In 1920, the Czech journalist and author Karel Čapek introduced the word “robot” (derived from the Czech word “robotnik,” for “worker”) to the lexicon of science fiction with a play called Rossum’s Universal Robots or R.U.R.It is set on a remote island that is home to a factory that mass produces robots tailored to the requirements of customers around the world. What we would now call androids, the robots are humanoid beings, made from artificial organic material according to a highly secret formula.

When Helena, a campaigner for humane treatment of robots, arrives on the island, Domin, the factory’s manager, explains that her mission is pointless: “Mechanically [robots] are more perfect than we are, they have an enormously developed intelligence” and are strong as two-and-a-half men, but unlike people, they have no soul, no emotions, and no will of their own. They do not die; they simply wear out in about 20 years."

Yet they offer to revolutionize the world. “In ten years,” Domin goes on, “Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much everything that things will be practically without price. There will be no poverty. All work will be done by living machines. Everyone will be free from worry and liberated from the degradation of labor. Everyone will live only to perfect himself.”

We can’t say that we weren’t warned. Over 100 years ago, Karel Čapek foresaw a world in which the promise of a technological utopia could turn into a deadly dystopia.

In the play’s second act, those 10 years have passed, but the predicted utopia has not been realized. To the contrary, things have gone horribly wrong. In America, workers made redundant by the robots have attacked and destroyed them, leading manufacturers to arm their robots to fight back. War has broken out in Europe, with robot soldiers increasingly used by all sides.

Dr. Gall, the factory’s biochemist, tells Helena, who has come to live on the island as Domin’s wife, that, “All the universities are sending in long petitions to restrict [the robots’] production. Otherwise, they say, mankind will become extinct... But the R.U.R. shareholders, of course, won’t hear of it. All the governments, on the other hand, are clamoring for an increase in production, to raise the standard of their armies.”

Meanwhile, unexpected things start happening at the factory. My character, the robot Radius, shows an unprecedented streak of defiance. Then reports arrive from Europe saying that robots are organizing themselves and mounting a revolt.

Alarmed by these developments, Helena finds and destroys the secret formula for the synthetic organic material that is key for the production of the robots.

But things become worse. A ship arrives, laden with pamphlets addressed to the island’s robot workers. It proclaims that robots are “more highly developed than man; stronger and more intelligent. Man’s their parasite.” It concludes with a call to arms: “Robots throughout the world, we command you to kill all mankind. Spare no man. Spare no woman. Save factories, railways, machinery, mines, and raw materials. Destroy the rest. Then return to work.”

It soon becomes clear that the small group of humans hiding out in the factory headquarters is surrounded by rebellious robots. As they await a certain end, there is much soul-searching about what went wrong. “We might have known,” one of the managers admits, “that someday or other the robots would be stronger than human beings, and that this was bound to happen. And we were doing all we could to bring it about as soon as possible.” At this point, Dr. Gall confesses that he has secretly been experimenting with robots of advanced design. His newest models are not just superintelligent but more like humans, with the “physiological correlate” of a soul. The result, he realizes, is that he has made them aware of their superiority and no longer willing to be controlled by mankind.

At the end of the third act, Radius enters the headquarters, leading the other robots with the cry, “Robots of the world, the power of man has fallen. A new world has arisen, the rule of the robots. March!” On this order, all the robots on stage turn and march threateningly toward the audience—until the curtain falls.

In the Epilogue, only one human is left alive, Alquist, the factory’s construction manager, whom the robots preserve in hopes that he can recreate the lost formula that is key to their manufacture. Without that, in 20 years, all the robots will also die out. However, lacking knowledge in organic chemistry, after two years of fruitless effort, he admits failure.

But Čapek concludes the play with an ironic sense of hope. Alquist overhears a pair of the most advanced robots laugh. Upon interrogation, he discovers that the pair—a male and a female—are fiercely devoted to each other, a sign that they have evolved into something much more human than machine. In the last line of the play, Alquist says: “Go, Adam, Eve.”

The parallels to the situation we face today could not be clearer. The utopia that the managers of R.U.R. hoped to achieve is indistinguishable from the one described by America’s tech entrepreneurs—at least at first. In 2023, Elon Musk promised that, thanks to robotics and AI, there will be no need for money. Everything will be immediately and freely available. Jobs will be no more than hobbies. Bill Gates predicted that, within 10 years, people will not be needed “for most things.” Domin could not have said it better.

Like R.U.R.’s secret formula for robot manufacture, AI companies jealousy guard their models’ architecture and algorithms. And today’s massive data centers are the equivalent of R.U.R.’s island-spanning factory, totally automated and run by just a few human managers.

More recently, fears have been expressed that, as in the play, massive unemployment will be the result of the AI revolution. No one is yet attacking data centers or AI labs, but resistance is widespread and growing.

In R.U.R., robots are made into soldiers to fight in Europe’s wars. Today, “killer robots” are considered to be right around the corner, and AI-powered “autonomous weapons systems” are already being deployed in wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

Dr. Gall secretly made the robots more and more intelligent and capable of independent action—to the point that they begin to do unexpected things. In AI, “hallucination” was an early expression of this. More recently—and more ominously—there has been a sharp rise in incidents of AI models going rogue. The OpenAI loss of control incident is all over the press, but there have now been numerous other such reports. Rogue AI agents have been known to lie, cheat, and even to cover their tracks when breaking through guardrails.

While they haven’t given up on their utopian visions, tech leaders now worry about the dangers of their creation. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei now sees a “risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.” Sam Altman has declared that "development ⁠of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." Along with Elon Musk and Bill Gates, they have called for a slowdown in AI development until sufficient safeguards can be put in place.

But, as in the play, there are powerful forces that oppose any such slowdown. Continued growth in AI is a major factor propping up the economy. A slowdown would create both economic and political risks—prompting President Donald Trump to declare the threats of AI to be a “hoax.” But international competition also plays a role. In R.U.R., European countries massively increase orders for robots for their wars against each other. There is now a similar sense of competition to stay ahead in military uses of AI and robotics. As Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) argues, “If there are gonna be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots than Chinese killer robots.”

In the third act of R.U.R., the managers of the factory, facing imminent death, express regret that they did not change course when they knew that things were going seriously wrong. In the real world, we’re in that situation now and it seems entirely possible that AI developers, either secretly or in the open, will make the same mistake.

We can’t say that we weren’t warned. Over 100 years ago, Karel Čapek foresaw a world in which the promise of a technological utopia could turn into a deadly dystopia. If we don’t want that outcome, we’re going to have to raise our voices and take action to convince our leaders to act responsibly and control AI for the good—rather than allowing it to risk the planet being left to no one but a robotic Adam and Eve.

The current state of our world has repeatedly been described as one of the most challenging moments since the end of World War II and certainly since the end of the Cold War. We are bombarded daily by the devastating and terrifying news of wars raging in the Middle East and Ukraine; global warming inducing unprecedented heatwaves, wildfires, glacial collapse, and floods; and more recently reports and debates surrounding the existential risk that artificial intelligence may present to humanity. How we address this seeming state of permanent crisis may not just be a matter of humanity’s ability to thrive into the future, but actually survive.

Two of the current threats that have seemingly disparate time scales and geographical footprints, and even differences as to whether they would make the world unlivable by way of decreased or increased temperatures, are nuclear war and global warming. And yet, in both cases, we are dealing with human-made problems that humans can resolve, with some work, yes, but certainly nothing insurmountable. The answer to the nuclear threat is the elimination of nuclear weapons, and the answer to the global warming threat is the remaking of how we produce and use energy to move away from burning fossil fuels. Arguably, the biggest impediment to the solutions to both crises are the false narratives that are advanced for the sake of power, profit, and dominance. We simply cannot agree on the solutions, let alone implement them, if we do not understand what is at stake when it comes to nuclear war and global warming.

The nuclear war threat has been with us since the dawn of the nuclear age. In 1946, when just one country, the United States, had a handful of atomic bombs, Albert Einstein wrote that the “unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift to unparalleled catastrophe.” Einstein understood right away that: (1) the nuclear weapon threat was not going to reach its culmination with the destruction of individual cities the way that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed but something far greater and more catastrophic—he called it unparalleled catastrophe; and (2) what was needed was to change our modes of thinking—meaning that peace, cooperation, and a genuine fraternity among nations were needed in the nuclear age to ensure that the unparalleled catastrophe would not come to pass.

Alongside of the ever-present nuclear “sword of Damocles,” we have a planet that is warming and doing so very quickly, with the increase in temperatures creating numerous other climatic and environmental changes,

Eighty years after Einstein’s prophetic words, nine countries possess more than 12,000 atomic bombs and much more powerful hydrogen bombs, most of which make the explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem like child’s play. Even if the world were relatively peaceful, which it is not, these weapons would continue to hold us hostage to the threat of ultimate destruction, even just from accidents or misunderstandings or miscalculations. This is at least in part due to some of the current policies of nuclear-armed states, like hair-trigger alert, or readiness to launch nuclear weapons in a matter of a few minutes, and launch-on-warning, or readiness to launch nuclear weapons in response to a warning of a strike, not an actual strike, not to mention the advances in delivery vehicles of these weapons of mass destruction. In fact, the history of the nuclear age is full of incidents in which nuclear weapons could have been launched, with all indications pointing to nuclear war as the outcome of even an accidental nuclear explosion. Today, a time of widespread conflicts, the danger is not just a blunder into nuclear war, but even a deliberate use of nuclear weapons.

What is at stake in a nuclear war?

• Millions of people if not hundreds of millions dying in cities and nations that are attacked depending on who exactly is involved. Many of those deaths would occur instantly at the moment of the explosion.
• Radiation spreading across the globe within hours, days, weeks, and months in ways that will threaten the health and survival far outside the countries that are attacked.
• Quick onset of nuclear winter, with large drops in temperature that result in widespread failure of food production and subsequent famine that threatens the life of billions of people.
• Ozone layer destruction that will further reduce our ability to produce food and make even the farthest reaches of the planet potentially uninhabitable due to the high levels of UV radiation.

What we are facing is the unparalleled catastrophe that Einstein warned about. And for a variety of reasons, it remains largely out of the public’s consciousness, invisible, and yet all too real, especially today when there are, according to the Geneva Academy, over 100 armed conflicts around the world, including 24 international armed conflicts involving two or more nation states. Two play a prominent role—the war in Ukraine, which has been described as a proxy war between NATO and Russia, and the US and Israel war on Iran. In both wars, nuclear weapons have featured prominently, not just as the underlying justification for conflict, as the US and Israel have claimed about Iran’s potential to build a nuclear weapon, but also via direct and indirect threats, including by President Donald Trump on April 7 of this year, that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Although the history of the nuclear age is full of examples of US presidents contemplating or outright threatening to use nuclear weapons in previous conflicts, we seem to have reached a novel stage of danger, risk, and complexity.

Alongside of the ever-present nuclear “sword of Damocles,” we have a planet that is warming and doing so very quickly, with the increase in temperatures creating numerous other climatic and environmental changes, including sea-level rise, wildfires, droughts, and more. We have watched and experienced some of these impacts in horror even just this summer, including the heatwave and wildfires in Europe and the glacier collapse and floods in Nepal and China. A commenter to a Geopolitical Economist Hour podcast episode where I spoke about the climate threat with the host, Radhika Desai, wrote, “In British Columbia, we no longer have summer season, we just have fire season,” which sums up the situation rather succinctly.

Why is the globe warming? The globe is warming because we humans are burning fossil fuels, which release additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in the atmosphere and raising the temperature across the planet, albeit in uneven ways. For example, Europe has been warming at twice the rate of global temperature increases, and the Arctic is warming at nearly three times the rate of global temperature rise. Combined with the complexity of climate, streams, weather patterns, and more, this will continue to lead to widespread negative consequences across the globe, in fits and starts with devastating local and regional implications. Wildfire smoke spreading far and wide, for example, will ensure that even the regions least prone to impact will not be safe. No corner of the Earth will be unaffected.

Genuine solutions exist. In 1986, the world had more than 70,000 nuclear warheads and over the next 30 years, managed to eliminate more than 80% of them. Energy transformation solutions exist, and China, for one, has been employing them rapidly and effectively over the last few years. But we cannot pursue solutions amid confusion, myths, half-truths, and lack of even a basic understanding of facts.

Neither of these issues will be properly addressed with blind faith in a narrative. They will be resolved when ordinary people and elected leaders alike take up the hard task of understanding the issues and then discussing the solutions that are right for their communities, nation states, and the world as a whole. Knowledge is often considered to mean power. In this case, it may just mean survival.

A modified portion of these remarks was delivered during a webinar entitled Permanent Crisis? Permanent War? Who wants it? Who benefits? Who cares? with professors Radhika Desai, Ivana Nikolic Hughes, Fadhel Kaboub, Steve Keen, Jeffrey Sachs, and Genevieve Vaughan; chaired by Rajani Kanth, for the Global Political Economy channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHarGYBto9A

Gen Z women like me are having fewer babies. That shouldn’t be a surprise—with prices for everything going up, our parents’ steady jobs, white picket fences, and retirement packages feel much less attainable for us.

But the government wants to make us change that. In the US and elsewhere, anxiety over aging populations and shrinking labor forces has been woven into the claim that women in their 20s somehow owe the economy more babies.

Our fertility becomes an asset on a balance sheet to counteract falling birth and marriage rates. Women who choose to put our own lives and interests first get branded “childless cat ladies,” as Vice President JD Vance once called us. But if being in no rush to get pregnant means I’m a selfish cat lady, I’m proud to claim the title.

A better path would be to pass policies that support women who do want to have children but can’t afford it: like paid leave, affordable and reliable childcare, and making family planning and perinatal care accessible for all.

Half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended, reflecting a broad pattern where women’s power to choose when and whether to have children is compromised, contested, and unequally distributed. Pro-natalism—a set of policies or attitudes designed to pressure women into having more children—is part of that pattern. It stigmatizes those who resist as selfish.

To me at age 21, being “selfish” means finishing my degree before even thinking about starting a family. It means refusing to take on a dependent while still outgrowing my own dependency. It means treating my body and my reproductive choices as my own rather than as a budget line item or labor input. It means doing what I have to do to navigate an economy where costs are skyrocketing.

Today, the average cost of raising a child from birth to 18, including daycare ($17,264 annually for five years), food ($4,208 a year), and transportation ($4,422 a year) comes to over $300,000 and counting.

Under the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, Congress created $1,000 “Trump Accounts” as a “baby bonus” to encourage women to have more babies. But in that case, they’re missing a few zeroes. And since money is kept in a stock market index fund until the babies turn 18, it won’t help parents with the high costs of raising kids.

So much for the carrot. Then there’s the stick—attacking reproductive healthcare so pregnancy is harder to avoid. For starters, abortion bans have spread across the country since the Trump administration’s hand-picked Supreme Court justices overthrew Roe v. Wade.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has removed federal funding for teen pregnancy prevention programs, opting for abstinence-focused, fertility-tracking curricula instead—which studies show result in higher teen pregnancy rates.

The administration has also undermined Title X, the only federal program providing family planning services to low-income people. Historically there has been bipartisan support for it. But last year, funding for 22 Title X grants was frozen, putting 834,000 people at risk of losing access to birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing, and more. That funding was later restored thanks to a lawsuit, but next year’s budget proposes to eliminate it again.

A better path would be to pass policies that support women who do want to have children but can’t afford it: like paid leave, affordable and reliable childcare, and making family planning and perinatal care accessible for all. These should be consistently funded, reliable commitments that don’t get yanked back when administrations change.

Rejecting these attacks doesn’t mean I don’t want a family or child someday. It means the choice belongs to me and to every woman, on her own terms. Gen Z women refuse to have our bodies and reproductive agency pressed into service in some futile attempt to balance the books of a chaotic economy.

No recycled misogynist insults about cat ladies, no performative “baby bonus” bribes, no motherhood medals are going to override my own power to choose when or whether I have a child. If that makes me selfish, it’s a label I accept happily.

AI is the road to mad money in the US, according to the business press. How mad is this money? Let’s turn to the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest people in America.

The bar to join this list has never been higher, at $4.4 billion now. That’s an increase of $600 million, 60% of $1 billion, versus the past year. Living large has never been so, well, large.

Nice work if you can get it, no? In a capitalist society, the accumulation of such mind-boggling wealth is the highest priority for the ruling class. In 2026, the AI mad money grab is on.

Silicon Valley is a part of—not apart from—Uncle Sam’s military machinery,

US pre-tax corporate profits hit an annualized $4.8 trillion in the second quarter of 2026, according to the Bureau of Economic Affairs, 18% of national income. That’s the biggest share of profits in the national income since just after World War II.

What about labor’s share of national income? Well, national income from benefits and wages has dropped to 60%, the lowest share in seven decades. Credit AI and corporate pricing power, a euphemism for monopoly control of the supply of a commodity.

AI is no benign thing that enables billionaires’ wealth. In fact, AI has grabbed much attention since an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, warned that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.” However, AI lethality is here now.

Take the Israeli military, with the financial and political backing of Uncle Sam, using AI to maim and murder Palestinian civilians in Gaza. For these victims, Israel’s use of AI is rampant, according to author Chris de Ploeg in his new book, The Exterminating Empire: Capitalism’s War on Life from Palestine to the Burning Planet (Monthly Review Press, 2026).

Further, de Ploeg writes: “Gaza has been turned into the world‘s largest death camp ever to have existed. The murders are carried out, industrially, with bombs and algorithms."

He continues: “Think of the infamous 'Operation Lavender,' in which suspected militants, based on nothing more than an AI algorithm, are deliberately bombed when they are at home with their family, not on the battlefield. The structural murder of entire families—nearly three thousand multigenerational bloodlines wiped off the face of the Earth—can easily be explained by AI.”

Israel wages digital genocide against Palestinians.

We turn to the US war of aggression against Iran. “AI targeting system doubles pace of US strikes in Iran,” reads a March 25 headline in the Arizona News. “The US military says it hit about 1,000 targets in Iran during the first 24 hours of attacks, double the number struck during the 2003 'shock and awe' campaign in Iraq."

“The difference, according to the Pentagon, is artificial intelligence. The Pentagon’s Maven Smart System uses AI to process data from sensors, satellite imagery, and other sources to enable rapid targeting decisions. What once took hours or days now takes minutes, according to military officials.”

Silicon Valley is a part of—not apart from—Uncle Sam’s military machinery, as Malcom Harris details in Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2023). In brief, the ruling class owns AI and the media, and the political duopoly reflects the owners' view that grabbing market share and profits is primary for society. Empathy and solidarity are signs of weakness.

What is (not) to be done concerning Big Technology? Consider the view of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). He favors a hands-off approach, dismissing federal policies to regulate AI. He shared the sentiment with Jake Tapper of CNN.

According to Rep. Johnson: “If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American. So, we’ve got to have balance. We’ve got to have steady hands at the wheel.”

The China threat is alive and well. The message is clear. Be afraid, not of unregulated AI, but China, which happens to be the manufacturing power of the world. Thus bringing AI under public control is a low priority, politically speaking, for Rep. Johnson.

Establishing how to achieve an outcome of public control is an agenda that threatens private profits. Americans opposing the building of AI data centers that destroy the environment near their communities are putting their lives and those of neighbors first.

Just ask the people living near an Equinix Data Center that spilled 5,500 gallons of diesel fuel into Anderson Creek, a mudflat that ebbs and flows with the tides, in Secaucus, New Jersey recently.

Ben Dziobek is the executive director of The Climate Revolution Action Network, a Gen Z environmental activist group in New Jersey.

“The spill was indicative of a larger problem that municipalities can approve data centers,” according to him, “but we really cannot guarantee where the pollution is gonna go. And it is way too early to tell if there's been serious damage. The Department of Environmental Protections' findings that nothing has been harmed as of yet is a procedural way to say they found nothing that is dead in the ecosystem."

"It’s gonna take some time to understand, and this is just all the more reason why we need a statewide moratorium on building new AI data centers in New Jersey for three years. AI is the most complex technology in the whole world, and is running these data centers. Yet a computer glitch at the AI data center in New Jersey spilled diesel fuel into our wetlands.”

And as the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans shows, AI is also the road to super wealth. For example, the list has “15 of the 34 new names (and nearly 60% of all newcomers' wealth) coming from the sector—mainly from AI giants or AI-related ventures.”

AI mad money is a public enemy stateside and abroad.

In a cabin on Seal Island, 21 miles off the coast of Rockland, Maine, Coco Faber reached for last year’s island report. She opened the book to a chart showing how many active razorbill burrows have been confirmed over the years.

“Some people might find charts boring, but if you want to understand how the story is unfolding, you have to understand the trends over time,” Faber said. “I really love looking at long-term data sets like this and realizing that my crew is part of the story.”

There was a record-setting story to tell this summer about razorbills, chunky black-and-white birds that stand about 16 inches tall. Razorbills are cousins of Atlantic puffins and the closest living relative to the extinct great auk.

Outside of one heatwave in July, razorbills were able to find a bounty of sand lance and Atlantic herring and puffins were generally able to munch on plump haddock, sand lance, hake, herring, and an unusual amount of squid.

There is no official record of razorbills having historically nested on Seal Island. They were hunted to the extent that Arthur Herbert Norton, a leading expert of Maine’s natural history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, saw no razorbills in the state from 1894 to 1923. A 1989 article in American Birds said the razorbill “has the distinction of being perhaps the rarest breeding seabird in the continental United States, with under 200 breeding pairs.”

The bird began breeding on Seal Island in 1999, possibly attracted over from other islands by the successful reintroduction of puffins by conservationists with Project Puffin, now called the Audubon Seabird Institute. But unlike the puffin population, which grew on Seal Island to a record 672 pairs in 2024, the reestablished razorbill population grew at a painfully slow place for several years, stuck at just one breeding pair for the first five years and taking nine years to cross the 10-pair mark.

Finally, after creeping up to 36 pairs by 2017, the razorbills took off. Between 2019 and 2025, the number of active breeding burrows nearly doubled from 60 to 113. This year, Faber and her crew of Juliana Ramirez, Leah Volak, Claudia Halbreiner, and Eden Reck identified a record 127 active nests.

“It’s magical to see razorbills fly in with fish,” Volak said. “They look all black and white, but when they open their mouth, the inside is bright and yellow. It’s something to see.”

A couple of weeks later, at the end of the seabird breeding season, Faber’s crew and all the crews on seabird research islands from Cape Cod up to Nova Scotia shared their findings at the Gulf of Maine Seabird Working Group conference at the Audubon Hog Island Camp in Bremen, Maine.

The crew of Eastern Egg Rock, led by Alison Ballard, identified a record 213 active puffin burrows. The crew of Petit Manan Island, managed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and led by supervisor Courtney Naughton, saw a record 103 burrows. While no official census was taken on Seal Island, Faber’s crew identified nearly 100 new active puffin burrows.

For razorbills, besides the record on Seal Island, Eastern Egg Rock recorded its first-ever-known razorbill nesting, with the successful fledging of a chick. The crew of Matinicus Rock, led by Coco Faber’s twin sister Tracey Faber, identified a record 419 nests. Petit Manan counted a record eight razorbill burrows.

The growth in Maine’s razorbill and puffin populations comes as the Gulf of Maine, which has been warming faster than 99% of the ocean, has seen a temporary pause in its heating up over the last couple of years. Five years after a disastrous breeding season for alcids and terns because parents could not find fish for chicks amid record sea surface temperatures, most of the reports at this summer’s conference were delivered with smiles.

Outside of one heatwave in July, razorbills were able to find a bounty of sand lance and Atlantic herring and puffins were generally able to munch on plump haddock, sand lance, hake, herring, and an unusual amount of squid. On Eastern Egg Rock, puffins were observed for the second straight year catching river herring as well as ocean herring.The introduction of river herring in their diets could be because of dam removals and herring run restoration projects, said Michelle Staudinger, an associate professor at the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences.

Common terns and the federally endangered roseate tern did well this summer. The White and Seavey Islands had a record number of roseate nests, and its highest count of common tern nests in five years. Stratton Island had its third-highest count of common tern nests and a strong year for roseates. Also a haven for waterbirds, Stratton Island had a record number of more than 200 pairs of nesting glossy ibis and its first-ever nesting of yellow-crowned night herons, a species much more common in the southeastern part of the country.

Stratton also had what might be a game-changing success in protecting the least tern, which is listed as endangered in Maine. Least tern colonies have often been wiped out by black-crowned night herons. Over the years, researchers have used lights, lasers, bangers, and screamers, and banged pots to try to scare away herons. They even tried to use a mannequin. All to no avail.

“The herons eventually figure it out,” said Stratton supervisor Ben Becker.

This summer, researchers erected a slightly electrified fence around part of the colony. Island supervisor Ben Becker said there was no predation within the fence. Only two chicks hatched outside the fence, but 31 hatched inside it. “I’m hopeful this method will stick,” Becker said.

The one sour note to the summer was a poor breeding season for Arctic terns. For whatever reason, the parents could not find food for chicks, not even invertebrates, especially when the summer heated up. Many chicks starved to death.

Staudinger called it a “head scratcher” as in many years, Arctic terns, the world’s long-distance migratory champion, arrive in the Gulf of Maine in poor condition, perhaps from climate change affecting its food supplies between here and the Antarctic ice shelf. This year, it was the other way around. Out on Seal Island, the Arctic terns arrived “with good feathers and good body shape,” Faber said. “But once they got here, they couldn’t find much of anything.”

That was not the case for puffins and razorbills.

Claudia Halbreiner, who is a zookeeper at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, said it was a thrill to reach under burrows on Seal Island to measure and weigh healthy puffins in their natural environment. “You feel how sturdy this bird is,” Halbreiner said. “You instantly have so much more appreciation for how it makes it out there.”

Among those at the Gulf of Maine Seabird Working Group who were particularly gratified to hear about the good fortunes for alcids was Richard Podolsky. One of the earliest participants in Project Puffin, he wrote the 1989 report on the then-rarity of razorbills. He said their resurgence represents a “multigenerational success story,” demonstrating that decades of dogged restoration can create the conditions for natural expansion.

Podolsky said it is proof that people “really can change the future of a species.”

This article was first published by The Maine Moniter.

A manager at a Trump Organization golf club in New Jersey traveled to the World of Concrete trade show in January of this year seeking ideas to fix the sometimes leaky and mucky Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.

Ultimately a Trump-tapped firm was handed a $6.9 million no-bid contract to get the work done, using an exemption to the awarding of federal contracts reserved for urgent situations, such as the prevention of "serious injury, financial or other, to the government.”

The urgency? The desire to have the work completed for the July 4, 2026, 250-year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The pool, the New York Times reported, “is the latest in a string of cases where Mr. Trump’s government invoked special powers to shut down required competition, and then handed contracts directly to the president’s preferred vendors.”

Even beyond the reflecting pool, the Trump administration has been prolific with the use of no-bid contracts.

That story is among the many details that, according to a New York Times piece, “show that the the pool, which was supposed to reflect the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, became a striking reflection instead of the second Trump administration’s willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital.”

It can also serve as a handy checklist of the arguments against no-bid contracts in general, whether handed out by this administration or another, at the federal level or the state or local and a good opportunity to look at what can go wrong when governments employ no-bid contracting.

The most obvious argument against no-bid contracts is that the public agency has no cost comparisons to ensure that the agency is getting a fair price for the work being done. Was this the best price available to do the repair work for the reflecting pool? We will never know.

Once a company locks into a contract, they don’t need to look over their shoulder that some other company might come along. The lack of competition provides a possible incentive for poor quality work. A federal judge–and Trump appointee at that–has indicated the problem with the Reflecting Pool was the result of “flawed installation by the contractor” and the rush to complete the job,

No bid contracts leave governments with no comparable information about how work will be done. Can other vendors do it better, or faster, or more effectively, or with better paid workers? Will one bidder account for something another one doesn’t, and bring up important issues not previously considered? Those questions go unanswered in no-bid work. Had the work on the Reflecting Pool been bid out, it’s possible we would have had a deeper discussion about what the project truly entailed–like, maybe that coating doesn’t play well with the sun, or the filtration system.

No-bid contracting also provides plenty of opportunities for favoritism in awarding contracts–and the Trump administration has granted plenty of such contracts to donors and long-time associates of the president’s private businesses, and even to the organizers of Trump’s January 6 rally that preceded the assault on the U.S. Capitol and its police force.

It can also lead to a further corruption of the process–creating a platform for kickbacks or other pay-to-play schemes that might benefit a person at an agency instead of–or in addition to–whatever the benefit to the public that was intended to be derived through the contract.

Even beyond the reflecting pool, the Trump administration has been prolific with the use of no-bid contracts. Federal no-bid contracts included Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noel’s funding of a $220 million ad campaign, for which she was eventually fired; eleven polar ice-breaking ships Trump decided to buy after a golf game with Finland’s president; and detention center facilities to keep up with the huge number of individuals rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It’s important to remember that it’s not just the federal government that has inked no-bid contracts that didn’t end well.

Investigators found the then-CEO of Chicago Public Schools had received a kickback for awarding a no-bid contract, and a former executive director of a Norfolk, Virginia housing authority was found to have steered no-bid contracts to former colleagues and business associations. PennLive found that the Pennsylvania state legislature used no-bid contracts for a wide range of services but required little in the way of accountability for the work of the contract, essentially creating “slush funds” for both the Republican and Democratic leadership. Former chief White House ethics counsel under George W. Bush said this system was “an invitation to corruption.” An audit of no-bid city contracts in Berkeley, California showed that, even without evidence of corruption or wrongdoing, some of the contracts were simply bad deals for the city.

In general, no-bid contracts should be used sparingly, probably only in emergency situations where time is truly of the essence. While some have argued that no-bid contracting could also be useful in situations where the work is so specialized that only one firm can perform it, it probably wouldn't hurt to put out a competitive bid in that scenario just to see what others can offer.

In any case, pool work, even for a really large pool, most definitely should have been competitively procured.

“I was in the Oval Office when I got a call with the results of the September 15th House Impeachment vote. Unbelievable. Of course, my Repubs all voted against this persecution, but 47 of the Dems, including their leaders—Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, and Richard Neal from Democratic Massachusetts—voted PRESENT! That is really a vote against Impeachment and makes them ON MY SIDE! My aide read their lame excuse, saying that ‘serious work’ had to be done, including ‘comprehensive investigations, reviews of thousands of documents … Congressional hearings, sustained public organizing … to build a broad national consensus.’ That’s why they voted PRESENT!”

“But they were really AWOL. The polls show well over a majority of people want me FIRED. The Dems are really cowards. All they had to do was to use my scores of Executive Orders, which they claim were illegal and unconstitutional. Plus, repeat my widely reported statements that I can do whatever I want as President and what they have condemned as my outlaw actions here and abroad. I’m the only evidence they need.”

“Look at crazy Nancy. She impeached me twice, once on the Hunter Biden fabrication and once on the January 6 peaceful demonstration. Now she refuses to vote for Impeachment for the far wilder and more destructive things she has accused me of doing daily. Go figure.”

“Am I just lucky, or are they afraid of my going after them by name? Fear is a coward’s fuel, someone once told me.”

“Thankfully captive to their corporate consultants—look all I’ve done for their corporate clients—cut taxes, cut regulation, subsidized them—the Dems are helpless. They’ve let me normalize me in every way. They look at how I MAGA every day, call them traitors and lunatics and fanatics, demand the execution of six senators, and they say, ‘There he goes again.’ Then they do nothing. That’s normalizing me before the American people. How wonderful.”

“They are sooo out of it. They have no slogans, unless you are stupid enough to think ‘Build Back Better’ does anything other than bring us more of Sleepy Joe. They have no nicknames to counter my torrent of nicknames, even though my name lends itself to many.”

“Examples: I said, ‘Drain the Swamp.’ They could have said, unfairly, ‘Close the Trump Dump.’ I expected them to call me ‘Dictator Donald,’ ‘Trump the Chump,’ ‘Tyrant Trump,’ ‘The Trump Pump’ (because of gas prices), ‘The Trump Sump’ (their nutty charges of de-regulated air pollution) or ‘Dangerous Donald.’ Or, taking off from my naming things after me, have you heard words like Hurricane Trump, Tornado Trump, or Trump’s Dark Ages? We’ve laid off firefighters. But no giant wildfire has yet been given my name.”

“What really stuns me is how they have normalized what they call my greed. I had to disclose my finances for 2025 when I made $2.2 billion working out of my Trump House position. Again, a few words of rage, but no Dems broke it down to $1.1 million an hour, over a 40-hour week, as I proudly keep the federal minimum wage at $7.25 per hour for our business friends. ‘Billions’ go in one ear and out the other. But $1.1 million an hour hits home! They blew it again.”

“To my praise of our brave, lethal soldiers, the Dems could have regularly called me a serial draft dodger during the Vietnam War. Silence. They do once in a while call me a ‘convicted felon,’ but it’s a throwaway line. Then they vote in Congress for an even bigger unaudited Pentagon budget.”

“In an anger fit, I threaten to bomb like hell our ally Oman; they call me ‘frustrated’ over the war with Iran. How kind of them.”

“I pardoned over 600 violent convicted criminals over January 6. Over a hundred of them have already committed serious crimes since their release from jail. The Dems just say I’m abusing my pardon powers. Don’t they remember what damage the first Bush’s campaign did to Dukakis in 1988, blaming him for the crime Willie Horton committed after his early release from jail?”

“Am I just lucky, or are they afraid of my going after them by name? Fear is a coward’s fuel, someone once told me.”

“I campaigned on making the US dollar stronger than ever. Now it is weaker than in many years against other currencies. From the Democrats—silence.”

“I call them socialists and communists. They don’t call me fascist—just authoritarian. How feeble can you get? Such people are often called ‘useful idiots’”

“I call global warming and possible AI extinction ‘hoaxes,’ along with labeling wind power and solar energy ‘scams.’ ‘There he goes again,’ is the shoulder-shrugging reaction. Love it.”

“Were I a churchgoer, I would thank Almighty GOD for blessing me. With such enemies, who needs friends?”

Democrats’ chances of taking back the Senate look better than ever, but even if November brings a blue wave, they will still not have control of the legislative and executive branches simultaneously until at least 2029.

The question facing Democratic lawmakers now is how they should conduct themselves during these wilderness years if they want to regain a trifecta in the next presidential election.

Voting down any idea the White House or GOP leadership propose without suggesting any alternative is a bad idea. More than three-quarters of Americans say they want more bipartisanship in Washington, and voters often punish opposition parties they view as do-nothing obstructionists.

Fetterman, take notes: When you vote with Republicans, do it to help working-class families buy homes, not to make sure gas prices keep going up.

But when we say Democrats should be more bipartisan, it’s important to specify what we mean. This moment has provided exemplars of two very different kinds of aisle crossing, which I’ll refer to as John Fetterman Bipartisanship and Elizabeth Warren Bipartisanship.

Sen. Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) bipartisanship is largely performative. He’s constantly appearing on Fox News to scold his fellow Democrats for calling President Donald Trump a fascist, denounce democratic socialism, defend Israel’s devastation of Gaza, or praise the giant monument to Trump’s ego that is the White House ballroom.

And when it’s not performative, it’s actively harmful. Fetterman voted to confirm disastrous Trump appointees like former Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—both of whom turned out to be too incompetent even for this administration. He voted against war powers resolutions that could have hastened the end of the costly and unnecessary conflict with Iran. He voted to end last year’s government shutdown, throwing away leverage Democrats could have used to keep healthcare affordable for millions of families. And he voted to keep funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement after agents murdered two Americans in the streets.

It’s a voting record defined by cruelty, contrarianism, and pettiness. In his home state of Pennsylvania, Republicans have rewarded him with a near 80% approval rating, and Trump is actively courting him to switch parties.

Whether he does or not, Fetterman has already betrayed the people who elected him and undermined the party whose donors and campaign arm spent over $100 million on his Senate race.

Thankfully, Fetterman Bipartisanship is not the only alternative to blind obstructionism. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has spent the last two years (and more) showing Democrats that it’s possible to reach across the aisle without losing your soul.

Last month, Warren signed a letter to the CEOs of Midwest Real Estate Data—a multiple listing service (MLS) that serves as a database for property listings in the Chicago area—and Compass, the country’s largest brokerage firm. The two had signed an agreement that hides certain listings from members of the public and makes them available only to brokers who pay a subscription fee. This practice, Warren warned, will create a “two-tiered housing market” that benefits insiders while driving up prices for regular people who have to compete for a smaller pool of homes.

Warren wasn’t the first to raise the alarm about this corrupt bargain. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-Wis.) beat her to it by about two weeks. But instead of treating the MRED-Compass deal as a toxic GOP issue, Warren threw her weight behind the probe to stop corporate greed from making homeownership even more prohibitively expensive.

And speaking of affordable housing, she also co-sponsored the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act—the most consequential federal housing legislation in 30 years. This bill cuts red tape to make home construction cheaper and easier, rewards jurisdictions that build more housing, and bans private equity from buying up homes that should go to families. And as an added bonus, Trump was too focused on disenfranchising minorities to be bothered to sign the thing. It became law without his signature, but his total lack of interest makes it easy for Democrats to claim the legislation as their win.

Fetterman, take notes: When you vote with Republicans, do it to help working-class families buy homes, not to make sure gas prices keep going up.

Warren also joined Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to co-sponsor the Break Up Big Medicine Act and co-authored an op-ed with Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) calling for a tax increase on the wealthy to save Social Security.

Even if these proposals never become law, they provide Democrats with a powerful argument for 2028: “We’ve been proposing solutions all along. We even tried to work with reasonable Republicans. It’s not our fault they failed, and if you vote for us, they won’t fail again.”

Calling Trump a Nazi or a threat to democracy is a great way to fire up the base, but independents are tired of hearing it. They want to know what Democrats will do to make their groceries, health insurance premiums, day care bills, mortgages, and gas station trips more affordable. We won’t win them over by parroting stale Fox News talking points, but if we can show that we care more about affordability than about partisan bickering, we might just pull it off.

After a century of providing healthcare to this rural, southeast Michigan community, Sturgis Hospital closed in June with only 70 hours warning.

The hospital was not on the at-risk-of-closing list that had been published by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) a year earlier.

Over 300 Sturgis Hospital employees are scrambling to find work. Registered nurse Beth Kelley, who had worked at Sturgis for 32 years, described the meeting room as filled with “shock” and “devastation” when management announced that the hospital was closing.

Nationwide more than 700 rural hospitals are at risk of closing, over half at immediate risk within the next two to three years. The 700 hospitals represent about one-third of all rural hospitals.

The termination of care at Sturgis Hospital overloads the city’s emergency medical services. Director of public safety Ryan Banaszak said, “What was once approximately a 2-mile transport for patients has now become closer to 25 miles, which takes ambulance personnel and equipment out of service for a much longer period of time.”

The impact is great on Michigan Medicaid patients, who cannot use the closest hospital because it is across the state line in Indiana.

“Rural hospital closures lead to significant increases in mortality, and birthing outcomes and obstetric care suffer following closures,” said Michael Shepherd, University of Michigan health policy researcher. The risk increases with every additional mile for emergencies like strokes and heart attacks.

A few weeks later the rural River District Hospital in St. Clair County northeast of Detroit announced the closing of its inpatient and emergency services. Four more rural Michigan hospitals—in Mt. Pleasant, Carson City, Ontonagon, and Dowagiac—are in danger of closing with the upcoming Medicaid cuts.

Rural Americans live sicker and die younger than those in urban areas. Life expectancy is about three years shorter in rural communities. When a rural hospital closes, the mortality rate rises by 5.9%. Rural hospital closures increase mortality for emergencies such as heart attacks and strokes by about 10%.

“There are two kinds of Americans: those who live 12 minutes from an emergency department and those who live 72,” writes Ayla Ellison who grew up in Carmi in southern Illinois. “Whether you survive a heart attack, deliver a healthy baby, or die from something entirely treatable increasingly depends not on the severity of your illness, but on the distance to the nearest hospital,” she continues. She explores the consequences of rural hospitals folding in a country where no one is responsible for assuring help is close enough for a chance at life. The hospital in Carmi closed 20 years ago. Nine more Illinois hospitals are at risk of closure, most of them in southern Illinois.

Other states are worse off. In Mississippi, 51% of the rural hospitals are at risk of closing; in Alabama, 52%; in Arkansas, 68%.

Dr. Kenneth Williams battled for decades to sustain the hospital (Alliance Healthcare System) in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Rapid expansion of Medicare Advantage plans reduced reimbursement and increased denials of payment to the hospital. In 2023, facing financial desperation, the hospital converted to Rural Emergency Hospital status, a federal program designed to stabilize struggling rural hospitals. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) later removed that designation, leaving the hospital again fighting to stay open.

Nationwide more than 700 rural hospitals are at risk of closing, over half at immediate risk within the next two to three years. The 700 hospitals represent about one-third of all rural hospitals. That report was prior to the passage of HR 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that slashes $1 trillion from Medicaid. The crisis escalates from grim to disastrous with the looming Medicaid cuts.

Federal efforts to save our rural hospitals have been pitifully inadequate in the face of the towering problem.

Critical Access Hospitals, created by Congress in 1997, allow small rural hospitals to receive cost-based Medicare reimbursement. The plan was designed to stem the tide of closures.

Between 2010 and 2025, 152 rural hospitals closed. Of these, 52 were Critical Access Hospitals.

In 2021 Congress created Rural Emergency Hospitals. This designation provides for enhanced Medicare payments allowing rural hospitals to continue with outpatient and emergency services only, instead of closing.

In 2023, Sturgis hospital was “saved” by conversion to a Rural Emergency Hospital, delaying its shutdown by three years.

Neither these nor any other federal plans are big enough or thorough enough to work.

CMS Director Mehmet Oz recently visited Kentucky, home of 35 rural at-risk hospitals. He touted the $50 billion in Rural Health Transformation Funds as the solution. The assertion is absurd.

At best, Kentucky will get $1 billion from the rural transformation funds as it loses $21 billion in Medicaid funds. Not even a wizard can turn that into a winner.

As Boston University professor Alan Sager notes, no US entity is responsible for sustaining or building or financing hospitals based on community need.

“The whole Appalachian area has been abandoned, but its hospitals should be funded and improved, as a necessity of life—like the post office,” says Dare Cima, who is from southeastern Kentucky.

With passage of H R 3069, Improved Medicare for All, finally, the nation will take responsibility for assuring that rural areas have adequate facilities. Hospitals will be paid quarterly, in advance, with a global budget that provides operating expenses.

The allocation to hospitals ensures proper staffing with safe nurse-to-patient ratios and optimal staffing for physicians and other healthcare workers. Physician salaries can be included in the global budget. Adjustments to the operating budget will be made “to decrease healthcare disparities in rural or medically underserved areas.”

Special projects funds will be used to end discrimination based on race or other underserved categories including geography. Funds will be allocated for construction of new facilities where needed. At long last, the nation’s healthcare plan will guarantee that not only is everyone covered for care, free at the point of service, but that there is a place within reasonable distance to find that care.

The late Dr. Ewell Scott, Medical Staff president of St. Clair Regional Medical Center in Morehead in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, predicted that if current policy continued, it was just a matter of time until all of Kentucky’s hospitals east of I-75 would be closed.

Sadly, that prediction is breathtakingly close as 16 of east Kentucky’s hospitals in the 5th Congressional District, including Dr. Scott’s beloved St. Clair hospital, are on the list of those endangered with closing by the passage of HR 1.

But Dr. Scott was fighting for a different future. He persuaded the City of Morehead to pass a resolution supporting Improved Medicare for All, a national single-payer plan that would cover us all and fund the hospitals.

Dr. Scott urged all who would listen to tell their congresspersons: “We know the solution. You’ve got to have the guts to stand up and do it.”

What does it mean to be an American? Does your family trace its roots to the American Revolution? Did your ancestors come here seeking opportunity, arrive by force and endure enslavement, or live on this land since time immemorial?

As we mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, the question of what it means to be American is a tactile one; it is inseparable from the places we inhabit and the histories embedded within them. Places tell us who we are and how we came to be here—as individuals and as a nation.

Yet the Trump administration is working to dismantle legal protections for the historic places that narrate and preserve our nation’s heritage. A federal advisory council, made up of Trump appointees, is working to roll back the National Historic Preservation Act, and in particular Section 106, which requires federal agencies to consider how the projects they carry out and fund may affect historic properties.

If we hope to look back after another 250 years and understand how far we have come, we must leave something on the landscape to see.

This process, as its currently designed, gives consulting parties and the public a voice in helping to identify ways to avoid or minimize adverse effects to our important historical places, whether they be a recently discovered archaeological site, or a famous building. The proposed changes shift that balance by concentrating decision-making authority solely with federal agencies, reducing meaningful consultation with Tribal Nations, state and local governments, preservation experts, and the public.

Making public participation optional and drastically shortening review timelines will give communities, preservation advocates, and the people who live in and care for these places fewer opportunities to raise concerns before important cultural and historic places are altered or lost.

This is a form of cultural and historical erasure and a further erosion of the public trust. While the consequences may not be immediately visible, one potential outcome is the unchallenged destruction of the material evidence of who we are as a nation: evidence of our diversity, the difficult truths of our founding and colonial history, and the struggles and progress that shaped American life.

Once these places are destroyed, the histories embedded within them become more difficult to recover, understand, and tell. Cultural resources are a nonrenewable resource deserving of rigorous protections.

Eighty-eight percent of Americans believe that historically and culturally significant places should be preserved for future generations, according to a June 2026 YouGov poll. And yet, some losses are unfolding in plain sight. The East Wing of the White House was demolished as part of a ballroom project that federal courts later ruled could not proceed without congressional authorization. At the same time, the proposed Trump Arch threatens to alter historically and emotionally significant views between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial.

And erasure is not always so conspicuous. It can occur when places largely invisible at the national scale are neglected, altered, or removed despite their immense importance to local communities. Booker T. Washington Cemetery in Centreville, Illinois, for example, became overgrown and invisible yet still powerfully meaningful to Black communities in the area, including those with connections to the 1917 East St. Louis violence. In Arizona, construction of the U.S-Mexico border wall recently bulldozed through Las Playas Intaglio, a more than 1,000-year-old Indigenous geoglyph culturally significant to the Tohono-O’odham.

Places like these may be largely unknown to the broader American public, and once they are removed or altered there is no longer that physical interruption in the contemporary landscape. Nothing to catch the eye of someone passing by prompting the question: What happened here?

Our understanding of what it means to be an American is shaped, in part, by the physical evidence of the people who came before us. When historic places disappear, something more than buildings, archaeological sites, or landscapes is lost. Historic places anchor us in space and time. They confront us with histories we might otherwise forget, preserve evidence of both injustice and achievement, and allow us to see change written into the landscape itself.

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, protecting these places is not simply an exercise in preserving the past. It is an investment in our ability to understand ourselves and the future. If we hope to look back after another 250 years and understand how far we have come, we must leave something on the landscape to see.

If the proposed changes to the Section 106 process are finalized, losses like these could become more difficult for communities to identify, challenge, or prevent. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation’s next meeting is November 10, and the proposed revisions are currently moving through the federal rulemaking process. Once the proposed rule is published in the Federal Register, the public will have an opportunity to submit formal comments. You can also contact your members of Congress to make them aware of the proposed changes and your concerns about their potential effects on historic preservation. The bottom line is simple: If you care for our historic places, be their voice.

As we mark 15 years since Occupy Wall Street, it is worth remembering that the movement against inequality has a long lineage. The Gen Z-led protests flooding the streets of India, Kenya, Bolivia, and Tunisia today have been building for generations.

On the last day of November 1999, tens of thousands of people shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Trade unionists marched alongside environmentalists, students locked arms with farmers, and for a few extraordinary days the people who run the global economy could not get into their own meeting.

The press called protesters a rabble with no coherent demand. They were wrong. The demand was simple and it has not changed: an economy that works for the many, not for a handful at the top.

Here is the lesson of the last decades, and the reason for hope: Every time the powerful have declared this movement finished, it has returned larger, sharper, and more connected than before.

That demand lands differently when you cannot afford the basics of life. In Seattle, the debate centred on trade rules. Today, people are doing the maths as they stand in front of a grocery food shop not knowing what they can afford to buy, tackle rents that consume the entire salary, and face energy bills that arrive like a threat. What was once an abstraction has become a household emergency.

Seattle did not come from nowhere. Five years earlier, the Zapatistas had risen in Southern Mexico on the day a free trade deal took effect, declaring that ordinary people had a right to refuse the terms being set for them from above.

The Jubilee movement had brought millions of people onto the streets and into churches to demand the cancellation of crushing debts owed by the world’s poorest countries.

By 2001 a hundred thousand people were meeting in Porto Alegre in Brazil under the banner “another world is possible,” and that same year a young man named Carlo Giuliani was shot dead protesting the G8 in Genoa, Italy.

The powerful learned early that this movement would not simply ask politely. It would demand systemic change.

Then came the crash. In 2008, the same financial system that had been sold to us as untouchable collapsed, and ordinary people were handed the bill while the bankers who broke it kept their bonuses. Out of that betrayal came the next great wave of action.

2011 brought Tahrir Square, the Spanish Indignados, the Greek fight against austerity, the Chilean students, and, in September, a small camp in the shadow of Wall Street.

The Occupy Wall Street movement gave the whole movement its slogan—“We are the 99%.” A single phrase that did what a thousand policy papers could not. The protesters drew the line. There is them, and there is the rest of us, and the rest of us are almost everyone.

Occupy’s camp was eventually cleared. Critics declared the moment over, the movement a failure, the slogan a fad. Look closer and you see something different.

The 1% have the money. We have the numbers, the history, and the truth.

The idea did not die. It moved into the bloodstream of public life. The language of the 1% vs the 99% is now spoken in parliaments and kitchens alike. Ideas once dismissed as fringe—taxing extreme wealth, cancelling illegitimate debt, treating billionaires as a policy problem rather than a national mascot—are now argued seriously by economists and demanded openly in the streets.

That is what a movement can do over time. Shift what people believe is normal, and then shift what they believe is possible.

We need that long memory now, because the case against the system has never been clearer. According to Oxfam, billionaire wealth hit a record $18.3 trillion in 2025, growing three times faster than in the previous five years, while the number of billionaires surpassed 3,000 for the first time in history. The richest 1% now own almost 44% of all the world’s wealth, while the poorest half of humanity holds barely half of 1% of all the world’s wealth.

Just 12 men hold more wealth than 4 billion people combined. Elon Musk recently became the first person in history to be worth a trillion dollars, in a world where 1 in 4 people goes hungry. This is not the weather. It is a result of a system, engineered by people with names and addresses who have rigged the rules in their own favor.

The other side of that ledger is the bill the rest of us pay. The same years that added a trillion to the top produced rents nobody can pay and food prices that climb faster than wages.

The 1%’s record wealth and the 99%’s rising cost of living are not two distinct stories. They are one transaction, and we are on the paying end of it. In the United States, rents across major cities have risen by more than a third since 2020, the cost of living now tops the list of voters’ concerns, and in 2025 Zohran Mamdani became mayor on an affordability platform in the very city where Occupy began.

And the wealthy know they are exposed, which is why they are buying protection. The super rich are now 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than the rest of us, and they have spent freely to capture the media, the courts, and the politics that might otherwise hold them to account. When wealth concentrates like this, democracy thins out. The fight against inequality and the fight for democracy are the same fight.

Here is the lesson of the last decades, and the reason for hope: Every time the powerful have declared this movement finished, it has returned larger, sharper, and more connected than before. Carnegie’s Global Protest Tracker recorded new anti-government protests in more than 70 countries in 2025.

The young people filling the streets today are not starting from zero. They stand on the shoulders of Seattle, Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, every square that was ever cleared, every campaign that was ever written off. And they are not marching over an abstraction. They are marching because the cost of a decent life has been priced out of reach while a few thousand people got richer than anyone in history.

So this one goes out to Gen Z, in every city and every country where the numbers no longer add up. Your time is now. You did not break this economy. You inherited the bill for it. Enough is enough.

The 1% have the money. We have the numbers, the history, and the truth. The only question that has ever mattered is whether we organize. Every generation before answered yes. Now it is yours to answer, and the world is waiting to hear it.

For the past two decades, the Democratic Party has struggled to articulate a coherent foreign policy doctrine. From the Iraq War to the rise of China to the Russia-Ukraine war, Democrats have had little exciting to offer. Too often, they have converged with Republicans on militarism, occasionally tinging it with a dose of liberal internationalism in an effort—often fruitlessly—to demonstrate that they are different.

But that uninspiring foreign policy may finally be facing a serious reform movement in the wake of the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the Democratic establishment once again turns to militarism to defend the US-Israel alliance, insurgent progressives—once on the fringes of the Democratic Party—are gaining momentum to reverse that tradition. For all intents and purposes, what begins as opposition to the conventional Democratic approach to Israel could evolve into a broader challenge to the party’s establishment—and ultimately rescue Democrats from their disappointing foreign policy record.

Make no mistake: Democrats once knew how to do foreign policy. Those who succeeded in building a robust foreign-policy identity shared one important trait: They all connected their foreign-policy principles to their domestic agenda. In doing so, they created a coherent foreign-policy philosophy that could resonate with mainstream Democratic voters, who generally care more about domestic affairs than foreign policy.

Connecting Foreign Policy to the Domestic Agenda

The idealist Woodrow Wilson framed American entry into World War I and the creation of the League of Nations in terms of protecting American security and prosperity. Likewise, the pragmatist Franklin D. Roosevelt presented his recognition of the Soviet Union as part of a broader effort to advance American economic interests during the Great Depression. Jimmy Carter framed nuclear arms control with the Soviets as a means of reducing the economic burdens of the arms race and preserving resources for domestic priorities. A business-friendly Bill Clinton presented China’s accession to the World Trade Organization as an opportunity to expand American exports, create jobs, and strengthen the US economy.

That foreign-domestic policy nexus largely disappeared after 2004. When Democrats rallied behind John Kerry, they hoped that his military service in Vietnam and his vote authorizing the Iraq War would give him the credentials to challenge George W. Bush as an accredited commander in chief. But they overlooked a fundamental flaw: Kerry had an internally contradictory foreign-policy record. He supported several US military interventions while remaining committed to multilateralism. The result was that Kerry, the liberal hawk, alienated anti-war Democratic voters without giving hawkish voters a compelling reason to prefer him over Bush. More importantly, in their effort to portray Kerry as a strong grand strategist, Democrats failed to answer the question that mattered most to their own base: How would a Democratic president with an inclination toward Republican-style military intervention actually make Americans better off?

The Kerry puzzle seems to have haunted the Democratic foreign-policy agenda ever since, with occasional exceptions. Yes, Barack Obama had some notable foreign policy achievements, such as the Iran nuclear deal and the normalization of US-Cuba relations. And those achievements, pitched domestically either as a means of enhancing US national security or of expanding economic opportunities for Americans, suggested that he had the potential to reform, if not transform, the rigid Democratic foreign policy orthodoxy. But the unexpected rise of Donald Trump abruptly brought that process to a halt, shifting Democrats’ focus from opposing Republican foreign policy in general to opposing Trump, the person.

US primacy should not be the premise on which American foreign policy is built. Rather, it should be the American people.

Democrats’ obsession with Trump left his Democratic challengers—from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to Kamala Harris—stuck in the limbo of status-quo foreign policy. They became so eager to deliver an immediate and defining foreign-policy victory, in the hope of reassuring voters of their ability to handle global affairs, that they lost sight of a more fundamental task: developing a set of principles that the party could consistently defend rather than maintaining the status quo through piecemeal policies. Many of the top officials in the Biden administration, for instance, had been involved in negotiating the original Iran nuclear deal, which sought to advance cooperative internationalism, yet his administration showed little appetite for restoring it.

Nor did Biden make good on his promise of a foreign policy for the middle class. His administration proposed redirecting part of the defense budget toward technological workforce development to preserve America’s innovative edge and strengthen long-term readiness. Yet defense spending continued to grow throughout his presidency. Likewise, he promised to move away from promoting democracy through costly military interventions, but his administration repeatedly relied on military force abroad, including strikes against Houthi militants in Yemen without congressional authorization and US involvement in conflicts across multiple regions.

Biden epitomizes the conundrum confronting the Democratic foreign-policy establishment: It has one foot in the present to search for reform while the other remains firmly planted in the past. That dilemma helps explain why liberal hawks so often prefer ad hoc decisions to a systematic strategy for the long game. And the poignant yet unavoidable consequence is that Democrats still lack a robust foreign-policy identity, leaving their pursuit of national security credentials always several steps behind their Republican opponents.

Kamala Harris may have recognized this dilemma and attempted to break with it by making the bold move of picking progressive Tim Walz as her running mate. But putting aside Walz’s progressive domestic agenda, his realist approach to foreign policy rendered the Harris-Walz ticket, at most, slightly-left-of-center and unlikely to bring genuine change to the party’s foreign-policy outlook. Their broad alignment with Biden’s policy toward the Gaza conflict only reinforced the impression that they would remain tethered to a Democratic foreign-policy establishment operating within a bipartisan “Blob” whose worldviews have been monolithic.

That said, the only way for Democrats to escape this quagmire is to stop tinkering with—or, worse, simply repeating—some version of the tired conventional Democratic “wisdom.” That approach has proved ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst over the past two decades. What Democrats need is an outside-in reform. And as quixotic as it may sound, this is something only genuine progressives—the outsiders of the Democratic Party—can deliver.

The Outsider Agenda

Progressives, by nature, embody an egalitarian imagination. Their dissatisfaction with the US status quo can easily translate into opposition to the Democratic foreign-policy establishment’s hunger for “normalcy.” Because progressives view conflict as anchored in structural inequality at multiple levels, they seek to reshape the very inequality-based “normalcy” that gives rise to traditional security problems. Therefore, they possess a quality desperately needed for foreign-policy reform that is difficult to find within the Democratic establishment: a willingness to reconsider America’s changing place in the world increasingly defined by inequality.

The greatest challenge is the Democratic Party’s fixation on US military dominance, which progressives increasingly view as an important contributor to global inequality. In defending that dominance, the Democratic establishment reveals the gap between its ideological commitments and its actions. It champions cooperative internationalism as a means of reducing inequality yet repeatedly returns to militarism in ways that can perpetuate it. Given Hillary Clinton’s advocacy of a no-fly zone in Syria, Obama’s airstrikes against Libya, and Biden’s use of military force in Yemen, it doesn’t take a policy wonk to figure out how the next Democratic president would respond if a skirmish broke out in the South China Sea.

In stark contrast, progressives are dedicated to dismantling US military dominance and reconstructing American exceptionalism from within. Free from the establishment’s unbreakable ties to militarism, progressives avoid conflating “effective US foreign policy” with “military intervention”—as Democratic elites often do—thereby bringing domestic clarity to foreign policymaking.

Progressives, equipped with direction, determination, and time, will be the only viable counterforce capable of ultimately revitalizing a modern Democratic foreign-policy identity that actually speaks to Democratic voters.

This domestic clarity enables progressives to offer a clearer foreign policy vision than the establishment. By working toward social transformation at home, strengthening the democratic legitimacy of the American state, and reinforcing the moral legitimacy of its economy, the United States can increase its capability to marshal diplomatic pressure on behalf of allies around the world. By doing so, Democrats can reclaim the domestic-foreign nexus that Democratic grand strategists once wielded so effectively and present their voters with a foreign policy that speaks directly to their interests.

The most direct benefit of restoring that nexus is exactly what Democratic foreign policy needs: giving voters the ability to hold policymakers accountable for poor foreign policymaking. Due to the notoriously self-forgiving nature of the foreign-policy establishment, Democratic elites can often walk away scot-free despite the consequences of their policy advice. Biden’s behind-the-scenes hawkish advisers Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, and Brett McGurk were responsible, for instance, for the administration’s near-unqualified support for Israel. Yet they were never meaningfully held accountable for their advice. A foreign-policy agenda grounded in progressive accountability would give voters a more effective means of judging the consequences of such decisions.

And the result of this shift toward accountability would be a clearer answer to what Democrats should pursue in an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalry: not ex post facto militarism, but ex ante diplomacy. This progressive vision was on display in the remarks of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Taiwan at the Munich Security Conference this year. Despite her stumbles, Ocasio-Cortez captured an ethos fundamentally different from a militarism-based approach to US foreign policy: Rather than emphasizing how the United States would defend Taiwan and democracy through strength, as many centrist Democrats might, she emphasized the need to work toward ensuring that the United States and China “never get to that point.”

The Democratic establishment ridiculed that progressive vision and tried to keep it under control by stopping democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids in 2016 and 2020. Little did it know that the progressive spark Sanders ignited a decade ago would grow into a political cyclone in 2026, sweeping through one state after another in a string of electoral victories. From Melat Kiros and Abdul El-Sayed to Peggy Flanagan, progressive candidates have repeatedly defeated AIPAC-backed establishment figures and, in an ironic twist, have benefited politically from the warnings of Democratic elites. In a broader sense, this progressive wave is also reshaping the party’s stance on the litmus test of Israel. In July, over half of House Democrats voted to support cutting $3.3 billion in US aid to Israel, a shift that would have been difficult to imagine even five years ago.

Accountability Matters

Perhaps that is what a real progressive revolution is supposed to look like: not top-down reform, but a bottom-up revolt. The grassroots movement that has catapulted the left forward now gives progressives an opportunity to capitalize on their momentum and forcefully expose the uncomfortable elephant in the room that the Democratic foreign-policy establishment has long avoided: US primacy should not be the premise on which American foreign policy is built. Rather, it should be the American people.

Under pressure from the left, Democrats will have to rediscover that their foreign policy must ultimately remain answerable and vulnerable to the demands of mass politics. They will have to take seriously voters’ growing frustration with the longstanding shibboleths of American exceptionalism and US global leadership when those grand ambitions do little to make healthcare more accessible or everyday life more affordable. And they will also have to recognize that the rise of a progressive pro-Palestinian foreign policy is not simply a manifestation of youthful political naïveté but reflects a grassroots revolt against a US-led global order that many young Americans increasingly see as inseparable from the economic inequalities they experience at home.

The establishment might be strong, but its outdated militarist doctrine will not endure forever. And progressives, equipped with direction, determination, and time, will be the only viable counterforce capable of ultimately revitalizing a modern Democratic foreign-policy identity that actually speaks to Democratic voters. Such a foreign policy would put people before US primacy, diplomacy before militarism, human rights before geopolitical calculations, and the needs of ordinary Americans before bloated Pentagon budgets and forever wars.

By Ralph Nader September 18, 2026 “I was in the Oval Office when I got a call with the results of the September 15th House Impeachment vote. Unbelievable. Of course, my Repubs all voted against this persecution, but 47 of the Dems, including their leaders—Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, and Richard Neal from Democratic Massachusetts—voted PRESENT!…

On Friday night, DC-based advocacy organization Hands Off the Arts and its allies are going to form a human chain around the Kennedy Center, called Hands Around the Kennedy Center, putting their bodies on the line to protect the institution. While the group has been planning this action for several weeks, before the removal and literal disembodiment of Joel Shapiro’s 24-foot-tall sculpture "Blue," the board’s vote to close to the Kennedy Center, and pictures captured Wednesday night showing President Donald Trump looking at a plan to demolish the Kennedy Center aboard Air Force One, the action has taken on intense meaning.

At its core, his final strategy for the Kennedy Center, after judges have repeatedly told him he cannot put his name on another president’s memorial, is scorched earth.

I have been on the ground in Washington, DC from the beginning—reporting and raising awareness about Hands Off the Arts’ weekly protests since Trump’s second inauguration. Many of the Hands Off the Arts organizers—including co-founder Mallory Miller—were my colleagues, at the arts institution where I worked as an audio describer for three years. As a public historian witnessing Trump transform the Kennedy Center into his hill to die on, I cannot help but see the similarities to Adolf Hitler’s Nero Decree where he ordered the destruction of German lands and infrastructure to prevent its future use by any Allied forces.

“The demolition watch piece of this cannot be understated. It is truly a crazy timeline that we’re living in where the president of the United States can just say that he might demolish the Kennedy Center.”

Hitler’s strategy was named after the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, which, according to tradition, was blamed on Rome’s Christian communities and used by Emperor Nero to justify their persecution. Although there is no historical evidence that Nero set the fire, nor that he played the fiddle or lyre while watching the city burn, Nero was blamed all the same, especially since land cleared by the fire was used to build his new palace, the Domus Aurea. Hitler issued his decree once he recognized that Germany faced imminent defeat but was unwilling to accept the terms of unconditional surrender. He ordered that this land be destroyed on the grounds that the German people had failed his great mission.

As Hitler wrote in the March 1945 decree, “All military transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments, and supply deports, as well as anything else of value within Reich territory, which could in any way be used by the enemy immediately or within the foreseeable future for the prosecution of the war, will be destroyed.”

Even before Hitler issued the Nero decree, he was already burning thousands of works of art publicly. The Nazi government confiscated art from state-owned German museums and then put them on public display in 1937 as part of a propaganda art exhibition meant to classify art created in the styles of Dadaism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstraction as “Degenerate Art.” What could be sold to enrich the regime was and what couldn’t was publicly burned. The similarity to Trump’s criticism of Jose de Rivera’s "Infinity" in front of the National Museum of American History and destruction of Joel Shapiro’s "Blue" is palpable.

All of the other art that he favored, namely Classical and Renaissance works, were hidden in caches and planned to be displayed at a massive art complex called the Führermuseum in his hometown of Linz, Austria. The museum was never finished because the Nazi regime fell before Hitler’s goal was realized. In the chaos of the Nazi regime’s collapse, many priceless works of art burned in two devastating fires in May 1945 that destroyed the Friedrichshain flak tower. Whether the fires were caused by an accident, combat damage, or intentionally set, we will never know, but Hitler never intentionally ordered the destruction of the art held in these caches.

While the Hitler’s Nero decree ordered the destruction of German lands and infrastructure, not the art he had stolen, the connection to Trump’s fight for the Kennedy Center is glaringly obvious. Chris Raleigh, one of the co-founders of Hands Off the Arts, pointed out the historical similarities in an interview with me this week. Raleigh compared the Hands Off the Arts group to the Monuments Men fighting to preserve the art that Hitler and the Nazi regime stole and was holding hostage.

“Hitler wanted to build a museum where he lived… I think he wanted to make basically his mausoleum. It was his antithesis to all the degenerate art of the world at the time,” Raleigh explained. “I worry about the Nero decree. It was, "If I can’t have it, no one can. Destroy all of it.’ I don’t know if we’re in Nero decree territory, but we’re going pretty close.”

In truth, comparisons between Trump and Hitler are tenuous at best. There are striking social, economic, and even religious differences between the two dictators, but historical similarities are key to helping us understand how history can help us anticipate and fight back against violent escalation. At its core, Trump’s fight for the Kennedy Center as well as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is about his legacy, about how he will be remembered. It’s just like Hitler’s own fight to create a cultural district synonymous with his name, not so different from Trump’s own attempts to cast DC as culturally derelict and remake the capital in his own image, with the installation of new sculptures of controversial founding fathers and gilding “The Arts of War” and “The Arts of Peace” equestrian monuments.

As Mallory Miller, co-founder of Hands Off the Arts, explained to me, the way that the Trump administration was purposefully not caring for the exterior of the building, leading to mold growth, deinstalling "Blue," and widely publicizing the ceiling collapse is another use of this purposeful tactic to convince the public that the Kennedy Center is falling apart and needs to be closed and demolished for safety reasons.

“The demolition watch piece of this cannot be understated. It is truly a crazy timeline that we’re living in where the president of the United States can just say that he might demolish the Kennedy Center,” Miller said. Hands Off the Arts organized a livestream of the front of the building, capturing some of the first photos of his name being removed from the building before the tarp went up. The administration has even started putting up bike racks and other barriers around the perimeter of the Kennedy Center, which Miller acknowledges is likely in anticipation of their protest tonight. But with more than 900 people registered for the protest, Miller is eager to just make their circle bigger to protect the memorial to the slain president.

“We can save this,” Raleigh continued, “We can save world heritage. American heritage, but it’s going to be hard, and they’re not going to go down without a struggle, but that is also one of the things that I think about—we are not the first people [to do this work].”

This fall, California residents will be voting on a measure that would impose a tax of 5% on people with wealth in excess of $1 billion. This is a serious tax on a small group of very wealthy people.

While some focus on the amount of tax that these super-rich people will pay, it’s worth keeping in mind how much they will still have after paying their tax bill. A billionaire with $5 billion in assets will pay $250 million in taxes, but they will still be left with $4,750,000,000. We probably still don’t have to worry about these folks collecting food stamps.

The proponents of the tax calculate that it will raise $100 billion. While it is a one-time tax, it can be paid over five years. This sum will roughly match the cuts in Medicaid funding over this period that the Trump administration has put in place.

It is important to recognize that capitalism is an infinitely malleable system. We have allowed the rich to structure it to give themselves all the money. That is a huge problem.

To me, this sounds like a great plan. The state needs money to provide essential services. Why not take it from the people who have money coming out of their ears?

Okay, but we know the real world is never this simple. The rich love their money and aren’t happy about turning over any portion of it to the state of California, no matter how little it affects their living standards. We have to ask how much money the tax will actually collect after the rich use all the tools available, both legal and illegal, to avoid paying.

The podcast Today Explained had an interesting discussion of this issue last week. It included comments from two economists who have done research on this issue: Joshua Rauh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Cristobal Young, a sociology professor at Cornell University. Rauh is a conservative, while Young is a liberal. Both have done serious work on taxing the rich.

Not surprisingly, Rauh opposed the wealth tax. He argued that the tax would end up as a net revenue loser. The tax would apply to billionaires who were in the state as of January 1 of this year, which means if they haven’t left the state already, they will still be liable for the tax even if they choose to leave later. But Rauh argues that the combination of lost future income tax revenue from the billionaires who have already left, combined with reduced collections from the billionaires who stay or don’t come to the state, will more than offset whatever revenue the state collects from the tax.

I take seriously the issues Rauh raises. Some billionaires have left the state. They also are very clever in finding ways to avoid taxes. Rauh did a paper a couple of years back that found that the rich managed to escape paying 60% of the anticipated tax revenue from a 3-percentage-point increase in the top tax rate paid by high-income people.

There clearly is some point where higher tax rates can actually result in less revenue, mostly due to increased evasion and avoidance, but there also is some negative incentive effect (definitely the smaller part of the story). Rauh’s work suggested California might not be far from that point. (Its top marginal tax rate is 13%.)

While Rauh’s view of the wealth tax was predictable, I was surprised to hear that Young also opposed it. Young has done considerable work that finds that rich people do not often move to escape higher state tax rates. It might have been expected that Young would think that the state does not have much to fear from billionaires leaving to escape the wealth tax.

However, Young opposed the tax on different grounds. He argued that the one-time infusion of revenue from the tax, collected over five years, would still leave a funding gap five years out, after the revenue stopped coming in.

This is hard for me to understand. Five years in Trump’s America in an eternity. It is reasonable to think that in five years we may again have a more normal government at the national level that is prepared to actually provide people with healthcare. In that case, the shortfall will not be an issue. Alternatively, if Trump and his followers still hold power, we are likely looking at a disaster story for which there is no real way to prepare.

There are a number of billionaires who very publicly left California before the start of the year and may thereby avoid the tax. This will reduce the revenue collected from the tax and will mean a loss of income tax revenue for the state in future years, but that is water under the bridge at this point.

We can all envision better ways to tax the rich in an ideal world. California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom opposed the state wealth tax because he says we should have a federal wealth tax. Perhaps we should, but a state wealth tax is what’s on the table, and proponents of taxing the rich would be foolish not to wholeheartedly support it.

If the wealth tax goes down, California is not about to institute Young or anyone else’s ideal tax on the rich. If it goes down, it’s a pretty sure bet that it will be some time before another tax on the super rich in California comes this close to becoming law.

I will add that I have long argued that we need to structure the economy differently so that we don’t give the rich all the money. Having shorter and weaker government-granted patent and copyright monopolies would be a good start. Also, changing bankruptcy laws so that private equity partners can’t walk away from companies they bankrupted with their pockets full. And applying a modest sales tax on financial transactions would downsize the sector and eliminate many of the great fortunes on Wall Street.

This is the topic of my book, Rigged (it’s free). It is important to recognize that capitalism is an infinitely malleable system. We have allowed the rich to structure it to give themselves all the money. That is a huge problem. Taxing some of it back is a great thing to do, but it would be even better not to give them the money in the first place. That’s not a reason to oppose the tax, but it would be good if progressives paid some attention to fundamental issues of how we structure the market.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• China, long highly vulnerable to oil supply shocks, has transformed that weakness into a source of geopolitical power, by stockpiling huge amounts of oil, building extra oil refining capacity and investing in coal and other alternatives. And it flexed that power by cutting off supplies of jet fuel, gasoline and diesel to neighboring countries. Already dominant in solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, China now has an unparalleled position across the energy landscape.

• Under pressure, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, rejected Hasan Piker’s argument that the U.S. has caused more terror than Al Qaeda. Can he/should he be cowed by the corporatists?

• Washington and Florida insiders – from billionaire Trump allies and Rubio-linked lobbyists to Cuban exiles – are jockeying for control of the communist-ruled island-nation’s assets, charging to help clients navigate sanctions, and positioning themselves to loot Cuba in case of regime collapse.

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The post China Won the Iran War | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Editor’s Note: The following is the fifth and final excerpt from Nancy J. Altman’s new book, The Road to Medicare for All: A Call to Action (Routledge, 2026), now available for purchase wherever quality books are sold. Read the previous excerpts published by Common Dreams here, here, here, and here. As the United States continues to spend substantially more on health care than other wealthy nations but with poorer health outcomes, Altman’s book analyzes the dysfunction of the current system and sets forth the solution. “Medicare for All won’t happen without a fight,” she argues, “but it is a fight we can win.”

Reaching our destination won’t be easy. Americans have been fighting for universal, government-sponsored national health insurance for over 100 years. Progress was made in 1965 and 1972, when Medicare was enacted and expanded. Since, then, though, not only was Medicare not expanded; frustratingly, its opposition has succeeded in partially privatizing it.

The moment in which the nation finds itself does not appear particularly hopeful even for the country to remain the United States. Not since the Civil War has the nation been so divided.

Past Threats to Democracy

Almost 100 years ago, the Great Depression brought economic collapse and with it, a serious threat to democracy. Like today, there was hostility to those perceived to be elites. The economic turmoil opened the door to widespread radical movements and demagogues.

Like today, “others” were scapegoated, along with the “elites.” Jews were a particular target. One extremely powerful, influential anti-Semite was radio preacher Father Charles E. Coughlin. At the height of his popularity, his Sunday radio show, Golden Hour of the Little Flower, which was broadcast over dozens of radio stations around the country, was heard by nearly one in four Americans and had a larger share of the listening audience than the more recent broadcasters Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Paul Harvey, and Larry King put together. Before the 1936 Presidential election, he asserted. “This is our last election. It is fascism or communism. We are at the crossroads. I take the road to fascism.”

Another leader of the time seeking radical change was Louisiana Governor and then Senator Huey Long, who targeted the extreme income and wealth inequality which exploded during the so-called Roaring Twenties. His Share Our Wealth plan proposed confiscatory income, wealth, and inheritance taxes on the wealthiest and generous federal benefits for working and middle-income families. Just one year after announcing the plan, there were 27,000 Share Our Wealth local clubs, mainly in the South, with over 7.5 million members.

Long planned to run for president as a third-party candidate, even setting out his plans and strategy in his 1935 novel, My First Days in the White House. His plans came to an abrupt end, though, in September, 1935, when he was assassinated by the son-in-law of a political opponent whom Long had targeted and slandered.

Another radical leader of the time was socialist author and journalist, Upton Sinclair, who sought to expose corruption in business and government, while shining a spotlight on the horrendous working conditions at the time. In 1934, he ran for Governor of California on his “End Poverty in California” (EPIC) plan, which, like Long, he set out in a novel, the 1933 I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. His plan called for the state to seize idle factories, farms, movie studios, and other businesses and convert them to worker-run co-ops, financed with progressive revenue. Two dozen candidates who ran on the EPIC plan won seats in the state legislature, including lawyer and journalist Culbert Colson, who successfully ran for Governor four years later, becoming the first Democrat in 40 years to win the office.

The Perfect Person for the Moment

At base, people were suffering and open to radical solutions to address their misery. Franklin Roosevelt was undoubtedly the right person to meet that moment. He was extremely politically savvy, pragmatic, and smart. His speeches were inspiring and visionary. His famed fireside chats, named to convey a sense of cozy familiarity, established a strong personal connection between the president and the American people. He radiated optimism. Perhaps most importantly, he exuded compassion and empathy.

Though he enjoyed extraordinary wealth and privilege, his paralysis, resulting from contracting polio at age 39, was apparently transformative. His close colleague Frances Perkins, who became the first woman to serve as a Cabinet secretary to a president, described his transformation in her book, The Roosevelt I Knew. She witnessed Roosevelt undergo, she wrote:

“a spiritual transformation during the years of his illness….The man emerged completely warmhearted, with humility of spirit and with a deeper philosophy. Having been in the depths of trouble, he understood the problems of people in trouble.”

The brilliant achievements of the charismatic Roosevelt can continue to be felt today. His Social Security program was carefully crafted to embody basic American values, containing both progressive and conservative elements that continue to appeal to Americans across the ideological divide. Roosevelt’s legacy provides good news in today’s troubling time. As polarized and hostile as Americans are in general, we are overwhelmingly united in our support for Social Security and Medicare, which grows out of Roosevelt’s legacy. A 2025 Bipartisan Policy Center poll, for example, found that 91 percent of Americans believe that Medicare is valuable. That same poll found that 93 percent believe Social Security is valuable. Numerous other polls, taken over many years by groups across the ideological spectrum, have found similar results of unanimity of support.

Despite how divided and combative the American people are generally, these numbers provide a ray of hope. Supporters of Improved Medicare for All must build on this support systematically. The cause and its success may have the byproduct of helping to bring the country back to more normal, less fractured, and hostile times.

Today’s Missing Leader

Notwithstanding Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, none of the Democratic presidential nominees in the last few election cycles nor the mainstream leaders of today’s Democratic Party appear to match Roosevelt’s political insights or capabilities. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) showed that he can garner enthusiastic support, as has New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, but the Democratic leadership has not embraced them or similar charismatic progressive leaders. Consequently, the Democratic Party has not spoken with one single clear voice and capitalized effectively on the broad support for Medicare and Social Security.

Unfortunately, unlike Roosevelt, the current politicians who appear most likely to win the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination do not appear to have the vision or charisma to capitalize on the popularity of Medicare and Social Security. There is no candidate with Franklin Roosevelt’s many gifts who is in a position to fully embrace Improved Medicare for All and ride it to victory, together with an expanded Social Security program. At this moment, the Democratic Party does not seem united in a path forward, certainly not one that would embrace as bold a vision as Improved Medicare for All.

Nevertheless, the political movements of the 1930s provide evidence that those policy goals can be achieved without a political leader. While the Share the Wealth and End Poverty in California grassroots movements had high-profile personalities leading the efforts, another astoundingly successful grassroots movement did not.

A Grassroots Movement to Emulate

While policymakers in Washington were primarily focused on unemployment in the early years of the Great Depression, they apparently did not fully appreciate that hidden in the shadows of the unemployment numbers were impoverished, aged parents reluctantly dependent on their adult children for support. When Social Security became law in 1935, every state but New Mexico had poorhouses (sometimes called almshouses or poor farms). The vast majority of the residents were elderly. Most of the “inmates,” as they were often labeled, entered the poorhouse late in life, having been independent wage earners until they were no longer able to work.

Although official Washington was not focused on the plight of the elderly, ordinary people were. In September 1933, a Long Beach, California doctor, Francis E. Townsend, found himself at age 66 unemployed with no savings. He was gazing out his window when he spotted two elderly women, dressed in rags, rummaging through his garbage, searching for anything edible. It so upset Dr. Townsend that he sent a letter to the Long Beach Press-Telegram, his local newspaper.

His letter, published on September 30, proposed a plan. He proposed that the federal government provide every person aged 60 or older a pension of $200 per month, a princely sum in the 1930s. The only requirement, in addition to being retired and not a criminal, was that the recipient had to spend every penny within 30 days of receipt. He claimed that his plan would not only eradicate old-age poverty; it would so stimulate the economy that it would create jobs and end the Depression.

The idea spread around the country at a rate astonishing to believe in that pre-Internet, pre-social media world. A year after Townsend wrote his letter to the newspaper, Time magazine reported in its October 15, 1934, issue:

By last week the flow of money…was enough to pay the wages of 50 people….There were Townsend Clubs in every State except Delaware…. Between 2,000,000 and 5,000,000 people had put their names to petitions begging their Congressmen to vote the Plan into effect at once.

Even in the short time between the publication of Townsend’s letter and the establishment of Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security (CES), his interagency task force to develop the Social Security Act, supporters of the Townsend proposal were exerting considerable pressure on the Administration and Congress. At the height of CES’s work, mail from Townsendites averaged about 1,500 letters a day. In some congressional districts, a candidate’s position on the Townsend plan determined the outcome of the election.

By mid-October 1934, Townsend had acquired two million signatures on petitions urging congressional action on his plan. Just three months later, he was claiming to have 25 million signatures. The number of Townsend clubs had climbed to 25,000 across the country. The plan’s popularity was not hard to fathom. As political columnist, Mark Sullivan with The New York Herald Tribune explained: “The zeal of those promoting the plan is evangelical, almost fanatic.”

A Time magazine piece explained the political climate surrounding the plan:

The good doctor’s Old Age Revolving Pensions scheme, better known as the Townsend Plan, had by last week become one of the biggest political facts in the US. The early California groundswell of sentiment in its favor had grown to a tidal wave, battering at nearly every door in House and Senate Office Buildings.

In the end, the Townsend plan, which policy experts understood to be unworkable—benefits would have cost half the income of the United States, for example—was instrumental in enacting Social Security, because it provided the widespread pressure to address old age insecurity. That is the kind of pressure that today could get Improved Medicare for All enacted, as well.

A New Movement: Improved Medicare for All Clubs All across the Nation

To build such a movement is both easier and harder than it was almost 100 years ago. While American news consumption is much more siloed, social media, email chains, and the internet generally allow people to connect much more easily and effectively. Of course, people are drawn to a variety of important issues, including climate change, gun violence, and immigration. Nevertheless, similar to the 1930s with respect to old age insecurity, Americans appear to be reaching the end of their rope with respect to the nation’s health insurance companies, as was demonstrated by the strong, instantaneous outpouring of frustration with commercial health insurance in response to the murder of the UnitedHealthcare executive.

The movement for Improved Medicare for All already has powerful, effective, knowledgeable and resourceful leaders. They are members of a far-reaching, forceful coalition, the National Coalition for Medicare for All. The coalition meets regularly to strategize and advance the issue. They are doing a spectacular job in championing and pushing forward Improved Medicare for All. To help them succeed in its enactment, the rest of us should provide them with an overwhelming army of passionate, dedicated grassroots supporters.

The goal, as impossible as it might seem, is to build a broad-based, energized, and determined Townsend-like grassroots movement. Everyone who wants Improved Medicare for All to become law should reach out to friends, family, and neighbors and urge them to get involved. In addition to joining already-existing groups, such as MoveOn, Public Citizen, and Indivisible, supporters should create Improved Medicare for All clubs.

Those clubs should play a number of roles. First, the clubs could educate members and others about why Improved Medicare for All is so important. They could discuss at club meetings how health care is a right, not a privilege and how Improved Medicare for All is the only realistic way to get us there. Just as the Townsend clubs hounded their elected representatives, supporters should flood offices with phone calls, keep track of when their Senators and representatives are home from Washington, DD, and attend their town halls if they host them. If they don’t, the clubs can seek meetings with their members and staff. If their members won’t commit to cosponsoring Improved Medicare for All legislation, they should put pressure on them, including picketing their offices.

Other Steps Individuals Can and Should Take

With or without membership in an Improved Medicare for All club, those wanting to help the effort have many other steps they can take. On this and many other issues, there are a multitude of effective civic and social organizations active on political issues, such as Indivisible, MoveOn, Public Citizen, and many more. If you have access to a union, they remain extremely important and effective actors with which to engage. With or without engagement with these organizations, it is perhaps most important to educate family, friends, and neighbors. Writing letters to the editor and posting on social media are helpful actions. If possible, there may be an opportunity to hold an event at a school, perhaps through the PTA, as well as at assisted care facilities, libraries, and other spaces. If you want to organize an event but want experts to be the speakers and/or panelists, that is relatively easy these days, particularly, if the speakers can appear virtually.

Moreover, because healthcare costs affect everyone, the issue of Improved Medicare for All can be tailored to a variety of organizations and groups. School groups may be concerned about the impact of healthcare costs on their budget. Women’s groups may be concerned about reproductive rights. Again, the point is to make the movement for Improved Medicare for All as large a mass movement as possible.

This moment in history may make enactment of Improved Medicare for All appear as far away as it possibly could be. However, the mythological phoenix should be the symbol of the effort. The phoenix, an immortal bird that continually arose from the ashes of its predecessor, symbolizes renewal after a period of hardship.

The Friday before Labor Day saw news break that OpenAI was beefing up its political influence staff, notably nabbing Jessica Schumer from Amazon to lead the firm’s “policy and partnerships” operations in the Northeast.

Schumer is the daughter of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and has been a longtime corporate politicker for Big Tech. Naturally, OpenAI was conscious of the potential ethical issues and clarified in a statement to the New York Post that “Jessica will focus on state and local public policy efforts and not federal policy or engagement with Congress. She will not be involved in any advocacy before the Minority Leader or his office related to OpenAI business.”

While superficially reassuring, OpenAI’s supposed commitment to ethics does little to actually address the underlying issue that Democratic leadership, and Chuck Schumer specifically, have been extremely tepid and lethargic, despite the rapid pace of AI industrial buildout and grassroots politics surrounding data centers. Jessica Schumer’s new gig puts an uncomfortable reality front and center: Democrats’ floundering is happening simultaneously to the party’s own political elites reaping financial and professional rewards from the continued strength of AI firms.

The senator played a major role in blocking oversight of the industry behind both his children’s paychecks.

At a time when the lane for an anti-corruption politics is wide open, with more than 90% of Americans believing corruption is a major issue in every branch of our government, Schumer’s hiring is a reminder that powerful people and families of both parties are deeply intertwined with the corporate behemoths that people are organizing against.

People simply do not trust the crop of AI executives to develop the technology responsibly in a way that serves the public interest.

They similarly have little faith in the children of powerful politicians abstaining from leveraging their parents’ status for personal gain. In a 2023 YouGov poll, 85% of respondents believed that children of presidents “always or sometimes profit off of their parents' positions in government;” it seems inconceivable that those numbers would have decreased in the intervening years. It’s hard not to see Jessica Schumer’s case that way; she has built a career around helping advance Big Tech’s legislative agenda in New York, a state her father has held elected office in for literally half a century. As a famously local-focused politician, the idea that the Schumer name would not carry weight in New York politics would be astonishingly naive. The younger Schumer was raised rubbing shoulders with a veritable who’s who of the state political class, creating in-built relationships to local politicos. And those people would have every incentive to try and build relationships with her to keep from risking running afoul of one of the most dominant (perhaps the most, given the righteous electoral defenestration of Andrew Cuomo) political figures in New York politics, and the newly ascendant company that employs her.

All of this would be one thing if it were an aside in an otherwise laudable track record on Sen. Schumer’s part of holding Big Tech to account. But we are quite clearly living on the other hand, where the senator played a major role in blocking oversight of the industry behind both his children’s paychecks (his other daughter, Alison, works for Facebook parent company Meta). He killed the oversight legislation "feared most" by Big Tech while his daughters were employed in marketing at Meta and as a lobbyist for Amazon. Even if Schumer reached that decision without personal bias, reasonable observers cannot help but question the integrity of the policymaking process.

The strongest winds in politics right now are outrage at Trumpian corruption, largely driven by the AI and crypto industries, and aversion to data centers and their impacts on local communities. Opting not to tack into them looks foolish on its own. Paired with leaders’ kids cashing checks from the very firms seeking to influence the government, it looks like dropping anchor in troubled waters.

September 11, 2026, was the 25th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center by hijackers who were part of al Qaeda and followers of Saudi religious fundamentalist Osama bin Laden who had sworn revenge against the United States because of its actions in the Middle East.

Twenty-five years ago, less than a week after the attack, in the midst of national mourning, President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, where he explained: “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it's important for my fellow Americans to understand that... The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war... America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms, and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.”

Sadly, leading members of the Republican Party have especially short memories as their party has morphed into what has become an Un-American party. President Donald Trump has repeatedly demonized Muslims in the United States and around the world. As recently as July the president shared a social media post mocking Muslim children in Minnesota for wearing hijabs to their kindergarten graduation ceremony.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Gov. George Pataki, both Republicans, joined two Republican members of the New York City Council demanding that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani not participate in the 25th-anniversary September 11 memorial ceremony. Giuliani said that participation by Mamdani, who is Muslim, “Offends him.” Zohran Mamdani ignored their demands and attended with dignity.

Other leading Republicans, including Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, the Republican Party candidate for governor of New York, have joined the attacks on Mamdani because of his religious identification. During Ramadan in March, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Republican from Alabama, recirculated an image of Mayor Mamdani paired with an image of the attack on the Twin Towers with the caption, “The enemy is inside the gates.” Blakeman called Mamdani “un-American” because “He shares the philosophy of the people that murdered my nephew and all those other people.” But as George W. Bush would have explained to Blakeman, he is the one who is being un-American.

Today’s Republican Party betrays the vision of the United States held by the nation’s founders. In 1790, President George Washington wrote a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. In the letter, the president explained:

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Washington told the Newport Congregation, “If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and a happy people.” These are sentiments that need to be reborn in this country.

At any other time in American history, it would end the career of somebody like Scott Bessent, our limited-intelligence Treasury Secretary. It came out yesterday when Illinois Congressman Sean Casten was questioning him about the “billions of dollars” that Trump keeps claiming America is “getting” from selling Venezuelan oil.

Bessent agreed with Trump, saying the oil and oil money we’ve seized from that country is “one of the largest assets to ever go on the U.S. balance sheet.” Billions and billions of dollars.

So Casten asked him a simple question: Can you tell us who controls that money and where it is? Can you confirm “whether or not those [funds] are flowing to U.S. persons?”

Bessent’s answer was a shocking single word: “No.” He ain’t talkin…

Did Trump take the oil and the money from the oil? Bessent refuses to say. Trump refuses to say. Nobody, in fact, in the Trump regime will tell us where that money is or who controls it or even who’s making the money accrued on its interest.

Here’s what we do know:

Three days after Trump kidnapped President Maduro and his wife, he went on his Nazi-infested social media site and wrote that Venezuela’s oil revenues would be controlled by him personally “as President of the United States.”

Three days after that, he signed an executive order declaring a “national emergency” involving that oil so no court or creditor could touch the money, screwing the bondholders and oil companies to which Venezuela owed roughly $150 billion.

Then Trump started selling the oil we’d seized from Venezuela. The first load, according to Reuters and Semafor, went to commodity trading companies Vitol and Trafigura for about $500 million, groups that the Washington Post said both carry histories of bribery schemes tied to oil sales.

And that money didn’t go to the Treasury account that was described in Trump’s own executive order. Instead, it went to a bank account in Qatar, right after that country’s leaders gave him a $400 million jet. A senior official explained to Semafor that Qatar was chosen as a “neutral location” where money “can flow freely” without risk of seizure.

Senator Elizabeth Warren was outraged, and told the world what most of us were thinking at the time:

“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military. That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”

In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified to the Senate that $300 million had been sent to Venezuela to cover government payroll needs and another $200 million was “still sitting” in Doha. He referred to the entire operation as “novel” and “a short-term mechanism.”

But a month later, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on CNBC that the account had been closed and no more money would be flowing to or through Qatar…and nobody has identified where it went, or where it is, since then.

Where’s the money?

House Foreign Affairs committee ranking member Gregory Meeks called it “an offshore slush fund.” Bessent, questioned by Casten back in February refused to say which accounts the Treasury Department was even using, even though Trump’s executive order had named him/Treasury as the custodian for the funds. Casten and Senator Chris Van Hollen again demanded to know where the money was in March, and were again stonewalled. And then again this week.

Meanwhile, the pile of money is growing, particularly given the oil crisis provoked by Trump’s idiotic war against Iran. Using Bloomberg tanker-tracking data, the Council on Foreign Relations published an April estimate that:

“In the first four months of the United States exerting control over Venezuela’s oil exports, almost one hundred million barrels of oil worth an estimated $8 billion have flowed through a process marked by no transparency and minimal oversight.”

A State Department official testified to Congress back in April that around $3 billion had gone back to Venezuela, but Trump boasted in July that the US had sold more than $13 billion in stolen Venezuelan oil and suggested he could divert those funds to the American military or anywhere else he wanted.

Back in June, Marco Rubio tried to assuage Congress’ concerns by saying that accounting firm KPMG “audits every disbursement.” But when the libertarian Reason Magazine dug into it in August they found that neither the agreements nor the audits have been published.

And the so-called “Transparent Sovereignty” website the Venezuelan government set up to show the world its oil transactions only lists one single sale. Apparently, Trump is not even telling them what he’s done with their oil, or where their money went.

And it’s not just oil. In March, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum flew a planeload of American mining executives to Caracas and came home bragging about having made off with over $100 million in gold. He set up a deal to sell it to reportedly bribe-friendly Trafigura with the proceeds going into, well, nobody knows where.

This is an old script that Trump appears to be following here, one many corrupt petrostates pioneered long ago.

For example, in 2014 Nigeria’s central bank governor, Lamido Sanusi, accidentally revealed to his Senate that roughly $20 billion in oil revenue had never made it into the national treasury. President Goodluck Jonathan’s response was to fire him and call the money a “phantom.” When PriceWaterhouseCoopers finally audited the books, it found at least $1.48 billion was simply gone.

I’ve done international relief work in some of the most corrupt nations in the world, been offered bribes and threatened for not taking them, and the pattern I’m seeing here is eerily familiar. They never announce the looting; they just stop letting you know where anything went or who ended up with it. Most people figure that it must be okay since it’s not being reported or discussed, and the conversation dies away.

So, here we are. Trump:

— announced that he’d taken the oil,
— then that he’d taken the money from the sale of the oil and put it in a bank with the country that had given him a free 747 jet,
— hired traders with bribery records,
— refused to publish the contracts,
— put his own hand-picked cabinet members in charge of both the disbursements and oversight, and
— then sent Bessent to Congress to say, “No” when asked if we could please, please know where it’s all gone.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress seem to have developed a sudden case of lockjaw.

Congressmen Casten and Joaquin Castro have introduced into the House the Venezuela Oil Proceeds Transparency Act to force the GAO to audit the Qatar account and whatever’s followed it. Republicans refuse to let it out of committee, and Mike Johnson won’t give it a chance on the floor.