When a marriage is in crisis, a point often occurs when constant bickering, arguing and fighting yields to detachment and hopelessness. The yelling stops. It’s quiet.

But it’s not peace. Exhausted, dispirited and contemptuous, one or both partners give up trying to convince the other that they’re wrong or ought to change. They accept that improvement is highly unlikely and check out emotionally.

Some psychologists call this uneasy calm a “silent divorce.” Dr. Ridha Rouabhia describes a silent divorce as “a state of being legally married but emotionally disconnected from one another, thus carrying within it a relational breakdown that is very often imperceptible but deeply damaging.” By the time you and your spouse are fighting your own personal cold war, odds of divorce are high.

Couples who fall in love and dedicate themselves to long-term committed relationships tend to fit into one of two categories. There are the soulmates who share important values and personality traits. Then there are the complementary types, a.k.a. “opposites attract,” where—hopefully—one partner’s strengths make up for the other’s weaknesses and vice versa.

Complementary couples can have successful marriages. But these relationships work only if each partner appreciates their partner’s contributions and is cognizant as well as grateful that their own failings are generously overlooked. As time builds familiarity and familiarity breeds contempt over the course of a lifetime, that can be challenging.

Years ago, I was close to a classic complementary couple. The wife, whom I met in college, was married to a man ten years older than her. A tight-cropped salt-and-brunet WASP from the Midwest, he was politically and temperamentally conservative, preppy and stuffy. A fluffy-blonde converted Buddhist from the West Coast, she leaned left and was loud, bubbly and unfiltered. Everyone who met them instantly understood their mutual attraction. Wild, sexual and adventurous, my friend dragged her uptight husband out of his shell. She made his life fun and interesting. Organized and always planning for contingencies, he bailed her out and cleaned up her frequent messes. He made her feel safe. They were a cute couple.

Over the years, the mutual gratitude that drove my friends’ Lucy-and-Ricardo marriage ceded territory to sneering contempt. She got tired, and then angry, at always having to initiate sex. He grew weary of the drama from her never-ending series of crises. They fought. Then, they didn’t. They had fought to a stalemate.

Their “silent divorce” lasted a few years before giving way to the real thing.

Everyone thought it was a shame.

They needed one another.

The American political union between partisans of the two major parties is a complementary marriage. Though frequently fractious, for much of the 20th century there was a tacit understanding between Democrats and Republicans that each brought something to the union, to the country, that the other needed even if they weren’t good at verbalizing their appreciation.

Like my friend’s husband, Republicans were America’s stolid, responsible, national caretakers. Based in the countryside (and until recently in the boardroom), they were boring and hated the hippies and their rock ’n’ roll and never would have supported civil rights and other liberation movements had they not been forced upon them. But conservatives also provided and protected virtues like military strength, national pride and deficit hawkishness that, deep in their pot- and LSD-infused souls, liberals knew were essential to the republic.

And like his wild-and-loopy wife, Democrats were reckless tax-and-spenders who hung out on the coasts and in big cities and tried and failed at social engineering schemes like welfare and affirmative action, but some of those schemes, like Social Security and Medicaid, saved the country, and drove almost all the progress that improved people’s lives and thus staved off revolution. Though they didn’t like to admit it, Republicans knew in their stock-portfolios-for-hearts that liberalism saved them from their rapacious selves and forced them to admit when their wars didn’t work out.

The national marriage started to unravel under Reagan, enjoyed a rapprochement under Clinton and turned ugly under Obama. As with any failed romance, it’s hard to pinpoint a specific moment that marked the beginning of the end. I’d pick 2010, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” McConnell’s idea of trying to win back the White House wasn’t wild. His formulation, emboldened by the rise of the proto-MAGA Tea Party, was remarkably contemptuous. As an opposition party, the GOP was expected to articulate its own set of policies while paying lip service to its willingness to work with the president on issues where the two parties had common ground, rather than center its messaging around pigheaded obstructionism.

            Republicans, having failed to prevent Obama’s reelection in 2012, doubled down in 2014 when McConnell pledged not only to block Democratic initiatives just because, but to threaten to shut down the federal government every time the other party tried to push through a bill.

            Now everything is going their way. White House, Congress, Supreme Court, big tech and a compliant news media—Trump and the Republicans control it all. There was scarcely an echo of the riotous protests in response to Trump’s first inaugural in 2017 in the streets of Washington for the second one last week. Democratic leaders and their allies are despondent, disorganized and silent. “Far from rising up in outrage, the opposition party’s lawmakers have taken a muted wait-and-see approach,” reports The New York Times. Liberals are actively tuning out of politics, canceling their subscriptions and turning off MSNBC, televised organ of the DNC.

            After sounding Defcon-4 at volume 11 every time Trump issued an obnoxious tweet during his first term, incessantly shrieking about the January 6th Capitol riot, unleashing ferocious partisan legal warfare against him and hysterically characterizing a Trumpian restoration as an existential threat to democracy that would bring about real and actual fascism, the post-electoral silence of the liberal lambs is deafening.

            You may feel good about all this, if you’re a Republican.

            Don’t. As the Tacitus quote currently circulating in response to Israel’s flattening of Gaza goes: “They make a desert and call it peace.” The sounds you’re not hearing—leftists marching and chanting down the block, liberals bleating in the comments section, Democratic politicians hollering about Trump’s unprecedented awfulness—is not acquiescence, much less acceptance. It is the disgust of silent divorce.

            Democratic voters (of whom I am not one, I am to their Left) have given up on the Republicans with whom they share a country. Democrats still live under the same roof as their Republican spouses—for the time being, there’s no way for them to move out—but their anger has devolved into a cold contempt from which there is rarely any way back. Those people—Republicans—can stay in their Electoral College-inflated flyover states and watch Fox and NASCAR and vote however they want, including against abortion, and we (the smart people) will keep to ourselves in our urban enclaves. They’re not worth yelling at.

            They’re not even worth talking to.

            This marriage is in trouble.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

The post Democrats Want a Divorce first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Democrats Want a Divorce appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Eighty years ago saw the dawn of the nuclear age with the development and subsequent sole use of nuclear weapons when the United States dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing roughly 200,000, mainly civilian Japanese citizens. These events and the subsequent nuclear arms race driven by the myth of nuclear deterrence have hung over civilization to this day, threatening our very existence.

On Tuesday, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists unveiled its prophetic “Doomsday Clock” moving the hand to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to midnight, representing the time at which our planet is uninhabitable and life as we know it is no longer possible. The Bulletin was originally founded in 1945 by the developers of the atomic bomb, including Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists to inform the public of man-made threats to human existence.

While nuclear weapons were the initial existential threat focus of the Doomsday Clock, risk multipliers are now included. These include the climate crisis, which reduces access to natural resources fueling conflict. Bio threats, like COVID-19 and future pandemics, are increasing as mankind and the animal kingdom interface ever more closely. In addition, the threats of bioterrorism, disinformation, and disruptive technologies—including AI—have made the risk even greater.

An important element to realizing this call to protect our world is the need to build the political will and give cover to members of Congress, many of whom who have been captured by the nuclear and military industrial complex.

Even at this time of great challenge, there is great hope arising from the international community as the fourth anniversary of the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was celebrated last week. Under this treaty, nuclear weapons are illegal to stockpile, develop, test, transfer, use, or even threaten to use, and join all other weapons of mass destruction in that reality. The treaty emanated from civil society; impacted communities, including Hibakusha and victims of nuclear weapons, testing, and development legacy; international organizations; and government and elected officials. Today, with 73 nations ratifying the treaty, half the world’s countries representing over 2.5 billion people are on board with this nuclear ban.

The international movement that brought forth this treaty is the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace prize. This movement currently has 652 international partner organizations. The aim of this movement is to stigmatize, prohibit, and eliminate nuclear weapons.

In the United States there is a parallel effort endorsing nuclear abolition and the precautionary safeguard measures to reduce the risk of nuclear war until these weapons are verifiably abolished. This movement is called “Back from the Brink.” Similar to the TPNW, this movement has been endorsed by 493 organizations, 77 municipalities and counties, eight state legislative bodies, 428 municipal and state officials, and 44 members of Congress. It calls on the United States to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war by:

• Actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals;
• Renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first;
• Ending the sole, unchecked authority of any U.S. president to launch a nuclear attack;
• Taking U.S. Nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; and
• Canceling the plan to replace the U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons.

There is companion legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives, H. Res. 77, calling on the United States to adopt Back from the Brink’s comprehensive policy prescriptions for preventing nuclear war. This legislation introduced by Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.) is expected to be reintroduced soon in the new Congress.

An important element to realizing this call to protect our world is the need to build the political will and give cover to members of Congress, many of whom who have been captured by the nuclear and military industrial complex, to endorse this legislation and to engage the next generation whose future is threatened by policies that they have had no say in. Across the nation over the past year a student movement called Students for Nuclear Disarmament (SND) has been taking shape in our high schools, colleges, and universities.

*****

Talia’s Story

I am currently a senior at Tufts University, graduating this June. As I reflect back on my choice of major, I recognize that I first knew I wanted to study international relations as a freshman in high school. I am an avid news reader and am fascinated by different countries’ decision-making processes. I considered myself well read and up to date on current events. It wasn’t until near the end of my freshman year of college that I had even heard of the nuclear threat.

After hearing one lecture on the growing threat of nuclear war, I changed my major to focus on understanding the history of nuclear weapons and advocating for disarmament through extracurricular activities. I joined SND last year, and, working with other student activists, renewed my passion for this work. Through webinars, emails, phone calls, and social media, we have engaged with students across America to build our movement.

It is clear that my generation does not associate the nuclear threat with problems we face today. SND is not only an organization that raises awareness, but also an organization that empowers young people to take action and show their congresspeople that we are not blind to this threat. Successful student activism inspires students on the precipice of action to take the next step. SND has made great strides in 2024, and, with growing chapters and more student leaders, SND is ready to push Congress to take action.

*****

The timing of this Doomsday Clock unveiling could not be more critical. U.S. President Donald Trump, who professes wanting to make America great again, has expressed his concern about the existential consequences of nuclear war throughout his public life. Campaigning last June he said, “Tomorrow, we could have a war that will be so devastating that you could never recover from it. Nobody can. The whole world won’t be able to recover from it.”

With Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine and the Israeli-Gaza war, heightened tensions between Taiwan and China, and North Korean nuclear advances, the stakes could not be higher. All nuclear nations are following the U.S. lead in rebuilding their arsenals. The U.S. alone is estimated to spend $756 billion on nuclear weapons in the next 10 years.

Time and luck are not on our side. What is required is bold and new thinking about our nuclear realities. President Trump, the “great dealmaker,” is back in the White House with one last chance to make the ultimate deal for the future of humanity.

Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has triggered controversy. Many have rightly criticized his ongoing anti-vaccine messaging. He’s also erroneously claimed that antidepressants were linked to school shootings, among other falsities.

Despite this all, his confirmation seems likely. So, let us prepare.

Kennedy promises to take on ultra-processed foods. He has alerted Americans that their over-consumption is linked to multiple maladies, from diabetes to heart disease. He also advocates banning them from school lunches.

On this, I say, “Right on, Bobby!”

The American diet poses great risks, including its heavy reliance on ultra-processed foods. They are one reason for our shockingly low international health and health-system ranking—way down at 69th. Unfortunately, RFK’s tendency to mislead carries over to this issue. It’s already clear that his campaign against ultra-processed food is not evidence-based. For example, he falsely claims seed oils (sunflower and canola) are harmful.

If confirmed, RFK Jr. will oversee the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), giving him power to regulate our food industry as well as a much-broader mandate: “to safeguard the food supply.”

If Kennedy really wants to “Make America Healthy Again,” he could instead start by addressing the dangers of red and processed meats, a concern grounded in science. The World Health Organization identifies red meat as a probable carcinogen and processed meat a carcinogen. Likewise, a meta-analysis of 148 studies reveals that red meat—especially processed meat—contributes to higher risks for a range of cancers.

Crucially, today’s definition of “food-borne illnesses” contains a serious oversight: the deadly diseases linked to red meat and processed meats. We have a right to be outraged that the FDA still fails to require warning labels or otherwise alert the public to this serious harm. The recently proposed front-of-package labels for saturated fats, sodium, and sugar would be a first step, but we cannot stop there.

Perhaps most troubling, the agency has enabled ultra-processed meats—hot dogs or bologna—to be fed to our children at our schools. Loose guidelines also allow mega-food corporations like Kraft Heinz to introduce ultra-processed products like Lunchables in school cafeterias. Sadly, for many children, school meals are their main source of nutrition. We need to do better by them.

This crisis also reflects the political power of the meat industry. Therefore, RFK Jr. must stand up to this pernicious interest group, which “spent more than $10 million on political contributions and lobbying efforts in 2023,” which for some, “was an all-time high,” reports the Missouri Independent.

Over more than 50 years, a number of my books, starting with Diet for a Small Planet, have focused on the needless waste, ecological destruction, and hunger built into our grain-fed-meat-centered diets—all driven by the highly concentrated power of corporate agribusiness. I have stressed the health benefits of plant-based diets.

The great news is that diets rich in whole grains, legumes, fish, fruits, vegetables, and nuts—with little or no red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, and refined grains—can lengthen our lives. A much-cited 2001 National Institute of Health study predicted that avoiding meat contributes to lifestyles that could add ten years to one’s life. Even if one began this healthier diet as late as age 60, life-expectancy increases over eight years for women and almost nine years for men.

To enable access to wholesome diets, Kennedy must also do his part to tackle the growing crisis of “food deserts”—low-income, urban areas where at least a third of residents live a mile or more from a supermarket. This barrier to healthy diets affects over 40 millions of us. The HHS will oversee the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which inform key programs such as SNAP and the National School Lunch Program. Here, we must urge RFK Jr. to focus on the science: processed meats are dangerous.

In all this, we must remain vigilant in holding Kennedy and the broader Trump administration accountable. We must also work for political reforms to ensure our elected officials are no longer corrupted by private interests. Our fight to protect our community’s health goes hand-in-hand with our fight for democracy.

Every bite we eat is a choice for the world we want. So, let’s push the incoming head of the HHS to ensure that all Americans are able to take healthy, wholesome bites.

With the Democratic Party in disarray and the Left unable to organize itself into a coherent political movement, it’s a good time for Americans who oppose capitalism to get back to the basics of anti-capitalist politics: communism.

Communism is an economic and political system under which everyone lives equally and has equal access to goods, services and power. Socialism is a system that precedes communism, in which the value added by labor is transferred over time from the ruling-class elites who control it under capitalism to the working class that produces it.

40% of American voters consistently tell pollsters they have a favorable view of socialism. We appear to be in a classic Marxist final crisis of late capitalism, overproduction, yet the media and education systems do not permit serious discussion of alternatives to capitalism.

On “The TMI Show,” co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan ask: What is communism exactly? Is it desirable? Is it attainable? Can revolution be achieved non-violently?

 

The post TMI Show Ep 66: What Is Communism? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 66: What Is Communism? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

While some prominent Democrats are calling on party to reconnect with the working class by embracing economic populism, Fareed Zakaria, the host of a CNN news show and a Washington Post columnist, argues in a recent op-ed that it’s lost cause:

“[The Democrats] have a solid base of college-educated professionals, women and minorities. Many of the swing voters who have helped them win the popular vote in seven of the past nine presidential elections are registered independents and suburbanites. Perhaps they should lean into their new base and shape a policy agenda around them, rather than pining for the working-class Whites whom they lost decades ago.”

It's eerily reminiscent of what Senator Chuck Schumer infamously said eight years ago just before Hillary Clinton lost to Trump:

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Zakaria, however, claims that Biden didn’t follow Schumer’s advice and instead enacted massive infrastructure investments that were intended to please the entire working class. Biden, he writes, “presided over the creation of almost 17 million jobs with inflation nearing the Fed’s 2 percent target….wage inequality is down…and wage growth is outpacing inflation.”

To counter the blooming oligarchy which appears to have planted itself firmly in both parties, working people need a new political home, one of their own making.

But despite all this economic assistance, the working class increased its vote for Trump. For Zakaria, the Democrats’ electoral failure illustrates the futility of pandering to the working class.

We might better understand working-class alienation if we look at how Zakaria cherry picked his facts and ignored those that didn’t fit his story.

• He didn’t mention that most of those new jobs were a bounce-back after Covid -- the December 2024 employment level is 7.2 million higher, not 17 million higher, than the pre-pandemic peak in February 2020.
• Yes, inflation is down, thank goodness, but it soared to a 40-year high during the Biden years, soaring by 20 percent, and causing enormous financial stress for working-class families.
• He didn’t mention that the subhead for the link he cites on wage inequality reads, “But top 1% wages have skyrocketed 182% since 1979 while bottom 90% wages have seen just 44% growth.”
• It’s not at all clear that wage growth for the average worker is outpacing inflation. (See “Are Workers Just Too Stupid to Understand Inflation.”)
• And finally, Zakaria fails to mention the involuntary layoffs that hit millions of workers during the Biden administration. It’s hard to feel good about a party that fails to protect your job.

Zakaria loads the dice because he is sure that the White working-class cares more about race, immigration, gender, and sexual preference than it does about its own economic well-being. Hillary Clinton in 2016 ungracefully called half of the Trump voters “deplorables.” Zakaria means much the same when he writes that the Democratic Party “has been slowly losing the votes of the White working class, largely on issues related to race, identity and culture.”

The data from long-term voter surveys tell a different story. The White working-class has become more liberal, not more deplorable, on these issues. While researching my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, I identified 23 controversial questions put to tens of thousands of White working-class voters over the last several decades. In no case did the White working-class become more illiberal. On thirteen of those controversial questions workers became more liberal. Here are five examples:

Zakaria’s laments the Democrats leftward shift, but the Democrats have not in recent years put forth a strong populist agenda. (See “Are You Still Wondering Why Workers Voted for Trump?”)

• Democrats have not eliminated Wall Street stock buybacks, which kill millions of jobs each year while enriching the richest.
• They have not limited the price gouging by food and drug cartels.
• They have not stopped the healthcare industry from profiting wildly at our expense.
• And their major infrastructure bills continue to pour money into corporate coffers without requiring job-creation guarantees.

Zakaria, nevertheless, has no trouble pushing these alienated workers into the MAGA movement. No big loss. But such abandonment is a loss for members of the working class. The MAGA oligarchs did not become billionaires by protecting the economic needs and interests of working people.

To counter the blooming oligarchy which appears to have planted itself firmly in both parties, working people need a new political home, one of their own making. Although the process is extremely difficult in our two-party system, working people and labor unions may have no choice but to build a new political formation of and by working people, just like the Populists did at the end of the 19th century to battle the robber barons of that era.

Their party’s name is as appropriate today as it was then: The People’s Party.

t came upon a midnight clear, a vision both complete and quite specific—not from any of those “angels bending near the Earth to touch their harps of gold,” as in the Christmas carol, but from a long line of trucks on the Indiana Toll Road.

On that cold winter’s night about five years ago, the 18-wheelers were playing their usual game to stay awake, passing each other endlessly and slowing me down to 60 miles an hour when I wanted to do 70 or, I’ll admit it, 75. When I pulled into a rest stop to gas up, about 50 of those big rigs were parked there. Their drivers were taking the federal government’s mandatory 11- or 12-hour rest breaks.

A quick bit of mental arithmetic told me that 50 big rigs, each costing $200,000 new, meant that $10 million in working capital was snoozing profitlessly by the side of that road. Back on the highway in a radio-dead zone, my mind wandered as I wondered just how many trillions of dollars in capital were tied up when America’s three million big rigs spent half their working days functionally asleep. Surely, I thought, there must be a better way to run the world’s biggest consumer economy.

As I hit the Chicago Skyway with its rough pavement and rusting guard rails, a vision of America’s automotive future came to me in a flash, complete in every detail. One day in the not-too-distant future, the left lane of every Interstate highway across America would be filled with platoons of a dozen or so 18-wheelers, all electric, all driverless, going 70 miles per hour only 10 feet apart to draft in the slipstream and cut their energy consumption by 30%. In the right lanes, electric passenger vehicles would be driving, hands-free, until they reached their exit ramps. To keep the navigation signal constant, the highway reflectors would have become wireless transmitters, linked by fiber-optic cables to ensure safety.

Then, as I merged into that crazy-fast nighttime traffic on Chicago’s Kennedy Expressway, I came up with what I thought was my really big idea. Outside every major city, those all-electric big rigs would pull into an automated depot to exchange their standard-sized batteries, allowing a full charge in five minutes. There, human truckers, probably more of them than ever before, would take over, navigating crowded city streets and tight loading docks with hard-won skills that no robot could ever replicate.

When I got home to Madison, Wisconsin late that night, I went online to test my vision with some quick numbers. In 2020, the costs for a big rig’s driver, fuel, and engine maintenance were as much as $2.20 a mile, so a typical thousand-mile run from Port Newark on the East Coast to Chicago could cost $2,200. By contrast, a driverless electric semi-slipstreaming in a peloton would make the same trip for just $70—with the cost of drivers at near-zero, energy outlays down to five cents per mile, and maintenance reduced to tire replacement—not to mention the incalculable gains from doubling each rig’s driving time to 24/7.

Vision Becomes Reality

Until recently, I kept that midnight vision to myself, except for an occasional dinner-table chat after a second glass of wine. Frankly, it all seemed a bit much for prime time. Even electric passenger vehicles, much less semi-trucks, faced two key barriers to widespread acceptance in America—range and cost. In the upper Midwest where I live, a cold winter’s day can cut the 300-mile range of an electric car like a Tesla to just 150 miles. Although I could make the 250-mile drive in an electric vehicle from the state capital of Madison to hike or ski in Northwoods Wisconsin, there’s no public charger anywhere nearby. So there’s no way to get back. And cost? While you can get a reliable gas-powered Honda Civic for $24,000, a comparable electric vehicle like the Hyundai Ioniq now costs $39,000.

But just last week, I was surfing the EV (electric vehicle) test drives in Edmunds and Kelly Blue Book when a web page popped up with the title “Seven Long-Range Electric Cars from China.” I was stunned to read that a car I’d never heard of, the NIO ET7, comes with a standard 649-mile range and complimentary access to “3,000 battery swap stations across China.”

Following Ford’s time-tested lead, China’s largest automaker, BYD, is selling its Dolphin hatchback EV for a low-low $15,000, complete with a 13-inch rotating screen, ventilated front seats, and a 260-mile range.

Was my midnight vision becoming clearer? Yes, the article said, “the battery swap stations allow you to exchange your depleted battery for a fully charged one in just a few minutes, minimizing downtime.” Another cutting-edge Chinese car few in America have ever heard of, the ZEEKR 001, can load a 300-mile charge in 11 minutes flat, less time than it takes to pump an equivalent-mileage of gas. And a Chinese car unknown here, the XPENG P7, has an innovative battery that “operates optimally” in temperatures ranging down to –22°F, ending the cold weather battery loss that makes EV driving so frustrating in Midwest winters.

And what about their price? While Detroit is maxing profits by pricing the tricked-out Ford F-150 Lightning EV truck for $87,000 and GM’s similar Silverado EV costs $96,000, China has gone back to basics with a latter-day Model T Ford—reliable, affordable cars for the average worker.

European companies were hand-crafting cars for the rich as early as 1890. The Detroit auto industry didn’t get a jump-start until 1908 when Henry Ford mass-produced the Model T for what began as a reasonably affordable $850 and soon had dropped to $345—unprecedented pricing that ramped that car’s production relentlessly up to an impressive 2 million units a year. In just 10 years, half of all the cars in America were Model Ts.

Following Ford’s time-tested lead, China’s largest automaker, BYD, is selling its Dolphin hatchback EV for a low-low $15,000, complete with a 13-inch rotating screen, ventilated front seats, and a 260-mile range. Here in the U.S., you have to pay more than twice that price for the Tesla Model 3 EV ($39,000) with lower tech and only 10 more miles of driving range. In case $15K beats your budget, the Dolphin has a plug-in hybrid version with an industry-leading 74-mile range on a single charge for only $11,000 and an upgrade with an unbeatable combined gas-electric range of 1,300 miles. Not surprisingly, EVs surged to 52% of all auto sales in China last year. And with such a strong domestic springboard into the world market, Chinese companies accounted for more than 70% of global EV sales.

It’s time to face reality in the world of cars and light trucks. Let’s admit it, China’s visionary industrial policy is the source of its growing dominance over global EV production. Back in 2009-2010, three years before Elon Musk sold his first mass-production Tesla, Beijing decided to accelerate the growth of its domestic auto industry, including cheap, all-electric vehicles with short ranges for its city drivers. Realizing that an EV is just a steel box with a battery, and battery quality determines car quality, Beijing set about systematically creating a vertical monopoly for those batteries—from raw materials like lithium and cobalt from the Congo all the way to cutting-edge factories for the final product. With its chokehold on refining all the essential raw materials for EV batteries (cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel), by 2023-2024 China accounted for well over 80% of global sales of battery components and nearly two-thirds of all finished EV batteries.

Clearly, new technology is driving our automotive future, and it’s increasingly clear that China is in the driver’s seat, ready to run over the auto industries of the U.S. and the European Union like so much roadkill. Indeed, Beijing switched to the export of autos, particularly EVs, to kick-start its slumbering economy in the aftermath of the Covid-19 lockdown.

Given that it was already the world’s industrial powerhouse, China’s auto industry was more than ready for the challenge. After robotic factories there assemble complete cars, hands-free, from metal stamping to spray painting for less than the cost of a top-end refrigerator in the U.S., Chinese companies pop in their low-cost batteries and head to one of the country’s fully automated shipping ports. There, instead of relying on commercial carriers, leading automaker BYD cut costs to the bone by launching its own fleet of eight enormous ocean-going freighters. It started in January 2024 with the BYD Explorer No. 1, capable of carrying 7,000 vehicles anywhere in the world, custom-designed for speedy drive-on, drive-off delivery. That same month, another major Chinese company you’ve undoubtedly never heard of, SAIC Motor, launched an even larger freighter, which regularly transports 7,600 cars to global markets.

Those cars are already heading for Europe, where BYD’s Dolphin has won a “5-Star Euro Safety Rating” and its dealerships are popping up like mushrooms in a mine shaft. In a matter of months, Chinese cars had captured 11% of the European market. Last year, BYD began planning its first factory in Mexico as an “export hub” for the American market and is already building billion-dollar factories in Turkey, Thailand, and Indonesia. Realizing that “20% to 30%” of his company’s revenue is at risk, Ford CEO Jim Farley says his plants are switching to low-cost EVs to keep up. After the looming competition led GM to bring back its low-cost Chevy Bolt EV, company vice president Kurt Kelty said that GM will “drive the cost of E.V.s to lower than internal combustion engine vehicles.”

Will Tesla Be Toast?

What about Tesla, America’s pioneering EV maker? With its CEO Elon Musk off playing pretend president, its worldwide vehicle deliveries fell last quarter for the first time in a decade, even as BYD’s global sales shot up 12% to 1.76 million, beating Tesla by a 20% margin to become the world’s biggest EV car-maker. Even though Tesla still accounts for almost half of this country’s EV sales and has a current market capitalization of $1.3 trillion, Musk’s model line-up now seems increasingly outmoded, over-priced, and unappealing, exemplified by his latest launch, the “weird” Cybertruck with a “nonsensical exterior,” which starts at $82,000 for a minimal 330-mile driving range. Even though Tesla is still the world’s “most valuable automotive brand,” stock pickers and short-sellers take note: Its car sales could be toast within five years, though its still-small division making electrical semi-trucks has real growth potential. (And take note as well that I’m not giving stock advice, just making a point on where I think our world’s heading.)

Realizing that their auto industries are facing a carmageddon of Chinese competition, the U.S. and Europe are already slapping heavy tariffs on imports from China. With its robotic factories cranking out one complete car every 76 seconds, China is ready to crush rival car companies and build 80% of all the world’s autos, as it already does with solar panels. Last June, the European Union imposed additional duties of 17% on China’s BYD and 38% on SAIC, but the Biden administration had already beaten that with a flat 100% duty on all Chinese EVs. And count on one thing: That’s just the start. In his second term in office, Donald Trump has already promised an additional 10% tariff on all Chinese imports, cars included—protecting the U.S. auto industry just long enough for it to decline into technological obsolescence.

In our integrated global economy, cars are a commodity like copper, oil, food, or textiles. In capitalist societies, commodities are not just products but the sinews that bind together nations on an otherwise disparate planet and a force like water that always finds its own level. Even if those tariffs manage to keep American workers buying overpriced, outmoded vehicles, the big four of the U.S. auto industry—Ford, GM, Stellantis, and Tesla—can hardly afford to lose their overseas markets. Last quarter, China’s motorists accounted for a hefty 40% of Tesla’s total worldwide sales, so Elon Musk faces an impossible contradiction: how to get President Trump to protect his U.S. market with high tariffs on Chinese cars while somehow avoiding Beijing’s wrath. Finding a way through that conundrum will likely prove challenging for Tesla.

Autos and America’s Future

So, what does all this mean for America? In the past four years, the Biden administration made real strides in protecting the future of the country’s auto industry, which is headed toward ensuring that American motorists will be driving $10,000 EVs with a 1,000-mile range, a 10-year warranty, a running cost of 10 cents a mile, and 0 (yes zero!) climate-killing carbon emissions.

Not only did former President Joe Biden extend the critical $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of an American-made EV, but his 2021 Infrastructure Act helped raise the number of public-charging ports to a reasonable 192,000, with 1,000 more still being added weekly, reducing the range anxiety that troubles half of all American car owners. To cut the cost of the electricity needed to drive those car chargers, his 2022 Inflation Reduction Act allocated $370 billion to accelerate the transition to low-cost green energy. With such support, U.S. EV sales jumped 7% to a record 1.3 million units in 2024.

Most important of all, that funding stimulated research for a next-generation solid-state battery that could break China’s present stranglehold over most of the components needed to produce the current lithium-ion EV batteries. The solution: a blindingly simple bit of all-American innovation—don’t use any of those made-in-China components. With investment help from Volkswagen, the U.S. firm QuantumScape has recently developed a prototype for a solid-state battery that can reach “80% state of charge in less than 15 minutes,” while ensuring “improved safety,” extended battery life, and a driving range of 500 miles. Already, investment advisors are touting the company as the next Nvidia.

The loss or even weakening of the U.S. auto industry would have a devastating effect on this country’s economy and its quality of life.

But wait a grim moment! If we take President Donald Trump at his word, his policies will slam the brakes on any such gains for the next four years—just long enough to potentially send the Detroit auto industry into a death spiral. On the campaign trail last year, Trump asked oil industry executives for a billion dollars in “campaign cash,” and told the Republican convention that he would “end the electrical vehicle mandate on day one” and thereby save “the U.S. auto industry from complete obliteration.” And in his victory speech last November, he celebrated the country’s oil reserves, saying, “We have more liquid gold than anyone else in the world.”

Then, just last month, president-elect Trump “vowed” to repeal Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and its $400 billion in unspent funds for green energy, while his transition team began to plan a “sweeping rollback” of federal support for the adoption of EVs—including shifting charging-station appropriations to defense, blocking California’s strict emission standards, and ending the $7,500 tax credit that has made EVs affordable for many Americans. More broadly, he’s promised to reverse Biden’s ban on oil leases in federal waters, saying just this month: “It’s ridiculous. I’ll unban it immediately. It’ll be changed on Day One.”

But, you might protest, it’s only four years, right? How much damage can be done in just one itty-bitty presidential term? The answer is all too grim: With technology passing us at 100 miles an hour, four years isn’t a term; it’s an era, a veritable epoch. Think back to 2020. Worldwide EV sales were just 1.6 million then; now they’re up 10-fold to 16.6 million and rising fast. Chinese motorists bought just 1 million EVs in 2020; now they’re buying 10 million a year. Then, the reasonably affordable 2020 Hyundai Ionic EV had a relatively useless driving range of 133 miles; now, it has a very usable 342 miles. Back in that day, QuantumScape’s extended-range solid-state EV battery seemed so improbable it was damned by stock-pickers as “a pump and dump… scam”; now Volkswagen is taking that company’s prototype into mass production.

So here’s the reality of it all: The loss or even weakening of the U.S. auto industry would have a devastating effect on this country’s economy and its quality of life. At the moment, the industry employs 13 million workers, including 1 million in manufacturing. We’re talking about a solid 10% of the country’s full-time workforce of 133 million.

Under their 2023 union contract, striking unionized UAW auto assembly workers won an hourly wage of $35 and skilled trades got $50, which is a gate pass into the American middle class. Not only did President Biden join a UAW picket line with striking auto workers, but he engineered a full-spectrum transition to EVs, understanding that they represent the future of the auto industry. Indeed, as Biden explained while signing a 2021 executive order requiring that 50% of all cars sold in America by 2030 be EVs: “We need to grow good-paying, union jobs at home, lead on electric vehicles around the world, and save American consumers money.” As Biden all too accurately reminded that UAW picket line at the Willow Run GM plant: “The middle class built the country, and unions built the middle class.”

During his upcoming four-year term, despite the present support of Elon Musk—and who knows how long he’ll last in Trump world—President Trump has made it clear that he will undo all of that, promote fossil fuels in a massive fashion, ignore climate change, and potentially hand the economic future to China (which already makes 80% of the world’s solar panels and 60% of its wind turbines), while creating a carmageddon for this country’s auto industry.

And what about my midnight vision of that peloton of all-electric, driverless semi-trucks slipstreaming down the Interstate at 70 mph? Yes, it’s coming. But with Trump as our driver for the next four years, we can only pray to those angels with the golden harps that electric semi-trucks and their batteries will somehow, someday, be made in America.

When I think of hospitals, what immediately comes to mind is clean, brightly lit, quiet, and orderly spaces. I think of human healing and of caring, skill, and dedication. I think of technology applied to the noblest purposes. I think of people—people of all ages and colors—healing and being healed, people sharing the same hope that their loved ones will leave the hospital and thrive because of the treatment they received there.

When I think of weapons manufacturers, different images crowd my mind. I think of war, chaos, and destruction. I see maimed and dying people and animals. I see destroyed landscapes. I hear explosions and screaming. I smell smoke, blood, and death.

These thoughts seem to be in profound opposition. So you can imagine my shock when I learned that a member of the Board of Directors of Mass General Brigham (MGB), the giant medical system in Massachusetts with a national and global reach and reputation, is James D. Taiclet, the president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer.

MGB apparently has no trouble managing the contradiction of its mission and its friendship with one of the world’s top purveyors of death. How much, one wonders, does MGB accept in charitable donations from Lockheed Martin?

Did your mind recoil? Mine too, so I’ll repeat it: The CEO of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, serves on the Board of Directors of Mass General Brigham, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious healthcare systems.

Leaving, for a moment, the no doubt highly polished board room of MGB, with all of its luxurious appointments, let’s travel 8,000 miles away to the occupied Palestinian territory of Gaza. Though it is highly unlikely that James Taiclet has or ever will set foot here, there is evidence everywhere of his labors. This is because the company whose pinnacle he has reached is one of the largest weapons suppliers to Israel, both in the past, and during the current genocide in Gaza. Its technologies are integrated into Israel’s main weapons systems. Its weapons are frequently gifted to Israel through the U.S. government’s Foreign Military Financing program.

Despite the current, tenuous cease-fire, the Israeli-U.S. genocide in Gaza continues. Some of the weapons and weapons systems supplied by Lockheed Martin to Israel throughout the genocide include:

1. F-16 and F-35 fighter jets used to bomb Gaza. These two types of Lockheed Martin aircraft comprise nearly 80% of Israel’s fighter-bomber force and are largely responsible for turning nearly 70% of Gaza into rubble, by United Nations estimates.
2. C-130 Hercules transport planes, which supported the ground invasion of Gaza.
3. M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) used to bomb Gaza.
4. AGM-114 Hellfire missiles for Israel’s U.S.-supplied Apache helicopters, a primary weapon used in aerial attacks on Gaza.
5. CH-53K King Stallion heavy lift helicopters (manufactured by Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary), used to transport Israeli troops into and out of Gaza.

For 15 months, we witnessed, and those of us with a conscience were sickened by, the genocide in Gaza. We witnessed Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian “problem,” aided, abetted, and in partnership with the U.S. and other Western governments, and paid for by our taxes. Palestinian-British surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah estimates that 300,000 Palestinians have been murdered in Gaza, up to 12% of the population. The daily toll on children, who account for half of the population, has been historic and horrific, with more child amputees in Gaza than any other place on Earth. It has been accurately pointed out that the greatest threat on Earth to children is Israel. Civilian suffering and death in Gaza have not been “collateral damage,” they have been driven by the deliberate, racist dehumanization of the Palestinian people undertaken by Israel and the West since the horrendous Nakba of 1948 and before.

Let’s pause for a moment to recall that much of this death and destruction has been made possible through the ingenuity of the people of Lockheed Martin, whose leader sits on the board of a massive HEALTHCARE system. Though the cognitive disconnect is severe, please stay with it, because this is the reality of the country and the world that we live in.

Stay with your cognitive discomfort, because the contradiction is even more profound. Not only is MGB’s board member directly responsible for enormous carnage throughout Gaza, his Israeli and U.S. clients have deliberately and systematically targeted the healthcare system of Gaza. Hospitals have been bombed at other times in history, but the extent of the military targeting and destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system is unprecedented, breaking all humanitarian laws and norms including the famed Geneva Conventions. There are no fully functioning hospitals in Gaza. Over 1,000 healthcare providers have been targeted and murdered. Over 400 have been kidnapped and detained in torture camps. Hospitals, vaccination clinics, ambulances, and civil defense rescue squads have been bombed, sniped, and set on fire. Patients have been burned alive in their beds. Starving dogs and cats roam the hallways of tattered hospitals, feeding on the flesh of martyrs. Blockade and starvation have been used as deliberate weapons of annihilation. The four-month Israeli attack on the people and infrastructure of north Gaza was an extermination campaign the likes of which are unprecedented in living memory.

A little over one week into the cease-fire, the people of Gaza have been left to struggle for survival in a hellscape of inconceivable proportions. Israel’s systematic decimation of Gaza’s healthcare system, including its kidnapping and torture of renowned pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who refused to abandon his patients during the Israeli siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital, has been undertaken to destroy the will and spirit of the people, deepen their suffering, and fuel their desire to leave their homeland.

Let’s repeat—James D. Taiclet, the CEO of a company that has made possible these unspeakable horrors, who was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal this month, sits on the Board of Directors of Mass General Brigham healthcare system.

MGB, with its annual funding of more than $2 billion, is the largest, hospital-based research enterprise in the United States. It employs 82,000 people and treats 1.5 million patients annually. Its 2022 revenue exceeded $18 billion. It prides itself not just on the services it provides across Massachusetts, but on its national and global reputation. Its website touts the fact that MGB is the top system for National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in the world. It boasts of 22 Nobel Laureates and 3,700 ongoing clinical trials designed to “accelerate bringing new treatments and therapies to our patients and the world.”

How does one square this shining vision of striving for optimal human health and performance with the depraved annihilation of the people of Gaza? MGB apparently has no trouble managing the contradiction of its mission and its friendship with one of the world’s top purveyors of death. How much, one wonders, does MGB accept in charitable donations from Lockheed Martin?

While it is crucial that we not lose our capacity for amazement at such a conjoining, let’s not be naïve. The bed-sharing of Lockheed Martin and Mass General Brigham is typical of the corrupt, profit-driven, military-worshipping system we inhabit. Look into who sits on the boards of your local hospitals, colleges, universities, and more. You will find the story repeated ad nauseam.

This story, this old, sickening, tired reality of our politics, our economy, our society, is overdue for radical overhaul. Doctors Against Genocide, a global coalition of healthcare providers and allies who vow to stop global genocides that governments fail or refuse to, has teamed up with River Valley for Gaza Healthcare in western Massachusetts in launching a petition demanding that MGB immediately remove James Taiclet from its board and renounce any association with Lockheed Martin.

C’mon, Mass General Brigham CEO Anne Klibanksi: Lockheed Martin is a criminal enterprise profiting from the wreaking of unimaginable havoc and suffering on humanity and the planet. It should be a global pariah, not have its boss man sitting on your board. Why has MGB failed to speak out publicly about the genocide in Gaza? Why has MGB failed to stand publicly with its healthcare colleagues in Gaza as they courageously struggle against tremendous odds? Your cozy relationship with Lockheed Martin’s CEO combined with your silence on Gaza make you a partner in its genocide and complicit in creating a world in which healthcare facilities and providers are fair game to warlords.

The sickness of U.S. society has deepened sharply with its partnership in the genocide of the Palestinian people. Let’s say no more to necropolitics. As Doctors Against Genocide member Rupa Marya wrote, it is long past time to move from colonial to liberation medicine. From racist colonialism to liberation in all aspects of our lives.

Free, free Palestine. For Palestine’s sake. And because freeing Palestine will free us all.

Life in the United States has never been better—if your personal fortune stretches well into the thousands of millions.

Our new year has dawned with 813 Americans cavorting in billionaire land. These deep pockets ended 2024, notes an Institute for Policy Studies analysis, with a combined wealth over $6.7 trillion. They averaged over $8.2 billion each.

Need some perspective on that $8.2 billion? The typical American worker, according to the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor stats, would have to work over 136,000 years to earn that much.

Growing linkages between crypto and the more traditional economy have expanded the economic peril.

Billionaires, of course, don’t have to actually do any labor to collect their billions. They just let their money do the heavy lifting.

That money, if invested in enterprises that provide us with useful goods and services, can add real value to an economy. But these days our billionaires and their billions don’t have to produce anything of value to climb up the wealth ladder. They can make big bucks manufacturing—at a heavy environmental cost—a product that has no real-life value whatsoever.

Welcome to the world of cryptocurrency.

Crypto emerged amid the turmoil of the Great Recession, an economic catastrophe that began late in 2007 with the bursting of a housing bubble that U.S. financial institutions had pumped up with subprime mortgages and assorted other exotic financing schemes.

Crypto’s early aficionados, notes the British economist Michael Roberts, claimed that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin would eliminate “the need for financial intermediaries like banks.” Cryptocurrencies existed only electronically, as elaborate computer code that takes huge amounts of energy to “mine.” No government guarantees backed their value, and no crypto champs sought those guarantees.

Within this frame, crypto values spent a dozen years bouncing mostly upward. By mid-2024, the crypto world had turned into a speculative colossus worth some $2.5 trillion. But crypto’s biggest players were doing little celebrating. The industry seemed to be losing its big-time momentum.

Just two years before, a spectacular crypto crash had cost the sector’s founders and investors a combined $116 billion. By the end of 2023, some 20 nations had banned banks from dealing with crypto exchanges, and critics were blasting the crypto industry for pumping ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere “to solve complex mathematical problems that have no productive purpose.”

Early in 2024, Pew Research polling found the American public exceedingly “skeptical” about cryptocurrency, with almost two-thirds of the nation’s adults having little to no confidence that cryptocurrencies rated as either reliable or safe. Only 19% of Americans who had actually invested in crypto, Pew found, deemed themselves “confident” with the industry’s “reliability and safety.”

Last June, one of the nation’s most influential financial market analysts, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler, gave cause for even more public unease. In congressional testimony, Gensler described the crypto market as a “Wild West” that has investors putting “hard-earned assets at risk in a highly speculative asset class.”

“Many of those investments,” Gensler added, “have disappeared after a crypto platform or service went under due to fraud or mismanagement, leaving investors in line at bankruptcy court.”

In the battle for public opinion, crypto kings realized, they were losing. Their response? Crypto’s big guns moved to lock down as much political help they could buy. They spent last year flooding millions upon millions of dollars into primary and general election races against lawmakers who had dared to support meaningful moves to regulate crypto’s digital highways and byways.

“It’s time to take our country back,” roared one deep-pocketed crypto mover-and-shaker, Tyler Winklevoss. “It’s time for the crypto army to send a message to Washington. That attacking us is political suicide.”

In no time at all, the Lever’s Freddy Brewster notes, this new crypto offensive had lawmakers in Congress, from both sides of the aisle, signaling their openness to minimizing any serious attempts at crypto regulation. The November elections would go on to generate a substantial crypto-friendly majority in the House and a Senate almost as crypto-committed.

Helping to produce this smashing crypto triumph: over $250 million in campaign contributions from the three top cryptocurrency political action committees.

No one would ultimately jump on the 2024 crypto political bandwagon more dramatically than Donald Trump. Up until then, the former president had been a pronounced crypto skeptic.

“I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” Trump announced on social media in 2019. “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”

But Trump would eventually come to see the potential in crypto campaign dollars and turn himself into the political world’s most visible crypto booster. In May 2024, Trump became the first major presidential candidate to accept donations in cryptocurrency. In July, he gave a fawning keynote address at one of the crypto world’s premiere annual conferences.

Trump saw something else in crypto as well. The industry, he ever so accurately perceived, could turbocharge his own personal wealth, to levels far outpacing his old-school investments in office towers and classic hotels—and all without engaging in any sort of real risk.

So Trump did that crypto engaging. By Inauguration Day, thanks to the release of his own “red-hot” crypto token, Trump had more than 90% of his personal net worth in crypto assets.

To protect that investment, Trump will undoubtedly put his signature on legislation—first introduced by Wyoming Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis—designed to force the federal government to buy up a national stockpile of cryptocurrency as a reserve just like the gold in Fort Knox. Getting crypto reserve status, cheers billionaire MicroStrategy executive chair Michael Saylor, would rank as a truly noble 21st-century “Louisiana Purchase.”

But independent analysts see “no discernible logic” to any move in that direction.

“I get why the crypto investor would love it,” observes Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Other than the crypto investor, I don’t see the value, particularly if taxpayers have to ante up.”

Turning crypto into a reserve currency, explain other analysts, would “prop up” cryptocurrency prices. Reserve status, note Wall Street on Parade editors Pam and Russ Martens, would enable crypto billionaires to sell their crypto “without driving down” cryptocurrency prices—because these billionaires would have “a perpetual buyer on the other side of their trade.”

Having the government buy up crypto, as Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research recently told The Nation, has “literally no rationale other than to give money to Trump and Musk and their crypto buddies.”

Not surprisingly, conventional financial institutions—outfits ranging from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to BlackRock and other big asset manager funds—would like to share in that money harvest. They’ve all begun entering the crypto “fray,” points out the economist Ramaa Vasudevan, and institutional investors “are also banging at the door.”

Crypto, adds Vasudevan, is “turning on a spigot of financial fortune-hunting.”

That sort of hunting, historically, has almost always ended in crashes that left average people the hardest hit. In our new crypto age, that could easily happen again.

The various crypto crashes we’ve seen over recent years, as the Lever’s Freddy Brewster noted last month, have “mostly affected” people already invested in cryptocurrencies. But the growing linkages between crypto and the more traditional economy have expanded the economic peril.

“Potential victims of future crashes,” Brewster warns, “could balloon if the nascent industry is allowed to become more entrenched with traditional banks.”

And that entrenching is approaching overdrive.

“Crypto bros are heading into 2025 with great expectations,” notes Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee.

These “bros” invested big-time in 2024’s presidential and congressional campaigns. Now they want, Mukherjee adds, “unhindered access to the global banking system.”

What could possibly go wrong?

U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent “just clean out” comment aboard Air Force One regarding Gaza starkly highlights how U.S. policy has shifted from enabling to actively facilitating Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Alongside his call to expel Palestinians, Trump announced the release of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, munitions previously held back by the Biden administration, just days after lifting sanctions on Israeli settlers.

Rather than signaling a new direction, Trump’s remarks reveal the culmination of America’s ongoing and escalating support for Israel’s actions. This moment also exposes the cynical manipulation of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voters by the Trump administration, which previously used hollow overtures to exploit anti-Democratic sentiment.

During his first term in office, Trump adopted a series of measures that emboldened Israel’s expansionist and militaristic agenda. His recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017 sparked widespread condemnation and global protests. The decision elicited a wide range of reactions. Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, celebrated it as a historic and rightful acknowledgment of their capital. In stark contrast, it provoked widespread outrage among Palestinians and throughout the Arab and Muslim world, sparking protests and condemnations. In response, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) declared East Jerusalem the capital of Palestine and warned the U.S. of potential repercussions.

Trump’s cynical attempts to win over pro-Palestinian voters only highlight the depth of his gaslighting and abuse.

The move, which flew in the face of decades of U.S. policy and international consensus, led to violent crackdowns on Palestinian demonstrators. The backlash against Trump’s Jerusalem decision extended beyond Palestinian communities. Protests erupted worldwide, from Istanbul to Jakarta, reflecting a collective outrage against U.S. complicity in Israel’s occupation.

Trump’s presidency also saw recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a region internationally recognized as Syrian territory. The Golan Heights, seized by Israel from Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967, was formally annexed by Israel in 1981, a move that remained unrecognized by the international community until President Trump’s proclamation. This unprecedented decision not only broke with decades of international consensus but also heightened tensions and further complicated the already fraught Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This move further cemented Trump’s legacy as an enabler of Israel’s expansionism and drew condemnation from both Arab states and Iran. The recognition emboldened Israel’s settlement expansion in the West Bank, with Trump consistently turning a blind eye to illegal land grabs and settler violence.

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump made calculated overtures to Palestinian and Arab-American voters, particularly in areas like Michigan’s Hamtramck. He attempted to portray himself as sympathetic to Arab and Muslim concerns, even naming Jill Stein as one of his “favorite politicians,” presumably to appeal to disaffected progressives. Yet these gestures were nothing more than political theater. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) conducted an exit poll revealing a significant shift in Muslim voter preferences during the 2024 presidential election in Trump’s favor. It’s important to note that while Arab and Muslim Americans have been scapegoated for Trump’s electoral success in certain quarters, their communities have consistently organized against his policies. They are ultimately victims in a U.S. electoral system that offered no positive options.

Trump’s rhetoric and policies have not only emboldened Israel but also placed the U.S. on a path of proactive engagement as opposed to facilitator in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This is only underscored by his cynical response to the potential of rebuilding Gaza where he referenced the “phenomenal location” and “the best weather.” When placed in the context of past remarks by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the comments take on added weight. Kushner previously suggested that Gaza’s waterfront property could hold significant potential if efforts were directed toward building up livelihoods. He described the situation as “a bit of an unfortunate situation” and stated, “from Israel’s perspective, I would try to relocate the people and clean it up.” This rhetoric is not an aberration but a culmination of U.S. policies that have systematically marginalized Palestinians and emboldened Israeli aggression.

Trump’s “just clean out” comment epitomizes the culmination of decades of U.S. complicity in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, shifting from passive support to active facilitation of ethnic cleansing. His past administration’s policies, from recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital to endorsing sovereignty over the Golan Heights, reflect a blatant disregard for international law and Palestinian rights. These actions, paired with hollow overtures to Arab and Muslim voters, reveal a strategy of gaslighting and manipulation. Trump’s cynical attempts to win over pro-Palestinian voters only highlight the depth of his gaslighting and abuse. As the U.S. continues down an escalating path of proactively engaging in ethnic cleansing and genocide, we must demand accountability and an end to complicity in these atrocities.

As of Friday, the Trumps’ cryptocurrency meme coins—the $TRUMP and $MELANIA cryptocurrency coins—had a combined market value of about $6 billion.

Days before taking the oath of office, now-U.S. President Donald Trump announced on his social media platform the creation of the $TRUMP coin, featuring Trump’s image from the July assassination attempt, and said: “Join the Trump Community. This is History in the Making!”

The $MELANIA coin soon followed.

Any wealthy person, corporation, or foreign leader wishing to curry favor with Trump now has a particularly easy means—just buy $TRUMP and $MELANIA cryptocurrency tokens.

Despite no details about the coin’s value, use, or risks, Trump supporters. gamblers, and those wishing to suck up to Trump bought it—sending the coin’s price into the stratosphere. On paper, the Trump family is now several billion dollars richer.

Trump once denounced crypto, but as the crypto industry poured tens of millions of dollars into 2024 campaigns, he changed his mind. Not only did he see the political power of the crypto industry; he saw an opportunity to make a pile of money.

He then promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.”

In September, the Trump family started World Liberty Financial, which they marketed as a platform to facilitate borrowing and lending in digital currencies. (Trump receives a cut of the sales of WLFI, the cryptocurrency associated with the platform.)

Now that he’s taken office, Trump plans to make billions off his presidency by implementing policies that favor crypto.

The Truth About Crypto

Cryptocurrencies serve no useful purpose other than the purchase of other crypto assets, money laundering, extortion, and scams. As economist Paul Krugman has said, their market value rests on nothing but “technobabble and libertarian derp.”

They also use huge amounts of energy.

And if they infiltrate Wall Street, they could destabilize the entire financial system.

The crypto industry has a dubious reputation. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, one of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges, was last year sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. Changpeng Zhao, founder of a rival exchange, has spent four months locked up for money-laundering.

But the richest people in America with huge power—the oligarchy, including Trump—support cryptocurrencies. Not only can they make a fortune, but crypto advances their long-term aim of shifting financial controls out of a democratically elected system of government and into their own hands.

Trump II and Crypto

Now that he’s president, Trump is actively promoting crypto—reversing former President Joe Biden’s attempts to prevent the crypto industry from infiltrating Wall Street.

Biden’s tight rules made it prohibitively expensive for banks to hold digital assets on behalf of clients, and stopped them from developing their own crypto products, such as stablecoins (tokens pegged to the dollar or other assets).

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), a watchdog, stopped dozens of such projects on the basis that it did not know how digital assets ought to be treated in regulatory filings.

With Trump, though, banks and the crypto industry are now pushing in the same direction, and face little resistance. New and enormously profitable forms of risk-taking are emerging—for a small group of people able to take such risks and able (like the Trump family) to profit of their own crypto products.

Trump is putting crypto-friendly people into place at key federal agencies, boosting its prospects. In December, he picked Washington lawyer Paul Atkins, a known crypto booster, to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s main financial regulator.

Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission altered its guidance so that financial institutions no longer have to account, on their own balance-sheets, for crypto assets held on behalf of customers. The SEC rolled back accounting guidance that had deterred banks from getting involved with crypto.

Trump has tapped the venture investor and digital currency enthusiast David Sacks to oversee administration policies on crypto (and artificial intelligence).

Then, this past Thursday, Trump issued an executive order committing the Trump administration to “protecting and promoting” the crypto industry:

The digital asset industry plays a crucial role in innovation and economic development in the United States, as well as our nation’s international leadership. It is therefore the policy of my administration to support the responsible growth and use of digital assets.

The order gives his administration authority to establish a national cryptocurrency stockpile—a stash of digital coins that the crypto industry has spent months lobbying the new administration for because it further legitimizes crypto and adds to the demand for it.

Trump’s order also prohibits the creation of a “central bank digital currency,” overseen by the government. And the order promises “fair and open access to banking services” for crypto (responding to complaints from crypto companies that banks have denied them accounts).

In effect, Trump is writing the rules for a business venture from which he and his family are personally profiting. It could earn them hundreds of billions of dollars.

If you’re outraged by this, fine. You’re probably outraged by a large number of things Trump has done since January 20.

The Larger Picture

The real significance of such blatant profiteering off the highest office in the land is what it reveals—not just about Trump but about the entire oligarchic enterprise he fronts for. It is likely to contribute to a vast wave of public alarm and disgust.

Just as Elon Musk is demonstrating how huge wealth can create enormous personal political power, Trump is demonstrating how enormous personal political power can create huge wealth.

Musk sank a quartet of a billion dollars into electing Trump, and was rewarded with a key spot as director of the so-called department of government efficiency, or DOGE (Dogecoin, itself a cypto token, has benefited from Musk’s vocal support)—creating vast conflicts of interest over crypto and Musk’s myriad businesses (X, SpaceX, and Tesla, which are regulated by federal agencies and also major government contractors).

As crypto and banking begin to merge, bank deposits will become more vulnerable to movements in the crypto market, and banks more vulnerable to runs.

This dynamic—great power creating huge wealth, and huge wealth creating great power—is central to the oligarchic takeover of America. And both are premised on the corruption of democracy.

Any wealthy person, corporation, or foreign leader wishing to curry favor with Trump now has a particularly easy means—just buy $TRUMP and $MELANIA cryptocurrency tokens.

The corruption will grow worse because neither Trump nor Musk has any sense of limits. Nor do any of the oligarchs surrounding them, such as David Sacks, who Trump picked to oversee his administration’s policies on crypto and artificial intelligence.

Like Musk, Sachs serves as a "special government employee,” which does not require Senate confirmation or full financial disclosure, and allows Sacks to maintain his business interests while influencing policy. Expect more conflicts of interest.

As crypto and banking begin to merge, bank deposits will become more vulnerable to movements in the crypto market, and banks more vulnerable to runs. That’s what happened at Silvergate and Signature, two crypto-focused banks which collapsed in 2023. Both were broken by a tumble in cryptocurrency prices that began in late 2021 and then reverberations from FTX’s collapse.

The biggest beneficiaries of all this are the highest rollers—the oligarchs who have been pushing crypto for years. And now Trump is in on it and stands to personally gain billions, as will those seeking to curry his favor by buying his coin.

The Endgame

The American public doesn’t abide flagrant self-dealing. We don’t want public officials personally profiting by decisions that are supposed to be made in the public’s interest.

You may be thinking: “But Trump has been profiteering for years off his presidency, as have members of his family. And they’ve gotten away with it.”

True, but what’s happening now is much bigger and far more visible. It involves an entire industry (crypto), and conspicuous members of the American oligarchy who are investing in it, including the president and officials around him.

And it’s inherently risky. For oligarchs, the rise of digital finance provides large moneymaking opportunities. But for the rest of us, it increases the risk of another financial crisis.

Unbound greed combined with unconstrained power is an explosive combination. When the blowup comes, it will take Trump, Musk, and the oligarchy with it.

There are two realities that must be confronted in any consideration of “What’s next for Gaza?” The first is that it would be naïve and risky to put too much faith in this current cease-fire. The second is that failing to understand the true human toll of this war is dangerously insensitive—it’s far greater than the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed and severely wounded by Israeli forces.

The pause in Israel’s bombing of Gaza is, of course, a welcome development. It has provided Palestinians some amount of relief, the opportunity to grieve, and, for some, the chance to attempt to trek northward, assess the damage to their bombed-out neighborhoods, and dig through the rubble to find the bodies of missing family members. The pause has also allowed for a huge influx of food and aid supplies into Gaza and the passage of critically wounded Palestinians to Egypt for treatment.

This was the good news about the pause. The bad news is that the agreement is weak, with no enforcement mechanism. The original plan offered by former U.S. President Joe Biden over six months ago included three phases with the parties agreeing to all three from the outset.

It should be clear that neither this Israeli government or any of its possible successors, nor the Trump administration or any of its possible successors have any interest in a just solution to the conflict.

What we’re learning from the Israeli press is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been assuring his supporters that he will only honor the first phase and will resume the bombing when it’s over. He will not withdraw Israeli forces from Gaza, nor allow Palestinian governance in Gaza that politically connects that area with the West Bank.

The administrations of Presidents Biden and now Donald Trump have chosen to ignore Netanyahu’s intentions in order to make a show of their “success.”

Biden has been providing support and cover for the Israeli leader from the beginning of the conflict. From October 2023 until leaving the White House, Biden and co. supported Netanyahu’s goals and gave him free rein. Despite the U.S. president’s insistence that he had been strenuously pursuing a cease-fire for half a year, there is clear evidence that the administration knew that Netanyahu wouldn’t agree to a cease-fire and yet continued to publicly claim that Israel supported one and that Hamas was the major obstacle. The charade continues with this agreement because even though Biden knows the cease-fire is of limited duration, he took the “PR victory” to end his term in office.

The pause provided much the same for incoming President Donald Trump—an early show of his ability to solve a problem that haunted his predecessor. That the cease-fire won’t last more than a few months doesn’t matter. Forever the showman, what matters for Trump is the show at the moment: a good photo-op and a boost in ratings. It doesn’t matter to him if down the road the cease-fire doesn’t last; most folks will have forgotten it by then.

It should be clear that neither this Israeli government or any of its possible successors, nor the Trump administration or any of its possible successors have any interest in a just solution to the conflict. And so, even setting aside the matter of the cease-fire, despite plans afoot to lay out a path toward peace starting with an interim government in Gaza, there doesn’t appear to be any real buy-in from the Israelis. Nor will the U.S. pressure Israel to take the steps needed to move peace forward.

The equally worrisome reality that is cause for concern is that wars have consequences that last long after the bombs stop falling. Often unforeseen, they can lay dormant for years like a virus before manifesting themselves. Because neither the Israelis nor their American enablers ever understood Palestinians’ humanity, they can’t fathom the long-term impact this disastrous war is having and will continue to have on its survivors.

The counts are staggering: 47,000 dead, 116,000 wounded, as many as 33,000 with permanent disabilities, an estimated 50,000 missing and unaccounted for, 90% of the population (almost 1.9 million) forced to relocate with most of them now homeless because their previous residences have been destroyed, and 34,000 children orphaned with no surviving family members.

We are told that it may take two decades to clear the rubble and unexploded ordinance in Gaza and then years more to rebuild. But healing the wounds of war that will continues to plague the survivors will take much longer. The switch can be flipped to end the bombs, but the impact of this devastating war but will continue to take its toll for more than another generation. There will be multiple types of psychological disorders like trauma, anxiety, severe depression, and internalized violence leading to self-hurt or striking out at others.

Compounding this pain is the shock of seeing the rubble of what had been their homes and ruins of what had been their communities. Over the decades it will take to clear and rebuild, where are Palestinians to go? It’s not as if the Israelis will look with compassion on these survivors of their genocidal war. Palestinians rightly fear that if they leave what is left to them in Palestine, the Israelis will not let them return. Neither the U.S. nor the Israelis are prepared to ensure the counseling and care needed to heal the wounds of this war will be available to this community of victims. The future is, therefore, uncertain, but leaning toward bleak.

At the start of 2024, in an AP-NORC poll, only 4 out of 10 Americans mentioned a foreign policy topic when asked to list five important issues facing Americans. This represented an increase from years past but is still bleak since it means 6 in 10 Americans do not view foreign policy as a top concern.

Yet, as I write this, the United States is involved in multiple violent conflicts, many of which have no real end in sight, along with foreign interventions that drastically affects other countries’ well-being. While Israel’s now multi-front war has broken through to an extent over the past two years, and time will tell if this cease-fire is real, many of the other conflicts and interventions linger in the background, if, indeed, they are mentioned at all in day-to-day political chatter.

For instance, the United States is normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia despite open questions on that government’s knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and its hold on the oil industry, not to mention MBS’ brutal killing of a Washington Post journalist. In addition, Saudi Arabia’s relentless assaults on Yemen, backed with U.S. arms, began in 2015. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has gone on for almost three years while the United States supplies humanitarian aid and arms to Ukraine. Crippling sanctions on Cuba have decimated the country’s economy and caused it to struggle mightily after recent hurricanes. And that’s not even to begin to list the various ways the United States has increased its involvement in Africa via AFRICOM, arming countries and training paramilitary groups.

For many Americans, with their own positions so precarious due to our capitalistic approach to society, worrying about how to improve relations with China and Cuba is simply not a priority.

These events, all of which involve or are directly caused by the United States, can and in most cases will result in history-changing phenomena for better or worse. This is not to say that all of these situations require a complete reversal—humanitarian aid to Ukraine is a worthy cause in my opinion—but the scale of these endeavors should not be absent from the political sphere. So, why don’t more voters care?

Consider: In the 2024 vice president debate, the opening question was about foreign policy, but pitched in the most juvenile fashion possible, circling around the candidates’ eagerness to bomb Iran. Not an intellectually serious question but rather a little blood sport for the masses to enjoy. It led to no real discussion on the United States’ overall approach to foreign policy nor to the possible aftereffects of the country’s decisions. No discussion of Ukraine and NATO, no discussion of Cuba or even Yemen.

To an extent, this is understandable. Based on polling in general and exit polls in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, the average American does not seem to vote based on Ukraine or Yemen or Gaza (although recent polling shows that Gaza mattered a bit to those who didn’t vote in 2024). One of the downsides of having a weak safety net in the United States is that voters’ main issues will almost always be the economy and healthcare. If you lose your job, you receive a pitiable amount of unemployment and end up in dire straits with health insurance. For many Americans, with their own positions so precarious due to our capitalistic approach to society, worrying about how to improve relations with China and Cuba is simply not a priority.

But it should be. There’s a moral argument that the United States’ foreign policy is largely making lives worse for millions and that with the immense capital the United States has it can care for refugees fleeing desperate situations instead of vilifying such people.

While Americans may like that argument in the abstract, it does not appear to be a pressing concern for them nor one they see affecting their own lives in any real way. With the 2024 election’s remains smoldering behind us, it’s worth reviewing the speeches and discussions to see how often issues of migration and prevention of war came up. The verdict? Beyond glancing references to a cease-fire in the Middle East and supporting Ukraine, it’s hard to find much rhetoric that addresses American foreign policy.

Voters need to consider that the next economic impact on their wallets may well originate due to decisions made overseas as opposed to ones here in the homeland.

Immigration is entirely treated as a domestic issue and even then, largely in a law-and-order fashion. The economics of immigration, which are extremely positive, were mostly absent from the discussion. So, too, however, were the causes, and it is impossible to address immigration without noting that the United States itself is responsible for many of the migration issues. After spending much of the 1900s undermining government after government in South America, it is no surprise that many of those countries still struggle economically, resulting in migration. Ditto the unrest in the Middle East, which can easily be traced back to George W. Bush’s neocon policies. On a purely ethical level, it seems immoral to turn around and claim that the United States has no duty to help the people it has hurt. On a foreign policy level, it makes sense to examine how our continued interference in other countries’ elections, which is done both overtly and covertly, has caused such a destabilizing effect. Whether the U.S. has done it on behalf of the United Fruit Company or Halliburton, U.S. involvement in South America and the Middle East has helped only the very wealthy and hurt everyone else, both in those countries and in America itself.

The other foreign policy issue sometimes addressed is terrorism, although that, too, was not much mentioned this past election cycle outside of vague allusions to immigrants being terrorists in order to scare swing voters into voting for U.S. President Donald Trump. Yet in most cases, terrorism does not come from nowhere: Destabilized countries brew radicalization and radicalization brews terrorist attacks. An unstable Middle East is far likelier to lead to another terrorist attack than a stable Middle East. A foreign policy geared toward non-intervention could result in a severe decrease in terrorist acts around the world, including in the United States itself. In turn, this would allow for the United States’ economy to detangle itself from the web of the military industrial complex and perhaps spend some of the seemingly infinite cash on concerns closer to home, such as building a safety net that allows Americans to vote with a vision beyond whether their next paycheck will allow them to afford rent.

In short, foreign policy is not truly foreign; it remains a domestic issue, not some abstract concept that does not affect the average American’s everyday life. Voters do not realize this, but they need to.

Of course, much of this lies at the fault of politicians, many of whom could easily formulate a foreign policy narrative but choose not to. Voters are not blameless, they have their own agency and the ability to inform themselves, but politicians seem to see no pressing need to address any foreign policy issue that is not massive front-page news—and even then, not always as we saw this past election season. Why?

For one, it does allow them to make foreign policy decisions without much interest from the public, meaning they can make decisions that enrich their donors with zero pushback from your average voter. For another, involving foreign policy means political risk, something they are naturally averse to. Questioning the economic sense behind Cuban sanctions, for instance, invites pushback from neoconservatives. Politicians often take the cowardly route. Don’t rock the boat, receive your donations, smile, get reelected.

If that makes it all sound hopeless, well, that’s a fair interpretation. But, once again, America finds itself in a precarious position as Donald Trump takes the reins in the White House. His tariffs may well crash the economy, and such a circumstance would be a good occasion for the American public to be reminded that we do not exist separate from other countries and their own economies and cultures. This is a globalized world, and all chickens come home to roost in one way or another. Voters need to consider that the next economic impact on their wallets may well originate due to decisions made overseas as opposed to ones here in the homeland. I also hear there is a political party entirely out of power as of now: Perhaps they could involve this message and use it to their advantage?

“how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion.”—Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics” (1971).

Readers of this piece might remember 2020 as a time of widespread vulnerability and anxiety. Confusion, even.

American citizens went to the polls that November in record numbers to vote in an extremely heated election that pitted challenger Joe Biden against then-President Donald Trump. Trump—whose presidency was marked by scandal, impeachment, an atrocious response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and a violent response to Black Lives Matter protests—sought reelection on the basis of a campaign driven by fear, anger, and resentment. At a time of chaos, Biden stood for the Constitution, normality, and basic decency.

The struggle of authoritarian power against freedom is the struggle of forgetting against memory.

The contrast was clear, and the contest bitter. It was days after the election before all votes were tallied in the swing states that would decide the winner. But by November 7 all major media outlets, led by Fox News, called the election for Biden, and in the days that followed, it was clear to virtually every serious journalist, legal expert, and election official that Biden had won.

As constitutional law required, state governments certified Biden’s election, the Electoral College confirmed his election, Congress validated his election, he was inaugurated on January 20, 2021, and he went on to serve, for four years and until a few short days ago, as the 46th president of the United States.

There was only one problem: Donald Trump, his MAGA Republican party in tow, refused to recognize the result.

Trump did more than denounce the election. In the closing months of his term, he conspired to overturn it. When his efforts failed, he summoned his supporters to the Capitol for an angry demonstration, incited the crowd to march on the Capitol, and stood by as thousands of his supporters violently attacked and entered the Capitol and attempted to disrupt the constitutionally prescribed lawful and peaceful transfer of power.

That day that will go down in infamy as “January 6.” Or not.

Readers might recall these events, painstakingly documented by a bipartisan House Select Committee report and a Justice Department indictment.

It all happened.

But did it?

Moments in time evaporate. Events pass. Memories fade. And truth—always precarious and especially so in a culture of simulation and dissimulation—is an easy casualty of the cynical.

No individual is more cynical than Donald Trump, none more craven than the MAGA Republican party that supports him, and none more credulous than the millions upon millions of Fox News-watching and Joe Rogan-listening Americans who adore him.

And in less than a week in office, Trump has commenced the process of officially erasing the truth not simply about January 6, 2021, but about the last four years.

That is the essential meaning of his blanket pardon and commutation of all prosecutions, convictions, and sentences related to January 6, officially announced thus: “This proclamation ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.”

For four years, Trump has insisted that the 2020 election was stolen, that Joe Biden was not the legitimate president, and that Democrats were radical Marxist haters of America who had hijacked the government and subjected the American people to a tyrannical occupation (all of these are things that Trump has repeatedly said). And he has described the January 6 insurrectionists as virtuous citizens who were repressed by an evil regime determined to “weaponize” government, and as “hostages” of the occupying enemy power that was the Biden administration.

This week, these outrageous claims became the official position of the U.S. government.

Trump has freed the “hostages,” restoring MAGA-style American civic virtue in the opening gambit of the campaign of recrimination, retribution, and repression that will define his presidency.

Thus liberated, the “hostages” can now stand back and stand by in support of Their Leader. Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio, and other leaders of the insurrection, have made no bones about this. As one of the Justice Department attorneys who prosecuted the insurrectionists has noted, “The effect—and I believe purpose—of these pardons is to encourage vigilantes and militias loyal to the president, but unaccountable to the government.”

Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) has announced the creation of a new House subcommittee to investigate January 6, 2021. As NBC News reports: “‘House Republicans are proud of our work so far in exposing the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee during the 117th Congress, but there is still more work to be done,’ Johnson said in a statement. The subcommittee’s mission is to ‘uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people,’ Johnson said.”

The “truth” at which this committee will arrive, there can be no doubt, will be a simple one, easily digested by Trump’s plebeian base: that “January 6” was a noble effort to defend “election integrity” that was brutally repressed by the deep state, and that after the American people have suffered for four years under the tyrannical yoke of Biden the Woke Marxist Usurper, their popular sovereignty has finally been restored by the return of Donald Trump to the White House.

On this view, last November’s election was thus much more than a conventional repudiation of an unpopular incumbent president via the electoral process. It was the victorious return of the man, the leader, the Fuhrer, who by rights should never have been forced to leave the White House in the first place.

This is now the Uber narrative of Trump’s presidency, from which Trump’s many rash, cruel, and often manifestly unconstitutional executive orders contemptuously flow.

And by “Trump’s presidency,” I do not mean simply the term of office that commenced last week. I mean the entire period since January 6, 2017. From that day to this, Donald Trump has claimed the presidency, and his political party and his many millions of followers have embraced and loudly reiterated this claim. (Do you not recall that during the entire four years Biden occupied the White House, every Trump supporter consistently referred to him as “President Trump” and even “the President?”) With his return to the White House, this claim, in a sense, is vindicated, as the Biden years already begin to feel like a brief, and aberrational, interlude in The Age of Trump.

As clearly anticipated by the Project 2025 Agenda crafted by Russ Vought and Stephen Miller, Trump will now “restore” justice at Justice by using every possible means to threaten, harass, investigate, and prosecute the “enemies of the people” who had the temerity to refuse his dictatorship. (The executive order under which this will occur bears the appropriately Orwellian name “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”). Are the members of the House J-6 Committee pardoned by Biden safe? Is Biden himself safe? Or Jack Smith, or Merrick Garland, or even Mark Esper? There will be retribution. This much is clear.

In the meantime, Trump has already commenced his plan to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants; to revoke birthright citizenship; to purge the federal government of all career civil servants suspected of actual or potential “disloyalty”; and to purge public education and academic institutions of all forms of teaching, and learning that interfere with “American Greatness.”

Back in a widely covered 2023 Veteran’s Day Speech, Trump promised that, when elected, “we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” declaring that “they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream... the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.” Commentators immediately observed that Trump was “echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini.” Because he was echoing those dictators, and signaling an intention to follow their example, not simply by constricting civil and political space and punishing political opponents, but by also attempting an extreme form of ideological domination centered on the wholesale redescription of public service as treason, insurrection as patriotism, and Donald Trump as the avatar of American Greatness whose authority is beyond question.

Years ago, commenting on an earlier experience of authoritarianism, famed Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously observed that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

The obverse is equally true: the struggle of authoritarian power against freedom is the struggle of forgetting against memory.

It is bad enough that Trump was able to win the 2024 election.

He has already begun to do great harm. More will surely follow.

But if he can succeed in claiming the 2020 election as well, then we are truly doomed.

It sure looks like he is succeeding.

Let us not talk falsely now / The hour is getting late—Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

We can have no illusions. There’s a reason the word “oligarchy” has been trending.

After only one week of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second administration, the idea of America as an open society where the people are sovereign is under serious threat.

So, what is to be done?

It’s time for progressives to step up. If we truly believe, as I know we do, that progressives have the best policies for improving the lives of Americans, protecting the planet, and making peace with the world, we cannot sit on the sidelines anymore, bemoan our marginalization at the hands of moderate Democrats, and merely congratulate ourselves for having the correct analysis. We need to get in the game, en masse.

Progressives are the last best hope for democracy in America.

This is the second article in a series about why progressives must seize this moment. The Democratic Party is in disarray following another defeat to Donald Trump. The ‘‘moderate’’ faction that has dominated the party in recent decades is discredited. Progressives must mobilize to increase their influence within the Democratic Party—for the sake of the party, the country, and the planet.

The Democratic Party cannot claim to be the defender of democracy against the forces of oligarchy if its own base is subjugated to the power of big money within the party.

In my previous article, I focused on the economy, the greatest source of dissatisfaction among the American people, and thus the largest contributing factor to the rise of Trump. However, Trump’s actual economic program will not improve prospects for the vast majority. Only the progressive economic program has a proven track record and can deliver the prosperous middle class society that Americans want. Thus, we must be bold in asserting that the Democratic Party embrace progressive economic policies.

In this article, I will focus on the second great source of dissatisfaction among the American people: the political system, which they see as working for elites and not the average citizen—and they are correct. Polls consistently reveal widespread alienation from, and distrust of, the political status quo, elected officials, and both major parties. Once again, it’s only progressives who not only propose changes to the system supported by the majority, but also practice a form of politics that the public embraces. The time has come for progressives to loudly re-introduce ourselves to the base of the Democratic Party and the public at large.

Currently, the primary beneficiary of the public’s disgust with the political system is Donald Trump, who aggressively condemns the political establishment of recent decades. As Trump and his MAGA movement have effectively taken over the Republican Party, they have effectively cast the Democratic Party, to its detriment, as the party of the old establishment. (This taint doesn’t extend to progressives. Too many people are aware that the Democratic Party establishment worked overtime to defeat Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2016 and 2020.)

Of course, Trump’s challenge of the status quo is much more malevolent than a mere rebellious attitude. He is an autocratic “strongman” who views both common law and the Constitution’s system of checks and balances as little more than annoyances that he can disregard at his whim. And, in contrast to eight years ago, the incoming administration is not populated by “establishment” Republicans, but MAGA yes men; it is also supported by the most successful capitalists of the 21st century, the titans of Silicon Valley (who have long embraced an Ayn Rand-influenced political philosophy that calls for the rule of people like themselves, and now recognize Trump 2.0 as the means to fulfill their fantasy—and they fight to win.)

There can be no downplaying the immediate threat. We must defend communities, institutions, and environments under threat from Trump, and we will. Yet, progressives also need to go on the offense by presenting a clear and realistic plan to preserve and re-build American democracy—and put that plan in motion. A strong offense will complement the defense and vice versa.

Recent public opinion polling points the way forward—and suggests a path that only progressives will pursue.

Before the election, a series of polls grabbed the headlines. They revealed how a frightening number of Americans—in particular, young Americans—were willing to embrace the rise of a strongman leader. However, if you dug down into the polls it was evident that the overwhelming majority of people wanted a well-functioning democracy. Even half of those who were attracted to the idea of a strongman said they only felt that way because our democracy had been corrupted to favor the elite.

How did they want to see our democracy improve? Almost everyone polled wanted to see a reduction of big money’s influence in politics, which, of course, is a position that progressives advocate for, in contrast to moderates and conservatives. However, even more fundamental, was the wish that average people could have a voice in the system, so that the needs of average people would drive our democracy. People feel shut out from influence in our democracy.

Progressives must rectify this—and we can through a very simple strategy: mass entryism into the Democratic Party in a coordinated manner.

In the next essay in this series, I will shoot down the familiar objections to this strategy. Then, in the final installment I will go into greater detail about how the strategy could operate optimally (hint: It should be coordinated through inside-outside organizations like Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), and anchored on the inside by the progressive caucus, or the analog progressive group, of each state’s Democratic Party).

For now, I just want to emphasize why progressive entryism into the Democratic Party fits this moment perfectly and can redeem American democracy in its hour of need.

First off, the Democratic Party is electing new leadership on the weekend. All of the leading candidates for Democratic National Committee Chair have announced that they not only support more progressive influence in the party, but also more progressives becoming party activists. As progressives know, this has not been the case in recent decades. Progressives must seize this opportunity and hold the incoming DNC chair to their word.

Currently, the Democratic Party is such a hollow shell of an organization in most states, it would only take a few hundred extra progressives mobilizing to gain the upper hand inside the party—a couple thousand in the larger states. This is low-hanging fruit. Though, progressives should not approach this task cynically. We can, and should, mobilize in much greater numbers.

Polling shows overwhelming support for progressive policies among the Democratic voters. So, let’s be clear about the heretofore dominance of the moderate, neoliberal wing of the party—it is propped up by the dominant role of big money donors within the party and their high-paid consultants. There is a vast base of progressive activists in the country. No such base exists for Democratic moderates (the very idea of pro-neoliberal activists is comical at this hour of history).

Now, let’s put two and two together. The Democratic Party cannot claim to be the defender of democracy against the forces of oligarchy if its own base is subjugated to the power of big money within the party. Given that dynamic, it is highly unlikely that even the party’s most conservative gatekeepers can afford the public backlash that would come from excluding progressives—i.e. if we do pursue a strategy of mass entryism.

Which brings me to the final, and most salient, point of today’s essay: What other route is there to save American democracy? There is none because it’s only when progressives gain the upper hand inside the Democratic Party that one of the two major parties will begin to practice democracy in a truly inclusive manner—thereby, distinguishing themselves from the GOP, as well as the previous top-down version of the Democratic Party.

For better or worse, America has a two-party electoral system (more on this in my next essay), and the rules and regulations that govern our society are still determined by elected officials and their appointments—at least, until further corrosion of the system takes hold.

That means, while we still have meaningful elections, we’re truly lost at sea if, when the fabric of the constitutional system is under attack, neither of the two parties stands for democracy in a way that resonates with the voting public.

The message is simple. Either we act to reform the Democratic Party, or we acquiesce to our oppression. We either achieve the mass mobilization of progressives into the party, or it will remain the “oligarch-light” party, and that is doomed to fail.

Then, once progressives have more power inside the party, we will bring it into alignment with what the public wants from a party that truly operates in the interest of the people.

That may sound to some like a long shot, but it’s our only shot. I happen to believe it can be readily achieved with some high-quality organizing. After all, having a choice that lines up with what the people want is, well, what people want from a democracy.

Indeed.

Progressives know what democracy looks like, and if we stand up, accept historical responsibility and take action, we can yet fulfill Leonard Cohen’s prophecy that “Democracy is Coming to the USA.” But we must act fast.

Join PDA’s efforts to create a truly progressive Democratic Party, which we desperately need at this crucial hour of our history.

“Dear young people who have never experienced war, ‘Wars begin covertly. If you sense it coming, it may be too late.’”—Takato Michishita, survivor of the bombing of Nagasaki.

On a rainy Saturday afternoon in the Catskill Mountains where New Yorkers went for the summer to escape the city heat, Alice Slater’s mother took her to go see a movie in town. It was late summer in 1945, and the second World War had just ended. Alice remembers parading around the Catskills town a few weeks earlier as everyone celebrated the end of the war. When I asked her when she first became aware of nuclear weapons, the first thing she thought to tell me was about her trip to the theater with her mom. Instead of trailers before the movies, they used to show news reels. The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima projected across the screen, and Alice asked her mom, “What is that?”

“That’s a wonderful new weapon, and now all the boys would come home,” her mom answered.

Between what they showed on the screen and what her mom had told her, at that moment Alice had no real idea what a nuclear bomb was, or what it did to the people it was used on. It was only a mushroom cloud, and the mushroom cloud meant the war was over.

The Doomsday Clock was created as a warning—a warning that the most powerful people in the world are playing God.

Seventeen years later, Alice was a young mom who had moved to the suburbs of New York City. Her husband was working for CBS, and one day he didn’t come home—he had to stay at work to deal with breaking news for a handful of days. The world had just found out that the Soviet Union, bringing us to the height of the Cold War between Washinton and Moscow, put nukes just 90 miles off the coast of the United States in Cuba. Alice, even with close proximity to someone who worked in the news, had no idea what was happening. Americans didn’t know the U.S. had nukes near the Russian border in Turkey, too. All they knew was that the communists were threatening them with nuclear bombs. We are far removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis now, but Alice said it was probably the most afraid she’s ever been. People really thought we were about to enter another war and send the entire world into a nuclear winter. Later people found out former U.S. President John F. Kennedy had negotiated to move U.S. nukes out of Turkey. But now they’re back, and scattered all over Europe.

Carol Gilbert, around the same week Alice’s husband didn’t come home from CBS, was at her aunt’s house in Michigan. She was around 15 years old at the time, and she remembered that it must have been during the school year—it was special that she got to go stay there that day, she loved spending time with her cousin. “I remember my mom calling my aunt and saying she was going to come pick us up because they were worried about the bomb,” Carole continued, “At some point I think we knew something bad was happening, but I don’t think I fully understood what was going on.”

On the other side of Lake Michigan from Carol, Kathy Kelly was in her home in Garfield Ridge, Chicago when her mother started putting stuff down in the basement on the day the news broke. Kathy’s parents lived in London during World War II, and tried every way they could to keep her sheltered from the trauma of war, but in the face of nuclear war—what are parents to do?

All three women recall the Cuban Missile Crisis as a time of uncertainty. Where people were freaked out and didn’t know what to do. Alice was afraid for her kids, and Carol’s and Kathy’s moms were clearly afraid for their children too. Then the missiles were taken out of Cuba, and the panic disappeared.

I chose Alice, Kathy, and Carol to interview on this topic because they are anti-war activists I deeply admire. I figured the concern over nuclear weapons amongst my peers may be less than that of older generations because of things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, or even becoming conscious in the years right after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the more elders I talked to, the more I realized how little it may have impacted their trajectory as activists. Alice didn’t become an anti-nuke activist after the missile crisis, and neither Carol nor Kathy mentioned it as a moment they remembered in the awakening of their conscience. Kathy was radicalized on the issue of nukes by the women who worked at the bookshop in downtown Chicago that she would stop into on her way to work as a teenager. Alice was pulled into the movement by the war in Vietnam.

On January 28, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the Doomsday Clock in 1947, will reveal how close we are to midnight, or “doom.” Since the clock was made, nukes have proliferated all over the world. First it was the U.S., and then U.S. and Russia—now nine countries have a nuclear weapons stockpile. It would only take a fraction of that firepower to send us into a nuclear winter, wiping out all life as we know it. The Doomsday Clock was created as a warning—a warning that the most powerful people in the world are playing God. It’s not an exaggeration in the slightest; because of a handful of people, one political misstep or accident and our whole planet is destroyed along with every precious life on it. Governments continue to pour trillions of dollars into developing these weapons while people they are supposed to care about sleep out on the street.

With tensions between the U.S., Russia, China, and Iran at a high, we should all be putting things in the basement, picking our kids up from their playdates, and preparing for disaster. Instead, we walk around like a bomb was never dropped. Like hundreds of thousands of Japanese people didn’t have their lives taken or destroyed. With no reason to believe so, we act like our government would never do it again. While our leaders have bombed a dozen countries to oblivion since World War II ended, we still act like we are the civilians the world ought to care about, like we are untouchable. We aren’t. Mutually assured destruction might be useful if the people with their fingers on the buttons cared for the people they governed, but oftentimes they don’t.

On the other side of doom is just life as we’ve been living it, which isn’t that great for a lot of people.

I asked Carol why she thinks no one is really freaked out about nuclear weapons like they ought to be, whether they be my age or hers. She said, “We have too much.” She was talking specifically about Americans, whose lives are inherently made more comfortable because of the conquest and wars of our past and present. Whether we would like to admit it or not, the United States and the entire modern life it provides is built on war. When I asked Alice, specifically in relation to the Cuban Missile Crisis, if people were scared into becoming anti-nuke activists she said, “You’re asking me if I was scared… I just kept hoping that democracy would prevail in some way, I guess.”

Carol, a Roman Catholic sister, and two other Dominican nuns were convicted of sabotage after pouring their blood into a Minuteman III missile loaded with a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb in Colorado. She spent two and a half years in federal prison for drawing attention to the real weapons of mass destruction while George W. Bush and Dick Cheney made up fake ones in Iraq. In the 1980s, Kathy was greeted by four armed soldiers riding in a large military vehicle after she planted corn on top of a nuclear missile silo in Missouri. A soldier was left behind with Kathy while she was handcuffed, kneeling on the ground. “Do you think the corn will grow?” she asked him. “I don’t know ma’am,” he responded, “but I sure hope so.” Following a trial, Kathy spent nine months in maximum security prison.

Whether or not the Doomsday Clock reveals we are inching closer to midnight or staying where we are, the fear around nuclear Armageddon seems to freeze most of us in our tracks. If the whole world is going to be annihilated and suffering is imminent anyway, why think about it at all? We can cross that bridge to hell when we get there. If there weren’t a nuclear stockpile that could end life at any moment, maybe people would feel more inspired. Afterall, preventing doom isn’t a particularly motivating notion. On the other side of doom is just life as we’ve been living it, which isn’t that great for a lot of people.

Alice, Carol, and Kathy are all inspired activists. When you talk to them you don’t really ever get the sense that they will stop pushing ahead for what they believe in. I met Carol in the halls of Congress last February, despite being over 50 years older than me she was leaving me in the dust. After 12,000 steps on Capitol Hill, she walked with me to a vigil for Aaron Bushnell, an active duty airman who self-immolated over the genocide in Gaza. Never once in any of my conversations with them did I ever get the sense they did what they did out of fear—whether it be fear of war, nuclear winter, or overall doom. They all talk about a world that gives people what they need to survive and thrive. Kathy talked to me about international cooperation and laughed at the idea of borders: “When there’s a nuclear energy accident like Chernobyl or Fukushima, the poison that floats around in the air doesn’t care about your borders.” And she made note of the brilliant atomic scientists, and how quickly they’d figure out how to address the climate catastrophe if only we were to change our priorities. They talk at length about how the world ought to be, and their vision for a better future is what propels them ahead, not doom. Doom isn’t good enough to get us to where we need to go.

Planting corn over a nuclear silo, disrupting a weapons manufacturer, and creating a community of war resisters are steps we can take toward something much more impactful. A world that is mindful about nuclear weapons can push toward their elimination, and we absolutely must. If you’re not moved away from doom, be moved toward peace. At CODEPINK, we’ve created a Peace Clock to give us ways not to just move away from doom, but to bring us closer to the kind of world we want to see. It’s something that’s been within our sight a thousand times. We have to sprint toward it.

“Dear young people who have never experienced the horrors of war—I fear that some of you may be taking this hard-earned peace for granted.”—Takato Michishita

Live at 10 am Eastern time/8 am Mountain and Streaming all the time after that:

Trump’s foreign policy is only a week old and all over the place. Over the weekend America’s new president waged and won a short-lived trade war with Colombia, a staunch US ally in Latin America, over deportation flights. We saw mixed messages in Gaza, where Trump urged Arab neighbors to take in displaced Gazans which would appear to set the stage for Israeli ethnic cleansing while simultaneously ordering Israel to extend its ceasefire with Hamas by at least 30 extra days. He threatened Russia even as he said he wants to denuclearize and negotiate with Putin over Ukraine. And who knows what he’s on about when it comes to China, which reversed its previous refusal to accept its own undocumented migrants after the scrap with Colombia?

On “The TMI Show,” co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan try to make sense of Trump’s foreign policy. Is it an incoherent mess? Or is there a method to his madness?

The post TMI Show Ep 65: Trump’s FAFO Foreign Policy first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 65: Trump’s FAFO Foreign Policy appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Amid a flurry of executive orders signed by Donald Trump during his first few days in office was one authorizing immigration police and agents to enter places that previously had been off-limits to violent immigration raids, including schools and churches. Now there are no more safe spaces.

The post No More Safe Spaces for Immigrants first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post No More Safe Spaces for Immigrants appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Ignoring a genocide or pretending it is not happening is not a "difference of opinion." It is a racist ideology. This ideology does not belong in medicine. Decolonizing medicine requires understanding that we will not have health equity as long as racism is baked into the very structures of medicine. Decolonizing medicine is not about tweaking who is at the top of the pecking order or playing into liberal identitarianism, which, as Dr. King accurately diagnosed, “is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” Decolonizing medicine requires reimagining the order altogether, because the one that exists was created in a time of subjugating women, queer, Indigenous, chronically ill, Black/brown, immigrant and other people deemed “deplorables” by European colonial standards.

The "Other" in medicine—whether between doctor and patient or doctor and structure—this phenomenon is about power, who has it and who is denied it. Power differentials create health inequities, and the differences that exist today were established in a time of colonial conquest. The United States and all of the Global South were colonized by militaries, missionaries, and medics. If we want health equity, we have to transform these outdated and harmful structures of power. We must compost them and create the conditions for something more healing to grow.

To do that we must understand the history and context of how these power structures evolved, who is occupying the seats of power today, and why. People in power in medicine today will tell you that we do not want to mix politics in medicine. But medicine is politics practiced on the human body. To pretend it is any other way is to ignore the actual realities that are causing harm on marginalized people in a system that was not built to serve us. Those in power prefer to distract us with superficial adjustments rather than structural ones. They tell us we are “unprofessional” when we push for change that will close the gaps on disparities. We can no longer play their game of delay.

Yesterday, my colleague Dr. Yipeng Ge suggested we change our oath, from the Hippocratic oath to an oath crafted by the doctors in Gaza, one that uplifts that level of commitment to serve the people.

History and context are critical to understand so we can stop having people who kill and justify killing inside medicine. Having a genocidal war criminal for a physician is bad for patient outcomes. We do not have to study it. We can just look at physician Howard Maibach, a devout Zionist who injected 2,600 imprisoned people (Black/brown) with pathogens and poisons without their informed consent, reminiscent of the Nazi medical experiments. Before I was slated to speak at the American Medical Association’s first Grand Rounds for Health Equity where we discussed Maibach’s medical racialized violence, Maibach’s lawyer—also “Israel’s lawyer”—Alan Dershowitz pressured my university to prevent me from talking. Dershowitz is now representing Israel in the International Criminal Court hearings calling for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant.

Now while Maibach is not a war criminal, he harbors deep-seated racist ideologies. The harm he did and the fact that he remains employed by the University of California reveal the university’s power structure. Maibach’s family donates heavily to the Friends of the IDF, providing material support for the genocide in Gaza. This is a problem. We need doctors who are fully committed to healing and health for all, not killing some because it happens to be in alignment with their political agendas. And we require doctors who allow for discourse, not silencing because “it’s complicated” when people of European ancestry decide it is time to kill again for colonial conquest.

To decolonize medicine is to remove those obstructions to our voices so we can advocate for the health for all, as it is our moral and professional obligation. Since October 2023, medical students from around the country have texted me horrific, violent, and even murderous things that pro-Israeli professors have said about Palestinian patients in their presence. Once these students find their courage to speak up, the world is not ready for what they have to share. This is why there is such active repression of medical students and their voices, as Israeli doctors called for the destruction of the entire healthcare system in Gaza and the powers that be in Western medical institutions repress those of us who do speak up. The silence of healthcare workers across the West is a part of Israel’s genocide, and a recent submission to the United Nations documents exactly how.

In spite of the forces against us, I hope medical students will find their courage and recognize that building a medicine that will serve all will require that courage in order to compost a colonial system. This work requires the daylight of truth. In that daylight, there are incredible doctors ready to build a liberation medicine, one that will be able to address the needs of all the people we serve, not just an elite few—everyone.

I am grateful to medical students like Umaymah Mohammad, whose courage shines as she shares her horror that a professor at Emory went to serve a combat unit during the genocide and came back as if everything was perfectly normal. It is not. Genocide is the most intense expression of racism. Dr. Josh Winer at Emory University is not fit for teaching medical students in a pluralistic society, especially not ones whose family is currently being annihilated by Israel. Umaymah was suspended for speaking up about this violation of her safety and civil rights. Her stance is a moral one—and a missing one—in a colonial medical system that supports genocidal physicians and silences ones who speak up to stop a genocide. The agenda could not be clearer. Please support Umaymah here.

Physicians and other healthcare workers who have been repressed in the West are finding each other, and we are working to teach our colleagues how to cultivate their courage to embark on this transformative work together. We recently held a webinar to launch our peer to peer curriculum—Cultivating Courage—which is a six-week course to learn and unlearn together as we map out what is needed to build a liberation medicine.

As people across the West wake up and realize that physicians who supported, endorsed, and even participated in genocide continue on in their careers as those who stood to make noise about a genocide were defamed, suspended, and even fired, they will start to ask themselves questions about their personal safety in the hospital. Physicians who are deeply racist provide poor care to the people they hate. This has been shown over and over again. And the issue is not simply a healthcare issue. It is a matter of civil rights.

People of color have the right to be served by physicians who do not hate them. Arabs and Palestinians have a right to be served by physicians who do not want to see them annihilated. In a pluralistic society, holding deeply racist beliefs should be enough to show that a person does not have the basic competency required to be a physician. Changing one’s belief is not simply a matter of showing up for a DEI workshop or implicit bias training. This work cannot be led by liberals who opened the door to the right-wing exploitation of civil rights laws to silence people of color across the Global North as the West started its bloody campaign in Gaza. This transformative work requires reimagining medicine’s structures, moving people with racist beliefs out of positions of power. It requires creating systems for the most marginalized people who uplift the health of all in practice, not just in speech, to lead.

The decolonization of medicine is happening right now, led by the doctors in Gaza. With moral courage and leverage, they “absorb what is useful” from Western medicine and “discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own,” in the words of martial artist Bruce Lee. That is the path ahead for physicians of conscience. It is the future of medicine. Yesterday, my colleague Dr. Yipeng Ge suggested we change our oath, from the Hippocratic oath to an oath crafted by the doctors in Gaza, one that uplifts that level of commitment to serve the people. Because in the times that are upon us—social upheaval and climate collapse, fascism and food systems deterioration—we will need a different kind of physician and a different kind of medical system. The time to start laying those seeds is now.

This piece was originally published on Marya’s Substack Deep Medicine.

Since we published The Oligarchs’ Grip: Fusing Wealth and Power in 2023, the question we get asked most often is: What’s the difference between an oligarch and a strongman? Instead of strongmen, some interlocutors use adjacent words like autocrat, authoritarian, dictator, or tyrant. That question is of great relevance now that Donald Trump has become the 47th U.S. president.

In part, the question reflects confusion about what an oligarch is. To paraphrase Aristotle, oligarchs are the wealthy few who govern us. Or, to put it slightly more formally, oligarchs secure and reproduce wealth and power, then use one to acquire the other. The key word in these definitions is wealth.

Oligarchs acquire their wealth in three ways. They can be self-made through entrepreneurial ventures, such as Elon Musk. They can inherit their wealth, such as Tung Chee-hwa did. Or they can use their connections to generate wealth. Vladimir Putin is a good example. Trump’s wealth came from all three sources.

All of these oligarchs have options, no matter how things work out for them. Their wealth is the ultimate insurance policy.

Oligarchs also possess three types of power. The power generated from holding a decision-making role, such as head of state or government. The power to set agendas through media ownership or political campaign contributions. Or the power to shape the way we think and act, as Google has done so effectively. Trump’s power comes from all three types.

Strongmen focus on the consolidation and centralization of decision-making power. They have little or no accountability. They control key institutions such as the legislature, judiciary, military, and the media. They suppress dissent. They often rely on a personality cult. They also seek to remain in power for long periods. Note the key word here: power.

Simply put, oligarchs have two mechanisms of control: wealth and power. Strongmen have only one: power. And this matters a lot in the era of growing uncertainty in which we live. Think of it this way. Oligarchs have diversified their resources across two control mechanisms, much as we diversify our investment portfolios. If one resource becomes diminished, oligarchs can fall back on the other.

Thaksin Shinawatra is a good example of why this matters. Deposed as Thailand’s prime minister in a 2005 military coup, Thaksin had sufficient wealth to flee the country and comfortably re-establish himself in exile in Dubai. From there, he continued to help set Thailand’s political agenda, and, after returning this year, caused a change in government favorable to his political party.

Oligarchs and strongmen are different categories of economic and political actors. But the lines between these categories are not always sharp. One way to understand this better is by dividing oligarchs and strongmen into three different categories. We identified 40 oligarchs and strongmen over the period from the 1930s to the present and categorized them this way:

Oligarchs Who Are Strongmen

Oligarchs Who Are Not Strongmen

Strongmen Who Are Not Oligarchs

Idi Amin

Mohammed bin Laden

Abiy Ahmed

Mohamed Siad Barre

Isabel Dos Santos

Jair Bolsonaro

Silvio Berlusconi

Mikhail Fridman

Rodrigo Duterte

Nayib Bukele

Al Gore

Boris Johnson

Alejandro Char

Rafic Hariri

Jaroslaw Kaczynski

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Charles Koch

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO)

Francisco Franco Bahamonde

Larry Page

Narendra Modi

Muammar Gaddafi

Sebastian Piñera

Benito Mussolini

Adolf Hitler

Cyril Ramaphosa

Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu

Saddam Hussein

Thaksin Shinawatra

Augusto Pinochet Ugarte

Mobutu Sese Seko

Tung Chee-hwa

Elon Musk

Yulia Tymoshenko

Victor Orbán

Asif Ali Zardari

Vladimir Putin

Mohammed bin Salman (MBS)

Donald Trump

Xi Jinping

As depicted in the first column, in 42% of these cases, oligarchs are also strongmen, consolidating power and growing more wealthy in sequence or sometimes at the same time. Silvio Berlusconi was an oligarch before becoming Italy’s prime minister three times, using his media ownership to reshape public opinion. Once in office, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, he projected a nationalist cult of virility and mainstreamed the far-right. All while maintaining and growing his wealth. He admired other oligarchs who were strongmen, such as Vladimir Putin.

But, as shown in column two, 32% of the cases involve oligarchs who are NOT strongmen. In some instances, they’re not strongmen, because they don't hold the decision-making power needed to become strongmen. For example, Larry Page and Charles Koch, who have substantial ideological and agenda-setting power, respectively, haven’t served in political office and thus lack the decision-making power needed to become strongmen. Other oligarchs in this category have held decision-making positions, but were constrained from becoming strongmen by their country’s constitutional orders. Rafic Hariri served two terms in office as Lebanon’s prime minister, and his power was limited by its confessional system of political power distribution.

As shown in the third column, 28% of the cases we examined are strongmen who are not oligarchs. They lack the wealth to become one. In some instances, they may not care. For example, AMLO is likely to continue as an important figure in Mexican politics after completing his term in office, regardless of whether he has wealth or not. But, for others, wealth could have made a difference. Mussolini must have dreamed of having the wealth to buy himself out of his ignominious death. Bolsonaro must have wished for the wealth that would make his post-presidency more comforable. Strongmen have incentives to become oligarchs.

Why does the distinction between oligarchs and strongmen matter? We can see why in the new Trump regime that is emerging in the United States. Trump is both a master oligarch and a strongman. His ruthlessness and that of other oligarchs in his orbit reflect in part a self-confidence founded on their wealth. Elon Musk, currently the world’s wealthiest person, with a net worth we estimate at $440 billion by Forbes, is one of the most powerful people in Trumpworld now. Timothy Mellon, whose family is worth $14.1 billion, is one of the top contributors to Trump’s campaign. Peter Thiel, worth $15.5 billion, is JD Vance’s benefactor. And of course Trump, worth $6.3B. This is just a partial list.

All of these oligarchs have options, no matter how things work out for them. Their wealth is the ultimate insurance policy. In an uncertain world, two control mechanisms—wealth and power—are always better than one.

During the campaign and in the months since the election, President Donald Trump spoke about tariffs—a tax on imports—as a tool to achieve everything from “bringing back” manufacturing jobs to the Midwest to acquiring Greenland. A tariff policy that delivers good jobs and a better quality of life to working families is possible. But it must be thoughtful and work with other policies that prioritize innovation, public health, and sustainability. Under this administration’s current approach, working families risk paying more for goods we need every day while suffering higher levels of pollution.

Tariffs are a tool for compliance and can be effective in enforcing human rights, labor, and environmental protections around the world. For instance, tariffs can make it more expensive for American companies and consumers to purchase goods made in countries that choose to produce goods more cheaply than American competitors because they allow factories to dump their waste in local waterways. A pollution-linked tariff would either nudge factories in a foreign country to compete more fairly by following the same environmental rules or nudge American consumers to buy from American manufacturers who do follow those rules.

Unfettered free trade promoted by U.S. leaders for decades sent our jobs abroad, shed key industries vital to our economic security, and worsened the environment around the world. Carefully applied, tariffs are one way to help rectify these errors.

Recently, former President Joe Biden’s lead trade negotiator announced that her office would investigate Nicaragua’s human and labor rights abuses to determine if the U.S. can put a “Section 301” tariff on Nicaraguan goods. Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 lets the U.S. government impose tariffs for production practices and policies in other countries that make trade unfair. In her statement, former Ambassador Katherine Tai said that the Nicaraguan government undermines fair competition by repressing its people. To put it simply, because there is little respect for workers, human rights, and the rule of law, goods can be made more cheaply in Nicaragua than they would be made in countries that abide by high-road standards. While this is the first time Section 301 tariffs have been used in this way, these tariffs could be more widely deployed to address harmful or hostile production practices worldwide. For example, countries with highly toxic and pollution-intensive industries could also be targeted.

While tariffs can be a tool for positive change, they need to be used alongside investments and strong environmental protections in our own country. Together, this could position the U.S. as a leader in modern manufacturing. Additionally, as a significant purchaser of goods, our government can keep those billions circulating in our own economy.

Tariffs can raise the price of imported goods if the companies importing those goods pass the extra cost onto the consumer. Given that corporate profits and CEO compensation are at an all-time high, there is no reason to think importers would pass up an opportunity to increase their margins. So if U.S. producers do not increase output to compete more aggressively against imported products with marked-up prices, consumers will face higher prices. Heightened costs to consumers are more likely when the tariffs target a variety of goods from many countries. With so many working families already facing a cost of living crisis, we have to counter potential price increases by making new investments in manufacturing.

When tariffs encourage domestic production to meet a gap in demand, policies also need to ensure that U.S. manufacturers are held to high standards. Increased production at a facility that is leaking toxic waste into the local water supply will place the community around that factory in greater danger—and allowing a facility with a history of safety violations to increase operations places the workers there at risk. We don’t have to choose between a productive manufacturing sector, clean air and water, and good jobs. Tariffs need to be accompanied by strong commitments that our factories meet high environmental protection standards, worker safety, and other safeguards.

Unfettered free trade promoted by U.S. leaders for decades sent our jobs abroad, shed key industries vital to our economic security, and worsened the environment around the world. Carefully applied, tariffs are one way to help rectify these errors.

But as the Center for American Progress notes, President Trump’s deployment of tariffs as a cudgel—an arbitrarily imposed 10% tariff on Chinese imports and a 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico—would undermine sincere efforts to reform global trade policy to work for working families and fenceline communities. It would instigate tit-for-tat actions from trade partners buying key American products. This kind of retaliation then reduces the market share for American businesses and jeopardizes the stability of our hard-won jobs. Our top three export destinations are Canada, Mexico, and China, the countries Trump targets. Plus, signals from the Trump administration that it will claw back investments in American factories and roll back environmental protections will place the cost of tariffs on the health and pocketbooks of families.

We stand to lose a lot if we build our tariff policy on bluster alone. What we stand to win could change the trajectory of rural America and our economy.