any steps to make that possible. As Matthew Duss of the Center for International Policy noted in a recent article in The New Republic on the Palestinian quest for statehood, the Democrats’ view is that, “Violent resistance is unacceptable. Nonviolent resistance is also unacceptable. The only acceptable path to liberation is to negotiate with an Israeli government that is fundamentally opposed to granting it and is continually protected by the U.S. Congress from any consequences for that opposition.”

Indeed, the Biden administration and Congress have long taken the position that Palestinian statehood is only acceptable on terms voluntarily agreed to by Israel in bilateral negotiations. This comes despite the fact that there have been no such negotiations since 2015 and the Israeli government categorically rules out allowing any kind of Palestinian state.

Contrast this position with the United States’ reaction to Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990. There was no insistence that it be left to bilateral negotiations between the occupier and the occupied nation. Indeed, the United States went to war to free Kuwait from Iraqi rule on the grounds that countries cannot expand their territory by force and that people have the right to self-determination. This principle does not apply to conquests by U.S. allies, however.

It was the United Nations that established the state of Israel through United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 in 1947, a decision which has long been celebrated by Biden and other Democratic leaders. However, these same leaders categorically reject any role for the United Nations in establishing a state of Palestine.

Earlier this month, the United States was one of only two countries in the 47-member UN Human Rights Council to vote against a resolution which “reaffirmed its support for the solution of two States, Palestine and Israel, living side by side in peace and security.”

Even prior to the recent veto, the United States has been quite vehement about making sure the United Nations does not support Palestinian self-determination; it has been U.S. policy since 1990 to withdraw funding from any United Nations agency which grants Palestine full member status. When Palestine was admitted to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2011, the Obama administration suspended funding. This 22 percent reduction greatly harmed UNESCO’s important work to improve literacy, protect women’s rights, provide technical training and education, preserve regional and cultural history, encourage scientific research, protect independent media and press freedom, promote cultural diversity, and set international standards for artificial intelligence and technology education. The U.S. position was that opposing Palestinian membership in that body was more important than supporting UNESCO’s work.

In 2018, President Trump withdrew from the organization altogether, making the United States the only UN member to not be part of UNESCO.

In 2023, Biden announced that the United States would be rejoining UNESCO and begin paying its dues, enacting a waiver to the congressional ban but including a proviso that the United States would cut all funding to the United Nations if Palestine was admitted as a full member state. Robert Wood, deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that if Palestine was recognized by the world body as a whole, it would mean “funding would be cut off to the UN system, so we’re bound by U.S. law.” Mae Elise Cannon, executive director of Churches for Middle East Peace, told Truthout that when she and other representatives from church groups met earlier this month with a high-ranking U.S. official in Washington, they were told that the Biden administration would indeed withdraw all funding for all UN agencies if Palestine was admitted as a member state, as well as demanding their UNESCO dues be refunded.

The Biden administration and Congress are also determined to punish the Palestinians directly for pursuing recognition of statehood. The recently passed 2024 Appropriations bill promises to cut all U.S. funding for the Palestinian Authority if “the Palestinians obtain the same standing as member states or full membership as a state in the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof outside an agreement negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians.”

As prominent journalist and commentator Peter Beinart said on social media: “Most Democratic leaders don’t actually support 2 states. In practice, they support 1 state that denies millions of Palestinians basic rights.”

What is particularly disheartening is that the Palestinian Authority, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the ruling Fatah party are simply demanding control of 22 percent of historic Palestine, an area only slightly larger than the state of Delaware. This is less than half of what the United Nations initially called for in resolution 181. The longstanding U.S. position, however, is that while Israel must be able to hold on to the 78 percent of Palestine it has controlled since the 1948-49 war, Palestinians must be willing to compromise on how much of what remains they could govern.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s supposed “generous offer” of a Palestinian state in the 2000 Camp David talks would have not only reduced Palestinian control to barely 18 percent and not included most of occupied Arab East Jerusalem and its environs, but the remainder would have been divided into four noncontiguous cantons with Israel controlling the air space, water resources, and the movement of people and goods between them.

While Republicans’ strident opposition to Palestinian statehood is clearly rooted in bigotry, the Democratic leadership’s role is more like that of the “white moderate” described in Martin Luther King Jr.

Even if Netanyahu and his far right government are replaced, there is no conceivable Israeli coalition government that could come to power in Israel that would be willing to offer anything close to what even Barak was willing to offer. Indeed, in February, 99 out of the 120 members of the Israeli Knesset went on record in opposition to international recognition of a Palestinian state.

As a result, many longtime supporters of a two-state solution in Palestine, Israel, and elsewhere now believe that Israeli colonization of the West Bank with Israeli settlements, made possible by the U.S. blocking the UN Security Council from enforcing resolutions citing their illegality, has changed the demographics to the extent that the establishment of even a Palestinian mini-state is now impossible. Many activists have moved from an anti-occupation focus to an anti-apartheid focus, calling for a single binational state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea with guaranteed equal rights for both peoples, a position which a bipartisan majority of the U.S. House of Representatives recently declared is somehow “a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel and its people.”

Fear that time may be running out for a two-state solution has led moderate Zionist groups like J Street to call for the United States to recognize Palestine as part of a comprehensive peace initiative. Given such divisions within Zionist groups in Washington, it would be inaccurate to characterize Democratic rejection of such proposals simply as a result of pressure from “the Zionist lobby.”

In light of all this, why do Biden and Democratic congressional leaders still claim to support a two-state solution when they are going to such great lengths to prevent one? They recognize that the vast majority of their constituents believe that Palestinian Arabs, like Israeli Jews, have a right to statehood. Constituent pressure is likely the major reason that Biden, who strongly opposed Palestinian statehood for most of his long Senate career, at least claims to support it now.

While Republicans’ strident opposition to Palestinian statehood is clearly rooted in bigotry, the Democratic leadership’s role is more like that of the “white moderate” described in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” who professes to support the goals but not the methods, who insists on endless negotiations with oppressors who refuse to compromise, and who “believes he can set the timetable for [someone else]’s freedom.”

Until more Democrats recognize the duplicity of their leadership, the Biden administration and congressional leaders will continue to give lip service to a two-state solution while blocking every avenue to actually make that possible.

An earlier version of this column appeared at Truthout.

Here’s an anniversary no one wants to celebrate: The Columbine school shooting — April 20, 1999 — just passed its 25th anniversary. Fifteen dead (including the two shooters), twenty-one injured. A new era begins . . .

Why, why, why bring up such a horrific event? Perhaps because it hasn’t stopped.

Even though I sit here in the comfort of my study, feeling perfectly safe, I can’t emotionally disentangle myself from the news, which is always, in one way or another, about the human need to kill itself — or rather, the human assumption that it’s divided from itself, and “the other,” whoever that other is, either needs to be killed or is, at best, expendable. For instance:

“The Senate has passed $95 billion in war aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, sending the legislation to President Joe Biden after months of delays and contentious debate over how involved the United States should be in foreign wars.”

So AP informs us, and immediately scenarios of screaming children, bombed aid workers, home and hospitals reduced to rubble, flash before me. No, these are not abstract scenarios! Part of me and part of you lie trapped in that rubble, or stunned and grieving over the sudden loss of your whole family. And all we seem to do is continue funding the process that makes this happen, as though a larger understanding of our existence is not available — certainly not at the level of global politics.

What is power? Is it simply and sheerly us vs. them, good vs. evil? Every war on Planet Earth is sold with this advertising slogan. Perhaps this is why I find myself thinking about the Columbine shootings — and all the mass shootings since then. Define an enemy, then kill it. This is what we learn in history class — but would-be mass shooters, caged in their own isolation, cross a line. They take this lesson personally.

And there’s a world of possibility that welcomes them, oh so ironically. In this world, the sword is mightier than the pen (or anything else). Power means power over. . . something. So if you’re a lost or wounded soul, imagining an enemy that needs to be destroyed is probably enormously tempting. If the world is going on without you, maybe you should do something to stop it. And the “world of possibility” — by which I mean far more than merely the “gun culture,” but the entirety of our culture of scripted violence, from global politics to the media to the entertainment industry — makes the loner’s imagined and insane solution, defining and killing an enemy, an actual possibility.

At the time of the Columbine shootings, I had begun writing poetry. This was in the wake of my wife’s death, in 1998, from pancreatic cancer. Poetry allowed me to deal with the shattered narrative of my life, and pretty soon I had expanded the terrain of my poetry beyond my personal grief to, well, life itself, including the horrific strangeness of the news. And I happened to read, after Columbine, a news account of President Clinton visiting the school and meeting with students in the gymnasium. And outside the school, gun-rights advocates held what they called a vigil, holding signs that declared “Gun Control Kills Kids” and “We Will Never Give Up Our Guns.”

What struck me about it the most was the idea that this was a “vigil,” which implied something more than simply a protest — an expression of anger and disagreement. A vigil dug deeper, seemingly entering the soul. Guns were a source of power and power was the source of one’s humanity, so stripping away the right to own one had a deep, spiritual impact.

I wrote a poem in response to the vigil — I called it “Vigil” (I quoted part of it in an earlier column) — attempting to address my feelings about the total scenario: the shooting itself, Americans’ deeply desired availability of guns, the impact of that availability on society’s lost souls. Here’s part of the poem, focusing on the lost souls:

. . . The violent seed
in a boy’s soul
must sprout.
It is meant to ripen
into courage,
endurance and grace.
But when it bursts open
in another dream —
the dream of permanent armament
and the grandeur of self-defense —
what happens to the boy?
What happens when soft,
immature fingers
find their way
around the deadly toys
of grown men, and
the desperate possible
co-opts the reverie?
The unimaginable
is suddenly commonplace:
burst lesson plans,
bookbags abandoned
in terrified heaps
and young lives frozen
in their yearbook photos.
This is our nightmare.

I acknowledge that the sword is probably mightier than the poem, but a poem can ask questions that the sword can’t: Why? Where are we headed? What world comes next? Does armed defense — whether of home or country — ever go wrong, ever turn into poison? All humans have a dark side; is killing it in the other guy our only option, and what are the consequences of doing so? Can power be with others, even those with whom we are in serious conflict, rather than simply over them? And if so, how can we begin reorganizing the world’s relationship with itself? What’s stopping us?

The Freedom Flotilla is ready to sail. All the required paperwork has been submitted to the port authority, and the cargo has been loaded and prepared for the trip to Gaza.

However, today we received word of an administrative roadblock initiated by Israel in an attempt to prevent our departure. Israel is pressuring the Republic of Guinea Bissau to withdraw its flag from our lead ship—Akdeniz (“Mediterranean”).

This triggered a request for an additional inspection, this one by the flag state, that delays our April 26 planned departure.

How many more children will die of malnutrition and dehydration because of this delay and an ongoing siege which must be broken?

This is another example of Israel obstructing the delivery of life-saving aid to the people in Gaza who face a deliberately created famine. How many more children will die of malnutrition and dehydration because of this delay and an ongoing siege which must be broken?

This is not the first time that Israel has used these kinds of tactics to stop our ships from sailing. We have overcome them before and are diligently working to overcome this latest attempt.

Our vessels have already passed all required inspections and we are confident that the Akdeniz will pass this inspection provided there is no political interference.

We expect this to be no more than a few days delay. Israel will not break our resolve to reach the Palestinians of Gaza.

Last weekend, we flooded our streets and campuses with our voices and votes. Tens of thousands of young people along with the Sunrise Movement, Fridays for Future U.S., and Reclaim Earth Day, in more than 200 actions nationwide, are demanding bold action because billions of lives are under threat, and we need our leaders to act like it.

We call on President Joe Biden to stop approving new fossil fuel projects and declare a climate emergency that takes meaningful action to end the era of fossil fuels and invest in environmental justice. Bold climate action is long overdue, and we are running out of time. Every moment our president wastes, every new fossil fuel project he approves, magnifies the environmental and social disasters the world is already facing. The climate crisis exacerbates all other crises—it’s the most pressing of our time.

The U.S. is burning on the West Coast, flooding on the East Coast, and baking in the South. Yet oil and gas production has surged to record highs under Biden. We now produce more fossil fuels than any other country in the world. Just this month, Biden has approved dozens of new oil and gas projects that lock us into 30 more years of oil and gas, and will poison the air and water of communities living near the projects. From the petrochemical corridor “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana to neighborhood drilling in Los Angeles to flooded Miami, frontline communities are bearing the brunt of fossil fuel pollution and the climate crisis. Despite communities’ groundbreaking activism, fossil fuel companies and puppet politicians are doing everything in their power to keep us hooked on oil.

If Biden wants to win this November, he must deliver for young people.

But we’re not falling for it. We know that renewables are the cheapest source of electricity on the market and that fossil fuels must be phased out. When our institutions have been corrupted by oil influence, we need direct action from the highest level: a Climate Emergency Declaration. The time has passed for incremental action.

Last weekend, thousands of young people in three national days of action called on President Biden to use his executive powers to act decisively. On Friday, April 19, thousands of high school students walked out of their classes and onto the streets as a part of the Fridays For Future global day of action; over the weekend, Sunrise Movement activists held teach-ins at congressional offices across the country; and on April 22, college students at over 100 institutions rallied across campuses to Reclaim Earth Day. Across more than 200 different cities and campuses, thousands of students and young voters made their voices heard.

Hundreds of young people walked out of classes at their march declaring a climate emergency and calling for the university to cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry. (Photo: Sunrise Princeton University)

We’re turning up the pressure because it’s time that President Biden stop approving fossil fuel projects and take action to protect our communities and our futures. By declaring a climate emergency using the National Emergencies Act (NEA), Biden would unlock critical authorities to phase out fossil fuels and protect our communities from the climate crisis—including the ability to reinstate a crude oil export ban and stop investments in fossil fuel projects abroad. He could use the Public Health Services Act to ensure that everyone has access to affordable healthcare and safe housing after climate disasters strike for the people most impacted by the fossil fuel industry. He could create millions of good-paying green union jobs building resilient and distributed renewable energy across the country. He can and he must take these actions. Millions of lives are on the line.

From coast to coast, we took action to demand Biden change track; our generation is leading the way. In 2021, millions of young people signed a petition to stop Biden’s approval of ConocoPhillips’ devastating Willow pipeline. In September 2023, 75,000 people, youth, along with faith, frontline, and labor leaders, took to the streets and demanded an end to fossil fuels. Last October, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a union 1.72 million strong, passed a resolution demanding Biden declare a climate emergency, and this spring, hundreds of thousands of us in Michigan, Wisconsin, and beyond voted “Uncommitted” in our call for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and an end to unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel.

Now, the weekend before Earth Day, we took action in the thousands from New York to Los Angeles, from college campuses to city centers, with one message: If Biden wants to win this November, he must deliver for young people.

Over a hundred young voters joined a march in Kansas City over the weekend, calling on President Biden to declare a climate emergency and for climate justice. (Photo: Sunrise Kansas City)

When he ran as a climate president in 2020, Biden won the youth vote by 20 points. But, as president, Biden has thrown youth and frontline communities under the bus with his continued fossil fuel approvals. Now, polls show Biden neck and neck with former President Donald Trump for the youth vote. The majority of Americans want Biden to both do more on climate and the crisis in Gaza.

We understand the severity of this political moment. Biden is going up against Trump and an extreme right-wing party that has the opposite of a climate or human rights agenda and no respect for democracy. We are pushing Biden because millions of lives are on the line, because activism is exactly what a healthy democracy demands, and because we hope that by listening to us Biden can use his time left in office to restore faith in our political system and reinvigorate young people to vote for him in the historical numbers we need. In the 2024 election, 41 million members of Gen Z will be eligible to vote. Simply put, Biden will not win without young people.

Going into 2024, young people are calling for Biden to invest in future generations and recognize the need for immediate action to combat the intersecting crises of our time. He must prove to our generation that he is fighting for us.

As more campuses join the protests against Israel’s continuing engagement in war crimes in Gaza, one common thread runs through the student demands. It's this: divest from supplying the Netanyahu government and the IDF with weapons of mass destruction.

What compels many of these youthful demonstrators to occupy the public spaces and offices of their universities is the complicity of college portfolios with investments in U.S. weapon manufacturers. They know that the products of defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighterjet and General Dynamics' MK 84—a 2,000-pound bomb—are slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians throughout Gaza.

They also understand that the U.S. government, from President Joe Biden to the Congress, is opposed to legislative efforts to hold Israel accountable to its violation of various on-the-books prohibitions for governments “engaged in gross human rights abuses” (Section 502 B of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act). Instead, they see the Biden Administration exploiting every loophole in any restrictions to supply Israel with unending transfers of bombs and military equipment. While countries, like Canada and numerous others, have stopped shipping weapons to Israel, the U.S. seems oblivious to the suffering and devastation caused daily by the IDF in Gaza.

They are aware that Israeli state propaganda spreads constant disinformation about its war crimes in Gaza, from rationalizing its attacks on the staff and patients in hospitals to the murder of over 200 aid workers. They know that countless human rights agencies have condemned these kinds of war crimes in Gaza. (These same human rights agencies have also condemned the brutal killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7). In order to justify the murder of so many innocent civilians, the Netanyahu government has insisted that they have actually killed 9,000 Hamas militants. However, if they read one of the recent articles in the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz from March 31, they understand this figure is reflective of what the IDF calls “kill zones” (think “free-fire zones” in the U.S. war on Vietnam) where anything in those zones, including women and children, were legitimate targets to then be counted as Hamas militants.

They are surely aware of what Netanyahu cabinet members have said about the Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank that they are just “human animals.” The Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, has bragged about destroying the “electricity, food, and fuel” in Gaza. One of his advisers, a former IDF General, reflective of the targeting of aid workers, including those murdered seven from World Central Kitchen, acknowledged that “in order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza.” Such mass murder and wanton destruction of property in Gaza is part of a campaign of killing that one UN official has cited as “probably the highest kill ratio of any military killing anybody since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”

When students see and hear about all of this, they are obviously motivated to express their moral outrage. On one hand, these expressions may not always comport with so-called civility. On the other hand, they are not prepared to remain silent and/or passive in the face of an unfolding genocide. In their adherence to Dr. King’s reference to the “fierce urgency of now,” they are committed, as Dr. King was, to disturbing the peace.

Indeed, we need to be reminded of another quote from Dr. King that was central to his famous Riverside Address (“A Time to Break Silence”) from April 4, 1967. He warned prophetically that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Beyond the horrors in Gaza and the long tragic history of the oppression of Palestinians, these student protestors are trying to save their own nation from its death-dealing spiral. What their protest ultimately signifies is their commitment to an authentic advocacy for peace and justice abroad and at home.

“To this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me… The time I spent in Abu Ghraib—it ended my life. I’m only half a human now.” That’s what Abu Ghraib survivor Talib al-Majli had to say about the 16 months he spent at that notorious prison in Iraq after being captured and detained by American troops on October 31, 2003. In the wake of his release, al-Majli has continued to suffer a myriad of difficulties, including an inability to hold a job thanks to physical and mental health deficits and a family life that remains in shambles.

He was never even charged with a crime—not exactly surprising, given the Red Cross’ estimate that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country’s War on Terror.

The Abu Ghraib “Scandal”

On April 28, 2004, CBS News’s “60 Minutes” aired a segment about Abu Ghraib prison, revealing for the first time photos of the kinds of torture that had happened there. Some of those now-infamous pictures included a black-hooded prisoner being made to stand on a box, his arms outstretched and electrical wires attached to his hands; naked prisoners piled on top of each other in a pyramid-like structure; and a prisoner in a jumpsuit on his knees being threatened with a dog. In addition to those disturbing images, several photos included American military personnel grinning or posing with thumbs-up signs, indications that they seemed to be taking pleasure in the humiliation and torture of those Iraqi prisoners and that the photos were meant to be seen.

Once those pictures were exposed, there was widespread outrage across the globe in what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, that word “scandal” still puts the focus on those photos rather than on the violence the victims suffered or the fact that, two decades later, there has been zero accountability when it comes to the government officials who sanctioned an atmosphere ripe for torture.

Thanks to the existence of the Federal Tort Claims Act, all claims against the federal government, when it came to Abu Ghraib, were dismissed. Nor did the government provide any compensation or redress to the Abu Ghraib survivors, even after, in 2022, the Pentagon released a plan to minimize harm to civilians in U.S. military operations. However, there is a civil suit filed in 2008—Al Shimari v. CACI—brought on behalf of three plaintiffs against military contractor CACI’s role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Though CACI tried 20 times to have the case dismissed, the trial—the first to address the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees—finally began in mid-April in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. If the plaintiffs succeed with a ruling in their favor, it will be a welcome step toward some semblance of justice. However, for other survivors of Abu Ghraib, any prospect of justice remains unlikely at best.

The Road to Abu Ghraib

”My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture... And therefore, I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.” So said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in 2004. He failed, of course, to even mention that he and other members of President George W. Bush’s administration had gone to great lengths not only to sanction brutal torture techniques in their “Global War on Terror,” but to dramatically raise the threshold for what might even be considered torture.

As Vian Bakir argued in her book Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building Struggles, his comments were part of a three-pronged Bush administration strategy to reframe the abuses depicted in those photos, including providing “evidence” of the supposed legality of the basic interrogation techniques, framing such abuses as isolated rather than systemic events, and doing their best to destroy visual evidence of torture altogether.

Although top Bush officials claimed to know nothing about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the war on terror they launched was built to thoroughly dehumanize and deny any rights to those detained. As a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, “The Road to Abu Ghraib,” noted, a pattern of abuse globally resulted not from the actions of individual soldiers, but from administration policies that circumvented the law, deployed distinctly torture-like methods of interrogation to “soften up” detainees, and took a “see no evil, hear no evil,” approach to any allegations of prisoner abuse.

Revisiting Bush’s apologia so many years later is a vivid reminder that he and his top officials never had the slightest intention of truly addressing those acts of torture as systemic to America’s war on terror, especially because he was directly implicated in them.

In fact, the Bush administration actively sought out legal opinions about how to exclude war-on-terror prisoners from any legal framework whatsoever. A memorandum from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to President Bush argued that the Geneva Conventions simply didn’t apply to members of the terror group al Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Regarding what would constitute torture, an infamous memo, drafted by Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, argued that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Even after the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials never relented when it came to their supposed inapplicability. As Rumsfeld put it in a television interview, they “did not apply precisely” in Iraq.

In January 2004, Major General Anthony Taguba was appointed to conduct an Army investigation into the military unit, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which ran Abu Ghraib, where abuses had been reported from October through December 2003. His report was unequivocal about the systematic nature of torture there: “Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison.”

Sadly, the Taguba report was neither the first nor the last to document abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, prior to its release, the International Committee of the Red Cross had issued multiple warnings that such abuse was occurring at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Simulating Atonement

Once the pictures were revealed, President Bush and other members of his administration were quick to condemn the violence at the prison. Within a week, Bush had assured King Abdullah of Jordan, who was visiting the White House, that he was sorry about what those Iraqi prisoners had endured and “equally sorry that people who’ve been seeing those pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.”

As scholar Ryan Shepard pointed out, Bush’s behavior was a classic case of “simulated atonement,” aimed at offering an “appearance of genuine confession” while avoiding any real responsibility for what happened. He analyzed four instances in which the president offered an “apologia” for what happened—two interviews with Alhurra and Al Arabiya television on May 5, 2004, and two appearances with the King of Jordan the next day.

In each case, the president also responsible for the setting up of an offshore prison of injustice on occupied Cuban land in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 managed to shift the blame in classic fashion, suggesting that the torture had not been systematic and that the fault for it lay with a few low-level people. He also denied that he knew anything about torture at Abu Ghraib prior to the release of the photos and tried to restore the image of America by drawing a comparison to what the regime of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had done prior to the American invasion.

The false pretenses under which the U.S. waged war on Iraq are a reminder that the war on terror was never truly about curbing a threat, but about expanding American imperial power globally.

In his interview with Alhurra, for example, he claimed that the U.S. response to Abu Ghraib—investigations and justice—would be unlike anything Saddam Hussein had done. Sadly enough, however, the American takeover of that prison and the torture that occurred there was anything but a break from Hussein’s reign. In the context of such a faux apology, however, Bush apparently assumed that Iraqis could be easily swayed on that point, regardless of the violence they had endured at American hands; that they would, in fact, as Ryan Shepard put it, “accept the truth-seeking, freedom-loving American occupation as vastly superior to the previous regime.”

True accountability for Abu Ghraib? Not a chance. But revisiting Bush’s apologia so many years later is a vivid reminder that he and his top officials never had the slightest intention of truly addressing those acts of torture as systemic to America’s war on terror, especially because he was directly implicated in them.

Weapons of American Imperialism

On March 19th, 2003, President Bush gave an address from the Oval Office to his “fellow citizens.” He opened by saying that “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.” The liberated people of Iraq, he said, would “witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military.”

There was, of course, nothing about his invasion of Iraq that was honorable or decent. It was an illegally waged war for which Bush and his administration had spent months building support. In his State of the Union address in 2002, in fact, the president had referred to Iraq as part of an “axis of evil” and a country that “continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.” Later that year, he began to claim that Saddam’s regime also had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn’t and he knew it.) If that wasn’t enough to establish the threat Iraq supposedly posed, in January 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that it “aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda.”

Days after Cheney made those claims, Secretary of State Colin Powell falsely asserted to members of the United Nations Security Council that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, had used them before, and would not hesitate to use them again. He mentioned the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” 17 times in his speech, leaving no room to mistake the urgency of his message. Similarly, President Bush insisted the U.S. had “no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”

Whether or not justice prevails in some way for Abu Ghraib’s survivors, as witnesses–even distant ones—to what transpired at that prison, our job should still be to search for the stories behind the hoods, the bars, and the indescribable acts of torture that took place there.

The false pretenses under which the U.S. waged war on Iraq are a reminder that the war on terror was never truly about curbing a threat, but about expanding American imperial power globally.

When the United States took over that prison, they replaced Saddam Hussein’s portrait with a sign that said, “America is the friend of all Iraqis.” To befriend the U.S. in the context of Abu Ghraib, would, of course, have involved a sort of coerced amnesia.

In his essay “Abu Ghraib and its Shadow Archives,” Macquarie University professor Joseph Pugliese makes this connection, writing that “the Abu Ghraib photographs compel the viewer to bear testimony to the deployment and enactment of absolute U.S. imperial power on the bodies of the Arab prisoners through the organizing principles of white supremacist aesthetics that intertwine violence and sexuality with Orientalist spectacle.”

As a project of American post-9/11 empire building, Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners there should be viewed through the lens of what I call carceral imperialism—an extension of the American carceral state beyond its borders in the service of domination and hegemony. (The Alliance for Global Justice refers to a phenomenon related to the one I’m discussing as “prison imperialism.”) The distinction I draw is based on my focus on the war on terror and how the prison became a tool through which that war was being fought. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the capture, detention, and torture through which Iraqis were contained and subdued was a primary strategy of the U.S. colonization of Iraq and was used as a way to transform detained Iraqis into a visible threat that would legitimize the U.S. presence there. (Bagram prison in Afghanistan was another example of carceral imperialism.)

Beyond Spectacle and Toward Justice

What made the torture at Abu Ghraib possible to begin with? While there were, of course, several factors, it’s important to consider one above all: the way the American war not on, but of terror rendered Iraqi bodies so utterly disposable.

One way of viewing this dehumanization is through philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, which defines a relationship between power and two forms of life: zoe and bios. Zoe refers to an individual who is recognized as fully human with a political and social life, while bios refers to physical life alone. Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were reduced to bios, or bare life, while being stripped of all rights and protections, which left them vulnerable to uninhibited and unaccountable violence and horrifying torture.

Twenty years later, those unforgettable images of torture at Abu Ghraib serve as a continuous reminder of the nature of American brutality in that Global War on Terror that has not ended. They continue to haunt me—and other Muslims and Arabs—20 years later. They will undoubtedly be seared in my memory for life.

Whether or not justice prevails in some way for Abu Ghraib’s survivors, as witnesses–even distant ones—to what transpired at that prison, our job should still be to search for the stories behind the hoods, the bars, and the indescribable acts of torture that took place there. It’s crucial, even so many years later, to ensure that those who endured such horrific violence at American hands are not forgotten. Otherwise, our gaze will become one more weapon of torture—extending the life of the horrific acts in those images and ensuring that the humiliation of those War on Terror prisoners will continue to be a passing spectacle for our consumption.

Two decades after those photos were released, what’s crucial about the unbearable violence and horror they capture is the choice they still force viewers to make—whether to become just another bystander to the violence and horror this country delivered under the label of the War on Terror or to take in the torture and demand justice for the survivors.

As a Texan living in the shadow of a liquefied natural gas facility, I was relieved to see the House move forward with a slate of foreign aid bills last week that do not include a rider reversing President Joe Biden’s LNG pause. It’s reason enough to celebrate Biden’s rejection of the rider provision and the Democrats’ united stand against Big Oil’s puppets in Congress.

The pause—which aims to halt the construction of toxic LNG export facilities until it can be determined whether or not they serve the public interest—is a bold attempt to end the profits over people ethos that has defined U.S. energy policy for too long. Citizens like me are grateful that some of our elected leaders are finally standing up to Big Oil. It’s clear the Big Oil gravy train doesn’t make stops for ordinary Americans—just cronies who will stop at nothing to do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) signaled openness in recent weeks to linking the passage of the foreign aid package to a reversal of President Biden’s LNG pause—which would have been a massive handout to fossil fuel billionaires, who have padded their margins by exporting LNG to China.

Standing by its LNG pause, the Biden administration makes communities like Port Arthur feel heard.

Two weeks ago, Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) led a field hearing in my hometown of Port Arthur, Texas—ground zero for Phase 2 of the Port Arthur LNG project—where they called for more LNG exports and accused President Biden of pandering to environmental extremists in an election year. But consider who the real extremists are in this fight: The communities begging for a chance to breathe clean air or three politicians who have received more than $2 million in oil and gas contributions?

Regardless of what Speaker Johnson would have you believe, the U.S. is surpassing its energy commitments to Europe, and U.S. LNG exports are already meeting Europe’s LNG needs. And European leaders know this, having affirmed the Biden administration’s leadership on the gas exports pause and recognizing that their security depends on clean energy investments.

What Speaker Johnson and other Big Oil insiders are hiding is that approving pending LNG export terminals would increase gas costs for industry, businesses, and households by $11-$18 billion in the near term and could increase gas prices for Americans by 9-14% each year—a fact backed up by a recent analysis from Energy Innovation.

Standing by its LNG pause, the Biden administration makes communities like Port Arthur feel heard. For years, our hometown endured cancer diagnoses and contaminated air—all while being told that LNG was a “win” for the local economy. Had they done their research on Port Arthur—which has had three operating refineries and other petrochemical facilities for many years—they would’ve known that our city has a poverty rate of 28%, an unemployment rate that’s almost three times the national average at 10.4%, and some of the lowest home values in Texas. If LNG facilities are meant to benefit ordinary citizens, shouldn’t the citizens of Port Arthur feel it by now?

And it’s not just Port Arthur that’s bearing the brunt of Big Oil’s reckless profit-seeking. Domestic consumers will face $14.3 billion in higher annual energy costs based on LNG facilities’ current rate of production. That doesn’t include the anticipated spike in prices that LNG proliferation will cause. Do you think those new plants will be built in Speaker Johnson’s community? Or will the Big Oil gravy train continue to steamroll over vulnerable working class neighborhoods like mine?

Biden and House Democrats’ defense of the LNG pause has certainly slowed the gravy train, but it hasn’t come to a stop. Doing that will require Democrats and climate-minded Republicans to remain united in the face of Big Oil’s antics. The fight isn’t over, but for the first time in a while, I can hear the voice of community leaders and courageous politicians over the sound of that unrelenting train whistle.

The UAW’s successful unionization effort last week at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee—the first successful unionization effort at a car factory in the South since the 1940s—is breaking the brains of Republicans in that region. They’re truly astonished that workers might not trust their corporate overlords with their working conditions, pay, health, and retirement.

Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Lee—along with Governors Kay Ivey (Alabama), Brian Kemp (Georgia), Tate Reeves (Mississippi), Henry McMaster (South Carolina), and Greg Abbott (Texas)—issued a joint statement last Tuesday condemning the vote:

We the Governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas are highly concerned about the unionization campaign driven by misinformation and scare tactics that the UAW has brought into our states…

In America, we respect our workforce and we do not need to pay a third party to tell us who can pick up a box or flip a switch. No one wants to hear this, but it’s the ugly reality… The experience in our states is when employees have a direct relationship with their employers, that makes for a more positive working environment. They can advocate for themselves and what is important to them without outside influence…

[W]e have serious reservations that the UAW leadership can represent our values. They proudly call themselves democratic socialists and seem more focused on helping President Biden get reelected than on the autoworker jobs being cut at plants they already represent.

Southern autoworkers, though, aren’t listening to the GOP’s BS any more: A unionization vote is set for the week of May 13 at a Mercedes plant in Alabama, and more than half the workers there have already signed a card indicating their desire for union representation.

The problem for Republicans is that unions represent a form of democracy in the workplace, and the GOP hates democracy as a matter of principle. It’s why conservatives have opposed every effort to expand voting rights from the Jim Crow era, through fighting woman’s suffrage, to opposing voting rights legislation from 1965 to this day.

Corporations, on the other hand, are not democracies: They’re organized along the lines of feudal-era kingdoms with a big boss (CEO), a small society of Lords and Ladies (senior executives and the board of directors), and a large number of serfs whose continued employment is up to the whims of the Boss and the Lords and Ladies.

Their commitment to gutting voting rolls and restricting voting rights, their obsession with women’s reproductive abilities, and their hatred of regulations and democracy in the workplace are increasingly seen by average American voters as out-of-touch and out-of-date.

In kingdoms and the form of government Republicans try to impose on Americans (particularly in Red states), power flows from the top-down; in democracies and unions, however, power flows from the bottom-up, with leaders, to quote the Declaration of Independence, exclusively “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

An interesting irony about the successful unionization of the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant is that that factory was the only Volkswagen operation in the world that wasn’t already unionized.

Representatives of the German-based corporation and its German union both traveled to Chattanooga to support workers voting for the union: In Germany, federal law requires every corporation with over 2,000 workers to have 50% of their board of directors drawn from their company’s unionized rank-and-file workers.

You could argue that we wouldn’t even have American democracy if it weren’t for unions; that we never would have had the Renaissance and the subsequent Enlightenment without them.

When the bubonic plague ravaged Europe in the middle of the 14th century, it killed so many workers, tightening the labor market, that the few who survived were able to demand higher wages.

Those who were skilled workers, from the construction trades to the arts to the professions, formed the first genuinely powerful guilds to negotiate on their behalf with employers and to enforce the contracts they’d worked out. This was also the beginning of the Freemasons, the “secret society” in which George Washington proudly claimed membership, that exists to this day and was the precursor to our modern unions.

The guilds and subsequent unions, through the Renaissance and the later Enlightenment, largely created the movements for universal suffrage and public education that led to the formation of the first middle classes and ultimately to our modern systems of democracy.

Modern American corporations have never been more profitable and their CEOs have never taken more out of our economy than in the past few decades, partly because of technology that improves productivity and partly because our pathetic percentage of unionization means CEOs, shareholders, and senior executives are free to pillage their companies while ignoring the very workers whose efforts made them rich.

According to Goldman Sachs, American corporations will spend over a trillion dollars this year on stock buybacks alone, all money that could instead have better compensated workers and thus strengthened our working class. Historically, as union density goes up inequality goes down and vice-versa. In the years since former President Ronald Reagan and the GOP declared war on unions in 1981, the wealth of the morbidly rich has exploded while worker salaries have largely stagnated.

Union members overall earn a bit over 10% more than their nonunion peers. For Black workers the numbers are even more stark: Black union workers earn 13.1% more than nonunion workers and for Hispanic workers it’s 18.1% more.

Women workers without a union earn only 78% of what men do; unionized women workers take home fully 94% of what men earn.

The “Great Compression” is what economists call the era from FDR’s presidency through the beginning of the Reagan Revolution: It was the only time in the history of America when inequality actually declined and workers’ pay increased at a faster rate than did their employers. High rates of unionization and a top marginal tax rate of 91-74% drove the process, but, since Reagan destroyed both, inequality has exploded.

Researchers found that for every 1% increase in unionized workers’ wages, there’s a corresponding 0.3% increase in the wages of nonunion workers because the unionized workplaces have established the local wage floor.

That inequality causes the U.S. economy to stagnate, as the morbidly rich save or invest their money in financial instruments rather than spending it or building new factories and businesses. We saw this played out as low GDP growth rates during the period from Reagan’s presidency through 2021, when Joe Biden brought us back to 1960’s-level economic growth by rejecting neoliberalism and embracing unions and Keynesian stimulus.

When worker wage increases are held low, average people have less disposable income and that slows the economy (something called “secular stagnation”); when their pay is enhanced by union representation, the economy surges (as we’re seeing right now).

The benefits of unionization aren’t limited to the unionized workers themselves. Nonunion companies, particularly smaller employers, find themselves having to compete for workers in a unionized high-wage environment that helps all workers.

Researchers found that for every 1% increase in unionized workers’ wages, there’s a corresponding 0.3% increase in the wages of nonunion workers because the unionized workplaces have established the local wage floor. This makes entire communities more prosperous.

Republicans appear committed to politically dying on a number of hills that time has passed by. Their commitment to gutting voting rolls and restricting voting rights, their obsession with women’s reproductive abilities, and their hatred of regulations and democracy in the workplace are increasingly seen by average American voters as out-of-touch and out-of-date. Elitist. Arrogant.

So they write increasingly frustrated rage-rants about “democratic socialists” and the evils of “union bosses” while the people in their states are choosing unions, reproductive freedom, and a clean environment.

Will they ever wake up and change their policies to ones supported by the majority of Americans?

As long as six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court continue to keep bribery legal and morbidly rich CEOs continue to hate unions almost as much as they dislike their own workers, I’m not holding my breath… and you shouldn’t, either.

The three-member trade panel hearing the U.S. complaint over Mexico’s restrictions on the use of genetically modified corn in tortillas will no doubt need some scientific advice to evaluate the technical evidence presented by the Mexican government on the risks associated with GM corn and their accompanying herbicide residues. They got some on April 23 from a panel of experts assembled by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) in the first of three webinars on the GM corn dispute.

Their message could not have been clearer. The Mexican government is right to doubt U.S. assurances that GM corn is safe to eat given the lax regulatory processes for GM crops in the U.S. There is a mountain of evidence that both GM corn and its accompanying herbicides, including glyphosate, may cause serious health problems. And those risks are magnified for Mexicans, who eat more than ten times the corn we eat in the U.S. and do so in minimally processed form, not processed foods.

"Has the U.S. government provided sufficient evidence to the Mexican government to assure the safety of GM corn, which is routinely sprayed with multiple herbicides known to be associated with reproductive problems, metabolic syndrome, and cancer?” asked pesticide expert Dr. Charles Benbrook in his remarks during the webinar. “No, because the studies have never been done."

Strong evidence for precaution

Benbrook and his fellow panelists all were invited to submit formal comments to the trade panel hearing the dispute, a year-long process expected to be resolved by the end of the year. The eight submissions from U.S. and Mexican non-governmental organizations were published by the tribunal earlier this month. They offer a range of evidence that supports Mexico’s presidential decree, issued in February 2023, phasing out glyphosate use in Mexico and restricting the use of GM corn in tortillas and other minimally processed corn products. (The submitted comments are available in English and Spanish on this IATP resource page.)

Dr. Benbrook co-authored technical comments for Friends of the Earth, which focused on the rising toxicity of GM corn, particularly the insecticidal Bt varieties, and the failure of U.S. regulators to test them for safety.

“Mexico is correct to state that it cannot rely on the U.S. government to ensure the safety of GM crops.”

"The first GM corn varieties in the late 1990s expressed 2 ppm to 6 ppm of one or two Bt toxins in corn kernels, the part of the plant people eat,” said Dr. Benbrook. “Today's leading GM corn varieties express four to seven toxins in corn kernels and at much higher levels, 50 ppm to 100 ppm. Why the big increase? Because target insects become more tolerant to Bt toxins over time, and eventually fully resistant. This forces the seed-biotech industry to add in new GM toxins and engineer the plants to express them at much higher levels. That might help kill more insects for a short time, but it also steadily increases human food safety risks."

Bill Freese, Science Director at the U.S.-based Center for Food Safety, emphasized just how weak U.S. regulations are, allowing companies to introduce new products with no required safety testing. He referred to is as a “deregulatory regime” rather than proper regulation.

“U.S. regulation of GM crops does not even comply with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA) because it is weak and voluntary, not mandatory,” he said, claiming U.S. agencies have facilitated the rising toxicity in fields of GM crops. As Freese explained, “The Environmental Protection Agency has raised the permissible level of glyphosate on corn by 50-fold since the mid-1990s to facilitate introduction of GM corn, which is sprayed directly with glyphosate.”

Monsanto and new parent company Bayer are now paying out billions of dollars in damages to people who have suffered cancer and other ailments from glyphosate exposure.

Lucy Sharratt, coordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN), highlighted Mexico’s strong rationale for its precautionary measures. CBAN was invited to offer comments to the trade panel but was later disinvited because it is a Canadian, not a U.S. or Mexican, organization. CBAN published its technical comments anyway.

"U.S. and Canadian government safety assessments of GM corn do not necessarily transfer readily to an assessment of safety in the Mexican context,” Sharratt explained to the webinar’s large online audience. “The U.S. and Canada argue that there is a long history of safe use of GM corn, but this is not the case in Mexico. The use of white corn in Mexico is entirely different from the history of the use of GM corn in processed food ingredients across North America. Mexico is largely self-sufficient in white corn, which is a staple of the diet, and has been mostly non-GM. Additionally, there is no post-market monitoring to validate safety of any use."

Mexican lawyer Javier Zuñiga, from the NGO Poder del Consumidor (Consumer Power), closed the expert panel, explaining that Mexico’s decree is both justified and legal under existing trade rules. “The Mexican government is obligated by its own constitution to take precautionary and preventive action to ensure the right to health, food, and a clean environment,” Zuñiga said. “Mexico's presidential decree is legal in the Mexican context and also under the USMCA, which includes exceptions for matters of public health.”

This scientific panel urged the trade tribunal to consider the evidence, listen to experts who do not have industry ties or conflicts of interest, and acknowledge that Mexico has the right to take precautionary measures to protect public health and the environment. It has done so in the least trade-distorting manner possible entirely consistent with USMCA guidelines.

As Freese concluded, “Mexico is correct to state that it cannot rely on the U.S. government to ensure the safety of GM crops.”

Two more webinars on other aspects of the trade dispute are scheduled May 2, on biodiversity and cultural rights, and May 7, with farmers’ perspectives on non-GM corn opportunities. The recording of this panel will be available April 25 here

Former President Trump’s criminal prosecutions, the first of which headed to trial this week in New York state court, are a historic first for the United States. But such prosecutions are not especially rare in the global context. Indeed, many other countries have investigated and prosecuted both sitting and former national leaders for alleged wrongdoing. Such cases should never be pursued lightly, as they introduce very real risks for a democracy. If done right, however, holding top officials accountable when they commit serious misconduct is a hallmark of liberal democracy and essential for the rule of law.

Trump is one of several world leaders currently facing criminal proceedings. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted in 2019 for fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. He has been fighting to stay out of prison ever since. If convicted, Netanyahu would be the second Israeli prime minister to serve time in prison for corruption.

Last month, the Brazilian federal police recommended criminal charges against former President Jair Bolsonaro for allegedly falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination record. Bolsonaro is also facing an investigation related to the January 2023 attack on Brazil’s presidential complex by his supporters after his election loss. This attack bore striking parallels to the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which is the basis for one of the criminal cases against Trump.

And in Peru, prosecutors recently raided the official and personal residences of President Dina Boluarte on suspicion of “unlawful enrichment.” She, too, is not her country’s first leader to face prosecution.

Other long-standing democracies whose former leaders have faced criminal prosecution include France, where two former presidents have been handed criminal convictions for corruption and campaign finance violations; Portugal, where a former prime minister is contesting a court-ordered trial for money laundering; Italy, where former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud and embezzlement; Costa Rica, where two former presidents have been tried for corruption; South Korea, which also convicted two of its former presidents for corruption; and Iceland, which tried a former prime minister for alleged crimes related to the 2008 financial crisis.

Even in the United States, many top politicians, including dozens of governors and state and federal legislators, have faced criminal charges during or after their time in office. For example, four of the last ten governors of Illinois have gone to prison. And Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey currently faces charges of bribery, corruption, and obstruction of justice.

Two former U.S. presidents have come close to being indicted. A draft indictment, unsealed in 2018, showed that a federal grand jury planned to charge former President Richard Nixon with bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of a criminal investigation, and obstruction of justice — and was forestalled only by the blanket pardon President Gerald Ford granted to his predecessor. President Bill Clinton could have also faced criminal liability for giving false testimony about his extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky, but he was able to avoid charges after agreeing to a temporary suspension of his law license and a fine.

To hold leaders accountable for serious wrongdoing is a hallmark of democracy, but weaponized prosecutions intended to settle political scores or sideline popular leaders are a real and serious concern. In Pakistan, for instance, popular former Prime Minister Imran Khan has been jailed on a plethora of opaque criminal charges, allegedly at the behest of his political opponents and the country’s powerful military. In Brazil, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was prosecuted and found guilty of corruption and money laundering charges in 2017 in what was widely considered an unfair trial, which prevented him from running again in 2018 and paved the way for Bolsonaro’s election. (Lula’s conviction was reversed in 2021, and he narrowly defeated Bolsonaro in the 2022 election.)

These examples serve as important reminders that prosecuting a former president or prime minister can have significant consequences and should never be pursued lightly. Criminal charges should only be brought based on credible evidence, and investigations and prosecutions must be conducted transparently and free from any political bias. The failure to do so, and even the appearance of political taint, can create grave risks for a democracy, including undermining trust in institutions and widening societal divisions. All of this underscores the need to proceed in such cases with the utmost care and according to the highest professional standards.

As the organization Protect Democracy has identified, there are a number of widely recognized criteria for assessing whether criminal proceedings against a high-profile political leader have cleared this bar. These include the quality of publicly available evidence, whether others have been held accountable for similar conduct, the political independence of investigators and prosecutors, and the robustness of other checks and balances, especially whether the courts can be trusted to afford the defendant due process and a fair trial. Sitting leaders should refrain from any behavior, including public statements, that might give even the appearance of involvement in an investigation or prosecution.

Although there is a very real risk to prosecuting leaders, and there is a high burden for meeting the criteria for appropriate criminal proceedings, democracies should still pursue accountability. The alternative — a culture of impunity for those at the top — is antithetical to democracy. Holding former President Trump accountable for criminal activity that is proven through a fair, impartial, and transparent process is essential — something both the former president’s supporters and opponents should remember. The stakes are high not only for him, but for American democracy.

About a month ago, a group of 14 prominent lawyers from the United States launched a global campaign to demand a pardon from President Joe Biden for my misdemeanor contempt conviction after I helped Amazon communities in Ecuador win a landmark $10 billion pollution judgement against Chevron. While I want a pardon for personal reasons—including the restoration of my freedom to travel and to earn a livelihood—this request is also a major opportunity for the White House to uphold its stated commitments on climate justice, human rights, and corporate accountability.

First, the personal.

I need this pardon because I am the only person in U.S. history to be privately prosecuted by a corporation. More specifically, the government (via a pro-corporate judge) gave a giant oil company (Chevron) the power to prosecute and lock up its leading critic. As a result of this unprecedented and frightening private prosecution, I still cannot travel out of the country and I have been prohibited from meeting with clients I have represented for over three decades. Nor can I practice law, maintain a bank account, or earn a livelihood. I am largely dependent for my survival on the support of people around the world who have contributed to my defense fund, which also pays my hefty legal fees to deal with Chevron’s attacks. I have no bank account because Chevron essentially stole (they would say “garnished”) all of my assets after a judge ordered me to reimburse the company millions of dollars for legal fees they spent trying to destroy me.

This obviously matters deeply to me, to my clients in Ecuador who are deeply suffering from the impacts of Chevron’s pollution, and to anyone who cares about ending corporate retaliation against the climate movement.

The fact 14 highly credible lawyers—among them Marty Garbus, Natali Segovia, and Michael Tigar—are representing me pro bono attests to the merits of the pardon request. To understand the the powerful arguments on our side, I would urge everyone to read the 12-page pardon letter in full, available here.

The private prosecution was carried out by Chevron and two of its U.S.-based corporate law firms, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and Seward & Kissel. It happened after Judge Lewis A. Kaplan charged me with criminal contempt after I appealed a clearly illegal order that I turn over my computer and confidential case file to Chevron. This unprecedented order would have forced me as an attorney to violate my ethical duties to my clients and would have put their lives in danger. (The ostensible basis of the order was to allow Chevron to search my computer for supposed hidden bank accounts that might contain money to pay the company the roughly $5 million in legal fees Kaplan ordered that I pay them; the reality is that the reason was manufactured to give the judge a reason to lock me up.)

Significantly, Kaplan’s criminal contempt charges were rejected for prosecution by the regular federal prosecutor in New York, Geoffrey Berman. That decision prompted the judge to illegally appoint the Chevron law firm to act in place of the government prosecutor. Not only was the appointment of a private prosecutor in a case already rejected by the government entirely inappropriate, neither Kaplan nor the law firm ever disclosed to our team that Chevron had been a client until we discovered it months later. Because Chevron had wrested complete control of a public prosecution rejected by the government, I ended up detained for 993 days on a petty misdemeanor charge with a maximum sentence of 180 days. That time included six weeks in a federal prison during a Covid-19 lockdown. Before me, no lawyer had ever been locked up even one day on such a charge.

The entire prosecution was condemned as illegal by the United Nation’s Working Group On Arbitrary Detention ( decision here) and in a detailed report issued by a team of international trial monitors led by former U.S. Ambassador for War Crimes Stephen A. Rapp and Canadian human rights scholar Catherine Morris. It also was condemned as unconstitutional by three U.S. federal judges, including two from the Supreme Court (decision here). In addition, dozens of Nobel Laureates (see article) supported my campaign along with 120 civil society groups, among them Amnesty International and Global Witness (see letter).

No matter where one stands on the political spectrum, we should all be able to agree that what happened to me should not happen to anybody in any country that adheres to the rule of law.

The petition to President Biden from the 14 lawyers states that “a pardon would bring a measure of justice to a prosecution that has been widely criticized as a violation of international law... and as a grave threat to free speech.” It adds: “This pardon is not only critical to protect the First Amendment rights of all advocates regardless of their political orientation, but also is vital to protect the climate justice movement both in the U.S. and around the world.”

Natali Segovia, one of the leading Indigenous rights lawyers in the world, has taken the lead in organizing the lawyers to push for the pardon. This is what she said in our press release announcing the campaign:

Around the world, human rights defenders like Steven Donziger are targeted and even killed for their advocacy and work on Indigenous rights and environmental justice issues. Such extrajudicial human rights violations have come to be expected occurrences in the Global South and “developing” nations at the hands of powerful corporations and extractive corporations who act with impunity and collusion from state governments; for Indigenous peoples and allies that stand to protect the Earth, this is a known assumption of risk. Steven’s case, however, is emblematic of the weaponization of the law by a powerful corporation against a human rights defender—an attorney, to be exact—and sets a dangerous precedent. We know the criminalization of Water Protectors and Land Defenders is on the rise, now we are seeing the rise of corporate-sponsored prosecution, RICO, and SLAPP tactics. If it could happen to Steven, a Harvard-trained human rights lawyer, it could happen to anyone on climate frontlines. This is what we are guarding against. This is why a pardon for Steven barely hits the tip of the iceberg to reverse course, but is a necessary step in ensuring fundamental rights of due process and human rights in the United States.

Others representing me include Jeanne Mirer, the president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers; Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union; Beher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Terrance P. Collingsworth, a leading international human rights lawyer and the director of International Rights Advocates; Jeffrey Haas, the longtime civil rights lawyer who successfully represented the family of Fred Hampton after he was killed by Chicago police; Nadia Ahmad, a visiting professor at Yale and a leading environmental and corporate accountability lawyer; and Scott Badenoch, Jr., an environmental justice attorney and a visiting scholar at the Environmental Law institute.

Our operating assumption is that it is absolutely possible to obtain a pardon if we fight for it. That means creating massive public pressure on why this is so needed not just for one person and his family, but for all justice advocates in our country and across the globe. This obviously matters deeply to me, to my clients in Ecuador who are deeply suffering from the impacts of Chevron’s pollution, and to anyone who cares about ending corporate retaliation against the climate movement.

The best way to support the pardon campaign is to donate at our new crowdfunding site here and to sign the petition here.

This piece originally ran on Steven Donziger’s SubStack, Donziger on Justice. You can also support his campaign by subscribing to his SubStack or visiting his campaign website.

Imagine it’s Monday, January 20, 2025, and by the end of the day, somewhere between 50,000 to hundreds of thousands of the 2 million federal government employees are summarily out of a job. A skeleton crew made up of a list of far-right, free-market conservatives excited to carry out an unpopular anti-democratic agenda has replaced them. Their marching orders are to cater to big business and rot every institution established to protect our lives, from education to transportation, from housing to labor to environmental protections to healthcare and more.

This is not a far-fetched dystopian nightmare.

It’s a plan outlined in a more than 800-page document from the conservative Heritage Foundation called Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership.

The Heritage Foundation is compiling and vetting a list of thousands of extremist operatives like DeVos who have little to no experience running programs for the American people, but are eager to wreak similar havoc across our entire government

This supposed “Mandate for Leadership” was drafted in collaboration with more than 50 organizations and 360 so-called “experts” from the conservative movement to promote policies based on free enterprise and limited government. If implemented, the plan would gut the governmental agencies that should be working for the people and replace anyone left standing with corporate shills.

What’s In Store If Heritage DeVos-ifies America

What would the unraveling of these democratic cornerstones look like? Imagine if every department in the U.S. was run by a Betsy DeVos. As a reminder, former President Donald Trump appointed DeVos as the secretary of education despite her having no experience with public education as a student, teacher, or leader. Her sole qualification was loyalty to a free-market agenda and a vision to privatize public schools.

Among the disastrous policies she advanced, DeVos:

• Proposed a $7B cut to public education with a significant portion of that defunding aid for students with disabilities;
• Advocated for a voucher program to siphon money out of public schools into private hands; and
• Proposed increasing guns in schools by using funding intended for student enrichment to purchase weapons for teachers.

The Heritage Foundation is compiling and vetting a list of thousands of extremist operatives like DeVos who have little to no experience running programs for the American people, but are eager to wreak similar havoc across our entire government from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice and more.

Anti-Democratic Philanthropy

Philanthropy isn’t neutral. Organizations like Heritage exemplify how the philanthropic sector is weaponized to rig systems in favor of their donors' quest for political and economic power. Heritage donors receive huge tax breaks on the millions of dollars they give to fund this work. Not only do the American people lose out on those tax dollars that should be funding our schools—among other things—but Heritage is more than happy to conceal those donor identities. I couldn't find their donors online and they don't seem to be in their 990s. Their donors may not want to be publically linked to this anti-democratic plan, but Project 2025 is their path to roll back the remaining safeguards protecting our communities from corporate greed. If they have their way, we can thank the Heritage Foundation’s nameless donors for more toxins in our water, fewer teachers in our schools, and fewer protections for workers.

Public Harms vs. Public Goods

Conservative initiatives like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are the antithesis of the vision the Marguerite Casey Foundation (MCF) and our grant partners have for the future. In response to their authoritarian agenda, nonprofits and donors alike should collectively double down to use our resources to resist pressure from those groups that are clearly at odds with the work needed to build a just society.

At MCF, we use our endowment to advance a vision of a government that digs deeper to serve everyday people and prioritizes safeguarding the natural resources, educational institutions, and infrastructure we rely on to live lives of dignity, health, and well-being.

Instead of slashing government jobs or “slitting throats” on day one as one of our government officials so plainly phrased it, the future we’re fighting for is one where well-paid, dignified public jobs help people economically obtain what they need and deserve to live good lives. We know that advancing the unfinished business of racial and economic justice is generations in the making. We’re committed to funding the grassroots organizations building community power to make it possible.

hat makes an income tax “fair”? Right-wing lawmakers the nation over have a ready answer. To be fair, they tell us, an income tax needs to be “flat.” Their core claim: In an evenhanded tax system with no axe to grind, everyone would pay tax at the same rate. What approach, flat taxers argue, could possibly be any fairer?

These flat taxers, not surprisingly, ignore the answer our income tax history makes patently plain: All of us share a comparable tax burden only when we have a graduated tax in effect, a levy that applies higher tax rates to income that sits in higher income brackets.

Flat taxes, by contrast, give our richest what amounts to a free ride at tax time.

Suppose, for instance, that a 5 percent flat tax on income became the law of our land. In this flat-tax America, families earning $70,000 a year would feel a far greater squeeze at tax time than families making $700,000 a year. For households pulling down even more in annual income, say $7 million, a mere 5 percent outlay to Uncle Sam would rate as little more than a financial hiccup.

And that reality neatly explains why our nation’s rich people-friendly think tanks and politicos have of late been investing so much financial and political capital in advancing flat tax plans, especially at the state level. Early in in our current 2020s, this state-first strategy seemed to be working just fine.

As analysts at the flat tax-friendly Tax Foundation gushed earlier this year: “In 2021 and 2022 alone, within the span of 15 months, more states enacted laws converting graduated-rate individual income tax structures into single-rate income tax structures than did so in the whole 108-year history of state income taxation up until that point.”

But then came Kansas. In 2023 and 2024, lawmakers leaning the flat tax way could not gather enough votes to overturn a gubernatorial veto of a bill that would have, notes the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “replaced Kansas’ graduated income tax brackets with a single flat rate of 5.25 percent.”

If that flat tax had become law, the Institute added, the biggest beneficiary probably would have been Kansas billionaire Charles Koch. His likely state tax savings: about $875,000 a year, 12 times as much as a typical Kansas household earns annually.

In Wisconsin, a similar story has unfolded. That state’s lawmakers have for two straight years dumped onto the governor’s desk legislation that significantly flattens the tax rates that impact Wisconsin’s wealthiest. For two straight years, the governor has vetoed that legislation.

The 2024 version of this Wisconsin legislation, if signed into law, would have saved households making $45,000 a year an average $78. Households making $674,300 annually would have saved 38 times more.

Have the latest tax battles in Kansas and Wisconsin seriously stalled the right-wing’s let’s-not-tax-the-rich momentum? At one level, most certainly yes. But stepping back and taking a broader view paints a more discouraging picture. And analysts at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy take that broader view in a just-released report, Who Pays Taxes in America in 2024.

This new research takes all the taxes Americans pay — federal, state, and local — into consideration. The progressivity of America’s tax system writ large, ITEP concludes, has almost all disappeared.

The share of all taxes the rich pay, the Institute’s analysts note, “only slightly exceeds the share of total income they receive.” In 2024, these analysts calculate, “the share of all taxes paid by the richest 1 percent of Americans” will only “be slightly higher than the share of all income going to this group.”

“And many individuals within the richest 1 percent, especially the richest in the group,” are paying “far less” than the top 1 percent average, the new ITEP report adds, thanks to assorted special tax breaks and loopholes.

“Our tax system should require the richest Americans to pay much more in taxes than they do now,” the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis concludes, “to support the public investments that make their fortunes possible.”

Americans, the latest polling data show, in no way support the rich people-friendly tax reality the new ITEP research so devastatingly details. One recent national poll — from the National Women’s Law Center and MomsRising — has found that a healthy majority of Americans support raising taxes on our richest to help people in need.

Some two-thirds of voters “across party lines,” this new polling shows, want Congress to wipe away the massive tax cut for America’s wealthy that Donald Trump signed into law in 2017. An even greater share of the American public — nearly 80 percent — would like to see Congress increase investments in the nation’s care-giving agenda by raising taxes on the wealthiest and the corporations they run.

Amid this widespread support for upping taxes on the richest among us, how can these rich be paying as little in taxes as they currently do? The simple answer: These rich have enough wealth and power to get our nation’s lawmakers to swallow the bogus narrative at the heart of the flat-tax flim-flam.

Any jurisdictions that choose to seriously tax the rich, this flim-flam posits, will lose their richest taxpayers to other jurisdictions — and end up collecting less, not more, in taxes.

Tax expert Brian Galle, a law professor at Georgetown University, likes to call this argument the “myth of the mobile millionaire.” But this notion, Galle explains in a new Atlantic magazine analysis, mostly amounts to pure fiction.

The easiest way to expose this fiction? Just look, Galle suggests, at the small number of states — California, New Jersey, and New York among them — that do at present tax the rich at rates appreciably higher than the national state tax average.

“If the conventional wisdom were accurate, you would expect those states to be devoid of wealthy people,” Galle notes. “Instead, they are among the richest in the country.”

But the myth of the mobile millionaire continues to hold sway, even among Democrats elected in deeply blue states. In 2022, as the Lever’s David Sirota points out, voters in Massachusetts passed a ballot measure that put in place a special surtax on millionaires. The state’s horrified Democratic governor then successfully pressed for a tax cut that included savings for her state’s wealthiest.

The result? A $1 billion state budget shortfall that the governor now says justifies big cuts for Medicaid.

In New Jersey, New York, and Colorado, similar stories. Democratic Party governors are shying away from taxing their richest and demanding budget cutbacks for programs that help people of modest means.

But hope does spring eternal, even in the struggle over taxing the rich. The latest ray of hope comes from the pressure for a more equal world now coming from Brazil, the nation currently chairing the G20, the international grouping that encompasses 20 of the world’s largest economies.

Just this past week, the Brazilian finance minister, backed by his French counterpart, called for an annual tax of at least 2 percent on the wealth of the world’s billionaires. Brazil and France are hoping to see this call gain the approval of G20 finance ministers when they meet this July.

Making that sort of move has become essential, notes Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of the Walt Disney entertainment empire’s co-founder and a tax-the-rich activist with Patriotic Millionaires. In our “increasingly interconnected” global economy, she lays out, our world’s ultra-wealthy find it “easier than ever” to move their money around to sidestep paying taxes.

That ease has to end.

‘The need to tax rich people like me,” Disney asks us to see, “has never been so dire.”

The GOP’s criminal justice platform in a few words: attack prosecutors for treating kids like kids.

Over the past several years, reform-minded prosecutors like Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty have been elected on platforms that involve a commitment to not charge juveniles in adult court. This is a simple promise that has and will continue to deliver equitable justice without exception to children. However, the implementation of this commitment has been met with intense backlash, resulting in attempts from the far right to undermine the discretion of reform-minded prosecutors and remove them from office.

In Oakland, District Attorney Price’s decision to charge a 17-year-old in juvenile court was leaked by an adversarial media outlet. Soon after, this decision became fuel for the recall facing Price, bolstered by the same MAGA messaging on crime we see catching fire across the country. In Minneapolis, County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged a 15-year-old in juvenile court, resulting in sustained requests from Republican state officials to transfer the case to the state attorney general’s office. As major cities across the country have elected reform-minded prosecutors, Republican lawmakers have attacked and disparaged them at the great cost of Black communities, who are disproportionately impacted by tough-on-crime prosecutorial practices.

For our systems to be consistent, to be fair, and to reflect science, we have to have prosecutors willing to stand firm in their commitments to treat kids like kids.

The “adultification” of Black kids in our criminal legal system is no secret. Black youth comprise 47.3% of adult court transfers, while only making up 14% of the youth population. The GOP’s continual pressure to charge kids as adults is not just an attack on criminal legal reform, it is a coordinated attack on justice for Black children. Children in adult jails are more likely to suffer permanent trauma and are five times more likely to die by suicide than children held in juvenile detention centers. We know that incarcerating children with adults also deprives them of access to essential programs and services that are fundamental to successful reentry into their communities. This can not be about politics, it has to be about delivering appropriate justice that considers age-appropriate sentencing.

The U.S. Supreme Court appropriately recognizes that youth are different from adults. The Court’s ruling in Roper v. Simmons— where the court held that executing minors under the death penalty is unconstitutional—confirmed what science has shown to be irrefutably true: The adolescent brain is not fully developed until about age 25. Therefore, youth cannot be viewed “as morally culpable as adults” in their conduct.

While we expect Republicans to vacate moral grounds to accomplish their electoral priorities, it has been unfortunate to see centrist Democrats adopt this playbook. In Minneapolis, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz pushed back on a ruling from County Attorney Moriarty in the face of pressure from the state GOP. In Oakland, Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell attacked District Attorney Price by peddling a manufactured crime wave narrative. Centrist Democrats are allowing the GOP to mandate how we talk about crime, how we address public safety, and how to deliver equitable justice for juveniles.

We know that many cases involving juvenile defendants carry profound grief, great consequences for communities, and are rightfully emotionally charged. Unshockingly, the GOP has manipulated this grief as a talking point to unseat prosecutors. The recall facing District Attorney Price, for example, has platformed directly affected parents, and pushed their stories to support the recall. This strategy not only belittles the true testimony of these cases, but also politicizes the grief of impacted families and communities.

For our systems to be consistent, to be fair, and to reflect science, we have to have prosecutors willing to stand firm in their commitments to treat kids like kids. While the GOP continues to manipulate cases involving Black children for political gain, we have to be aware of the politics they are playing. We need to understand that Republicans do not care about fairness, they care about disparaging the progressive movement for justice.

The Senate approved the national security supplemental on Tuesday night, by a vote of 79-18.

The legislation combined the four bills that were approved by the House over the weekend. After months of pushing the Biden administration to do more to pressure Israel to change its conduct in its war in Gaza, Democrats in Congress ultimately approved $26 billion in aid for Israel, including approximately $9 billion in global humanitarian aid (how much would go to Gaza, to be determined).

In the Senate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) tried to introduce two amendments — one that would remove all offensive military aid for Israel and another to restore U.S. funding for UNRWA. "What we are doing today is aiding and abetting the destruction of the Palestinian people," he said on the Senate floor Tuesday night.

No Democrats, including some who have raised concerns about Israel’s war, supported Sanders’s effort, saying that they wanted the package to move forward without delay.

In the lead-up to the votes, pushback was more prevalent in the House. Perhaps most notably, on April 5, 39 voting congressional Democrats circulated a letter that urged President Joe Biden to stop sending offensive arms to Israel until an investigation into the strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen staffers was completed.

In addition, the members also urged Biden “to withhold these transfers if Israel fails to sufficiently mitigate harm to innocent civilians in Gaza, including aid workers, and if it fails to facilitate — or arbitrarily denies or restricts — the transport and delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza.”

On Saturday, 37 Democrats (along with 21 Republicans) voted against the Israel aid bill — a significant total given the history of bipartisan support for Israel in Congress. But the large majority of the caucus, 173 in total, voted to advance it (3 Democrats did not vote).

Of those in support, 20 of the members had signed that letter to Biden earlier this month.

Securing another tranche of aid for Ukraine has been a long-term policy priority for the party, and some Democrats may have been willing to swallow more aid for Israel as a price for accomplishing that goal. But the vote over the weekend gave Democrats an opportunity to follow through on their rhetoric and vote against sending Israel more military aid without compromising any other piece of legislation.

But many Democrats nonetheless retreated from the line they had set earlier this month. Signs of a shift in rhetoric from some of these members came in the aftermath of Iran’s strikes on Israel on April 13.

“Iran is a terrorist nation. They have just launched a disproportionate terrorist attack against our ally Israel. The free world and the United States will stand against this terrorist nation and the tyranny that it promotes,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) on X on the night of the attacks. “We must pass Biden’s supplemental appropriation funding now that covers Israel, Ukraine, and Gaza among others.” This followed her signing of the April 5 letter urging Biden to hold aid.

Others stayed noticeably quiet following the exchange of attacks between Iran and Israel, but their calculus on aiding Israel clearly changed between April 5 and last weekend.

“I will always support our allies against enemy attacks — especially with potential nuclear threats. Iran’s attacks against Israel necessitated that we approve the emergency aid package without delay,” Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C) told RS on Tuesday. “I additionally chose to do so because it provides for over $9 billion in humanitarian aid. I trust that President Biden will ensure this aid is dispensed to those most severely impacted by this conflict.”

Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.), told RS that the Iran attacks changed her calculus as well. “Earlier this month, I signed a letter asking President Biden to withhold offensive weapons until there was an investigation into the airstrike that resulted in the death of seven World Central Kitchen humanitarian aid workers. I still maintain that any funding the United States provides to our allies must be used in accordance with international law,” she said.

“The situation changed when Iran launched an attack against Israel and further escalated tensions in the region," she added. "Providing aid to our allies around the world, including Israel, is of vital importance to our national security. This does not negate the need for assurances of how aid will be used. The national security supplemental I voted for last week ensures Israel has the resources to combat Hamas and provides crucial humanitarian aid to vulnerable people around the world, including the civilians in Gaza. We can and must continue to do both."

Eight of the 20 signatories who eventually supported the bill have not issued public statements about their votes, including Reps. Jackson Lee, Adams, and Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Nanette Barragan (D-Calif.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Tony Cardenas (D-Calif.), and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.)

Four others, including Pelosi, as well as Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), and Hayes (D-Conn.) released statements celebrating the passage of the series of national security bills without explicitly explaining or justifying their positions on Israel aid. Pelosi’s office published a transcript of her floor speech on Ukraine aid but did not mention Israel.

“Speaker Pelosi has a long record of strong support for Israel and its right to defend itself. Speaker Pelosi signed the April 5 letter to call for a pause on offensive weapons transfers until there was an independent investigation into the attack on the World Central Kitchen heroes, steps the administration has taken and is taking,” a spokesman for Pelosi told RS, explaining her vote. “Speaker Pelosi’s position is fully consistent with her vote in favor of the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act.”

Three other Democrats — Reps. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.), and Kevin Mullin (D-Calif.) issued short statements emphasizing the $9 billion in humanitarian aid, some of which will go to Gaza — but not mentioning or explaining their support for the military assistance to Israel.

Besides Adams, Hayes, and Pelosi, none of the other members who did not clearly state their rationale for the vote responded to requests for comment.

Avoiding an explanation of controversial votes is nothing new for Democrats.

“The GOP mentioned the country in the title of its press release and sixteen times in its summary of the bill. But the House and Senate Democrats’ press releases don’t mention Israel at all,” Stephen Semler noted in Jacobin when Congress passed a $1.2 trillion funding bill that included almost $4 billion in military assistance for Israel and cut off all funding for UNRWA, the most important supplier of humanitarian aid in Gaza. “Clearly, Democratic elected officials were afraid to cop to the contents of the bill.”

The other six members who voted for the aid package explained their decisions more clearly to the public.

Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) explicitly criticized the inclusion of funds that Israel could use for offensive weapons, but said that the defensive aid for Israel and the humanitarian aid present in the bill were necessary.

“While I have deep concerns about the bill that includes additional security assistance to Israel, the funding in this bill is urgently needed to address the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” said Schakowsky. "I am concerned by the inclusion of $3.5 billion in funding for Israel that could be used to obtain offensive weapons. While this funding will not be disbursed to Israel for several years, I reiterate my calls for the U.S. to halt all offensive weapons transfers to Israel until and unless it can be confirmed that U.S. weapons are being used in accordance with domestic and international law and that the Israeli government is not impeding the entry of U.S. humanitarian aid into Gaza.”

“While I’m deeply concerned about further military assistance to Israel, I couldn’t in good conscience vote against this lifesaving humanitarian assistance when millions of people around the world are suffering,” added Jacobs.

Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.), Veronica Escobar (D-N.Y.), and Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) all supported the measure but urged Biden to keep pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu to follow international law and protect civilians during the war. Stansbury paired her statement on the supplemental’s package with a letter she wrote to Biden saying that she understands “that the funding provided in the supplemental is defensive in nature and will not be used to support offensive weapons in Gaza.” The legislation earmarks approximately $3.5 billion for buying “advanced weapons systems.”

Escobar said that her “support for the Israel package comes with [her] continued calls on the administration to use its leverage with Israel to allow more life-saving humanitarian aid to enter Gaza.”

Democrats who opposed the measure on Saturday made the case that taking the rare opportunity to register clear, widespread opposition to weapons packages like this one is how opponents of funding Israel’s war can provide Biden with the necessary leverage to push Netanyahu.

“I hope this vote will show the world that there is a really significant segment of the United States that doesn’t want to see expanded and widening wars,” Rep. Greg Casar told the New York Times before the vote.

Following the vote, a group of 19 Democrats who voted against the aid issued a statement stating, in part: “Today is, in many ways, Congress’ first official vote where we can weigh in on the direction of this war. If Congress votes to continue to supply offensive military aid, we make ourselves complicit in this tragedy.”

The inability of U.S. citizens, even a majority, to influence our country’s policies of war and peace in a rapid and effective way has long been obvious to many. Our support for Israel’s war in Gaza has made it painfully obvious—and now perilous.

The U.S. stands before the world as an accomplice to Israel’s flagrant violation of international law in Gaza. Yet Congress continues to pass aid because so many of our legislators—and their constituents and donors—cannot turn their backs on our ally, for valid reasons of historical memory and conscience.

So it is time to create an escrow account for further aid to Israel. With such an account we can still show support for our ally. But the aid will not be released until the U.N. certifies that Israel is in compliance with international law regarding the treatment of civilians in Gaza.

Many would argue, not without reason, that the U.N. is unlikely, at present, to certify Israel as being in any way compliant with international law. But Israel’s disputes with the U.N. and its member nations must be worked out there. The U.N. admitted Israel as a member state in 1949. The U.S. can help as a go-between. But not in an atmosphere where President Joe Biden’s warning to Netanyahu to avoid our country’s post-9/11 mistakes has been so violently ignored.

As congressional majorities continue to pass aid to Israel, let the escrow account signal U.S. refusal to comply any longer with collective punishment: blockade, planned starvation, and indiscriminate bombing.

Israel’s sovereign right to self-defense is always invoked as the bedrock principle that keeps U.S. aid flowing. Let our ally now respect that same right of self-defense for our country. The U.S. must defend itself from indictment and prosecution as an accomplice to Israel’s violations of international law. Our aid to Israel can be sequestered in an escrow account until it will not be used to commit such violations.

The Biden administration has been willing to acknowledge U.S. foreign policy mistakes that spiraled out of control. Let Congress encourage Israel to do the same by establishing this escrow account. As congressional majorities continue to pass aid to Israel, let the escrow account signal U.S. refusal to comply any longer with collective punishment: blockade, planned starvation, and indiscriminate bombing.

Members of Congress who have vowed to support Israel can honor their consciences by passing bills to aid Israel’s economic health and pragmatic self-defense. But we who feel the deep moral injury, to ourselves and Israel, and see the horrific physical suffering of Gaza and its people, can also honor our consciences by promoting this practical step to end U.S. complicity with these grave errors that are visible throughout the world as violations of international law. This can be achieved, without abandoning Israel, by placing our promised aid to our longtime ally in an escrow account. On behalf of the majority of Americans, we ask U.S. Senators to consider this option before continuing to approve military aid for Israel.

One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Barack Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the U.S.-Iran agreement who promised to restore it upon taking office, only to ham-handedly bungle the job, while placating Israel.

In November, of course, American voters get to choose which of the two they’d trust with handling ongoing explosive tensions with Tehran across a Middle East now in crisis. The war in Gaza has already intensified the danger of an Iran-Israel conflict—with the recent devastating Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria and the Iranian response of drones and missiles dispatched against Israel only upping the odds. In addition, Iran’s “axis of resistance”—including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria—has been challenging American hegemony throughout the Middle East, while drawing lethal U.S. counterstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

It was former President Donald Trump, of course, who condemned the U.S.-Iran agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) while running in 2016. With his team of fervent anti-Iran hawks, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, he took a wrecking ball to relations with Iran. Six years ago, Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and, in what he called a campaign of “maximum pressure,” reinstituted, then redoubled political and economic sanctions against Tehran. Characteristically, he maintained a consistently belligerent policy toward the Islamic Republic, threatening its very existence and warning that he could “obliterate” Iran.

The question remains: Could some version of the JCPOA be salvaged in 2025?

Joe Biden had been a supporter of the accord, negotiated while he was Obama’s vice president. During his 2020 presidential campaign, he promised to rejoin it. In the end, though, he kept Trump’s onerous sanctions in place and months of negotiations went nowhere. While he put out feelers to Tehran, crises erupting in 2022 and 2023, including the invasion of Israel by Hamas, placed huge obstacles in the way of tangible progress toward rebooting the JCPOA.

Worse yet, still reeling from the collapse of the 2015 agreement and ruled by a hardline government deeply suspicious of Washington, Iran is in no mood to trust another American diplomatic venture. In fact, during the earlier talks, it distinctly overplayed its hand, demanding far more than Biden could conceivably offer.

Meanwhile, Iran has accelerated its nuclear research and its potential production facilities, amassing large stockpiles of uranium that, as The Washington Post reports, “could be converted to weapons-grade fuel for at least three bombs in a time frame ranging from a few days to a few weeks.”

Trump’s Anti-Iran Jihad

While the U.S. and Iran weren’t exactly at peace when Trump took office in January 2017, the JCPOA had at least created the foundation for what many hoped would be a new era in their relations.

Iran had agreed to drastically limit the scale and scope of its uranium enrichment program, reduce the number of centrifuges it could operate, curtail its production of low-enriched uranium suitable for fueling a power plant, and ship nearly all of its enriched uranium stockpile out of the country. It closed and disabled its Arak plutonium reactor, while agreeing to a stringent regime in which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would monitor every aspect of its nuclear program.

In exchange, the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations agreed to remove an array of economic sanctions, which, until then, had arguably made Iran the most sanctioned country in the world.

Administration officials made it clear that the goal was toppling the regime and that they hoped the sanctions would provoke an uprising to overthrow the government.

Free of some of them, its economy began to recover, while its oil exports, its economic lifeblood, nearly doubled. According to How Sanctions Work, a new book from Stanford University Press, Iran absorbed a windfall of $11 billion in foreign investment, gained access to $55 billion in assets frozen in Western banks, and saw its inflation rate fall from 45% to 8%.

But Trump acted forcefully to undermine it all. In October 2017, he “decertified” Iran’s compliance with the accord, amid false charges that it had violated the agreement. (Both the E.U. and the IAEA agreed that it had not.)

Many observers feared that Trump was creating an environment in which Washington could launch an Iraq-style war of aggression. In a New York Times op-ed, Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, suggested that Trump was repeating the pattern of unproven allegations President George W. Bush had relied on: “The Trump administration is using much the same playbook to create a false impression that war is the only way to address the threats posed by Iran.”

Finally, on May 8, 2018, Trump blew up the JCPOA and sanctions on Iran were back in place. Relentlessly, he and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin piled on ever more of them in what they called a campaign of “maximum pressure.” Old sanctions were reactivated and hundreds of new ones added, targeting Iran’s banking and oil industries, its shipping industry, its metal and petrochemical firms, and finally, its construction, mining, manufacturing, and textile sectors. Countless individual officials and businessmen were also targeted, along with dozens of companies worldwide that dealt, however tangentially, with Iran’s sanctioned firms. It was, Mnuchin told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “a maximum pressure campaign for sanctions… We will continue to ramp up, more, more, more.” At one point, in a gesture both meaningless and insulting, the Trump administration even sanctioned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, a move moderate President Hassan Rouhani called “outrageous and idiotic,” adding that Trump was “afflicted by mental retardation.”

Then, in 2019, Trump took the unprecedented step of labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s chief military arm, a “foreign terrorist organization.” He put a violent exclamation point on that when he ordered the assassination of Iran’s premier military leader, General Qassem Soleimani, during his visit to Baghdad.

Administration officials made it clear that the goal was toppling the regime and that they hoped the sanctions would provoke an uprising to overthrow the government. Iranians did, in fact, rise up in strikes and demonstrations, including most recently 2023’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, partly thanks to tougher economic times due to the sanctions. The government’s response, however, was a brutal crackdown. Meanwhile, on the nuclear front, having painstakingly complied with the JCPOA until 2018, instead of being even more conciliatory Iran ramped up its program, enriching far more uranium than was necessary to fuel a power plant. And militarily, it initiated a series of clashes with U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf, attacked or seized foreign-operated oil tankers, shot down a U.S. drone in the Straits of Hormuz, and launched drones meant to cripple Saudi Arabia’s huge oil industry.

“The American withdrawal from the JCPOA and the severity of the sanctions that followed were seen by Iran as an attempt to break the back of the Islamic Republic or, worse, to completely destroy it,” Vali Nasr, a veteran analyst at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and one of the authors of How Sanctions Work, told me. “So, they circled the wagons. Iran became far more securitized, and it handed more and more power to the IRGC and the security forces.”

Biden’s Reign of (Unforced) Error

Having long supported a deal with Iran—in 2008, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, in 2015, in a speech to Jewish leaders—Joe Biden called Trump’s decision to quit the JCPOA a “self-inflicted disaster.” But on entering the Oval Office, Biden failed to simply rejoin it.

Instead, he let months go by, while waxing rhetorical in a quest to somehow improve it. Even though the JCPOA had been working quite well, the Biden team insisted it wanted a “longer and stronger agreement” and that Iran first had to return to compliance with the agreement, even though it was the United States that had pulled out of the deal.

Consider that an unforced error. “Early in 2021 there was one last chance to restore the agreement,” Trita Parsi, an expert on Iran and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. “He could have just come back to the JCPOA by issuing an executive order, but he didn’t do anything for what turned out to be the 10 most critical weeks.”

Against the possibility of a revived accord, according to Vali Nasr, Iran has concluded that Washington is an utterly untrustworthy negotiating partner whose word is worthless.

It was critical because the Iranian administration of President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, responsible for negotiating the original accord, was expiring and new elections were scheduled for June 2021. “One of the major mistakes Biden made is that he delayed the nuclear talks into April,” comments Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Princeton University scholar and a former top Iranian official who was part of its nuclear negotiating team in 2005-2007. “This was a golden opportunity to negotiate with the Rouhani team, but he delayed until a month before the Iranian elections. He could have finished the deal by May.”

When the talks finally did resume in April—“gingerly,” according to The New York Times—they were further complicated because, just days earlier, a covert Israeli operation had devastated one of Iran’s top nuclear research facilities with an enormous explosion. Iran responded by pledging to take the purity of its enriched uranium from 20% to 60%, which didn’t exactly help the talks, nor did Biden’s unwillingness to condemn Israel for a provocation clearly designed to wreck them.

That June, Iranians voted in a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric and militant supporter of the “axis of resistance.” He took office in August, spent months assembling his administration, and appointed a new team to lead the nuclear talks. By July, according to American officials, those talks on a new version of the JCPOA had reached “near complete agreement,” only to fall apart when the Iranian side backed out.

It was also clear that the Biden administration didn’t prioritize the Iran talks, being less than eager to deal with bitter opposition from Israel and its allies on Capitol Hill. “Biden’s view was that he’d go along with reviving the JCPOA only if he felt it was absolutely necessary and to do it at the least political cost,” Parsi points out. “And it looked like he’d only do it if it were acceptable to Israel.”

Over the next two years, the United States and Iran engaged in an unproductive series of negotiations that seemed to come tantalizingly close to an agreement only to stop short. By the summer of 2022, the nuclear talks once again appeared to be making progress, only to fail yet again. “After 15 months of intense, constructive negotiations in Vienna and countless interactions with the JCPOA participants and the U.S., I have concluded that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted,” wrote Josep Borrell Fontelles, the foreign policy chief for the European Union.

By the end of 2022, Biden reportedly declared the Iran deal “dead” and his chief negotiator insisted he wouldn’t “waste time” trying to revive it. As Mousavian told me, Iran’s crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom revolt in the wake of its “morality police” torturing and killing a young woman, Mahsa Amini, arrested on the streets of Tehran without a veil, and increased concern about Iranian drones being delivered to Russia for its war in Ukraine soured Biden on even talking to Iran.

Nonetheless, in 2023, yet another round of talks—helped, perhaps, by a prisoner exchange between the United States and Iran, including an agreement to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian oil revenues–resulted in a tentative, informal accord that Iranian officials described as a “political cease-fire.” According to the Times of Israel, “the understandings would see Tehran pledge not to enrich uranium beyond its current level of 60% purity, to better cooperate with U.N. nuclear inspectors, to stop its proxy terror groups from attacking U.S. contractors in Iraq and Syria, to avoid providing Russia with ballistic missiles, and to release three American-Iranians held in the Islamic Republic.”

But even that informal agreement was consigned to the dustbin of history after Hamas’s October 7 attack doomed any rapprochement between the United States and Iran.

The question remains: Could some version of the JCPOA be salvaged in 2025?

Certainly not if, as now seems increasingly possible, a shooting war breaks out involving the United States, Iran, and Israel, a catastrophic crisis with unforeseeable consequences. And certainly not if Trump is reelected, which would plunge the United States and Iran deeper into their cold (if not a devastatingly hot) war.

What do the experts say? Against the possibility of a revived accord, according to Vali Nasr, Iran has concluded that Washington is an utterly untrustworthy negotiating partner whose word is worthless. “Iran has decided that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans and they decided to escalate tensions further in order to gain what they hope is additional leverage vis-à-vis Washington.”

“Biden’s intention was to revive the deal,” says Hossein Mousavian. “He did take some practical steps to do so and at least he tried to deescalate the situation.” Iran was, however, less willing to move forward because Biden insisted on maintaining the sanctions Trump had imposed.

The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi, however, catches the full pessimism of a moment in which Iran and Israel (backed remarkably fully by Washington) are at the edge of actual war. Given the rising tensions in the region, not to speak of actual clashes, he says gloomily, “The best that we can hope for is that nothing happens. There is no hope for anything more.”

And that’s where hope is today in a Middle East that seems to be heading for hell in a handbasket.