Let one old man deal with two others.

I turn 80 in July, which makes me just over a year-and-a-half younger than President Joe Biden and almost two years older than former President Donald Trump. And, honestly, I know my limits. Yes, I still walk—no small thing—six miles a day. And I work constantly. But I’m also aware that, on my second walk of the day and then as night approaches, I feel significantly more tired than I once did. I’m also aware that my brain, still active indeed, does forget more than it once did. And all of this is painfully normal. Nothing to be ashamed of, nothing whatsoever.

I also know from older friends that we humans can still be distinctly functional, thoughtful, and capable at age 82 (when Donald Trump would leave his second term in office) or even 86 (when Joe Biden would do the same). But honestly, what are the odds? I’ll tell you one thing that couldn’t be more obvious—not as good as for someone who’s, say, 55 or 60 years old, that’s for sure. Yes, there’s also the reputed wisdom of old age—and it might indeed make Joe Biden a more thoughtful president, were he to get a second term; Donald Trump, of course, would be Donald Trump, at 60 or 82.

And I have little doubt that, whatever age you are, you’ve been thinking somewhat similar thoughts. I mean, doesn’t the very possibility of watching a televised debate between the two of them make you anxious? After all, the oldest president to previously leave office was Ronald Reagan at 77 (and by then he may have had dementia). Before him, the oldest was Dwight D. Eisenhower who ended his second term in 1961 at 70 years old, having had a heart attack while in office. Third comes William Henry Harrison, who entered the White House in 1841 at age 68 and died, possibly of pneumonia, 32 days later. Now, it’s also a fact that we Americans are generally lasting longer than once upon a time. But is that really where you want to put your political money? I doubt it.

As one old man to two others, if only you could stand down, we could face the world we’re actually in before it becomes too late.

Still, all of the above is too obvious to belabor, so here’s a question: Are there any other implications we can draw from the upcoming battle between those two old men that’s going to grab our attention and steal the headlines for all too many months to come? The answer, I suspect, is yes. Sometimes in our world, the symbolic is all too subtle, but every now and then it impolitely smacks you in the face. And at least as far as I’m concerned, the second Biden-Trump election campaign should more than qualify in that regard.

I mean, the country that still passes for the greatest power on Planet Earth is going to set a limping age record for president, no matter who wins, leaving China’s Xi Jinping, now 70, and Russia’s Vladmir Putin, now 71, as relative youths in an all-American world of absolute ancientness. And that should certainly tell you something about the state of our country and this planet, too.

To be a little clearer about just what, let me add one more factor to the equation. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are preparing a fight to the wire to lead an America that, not so many decades ago, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, was considered the “sole superpower” on planet Earth. Doesn’t that tell you something?

I think it does. I think, quite bluntly (though I’ve seen no one discussing this amid the endless media headlines and chatter about Trump and Biden), that those two old codgers offer a stunning image of the all-too-literal decline and fall of—yes!—the United States. They should make us consider where the country that still likes to think of itself as the singularly most powerful and influential one on this planet is really heading.

A World Without Peace Dividends

As you might imagine, there’s a prehistory to all of this. George H. W. Bush, president at the moment when the Soviet Union went down in 1991, had that very year ordered the U.S. military to launch Operation Desert Storm, which drove Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait. In its own fashion, it also launched what would, in the century that followed, become a set of American military operations around the globe. At the same time, with Russia in tatters and China still a modestly rising power—with, that is, no true great-power enemies left on Planet Earth—that sole superpower would do something rather surprising. It would continue to pour ever more taxpayer dollars into the U.S. military-industrial complex. Yes, there was talk then about a “peace dividend” for this country and its people, but none ever arrived.

Thirty-two years later, the Pentagon budget has almost hit the trillion-dollar mark annually, while the overall national “security” (yes, it’s still called that!) budget long ago soared well above the trillion-dollar mark. Meanwhile, in this century, George H. W. Bush’s son, elected president in November 2000, would the following September respond to the 9/11 attacks, planned and carried out by Osama bin Laden and his small terror group, al Qaeda, by launching what quickly came to be known as “the Global War on Terror.” And all too global it would be with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. It would also prove a disaster of the first order for the last superpower, whose military would leave literally millions dead across the planet, destroy countries, decimate economies, and create tens of millions of refugees, while costing this country a staggering $8 trillion and counting as, over more than 20 years, the U.S. military lost wars, while terrorism as a phenomenon only grew.

Yes, in May 2011, Osama bin Laden would be killed in Pakistan by a team of U.S. Navy Seals. Still, were he alive today, I suspect he would be pleased indeed. With next to nothing other than his personal wealth, a small crew of followers, and some hijacked airplanes, he managed to outmaneuver and outplay what was then the greatest power on Planet Earth. Thanks to the slaughter of several thousand Americans in New York and Washington, he also managed to draw this country into an endless war against “terrorism” and, in the process, turn it into an increasingly terrorized country, whose inhabitants are now, however symbolically (and, in the future, possibly far more literally), at each other’s throats.

The once-lone superpower, and now perhaps the loneliest power of all, could even be heading for previously unimaginable autocratic waters or who knows what else?

In some eerie fashion, both former President Trump and President Biden might be considered creations of al Qaeda. And so might the country itself today. I mean, could an American of 1991 ever have imagined that, in 2024, polls would show the urge for violence against fellow Americans reaching eerie highs here? Meanwhile, approximately 1 in 20 of us is now armed with a military-style AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Even young people can now possess a JR-15 (for “junior”) child’s version of such weaponry that’s all too deadly.

Perhaps not surprisingly, AR-15s have proven the weapon of choice in the worst of the mass killings that have become commonplace in this country and, in recent years, have been distinctly on the rise. They could indeed be considered “terrorist” activities, involving as they do the repeated deaths of startling numbers of us. And all of this is happening without an American-style al Qaeda yet truly in sight. Mind you, there are now an estimated almost 400 million weapons of various kinds in the possession of American civilians, a stunning arsenal for any country, no less one increasingly divided against itself. Meanwhile, according to a recent NPR/News Hour/Marist poll, 3 in 10 Republicans (or 20 million of us) claim that “Americans may have to resort to violence to set things straight” in this country, while, on the right, militarized terror-style groups are ever more the order of the day.

Consider that a brief summary of the increasingly divided and divisive American society over which those two old men are now fighting, a domestic world that could, in the end, rip apart whatever fantasies our leaders may still have about American power on this planet.

Coming Apart at the Seams?

As was true of the Soviet Union until almost the moment it collapsed in a heap, the U.S. still appears to be an imperial power of the first order. It has perhaps 750 military bases scattered around the globe and continues to act like a power of one on a planet that itself seems distinctly in crisis. It also continues to organize for a new Cold (verging on Hot) War with China in the Pacific. That explains President Biden’s recent highly publicized “summit” in Washington with the prime minister of Japan and the president of the Philippines, just as it explains the way U.S. special operations forces have only recently been “permanently” assigned to an island only a few kilometers off China’s coast. Yes, as that recent meeting with the Japanese and Filipino leaders and those commandos suggest, the Biden administration is still dealing with China in particular as if this were indeed a Cold War moment, and the sort of “containment” of a communist country the president grew up with was still the order of the day for the globe’s greatest power.

Unfortunately, that’s truly an old man’s version of the world we now live in. I’m thinking about the planet which, each month, sets a new heat record and where, despite much talk about cutting fossil fuels, the U.S. in 2023 produced more oil (13.5 million barrels a day) than at any time in its history, while China’s coal-power capacity grew more rapidly than ever. And that’s just to start down a list of fossil-fuelized bad news. On a planet that itself looks as if it might be going to hell, amid record heat, fires, storms, and the like, the urge to put such effort into organizing alliances of nations in the Pacific (led by Washington, of course) to “contain” China in an ever more warlike fashion represents, it seems to me, folly of the first order.

This presidential campaign could turn out to be about the decline and fall of it all—and, of course, if Donald Trump (“drill, drill, drill”) ends up back in the White House that decline and fall could happen in a fashion almost beyond imagining.

It’s increasingly an illusion (or do I mean delusion?) that this country has any sort of genuine control over the rest of the planet (no less itself). And today—with those two old men, one of whom is also bizarre beyond compare, wrestling each other for the presidency—this country is threatening in its own odd fashion, like the USSR in 1991, to come apart at the seams.

It’s strange to think about just how distant the America I grew up in—the one that emerged from World War II as the global powerhouse—now seems. If you had told anyone then that more than three-quarters of a century later, there would be well-armed private militias forming in a country armed to the teeth with military-style weaponry or that one presidential candidate would already be hinting at calling out the military to subdue his opponents if he ends up back in the White House, who would have believed you? It wouldn’t have even seemed like convincing science fiction.

And yet today, the greatest country on Earth (or so its leaders still like to believe), the one that continues to pour taxpayer dollars into a military funded like no other, or even combination of others, the one that has been unable to win any war of significance since 1945, seems to be threatening to come apart at the seams. Yes, this presidential campaign could turn out to be about the decline and fall of it all—and, of course, if Donald Trump (“drill, drill, drill”) ends up back in the White House that decline and fall could happen in a fashion almost beyond imagining.

The once-lone superpower, and now perhaps the loneliest power of all, could even be heading for previously unimaginable autocratic waters or who knows what else? If only it were otherwise, but unfortunately, in the months to come, we’ll be watching as an all-American world possibly spins slowly out of control, while the leftovers of the American Century fight it out in a country where all too many of us seem focused on anything but what matters.

As one old man to two others, if only you could stand down, we could face the world we’re actually in before it becomes too late.

The non-violence training to join the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s ships to Gaza has been intense. As hundreds of us from 32 countries gathered in Istanbul, we were briefed about what we might encounter on this voyage. “We have to be ready for every possibility,” our trainers insisted.

The best scenario, they said, is that our three ships—one carrying 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid and two carrying the passengers—will reach Gaza and accomplish our mission. Another scenario would be that the Turkish government might cave to pressure from Israel, the United States, and Germany, and prevent the boats from even leaving Istanbul. This happened in 2011, when the Greek government buckled under pressure and 10 boats were stalled in Greece. With our boats docked in Istanbul today, we fear that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who recently suffered a crushing blow in local elections, is vulnerable to any economic blackmail the Western powers might be threatening.

Another possibility is that the ships take off, but the Israelis illegally hijack us in international waters, confiscate our boats and supplies, arrest and imprison us, and eventually deport us.

What brings us together is our outrage that the world community is allowing this genocide in Gaza to happen, and a burning desire to do more than we have been doing to stop people from being murdered, maimed, and starved.

This happened on several other voyages to Gaza, one of them with deadly consequences. In 2010, a flotilla of six boats was stopped by the Israeli military in international waters. They boarded the biggest boat, the Mavi Marmara. According to a United Nations report, the Israelis opened fire with live rounds from a helicopter hovering above the ship and from commando boats along the side of the ship. In a horrific display of force, nine passengers were killed, and one more later succumbed to his wounds.

To try to prevent another nightmare like that, potential passengers on this flotilla have to undergo rigorous training. We watched a video of what we might face—from extremely potent tear gas to ear-splitting concussion grenades—and we were told that the Israeli commandos will be armed with weapons with live rounds. Then we divided up into small groups to discuss how best to react, non-violently, to such an attack. Do we sit, stand, or lie down? Do we link arms? Do we put our hands up in the air to show we are unarmed?

The most frightening part of the training was a simulation replete with deafening booms of gunfire and exploding percussion grenades and masked soldiers screaming at us, hitting us with simulated rifles, dragging us across the floor, and arresting us. It was indeed sobering to get a glimpse of what might await us. Equally sobering are Israeli media reports indicating that the Israeli military has begun “security preparations,” including preparations for taking over the flotilla.

That’s why everyone who has signed up for this mission deserves tremendous credit. The largest group of passengers are from Turkey, and many are affiliated with the humanitarian group, IHH, an enormous Turkish NGO with 82 offices throughout the country. It has consultative status at the U.N. and does charity work in 115 countries. Through IHH, millions of supporters donated money to buy and stock the ships. Israel, however, has designated this very respected charity as a terrorist group.

The next largest group comes from Malaysia, some of them affiliated with another very large humanitarian group called MyCARE. MyCARE, known for helping out in emergency situations such as floods and other natural disasters, has contributed millions of dollars in emergency aid to Gaza over the years.

From the U.S., there are about 35 participants. Leading the group, and key to the international coalition, is 77-year-old retired U.S. Army colonel and State Department diplomat Ann Wright. After quitting the State Department in protest over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wright has put her diplomatic skills to good use in helping to pull together a motley group of internationals. Her co-organizer from the U.S. is Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American attorney who is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and who ran for congress in 2022. Arraf was key to organizing the very first flotillas that started in 2008. So far, there have been about 15 attempts to get to Gaza by boat, only five of them successful.

The incredible breadth of participants is evident in our nightly meetings, where you can hear clusters of groups chatting away in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, French, Italian, and English in diverse accents from Australian to Welsh. The ages range from students in their 20s to an 86-year-old Argentine medical doctor.

What brings us together is our outrage that the world community is allowing this genocide in Gaza to happen, and a burning desire to do more than we have been doing to stop people from being murdered, maimed, and starved. The aid we are bringing is enormous—it is the equivalent of over 100 trucks—but that is not the only purpose of this trip. “This is an aid mission to bring food to hungry people,” said Huwaida Arraf, “but Palestinians do not want to live on charity. So we are also challenging Israeli policies that make them dependent on aid. We are trying to break the siege.”

Israel’s vicious attacks on the people of Gaza, its blocking of aid deliveries and its targeting of relief organizations, have fueled a massive humanitarian crisis. The killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers by Israeli forces on April 1 highlighted the dangerous environment in which relief agencies operate, which has forced many of them to shut down their operations.

The U.S. government is building a temporary port for aid that is supposed to be finished in early May, but this is the same government that provides weapons and diplomatic cover for the Israelis. And while President Joe Biden expresses concern for the suffering Palestinians, he has suspended aid to UNRWA, the main U.N, agency responsible for helping them, after Israel made unsubstantiated claims that 12 of its 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 attacks.

Given the urgency and danger this moment presents, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition is entering rough and uncharted waters. We are calling on countries around the world to pressure Israel to allow us “free and safe passage” to Gaza. In the U.S., we are asking for help from our Congress, but as they have just approved another $26 billion to Israel, it is doubtful that we can count on their support.

And even if our governments did pressure Israel, would Israel pay attention? Their defiance of international law and world opinion during the past seven months indicates otherwise. But still, we will push forward. The people of Gaza are the wind in our sails. Freedom for Palestine is our North Star. We are determined to reach Gaza with food, medicines, and, most of all, our solidarity and love.

In 2019, we traveled with our colleagues to Michoacán, Mexico, to witness the great monarch butterfly migration. Scientists predicted that it may have been one of the last massive flourishes of this fast-dwindling phenomenon.

It can only be described as otherworldly to experience the great Eastern Monarch migration, where each winter millions of monarchs fly more than 2,500 miles south from Canada through the United States to Mexico.

At the end of their arduous journey, the butterflies’ fluttering tapestry of orange and black enveloped the clear blue Michoacán skies. Thick clusters of monarchs clothed oyamel trees to roost. The flapping of millions of pairs of wings bathed us in a sound dome like the pitter-patter of a summer rain.

Earth Week serves as a reality check that we have the tools to rapidly phase out the burning of fossil fuels driving our climate and extinction emergencies.

But the iconic monarch migration is at risk of being lost forever. And scientists say climate change is now the driving factor.

Though pesticides drove their initial decline in the early 2000s, the climate emergency has since taken the driver’s seat. Their migration is threatened year-round by severe and abnormal weather—winter storms, summer droughts, year-round forest fires.

Just this past winter, one of their overwintering forests in Mexico caught fire before all the monarchs took flight back north for spring. On the other end, warm temperatures are keeping them too long in the north and putting them at risk of fall freezes before they reach their overwintering grounds in Mexico.

The climate crisis—largely fueled by burning coal, oil and gas—is driving higher temperatures and severe storm events that threaten the butterflies’ ability to survive, as well as the growth of milkweed they feed on. Meanwhile, destruction of Mexican forests and the widespread use of toxic pesticides on grasslands and milkweed endanger the butterflies’ critical habitats, flyways, and sustenance.

This year, monarch numbers dropped by 59% in Mexico, to the second-lowest level in recorded history. The current population is only a sixth of the size scientists say is needed to avoid migratory collapse.

The migratory monarch is but one of the over 44,000 species around the globe that are known to be threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN.

And that’s just the species we have data for. IUCN found that 28% of assessed species are at risk of extinction. The United Nations multiplied that proportion of species at risk by the number of species on Earth and estimated that 1 million species could be gone in the coming decades, especially as profound climate threats are expected to grow.

Climate change, along with habitat loss and exploitation, are accelerating extinction at a terrifying rate. Humankind has never witnessed so many species being annihilated so quickly and in so many places. This is an existential threat to continued human life, and all life on Earth.

Consider the coral reefs now facing an ocean heat-induced mass bleaching event on track to be the most extensive on record. Coral reefs are the rainforests of the ocean that support a quarter of marine life and the livelihoods of half a billion people.

Meanwhile communities across the United States—disproportionately low-income neighborhoods, communities of color, and vulnerable workers—are suffering the intensifying consequences of climate chaos: fatal heatwaves and destructive wildfires, cycles of drought and catastrophic flooding.

2023 destroyed global heat records, and March temperatures marked the 10th record-breaking month in a row.

Last year saw a record 130 million Americans under heat alerts. Heat caused record-high rates of health emergencies. Arizona’s Maricopa County alone recorded a record 645 heat deaths.

Climate change combined with the hangover effect of the El Niño cycle may make this year even worse.

But Earth Week serves as a reality check that we have the tools to rapidly phase out the burning of fossil fuels driving our climate and extinction emergencies.

As the world’s top producer of the oil and gas driving the climate crisis, the United States has more power than any country on Earth to confront it. A suite of key actions across all agencies can launch us on the path forward:

1. Declare a climate emergency to pause all new crude oil exports and curb the hundreds of billions of dollars that fund coal, oil, and gas projects abroad. Simultaneously declare an extinction emergency and unlock $1 billion for saving the diversity of life on Earth.
2. Vigorously defend and make permanent the Department of Energy’s landmark pause on liquefied natural gas exports. This is the first step in what must be a systematic phasedown plan for the country’s fossil fuel production.
3. Massively deploy community-based solar and storage in climate-vulnerable communities. That makes power bills affordable, keeps the lights on in our increasing climate disasters, and protects our ecosystems. Building off the Solar for All program for low-income families, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies can simply redirect their current investments in fossil fuels toward the distributed clean energy future.

We have no more time to waste. The nation’s Fifth National Climate Assessment found that every region of the country is suffering increasingly harmful effects from climate change.

And Americans understand it: 75,000 people hit the streets of New York City last year for the March to End Fossil Fuels, a movement the Center for Biological Diversity co-led with environmental justice and youth partners across the country.

Unfortunately, the politicians and fossil fuel corporations treating our planet as simply a source for profit and greed view our wildlife in much the same way. But everything in the world is connected, including the air we breathe, the water we drink, the lands and the climate that sustain us. When we destroy nature and what’s wild, we are writing humanity’s own death sentence. It may come later than other species, but it’s only a matter of time.

We can choose a different future for ourselves and the species around us, and this Earth Week is a great time to start.

We can commit to ending fossil fuels, locking in plans that are just and match the magnitude of the crisis that confronts us. And we can move with speed and urgency, as if all life on Earth depends on it. Because it does.

When my first wife passed away more than a decade ago, it was one of the hardest times in my life. I became a single father, and while it’s been my life’s joy to raise my kids, it has been lonely. That changed when Deborah came into my life.

We met on a Christian website and immediately fell in love. Despite me living in Missouri and Deborah in Kenya, we had an instant connection. She is beautiful, caring, and smart as a whip. We started talking every day and quickly realized we wanted to spend our lives together.

We are both preachers, and our faith has given us strength as we navigate life’s challenges. In 2018, I flew to Kenya and we got married at a big church wedding in her parent’s village. I adopted Deborah’s daughter from a previous marriage, and in 2020, we had our own beautiful baby girl.

As an American citizen, I never thought I would be forced to choose between love and country. I am an Army and Navy veteran, and it feels like a betrayal of my service that I can’t live with my family in my own country.

Our family has a near-perfect life except for one thing: A consular officer in the U.S. Embassy in Kenya will not grant Deborah’s visa to live in the United States. To complicate things further, my stepdaughter’s visa was approved. She now lives with me and my eldest daughter outside Kansas City while our toddler lives in Kenya with her mother.

My desires are simple: I want to live with my wife and our children. I trust God has a plan, but that doesn’t make living apart less difficult. We spend hours on the phone every day, and I go to Kenya twice a year, but it’s not the same as living together. I have a good union job on a Ford assembly line in a community I love, and if I moved to Kenya I wouldn’t be able to provide for my family the way they deserve.

As an American citizen, I never thought I would be forced to choose between love and country. I am an Army and Navy veteran, and it feels like a betrayal of my service that I can’t live with my family in my own country.

Never once have Deborah and I doubted our commitment to each other, but it isn’t easy to function as a family spread across two continents. Thankfully, my wife and I are both stubborn as an ox. It’s part of what makes us a good match, and it means we’re never going to stop fighting for our family. We know we’re meant to be together; it’s just a matter of when and how.

That’s why I am helping challenge these unjust family separations. With the support of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) and American Families United, I contributed my story to a friend of the court brief in the Supreme Court case Department of State v. Muñoz. Like my family, the husband and wife at the center of this case have been separated for years because of a decision of a single consular officer. The Supreme Court is considering whether U.S. citizens have a constitutionally protected interest in a visa for their spouse.

For families in our situation, the decision in this case could be life-changing. The Court will hear the case April 23, with a decision expected in the summer. As they consider the case, I hope the Supreme Court justices listen to our stories and ensure that U.S. citizens will have access to a fairer process when seeking to live with their non-citizen spouses in the United States.

For now, my family and I continue to pray every day that we’ll be able to live together soon. We hope you’ll join us.

Back in 1967, a friend of mine and I hitchhiked from East Lansing, Michigan to San Francisco to spend the summer in Haight-Ashbury. One ride dropped us off in Sparks, Nevada, and within minutes of putting our thumbs out a city police car stopped and arrested us for vagrancy.

The cop, a young guy with an oversized mustache who was apologetic for the city’s policy, drove us to the desert a mile or so beyond the edge of town, where we hitchhiked standing by a distressing light-post covered with graffiti reading “39 hours without a ride,” “going on our third day,” and “anybody got any water?”

Vagrancy laws were so 20th century.

Today, the US Supreme Court heard a case involving efforts by the City of Grants Pass, Oregon to keep homeless people off its streets and out of its parks and other public property. The city had tried a number of things when the problem began to explode in the last year of the Trump administration, as The Oregonian newspaper notes:

“They discussed putting them in their old jail, creating an unwanted list, posting signs at the city border or driving people out of town... Currently, officers patrol the city nearly every day, Johnson said, handing out [$295] citations to people who are camping or sleeping on public property or for having too many belongings with them.”

The explosion in housing costs has triggered two crises: homelessness and inflation. The former is harming the livability of our cities and towns, and the Fed’s reaction to the latter threatens an incumbency-destroying recession just as we head into what will almost certainly be the most important election in American history.

The problem with housing inflation is so severe today that without it the nation’s overall core CPI inflation rate would be in the neighborhood of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s 2 percent goal.

Graphic based on BLM data and interpretation by The Financial Times

Both homelessness and today’s inflation are the result of America — unlike many other countries — allowing housing to become a commodity that can be traded and speculated in by financial markets and overseas investors.

Forty-three years into America’s Reaganomics experiment, homelessness has gone from a problem to a crisis. Rarely, though, do you hear that Wall Street — a prime beneficiary of Reagan’s deregulation campaign — is helping cause it.

Thirty-two percent seems to be the magic threshold, according to research funded by the real estate listing company Zillow. When neighborhoods hit rent rates in excess of 32 percent of neighborhood income, homelessness explodes.

And we’re seeing it play out right in front of us in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires want to make a killing.

It wasn’t always this way in America.

Housing prices have spun out of control since my dad bought his house in 1957 when I was six years old. He got a Veteran’s Administration-subsidized loan and picked up the brand-new 3-bedroom-1-bath ranch house my 3 brothers and I grew up in, in suburban south Lansing, Michigan. It cost him $13,000, which was about twice what he made every year working a good union job in a tool-and-die shop.

When my dad bought his home in the 1950s the median price of a single-family house was 2.2 times the median American family income. Today, the Fed says, the median house sells for $479,500 while the median American personal income is $41,000 — a ratio of more than ten-to-one between housing costs and annual income.

As the Zillow study notes:

“Across the country, the rent burden already exceeds the 32 percent [of median income] threshold in 100 of the 386 markets included in this analysis….”

And wherever housing prices become more than three times annual income, homelessness stalks like the grim reaper.

We’re told that America’s cities have seen this increase in housing costs since the 1950s in some part because of the growing wealth and population of this country. There were, after all, 168 million people in the US the year my dad bought his house; today there are 330 million.

And it’s true that we haven’t been building enough new housing, particularly low-income housing, as 43 years of neoliberal Reaganomics have driven down wages and income for working-class people relative to all of their expenses while stopping the construction of virtually any new subsidized low-income housing.

But that’s not the only, or even the main dynamic, driving housing prices into the stratosphere — and, as a consequence, the crisis in homelessness — over the past decade. You can thank speculation for much of that.

As the Zillow-funded study noted:

“This research demonstrates that the homeless population climbs faster when rent affordability — the share of income people spend on rent — crosses certain thresholds. In many areas beyond those thresholds, even modest rent increases can push thousands more Americans into homelessness.”

So how did we get here?

It started with a wave of foreign buyers over the past 30 years (particularly from China, Canada, Mexico, India and Colombia) who, in just the one single year of 2020, picked up over 154,000 homes as their way of parking money in America. Which is part of why there are over 20 times more empty houses in America than there are homeless people.

As Marketwatch noted in a 2015 article titled “The Danger of Foreign Buyers Gobbling Up American Homes”:

“Unusual high appreciation of the aforementioned urban centers is due to the ever growing influx of foreign buyers — mostly wealthy Chinese — who view American residential real estate as the safest investment commodity. … According to a National Realtors Association survey, the Chinese spent $22 billion on U.S. housing in 12 months through March 2014…. [Other foreign buyers primarily include] Canadians, British, Indians and Mexicans.”

But foreign investment has been down for the past few years; what’s taken over and is really driving home prices today are massive, multi-billion-dollar US-based funds that sweep into neighborhoods and buy everything available, bidding against families and driving up housing prices.

As noted in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street,” in just one suburb (Spring Hill) of Nashville, “In all of Spring Hill, four firms … own nearly 700 houses … [which] amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town.”

This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

“On the first Tuesday of each month,” notes the Journal article about a similar phenomenon in Atlanta, investors “toted duffels stuffed with millions of dollars in cashier’s checks made out in various denominations so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their buying spree with trips to the bank…”

The same thing is happening in cities and suburbs all across America; the investment goliaths use finely-tuned computer algorithms to sniff out houses they can turn into rental properties, making over-market and unbeatable cash bids often within minutes of a house hitting the market.

After stripping neighborhoods of homes families can buy, they then begin raising rents as high as the market will bear.

In the Nashville suburb of Spring Hill, for example, the vice-mayor, Bruce Hull, told the Journal you used to be able to rent “a three bedroom, two bath house for $1,000 a month.” Today, the Journal notes:

“The average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned by the big four [Wall Street investor] landlords was about $1,773 a month…”

Ryan Dezember, in his book Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare, describes the story of a family trying to buy a home in Phoenix. Every time they entered a bid, they were outbid instantly, the price rising over and over, until finally the family’s father threw in the towel.

“Jacobs was bewildered,” writes Dezember. “Who was this aggressive bidder?”

Turns out it was Blackstone Group, now the world’s largest real estate investor. At the time they were buying $150 million worth of American houses every week, trying to spend over $10 billion. And that’s just a drop in the overall bucket.

In 2018, corporations bought 1 out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember, noting that, “Between 2006 and 2016, when the homeownership rate fell to its lowest level in fifty years, the number of renters grew by about a quarter.”

This all really took off around a decade ago, when Morgan Stanley published a 2011 report titled “The Rentership Society,” arguing that — in the wake of the 2008 Bush Housing Crash — snapping up houses and renting them back to people who otherwise would have wanted to buy them could be the newest and hottest investment opportunity for Wall Street’s billionaires and their funds.

Turns out, Morgan Stanley was right. Warren Buffett, KKR, and The Carlyle Group have all jumped into residential real estate, along with hundreds of smaller investment groups, and the National Home Rental Council has emerged as the industry’s premier lobbying group, working to block rent control legislation and other efforts to regulate the industry.

As John Husing, the owner of Economics and Politics Inc., told The Tennessean newspaper:

“What you have are neighborhoods that are essentially unregulated apartment houses. It could be disastrous for the city.”

Meanwhile, as unionization levels here remain among the lowest in the developed world, Reagan’s ongoing war on working people continues to wipe out America’s families.

At the same time that housing prices, both to purchase and to rent, are being driven through the roof by foreign and Wall Street investors, a survey published by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health found that American families are in crisis.

Their study found:

— “Thirty-eight percent (38%) of [all] households across the nation report facing serious financial problems in the previous few months.
— “There is a sharp income divide in serious financial problems, as 59% of those with annual incomes below $50,000 report facing serious financial problems in the past few months, compared with 18% of households with annual incomes of $50,000 or more.
— “These serious financial problems are cited despite 67% of households reporting that in the past few months, they have received financial assistance from the government.
— “Another significant problem for many U.S. households is losing their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak. Nineteen percent (19%) of U.S. households report losing all of their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak and not currently having any savings to fall back on.
— “At the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction ban expired, 27% of renters nationally reported serious problems paying their rent in the past few months.”

These are not separate issues, and they are driving an explosion in homelessness.

The Zillow study found similarly damning data:

— “Communities where people spend more than 32 percent of their income on rent can expect a more rapid increase in homelessness.
— “Income growth has not kept pace with rents, leading to an affordability crunch with cascading effects that, for people on the bottom economic rung, increases the risk of homelessness.
— “The areas that are most vulnerable to rising rents, unaffordability, and poverty hold 15 percent of the U.S. population — and 47 percent of people experiencing homelessness.”

The Zillow study makes grim reading and is worth checking out. In community after community, when rent prices exceeded 32 percent of median household income, homelessness exploded. It’s measurable, predictable, and is destroying what’s left of the American working class, particularly minorities.

The loss of affordable homes also locks otherwise middle-class families out of the traditional way wealth is accumulated — through homeownership: Over 61% of all American middle-income family wealth is their home’s equity. And as families are priced out of ownership and forced to rent, they become more vulnerable to long-term economic struggles and homelessness.

Housing is one of the primary essentials of life. Nobody in America should be without it, and for society to work, housing costs must track incomes in a way that makes housing both available and affordable. This requires government intervention in the so-called “free market.”

— Last year, Canada banned most foreign buyers from buying residential property as a way of controlling their housing inflation.
— New Zealand similarly passed its no-foreigners law (except for Singaporeans and Australians) in 2018.
— Thailand requires a minimum investment of $1.2 million and the equivalent of a green card.
— Greece bans most non-EU citizens from buying real estate in most of the country.
— To buy residential housing in Denmark, it must be your primary residence and you must have lived in the country for at least 5 years.
— Vietnam, Austria, Hungary, and Cyprus also heavily restrict who can buy residential property, where, and under what terms.

This isn’t rocket science; the problem could be easily fixed by Congress if there was a genuine willingness to protect our real estate market from the vultures who’ve been circling it for years.

Unfortunately, when Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote to allow billionaires and hedge funds to legally bribe members of Congress in Citizens United, he and his four fellow Republicans opened the floodgates to “contributions” and “gifts” from foreign and Wall Street interests to pay off legislators to ignore the problem.

Because there’s no lobbying group for the interests of average homeowners or the homeless, it’s up to us to raise hell with our elected officials. The number for the Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121.

If ever there was a time to solve this problem — and regulate corporate and foreign investment in American single-family housing — it’s now.

Later this week, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to reverse a Trump-era decision that stripped away essential open-internet protections. In a Thursday vote, a majority of commissioners will return to the agency the authority it needs to act as a strong advocate for a user-powered internet.

They will do this by reclassifying broadband-access services as telecom services subject to Title II of the Communications Act. Title II authority allows the FCC to safeguard Net Neutrality and hold companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon accountable to internet users across the United States.

Title II authority gives the FCC the tools to make the internet work better for everyone, ensuring that internet service providers can’t block, throttle, or otherwise discriminate against the content everyone accesses online. But it also gives the FCC the regulatory means to ensure that broadband prices and practices are “just and reasonable.” The agency will be able to step in to stop price gouging, safeguard user privacy, protect public safety, eliminate junk fees, and stop other abusive behavior from providers.

During a Capitol Hill press conference last week, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, “There are a lot of things in this country that divide us, but Net Neutrality is not one of them.” Rosenworcel cited poll after poll that show that people across the political spectrum overwhelmingly support the 2015 Title II Net Neutrality safeguards that the Obama FCC put in place. The same polls show majorities opposed the Trump FCC’s 2017 repeal of these protections.

“Bringing back the FCC’s authority over broadband and putting back net neutrality rules is popular, and it has been court-tested and court-approved,” she added. “[W]e have an opportunity to get this right. Because in a modern digital economy, it is time to have broadband oversight, national Net Neutrality rules, and policies that ensure the internet is fast, open, and fair.”

Back to the future

The rules up for a vote on April 25 are identical to the 2015 rules. The FCC will enforce them in the same way. And the draft order text that the agency will finalize and adopt already makes this clear — in some cases, going further than the 2015 order did — with a chance before the vote occurs for the FCC to make this language even stronger.

Losing Title II hurt people, which is why millions protested the Trump FCC’s action. Not only did its 2017 repeal gut the Net Neutrality rules, it also surrendered the agency’s power to protect communities from unjust or unreasonable practices by these internet-access goliaths.

This had troubling consequences during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai asked broadband providers to sign a voluntary pledge to preserve people’s vital internet access (he couldn’t force providers to do this since he’d abdicated the agency’s authority to compel these companies to keep users connected). Despite Pai’s claim that the pledge was a success, reporting by Daily Dot found that many of these same companies still cut users’ connections during a national emergency, when everything from work to health care had shifted online.

A 2019 study by Northeastern University and UMass Amherst found that ISP throttling of network services happens “all the time.” Researchers analyzed data from hundreds of thousands of smartphones to determine whether wireless providers were slowing, or throttling, data speeds for specific mobile services. They found that “just about every wireless carrier is guilty of throttling video platforms and streaming services unevenly.”

In everyday terms, this means that companies like AT&T are picking winners and losers online. Allowing such throttling to continue opens the door to more content-based discrimination. This isn’t just about economic favoritism — for example, an ISP slowing down a competitor’s online app so people would use their product instead — but, potentially, the blocking of political messages that gigantic communications companies don’t like.

This isn’t a hypothetical. In 2005, the internet service provider Telus blocked access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. And in 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that several ISPs were intercepting user search queries on Bing and Yahoo and directing them to “results” pages that they or their partners controlled.

The say-anything lobbyists

Lobbyists working for these large internet-access companies like to say that Title II authority offers “a solution in search of a problem” that doesn’t exist. And you can bet they’ll repeat a lot of these lies in the aftermath of this week’s vote.

Throughout the 20 years of debate around Title II and Net Neutrality, the powerful phone and cable lobby has demonstrated a willingness to say anything and everything to avoid being held accountable. They’ll say that Title II’s open-internet standard is a heavy-handed regulation that will undermine investment in new broadband deployment; in reality, executives from these companies have said publicly that their capital expenditures aren’t impacted in any way by Title II rules. The lobbyists will say that Net Neutrality is a hyper-partisan, politicized issue — ignoring public polling (see above) that shows internet users on the political left, right, and center overwhelmingly support the sorts of baseline protections offered under Title II.

The fight for this week’s victory predates the Trump FCC repeal of strong Title II rules in 2017. By restoring safeguards that millions fought so hard to make a reality, the FCC is recognizing the broad-based grassroots movement that coalesced in 2005 around the then-obscure principle of Net Neutrality and built a movement focused on retaining the people-powered, democratic spirit that was baked into the internet at its inception.

Without baseline open-internet protections, internet users are subject to privacy invasions, hidden junk fees, data caps, and billing rip-offs from their ISPs. In addition, without Title II oversight the FCC is severely limited in its ability to promote broadband competition and deployment, bringing this essential infrastructure within reach of people in the United States who lack access.

The FCC will change all of that later this week. It will respond to overwhelming public opinion and stand up for internet users against a handful of monopoly-minded companies that for too long have dictated media policy in Washington.

Come Thursday, I and many of the amazing advocates who’ve been fighting this fight for the past 20 years will be on hand at the FCC to witness the final vote. It will be a moment to appreciate our hard work and thank the agency for restoring to Americans their all-important online rights. Join us in celebrating!

This Earth Day is like no other—our planet reached its highest recorded temperature in 2023, and the climate crisis is rapidly reaching the point of no return. A growing number of climate-related disasters, including floods, wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and the like, will continue to wreak havoc and devastate communities across the globe. Climate preparedness and resiliency programs, such as early warning systems, community-based disaster risk reduction, and climate-smart agriculture, are increasingly necessary to prevent damage and keep humanity safe.

Emergency response organizations like CORE (Community Organized Relief Effort) are at the forefront of addressing climate catastrophes, providing immediate relief to help rebuild communities, and implementing long-term solutions to mitigate future risks. The devastating impact of these disasters, exacerbated by the climate crisis, is felt most deeply in developing and low-income countries like Haiti and Pakistan.

Exacerbated by the increasingly volatile security situation facing the country where CORE (formerly J/P HRO) began, Haiti is currently ranked in the top 10 of the Climate Risk Index, which combines exposure to extreme weather events and societal vulnerabilities. This ranking indicates its significant susceptibility to the escalating impacts of climate change, affecting the well-being and livelihoods of over 11 million people. Additionally, recent storms have led to an estimated $61 million loss in agricultural production. With the looming threat of intensified environmental disasters like hurricanes and floods, Haiti faces deepening economic repercussions unless proactive measures are implemented.

With climate change intensifying these challenges, the need for urgent actions is clear.

As temperatures rise across South Asia, the volume of meltwater from the Himalayas has notably surged. Scientists further observe that climate change has led to a heightened unpredictability in monsoon rains. Pakistan experienced unprecedented devastation from monsoon rains that began in 2022.

Approximately one-third of the country was submerged, affecting around 33 million people, equivalent to roughly 14% of Pakistan's population. According to Pakistan's Natural Disaster Management Authority, the floods claimed the lives of over 1,700 individuals, with countless others forced to flee their homes. Flooding remains a significant issue for communities to this day. Beyond the extensive property damage, Pakistan's crucial agriculture sector, which serves as a cornerstone of its economy, bore severe repercussions, with many fields left underwater. Authorities in Pakistan estimate that the floods caused approximately $30 billion in combined damages and economic losses.

European Union data show that Pakistan contributes less than 1% to global planet-warming emissions. Despite this relatively low number, Pakistan is ranked as the eighth most vulnerable nation to the effects of climate change, as per the Global Climate Risk Index.

CORE has been at the forefront of the climate crisis in these two countries. After the devastating Pakistan floods in 2022, CORE responded to the initial disaster, ensuring the pressing needs of 80,000 villagers in the south were met through the distribution of food, hygiene, and medical support and the provision of temporary shelter solutions. In the years after that initial response, CORE collaborated with local leaders to help safeguard communities from similar destruction in the future through innovative mitigation works. CORE raised plots of land in entire villages, built sustainable flood walls, and installed water pumps to keep community members safe and give them peace of mind.

In Haiti, where we have deep community roots tracing back to the 2010 earthquake, we've worked with local fishers and farmers in the south to assist them as they face this "new normal." CORE's goal is to help promote sustainable, nature-based solutions to the impact of climate change that will increase the health and longevity of local ecosystems. Through a ridge-to-reef approach, CORE is assisting farmers in planting sustainable crops that will reduce erosion, which will help strengthen the health of nearby reefs that are the cornerstone of the local fish population and a critical source of income and food for these communities. As part of coastal preservation under the ongoing program with the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund, CORE is working with local enterprises to plant new mangroves to restore areas damaged by human activity and improve sanitation as current practices pollute sensitive estuaries.

Domestically, places like California and New Orleans have seen an influx of extreme weather, including wildfires, excessive rainfall, and severe flooding. With climate change intensifying these challenges, the need for urgent actions is clear. The importance of proactive measures such as preparedness initiatives and other adaptation strategies cannot be overstated. These measures are crucial to bolster community resilience and mitigate the potentially catastrophic consequences for at-risk populations.

Over the last decade, CORE, alongside local partners and committed staff, has witnessed the remarkable resilience of vulnerable communities despite facing the worst climate-related disasters. Take our partners, Riverside Development Organisation in Pakistan and Haitian-led Acceso, for instance, who have shown incredible strength and adaptability in meeting immediate and long-term needs. CORE's environmental resilience initiatives have been crucial in equipping local partners and staff with resources and knowledge to confront and mitigate climate challenges, focusing on the hardest-hit populations in affected areas.

The urgency to protect our planet has never been more evident. With climate change exacerbating the destructive impacts of extreme weather, it's marginalized and low-income communities that bear the brunt of the consequences. This underscores the critical need for collective action to support these communities with dedicated action to tackle environmental and social issues head-on. We must all play a part in forging a pathway of climate resiliency and sustainability to ensure the planet and those of us who inhabit it thrive.

On this 54th Anniversary of America's first Earth Day celebration, it is a time to reflect on how we moved from a consensus on the urgent need for environmental protection across the country to woefully underestimating the need for action about climate change.

A recent study shows that most Europeans and Americans acknowledge that the climate is warming and that a warming planet will likely hurt humankind. At the same time, there is a distortion of the scientific consensus about the data, which leads to a tendency among the public to underestimate the urgency of the situation. This misunderstanding comes from an inaccurate belief that scientists do not agree about the human-caused nature of the crisis. Fossil fuel industry advocates and media outlets often characterize the scientific debate as mixed when the consensus among scientists is well above 97%.

Let's face it. There is overwhelming scientific agreement, and many members of the public agree.

We do this by moving away from arguments about the scientific consensus and focusing on local problems and solutions.

Humans also tend to have "Earth blindness," that is, we do not appreciate the life support systems that the natural environment provides us with daily. This explains, in part, why people in democratic societies with the freedom to demonstrate are not engaging in large-scale protests. It also seems that more visible and immediate events, such as Covid-19 and conflicts and war, push the long-range danger aside. What a difference from the 1970s—when the environmental movement was on par with student protests in many countries, the anti-war protests, and fighting for women's rights in the United States and other countries!

We can take comfort in the fact that most people across many countries think that a warming climate is not good for humanity. Since most people are aware of the climate situation, the time is now to transform the conversation.

We do this by moving away from arguments about the scientific consensus and focusing on local problems and solutions. Some of the best climate mitigation in this country is happening in communities and municipalities. These efforts include building resilient infrastructure—such as designing energy-efficient buildings—and investing in renewable energy, converting public vehicle fleets to electric, and investing in water conservation and reuse, recycling, and plastic waste reduction, and much, much more. These investments and designs may not be perfect, but they are an important start in creating more climate-friendly spaces for people to live in.

We must also focus efforts throughout higher education and other sectors. My institution, Fielding Graduate University, continues its ecological justice work throughout the world. During 2023's Ecological and Social Justice Service Year, our community members participated in a beach cleanup in Santa Barbara, volunteered at their local nonprofit organizations, and advocated for sustainable solutions in their communities.

Current students and alums continue to study ecological worldviews, conservation, sustainability, and more through their theses and dissertations. Many who wish to advocate for the environment think that only substantial action will achieve anything. While substantial change is certainly necessary, consistent small actions can lead to meaningful, lasting change. We can join in-person or virtual global witnessing groups to share our environmental crisis reflections and action plans. We can tweak our business practices, improve production processes to decrease emissions, decrease our footprint, and advocate at governmental and other levels.

On this Earth Day, I encourage you to reflect upon how your actions can take root in the interests of our environment. It is our responsibility to leave the Earth better than we found it. We must find a middle ground between the temptation to deny there is a problem and despair that there are no solutions. From an acknowledgment of the reality of the climate crisis, we can continue our transformative path to positively affect the Earth for the benefit of generations to come.

I was born in a small village in the heart of Afghanistan, but most of my childhood was spent as a refugee in Quetta, Pakistan. My family returned to Afghanistan in the early 2000s after the American invasion. Both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I grew up amid the chaos of conflict, and the sounds of bullets and bomb blasts were a part of my daily life.

However, the conflict that loomed the largest for my family was between people and nature. Like many from our village, leaving became inevitable for my family as our homeland was transformed by drought into a barren wasteland again and again. As resources dwindled, we were forced to chase water, which became increasingly scarce and expensive. Like so many others, my family became nomadic, changing homes, cities, provinces, and countries in search of water to survive. Afghanistan is one of the world’s most vulnerable places to climate change, and as I write this, the country is undergoing the worst drought in decades.

A decade later, in 2017, I applied for asylum in the United States. When I attempted to include this narrative of my community’s plight from drought and natural disasters in my application, my lawyer strongly advised against it. Instead, I was encouraged to focus solely on the impacts of war and my triple minority identity as a Hazara-Shia-Afghan woman. It didn’t make sense to try to separate the religious and political persecution I faced from the reality that my ancestral village, once verdant and flourishing, had been reduced to dust by decades of unyielding drought. My attorney seemed fixated on presenting me as a “Western-educated Hazara-Shia-Afghan woman” fleeing persecution and ignoring any mention of the environmental devastation that compelled my family to flee our homeland numerous times.

Amid these struggles with armed conflict, corruption, and dictatorship, there lurks another adversary: global warming, the silent killer.

Unfortunately, my attorney’s stance proved valid. There are currently no systems or protections in place for individuals displaced by climate impacts under U.S. or international law. My asylum application was approved with a selective narrative devoid of the true underlying causes of my displacement.

As I became an immigrant rights advocate, first at the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition and now as the director of We Are All America, I connected with fellow asylum seekers with the same thread of environmental injustice woven throughout their stories. I met people who, like me, saw their vulnerabilities multiplied by the climate crisis and faced much more intricate, intersectional challenges than our current asylum pathways recognize.

Paul, an asylum seeker from Congo, is one such example. He and his family of farmers initially fled due to war, but when floods and heavy rain destroyed their new home in Kenya, they were forced to seek refuge elsewhere. After experiencing this double displacement, Paul sought resettlement in Canada because he knew the U.S. didn’t have a protected asylum pathway that aligned with his experience.

Amid these struggles with armed conflict, corruption, and dictatorship, there lurks another adversary: global warming, the silent killer. Despite its profound impact, our stories about it are often left untold, overshadowed by tales of violence and persecution. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, climate is now the leading cause of global displacement, surpassing conflict. Our limited asylum policies shape the very stories of our displacement, masking the extent to which climate change is interwoven with other root causes and warping climate-displaced people’s perceptions of what makes a valid reason to move to safety

However, there is a growing movement of displaced people, like Paul and myself, who are sharing our stories of climate and displacement and calling for recognition of climate change in asylum and refugee policies. Some asylum seekers and their lawyers are beginning to include climate impacts as a central part of their cases, and attempting to set precedents that would require immigration judges to consider them. In the past few years, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies started tracking asylum cases with prominent climate impacts and already has an extensive number in their database, including some promising successes.

There’s a lot the Biden administration could do to support these efforts. In one of his first executive orders, President Joe Biden created an inter-agency task force on climate and migration. However, three years on, the task force has produced little tangible action. Meanwhile, advocates have offered a number of immediate actions for the administration to take, from prioritizing the resettlement of climate-impacted refugees to training USCIS officials to consider climate impacts as a supporting factor in asylum claims.

Of course, the need to update the United States’ outdated refugee and asylum policies is at the heart of this issue. Last year We Are All America’s sister project, the Climate Justice Collaborative, led a broad coalition of immigrant, refugee, and climate justice organizations that supported the reintroduction of Sen. Edward Markey’s (D-Mass.) Climate Displaced Persons Act (CDPA). The CDPA would create a new visa program parallel to refugee resettlement, specifically for people facing forced displacement due to climate impacts. It would also create a global climate resilience strategy to help vulnerable countries, like mine, adapt to climate change. This is the kind of bold policy change we need to bring our country into the modern age and build a life-sustaining future in the face of the climate crisis and its intersectional impacts on our society.

Climate displacement is not a far-off problem for future generations. It is happening now and has been happening for decades. Our voices have just been silenced, and our experiences have been buried by those deemed valid by our antiquated asylum policies. We deserve the same empathy and support as those fleeing bullets. It’s time for policy to reflect that.

As we celebrate Earth Day, there are unrelenting warning signs the climate crisis could have reached a catastrophic tipping point. To bring us back from the edge, we must ignore the siren calls from the fossil fuel industry that they have the solutions to the crisis they created.

After decades of obfuscation, denial, and delay, time is not on our side. We have just experienced the warmest March on record. The 10 previous months also set a new temperature record and were ranked as the hottest on record. Scientists from the European Union climate change monitoring service are “very concerned.”

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Other leading climate scientists, such as Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, believe that if temperatures do not fall by the end of this year, we could be moving into “unchartered territory.”

If the snowballing effects of our climate crisis seem overwhelming, the solutions have always been straightforward. “The main driver of the warming is fossil fuel emissions,” says Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute.

The solutions to our climate crisis have been evident for decades: As our window for action decreases as our collective carbon budgets get smaller, we need a fast, fair, full, and funded fossil fuel phaseout. We need to stop fossil fuel subsidies and without dangerous distractions such as gas certification, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), and carbon offsetting. We need a just transition to clean, renewable energy as soon as possible.

The industry’s Plan A for survival is to convince you that they are integral to the climate fight, and Plan B is to push plastics. Both of these are flawed.

To speed up the transition, we need to stop the market-manipulating incentives to use more fossil fuels, and one of those is subsidies. According to the International Monetary Fund, global fossil fuel subsidies were worth a staggering $7 trillion, or 7.1% of GDP, in 2022, reflecting a $2 trillion increase since 2020 due to government support from surging energy prices caused by the Ukraine war.

Subsidies for false solutions also create a double roadblock preventing the transition to clean energy. One of the key technologies being pushed by the oil industry and its allies is CCS, which, despite the hype, has a 50-year history of false hope and failure. In September 2023, the International Energy Agency (IEA) noted that “the history of CCUS has largely been one of ‘underperformance’ and ‘unmet expectations.’”

Despite this, governments are determined to hand more public money to an industry that rakes in record profits. They have spent over $20 billion and legislated or announced policies that could spend up to $200 billion more of public money on CCS. This is providing a lifeline for the fossil fuel industry.

Many countries want you to see them as climate leaders, but are actually climate villains. In December last year, Oil Change International (OCI) revealed that Norway spent $1 out of every $5 spent on CCS. Only the United States spent more public money on CCS subsidies: $8.08 billion.

Similarly, companies that want you to believe they are integral to the climate solution remain central to the problem. None of the Big Oil companies’ plans are remotely aligned with the 1.5°C warming Paris goals. Back in 2022, OCI and dozens of other civil society groups revealed that the eight largest oil and gas companies alone are involved in over 200 expansion projects on track for approval from 2022 through 2025—equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 77 new coal power plants.

More recently, the CarbonTracker think tank examined the 25 largest listed oil and gas companies and evaluated the extent to which they are aligned with the Paris climate goals. They concluded that none were aligned at all. Maeve O’Connor, the report author, said that although the world’s largest oil companies claimed to “be part of the solution in accelerating the energy transition… we see that none are currently aligned with the goals of the Paris agreement.”

Just as the companies are not aligned with Paris’ goals, neither are leading oil- and gas-producing countries. A recent OCI analysis found that none of the oil- and gas-producing countries in the North Sea are on track to stop drilling in time to reach the 1.5°C warming limit.

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Although companies and countries are way off the pace to secure a liveable future, they are also trying to spin that they are an integral part of the climate solution and pushing back against a transition to renewable energy.

The fossil fuel hawks, like the boss of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, even told a recent influential oil and gas event that the world should give up on the “fantasy” idea of phasing out oil and gas altogether.

Others say gas could be integral to our future because it can be made “carbon neutral” by cleaning up leaking methane emissions through certification and carbon offsetting. Both of these strategies are flawed. Last year, OCI and Earthworks revealed that the growing gas certification industry, where third parties use monitors to identify leaks along the U.S. gas network, from drilling to distribution, was unreliable and ineffective.

The report quoted Chris Romer, the boss of one of the U.S.’s leading certification companies, Project Canary, stating, “We are going to be able to solve climate change with measurement.” Romer had argued that Project Canary’s “goal” was to allow the oil and gas industry to maintain “a social license to operate” and that “clean” certified carbon would allow the industry to operate “for many decades to come.” He called certified gas a “climate solution.” There are also leading American fracking companies, such as EQT, that are pushing the message that gas is central to the climate fight too.

It is not all doom and gloom. There is good news. According to the IEA, the world added 50% more renewable capacity in 2023 than the year before. And in the next five years, we will see the fastest growth yet. Last year, it also set a new record in renewables deployment in the power sector by reaching a total capacity of 3,870 gigawatts (GW) globally.

Last year at the COP28 climate talks, for the first time in United Nations history, the final agreement text named fossil fuels as the problem and pointed towards a solution, calling for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.”

The agreement is far from perfect, but history was made.

This Earth Day, the theme is “Planet versus Plastics.” According to the IEA plastics are set to drive nearly half of new oil demand growth by mid-century. So, the industry’s Plan A for survival is to convince you that they are integral to the climate fight, and Plan B is to push plastics. Both of these are flawed. “Plastics is the Plan B for the fossil fuel industry,” argues Judith Enck, Founder and President of Beyond Plastics.

Both the industry’s Plan A and B will tip us into climate chaos. If we are going to reduce our use of plastics, we have to reduce our use of oil. To do that, we must see through the spin and continue to push for a fast, fair, full, and funded phaseout of fossil fuels.

Students across the United States are rising up against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, bringing to memory the student movements of the 1960s. From Columbia to Brown, from Yale to Harvard, students are staging sit-ins, hunger strikes, class walkouts, and interfaith prayers, demanding an end to U.S. support for Israel and the complicity of their academic institutions in the ongoing genocide.

While some U.S. institutions are treading a delicate path, the Columbia University administration, led by President Minouche Shafik, has violently cracked down on its own students, summoning the NYPD to mass arrest over 100 students, and suspending others with a 15-minute notice. In an unprecedented brutal crackdown on free speech on campus, the police destroyed solidarity encampments and student belongings, while charging arrested students with “trespassing” on the campus that they are charged a whopping tuition of more than $60,000 a year to attend!

In its attempt to appease far-right extremists in Congress, and to save Columbia from “being cursed by God,” as a Republican Congressman warned Shafik, Columbia has sided with genocide, thus undermining its own legacy of safeguarding free speech and peaceful protest on campus.

Perceptively, Said warned of weaponizing antisemitism and the plight of Jews in Europe as a means to suppress and vilify Palestinians, and to justify Israel’s oppression of its victims.

The violence has backfired, as hundreds of students continue to protest at Columbia, sparking a ripple effect across U.S. campuses, and defying what they see as a growing McCarthyism in U.S. academia. An early target of this academic McCarthyism was the prominent Palestinian-American intellectual and distinguished Columbia Professor Edward Said, whose writings on postcolonialism, humanism, and democratic criticism are required readings at Columbia and across the humanities.

Said was a victim of anti-Palestinian intimidation himself. His office at Columbia was occasionally raided and vandalized. He received several death threats and was smeared with terrorism accusations and spied on by students and AIPAC agents. Shortly before his death, Said became the target of a vicious academic persecution, which he survived only because Columbia still had a shred of academic and moral integrity at the time.

In July 2000, Said went to South Lebanon on a solidarity tour, where he hurled a rock toward an Israeli guardhouse from the Lebanese border, which he described as “a symbolic gesture of joy” to mark the end of Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. A photographer caught the action, featuring Said with his arm reached far behind him, ready to throw. The Israeli lobby, led by Anti-Defamation League, called on Columbia to punish Said. Columbia refused to be intimidated, though it took the administration two months of eerie silence to respond. In its five-page letter response, the university said that Said’s action was protected under the principles of academic freedom. Citing John Stuart Mill as well as from the Columbia Faculty Handbook, the letter asserted:

There is nothing more fundamental to a university than the protection of the free discourse of individuals who should feel free to express their views without fear of the chilling effect of a politically dominant ideology... This matter cuts to the heart of what are fundamental values at a great university.

In defense of Said, the letter added: “If we are to deny Professor Said the protection to write and speak freely, whose speech will next be suppressed and who will be the inquisitor who determines who should have a right to speak his or her mind without fear of retribution?”

The era of moral clarity and intellectual integrity in academia is now unraveling amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The tragic irony is that the current atmosphere of anti-Palestinian McCarthyism on U.S. campuses—led by an unlikely coalition of far-right Republicans, mainstream media, and liberal academic institutions—was foreseen by none other than Said himself. In his seminal essay, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” (1979), Said warned:

The special, one might even call it the privileged, place in this discussion of the United States is impressive, for all sorts of reasons. In no other country, except Israel, is Zionism enshrined as an unquestioned good, and in no other country is there so strong a conjuncture of powerful institutions and interests—the press, the liberal intelligentsia, the military-industrial complex, the academic community, labor unions—for whom […] uncritical support of Israel and Zionism enhances their domestic as well as international standing.”

Presaging the rise of anti-Palestinian McCarthyism in academia, Said detected a state of academic repression and campus policing in which Palestinians “have no permission to narrative” and are increasingly demonized and silenced in the name of fighting antisemitism—a loaded concept that has become a shield for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Perceptively, Said warned of weaponizing antisemitism and the plight of Jews in Europe as a means to suppress and vilify Palestinians, and to justify Israel’s oppression of its victims. He understood that systematically inflating antisemitism with the critique of Zionism was feeding anti-Palestinian sentiments in U.S. academic and media discourse. He further warned:

One must admit, however, that all liberals and even most “radicals” have been unable to overcome the Zionist habit of equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Any wellmeaning person can thus oppose South African or American racism and at the same time tacitly support Zionist racial discrimination against non-Jews in Palestine. The almost total absence of any handily available historical knowledge from non-Zionist sources, the dissemination by the media of malicious simplifications (e.g., Jews vs. Arabs), the cynical opportunism of various Zionist pressure groups, the tendency endemic to university intellectuals uncritically to repeat cant phrases and political clichés (this is the role Gramsci assigned to traditional intellectuals, that of being “experts in legitimation”), the fear of treading upon the highly sensitive terrain of what Jews did to their victims, in an age of genocidal extermination of Jews—all this contributes to the dulling, regulated enforcement of almost unanimous support for Israel.

The assault on Columbia students is an attack on constitutional rights and the basic tenets of democracy. It’s deplorable that the one of the most violent crackdown on student protests in U.S. history is coinciding with one of the worst genocides in recent memory, which has killed over 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them children, and displaced nearly two million others.

One day after the mass arrests at Columbia, Palestinians in Gaza unearthed large mass graves at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, containing hundreds of civilians and patients who were massacred or buried alive by Israel. More deplorable, from the young generation’s standpoint, is that this genocide is being backed and sustained by U.S. weapons and tax money, diplomatic support, and media and academic complicity. (The Biden administration is preparing to send its largest military aid package to Israel in U.S. history, with bipartisan blessing.) Despite massive protests, U.S. colleges have refused to divest from Israel over its genocidal war in Gaza (with few notable exceptions that include Rutgers and UC Davis.) Several universities, including Columbia, have suspended the chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

Edward Said’s legacy reads today as a scathing condemnation of the hypocrisy of U.S. liberal institutions, their moral corruption, and the hollowness of the very values that they profess to teach. This irony is best illustrated by a Columbia student’s protest sign, which read:

“Columbia, why require me to read Prof. Edward Said, if you don’t want me to use it?”

There has been much media hype about manure digesters and how they will “solve” climate change by capturing and burning methane from confined animal feeding operations or CAFOs—aka factory farms. Billions in taxpayer handouts and other incentives through pollution offset trading markets are encouraging factory farms to expand and profit from their waste stream. Some economists now speculate that factory farms are earning more from making methane than milk!

A recent Friends of the Earth and Socially Responsible Agriculture Project report goes even further, suggesting that if the U.S. really wanted to reduce it’s agricultural contribution towards greenhouse gases, it would make more sense for regulators to phase out or split up CAFOs and shift taxpayer support towards smaller grass-based livestock operations instead.

Sadly, the misguided notion of manure digesters as a “solution” to the climate crisis is nothing new. Back in 2009 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, I almost fell off my chair when then-U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that manure digesters on factory farms were going to be a key part of former President Barack Obama’s climate change agenda. He later admitted that less than 10% of dairy farms (ie CAFOs) would be large enough to qualify for these USDA digester grants—another example of how federal policies support industrial agribusiness to the detriment of smaller farmers.

Intentional factory farm production and subsequent “climate smart” combustion of methane is not only oxymoronic, but will undermine the future prospect of life here on Earth.

This manure digester building binge has ramped up even more under President Joe Biden—with Vilsack once again back at the helm of the USDA. The latest Instititue for Agriculture and Trade Policy report critiquing the Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP) reveals just how much of this popular USDA effort has been hijacked by a small elite number of CAFOs, to the detriment of the majority of farmers who have their EQIP applications declined. Encouraging livestock grazing is NOT front and center among “climate smart” practices promoted under EQIP and the Natural Resources Conservation Service—that star role is held by waste lagoons and manure digesters.

A typical CAFO digester for 2000 dairy cows costs over $2 million, with EQIP covering up to $400,000. But there are many other funds available, such as through the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP), which bankrolled $78 million for digesters in the last decade. The recent Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) added another $250 million to EQIP, along with another $2 billion for REAP, including a brand new 30% tax credit for all new digesters built.

The current trough of taxpayer funding for the manure methane industrial complex is long and deep, but there is even more potential revenue to be milked. In Wisconsin alone there are now 15 manure digesters getting money for their methane offsetting of 1.3 million carbon credits available through the California Cap and Trade System. How does this work? Build a methane digester in Wisconsin, claim that by burning off this really bad methane it is equal to reducing the impact of so many tons of carbon dioxide emitted in California, and then get a bonus check for that hard offset work! The value of one carbon credit on the California market as of April 2023 was $28.66.

The problem with this taxpayer mandated and subsidized “cap and trade” system is that it does not necessarily reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions—it just moves pollution around (and the atmosphere doesn’t care about your zipcode). Worse yet, if your offset claims prove to be bogus and corrupt, the climate crisis ends up much worse. This was exactly the case when Midwest activists alerted California officials that some of the Wisconsin CAFOs claiming methane offset credits were really engaged in wire fraud, since their digesters were either broken or not effectively functioning to capture methane as claimed. More details can be found in the SRAP expose of this 21st century Ponzi style scheme. Along with many allies, Family Farm Defenders has been diligently opposing such corporatized pollution trading mechanisms through the Alliance Against Farm Bill Offsets, whether they involve offsets for carbon sequestration pipelines, manure digesters, or “no-till” GMO monocultures.

My gut reaction 15 years ago to Vilsack’s manure digester panacea to global climate change remains true today—why pay to fix a problem that doesn’t even need to exist? Countless studies have shown that the most cost effective, eco-friendly, and often quite profitable form of animal husbandry—including dairying—is managed rotational grazing. If animals are just allowed to enjoy pasture outside (as they prefer and are meant to do by mother nature) and then also allowed to deposit their manure in a healthy perennial ecosystem, one does not end up with a methane crisis. It is only when one decides to confine thousands of animals in a warehouse, offer them nothing but TMR to consume (with dubious components like feather meal and ethanol leftovers), liquefy millions of gallons of their manure, and then store it in massive anaerobic lagoons, that one creates a pollutant 80+ times worse than carbon dioxide.

Sure, one can always capture and burn the methane that doesn’t leak from a CAFO digester to make electricity or run a vehicle (which means more greenhouse gas pollution), but you still have the leftover sludge (aka digestate) to deal with. This is loaded with nitrates, phosphorous, and—depending upon what other waste gets dumped into the digester—PFAS, pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, heavy metals—which will then seep into the ground and became part of runoff, contributing to tainted wells, beach closures, toxic fish, the list goes on and on. Besides methane, there are other toxic CAFO gases—such as hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and nitrous oxide—that cause chronic headaches for neighboring residents and hurt anyone else downwind.

And let’s not forget the ever present danger of methane explosions and lagoon ruptures. When a massive lagoon leaked on a hog factory farm in Wayne County, North Carolina, in May 2022, spilling into the nearby Nahunta Swamp, it was revealed that hundreds of rotting pigs, along with deli meat and discarded hotdogs, were part of the digester feedstock to make the methane being sold to Duke Energy. Closer to home, just ask anyone who lives near Waunakee, Wisconsin, what it was like to have a poorly designed and managed digester both explode and also leak 400,000+ gallons of fresh manure into Lake Mendota about a decade ago. This single disaster set back Yahara Watershed cleanup efforts for years. It would have been so much cheaper, simpler, and less disastrous for Wisconsin state and Dane County taxpayers to have promoted composting instead (which some better CAFOs actually do, without lagoons).

In November 2022 Kari Lydersen wrote a disturbing investigation, chronicling the many risks to farm workers from factory farms and their manure digesters. She tells one story of Bob Baenziger, Jr., retired Army veteran and former offshore oil rig diver, who died in 2021 as a hired contractor trying to fix a broken cable in an Iowa manure digester. Drowning in such a squalid pool is something straight out of Dante’s Inferno. The same year Samuel Antonio Padilla Castro, a Honduran immigrant, was working a 12-hour shift at the Fair Oaks Farm in Indiana when his clothing was caught in manure handling equipment, strangling him to death. His death left behind a widow, three children, and a token $10,500 Occupational Safety and Health Administration fine. Austin Frerick’s profile of the McCloskey family, which owns Fair Oaks Farm, in his new book, Barons, reveals more of the underbelly of this “Dairy Disneyland,” including their role as digester cheerleaders. Another Fair Oaks tourist and digester advocate he mentions is Tom Vilsack.

Our current “get big or get out” farm policy does not have much time or interest in agroecological approaches for healthier food that also ensure food sovereignty. Instead, corporate agribusiness is allowed to manipulate commodity markets—driving out what little competition exists from smaller farmers and local processors. The political allies of the food giants then ensure that taxpayers help underwrite the largest industrialized operations left standing, since they are the easiest to vertically integrate into the dominant oligopoly structure. Is it any surprise to see agribusiness lobbyists and their academic apologists now touting manure digesters as “climate smart” just in time for Earth Day and pushing for pollution trading offset schemes within the 2024 Farm Bill?

Thankfully, there are better responses to the climate crisis that also treat rural people and our land, air, and water with respect. Existing federal initiatives such as the Conservation Reserve Program could be expanded to better direct payments to farmers who are already doing so much responsible land and climate stewardship—without carbon offset peddlers skimming 25% off the top. The EQIP and REAP programs need to be overhauled to severely limit or even eliminate CAFO lagoon and digester grants and earmark more towards smaller grass-based diversified operations instead. This is the gist behind the EQIP Reform Act, introduced by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep. Mike Lee (R-Utah) last year as part of the Farm Bill debate.

More generally, factory farms must be treated as a pollution point source, subject to all the monitoring, regulation, and liability required for any other industrial operation. Why should CAFOs evade the common sense oversight that other businesses respect? Defending local control also remains critical. Last year grassroots activists in St. Croix County were able to push back and shut down a massive digester proposal near New Richmond, Wisconsin, being aggressively promoted by Nature Energy, a Shell Oil subsidiary. Thousands of folks recently responded to a statewide action alert successfully demanding that Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers veto CAFO industry-crafted preemption legislation that would have hamstrung the right to pass ordinances that would restrict their manure digesters and other rural mal-development projects. Democratic direct action can get the goods!

NASA space probes have revealed that there is a massive ocean of liquid methane on Titan, one of the moons circling Saturn. There is also not any life that we know of on Titan… Intentional factory farm production and subsequent “climate smart” combustion of methane is not only oxymoronic, but will undermine the future prospect of life here on Earth. Farmers can feed the world and the cool the planet—without the false promise of manure digesters.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted $26 billion for Israel on Saturday to reward it for its ongoing war crimes against Palestinians. Some 58 members voted against the measure, including 37 Democrats. It was the House of Representatives’ most decisive vote of confidence in genocide since the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

The U.S. national debt is $34.5 trillion, up $2 trillion since last summer, against a gross domestic product of $27 trillion. For the debt to run so far ahead of GDP could cause the U.S. economy to crash. That is, the U.S. Congress does not have $26 billion to give to Israel in the first place.

The enormous windfall will allow the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to kill or wound a Palestinian child in Gaza every 10 minutes.

Israeli rules of engagement, the loosest in the world aside from the gangs of the blood diamond cartels, allow up to 20 civilians to be killed with each strike at a member of the Qassam Brigades paramilitary.

Israel’s bombing raids, including against designated safe areas in Gaza, continued daily this week. On Saturday, the Israeli Air Force bombed a house in the center of Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have been pushed from the north, killing six persons and wounding others. Rafah had been designated a safe zone by the Israelis when they were trying to force people down there.

Emma Graham-Harrison writes at The Guardian:

Ahmed Barhoum lost his wife, Rawan Radwan, and their five-year-old daughter Alaa. “They bombed a house full of displaced people, women and children,” he told The Associated Press on Saturday, crying as he cradled Alaa’s body, wrapped in a white shroud, and gently rocked her. “This is a world devoid of all human values and morals.”

Saturday’s strikes brought the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 8 to over 34,000, Graham-Harrison reports. These numbers exclude more thousands buried under rubble when Israeli fighter-jets destroyed civilian apartment buildings. Some 77,000 Palestinians have been wounded, 12,000 of them children.

On Wednesday through Friday of this week, Israeli bombing raids killed 113 Palestinians and injured 169 Palestinians.

UNICEF said this week that 12,000 children, at the very least, have been wounded by Israeli bombardment or other fire since last October.

That comes to 70 children injured every day, or nearly 3 every hour, one every 20 minutes or so. Since some 13,000 children have been killed, that means that a child has been either killed or wounded every 10 minutes.

Spokesperson Tess Ingram Ingram said:

I left Gaza yesterday after spending two weeks there. It was my second mission into Gaza this year. By far, what struck me most about this mission was the number of wounded children. Not just in the hospitals, but on the streets. In their makeshift shelters... their lives forever changed by the horrors of war.

Half of the inhabitants of Gaza are children.

Most of the hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed by the Israeli military. Of 36, only 11 are still partially functioning, mainly as warehouses for the sick and wounded since they lack “needles, stitches, anaesthetic.” Children lie on mattresses or floors “languishing in pain.”

Despite the desperate need for medavac transportation of these children, many amputees, from Gaza, only 3,500 such requests have been granted in over six months.WHO says that in northern Gaza, between 12% and 16.5% of children (6-59 months) have been stricken with with acute malnutrition, and 3% of children have severe acute malnutrition. In southern Gaza, 2-6% of children have acute malnutrition.

Severe acute malnutrition presents with substantial muscle wasting in the arms, unnatural thinness, and build-up of fluid and swelling in the feet. Acute malnutrition has the same symptoms but they are less exaggerated. Even a short bout of malnutrition leaves children with permanent cognitive deficits and learning disabilities.

In April, 15% of the aid missions to northern Gaza and to parts of southern Gaza that require coordination with Israel have been denied by Israeli authorities, often on arbitrary grounds.

Because Israel cut off potable water or destroyed its delivery systems with bombing, and because 270,000 tons of solid waste has accumulated in the absence of hygiene services, WHO recorded 345,768 cases of diarrhea, with 105,635 cases in children under five. In toddlers and infants such gastrointestinal diseases can easily lead to fatal dehydration. Without an immediate cease-fire, a team at Johns Hopkins has predicted that 11% of the deaths in Gaza over the next four months will be from epidemic diseases.

Israel is using facial recognition programs and drones to locate and kill the 37,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, but at least 10% of their identifications are wrong, and they often strike at these individuals when they are surrounded by their wives, children, other relatives, and neighbors. Israeli rules of engagement, the loosest in the world aside from the gangs of the blood diamond cartels, allow up to 20 civilians to be killed with each strike at a member of the Qassam Brigades paramilitary. Most of these members had no knowledge of the October 7 attack, which was planned and carried out by a small clique. The Israeli destruction of civilian infrastructure and the imposition of starvation on the population are forms of illegal collective punishment.

This year Earth Day, April 22, marks the start of the fourth round of negotiations for a Global Plastics Treaty. Without much public fanfare, delegates from 175 countries—together with hundreds of observers representing industry, academia, health organizations, and environmental groups—will gather in Ottawa to chart the course for the future of plastics and plastic pollution.

The stakes could not be higher.

Plastics have been linked to serious health problems, including cancer, lung disease, and birth defects. Recently researchers found that individuals with heart disease that had microplastics—those tiny particles that pervade our environment—in their tissue had twice the risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke or death within three years. Babies, because of their increased exposure to plastics and vulnerability, are especially at risk.

The details of the potentially influential U.S. position remain undeclared—ironically when the administration is touting its leadership in addressing climate change and promoting environmental justice.

Humans are not the only ones in danger—more than 1 million marine creatures are estimated to be killed by plastics in garbage each year. Eleven million metric tons of plastic waste are flowing into the ocean each year. The World Health Organization report, Tobacco: Poisoning Our Planet, describes the significant risks presented from the 4.5 trillion discarded cigarette butts. Cigarette filters based on cellulose-acetate don’t degrade and continue harming the environment as microplastics that circulate in our marine and freshwater systems. They also release nicotine, heavy metals, and other chemicals which threaten not only coastal fishing communities but also those who consume seafood products.

Moreover, plastics are irrefutably fueling the climate change crisis.

Over 90% of plastics are produced from fossil fuels, and 4% of total greenhouse gas emissions are generated in connection with the production, conversion, and waste management of plastics. And plastics-related emissions are projected to more than double by 2060. With low income and communities of color disproportionately located near petrochemical plants, as well plastic production and waste incineration facilities, they are especially at risk for the harmful environmental and health impacts.

The scale of the problem is only expected to grow. Experts predict that global production of thermoplastics will increase to 445.25 million metric tons in 2025 and continue to increase by more than 30% by 2050.

And notwithstanding increasing government bans and regulation of single-use plastic, between 2019 and 2021 there was an increase annually of 6 million tonnes (6.6 million U.S. tons) per year in single-use plastic production.

Contrary to decades of industry promotion, recycling is not the answer to the plastics challenge. According to a comprehensive analysis and report by Greenpeace, even though the industry has been pushing recycling since the 1990’s, “the vast majority of U.S. plastic waste is still not recyclable.” The report further observed a decline in the rate of recycling in the U.S. from a high of 9.5% in 2014 to 5-6% in 2021. Even new recycling technologies, such as chemical recycling, can produce toxic emissions and hazardous waste.

The Global Plastics Treaty negotiations offer a chance to chart a sustainable course for our planet. We are at the crossroads of moving forward with a treaty that will call for significant reductions not only in single-use plastics but also reduce the overall amount of plastics produced and demand full transparency in the industry.

So far, the prospects for a strong treaty are uncertain at best. While the member countries of the High Ambition Coalition are pushing for the restriction and elimination of problematic plastics as well as reporting and transparency provisions to ensure accountability through the value chain, the so-called “Like Minded Group” representing many fossil fuel countries are advocating for a focus on waste management rather than production limits. And despite a letter from six U.S. senators and more than a dozen U.S. House members calling on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to negotiate “the strongest agreement possible” including binding plastic production limits, the details of the potentially influential U.S. position remain undeclared—ironically when the administration is touting its leadership in addressing climate change and promoting environmental justice.

To turn the political tide in Ottawa, we need to take a lesson from the first Earth Day when grassroots activism in the form of 20 million people from all walks of life taking to the streets sparked the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the first generation of environmental laws. With a myriad of media and communication technologies and platforms available today to share your voice (#PlanetvsPlastics, #EndPlastics, #EarthDay, #GlobalPlasticsTreaty), it’s time to demand that our elected leaders forge a treaty that will free us and our planet from the scourge of plastic and plastic pollution.

The distance between Gaza and Namibia is measured in the thousands of kilometers. But the historical distance is much closer. This is precisely why Namibia was one of the first countries to take a strong stance against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Namibia was colonized by the Germans in 1884, while the British colonized Palestine in the 1920s, handing the territory to the Zionist colonizers in 1948.

Though the ethnic and religious fabric of both Palestine and Namibia are different, the historical experiences are similar.

Though intersectionality is a much-celebrated notion in Western academia, no academic theory is needed for oppressed, colonized nations in the Global South to exhibit solidarity with one another.

It is easy, however, to assume that the history which unifies many countries in the Global South is only that of Western exploitation and victimization. It is also a history of collective struggle and resistance.

Namibia has been inhabited since prehistoric times. This long-rooted history has allowed Namibians, over the course of thousands of years, to establish a sense of belonging to the land and to one another, something that the Germans did not understand or appreciate.

When the Germans colonized Namibia, giving it the name of “German Southwest Africa,” they did what all other Western colonialists have done, from Palestine to South Africa to Algeria, to virtually all Global South countries. They attempted to divide the people, exploited their resources, and butchered those who resisted.

Although a country with a small population, Namibians resisted their colonizers, resulting in the German decision to simply exterminate the natives, literally killing the majority of the population.

Since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Namibia answered the call of solidarity with the Palestinians, along with many African and South American countries, including Colombia, Nicaragua, Cuba, South Africa, Brazil, China, and many others.

Though intersectionality is a much-celebrated notion in Western academia, no academic theory is needed for oppressed, colonized nations in the Global South to exhibit solidarity with one another.

So when Namibia took a strong stance against Israel’s largest military supporter in Europe—Germany—it did so based on Namibia’s total awareness of its history.

The German genocide of the Nama and Herero people (1904-1907), is known as the “first genocide of the 20th century.” The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza is the first genocide of the 21st century. The unity between Palestine and Namibia is now cemented through mutual suffering.

But it is not Namibia that has launched the legal case against Germany at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) but, rather, Nicaragua, a Central American country that is also thousands of miles away from both Palestine and Namibia.

The Nicaraguan case accuses Germany of violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It rightly sees Germany as a partner in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians.

This accusation alone should terrify the German people, in fact the whole world, as Germany is affiliated with genocides from its early days as a colonial power. The horrific crime of the Holocaust, and other mass killings carried out by the German government against Jews and other minority groups in Europe during WWII, is a continuation of other German crimes committed against Africans, decades earlier.

The typical analysis of why Germany continues to support Israel is explained on the basis of German guilt over the Holocaust. This explanation, however, is partly illogical and partly erroneous.

Illogical, because, if Germany has, indeed, internalized any guilt from its previous mass killings, it would make no sense for Berlin to add yet more guilt by allowing Palestinians to be butchered, en masse. If guilt indeed exists, it is not genuine.

And erroneous, because it completely overlooks the German genocide in Namibia. In fact, it took the German government until 2021 to acknowledge the horrific butchery in that poor African country, ultimately agreeing to pay merely 1 billion euros in “community aid,” which will be allocated over the course of three decades.

The German government’s support of the Israeli war on Gaza is not motivated by guilt, but by a power paradigm that governs the relations among colonial countries. Many countries in the Global South understand this logic very well, thus the growing solidarity with Palestine.

The Israeli brutality in Gaza, but also the Palestinian sumud, resilience and resistance, are inspiring the Global South to reclaim its centrality in anti-colonial liberation struggles.

The revolution in the Global South outlook—culminating in South Africa’s case at the ICJ, and also the Nicaraguan lawsuit against Germany—indicates that the change is not the outcome of a collective emotional reaction. Instead, it is part and parcel of the shifting relationship between the Global South and the Global North.

Africa has been undergoing a process of geopolitical restructuring for years. The anti-French rebellions in West Africa, demanding true independence from the continent’s former colonial masters, in addition to the intense geopolitical competition—involving Russia, China and others—are all signs of changing times.

And, with this rapid rearrangement, a new political discourse and popular rhetoric are emerging, often expressed in the revolutionary language emanating from Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, and others.

But the shift is not happening on the rhetorical front only. The rise of BRICS as a powerful new platform for economic integration between Asia and the rest of the Global South has opened up the possibility that alternatives to Western financial and political institutions are very much possible.

In 2023, it was revealed that BRICS countries are now holding 32% of the world’s total GDP, compared to 30% held by the G7 countries. There is much political value to this as four of the five original founders of BRICS are strong and unapologetic supporters of the Palestinians.

While South Africa has been championing the legal front against Israel, Russia and China are battling the U.S. at the United Nations Security Council to institute a cease-fire. Beijing’s ambassador to The Hague went as far as defending the Palestinian armed struggle as legitimate under international law.

Now that global dynamics are working in favor of Palestinians, it is time for the Palestinian struggle to return to the embrace of the Global South, where common histories will always serve as a foundation for a meaningful solidarity.

From the distant shores of Guantánamo Bay to the heart of the European Parliament in Brussels, a powerful exhibition titled "Guantánamo: Art in Captivity" emerges, shattering the silence that has long shrouded the infamous U.S. military prison. The exhibit, which relayed poignant stories from the men detained, demonstrated the power of art to bring to life the haunting images of the pain and suffering they endured.

Attending and presenting at the exhibit, I embraced my identity as detainee 441—a prisoner classified as the worst of the worst, but who, nevertheless and against all odds, was welcomed in the European Union parliament for the second time to tell a different story of Guantánamo—the men's stories. Our story.

Guantánamo is present for the second time at the E.U. parliament; the first time was last year where two Irish Members of European Parliament (MEPs) Clare Daly and Mick Wallace hosted a special conference about Guantánamo. The gathering's importance cannot be overstated, and it was described as the "most significant gathering on Guantánamo," it underscored the gravity of the ongoing human rights struggle. It provided a platform for former prisoners, 9/11 family victims, former camp staff, the former United Nations special rapporteur to Guantánamo, lawyers, activists, and advocates to raise their voices against atrocities committed in the name of justice.

Even when we were isolated from the rest of the world and had nothing in our cages, using apple stems as pencils and Styrofoam cups and clamshells as our paper, we drew flowers.

At its core were firsthand accounts of Guantánamo's horrors. Former prisoners and military personnel, including ex-Army captain and Muslim chaplain James Yee, shared tales of detention, torture, and resilience. Their stories reminded us of the human toll of indefinite detention and the urgent need for justice and accountability.

In the European Parliament, a resounding message echoed: We won't rest until Guantánamo is closed and every individual's rights are honored. This wasn't just a gathering; it symbolized the enduring human spirit's commitment to justice. May its impact inspire future generations to fight for what's right and just.

As voices filled the chamber, a collective call to action emerged. Attendees were urged to confront Guantánamo's reality and demand accountability for its crimes. Through powerful testimonies, they highlighted the plight of detainees and the need to hold perpetrators accountable.

The "Close Guantánamo!" event was a rallying cry for those who believe in every human being's dignity and worth. It reminded us that silence equals complicity and urged us to continue demanding justice until Guantánamo is closed and justice prevails for all.

Art was always present at Guantánamo, even in the opening days of 2002 when the U.S. government sent its first prisoners to Camp X-Ray. Even when we were isolated from the rest of the world and had nothing in our cages, using apple stems as pencils and Styrofoam cups and clamshells as our paper, we drew flowers. Later, we used toilet paper, powdered tea, and soap to draw and write poetry.

Of course, any form of artistic expression, particularly when we organically found ways to create beauty out of the ugliness of the prison, was always against the camp rules. Camp administrators, guards, and interrogators routinely confiscated our work and punished us. They punished us for singing and dancing, too. They feared that the we, the monsters they constructed us to be, were sending each other secret messages, instead of finding ways to cope with the brutality of detention and torture. Artistic expression made us feel human in a place that was designed to strip us of our dignity.

Before 2010, it was customary for art to be integrated into interrogation sessions within the chambers. Artwork produced during these sessions was routinely confiscated, repurposed as evidence, and classified accordingly. An illustrative example is a painting by Suliman, created during an interrogation session in 2007, serving as proof to interrogators of his artistic abilities. The painting bore multiple red stamps denoting its classification as "SECRET." Suliman inscribed his full name, the date, and signed it in Arabic.

In 2010, after former U.S. President Barack Obama ordered a complete review of Guantánamo, living conditions improved. For the first time since opening, we were allowed to attend art classes. Of course, we weren't free by any means and in order for us to attend these classes, we had to endure humiliating searches, and thereafter we were shackled and chained to desks and chairs while in the classroom. Even though we only had a few minutes in class and the supplies were limited, these classes provided us with a place where we could express ourselves outside the confines of a system that criminalized us and treated us as irredeemable.

We could draw and paint the world outside we missed most—the beautiful blue sky, the sea, flowers, and nature. We painted our pain, our fear, our hope, our dreams. After eight years of indefinite and arbitrary detention, we felt connected again to our lost humanity. Each brushstroke colored in a piece of who we once were.

During the Obama administration, we were allowed to send our artwork to our lawyers and families. The journey of artwork out of Guantánamo was similar to ours, and it was not spared from the violence that is Guantánamo.

Each painting we created had to go through a rigorous process of review and censorship by multiple agencies and departments in order to leave the prison. Some of our artwork disappeared, some was redacted and silenced, and some made it out of the military prison. Was that ship a message? Was the art communicating an imminent threat? Anything suspicious lead to immediate disappearance (a death sentence). If artworks survived the scrutiny of the censors, they were registered, numbered, and stamped. But that didn't mean the artwork wouldn't be confiscated or taken later. Suffice it to say that the stamp on the back of the art continues to be reminder of the violence we endured, and which many still endure, at Guantánamo .

Moreover, like Guantánamo prisoners, some art died at Guantánamo. Some art is still held there waiting to be released.

At one point, even the U.S. government created an art gallery at the camp to exhibit our artwork for visitors and the media. While art helped to make us human again, the camp administration used what we created to construct the illusion that we were treated humanely.

I was one of the prisoners who made it out of Guantánamo—more fortunate than many who continue to languish behind bars. My journey to this point—standing in front of the E.U. parliament as a free man without shackles, chains, and no guards dragging me around for sport—was long and arduous. While I stood in my orange shirt looking at each painting for the first time after I was released in 2016, the memories of the place that tortured and detained me flashed through my mind, tears blurring my vision as I reconnected with my paintings. It was not just feelings of anguish however that filled my memories, but resilience as well—the resilience that I knew then would get me here now.

"It's nice to see you again my sweethearts. I'm glad we made it in one piece. I've missed you."

These are all things I said to my paintings, which could never be reduced to a piece of paper, but are testaments to our struggle for survival amid unimaginable cruelty.

This evocative exhibition, which ran from April 2 to 5, transcended the physical confines of the military prison, offering a poignant glimpse into the lives of those ensnared within its walls. Each stroke of the brush is a testament to the artists' resilience, a silent plea for justice. Each painting is proof of survival, while also being an act of resistance. We entrusted our secrets, tears, and hope to art from Guantánamo.

While the U.S. government suppressed our voices by banning and threatening to burn our artwork in 2017, courageous MEPs like Stelios Kouloglou, Daly, Wallace have breathed life into our creations, challenging these oppressive measures and amplifying our cries for justice. It's my honor to curate this exhibition. "Art from Guantánamo" marks a historic moment—a beacon of hope illuminating the darkness of secrecy and isolation.

The artwork on display varies from poignant portraits that capture the depth of human experience to haunting landscapes that echo the desolation of confinement. Each piece narrates a story of shattered dreams, stifled aspirations, and voices yearning to be heard.

These creations narrate stories of dreams that were imprisoned and aspirations stifled. They serve as a stark reminder of the human cost of policies shrouded in secrecy, urging us to confront uncomfortable truths and demand accountability.

As visitors navigated the exhibition, they were confronted with uncomfortable truths—the human consequences of policies enacted in the name of national security. The art became a call to action, urging a demand for accountability and the upholding of fundamental principles of human rights.

Among the collective voices, four names resonate with enduring resilience—Khalid Qassim, Moath Al-Alwi ,Tawfiq Al-Bihani, and Ammar al-Baluchi. These artists, imprisoned in Guantánamo for over two decades despite three of them have been cleared for release, continue to defy injustice through their art, their spirits unbroken by the passage of time. Their art, bleeding from behind bars, epitomizes the unwavering spirit of resilience in the face of injustice.

Among the attendees of the exhibition were Guantánamo lawyers Alka Pradhan and Navy Lieutenant Jennifer Joseph, who represent several of the prisoners. During a panel discussion, Pradhan shed light on the legal complexities surrounding Guantánamo, remarking, "It is deeply moving to witness the resilience and humanity of men who have endured unimaginable suffering. This exhibition serves as a poignant reminder of the ongoing crisis at Guantánamo and underscores the urgent need for global unity to put an end to this atrocity."

The impact of "Art from Guantánamo" transcended the walls of the exhibition space. It served as a call to carry these stories forward, to advocate for justice and freedom beyond. Let us amplify the voices of those who seek justice and speak of resilience despite their confinement. May this exhibition ignite conversations that spark action—a collective demand for the closure of Guantánamo and a renewed commitment to accountability.

This is a unique opportunity to witness firsthand the enduring human spirit in the face of unimaginable hardship. Together, let us ensure that these stories are heard and that the fight for justice continues.

Today, 30 individuals remain imprisoned in Guantánamo, 16 of whom have been cleared for release. However, despite efforts to address the situation, reports of abuse in the prison persist. Last month, detainees in Guantánamo went on a hunger strike to protest the mistreatment and abuse they endure, yet the U.S. government continues to suppress such reports, denying journalists access to the prison for accurate reporting.

During her visit to Guantánamo last year, the former U.N. Special Rapporteur Fionnuala Ní Aoláin expressed significant concerns regarding the treatment of prisoners. Her report highlights alarming issues such as the ongoing detention of individuals without trial, limited access to healthcare, and the potential use of torture methods, including prolonged periods of solitary confinement. Additionally, she emphasized the absence of proper legal procedures, drawing attention to the prolonged imprisonment of individuals without formal trials.

Guantánamo symbolizes injustice, torture, and abuse of power. It is where humanity and beauty are sentenced to death. However, the “Art from Guantánamo" exhibit in the European Parliament conveys a different message—one of survival. This is why we must heed the call to action for justice and accountability that is deeply embedded in each of the paintings. Now that many of us have borne witness to the men's powerful stories, we must ensure that they are never again silenced and in doing so, commit ourselves to the pursuit of justice, dignity, and freedom for all.

Throughout history, military empires have reduced their victims, their subjugated, and their abducted to a state of “The Others.” The political and mass media institutions usually follow suit by supporting their empire’s predatory policies with slanted coverage.

Such is the case with the U.S. global and the Israeli regional empires. The U.S. federal government and the mainstream media often move in lockstep.

For example, take the word “terrorism.” The New York Times regularly refers to the Hamas regime as “terrorists,” while describing the far more extensive Israeli acts of state terrorism as “military operations.” Since October 7, the Israeli military superpower has killed over 500 times more children than Hamas killed in their raid through a still uninvestigated collapse of Israel’s vaunted multi-tiered border security.

The Intercept reported that the three newspapers mentioned antisemitism against Jews in the U.S. 549 times compared to 79 mentions of Islamophobia, notwithstanding, far more frequent, and violent, assaults on Muslims and Arabs.

Apart from a massively greater overall civilian toll inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza—the vast undercount stands at 34,000 Palestinian deaths compared to the deaths of 1,139 Israeli civilians, soldiers, and foreign workers. This staggering ratio—over 14,000 Palestinian children (with many thousands under the rubble) compared to 30 Israeli children—escapes proper reporting. “The Others” don’t get accurate coverage as was also the case with huge Iraqi losses during the Bush/Cheney criminal war. (See, the March 5, 2024, column: Stop the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza).

Take the use of the term “hostage.” Hamas seized over 240 Israelis hostages on October 7. Since then, the Israeli army has seized about 9,000 Palestinians, including women and children, and taken them without charges, along with many more thousands languishing in these prison camps also without charges for years (it’s called Israel’s “administrative detention”). Many of the imprisoned Palestinians are being tortured. Who has gotten the far greater attention? Aren’t these Palestinian hostages also? Again “The Others.”

How about the application of the right to self-defense? Every state has the right to self-defense. Count the many times you have heard, “Israel has a right to defend itself” compared to “Palestine has a right to defend itself.” Members of Congress who bellow the former declaration daily can not get themselves to say the latter. It is a forbidden phrase. Yet, who is the violently occupying, colonizing, land- and water-stealing party? Israel. For over 50 years, more than 400 times more innocent Palestinians have been killed and injured compared to innocent Israeli civilians. Where is the detailed coverage of the loss of life from enforced destitution and denial of life-saving medicines, equipment, and emergency transport to health facilities? Again, it is “The Others.”

“The Others” are always described with less charitable words. In a meticulous content analysis by The Intercept of the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post between October 7 and November 24, the use of the words “slaughtered,” “horrific,” and “massacre” in relation to Israeli and Palestinians killed was 218 to 9!

The Intercept said Israel’s war on Gaza is “perhaps the deadliest war for children—almost entirely Palestinian—in modern history.” There is scant mention of the word “children” and related terms in the headlines of articles in that span of time.

(Note, reporters from these papers are like the rest of the mainstream Western media reports, including Israeli journalists, who have been long banned by the Israeli government from freely reporting from inside Gaza, but have managed to write some exceptionally graphic stories from a distance.)

Palestinian Arabs are denied the description of armed-force antisemitism by the Israeli war machine. Arabs are Semites and have long been the victims of violent, racist, hate-filled antisemitism by brutal Israeli leaders. (See the “ Antisemitism Against Arab and Jewish Americans” speech by Jim Zogby and DebatingTaboos.org).

The Intercept reported that the three newspapers mentioned antisemitism against Jews in the U.S. 549 times compared to 79 mentions of Islamophobia, notwithstanding, far more frequent, and violent, assaults on Muslims and Arabs.

Western medical doctors spending a few weeks in bombed Gaza hospitals are personal witnesses of scenes beyond any level of deliberate slaughter they have ever experienced in their courageous service in troubled areas around the world. Ambulances, hospitals, and thousands of families—adults, children, women, and babies alike—huddling in areas outside these facilities are routinely bombed, and shelled by Israeli planes and tanks, and targeted by Israeli snipers. Courageous Israeli human rights groups and refuseniks will detail more of the mayhem over time.

Biden’s chosen humanitarian aid emissary David Satterfield did not mince words in his remarks during a virtual event hosted by the American Jewish Committee, “There is an imminent risk of famine for the majority, if not all, the 2.2. million population of Gaza.”

According to Satterfield, “This is not a point in debate. It is an established fact, which the United States, its experts, the international community, its experts assess and believe is real…”

Still, the duplicitous Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu twirling the hapless U.S. President Joe Biden around his bloody fingers continues to obstruct the entry of hundreds of trucks with critical food, water, and medicine, sometimes paid for by U.S. taxpayers, that are lined up daily at the borders of Gaza. Netanyahu continues to enforce, whenever he can, the genocidal orders by his barbaric ministers on October 8—“No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water… We are fighting animals and will act accordingly.”

To the White House and the Netanyahu-dominated U.S. Congress, violating numerous federal laws, (See the April 19, 2024, Letter to President Joe Biden), the response is to make the American taxpayers continue to pay billions of dollars to unconditionally weaponize further the Israeli death machine in Gaza, right down to 2,000-pound bombs that destroy entire civilian neighborhoods. After all, Gazans are “The Others.”

The streets of America have come alive with valiant Jewish, Muslim, and Christian protestors joining together and showing up wherever Biden and other callous politicians speak such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) who said, “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza.”

After 76 years of Congress blocking testimony by leading Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates, more lawmakers are starting to listen. But many more in Congress are still mired in their clenched-jaw obeisance to the AIPAC lobby. It is time to stop the rubble “bouncing” over decomposing bodies in the besieged tiny Gaza Strip.

The national organization Veterans For Peace is demanding that the Biden administration abide by U.S. law regarding the illegal possession of unregulated nuclear weapons and halt all military aid to Israel.

In a letter to President Joe Biden and top members of his administration, Veterans For Peace asserts that U.S. law requires the cutoff of all military aid to Israel because it possesses nuclear weapons in noncompliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel does not admit it possesses nuclear weapons, has not signed the NPT, and does not allow inspections of its nuclear arsenal.

The letter lists multiple credible reports that Israel has possessed nuclear weapons for decades. Because Israel has not signed the NPT, the Symington-Glenn Amendments to the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act of 1976, which allow no presidential discretion, require the suspension of all military aid.

The United States may not be able to directly control Israel’s nuclear weapons program, but it surely can—and must—curb the invasion of the Gaza Strip and Israel’s intensifying conflicts with its neighbors.

The president may not waive the cutoff of the aid and exports under the Glenn Amendment where there has been a nuclear weapons detonation, or the offending state has received a nuclear explosive device. Congress would have to enact new legislation authorizing the president to waive some or all of these sanctions.

“The law is quite simple,” said VFP National Director Mike Ferner. “Does Israel have an unregulated nuclear weapons arsenal? Yes, it does. Is Israel a signatory to the NPT? No, it isn’t. So, the question to Biden is, ‘Will you obey the law or continue to let the Madmen Arsonists run America?’”

The well-referenced 11-page letter was researched and written by VFP member Terry Lodge, an activist lawyer who specializes in nuclear issues. It makes for a fascinating read, detailing Israel’s many illegal actions to acquire nuclear weapons materials, and Henry Kissinger’s approval of Israel’s “strategic ambiguity.” Israel has never officially admitted it possesses nuclear weapons, but “everybody knows.” In November, an Israeli cabinet member actually suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza.

The letter also references former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s hacked email (“The boys in Tehran know Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran, and we have thousands.’’). Colin Powell’s assertion that Iran’s capital Tehran has long been targeted by Israel’s nuclear weapons is especially chilling at this moment, when Israel has provoked an armed conflict with Iran and may be trying to drag the U.S. into a wider war in the Middle East. Would Israel attack Iran with nuclear weapons?

All U.S. Military Aid to Israel Must Be Ended Immediately

Israel’s provocative approach to foreign relations before and since commencing the genocidal invasion of Gaza suggests that nuclear weapons might be used against both real and perceived existential threats to Israel. In May 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assessed that Israel’s security problems come from Iran, and then in September, he insisted at the United Nations that “[A]bove all, Iran must face a credible nuclear threat.”

Presently, Israel has at least 90 warheads, and possibly as many as 200. Israel's bombs are deliverable via aircraft, land-based ballistic missiles, and submarine-based cruise missiles. Israel’s Jericho III intercontinental ballistic missiles are capable of delivering a nuclear warhead from 4,000 miles away, which means that Iran, Pakistan (another NPT scofflaw non-weapons state believed to have nuclear weapons), and all of Russia west of the Urals—including Moscow—are within range of Israeli nuclear targeting, should Israel resort to The Bomb.

Israel is conducting an ongoing genocidal military campaign in the Gaza Strip against Palestinian civilians and the Hamas government, even as it bombs and fires artillery and rockets into Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. The United States may not be able to directly control Israel’s nuclear weapons program, but it surely can—and must—curb the invasion of the Gaza Strip and Israel’s intensifying conflicts with its neighbors. Given the overwhelming evidence that Israel has received many nuclear weapons from its military branch and has maintained that offensive nuclear capability for decades, federal law compels President Biden to immediately terminate all military assistance to Israel.

Veterans For Peace is demanding that the president issue a formal finding that (1) Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968; (2) that Israel is, as a matter of law, a “non-nuclear-weapon state” under the NPT; (3) that Israel has acquired an arsenal of nuclear weapons with the means of using them in war and has experimentally detonated nuclear weapons in the past; and (4) that Israel has violated 22 U.S.C. § 2799aa-1(b)(1)(B). Federal law requires Biden to end all defense sales and licensing of Munitions List exports to Israel, terminate all foreign military financing, cease delivery of any military weapons and munitions, and implement all other aid cutoffs and curtailments required by the Symington and Glenn Amendments.

While awaiting a response from the Biden administration, Veterans For Peace, with over 100 chapters in the U.S., is calling on all its members, friends, and allies to tell their congressional representatives to oppose any further funding or weapons shipments to Israel. The veterans organization recently sent a letter to the State Department detailing multiple U.S. laws that are being broken by sending weapons to Israel while it is blatantly violating the human rights of Palestinian men, women, and children.

As Earth Day approaches, prepare for the annual spectacle of U.S. lawmakers donning their environmentalist hats, waxing poetic about their love for the planet while disregarding the devastation their actions wreak. The harsh reality is that alongside their hollow pledges lies a trail of destruction fueled by military aggression and imperial ambitions, all under the guise of national security.

Take Gaza, for instance. Its once-fertile farmland now lies barren, its water sources poisoned by conflict and neglect. The grim statistics speak volumes: 97% of Gaza's water is unfit for human consumption, leading to a staggering 26% of illnesses, particularly among vulnerable children. Israel's decades-long colonial settler project and ethnic cleansing of Palestine have caused irrefutable damage to the land, air, and water, consequently contributing to the climate crisis. In fact, in the first two months of the current genocide campaign in Gaza, Israel's murderous bombardment, which has killed nearly 35,000 people, also generated more planet-warming emissions than the annual carbon footprint of the world's top 20 climate-vulnerable nations. Yet, despite these dire circumstances, U.S. lawmakers persist in funneling weapons to Israel, perpetuating a cycle of violence and environmental degradation.

The ripple effects of militarism extend far beyond Gaza's borders. In Ukraine, the Russia-Ukraine War has left a staggering $56.4 billion environmental bill, with widespread contamination of air, water, and soil. Landmines and unexploded ordnance litter 30% of the country, posing long-term risks to both the environment and human health. The United States' answer to all this has been to reject diplomacy and fuel a long, protracted war with a seemingly endless supply of weapons and military support—a war that most experts will tell you is not a winnable war. The proxy war the United States is funding not only leaves Ukrainians at risk of never achieving peace but also significantly contributes to the ever-growing climate crisis.

At the heart of this destructive cycle lies a perverse economic incentive, in which war becomes a lucrative business at the expense of both people and the planet.

Then, there is our government's desire to go to war with China. The U.S. military's heavy footprint already looms large in the Pacific, and with the war drums now beating harder for war than ever before, the footprint is growing. With over 200 bases dotting the region, the Pentagon's voracious energy consumption fuels greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation, from polluted drinking water in Okinawa to severe contamination near military installations in Guam. Yet, our government insists that it is China that is our greatest enemy and not the looming threat of climate destruction. The U.S. military's presence in the Pacific is destroying natural, Indigenous ecosystems, favoring the idea of environmental destruction over attempting any form of diplomacy and cooperation with China.

All of this destruction to the environment and acceleration of the climate crisis happen silently under the veil of "national security," while discussions on how the environmental toll of war is the most significant national security threat are absent in D.C. While the threat of nuclear annihilation and civilian casualties rightfully dominate headlines, the ecological fallout remains an underreported tragedy. The Pentagon is the planet's largest institutional emitter of fossil fuels; Its insatiable appetite for conflict exacerbates climate change and threatens ecosystems worldwide. To make matters worse, the U.S. government wants to fund this destruction to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars a year while poor and low-wealth communities worldwide bear the brunt of climate catastrophes with little to no resources to protect themselves.

At the heart of this destructive cycle lies a perverse economic incentive, in which war becomes a lucrative business at the expense of both people and the planet. The narrative of GDP growth masks the actual cost of conflict, prioritizing financial profit over genuine progress in education, healthcare, and biodiversity. However, instead of war-economy metrics such as the GDP, we could embrace alternative metrics such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)that reckon with the actual toll of war on our world. We can shift from endless growth toward genuine well-being by valuing air quality, food security, and environmental sustainability.

This Earth Day, let us reject the empty rhetoric of environmentalism without action. Let us demand accountability from our lawmakers and insist on an end to the cycle of violence and ecological devastation. By prioritizing peace and sustainability, we can protect our planet and safeguard future generations.

As a longtime anti-Zionist and member of Jewish Voice for Peace, it has been a fact of my life that the organized Jewish community has considered me a pariah. When I was president of my Jewish congregation, the executive director of the local Jewish Federation refused to speak with me; when communication was required, he always found a workaround. Even so, he never insulted me, never directly expressed anger, never used profanity. A few years ago, members of the local federation board politely told me I was an antisemite. But, I emphasize, they were polite.

Things have changed. The organized Jewish community has weaponized conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism; colleges and universities are banning chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine from campuses. Congressional demagogues are forcing university presidents to resign. State and local governments, foreign governments, U.S. cabinet departments, and even Congress are adopting a definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionism. We are encountering rabbis who accost us and accuse us of creating division in their congregations. Other rabbis spare us the words and literally flip us off. (Yes. That happened.)

One longtime progressive Jewish activist who until recently had worked primarily on issues other than Israel/Palestine encountered this intensified hostility from segments of the Jewish community. The activist wondered if this were happening because we are threatening some Jews' foundational beliefs about Israel.

Our primary role now is to demonstrate that there are Jewish values and traditions that go back thousands of years and do not depend upon a Eurocentric political ideology born less than 150 years ago.

However, these foundational beliefs are not being threatened by us—the beliefs are being threatened by Israel having stripped itself of the liberal veneer with which it has covered its true nature, forcing those who hold those beliefs dear to face reality for the first time.

There is a name for the situation in which one finds one's internal beliefs clashing with the reality one sees— cognitive dissonance. The more desperately one clings to one's beliefs in the face of a contrary reality, the more fearful and angry one becomes.

This is made even more intense by the fact that the image of a liberal, moral Israel has not been an individual cognition but a communal cognition. Even more powerfully, it has been a group cognition that has played a huge role in holding the community together. Therefore, undermining the cognition not only threatens how individuals perceive themselves, it threatens the cohesiveness of the community and individuals' communal identification.

When a member of a Jewish community group begins to question the core belief in Israel's goodness, it raises two issues: "If this is what Israel is, who am I?" and "If I accept the reality before me, what happens to my place in the group?" (The "group" can be the Jewish world as a whole, the congregation to which one belongs, one's family, one's friends, etc.)

To understand how psychically, emotionally, and even viscerally disruptive it can be for many Jewish community members to face the truth about Israel, one may look to Upton Sinclair's insight, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." In this instance, it is difficult to get a person to understand something when that person's self-identity, familial and friendship relationships, group membership, social structure, and support net all depend upon the person's not understanding it. With so much at stake, people cling to their false and no longer serviceable beliefs.

It is not out of the question that when most or even every member of a group is questioning a false belief at the group's core that every individual will be too afraid to admit their own questioning to the others. So the group circles the wagons against the outside, not consciously realizing that there is no longer an inside or perhaps fearfully suspecting that there is no longer an inside. This creates fear and stress, which then come out as anger at the tellers of unwelcome truth.

In the face of this dynamic, I believe Jewish Voice for Peace and other anti-Zionist Jews have two sets of roles, one outside the Jewish community and one inside the Jewish community. Outside, our primary roles have been to work toward a day when all who live between the River and the Sea enjoy freedom, equality, and dignity and to show the world that Jews are not monolithic.

Inside, we have crossed a line, where our primary role within the Jewish community is no longer to be carriers and chroniclers of that hidden and unwelcome truth. That truth may still be unwelcome, but it is no longer under wraps. One need only look at the coverage in mainstream media that would have been unthinkable as recently as October 6 of last year. The truth is out.

Our primary role now is to demonstrate that there are Jewish values and traditions that go back thousands of years and do not depend upon a Eurocentric political ideology born less than 150 years ago. In other words, we must demonstrate that one can leave Zionism and still be part of a Jewish community that lives its traditions, its values, and—if so inclined—its spiritual life with vitality and integrity.

In the meantime, we must be aware of the pain that all this is causing our fellow Jews who have not yet found their way out of the web of false beliefs. As James Baldwin said, "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." That pain comes out as hatred toward us, accusations of splitting congregations, giving us the finger, calling us antisemites, and passing laws against us.

As we go forward, it is worthwhile to recall a truism about struggle often misattributed to Mahatma Gandhi: First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win. We have reached Stage No. 3. They are fighting us. As unpleasant as it is, remember this: The vehemence of the vituperation aimed at us is directly related to how close we are to winning.