Donald Trump is about to return to the White House, but it's clear who's really running the show: Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world and the chair of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Musk will do anything to avoid paying his fair share of taxes. That's why he wants to use DOGE to cut $2 trillion in government spending—which is mathematically impossible without slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Last month, Musk amplified a thread from Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) that used zombie lies about Social Security to call for cutting and privatizing it.

Nobody voted to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. Despite his past history of supporting cuts to these programs, Trump blanketed millions of households in swing states with flyers promising to protect them.

Our job is to remind voters of that promise, and demand that Republicans keep it. Trump won't be on the ballot again, but every member of the House of Representatives (and one-third of the U.S. Senate) is up for reelection in less than two years. That's why they want to slash our benefits behind closed doors.

I went to the first meeting of the DOGE Caucus, and stood outside those closed doors to confront members as they entered and exited the room. I handed them copies of Trump's campaign flyers promising to protect Social Security and Medicare, and asked if DOGE intended to keep that promise.

One Republican told me that "there will be some cuts" to Social Security and Medicare. Another said that "everything is on the table." Most of the rest refused to answer—except for DOGE Caucus co-chair Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). When I handed her Trump's flyers, she said, "We don't care" and tossed them to the ground.

That's what Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks of Trump's campaign promise to protect earned benefits—and we're going to make sure her constituents know it. My organization, Social Security Works, just sent a billboard truck to drive to every large senior center in her district, reading "Marjorie Taylor Greene is helping the richest man in the world cut YOUR Social Security" and urging voters to call her office.

We are also planning to send a billboard truck to the district of Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.). Van Orden is a member of the DOGE Caucus and refused to pledge to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He is one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents, winning his most recent race by fewer than 11,256 votes.

These two billboard trucks are just the beginning. We are demanding that every member of Congress, starting with the members of the DOGE Caucus, pledge to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If they refuse, our trucks will be driving through their districts in the very near future.

Join our campaign to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid at https://socialsecurityworks.org/pledge.

In late November, President-elect Donald Trump announced Pam Bondi—former Florida attorney general, current partner at Ballard Partners, and long-time Trump-world regular—as his nominee for attorney general. Bondi perfectly exemplifies Trump’s approach to staffing the executive branch: prioritizing loyalists with a history of defending him personally and actively creating opportunities for revolver-induced corruption.

Going into the second Trump administration, the Department of Justice (DOJ) faces a broad array of issues, from counter-intelligence to civil rights enforcement. But in many respects the Justice Department is most central and critical as the enforcer of laws that limit corporate misbehavior. From monopolistic collusion and tax evasion to wage theft and polluting the air, the DOJ is constantly deciding whether to pursue potential civil and criminal actions against a wide array of corporations.

Is someone whose (virtual) rolodex is full of contacts at large tech companies likely to be enthusiastic about supporting antitrust enforcement against the very tech executives she has a warm working relationship with?

If confirmed, Bondi will be a classic corporate revolver. While at Ballard, she’s worked with a slate of corporate clients, prominently including Amazon, which has pending cases before the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission. As attorney general, Bondi would stand to oversee cases against a number of her former clients and their ilk, creating at the very least the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Bondi would also have the power to influence resource allocation decisions, determining how much effort the federal government puts toward enforcing the law against corporate actors and individuals alike. With many of Bondi and her Ballard peers’ clients and former clients number among those who stand to face federal enforcement, there are clear reasons to worry she might de-emphasize corporate misconduct and prioritize Trump’s political enemies.

Is someone whose (virtual) rolodex is full of contacts at large tech companies likely to be enthusiastic about supporting antitrust enforcement against the very tech executives she has a warm working relationship with? Questions like this seem to answer themselves, and the outlook isn’t good for those of us who see the role of government as protecting most of us from the greed and abuses of wealthy and powerful corporations and executives.

Beyond concerns about corporate revolver dynamics that could undercut DOJ’s efficacy in cracking down on corporate wrongdoing, Bondi herself has a worrying history of receiving support from corporate actors before seemingly using her power to shield them from legal action.

In 2011, newly inaugurated Florida Attorney General Bondi led the charge to fire two attorneys who had been investigating Lender Processing Services (LPS)—a mortgage services company that later pled guilty to having forged documents to illegally repossess borrowers’ homes—after Bondi received substantial campaign contributions from LPS. In 2013, Bondi directly solicited a reelection campaign donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Shortly after Bondi received the $25,000 donation, her office declined to continue investigating complaints against Trump University. Also during Bondi’s first term as Florida attorney general, she had an extended relationship with lawyers from firm Dickstein Shapiro who met with Bondi to represent an array of corporate clients. In several documented cases, Bondi declined to use her AG powers to pursue action against these companies, as The New York Times reported in a Pulitzer-winning 2014 series. (As the Miami Herald reports, a brochure from the firm even boasts that “we persuaded AGs not to sue Accretive Health.”)

These corruption concerns don’t even scratch the surface of Bondi’s broad network of financial and personal relationships with conservative interest groups and influential corporate actors, not to mention her lobbying work for the nation of Qatar. As such, Bondi's confirmation would likely become quite difficult, as every issue from how to deal with Foreign Agents Registration Act enforcement to antitrust policy is implicated by her time at Ballard.

These blatant concerns with Bondi’s fitness for the role were drawn out to some extent in her first confirmation hearing on Wednesday. Bondi repeatedly took a combative tone in response to questions. She dodged or evaded numerous questions about how her loyalty to Trump might influence her decision-making as attorney general, even making the blanket statement, “I’ll never speak on a hypothetical, especially one saying that the president would do something illegal”—a concerning hard line for her to take, given Trump's multiple, non-hypothetical, criminal convictions.

Bondi’s second hearing, scheduled for on Thursday, promises to produce more eventful and contentious testimony, as hearings for Trump nominees continue this week.

After years of advocacy from the disabled community, the Department of Labor is proposing a rule that would end the issuance of 14(c) certificates, which enable businesses to pay subminimum wages to disabled workers.

If you’re unfamiliar with Section 14(c) of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, you might be shocked to learn that it is, in fact, legal to pay disabled workers below the minimum wage. Companies across the country can request 14(c) certificates that give them license to pay disabled workers far below poverty wages. It’s a practice that has been present for decades, but there is once again movement toward making 14(c) a thing of the past.

Ending this practice is long overdue, and is desperately needed to keep disabled people out of poverty. In the South, where my organization New Disabled South works, poverty is higher than anywhere else in the country. And there are more 14(c) certificates in the South than any other region in the nation. We know that disabled people live in poverty at twice the rate of nondisabled people—which means that there is simply no reason to keep disabled people in poverty by paying them poverty wages. It is unconscionable.

Calling this a “special” wage is an insult to the disability community, which deserves to thrive and live with dignity.

Proponents of 14(c) certificates have emphasized the supposed merits of these certificates, saying that they provide people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) the opportunities to work that they otherwise wouldn’t have. One argument that gets perpetuated often is that it’s better to pay folks with IDD something rather than nothing at all. This is perhaps the most disturbing justification imaginable—implying that sheltered workshops are sufficient options for people who “wouldn’t otherwise be employable.” In truth, segregated, subminimum wage jobs deprive disabled people of the chance to know what we’re capable of when our needs are valued and met. We rise to the occasion when employers, family advocates, caregivers, regulatory agencies, and legislators meet their responsibilities to us. Many more disabled people would be capable of competitive integrated employment—and more generally, would be better able to reach our highest potential—if we are first provided with fair wages, in addition to wrap-around support that allows us to improve our skills and do our jobs in an accessible environment.

Decades of research demonstrate that segregated, subminimum wage jobs generate higher costs for employers and worse outcomes for disabled people. Plus, employment rates for disabled people improve in states that end 14(c). What is truly needed is Competitive Integrated Employment (CIE), which ensures that disabled people get paid fairly and have opportunities for employment in their community, as opposed to being segregated from it. Many more of us would be capable of CIE if we were provided with the integrated opportunities afforded under Olmstead and the reasonable accommodations protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), including those that teach and allow us to communicate via augmentative and alternative communication (AAC).

Arguments favoring the continued use of 14(c) certificates are primarily based on fear or misunderstanding of the current policy and programmatic landscape. The biggest misconception is that payments above subminimum wage will disqualify disabled employees from receiving the public benefits they require. However, two existing options for mitigating that possibility are ABLE Accounts and Medicaid “buy-in” programs.

ABLE accounts are savings accounts that allow disabled people to save money without it counting toward the asset limits associated with eligibility for SSI, Medicaid, SNAP, and other government assistance programs. Medicaid “buy-in” programs allow disabled workers to access, sometimes in exchange for a premium, the home- and community-based services that are not provided under employer-sponsored or other private health insurance plans. Forty-seven states and D.C. have Medicaid “buy-in” programs. No one should have to choose between keeping a job and keeping their healthcare, and this program makes it possible for disabled people to have both.

ABLE accounts and Medicaid “buy-in” programs must be expanded to eliminate disincentives to work. Income and asset limits associated with eligibility for government assistance programs must also be raised to align with the rising cost of living across the country, particularly for disabled people. But even in the absence of those policy changes, the finalization of DOL’s proposed 14(c) rule will still be beneficial.

This is what equity and inclusion looks like, not continuing the standard set by Section 14(c) for low quality of life, inequality, and economic suffering. Proponents of the 14(c) program refer to subminimum wages as the “Special Minimum Wage,” a stunningly offensive term aimed at diminishing the harm that paying these wages does to disabled workers. As of 2019, the majority of 14(c) employees were earning less than $3.40 an hour, or $213.76 per month, while—as I highlighted two years ago—the executive directors of many of these workplaces made five- and six-figure salaries. Calling this a “special” wage is an insult to the disability community, which deserves to thrive and live with dignity.

The Department of Labor is accepting public comment through January 17, meaning there is still time to encourage them to finalize the proposed rule and finally end the 14(c) program once and for all. To learn more about DOL’s proposed rule and how to submit comments by January 17, check out this Plain Language explainer and action alert from the Autistic Self Advocacy Network.

Until recently, the American-funded Israeli genocide of Palestinians unsurprisingly continued without a stop in sight. On January 13, 2025, Israeli attacks assassinated at least 45 Gazans. Shortly after these attacks, however, a cease-fire and hostage deal (reportedly split into three phases) was confirmed on January 15, 2025. Importantly, Steven Witkoff, selected by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to be his special envoy in the Middle East, has forced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a cease-fire and hostage plan in two months, existing in stark contrast with the Biden administration’s incompetent (and frankly cruel) inability to pressure Netanyahu into accepting a plan over the past year.

Nevertheless, even though the incoming Trump administration secured a cease-fire and hostage deal, it’s impossible to truly know what will come next. Trump is notoriously unpredictable. According to recent estimates from Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 45,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered since October 7, 2023. In the days leading up to his presidential inauguration, many around the United States and the world at large are uncertain about how Trump will treat Israel’s ongoing genocide and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole. To help answer these questions, I interviewed a variety of scholars.

First, it’s important to assess Trump’s impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his first term. On the one hand, Trump perpetually enabled Israeli expansionism. “Trump recognized Israel’s illegal annexation of Jerusalem, [and] he recognized Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights,” political scientist Norman Finkelstein told me. Further, the two-state proposal that Trump disclosed in 2020 radically reversed the policy of his predecessors by allowing Israel to annex the Jordan Valley and the vast majority of illegal settlements in the West Bank, while merely allotting 15% of historic Palestine toward a Palestinian state. Trump’s first administration simply didn’t value Palestinian sovereignty, a sentiment shared by the Biden administration. “Biden could have reversed [Trump’s] decisions, but elected not to,” Finkelstein further explained to me. The Biden administration’s encouragement of Israel’s genocide are simply an outgrowth of Trump’s previous policies, which approved of Israeli expansionism.

Although criticizing Liz Cheney and other members of Washington’s war machine, Trump remains perpetually ignorant of his own hawkish behavior.

On the other hand, Trump partly abandoned the Palestinian issue during his first term. “Trump (or more precisely, Kushner and others) tried to sideline the Palestinian issue completely and to focus on promoting normalization between Israel, the Gulf States, and Saudi Arabia instead,” international relations scholar Stephen Walt told me. After feeling deserted by the Trump administration, many Palestinians, according to Walt, came to believe that they “had no options other than violence.” Since the Biden administration continued Trump’s policies of abandonment, “October 7 was the result.”

While Finkelstein and Walt highlight the negative consequences of Trump’s policies toward Israel, famed Israeli revisionist historian Benny Morris views Trump’s previous actions differently. “[Trump] recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, which previous U.S. presidents should have done, but apart from giving Israelis a good feeling, it had no impact on the conflict,” Morris told me. Nevertheless, by arguing that Trump was right to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and that previous American presidents “should have,” Morris explicitly acknowledges and approves of the Israeli expansionism that Trump fomented, undermining Morris’ credibility to speak on behalf of whether or not the Palestinians perceived Trump’s actions to be escalatory.

Early signs already indicate that the second Trump administration will, at the very least, further enable illegal Israeli expansion, especially upon the occupied West Bank. Two of Trump’s key appointees, Pete Hegseth (Defense Department) and Mike Huckabee (ambassador to Israel), dismiss a two-state solution. Further, Huckabee habitually denies Palestinian existence itself, identifies the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” and believes that the entirety of the West Bank belongs to Israel. David Friedman, who remains a close associate with Trump and was U.S. ambassador to Israel under his first administration, recently wrote a book arguing for a single Jewish state, which would include the West Bank and likely Gaza. Understanding that a second Trump presidency enables further Israeli expansionism, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that “now is the time” to seek sovereignty over the settlements in the West Bank.

It’s entirely likely that the second Trump administration will encourage Israeli expansion over the West Bank to a degree that would guarantee the prevention of an independent Palestinian state from emerging. Former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative Sari Nusseibeh, previously one of the most visible Palestinian peace activists advocating for a two-state solution, maintains, “Under Trump, Israel’s policy will be the geographic and political dismemberment of the embryonic Palestinian state, bringing all this under a hegemonic Israeli authority, with total disregard to international opinion.”

Although a cease-fire and hostage deal has been achieved, Trump promised Netanyahu that his administration would maintain support for Israel even if it violated the agreement, according to a recent report. While a cease-fire was previously reached between Israel and Lebanon, Israel has continued air striking southern and eastern Lebanon. Neither the Trump nor Biden administration has punished Israel, and it’s unlikely that they will. Recently, Hegseth expressed his support for Israel to kill “every last member of Hamas.” In practicality, this entails that high-ranking members of the Trump administration approve of Israel intensifying its indiscriminate assault on Gaza. In addition to the possibility of “the elimination of Gaza as a Palestinian entity and the continuing [encroachment] on the West Bank and its absorption into the state of Israel,” it’s very likely that there will be “more killing and ethnic cleansing” under the second Trump administration, cultural studies scholar Iain Chambers told me. Such wariness regarding the possible perpetuation of genocide and Israeli expansionism under a second Trump administration is also shared by Walt: “The genocide/ethnic cleansing will continue, and I think it is likely that Israel will annex the West Bank (and perhaps portions of Syria and Lebanon).”

Although the future is never entirely given, it’s possible to gauge how the second Trump administration will treat Israel. Based on Trump’s disastrous actions toward Palestinians (during his first term and now), it’s plausible to assume that the second Trump administration will sharply enable Israeli expansionism at the very least, although the simultaneous escalation of Israel’s genocide is also a likely option. Although criticizing Liz Cheney and other members of Washington’s war machine, Trump remains perpetually ignorant of his own hawkish behavior. While hopelessness may ensue upon the realization that the second Trump administration will have disastrous consequences for Palestinian livelihood, one must resist feeling discouraged. Perpetual, collective political action still remains the only viable form of resistance to Washington’s endless support of oppression.

As the MAGA troops dine, dance and saunter into the White House, we have to ask how one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history triumphed yet again. Yes, Trump is a gifted entertainer with an incredibly loyal base. But he could not have won without Democratic Party malfeasance. Let us count the ways:

1. Biden’s Ego

You don’t get to be president without an enormous ego, so large that it’s very hard to imagine not getting exactly what you think is your due. Even though Biden told his advisors in 2019 that he would serve only one term, he changed his mind, or rather his ego demanded four more years. Biden liked the job he had spent his life pining for, and damn anyone who thought he wasn’t up to it.

The combination of ego and power meant that those around Biden were loathe to suggest that maybe, just maybe, he shouldn’t start a second term at age 82. The closer his advisors were to power, the less likely they were to risk losing their access by pointing out that Biden looked his age and then some, and that an overwhelming majority of voters thought he was too old to serve again. That Biden was having difficulty putting forth coherent sentences in public was studiously ignored. Biden was told exactly what he wanted to hear. Run, Joe, Run!

2. Liberal-Left Complicity

Everyone who was awake, except Biden and those dependent upon him, knew that he was too old to run again. On November 20, 2023, Biden’s 81st birthday, I wrote , “Happy Birthday Joe: Please Don’t Run!” I took a good deal of criticism, even from close colleagues. Didn’t I know that there was no way he would agree to step down? Didn’t I realize that if someone challenged him the Democrats would lose, just as in 1968 when Lyndon Johnson was forced out? Didn’t I realize that Biden was the best president for workers since FDR, maybe even better, and had therefore earned a second term?

I was stunned especially by the FDR claim. That one only works if you live in the Washinton bubble and are blind as a bat (without a bat’s stunning radar.)

• FDR, through his fireside chats, was an enormously gifted communicator. Biden during his presidency has been one of the worst.
• FDR’s massive public works programs engaged millions of people in highly visible ways each day. Biden’s infrastructure programs were nearly invisible, and severely hampered by his inability to promote them.
• FDR’s changes in labor law legalized unions and led to an explosion of successful organizing, full of posters with FDR saying, “If I went to work in a factory, the first thing I’d do is join a union.” While Biden did go on a picket line and put pro-labor appointees into key regulatory offices, union density barely budged on his watch.

The voters of Mingo County, West Virginia could tell the difference. FDR in 1936 got 66.1 percent of their vote. Biden received only 13.9 percent in 2020. (See Wall Street’s War on Workers for a closer look at Mingo County and the collapse of the Democrats.)

By 2024, the rise of inflation and Biden’s feeble demeanor, during the rare times he was let out in public, augured for a sizable Trump triumph. Democrats who feared a second Trump term should have demanded that Biden step down long before he fell flat on his face during the June 2024 debate.

Where were AOC and Sanders? In Biden’s pocket. As late as the middle of June 2024, AOC said:

Joe Biden is our nominee. He is not leaving this race. He is in this race, and I support him.

Even after the worst debate performance in presidential history, Bernie Sanders chastised Biden’s critics:

Enough! Mr. Biden may not be the ideal candidate, but he will be the candidate and should be the candidate.

No doubt AOC and Sanders saw what I saw a year earlier--- that Biden really was too old to serve a second term. But they kept silent. They were not about to give up their influence over Biden’s agenda, an agenda they can kiss good-by during the coming four years of Trump.

3. The legal cases

If you’re going to put a former president on trial, one who desperately wants to run again, you had better do it long before the next election. Instead, Attorney General Merrick Garland fumbled around for two years before appointing a special counsel to investigate Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his hiding classified documents in his bathroom. The delay allowed Trump to run out the clock and avoid any punishment, despite 34 felony convictions in the New York State business records case involving the adult film star Stormy Daniels and campaign finance laws.

Clearly, Trump’s legal woes didn’t wound his election chances and may even have helped to solidify his base. While progressives were titillated (me included) by each new legal revelation about Trump’s malfeasance, the public at large cared much more about leadership, change, inflation, and the economy.

4. Anointing Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris was a very poor candidate in 2020. She withdrew after polls showed her at 3 percent. Yet, by waiting until after the 2024 debate debacle, Biden ensured that the Democrats had no choice but to rally around Harris. She was the incumbent vice-president and not doing so would have been viewed as a slap in the face to women and people of color.

But they had a choice if they had acted sooner. Had party leaders forced Biden out in early 2024, later than they should have, there was time to hold at least two primaries that would have put Harris to the test—primaries that would have let voters register their preferences, perhaps finding the best candidate and giving more legitimacy to whomever was selected.

Taking away that vital phase of the democratic process, the Democrats neutered their own claim that Trump was an enemy of democracy. Whether or not those acts are parallel in anti-democratic gravity is irrelevant. More than a few voters thought that Democrats did not have the high moral ground on democracy issues.

And blaming the Harris loss on racism and sexism is a poor excuse for a party desperate to prevent Trump from stomping all over democracy. If the Democrats really believed that racism and sexism would defeat Harris, why nominate her?

In the end she could not compete with Trump on two key issues—leadership and change. On the exit poll question of the candidate's "ability to lead,” Trump received 66 percent to Harris’s 33 percent. On “Can bring needed change,” it was 74 percent for Trump to 24 percent for Harris.

5. Anti-working-class campaign

Nevertheless, Harris was a much stronger campaigner in 2024 than in 2020. She exuded energy and certainly was far more coherent than Biden. The spark needed to attract support was there. But by that point the problem was substance, not style. Harris is a corporate Democrat, and she wanted to gain the support of Wall Street as much if not more than she wanted to be the party of the working class.

While independent polls, like those from the Center for Working Class Politics, showed that the Democrats needed to campaign on a strong anti-corporate populist message, especially in Pennsylvania, Harris chose to emphasize her opponent’s threat to democracy. Further, she went out of her way to raise money from Wall Street, to campaign with Republicans, and to make her campaign palatable to them both.

For me, the defining moment came in the response to the John Deere and Company’s announcement moving 1,000 jobs from the Midwest to Mexico. In June 2024, right here on the pages of Common Dreams, I repeatedly begged the Biden administration to stop the carnage. Deere was the poster child of a greedy corporation that was using job cuts to move money to Wall Street through stock buybacks, an artificial means of boosting the share price to enrich a company’s richest investors. In 2023, Deere logged $10 billion in profits, paid its CEO $26.7 million, and conducted $12.2 billion in stock buybacks. As I pleaded then: “Come on Joe, go to bat for these workers and show the working class that you’re tougher than Trump when it comes to saving American jobs.”

The greatest president for labor since FDR did nothing. When more layoffs were announced in the fall, Trump jumped on it, calling for a 200 percent tariff on John Deere imports from Mexico.

Here was the chance for Harris to strut her pro-working-class stuff. Instead, her campaign committed political malpractice. They recruited Mark Cuban, the TV star billionaire, former principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, to attack Trump’s plan. He called the proposed Deere tariffs, “insanity.” He criticized Trump’s worker-friendly proposal rather than Deere’s attempt to kill workers’ jobs. Cuban is on record saying stock buybacks are bad for employees, but he said not a word about Deere’s abuse of them. And most importantly, neither he, nor Harris, nor anyone else in the campaign said a word about the 1,000 jobs that would be lost.

That’s because they are corporate Democrats who refuse to interfere with corporate decision making. Job loss is inevitable and necessary, they believe, and only can be confronted by the vague promise that new jobs will be created elsewhere within the prosperous “opportunity society.” Instead of stopping needless mass layoffs, the Democrats prefer to shower corporations with public money to “encourage” them to create jobs, which are nearly always for someone other than those who are losing theirs. It’s not hard to see why workers like those at Deere might think Trump would fight harder for them.

6. Inflation

The rise in prices negatively affected the vast majority of voters and it happened on Biden’s watch. To say it was not as bad as in the rest of the world was a feeble response, as was blaming Covid supply chain transformations. Whatever truth there was to these claims, what voters wanted to see were actions to stop prices from rising and attempts made to lower as many as possible.

This would prove to be a heavy lift for Harris. She needed to attack the major corporate cartels that jacked up prices, which would mean breaking with the Biden administration (something she pointedly refused to do). She would have to call for investigations about price gouging, and even demanding price controls to prevent the food and drug producers form profiteering. It would also mean proposing new laws to prevent Wall Street and private equity firms from buying up millions of homes, a practice that was putting upward pressure on home prices and hurting even workers with decent-paying jobs. In short, it would mean breaking from Wall Streeters and turning public ire against them. She early on made some noise about price controls, but as the campaign proceeded, a populist message didn’t happen and realistically could not have happened given the Democrats’ immense entanglement with their Wall Street financiers.

Of the voters who said inflation has caused their family “severe hardship,” 76 percent voted for Trump according to exit polls. Of those who said inflation caused “no hardship,” 78 percent voted for Harris. So why would you do anything serious about inflation if your real base of support, upper income voters, don’t feel any pain?

Chuck Schmer enthusiastically summarized the new class politics in 2016:

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.

Now, didn’t that turn out to be the perfect strategy for four more years of Trump?

The tent is quiet, save for the whistle of the wind slicing through the thin walls and the occasional patter of raindrops. My nights in the tent in Nuseirat refugee camp are endless. They feel heavy, with a cold that seeps into my bones despite my five mismatched layers of clothes, all the clothes I own.

How did I fall asleep before the war that uprooted our lives? Effortlessly, cradled by the warmth of my bed and the comfort of familiar walls. Now each attempt to close my eyes feels like a battle against the biting chill and the relentless ghosts of a life I once knew.

I live in a tent with my mother, and it is all we have got. Each night, we pull our old worn-out mattresses close together, huddling for warmth. The next day, our breath creates tiny clouds in the icy air as we whisper “good morning,” showing only our faces from beneath our blankets to greet each other. Moving feels impossible until the sun rises, its faint warmth coaxing us out of the cocoon we’ve created against the cold.

The day doesn’t bring much relief because the tent offers no privacy. I hear my cousin in the tent next to ours complaining she hasn’t slept all night because of the freezing weather. Her voice sounds weary: our struggles are shared yet solitary. This cold doesn’t just invade my body, it steals the simplest joys of life.

Studying in the early morning before the chaos of the day begins is another challenge. My fingers stiffen, and my hands feel so fragile that holding a pen tightly enough to write becomes an impossible task. I feel that my frozen fingers will break with the slightest movement.

This cold doesn’t just invade my body, it steals the simplest joys of life.

But my studies are more than routine; they’re a lifeline, a defiance against the war that has stripped me of almost everything I cherished. The cold bites at my resolve, but I force myself to read, to hold the pen.

Before this war winter meant something entirely different. It was the season to sit around the fire with mama, sipping Sahlab (milk pudding), listening to the elders’ stories. Rain wasn’t a threat; it was replenishment for the earth, a sound that lulled me into peace and happiness. Now, the first drop of rain sends me hurrying to inspect the tent’s fragile seams, fearing leaks that could soak our few possessions. Another unbearable loss.

I miss my friends, too—the warmth of our shared laughter, the way we used to run from a downpour to watch it from some safe place together. That circle of joy feels shattered now. There is no safe place in Gaza.

Some of those friends are in Egypt, some have remained in northern Gaza, while others are scattered across the south. Visiting those who are nearby is no longer a simple matter. It would take hours to travel what used to be a half-hour journey and cost more money than I can spare and risk the wartime dangers of being robbed, raped, or killed.

The physical toll of this refugee life weighs on me as well. Ever since the temperature began to plummet, the cold of the tent has left me in a constant state of illness. The flu lingers, seemingly permanent, and I’ve been suffering from persistent backache for weeks now. Recovery from even such minor sickness takes far longer than it should because I cannot find the medicines I need. My body, worn down by 14 months of war, feels more vulnerable with each passing day.

In the scratch of my pen against paper—despite my frozen fingers—I mumble to myself that this knowledge I am gaining is a form of power, that the act of writing itself is resistance.

The psychological weight of these days and sleepless nights is as heavy as the biting cold. The tent, though it offers minimal shelter, feels like a prison that traps me with impossibly distant memories. Ghosts of my past creep into my mind: a heated home, the security of being surrounded by four solid walls, and the simplicity of closing my eyes without worry. Each memory is a double-edged sword, bringing both comfort and pain.

Yet even here there are moments that give me courage. Every morning, as my mother and I exchange smiles from beneath the blankets, I feel a spark of defiance against the bleakness around us. In the scratch of my pen against paper—despite my frozen fingers—I mumble to myself that this knowledge I am gaining is a form of power, that the act of writing itself is resistance. In those moments there is hope that even the longest winters end.

A primary responsibility of the government is, of course, to keep us safe. Given that obligation, you might think that the Washington establishment would be hard at work trying to prevent the ultimate catastrophe—a nuclear war. But you would be wrong.

A small, hardworking contingent of elected officials is indeed trying to roll back the nuclear arms race and make it harder for such world-ending weaponry ever to be used again, including stalwarts like Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), and other members of the Congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group. But they face ever stiffer headwinds from a resurgent network of nuclear hawks who want to build more kinds of nuclear weapons and ever more of them. And mind you, that would all be in addition to the Pentagon’s current plans for spending up to $2 trillion over the next three decades to create a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, stoking a dangerous new nuclear arms race.

There are many drivers of this push for a larger, more dangerous arsenal—from the misguided notion that more nuclear weapons will make us safer to an entrenched network of companies, governmental institutions, members of Congress, and policy pundits who will profit (directly or indirectly) from an accelerated nuclear arms race. One indicator of the current state of affairs is the resurgence of former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, who spent 18 years in Congress opposing even the most modest efforts to control nuclear weapons before he went on to work as a lobbyist and policy advocate for the nuclear weapons complex.

His continuing prominence in debates over nuclear policy—evidenced most recently by his position as vice chair of a congressionally appointed commission that sought to legitimize an across-the-board nuclear buildup—is a testament to our historical amnesia about the risks posed by nuclear weapons.

Senator Strangelove

Republican Jon Kyl was elected to the Senate from Arizona in 1995 and served in that body until 2013, plus a brief stint in late 2018 to fill out the term of the late Sen. John McCain.

One of Kyl’s signature accomplishments in his early years in office was his role in lobbying fellow Republican senators to vote against ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which went down to a 51 to 48 Senate defeat in October 1999. That treaty banned explosive nuclear testing and included monitoring and verification procedures meant to ensure that its members met their obligations. Had it been widely adopted, it might have slowed the spread of nuclear weapons, now possessed by nine countries, and prevented a return to the days when aboveground testing spread cancer-causing radiation to downwind communities.

The defeat of the CTBT marked the beginning of a decades-long process of dismantling the global nuclear arms control system, launched by the December 2001 withdrawal of President George W. Bush’s administration from the Nixon-era Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. That treaty was designed to prevent a “defense-offense” nuclear arms race in which one side’s pursuit of anti-missile defenses sparks the other side to build more—and ever more capable—nuclear-armed missiles. James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace called the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty an “epic mistake” that fueled a new nuclear arms race. Kyl argued otherwise, claiming the withdrawal removed “a straitjacket from our national security.”

The truly naive ones are the nuclear hawks who insist on clinging to the dubious notion that vast (and still spreading) stores of nuclear weaponry can be kept around indefinitely without ever being used again, by accident or design.

The end of the ABM treaty created the worst of both worlds—an incentive for adversaries to build up their nuclear arsenals coupled with an abject failure to develop weaponry that could actually defend the United States in the event of a real-world nuclear attack.

Then, in August 2019, during the first Trump administration, the U.S. withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which prohibited the deployment of medium-range missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. That treaty had been particularly important because it eliminated the danger of having missiles in Europe that could reach their targets in a very brief time frame, a situation that could shorten the trigger on a possible nuclear confrontation.

Then-Sen. Kyl also used the eventual pullout from the INF treaty as a reason to exit yet another nuclear agreement, the New START treaty, co-signing a letter with 24 of his colleagues urging the Trump administration to reject New START. He was basically suggesting that lifting one set of safeguards against a possible nuclear confrontation was somehow a reason to junk a separate treaty that had ensured some stability in the U.S.-Russian strategic nuclear balance.

Finally, in November 2023, NATO suspended its observance of a treaty that had limited the number of troops the Western alliance and Russia could deploy in Europe after the government of Vladimir Putin withdrew from the treaty earlier that year in the midst of his ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

The last U.S.-Russian arms control agreement, New START, caps the strategic nuclear warheads of the two countries at 1,550 each and has monitoring mechanisms to make sure each side is holding up its obligations. That treaty is currently hanging by a thread. It expires in 2026, and there is no indication that Russia is inclined to negotiate an extension in the context of its current state of relations with Washington.

As early as December 2020, Kyl was angling to get the government to abandon any plans to extend New START, coauthoring an op-ed on the subject for the Fox News website. He naturally ignored the benefits of an agreement aimed at reducing the chance of an accidental nuclear conflict, even as he made misleading statements about it being unbalanced in favor of Russia.

Back in 2010, when New START was first under consideration in the Senate, Kyl played a key role in extracting a pledge from the Obama administration to throw an extra $80 billion at the nuclear warhead complex in exchange for Republican support of the treaty. Even after that concession was made, Kyl continued to work tirelessly to build opposition to the treaty. If, in the end, he failed to block its Senate ratification, he did help steer billions in additional funding to the nuclear weapons complex.

Our Man from Northrop Grumman

In 2017, between stints in the Senate, Kyl worked as a lobbyist with the law firm Covington and Burling, where one of his clients was Northrop Grumman, the largest beneficiary of the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons spending binge. That company is the lead contractor on both the future B-21 nuclear bomber and Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The Sentinel program drew widespread attention recently when it was revealed that, in just a few years, its estimated cost had jumped by an astonishing 81%, pushing the price for building those future missiles to more than $140 billion (with tens of billions more needed to operate them in their years of “service” to come).

That stunning cost spike for the Sentinel triggered a Pentagon review that could have led to a cancellation or major restructuring of the program. Instead, the Pentagon opted to stay the course despite the enormous price tag, asserting that the missile is “essential to U.S. national security and is the best option to meet the needs of our warfighters.”

Independent experts disagree. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry, for instance, has pointed out that such ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons we have” because a president, warned of a possible nuclear attack by an enemy power, would have only minutes to decide whether to launch them, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war triggered by a false alarm. Perry is hardly alone. In July 2024, 716 scientists, including 10 Nobel laureates and 23 members of the National Academies, called for the Sentinel to be canceled, describing the system as “expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary.”

Meanwhile, as vice chair of a congressionally mandated commission on the future of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, Kyl has been pushing a worst-case scenario regarding the current nuclear balance that could set the stage for producing even larger numbers of (Northrop Grumman-built) nuclear bombers, putting multiple warheads on (Northrop Grumman-built) Sentinel missiles, expanding the size of the nuclear warhead complex, and emplacing yet more tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. His is a call, in other words, to return to the days of the Cold War nuclear arms race at a moment when the lack of regular communication between Washington and Moscow can only increase the risk of a nuclear confrontation.

Kyl does seem to truly believe that building yet more nuclear weapons will indeed bolster this country’s security, and he’s hardly alone when it comes to Congress or, for that matter, the next Trump administration. Consider that a clear sign that reining in the nuclear arms race will involve not only making the construction of nuclear weapons far less lucrative, but also confronting the distinctly outmoded and unbearably dangerous arguments about their alleged strategic value.

The Advocate

In October 2023, when the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on a report from the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, it had an opportunity for a serious discussion of nuclear strategy and spending, and how best to prevent a nuclear war. Given the stakes for all of us should a nuclear war between the United States and Russia break out—up to an estimated 90 million of us dead within the first few days of such a conflict and up to five billion lives lost once radiation sickness and reduced food production from the resulting planetary “nuclear winter” kick in—you might have hoped for a wide-ranging debate on the implications of the commission’s proposals.

Unfortunately, much of the discussion during the hearing involved senators touting weapons systems or facilities producing them located in their states, with little or no analysis of what would best protect Americans and our allies. For example, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) stressed the importance of Raytheon’s SM-6 missile—produced in Arizona, of course—and commended the commission for proposing to spend more on that program. Sen. Jackie Rosen (R-Nev.) praised the role of the Nevada National Security Site, formerly known as the Nevada Test Site, for making sure such warheads were reliable and would explode as intended in a nuclear conflict. You undoubtedly won’t be shocked to learn that she then called for more funding to address what she described as “significant delays” in upgrading that Nevada facility. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) proudly pointed to the billions in military work being done in his state: “In Alabama we build submarines, ships, airplanes, missiles. You name it, we build it.” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) requested that witnesses confirm how absolutely essential the Kansas City Plant, which makes non-nuclear parts for nuclear weapons, remains for American security.

The next few years will be crucial in determining whether ever growing numbers of nuclear weapons remain entrenched in this country’s budgets and its global strategy for decades to come or whether common sense can carry the day and spark the reduction and eventual elimination of such instruments of mass devastation.

And so it went until Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked what the nuclear buildup recommended by the commission would cost. She suggested that, if past history is any guide, much of the funding proposed by the commission would be wasted: “I’m willing to spend what it takes to keep America safe, but I’m certainly not comfortable with a blank check for programs that already have a history of gross mismanagement.”

The answer from Kyl and his co-chair Marilyn Creedon was that the commission had not even bothered to estimate the costs of any of what it was suggesting and that its recommendations should be considered regardless of the price. This, of course, was good news for nuclear weapons contractors like Northrop Grumman, but bad news for taxpayers.

The Brink of Armageddon?

Nuclear hardliners frequently suggest that anyone advocating the reduction or elimination of nuclear arsenals is outrageously naive and thoroughly out of touch with the realities of great power politics. As it happens though, the truly naive ones are the nuclear hawks who insist on clinging to the dubious notion that vast (and still spreading) stores of nuclear weaponry can be kept around indefinitely without ever being used again, by accident or design.

There is another way. Even as Washington, Moscow, and Beijing continue the production of a new generation of nuclear weapons—such weaponry is also possessed by France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom—a growing number of nations have gone on record against any further nuclear arms race and in favor of eliminating such weapons altogether. In fact, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has now been ratified by 73 countries.

As Beatrice Fihn, former director of the Nobel-prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, pointed out in a recent essay in The New York Times, there are numerous examples of how collective action has transformed “seemingly impossible situations.” She cited the impact of the antinuclear movement of the 1980s in reversing a superpower nuclear arms race and setting the stage for sharp reductions in the numbers of such weapons, as well as a successful international effort to bring the nuclear ban treaty into existence. She noted that a crucial first step in bringing the potentially catastrophic nuclear arms race under control would involve changing the way we talk about such weapons, especially debunking the myth that they are somehow “magical tools” that make us all more secure. She also emphasized the importance of driving home that this planet’s growing nuclear arsenals are evidence that all too many of those in power are acquiescing in a reckless strategy “based on threatening to commit global collective suicide.”

The next few years will be crucial in determining whether ever growing numbers of nuclear weapons remain entrenched in this country’s budgets and its global strategy for decades to come or whether common sense can carry the day and spark the reduction and eventual elimination of such instruments of mass devastation. A vigorous public debate on the risks of an accelerated nuclear arms race would be a necessary first step toward pulling the world back from the brink of Armageddon.

A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”

The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.” The journalism from +972—in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media—has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.

+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information”—which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.

What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11.

Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:

• Routine discourse avoided voices condemning the U.S. government for its role in the slaughter of civilians.
• The U.S. ally usually eluded accountability for its high-tech atrocities committed from the air.
• Civilian deaths in Gaza were habitually portrayed as unintended.
• Claims that Israel was aiming to minimize civilian casualties were normally taken at face value.
• Media coverage and political rhetoric stayed away from acknowledging that Israel’s actions might fit into such categories as “mass murder” or “terrorism.”
• Overall, news media and U.S. government officials emitted a mindset that Israeli lives really mattered a lot more than Palestinian lives.

The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.

During the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post applied the word “brutal” or its variants far more often to Palestinians (77%) than to Israelis (23%). The findings, in a study by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), pointed to an imbalance that occurred “even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.” News articles and opinion pieces were remarkably in the same groove; “the lopsided rate at which ‘brutal’ was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories.”

Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely out of view. Gradually, surface accounts reaching the American public came to seem repetitious and normal. As death numbers kept rising and months went by, the Gaza war diminished as a news topic, while most talk shows seldom discussed it.

As with the slaughter via bombardment, the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem. Along the way, official pronouncements—and the policies they tried to justify—were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.

The propaganda approach was foreshadowed on October 8, 2023, with Israel in shock from the atrocities that Hamas had committed the previous day. “This is Israel’s 9/11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations told reporters in New York, and he repeated: “This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS News Weekend interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States declared: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”

What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self-protection, and, of course, the “war on terror.”

As Israel’s war on Gaza persisted, the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the “war on terror” from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events. Reverberation was in the air from late 2001, when the Pentagon’s leader Donald Rumsfeld asserted that “responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda and the Taliban.” After five weeks of massacring Palestinian people, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “any civilian loss is a tragedy”—and quickly added that “the blame should be placed squarely on Hamas.”

The licenses to kill were self-justifying. And they had no expiration date.

This piece was originally published by MediaNorth. It is adapted from the afterword in the paperback edition of Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press).

The Russo-Ukrainian War has entered a new phase, in which Ukraine’s Western allies are finally acknowledging that Russia, which controls 35% of Ukrainian territory, is prevailing and will likely win in the end. Trump has signaled that the blank check of weapons and money to Kyiv is about to expire and that he wants a peace deal. Putin has responded that Russia is ready to negotiate. Zelensky says he’s willing to talk. So, will peace talks actually happen? If so, how are they likely to conclude?

A side show to the conflict has been Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk Region of Russia. Russian and allied North Korean forces have encircled the Ukrainians occupying Russia, and Ukraine has made much of the North Korean presence, though it’s not clear what their point is.

“The TMI Show”’s Ted Rall and Manila Chan check in with Mark Sleboda, international relations and security analyst, on the state of the Ukraine War.

The post TMI Show Ep 57: “North Korea Has Entered the Chat” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 57: “North Korea Has Entered the Chat” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The first official reference to Gaza becoming increasingly uninhabitable was made by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, or UNCTAD, in 2012, when the population of the Gaza Strip was estimated at 1.8 million inhabitants.

The intention of the report, The Gaza Strip: The Economic Situation and the Prospects for Development, was not merely to prophesize, but to warn that if the world continued to stand idle in the face of the ongoing blockade on Gaza, a humanitarian catastrophe was imminent.

Yet, little was done, though the U.N. continued with its countdown, increasing the frequency and urgency of its warnings, especially following major wars.

Even after the devastating war on Gaza ends and the rebuilding of the strip concludes, the ecological and environmental harm that Israel has caused will remain for many years to come.

Another report in 2015 from UNCTAD stated that the Gaza crisis had intensified following the most destructive war to that date, the year before. The war had destroyed hundreds of factories, thousands of homes, and displaced tens of thousands of people.

By 2020, though, based on the criteria set by the U.N., Gaza should have become "uninhabitable." Yet, little was done to remedy the crisis. The population grew rapidly, while resources, including Gaza's land mass, shrank due to the ever-expanding Israeli "buffer zone." The prospects for the "world's largest open-air prison" became even dimmer.

Yet, the international community did little to heed the call of UNCTAD and other U.N. and international institutions. The humanitarian crisis—situated within a prolonged political crisis, a siege, repeated wars, and daily violence—worsened, reaching, on October 7, 2023, the point of implosion.

One wonders if the world had paid even the slightest attention to Gaza and the cries of people trapped behind walls, barbed wire, and electric fences, whether the current war and genocide could have been avoided.

It is all moot now. The worst-case scenario has actualized in a way that even the most pessimistic estimates by Palestinian, Arab, or international groups could not have foreseen.

Not only is Gaza now beyond "uninhabitable," but, according to Greenpeace, it will be "uninhabitable for generations to come." This does not hinge on the resilience of Palestinians in Gaza, whose legendary steadfastness is hardly disputed. However, there are essential survival needs that even the strongest people cannot replace with their mere desire to survive.

In just the first 120 days of war, "staggering" carbon emissions were estimated at 536,410 tons of carbon dioxide. Ninety percent of that deadly pollution was "attributed to Israel's air bombardment and ground invasion," according to Greenpeace, which concluded that the total sum of carbon emissions "is greater than the annual carbon footprint of many climate-vulnerable nations."

A report issued around the same time by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) painted an equally frightening picture of what was taking place in Gaza as a direct result of the war. "Water and sanitation have collapsed," it declared last June. "Coastal areas, soil, and ecosystems have been severely impacted," it continued.

But that was over seven months ago, when parts of Gaza were still standing. Now, almost all of Gaza has been destroyed. Garbage has been piling up for 15 months without a single facility to process it efficiently. Disease is widespread, and all hospitals have either been destroyed in the bombings, burned to the ground, or bulldozed. Many of the sick are dying in their tents without ever seeing a doctor.

Without any outside assistance, it was only natural for the disaster to worsen. Last December, Médecins Sans Frontières issued a report titled Gaza: Life in a Death Trap. The report, a devastating read, describes the state of medical infrastructure in Gaza, which can be summed up in a single word: non-existent.

Israel has attacked 512 healthcare facilities between October 2023 and September 2024, killing 500 healthcare workers. This means that a population is trying to survive during one of the harshest wars ever recorded, without any serious medical attention. This includes nearly half a million people suffering from various mental health disorders.

By December, Gaza's Government Media Office reported that there are an estimated 23 million tons of debris resulting from the dropping of 75,000 tons of explosives—in addition to other forms of destruction. This has released 281,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air.

Once the war is over, Gaza will be rebuilt. Though Palestinian sumud (steadfastness) is capable of restoring Gaza to its former self, however long it takes, a study conducted by Queen Mary University in the U.K. said that, for the destroyed structures to be rebuilt, an additional 60 million tons of CO2 will be released into an already severely impacted environment.

In essence, this means that even after the devastating war on Gaza ends and the rebuilding of the strip concludes, the ecological and environmental harm that Israel has caused will remain for many years to come.

It is baffling that the very Western countries, which speak tirelessly about environmental protection, preservation, and warning against carbon emissions, are the same entities that helped sustain the war on Gaza, either through arming Israel or remaining silent in the face of the ongoing atrocities.

The price of this hypocrisy is the enduring suffering of millions of people and the devastation of their environment. Isn't it time for the world to wake up and collectively declare: enough is enough?

Republicans are using their massive structural media and social media advantage to try to destroy Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and the California Democratic Party.

It follows an old script, that’s recently been played out in Russia and Hungary, among other nations: Want to seize control of a nation and turn it into a neofascist state with the consent of the people? Just take control of the channels of public information and news, and then turn lies about your opponents and their supporters into a perceived reality.

Over the past 50 years, Democrats have been busy focusing on and working out policies to benefit average Americans. Increasing access to medical care, $35 insulin, reducing student debt, the CFPB to protect people from banks, cleaning up the environment, American Rescue Act, Inflation Reduction Act, etc.

Republicans and billionaires aligned with them, however, have not only fought against all these efforts, but, far more importantly, have engaged in a massive power play to shift control of popular opinion — and thus control of our government — toward themselves in a way they believe could be permanent.

The plan for this wasn’t a secret; it was laid out in a 1971 memo by tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell, who Richard Nixon put on the Supreme Court in 1972 where he could participate in putting the plan into action — as he did with the Buckley and Bellotti decisions (Powell wrote the latter) legalizing political bribery by saying “money is free speech” and “corporations are persons.”

It began the corruption of the American government by the Reagan administration.

But the details of the GOP’s efforts — which Democrats and wealthy Democratic donors should begin to emulate now if our republic is to survive — are rarely discussed. Here’s what they did, in outline, and how Democrats can fight back.

First, Republicans realized that public opinion drives everything, so they set out to seize as much control over the instrument that drives public opinion as they could: the media.

The details of the GOP’s efforts — which Democrats and wealthy Democratic donors should begin to emulate now if our republic is to survive — are rarely discussed. Here’s what they did, in outline, and how Democrats can fight back.

Second, they realized that the Senate was the power-based linchpin for control of the legislative branch and the key to controlling both the Executive and Judicial branches because only the Senate confirms presidential cabinet positions and federal judges.

If they controlled the Senate much of the time and occasionally got a Republican president, they could also easily stack both the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court.

To control the Senate, they knew, they had to control a majority of the states. And that came back to controlling public opinion through the media, particularly in low-population or largely rural states where media could be bought or coopted cheaply.

To first influence public opinion, back in the 1970s-1990s era, billionaires associated with the GOP built a whole series of institutions whose sole purpose was to influence public opinion in ways that comported with the billionaire’s oligarchic agenda.

They crank out policy papers, write op-eds for newspapers and websites, engage in social media, and provide “expert” guests for TV, radio, NPR, and podcasts. Another major function is to “educate” and lobby Republican elected officials about policy and nominees to executive and judicial positions.

Those include:
— Cato Institute
— Mercatus Center at George Mason University
— Americans for Prosperity
— Heritage Foundation
— Manhattan Institute
— American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
— Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
— DonorsTrust
— Independent Women's Forum (IWF)
— Federalist Society
— Judicial Crisis Network (Now Concord Fund)
— Republican State Leadership Committee
— Alliance Defending Freedom
— Marble Freedom Trust
— 85 Fund (Formerly Judicial Education Project)

They also created the State Policy Network, which funds and guides a network of state-based think tanks in every state in America. They similarly influence political discussion through interactions with the media by publishing papers, participating in social media, and lobbying/educating Republican governors, state representatives, and senators. (At the end of this article is a list of them.)

There is no similar infrastructure on the left because no lefty billionaires ever set out to create one.

There are a few left-leaning think tanks and policy outfits like Public Citizen, NAACP, ACLU, Center for American Progress, Economic Policy Institute, Roosevelt Institute, Demos, and the Century Foundation. None of these, however, have levels of funding, inter-agency coordination, or integration with the Democratic Party that even begins to approximate the list of conservative organizations above.

In addition to creating powerful, well-funded groups to influence public policy, conservatives focused on the media itself, which they had historically seen as their enemy. Early efforts included Lee Atwater’s famous 1980s “work the refs” strategy of complaining loudly whenever media outlets reported on partisan issues that reflected poorly on the GOP and its politicians.

These were followed by funding and rolling out Rush Limbaugh’s show (1988), Reagan fast-tracking the citizenship of Rupert Murdoch and the subsequent start of Fox “News”; Sinclair’s purchase of hundreds of local TV stations; billionaires like the Dickey brothers purchasing hundreds of local radio stations; and Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital purchasing Clear Channel (2008) and then taking progressive Air America programming off their stations (2010).

Multimillionaire televangelists and wealthy rightwing Hispanics got into the game as well over the past two decades, purchasing over a thousand radio stations nationwide.

The result of these collective efforts is around 1500 radio stations programming rightwing talk (and hundreds of young “farm team” rightwing talk show hosts learning the trade in local markets), almost a thousand “nonprofit” religious stations that also push rightwing politics, and several hundred rightwing Spanish-language stations (that had a huge influence on the Latino vote in 2024).

Rightwing media is now a multi-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year enterprise that includes three major cable TV networks, and more recently rightwing billionaires have ventured into the newspaper business. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong picked up the LA Times, Rupert Murdoch bought the NY Post and The Wall Street Journal, and New York City-based hedge funds run by rightwing billionaires own around half of all local newspapers in the country.

And now they’re focusing this media behemoth toward their efforts to destroy the Democratic Party in California and neuter Governor Newsom’s hopes to one day become president.

Again, there is no leftwing or Democratic analog to this media empire that’s been created and is held together largely by a handful of conservative billionaires.

A major parallel strategy Republicans followed was to use this media monster to take over enough states to take control of the Senate and, even when not in majority control, use the filibuster to block Democratic efforts at reform.

There is no leftwing or Democratic analog to this media empire that’s been created and is held together largely by a handful of conservative billionaires.

Their initial focus was low-population and largely rural states, as radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers in those markets are often very cheap.

By the end of 2010, when Romney/Bain shut down the progressive Air America radio network that had helped get Barack Obama elected in 2008, one could drive from coast-to-coast and continuously hear rightwing talk radio but only rarely (when passing through big cities or on SiriusXM) find a progressive voice.

This silencing of progressive talk radio and absolute dominance of the airwaves, both on radio and TV, made it easy for Republicans over the past 35 years to flip low-population and rural states that had been Democratic for generations into the GOP’s camp.

West Virginia, Arkansas (former governor: Bill Clinton), Kentucky, Louisiana, Alabama, Montana (former governor: Brian Schweitzer), Iowa (former governor: Tom Vilsack), Wyoming (former governor: Mike Sullivan), Tennessee (former senator: Al Gore), Georgia (former governor: Roy Barnes), Missouri, and Texas (former governor: Ann Richards) all went from solid blue or largely blue to solid red, as there have functionally been no dissenting voices heard in local media since the 1980s.

A large handful of other states followed a similar trajectory, giving Republicans majority control of the least democratic of our legislative institutions, the Senate, where Wyoming (pop: 584,000) has the same two senators — and thus the same legislative power — as California (pop: 38.9 million).

Following these victories, Republicans turned their attention to the fastest growing aspects of the Fourth Estate: Social media and podcasts. With help from Vladimir Putin’s Internet Research Agency and Wagner Group trolls, GOP operatives, politicians, talk hosts, podcasters, influencers, and cyberbullies began to saturate social media and podcasts with messages condemning Democrats for every little thing that went wrong in America.

Most recently, they’ve brought control of X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp under their banner, both through allowing the uninhibited spread of political lies and disinformation and by tilting their secret algorithms that control what content people see toward the right.

As a result, Republicans — using their vast think tank and media power — have succeeded in rolling back voting rights, civil rights, women’s rights, and taking an axe to public education. And now they’re using lies and slander to go after Gavin Newsom.

This massive machine was so successful in recasting the public perception of elected Democrats that millions of dispirited formerly-Democratic voters simply gave up and failed to vote in the 2024 election.

Next in their sights — along with more tax cuts for the billionaires who funded all this — are healthcare and Social Security, as they work to roll back the last 100 years and end the New Deal and Great Society.

If Democrats want to slow this speeding train heading toward single-party rule of America, they must get with the program and begin to support existing and build out new and powerful policy think tanks and media operations.

The coming election of a new DNC chair presents an opportunity to begin reforming and redirecting the efforts of the Party to a 50-state strategy that can effectively compete with Republicans.

And billionaires with a social conscience — like MacKenzie Scott, Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Tom Steyer — need to consider emulating the efforts of Charles Koch, Miriam Adelson, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, and Ken Griffin.

Republicans have already decided to exploit the climate-change-driven wildfires on the west coast to try to flip California from Blue to Red in the next elections. They’re using their massive media machine to promote naked lies, blaming the fires on Democratic politicians while obscuring the role of the climate change driven by oil industry executives who fund the GOP and many of their think tanks.

Without an all-hands-on-deck effort to build out a Democratic media machine now, our precious democracy may soon be replaced with an authoritarian dystopia that serves nobody but the morbidly rich.

And California could become their biggest victory since the election of Governor Reagan.

Can I admit something to you? Gotta say... I feel embarrassed about this. Perhaps even ashamed.

Okay, here goes: Yes, when I read, see, or hear accounts of what is happening in Los Angeles right now, I do experience empathy and sadness and compassion. And—oh yeah—also a healthy dose of heartbreak and rage about the torrents of disinformation that, these days, automatically mushroom around any event of any significance, especially if climate change is involved.

But—and here's the confession part—I am guessing that my primary reaction, the one about which I feel shame, is based upon this: I'm not there.

In other words, since it's not myself (or any of my loved ones) who is being directly and viscerally and financially impacted, my reactions of empathy occur (literally and figuratively) at a distance. Sure, I'll experience these feelings for a while, especially as I am taking in information or pictures about the situation, but then most of that will quickly evaporate as I go about my day. My at-a-distance reactions almost never move me to take direct and impactful and lasting action, because... I'm not there.

And so my primary reaction is a mixture of relief and (here comes the shame part) some level of indifference.

I'm not proud of this. But there it is.

Right now, there are obviously many thousands of people in Los Angeles who are "there." Right there. Exactly there. They are directly experiencing one of the scientifically understood symptoms of a fossil fuel-supercharged, heating planet.

It's an April day in 2001 and I sit across from the chief of hepatology of Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia as he shares the conclusions of various diagnostic procedures brought on by some recent health difficulties.

"David, you have a disease called Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC), which is a progressive narrowing of the bile ducts."

Hmm. Okay. That doesn't sound all that bad, right? Okay, I'm not even sure what bile ducts do or where they are located, but...

"So," the doc continues, "What it comes down to is that you will eventually need a liver transplant, and there's nothing we can do to prevent that."

Shock. Utter shock. You see, I wasn't feeling any symptoms of this disease, this PSC. None at all. I'd been dealing with an unrelated medical matter and labs revealed that something was off with my liver numbers and further investigation revealed the PSC.

It took me about a month to get over the shock of my diagnosis. And then... well... I just got on with living my life mostly as if nothing had changed. Since I had no symptoms (they would begin to kick in about three years down the road—fatigue, itching, jaundice) and could do nothing to prevent the disease progression, it was as if I didn't have a disease at all.

I wasn't "there" yet.

Back to Los Angeles. Full Disclosure: I know much more about climate change than the average person. I researched it intensively and wrote 15 published articles back in 2012-2015. Then... I mostly gave up writing about it. Why? Because it gradually became apparent that mere information—no matter how compellingly or creatively expressed—was NOT going to move most people to take significant action.

Why? Because most people would not be "there" for years and decades to come? Sure, climate change would become more and more symptomatic, but the Earth is a big place. An increasingly occurring wildfire here or there, a superstorm here or there, a superdrought here or there, still ends up leaving the vast majority of folks not being obviously and viscerally impacted.

I mean... at least at first.

January, 2006. Dr. Susan Althoff—one of three surgeons who performed the liver transplant—shoots me a steely look: "David, we WILL get you through this."

I am laying on my bed in the liver-transplant wing of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. My youngest brother is also in this wing since, about a week before, he donated half of his liver to me (It's called a Live Donor Transplant).

So now I've got a new half-a-liver (which, incredibly, will grow to a 100% liver in about a month's time, as will my brother's remaining half-a-liver). The problem is that my body has so far rejected my new liver. This is not particularly uncommon. Suddenly, there is a huge hunk of "foreign" tissue inside of me, and my body's immune system is trying to eject it. There are drugs for this, which I am now taking and will be taking for the rest of my life.

But these drugs are being overwhelmed, and so they put me on the next protocol—high dose steroids. And—wheeeeee!—the steroids DO give me drug-induced diabetes but are not enough to turn the tide. Dr. Althoff has just entered to give me that piece of bad news. I am beyond exhausted and respond with some expression of despair and hopelessness.

Dr. Althoff responds with that steely look (see above) and explains: "We have one more protocol called OKT-3 (when they bring out the letters-and-numbers meds, you know it's serious). We've only used it three times in the last year. You'll know it's working if you get a high fever and start to feel really, really sick."

Twelve hours later, I am shivering under a special, ice-filled blanket. I have a high fever and feel quite sick, wrecked even. The OKT-3 is apparently working.

Finally, I am "there." Boy-oh-boy, am I there. Right there. Exactly there. Everything else in the world disappears. Every single thing other than wanting this to stop and wanting to get better and feel better. I would do anything.

Right now, there are obviously many thousands of people in Los Angeles who are "there." Right there. Exactly there. They are directly experiencing one of the scientifically understood symptoms of a fossil fuel-supercharged, heating planet. Most of them, I am sure, would do anything to make it stop and to make things better.

Even the ones who—subject to the unceasing and enormously financed propaganda of fossil fuel corporations and the governments and political parties that they have purchased—have denied the reality of human-caused climate change (as well as the ones—let us not forget—who blandly "believe" it, but have placed it way down on the list of concerns) will be less likely to dismiss the scientific reports that will be published finding that the intensity of these fires was 20% or 40% or 75% more likely to have happened due to the inexorably heating planet. These reports will be coming. This is certain.

Because—just like me under that ice blanket—they are finally "there," their nervous systems violated and assaulted. Their world turned upside down.

I am forever grateful to my brother. Yes, my situation was serious. But I was only one person. And I was willing to go along with the science. And I only needed one other person (with a compatible blood-type!!) to step up. And, lastly, as my fatigue increased and my weight melted away and my eyes and skin turned yellow, I was brought at least partially "there" and became willing to undergo fairly extreme and grueling duress to set things right.

But when it comes to setting things right climate-wise, there are 8.2 billion of us. Most are ceaselessly occupied trying to make ends meet. Many are swayed by the flat-out disinformation campaigns of those wishing to keep things as they are. Most—though this ratio will gradually swing the other way—are not yet nearly "there" in terms of direct-and-undeniable climate impacts.

This is a stark brew.

Things can get stark under the ice blanket or the thousand-and-one other grueling demands of major surgery and recovery (I needed a follow-up surgery in 2010 which was—I kid you not—at least 200% more difficult than the transplant. Once things are allowed to go a great degree out-of-balance, it becomes much more likely that unforeseen complications and collapses will ensue.)

I could have died during my transplant in 2006. I very nearly did die in the 2010 surgery.

Some people have died in the LA fires. The body count continues to grow. Many, many more have lost now-uninsurable homes, cars, pets, etc. The "stark brew" cited above all but assures that millions more people will die before anything close to enough "there-ness" occurs throughout the populace to prompt enough people to stand for change—even the grueling and deeply inconvenient change that is demanded by the physics of Earth.

I wish it were different. So do many people whom I know.

But it isn't different.

One barely noticed pledge by President-elect Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign appeared in a May Time magazine interview that offers an especially ominous warning about Trump 2.0. If he won a new term, Trump said, he would “probably” disband the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response policy established by Congress in 2022.

Fast forward to his new nominees, especially Secretary of Health and Human Services anti-vax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said he would pause National Institute of Health infectious disease and drug development research for eight years. As the saying goes, we might have a problem.

With confirmation hearings soon to begin for Kennedy and other healthcare department heads with similar views about to begin, the threat of future pandemics in an administration with a disastrous track record is another reason to urge their defeat.

If the U.S. had the same death rate as Australia, The New York Times later reported, about 900,000 American lives would have been saved.

The 2022 law was prompted by the worst pandemic in a century, that has killed over 1.2 million Americans. The law’s roots were in a pandemic global health security office former President Barack Obama set in the National Security Council. It followed Obama’s experiences with the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009 that killed up to 575,000 people globally, including more than 12,000 in the U.S., and the 2014 Ebola outbreak that claimed thousands of lives in West Africa and provoked a major scare in the U.S.

Trump eliminated the office in 2018, suggesting, The Associated Press reported, “that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.” In March, 2020, former pandemic office director Beth Cameron wrote she was “mystified” by the unit’s shutdown “leaving the country less prepared for pandemics… all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm blaze.” Trump officials insisted they were fully prepared. Facts on the ground tell a different story.

In December 2019 the first reports emerged of patients in China suffering symptoms of an unknown pneumonia-like illness, drawing reminders of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, SARS Cov-1. By early January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) began referring to the outbreak as a 2019 Novel Coronavirus, soon to be renamed Covid-19.

With infections spreading in Asia, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in late January reported the first U.S. cases. The first U.S. deaths occurred in January 2020. By mid-March, when Cameron’s op-ed appeared, the WHO confirmed more than 118,000 Covid cases and 4,291 deaths.

Australia, which had a similar profile of libertarian individualism and a right-wing prime minister in 2020, created a bipartisan response with opposition Labor Party and state leaders, and medical officers out front. They quickly subsidized production and distribution of masks, prioritized testing and contact tracing, and understood some shutdowns were necessary. If the U.S. had the same death rate as Australia, The New York Times later reported, about 900,000 American lives would have been saved.

Trump: ‘It’s Going to Be Fine’

The first year of Covid-19 was critical to establishing the protocols and public health protections to confront the crisis and reduce the deaths and suffering. But, due to widespread government failures, infections spread like wildfires. Yet the Trump administration was glacially slow to react. In his first public statement January 22, 2020, Trump declared, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

In multiple comments tracked by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), Trump downplayed the danger. February 2020: “Looks like by April… when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away,” “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus,” “We’re going very substantially down, not up,” and, “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Due to Trump’s malfeasance; promotion of misinformation, including false miracle cures; and actively discouraging government and community safety steps to slow the spread, Covid-19 exploded.

As Trump’s term ended on January 20, 2021, the U.S. recorded 25 million cases, and over 400,000 deaths.

Embracing the sluggish signals from Washington, hospitals stalled on adopting critical safety protocols and were ill-prepared for the flood of desperately ill patients that led to cascading deaths, with bodies piling up in makeshift morgues or refrigerated trucks outside hospital doors. It was made worse by inadequate isolation of infected patients and shortages of ventilators and proper protective equipment for overwhelmed nurses and other healthcare workers who paid a horrific price with thousands of deaths and many leaving due to unwillingness to work in unsafe conditions.

Trump’s failures continued for months. At a White House press conference on April 3, Trump eroded a new tepid CDC guidance people consider wearing masks, as other countries were now requiring to reduce transmission of the virus, by adding he would not do so.

Trump’s position, New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg recalled, “undermined it,” suggesting “to anyone in his world that wears a mask, it’s cowardly, weak, feminine, so no one’s going to wear masks. [It] becomes clear to everyone in the Republican establishment that bearing your face is the way to show solidarity and support to the president,” reinforcing a partisan political divide on not just masks but soon all public health measures.

In late April 2020, as the U.S. death toll passed 60,000, Trump said, “This is going away.” In May, amid 80,000 deaths, Trump said, “We have met the moment, and we have prevailed.” In June, with 110,000 dead Americans, Trump said, “It is dying out, it’s going to fade away.”

On August 31, with the death count passing 180,000, Trump said, “We’ve done a great job in Covid, but we don’t get the credit” blaming a “fake news media conspiracy.” For months, Trump demanded an end to steps some states were implementing to limit infections. As Trump’s term ended on January 20, 2021, the U.S. recorded 25 million cases, and over 400,000 deaths.

National Nurses United (NNU), one of the first to respond to prior pandemics during H1N1 in 2009 and Ebola in 2014, had gained valuable experience. By early January, 2020, “before most people in the U.S. had even heard of Covid-19,” as The New York Times noted, NNU began mobilizing and aggressively pushing employers, government elected officials, and health and regulatory agencies to implement decisive safety actions. In contrast to public agencies, NNU launched multiple public endeavors from rallies to marches, vigils, pickets, and other collective action, including strikes, to demand optimal protections for nurses, other healthcare workers, patients, and the broader public.

Employers took their lead from Trump and the federal agencies he influenced, including the CDC and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that continually eroded safety guidelines and workplace regulations. Hospitals, observed NNU executive director Bonnie Castillo, RN, “took a gamble relative to how much to have and how much to be prepared. And the CDC came out with guidelines shifting, commensurate to what the hospitals are complaining of. The lower standard is cheaper. So they just kept lowering and lowering, all the way down to bandannas. They’re looking at us like fodder.”

The racist Legacy of Trump’s Covid-19 Malfeasance

Trump’s mismanagement and indifference to who was most harmed proved catastrophic for communities of color, including a large percentage who were essential workers in transit, food processing, service industries, and healthcare.

Early in the pandemic, Trump sought to shift blame from his administration to China, repeatedly referring to Covid-19 as “the China virus,” though by April the U.S., with 4% of the world’s population, accounted for 17% of global Covid-19 deaths. Trump’s racist scapegoating ignited a sharp rise in anti-Asian hate speech and physical assaults.

His future HHS nominee Kennedy was among those adding fuel to the fire. At a 2023 New York press event Kennedy claimed “there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately… The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

“We’re being treated like we don’t matter and we’re dispensable.”

Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) healthcare workers subsequently reported a rise in racist incidents, both in hospital settings and in their daily lives. Twice as many verbal and physical assaults were directed at women. “We must unite to challenge anti-Asian violence, harassment, and racism,” said University of California San Diego RN Dahlia Tayag at a statewide California Nurses Association protest against ongoing anti-Asian hate crimes.

The disproportionate racial impact was evident in Covid=19’s devastating toll on Filipino healthcare workers. Kansas City RN Celia Yap Banago, one of many RNs who had pressed her hospital to fix inadequate protections, was one of the first RNs to die in April 2020. “We were being told we’re not allowed to wear masks because it’s going to scare our patients,” said Jenn Caldwell, RN.

By August 2023 when the government stopped reporting healthcare-worker Covid-19 data, 5,753 healthcare workers, including 501 RNs, had died of Covid-19. In a June interview, Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, RN, CNA/NNOC’s first Filipina president, noted that nurses call for help from Trump and Congress “fell on deaf ears… Our employers are banking on (CDC) guidelines, which have been watered down… We’re being treated like we don’t matter and we’re dispensable.”

The Racial Disparity of Infections and Death

Centuries of structural racism accelerate the disproportionate impact of any crisis, including pandemics. As Trump was continuing to downplay the tsunami of infections and deaths, and discouraging safety procedures, the racial impact escalated. Black Chicagoans, 30% of city residents, comprised 72% of the Covid-19 deaths. Black Michigan residents, under 15% of the population, accounted for 40% of the deaths. Milwaukee African Americans, 26% of the population, totaled 70% of Covid-19 deaths. Similar rates were evident across the country, from states with large Black populations like North and South Carolina, to those with smaller percentages, such as Nevada and Connecticut.

Latinos were 80% of the first people admitted for care at San Francisco’s large public hospital and in Latino San Jose neighborhoods. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander infection and death rates were also higher in California. In March 2020, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham cited “incredible spikes” in Navajo Nation. Two months later, Navajo Nation still had higher Covid-19 infection cases per capita than much more publicized, hard-hit New York City.

Columnist Jamelle Bouie linked the disparities to “longstanding structural inequities.” Systemic racism in healthcare had a long history, evident in less access to medical institutions and caregivers, provider treatment biases, lower rates of costly health coverage, housing segregation, and higher concentration in polluted neighborhoods. Hospitals in Black neighborhoods were far more likely to close than in mostly white areas, a National Institutes of Health study found.

“What it meant to be an essential worker was to be deemed expendable.”

Black and Latino workers were also far more likely to hold “essential” jobs. Many were concentrated in lower paid jobs often forced to keep working due to economic need or employer pressure, including in food services, grocery and drug stores, and poultry and other meat processing plants. The Guardian reported alarmingly high transit worker death rates among bus and subway drivers, mechanics, and maintenance workers in New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Washington D.C., and other major cities.

In September 2020, the CDC drew condemnation for reportedly soft-pedaling safety precautions due to political interference at a South Dakota meatpacking plant. All these factors resulted in workers of color having less economic ability or opportunity to shelter or work from home, and less access to safety measures, from masks to social distancing on the job where they risked constant exposure.

It also reinforced a class chasm with “a lot of professional and more affluent people who could afford to make the kind of sacrifices this public emergency called for who were able to protect themselves, able to sustain a level of comfort that other people in America were not,” says sociologist Klinenberg.

“It wasn’t like when we called them essential, we said, because you’re essential we’re going to honor you, we’re giving you masks, you get the best access to healthcare in the world, and here’s a bonus from all of us and our forever gratitude. What it meant to be an essential worker was to be deemed expendable. And it wasn’t just you, you got exposed to the virus, then you were more likely to go back home to your family who also got exposed to the virus. So you’ve got these neighborhoods throughout the country where there’s a lot of working class people who are getting exposed and they have higher mortality,” he added.

“Covid was kind of a search light that showed us everyone, everywhere we had studiously looked away from,” writer and activist Naomi Klein observed. “Suddenly we’re forced to think about the way in which our culture produces disposable people, whether they are working in elder care facilities when there’s suddenly Covid outbreaks, or the poultry plants [that] were Covid hotspots. Places where you never see a camera because we’re not supposed to think about, [like] what’s going on in prisons.” Klein cited “the myth of neoliberalism, like we are just individual people and families, and we don’t owe anything to each other. Covid said that wasn’t the case because you can’t just treat individuals, you have to treat a body of enmeshed individuals.”

Workers and unions had to fight their employers and public agencies under Trump to protect their members and the public. Union pressure, Castillo told The New York Times, moved some hospitals to act. In the first six months alone, NNU “staged more than 350 socially distanced protests, including two vigils in front of the White House for the nurses who died from the virus.”

Though Trump’s first term ended with the rollout of a Covid-19 vaccine, lasting damage had been done with his encouragement of opposition to critical community protections from masking to social isolation to needed closures to reduce the spread of the virus, and his sympathy for an escalating anti-vax movement. NNU early in 2021 characterized the Trump administration’s response as “one of denial and abandonment.”

Going forward, with Trump nominating people with similar views opposing the importance of a robust approach to public health, including full preparedness and action on sure-to-come future epidemics, there is ample cause for concern. A new avian flu’s first U.S. death has already occurred. Measles, polio, and other illnesses could mushroom, especially with health officials hostile to vaccines in charge of health agencies with vaccination rates already declining.

With confirmation hearings approaching, The New York Times this week reported the alarming vaccination drop “creating new pockets of students no longer protected by herd immunity [with]… now an estimated 280,000 kindergartners without documented vaccination against measles, an increase of some 100,000 children from before the pandemic.” Resurgence of polio, once virtually eradicated, is also a threat.

Rising temperatures from climate change mean that bacteria not only grow faster but are also associated with increased antibiotic resistance, facilitating the rise of new deadly pandemics. Factor in expected cuts in federal agencies and reduced enforcement of workplace and community protections by an administration more friendly to corporate demands for cuts in regulations.

Over the coming days and years, our vigilance and mass action will be critical to protecting public health.

Although he’s purportedly less serious about it than his sabre-rattling against Greenland and Panama, Donald Trump is making dark threats against Canada, saying he wants it to become the 51st state. He should be careful! The US almost always loses its wars.

The post War Against Canada first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post War Against Canada appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The NFL was forced to relocate Monday night’s playoff game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Minnesota Vikings to State Farm Stadium in Arizona because the Rams’ home field, SoFi Stadium, is only 10 miles from the Palisades Fire, the largest of six active blazes in the Los Angeles area. Turbocharged by climate change, the fires have killed at least 24 people, burned more than 40,000 acres, destroyed more than 12,300 structures, and displaced tens of thousands of residents.

The day before the game, Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford told reporters that his team was playing for more than just themselves—they were playing for the entire city of Los Angeles. “Every time we suit up, we’re the Los Angeles Rams,” he said. “We play for the people in this community, the people that support us, and this week will be another example of that.”

But the Rams also play for their corporate sponsors, which ironically include Shell Oil Products US, an affiliate of a multinational oil company that bears major responsibility for the conditions that set the stage for Los Angeles’ devastating fires.

Will mounting extreme weather disasters—and stadium damage projections—ever convince the L.A. Rams and other sports teams to sever their ties to the very companies responsible for the climate crisis?

The Rams are not alone in their choice of partnerships. More than 60 U.S. pro sports teams and at least three leagues have lucrative sponsorship deals with oil companies and electric and gas utilities that afford the companies a range of promotional perks, from building signage to uniform logos to facility naming rights, according to a survey conducted last fall by UCLA’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. Likewise, sports teams and leagues partner with banks and insurance companies that invest billions of dollars in coal, oil and gas companies, all to the detriment of public health and the environment.

With annual payrolls running as high as $240 million in the NFL, $300 million in the MLB, and $200 million in the NBA, it is not hard to understand why teams pursue corporate sponsorships.

Companies, meanwhile, sponsor teams and leagues to increase visibility and build public trust. According to a 2021 Nielsen “Trust in Advertising” study, 81 percent of consumers completely or somewhat trust brands that sponsor sport teams, second only to the trust they have for friends and family. By sponsoring a team, corporations increase the chance that fans will form the same bond with their brand that they have with the team.

Oil companies, gas and electric utilities, and the banks and insurance companies that finance them have yet another rationale for aligning with a team or a league: to distract the public from their unethical practices and portray themselves as public-spirited, good corporate citizens. It’s called sportswashing, a riff on the term greenwashing.

When Bank of America—which invested $33.68 billion in fossil fuel companies in 2023 alone—signed on as an official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup last year, the company’s chief marketing officer explained how it works. “The World Cup is religious for the fans, it’s an entirely different beast,” he said. “It allows us a very powerful place for the emotional connections to build the brand.” Having a strong brand, he added, can provide a “halo effect” for a company.

Making Shell Look Good

The Rams and Shell have been partners since 2018, but in October 2023 the Rams announced that the company signed a multiyear contract for an undisclosed sum to be the “exclusive fuel sponsor” of the team, SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park, the mixed-use, under-construction district surrounding the stadium that is owned and operated by Rams CEO Stan Kroenke. Shell now offers gasoline discounts on game days and collaborates with the three organizations on community initiatives on health, STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics) education, sustainability and other issues.

A home is engulfed in flames during the Eaton fire in the Altadena area of Los Angeles County, California on January 8, 2025. (Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)

The Rams could not have picked a more inappropriate partner (except, perhaps, ExxonMobil). Shell a cosponsor of community health projects? It’s one of the top 20 air polluters in the country. A supporter of STEAM education? The first initial of that acronym stands for “science,” but Shell is still funding climate science disinformation, even though it was aware of the threat its products pose as far back as the 1950s. And a promoter of sustainability? Historically the company is the fourth-biggest investor-owned carbon polluter and the second-biggest since 2016, when the Paris climate agreement to cut emissions was signed.

In 2020, the company did adopt a number of goals to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Since then, however, it has backtracked, reneging on its pledge to cut oil production 1 to 2 percent annually through 2030, weakening its target of reducing emissions from 25 to 40 percent by 2030 to only 20 to 30 percent, and completely abandoning its goal of lowering the total “net carbon intensity” of its products (the emissions per unit of energy) 45 percent by 2035 due to “uncertainty in the pace of change in the energy transition.”

The Rams are not the only U.S. pro team, nor the only team in California, enabling sportswashing. Chevron sponsors the Los Angeles FC soccer team, Sacramento Kings and San Francisco Giants; Arco, owned by Marathon Petroleum, sponsors the L.A. Dodgers and Sacramento Kings; NRG Energy, an electric utility that sold off its renewable energy division years ago, sponsors the San Francisco 49ers; and Phillips 66, owner of Union 76 gas stations, also sponsors the Dodgers. Although the two NBA teams in Los Angeles do not have fossil fuel industry-related sponsors, ExxonMobil is an “official marketing partner” of the NBA, WNBA and NBA Development League in the United States and China.

Given California has been plagued by climate change-driven wildfires for years, one would hope that sports teams in the state would reconsider their fossil fuel industry sponsorships. Last August, more than 80 public interest groups, scientists and environmental advocates tried to get the Dodgers to do just that, calling on the team to cut its ties to Phillips 66. “Using tactics such as associating a beloved, trusted brand like the Dodgers with enterprises like [Union] 76,” they wrote in an open letter, “the fossil fuel industry has reinforced deceitful messages that ‘oil is our friend,’ and that ‘climate change isn’t so bad.’” Since it was first posted, more than 22,000 Dodgers fans have added their names to the letter, which urges the team to end its sponsorship deal with the oil company “immediately.” To date, they are still waiting for a response.

California state, county and city governments, meanwhile, are going after the perpetrators in court. Altogether they have launched nine lawsuits against Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell to hold them accountable for deceiving the public and force them to pay climate change-related damages. The cities filing suit include Imperial Beach, Oakland, Richmond (home to a Chevron refinery), San Francisco and Santa Cruz. Five of the nine lawsuits also name Marathon Petroleum and Philips 66 as defendants.

State Farm a Good Neighbor?

The UCLA survey only documented the links between pro sports teams and their leagues with oil and utility companies. Banks and insurance companies that finance fossil fuel projects also have sponsorship deals. For example, six of the 12 banks that invested the most in fossil fuel companies since the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2016—Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Scotiabank and Wells Fargo—have each spent a small fortune on sports facility naming rights. Meanwhile, a review of the 30 NFL stadiums found that at least three are named for an insurance company with significant fossil fuel-related investments. One of those facilities is State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, where the Rams and Vikings played Monday night. The biggest home and auto insurer in the country, State Farm bought naming rights to the stadium in the fall of 2018 for an undisclosed sum.

Unlike all but one of its competitors, which have significantly cut back their investments in fossil fuel projects, State Farm has dramatically increased them, according to a September 2024 Wall Street Journal investigation. As of last May, the company held $20.6 billion in shares and bonds in 65 fossil fuel companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell, according to a 2024 report by Urgewald, a German environmental group.

In May 2023, at the same time it was expanding its fossil fuel industry portfolio, State Farm stopped issuing new homeowner policies in California because of wildfire risks and ballooning construction costs. Less than a year later, it announced that it would not renew 30,000 homeowner policies and 42,000 policies for commercial apartments in the state. Some 1,600 of those policies covered homes in Pacific Palisades, the neighborhood just destroyed by the Palisades Fire.

State Farm’s “2023 Impact Report” states the obvious: “Being a good steward of our environmental resources just makes sense for everyone.” But for the company, that only means cutting its own carbon emissions, reducing waste at its facilities, and promoting paperless options for its customers. What about the impact of the billions of dollars the company invests in major carbon polluters? The report doesn’t mention it.

Stadiums at Risk

Hurricanes, snowstorms, and other severe events have forced the NFL to cancel preseason games and postpone and move regular season games in the past. But Monday night’s game in Arizona was the first time the NFL had to relocate a postseason game since 1936, when it moved the championship game between the Green Bay Packers and the Boston Redskins from Boston to New York because of low ticket sales.

What about the impact of the billions of dollars the company invests in major carbon polluters?

Going forward, the NFL and other sports leagues likely will have to move games more often, if not abandon facilities, because of climate change-related extreme weather events. A handful of events over the last two decades may signal what team owners should anticipate. They include:

• Hurricane Milton sweeping through Florida’s midsection last October, shredding the roof of the Tampa Bay Ray’s Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg and causing more than $55 million in damage. The Rays will have to play its 2025 season home games at the Yankees’ 11,000-seat spring training facility in Tampa.
• A massive snowstorm in December 2010 crushing the roof of the Minnesota Vikings’ Metrodome, costing $18 million to replace.
• Hurricane Katrina ripping the roof off of the New Orleans Saints’ Superdome in August 2005, costing more than $200 million to repair.

Several NFL stadiums are especially at risk, according to a report published last October by Climate X, a data analytics company. The report ranks the 30 NFL stadiums based on their vulnerability to such climate hazards as flooding, wildfires, extreme heat and storm surge, and compares projected damage over the next 25 years to each stadium’s current replacement value.

The three stadiums that face the greatest threat? MetLife Stadium, SoFi Stadium and State Farm Stadium, in that order.

The report projects that MetLife Stadium, the New Jersey home of the New York Giants and Jets, will suffer the highest total percentage loss of 184 percent of its current replacement value, with cumulative damages of more than $5.6 billion by 2050 due to its low elevation and exposure to surface flooding and storm surges. (Like State Farm, the MetLife insurance company has major fossil fuel investments. As of May 2024, it held $7.4 billion in stocks and bonds in more than 200 companies, including Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell.)

SoFi Stadium and State Farm Stadium, meanwhile, are both expected to sustain significant losses due to increased flooding and … wildfires. The Climate X report estimates that SoFi Stadium will incur a cumulative loss of 69 percent of its current replacement value with damages of $4.38 billion by 2050. State Farm Stadium, the third-most vulnerable facility, likely will experience a 39 percent total loss, with $965 million in cumulative damages.

Will mounting extreme weather disasters—and stadium damage projections—ever convince the L.A. Rams and other sports teams to sever their ties to the very companies responsible for the climate crisis?

Last summer, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres castigated coal, oil and gas companies—which he dubbed the “godfathers of climate chaos”—for spreading disinformation and called for a worldwide ban on fossil fuel advertising. He also urged ad agencies to refuse fossil fuel clients and companies to stop taking their ads. So far, more than 1,000 advertising and public relations agencies worldwide have pledged to refuse working for fossil fuel companies, their trade associations, and their front groups.

It is past time for professional sports teams and leagues to do the same.

Everyone needs access to high-quality health services, but health inequities persist. Societal attitudes among healthcare workers, advocates say, foster stigma and discrimination that discourage patients from seeking help.

Enter the “woke brigade.” In an effort to provide “culturally and linguistically-appropriate proficient health care delivery for our nation’s increasingly diverse population,” doctors, nurses and others are being trained in Cultural Sensitivity classes to use more better words.

Are Cultural Sensitivity programs effective or, as some studies have shown, can they be counterproductive and even create a hostile work environment? Are they actually a distraction from the real causes of unequal access to healthcare: poverty and health-insurance companies that routinely deny claims?

Ted Rall and Manila Chan have exclusively obtained documents from a Cultural Sensitivity program now in widespread use in a US hospital system. Join us as we explore the role of language training in a medical workplace.

The post TMI Show Ep 56: “Cultural Sensitivity for Marginalized Groups and Persons” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 56: “Cultural Sensitivity for Marginalized Groups and Persons” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Donald Trump has nominated former Texas state representative Scott Turner as his secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the $70 billion federal agency that administers rental assistance and public housing programs, enforces fair housing laws, and provides community development grants to local communities.

Other Trump cabinet nominees, like potential Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have attracted attention for the ways they may shift the traditional priorities of the agencies they would lead. Turner has flown under the radar.

Perhaps that is because dramatic changes to HUD would need congressional approval, which was denied when Trump tried to slash the department during his first administration. Or maybe it is because, in many respects, Turner does not seem inclined to significantly alter U.S. housing policies.

As for likely HUD Secretary Turner, he is most associated with yet another housing giveaway to the rich.

That is not a good thing.

A Trump-Turner housing agenda appears destined to continue the worst aspects of our nation’s approach to affordable housing: a relentless diversion to the already-wealthy of resources supposedly designated for the housing needs of the poor.

This reverse Robin Hood approach to U.S. housing began in the 1970’s, when the Nixon administration and Congress began switching our affordable housing investment away from public housing to subsidizing for-profit landlords. Now, we fund wealthy landlords, often corporate landlords, via direct payments such as the Housing Choice Voucher program and Project-Based Section 8 program, in return for the for-profit landlords temporarily housing low-income tenants. 558F Low-Income Housing Tax Credits are designed to provide a tax shelter for wealthy investors.

This profit-soaked combination costs taxpayers six times more each year than public housing does. But public housing is far more efficient, for the simple reason that it bypasses private profits. Public housing is also hugely successful in providing high-quality, low-cost housing when there is adequate investment in maintenance and upkeep.

That is why other nations, who have far less homelessness, evictions, and housing-insecure people than we do, prioritize public housing. They divert little if any government support to for-profit landlords. And it is why U.S. for-profit landlords have been pushing for generations to block U.S. public housing from the funds it needs to ensure safety and keep up maintenance. The resulting deterioration of U.S. public housing undercuts competition for private landlords and creates a narrative justifying the delivery of housing dollars to the private sector.

A Subsidy for Gentrification

But those privatized programs are deeply flawed. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit often leads to rents higher than poor families can afford. The program known as LIHTC has been characterized by housing researchers as “a better-than-nothing gimmick that helps the poor by rewarding the rich.” Even that characterization is too generous for some legislators, who call LIHTC “legalized theft of government assets.”

Similarly, project-based Section 8 housing directs government dollars to for-profit landlords as payment for low-income tenants’ rent. But, like LIHTC, the program allows those landlords to convert their buildings to market-rate rentals after they use the government subsidies to pay off their debt on the properties. By contrast, public housing provides affordable housing in perpetuity.

There is even less lasting impact coming from the largest low-income housing program in the country, Housing Choice Vouchers. We provide a full $30 billion per year in voucher payments to landlords, often large corporate landlords, but those landlords can end their involvement at the end of each tenant’s lease, leaving the low-income renter without housing. It is another low-risk high-yield arrangement for the wealthy and raw deal for the poor: little wonder that the Project 2025 blueprint drafted by Trump supporters champions vouchers even as it slams other HUD programs.

As for likely HUD Secretary Turner, he is most associated with yet another housing giveaway to the rich. During Trump’s first administration, Turner served as executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, which focused on promoting opportunity zones, a program created by Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The program rewards the wealthy’s investment in economically distressed areas—opportunity zones—with huge tax breaks. But investigations by ProPublica and Congress show that the definition of what areas count as opportunity zones is far too broad, and the guidelines for who benefits from the investments are far too loose. As a result, money invested in expensive hotels, high-rent apartment buildings, and even luxury condominiums as a superyacht marina escapes taxation. Politically connected billionaires lobby for the land where they develop to be designated an opportunity zone, then rake in the benefits.

The Brookings Institution says opportunity zones operate as a subsidy for gentrification. “The direct tax benefits of opportunity zones will flow overwhelmingly to wealthy investors,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says. “But the tax break might not do much to help low-income communities, and it could even harm some current residents of such communities.”

So, despite the relative quiet around Scott Turner’s nomination, we know some important things about him. We know that he champions opportunity zones as an addition to the already abundant tax benefits the U.S. showers on landlords and real estate investors. And we know that he is a fierce critic of anti-poverty programs, as he has made multiple public statements about government assistance being harmful and even disastrous.

But we also know that the likely next HUD secretary is concerned about that alleged harm only when assistance is provided to the poor. The wealthy can count on Trump and Turner to keep the pipeline of government housing money wide open and flowing their way.

In recent weeks, political soothsayers have speculated about a wide variety of odious new policies the incoming Trump administration and its allies in Congress may or may not pursue. No one can predict with certainty which of those measures they will inflict on us and which they’ll forget about. But we can make one prediction with utter confidence. The White House and large bipartisan majorities in Congress will continue their lavish support for Israel’s war on Gaza, however catastrophic the results.

Washington has supplied a large share of the armaments that have allowed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to rain death and destruction on Gaza (not to speak of Lebanon) over the past year and a quarter. Before October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other groups attacked southern Israel, that country was receiving $3.8 billion worth of American military aid annually. Since then, the floodgates have opened and $18 billion worth of arms have flowed out. The ghastly results have shocked people and governments across the globe.

In early 2024, the United Nations General Assembly and International Court of Justice condemned the war being waged on the people of Gaza and, in November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, and Médecins Sans Frontières all followed with determinations that Israel was indeed committing genocide.

This country’s laws and regulations prohibit aid to military forces deliberately killing or wounding civilians or committing other grave human rights abuses. No matter, the U.S.-to-Israel weapons pipeline has kept right on flowing, completely unchecked. A cornucopia of military funds and hardware for Israel in the early months of the war came from just two nations: 69% from the United States and 30% from Germany.

This country’s laws and regulations prohibit aid to military forces deliberately killing or wounding civilians or committing other grave human rights abuses.

Were it just about any other country than Israel committing such a genocide, Washington would have cut off arms shipments months ago. But U.S. leaders have long carved out gaping exceptions for Israel. Those policies have contributed mightily to the lethality of the onslaught, which has so far killed at least 52,000 Palestinians, 46,000 of whom are believed to have been civilians. And of those civilian dead, five of every six are also believed to have been women or children. Israeli air strikes and other kinds of bombardment have also destroyed or severely damaged almost half a million housing units, more than 500 schools, just about every hospital in Gaza, and large parts of that region’s food and water systems — all with dire consequences for health and life.

Bombs Leave Their Calling Cards

From October 2023 through October 2024, reports Brett Murphy at ProPublica, 50,000 tons (yes, tons!) of U.S. war matériel were shipped to Israel. A partial list of the munitions included in those shipments has been compiled by the Costs of War Project. The list (which, the project stresses, is far from complete) includes 2,600 250-pound bombs, 8,700 500-pound bombs, and a trove of 16,000 behemoths, each weighing in at 2,000 pounds. In January 2024, Washington also added to Israel’s inventory of U.S.-made F-15 and F-35 fighter jets. Naturally, we taxpayers footed the bill.

As Abigail Hauslohner and Michael Birnbaum of the Washington Post noted in late October, “The pace and volume of weaponry have meant that U.S. munitions make up a substantial portion of Israel’s arsenal, with an American-made fleet of warplanes to deliver the heaviest bombs to their targets.” When confronted with solid evidence that Israel has been using U.S. military aid to commit genocide, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters, “We do not have enough information to reach definitive conclusions about particular incidents or to make legal determinations.”

Really? How much information would be enough then? Isn’t it sufficient to see Israeli forces repeatedly target clinics, homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools with massive, precision-guided bombs? Isn’t it enough when the IDF targets the very “safe zones” in which they have commanded civilians to take shelter, or when they repeatedly bomb and strafe places where people have gathered around aid trucks to try to obtain some small portion of the trickle of food that the Israeli government led by Netanyahu has decided to allow into Gaza?

If the U.S. State Department’s analysts really were having trouble making “definitive conclusions about particular incidents,” then Stephan Semler was ready to lend a hand with a report at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft entitled “20 Times Israel Used U.S. Arms in Likely War Crimes.” Worse yet, his list, he points out, represents only “a small fraction of potential war crimes committed with U.S.-provided weapons,” and all 20 of the attacks he focuses on occurred at locations where no armed resistance forces seemed to be present. Here are a few incidents from the list:

When warplanes bombed a busy market in northern Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp, killing 69 people in October 2023, U.N. investigators determined that U.S.-made 2,000-pound GBU-31 air-dropped munitions had been used. A couple of weeks later, the U.N. found that “several” GBU-31s were responsible for flattening a built-up area of more than 60,000 square feet within Gaza City, killing 91 people, 39 of them children. A weapon dropped on a residential building last January, killing 18 (including 10 children), left behind a fragment identifying it as a 250-pound Boeing GBU-39. An airstrike on a tent camp for displaced people in Rafah in May, killing 46 people, left behind a GBU-39 tailfin made in Colorado. The next month, a bomb-navigating device manufactured by Honeywell was found in the rubble of a U.N.-run school where 40 people, including 23 women and children, had been killed. In July, more than 90 people were slaughtered in a bombing of the Al-Mawasi refugee camp, an Israeli army-designated “safe zone” near the southwest corner of Gaza. A tailfin found on the scene came from a U.S.-built JDAM guidance system that’s commonly used on 1,000- or 2,000-pound bombs. Also in July, fragments of the motor and guidance system of a Lockheed-Martin Hellfire missile fired from a U.S.-made Apache helicopter were found in the remains of a U.N.-run school where refugees were sheltering. Twenty-two had been killed in the attack.

“Everyone Knew the Rules Were Different for Israel”

In December, a group of Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the State Department of violating a 1997 act of Congress that prohibits arms transfers to any government that commits gross human rights violations.

As the Guardian reported, a large number of countries “have privately been sanctioned and faced consequences for committing human rights violations” under the act, which is known as the “Leahy law” after its original sponsor, former Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. But since 2020, a special committee, the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum (ILVF), has decided whether payments or shipments destined for Israel should be permitted. According to the Guardian, Israel has “benefited from extraordinary policies inside the ILVF,” under which arms transfers get a green light no matter how egregiously Israeli occupation forces may have violated human rights. In the words of a former official, “Nobody said it, but everyone knew the rules were different for Israel.”

According to the Post‘s Abigail Hauslohner and Michael Birnbaum, the process of determining whether Israel is using U.S.-supplied weapons to commit war crimes “has become functionally irrelevant, with more senior leaders at the State Department broadly dismissive of non-Israeli sources and unwilling to sign off on action plans” for disallowing aid. A midlevel department official, once stationed in Jerusalem, told Post reporters that senior officials “often dismissed the credibility of Palestinian sources, eyewitness accounts, nongovernmental organizations… and even the United Nations.” So, the arms have continued flowing, with no letup in sight.

In January 2024, Jack Lew, the Biden administration’s ambassador to Israel, sent a cable to top State Department officials urging that they approve the IDF’s request for thousands of GBU-39 bombs. Lew noted that those weapons were more precise and had a smaller blast radius than the 2,000-pound “dumb bombs” Israel had been dropping in the war’s early months. Furthermore, he claimed, their air force had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding civilian deaths when using the GBU-39.

That was, unfortunately, pure eyewash. At the time of the cable, Amnesty International had already shown that the Israeli Defense Forces were killing civilians with GBU-39s. The State Department nevertheless accepted Lew’s claims and approved the sale, paving the way for even more missiles and bombs to rain down on Palestinians. In reporting on the Lew cable, ProPublica‘s Brett Murphy wrote, “While the U.S. hoped that the smaller bombs would prevent unnecessary deaths, experts in the laws of war say the size of the bomb doesn’t matter if it kills more civilians than the military target justifies.” That principle implies that when there is no military target, an attack causing even one civilian casualty should be charged as a war crime.

During 2024, with its unrelenting bombardment of Gaza and then Lebanon, too, Israel chewed rapidly through its munition stocks. The Biden administration came to the rescue in late November by approving $680 million in additional munitions deliveries to Israel — and that was just the appetizer. This month, ignoring Israel’s 15 months of brutal attacks on Gaza’s population, the administration notified Congress of plans to provide $8 billion worth of additional arms, including Hellfire missiles, long-range 155-millimeter artillery shells, 500-pound bombs, and much more.

Big Death Tolls Come in Small Packages

International bodies have accused Israel of using not only bombardment but also direct starvation as a weapon, which would qualify as yet another kind of war crime. In early 2024, responding to pressure from advocacy groups, Joe Biden signed a national security memo designated NSM-20. It required the State Department to halt the provision of armaments to any country arbitrarily restricting the delivery of food, medical supplies, or other humanitarian aid to the civilian population of an area where that country is using those armaments. But the memo has made virtually no difference.

In April, the two top federal authorities on humanitarian aid — the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department’s refugee bureau — submitted reports showing that Israel had indeed deliberately blocked food and medical shipments into Gaza. Under NSM-20, such actions should have triggered a cutoff of arms shipments to the offending country. But when the reports touched off a surge of outrage among the department’s rank and file and demands for an arms embargo, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top brass steamrolled all objections and approved continued shipments, according to Brett Murphy of ProPublica.

Another dimension of Israel’s war-by-starvation has been illustrated and quantified in a spatial analysis published by the British-based group Forensic Architecture. See, for example, the maps and text on pages 252–258 of their report, which reveal in stark detail the extent to which Israeli forces have ravaged agricultural lands in Gaza. Alongside bombing, shelling, and tank traffic, bulldozers have played an outsized role in the near-obliteration of that area’s food production capacity. The model D-9 bulldozers that are used to demolish Gaza’s buildings and lay waste to her farmland are manufactured by Caterpillar, whose global headquarters is in Texas.

In the early months of the war, Biden administration officials also took advantage of federal law, which doesn’t require that military aid shipments whose dollar value falls below certain limits be reported. They simply ordered that the huge quantities of arms then destined for Israel be split up into ever smaller cargoes. And so it came to pass that, during the first five months of the war, the Biden administration delivered more than 100 loads of arms. In other words, on average during that period, an American vessel laden with “precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid” was being unloaded at an Israeli dock once every 36 hours.

Israeli pilots have used U.S.-built fighter jets for the lion’s share of their airstrikes on Gaza and, by last summer, even more aircraft were needed to sustain such levels of bombing. Of course, jets are too big and expensive to be provided covertly, so, in August, Secretary of State Blinken publicly approved the transfer of nearly $20 billion worth of F-15 jets and other equipment to the IDF. The aircraft account for most of that sum, but the deal also includes hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ground vehicles and tank and mortar ammunition.

In September, Bernie Sanders, who served in Congress alongside Patrick Leahy from 2007 until the latter’s retirement in 2023, further enhanced the good reputation of Vermont senators by introducing three resolutions that would have blocked the State Department’s $20 billion Israel aid package. But when the measures came up for a vote in November, all Republicans, along with two-thirds of Sanders’s fellow Democrats, joined forces to vote them down. So, as always, Israel will continue to get its jets, tanks, and ammo.

With scant political opposition, the new Republican-controlled Congress and Trump White House will undoubtedly only double down on material support for Israel’s war crimes. And they are already threatening people who demonstrate publicly in support of an arms embargo with investigation, prosecution, deportation, or other kinds of attacks. Citing those and other threats, Ben Samuels of Haaretz anticipates that Trump’s promise “to crack down on pro-Palestinian sentiment in America will be a defining factor of his administration’s early days” and that “the fight against the pro-Palestinian movement might be one of the only things that has a clear path across the government” — that is, the suppression could be bipartisan. For the people of Gaza and their American supporters, 2025 could turn out to be even more horrifying than the ghastly year just passed.

On January 14 at 9:30 am, the Fox News commentator and Army National Guard Major Pete Hegseth is scheduled to be questioned by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in a confirmation hearing on President-elect Donald Trump's nomination for him to be Secretary of Defense.

I, along with many other women and men military veterans, will be at the hearing to strongly protest Hegseth's nomination and demand that the committee refuse to send the nomination forward for a vote of the entire Senate.

I am an unlikely protester. I served 29 years in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves. I retired as a colonel. I was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and was on the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2001. I resigned from the U.S. government in March 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq.

Sexual Assault Allegations

I will protest lackluster Army National Guard Major Pete Hegseth's nomination on several points, but my primary concern is his physical and psychological violence toward women.

I am 78 years old. I joined the Army in 1967 when less than 1% of U.S. military forces were women. Now, 17.5% of U.S. military forces are women.

Sexual assault in the military is rampant, and Hegseth has a history of sexual violence toward women. He secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017.

Even Hegseth's mother, Penelope Hegseth, in 2018, during Hegseth's divorce proceedings from his second wife, strongly criticized his treatment of women. In an email obtained by The New York Times, Hegseth's mother wrote:

As a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out... You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth. [...] It's time for a someone (I wish it was a strong man) to stand up to your abusive behavior and call it out, especially against women. [...] On behalf of all the women (and I know it's many) you have abused in some way, I say... get some help and take an honest look at yourself.

The Associated Press reported that "Tim Palatore, Hegseth's attorney, has revealed that the woman who made the allegations was paid an undisclosed sum in 2023 as part of a confidential settlement to head off the threat of what he described as a baseless lawsuit."

A 22-page police report was released in response to a public records request and offers the first detailed account of what the woman alleged to have transpired—one that is at odds with Hegseth's version of events. The report cited police interviews with the alleged victim, a nurse who treated her, a hotel staffer, another woman at the event, and Hegseth.

Considering the horrific history of sexual assault in the military, Hegseth's payoff to someone who has accused him of sexual assault must disqualify Hegseth from confirmation as Secretary of Defense.

With sexual assault in the military a continuing problem for women…and for men, there is no way that a person who has been involved in even allegations of sexual assault should be Secretary of Defense… or president, for that matter, but that's another issue for evangelical Christians, Catholics, and other religious conservatives who voted for Trump to explain to their daughters.

The number of sexual assaults in the U.S. military is likely two to four times higher than government estimates, according to a study from Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute. "During and beyond the 20 years of the post-9/11 wars, independent data suggest that actual sexual assault prevalence is two to four times higher than DOD estimations—75,569 cases in 2021 and 73,695 cases in 2023," the authors wrote in the report, which was released August 14, 2024.

The Costs of War Project report comes a year after a Pentagon report found that reports of sexual assault at the country's three military academies increased by over 18% between 2021 and 2022, setting a new record.

A 2016 Department of Veterans Affairs study of over 20,000 post-9/11 veterans and service members found that 41.5% of women and 4% of men experienced some form of sexual trauma while serving. One in three women and 1 in 50 men have reported military sexual trauma during VA healthcare screenings.

And finally, if the previous concern about on sexual assault allegations isn't enough to torpedo Hegseth's nomination, his statements on women's role in the military should sink his nomination.

Hegseth's Negative View of the Role of Women in the Military

In a podcast, Hegseth said the military "should not have women in combat roles" and that "men in those positions are more capable." In another podcast he said that female soldiers "shouldn't be in my infantry battalion."

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a former Army National Guard member and a Purple Heart recipient, said Hegseth was "dangerous, plain and simple." Duckworth was one of the first women in the Army to fly combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom. She lost both of her legs and partial use of her right arm in 2004 after a rocket-propelled grenade struck her helicopter. "Where do you think I lost my legs? In a bar fight? I'm pretty sure I was in combat when that happened," she told CNN. "It just shows how out of touch he is with the nature of modern warfare if he thinks that we can keep women behind some sort of imaginary line, which is not the way warfare is today."

Additionally, Sen. Duckworth added: "It's frankly an insult and really troubling that Mr. Trump would nominate someone who has admitted that he's paid off a victim who has claimed rape allegations against him... This is not the kind of person you want to lead the Department of Defense."

If sexual assault issues and his negative view of women's role in the military do not convince the Senate's Armed Services Committee that Hegseth's nomination should not go forward, then the mismanagement of funds of tiny organizations compared to the massive Department of Defense budget should take him out of consideration for the extraordinary position of Secretary of Defense.

Mismanagement of Tiny Organizations Compared to the Massive Department of Defense

In the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct while in the organizations, Hegseth was forced to resign from the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran, Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America.

According to CBS, "Hegseth received a six-figure severance payment and signed a non-disclosure agreement when he exited the organization Concerned Veterans of America" in 2016. "The payment came amid allegations of financial mismanagement, repeated incidents of intoxication and sexual impropriety, as well as dissension among its leaders over Hegseth's foreign policy views," CBS reported.

Prior to joining Concerned Veterans for America, Hegseth faced allegations of financial mismanagement from Vets for Freedom (VFF), where he worked from 2007 to 2010.

"Donors were concerned their money was being wasted and arranged for VFF to be merged with another organization, Military Families United, which took over most of its management," CBS reported further. "Revenue at VFF dwindled to $268,000 by 2010 and by 2011, the organization's revenue was listed as $22,000. Hegseth joined Concerned Veterans for America the following year."

Margaret Hoover, host of the PBS program "Firing Line" and a former adviser to Vets for Freedom, said in an interview on CNN that Hegseth had managed the organization "very poorly." Hoover expressed doubt about his ability to run the sprawling Defense Department when he had struggled with a staff of less than 10 people, and a budget of under $10 million.

This week, Pete Hegseth will face questions from Congress as President-elect Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense. If he is confirmed, he would become the civilian authority over the U.S. military, second only to the president. The job of secretary of defense is as difficult as it is critical. Pete Hegseth, a television presenter and author who formerly served in the National Guard, does not have the qualifications to perform this role. Worse, his values and beliefs make him a downright dangerous candidate.

Requirements of the Job

The Department of Defense is the largest federal agency, with a budget of more than $850 billion, almost 900,000 civilian employees, and oversight of 2.5 million service members. Pete Hegseth is not qualified to manage this sprawling bureaucracy—he has not served in a senior role in the military, served in the government, made national security policy, nor led any large organization, in stark contrast to the last 10 confirmed secretaries, who all had either decades of senior military service, ran large organizations, or served in governmental or policymaking roles. Hegseth headed two small nonprofit veterans advocacy organizations, though was reportedly removed from those positions due to financial mismanagement and personal and sexual misconduct.

The secretary of defense also shapes strategic decisions, advises the president on sensitive issues of national security, and engages with counterpart defense ministers in both allied and adversarial countries. The next secretary will have to perform the job during a challenging time, when existing arms control structures are collapsing, ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are threatening to pull more countries into these conflicts, and tensions in East Asia are rising. In the event of a crisis, especially a worst-case scenario involving nuclear weapons, the secretary of defense may be one of the only people the president consults. That’s why it’s extremely important the job be filled by someone with experience, a steady hand, and a proven record of seeking the best information before making decisions. In each case, Pete Hegseth falls short.

The Secretary of Defense’s Role in U.S. Nuclear Weapons

In terms of the most consequential decision anyone could face—and with little time to make it—there is no scenario worse than if U.S. early warning systems detected an incoming nuclear attack. The president would only have minutes to assess whether the warning was false or real and whether to retaliate with U.S. ICBMs. An emergency conference would be convened for the president with the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other military leaders. While the secretary of defense is not officially in the nuclear chain of command—the president has the authority to use nuclear weapons without the agreement of anyone else—the president would look to the secretary for advice.

Through his writing, candidacy for public office, and time as a Fox News contributor, we know some things about Hegseth’s personal views, and many of them are dangerous. For example, he has expressed hostility and contempt for international humanitarian law, blaming rules that protect human life for hindering the operations of the U.S. military. Hegseth has argued repeatedly that U.S. forces should ignore international humanitarian laws governing the conduct of war. The United States has a legal and moral obligation to follow these rules, and has devoted significant resources to operationalizing that commitment. International law not only protects civilians and soldiers in war, but helps recruit allies and undergirds support at home.

Hegseth’s disregard for international humanitarian law and the rules of armed conflict is consistent with his alarmingly cavalier attitude towards the use of nuclear weapons. In his book The War on Warriors, discussing the United States’ use of nuclear weapons in World War II, Hegseth writes, “They won. Who cares.” Meanwhile, the few remaining Japanese survivors of nuclear weapons are trying desperately to get the world to understand the horror of nuclear weapons and eliminate them before they can be used again.

Nuclear risks are rising globally. Arms control is on life support. The military is pursuing an unnecessary trillion-dollar project to replace every weapon in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Given serious concerns about his qualifications, dangerous beliefs and values, and lack of meaningful track record, Hegseth is a poor choice for the consequential position of secretary of defense. The members of the Senate Armed Services Committee should ask hard questions in this week’s hearing. Given the enormity of the challenges facing the next secretary, the United States deserves someone with the experience, expertise, and judgment to deal with them wisely.