Maybe you’ve heard the phrase means of production and maybe you haven’t. It basically means the tools, land, factories, machines, infrastructure, and systems a society uses to make the material stuff of life. Who owns those means, who controls them, and who benefits from them is one of the oldest fights in politics.

The communists, at their extreme, think the state should own and control all of it. The capitalists, at their extreme, think it should be completely in private hands. Socialists like me think there ought to be a blend of public and private ownership, that capitalism and socialism work best when paired. The neoliberals, which is mostly what we’ve got now, think our future should be in private control but paid for by the people, maybe with a guardrail or two set up between the people and the private sector’s insatiable desire for profit.

We fought about this hard in the early 1900s. There was a big movement around labor and organizers and workers, and a lot of those folks were actual communists. The communists were fighting for the means of production and the capitalists were fighting for it too, and they fought tooth and nail. The workers were unionizing and fighting for better rights and better conditions, and these were actual fights, with guns and sticks and knives, and people got killed, mostly workers. They fought for more rights. They fought for the 40-hour week. They fought for overtime. They fought for working conditions that were safe and not deadly, and in a lot of cases they won. They won those fights with blood. They won those fights with effort. They won those fights by putting things on the line.

You might have heard of something called the weekend. Not the singer, though I love him. The idea that Monday through Friday is the work week and the weekend is for your life. You might have heard of the eight-hour day, that anything over eight hours is overtime. Both of those were brought to you by the labor movement, a labor movement that at one point was empowered not to fight for the members of its own labor union but empowered to fight for people who worked for a living. That was their mantra. That was their goal.

Then came the New Deal in the 30s, the people injecting themselves into the production of the things we needed to rebuild the country after the Great Depression. We did it through the Civilian Conservation Corps. We trained workers, we provided health care, and during the war we even created daycare centers so women could go into the factories. It was a real rebalancing of our economy between capital and labor, with the state taking part of the means of production, engineers and scientists doing the work for the people, paid for by the people, and then used by the people. Corporations got brought to heel for a while.

Then we beat the fascists, the Nazis in Germany and Italy and the imperialists in Japan, and right after that the Americans decided the biggest scourge, the biggest fear they had, was communism and socialism. Because we’d gotten a taste through the New Deal and the Arsenal of Democracy of what it was like to share in the growth, to share in the fruits of our own labor, and there was a fear that if we kept tasting it we’d decide we too deserved more, and that would mean the Vanderbilts and the railroad tycoons and the shipping barons and the oilmen would have less and the people who did the work would have more. So we fought it. We fought it through the McCarthy era, with propaganda, with all sorts of ideological battles. The idea of socialism and the idea of communism both lost. And the Democratic Party started moving away from its socialist roots and its socialist ideas toward what would ultimately become neoliberalism, the system we’ve got now.

We went through all of those fights, the prisons, the violations of the Constitution. We perverted ourselves in order to fight off socialism, to keep the means of production in the hands of the capitalists, because they alone were able to properly guide our system. And then what did they do with our productive capacity? What did they do with it through the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s and right up to today? They shipped it off to Mexico and China and Brazil. They gave away the very thing we fought over. And why? Because it was cheaper, more profitable, and they figured they could do it with impunity.

But when you take away people’s means of production, you also take away their means of making a living, their power and their value in life, economically and socially and every other way, and then you’ve got people fighting over what little is left, and it turns ugly and it turns dirty. Look at January 6th. Look at the riots and the protests during the Black Lives Matter movement. What you end up with is a police force that has to oppress, and private prisons that have to fill up, and a military-industrial complex that doesn’t care whether it’s participating in a genocide or not, because it’s about money and power. And ultimately what you end up with is a country that can’t defend itself or provide for itself, a giant welfare state leaning on the Chinese to make our goods and to buy our debt. A nation that no longer holds its own means of production, no longer holds its own means of making a living, no longer holds its independence, not in energy production, not in the ability to build housing or infrastructure or the things that make our lives better. We import all of it, because all we need is money, we can just make more money.

And that only works as long as the money stays in the hands of a few. All that money creation, all that expansion of wealth, would lead to massive inflation if it weren’t held by a few, and you can already see what it does, because it’s caused massive inflation in indexes and in asset prices. Bitcoin and Apple and the stock market have risen to unreasonable heights, heights that are detached from any reality. Tesla is worth more than the next 30 car companies combined, even though it doesn’t produce as much as any of the top ten and doesn’t make more profit than any of the top ten, and yet somehow it’s worth more. Why? Because the money that’s been created has caused that inflation, and the inflation stays at the top. It makes trillionaires and centibillionaires. If that same money had been shared with the rest of America without creating more productive capacity, without the ability to build more housing or train more doctors or build more hospitals, it would create massive inflation everywhere, because you’d have more money chasing fewer goods in a system that can’t produce the things anymore and just imports them. The inflation is real. It just stays at the top, in asset prices, instead of showing up at the grocery store.

So the means of production was a fight that working people lost and the capitalists won. And then the winners gave away the spoils of their own victory to other nations, because they aren’t patriots and they aren’t citizens of this country. They’re citizens of the world. They’re detached and untethered, private jets and private islands and private security forces, and at that level of wealth they don’t need this country to succeed.

But here’s the thing. The elite, for now, do need us more than we need them. We’re the ones propping them up right now.

The question with AI and robotics is not whether the machines will be powerful. They will be. The question is whether they become another offshore factory, another private island, another asset owned by people who do not need us, or whether they become part of a shared American capacity again.

We lost the last fight over the means of production, and then the winners gave it away. We should not let them do it twice.

The red emergency light is flashing on America’s democracy dashboard, like a damaged aircraft teetering toward a mountain. Elon Musk becoming the planet’s first trillionaire should make us tremble for the future of self-governing republics. It’s as if we’re bringing back modern pharaohs to dominate our societies.

Musk’s SpaceX company recently went public with a (probably inflated) market capitalization of $2 trillion. SpaceX’s IPO increased Musk’s net worth by an estimated $188 billion, and the stock’s first-day surge subsequently pushed his fortune to roughly $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes.

The concern here isn’t with wealth per se. It’s the tremendous power of concentrated wealth to distort markets, politics, and society. When you have Musk’s level of wealth, you’re no longer just buying another mansion or private jet (of which he already has several). You’re buying a media outlet, a senator, and maybe, in the case of Musk, elevating a president.

Musk has no inhibitions about deploying the power of his considerable wealth. He bought Twitter, one of the public squares of our time, and transformed it into X, a partisan and disinformation platform rife with hate speech and extremism.

We need to get serious about curbing this billionaire influence and supporting regular people—starting with a wealth tax.

In the 2024 election cycle, he donated $291 million to President Donald Trump and Republican candidates, according to Open Secrets. As Michael Mechanic wrote in Mother Jones, “Musk expended 0.1% of his wealth in the process and got far more in return.” Mechanic notes “The Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies.”

Musk was rewarded with a rogue government agency—the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), named for a crypto meme coin Musk invested in—to advance a self-interested data grab and chainsawing away at government capacity. Public Citizen found that 70% of the agencies that were targeted by DOGE had conflicts of interest for Musk’s businesses. For example, Musk directed DOGE to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would have overseen X’s move to become a payment processor.

More dire still, DOGE cuts to USAID and other humanitarian aid programs have contributed to an estimated 750,000 lost lives. The projected deaths from these cuts run into the millions.

Musk was further rewarded with lucrative government contracts for SpaceX, Starlink, and other Musk-companies. In early 2025, The New York Times reported on a boost in multi-billion-dollar contracts for Musk’s companies as the Trump administration took power.

That was Musk as a “mere” centi-billionaire. What other power might Musk be able to wield as the world’s first trillionaire?

But it’s not just Musk. America’s 16 centi-billionaires (including Musk) have a combined wealth of $4 trillion. And the 977 billionaires on the Forbes US wealth list now own a combined $9.24 trillion, according to analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness.

This isn’t a partisan concern. Whether it’s liberals like George Soros and Tom Steyer or right-wingers like Musk and Peter Thiel, this concentration of power and influence should trigger the flashing red light. It’s never a good thing for anyone to have the power of modern-day pharaohs. Musk was the top political donor in 2024, but five other billionaire households gave over $100 million to candidates.

Billionaires—and soon trillionaires as well—are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence our elections while working Americans struggle to afford food, housing, and healthcare. It’s clearer than ever that those two facts are connected. We need to get serious about curbing this billionaire influence and supporting regular people—starting with a wealth tax.

Oxfam observes Musk could give $100 to every person on Earth and remain one of the 10 richest people on the planet. A 10% wealth tax on Musk’s fortune alone, they estimate, could end global extreme poverty and lift 800 million people above the extreme poverty line. Imagine the revenue and investment possibilities of a global wealth tax on all billionaires.

The planet’s first trillionaire is not a sign of economic health. It’s an indicator of extreme inequality and the dangers of concentrated power.

One benefit of having watched the climate story from the start is that I tend not to panic when “climate” is temporarily eclipsed as an issue, almost always thanks to the hard work of Big Oil. It happened at the end of the 1980s after the initial furor over the newly public “greenhouse effect,” and again after the Kyoto climate talks; when Al Gore made global warming a central issue in the oughts, the collapse of the Copenhagen talks put it on the back burner. Many of us built the movement that pushed it back to the front again in the oughts, culminating in the Paris accords; when momentum wavered Greta Thunberg and her colleagues emerged, building the consensus that took us through the Inflation Reduction Act.

At the moment, of course, a resurgent fossil-funded right wing has killed off that landmark legislation, and done all it can to destroy clean energy in the US; America is out of the global climate talks; around the world various strongmen have made protest far more difficult. The new authoritarians have managed to intimidate many of the centrist pols in much of the world who are no longer willing to talk much about “climate;” indeed, there’s a closet industry of pundits and consultants advising them not to.

But it’s never occurred to me that this state of affairs would last very long—physics is running this show, and it won’t be long denied. And now I think we can see the next of these cycles firing off—and this one, I think, will be climactic. We have a chance to insure that civilization comes out of this one focused on the physical world.

The politics of climate begins with… climate. Perhaps you’ve heard that Europe spent the past week suffering through a truly remarkable heatwave, with France reaching a new all-time record temperature, the UK recording its hottest day ever, Spain smashing all its old marks. It’s truly brutal—and it recalls, for Europeans, the heatwave of 2003, which ended up killing 70,000 people. Even today, the continent is ill-prepared for extreme heat—in France, for instance, Angelique Chrisafis reports that:

The impact of the heatwave has been made considerably worse by the high proportion of French buildings and infrastructure not designed to cope with high temperatures. Paris, one of Europe’s most densely populated cities, known for its poorly insulated housing stock, has for years been considered to have the highest heatwave mortality risk of any capital on the continent. The French government has been criticised for a lack of preparation and for cutting funding for projects designed to adapt infrastructure to the climate crisis.

Half of all French homes have insufficient protection from high temperatures, leaving inhabitants dangerously overheated, a report for the NGO Fondation pour le Logement (Foundation for Housing) found this month. About 66% of French people struggle to tolerate the heat in their homes.

Maïder Olivier, the head of climate advocacy at the NGO, said France had a “massive and worsening problem of heat-trap housing.” She said climate inequality in France was growing, with low-income, suburban housing estates suffering the worst from heatwaves.

Apparently English homes, especially modern ones, aren’t much better. And the heat has caused a surge in British hospital admissions, even as it’s damaged hospital equipment. Andrew Gregory writes:

Several NHS trusts in England have declared critical incidents as a direct result of the extreme heat. One hospital had done so after its machines failed in multiple areas, a doctor said. Labs used for testing were also affected and two linear accelerator machines, used to treat cancer patients, had stopped working amid the high temperatures.

The doctor said that although they were working in a relatively new care setting, it was “tacked on to an old Victorian hospital,” creating severe infrastructure challenges. “It’s hopeless, really,” they said.

The doctor also said their NHS trust had faced “major issues” with IT servers overheating on Wednesday. “We thought we were going to lose everything, so we were all asked to turn off non-essential computers and electrical equipment, including lights.”

But it’s not just dialysis machines going down—in France, nuclear reactors had to be taken offline because the river water used for cooling was getting too warm. Also, save some tears for the poor American tourists complaining to The Wall Street Journal that European restaurants offer too few ice cubes in their drinks.

Look, there’s no doubt why these records are being smashed—as Bob Henson writes at Eye on the Storm:

Extreme heat is among the most-studied consequences of human-caused climate change, and the connections between a warming planet and amplified, localized extreme heat are not only intuitive but well documented.

In this case the jet stream—powered by the temperature differential between the poles and the equator, and unsettled by the melt up north—has gone kaflooey, producing what’s called an “omega block” for its distinctive shape. The sun beating down on this heat dome is relentless. As Lauren Dalban reports for Inside Climate News:

“There’s a sad inevitability to all of this, with scientists like me trotting out the same quotes year after year,” Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at the Imperial College London who leads the World Weather Attribution, a group that works to link weather events to climate change, said in an email. “Simply put, we remain on a one-way trip towards a more dangerous future, and it’s time we hit the brakes.”

I could of course go on and on about the heat; it’s wretched. (And remember that we’re paying attention in part because there’s lots of media, some of it English-speaking, in Europe; similar hideous heatwaves have been plaguing much of Asia this spring). But what I really want to talk about is its political meaning—I think this heatwave is one of those events that will help bring “climate” back into fashion in our discourse.

Britain will be an interesting test case. Its politics have been roiled for the last two years by the odd static incompetence of Keir Starmer’s Labour government, now about to be replaced by the Andy Burnham government. A key question for that new administration will be the role of Ed Milliband, who has been serving as the energy secretary, and may be in line for a job as chancellor. He’s been (almost uniquely) effective in his role, moving fast to boost clean and cheap renewable energy in the UK.

But that’s roiled the fossil fuel industry, which is putting big money behind the right-wing Reform Party, which, according to an April investigation by Sam Bright and Adam Barnett, has collected two-thirds of its funding from oil interests. Together with the always vile Murdoch press, they’ve mounted a full-on attack on “Net Zero” policies, alleging—a la Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal in this country—that they’re responsible for rising energy prices in the UK.

The entire status quo is in on this fight—including British labor unions. They aren’t venal the way oil companies are, but they are fighting against change, in the name of their current members. And they’ve focused their fire on Milliband. Sharon Graham, head of the giant UNITE union, has said:

Jobs in Britain are important. We need someone in that role [chancellor] who understands that, and at the moment that isn’t Ed Miliband… It’s been floated that Ed Miliband would be chancellor, that would be a noose around the neck of what we need to do on jobs.

Happily, we’re starting to see serious pushback to this endless irresponsible climate delayism. It begins with scientists. In France eminent climate researchers have started speaking out to Le Monde, complaining about the inability of scientists to effectively connect the dots between climate change and heat for the public. British scientists have gone one better: Nine of them wrote the agency responsible for regulating the press to complain about the lame coverage:

News stories about heatwaves often do not mention the influence of climate change or the burning of fossil fuels on increased temperatures—for example, 3 in 5 stories during the May heatwave did not—while two-fifths of those about net zero make no mention of climate change. In this context, it is unsurprising that the public often do not understand these issues or the connection between them.

I think my favorite was a letter to the London Times from the veteran climate research Brian Hoskins of Imperial College London, which I reprint here just because I like its cadences:

The sentence “net zero is not an arbitrary slogan, rather it is dictated by the laws of physics” should be a watchword in the years to come.

And here’s my guess: Milliband will be vindicated, landing in an important new job. Despite the complaints of union leaders, Britain’s green economy is one of the few things that’s booming on the island. He’s not backing down: At a press conference last week he heralded the fact that more than a hundred billion pounds in private clean energy investments had been made during his term:

Experts told The Guardian that the new investment data, as well as previous findings by the Confederation of British Industry that the UK’s net zero economy had grown faster than the rest of the economy and generated higher-paying jobs… [contradicted the claims of union leaders]

Miliband said: “I’m proud to have led a pro-business, pro-growth department in these last two years. This achievement didn’t happen by accident, but because of clarity of mission, government investment, and building not blocking. As we have shown in energy, progressive government in hard times requires partnership with business to secure economic growth, built on an active industrial strategy.”

Indeed, 40 progressive economists in the UK wrote to the labor leaders this week, rejecting their attack on Net Zero:

There is no alternative to the green transition. The effects of climate change are with us now. Miliband is right to oppose further expansion of North Sea oil and gas.

If Burnham were to back off the Net Zero pledges, he’d be disappointing the 60% of Brits who like the strategy. Starmer staggered in part because he took right-wing positions on immigration, giving the Green Party an opening; that door will grow much larger if he backs off on climate policy, so I suspect he won’t.

And the heatwave will give him political cover to do the right thing. As the head of Greenpeace UK said last week:

The only way off this hellish treadmill is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Our next prime minister needs to act on the evidence outside their window, and the advice of their scientific advisers, and stay the course on climate policies. The alternative is parched reservoirs, unaffordable food, shuttered hospitals and schools, and wildly fluctuating bills each time a new oil war is kindled.

My further guess is that the coming El Niño will have the same effect on global climate politics—and maybe even in our caboose of a nation. We enter this new warming spell in rough shape: Recent data shows the heat content of oceans at all-time highs. Things are grim enough that one (ghoulish?) investor has launched a fund designed to make money off the coming crisis:

Hedge fund Moreton Capital Partners is targeting $500 million for a special-purpose vehicle to trade multiple commodities that stand to be impacted by the weather phenomenon, including South African corn, Malaysian palm oil, and Australian wheat. The markets are underestimating risks, according to Moreton’s co-founder Les Finemore.

“We think it’s going to be a dramatic reshaping of the global food situation,” Finemore said in a video interview from Mexico City. “We feel like today the market is seriously mis-pricing that risk.”

American politicians may feel that the easiest course for the short term is to back off on climate talk—and the green movement is perhaps inclined to let them get away with it through the midterm elections, which will be fought largely as a referendum on the mendacity of the Trump administration. (Though it’s political malpractice not to be calling out Trump’s incredibly unpopular attacks on solar and wind energy). But next year, as primary season begins in earnest, El Niño will insure climate is firmly back on the agenda. And given the explosion in clean energy, the case will be easy for smart candidates to make.

That this cycle has gone on since the 1980s does not mean it can go on forever. We’re clearly reaching desperate physical tipping points. So this had better be the last turn of the wheel—by the end of the decade we need to have decisively broken the political power of the fossil fuel industry, so we can get on with the energy transition, and with building a world that can survive the damage Big Oil has inflicted.

It starts now.

During an election season, it’s natural to take sides—that’s what elections are for. But taking sides doesn’t have to mean dividing the Jewish community, or isolating Jews from the broader community around us.

As the Executive Director of Jews United for Justice and the JUFJ Campaign Fund in Washington, DC and Maryland, I lead a group that has worked for more than a quarter century to ensure that everyone in our region—no matter our religion, where we come from, how much money we have, or what we look like—can live with freedom, safety, and belonging. Unfortunately, in DC, we just witnessed primary elections that saw national political polarization impacting us locally. Disagreements and concerns within the Jewish community are intersecting with local electoral politics—in ways that I fear could leave us more divided and less safe. But there is another path forward.

The JUFJ Campaign Fund endorses candidates who we believe will use their voices and their offices to build a more just region for all of us, including Jews. In this month’s DC Primary election, all seven of the progressive candidates that we endorsed won. That includes Janeese Lewis George, the winner of the Democratic Primary for Mayor, and soon-to-be Councilmember Aparna Raj, both of whom have also been endorsed by local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Given DSA’s anti-Zionist positions, for some Jews, DSA’s backing is enough to warrant labeling these politicians as a threat to our community. Yet for myself and our organization, our personal experiences of these candidates could not be more contrary to that image.

When we feel alone and misunderstood, every disagreement can seem like a threat. Yet I know, from these past 20 years, that the way through this anxiety is relationships.

All of our endorsees, including Lewis George, Raj, and others endorsed by DSA, have shown up for my colleagues and me individually, our organizations, and their own Jewish constituents. They’ve cited our community’s needs and concerns as important to them, and recognized our community as part of their winning coalitions on election night. Even—and especially—when we have had disagreements, we have remained in relationships that allow us to recognize each other’s humanity and to build a strong Jewish presence in our shared political work.

At JUFJ’s community seders this spring, we hosted a dozen candidates for local and statewide office in DC, Montgomery County, and Baltimore. These candidates were Jewish and non-Jewish, ones who had received our endorsements and ones who hadn’t, DSA members and not, of many races and ethnicities—and they all came together to retell the Passover story and connect it to the struggles we face here in our region. I’ve seen these candidates build relationships and create space for conversation with our Jewish community over many years, and throughout this campaign season. And these relationships bear fruit during hard times.

After the terrorist attack against Temple Israel in Michigan this March, a non-Jewish, DSA-endorsed candidate wrote to one of my colleagues: “I saw the news coming out of Detroit and just wanted to say I’m thinking of you. It means a lot to be able to organize alongside you and others in the Jewish community to create a vision for a multiracial democracy where we’re all safe together. Hope you're doing ok.” Another non-Jewish DSA-endorsed elected official called all the senior rabbis in their jurisdiction on October 8, 2023, and has since worked to arrange additional security for Jewish institutions after antisemitic violence. In DC and Montgomery County, our endorsed candidates in elected office have voted time and time again to support funding for Jewish nonprofits and providing security grants for places of worship.

When I started at JUFJ in 2008, I didn’t see antisemitism as one of the pivotal challenges to address in our region. Today, that has changed. We’ve made dismantling antisemitism a key piece of our ongoing work, including working with candidates and elected officials to help them gain a better understanding of antisemitism, how it affects us, and what they can do. Unfortunately, we are living through a time when some politicians and community leaders attempt to build their own power by fueling antisemitism and exploiting divisions within our communities. They want Jews to feel isolated and alone. But isolation is not a path to safety. Anger and resentment is not a strategy.

When we feel alone and misunderstood, every disagreement can seem like a threat. Yet I know, from these past 20 years, that the way through this anxiety is relationships. Building and maintaining relationships with people who are different from me means that I have people to reach out to for a better understanding of our differences. As the great Black activist and musician Bernice Johnson Reagon put it, “Coalition work is not work done in your home.” To build coalitions with people who are different from us, we must resist the urge to isolate—despite fears and disagreements.

As DC’s next mayor and other progressive and democratic socialist candidates across the country take office, we in the Jewish community have a choice ahead of us. We can treat them as potential threats—even as they say they are working to build a city where everyone can thrive. Or, we can consider them to be potential partners and allies, despite any differences—and engage openly and honestly with them on that basis.

History has taught us that Jews are safest in societies and political systems that pursue true safety for everyone who faces marginalization and hate. That is why our movement here in the DMV has endorsed candidates who are committed to tackling antisemitism, and who are also looking out for my Black, brown, immigrant, and low-income neighbors. When we look out for and talk to each other, only then can our society be a place where all of us can live with respect and dignity.

"We have nothing to do with that." An American Medical Association staff member said this to me with a look of disdain on her face. I was at the AMA's annual conference in Chicago, urging the doctors in attendance to speak up for their imprisoned Palestinian colleague, pediatrician and neonatologist Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. My group posted up outside conference rooms and handed out informational flyers uplifting his story. Dr. Abu Safiya has been held in brutal Israeli detention for over 500 days without charge; you would think these details would trigger some sympathy or at least curiosity in his American counterparts, but the opposite happened. We were flocked by security guards, verbally harassed, and treated as if we were doing something much more nefarious than handing out harmless pieces of paper.

A male security guard was threatening to get physical with me when the AMA staffer walked past — but instead of intervening, she joined in with him, egging him on. I asked her, "Do you know why we're here, though? You guys need to speak up for your colleagues in a genocide." She shook her head snidely, showcasing an apathy that was almost laughable considering the irony of the situation: A staff member for the country's leading medical institution — one that prides itself on its ethics — couldn't even pretend to care about a Palestinian doctor being tortured by Israel.

It's quite maddening when you think of how much support the AMA gave Ukraine when the Russian invasion began. They quickly put out statements of condemnation that the healthcare sector was being impacted, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid were given almost instantly. It has been three years since Gaza's healthcare sector was completely reduced to rubble, and the AMA has yet to say a single word about it. A year and a half has passed since Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was abducted from the hospital that Israel besieged.

Dr. Abu Safiya before Israeli priso.

Coincidentally, the same week the AMA was meeting in Chicago, new photos of Dr. Abu Safiya emerged, the first in many months. He's shown handcuffed and alone in a sterile white room, apparently on a video call with the Israeli courts.

Dr. Abu Safiya after 1.5 years in Israeli prison

The new image of Dr. Abu Safiya breaks my heart. He's lost so much weight, and there's scarring and scabbing on his arms that weren't there before, obvious signs of torture. Israeli prisons are vile and dangerous; they are places where military personnel can go rogue with no fear of punishment and enact their most atrocious desires. After all, these prisons are run by the likes of Ben Gvir, a racist, sadist, and war criminal. I just don't understand how physicians in the AMA can consciously look at this photo of Dr. Abu Safiya and have nothing to say.

When Israelis are permitted to commit war crime after war crime, including holding medical professionals hostage, it sets a precedent. They're not only killing and kidnapping healthcare workers in Gaza, but in Lebanon and Iran, too. Is it just because these are brown Muslim people that the AMA refuses to speak out? For an organization that claims a commitment to human rights and dignity, its racism is loud, and its participation in the white supremacist attitudes of Western imperialism is staggering.

This conference was a place for the AMA to discuss policy, especially around advocacy. CODEPINK staff, volunteers, and coalition partners were outside and inside the conference every single day. Our presence sparked awareness and conversation among the members, and we learned that there were debates inside on an issue the organization could no longer ignore: Palestinian healthcare workers.

Although they didn't mention Dr. Abu Safiya by name, it's clear that the AMA heard our collective message and that the friends of the movement inside the AMA were emboldened by our consistent energy. During the conference's scheduled time to amend, remove, and propose new policies, a handful of resolutions were introduced about Palestine and the blatant attacks on its healthcare workers and infrastructure. There was one resolution in particular that was proof that our work was changing hearts and minds. It reads as follows:

RESOLVED, that our AMA supports efforts to protect, release, and provide restitution to detained noncombatant healthcare workers in all areas of conflict, including Gaza.

Ultimately, this specific resolution was not passed. But the mere inclusion and debate of the topic means that our persistence illuminated the issue of Palestine to every single person at the conference. And, because of that, the AMA delegates managed to pass 2 resolutions about the general "protection of healthcare workers and facilities in conflict areas."

The AMA staff member and security guards knew what we were talking about; they knew the story of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. Whether they feel a moral obligation to do anything about it is beyond me, but we got confirmation that they knew exactly what we are organizing for. And even if the people in positions of power at the AMA don't feel inclined to do anything about genocide, it is very clear that the general body does care.

The AMA was founded, in part, to lay out a strict code of ethics for medical professionals in the United States. These principles explicitly highlight the responsibility of physicians to advocate for human dignity, human rights, public health, and medical access for all. What has happened in Gaza over the past three years has been nothing short of an abomination of human dignity and rights. Israel and the U.S. have bombed Gaza's public health system to the ground, and now the one million Palestinians in Gaza have been left without access to proper medical care for three years. If the AMA were run by individuals who actually practiced their own code, they would have been the first to advocate against medicide in Gaza. Unfortunately, the organization seems to favor quiet comfort over the actual embodiment of its values.

I am reminded of the photo that came out of Gaza just a few weeks after the genocide began. At a press conference outside an exhausted hospital, dead bodies of children in bags surrounded the podium, traumatized men stared at the camera, and some of the most courageous healthcare workers I have ever seen spoke out, pleading for the world to do something.

Press conference outside of Al-Ahli Hospital on October 18th, 2023.

I see the photo above, and the photo of Dr. Abu Safiya — these are just a handful of Palestinian healthcare workers making tremendous sacrifices to protect human life and dignity. They physically put themselves in the line of fire; meanwhile, the AMA doctors can't even put out a statement. It is well past time that they break their silence. If the AMA chooses to advocate for the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, they very well might save his life.

Jimmy Carter’s campaign motto in 1976 was “Why Not the Best!” declaring everywhere he went: “I want to see us once again have a nation that’s as good and honest and decent and truthful and competent and compassionate and filled with love as are the American people.”

Dictator Donald Trump wants the opposite and is bringing the worst out of America. Here are a few of his metastasizing initiatives:

1. Championed the worst forms of energy – coal, oil, and gas – and depressing solar energy and wind power with restrictive policies, and even paying ongoing wind project companies nearly a billion dollars in your tax dollars to stop construction! Also, he is using many billions of your tax dollars to subsidize the failing nuclear power companies to build more expensive, unneeded, uninsurable, un-investable (by Wall Street), unsafe, boondoggles while his GOP takes large campaign contributions from fossil fuel and nuclear power corporate welfarists.

2. Encouraged the worst corruption of the Pentagon—more waste, contractor fraud and abuse—led by a foul-mouthed buffoon pushing illegal wars, mass deaths, and racism. Hegseth is despised by many high-ranking officers for his misogynistic firings and incompetence.

3. Brought out the worst from his toady Attorney Generals at the Justice Department—firing prosecutors and other lawyers for perceived vengeance. Trump gives orders directly to DOJ officials, thus ending any traditional arms-length independence at that Department. Trump has gotten his Attorney Generals to dismiss over 100 corporate crime cases, to decline enforcement of laws holding polluters and corporate criminals accountable, and made DOJ his personal law firm.

4. Encouraged the worst from the Environmental Protection Agency, whose puppet director believes that more methane, other greenhouse gases, motor vehicle gases, auto factories, and coal pollution are permissible for America’s children to breathe. EPA Director Lee Zeldin should rename his shattered agency and fired scientists “The Trump Anti-Environment Protection Agency.”

5. Suppressed or cancelled programs of scientific truth-seeking while publicizing pseudo-scientists who go far beyond healthy skepticism to peddle quackery about climate violence, pandemics, and vaccines that lead to distrust and disarray among vulnerable people wanting to protect their families. For Trump, climate catastrophes are “a hoax, a scam” and he is giving corporations the green light on dangerous pesticides (especially deadly to little children) which increase the risk of cancer and other lethal diseases. When you lie every talking hour of the day, as Trump does, the truth and facts have no relevance.

6. Trump is self-servingly wrecking the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Further cutting its tight budget via the GOP in Congress, the IRS has a grossly inadequate number of experts skilled in detecting complex corporate tax schemes and evasions totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in TAX ESCAPES per year.

One of those Escapes is the coerced deal Trump imposed on the IRS to give him and his avaricious family immunity from past and contemporary audits and enforcement, worth a gold mine to the bragging tax dodger-in-chief. He has wrecked public trust in his politicized IRS, on which voluntary compliance by American taxpayers is based.

7. Trump has grievously brought out the worst from the Congress, finishing off what is left of the separation of powers, turning Speaker Mike Johnson into a panting lap dog and Senate Majority Leader John Thune into a more staid but ready heel-clicker. Trump has opposed any public hearings and investigative oversight of the Executive Branch, including an inquiry into his illegal firing of 17 inspector generals required to root out waste and fraud from their departments.

In his first term, Trump defied over 125 Congressional subpoenas – an impeachable offense if ever there was one.

8. Trump brings out the worst from major corporations. His dictates—allowing corporations to cheat, steal, harm, pollute, and violate with impunity almost any federal laws, most of which Trump has shelved by taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beat—could fill a large book.. This is especially the case in lifting controls over poisonous corporate pollution and letting large companies decide for themselves how little or no tax they pay to Uncle Sam from their massive profits. Why not? He preaches what he practices as he amasses an ever-greater personal wealth using the White House as a profiteering office for profiteering.

9. Worsening the architecture of the White House and nearby Washington, D.C., are major preoccupations of this egomaniacal dilettante. He illegally tore down the East Wing and is building, without Congressional permission, a huge, garish ballroom to go along with other planned desecrations, such as the 250-foot-high arch. As architect critic Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post writes, he has turned “the reflecting pool from a serene oasis to a police zone,” bungling millions of dollars.

Day after day, thousands of National Guard soldiers are wondering what they’re doing aimlessly patrolling downtown Washington to fill the whims of Trump’s false claims about their ending street crimes in the national capital.

10. The Trumpeteer has brought out the worst in the mainstream media, giving preferential access to uncritical reporters, and restricting or prohibiting access to reporters who are steadfast and straightforward. Trump maliciously sues to extort money from networks like CBS and ABC, while approving mergers and acquisitions of media properties by Trump funders and flatterers expected to censor in his favor.

11. From the people, he has celebrated vice over virtue, greed over charity, obscenity over decency, violence over peace, police and ICE brutality over more effective standards of prudence and restraint by law enforcers. As an open, brazen liar, a delusionary braggart, and peddler of empty promises, Trump has troubled parents who see their youngsters mimic his abuses and foul talk.

12. He pardons hundreds of convicted violent criminals and other fraudsters and says he will pardon more crooks, even urging them to continue their lawless ways because he will pardon them if they are caught. As a convicted felon himself, he knows a criminal when he sees one. .

13. Trump has violated seven of the Ten Commandments and is almost never seen in Church, yet Trump manages to bring out the most extreme hypocrites from the leadership of organized religion, who support his violent, aggressive wars and alliances of mass murder, larger military budgets, and his waiver of prosecuting corporate crooks, because they like his anti-abortion stance.

Twice, he has assailed Pope Leo, who is insisting that Christianity be a religion of love, compassion, and peace.

14. His most fervent mission is to provoke biases and bigotry against recent immigrants and asylum seekers among millions of his voters who believed his lies about these desperate people, fleeing with their children from oppressive regimes and oligarchies long supported by the U.S. government in Central and South America.

Using words like “invasion,” “rapists,” “criminals,” he succeeded in defaming the overwhelming law-abiding and hard-working people harvesting our crops, caring for our little children and elderly, and cleaning up after us every day to feed their families.

Largely unrebutted by a cowardly Democratic Party, Trump’s fabrications threw his MAGA supporters into a frenzy, which he fed daily, obscuring his own employment of hundreds of low-paid, undocumented construction workers in New York and his servants in New Jersey.

Every society has its cruel, greedy, and bigoted inhabitants. Trump grossly exaggerated troubled conditions in the US to embolden these miscreants, then heralded them, gave them access to the White House and Mar-a-Lago, helped them get media coverage, and sell their books. Trump then intimidated or prosecuted those who exercised their freedom of speech rights to criticize or counter Trump’s depraved and baleful lackeys.

He has regaled Silicon Valley’s corporate digital child molesters, taken their campaign donations, flattery, and investments at the expense of curtailing the daily harm they are directly marketing to tens of millions of vulnerable children.

Presidents of our country, with their “bully pulpit” and vast media coverage, set examples in many ways for families. They can bring out the kindness and idealism of many Americans, as did President John F. Kennedy in 1961 when he and Congress launched the Peace Corps. Or they can exhibit to the world the cruelty and viciousness of the Trump/Musk illegal rampage that started with closing the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). With the rupture of the flow of critical medicines, food, medical supplies, and clean water to those in need, the Trump/Musk Axis sealed the fate abroad of millions, mostly infants, children, and mothers, over the next several years, according to expert estimates. (See USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.)

Long after Trump is impeached and removed from office, his hateful, vengeful drive to bring out the worst from our country will linger and fester. Until, that is, the forces behind expanded goodwill and fair play, peace and justice manifest themselves at the polls, the civic and political arenas, and the civic education and experiences within our repurposed elementary and secondary schools.

History repeatedly teaches us that principles of peace, justice, and opportunity always enjoy overwhelming public support when polled compared to ideologies of corruption, violence, and greed.

So, it is entirely in our hands to bring these preferences into the daily reality of the people, their children and grandchildren, and future generations who deserve better.

Separating the meaning of Jewish identity and learning, distinct from the Israeli state and its underlying doctrine, is worthwhile work.

It's also urgent work, overdue. This is a maniacal, genocidal post from Israel's Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir:

For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!

Repulsion from Israel's actions naturally affects how Jews are seen in the world, how we walk among others in the world—and ironically, for Zionists, validates their conception of the gentile world as forever hostile to Jews.

The existence of the State of Israel, the merger of Judaism with Jewish nationalism, has unavoidably changed what being a Jew is.

Identifying with a state perpetually in conflict, we retreat to the protection of our litany of noble sufferings, protecting from facts, from seeing ourselves as cruel or hurtful. Or—even—silly, annoying, not so significant.

Zionist theoretician Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 of the way that the Jewish state would have to be constructed, that “it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.”

Colonization would have to continue “only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”

When Jabotinsky wrote this, Jews were immigrating to Palestine under British protection to fulfill the League of Nations Mandate promise of a yet-to-be defined “Jewish homeland” there.

Population "transfer" to create a Jewish majority state was envisioned by Zionist leadership, from founder Theodor Herzl onwards.

The United Nations Palestine partition plan of 1947 and resulting civil conflict provided the opportunity for Jewish militias and then the Israeli army to target and empty communities—to become sites for Jewish settlements with Hebrew names.

Israeli statehood on May 14, 1948 was accomplished by dispossession of most of the Arabs of Palestine—the expulsion of 750,000 Arabs from what would become Israel. This is called the Nakba (catastrophe) in Arabic.

Those Palestinians remain exiled despite a pledge from Israel to the United Nations in 1949 to accept returning refugees, as part of their admission as a member state.

The “restoration” of our sovereignty inflicted a catastrophe on Palestinians which will be part of Jewish history forever.

The creation of the State of Israel is presented as necessary Jewish self-assertion.

In September 1948, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban wrote that in a “just world” consultation and agreement would have been preferred. “But the world is more realistic than just. The doctrine of ‘accomplished fact’ has been entirely vindicated against that of ‘prior consent.’”

That doctrine forces for Jews a necessity of either identifying with Israel, or maintaining the identity of “Jewish-not Zionist,” an awkward thing to maintain while well-provisioned Jewish organizations present Zionism as Judaism.

That doctrine also destroyed Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa, and as far as India. Exercising naked power to force Arabs from their homes to privilege Jews in Palestine poisoned the place of Jews who lived for many centuries as citizens in neighboring societies.

Thinking of the vulnerability and degradation of Jews in the past, I struggle to reconcile those moments with this moment of Jews as a menace—and Jewish nationalism as a personal imprisonment.

The Zionist movement which descended on Palestine to “ingather the exiles” is now a state dedicated to a philosophy of Jewish redemption by violence, “an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority,” as described by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others in a 1948 letter to The New York Times, of the faction that is now in control of Israel’s psyche.

Israel operates with a logic in which opponents to the Jewish state intend a Holocaust—mindless, causeless enemies as in the Passover or Purim or Hanukkah stories.

While most Jews in the diaspora live in accommodation and cooperation with gentile co-nationals, Israel has sacralized and militarized the “they always turn on us” belief.

We live in two models of Jewishness—the Jew living in civil cooperation with gentiles, and the militant Jewish supremacist in Palestine.

The contradiction of those two models of Jewishness makes us a problem to ourselves and others, with no clarity.

Complicating this is our belief in the grandeur of our own culture and learning.

As a child, I was buoyed by stories of Jewish learning and achievement—unlikely persistence through the ages—uniqueness.

I felt I was one of a fine, special group.

I also absorbed the other, paired, narrative of Jewish history. In the ritual reading of the Haggadah text each Pesach, I was reminded that we were enslaved in Egypt, and that in every generation They rise up to destroy us. And we survive, achieve, and show our high quality.

The theme of Jewish life is that we were chosen for a great mission, and have been persecuted since.

In these narratives, living a Jewish life is fulfilling the endowment of Torah and generations of scholarship, earnest and humane— targeted by malice, by jealousy from peoples less… fortunate? Not Jewish.

It may be that feelings Jews have about gentiles are as problematic as prejudices gentiles have against Jews. We suffer from not only how gentiles may see us, but limitations on how we see non-Jews.

Mitch Abidor, in the magazine Jewish Currents, describes a passage in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint about a non-Jewish girl who tosses a flaming baton and catches it, and and its significance to the “nice Jewish boys in the stands." Portnoy observes that:

there was still a certain comic detachment exhibited on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first place.

Legendary Forverts newspaper editor Abraham Cahan wrote in his novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, of Talmudic education (an experience Cahan had shared with his character during his youth in Lithuania). The process of extended reasoning and disputation in religious study seemed the acme of human ratiocination:

"Can you fathom the sea? Neither can you fathom the depths of the Talmud," as we would put it. We were sure that the highest mathematics taught in the Gentile universities were child's play as compared to the Talmud.

This feeling of higher thought as a specifically Jewish achievement is useful to surface in discussion of how we see our not-Jewish fellows.

Torah study may be mostly a treasure of the observant now, but the habits and outlook of study and productive disputation persist. Might the assumption of superlative Jewish quality also?

To accept the World-Against-the-Jew construct, one must accept the idea that there is a unique quality to Jews.

Our religion revolves around identity, descent from tribes in a substantive relationship with the true God. When we pray, we are praying to a god that particularly cares that we are Jews doing the praying.

The central prayer of Judaism is the Shema:

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

The Yiddish phrase "pintele yid," Jewish spark or kernel, expresses the belief that there is an irreducible, distinct core of Jewishness that is in a born Jew, observant or secular or ignorant.

The story told about converts is that their nefesh (soul, spirit) was there at Sinai to hear Moses tell God’s covenant with his people..

This resolves Judaism as an embrace of Torah—fudges the membership story, in truth.

Is “Jew” a coherent national category, as we include Indians, Ethiopians, Yemenis, Poles, and Romanians?

When devotion to Torah is the center of this identity, it does not require ruling from imagined supremacy.

The poison brewed when mixed with a colonial enterprise designed at a time Britain could design a plan “natives” had to accept.

The Israeli government recognizes Israeli citizenship for Jews, Arabs, and others, but then records the “nationality” of the citizen separately, so that I, an American citizen, in their system share the same “nationality”—“Jewish”—as an Israeli Jew.

Ultimately the identity is based on magic, superstition, folkways, and spiritual truth. Am I required to believe in the existence of "The Jewish Nation" as the term is meant in the Zionist state?

The Zionist proposition for the world’s relationship with Jews is, “Love us, love our land.” This is articulated in their claim, “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”

In 1906, Jewish educator Solomon Schechter said that he feared assimilation of Jews, loss of identity, “even more than pogroms.” He wrote that in the Jewish “exile,” the Zionist project could form “the great bulwark against assimilation… an opposing force.”

As we Jews "fight for our existence," is it because diminishment of our self-held special place in the world feels like death?

American Jewish organizations promote connection with the State of Israel to nurture Jewish identity of the young.

Identifying with a state perpetually in conflict, we retreat to the protection of our litany of noble sufferings, protecting from facts, from seeing ourselves as cruel or hurtful. Or—even—silly, annoying, not so significant.

A popular 1970s Israeli song had the refrain, "The Whole World is Against Us.” It concluded,

The whole world is against us...
This song was taught to us
By our old fathers,
And we too shall sing it,
And after us—the sons.
And great-grandchildren of great-grandchildren will sing
Here in the Land of Israel,
And anyone who is against us
Can go to hell!
The whole world is against us…

It’s not clear how we wish to be regarded.

At the Enlightenment and revolutionary emancipation of Jews, converting from toleration to equal citizenship, there was a loss of community autonomy, statutory difference—the loss of definition as members of a nation within the nation.

Even stigmatized, community autonomy had its advantages. Jewish communities had their own recognized governance, internal taxation, regulation of their own personal affairs, and laws, courts.

That concept of modern citizenship as individual equality conflicts with Jews residing as their own self-governing polity with representatives to the larger society, as was often the practice. This is sacrificed with equal citizenship, where all live under the same law.

Max Nordau, speaking to the First Zionist Congress in 1897, made interesting comments that when Jews lived isolated in ghettos, they had society of their own. He says that while Emancipation had its intoxication, it left Jews in Western Europe in “misery” because they could not thrive as Jews among Jews.

We are people; people do evil.

Acceptance becomes a stressor; the more we become like our fellow nationals, the more desperate to maintain a difference.

By the logic of Nordau, the most salutary circumstance for Jewish happiness is isolation from the larger society—or living as the majority the Jewish state achieved in 1948.

UK Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in a 2016 address on antisemitism, presents the existence of Israel as a Jewish human right. “Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else.” (Emphasis added.)

Now, we've acquired the belief we're only meant to be happy if we rule our own “Jewish” land? Or only be safe if we do? The rationale toggles between the two, that Israel represents Jewish safety or Jewish fulfillment.

Jewish history treasures—curates—narratives of persecution. The meaning of that must be considered. If we have grievance, contempt, or pity for those outside our circle, are we healthy?

For me, there has been not just a feeling of kinship but a higher expectation of Jews, expecting less of gentiles as a rule. Prejudice absorbed growing up is painful to examine.

The origin story of our people—chosen by God to a special mission of glorifying Him and his laws—may instill confidence, a sense of identity, but I think is “worth another think” as a problem when, as Peter Beinart points out, it is empowered as a state.

He writes, “In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself.”

Beinart's comment suggests that many Jews now have Zionism as their faith—and faiths are based on taking certain premises as fact. It may be a creator of a particular sort, or in this case a belief in the Jewish people as a reconstituted modern nation-state. In any case, faiths can't be debated.

Beinart, religiously observant and well-grounded in Jewish study, called his book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, and gave it the subtitle, A Reckoning. The necessary reckoning he forecasts for Jews I think will be ugly and with false starts and detours, and will necessitate re-evaluations of how we prejudge gentiles.

We number perhaps 16 million worldwide, and we Jews are at the pivot point of the USA’s wars on Iran, Iraq, and all sorts of involvement in bolstering Israel’s impunity in its neighborhood. Things at pivot points can get caught and mangled.

Dr. Michael A. Meyer wrote of American Jews: “For them the state is the flagship of the people to which they belong. Their Jewish identity is as much ethnic as religious, and their religious expression of that identity as much as affirmation of their peoplehood and the importance they attribute to preserving it…”

Polling shows this identification with Israel is less true than when written in 1994.

The American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist organization founded in 1943, is reviving the struggle within the Jewish community for Jewish life "free from the Zionist idea of Judaism as a nationality or the elevation of one nation above others…grounded in justice, solidarity, and humility."

We maybe are preserving ourselves without attention to what we become. An organized project to dispossess Arabs from their homes leaves us as what sort of people, declaring populations "human animals," and promising a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48”?

Israel is now again attempting a land grab of south Lebanon, methodically blowing up evacuated villages so that Lebanese have no homes to return to.

Israel has no declared borders, only armistice lines after various wars since 1948. It has claimed and settled part of Syria, and in a de facto manner acquired all of mandate Palestine, settled it with Jews, but without recognizing citizenship of non-Jews living there. Gaza, populated in majority by refugees from the 1948 Nakba, it tried to settle, and strangled it at the best of times.

Israel has, since 1948, and especially since the 1967 occupation, arbitrarily detained 1 million Palestinians, and subjected them to routine beatings, humiliation, and abuse, reaching new depths since October 7, 2023.

This abuse is enabled by indifference to the humanity of a classification of people—in this case non-Jews.

Having known abuse from both pogromists and cruel soldiers, we—we?—unleash them on Arab civilians.

Israel is a significant producer in the international arms trade, especially in mechanisms of surveillance and control of civilian populations.

One thing is taboo: anything other than seeing innocence in the actions of Jews in the world.

Cruelty, persecution, crimes against humanity are in a blind spot when it's “our own people” as perpetrators. Exceptions to a virtuous rule.

There is anger at Israel's blockade, bombing, and occupation of Gaza, and West Bank state terrorism, and the reaction of Israel defenders is often that the charged offenses match historic antisemitic canards—thus are invalid.

The problem with enumerating the package of common antisemitic slurs is that they always seem to create a kind of immunity: If something has been falsely charged of Jews, one needn't avoid the crime charged?

Is it a matter of seeing ourselves as others see us? Is it a matter of the struggle for some objectivity? Is every ethnic or tribal identity a devaluing of those outside it?

For me to see the Jewish story with objectivity is as impractical as performing a non-trivial surgical operation on myself.

Do I touch on something unmentionable, “feed antisemitism,” by separating our human value from our outsize mythologizing?

I defend myself: It cannot be betrayal to think of Hillel's teaching, the universal "What is hateful to you, do not do to another," with an eye to truths we thought established in the Nuremberg trials, not to mention learned from the object lesson of the Nuremberg rallies.

Zionist Israel is Chelm. The legendary town of Chelm (not the real Polish city) in Yiddish stories is inhabited by remarkably foolish people who begin from foolish premises and build on them to ridiculous solutions.

The first stupid premise—that “Israel” can be taken from “Palestine”—is compounded by more and more technological excellence in killing and surveillance.

For believers that the Jewish story must include a modern nation-state in Palestine, it’s a certainty that I am “betraying my people” by writing out these thoughts. Or, naive to the innate antisemitism of the world.

In the Passover ritual meal, the “wicked son” asks, “What does this mean to you?” By not asking what the Exodus story means to “us,” he separates himself from The Jewish People, showing his wickedness.

I think the only irredeemable sin, among Jews, is faithlessness to “Our People”—aligning with gentiles. As a comment posted on a Zionist website stated, “True Jewish morality begins with loyalty to our own people.”

If all Jews compose a Jewish nation in a literal rather than spiritual, figurative sense, the weight of treason comes into play for faithlessness.

Danish expatriate Israeli Jonathan Ofir wrote in an online essay titled “I Am Freed from Zionism”:

It's hard to define the line where people sense you're not loyal. But it is a kind of social control with cult characteristics. It’s like people have the understanding that you’ve gone too far and now you’re not with "us" but against "us."

Ofir's provocative suggestion that Zionism is cultish makes me ask if there is some vulnerability that Zionism exploits in Jewish hyper-fixation on identity. Are we prone to the cultish division of the world into members and outsider "enemies" that installs an inner policeman to monitor for betrayal?

Certainly there is the cult characteristic of devaluing views from outside of the cult as worthless, ill-intentioned.

Intrinsic to Zionist belief is that Jews are historically vulnerable and non-Jews are unreliable, and that Israeli security is achieved by "realism”—relying on military superiority, "teaching" non-Jews lessons by massive retaliation and iron control.

Zionism began as a secular movement. The secular seamlessly slid to the sanctified, as the words of the Zionist anthem “Hatikvah,” with no mention of the deity, evoke the “Jewish soul,” necessarily implicating a God that made Jewish souls.

Considered with a step back, it has impressive gravity, being a selected people of God. Add the patina of antiquity and who can match the distinction?

The Zionist solution is to be strong and a majority—jettisoning the aspiration of making a better world where the weak and less numerous can be safe.

When arms and sovereignty are grafted to this identity, we have Jewish identity transmogrified to something new—Jewish religious-nationalist power.

With Jews’ role of noble victim is the gentiles’ role of ignoble victimizers. In practice, we may view non-Jews as defective, lacking, having morally-vacant animality.

There is a witticism of uncertain origin, “Jews are like everyone else, only moreso.” I’d leave off the last part, and just say we’re human, with all the human prides and failings.

We are people; people do evil.

Israeli-born genocide scholar Omer Bartov has concluded that Zionism “became the ideology of the state. And it became not only militaristic and expansionist but also racist, extremely violent, and ultimately an ideology that deeply harms both the individual and the collective.”

Bartov continues that in Israel there was “a radical transformation of Judaism itself into a political religion, intertwined with a certain translation of Zionism... In Israel the specific version has, in effect, produced divine or rabbinic legitimation for genocide.”

Zionism becomes revenge, for correction of every humbled moment of Jews in history, and glorification of the god that selected us—to wreak on Palestinians reversal of centuries of obstruction of God’s promise of Jews being mighty and numerous in our land.

Fatally, omitted in the fury is remembering the promise of the land is conditioned on faithful following of God's mitzvot.

The “eternal Jewish vulnerability” narrative is available in Jewish learning to be turned to Zionist purposes. In February, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu laid out concisely the mental landscape of Zionism grafted to Judaism—eternal world antisemitism:

If you look at the course of Jewish history, then what you see is this was a fairly constant phenomenon:

I mean, once we lost our land, once we were scattered among the Nations, we were ready prey. We were ready prey. And eventually, when there was societal change the Jews always were blamed… And these attacks on the Jews were always preceded by vilification. Horrible vilifications that even so-called civilized and educated people adhered to: “The Jews poisoned the wells. The Jews spread vermin. The Jews slaughtered Christian children to use their blood for baking matzos.”

And this goes into modern times. The Nazis basically said the same thing. And all these vituperations, all these slanders were always accompanied, eventually, by exile or pogroms or mass murder.

That's what happened to the Jews one country after another into modern times.

PM Netanyahu then defines the rationale for whatever violence is necessary to preserve the Jewish state in Palestine:

The great change in Jewish history which [Theodor] Herzl saw very clearly is that when the Jews have their own independent state they will have the independent power to roll back the physical attacks against us.

Functionally, it is the strategy of a paranoid person holed up with weapons. As in any religion’s foundational literature, justifications can be found. In the Talmud is the imperative, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”

In territories under Israeli control, it has fostered land stealing and ongoing terrorizing of Arab residents by Jewish “settlers” drunk on ethnic self-assertion, protected by the army of the Israeli state.

When we live among others, the paradox of this outlook on Jewish history, and its "solution" by territorial Zionism, is the abandonment of Jews' right to be French, American, Indian, Syrian, Irani. In harmony with the Nazi legislation that German Jews were not German.

Zionist founding father, secular Theodor Herzl, in Der Judenstaat, summarized the basis of Zionism—that Jews carry antisemitism with them. He said we go where there is no antisemitism and there generate antisemitism:

The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution.

Herzl describes an irredeemable gentile world: “In the world as it now is and for an indefinite period will probably remain, might precedes right. It is useless, therefore, for us to be loyal patriots, as were the [French] Huguenots who were forced to emigrate. If we could only be left in peace... But I think we shall not be left in peace.”

Herzl's and Netanyahu's formulation is degrading of gentiles—that Jews cannot live among others. That there is something profoundly wrong with everyone but Jews.

This approach disregards the success story of a tribal cult from Judea maintaining and building culture over millennia, integrating converts wherever they’ve settled, up to our present.

Jewish pride can be consciousness of heritage, or be a sort of implicit contempt of gentiles.

The Zionist outlook, expressed by Maurice Samuel in 1924—talking of Jews' "wretched fate"—has Jews living in a trap which alienates us from humanity. One may be proud or lament the identity, but with no escaping it:

A century of partial tolerance gave us Jews access to your world. In that period the great attempt was made, by advance guards of reconciliation, to bring our two worlds together. It was a century of failure. Our Jewish radicals are beginning to understand it dimly...

The wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust this unwelcome rôle upon us.

Do we demand safety, protection, because we share common humanity with rights to be respected, or because of our rare qualities—making us a special case?

Whether we think of ourselves as “ready prey” (Netanyahu) or precious unicorns of advanced civilization—or both—the point is we may think of ourselves as a different ilk than run-of-the-mill-humanity.

In America, the claim of being an extraordinary case makes a sisterly blend with Christians Zionist eschatology and “American exceptionalism” in Israel advocacy.

We are whatever we think we are. It isn’t a lament but a boast, that we are “a people that dwells apart.”

The Zionist solution is to be strong and a majority—jettisoning the aspiration of making a better world where the weak and less numerous can be safe.

In 1938, a Polish leader of the anti-Zionist socialist Bund forecast:

Zionism has always regarded the law of force, of nationalistic action, as the normal law of history and on this law has based its perspective on Jewish life…

If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs)…

With Jewish identity focused on its ethnic nation-state rather than a worldwide people gifted Torah and obligations, its majoritarianism and contempt for others shows our vulnerability— as all other groups—to vice. Trauma has not ennobled us.

The whole of Torah revolves around the proposition of singular essential Jewish peoplehood.

Herzl’s proposition that we have “our right to exist as a separate people, according us our rightful place among the nations of the world” is built on it.

The inner policeman tries to stop critical examination of the identity—Disloyalty to faithful ancestors! Betrayal of my people!—to question Zionist corollaries of the statement, “I am a Jew.”

For one day in late June, it looked as though the Constitution had won. For the first time in the 53-year life of the War Powers Resolution, both chambers of Congress voted to order a president to remove US forces from a war he had never asked them to authorize. The House carried the measure on June 3. The Senate followed on June 23. After more than half a century of the legislature flinching from its own authority, here at last was a majority in both houses saying, on the record, that the war in Iran was not theirs and would not be waged in their name.

It lasted about 24 hours.

The resolution that passed was a concurrent resolution—a vehicle that, by design, never reaches the president’s desk and carries no force of law. The measure with teeth, the one that would have required his signature, reached the Senate floor the very next day, June 24. By then the president had summoned Senate Republicans to a closed-door lunch, turned it into a confrontation over the war, and sent at least one wavering senator to a same-day White House briefing. When the binding resolution was called, it failed. Two senators who had voted to constrain the war on Tuesday declined to do so on Wednesday. A war-powers majority had been assembled and dismantled inside a single news cycle—not by argument on the merits, but by a luncheon and a briefing.

Set aside, for a moment, the conduct of any one senator. The deeper fact is structural, and it should trouble anyone who believes the decision to go to war belongs to the people through their representatives. If Congress can pass a war-powers resolution and then refuse to enforce it within a day, the question is no longer whether Congress will check this president. The question is whether it can—and what is supposed to happen when it cannot.

A Congress that can be moved from a war-powers majority to a war-powers minority overnight is not a Congress that is merely choosing not to act. It is a Congress that has shown it cannot make its own action stick.

The administration has not been coy about its view. The war in Iran began in late February without a congressional vote. The Resolution’s 60-day clock expired on May 1, and the president answered with a letter declaring the hostilities “terminated” even as a naval blockade remained in force. His secretary of state told a White House briefing that the War Powers Act is “unconstitutional, 100%,” adding that the administration honors it only as a courtesy, to preserve good relations with Congress. The vice president had earlier dismissed the statute as “a fake and unconstitutional law.” Strip away the “show,” and one proposition remains: that a duly enacted federal law binds the executive only when, and only so far as, the executive cares to be bound. That is not a war-powers position. It is a position about whether laws are laws.

Nor did the threats subside. Even after a memorandum of understanding was signed in mid-June to extend the ceasefire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the president warned that he would “bomb the hell out of” Iran if it failed to comply—a threat of force in open tension with the very agreement he had just concluded. Days earlier, discussing Iran’s nuclear stockpile, he reached for “the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again,” the unmistakable register of nuclear menace from the leader of the only nation ever to have used such weapons against a civilian population. As I have argued previously in these pages, language like this is not loose talk. It is the rhetorical scaffolding of a war the public was never asked to approve.

Here is where the courts enter—or rather, where they have declined to. For 50 years, whenever members of Congress have asked federal judges to enforce the war-powers framework, the judiciary has turned them away, most often by invoking the “political question” doctrine: the notion that disputes between the political branches over war are committed to those branches to resolve, not to courts. That doctrine has always rested on an empirical assumption—that the political process can correct itself, that Congress has tools enough to defend its own prerogatives if only it chooses to use them.

June 23 and 24 are the clearest refutation of that assumption in a generation. The political branches did not resolve this. They demonstrated, in real time and on camera, that the institutional machinery the doctrine relies upon no longer holds under pressure. A Congress that can be moved from a war-powers majority to a war-powers minority overnight is not a Congress that is merely choosing not to act. It is a Congress that has shown it cannot make its own action stick. When the premise of a doctrine collapses, the doctrine built upon it should not survive untouched.

So whose job is it now? The answer the Constitution supplies, once the political branches have failed, points to the one branch that has spent half a century looking away: the judiciary. The Supreme Court has never squarely decided whether a president may wage sustained, unauthorized hostilities past the 60-day deadline in defiance of an explicit statute. It has had reasons, prudential and real, to avoid the question. Those reasons weaken by the week. When an administration pronounces a federal statute void from the podium, complies only as “good relations,” and a Congress that votes to end the war cannot keep the vote alive for a day, the case for judicial abstention has run out. The framework Justice Robert Jackson set down in Youngstown—that a president acts at the “lowest ebb” of his power when he moves against the expressed will of Congress—was written for precisely this situation. It is waiting to be applied.

None of this is simple. Standing is a genuine hurdle; the path to the court runs most plausibly through members of Congress, or a chamber, suing in their institutional capacity rather than through any single citizen. The political-question doctrine will be raised again. But “political question” was always a choice the courts made, not a command the Constitution issued—and the conditions that once made the choice defensible no longer hold. A controversy is ripe for decision when it is concrete and when withholding review inflicts real harm. A war waged in the country’s name without its consent; a statute openly nullified; a legislature unable to enforce its own majority: If that is not ripe, nothing is. And Iran, for all its starkness, is not the only theater in which force has lately preceded authorization rather than followed it.

The Framers placed the war power in Article I—the first article, the people’s article—for a reason that does not age. They had watched kings march nations into war on their own word, and they meant to make that impossible here. The power “to declare War” was given to Congress alone. The War Powers Act did not invent that allocation; it merely tried to make it work in an age of undeclared wars. If Congress can no longer make it work, and the courts will not look, then the war power has quietly migrated to wherever the president happens to be standing when he decides to use it. That is the exact outcome the Constitution was written to prevent.

The stalemate is not an accident of partisanship; it has hardened into a feature of the system, and this president has learned to exploit it with unusual skill. Breaking stalemates between the political branches is what a court of last resort exists to do. It is time for the Supreme Court to take up the question it has avoided for 50 years—and to say, before the next war begins without a vote, who in this country actually holds the power to start one.

Now that the United States and Iran have signed a nonbinding memorandum of understanding ending their war—at least for now—the general public and pundits have been weighing in on who won.

A CBS-YouGov survey released Sunday found that 37% of Americans think the memorandum of understanding (MOU) favors Iran, while 22% believe the United States got the better deal. Nearly half—47%—say both sides broke even.

Newsweek, meanwhile, queried 10 military experts ranging from a former US Navy admiral and a former Pentagon official to five think tank scholars and two professors of international relations. Seven said Iran won the war. Two said “no one.” Only one thought the United States came out on top, but added, “Neither side will gain a complete victory.”

It remains to be seen how things ultimately shake out with the US-Iranian negotiations, but at this point it is clear that two industries won hands down: defense contractors and oil companies. Both profited enormously from the war.

About 20% of the world’s oil and gas is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, and after Iran shut it down, oil companies roughly doubled the price per barrel.

It’s also clear that the war’s biggest losers in the United States were motorists, frequent flyers, farmers, and grocery shoppers. In other words, just about everybody besides oil and defense companies and their shareholders.

The Big Winners

Defense contractors: There are various estimates of how much the conflict has cost the Defense Department thus far. On May 12, the Pentagon comptroller told Congress that the Pentagon had spent $29 billion in operational costs, but he conceded that the estimate did not include the cost to repair US bases in the Middle East that Iran damaged. According to a more recent analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, DC-based think tank, the war has cost closer to $40 billion, including the cost of munitions, destroyed equipment, and base damage. Recently the White House asked Congress for $87.6 billion in supplemental spending, mainly to pay for the Iran war.

Munitions have been the Pentagon’s largest expenditure, and defense contractors, notably Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, are cashing in.

In late March, The Washington Post reported that the US Navy launched more than 850 Tomahawk missiles in the first four weeks of the conflict. The Pentagon paid Raytheon (a division of RTX) about $2.2 million for each, or a total of roughly $1.87 billion. In April, the Navy’s fiscal year 2027 budget request asked Congress for $3 billion for 785 additional Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, a more than 1,200% increase from the 55 TLAMs Congress funded for $258 million in FY 2026.

The Post also reported that US military fired more than 1,000 air-defense interceptors, including Lockheed Martin’s Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles, in response to Iranian counterattacks across the region. Each THAAD interceptor missile costs about $12.7 million, while each Patriot interceptor costs about $3.7 million.

This week, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a $35.3 billion contract to produce THAAD interceptors through June 2032 and asked the company to triple its production of Patriot interceptors. It also inked a $398.7 million contract with Raytheon for Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles.

Oil companies: The war has been a bonanza for oil companies. About 20% of the world’s oil and gas is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, and after Iran shut it down, oil companies roughly doubled the price per barrel.

ConocoPhillips posted $2.2 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2026, up 84% from the $1.4 billion the previous quarter. BP, meanwhile, reported a $3.8 billion profit for the first quarter compared with a $3.4 billion loss in the fourth quarter of 2025.

ExxonMobil and Chevron had lower profits during the first three months of the year than in the previous quarter, but analysts expect a quick turnaround if higher prices persist. The bets are on ExxonMobil’s second-quarter earnings to more than double last year’s level and for full-year earnings to jump 46%, while Chevron’s full-year profits are predicted to rise by 56%.

The Big Losers

Inflation jumped in May for a third consecutive month as the Iran war continued to drive up prices, surpassing 4% for the first time in three years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier this month. Higher prices hit everyone, but especially low- and middle-income Americans. The biggest domestic losers include:

Motorists: Moody’s Analytics, a global financial research firm, estimates that the war has thus far cost Americans $132 billion, and a big chunk of that was due to inflated prices at the pump. Gasoline prices, which averaged just under $3 a gallon when the war began in late February, jumped as high as $4.56 a gallon after Iran cut off the Strait of Hormuz, according to AAA. A gallon of regular gasoline averaged $3.999 last Thursday, the first time since late March that prices were that low. This week, the average price per gallon dipped to $3.928, but gas is 25% more expensive than it was last year at this time and motorists are paying about $1 more per gallon for regular than before the war.

In 2025, US motorists consumed about 374.05 million gallons of gasoline daily, according to the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration. So, at the peak during the war, they paid more than half a billion dollars a day in higher prices. Although prices have dropped since then, that $1 more per gallon for regular motorists are now paying translates into $374 million a day in higher costs.

Likewise, diesel fuel prices increased from $3.76 a gallon just before the war to a peak of $5.69 in early April, according to AAA, raising costs for all goods shipped by train or truck.

Frequent flyers: News of the US-Iran peace deal drove jet fuel spot prices down sharply, from $4.88 a gallon to $2.85. That drop could cut the US airline industry’s annual fuel bill by more than $40 billion, according to the trade publication Oil Price, but “unlike previous oil price downcycles, airlines are unlikely to pass on these cost savings to passengers in the form of lower air fares.” Jet fuel prices jumped three times faster than ticket prices between January and May, Oil Price explained, which cost airlines $100 billion when oil prices spiked during the war, so they likely will apply the windfall to shore up their balance sheets. Lack of competition and tight airport capacity will also be factors.

In other words, airfares are not going to come down to Earth anytime soon. According to Kayak, the average cost of a domestic ticket was $290 in January. That same fare has since climbed to $370.

Farmers: American farmers, still reeling from Donald Trump’s tariffs, have been particularly hurt by the war. Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz drove up the price of farm diesel 46% by mid-April, raising expenses at nearly every stage of farm production. And because a significant percentage of nitrogen-based fertilizers urea and ammonia is produced in the Persian Gulf region, the blockade also disrupted the global fertilizer market, boosting fertilizer prices in the United States by as much as 47%. A nationwide survey conducted in early April by the American Farm Bureau found that roughly 70% of farmers reported that they could not afford to buy all the fertilizer they needed for spring planting. Although fertilizer prices are now lower than they were in April, they are still higher than they were a year ago. Urea, for example, is 16% higher, while anhydrous ammonia is 41% higher.

Grocery shoppers: Higher costs for farmers, as well as higher fuel costs for truckers, mean higher prices at the grocery store. The Independent Grocers Alliance, a coalition of 7,500 supermarkets around the world, calculates that for some food products “fuel-related costs can account for roughly 15-30% of the total cost,” which, on a sustained basis, “can result in a 2-4% increase in retail food prices.” Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture expects grocery prices to rise 3.2% this year, more than the historical average of 2.6%.

High Prices Aren’t Going Away Anytime Soon

Experts warn that high prices will continue long after the war is finally over.

“Product prices across the United States are projected to keep climbing for the rest of 2026,” Pat Penfield, a professor of supply chain practice at Syracuse University, told The Associated Press.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, is equally pessimistic. “I think under the most likely scenarios for how things unfold,” he told ABC News, “I’d buckle up.” Inflation worsened by the Iran war will likely linger for the next six to 12 months.

Wasn’t Donald Trump supposed to be the panacea? When he ran for president for a second term, he promised voters he would curb inflation, bring down prices, and end wars, not start them. He has failed on all counts.

Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens to traffic soon, Zandi said prices will not come down immediately. “It takes time for the higher costs [manufacturers and suppliers] are facing to be incorporated into the prices they charge and actually pass along to their customers, to you and I as consumers,” he said, adding that high energy prices due to the war have cost the typical US household nearly $600 in additional expenditures since the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28.

“The cost, particularly for lower-middle-income households, is real money; it matters,” Zandi said. “For many of these households, there’s no easy solution here. There’s no panacea.”

But wasn’t Donald Trump supposed to be the panacea? When he ran for president for a second term, he promised voters he would curb inflation, bring down prices, and end wars, not start them. He has failed on all counts.

Trump likes to think of himself as historically consequential as Napoleon. He even wants to construct an arch modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. But his “little excursion” in Iran just may prove to be his Waterloo, and Napoleon didn’t build an arch celebrating that.

This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.

The Memorandum of Understanding signed on June 17 by President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian provides a road map toward peace between the two countries. Peace advocates should support it. The journey to this point has been tortuous, the interim agreement contains numerous ambiguities, and the Trump administration as the agent of change from the US side is so deeply compromised that implementation of the steps will be extremely difficult. Nevertheless, the MOU deserves our support.

Unfortunately, Massachusetts Democratic members of Congress have not welcomed the MOU. They rightly point out that Trump started the war, that it was foolish, it was illegal, unconstitutional, it was costly, it damaged the world economy, and it accomplished nothing. That is all true—but they generally have not spoken to its substance unless to criticize it.

If starting the war was wrong, ending it is right. The MOU is a reasonable framework for ending the current conflict and taking steps toward peace with Iran. It calls for opening the Hormuz strait; winding down US sanctions (and the US has already suspended sanctions on Iranian oil sales); reduction of the US military footprint in Iran’s neighborhood; curbs on Iran’s nuclear program with details to be negotiated; Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon; and a reconstruction investment fund for Iran, which would not involve any US funds.

US policy towards Iran has been predicated on hostility to the Islamic Republic since 1979. The US political elite and media have long based their policy on the thesis that Iran is a threat to the region and the United States. US leaders claim that Iran’s nuclear program may lead to its arming itself with nuclear weapons; that Iran’s ballistic missile program threatens its neighbors, especially Israel; that it funds terrorist proxies, naming Hezbollah, Hamas, and Ansar Allah (Houthis) as dangerous sources of instability; that it seeks to destroy Israel and attack the United States; that its repressive internal regime is of a piece with its regional troublemaking.

We can in no way count on Trump and Vice President JD Vance to get this negotiation over the finish line—but we can and should push them to do so.

These premises are profoundly flawed. Iran’s supreme leader has rightly ruled that nuclear weapons violate religious morality, much as Popes Francis and Leo have done. After 47 years it should be clear that Iran has never really sought to build a nuclear weapon, as it surely would have done so by now had that been its intention. Rather, its nuclear program is evidently designed to force the US to the table and get it to end US sanctions and negotiate with Iran on a respectful basis. It is the US and Israel, not Iran, that are armed with nuclear weapons—and Trump who explicitly threatened to use them on Iran. Does Iran arm terrorists? Maybe sometimes, but it is Israel, armed by the US, that has laid waste to the Middle East, attacking Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Yemen, killing tens or hundreds of thousands, over just the past three years—although Iran has certainly done what it could to hit back in response to those constant provocations.

Within the anti-Iran consensus among US elites, one wing calls for diplomacy to obtain concessions from Iran, and for economic sanctions to force Iran to follow US wishes. President Barack Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was based on this strategy. Obama first imposed sanctions, then promised sanctions relief in exchange for strict limits on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program—although little sanctions relief was actually delivered by the US before President Trump ended the JCPOA in 2018.

The other wing of the US elite, joined by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, calls for war to destroy Iran’s military capacity, its nuclear program, cripple its economy, ensure it could not threaten its neighbors or Israel, and if possible, overthrow its government. President Trump took up this approach when he joined Israel in bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities in June last year and then resumed full-scale war with Iran on February 28.

But after Iran struck back at Israel and at US bases and economic infrastructure in the Gulf states, and closed the Strait of Hormuz, everyone understood that the US military campaign to subdue Iran had failed. The MOU that Trump and Iran’s president Pezeshkian signed on June 17 reflects this reality and sets forward a direction that, if implemented, would not only end the US-Iran war, but would begin to reverse the long anti-Iran campaign waged by the US It could be a historic step toward reconciliation between the US and Iran.

It is ironic that the reactionary, racist, ultra-imperialist administration of Donald Trump could be the one to reverse decades of bipartisan US hostile policy. But just as President Richard Nixon went to China, such shifts can happen, and can be led from the right side of US politics. Another example is Trump’s two-year rapprochement with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in his first term, in which he met Kim three times and signed peace framework agreements—though he ultimately dropped the project and reverted to a posture of hostility. Because Trump has no firm ideology, he sometimes can read the situation more clearly than politicians whose policies are anchored in an ossified world view. We can in no way count on Trump and Vice President JD Vance to get this negotiation over the finish line—but we can and should push them to do so.

Indeed, the situation today calls for peace with Iran and a completely new Middle East policy. Israel has become a liability for the United States more clearly than ever before, and US support for Israel’s constant wars on its neighbors and genocide directed at its occupied Palestinian population, its invasion of Lebanon, and its attack on Iran, are now very unpopular in the US. Iran has successfully asserted its ability to defend itself. And as Trump said on June 18, the world economy is teetering as it runs short of oil.

Vice President Vance held out the possibility that Iran can receive a $300 billion reconstruction fund based on the Gulf states, provided a final agreement is reached. In Switzerland on June 21, he asked: “How much more can we accomplish together? Can we turn over a new leaf? Can we change relations in the Middle East permanently, or do we go back to doing things the old way?”

The point, though, is that the wealthy elite of the Gulf are evidently ready to invest in Iran’s reconstruction from the destruction the US has caused. Why? To make money on the investments, to get their foot in the door for future business deals in the potentially lucrative Iranian market, and in the hope that economic ties will reduce the likelihood of a future war.

A diplomatic resolution of the US-Iran hostility would be positive for the US, Iran, and the region. Massachusetts’ Democratic members of Congress should speak in favor of diplomacy and seek to implement them.

This June, some Republican-led states are rebranding Pride Month with staid-sounding faux morality.

Instead of celebrating the rights and dignity of its LGBTQ+ communities, Utah and Arkansas are choosing to label this month “Fidelity Month.” They may as well come out and say queer people are “infidels.”

Tennessee and Alabama Republicans—supporters of President Donald Trump, a father of five children from three different marriages—have dubbed June as “nuclear family month.”

Alabama’s Republican Gov., Kay Ivey, wants the month of June to be known as “Strong Families Month.” Ivey, who is also a strong Trump ally, has been married and divorced twice and has no children.

It’s rich for Republicans to uphold so-called family values in an economy that is hardly suitable for building and raising families of any sort.

The hypocrisy is off the charts. And it’s dangerous.

For much of human history, Western civilizations have sought to shame and criminalize gender and sexual diversity. For LGBTQ+ communities, recent GOP-led political attacks and cultural erasure are matters of life-and-death. Hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people have surged. Debating the rights of queer people to exist has fueled suicide within that community.

Pride has been an antidote to the outdated taboos and dangerous stigmas that have hurt innumerable people. The history of Pride month goes back to the first Pride March in New York City on June 28, 1970 commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

Today most major cities in the US, along with many smaller towns, mark Pride Month with marches and parades throughout June. They are joyful occasions celebrating marriage equality, bodily autonomy, gender affirming care, and the freedom of people to be themselves without fear or judgement.

Although not without flaws, Pride has aspired to be a life-affirming tradition, even spreading all over the world. The rainbow Pride flag encourages people to break out of heterodoxy and binary thinking—puns definitely intended.

The Republican attacks on LGBTQ+ people serve a similar purpose to their racist attacks on immigrants. Both groups are vulnerable communities, scapegoated to distract people from their own economic hardships.

As the United States mints the world’s very first trillionaire, Elon Musk, about half the nation—which amounts to hundreds of millions of Americans—is struggling to get by. The prices of oil, groceries, and commercial flights remain high as a result of Trump’s war on Iran. Skyrocketing health insurance costs are crushing Americans. Higher education has become out of reach for a majority of people. Childcare costs are ridiculous. And housing costs continue to soar.

The rebranding of Pride Month not only feeds the dehumanization of LGBTQ+ communities but obscures the very real economic injustices facing most Americans.

It’s rich for Republicans to uphold so-called family values in an economy that is hardly suitable for building and raising families of any sort. How can people consider having children when it might force them to choose between paying for childcare versus rent?

While conservative politicians are busy erasing queer families, they are enriching the already rich while shrugging off the struggles of working Americans. Notably, the GOP is happy to be the near-exclusive recipient of political contributions from Musk’s Super PAC.

Pride can and should go hand-in-hand with economic justice for all. Transgender youth are almost 10 times more likely to be unhoused than the general population. LGBTQ+ workers earn lower wages on average than their straight cisgender counterparts.

The freedoms to live and thrive in a safe environment, to be educated and healthy without falling into debt, and to simply be able to put food on the table are all consistent with the freedom to marry or not, to procreate or not, to affirm one’s gender, and to love anyone one chooses.

The conservative answer to inequality is to worsen it through division and scapegoating. Our response must be grounded in collective liberation.

By Ralph Nader June 26, 2026 Jimmy Carter’s campaign motto in 1976 was “Why Not the Best!” declaring everywhere he went: “I want to see us once again have a nation that’s as good and honest and decent and truthful and competent and compassionate and filled with love as are the American people.” Dictator Donald…

On June 25, the Supreme Court drastically expanded the Trump administration’s ability to shape the nation’s immigration system. In two separate 6-3 decisions, the court’s conservative majority ruled that the administration can revoke Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants, as well as physically block asylum-seekers from entering the country and applying for legal protections.

Both rulings are as cruel as they are nonsensical.

Temporary Protected Status (TPS)

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has sought to end TPS for over 1 million migrants from 13 countries, including Venezuela, Haiti, Somalia, and Syria. These termination orders have been challenged in court and, to date, seven of them remain paused.

The Supreme Court’s ruling, however, puts all of them in jeopardy. While it allows DHS to remove legal protections for Haitians and Syrians specifically, it paves the way for the department to terminate TPS for any group with little to no oversight.

if Trump’s gross fearmongering about Haitians eating cats and dogs is not “overtly racial,” then it’s hard to imagine this Supreme Court acknowledging any of this administration’s blatant racism and xenophobia.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito claims that the courts are prohibited from reviewing whether DHS’ decision to terminate TPS complied with the legally required procedures needed to cancel the status. For example, whether former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem “inadequately consulted the State Department about conditions in Syria” or, more broadly, whether “her decision that country conditions in Syria and Haiti justified termination of their TPS designations” are exempt from any form of judicial review.

Importantly, the Supreme Court did not rule that DHS followed the proper protocols when ending TPS. Nor did it determine that conditions in those countries were safe—and, in fact, the Trump administration knows they are not. The State Department has active travel advisories warning Americans against traveling to Syria and Haiti “for any reason” due to the risk of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, limited healthcare, hostage taking, and armed conflict. It is also worth noting that the present conditions in those countries are the direct result of America’s actions in Syria through decades of sanctions and military intervention; and in Haiti, through years of colonial occupation and repeatedly undermining their democratic process.

For the conservative justices, none of this matters. These issues are, in their view, beyond the scope of the courts.

This is a ridiculous assessment. The relevant statute (8 U.S.C. 1254a) reads: “There is no judicial review of any determination […] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state under this subsection.” The court’s conservatives read the word “determination” here to refer to (i) the final decision, (ii) the entire decision-making process, and (iii) every sub-decision within that process. Based on that definition, they conclude that this statute “squarely bars” the courts from assessing the legality of any aspect of DHS’ decision to end TPS.

As Justice Elena Kagan puts it, this interpretation is not only “very broad,” but “very strange.” In her dissenting opinion, she correctly notes that the statute only applies to the final “determination” with regards to whether TPS is actually granted, terminated, or extended. It “does nothing to stop courts from reviewing […] other things” such as “the procedural steps the Secretary must undertake prior to making any determination about country conditions.”

This is not only more consistent with the relevant text but reflects a basic presumption inherent to our system of checks and balances—namely, that “Congress intends the executive to obey its statutory commands and, accordingly, that it expects the courts to grant relief when an executive agency violates such a command.”

After all, if Congress intended DHS to have broad authority to revoke TPS at its sole discretion, then why would it create a multi-step protocol that the department must follow to lawfully end those protections? That fact alone entails that it always intended how DHS reached its “determination” to be subject to judicial and external review.

The conservative majority ignores such considerations. Instead of proper judicial interpretation, they offer a politically motivated and disingenuous rationale designed to give the Trump administration complete control over the humanitarian program.

To this end, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration one more gift: sanitizing its racism.

The court rejected the plaintiff’s claim that terminating TPS for Haitians was racially motivated and thus violated the equal protection clause. For the court’s conservatives, none of President Trump’s past remarks—which include that Haitians are “eating the dogs,” “probably have AIDS,” and that Haiti is a “shithole country”—“were overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.” Whatever these “race-neutral justifications” are, the court conveniently fails to elaborate.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas goes even further. He posits that the plaintiff’s suit would fail simply because “aliens have no equal protection rights against the Federal Government.” Constitutionally, this is painfully wrong. Morally, this is utterly disgusting.

In one fell swoop, the Supreme Court effectively cleared all legal obstacles against the Trump administration’s efforts to end TPS for anyone at any time for any reason. Their ruling renders non-constitutional challenges regarding policy adherence moot from the outset. And if Trump’s gross fearmongering about Haitians eating cats and dogs is not “overtly racial,” then it’s hard to imagine this Supreme Court acknowledging any of this administration’s blatant racism and xenophobia. Their willful ignorance renders the equal protection clause similarly moot.

Asylum Entries

To make matters worse, the Supreme Court was not done. In a separate decision, the court’s conservatives upheld the Trump administration’s “turn-back policy” (also known as “metering”) that allows federal agents at the US border to stop migrants from crossing into the US.

Currently, federal law permits any migrant “who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival […])” to apply for asylum. In Mulin v. Al Otro Lado, the Trump administration argued that their policy does not violate this law since, insofar as those migrants never step foot onto US soil, they never become entitled to apply for asylum in the first place.

The Supreme Court agreed. Writing again for the court’s majority, Alito claims that this case is “straightforward.” He writes, “In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place—for example, a house, a city, or a country—before the person enters the place.”

The Trump administration does not cherish life. The Supreme Court does not value justice. Congress is now the last line of governmental defense against full-on fascism.

Yet, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in her dissenting opinion, the majority’s fixation with the word “in” overlooks the broader context of the statute. Federal law dictates that any migrant “arriving” and “seeking admission” into the country “shall be inspected by immigration officers.” If they are ineligible for admission, they shall be removed unless they indicate “an intention to apply for asylum […] or a fear of persecution.” In that case, “the officer shall refer the alien for an interview.” That clause clearly applies to migrants who haven’t physically entered the US.

This also explains the language Congress uses in that statute. Under the majority’s reading, to “arrive in” the US is synonymous with being “physically present in” the US. But, if this is true, then why would Congress include both phrases if they were so obviously redundant? It’s because, in addition to being physically present, those who have arrived before an immigration official also have the right to apply for asylum even if they are not physically present in the US.

As Sotomayor bleakly remarks, “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.”

This point not only underlines the cruelty of the policy, but also its sheer stupidity. Asylum-seekers brave horrible conditions, traveling hundreds if not thousands of miles away from their homes in search of a better life. Sotomayor is obviously correct that some will take the extra steps to enter the country by any means necessary. This is especially true if they believe that doing so is their only means of acquiring asylum. Trump’s policy undermines a system that would allow federal officials to screen migrants at the border, review their case, and provide them proper guidance for one that openly encourages the very kinds of “illegal entries” that his administration consistently bemoans as an existential threat to the nation.

Trump’s Humanitarian Crisis

With these decisions, the Supreme Court once again bends the knee to Trump’s vile agenda of violence and death. Eliminating humanitarian protections and denying asylum to those who need them most betray every value that makes this nation great.

What’s more, the court further exacerbates a humanitarian crisis that Trump is either intentionally or indifferently manufacturing. In his second term alone, he has either threatened or attacked 15 countries including Greenland, Venezuela, Somalia, and Syria; launched over 60 military strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean that have killed over 200 people; eliminated the US Agency for International Development (USAID)—an act that could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030; launched an illegal war that has killed more than 7,300 people in Iran and Lebanon; a war that has also wrecked the global economy and caused fuel and food shortages in the world’s poorest and most remote areas; has consistently aided and supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza; imposed a total oil blockade that is economically asphyxiating Cuba; and has made refugee status in the US a privilege nearly-exclusive to white South Africans (who he claims—without evidence—are facing “racially motivated violence”), among many other similarly insidious and corrupted acts.

Our best option is to empower Congress to stand up against both the Trump administration and his Supreme Court by working to elect as many progressive candidates in November.

In short, the Trump administration does not cherish life. The Supreme Court does not value justice. Congress is now the last line of governmental defense against full-on fascism.

Fortunately, even Republicans understand the gravity of this situation. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), for instance, has already called for Congress to extend TPS for Haitians. For all of Trump’s bigotry, migrants remain an indispensable part of the US economy.

Ultimately, we need extensions for every group under threat from the Supreme Court’s reckless decisions as well as new protections for those who have already lost their TPS designations. For now, our best option is to empower Congress to stand up against both the Trump administration and his Supreme Court by working to elect as many progressive candidates in November. Before things get worse, we need fighters in Congress that will serve the people’s interest and stand up to Trump and his cronies.

The real way to read the immigration decisions the Supreme Court issued on Thursday is not to see them solely as losses for immigrants to the United States or the rights of immigrants. They are much larger losses. They are losses for the authority of Congress to have its laws fully executed by a president who doesn’t agree with them.

Markwayne Mullin vs. Al Otro Lado concerns a 1917 law that requires immigration officers to inspect noncitizens who arrive at ports of entry to determine whether they may enter the United States. Congress amended the law in the Refugee Act of 1980 to allow noncitizens fleeing persecution in their home country to apply for asylum as part of this inspection process.

The act lays out a required set of procedures to guide this process. It says that a noncitizen who seeks admission to the United States “may apply for asylum.” If the noncitizen lacks valid travel documents, the officer “shall order [her] removed” unless she conveys an intention to apply for asylum or a fear of persecution, which in turn requires the officer to “refer” her for further processing of her asylum application.

This system is designed to ensure that the US government considers the application of each person seeking to come into the United States to determine who should be let in, who should be turned away, and who should be allowed to apply for asylum.

This must be seen for what it really is—a systemic effort by the six Republican appointees on the court to shrink congressional authority and enlarge the authority of the executive branch.

But on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s majority held that a president may circumvent these requirements simply by having US immigration officers stand at the border and physically block noncitizens from setting foot on US soil—even if the asylum-seeker is certain to be persecuted, or killed, if she is turned away.

What happened to the Refugee Act of 1980 and the specific procedures outlined in it? The Supreme Court ignored it.

The other decision released today, Markwayne Mullin vs. Dahlia Doe, concerns another law, part of the Immigration Act of 1990 called Temporary Protected Status. For over a decade administrations have provided humanitarian Temporary Protected Status relief to Haitian and Syrian nationals coming to the United States.

Today, the Supreme Court’s majority held that federal courts may not review the Secretary of Homeland Security’s compliance with that law. But in fact the Immigration Act of 1990 specifically allows judicial review of whether the secretary adhered to the procedures the law requires—exactly what the plaintiffs disputed.

It would be easy to see these two cases solely through the lens of immigration—and conclude that the Supreme Court’s decisions Thursday simply backed President Donald Trump and his fanatical underling Stephen Miller’s commitment to block noncitizens from the United States or to force them out. And surely these are the consequences of both of the rulings.

But the decisions are even darker and more dangerous than this. Even in the face of two laws in which Congress instructed the executive branch to do certain things, a majority of the current Supreme Court—the abominable Roberts Court—has bent over backwards to ignore those laws.

This must be seen for what it really is—a systemic effort by the six Republican appointees on the court to shrink congressional authority and enlarge the authority of the executive branch.

If there was any doubt before, there should be none now: The Supreme Court is part of the anti-democracy movement led by Trump and the billionaires behind him.

The Supreme Court is set to decide a case that could overturn laws in 30 states that provide grace periods, which allow counting mail ballots received after Election Day but sent on time.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has issued two executive orders seeking to displace states’ mail voting laws, including one that attempts to deny federal funds to states that do not reject mail ballots received after Election Day. (The Brennan Center and other voting rights groups have challenged both orders in court.)

These efforts seek to undermine state policies for when mail ballots may be counted. They are centered on false claims about mail ballots and misreading of election law and are occurring as states pass restrictive voting laws—some of which even rely on the executive orders or the ongoing litigation.

While many states have expanded access to mail voting since 2020, between 2020 and 2025, 27 states enacted laws restricting mail voting. These restrictions have followed false claims by Trump and his allies about fraudulent mail ballots. Indeed, Trump made similar claims due to ballot processing times following California’s recent primary. These false claims and restrictive laws around mail voting persist even though the overwhelming evidence shows that it continues to be safe and secure.

Lawmakers who focus on voters when enacting election laws recognize that some face unique hurdles when accessing the ballot box.

Laws restricting mail voting include laws eliminating grace periods. Notably, between 2020 and 2025, at least seven states, including Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, and Utah, have either tightened the deadline for returning a mail ballot or blocked officials from accepting mail ballots arriving after Election Day. At least four states have done so in the past year, including two that did so after the executive orders or Supreme Court litigation.

North Dakota eliminated its grace period, which counted mail ballots so long as they were postmarked by the day before Election Day, in April, shortly after Trump’s March 2025 executive order on voting. Among other things, that order illegally directs the Election Assistance Commission, an independent federal agency, to condition funding on a state’s adherence to an Election Day ballot-receipt deadline, even if the ballots were submitted on time under state law. Just three weeks after Trump issued the order, state legislators amended an elections bill to include a new section “addressing the new executive order” by eliminating the state’s grace period.

Then, in December 2025, Ohio passed a law eliminating its grace period, which counted ballots postmarked before Election Day and received by the fourth day after (a period that Ohio had already shortened in 2022 from the 10th day after the election). One of the 2025 bill’s sponsors pointed to Trump’s executive order. But Ohio lawmakers also made their decision while the Supreme Court case, Watson v. Republican National Committee, had yet to be argued, let alone decided.

That case began in early 2024 under a sham legal theory: that century-old federal “Election Day” laws, which require states to have presidential and congressional elections on the first Tuesday of November, preempt Mississippi’s policy of accepting mail ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within five business days thereafter. Those federal laws do not set the date by which states must receive and count ballots, and a federal district court rejected the lawsuit. But in March 2025, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the ruling in a deeply flawed opinion that inaccurately described the plain text, historical practice, and congressional history of the “Election Day” laws.

The same week in November 2025 that the Supreme Court agreed to hear Watson, Ohio’s Legislative Budget Office cited the Fifth Circuit’s flawed reasoning in its analysis for lawmakers. By the following month, Ohio had eliminated the state’s grace period except for military and overseas voters. (Mississippi, for its part, recently enacted a “trigger law” that, if the court overturns Mississippi’s current grace period, will require mail ballots to be received a full day before Election Day.)

To be sure, North Dakota and Ohio lawmakers also pointed to other states that do not provide grace periods. But North Dakota and Ohio’s passing of restrictive voting laws following a contested executive order and grace period-related litigation, respectively, shows the damage that the executive branch and courts alike can cause by elevating debunked legal theories.

In contrast with the executive order and Watson litigation, multiple states have exercised their authority to develop mail voting policies under a different approach: addressing voters’ needs. Today, at least 14 states, the District of Columbia, and three other US territories provide a grace period for all voters. At least 16 states provide a grace period specifically for military and overseas voters. And Montana provides a grace period specifically for users of the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot, which serves as a backup ballot for military and overseas voters.

During the Civil War, officials in states including Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island gave military voters additional time after Election Day to have their ballots arrive so they could be counted. In 2010, US Postal Service delays resulted in over 26,000 mail ballots arriving too late to be counted in California’s general election. This led California to adopt a three-day grace period for all voters, which the legislature lengthened to 17 days during the Covid-19 pandemic and shortened to seven days following the pandemic. Texas decided in 2005 to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day and received the day after. It added longer deadlines in 2017: five days after Election Day for civilian ballots and six days for military service members deployed abroad and their families. And some states, like Alabama and Colorado, that have adopted grace periods specifically for military and overseas voters have done so to build upon protections embedded in the federal Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.

Lawmakers who focus on voters when enacting election laws recognize that some face unique hurdles when accessing the ballot box. As the Brennan Center and co-counsel Covington & Burling noted in a friend-of-the-court brief in Watson, overseas civilian and military voters can face mail delays that prevent ballots from arriving on time, through no fault of the voter. Rural voters, like many in largely rural Alaska, can be wholly dependent on mail voting to participate in elections. So too can voters with disabilities, or certain communities of color that may rely on mail voting as an effective alternative to in-person voting. Indeed, recent research on the rescission of Ohio’s grace period suggests that thousands of valid votes in the 2024 election would not have been counted under the new rules.

Court decisions sanctioning Trump’s unconstitutional executive orders or the misleading claims underpinning Watson could add to the burdens some voters already face. But even if Trump’s executive orders fail and the Supreme Court upholds the grace period at issue, policymakers and advocates should still be concerned about how lawmakers can turn the false claims behind executive orders and litigation into restrictive state voting laws.

On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening.

Former city comptroller Brad Lander beat Rep. Dan Goldman by more than 30 points. A 32-year-old democratic socialist named Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and state Assemblymember Claire Valdez won the seat Nydia Velázquez is vacating. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (a recipient of dark money and AIPAC money) campaigned hard against all three and watched all three win anyway.

As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put it afterward, the message is pretty clear: Americans are sick to death of a rigged economy and of billionaires buying their elections.

The corporate press and just about every Republican in the country will tell you these candidates are “socialists,” and they’ll spit the word the way you’d say “arsonist.” A little history clears the fog.

This is what oligarchy looks like, and the people feeling it in their bank accounts, student loans, and their doctors’ offices understand it far better than the idiotic (or bought-off) Democratic National Committee consultants who keep telling Democrats to move to the “center.”

When a young public defender in upper Manhattan or a state assemblywoman in Brooklyn calls herself a democratic socialist today, she isn’t talking about Havana or the old Soviet Politburo (the way Republicans and much of the press want you to think). The three who won in New York ran on Medicare for All, affordable housing, stronger union protections, and an end to US military support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works 40 hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.

That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped out about.

Americans have wanted those things for a very long time. More than 120 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt stood up and called it the Square Deal: a fair shot for the worker, the consumer, and the “honest businessman” against the trusts and the railroad barons who’d swallowed the economy whole.

Franklin Roosevelt built the scaffolding of it with the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson finished the second story with the Great Society, and for about three decades we actually had it. The middle class in the postwar years grew faster and richer than any middle class in the history of the world. By 1980, it was two-thirds of us with a single paycheck (it’s about 41% now, and takes two paychecks to get there).

I grew up inside that promise. My father came home from the antifa war (aka WWII); got a job in a unionized tool-and-die shop in Michigan; and on that one paycheck he and my mother raised four boys, bought a house, kept a car in the driveway (new every three years), had a pension when he retired that let him travel the world, and never once feared that a hospital bill would take the whole thing down.

Nobody we knew was rich, but almost everybody we knew was secure. That security was the whole point, and it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the country decided, through its government, to make it happen.

And then it was taken apart on purpose. As I lay out in The Hidden History of American the American Dream, the dismantling of that middle class wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of globalization or robots or some impersonal economic weather. It was a deliberate Republican neoliberal project that began with Ronald Reagan imitating Maggie Thatcher and following Heritage’s A Mandate for Leadership in 1981 and has been carried forward by both parties ever since.

The tools were straightforward. Going back to Taft-Hartley in 1947 and the spread of “right-to-work-for-less” laws, Republicans and their corporate funders handed states and giant companies the power to strangle unions, and a worker without a union is a worker without leverage.

They froze the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, where it has sat untouched since 2009. America’s oligarchs fought, decade after decade, to keep the United States the only wealthy nation on Earth without national healthcare, herding us instead into the arms of insurance conglomerates and hospital and physician monopolies, more and more of them now owned by private equity firms that treat a sick patient as a line item to be squeezed.

The result, as the nonpartisan RAND Corporation recently calculated, is that roughly $79 trillion has been pumped upward from the bottom 90% of Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich top 1% since Reagan, and the middle class has sunk below 50% of us and is hanging on—now requiring two paychecks—by its fingernails.

In that same span the share of national income going to the bottom 90% fell from about two-thirds to less than half, we’ve watched the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the American republic all the way back to George Washington, and every dollar of it was a choice some oligarch or his wholly-owned politician made.

The one fully socialized, fully government-run healthcare system we do have in this country, the Veterans Administration, works so well (it has the highest happiness-approval rating of any other healthcare system in America) precisely because it isn’t run for profit, which is exactly why the Republicans are now busy gutting it.

And during the George W. Bush years they took a run at Medicare itself, creating the Medicare Advantage scam through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act and handing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to private insurers to “manage” the care of our parents and grandparents.

We can see now how that’s going. A federal watchdog reported this month that the biggest for-profit insurers are denying pre-approval for post-hospital care at rates between 51-80%, with more than a third of those denials reversed the moment somebody appeals, which tells you the care should have been approved in the first place.

A Senate investigation found those same insurers overcharged taxpayers by $83 billion in a single year while denying sick seniors the rehabilitation they were promised. But the health insurance industry oligarchs made out like bandits; several are now billionaires or worth hundreds of millions.

And now the administration is importing that very same denial machinery into traditional Medicare through a “test” program in six states that literally pays contractors a bounty for every claim they refuse.

This is what oligarchy looks like, and the people feeling it in their bank accounts, student loans, and their doctors’ offices understand it far better than the idiotic (or bought-off) Democratic National Committee consultants who keep telling Democrats to move to the “center.”

Forty-five years of this has produced a country where, thanks to the Supreme Court’s corrupt Citizens United decision, with on-the-take Justice Clarence Thomas the deciding vote, billionaires can legally own politicians outright. And that’s exactly what they’re doing: Just look at the billions that flowed to President Donald Trump and the GOP in 2024 and ask yourself who that government really works for.

Oligarchy, as history teaches and as I write about at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, is never a stable form of government. It’s a transitional stage because sooner or later ordinary people figure out they’ve been stripped of any real say, and they rebel.

When that moment comes—and, frankly, it’s here now in America—the oligarchs and the politicians they own face exactly two choices:

1. They can pull back and let the people back in, the way America’s elites grudgingly did in the face of the Republican Great Depression when they swallowed the New Deal in the 1930s.
2. Or they can stomp the middle class rebellion flat with an iron fist via police, the courts, and lawsuits against the media and those who speak out, the way Vladimir Putin did in Russia in the early 2000s.

Donald Trump and the lickspittles who work for him have very plainly chosen the iron fist.

His Department of Justice (DOJ) is prosecuting anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters in Minnesota on conspiracy charges while the federal agents who shot and killed two American citizens during that same operation walk free, and a jury in Texas just handed protesters 50-100 years in prison on “terrorism” charges.

His DOJ even tried to drag Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters before a grand jury to force them to burn their sources, backing off only after the papers fought back in sealed court filings, an effort that can be reissued the instant he wants it back.

The blueprint for all of it, Project 2025, is the latest plan to drag America back to the dog-eat-dog, mostly poor and powerless country we were before Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the middle class was a sliver rather than a majority and the rich owned everything and made most of the decisions.

What the overpaid corporate Democratic Party consultants miss, and what Trump’s own pollsters figured out years ago, is the shape of the actual American electorate.

Political scientists who map voters find that the single largest bloc of white voters is neither “conservative” nor “liberal,” but both. As Trump’s former PR guy Anthony Scaramucci told us all a few months ago:

Trump told me something once that I haven’t forgotten. He said, "You Wall Street guys are imbeciles. You’re socially liberal and fiscally conservative. You know what MY base is? Socially conservative and fiscally liberal.”

A meaningful share of white voters (probably a bit over half, looking at Trump’s two successful elections) carry real prejudice—hate—against either non-whites, queer people, or both, which is precisely why Republicans run almost entirely on trans panic and on demonizing Black “welfare queens” and brown immigrants, because those are about the only issues left on which they’re aligned with that bloc.

On the economics, though, as Scaramucci and Trump noted, that same white voting bloc wants the FDR-Truman-Eisenhower-JFK-LBJ-Nixon-Ford-Carter-era middle class back, the secure one we had before Reagan started tearing it all down in 1981.

That’s why Republicans have to scream “socialism” at any candidate whose actual platform is “rent you can afford” and “a doctor you can see when you need to without going broke.” They can’t argue the economics (and their billionaire donors won’t let them even if they wanted to), so they change the subject to fear.

But the American people aren’t buying the GOP’s oligarchic bullshit anymore. The GOP got crushed in last year’s off-year elections on the simple issue of affordability—which I read as blowback against oligarchy—and Tuesday in New York the floor under corporate Dems who’re still singing the Reaganomics song gave way again.

And it isn’t only New York. Progressives took a House primary in Pennsylvania last month, swept races across Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, and on Tuesday night knocked off four incumbent state legislators in New York alone, while Bernie Sanders kept drawing the biggest crowds of his life on what he calls his Fighting Oligarchy Tour.

So we’re watching two parties move in opposite directions at once.

What these voters keep saying they want is fighters against neoliberalism, fascism, and a return to the New Deal and Great Society.

The Democratic base is trying hard to pull its party back toward its FDR and LBJ roots, away from the Clinton-era deals with Wall Street and the Davos set, away from Barack Obama’s bargain with the insurance giants, away from the bipartisan habit of bankrolling distant wars, including the weapons still flowing to Israel’s assault on Gaza, because people here can’t make rent, go to college, or see a specialist without a three-month wait and a homelessness-threatening bill.

Opposition to that war inside the Democratic coalition has gone lopsided, and the base has noticed that its leaders—mired in big money—missed the moral question entirely. What these voters keep saying they want is fighters against neoliberalism, fascism, and a return to the New Deal and Great Society.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, is bowing and scraping lower and lower to Trump, Project 2025, and their neofascist agenda.

Just look at the last two days: On Tuesday the Senate found the spine to pass a war powers resolution reining him in on Iran, and by Wednesday night, after Trump reportedly screamed at Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) in a closed-door lunch, the Senate turned right around and reversed itself when Cassidy lost his spine and flipped his vote and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) ducked into a cowardly “present.”

November will tell us which direction the majority of Americans actually want to go, assuming Trump’s many efforts to rig the outcome don’t all succeed (and I’ll get into those efforts in detail in a future piece).

For now, though, we all should understand what these primaries and the wins that are shocking the Schumer-Jeffries crowd actually represent.

After 45 years in the wilderness, Americans are reaching back for the Square Deal that Teddy Roosevelt promised and the New Deal and Great Society that FDR and LBJ delivered, and no amount of red-baiting about Havana is going to talk them out of it.

We’ve been here before, and now at the end of the third of these 80-year cycles, Democrats must choose to kick the oligarchs out and let the people back in. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again, this time with Zoomers leading the way.

If any of this matters to you, don’t just nod and scroll. Call your senators and representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them where you stand on healthcare, on the minimum wage and free college, and on the right to protest.

Make sure you and everyone you know is registered and ready to vote in 2026 at vote.org, and find out who’s on your state and local ballot at openstates.org, because the people rigging the game are counting on you staying home.

And if this piece helped you see the pattern a little more clearly, share it, forward it, post it, and consider subscribing at hartmannreport.com so we can keep doing this work together.

Democracy, as Bernie used to say every Friday for 11 years on my radio program, isn’t a spectator sport, and the next three years are, I believe (if we all work hard enough), going to prove it.

Tag, you’re it!

The recent presidential election in Colombia highlighted a striking political paradox. New data from the country’s national statistics agency shows that the national poverty rate fell to 28% in 2025, the lowest level ever recorded. Nearly 1.8 million Colombians moved out of poverty in a single year, while extreme poverty and income inequality also declined. The figures represent a significant social achievement and continue a multi-year trend of improving living standards.

Yet, despite this advance, Colombians elected right-wing lawyer and businessman Abelardo De La Espriella, whose nationalist and law-and-order platform marks a sharp contrast with the policies of outgoing President Gustavo Petro. The outcome suggests that even significant social and economic progress does not necessarily translate into electoral support for the government that helped produce it.

Nor is Colombia unique. Across the region, electoral cycles have repeatedly shown that social progress does not necessarily produce lasting political loyalty. Similar patterns can be seen in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and elsewhere in South America, where periods of progressive governance have often been followed by the election of more conservative leaders or governments with markedly different priorities.

Former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa offered one explanation for this phenomenon. He argued that when people escape poverty and enter the middle class, many become primarily concerned with preserving their newly acquired status. As a result, they may become less supportive of policies aimed at extending similar benefits to others. Whether or not one accepts this interpretation, it highlights an important political challenge: The very success of progressive social policies may alter the interests, expectations, and priorities of the people they benefit, making long-term political continuity more difficult to sustain.

The very success of progressive social policies may alter the interests, expectations, and priorities of the people they benefit, making long-term political continuity more difficult to sustain.

There is, however, one notable exception: Mexico.

Mexico presents an important counterexample. The presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador was followed by the election of Claudia Sheinbaum, who belongs to the same political movement and has pledged to continue much of the same agenda. Rather than producing a backlash, the governing project maintained broad popular support through a successful leadership transition.

Why Was Mexico different?

Part of the answer may lie not only in policy outcomes but also in political identity. While many progressive governments in South America have defined themselves primarily through ideological labels such as socialism or the left, Mexico’s governing movement increasingly describes itself through the concept of Mexican Humanism. Although its policies share many objectives with progressive governments elsewhere, the language is notably different. Mexican Humanism emphasizes dignity, community, solidarity, and national culture rather than ideological affiliation.

This distinction may matter. Political projects framed primarily in ideological terms can reinforce divisions between supporters and opponents. Projects rooted in shared cultural and ethical values may be better positioned to build identification across traditional political boundaries. From this perspective, Mexico’s continuity may reflect not only the material results achieved by the government, but also the broader narrative through which those results were understood.

The Colombian election therefore raises a broader question for Latin America. If poverty reduction, lower inequality, and improved social indicators are not enough to guarantee political continuity, what is missing? Is the decisive factor economic performance, security, media influence, political organization, or something deeper within a nation’s culture?

Mexico suggests that political durability may depend on more than effective governance alone. It may also require a shared sense of identity and purpose that transcends conventional ideological categories. The most interesting question may not be why some countries move from the left to the right, but why Mexico has not.

This article was first published on Pressenza.

Beginning next week, Australians across a huge swath of the continent will begin getting three free hours of electricity every afternoon—to charge their cars, runs their dishwashers, fill up a storage battery to run the house at night. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t belabor it here, except to say that humans have spent the last 1.79 million years (according to new research last week) working hard for energy: spending time gathering firewood, spending time working to pay the power bill. Now, in one large part of the Earth, for one large part of the day, electricity will be too cheap to meter. You want some abundance? Here you go.

So it seems like a good time to dig in to the larger questions of energy, climate, pollution, and money—an interrelated set of issues, and one where the numbers are shifting quickly and dramatically almost every month. Here’s the bottom line, which I think is beginning to drive public policy almost every place except the US, where we have lots and lots of work to do: As the cost of clean energy keeps plummeting, it gets more and more obvious how much money we waste, and how much financial risk we incur, by staying with fossil fuel.

Let’s start first by talking about the climate crisis, and the ways it’s rapidly becoming an economic crisis. My old colleagues at 350.org have been publishing a series of quite brilliant reports on the subject in recent weeks. One, for instance, is on the insurance crisis, which is growing across the planet. This is from Risalat Khan and Kenny Stancil:

In the United States, homeowner insurance premiums increased by 29% from January 2021 to January 2026, and personal auto insurance rose nearly 25% over the same period. These mounting costs are among the biggest contributors to overall inflation.

France raised its mandatory natural catastrophe surcharge on property insurance from 12% to 20%, effective January 2025. In northern Australia, premiums climbed more than 130% in real terms between 2007 and 2022, a 6% growth year on year.

Across most low- and middle-income countries, insurance coverage is usually less than 10%, and sometimes far less, leaving uninsured communities and businesses to bear most of the risks and losses from climate disasters.

Somewhat karmically, a new report from risk analysts First Street finds that… data centers face much of this risk from extreme weather:

Approximately 54% of global data center capacity operates in markets facing elevated chronic heat or drought stress, while 79% is exposed to significant acute hazards such as flood, wind, or wildfire. For many markets, climate risk should now be considered part of the base case rather than a tail-risk scenario.

But most of us only buy insurance once a year, and it’s such a depressing task that we try to forget about it immediately. Groceries are different, and as Nicole Pita points out, the link to climate change is pretty clear.

Droughts in the US Midwest and Canada destroyed harvests in 2022. Floods in India and South Asia pushed up rice prices in 2023 and 2025. The climate crisis is affecting crop production itself, making food harder to grow. The irony is that food systems produce one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, making them both a victim and a driver of the crisis.

And it will get worse. Here’s a new report from the Autonomy Institute on what the climate crisis is doing to the cost of “Five a day” in the UK:

Heatwaves are projected to add around 11% to the price of the UK’s top 20 fruit and vegetables by 2035 and around 68% by 2050 under a high emissions scenario, on top of normal inflation. Imported tropical fruit such as melons, oranges, bananas, easy peelers, and grapes will rise 12% to 14% by 2035 and 80% to 93% by 2050 on these climate grounds alone.

• Compounded with estimated normal inflation, total average shelf prices of the overall basket of fruit and veg will reach upwards of 170% above today’s level by 2050.

• This means that climate-flation will be contributing 40% of total inflation across the basket of basic goods by 2035 and over 60% of it by 2050. Climate change will have gone from a junior contributor to the dominant driver of shelf-price inflation on fresh produce inside the working lifetime of someone in their 30s today.

(A note to the perplexed: “Easy peelers” turns out to be what Brits call mandarin oranges and clementines. I like it.)

Here’s how Emma Court and Kyle Kim summed it up in a comprehensive Bloomberg account:

Extreme weather also makes growing crops more expensive. For example, Del Monte Corp., which sold more than $4 billion of bananas, pineapples, avocados, and other food products last year, has been investing in measures to shield crops from rising temperatures and sun damage. This includes covering them with shade cloth and spraying them with a reflective layer of so-called plant sunscreen. The company is also paying more for cooling throughout its supply chain, including by requiring upgrades in fruit-processing plants in the Midwest that were originally designed for lower temperatures.

The effects of climate on pricing are difficult to capture, because they build gradually, says Hans Sauter, Del Monte’s chief sustainability officer. But lower yields, increasing disease threats, and higher costs can all contribute to more expensive produce. “This is part of our DNA. We have been dealing with climate events forever,” he says. “But these new circumstances are making it more expensive.”

Regions where temperatures are already warm will likely be the most exposed to climate inflation, in part because additional heat can more readily slash agricultural harvests. Among the worst-off are countries in Africa and South America, which also tend to have lower incomes, with less infrastructure, and fewer resources to guard against climate change.

But the fossil fuel that drives climate change raises costs in other ways too. The most obvious is their effect on public health. It’s hard, of course, to calculate this with precision, but the attempts leave us with staggering numbers: The Natural Resource Defense Council, five years ago, demonstrated that fossil fuel pollution was costing America $820 billion a year. (That’s nearly a Musk). The numbers elsewhere are much higher.

Sometimes, though, it’s easier to see them in reverse. A new study this month, described by Gary Fuller, finds that when London cut down sharply on urban air pollution with its congestion pricing zone, remarkable things followed:

Low emission and clean air zones attract controversy whenever they are proposed, but there is growing evidence that they work in improving air quality. The Bradford zone was followed by a reduction of about 25% in GP visits for heart and breathing problems and survey data shows that the central London zone was followed by a reduction in the likelihood of a person taking sick leave…

The researchers looked at emergency admissions to hospital, excluding cases such as accidents, burns, drug overdose, poisoning, or self-harm. For people living in the central London zone, admissions increased at 3% per year before the schemes started. After their launch this trend was altered, with a 3% reduction in annual trends for emergency admissions, including an 8% reduction for heart problems and a 6% reduction for breathing problems.

That adds up to real money. Not only that, but people can breathe, always a plus!

If you try to add all this up, you get some interesting numbers. As Kate Yoder reports:

“What’s striking is that already, households are bearing serious costs,” said Kimberly Clausing, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She co-authored a paper from earlier this year finding that families were paying between $400 and $900 more each year because of the effects of climate change, with the costs above $1,300 in the 10% hardest-hit counties, many of them found in Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, Colorado, and California.

What’s more, people are figuring all this out:

Two-thirds of US voters agree that global warming is affecting the cost of living to some degree, according to new survey data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, including most Democrats and moderate Republicans. Of those two-thirds, a majority of them said that climate change was driving up what they pay for groceries, utility bills, and home insurance.

And then there’s the sheer cost of energy itself—of the need to keep paying for coal and gas and oil while the far-cheaper sun and wind goes to waste. We’re stuck in a political moment when feckless Democratic politicians (paging Kathy Hochul) are making “affordability” their excuse for going along with Big Oil. But in fact one example after another is making it clear that, as Ray Wills writes, “what is making us poorer is not the move to clean energy—it is doing the transition slowly and badly. His examples are back in Australia:

The Australian Energy Market Commission’s latest Residential Electricity Price Trends work is blunt: Accelerating renewable generation, transmission, and battery storage is "essential" to keep electricity prices affordable over the next decade.

In scenarios where new wind, solar, and transmission arrive on schedule, household bills fall compared to today. When those projects are delayed, prices remain higher for longer because the system leans more heavily on expensive gas and unreliable old coal.

Independent modelling tells a similar story. Analysis for the Clean Energy Council shows that if Australia stalls the rollout of renewables, household bills in 2030 could be around 30% higher than on a timely transition path—roughly $449 a year extra for a typical household, and even more for small businesses.

Nexa Advisory’s work finds that transition delays that lock in more gas-fired generation could add about $115.7 billion to wholesale costs between now and 2050.

Individuals can and do figure out some of the ways to lower their own costs. Not surprisingly, the spike in gas prices for Americans during our farcical Iranian excursion convinced some to change their habits or their technology. Lydia DePillis looked at the numbers:

Americans are powerfully attached to their cars, and their spending at gasoline stations jumped 21% from February to May. But that ability to spend has limits. According to Dow Jones Energy, consumption was 6.1% lower in May from a year earlier. Some of that is a long-running trend owing to the increasing efficiency of passenger vehicles, said Denton Cinquegrana, the company’s chief oil analyst, and about half is probably a consumer response to higher prices.

But much of the real work needs to be done by governments: Nothing people can do by themselves will have much affect on the cost of food, healthcare, or energy. And when governments do their job well, the results can be amazing. I began with Australia and its free afternoon electricity; let’s close with Europe. As Jan Rosenow points out, the continent’s commitment to energy efficiency is paying off: It’s spending 29% less on energy than it would have if consumption had kept growing this century:

Importantly that is energy nobody had to generate, import, or pay for. It built up slowly, over 25 years, across 27 countries, in warmer buildings, more efficient factories, better appliances, the switch to LED lighting, and steadily more efficient transport. At any given price Europe now pays around a third less than it would have without those gains.

This shield holds whichever direction the next shock arrives from. If anything, the figure undersells the benefit, because it counts only the energy saved and not the power stations, pipelines, and grid connections nobody had to build. It is one of the most effective protection measures against future energy crisis: The energy not consumed cannot be withheld, weaponised, or made more expensive by a supplier you do not control.

As he points out, there’s vast room for expansion:

A heat pump in a well-insulated home on clean electricity cuts the energy the building needs, replaces the gas boiler, and runs on a grid that keeps getting cleaner. That single device also pulls the household out of the gas import chain for good, and as a side effect keeps it cooler through the sort of summer Europe now gets most years.

In the Netherlands, for instance, you can sign up for free clothes-washing, drying, and dishwashing between noon and 5:00 pm, part of a scheme from a company called CoolBlue.

People are quickly figuring all this out across much of the world. It remains for a savvy American politician to really lay out the case. But when she does the rewards will be high. “Free” would be a popular thing.

As J.D. Vance pointed out, the United States has poured billions of dollars into building Israel into the world’s neediest welfare state. But, as David Bowie used to say on MTV, too much is never enough for them.

The post Where’s Our Gratitude? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The US Supreme Court on Thursday sided with pesticide manufacturer Bayer in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, ruling that federal law preempts lawsuits brought by cancer patients who allege its Roundup product was to blame for their disease.

With the Trump administration siding with Bayer in the litigation, the devastating ruling by the court extends this legal shield to all pesticide corporations, leaving patients harmed by these toxic agricultural chemicals without the recourse of litigation that has cost Bayer billions of dollars.

Once again, the Supreme Court has sided with big business over people and the environment. This ruling is a disaster for public health—and it has Trump’s name written all over it. If one needed any further proof that the president’s feigned mission to "Make America Healthy Again" was a farce, today’s decision is all the evidence needed. Trump has been all too willing to endorse Bayer’s crusade to pollute with impunity, while the administration doubles down on a failed pesticide regulatory scheme.

Industrial agriculture is poisoning America. The fight against toxic pesticides does not end here. Congress must pass the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act to safeguard access to justice for all harmed by these toxic chemicals, and a Farm Bill that finally puts public health first. Until then, the Supreme Court has shut the courthouse doors to tens of thousands of sick and suffering Americans."

Today’s ruling comes despite a litany of evidence suggesting that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Bayer’s ubiquitous Roundup pesticide, is carcinogenic, and that the Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide registration process is fatally flawed. The World Health Organization has defined glyphosate as a probable carcinogen since 2015. Roundup is the most widely used pesticide in the United States.

The decision completes Bayer’s years-long, well-financed quest to stifle cancer lawsuits cutting into its bottom line. Since purchasing Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has spent over $11 billion settling over 100,000 cancer lawsuits related to Roundup. Bayer has been pushing widely-opposed Cancer Gag Act bills nationwide, seeking to shield pesticide corporations from health-related lawsuits in multiple states and Congress. So far this year, the immunity legislation has failed in 11 states and was stripped from the House Farm Bill and left out of the Senate version.

There is a better way, including the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act, introduced by Sen. Corey Booker (D-NJ), which would restore the right to sue over pesticide harms. It's a right all Americans deserve.