Maybe there won’t be a copycat mass shooting to grotesquely mark the 25th anniversary of the Columbine massacre on April 20, 1999. But just as we can be certain there will be another solar eclipse, it’s only a matter of time before a hail of bullets will block out the sun for another community somewhere in America. What’s also true? Expect the shooter to be male, probably white.

In an effort to prevent mass shooters from attaining posthumous fame, today the media rarely reveals their names. Back in 1999, after high school seniors Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris murdered 12 classmates and a teacher in Littleton, Colorado, their names were widely broadcast and published.

A quarter century later, despite substantive actions to prevent mass shootings by a number of states—and, with vice president Kamala Harris now overseeing the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention—we still lead the world in this particular brand of murder. USA! USA! USA! (As horrific as the April 13 murder of six by an Australian man at a mall outside of Sydney was, he was only wielding a knife. I shudder to think of the level of carnage if he had been brandishing an AR-15, the weapon of choice in most mass shootings.)

Sure, there are rare occasions when women pull the trigger, but as certain as I am that we’ll never hear a news report begin with the words, “A gunwoman opened fire today…,” I believe that to minimize mass shootings, we must move the question of the gender of the shooter from the periphery to the center of a long overdue national conversation.

Australia, you might recall, banned automatic and semi-automatic weapons after a mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, on April 28, 1996. There a gunman opened fire in a cafe, slaughtering 35 and wounding 23. Then-prime minister John Howard, a conservative politician in office for just six weeks, was able to push through sweeping gun control legislation 12 days after the shooting.

The legislative package he shepherded through banned selling and importing semi-automatic and automatic rifles, and shotguns, and required gun purchasers to explain the reason—and wait 28 days—before buying a firearm. Most significantly, the Australian law required a mandatory gun buyback. The government confiscated and destroyed nearly 700,000 firearms, cutting in half the number of households that possessed guns.

Prime Minister Howard said at the time, “People used to say to me, ‘You violated my human rights by taking away my gun.’ I’d tell them, ‘I understand that. Will you please understand the argument [that] the greatest human right of all is to live a safe life without fear of random murder?’”

Why, in 2024—a quarter century after Columbine, 12 years after Sandy Hook, eight years after Orlando, six years after Las Vegas, two years after Uvalde, and six months after Lewiston—is it so hard for U.S. legislators and gun owners to understand that?

In a world where leaders of all stripes use the term “a just war” with a straight face, working to prevent mass shootings feels more within our grasp then say, ending the war in Gaza. What to do first? Change how we talk about the issue. That means refusing to speak out against generic “gun violence.” Until we’re willing to say, men’s gun violence, we’ll continue to miss the mark, falling short of any campaign to prevent mass shootings.

This is not a condemnation of men. The vast majority of men are not mass shooters. For decades, I worked at a men’s center, published a magazine promoting a new definition of manhood, and championed revisiting how we socialize boys, as early as preschool. More and more men are rejecting conventional masculinity.

The weakened, shell-of-itself National Rifle Association coined the oft cited cliché, “Guns don’t kill people. People do” more than a century ago. Variations have long been used to thwart gun control legislation. It’s astonishing how little pushback there’s been.

“People kill people?” Really? Sure, there are rare occasions when women pull the trigger, but as certain as I am that we’ll never hear a news report begin with the words, “A gunwoman opened fire today…,” I believe that to minimize mass shootings, we must move the question of the gender of the shooter from the periphery to the center of a long overdue national conversation.

Now is a good time to listen again to entertainers Martin Mull and Steve Martin. They had it right when they penned the satirical sea shanty, “Men” with its one word chorus: Men, men, men, men.

In 2004, I was a single mom raising three daughters on my own. I worked three jobs, including an overnight shift as a translator at our local hospital, to make ends meet. Every time I stood in line at the supermarket, I worried about what I would have to put back on the shelf to stay within our weekly $100 food budget.

My daughters are all grown now. But whenever I’m buying groceries, I still get that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach as I remember not knowing if we would have enough to eat, and how much—or how little—I could provide for my family with $100.

Prices for all of us have gone way up since Covid-19, and $100 now buys about $65 worth of groceries compared to five years ago. This puts a huge bite on working families, because we spend most of our income every month—as much as 90%—on food and other necessities. So when prices rise, we hurt the most.

Time and again, big companies tell us that if they could only get bigger, they would pass savings on to consumers. This is almost never true.

Big corporations tell us that policies and supply chains are to blame for rising costs, but there’s a big part of the story they don’t want you to know: These giant corporations are themselves largely responsible for higher prices.

According to a new report by the Federal Trade Commission, the largest grocery retailers—which include Walmart, Kroger, and Amazon, which owns Whole Foods—used the pandemic as an excuse to raise prices across the board. The same is true for big agribusinesses like Tyson Foods and DuPont, which sell the lion’s share of meat products and seeds.

These giant companies wrote themselves a blank check during Covid-19, which they now expect us to pay for.

What all of these corporations have in common is they always want to get bigger. Why? Because when consumers have fewer choices, corporations can force us to pay higher prices. This is especially true with food, which none of us can live without. And according to the FTC, a big reason for these higher prices is corporate greed.

Time and again, big companies tell us that if they could only get bigger, they would pass savings on to consumers. This is almost never true. Instead, they give money back to their investors and reward executives—like Walmart’s Doug McMillon, who takes home over $25 million a year, and Kroger’s Rodney McMullen, who makes more than $19 million. That’s 671 times more than the amount an average Kroger’s worker makes.

Corporate consolidation can have deadly consequences. In healthcare, which my organization tracks closely, we see that the domination of private insurance by a handful of companies—Aetna, United Healthcare, and Cigna—leads to bigger bills, worse health outcomes, and lost lives.

The profits of retailers and agribusinesses have now risen to record levels, as much as five times the rate of inflation. How do companies like Tyson Foods, Kroger, and Walmart boost profits? The way they always do: by raising prices, while 65% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

No American should ever have to work three or more jobs just to survive: not in 2004, 2024, or 2044. We want a world in which every one of us has what we need not only to live, but also to dream. Identifying who is behind the rising cost of everyday essentials is a necessary first step.

Israel’s April 1 attack on Iranian diplomatic facilities in Damascus, Syria, and Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel less than two weeks later has resulted in no winners—and has raised concerns over a wider, more disastrous war. Fortunately, Israel’s response early in the morning April 19, which was apparently discussed with Washington prior to launching that attack, was extremely limited. So far, the administration’s response has been muted and there are hopes that there will be no further escalation on either side.

Both Israel and Iran are playing a dangerous game, however, and there are unconfirmed reports that, in return for Israel agreeing not to launch a major war on Iran, the United States would okay a massive Israeli attack on the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, where over 2 million residents and internally displaced Palestinians are crowded into an area of less than 25 square miles.

The initial Israeli attack killed top commanders of the Quds Force, the notorious foreign operations arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which have led Iran’s proxy forces in Syria and Iraq and have worked closely with the Lebanese Hezbollah. Although there are certainly victims of Iranian military operations who are not sorry for the commanders’ demise, diplomatic facilities are, legally speaking, the sovereign territory of the country they represent. Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus was, therefore, an attack on Iran.

When the primary Middle East conflict is seen as Israel versus Palestine, most people—even in the United States—are more sympathetic to the Palestinians. If it is seen as Israel versus Iran, there is greater sympathy for Israel.

While the Biden administration and congressional leaders have roundly condemned Iran’s strikes against Israel, virtually none seem to acknowledge that Israel struck first. This is particularly ironic in light of the U.S. obsession with Iranians violating the sanctity of U.S. diplomatic facilities when a state-sanctioned mob seized the United States Embassy in Iran in 1979. Even though they illegally held American hostages for 444 days, no one was killed.

For decades, Israel has been engaged in a shadow war with Iran, which—despite being more than 600 miles from Israel—has emerged as its most dangerous adversary. Assassinations of Iranian military leaders, intelligence officials, and nuclear scientists, cyberwarfare, and other attacks, were met with both inflammatory rhetoric from Iran, as well as support for Hezbollah and other militant groups that would occasionally engage in military confrontations with Israel.

Despite all this, Iran never attacked Israel directly—until now. The unprecedented action by Iran this past weekend was the first time any state has attacked Israeli soil since Iraq lobbed 42 Scud missiles into that country during the 1991 Gulf War. And, for the first time, U.S. forces have directly intervened in support of Israel in a military confrontation, shooting down a number of cruise missiles bound for Israel while they were flying over Jordanian and Iraqi airspace.

The highly nationalistic Iranian public, despite becoming increasingly alienated from their repressive regime, appears to be largely supportive of their government finally striking back after months and years of Israeli provocations. This confrontation unfortunately appears to have therefore strengthened the regime.

Iran, Hezbollah, and allied groups have no interest in taking on Israel in a full-scale war where they would face massive destruction by Israel’s vastly superior military forces. Iran has hundreds of powerful ballistic missiles it could have sent into Israel with devastating results, yet it chose to primarily launch drones and cruise missiles, knowing they would be mostly intercepted. Their targets included Israeli military installations, not major cities. Iran has made clear that this attack was the country’s only act of retaliation and that it would not attack Israel again unless it was attacked first.

Similarly, Israel has been bombing Hezbollah targets in Lebanon and Syria repeatedly since October, resulting in large numbers of casualties, only to be met with no more than an occasional rocket fired into northern Israel creating minimal damage, while Hezbollah keeps its own sizable arsenal of missiles in reserve.

During the past six months, Iran and its extremist allies have been winning politically by simply holding back and watching the Islamic world become increasingly radicalized. This occurs as people witness Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Muslims in Gaza with the support of the United States and other Western nations. A broader military conflict would do them little good.

Israel, by contrast, very much wants a confrontation with Iran. When the primary Middle East conflict is seen as Israel versus Palestine, most people—even in the United States—are more sympathetic to the Palestinians. If it is seen as Israel versus Iran, there is greater sympathy for Israel. Hence, it is in Israel’s interest to provoke a confrontation with Iran and, for the sake of the Palestinians, it’s important for Iran not to take the bait.

We have seen how, in the days since Iran’s attack on Israel, there has been little attention given to Israel’s ongoing bombing of civilian targets in Gaza. None of the 70,000 tons of explosives dropped on crowded urban areas since October 7 were intercepted. Nor has there been much attention on Israel’s illegal blocking of necessary food aid and the resulting starvation. Nor have there been any more protests in Israel by supporters of the hostages pressing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make the necessary compromises for their release.

In the United States, Biden administration officials and Democratic congressional leaders—who were finally appearing to be getting bolder in their criticism of Israeli war crimes in Gaza—have been largely silenced and are, instead, underscoring their “ironclad” commitment to Israel. Meanwhile, Republicans, along with Democratic hawks, are trying to blame even the timid expressions of disapproval regarding Israeli atrocities and calls to condition offensive military aid, as somehow emboldening Iran to attack.

While the recent confrontation has brought President Joe Biden closer to Israel, his administration has made clear its objections to Israel going to war with Iran—insisting that while Washington was still committed to defending Israel from attack, the United States would not participate in any military actions targeting Iran. They recognize that a broader war would open U.S. forces in the region to attacks by Iran and its allied militias. It could also very likely interrupt shipping in the Persian Gulf, the source of a large percentage of the world’s oil, thereby having a devastating impact on the global economy.

Despite this, there are those in Congress who would like to see the United States join Israel in a war against Iran, even if Israel initiates it. As far back as 2013, a large bipartisan majority in the Senate went on record in 2013 calling on the United States to provide military support for Israel in case it is “compelled to take military action.”

Still, Biden is likely to apply Washington’s considerable leverage on Israel to prevent an all-out war with Iran, since he recognizes how it would harm U.S. interests. It is unfortunate that he still refuses to apply that same leverage to prevent Israel from its ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

How do we break the cycle of violence?

As a local healing arts facilitator, trauma survivor, and Jewish activist, this question never leaves my mind.

Long before I dreamed of joining a mass action to block President Joe Biden’s motorcade route to his State of the Union address—or of co-organizing the 25 Mile March for Palestine—I was committed to understanding collective trauma, healing, and liberation.

You see, I grew up poor, white, and Jewish. The formative experiences of my childhood, including food insecurity, sexual violence, and antisemitism, left me with an intimate awareness of the human capacity for violence. Though this was normalized within the fabric of my everyday life, I always felt that so much more was possible. Only after my escape would I go through the painful and transformative process of learning what it actually meant to be a survivor, what it meant to have a voice, and what it meant to be free.

I am calling for the safety and freedom of all people, and an end to sexual violence, through an immediate and permanent cease-fire, the release of all hostages, unhindered humanitarian aid to Gaza, and a cessation of U.S. weapons sales to Israel.

Through this process, I uncovered trauma histories of my family lineage. I also learned to see my identity beyond victimhood by connecting with others who had experienced different forms of oppression and violence. I began to trace the familiar shapes of our silencing. I began to track the impact of mainstream narratives, including the stark dichotomy between victim and perpetrator, and how the assumptions of absolute innocence and evil that accompany these terms dehumanize all parties. When experiences of victimization become core to an individual or group’s identity, there is grave danger of being unable to grasp one’s sense of agency or impact. Indeed, I began to realize, victims can become perpetrators.

Following the shocking attack on October 7, allegations abounded that Hamas systematically sexually abused and mutilated Israeli women. As a survivor who deeply believes and loves other survivors, I immediately grieved alongside all who had been violated. My commitment to Palestinian liberation could never exclude my grief for the Israeli civilians who had been targeted. Yet, as further evidence surfaced, my heart broke open yet again: It became apparent to me that survivor voices were not at the center.

For example, the seminal New York Times article published in late December entitled “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7” was revealed to be wholly lacking in evidence for its sweeping claims. The United Nations has since released a special report clarifying that two of the most widespread allegations regarding sexual violence were groundless. The report also named that there were reasonable grounds to believe that incidents of sexual violence occurred on October 7. However, Israel has continued to disallow a full-fledged investigation by the U.N., while repeatedly using the specter of systematic sexual violence in Israeli and U.S. mainstream media to justify the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian men, women, and children.

Governments are so quick to act out of vengeance, but so slow to listen to the voices of survivors themselves. Many of us do everything within our power to find the truth beneath the rubble. Many of us plead that our society looks at the root causes of violence, ranging from intergenerational trauma to occupation, from racism to the pervasive denial of humanity. Many of us organize for systemic change and transformative justice practices that acknowledge the humanity of everyone who commits—and is impacted by—violence. Many of us break into pieces each time another child is killed before our eyes. Many of us scream: “Not in our name!” Many of us demand access to substantive healing resources for survivors everywhere, including the time to breathe and rest, and the support to tell our own stories.

While elected officials invest our tax dollars in deadly weapons, the actual demands and dreams of those who have been raped, traumatized, and brutalized by individual and communal acts of violence are forgotten. We know that the Israeli military has been documented sexually assaulting Palestinian civilians and prisoners throughout the occupied territories, even as such stories rarely make the headlines. State violence creates the conditions for sexual violence, and the resulting wounds are felt for generations.

In healing my sense of agency as a survivor, I have learned to recognize my privilege and power, and to see that I too have the capacity to commit acts both of harm and of healing. As an American Jew, I am compelled to embrace the power of my own voice, and refuse complicity with collective violence. I am calling for the safety and freedom of all people, and an end to sexual violence, through an immediate and permanent cease-fire, the release of all hostages, unhindered humanitarian aid to Gaza, and a cessation of U.S. weapons sales to Israel. Anything less would be a denial of my own humanity.

Haiti has descended into chaos. It’s had no president or parliament—and no elections either—for eight long years. Its unelected prime minister Ariel Henry resigned recently when gang violence at the airport in Port-au-Prince made it impossible for him to return to the country after a trip to Guyana.

Haiti is the poorest country in the region, its riches leached out by colonial overlords, American occupying forces, corporate predators, and home-grown autocrats. As if that weren’t enough, it’s also suffered an almost biblical succession of plagues in recent years. A coup deposed its first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, not once but twice—in 1991 and again in 2004. An earthquake in 2010 killed hundreds of thousands, leaving 1.5 million Haitians homeless, out of a population of less than 10 million. In the wake of that earthquake, nearly a million people contracted cholera, the worst outbreak in history, courtesy of a contingent of United Nations peacekeepers. To round out the catastrophes, in 2016, Hurricane Matthew made landfall, pushing Haiti back even further.

And now the country has been overrun by gangs that emerged as practically the only groups capable of providing services, however meager, to Haiti’s long-suffering population. People have become the country’s largest export. Anyone who has money, connections, or sufficient courage has fled, even if those who somehow made it to the United States were all too often deported back into the maelstrom. Haiti doesn’t have the three things that might prevent the sort of vacuum into which gangs so eagerly rush: robust democratic governance, a strong civil society, and a sufficiently uncorrupt constabulary. As a result, it’s returned to what political theorist Thomas Hobbes once called a “war of all against all” in which violence and the urge for power prevail, as fist takes precedence over gavel—the perfect environment for gangs to flourish.

In place of the biblical succession of plagues that swept through Haiti, the U.S. might only need the tinder of climate change and the flint of Donald Trump to go up in similar flames.

Political scientists often label places like Haiti “failed states.” With the breakdown of order, everything from political institutions to border controls disintegrates. In a comparable fashion, clans contested for power in Somalia in the 1990s and paramilitaries battled each other in the Democratic Republic of Congo during its repeated wars, while rebels and jihadis targeted the Syrian government beginning in 2011. In the end, such diverse groups seem to boil down to one thing: guys with guns.

In Haiti, the gangocracy is organized along the classic lines of criminal enterprises like the gangs that ruled New York City in the mid-19th century (immortalized in the film The Gangs of New York) or the Chinese tongs that warred over San Franciscan turf in the years after the Civil War (featured in the current Netflix series Warrior). The two major Haitian gangs in the capital city Port-au-Prince, GPep and the G9 Family, have similarly hierarchical structures, roots in particular neighborhoods, and flamboyant leaders like the former police officer and current G9 head Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier.

But gangs aren’t simply criminal syndicates. The Haitian gangs have close connections to political parties and align themselves with business interests (or run businesses of their own). Sometimes such gangs even begin as anti-gangs, neighborhood self-defense groups meant to help locals survive in an era of lawlessness.

Their mischaracterization resembles the overly narrow understanding of “terrorists.” Hamas, for instance, is on the U.S. terrorism list, but it’s not just a bunch of guys with guns and a predilection for violence. It’s also been a political party, a government, and a service organization that provided food, healthcare, and other necessities to underserved communities in Gaza.

Don’t make the mistake of associating gangs like Haiti’s with a “primitive” stage of political development or only with countries on the geopolitical margins. What’s happening there today could prefigure the future of the United States, too. In place of the biblical succession of plagues that swept through Haiti, the U.S. might only need the tinder of climate change and the flint of Donald Trump to go up in similar flames.

Gangs R U.S.

Today, Americans associate “gangs” with the Crips and Bloods, who developed a murderous rivalry in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s or, more recently, Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13, a gang of young Salvadoran transplants to Los Angeles initially focused on protecting its members from other gangs.

But shouldn’t we be more catholic in our definitions? After all, what are right-wing paramilitary forces, from the Three Percenters to the Proud Boys, if not gangs? They have their rituals, worldviews, indifference to the rule of law, even their own “Barbecues.” The gangs associated with far-right ideology and white supremacy today could claim a lineage stretching back to the European settlers of this continent who routinely engaged in the extrajudicial murder of Indigenous peoples while expanding westward, or the vigilante mobs that administered “rough justice” to “disobedient” slaves before the Civil War, or even the Ku Klux Klan. As for real-world impact, the Crips or MS-13 never had the audacity to force their way into the U.S. Capitol and trash the place, as Donald Trump’s informal gang did on January 6, 2021.

But why stop there? The Pinkerton detective agency once functioned like a gang in its attacks on the labor movement. The Central Intelligence Agency developed distinctly gang-like behavior overseas with its assassinations, coups, and outright criminal activities. And what about all the deaths associated with corporate gangs like Philip Morris and ExxonMobil? These institutions of “normal” society have had a much higher kill count and a more debilitating effect on the rule of law than the institutions of organized crime.

When it comes to starting fires in the American system, Trump is distinctly the Barbecue type.

When it comes to gang-like activities, much depends on geopolitics. The emergence of the “Washington consensus” and the birth of neoliberalism in the 1970s was an inflection point when it came to encouraging gang-like behavior. Previously, at least in advanced industrial countries, the state had been gradually assuming ever greater economic responsibility through the New Deal and its successors in the U.S. and the development of Europe’s market socialism. Neoliberalism, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in England and President Ronald Reagan in the United States, sought to roll back the power of the state through the defunding, deregulation, and privatization of government services.

That sustained attack on state functions ensured an increase in poverty and painful budget crises for institutions like school systems and hospitals, while corporate misconduct proliferated. In poorer countries, where states were already more fragile, the impact was far more devastating.

In Haiti, after the state borrowed money in the 1970s and 1980s to feed corruption and sustain autocracy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pushed subsequent democratic governments to privilege the free market, while opening ever more quickly to the global economy. Sensing opportunity, non-governmental organizations streamed into Haiti to provide food, housing, and healthcare, everything a cash-strapped government couldn’t do. The succession of catastrophes—coups, an earthquake, cholera, hurricanes—only strengthened the humanitarian sector but at the expense of effective government. In this century, the situation had become so dire that all too many parents were giving their children up to orphanages run by foreign charities. In other words, the road to Haiti’s hell was, in part, paved by good intentions.

Or take the case of Jamaica where, from the late 1970s on, similar IMF programs translated into disaster, especially in the capital, Kingston. Here, too, the state lost power as gang leaders, known as “dons,” expanded their territories. As Michelle Munroe and Damion Blake put it in Third World Quarterly: “Neoliberal policies not only paralyzed the state’s capacity to control and contain violence in the streets of Kingston, these changes also made dons and the gangs they command more lethal and powerful.”

Dons and the gangs they command: that language could soon seem all too eerily appropriate for the United States.

American Bloodbath

America’s ultimate Don is all too clear about what he expects come November, should he lose. “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath,” he told one of his rallies. According to that scenario, the crew that owes allegiance to Donald Trump—the right-wing militias, diehard conspiracy theorists, open-carry gun enthusiasts—will rise up in gang-like fashion in the face of another “stolen election.”

That, however, is an example of Trump’s magical thinking. The January 6 “insurrection” revealed the limits of his influence. What happened in Washington that day never came close to a coup d’état, thanks to the actions of the police and the National Guard, nor was it repeated, even in the reddest of states.

The real bloodbath would take place if Trump won the election. After all, he’s already promised violence as an organizing principle for his second term. As David Remnick has written in The New Yorker, Trump

makes no effort to conceal his bigotries, his lawlessness, his will to authoritarian power; to the contrary, he advertises it, and, most disturbing of all, this deepens his appeal. What’s more, there is no question that Trump has so normalized calls to violence as an instrument of politics that it has inflamed countless people to perverse action.

Trump has also promised a thorough purge of his enemies in the government and beyond, as well as the weaponization of the Justice Department to wage war on all MAGA opponents. As in his first term, he would destroy as many federal agencies as possible. Meanwhile, he would promote drilling über alles and roll back every Biden administration effort to create an industrial policy to guide the United States away from fossil fuels.

What Trump proposes is fundamentally different from the now shopworn Republican strategy of reducing the federal government to the size of something that can be “drowned in the bathtub” (as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once so memorably put it) in favor of “states’ rights.” Trump has nothing but contempt for the politics that advance such a perspective. Like the gang leader he is, he’d rather concentrate federal power in his own hands as an instrument of personal vengeance emphasizing loyalty above all. Instead of the empowerment of state legislatures, Trump prefers chaos, for in fraught times people look to autocratic leaders.

When it comes to starting fires in the American system, Trump is distinctly the Barbecue type. He admires leaders who slaughter people indiscriminately (Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines), change the constitution multiple times to bypass legislative and judicial opposition (Viktor Orbán of Hungary), or kill their political opponents wherever they might live (Vladimir Putin of Russia). He likes the bad boys who have transformed their parties into gangs and their countries into fiefdoms. In short, he’s the ultimate gang leader.

In the MAGA echo chamber, complaints about witch-hunts targeting Trump should be considered just a preface, should he win this November, to a genuine witch-hunt that could make the Red Scare of the 1950s look like a garden party.

Of course, he won’t do it alone. There are plenty of true believers and opportunists to staff his administration and implement his whims, but that’s not enough. As his first term revealed, the guardrails of democracy—opposition politicians, bureaucrats, even certain Republicans who continue to have qualms—can still prevent the country from tumbling over a cliff.

This time around, Trump and those backing him hope to disable enough of the political infrastructure to create the space for non-state actors to do his work for him. In The Donald’s first term, the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as Trumpophile Steve Bannon so infamously put it, was a strategy meant to empower actors like corporations and religious institutions to grab power for themselves. Next time around, he’s likely to surround himself with advisers pulled from the think-tank crowd that produced the nightmarish Project 2025 blueprint in order to “free” all MAGA-oriented non-state and (often) anti-state actors to do their damnedest.

But even ruthless think tanks, corporations, and apocalyptic preachers aren’t likely to go far enough for Donald Trump, since they also remain the bedrock of America’s more traditional right wing, the coalition that put Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush into the White House. Trump needs genuine mayhem-makers. By removing restrictions on firearms, he aims to deputize every American citizen in his camp to MAGAfy the United States.

Trump’s repeated exhortations to violence—“lock her up,” “punch him in the face,” “be there, will be wild”—may well take a more specific form in a second term. Like McCarthyites at the height of the Cold War, Trumpists have imagined “Marxists” under every bed, even in the Pentagon. It’s not far-fetched to think that the reelected president might issue a coded call to his supporters to round them all up and dispatch them in some grim fashion.

Trump often accuses his opponents of exactly the sins—attempting to steal elections, having distinctly senior moments—of which he is supremely guilty. In the MAGA echo chamber, complaints about witch-hunts targeting Trump should be considered just a preface, should he win this November, to a genuine witch-hunt that could make the Red Scare of the 1950s look like a garden party.

After Autocracy

Haiti has no government, much less a strong-armed autocrat like Donald Trump. So, it might seem ludicrous to compare the crisis there with the prospective “bloodbath” Trump promises here. But remember: Haiti suffered under two ruthless dictators from 1957 to 1986: Papa Doc Duvalier and his son, Baby Doc. Between them, they ensured that Haiti would never easily establish democratic institutions.

Donald Trump is nearly 78 years old. He doesn’t have a long political future. Yes, were he to win in November, he would surely do what he could to destroy democracy. Still, the true nightmare scenario is likely to come later, as climate change sends yet more migrants surging toward U.S. borders, generates more fires that sweep across the land, and heats politics to the boiling point. That’s when future versions of the gangs Trump has encouraged to “stand back and stand by,” the insurrectionists he’s promised to amnesty, and the loyalists who have shared images of Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck could assault the citadels of power in an attempt to destroy once and for all the rule of law that Trump has spent his life undermining.

Cue the ominous music: From sea to shining sea, the war of all against all may be just around the corner.

A FAIR study finds that since October 7, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have overwhelmingly applied the term “brutal” to violence committed by Palestinians rather than by Israelis. In doing so, journalists helped justify U.S. support for the assault on Gaza and shield Israel from criticism, particularly in the early months of the onslaught.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has been nothing if not “brutal.” The indiscriminate use of U.S.-supplied artillery that shred Palestinian bodies and bury them alive under rubble has killed at least 33,000, mostly women and children. The blockade of food and water into Gaza has caused the sharpest decline of a population’s nutrition status on record. Marauding Israeli soldiers frequently post videos on social media (Al Jazeera, 1/18/24) mocking people whose homes they have destroyed, and in many cases have killed—playing with children’s toys, fondling women’s underwear (Mondoweiss, 2/19/24). The total variety of indignities that characterize the “brutal” human toll in Gaza are too numerous to summarize here.

Looking at all attributions, 77% of the time when the word “brutal” was used to describe an actor in the conflict, it referred to Palestinians and their actions.

But to U.S. newspapers, brutality appears to be less about actions or outcomes than about identity.

Attributing ‘Brutality’

FAIR recorded each instance in which The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal used the word “brutal” (or variants like “brutally,” “brutality” etc.) to characterize Palestinians or Israelis, over the five-month period from October 7 to March 7.

Using the search terms “brutal” and “Israel” in the Nexis and Factiva news archiving services, FAIR distinguished between characterizations made by sources and those in a journalist’s own voice. When the word was used by a source, FAIR noted their occupation. FAIR also noted if a “brutal” claim came in an opinion piece or a news story.

If an occurrence of “brutal” was not clearly attributed to a party in the conflict, it was labeled “unattributed” and not included in the data analysis. For instance, the statement “most news and commentary describes the war in Gaza as the latest brutal episode in the conflict between Israelis and Arabs” (Wall Street Journal, 11/6/23) does not clearly attribute “brutal” to a particular side. On the other hand, if a statement called both parties “brutal”—such as a Palestinian source’s statement, “Fear makes us brutal to each other” (New York Times, 1/31/24)—then it was counted as two instances, one for each party.

Total Characterizations

Looking at all attributions, 77% of the time when the word “brutal” was used to describe an actor in the conflict, it referred to Palestinians and their actions. This was 73% of the time at the Times, 78% at the Post, and 87% at the Journal. Only 23% of the time was “brutal” used to describe Israel’s actions—even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.

Out of the 350 “brutal” mentions that were analyzed, 246 came from straight news stories—in quotes from sources and in journalists’ own words—while 104 came from op-eds. The lopsided rate at which “brutal” was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories: 77% of “brutal” mentions in news reports and 77% in op-eds were applied to Palestinians.

That publications were just as likely to describe Palestinians, as opposed to Israelis, as “brutal” in a straight news story versus an op-ed indicates a blurred distinction between these categories. Describing violent actors or their actions as “brutal,” after all, is an opinion, not a fact. That opinion may be well-justified, but it remains subjective.

Whatever concern these publications may have for Israel’s victims isn’t enough for them to openly question, in a meaningful and timely way, whether Israel’s stated goal of destroying Hamas is its actual one.

The New York Times, in fact, distributed an internal memo in November (leaked to The Intercept, 4/15/24) instructing reporters to refrain from using “incendiary” language in their reporting on the war on Gaza, because “heated language can often obscure rather than clarify.” The memo highlighted the risks of double standards, asking, “Can we articulate why we are applying those words to one particular situation and not another?”

Our study found a clear pattern of the tendentious word “brutal” being applied overwhelmingly to one side of the conflict, supporting the concerns that Times staffers expressed to The Intercept that the memo—which also prohibited the use of the term “occupied territory”—reflected a deference to Israeli talking points under the guise of journalistic objectivity.

Reflexive Inoculation

It took until the week of November 25 for the Times and December 2 for the Post to publish more characterizations of Israel as “brutal” than of Palestinians in a week. But that inversion only happened a few more times. From that point on, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to over 30,000 and children began to die not just from bombs but also famine, the frequency of “brutal” characterizations at the two papers dropped overall, and Palestinians were still more likely than Israel to be called “brutal” each week.

Meanwhile, as “brutal” references diminished at the Journal as well, there was virtually no shift in its application. From the week of December 9 through the end of the collection period, the Journal only characterized Israel’s actions as “brutal” once—versus seven times for Palestinian actions.

Much of the imbalance has to do with how often journalists reflexively—and lazily—inject “brutal” into phrases like “in the wake of Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel” (e.g., New York Times, 10/30/23, 1/2/24) or “following Hamas’s brutal assault” (e.g., Washington Post, 10/17/23, 10/19/23). Reporters seemed to want to inoculate themselves against charges of being insufficiently anti-Hamas, while at the same time giving their audience the semblance of context.

Describing Israel’s actions as a “response” to “brutal” Palestinians helps paint a picture in readers’ minds that the scale of destruction in Gaza is an unfortunate but natural result of the October 7 Hamas attack.

We now know that some of the most horrific atrocity claims that came out of Israel following the October 7 attack were fabrications or embellishments: There were no beheaded babies (FAIR.org, 3/8/24), there’s no evidence of systematic rape by Hamas (Electronic Intifada, 1/9/24; Intercept, 2/28/24), and at least some of the bodies burned beyond recognition—both Israeli and Palestinian—were killed by Israeli weapons (FAIR.org, 2/23/24).

But assume that journalists didn’t know this. Isn’t Israel’s well-documented intent to collectively punish the entire 2.2 million person population of Gaza through indiscriminate bombing and starvation, killing more children under the age of 10 than the number of people (soldiers and civilians) killed in total in the October 7 attack, at least equally deserving of the label “brutal”?

That top U.S. newspapers have used the term more than three times as much to describe Palestinian actions than Israeli ones—a cruel inversion of the actual death toll of the conflict—illustrates that their humanitarian concerns are not universal.

Consider the actual meaning of “brutal,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “suitable to one who lacks intelligence, sensitivity, or compassion: befitting a brute,” and “typical of beasts.” These newspapers’ selective use of the word echoes Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s statement that Palestinians are “human animals.”

‘Brutal’ Attack, ‘Massive’ Response

Statements characterizing the October 7 attack as “brutal” were often followed by neutral descriptions of the Israeli assault, even in articles ostensibly concerned with the Palestinian situation.

A piece by the Times’ editorial board called “The Only Way Forward” (11/25/23), for example, laid out the paper’s view of how to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict. It used “brutal” to describe Palestinian actions, but the more neutral “massive” to describe Israeli ones:

The brutal attack by Hamas on October 7 and the massive Israeli retaliatory assault on Gaza have already led to too much death and destruction, and have ignited communal hatreds in the United States and beyond.

The Post (11/27/23) used a similar frame:

Israel has mounted a massive assault on the densely populated Gaza Strip, killing more than 13,000—including thousands of children—since October 7, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a brutal cross-border assault on Israel, killing about 1,200 people—including dozens of children—and taking about 240 people into Gaza as hostages.

Note that the assault that by the Post‘s own reckoning killed two orders of magnitude more children was not the one that the paper thought deserved the label “brutal.”

The Journal (10/17/23) used the same frame in an op-ed headlined “Israel Must Follow the Laws Hamas Violates: But the Jewish State Isn’t Culpable for Its Enemy’s Using Gazans as Human Shields”:

The brutal slaughter of Israeli civilians has thrown Hamas’s advocates on the defensive, but if Israel is blamed for massive civilian casualties, this could change.

These statements, which range from stale lamentations of the conflict’s death toll to purely aesthetic concern for Israel’s public image, seem sympathetic at first blush. In fact, they really act as a sort of stress-test for the dehumanizing logic underpinning Western reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza, especially in the first few months after October 7.

In these cases, affective language is still only applied to Palestinian, not Israeli, violence. The extreme gore in Gaza that the world bears daily witness to apparently did not warrant a description as emotive as “brutal.” And whatever concern these publications may have for Israel’s victims isn’t enough for them to openly question, in a meaningful and timely way, whether Israel’s stated goal of destroying Hamas is its actual one.

Describing Israel’s actions as a “response” to “brutal” Palestinians helps paint a picture in readers’ minds that the scale of destruction in Gaza is an unfortunate but natural result of the October 7 Hamas attack—as though Israeli forces hadn’t killed more than 10,000 Palestinians, including more than 2,000 children, prior to October 7 in the 21st century. Add to this the logic of the “human shields” excuse, and it suggests that there’s no Palestinian death toll high enough to merit rhetorical condemnation from these publications.

‘A Brutal, Ugly, Inhumane People’

The sources quoted by the Times, Post, and Journal, when they called one side of the conflict “brutal,” were talking about Palestinians 64% of the time. But that was less lopsided than when reporters for those papers were applying the term in their own voice—when they used “brutal” 83% of the time in reference to Palestinians.

The Times, which urged its journalists not to use emotional phrases in their own voice, or “even in quotations”—suggesting there might be more leeway in such an instance–once again did not follow its own guidelines. When the paper used the term “brutal,” reporters applied it to Palestinian actors or actions 79% of the time when writing in their own journalistic voice, and 61% of the time in quotations.

Two categories of sources were the most frequently quoted: foreign government officials and U.S. government officials, which made up 28% and 27% of total sources, respectively. Quotes from foreign government officials were roughly evenly split between calling Palestinians and Israelis “brutal.” These sources included Israeli Defense Force officials, on the one hand, who made statements like “Hamas seeks to deliberately cause the maximum amount of harm and brutality possible to civilians” (Washington Post, 11/10/23). On the other hand, President Lula Da Silva of Brazil (New York Times, 2/18/24) remarked on Israel’s actions, “I have never seen such brutal, inhumane violence against innocent people.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrated Western media’s capacity to cover civilian suffering with sensitivity and empathy—when that suffering is caused by an official U.S. enemy. But with military campaigns waged by the U.S. and its allies, media’s humanitarian concerns tend to fade.

Quotes from U.S. government officials included statements from President Joe Biden (Wall Street Journal, 12/14/23): “Nobody on God’s green Earth can justify what Hamas did. They’re a brutal, ugly, inhumane people, and they have to be eliminated.” National security advisor Jake Sullivan (New York Times, 11/28/23) described Hamas as the “architects” of a “brutal, bloody massacre.”

The only two U.S. government sources to call Israelis “brutal” were Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) (Washington Post, 1/4/24), who called Israeli violence an “illegal, immoral, brutal, and grossly disproportionate war against the Palestinian people,” and the White House interns who issued a statement (Wall Street Journal, 12/8/23) saying they were “horrified” by both the “brutal October 7 Hamas attack” and “the brutal and genocidal response by the Israeli government.”

As FAIR (3/18/22) has noted, the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrated Western media’s capacity to cover civilian suffering with sensitivity and empathy—when that suffering is caused by an official U.S. enemy. But with military campaigns waged by the U.S. and its allies, media’s humanitarian concerns tend to fade. The uneven deployment of “brutal” seems like a clear case of Western media not just shielding a U.S. ally from justifiable criticism, but actively inciting public hatreds of Palestinians by portraying their violence as exceptionally inhumane despite paling in comparison to that of their colonial oppressor.

At the center of the University of Southern California’s campus in Los Angeles stands a statue of Hecuba, queen of ancient Troy. “A statue celebrating the women of Troy,” says USC’s website. “Hecuba would defend her children and her city with fierce passion and loyalty. She would urge the Trojans to fight on, even when they were outnumbered, exhausted, facing impossible odds.”

USC is suffused with the imagery of Troy, said by ancient writers like Homer to have been sacked by the Greeks after they entered the walled city by hiding inside the fabled Trojan Horse. The motto of USC’s sports teams, the Trojans, is, “Fight On!” But this week, USC decided to abandon one its most prominent young women students, its 2024 valedictorian Asna Tabassum, and to give up the fight, buckling under a wave of neo-McCarthyism sweeping campuses nationwide.

Last Monday, USC announced it was canceling Tabassum’s valedictory commencement address. “The intensity of feelings, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East… has escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement,” USC Provost Andrew Guzman explained in the statement, adding, “To be clear: This decision has nothing to do with freedom of speech. There is no free-speech entitlement to speak at a commencement.”

While genuine antisemitism exists, this current witch hunt appears to be targeting campuses where Palestinian solidarity and anti-war movements are growing in strength.

Asna Tabassum is a first-generation South Asian-American Muslim, graduating with a major in biomedical engineering and a minor in resistance to genocide. She posted a response to USC’s announcement on the website of CAIR, The Council on American-Islamic Relations, saying in part, “I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred. I am surprised that my own university—my home for four years—has abandoned me… on April 14, I asked about the alleged safety concerns and was told that the university had the resources to take appropriate safety measures for my valedictory speech, but that they would not be doing so since increased security protections is not what the university wants to ‘present as an image.’”

Speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, Asna described the vitriol she suffered after being named valedictorian: “It only took a few hours before… a very generalized and, honestly, very hateful and disappointing campaign to remove me as valedictorian.”

USC officials wouldn’t share details of the threats they allegedly received. “I was offered no information and was told it was not appropriate for me to know,” Asna said.

Her major and minor may seem completely disparate areas of study, but Asna explained, “My minor in resistance to genocide allows me to study the human condition at possibly one of its worst conditions.”

She continued, “Biomedical engineering is my way of learning technically, how we can improve the human condition through increasing health accessibility… so that we can improve the ways in which people experience healthcare when they are most in need.”

One likely reason she was targeted, not raised by the USC administration, is her solidarity with Palestinians. In her Instagram bio, she links to a website detailing the Israel/Palestine conflict. On that site, both the two-state solution and the one-state solution, the two principle proposals for a permanent peace in the region, are described. One sentence reads, “One palestinian state would mean Palestinian liberation, and the complete abolishment of the state of Israel.”

Asna responded on Democracy Now!, “The sentence right after talks about coexistence between Arabs and Jews… I’m only advocating for human equality, and for the sanctity of human life when I say that Palestinians, as well as Jews, as well as Muslims… and anyone else who has invested in this conflict has the equal right to life and the equal privilege of the fullest extent to life.”

Asna’s solidarity with Palestinians, especially as a hijab-wearing Muslim woman, while Israel relentlessly bombs civilians in Gaza, may actually be what USC doesn’t want to “‘present as an image.’”

This all comes as Congressional Republicans mount a neo-McCarthyite campaign accusing elite liberal universities of tolerating antisemitism on campus. While genuine antisemitism exists, this current witch hunt appears to be targeting campuses where Palestinian solidarity and anti-war movements are growing in strength.

Before Columbia University President Minouche Shafik appeared Wednesday at the same House committee that led to the resignation of two presidents, both women, from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, 23 Jewish Barnard and Columbia professors wrote her a detailed open letter. It stated, “We object to the weaponization of antisemitism. And we advocate for a campus where all students, Jewish, Palestinian, and all others, can learn and thrive in a climate of open, honest inquiry and rigorous debate.”

CAIR is calling on the public to join its demand that USC reinstate Asna Tabassum as a commencement speaker. In the spirit of Hecuba, Asna vows to fight on.

“Mr. Netanyahu faces a delicate calculation—how to respond to Iran in order not to look weak, while trying to avoid alienating the Biden administration and other allies already impatient with Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.”

Yeah, this is virtually nothing: a random, utterly forgettable quote pulled from The New York Times—from the basic corporate coverage of our present-moment violence, as the world shimmies on the brink of... uh, World War III.

It’s the forgettable quotes, especially in regard to ongoing war, that may be the most dangerous, because all they do is solidify a collective sense of normal. My term for it is “accepted insanity.” We have the technological and psychological capacity to kill not simply thousands or even millions of people but the whole human race, but let’s talk about it in terms of strategy, tactics, and public relations! Let’s talk about it as though we’re covering a bunch of 10-yer-old boys throwing stones. Which one’s going to win?

That’s the key issue here: winning.

Human lives are just bargaining chips, except, of course, when the bad guys kill them.

When two cowboys face off in an armed confrontation, the one who draws and fires fastest, hitting the other guy in the stomach or wherever, wins. He gets to walk away with a self-satisfied smirk.

I’m not singling out the Times story quoted above as uniquely problematic in its coverage of the latest turn of events in the Middle East, but rather that it’s representative of the accepted insanity of endless war—the reduction of war to an abstraction, virtually always involving clearly defined good guys and bad guys, and describing murder (including mass murder) as retaliation, self-defense, “show of force,” etc., etc. “National interests” are the prize at stake. Human lives are just bargaining chips, except, of course, when the bad guys kill them.

The Times story, for instance, steps beyond its abstraction of the Israel-Iran confrontation at one point. Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing several Iranian officers, the story informed us. Iran retaliated two weeks later, firing 300 drones and missiles at Israel, almost all of which were shot down and very little damage was caused. The Times noted: “The only serious casualty was a seven-year-old girl, Amina al-Hasoni, who was badly wounded.”

War affects children! Yes, yes, yes it does. My heart goes out to Amina al-Hasoni. But my God—some 13,000 children have been killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza, and thousands more injured, not to mention orphaned. And some are simply missing, lying under the rubble. What are their names?

What if war were covered the way street crime is covered—not as an abstraction, but with awareness that it’s a profound social problem? What if war were covered with external awareness, i.e., with wisdom that transcends political platitudes—rather than in obeisance to those platitudes?

Here, for instance, is CNBC reporting on the Israel-Iran confrontation. Noting that Israel has pledged to “exact a price” from Iran in response to the missile attack, CNBC then quotes President Joe Biden condemning the attack and adding that the United States “will remain vigilant to all threats and will not hesitate to take all necessary action to protect our people.”

Can you believe? His words didn’t make me feel safer. I’d been pondering not just the possibility but the likely reality of World War III, and to read these words—“take all necessary action to protect our people”—made the wolves start to howl in my own soul.

Platitudes plus nukes? Biden wasn’t talking about transcending war and shunning the country’s trillion-dollar military budget. Presumably, he was talking about using it, putting it to work to “protect” us—you know, to “defeat” our declared enemy (Iran, apparently), no matter the price exacted on planet Earth, including on you and me. How about some media coverage that doesn’t blow this off with a shrug?

Coverage of war requires awareness of the lies that prop it up politically. For instance, as World Beyond War has put it:

“According to myth, war is ‘natural.’ Yet a great deal of conditioning is needed to prepare most people to take part in war, and a great deal of mental suffering is common among those who have taken part.”

In other words, war is not a product of human evolution—humanity finally becoming mature enough to fight itself in an organized, collective fashion—but essentially the opposite of that: an unevolved aspect of who we are... an embedded failure to evolve, you might say.

So many veterans, as the World Beyond War quote implies, often bear the burden of this truth well beyond their time of service. They are forced to face, on their own, the psychological and spiritual implications of what they did—of following orders, of participating in the dehumanization and murder of alleged enemies. In the wake of wars, vet suicide rates can be horrific. While such psycho-spiritual trauma is officially defined as a mental illness—post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—others with deeper understanding, including many vets, call it moral injury. Following orders forced them to act beyond their own humanity: When you dehumanize others, you dehumanize yourself.

This is the accepted insanity the corporate media cover with such win-lose abstraction, even when we’re on the brink of World War III. Multiply moral injury by several billion human beings and what you could wind up with is human extinction.

A new study released today in Nature examines data from 1,600 regions of the earth for the last 40 years, and concludes that by 2050 climate change will be causing economic damage worth $38 trillion every single year. That seems like… a lot. The entire world economy at the moment is about $100 trillion a year; the federal budget is about $6 trillion a year. $38 trillion is 150 Bezoses (which is sick in its own way).

If those numbers seem impossible to comprehend, then let Bloomberg break it down for you, “planetary warming will result in an income reduction of 19% globally by mid-century, compared to a global economy without climate change.”

This is the largest study of this kind I know of; it comes from the Potsdam Institute in Germany, and as James Murray, writing in BusinessGreen points out, it’s more “granular and empirical” than past efforts. It concludes that these losses are already locked in, thanks to the carbon and methane we’ve already poured into the air.

“Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected,” said PIK scientist and co-author of the study, Maximilian Kotz.

“These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labour productivity or infrastructure… We find that economies across the world are committed to an average income loss of 19% by 2049 due to past emissions. This corresponds to a 17% reduction in global GDP.”

If anything, as Murray points out, the numbers are quite likely conservative:

The projected damages are mainly the result of rising average temperatures and changes in rainfall and temperature variability. But other weather extremes that are harder to model, such as storms or wildfires, could result in higher economic costs. The study also assumes that over time economies start to adapt to more intense climate impacts, serving to curb the resulting negative economic impacts. As climate scientists have repeatedly warned, there are plausible scenarios where some regions find it near impossible to adapt and development is thrown into reverse. Such outcomes would trigger huge geopolitical risks that could impact the entire global economy.

What might cause even deeper problems? Just for fun, read another European study from last week, on the rapid slowdown in the Atlantic Ocean circulation and the possible looming shutdown of the entire system.

Oh, and if we don’t take strong action now to limit the rise in temperature, then the economic losses just keep growing—that 19% at mid-century becomes 60% by 2100, when people currently being born will still be alive, and cursing us.

There are a couple of things to say here.

One, some of you may remember the famous Limits to Growth report from the early 1970s. It predicted that without serious efforts to change our demands on the planet, economic growth would begin to suffer right about now. We thought about it as a society and then, with the election of Ronald Reagan, rejected it; we are now harvesting that bitter fruit. If we don’t act now then our children may wish they still had bitter fruit to harvest.

These people are supposed to care about money, and for once it would help us if they actually did.

Two, capitalism—which regularly acts homicidally—is acting truly suicidally. Having been warned for years now, it resists every effort to rein in its excesses. As Exxon’s CEO helpfully explained earlier this year, it’s not that you couldn’t make good money from renewable energy—you just couldn’t make “above average returns” because sunshine is free. So instead we’ll tank the world, and with it the world economy (which is a subset of the first, not the other way round).

In Europe, for instance, climate protest has finally persuaded regulators to start slowing loans to the fossil fuel industry—but new data this week makes it clear that the slack is being taken up by American banks, and not just the mighty money center banks that are already most deeply implicated in this immoral trade. Now regional banks are taking it up too:

Some of the U.S. regional banks stepping up oil, gas, and coal lending are based in states that have either passed or are reviewing anti-ESG laws. In Oklahoma, which enforced its Energy Discrimination Elimination Act in late 2022, local bank BOK Financial recently soared up the league table to become one of the world’s 30 busiest dealmakers in fossil fuels.

Marisol Salazar, senior vice president and manager for energy banking at BOK Financial, says the bank is now seeing “much more opportunities” in the fossil-fuel industry.

“We’re not just picking up customers,” she said. “We’re also picking up talent, we’re picking up engineers, we’re picking up investment bankers, we’re picking up experienced relationship managers.”

All of this makes even more important the release of the Carbon Bankroll 2.0 report earlier this spring. You’ll recall the first version of this report a year ago, which made it clear that for many companies—Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and on and on—the bulk of their carbon emissions came from the cash they kept in the bank, where it got lent out to build more fossil fuel infrastructure. That’s because, as the new report makes clear,

If the largest banks and asset managers in the U.S. were a country, they would be the third-largest emitting country in the world, behind China and the U.S.

So let’s think about this for a moment. If Amazon and Apple and Microsoft wanted to avoid a world where, by century’s end, people had 60% less money to spend on buying whatever phones and software and weird junk (doubtless weirder by then) they plan on selling, then they should be putting pressure on their banks to stop making the problem worse. They should also be unleashing their lobbying teams to demand climate action from Congress.

These people are supposed to care about money, and for once it would help us if they actually did. Stop putting out ads about how green your products are—start making this system you dominate actually work.

This is not a radical proposition. A radical—and probably wise, if unlikely—proposition would be get past capitalism. But for the moment this is where we are, and the people who dominate it have an obligation to make it work, if only out of their own sad self-interest.

Here’s how the unradical Todd Stern—longtime American climate negotiator at international talks—put it in a quite powerful speech he gave last week in the U.K.:

“We are slowed down by those who think of themselves as grownups and believe decarbonisation at the speed the climate community calls for is unrealistic.”

“They say that we need to slow down, that what is being proposed [in cuts to greenhouse gas emissions] is unrealistic,” he told The Observer. “You see it a lot in the business world too. It’s really hard [to push for more urgency] because those ‘grownups’ have a lot of influence.”

Stern says that the ‘grownups’ will only listen when the rest of us push:

The original Earth Day in 1970 happened in a societal moment that isn’t easily replicated, but it does teach that there is still more to do in filling the streets and campuses with young people and people young at heart who see the danger of climate change for what it is.

What that original Earth Day represented was not just norm change but a sociopolitical tipping point in environmental concern—the kind of positive tipping point we need to reach on climate change as well. And it will come. But it has to be our collective mission to make it come sooner.

Indeed! Watch this space.

I’ve always known my Arab culture is worth celebrating.

I heard it in Syrian tenor Sabah Fakhri’s powerful voice reverberating in my mom’s car on the way to piano lessons and soccer practice during my youth. I smelled it in the za’atar, Aleppo pepper, allspice, and cumin permeating the air in the family kitchen.

I saw it in the intricate embroidery on my grandma’s silk robe. And in the determination etched in the faces of my immigrant parents, who raised seven children in Southern California without relinquishing our rich Syrian traditions.

How can Arab American life and culture be celebrated when fellow Arabs are facing erasure in Gaza?

April is National Arab American Heritage Month. It should be a time to celebrate the contributions of the over 3.5 million Arab Americans who strengthen our proud nation.

We have Ralph Nader to thank for consumer protections like automobile safety. We have the late Sen. James Abourezk (D-S.D.)—the first Arab American elected to the U.S. Senate—to credit for landmark legislation championing Indigenous rights. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician, first exposed the Flint, Michigan, water crisis.

There are countless others. But right now, it’s impossible to feel celebratory. My community is reeling from the immense pain and horror of an unfolding genocide against the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza.

Palestinian Americans have lost family members in Gaza from Israel’s unrelenting bombardment and mass starvation of civilians. Adding insult to injury, Israel is using U.S.-supplied weapons to commit these atrocities.

Palestinian Americans—along with other Arabs—have also been on the receiving end of increased hate crimes, harassment, racist rhetoric, and discrimination, belying the message that they, too, are an integral part of this nation. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee received 2,500 reports of anti-Arab hate from October to March.

During this period, Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian American boy from Illinois, was fatally stabbed. Three Palestinian college students were shot in Vermont.

In his proclamation marking this year’s heritage month, President Joe Biden was forced to reckon with Gaza. Instead of announcing a long overdue, permanent cease-fire and an end to U.S. military support for Israel, he offered empty words.

How can Arab American life and culture be celebrated when fellow Arabs are facing erasure in Gaza? Nearly 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza so far, including nearly 14,000 children. Thousands more remain missing. And at least 576,000 Palestinians are on the brink of famine.

Homes filled with family heirlooms and memories have been systematically destroyed. The ancient olive trees that symbolize Palestinians’ deep-rooted connection to their land haven’t been spared.

It’s easy to feel despair. But what brings me hope is the new generation of Arab Americans organizing, marching, and working with other communities to demand a permanent cease-fire. We are reminded that dissent is the highest form of “patriotism.”

Despite attempts to smear and silence them for supporting Palestinian human rights, their efforts are having an impact. A March 27 Gallup poll showed a significant drop in American public support for Israel’s conduct of the war, from 50% in November 2023 to 36% now.

Meanwhile, Arab Americans have emerged as a new and powerful voting bloc. Spearheaded by Arab Americans in Michigan, hundreds of thousands of Americans voted “uncommitted” in recent primary elections in Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and elsewhere to protest U.S. policy in Gaza.

This represents a real shift from the days after 9/11, when Arab Americans faced blanket demonization without any pushback. This is progress, although much more must be done.

We know we belong in America even if we’re not always treated that way. We need enduring collaboration between Arab Americans and policymakers, educators, and community members to defend our rights, create a more equal America, and promote more just U.S. policies abroad—starting with a cease-fire in Gaza.

April 19, 2025. WASHINGTON (AP)—At the direction of Donald Trump, 47th president of the United States, Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday sent teams of FBI agents to the residences of General Mark Milley, Eric Holder, and Hillary Clinton.

Knocking on their doors at precisely 9:00 am, the lead agents identically told each of their targets, “We’ve come to confiscate your electronic devices pursuant to a lawful warrant. You are not now under arrest.” Clinton appeared the most resigned. “What might the charges be?” “Sorry, ma’am,” said the female agent with a small ponytail and large vest emblazoned with the familiar oversized yellow lettering of the FBI. “We’re not now allowed to say.”

Paxton late morning explained the administration’s reasoning. “May we remind critics that the American people have spoken?” an apparent reference to Trump’s electoral vote victory of 270 to 268, despite former President Joe Biden’s popular vote margin of 10 million votes over Trump—or 48% to 40%. (The remainder went to four minor party candidates.) The electoral college, however, for the third time in the last seven presidential elections, turned a popular vote victory into a narrow loss.

Secretary of Homeland Security Stephen Miller made additional news on immigration in a Newsmax interview. “Today, we’re beginning construction of 50,000 modular homes in Waco, Texas, to launch ‘Operation Relocation’ to deport three million Americans who came here illegally. Promise made. Promise kept.”

The Pentagon also yesterday sent in federal troops under the 1871 KKK Insurrection Act to a dozen cities holding long-planned “Democracy, Not Dictatorship” protests—organized by MoveOn, Brady United, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Tens of thousands of peaceful marchers in each location were shocked to encounter M1 Abrams tanks rolling down city streets to block their paths with tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets. Thirteen students were killed in Atlanta alone when they stood in front of tanks that wouldn’t stop.

Reporters caught up with President Trump early afternoon in between rounds of golf at his Bedminster Club in New Jersey.. “Well, didn’t Biden do the same thing to me and Rudy? Sad about the deaths in Atlanta but, excuse me, what were those protesters doing in front of our tanks? Anyway, I’d like to remind all Americans that today is the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord that began our journey as an exceptional model of freedom and democracy.”

* * *

Growing up politically as a progressive Democrat, I never called conservative Republicans “fascist,” a) because they weren’t and b) because it sounded alarmist if not naive, the prevailing view being “only Hitler was Hitler.” That was and still is literally true… yet hopelessly dated since ignoring Donald Trump’s chesty Caesarism is now what’s truly naive.

Which raises three separate though related questions: What’s the evidence that he’s an American Fascist? Should the mainstream media finally concede that should be a newsworthy part of the 2024 contest? And will branding him as one repel a small but decisive number of independent voters to conclude, “Enough!”?

There are of course avalanches of solo articles detailing Trump’s astonishing rhetoric, scandals, and prosecutions. But in each instance, he belligerently “doubles down”—which by definition means there’s no depth he won’t descend to—and quickly offers up dog-ate-my-homework excuses: “It was a joke… Hillary and Joe are worse… What about Hunter?… That’s taken out of context… I never read Mein Kampf… Black prosecutors are racists!… that was AI, not me… Trump Derangement Syndrome!… Witch Hunt!“ His calculation is apparently to isolate and disparage all criticism and indictments so they appear at worst to be aberrations and obscure how his whole is-worse-than-the-sum-of-his-parts, as if a pointillist were judged by only a few dabs of color rather than the entirely of the work. Which in Trump’s case would reveal a portrait far closer to Orban than Obama.

America has never before witnessed a politician who so compulsively and flagrantly lies about everything that his lawyers will not allow him to testify in court.

It’s tempting to respond to his rotating evasions with John McEnroe-worthy contempt: “You. Cannot. Be. Serious!” But in the current context of close polls and monumental stakes, mere indignation might allow him to keep escaping accountability through a combination of scandal fatigue, Trump judges, his base of delirious ideologues and credulous abettors, and GOP leaders paying tribute to Trump by shrugging off his predations. Add to that Team Trump’s expectation that the Fourth Estate will just keep bothsides-ing every controversy due, in Molly Jong-Fast’s insight, to its “normalcy bias.”

With his rants dominating coverage and polls barely budging after a year of startling news cycles, Democrats need more passionate language and memorable story lines to move the needle. Brian Klaas, in his best-selling Fluke, urges advocates to use “schemas… psychological tools to distill vast amounts of information into easily maintained categories.” Former President Abraham Lincoln embraced his “rail splitter” moniker; Lenin took over Russia at the end of World War I with the penetrating slogan, “Land. Bread. Peace”; recent Republicans get it too, from Nixon’s “Silent Majority” to Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” to “Make America Great Again” and recently the rage over “Age.”

What new schema could help keep Democrats on offense and the GOP on the ropes? One would be to portray Trump as a “fascist,” despite or perhaps because of how much of the media dismiss that truth as taboo.

He did, after all, name his movement “America First” after Charles Lindbergh’s appeasement toward Germany in the 30s. Now he openly lauds, quotes, and yearns to imitate Putin, Xi, Kim and Orban—indeed acting as “Putin’s puppet” by implying that Russia should attack NATO (which is odd since the country he seeks to again lead is a member state). If that’s the company he keeps, Trump should be pressed to explain why he too isn’t a fascist, and down-ballot Republicans why they aren’t mute accomplices.

Many Americans may not now understand what that really means since America has never before encountered one… but intense national campaigns can be teachable events. A synthesis of recent books on modern definitions describe a governing system that sounds eerily familiar—viz., one-man rule (“unitary government” in the GOP euphemism) based on big lies, nationalist fervor, xenophobia, hatred of marginal groups, displays of militarism, incitement to violence, media manipulation, and persistent lawlessness.

Let’s apply those criteria to the 2024 election to see whether a democracy birthed after defeating a distant monarch might actually elect one 248 years later.

Lies. Most politicians will at times lie or fib—Mark Twain charitably called them “stretchers”—or, worse, they’ll weaponize Big Lies to justify depravity. The Confederacy maintained that slaves were “property,” Hitler blamed Jews for stabbing Germany in the back in WWI, Joe McCarthy waved around his shifting list of supposed Communists. Those falsehoods attracted immense, eager audiences… until, eventually, they didn’t.

America, however, has never before witnessed a politician who so compulsively and flagrantly lies about everything that his lawyers will not allow him to testify in court. It’s not merely Trump’s astounding 22 lies or falsehoods on average per day in his one term in office, according to The Washington Post’s fact-checking team, but also several ridiculous ones that have mesmerized his Cult-45: e.g., Obama was a Muslim born abroad; Biden stole the 2020 election; scores of different prosecutors, judges, and juries around the country are somehow in cahoots; vaccines are about personal liberty not public health; and serious crime is rampant with immigrants largely to blame (except, fyi, migrants commit fewer crimes per capita than non-migrants). Last month he even declared that Jewish Democrats “hate their religion and Israel” (which was news to this writer).

The problem is not any particular falsehood but rather how their critical mass has gravitationally pulled millions of aggrieved Americans into his black hole so they wind up not trusting anyone… except The Great Leader.

Then there are the thousands of times that Trump has deployed a classic tactic of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels—keep accusing enemies of your own misconduct in order to blur the truth. Hence, the ex-president declares, “It’s Biden who hates democracy and wants to overturn an election.” Why lie so blatantly, Trump friend Billy Bush once asked him? “Look, you just tell them and they’ll believe it. That’s it. They just do.”

Amplifying laughable lies are MAGAphones like House GOP chairs and Fox anchors. Republican chairmen have become innuendo-machines that disparage the “Biden Crime Family” based on “very credible” witnesses… who, mirable dictu, disappeared or are now in jail for spreading Russian disinformation. The performative outrage of Messrs. Jordan and Comer overlooks Biden’s zero criminal charges over his 50 years of public service compared to Trump’s 88 felony indictments in the past year (not counting adverse defamation, disbarments, and civil judgments).

At the same time, Fox seems to exist as mini-me’s repeating his gaslighting de jour—the latest being Hannity’s nightly attempts to earnestly announce that things were better four years ago, when 1.1 million American were dying from Covid-19 and Trump became the first president since Hoover to end his term with fewer jobs than at the start.

The problem is not any particular falsehood but rather how their critical mass has gravitationally pulled millions of aggrieved Americans into his black hole so they wind up not trusting anyone… except The Great Leader. Again, sound familiar?

Violence. Fascist rulers throughout history have won or maintained power via violence and intimidation: Lenin, Mussolini, Franco, and Gaddafi in violent takeovers; rogue militias such as Italian Blackshirts and German Brownshirts in the 1920s; Stalin’s Great Purge; and Hitler’s Kristallnacht in 1938 as a prequel to far worse later.

The ex-president of course has not been as savage, but it was interesting that—not exactly being a student of history—he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet by his bed, some of which were echoed later in his own propaganda. He repeatedly warns of a “blood bath” if he loses in 2024, promises that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” and, recently, endangers jurists and their families by attacking them by name. Nor was it cool when he dined with, and then praised, neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.

He routinely practices “stochastic terrorism” by deploying incendiary rhetoric that he knows—or hopes—will trigger subsequent violence. Like the hammer-wielding home invader looking for Nancy but settling for Paul Pelosi; the mass killers at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue, Walmart in El Paso, and the Buffalo supermarket quoting MAGAisms in their manifestos; and his near-physical inability to condemn the Proud Boys and Charlottesville protesters—can these private militias be fairly called his “Redshirts”?

Has America faced such a climate of “mobocracy”—a phrase of Lincoln’s—since the 1850s?

This campaign of menace has produced anticipatory genuflection by frightened Republicans whose in-boxes are clogged with death threats at any perceived disloyalty. It gets worse: FBI data demonstrate that a significant majority of domestic terrorism is now committed by white reactionaries; some senators privately admit they didn’t vote to convict him at his impeachment trial fearing for the safety of family members; ex-Pentagon Secretary Mark Esper disclosed that Trump suggested that “soldiers shoot civilians” during the George Floyd marches… as growing predictions of a new Civil War emanated from only one of our two major parties, even before the major film Civil War hits screens this month.

“In America, the hallmark of budding fascists was not intellectuals discussing how to take power,” concludes scholar Heather Cox Richardson recently in Democracy Awakening. “It was populist violence.”

No doubt that the leading example was the shouts of “hang Mike Pence” during a Trump-inspired riot that took seven lives. And no surprise that a Navigator poll in March showed the “fear of political violence” had jumped a stunning 29-45% among independents in only the past three months. Has America faced such a climate of “mobocracy”—a phrase of Lincoln’s—since the 1850s?

For the founders never anticipated a leader who would say, “We don’t debate our opponents, we destroy them!”… Oh, that was Benito Mussolini in 1936, but notice how easy it was to conflate two strongmen for whom violence was not a bug but a feature of their governance. Trump himself explained to Bob Woodward that his core belief was that “real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, fear.”

Democracy and Freedom. “Welcome to the end of Democracy,” said the smug opening speaker at this year’s CPAC conference, who at least gets props for candor.

Of course, dictatorships shun democracy by a) rigging free and fair elections and b) limiting independent thought since that threatens their all-powerful and all-knowing image. In the U.S. that shows up in proposed Republican bans on books, abortions, and marriage equality. Trump admitted to wanting to be “a dictator for a day” (as if he’d then voluntarily relinquish that power) and suggested yanking the broadcast license of NBC because of how SNL makes fun of him (networks, by the way, don’t have licenses, only stations do). A joke? Not when he previously declared that “I alone can fix it,” that “Article III [of the Constitution] allows me to do whatever I want,” and that future presidents should “have absolute immunity” for any crimes committed while in office.

Here’s only part of the GOP game plan to repress freedom by rewriting our laws and history:

• First, by shrinking minority voting at the state level while the Trump Supreme Court undermines the hugely successful Voting Rights Act (enacted unanimously, then reenacted). Why? Because, said Chief Justice John Roberts in Shelby County v. Holder, the South had changed since segregation became unlawful. Except it hadn’t and hasn’t. The Brennan Center in March documented a growing racial voting gap since that 2013 decision due to the 20 states that have enacted scores of new voter elimination laws.
• Second, limiting speech based on the unspoken premise that “everyone’s entitled to our opinion.” Numerous states are trying to imitate Florida’s pioneering attempt to ban books in school libraries that discuss racism and gender identity since that might either upset white students… or “groom” others. So Black children for generations had to endure the chains of racism, but white children today are too fragile to even learn about it.
• Third, systemically attacking the “fake media” for being “enemies of the people,” a coinage of Stalin’s. As he admitted to CBS’s Leslie Stahl, his intention behind repeating this phrase was to taint independent journalism and preempt any criticism of him.

Two of the leading Democracy indexes ( The Economist and Freedom House) rate the U.S. a “flawed democracy,” and declining. Trump redux might put us into Belarus territory.

The Rule of Law seems likely to invert into a version of mob rule if the Heritage Foundation’s dystopian Project 2025 were to be enacted. And what else could Trump have meant by admitting that he would “terminate the Constitution” in an emergency and—understanding the allure of the “anti-hero”—by repeatedly lauding Al Capone’s “tough guy” aura? Al Capone! It’s unlikely that any other American politician has ever said or even thought that.

Even as Team Trump excoriates the mild-mannered Merrick Garland for “weaponizing justice” (despite his record number of Republican Special Counsel), the ex-president unironically tells rallies that “if I see someone doing well and beating me… I’ll say indict them.” An ex-president who used his pardon power to release imprisoned political allies now promises to pardon 1400 people duly convicted of crimes in the January 6 insurrection. And no matter how delayed his multiple criminal trials may be, there’s already voluminous evidence under oath that his corrupt character puts him on a scale with Benedict Arnold and 100 Nixons. As his NSC advisor John Bolton put it, “For him, obstruction of justice is a way of life.”

If you taped over the name Donald John Trump on top of a list of all the times he’s lost in court, a neutral observer would conclude we were dealing with a career criminal.

Other-ism. History’s worst dictators have conjured up sinister-sounding enemies to boost nationalist fervor and justify violence. Whether it was Jews in Germany (Hitler famously looked admiringly on Confederate laws and later Jim Crow to help model his approach), socialists in Italy, the intellectual elites in Mao’s China, or gays now in Russia, it’s been an irresistible itch that they scratch. They may not have social programs but readily understand political pogroms (actual or polemical) to fuel their fundamental “US vs THEM” dynamic.

Trump has a proven history of bigotry. It includes unlawfully barring Black people in the 1970s from his father’s apartment buildings; questioning the birth of America’s first Black president; asserting that The Squad should “go back” to where they came from; calling African countries “shitholes”; attempting to bar Muslims from entering the U. S.; and now pledging to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. At the same time, fellow-travelers Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Fox hosts promote the white nationalist “Great Replacement Theory” and blame DEI (“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” in hiring) for causing airline crashes and the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

While avoiding the “N” word, the unmistakable GOP message is that everything will be all-white.

Wealth. Putin is reportedly the world’s richest person and keeps his oligarchs in line by controlling their wealth. Trump’s core DNA is obviously money. Consider: his obsession with ranking high on the Forbes 400; near sole policy goal of $2 trillion in more tax cuts for the already rich; transformation of the RNC into his personal piggy bank; and of course the emolumental $2 billion that Crown Prince MBS gifted son-in-law Jared Kushner. To MAGA, steep wealth and income inequality is not a problem but a promise.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in her brilliant 2020 book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, summarizes the “contract” between the authoritarian ruler and his collaborators: “The offer of power and economic gain in exchange for supporting his violent actions and suppression of civil rights.”

* * *

It’s critical that we appreciate the ambition of Trump’s extremism. He is attempting to pull off one of the biggest propaganda campaigns in political history and is getting dangerously close to succeeding. Slowing, stopping, defeating, and then reversing everything itemized above is no simple task.

Totalling all these similarities with history’s authoritarians, there must be a word that describes a corrupt megalomaniac who is running a campaign based, in his own words, on “revenge and retribution.” But that word isn’t “conservative” as Eisenhower, Reagan, or the Bushes would have understood it. If Trumpism, The Sequel were a streaming video, it would require a casting call for actors to play dolts like those in the cult movie Idiocracy, which was supposed to be a satire on reverse Darwinism, not a reality TV series.

The right word is Fascist. According to the most cited scholarship on such matters, “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then…” But can that word and frame in 2024 become as salient as the high-decibel GOP campaign of smear and fear?

We’ll never know whether the fascist moniker is effective if most of the Fourth Estate sticks to its standard “horse-race” template, and continues to assume that today’s GOP is anything like country-club Republicans of decades past.

There are still clusters of influential people who appear scared to utter it: commentators who are stuck on Hitler as the litmus test; politicians who don’t want to risk offending some conservative constituents; an entire party in a two-party system too fearful to criticize him; editors at major publications reluctant to turn off any of their audience, as libertarian oligarchs like Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and John Malone show no interest in encouraging debates about the GOP’s dangerous extremism. The mainstream media regularly quote Republicans calling all Democrats “socialists,” yet reach for their smelling salts at the prospect of discussing whether the Trump clique is “fascist,” even though the former is false and the latter true.

Calling out hard-core MAGAs, to be sure, won’t change their minds since they emotionally bond with a leader who shamelessly hates whom they hate and are loathe to abandon their tribe. “You can’t reason people out of an opinion,” wrote Jonathan Swift, “that they didn’t reason themselves into.” Still, that public conversation would likely spur a larger Democratic turnout (especially as compared to 2016 when so many lazy voters thought Hillary couldn’t lose) and also repulse some slice of undecided voters otherwise immune to mere high-minded appeals to democracy and freedom.

How real is the threat that an Americanized fascism can defeat “the world’s oldest democracy” this fall? My best answer—very real yet still very unlikely. There are obviously several big unknowns to come beyond the scope of this article, like the result of Trump’s upcoming criminal trial(s), the Extreme Court’s ruling on “president immunity,” third-party candidates getting on ballots, and a possible October surprise in either of two major wars.

But Biden has a clear edge (as of now) for three big reasons: first, the ascendancy of abortion as the likely No. 1 voter variable due to the Dobbs decision and the absurd Arizona decision this month that upheld a total ban based on an 1864 statute… and as voters have clearly shown in the 2022 midterms and all subsequent state abortion referenda; second, a steadily rising economy that undermines the GOP falsehood that things are going to hell; and third, Trump is in fact a dangerous extremist, although no one narrative has yet stuck to him. Fascist can because it’s true and odious.

Sticky monikers have done that before. The Johnson campaign was able to label Goldwater a war-monger, which helped produce a record majority. And in a non-political context, “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit“ successfully focused O.J.’s jury. Similarly, in 2024, “Dad, how can you vote for an open Fascist who threatens judges’ families and wants an abortion ban that could send your daughter to jail?” is not an easy question for a parent to answer. But we’ll never know whether the fascist moniker is effective if most of the Fourth Estate sticks to its standard “horse-race” template, and continues to assume that today’s GOP is anything like country-club Republicans of decades past.

While the campaign’s exact language and framing is evolving, the stakes are way bigger than even a timorous media. It’s a contest not merely between two presidents but especially between two traditions that have competed throughout U. S. history. One assumes that we are a nation founded on Democracy, the Rule-of-Law, and Equality; the other, to the contrary, on States Rights, Corporatism, and Free Markets. One flows from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration, a “we-the-people” Constitution, Lincoln’s Proclamation, FDR’s New Deal, and the 60’s Civil Rights laws. The other stems from the Articles of Confederation, the Confederacy, Reagan’s Cowboy Capitalism, Mike Johnson’s theocracy, and Trump’s dictatorial dreams.

Progress for all or privilege for some. The Rule of Law or the Law of Rule. Human rights or Property rights. Democracy or Fascism.

In this homestretch of our 60th national election, it comes down to Democratic framing, a truth-telling media, and the independent judiciary to convince the electorate that Trump is actually the biggest threat ever to the story of America. If these three entities can crystalize the tyranny in Trump’s personality and program, America will again validate Tom Paine’s optimism that “there is too much common sense and independence in America to be long the dupe of any fiction, foreign or domestic.”

Last Monday, April 8, Washington Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Republican South Carolina Rep. Jeff Duncan—two of the oil and gas industry’s biggest cronies—traveled to my home of Port Arthur, Texas, to push for the expansion of liquefied natural gas export facility buildouts in my community.

Their stunt comes as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) prepares to tie Ukraine aid to a reversal of President Joe Biden’s pause on the buildout of LNG facilities—until it’s determined whether or not they are truly in the best interest of communities like mine.

My only question is: Who are you going to believe?

Instead of believing the lies of executives with no skin in the game and no connection to the neighborhoods ravaged by climate change, we need to believe in ourselves—in our ability to organize and stand up for the health and prosperity of our communities.

For over 60 years, I’ve called Port Arthur my home. I lived on the “fence line”—the dividing line between residential neighborhoods and LNG facilities—most of my life. I’m a retired, second-generation refinery worker and union member; a former three-term city council member and mayor pro-tem, who has witnessed Big Oil operate with impunity for a long time.

I know oil executives’ push to build out these toxic LNG facilities is not to strengthen the local economy—as they will often argue. Rather, building harmful refineries in “sacrifice zones” like my neighborhood are what they deem “the path of least resistance” toward notching bigger corporate profits at a time when most Americans are struggling to make ends meet.

Reps. Rodgers and Duncan on the other hand—like many of the men in suits who pop up telling us what our community needs—are puppets of Big Oil and Gas, having received at least $1,711,300 in campaign contributions from the industry while in office. So I’ll ask once more: When it comes to the voices most concerned with the health and financial well-being of American citizens living in the methane haze of these plants, who are you going to believe?

What makes this incursion into our communities all the more brazen is that it comes while Americans, particularly in the Gulf South, are reeling from near-constant extreme weather events caused by fossil fuel-driven climate change. Price gouging corporations blame these catastrophes on American consumers, while gas prices skyrocket and families struggle to pay for escalating home insurance premiums.

Port Arthur has had three operating refineries, and numerous other petrochemical facilities for many years. Yet, Port Arthur has a poverty rate of 28%, an unemployment rate that’s almost three times the national average at 10.4%, and some of the lowest home values in Texas. If these facilities were meant to benefit ordinary citizens, wouldn’t we have felt it by now?

Furthermore, Port Arthur has been a prime example of the human and economic toll of fossil fuel-driven climate change—having endured Hurricane Rita in 2005, Ike in 2008, and Harvey in 2017. Because of the oil and gas industry’s turning a blind eye to the climate crisis, Port Arthur residents live in constant fear of life changing disasters. I’m afraid to even say the word “hurricane,” out of fear I’ll conjure one up. Again I ask: Who are you going to believe?

If you think that this is the lone horror story of just one community in America, I beg you to reconsider. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects LNG export capacity to double by 2027. Hitting that target means building more facilities. Do you think that expansion will happen in Beverly Hills, River Oaks, or the other affluent neighborhoods where these executives live? Or near the comfortable homes where Reps. McMorris Rodgers and Duncan reside? It seems far more likely they will continue to demand Black and Hispanic communities across the country be sacrificed, to hold their breath in billowing toxic clouds.

Instead of believing the lies of executives with no skin in the game and no connection to the neighborhoods ravaged by climate change, we need to believe in ourselves—in our ability to organize and stand up for the health and prosperity of our communities. We, the folks who have endured cancer diagnoses and the unnecessary loss of family, friends, and neighbors, must stand firm in the face of corporate greed and Big Oil deception.

The fight we are waging in Port Arthur is more than the isolated tale of a small town; it’s a playbook for working class communities actively resisting the “profits over people” ethos destroying American communities. Unfortunately for Reps. McMorris Rodgers and Duncan, you can’t be a mouthpiece for citizens AND Big Oil at the same time.

In March 2023, a group of House Republicans launched a new Anti-Woke Caucus to “root out all far-left political programs from the federal government”—including those focused on ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, in both hiring and workplace practices. The group wants to “protect taxpayer’s [sic] from being forced to fund woke and divisive ideologies.”

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) chairs the caucus, which has 26 members, half of whom are also members of the far-right, obstructionist House Freedom Caucus.

The major difference between the two special interest groups is that the more radical Freedom Caucus seeks to completely change the direction and approach of the House GOP, which it believes is too accommodating to Democrats and the few moderate Republicans still in office.

Calling for the total elimination of any preferential treatment based on race, color, or national origin—part of the so-called “leftist” agenda—may make for good GOP rhetoric and energize a receptive base of Christian white nationalists. But it also has real-world implications that conflict with the positions of other Republican interest groups.

In contrast, the Anti-Woke Caucus includes members who are willing to work with party leaders and only want to focus on a single cause: exposing and eliminating programs it considers “far-left” or too progressive throughout the federal government.

The first action the caucus undertook last year was to endorse the Fairness, Anti-discrimination, and Individual Rights Act (FAIR Act) sponsored by Rep. Thomas Tiffany (R-Wis.), which prohibits the federal government, federal contractors, or any state or private entity that receives federal funding from “discriminating” by barring them from “giving preference to” any person or group based on “race, color, or national origin.”

Last year the caucus also backed a House amendment Banks added to the FY 2024 appropriations bill for the Department of Defense (DOD), which would have prevented federal funds from being used to hire or pay employees to develop, refine, and implement DEI policies. Since the Senate rejected the amendment, the restriction on DEI initiatives within the military did not make it into the final DOD appropriation.

Targeting Support for Minority-Owned Business 

Calling for the total elimination of any preferential treatment based on race, color, or national origin—part of the so-called “leftist” agenda—may make for good GOP rhetoric and energize a receptive base of Christian white nationalists. But it also has real-world implications that conflict with the positions of other Republican interest groups.

The FAIR Act’s prohibition on preferences based on race would, for example, eliminate programs to encourage the growth and expansion of minority-owned businesses—also known as “set-aside” contracting. Through the Small Business Administration (SBA) and other agencies, the federal government is actively amping up its support of these businesses.

Dozens of studies have shown that minority-owned businesses are more likely to be denied credit in the private sector and are less likely to apply for loans due to fear of rejection.

The GOP had generally supported federal government contracting with minority-owned businesses, not as a means of addressing historical disparities but as a way to attract more Black, Latino, and Asian-American voters.

They “are likely to pay higher interest rates” on loans, according to Minority Professional: 7.8% on average versus 6.4% for businesses run by non-minorities. In addition, minority-owned businesses are “less likely to receive loans” and when they do, “they receive lower loan amounts.” Since state and federal government leaders have long recognized this disparity, they have created minority business set-aside programs as a counterbalance to these unfair practices.

Bipartisan support for minority-owned business contracting began as long ago as 1969 when Republican President Richard Nixon established the Office of Minority Business Enterprise. Today, that office is known as the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) within the U.S. Department of Commerce.

In addition, the SBA offers counseling, training, and funding for minority-owned businesses. President Joe Biden has greatly expanded outreach and access to small disadvantaged businesses (SDB)—those owned by one or more individuals who are socially or economically disadvantaged—while also increasing the percentage of government contracts going to these businesses.

GOP Waffles on Its Position

The Anti-Woke Caucus appears to be somewhat out of step with a majority of Republican leaders and right-wing organizations on the SDB issue. During his first year in office, former President Donald Trump proposed eliminating the MBDA, but minority-owned businesses and groups representing them got so outraged that he backed down. Up until then, the GOP had generally supported federal government contracting with minority-owned businesses, not as a means of addressing historical disparities but as a way to attract more Black, Latino, and Asian-American voters.

The U.S. Black Chambers (USBC) called Trump’s proposal to eliminate the MBDA “another failure to recognize the impact of Black business owners.” It pointed out that the MBDA actually “accounts for less than 0.001% of federal spending [yet it] supports business centers throughout the country and has helped secure $36 billion in contracts and capital for minority-owned businesses, retaining 125,000 jobs.”

Given the pushback—including bipartisan support in Congress and from the Congressional Black Caucus, in particular—Trump reversed course, kept funding for the MBDA in the proposed budget, and even went so far as to welcome winners of an MBDA enterprise development award program to the White House in October 2017.

Trump and the far Right can’t seem to land on a consistent position on the value of minority-owned business support.

“The work you do and the products and services you bring into this world generate new prosperity across America,” Trump congratulated the attendees. “For that, we are in your debt.”

Right-wing organizations also recognize that the Commerce Department’s longstanding agency enjoys broad, bipartisan support. Even The Heritage Foundation, speaking on behalf of more than 100 right-wing groups supporting its Project 2025 “presidential transition” playbook, recommends keeping the agency if Trump is elected to a second term.

At 900 pages, the Heritage playbook lays out the Right’s agenda for reconfiguring the federal government during a second Trump administration, with line-item eliminations of hundreds of programs in the federal budget. It envisions a country with a significantly weakened role for the federal government—which would no longer take action on climate change, for example, or provide protections based on race or sexual identity—and calls for replacing a nonpartisan, apolitical civil service with far-right political appointees.

Heritage admits that using race as an explicit criterion for federal funding is problematic for conservatives (see Project 2025, p. 716). But since it acknowledges that one-third of the total businesses in the U.S. are owned by non-whites, the numbers are too large to be ignored.

Even though Trump reversed course on MBDA in 2017, he could, of course, change his mind again if he regains office. Last month, the Trump-appointed Judge Mark T. Pittman of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Texas ruled in a lawsuit filed by the right-wing Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty that MBDA discriminates against white business owners and violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment equal protection clause.

Arguing that even saying minorities are at a disadvantage denies the rights of whites, Pittman ordered the MBDA to accept applications for loans and grants from white businesspeople as well. He acknowledges that the agency is meant to help “alleviate opportunity gaps” for minority entrepreneurs, but says that it is wrong to presume that racial minorities are inherently disadvantaged and that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

The Biden administration is likely to appeal the decision.

Trump and the far Right can’t seem to land on a consistent position on the value of minority-owned business support. But given its popularity among business groups and many politicians, it seems unlikely that the Anti-Woke Caucus will get its way—at least on this particular issue.

This week, the U.S. and U.K. have the chance to correct decades of their blatant geopolitical errors in the Israel-Palestine conflict by welcoming Palestine as the 194th United Nations member state. More than any other countries, the U.S. and U.K. have wrecked the Middle East through their non-stop meddling and imperial arrogance. This week they have the chance to make some amends.

A total of 139 countries already recognize the State of Palestine, more than two-thirds of the U.N. member states. Several European states will soon join the list. Yet the U.S. has so far blocked Palestine’s membership in the U.N., with the U.K. always sticking close to the U.S. lead. Both have relentlessly backed Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestine and are currently actively backing Israel in its horrific destruction of Gaza.

This week, most likely on Friday, the U.N. Security Council will vote in favor of U.N. membership for Palestine—if the U.S. and U.K. don’t block it yet again with their veto. Back in 2011, Palestine had the support of the U.N. Security Council for membership, except that the U.S. forced the Palestinians to accept “observer” status instead, promising that full membership would soon follow, yet another U.S. deception.

Despite Israel’s relentless provocations, routine killing of Palestinians (known colloquially as “mowing the grass”), repeated violations of the U.N. Security Council, and now the slaughter in Gaza, the U.S. and U.K. have remained steadfast in backing Israel and opposing Palestine as if nothing at all is amiss.

No countries in the world have done more to wreck the Middle East than the U.K. and U.S. The lead role certainly goes to Britain, whose imperial machinations in the region date back to the 19th century and continue until today. Britain kept Egypt under its thumb for decades, from the 1880s to the 1950s. It deceitfully promised overlapping parts of the Ottoman Middle East three times over during World War I: to the French (in the Sykes-Picot Agreement), to the Arabs (in the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence), and to the Zionists (in the Balfour Declaration), purporting to allocate what was not theirs in the first place.

After World War I, Britain took Palestine for itself under a so-called mandate of the newly created League of Nations, while France grabbed a mandate over Lebanon and Syria. Britain left Palestine in a shambles in 1947, but continued its relentless meddling by teaming up with France and Israel to invade Egypt in 1956. Britain’s meddling has also contributed to destruction and disarray in Yemen, Iraq, and many more parts of the Middle East.

After World War II, the U.S. picked up where Britain left off, first joining Britain in the MI6-CIA overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, and then going on to a long career of CIA-led regime-change operations including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, among others. Throughout the entire postwar period, the U.S. has been the lead dishonest broker between Israel and Palestine, for example calling for the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 but then boycotting and trying to overthrow Hamas when it won those elections. In 2011, when Palestine applied for U.N. membership, and won the support of the U.N. Security Council membership committee, the U.S. leaned on Palestine to wait and to accept observer status instead, promising that full membership would soon follow. This was yet another lie.

Despite numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions over the years calling for a two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Israeli governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu have blatantly rejected an independent State of Palestine. The current Netanyahu cabinet includes right-wing extremists such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir who openly call for ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza to create a Greater Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Yet despite Israel’s relentless provocations, routine killing of Palestinians (known colloquially as “mowing the grass”), repeated violations of the U.N. Security Council, and now the slaughter in Gaza, the U.S. and U.K. have remained steadfast in backing Israel and opposing Palestine as if nothing at all is amiss.

The question is whether the U.S. and U.K. have any sense and any shame at this point. They may think they are supporting Israel by blocking Palestine’s U.N. membership, but the fact is that Israel is more isolated and endangered than ever because of the Israeli government’s extremism, its shocking violence against the Palestinian people, and its apartheid rule. Since the start of the war last fall, 33,000 Palestinians are officially counted as dead, yet the actual death toll is vastly higher, with tens of thousands more still buried under the rubble or dead from extreme deprivations of food, water, and healthcare.

Alas, in recent days, the double standards and falsehoods of the U.S. and U.K. have been on full display. The U.S. and U.K. adamantly refused to condemn Israel’s brazenly illegal bombing of Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, but then heatedly condemned Iran when it counter-attacked two weeks later. This absurd double-standard makes the U.S. and U.K. look like crass bullies in the eyes of the rest of the world.

After more than a century of U.K. and U.S. meddling in the Middle East, it’s time to be honest about the facts and the solutions. Most importantly, welcoming Palestine as U.N. member state and implementing the two-state solution according to international law is the path to peace, justice, and security for both Israel and Palestine. Most of the world enthusiastically back this solution. It’s just a question of whether the U.K. and U.S. will veto it. It’s high time for the two powers that have done the most to wreck the Middle East to support the true path to peace by welcoming Palestine as a sovereign U.N. member state now, not in some fabled future that is forever blocked by Israeli hardliners.

A Boeing whistleblower is testifying before Congress today that the 787 has dangerous flaws in the way it’s put together.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s investigations subcommittee that will hear from the whistleblower, told The New York Times he has heard:

Repeated, shocking allegations about Boeing’s manufacturing failings [that] point to an appalling absence of safety culture and practices—where profit is prioritized over everything else.

Profit?

The last year that Boeing invested in creating a new jet airplane from scratch was 2004. While it costs around $7 billion to develop a new plane, Boeing chose to save that money by “upgrading” their 737 line to the infamous 737 Max, which has now killed hundreds of people.

But just between 2014 and last year, Boeing showed a profit of over $95 billion. If they didn’t spend that money on improved safety, new products, or paying their workers better, where did it go? Follow along…

It’s time to declare the 43-year Reagan Revolution’s neoliberal experiment a failure, and outlaw or heavily tax the share buybacks that are one of its most visible markers.

Just as an example, let’s say you and I owned a publicly traded corporation with 100 shares that sold for $100 each (yes, it’s a very small corporation!). You own 10 shares ($1,000 worth of stock), I own 10 shares (ditto), and the general public owns 80 shares. The notional stock value of the company is 100 shares times $100 each, or $10,000.

So, how do you and I increase the value of our stock so we can sell some or all of it (or borrow against it) for a profit?

The way businesses have traditionally increased the value of their shares—all the way back to the invention of the modern corporation when Queen Elizabeth I chartered the East India Company on December 31, 1600—has been to grow the company.

Develop new products. Build new airplanes or widgets. Open new stores. Invest in a sales-force or advertising campaign. Expand manufacturing capability or open new factories. Improve employee productivity and retention with better pay and benefits.

But what if there was a way to make our stock price go up without any real work on our parts? No need to develop new products, open new outlets, increase worker pay, or sell a single extra widget?

Turns out, there is. All we have to do is take some of the company’s profit this year into the public marketplace (the stock exchange we’re listed on) and “buy back” from the public, say, 20 shares for $100 each and “retire” or, essentially, destroy them.

Instead of 100 shares, our company now only has 80 shares, but it’s still worth $10,000. Which means each share magically went from a price of $100 to a price of $125! ($10,000 divided by 80 = $125 per share.)

The value of your and my investment in our company each went from $1,000 to $1,250 without either of us having done anything other than executing that stock buyback: if we sold our stock today we’d show an instant profit of $250 each. All our other stockholders are happy, too, because their stock also went up in price.

Back in 1934 when, in the wake of the epic stock market crash of 1929 caused by insider trading, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and put Joe Kennedy in charge of it, one of Kennedy’s first actions was to largely outlaw these kinds of stock buybacks, labeling them “stock price manipulation.”

(My late friend Gloria Swanson, who knew both Kennedy and FDR well, told me over dinner in her New York apartment in the early 1980s that FDR told her he appointed Kennedy head of the SEC because, she said, imitating FDR’s voice, “It takes a crook to catch a crook.”)

Thus, from 1934 until the Reagan Revolution, American businesses grew the value of their stock by growing the value of their companies. It made America the leader in industrial manufacturing, innovation, and R&D. Sam Walton started Walmart with the slogan, hung as giant banners over his stores and echoed as the title of his autobiography, “100% Made in the USA.”

With that innovation and business expansion, we developed lifesaving new drugs, the transistor and integrated circuit, put men on the moon, and produced more patents than every other country in the world combined.

Today, though, we’ve lost that distinction: China produces more patents than the U.S., and it takes massive government subsidies to get companies to develop new products like chips or electric cars.

Boeing, instead of building new airplanes to expand and upgrade their fleet, spent over $60 billion on stock buybacks in the years leading up to the 2019 grounding of their Max fleet. Just between 2013 and 2019 they bought back an astonishing $43.5 billion in shares.

Not one penny of that money did anything to increase the value of Boeing: instead, it simply manipulated upward the price of their stock, as the purchased and retired shares vanished from the marketplace per the example I opened this article with.

Because most of the company’s senior executives got most of their compensation in stock rather than pay (to avoid the corporate loss of tax deductibility on salaries over $1 million), the benefit went primarily to Boeing’s executives and stockholders. Regular salaried and hourly employees were left out of the equation altogether, as was much of the ability to grow the company.

In fact, to free up money to pay for stock buybacks to feather the nests of the company’s senior executives and shareholders, the company restrained pay increases for regular employees, cut back on quality control employees, and created the kludge of the jerry-rigged 737 Max 8 and 9 planes.

According to data compiled by William Lazonick and the Academic-Industry Research Network from Boeing’s 10-K SEC filings, in the 20 years from 1998 to 2018 the company bought back $61 billion worth of stock, representing 81.8% of all profits. When you add the dividends paid to shareholders during that same period, the amount was 121% of its profits.

In other words, the senior executives appear to have spent the past few decades looting the company for their own benefit.

And Boeing isn’t alone in this: Virtually every American exchange-listed company is doing the same, which is a main reason why American worker pay and innovation have both been so stagnant for so long.

Apple, for example, has bought back $467 billion in their own shares since 2012, rather than invest in manufacturing facilities and decent worker pay here in the U.S. Facebook bought back over $50 billion of their own stock just in 2021, making Mark Zuckerberg the richest millennial in America, controlling over 1/50th of all millennial wealth.

In the nine years leading up to 2021, the S&P 500’s 474 corporations spent $5.7 trillion buying back their own stock: That’s more than half their total income. Further gutting their ability to pay their employees well or develop new products, they paid another $4.2 trillion in dividends to shareholders, representing 41% of their net income.

And the problem is equally pervasive among companies listed on the Dow and the NASDAQ.

How did it come to this?

It started with Reagan’s putting John Shad—the vice chairman of the monster investment house E.F. Hutton—in charge of the SEC, which regulates monster investment houses.

Shad wasted no time in deregulating stock buybacks, instituting in 1982 what’s now known as “Rule 10b-18” that made stock buybacks explicitly legal for the first time since 1934.

Since then, share buybacks have become the most personally profitable business scam CEOs and senior executives can run against their own employees, companies, and communities.

When Reagan and Shad made this change in 1982, the average compensation of CEOs was around 30 times that of their average employee. CEO’s often lived in the same communities as their workers, or in a just slightly more upscale part of town.

Today CEO compensation is between 254 and 10,000 times the average employee, depending on the industry, and CEOs live in palatial estates with servants’ quarters, yachts, and private jets; most of that increase in their annual income is the result of their companies’ repeatedly executing stock buybacks over the past 40 years.

Corporate CEOs call this “maximizing shareholder value” and claim it’s how capitalism is supposed to work. But Adam Smith never anticipated such a thing, would have called it a scam, and he would have been right.

As more and more CEOs got in on the hustle since Reagan legalized it in the 1980s, it’s come to account for much of the 40-year explosion in the price of publicly traded stocks.

Dow Industrials are shown between 1900-2019.

Investors don’t complain because they’re making out well, too (and 84% of all stock in America is owned by the top 10%).

After all, why spend money on improving the company—or even on routine maintenance and safety—when you can personally cash in just as effectively by simply using your company’s revenues to engineer a new stock buyback scheme every year?

As William Lazonick wrote for The Hill in 2018:

Most recently, from 2007 through 2016, stock repurchases by 461 companies listed on the S&P 500 totaled $4 trillion, equal to 54% of profits... Indeed, top corporate executives are often willing to incur debt, lay off employees, cut wages, sell assets, and eat into cash reserves to “maximize shareholder value.”

It’s all done, Lazonick notes, to facilitate share buybacks.

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) have all written about this, decrying stock buybacks and offering specific proposals to tax or even outlaw them. (Biden put a 1% tax on them with the Inflation Reduction Act, a breakthrough, but it should probably be at least 40% to have any impact.)

It’s time to declare the 43-year Reagan Revolution’s neoliberal experiment a failure, and outlaw or heavily tax the share buybacks that are one of its most visible markers. Joe Kennedy knew what he was talking about when he criminalized them, even if he was a crook.

Donald Trump became the first former or sitting U.S. president to stand trial on criminal charges when jury selection began Monday in his “hush-money” case in New York City. Not even Richard Nixon, who was saved from an indictment for his role in the Watergate scandal by a presidential pardon, achieved such ignominy. Whatever its outcome, the trial will make history.

Trump was indicted in New York on March 30, 2023 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to prevent her from going public during the 2016 presidential campaign about their alleged sexual encounter a decade earlier. In a “Statement of Facts” filed along with the indictment and in a press release issued the day of Trump’s April 4 arraignment, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg explained that the payment to Daniels was part of a larger “catch and kill” scheme Trump initiated in August 2015 “to identify, purchase, and bury negative information about him and boost his electoral prospects.”

In addition to the Daniels disbursement, the scheme involved a $150,000 payment to former Playboy magazine “Playmate of the Year” Karen McDougal to cover up an alleged extramarital affair, and a $30,000 payment to Dino Sajudin, a former doorman at the Trump Tower in Manhattan, who allegedly was trying to sell a story about a child Trump had fathered out of wedlock.

From a political standpoint, the hush-money prosecution may not be as significant as Trump’s other criminal cases, but apart from its embarrassing and salacious details—all of which will be laid bare in open court—it is no laughing matter.

The scheme was carried out by Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen, who made the payment to Daniels on Trump’s behalf and was later reimbursed by Trump. The payments to McDougal and Sajudin came from American Media, Inc., the former publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid, whose then-chairman and chief executive officer, David Pecker, is a long-time Trump associate.

Although evidence of the larger scheme will come before the jury to show Trump’s intent to use the payments to enhance his election prospects, the indictment only charges him with offenses related to Daniels.

There is nothing illegal per se about making hush-money payments. The wealthy often use them to secure nondisclosure agreements to keep embarrassing or confidential information private.

What makes Trump’s scheme unlawful, according to Bragg, is that Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Daniels was actually a contribution to Trump’s election campaign that was both undisclosed and exceeded the 2016 $2,700 limit on individual contributions set by the Federal Election Campaign Act. In addition, the reimbursement checks written to Cohen in 2017 were “illegally disguised [in the records of the Trump Organization] as… payment for legal services rendered pursuant to a non-existent retainer agreement” to hide their actual purpose. Eleven of the 34 counts lodged against Trump involve checks written to Cohen (nine signed by Trump himself); 12 concern false invoices Cohen submitted; and 12 involve false entries in records maintained by the Trump Organization.

Although New York prosecutors routinely litigate business-record frauds, such cases are usually handled as misdemeanors. Offenses become felonies when the intent to defraud includes an intent to commit or conceal another crime. The other crimes implicated in Trump’s scheme include federal election campaign finance violations, parallel state-election law crimes, and tax fraud.

As in all criminal cases, Bragg’s legal team will have the burden of proving their case beyond a reasonable doubt. The team has named 11 potential witnesses, headed by Cohen, Daniels, and Pecker. Also named are Trump administration operatives Hope Hicks and Madeleine Westerhout, and Trump Organization insiders Rhona Graff, Jeffrey McConney, and Deborah Tarasoff, who presumably will be called to help establish Trump’s knowledge of the scheme and his criminal intent.

In addition to the witnesses, the prosecution will present a trove of documentary evidence, including the reimbursement checks written to Cohen, the phony business ledger entries, and a taped telephone conversation between Cohen and Trump that Cohen secretly recorded in September 2016. The pair can be heard on the recording discussing how to hide the payments to McDougal.

None of this means that the case is a slam dunk. Cohen will be particularly easy prey on cross examination as a convicted felon. In 2018, he pleaded guilty in federal court to tax evasion, making false statements to banks and campaign finance violations for the Daniels and McDougal payments. He was subsequently sentenced to serve three years in prison.

Trump was never charged with a federal crime, but was named in the pleadings filed against Cohen as “individual 1,” on whose behalf Cohen allegedly acted.

All of this has Trump alarmed that his strategy of delaying his day of reckoning in a criminal trial is coming to an end. The strategy has worked thus far in the two cases brought by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith for election subversion and mishandling classified documents, and in the case brought by Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis for election interference.

But the strategy has run aground in Trump’s former hometown, where he rose to fame as a real estate mogul and a “reality TV” huckster. Last week, his attorneys lost four last-ditch motions to delay the trial.

From a political standpoint, the hush-money prosecution may not be as significant as Trump’s other criminal cases, but apart from its embarrassing and salacious details—all of which will be laid bare in open court—it is no laughing matter. Each of the 34 counts carries a potential four-year prison term, with a maximum cap of 20 years for convictions on five or more counts.

We can’t peek inside Trump’s fevered mind, but it’s safe to assume, as former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has said, Trump “goes to bed every night, thinking about the sound of that jail cell door closing behind” him.

Last September witnessed what used to be a truly rare weather phenomenon: a Mediterranean hurricane, or “medicane.” Once upon a time, the Mediterranean Sea simply didn’t get hot enough to produce hurricanes more than every few hundred (yes, few hundred!) years. In this case, however, Storm Daniel assaulted Libya with a biblical-style deluge for four straight days. It was enough to overwhelm the al-Bilad and Abu Mansour dams near the city of Derna, built in the 1970s to old cool-Earth specifications. The resulting flood destroyed nearly 1,000 buildings, washing thousands of people out to sea, and displaced tens of thousands more.

Saliha Abu Bakr, an attorney, told a harrowing tale of how the waters kept rising in her apartment building before almost reaching the roof and quite literally washing many of its residents away. She clung to a piece of wooden furniture for three hours in the water. “I can swim,” she told a reporter afterward, “but when I tried to save my family, I couldn’t do a thing.” Human-caused climate change, provoked by the way we spew 37 billion metric tons of dangerous carbon dioxide gas into our atmosphere every year, made the Libyan disaster 50 times more likely than it once might have been. And worse yet, for the Middle East, as well as the rest of the world, that nightmare is undoubtedly only the beginning of serial disasters to come (and come and come and come) that will undoubtedly render millions of people homeless or worse.

Failing Grades

In the race to keep this planet from heating up more than 2.7°F (1.5°C) above the preindustrial average, the whole world is already getting abominable grades. Beyond that benchmark, scientists fear, the planet’s whole climate system could fall into chaos, severely challenging civilization itself. The Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), which monitors the implementation of the Paris climate accords, presented its alarming conclusions in a late March report. The CCPI crew was so disheartened by its findings—no country is even close to meeting the goals set in that treaty—that it left the top three slots in its ranking system completely empty.

For the most part, the countries of the Middle East made a distinctly poor showing when it came to the greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that are already heating the planet so radically. Admittedly, Morocco, with longstanding and ambitious green energy goals, came in ninth, and Egypt, which depends heavily on hydroelectric power and has some solar projects, ranked a modest 22nd. However, some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hit rock bottom in the CCPI’s chart. That matters since you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that the region produces perhaps 27% of the world’s petroleum annually and includes five of the 10 largest oil producers on the planet.

Ironically enough, the Middle East is at special risk from climate change. Scientists have found that it’s experiencing twice the rate of heating as the global average and, in the near future, they warn that it will suffer, as a recent study from the Carnegie Institute for International Peace put it, from “soaring heatwaves, declining precipitation, extended droughts, more intense sandstorms and floods, and rising sea levels.” And yet some of the countries facing the biggest threat from the climate crisis seem all too intent on making it far worse.

Little Sparta

The CCPI index, issued by Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute, and the Climate Action Network (CAN), ranks countries in their efforts to meet the goals set by the Paris agreement according to four criteria: their emissions of greenhouse gases, their implementation of renewable energy, their consumption of fossil fuel energy, and their government’s climate policies. The authors listed the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 65th place, calling it “one of the lowest-performing countries.” The report then slammed the government of President Mohammed Bin Zayed, saying: “The UAE‘s per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are among the highest in the world, as is its per capita wealth, while its national climate targets are inadequate. The UAE continues to develop and finance new oil and gas fields domestically and abroad.” On the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula, the UAE has a population of only about a million citizens (and about 8 million guest workers). It is nonetheless a geopolitical energy and greenhouse gas giant of the first order.

The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC, headquartered in that country’s capital and helmed by businessman Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber (who is also the country’s minister of industry and advanced technology), has some of the more ambitious plans for expanding petroleum production in the world. ADNOC is, in fact, seeking to increase its oil production from 4 million to 5 million barrels a day by 2027, while further developing its crucial al-Nouf oil field, next to which the UAE is building an artificial island to help with its expected future expansion. To be fair, the UAE is behaving little differently from the United States, which ranked only a few spots better at 57. Last October, in fact, American oil production, which continues to be heavily government-subsidized (as does that industry in Europe), actually hit an all-time high.

The UAE is a major proponent of the dubious technique of carbon capture and storage, which has not yet been found to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions significantly or to do so safely and affordably. The magazine Oil Change International points out that the country’s carbon capture efforts at the Emirates Steel Plant probably sequester no more than 17% of the CO2 produced there and that the stored carbon dioxide is then injected into older, non-producing oil fields to help retrieve the last drops of petroleum they hold.

Moving away from fossil fuels can make humanity more prosperous and safer from planetary catastrophe rather than turning us into so many beggars.

The UAE, which the Pentagon adoringly refers to as “little Sparta” for its aggressive military interventions in places like Yemen and Sudan, brazenly flouts the international scientific consensus on climate action. As ADNOC’s Al Jaber had the cheek to claim last fall: “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5°C.”

Such outrageous denialism scales almost Trumpian heights in the faux grandeur of its mendacity. At the time, Al Jaber was also, ironically enough, the chairman of the yearly United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) climate summit. Last November 21, he boldly posed this challenge: “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phaseout of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” (In the world he’s helping to create, of course, even the caves would sooner or later prove too hot to handle.) This year the International Energy Agency decisively answered his epic piece of trolling by reporting that the wealthier nations, particularly the European ones, actually grew their gross national products in 2023 even as they cut CO2 emissions by a stunning 4.5%. In other words, moving away from fossil fuels can make humanity more prosperous and safer from planetary catastrophe rather than turning us into so many beggars.

“Absolutely Not!”

What could be worse than the UAE’s unabashedly pro-fossil fuel energy policy? Well, Iran, heavily wedded to oil and gas, is, at 66, ranked one place lower than that country. Ironically, however, extensive American sanctions on Iran’s petroleum exports may, at long last, be turning that country’s ruling ayatollahs toward creating substantial wind and solar power projects.

But I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that dead last—with an emphasis on “dead”—comes that favorite of Donald (“drill, drill, drill“) Trump, Saudi Arabia, which, at 67, “scores very low in all four CCPI index categories: Energy Use, Climate Policy, Renewable Energy, and GHG Emissions.” Other observers have noted that, since 1990, the kingdom’s carbon dioxide emissions have increased by a compound yearly rate of roughly 4% and, in 2019, that relatively small country was the world’s 10th largest emitter of CO2.

Worse yet, though you wouldn’t know it from the way the leaders of both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are acting, the Arabian Peninsula (already both arid and torrid) is anything but immune to the potential disasters produced by climate change. The year 2023 was, in fact, the third hottest on record in Saudi Arabia. (2021 took the all-time hottest mark so far.) The weather is already unbearable there in the summer. On July 18, 2023, the temperature in the kingdom’s Eastern Province, al-Ahsa, reached an almost inconceivable 122.9°F (50.5°C). If, in the future, such temperatures were to be accompanied by a humidity of 50%, some researchers are suggesting that they could prove fatal to humans. According to Professor Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in England and his colleagues, that kind of heat can actually raise the temperature of an individual by 1.8°F. In other words, it would be as if they were running a fever and, worse yet, “people’s metabolic rates also rose by 56%, and their heart rates went up by 64%.”

Unfortunately, on a planet they are helping to overheat in a remarkable fashion, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have largely taken steps—huge ones, in fact—toward ever more carbon dioxide emissions.

While the Arabian Peninsula is relatively dry, cities on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden can at times be humid and muggy, which means that significant increases in temperature could sooner or later render them uninhabitable. Such rising heat even threatens one of Islam’s “five pillars.” This past year the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the Hajj, took place in June, when temperatures sometimes reached 118°F (48°C) in western Saudi Arabia. More than 2,000 pilgrims fell victim to heat stress, a problem guaranteed to worsen radically as the planet heats further.

Despite the threat that climate change poses to the welfare of that country’s inhabitants, the government of King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is doing less than nothing to address the growing problems. As the CCPI’s authors put it, “Saudi Arabia’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are rising steadily. Its share of renewable energy in total primary energy supply (TPES) is close to zero.” Meanwhile, at the 2022 U.N. climate summit conference held in Egypt, “Saudi Arabia played a notably unconstructive role in the negotiations. Its delegation included many fossil fuel lobbyists. It also tried to water down the language used in the COP’s umbrella decision.”

At the next meeting in Dubai last fall, COP28, the final document called only for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Avoided was the far more relevant phrase “phase down” or “phase out” when it came to fossil fuels and even the far milder “transitioning away” was only included over the strenuous objections of Riyadh, whose energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman, said “absolutely not” to any such language. He added, “And I assure you not a single person—I’m talking about governments—believes in that.” His assertion was, of course, nonsense. In fact, some leaders, like those of Pacific Island nations, consider an immediate abolition of fossil fuels essential to the very survival of their countries.

Abandoning the Logic of Small Steps

Although Saudi Arabia’s leaders sometimes engage in greenwashing, including making periodic announcements about future plans to develop green energy, they have done virtually nothing in that regard, despite the kingdom’s enormous potential for solar and wind power. Ironically, the biggest Saudi green energy achievement has been abroad, thanks to the ACWA Power firm, a public-private joint venture in the kingdom. The Moroccan government, the only one in the Middle East to make significant strides in combatting climate change, brought in ACWA as part of a consortium to build its epochal Noor concentrated solar energy complex near the ancient city of Ouarzazate at the edge of the Sahara desert. It has set a goal of getting 52% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. Though critics pointed out that it missed its goal of 42% by 2020, government boosters responded that, by the end of 2022, 37% of Morocco’s electricity already came from renewables and, just in the past year, it jumped to 40%, with a total renewables production of 4.6 gigawatts of energy.

Moreover, Morocco has a plethora of green energy projects in the pipeline, including 20 more hydroelectric installations, 19 wind farms, and 16 solar farms. The solar plants alone are expected to generate 13.5 gigawatts within a few years, tripling the country’s current total green energy output. Two huge wind farms, one retooled with a new generation of large turbines, have already come online in the first quarter of this year. The country’s expansion of green electricity production since it launched its visionary plans in 2009 has not only helped it make major strides toward decarbonization but contributed to the electrification of its countryside, where access to power is now universal. Just in the past two and a half decades, the government has provided 2.1 million households with electricity access. Morocco has few hydrocarbons of its own and local green energy helps the state avoid an enormous drain on its budget.

In contrast to the pernicious nonsense often spewed by Saudi and Emirati officials, the Moroccan king, Mohammed VI, is in no doubt about the severe challenges his poverty-ridden country faces. He told the U.N. COP28 climate conference in early December, “Just as climate change is inexorably increasing, the COPs must, from here on, emerge from the logic of ‘small steps,’ which has characterized them for too long.”

Large steps toward a Middle East (and a world) of low-carbon energy would, of course, be a big improvement. Unfortunately, on a planet they are helping to overheat in a remarkable fashion, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have largely taken steps—huge ones, in fact—toward ever more carbon dioxide emissions. Worse yet, they’re located in a part of the world where such retrograde policies are tantamount to playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.

I don’t like to slam books, especially those ahead of mine on the best seller list. It might seem like petty jealousy. But one recent release, White Rural Rage by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, is seriously flawed.

For starters, the authors write as if economic class no longer exists or matters. According to this book, all rural white people, or at least most of them, share similar racist attitudes. Class distinctions between bosses and workers, rich and poor, are meaningless.

Because Schaller and Waldman view the world through their anti-class, whiteness lens, they don’t consider the possibility that working-class voters share common attitudes across geographies. Contrary to their thesis, the research for my book found no discernable differences in attitudes on hot-button social issues between urban, suburban, and rural white working-class voters.

When Democrats, like Sherrod Brown, show the courage to fight against Wall Street’s war on workers they gain working-class support.

As Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux reports, “These voters wouldn’t care all that much about the cultural difference and the woke thing if the Democrats gave more of a damn about the economic challenges they face deeply and daily.”

Where’s the Beef?

Schaller put his cards on the table during an interview on MSNBC, during which he called rural Americans “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.”

The authors also claim it is getting worse. In defending themselves in The New Republic, they write that “as the rest of the country moved away from Donald Trump [in 2020] rural whites lurched toward him by nine points, from 62% to 71%.”

But voting for Trump is not the same as being a bigot. In fact, the data in my book shows that white working-class voters, rural and otherwise, are growing more liberal, not illiberal on key social issues.

Anti-Immigrant?

“Are you in favor of granting ‘legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and not been convicted of any felony crimes?’” (Cooperative Election Study)

White working-class in favor:

2010: 32.1%

2020: 61.8%

Anti-Gay?

“Should gay or lesbian couples be legally permitted to adopt children?” (American National Elections Study)

White working-class in favor:

2000: 38.2%

2020: 76.7%

Increasing Racism?

“Agree that most Blacks just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves out of poverty.” (General Social Survey)

1996: 56.8%

2021: 32.8%

Furthermore, our data, which is derived from three large multi-year voter surveys, shows that from 20-50% of white working-class non-Democrats are liberal on social issues.

What About Sherrod Brown?

If white rural racism is the key to all politics, then why do significant numbers of rural voters in Ohio support Sen. Sherrod Brown, who in 2018 ran about 12% ahead of President Joe Biden in 2020? In fact, Brown, who votes liberal on social issues up and down the line, ran significantly ahead of Biden in every rural county.

Brown’s connection to working-class voters might have something to do with his willingness to take on Wall Street for ripping off workers again and again. It works politically because enough of those supposedly bigoted white workers care a lot more about never-ending job instability than they do about wokeness.

In his excellent review (and evisceration) of White Rural Wage, Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist, points out that:

Democrats who give in to the simplistic rage thesis are essentially letting themselves off the hook on the politics, suggesting that rural Americans are irrational and beyond any effort to engage them.

It’s not white rural rage. It’s not irrational rage either. Rather it’s very clear-eyed working-class anger as insatiable corporate greed tears up their lives.

When Democrats, like Sherrod Brown, show the courage to fight against Wall Street’s war on workers they gain working-class support.

Maybe it’s time for a little more Democratic Party rage?

For the past several years, tenant unions from disparate locations like Kansas City, Missouri; Bozeman, Montana; and Louisville, Kentucky have been canvassing door-to-door, lobbying at the White House and Congress, and convening loud, passionate demonstrations in their home communities and at the national headquarters of corporate landlords. They have earned admiring profiles in The New York Times and Time Magazine and have been featured on National Public Radio. What they have not done is win a tangible federal victory for renters.

After tenants demanded cancellation of rent and mortgage obligations in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the government instead issued $46 billion in Emergency Rental Assistance to landlords with no strings attached, filling the coffers of serial evictors and institutional slumlords with notorious health and safety records. After tenants called for renter rights to be enshrined in federal law, the Biden administration’s early 2023 Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights was so lacking in actual policy to accompany its lofty language that the nation’s landlord lobbyists gleefully claimed victory.

“Over the past several decades, the federal government has not only abdicated its responsibility tenants, it has actually become the financial enabler of some of the worst landlord business practices,” says Tara Raghuveer of the National Tenant Union Federation.

But, as of last month, that may be changing.

That is when the Biden administration announced it would impose a cap on rent increases on Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) housing. The 10% annual increase limit is far higher than the 3% cap that tenant unions have been pushing for, and the limitation to the LIHTC program leaves out a great deal of other federally financed and subsidized housing. But the new rule could apply to over a million households. And perhaps more importantly, it shows for the first time that the tenant union movement can make its power felt on the national stage.

“For many of these landlords, rent-gouging, evictions, and poor conditions are part of the business model, and what makes their business model work is the favorable terms they receive from our federal government.”

“It’s a huge win, and it wouldn’t have happened if not for tenant unions beating the drum for the past several years demanding that every dollar of federal financing and subsidies be conditioned on tenant protections,” Raghuveer says. “The federal government is finally recognizing its responsibility to protect tenants from price-gouging.”

It seems the landlord lobby agrees. The same organizations that cheered the words-only Biden Blueprint a year ago have joined together to bitterly criticize the new rent cap.

“You’re discouraging the creation of supply,” the CEO of the National Housing Conference complained to The Washington Post.

Landlords were particularly disturbed by the Biden administration explicitly dismissing their increasingly discredited argument that rent limits decrease the supply of affordable housing.

“We’ve seen no evidence that this limitation—even those much lower than 10%—have limited the supply of new affordable housing nationally,” said Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesman Zachary Nosanchuk.

The new rent cap also heralds a shift in tenant organizing in the U.S. Although tenant unions have traditionally built their power through local struggles, laws passed by state legislatures in places like Missouri and Kentucky put ceilings on local housing reforms. At the same time, federal financing plays an enormous role in the housing industry. In 2022, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, or FHFA, which manages both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, purchased $142 billion in mortgages issued by banks to multifamily landlords, thus assuming the risk of nonpayment. So tenant unions argue that this federal government largesse should come with conditions, specifically limits on rent hikes, obligations to keep the housing clean and safe, and promises not to evict tenants or not renew leases except for good cause. These types of tenant protections on federally backed housing could apply to over 12 million rental units, nearly one in three renting households in the country.

Winning these conditions and ensuring that the new rent cap is fully enforced are the next steps for the tenant union movement looking to build on the momentum of this win.

“For many of these landlords, rent-gouging, evictions, and poor conditions are part of the business model, and what makes their business model work is the favorable terms they receive from our federal government,” Raghuveer says.

“The rent is too damn high, and the government is in business with our landlords.”

The Israeli online magazine +972 has published a detailed report on Israel’s use of an artificial intelligence system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. When Israel attacked Gaza after October 7, the Lavender system had a database of 37,000 Palestinian men with suspected links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Lavender assigns a numerical score, from 1 to 100, to every man in Gaza, based mainly on cellphone and social media data, and automatically adds those with high scores to its kill list of suspected militants. Israel uses another automated system, known as “Where’s Daddy?”, to call in airstrikes to kill these men and their families in their homes.

The report is based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have worked with these systems. As one of the officers explained to +972, by adding a name from a Lavender-generated list to the Where’s Daddy home tracking system, he can place the man’s home under constant drone surveillance, and an airstrike will be launched once he comes home.

Just as U.S. weapons development aims to be at the cutting edge, or the killing edge, of new technology, the CIA and U.S. military intelligence have always tried to use the latest data processing technology to identify and kill their enemies.

The officers said the “collateral” killing of the men’s extended families was of little consequence to Israel. “Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” the officer said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”

The officers explained that the decision to target thousands of these men in their homes is just a question of expediency. It is simply easier to wait for them to come home to the address on file in the system, and then bomb that house or apartment building, than to search for them in the chaos of the war-torn Gaza Strip.

The officers who spoke to 972+ explained that in previous Israeli massacres in Gaza, they could not generate targets quickly enough to satisfy their political and military bosses, and so these AI systems were designed to solve that problem for them. The speed with which Lavender can generate new targets only gives its human minders an average of 20 seconds to review and rubber-stamp each name, even though they know from tests of the Lavender system that at least 10% of the men chosen for assassination and familicide have only an insignificant or a mistaken connection with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

The Lavender AI system is a new weapon, developed by Israel. But the kind of kill lists that it generates have a long pedigree in U.S. wars, occupations, and CIA regime change operations. Since the birth of the CIA after the Second World War, the technology used to create kill lists has evolved from the CIA’s earliest coups in Iran and Guatemala, to Indonesia and the Phoenix Program in Vietnam in the 1960s, to Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and to the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just as U.S. weapons development aims to be at the cutting edge, or the killing edge, of new technology, the CIA and U.S. military intelligence have always tried to use the latest data processing technology to identify and kill their enemies.

The CIA learned some of these methods from German intelligence officers captured at the end of the Second World War. Many of the names on Nazi kill lists were generated by an intelligence unit called Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), under the command of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Germany’s spy chief on the eastern front (see David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 268).

Gehlen and the FHO had no computers, but they did have access to 4 million Soviet POWs from all over the USSR, and no compunction about torturing them to learn the names of Jews and communist officials in their hometowns to compile kill lists for the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen.

After the war, like the 1,600 German scientists spirited out of Germany in Operation Paperclip, the United States flew Gehlen and his senior staff to Fort Hunt in Virginia. They were welcomed by Allen Dulles, soon to be the first and still the longest-serving director of the CIA. Dulles sent them back to Pullach in occupied Germany to resume their anti-Soviet operations as CIA agents. The Gehlen Organization formed the nucleus of what became the BND, the new West German intelligence service, with Reinhard Gehlen as its director until he retired in 1968.

After a CIA coup removed Iran’s popular, democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, a CIA team led by U.S. Major General Norman Schwarzkopf trained a new intelligence service, known as SAVAK, in the use of kill lists and torture. SAVAK used these skills to purge Iran’s government and military of suspected communists and later to hunt down anyone who dared to oppose the Shah.

By 1975, Amnesty International estimated that Iran was holding between 25,000 and 100,000 political prisoners, and had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts, and a history of torture that is beyond belief.”

In Guatemala, a CIA coup in 1954 replaced the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman with a brutal dictatorship. As resistance grew in the 1960s, U.S. special forces joined the Guatemalan army in a scorched-earth campaign in Zacapa, which killed 15,000 people to defeat a few hundred armed rebels. Meanwhile, CIA-trained urban death squads abducted, tortured, and killed PGT (Guatemalan Labor Party) members in Guatemala City, notably 28 prominent labor leaders who were abducted and disappeared in March 1966.

Once this first wave of resistance was suppressed, the CIA set up a new telecommunications center and intelligence agency, based in the presidential palace. It compiled a database of “subversives” across the country that included leaders of farming co-ops and labor, student, and Indigenous activists to provide ever-growing lists for the death squads. The resulting civil war became a genocide against Indigenous people in Ixil and the western highlands that killed or disappeared at least 200,000 people.

This pattern was repeated across the world, wherever popular, progressive leaders offered hope to their people in ways that challenged U.S. interests. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in 1988, “The irony of U.S. policy in the Third World is that, while it has always justified its larger objectives and efforts in the name of anticommunism, its own goals have made it unable to tolerate change from any quarter that impinged significantly on its own interests.”

When General Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965, the U.S. Embassy compiled a list of 5,000 communists for his death squads to hunt down and kill. The CIA estimated that they eventually killed 250,000 people, while other estimates run as high as a million.

Twenty-five years later, journalist Kathy Kadane investigated the U.S. role in the massacre in Indonesia, and spoke to Robert Martens, the political officer who led the State-CIA team that compiled the kill list. “It really was a big help to the army,” Martens told Kadane. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands. But that’s not all bad—there’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”

Kadane also spoke to former CIA director William Colby, who was the head of the CIA’s Far East division in the 1960s. Colby compared the U.S. role in Indonesia to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which was launched two years later, claiming that they were both successful programs to identify and eliminate the organizational structure of America’s communist enemies.

The Phoenix Program was designed to uncover and dismantle the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) shadow government across South Vietnam. Phoenix’s Combined Intelligence Center in Saigon fed thousands of names into an IBM 1401 computer, along with their locations and their alleged roles in the NLF. The CIA credited the Phoenix Program with killing 26,369 NLF officials, while another 55,000 were imprisoned or persuaded to defect. Seymour Hersh reviewed South Vietnamese government documents that put the death toll at 41,000.

How many of the dead were correctly identified as NLF officials may be impossible to know, but Americans who took part in Phoenix operations reported killing the wrong people in many cases. Navy SEAL Elton Manzione told author Douglas Valentine (The Phoenix Program) how he killed two young girls in a night raid on a village, and then sat down on a stack of ammunition crates with a hand grenade and an M-16, threatening to blow himself up, until he got a ticket home.

“The whole aura of the Vietnam War was influenced by what went on in the ‘hunter-killer’ teams of Phoenix, Delta, etc,” Manzione told Valentine. “That was the point at which many of us realized we were no longer the good guys in the white hats defending freedom—that we were assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried over to all other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it becoming America’s most unpopular war.”

Even as the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the “war fatigue” in the United States led to a more peaceful next decade, the CIA continued to engineer and support coups around the world, and to provide post-coup governments with increasingly computerized kill lists to consolidate their rule.

After supporting General Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the CIA played a central role in Operation Condor, an alliance between right-wing military governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia to hunt down tens of thousands of their and each other’s political opponents and dissidents, killing and disappearing at least 60,000 people.

Nicolas has at least two good friends who survived the dirty wars in Latin America because someone who worked in the police or military got word to them that their names were on a death list, one in Argentina, the other in Guatemala. If their fates had been decided by an AI machine like Lavender, they would both be long dead.

The CIA’s role in Operation Condor is still shrouded in secrecy, but Patrice McSherry, a political scientist at Long Island University, has investigated the U.S. role and concluded, “Operation Condor also had the covert support of the U.S. government. Washington provided Condor with military intelligence and training, financial assistance, advanced computers, sophisticated tracking technology, and access to the continental telecommunications system housed in the Panama Canal Zone.”

McSherry’s research revealed how the CIA supported the intelligence services of the Condor states with computerized links, a telex system, and purpose-built encoding and decoding machines made by the CIA Logistics Department. As she wrote in her book, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America:

The Condor system’s secure communications system, Condortel,... allowed Condor operations centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S. military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret U.S. sponsorship of Condor…

Operation Condor ultimately failed, but the U.S. provided similar support and training to right-wing governments in Colombia and Central America throughout the 1980s in what senior military officers have called a “quiet, disguised, media-free approach” to repression and kill lists.

The U.S. School of the Americas (SOA) trained thousands of Latin American officers in the use of torture and death squads, as Major Joseph Blair, the SOA’s former chief of instruction described to John Pilger for his film, The War You Don’t See:

The doctrine that was taught was that, if you want information, you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get the person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you assassinate them—and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.

When the same methods were transferred to the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq after 2003, Newsweek headlined it “The Salvador Option.” A U.S. officer explained to Newsweek that U.S. and Iraqi death squads were targeting Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

The United States sent two veterans of its dirty wars in Latin America to Iraq to play key roles in that campaign. Colonel James Steele led the U.S. Military Advisor Group in El Salvador from 1984 to 1986, training and supervising Salvadoran forces who killed tens of thousands of civilians. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, narrowly escaping a prison sentence for his role supervising shipments from Ilopango air base in El Salvador to the U.S.-backed Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua.

In Iraq, Steele oversaw the training of the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos—rebranded as “National” and later “Federal” Police after the discovery of their al-Jadiriyah torture center and other atrocities.

Bayan al-Jabr, a commander in the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade militia, was appointed interior minister in 2005, and Badr militiamen were integrated into the Wolf Brigade death squad and other Special Police units. Jabr’s chief adviser was Steven Casteel, the former intelligence chief for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Latin America.

The Interior Ministry death squads waged a dirty war in Baghdad and other cities, filling the Baghdad morgue with up to 1,800 corpses per month, while Casteel fed the Western media absurd cover stories, such as that the death squads were all “insurgents” in stolen police uniforms.

Meanwhile U.S. special operations forces conducted “kill-or-capture” night raids in search of Resistance leaders. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003-2008, oversaw the development of a database system, used in Iraq and Afghanistan, that compiled cellphone numbers mined from captured cellphones to generate an ever-expanding target list for night raids and air strikes.

The targeting of cellphones instead of actual people enabled the automation of the targeting system, and explicitly excluded using human intelligence to confirm identities. Two senior U.S. commanders told The Washington Post that only half the night raids attacked the right house or person.

In Afghanistan, President Barack Obama put McChrystal in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in 2009, and his cellphone-based “social network analysis” enabled an exponential increase in night raids, from 20 raids per month in May 2009 to up to 40 per night by April 2011.

As with the Lavender system in Gaza, this huge increase in targets was achieved by taking a system originally designed to identify and track a small number of senior enemy commanders and applying it to anyone suspected of having links with the Taliban, based on their cellphone data.

This led to the capture of an endless flood of innocent civilians, so that most civilian detainees had to be quickly released to make room for new ones. The increased killing of innocent civilians in night raids and airstrikes fueled already fierce resistance to the U.S. and NATO occupation and ultimately led to its defeat.

President Obama’s drone campaign to kill suspected enemies in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia was just as indiscriminate, with reports suggesting that 90% of the people it killed in Pakistan were innocent civilians.

And yet Obama and his national security team kept meeting in the White House every “Terror Tuesday” to select who the drones would target that week, using an Orwellian, computerized “disposition matrix” to provide technological cover for their life and death decisions.

Looking at this evolution of ever more automated systems for killing and capturing enemies, we can see how, as the information technology used has advanced from telexes to cellphones and from early IBM computers to artificial intelligence, the human intelligence and sensibility that could spot mistakes, prioritize human life, and prevent the killing of innocent civilians has been progressively marginalized and excluded, making these operations more brutal and horrifying than ever.

Nicolas has at least two good friends who survived the dirty wars in Latin America because someone who worked in the police or military got word to them that their names were on a death list, one in Argentina, the other in Guatemala. If their fates had been decided by an AI machine like Lavender, they would both be long dead.

As with supposed advances in other types of weapons technology, like drones and “precision” bombs and missiles, innovations that claim to make targeting more precise and eliminate human error have instead led to the automated mass murder of innocent people, especially women and children, bringing us full circle from one holocaust to the next.