Once again, the Democratic Party is in crisis.

Activists both inside and outside the party have a big question to answer: Do insiders pivot to the center or the left? Do outsiders join the party or abandon it?

In both cases, the choice should be obvious: embrace the progressive economic agenda (move left) and enter the party en masse.

This moment of crisis is an opportunity to get the party on track, to turn it into what people want and need. Indeed, the table is set for us to transform American politics and save our democracy.

Beginning with the 2016 election, the American political system became defined by three competing blocks squeezed into a two-party system:

1. On the right, the Trumpian reactionaries,

2. In the middle, the neoliberal status quo, running from the Clinton-wing of the Democratic Party through the Romney-wing of the GOP

3. On the left, the progressives, defined by Sen. Bernie Sanders' insurgent presidential campaigns.

This new tripartite competition represented a sharp break from the neoliberal consensus that had defined both parties from 1992 through 2015. The abrupt shift in 2016 was the result of widespread dissatisfaction with a contemporary economic order defined by massive wealth inequality and, for the vast majority of the population, increasingly limited horizons, a life of overwork combined with non-stop precarity.

Trump will fail to provide the epoch-defining, shared economic prosperity he has promised the public. Rather, economic outcomes will be familiar, only more so: the few winners will win bigger, while the masses will continue to struggle just to tread water.

Now, for the second time in eight years, Trump and his minions will have power in Washington. And for the second time, in all likelihood, they will fail to alter how the economy performs for the average household.

The reasons for this are simple. To date, in a modern industrialized/technological society like ours, there is only one set of economic strategies that has been proven to constrain wealth disparity and distribute greater benefits to the majority of the population. This successful model was pioneered by FDR during the New Deal era. Then, after World War II, it was pursued in all the other prosperous democracies around the world. Broadly speaking, this is the program re-introduced to the American public by Bernie Sanders and the progressives, albeit updated for the 21st century.

The economic crises of the 1970s, created an opportunity for President Ronald Reagan to take American economic policy in a new direction in the 1980s, with less direct government intervention and more reliance on markets to determine how society made and spent its wealth. With President Clinton in the 1990s, the Democratic Party effectively dropped its opposition to the core tenets of Reaganomics, embracing what came to be known as neoliberalism. Then, in 2008, the entire global neoliberal financial system essentially imploded—and, while political leaders and economic elites tried to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, the public has remained recalcitrant, viewing the whole system as rigged for the already wealthy and their sycophants—which sounds a lot like something Donald Trump might say. But do his policies really break with a system that benefits rich people like him?

Trump's program, while moving away from neoliberal orthodoxy in a few ways (trade policy, immigration), keeps the basic architecture intact, and doubles down on some core neoliberal policies: tax cuts for the wealthy, accelerated deregulation, and the defunding of state programs. This is why Trump will fail to provide the epoch-defining, shared economic prosperity he has promised the public. Rather, economic outcomes will be familiar, only more so: the few winners will win bigger, while the masses will continue to struggle just to tread water.

However, Trump is intent on fulfilling other campaign promises that will transform American society. His cabinet nominees show that he is serious about establishing an authoritarian state apparatus intolerant of dissent.

This is why the current fight for the soul of the Democratic Party is so essential.

If the Moderates triumph and Democrats remain the party of the status quo, clinging to a zombie ideology that cannot deliver what Americans want and expect from life—it will not be able to vanquish reactionary populism. The constitutional republic will, at best, remain in peril.

The only choice for the Democratic Party if it hopes to succeed is to reject the political establishment, and embrace progressive economic principles, such as those listed in PDA’s 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights. Registered Democrats overwhelmingly support each item of this ambitious progressive agenda. Indeed, the most coveted of all demographics, Young Americans enthusiastically embrace this program by similar margins.

So, this should be straightforward. Rank-and-file Democrats want a progressive party. Unfortunately, the defining feature of American politics in the neoliberal era is that money matters more than people. The heretofore dominant wing of the Democratic Party, aka the Party ''establishment,'' is first-and foremost a money-raising behemoth.

This is why progressives must bring their A game. Many party loyalists embrace centrist policies out of a misguided notion of pragmatism. Our goal is not to chase these Democrats away, but to persuade them to support something more ambitious and inspiring. We have a very compelling case to make on all fronts. We can win them over.

We must reject the influence of big money, demand its removal from political campaigns, and limit its role in lobbying to a level commensurate with what an average household, or small business, can afford annually.

Similarly, we have to welcome outsiders into the party, assuring them that a progressive Democratic Party will be all-inclusive and will listen to its members.

At the same time, we must be unwavering in our commitments. Perhaps most significantly, we must reject the influence of big money, demand its removal from political campaigns, and limit its role in lobbying to a level commensurate with what an average household, or small business, can afford annually.

Yet, we have to be humble about the task ahead. The capitalism of the 2020s is very different from that of the 1930's—and transforming the economy on the order of FDR or Reagan requires extended political success, as well as buy-in from people and sectors across the society.

But we also shouldn’t sell ourselves short. We are promising an unrivaled reward for everyone who joins with us. The opportunity to make history, to be a part of something bigger than ourselves; to establish the world’s first multi-racial democracy in the most diverse country in human history, a society that will stand apart in a globalized world, as the rejoinder to ethno-nationalism and fascism, informed by the collective wisdom of all the world’s cultures; a land of unprecedented wealth, well-distributed among its citizens, and of limitless opportunity; home to the world’s leading universities, with unparalleled research capacity; a strong country at peace with the world, in harmony with the planet; a society of equals; a democracy; an America as good as its promise.

The first step to getting there is for one of the two dominant political parties to embrace the progressive economic policy program, which has a proven track-record and can deliver the prosperous middle-class society that Americans crave.

In a forthcoming article, I will explain why mass participation and direct engagement with the Democratic Party is essential to the success of this program and the maintenance of American democracy.

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

Over the past three years, a collective of volunteer researchers, lawyers, and commentators created The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, dedicated to holding accountable four weapon manufacturing corporations based in the U.S. Their tribunal amassed copious evidence to prove that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), and General Atomics (a company which manufactures weaponized drones) are guilty of committing war crimes. On January 15, 2025, as the world marks the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a press conference will announce the tribunal's verdicts and release the report of 10 international jurors who have weighed the evidence submitted to them.

Of necessity, the evidence was culled from examining a limited range of devastatingly criminal U.S. "forever wars," of brutal and needless wars of choice. The tribunal focused on specific U.S. war crimes and crimes against humanity in the invasions, occupations, and aerial assaults that followed the "9/11" attacks in 2001.

What if we could enlarge the tribunal, bringing before it war crimes occurring right now, the U.S.-assisted massacres we watch in real time on our phone and computer screens?

Certainly, one witness we would beg to appear for testimony would be Dr. Husam Abu Safiya, who was the director of Gaza's Kamal Adwan Hospital when such a place existed. The tribunal would wish to amplify his testimony on the harrowing weeks of siege during which Israel subjected his hospital to artillery and aerial bombardment. They would help to record his story of witnessing assassinations targeting medical staff, field executions of people clutching white flags in an attempt to surrender, the hospital's forced evacuation with at-gunpoint humiliation stripping of women and girls. The initial attacks disabled the hospital's operational capacities by targeting power generators and oxygen production equipment, but now an iconic photo shows Dr. Abu Safiya walking toward an Israeli tank through collapsed buildings and rubble. The tribunal would like to interview him, but he is being held without charge by Israel's military.

Our tribunal would surely turn to three of the world's most crucial international human rights groups for testimony.

On December 5, 2024, Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Its research documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, "Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously, and with total impunity."

On December 19, 2024 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) stated that "repeated Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians over the last 14 months, the dismantling of the healthcare system and other essential infrastructure, the suffocating siege, and the systematic denial of humanitarian assistance are destroying the conditions of life in Gaza." The report says there are "clear signs of ethnic cleansing" by Israel as it wages war in Gaza.

Also issued on December 19, 2024 was a report from Human Rights Watch, entitled "Extermination and Acts of Genocide," stating that Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza by denying them clean water, which it says legally amounts to acts of genocide and extermination.

Corroborating the testimony of healthcare workers and human rights advocates in Gaza would be Pope Francis' January 9, 2025 message to international diplomats. Pope Francis denounced Israel's ongoing war in Gaza, calling the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian enclave "very serious and shameful." Pope Francis referenced the deaths of children who froze to death because of Israel's destruction of infrastructure: "We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians. We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a country's energy network has been hit."

Recommendations made by jurors in the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal call for major weapon makers to pay reparations for suffering caused. They echo the words of Pope Francis, whose message to the assemblage of diplomats made this appeal:

With the money spent on weapons and other military expenditures, let us establish a global fund that can finally put an end to hunger and favor development in the most impoverished countries, so that their citizens will not resort to violent or illusory solutions, or have to leave their countries in order to seek a more dignified life.

Considering such testimony from so many diverse sources, one might expect that U.S. lawmakers would reevaluate their murderous, unwavering support of Israel. Instead, on January 9, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to sanction the International Criminal Court in protest of its arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister.

Who are the criminals? U.S. news coverage of five former or current presidents gathered for the funeral of President Jimmy Carter never hinted that hideous wars of choice along with massive increases in weapon sales had marked the administration of each of the five. There was no mention of President Joe Biden's order to send $8 billion dollars of weapons to Gaza. This gathering of U.S. presidents is referred to as "The World's Most Exclusive Club." Exclusive indeed. What other club of so few has caused so much suffering to so many?

On April 7, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famously insightful, prophetic speech about another illegal U.S. war of choice—"Beyond Viet Nam: A Time to Break the Silence"—in which Dr. King said, "Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful resolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments."

Dr. King's verdict, in this speech, on the momentous first anniversary of which he was taken from us, was that "this business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

The four defendants before our tribunal certainly did their part to pressure these five other criminals toward their varied crimes, but we all have a choice to hold ourselves accountable in the face of Dr. King's warning that we are approaching spiritual death. One step toward reconciling with wisdom, justice, and love would be to demand the release of Dr. Husam Abu Safiya from an Israeli prison so that we could humbly learn from him about war crimes and reparations.

President-elect Trump said on January 9th that he is planning a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine. He said “Putin wants to meet,” because “we have to get that war over with.” So what are the chances that a new administration in Washington can break the deadlock and finally bring peace to Ukraine?

During both of his election campaigns, Trump said he wanted to end the wars the U.S. was involved in. But in his first term, Trump himself exacerbated all the major crises he is now confronting. He escalated Obama’s military “pivot to Asia” against China, disregarded Obama’s fears that sending “lethal” aid to Ukraine would lead to war with Russia, withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran, and encouraged Netanyahu’s ambitions to land-grab and massacre his way to a mythical “Greater Israel.”

However, of all these crises, the one that Trump keeps insisting he really wants to resolve is the war in Ukraine, which Russia launched and the U.S. and NATO then chose to prolong, leading to hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian casualties. The Western powers have until now been determined to fight this war of attrition to the last Ukrainian, in the vain hope that they can somehow eventually defeat and weaken Russia without triggering a nuclear war.

Trump rightly blames Biden for blocking the peace agreement negotiated between Russia and Ukraine in March and April 2022, and for the three more years of war that have resulted from that deadly and irresponsible decision.

Neutrality would give Ukraine a chance to transform itself from a New Cold War disaster zone, where greedy foreign oligarchs gobble up its natural resources on the cheap, into a bridge connecting east and west, whose people can reap the benefits of all kinds of commercial, social and cultural relations with all their neighbors.

While Russia should be condemned for its invasion, Trump and his three predecessors all helped to set the stage for war in Ukraine: Clinton launched NATO’s expansion into eastern Europe, against the advice of leading American diplomats; Bush promised Ukraine it could join NATO, ignoring even more urgent diplomatic warnings; and Obama supported the 2014 coup that plunged Ukraine into civil war.

Trump himself began sending weapons to Ukraine to fight the self-declared “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, even though the Minsk II Accord’s OSCE-monitored ceasefire was largely holding and had greatly reduced the violence of the civil war from its peak in 2014 and 2015.

Trump’s injection of U.S. weapons was bound to reinflame the conflict and provoke Russia, especially as one of the first units trained on new U.S. weapons was the infamous Azov Regiment, which Congress cut off from U.S. arms and training in 2018 due to its central role as a hub for transnational neo-Nazi organizing.

So what will it take to negotiate a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine? The answer has been hidden in plain sight, obscured by the rote repetition of deceptive rhetoric from Ukrainian and Western officials, claiming that Russia has refused to negotiate or that, if not stopped in Ukraine, Russia will invade NATO countries, such as Poland or the Baltic states.

The agreement that had Ukrainian negotiators popping champagne corks when they returned from Turkey at the end of March 2022 was referred to by all sides as a “Neutrality Agreement,” and nothing has changed in the strategic picture to suggest that Ukrainian neutrality is any less central to peace today.

A neutral Ukraine means that it would not join NATO or participate in joint NATO military exercises, nor would it allow foreign military bases on its territory. This would satisfy Russia’s security interests, while Ukraine’s security would be guaranteed by other powerful nations, including NATO members.

The fact that Russia was ready to so quickly end the war on that basis is all the evidence an objective observer should need to recognize that Ukrainian neutrality was always Russia’s most critical war aim. And the celebrations of the Ukrainian negotiators on their return from Turkey confirm that the Ukrainians willingly accepted Ukrainian neutrality as the basis for a peace agreement. "Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it,” Zelensky declared in March 2022.

Neutrality would give Ukraine a chance to transform itself from a New Cold War disaster zone, where greedy foreign oligarchs gobble up its natural resources on the cheap, into a bridge connecting east and west, whose people can reap the benefits of all kinds of commercial, social and cultural relations with all their neighbors.

While Russia should be condemned for its invasion, Trump and his three predecessors all helped to set the stage for war in Ukraine

Biden justified endlessly prolonging the war by stressing territorial questions and insisting that Ukraine must recover all the territory it has lost since the 2014 coup. By contrast, Russia has generally prioritized the destruction of enemy forces and NATO weapons over occupying more territory.

As Russia inexorably occupies the remainder of Donetsk oblast (province) after three years of war, it has still not moved to occupy Kramatorsk or Sloviansk, the large twin cities in the north of that oblast where 250,000 people live. They were among the first cities to rise up against the post-coup government in 2014, and were besieged and recaptured by Ukrainian government forces in the first major battle of the civil war in July 2014.

Neither has Russia pushed further westward into the neighboring oblasts of Kharkiv or Dnipropetrovsk. Nor has it launched a much-predicted offensive to occupy Odesa in the south-west, despite its strategic location on the Black Sea, its history as a Russian city with a Russian-speaking population, the infamous massacre of 42 anti-coup protesters there by a mob led by Right Sector in May 2014, and its current role as a hotbed of draft resistance in Ukraine.

If Russia’s goal was to annex as much of Ukraine as possible, or to use it as a stepping-stone to invade Poland or other European countries, as Western politicians have regularly claimed, Ukraine’s largest cities would have been prime targets.

But it has done the opposite. It even withdrew from Kherson in November 2022, after occupying it for eight months. NATO leaders had previously decided that the fall of Kherson to Ukrainian government forces would be the chance they were waiting for to reopen peace negotiations from a position of strength, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley argued they should “seize the moment” to do so. Instead, President Biden put the kibosh on yet another chance for peace.

When Congress approved another $60 billion for weapons shipments to Ukraine in April 2024, Senator and now Vice President-elect J.D. Vance voted against the bill. Vance explained his vote in an op-ed in the New York Times, arguing that the war was not winnable and that Biden should start talking to Putin.

In explaining why Ukraine could not win, Vance relied heavily on testimony by NATO’s top military commander, U.S. General Christopher Cavoli, to the House Armed Services Committee. Vance wrote that even the most optimistic projections of the impact of the weapons bill could not make up for the massive imbalance between Russian and Ukrainian armaments and forces. Cavoli told the committee that Russia already outgunned Ukraine by 5-to-1 in artillery shells, and that a European push to produce a million shells in the past year had yielded only 600,000.

While Ukraine was desperate for more Patriot missiles to intercept 4,000 Russian missile and drone strikes per month, the U.S. could only provide 650 in the next year, even with the additional funds, due to the massive amount of weapons being shipped to Israel or already promised to Taiwan.

Both Russia and Ukraine have covered up their casualties with propaganda, underestimating their own casualties and exaggerating their enemies’, to mislead their own people, their allies and their enemies alike. General Cavoli testified under oath that over 315,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and wounded. But he went on to say that, by calling up reserves and conscripting new troops, Russia had not only made up those losses but increased its overall troop strength by 15%, and was well on the way to building a 1.5 million-strong army.

Ukraine, on the other hand, has a recruitment crisis, due to an underlying demographic shortage of young men caused by a very low birth-rate in the 1990s, when living standards and life expectancy plummeted under the impact of Western-backed economic shock treatment. This has now been severely compounded by the impacts of the war.

Ella Libanova, a demographer at Ukraine’s National Academy of Science, estimated to Reuters in July 2023 that, with so many people leaving the country and building new lives in other countries as the war drags on, the total population in government-held areas might already have fallen as low as 28 million, from a total population of 45 million ten years ago. It must surely be even lower now.

Based on huge imbalances in artillery shells and other weapons, Ukrainian and U.S. claims that Ukraine has suffered much lower casualties than Russia are frankly unbelievable, and some analysts believe Ukrainian casualties have been much higher than Russia’s. The declining morale of its troops, increased draft resistance, desertion, and emigration from Ukraine have all combined to shrink the available pool of new conscripts.

Vance concluded, “Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.”

In his press conference on January 3rd, President-elect Trump framed the need for peace in Ukraine as a question of basic humanity. “I don’t think it’s appropriate that I meet [Putin] until after the 20th, which I hate because every day people are being—many, many young people are being killed, soldiers,” Trump said.

More and more Ukrainians agree. While opinion polls soon after Russia’s invasion showed 72% wanting to fight until victory, that is now down to 38%. Most Ukrainians want quick negotiations and are open to making territorial concessions as part of a peace deal.

In recent interviews, President Zelensky has been softening his position, suggesting that Ukraine is willing to cede territory to Russia to end the war as long as the rest of the country is protected by a “NATO umbrella.” But NATO membership for Ukraine has always been totally unacceptable to the Russians, and so the 2022 neutrality agreement instead provided for security guarantees by which other countries, including individual NATO members, would guarantee Ukraine’s security.

Trump’s peace plan is rumored to entail freezing the current geographical positions and shelving Ukraine’s accession to NATO for 20 years. But continuing to dangle NATO membership in front of Ukraine, as the U.S. has bullied NATO into doing since 2008, is a root cause of this conflict, not a solution. Neutrality, on the other hand, resolves the root causes of the conflict for all the countries involved, and therefore provides a stable and sustainable solution.

There are many things we both disagree with Donald Trump about. But the need for peace in Ukraine is one thing we agree on. We hope Trump understands that Ukrainian neutrality is the key to peace and the best hope for the future of Ukraine, Russia, the United States and Europe, and, in fact, for the survival of human civilization.

Rather than be followed by the expressions of sympathy and shock one might usually expect, the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York was also greeted with ridicule and even approval by a substantial portion of the public. Worried that copycat killers might take that response as a cue to replicate the alleged actions of accused shooter Luigi Mangione, CEOs and their companies are reconsidering their security measures.

With the Inauguration days away, how does this inform the security landscape for that high-profile event? Are CEOs paranoid or are they really at increased risk now? What can they and ordinary people worried about their personal security do to make themselves safer?

Ted Rall and Manila Chan ask these questions to security expert Mark Ledlow, a former US Marine and founder of Ledlow Security.

The post TMI Show Ep 55: “CEOs in the Crosshairs” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 55: “CEOs in the Crosshairs” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

This past week, Washington D.C. was witness to a stark study in contrasts: The solemn dignity involved in the nation’s farewell to former President Jimmy Carter and the blustery antics accompanying former President Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House.

There couldn’t be any two men more different than Carter and Trump. And as if to make that point, one day’s newspaper featured headlines that virtually screamed across the front page at each other. One read “Celebrating a ‘servant of the people,’” with the subhead “As Carter arrived in Washington, many gather to honor his humility and decency.” On the other side, we read “Trump won’t rule out coercion to expand U.S. map,” with the subhead, “He eyes Panama Canal and Greenland.”

In the same week Americans were mourning the death of one former president who was praised for his service to others, his humility, honesty, and commitment to peace, democracy, and human rights, they were also awaiting the return of another former president who was threatening to use coercion to “take over” foreign countries and pardon hundreds of people convicted of the violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

There is another factor that unites these two former presidents: Despite their obvious differences, they reflect two distinct sides of the American reality.

The Panama Canal story alone tells the story of the differences between the two men and their approaches to governance. With Latin America in turmoil and many Panamanians growing restive with U.S. control of the Canal Zone that not only cut their country in half, but also negatively impacted their society in other ways, Carter realized that it was time to negotiate a deal that respected Panama’s sovereignty. Trump, on the other hand, wants to renege on the treaty, asserting that the canal is “ours,” claiming that “we lost thousands of lives” building it. In fact, it’s estimated that, while over 25,000 Panamanians perished digging the canal, very few Americans died.

Additional contrasts between the two men would include: one was humble, the other always boastful; one devoted his life to others, the other a narcissist; one said “I will never lie to you” (and fact-checkers were unable to identify a single one), while fact-checkers have identified 33,000 falsehoods told by the other in just four years; one was faithful to his wife for 77 years—let’s just say that the other was not; one attributed his successes to others, the other boastfully claims everything for himself; and one was born in a small southern town and after his term in office returned to that simple life until his final days, the other was born into wealth in New York City and has surrounded himself with the trappings of ostentatious excess.

While all of these differences between the two must be noted, there are some characteristics they share. First and foremost is the fact that both were elected president of the United States as insurgents and agents of change because, in their respective eras, both understood and responded to a felt need in the public’s mood. Carter was elected while the nation was still reeling from the double traumas of Vietnam and the Nixon resignation. He parlayed his simple rural style to establish himself as the antithesis of a typical politician. He was comfortable and steady, and that’s what voters were craving back then. For his part, Trump understood that many voters had been unsettled by social, economic, political, and cultural changes and were reeling from multiple traumas from 9/11 and the failed war in Iraq to the aftershocks of the economic collapse of 2008-9. Voters were wary of typical politicians who either didn’t understand or didn’t care about just how angry and upset they were. Carter promised honesty and an end to turbulence. Trump promised to shake things up at whatever the cost.

There is another factor that unites these two former presidents: Despite their obvious differences, they reflect two distinct sides of the American reality. We are a nation capable of doing great and good things. We are also a nation that has shown itself to be capable of doing evil. We have welcomed millions of refugees, provided humanitarian support to those suffering in the wake of catastrophic events, and have led efforts to support equality and human rights. At the same time, we recall that our nation was born with the original sins of slavery and genocide; continues to struggle with racism; still has a xenophobic streak that periodically rears its head; and has committed or aided and abetted war crimes in countries as far flung as Vietnam, Iraq, Cuba, and Palestine.

We can never deny either of these sides of our nation’s history and “personality,” because in a real sense both are who we have been. And more importantly, both can be who we are today and who we can become in the future. If we allow ourselves to forget that the capacity for evil is always residing under the surface, we become vulnerable to its allure. At the same time, if we forget that we have the capacity to do good and great things, then we deny our ability to make things better and lose hope in our possibility to make change.

The funeral of Jimmy Carter just days away from the inauguration of Donald Trump has presented us with a choice and a challenge. Which path will we take, and which America will we become?

Two billionaire publishers, the Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos and the LA Times Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked their editorial page editors from endorsing Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election (a Washington Post editorial cartoonist than quit when her cartoon depicting Jeff Bezos, Son-Shiong and other billionaires abasing themselves in front of Trump was killed). If you believe the Washington Post’s slogan that ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,’ their owner was the first to switch off the light.

Soon-Shiong also blocked an editorial asking the Senate to perform its constitutional duty to provide advice and consent on Trump’s cabinet picks. Next ABC News (owned by Disney) agreed to pay $15 million in a settlement of a Trump defamation lawsuit plus $1 million in attorney fees because George Stephanopoulos said on his Sunday show that Trump was found liable for the ‘rape’ of writer E. Jean Carroll. Actually, he was found guilty of ‘sexual abuse’ because a New York civil jury believed her claim that he forced his fingers into her vagina but was uncertain if he also used his penis. New York law states only penile penetration is considered rape. This was a case ABC could have easily pursued in court but made a political—really a business—decision not to because Disney has less courage than a mouse.

Trump is now suing the Des Moines Register and their pollster for a pre-election poll suggesting he would not do as well as he did in Iowa. And, while you probably shouldn’t be getting your news from Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has also announced the end of fact-checking on his Meta platforms in the U.S. which won him a compliment from president-elect Trump.

While billionaire 'tech bros’ like Elon Musk and Zuckerberg embrace Trump and Trumpism, working journalists are portrayed as part of an elite that he has defined as ‘enemies of the people’ mainly for exposing the machinations of those in power including the president-elect.

It seems likely that top-down self-censorship may preempt the expected legal attacks on critical coverage from the incoming administration that has been promised by Trump’s pick for FBI Director, Kash Patel and, of course, by Trump himself.

This is in large measure the result not simply of right-wing ascendency in national politics but of a long-term decline and corporate consolidation of American journalism. Also, helping to undermine the public’s ability to stay informed is the rise of the internet as a selective news source which generates revenue by reinforcing existing biases through algorithmic infrastructure that aims to keep viewers online longer.

While billionaire tech ‘bros’ like Elon Musk and Zuckerberg embrace Trump and Trumpism, working journalists are portrayed as part of an elite that he has defined as ‘enemies of the people’ mainly for exposing the machinations of those in power including the president-elect.

The proliferation of disinformation, misinformation, and incitement to hate on social media or through the use of AI fakes also raises questions about who’s left to mediate what passes for news and to sort facts from fabrication...

I’ve worked as a freelance journalist for half a century. According to a study by the job recruitment company Zippia there are close to 15,000 freelance reporters working in the U.S. whose demographics skew slightly more white and female, than the nation as a whole and who earn an average of $61,000 a year compared to full-time journalists who average $86,000. Freelancers make up a third of the 45,000 working journalists in the U.S. so figure your news is coming not from some media “elite,” that promote “fake news,” but working people like myself covering wars, politics, pandemics and the climate emergency.

Earlier in this century I got to train colleagues in Poland, Turkey, Tunisia and elsewhere on environmental reporting. I remember in Turkey going over some of the basics of investigative reporting including always keeping good notes and tapes stored and dated including by year as some stories become beats that can continue over a lifetime. Sergei Kiselyov, a Ukrainian colleague who’d covered the Chernobyl disaster, offered an addendum, “I’d just suggest you also keep your notes and files somewhere other than your home or office so that when the police come to look for them, they won’t be there.” This tip is worth keeping in mind over the next several years.

Most journalists of course are less likely to be jailed than to be laid off. Many of my friends and colleagues who worked in newspapers are now freelancers like myself, the newspaper industry being in a near terminal stage of collapse. This is largely due to loss of revenue to online advertising, corporate consolidation, and hedge fund predation where operating enterprises are bought up, wrung out (staff layoffs focused on older higher-paid reporters doing complex investigative work), and then sold off for parts (printing presses, data-bases, real-estate). This has resulted in massive job loss. Newsroom employment dropped 26 percent between 2008 and 2020 according to a study by the Pew Research Center and continues today. I know of one Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who agreed to a one-third pay cut rather than see a second wave of layoffs further hollow out their publication.

Most journalists of course are less likely to be jailed than to be laid off.

The loss of competitive newspapers has resulted in the absence of a lot of good reporting, particularly at the local and regional level where many papers continue to shut down each year. Since most local TV news stations depend on local newspapers for their hard news this has also had a cascading effect on the public’s ability to access reliable information about those with and in power and how they’re wielding it from zoning boards to local corporations and government agencies. Many people have turned instead to unreliable online social media including bloggers and influencers to get their information.

The proliferation of disinformation, misinformation, and incitement to hate on social media or through the use of AI fakes also raises questions about who’s left to mediate what passes for news and to sort facts from fabrication, particularly at a time when much of the public now agree with Donald Trump. An October 2024 Gallup poll found 69% of the public has either “no trust” or “not very much confidence” in the media. When I began working in 1974 over 70% of the public trusted the news media. And with some reason.

When I was covering the wars in Central America I asked my friend photo-journalist John Hoagland how he saw our role. “I don’t believe in objectivity because everyone has a point of view,” he said. “What I say is I’m not going to be a propagandist for anyone. If you do something right, I’m going to take your picture. If you do something wrong, I’ll take your picture also.” He was killed in crossfire a year later. Ironically the best recent movie on how reporters actually behave under fire and under stress is ‘Civil War’ that is set in a near-future America at war with itself.

With the “legacy” network news operations of ABC, CBS and NBC now under the control of Disney, Comcast, and ViacomCBS, major corporations dependent on the regulatory whims of Donald Trump, and with Trump’s talk of eliminating public funding for PBS (and its ‘News Hour’ and ‘Frontline’ reporting) plus ‘news outlets’ such as Fox and the Sinclair Broadcast Group that owns 294 TV stations covering 40% of U.S. households, acting more as propaganda arms of the MAGA movement than traditional sources of broadcast journalism, the likelihood of much critical mainstream coverage during a second Trump administration is doubtful even before the expected lawsuits, indictments, and jailing of journalists.

To paraphrase a quote from a darker time, “First they came for the journalists and then we don’t know what happened.”

Palestine solidarity activists, students, and scholars are facing an astronomic rise in attacks for calling attention to Israeli policies in the occupied territories, for naming the assault on Gaza a genocide, even for mentioning the health impacts of the massive bombing and killing campaign and calling for a ceasefire. Project Esther—a right-wing task force from the Trumpian Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and designed to crush the pro-Palestine movement—is about to make the repression much worse.

This creates a problem for liberal Zionists in the U.S., deeply allied with Israel but worried about the rightward political swing and distressed by the carnage in Gaza, violence of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and the widening of Israeli attacks in the region. These progressive folks get all tangled up when words like “war crimes” and “genocide,” as well as ending military funding to Israel or support for boycott, divestment, and sanctions, get mentioned in the very next sentence. Repeatedly, liberal Zionists respond to this reality with very illiberal behavior, pulling financial donations from universities and organizations, resigning from groups and institutions they otherwise support, condemning friends, children, and grandchildren for engaging in protests, encampments, and other unruly behavior, complaining that spaces are now “unsafe” for Jews, that “antisemitism” is rampant on college campuses.

Historically, the price of Israel’s settler colonial origins is the hostility of the people who lost their land, homes, and lives towards the people who promulgated this catastrophe. Moshe Dayan, one of the founding Israeli generals, famously stated “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.” The strategies of tolerance, negotiation, compromise, humility, respect for international law and human rights, were never woven into the Israeli psyche.

It is possible to be horrified by the suffering of those killed, harmed, kidnapped on October 7 or fleeing to bomb shelters as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian drones and missiles are fired over Israel, and at the same time, to call the brutal, unrelenting assault on Gaza a genocide. There are increasing reports in mainstream media as well human rights organizations from the United Nations to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, to B’Tselem. They document Israeli violations of multiple international laws about the rules of war, violations of the protected status of health care institutions and health care workers, massive civilian injuries and casualties, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, educational facilities, sanitation, water, and agriculture.

At the same time, Israeli allegations promote the idea that Palestinians are savage, hypersexualized animals, capable of horrific acts of violence, and thus, deserving of slaughter. This tactic was common in the Jim Crow south with the descriptions of Black men attacked and lynched. The language is also mirrored in Trump’s depictions of undocumented people coming into the United States. The foundational racism is obvious. The double standard exists because of societal assumptions about who are the “good guys” and who are the “bad,” which men are inherently decent and which men are capable of egregious violent behavior. If Gazans are all “animals,” “terrorists,” “Jew-haters,” then it is much easier to kill them with a clear conscience.

Exceptionalizing Jewish trauma only leads to a complete disregard for international law, proportionality in war, and the degradation of the Israeli military’s claim to be “moral,” to have any respect for the modern rules of warfare, the protected status of hospitals, the dignity of every human being, the safeguarded status of civilians.

When liberal Zionists object to the use of the word “genocide” as “too political,” it reflects their inability to grapple with the historical and current truths about the Israeli government and military and their demonization of Palestinians as less than human. When folks attack people for advocating for a ceasefire, (which is the first step towards ending the assault and protecting what is left of Gaza and releasing hostages), they often charge them with “antisemitism.” This is a descent into a tribal abyss that cannot see the “enemy” as human; cannot imagine the day after when the war ends and over two million hungry, sick Gazans are faced with unimaginable trauma and vast needs to survive and remake their lives; cannot remember that the only time a significant number of hostages were released alive was during a ceasefire.

The time is long overdue for liberal Zionists to find the courage to take a long hard look at their uncritical support for the actions of the Israeli state as it becomes increasingly indefensible and destabilizing, a pariah state that has lost its claim to be a so-called democracy (however flawed) that is endangering Jews in the country and abroad as well as Palestinians everywhere.

Elon Musk spent more than a quarter billion dollars to back Trump and other MAGA Republican candidates in last year's U.S. elections. He did so not simply because he has a lot to gain from Trump’s presidency, which he does, but also because of his own ideological proclivities.

Musk is a right-wing extremist and not content to limit his meddling to U.S. politics. In fact, he is clearly on a personal mission to advance the cause of the far right across the western world. Hence his foray into European politics.

Ahead of next month’s federal election in Germany, Musk took to his social platform X on December 20 to proclaim that “only the AfD can save Germany” while describing chancellor Olaf Scholz as an “incompetent fool,” urging him in turn to resign, and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier as an “anti-democratic tyrant.” He doubled down a few days later on his full-throated support for the far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), in an op-ed for the prominent German newspaper Die Welt, calling it “the last spark of hope” for the country. He went on to say that AfD “can lead the country into a future where economic prosperity, cultural integrity and technological innovations are not just wishes, but reality.” Incidentally, Musk—like all good imperialist investors—feels that his business investment in Germany gives him the right to make incursions into the country’s political condition.

The surge of the far right and extreme nationalism on the continent have echoes of the 1930s. But Elon Musk is on the wrong side of history.

Not content to limit his meddling to German politics, Musk has tried to stir up division and hatred in British politics by targeting Prime Minister Keir Starmer and top officials. He has accused the government of “releasing convicted pedophiles” and sided with jailed far-right activist Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party though he has called for Farage to be replaced as leader because “he doesn’t have what it takes” to lead the party. Apparently, even Nigel Farage isn’t sufficiently far right enough for Musk.

Europe’s leaders have denounced Musk’s meddling and support for far-right movements, but can they stop him? Musk is using the social media platform to communicate directly with hundreds of millions, bypassing traditional media channels. The billionaire owner of X has more than 200 million followers. Spreading lies and misinformation is easy and fast. MIT researchers have found that fake news spread 10 times faster than real news on social media. And it will become even easier and faster to do so after Mark Zukerberg’s decision to cancel fact-checking on his social media platforms, a move that Elon Musk lost no time in applauding.

On Thursday, Jan. 9, Musk held a livestream chat on X with AfD leader Alice Weidel that lasted more than an hour. Musk’s purpose for holding this discussion was to show people that Weidel is a very reasonable leader even though her party has been put under observation by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency for suspected extremism. Indeed, a German court found in May 2024 that there is sufficient evidence to designate AfD as a potentially extremist party that poses a threat to democracy and the dignity of certain groups and should therefore be kept under surveillance.

Musk has rejected the claim that AfD is a right-wing extremist party, with the ridiculous argument that it can’t be so since its leader has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka. The fact that AfD is engulfed in racist anti-immigrant hysteria and has vowed to restrict LGBTQ+ rights are no reasons for him to think that it is an extremist right-wing party. Weidel, in turn, used the opportunity afforded to her by Musk to argue that AfD shouldn’t be seen as a neo-Nazi party because it holds libertarian views on the economy (which is music to Musk’s ears as he is all for deregulation and lower taxes for corporations and the rich) and Hitler was a communist. Naturally, Musk agreed with Weidel in the outright lie that Hitler was indeed a communist. And also, with her equally ludicrous and utterly disgusting comment that left groups that support the Palestinian cause are Nazis and antisemites.

In an age of lies and misinformation, the notion that Hitler was a communist stands out as the high point of ideological perversion. Hitler hated communism and socialism and worked toward the annihilation of the communist movement not only in Germany but across Europe. Upon banning all existing political parties and making the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) the only political party in Germany, Hitler had thousands of communists and social democrats arrested and imprisoned. The Dachau concentration camp was constructed initially to hold the Nazis’ chief political enemies—the communists.

With Musk having become the first individual on X to have over 200 million followers, it is not difficult to imagine younger generations start believing that Hitler was a communist. Or in any other lies that Musk spreads, such as that the European Union (EU) tried to stop him from having a conversation with Alice Weidel.

In an age of lies and misinformation, the notion that Hitler was a communist stands out as the high point of ideological perversion.

Yet, it is Musk himself who is an enemy of free speech. He casts himself as a champion of free speech but has used his platform to target perceived enemies and to ban free speech. He has even sought to silence his critics with bogus lawsuits. Indeed, as the Guardian aptly put it, “Elon Musk has become the world’s biggest hypocrite on free speech.”

Thanks to Musk’s interference in German politics, there has been an enormous increase on Weidel’s average X posts in the last two weeks, which seems to suggest that Musk’s contributions could translate into more votes for AfD. Far-right parties are making significant strides across Europe. In 2024, the political pendulum in Europe swung even further right as far right parties made huge strides in France, Portugal, Belgium, and Austria while seven EU member states—Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia—already have hard-right parties in government.

As far as AfD is concerned, it won a German state election in 2024, making it the first far-right party to do so since 1945. However, Musk would like to see Germany’s far-right party victorious in the snap election set for Feb. 23 after the collapse of chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government.

There can be no denying that Musk “is throwing grenades into Europe’s political mainstream.” The continent needs radical change. The EU has failed on many fronts because of the rule-by-bureaucrats in Brussels. It lacks a unifying vision and the promises of a “social Europe” has given way to neoliberal policies that have been at the core of the creeping ascent of far-right movements and parties in the European political landscape. The surge of the far right and extreme nationalism on the continent have echoes of the 1930s. But Elon Musk is on the wrong side of history. His plan is to see Europe’s descent into a deep political crisis so the reactionary forces can eventually take over—just like they did in the 1930s. The question is: Can he be stopped before it’s too late?

President-Elect Donald Trump has threatened to use military force to invade and annex Greenland, which is currently a Danish colony, because he says the US needs it for vague national security reasons. It’s like the US never invades nice places anymore.

The post Operation Greenlander Freedom first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Operation Greenlander Freedom appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Donald Trump was hardly a steward of responsible global governance in his first term. His withdrawal from multilateral agreements, including the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords, showcased an unusual disdain for international institutions and cooperation. He has little evident regard for the “rules-based international order” favored by the Biden administration. However, therein lies an opportunity.

The idea that the United States upholds global stability by leading a “rules-based” order tends to generate more ill will than goodwill in many parts of the world. Rather than offering a positive American vision, it has come to symbolize American hypocrisy and double standards. Trump would be wise to drop the phrase from the U.S. lexicon.

The concept of a rules-based order gained popularity in the D.C. foreign policy establishment, known as the “blob,” in recent years because it encapsulated how experts — liberals and neoconservatives alike, many blindsided by Trump and thrown out of power — viewed what they, and America, stood for.

The Biden administration made the rules-based formulation an organizing principle of its foreign policy. The idea played a key role in shoring up like-minded states to counter China and Russia, which Washington accuses of seeking to overturn the current world order. Yet the order’s fallacies have been laid bare by Washington’s weaponization of this concept against its geopolitical foes even as, for example, the U.S. provides arms to Israel despite its repeated violations of international law.

More important, the rules-based concept has masked revisionist motivations of its own. Aiming to sustain America’s dominance of the international system has precluded a functional global legal framework. That risks inciting the formation of numerous competing orders rather than a more collaborative system following a single set of laws.

China has indicted rules-based talk for masking one-power rule of the globe. Its response so far, however, has been to operate within the existing system while seeking to reform it to its own liking. But if Biden had succeeded in turning the rules-based international order into a bloc, China might have responded by teaming up with Russia and Global South states to form a rival bloc with its own sets of laws.

Though nations in the Global South have disagreements with Russia and China, many are united in their opposition to the rules-based conceit, which they see as largely designed to prolong American unipolarity at the expense of rising powers such as Brazil and India. “I am struck by how much we have lost the trust of the Global South,” French President Emanuel Macron admitted at the 2023 Munich Security Conference.

A world in which states no longer differ over competing interpretations of one legal regime but instead proffer competing sets of rules is more frightening than anything Trump has done so far.

The more America and its allies fracture the global and legal order in the name of their rules, the less anyone follows them. We can’t forge an international order by imposing rules on states that have been excluded from their formulation. No wonder many international law experts view the rules-based order concept not as complementary to international law, but as a threat to it.

A multi-order world lacking a working framework for engagement, collaboration and de-escalation would fuel conflict and great-power competition at a fragile moment. It would be less capable of containing military aggression, preventing nuclear proliferation or managing shared crises such as climate change. If great-power competition is already happening, the key question is whether it proceeds under some common framework or becomes a matter of every great power for itself.

That makes Trump’s choices essential. He appears to be open to a multipolar world, though his investment in rules and laws is a different matter. But if he is serious about reducing America’s global military footprint, bringing our troops home and ceasing to play the increasingly unwanted role of world police, then avoiding anarchy and promoting peace by sustaining a multilateral system will serve U.S. interests and thus Trump’s.

Trump is a keen advocate for his own interests. His first-term foreign policy was marked by a transactionalism that occasionally enabled him to transcend Washington’s typical moralizing in favor of advancing U.S. interests through engagement, such as negotiating the withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban. This “what’s-in-it-for-me” approach to world affairs may enable Trump to jettison Washington’s mythmaking about its coalition-of-the-willing international order.

A working world order is an important condition for Trump’s apparent foreign policy goals — including winning the economic competition with China and forging peace in Ukraine. Those goals can’t be achieved without a healthy, predictable security framework that prevents disagreements and conflicts from spiraling into mutually destructive wars.

Some existing norms, laws and institutions encourage a range of good outcomes and deserve to stay in place, among them United Nations Charter rules that constrain force and the United Nations itself. As for ending the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, that will depend on the art of the deal. But everything depends on whether the bargaining occurs in the shadow of some belief that it is better to have fair, common standards.

The rules-based international order has betrayed that possibility. Over the next four years, America needs to do better.

Free speech is in the news! Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) discuss the high-profile departure of their colleague, Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes, from The Washington Post. Meta and Facebook are getting rid of their fact checkers. And TikTok is begging the Supreme Court for its life.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 188: Ann Telnaes Quits Washington Post first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 188: Ann Telnaes Quits Washington Post appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Watching, on the one hand, the Israeli soldiers’ video confessions of their genocidal intent and acts and, on the other hand, the Palestinians’ livestreaming of their own deaths and devastation, it is ever so easy to throw one’s hands up in the air, to despair, to want to shut the cruelty out, to find solace in oblivion and disengagement. But, it is not only ethically wrong to surrender to despair – it is also factually wrong that nothing good can be expected. Things change every day and, yes, the seeds of hope are already planted on the blood-soaked soil of the ancient land of Palestine. They may be only seeds, but that’s how new life is born.

So, let’s take a look at the seeds of hope that are taking root underneath the rubble.

1. Israel is not winning on the battlefield

Gaza has been destroyed. Its population is on death row. And yet the smart people in the Israeli military know full well that the destruction they wreaked does not translate into a victory. Fifteen months after they re-invaded the open prison that has been the Gaza strip since 1948, they still cannot control more than a small portion of it at a time. Armed resistance, including the regular blowing up of Israel’s mighty tanks, is continuing. Israeli military officers also know that their political leaders’ stated aim, of eradicating Hamas, can never be demonstrably achieved, however many Hamas fighters they kill. As a former Israeli general put it to me: “Even if we kill most the Gazans before we declare victory, a single teenager raising the Hamas flag over a pile of rubble will prove that we failed.”

Similarly in Lebanon. Yes, Israel has killed much of the Hezbollah leadership and, yes, the ceasefire it imposed on Hezbollah succeeded in stopping the Hezbollah missile launches in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance further south. However, the ceasefire was also forced upon Israel by its army’s inability to venture without massive losses by more than a few kilometres into Lebanese territory. And, lest we forget, it is simply not true that Hezbollah had to accept the ceasefire because its missile arsenal was destroyed: Israel signed the ceasefire hours after missiles hit Haifa, and indeed Tel Aviv.

The past year, in other words, will be remembered as a cruel paradox: Israel destroyed Gaza and much of South Lebanon, mainly from the air, but failed abysmally to control the ground. The time is fast approaching when Israeli society will realize that the thousands of Israeli soldiers who died or were seriously injured were the victims of a leadership that, ultimately, placed the Israeli people’s interests very low in their own list of priorities. This is also confirmed by the readiness of Israel’s government to lie through its teeth about its own casualties on the battlefield: compare the low number of casualties officially admitted with the more than twenty thousand soldiers that Israel’s health authorities say have been admitted to veteran rehabilitation centers.

2. Israel’s economy has entered a ‘spiral of collapse’

Turning now to the medium and long term impact of the war on Israel’s economy (which is of great importance from the perspective of the apartheid state’s capacity to reproduce itself through war and devastation financially), it is instructive to read a letter signed by Israeli economists, including Dan Ben-David who explain how Israel’s economic miracle hinges on a hi-tech sector that numbers at most 300 thousand people (including doctors, scientists, academics etc.) His point? If only 10% of these people leave the country, say thirty thousand, Israel’s already hugely indebted economy will fade. In Ben-David’s even starker words,

“We won’t become a third world country, we just won’t be anymore. Only 0.6% of the population are doctors, but who trains them? The senior staff in research universities are 0.1% of the people. High-Tech workers are 6% of the population. Altogether it’s 300,000 people. It’s enough that a critical mass of this group chooses not to be here tomorrow morning, and the State of Israel leaves the developed world.”

Are they leaving? You bet they are – leaving behind them more influential, more dominant than ever before the low-productivity bigots who are driving the fascist settler movement. And, the more dominant these low-productivity bigots are in government and in society, the greater the exodus of the high-tech, secular more liberally minded Israelis. This is the definition of a spiral of collapse.

Israel has lost in the court of public opinion – the illusion of a liberal democratic state is gone

Meanwhile, the genocide of Palestinians, and in particular the manner in which so many Israeli soldiers and politicians celebrate it in videos, speeches and posts, has claimed what is left of the illusion of Israel as a European liberal democracy embedded in a hostile Middle East. That illusion has been a central underpinning of the propaganda that helped Israeli lobbyists succeed in Washington and Europe. Now it is gone. It has drowned in the sea of flesh and blood the Israeli military has strewn all over Gaza – and the trail of destruction, hatred and viciousness that the settlers have unleashed in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Once Israel’s cleverly constructed reputation was gone, sullied, it cannot be reclaimed. And that is good news in the sense that the first step toward a just peace is the ethical fall from grace of the aggressor.

The situation in the Occupied Territories

Turning now to the situation in the West Bank, it is heart-wrenching to watch the non-stop violence against the Palestinians living under brutal apartheid conditions there. The violence against them comes from three quarters: From the Israeli military. From Israeli settlers. And, most tragically, from the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) own security forces who are, in the midst of the genocide of their people by the apartheid state, are cooperating fully with the security forces of that apartheid state. Why the army is doing this, we know. Why the settlers are doing it, we also know. But why is the leadership of the PA doing it?

This is not the first time the PA has cooperated fully with the Israeli occupiers who steadfastly reject any prospect of a Palestinian state – the stated objective of the PA. Sure enough, the PA’s leadership have been doing this for years. But, now, in the face of the fully-fledged genocidal campaign by Israel, the PA’s excuses are becoming transparent. The unelected, unrepresentative, patently corrupt leadership of the PA is behaving as if to impress Netanyahu and Trump that they can do their dirty work for them, with a veneer of legitimacy courtesy of being Palestinians themselves. That they have a role to play. It is a pathetic plea to the genocidal US-Israeli establishment to give them a job to do against the Palestinian Resistance now that the Palestinian people has seen through them. Nothing else explains why they are turning even against Fatah members who continue to resist in Jenin and elsewhere.

This is the saddest, most depressing, aspect of the Palestinian tragedy. So I shall not dwell on it further except to reiterate the urgent need for the election of a representative and thus legitimate leadership of the Palestinian people. No peace can be imagined, let alone negotiated, otherwise. I hope and trust that the Palestinians will find a way to speak with one non-sectarian voice. Nothing short of succeeding in this will curb the genocide they face. As for the rest of us, we must stand by to help give this voice, their voice, a chance to be heard.

Summary

To sum up, days before Donald Trump enters the White House – a man who has never not liked any war crime aimed at eradicating the Palestinian resistance, the Palestinians as a people native to Palestine – we are at a crossroads. Mega Death and uber destruction on the ground wreaked by a US-armed and EU-supported Israel. A spiral of collapse within Israel’s social economy. Arab countries split between complicit regimes and enraged citizens. A Global South that is becoming increasingly powerful and intolerant of the Western-Israeli self-awarded right ethnically to cleanse the non-Jewish native population. And a Western public opinion that can no longer pretend to not know. What is the upshot of these ingredients?

If I were to issue an educated guess, it would be this: Things will get even worse for the Palestinians in the short run. But, in the longer run, the possibility of liberation, of a just peace for both Palestinians, who refuse to go gently into the good night, and for Israelis, who understand the trap into which Netanyahu has ensnared them, seems stronger than it has been for 30 years.

Everyone's talking about mass deportations: how much they'll cost; how they'll tank the economy; how they'll tear communities apart, even if the Trump regime can’t realistically corral and expel the millions of people living and working and raising families without status in the US. Even if their promise was only ever meant to stoke terror and drive the MAGA base to the polls.

What's missing from discussions—what’s always missing from the immigration discussion—is the human impact: what such missions look, feel, sound, and smell like as well as the trauma endured by all involved, including the federal agents made to carry out such actions.

The truth is, few people know. And those who do know aren’t telling. Or can’t.

Well, I know. And we should all be horrified.

I interviewed over four dozen people deported en masse under Trump 1.0 by ICE Air and Department of Defense contractor, Omni Air International. I describe their revelations in my book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, one of only two public accounts that details what happens to an estimated average of 11,500 individuals on roughly one hundred ICE Air flights every month.

As I am not someone who’s been forced to endure the horrors of an ICE Enforcement and Removals Operation expulsion campaign, I can only imagine the terror and humiliation my sources felt based on the testimonies they shared with me. I, therefore, must ask you to imagine, too…

If you've ever been on a long-distance, economy-class flight, you will know that the body fatigues from sitting in the same position for too long. The joints swell, both from inaction as well as from the cabin's lower-than-normal humidity, which sucks moisture from the tissues and cells, causing dehydration. Shoes become uncomfortably tight; hands lose their grip. Even a six-hour journey across the continental US can be taxing to the lower back, hips, knees.

Now imagine being forced to fly across half the US as well as the Atlantic Ocean with your ankles in manacles, your hands cuffed, and tied tightly to a waist chain. Or your body locked in a torturous “stress position” because ICE ERO agents immobilized you in The WRAP. Imagine the links of the waist chain planting themselves into your spine and back muscles. Imagine not being able to shift or adjust them because you are bound for sixteen, twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six, even forty-eight hours in the case of a botched Omni Air International flight to Somalia documented by Rebecca Sharpless in Shackled (2024).

Imagine sitting for sixteen hours to Douala, Cameroon, your ankles and hands swelling, causing the metal hardware to pierce your skin and eat into your nerves. Imagine your panic at a moment of turbulence when you realize that in the event of an emergency, you will not be able to place over your nose and mouth the oxygen mask that drops from above; you will not be able to open the hatch if the aircraft lands on water; you will not be able to grab a life buoy or to tread water in the event you must deplane in a hurry. You will not be able to hurry. You will be helpless.

Imagine being fed nothing but stale white bread and potato chips. Imagine having to bend over, like a dog, to eat the tasteless, salty fare because your chains are so tight, that you cannot bring your hands to your mouth to feed yourself. Imagine not wishing to eat like a dog and going without, for sixteen hours, maybe more.

Imagine your mouth and nose so parched, the natural, human act of breathing causes you pain. Imagine hours passing before anyone offers you water. Now imagine being physically unable to raise the plastic bottle up to your bone-dry lips and throat.

"To get a drink," recounts Oscar (not his real name), "you had to squeeze both your hands around the container to push the water out the top and try to catch a little on your tongue."

Imagine not being allowed to go to the bathroom without the escort of an armed guard. Imagine having to shuffle your way down the aircraft aisle in manacles and chains with a bladder full to bursting only to find, when you reach the cabin restroom, that the guard refuses to close the door. It is impossible, of course, to lower zipper and trousers with your hands enchained. Imagine missing and soiling yourself. Imagine your escort erupting in laughter, shaming you. Imagine returning to your seat, made to sit in your own urine and feces.

Imagine being a menstruating woman denied a fresh pad; or given one but unable to apply it to soiled panties with bound hands. Imagine even wanting to try with the toilet door left open, and a male guard peering in. Laughing. Imagine.

Imagine that no one has cleaned the toilets and being overpowered by the stench of human excrement. Imagine trying desperately to hold it, but finally giving into the call of nature and the stench being so bad your body takes over. You pee in your pants as you retch, adding to the unholy mess.

I'm told it wasn't just the raw essence of human waste that infused Omni Air International N207AX. There was the constant sobbing of passengers; the ceaseless yelling of guards dressed for war and toting guns; and the odor of nervous, panicked sweat. Again quoting Oscar: "It was torture. You could smell the trauma."

Oscar wasn't the only one to say so. The four-dozen-plus accounts I collected from those forced into this ICE Air torture chamber collectively describe a flying Abu Ghraib. “There are laws preventing even terrorists being treated this way,” states Oscar.

He and the others were not terrorists. They were asylum seekers, fleeing a dictator’s war in which they had become human targets.

In the waning months of the first Trump administration, Omni Air International’s Boeing 767 wide bodies took off multiple times from Alliance Field in Fort Worth, Texas, a hub for defense contractors and cargo operators like Amazon, which is also the majority shareholder in Omni’s parent company, Air Transport Services Group (ATSG). Omni Air charged US taxpayers an estimated $1 million per mission.

How many such flights will it take to exile millions? And how many crimes against humanity will be committed by the so-called “leader of the free world” in the process? You do the math.

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take America back (again!) to greatness, there’s been much talk of Elon Musk’s new DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, and whether it will dare tackle Pentagon spending in useful ways. Could it curb rampant fraud, waste, and abuse within military contracting? Will the Pentagon finally pass a financial audit after seven consecutive failed attempts? Might the war in Ukraine finally sputter to an end, along with U.S. taxpayer support for that country of roughly $175 billion over the last three years?

“Efficiency” may be the word of the hour, but a more “efficient” imperial military, with a looser leash to attack Iran, bottle up China, and threaten Russia would likely bring yet more unrest to a world that’s already experiencing war-making chaos. When military “lethality” becomes the byword of even the Democrats, as was true with Kamala Harris’s campaign — her vice-presidential running mate’s main criticism of the Trump record on Iran was that his leadership was too “fickle” when it came to that country’s possible acquisition of a nuclear weapon — one wonders if any move toward restraint, let alone sanity and peace, is possible within the Washington beltway.

If Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to lead a useful DOGE when it comes to the U.S. military, they should focus on effectiveness, not efficiency. Remind me, after all, of the last major war America effectively won. Yes, of course, it was World War II, 80 years ago, with a lot of help from allies like Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.

On the other hand, remind me of just how “effective” the U.S. military was in replacing the Taliban with… yes, the Taliban in Afghanistan after 20 years of effort and roughly $2 trillion in expenditures; or how “effective” it was in finding Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction while bringing democracy to Iraq; or how “effective” it’s been in decreasing the risk of a world-altering nuclear war (while building a whole new generation of nuclear weaponry), as the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists creeps ever closer to a thermonuclear midnight.

Color this retired Air Force officer red, as in angry and scared. Still, a new administration should represent somewhat of a fresh start, another opportunity for this country to alter its militaristic course. Perhaps you’ll indulge me for a moment as I dream of 10 ways the Trump administration could (but, of course, won’t) bring a form of “greatness” back to America. (An aside: Explain to me Donald Trump’s eternal focus on making America “great again” when any president should instead be focused on making America good, as in morally just and decent, again.)

1. It’s said that Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, will “end wokeness” in the military. No more DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) generals, whatever that may mean. Apparently, the next administration wants to return to a military world of white men wearing stars (and losing wars) — the twenty-first-century equivalent of the heroes who “triumphed” in places like Korea and Vietnam in the previous century. Perhaps the new Trump administration should reanimate former Air Force Strategic Air Commander General Curtis LeMay to “win” a nuclear war against China or Russia. Whatever else you can say about LeMay, he wasn’t “woke.” Nor were generals like Douglas MacArthur in Korea and William Westmoreland in Vietnam. Nor, of course, were they victorious or even that effective, as was no less true of more recent “savior” generals like David Petraeus in Iraq and Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan.

America, we don’t need a secretary of defense to “end wokeness” in the military. What we need is one to end warness, the pursuit of perpetual conflict across the globe. Instead of channeling his inner Darth Vader and choking the careers of the “woke,” Hegseth — assuming he makes it to the Pentagon — should act to rein in all its “warriors” and civilian neocons who keep boasting of putting on their big-boy pants as they clamor for yet more war.

2. Speaking of Darth Vader and Star Wars (and recalling its planet-destroying weaponry), the $2 trillion or so planned for the “modernization” of this country’s nuclear arsenal, including new Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, a new stealth bomber (the B-21 Raider), and new Columbia-class nuclear submarines, could easily be curtailed, even cut completely, without faintly impacting national security. Instead, the U.S. could pursue nuclear reduction talks with Russia and China that would enhance world security so much more than building a whole new genocidal set of nukes and their delivery systems. If the Trump administration wants to show “greatness,” it should do what President Ronald Reagan once did: work to put an end to nuclear madness through diplomacy.

3. Speaking of diplomacy and disarmament, isn’t it time for this country to stop being the world’s foremost merchant of death? The United States is, in fact, an uncontested number one in international arms sales, accounting for 40% of the marketplace. For a start, Trump and his minions could regain a smidgen of moral authority by halting the endless flow of (nearly) free bombs, missiles, and shells to Israel, thereby slowing its genocidal efforts to murder yet more Palestinians in Gaza. (Good luck on that one, of course.)

4. If Trump is so keen to put “America First,” shouldn’t that mean sending money to Main Street, USA, rather than to Wall Street, K Street arms lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and giant military contractors in Crystal City, Virginia, and elsewhere? Euphemistically called the “defense” budget, the money that flows into the U.S. military is now officially set at nearly $900 billion, but its future ceiling seems unlimited and the total “national security budget” is already closer to an astounding $1.4 trillion. Why are Americans letting the Pentagon and the National (In)Security State gobble up roughly 60% of the federal discretionary budget, year in, year out, no matter which political party gains the presidency? In truth, America’s real political party is a warbird with two right wings.

5. Given those two right wings, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising how often it spins, flails, and fails. Only recently, for example, the Pentagon failed its seventh audit in a row. Had it been a Trump casino, it would have declared bankruptcy and gone belly up 30 years ago. Even then, you couldn’t have dissolved and distributed its assets, since roughly $2 trillion of them are “missing.” (America, your money is MIA, or missing in action, while the American dream has been KIA, or killed in action, by wanton, wasteful, and wrongheaded Pentagon spending.) Want that institution to pass an audit? Cut its budget in half until it produces a credible and accurate accounting. Something tells me that the bureaucracy would finally “win” its war on the numbers if faced with the equivalent of a budgetary guillotine.

6. Isn’t it finally time for the Pentagon to abandon its global fever dream of “full-spectrum dominance”? An American military deployed everywhere is also one that is vulnerable everywhere. What sense is there in having U.S. Special Forces in 80+ countries? What sense is there in having roughly 800 military bases around the globe? Harkening back to my sci-fi youth, America today most closely resembles the power-driven empire in Star Wars (with the belligerence of the Klingons in Star Trek thrown in for good measure). If Elon Musk truly believes that less can be more (as in more efficient), why not start with far fewer bases and foreign entanglements?

7. Speaking of Star Trek, this country could use a new “prime directive” where we don’t go in search of monsters to destroy everywhere. Isn’t it high time we turned inward and focused on healing ourselves? As presidential candidate and Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II bomber pilot, said so powerfully in 1972, “Come home, America.” Leave the world to settle its own affairs.

8. Speaking of new approaches, why not try rapprochement? Stop attempting to dominate Russia and China, countries that could conceivably destroy the U.S. (as we could destroy them), and start finding smart ways to cooperate. Echoing the business-speak that might appeal to Musk and Trump, isn’t it time to seek win-win scenarios rather than war-war ones?

9. They say fascism will come to America only if it’s wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross, but maybe some version of that is, in fact, the only way to neutralize future fascism — with critical patriotism (rather than jingoistic nationalism) that stresses fidelity to America’s highest ideals. Stop hugging the flag and start living up to the vision of a United (rather than increasingly dis-united) States, a true land of the free and home of the brave that refuses to be frightened by drones in the sky or an expanding China. Stop promoting a vision of a crusading America and start living a vision of a country in which peacemakers are honored, even revered.

10. The names of American drones — “Predator” and “Reaper” — reveal much about this country’s direction over the last half-century. What this country needs to be “great again” are military and government establishments that are far less predatory and reap far fewer bodies overseas or, even better, none. (Keep in mind the millions of people killed, wounded, or displaced in countries ranging from Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to Afghanistan, Iraq, and all too many other lands across this planet in this century.)

There you have it, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, my 10 thoughts on your all too dodgy (rather than DOGE) quest for “efficiency” and “greatness” (again). In a nutshell, efficiency, as in doing things right, is far less important than effectiveness, or doing the right things, as management guru Peter Drucker put it. So, for example, a more efficient military might have fought in a somewhat smarter fashion in Iraq, but an effective military (and government) would have recognized that such a war should never have been pursued to begin with. Let me be clear: I don’t want an “efficient” war with Iran or China or any other country. I want an effective American foreign (and military) policy where, to cite Abraham Lincoln, right makes might.

Put bluntly, you can’t do a wrong thing the right way, a simple maxim I fear will be lost on that potential future trillionaire Musk and his DOGE. Therefore, the U.S. military and government will continue to do all too many wrong things, perhaps in a few cases slightly more efficiently, only making U.S. “defense” policy ever more predatory and so reaping yet more innocent lives across this globe of ours.

When it comes to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, let me say the obvious: the U.S. needs a smaller military establishment capable of defending this country by upholding the ideals and freedoms delineated in the Constitution. Fighting endless wars in distant lands is not the solution here, it’s the problem. As a result, America has an ineffective military (inefficient as hell to boot) that essentially launders trillions in taxpayer dollars to merchants of death like Lockheed Martin and Boeing while filling far too many body bags with dead foreigners. Your DOGE, Mr. Musk, won’t change this, nor will your predilection for spoiling the Pentagon with ever-higher budgets, President Trump.

So, what is to be done, America? As the prophet Michael Jackson once sang, we must start with the man in the mirror. Collectively, we need to ask ourselves and by extension “our” government to change its ways. Or, more effectively, we need to demand radical and extensive changes, since power of the sort wielded by this country’s national security state will concede nothing without a demand.

The forms those demands take are up to you, America.

In my darker hours, I wonder if, in our latest Trumpian moment, this country will be the national equivalent of the Titanic, post-iceberg — meaning that our fate is sealed. If that’s the case, maybe we can play sweeter music and be kinder to each other as we slip toward an ice-cold watery grave. But there are other moments when I imagine the iceberg still looming before the ship of state and a course correction still possible.

I hope that’s the case, even if our ship’s captain (Donald Trump) and his senior officers appear asleep at the wheel, while a few nutcases seem to be seeking that iceberg as a national death wish of sorts or, if you prefer, as an “end times” quest. As Howard Zinn once said, you can’t be neutral on a moving train — or for that matter on a ship of state already deep in perilous waters.

To use a different nautical reference, a more hopeful (if fictional) one, before the USS Caine goes down with all hands in high winds and heavy seas under the blundering and blustering Commander Queeg, maybe it’s time for us, the crew, to take matters into our own hands, as difficult as that may be to contemplate.

Come hard about, America! Seek the fair winds and following seas of peace. If we have the courage to do that, we will truly save our ship, ourselves, and much of the rest of the world from looming disaster.

On January 15, 2025, five days before the inauguration of a U.S. president who threatens to rain down hell on the Palestinian people, and more war to the world, the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal will release its final report on how Lockheed Martin, Boeing, RTX/Raytheon and drone-maker General Atomics have delivered hell to millions across the globe since 9/11.

The Tribunal’s 35 evidentiary episodes explain how these four defendant corporations have been essential enablers of the U.S. colonial campaign of murder, extortion and thievery since 9/11, epitomized in the horrific crescendo of violence that is already being rained down on the Palestinian people. This grossly illegal war campaign—without equal in U.S. history in its geographic scope and length—is largely dependent on the products of the tribunal’s four defendant corporations.

The tribunal episodes explain how the U.S. campaign since 9/11 flows directly from the post-World War II decisions by U.S. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. businessmen and their congressional allies to try to pick up the reins of colonial control around the world that were being dropped by war-ruined European nations.

The U.S. leaders were, of course, acting from their racist cultural and business roots, extending back deep into slavery and the genocide against the first inhabitants of the continent, atrocities on which the U.S. was founded. They set us on the bloody path on which we find ourselves today.

For these industrialists and their political enablers, siding with liberation movements anywhere in the world meant less profits for U.S. corporations. Thus, colonial liberation must be officially described as a “communist” threat to be dealt with through direct and proxy killing, repression, torture, and terror.

We hope that we are effective representatives of those calling for justice and repair from the hideous war work of the Merchants of Death and the United States government since 9/11.

A permanent military industry was needed to enable this mafia-style scheme of international exploitation. Tribunal video episodes describe ways in which the U.S. public has been manipulated to support this military industrial system, to their great economic, spiritual and intellectual disadvantage as the U.S. economy and the wealth of its oligarchs, like Elon Musk, has become more and more dependent on war and intimidation.

After World War I, even the Senate and Congress condemned gross war profiteering. Challenges to weapon manufacturers profiteering continued during World War II, though greatly diminished by war propaganda. Congressional support for weapons makers surged in the post-World War II years, so much so that “defense” stocks have become sacred elements of college and university endowment funds, pension funds and private portfolios.

The immensity of this dependency on war stocks breached the surface of public awareness in the spring of 2024 as students in support of Palestinian life and liberation demanded that their schools disclose and divest their stock in weapons makers.

Students at Smith College occupied the school’s administration building for 14 days, calling on an institution that had divested from apartheid South Africa-connected stock to drop its holdings in L3 Harris and other war stock. The school’s board of trustees refused, calling the school’s holdings ”negligible”. Then in the fall, Smith administrators, and their colleagues nationwide moved, deplorably, to suppress students’ free speech.

Wealth-driven weapons makers who must be protected by the so-called educators, and are revered in the business world, are the successors to those weapons makers in early 20th Century war-grieving America, who were often depicted as overconsumptive, sleezy, money-grubbing vultures, feeding on the corpses and misery of the war dead and afflicted.

Now, we have reached a point in which James Taiclet, the president, chair and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation, the largest weapons maker in the world, whose F-35s, F-16s and Hellfire missiles have been slaughtering Palestinians wholesale, can be a valued member of the board of directors of MassGeneral Brigham, the largest hospital system in Massachusetts, serving 2.6 million patients a year.

Intervening in this surging, greed-driven, incredibly lethal mess, the Tribunal rapporteurs and an international panel of 10 jurors, offer 13 recommendations for action by the public and by government officials to pull the profit out from under war and to provide reparations for the vast harm visited on millions of people by the Merchants of Death and the U.S. government since 9/11.

More specifically, we tribunal coordinators want to work with prosecutors around the world to bring the CEOs of the defendant corporations to justice for having enabled, since the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

We want to work with student and other movements to end private and public investment in weapons production.

We must note that in our investigation, we repeatedly called on the defendant corporations to respond, in one instance getting arrested in the process. The four defendant corporations ignored us. We repeatedly asked members of Congress to answer our questions about their involvement with weapons makers. They ignored us.

The work of the Tribunal was made possible by the volunteer and the extremely low paid work of more than 40 people—students, filmmakers, artists, journalists, and others who joined us at various times over nearly three years to complete our video evidentiary episodes and report.

Those involved represent millions of people who mean to stop the depravity of invasion, occupation, killing and repression, everywhere, so that we can properly get about the work of human survival and the restoration of our planet.

In this, we hope that the Tribunal recommendations will be among the guide stars that will help us chart our course, shining above the hurricane of greed and viciousness now ravaging the U.S and the world.

We hope that we are effective representatives of those calling for justice and repair from the hideous war work of the Merchants of Death and the United States government since 9/11, of those calling to the world from their graves, from their hospital beds, from their poverty and dislocation and their relentless battles against racism in their places of refuge.

Note: You may register here for the January 15, 2025, (9 a.m. Eastern time), tribunal report release press conference. The 35 evidentiary video episodes appear on the Rumble platform and can be easily accessed at MerchantsofDeath.org, as can our Tribunal Study Guide and our podcast – Merchants of Death Radio.

            For journalists, this is the first of two occasions to discuss and evaluate the presidency of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. The second will arrive sooner rather than later, when the president dies. Long after we follow him to the grave, historians with the benefit of declassified archives and looser-lipped eyewitnesses will take their own measures of the man and his political career. So away we go with a look at…

            The Good…

            At the end of Trump’s first term, the country’s infrastructure was in woeful condition. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ annual report on the roads, water, waste treatment and schools we rely on gave it a grade “D.” 43% of roads were in miserable condition. We ranked at the bottom of the G20 most-developed economies in terms of infrastructure spending.

            The 2021 ASCE report said the U.S. needed to spend $5.9 trillion on infrastructure, $3.4 trillion of which was funded. The remaining funding gap was $2.5 trillion.

            Biden’s 2021infrastructure spending bill was the biggest and most ambitious attempt in decades to redress neglect by both Democratic and Republican presidents in the form of “deferred maintenance” and to maybe even build more. Republicans had long signaled that they were open to a bipartisan spending package. But when Biden asked for $4 trillion, they chopped it to bits. By the time he signed it into law in November 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided for just $1.2 trillion.

            Still, it was impressive. Monies authorized by this legislation will replace out-of-date infrastructure, fund new projects and renovate airports and freight rail and the electrical grid and countless other categories for years to come. Ten and fifteen and twenty years from now, you’ll charge your vehicle at a facility that otherwise might not have existed and drive across a bridge that doesn’t collapse because Biden spent his political capital on pushing this bill, the outgoing president’s signature achievement, through Congress.

            …The Bad…

            Throughout Biden’s first year in office, President Vladimir Putin repeatedly warned that Russia would not tolerate Ukraine joining NATO, the anti-Russian military alliance whose members pledge to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. Putin’s warning was hardly surprising; how would the U.S. have responded to Mexico or Canada joining an anti-U.S. military alliance like the Cold War-era Warsaw Pact, creating a tense border for hundreds of miles? The U.S. invaded tiny Grenada over far less. And Russia had history to consider: when Nazi Germany invaded Russia during World War II, leaving 27 million Soviet citizens dead in their wake, they came in via Ukraine—and the Ukrainians greeted the Nazis as liberators and eagerly participated in the Holocaust.

            Gambling that Putin was bluffing, Ukraine and its Western allies told Putin to go to hell. Months later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

            Three years later, despite spending a quarter of a billion dollars on advanced weapons, many of which vanished into the country’s bottomless pit of corruption, Ukraine is losing.

            Ukraine’s ex-actor president, Volodymyr Zelensky, played Biden for a fool. Biden assured Americans that our support for Ukraine was in defense of democracy. Ukraine then banned opposition parties, arrested political opponents, censored the media, banned cable news channels that didn’t toe the line and canceled presidential and parliamentary elections indefinitely. We’ve gone to the mat for the dictator of an authoritarian kleptocracy with a serious neo-Nazi problem, and lost.

            As if one poor choice of foreign bedmates wasn’t enough, Biden pulled the extreme-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even closer following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 raid from Gaza. Like Zelensky, Bibi cashed the blank check from Biden like a drunk gambler on a bender, gleefully engaging in a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder that has killed at least 200,000 innocent Gazans and been officially declared genocide by international bodies and revered human-rights organizations.

            Before he dropped out of the presidential race, Biden’s immoral stance in favor of Israel’s bloodthirsty leaders had already hobbled his chances and alienated his party’s progressive base, which was disgusted by the carnage. Kamala Harris, his anointed successor and who echoed his unconditional support for the IDF, inherited this liability. Still worse from a historical vantagepoint, Biden’s branding as a good, decent man, wound up in the toilet.  

            Oh, and Biden didn’t try to increase the minimum wage or create the socialized healthcare system we need and want.

…and The Ugly

You probably know what I’m going to say, but here goes anyway.

Following his disastrous LBJ-style withdrawal from the race, some Democrats now allow that the 82-year-old Biden ought to have kept his implicit promise to serve a single term, to be “a bridge, not as anything else.”

They’re half-right.

As has now been undeniably established from the testimony of the staff who knew him best and as ordinary Americans experienced with dementia could plainly see from the beginning, Biden’s mental deficiencies did not begin with his catastrophic debate performance in 2024. He had “good days and bad days” back in 2020. He ought not have run in the first place.

Vain and self-deluded, and clearly not as sharp as he needed to be to make such a decision, Biden and his DNC handler-allies somehow convinced themselves that he was the only Democrat who could defeat Trump in 2020. That was almost certainly untrue. There are credible cases to be made that any number of other of his primary rivals, beginning with Bernie Sanders, could have taken out The Donald.

Even if Biden’s only-I-can-beat-him calculus could be proven to have been accurate, however, the nation, the Democratic Party and Biden himself have paid an awful price for his hubris.

There is now no denying that all the “Weekend at Bernie’s” jokes were true. White House officials and staffers, and the Washington press corps, were “hidin’ Biden” for four years in one of the most breathtaking and long-running scams ever undertaken in U.S. politics. They ran a stuffed corpse for president, got it elected, pretended it was running the government, and then, incredibly, tried to pull it off a second time. The Democratic Party, which branded itself the anti-Trump party of democracy and fair elections, pulled off a coup d’état; after they relentlessly attacked Trump for serial lying, it turns out that they were even worse. They stand exposed and ridiculous.

And what was the point? Despite all their efforts, including weaponizing the judicial system against him, Trump won anyway. Now the Democrats are weak and discredited, setting up Trump to be more dangerous than he would otherwise have been.

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

The post Joe Biden: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Joe Biden: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Earlier on Wednesday, January 8th, I saw a prominent Zionist commentator and Twitter/X User post, “Has Greta Thunberg taken her keffiyeh off to address the fires in LA yet or are there too many Jews living here for her to be concerned?” The weird implications about a mythical antisemitic malice that climate activist Greta Thunberg has to supposedly fuel her anti-genocide and ecocide beliefs aside, the post is equally embarrassing in its lack of understanding about the exacerbators of Los Angeles’ most destructive fires in the metropolitan area’s history.

Sadly, the disconnect that this post showcases is representative of many people and institutions, not only in explicitly pro-Israel spaces but also in the environmental movement. The US military is the #1 institutional polluter in the world. Cities across the country have been sacrificed by the local and federal prioritization of militarism and policing. Our endless wars have pushed forward the climate crisis, and now its catastrophic results are once again terrifyingly visible inside the belly of the beast.

For decades, the military-industrial complex has been destroying ecosystems, cities, and nations across the SWANA region for the sake of dominance in the oil industry. For 15 months, the US-Israeli bombing unleashed on Gaza has released insane amounts of fossil fuel into the atmosphere while poisoning the soil with each shell. Israel recently detonated an “earthquake bomb,” which some reports have suggested could have been possibly nuclear. The genocide in Gaza has devastated the ecosystem and will make agricultural survival in any eventual rebuilding effort extremely difficult. The war in Ukraine has resulted in explosions of the Nordstream pipeline. Bases around the world, expanded for meaningless escalation with China, have resulted in soil contaminated with toxic PFAS chemicals, harming the soil. Biodiversity is at risk globally.

Forest fires are a natural part of California’s ecosystem. They are needed to survive. The long-time development in inevitable natural burn zones, combined with the suppression of these natural cycles for the sake of billionaire Malibu homes, has not helped this situation at all. This disregard for a balanced ecosystem has historically and continuously come at the expense of middle and working-class neighborhoods in LA vulnerable to preventable fires. The threat to LA is only further magnified by the extra dry air and almost 100mph wind speeds created by the war economy’s climate crisis.

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg attends a solidarity with Palestine event on December 06, 2024 in Mannheim, Germany. Thunberg, who was a central figure in the global movement calling for action on climate change, has been outspoken in her support for Palestine ever since the Israeli invasion of Gaza in October of 2023. (Photo by Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images)

This local neglect of the natural environment comes from a similar place as the Jewish National Fund’s planting of non-native pine trees across Palestine, often above bulldozed Palestinian villages, at the expense of crucial biodiversity. In both instances, the interests of the war economy that prioritizes those in power are what remain above respect for Indigenous caretaking practices and life. And the results in both cases are catastrophic. Amidst a world that has gone through imperialist ecocidal war for decades, the world’s biodiversity, much of which is in sovereign Indigenous land, has been decimated.

This climate-sacrificial militarism isn’t just on the international stage either. In Atlanta, the proposed “Cop City” police training facility is supposed to be built on the Weelaunee Forest: sacred indigenous land also described as the “lungs” of the city. Not only does the forest provide crucial air quality, but it also acts as flooding protection. Recently, Appalachia and Atlanta suffered extreme flooding. Cop City will only make this worse as the forest is destroyed. Those prioritizing these military training facilities and exchange programs with Israeli Occupation Forces are doing so at the expense of the city itself. LA’s Mayor, Karen Bass, recently proposed allocating an extra $123 million to the police while cutting the budget of the fire department by $23 million. Now, the city is burning uncontrollably, and the fire department can only attempt to save residents.

This was avoidable. The flooding in Appalachia is avoidable. Future devastating flooding in a post-cop city Atlanta, NYC, and the entire coastal region is avoidable. Did anyone really think that we could continue to wage ecocide across the world without it coming back to us? Or prioritize militarism at home that trains with our genocidal proxy above human services? The fires in Gaza are the fires in LA. They are brought about by the same institutions and are fixable through overlapping measures. The former was intentional, and the latter is a ricochet. Both are devastating, heartbreaking, terrifying, and infuriating.

Climate organizations are warning about what the fires in LA represent. Some amount of federal funding left over from our shiny new nearly $1 trillion military budget will be allocated to helping the people of L.A. But the same organizations releasing these statements and the same politicians allocating emergency funds are the ones fanning the flames. Either by the silence that deliberately or neglectfully hides the crisis or warmongering that actively drives it further.

So no, Greta Thunberg should not “take off her keffiyeh” to talk about the fires. The only way to fight the fires is through the understanding that should come with wearing one.

Over the past months, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken has given several interviews in which he repeatedly claims that Hamas, rather than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been the key obstacle to achieving a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza. This messaging has been echoed by other Biden administration officials and surrogates.

At a workshop in Geneva in November, a recently retired US ambassador, who had just returned from meeting White House officials, claimed, “There are currently three ceasefire deals on the table and Hamas isn’t responding to any of them.” The veteran diplomat acknowledged the suffering in Gaza but blamed it on Hamas’ “rejection” of an agreement to end the war.

To my surprise, a former senior Israeli security official in the room rushed to challenge this claim, which he described as a “shameful attempt to rewrite history and blame Hamas rather than Netanyahu for the obstruction of ceasefire talks.”

A few weeks later in Doha, I met a senior Arab official who emphasized to me one of the most crucial things Biden can do in his “lame duck” period is name and shame Netanyahu for systematically foiling ceasefire talks. But the official quickly added the White House is “instead rewriting history.”

Since July, all of the sources I have spoken to confirmed that Hamas had accepted Biden’s ceasefire proposal that was endorsed by the UN Security Council, which is premised on an 18-weeks long ceasefire divided into three phases, at the end of which there would be a permanent end to the Gaza war after all hostages have been released. The same sources, as well as Israeli media, and the Egyptian mediators have consistently blamed Netanyahu for obstructing the talks and refusing to end the war.

Even in the latest ongoing round of negotiations, senior Israeli security officials are sounding the alarm that their Prime Minister is still sabotaging the talks. Yet, the White House keeps insisting that Hamas is “the obstacle.”

The reality is that since July, US president Joe Biden has completely stopped pressuring Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire-hostage deal. Rather than tell the truth about Netanyahu repeatedly foiling the talks, the outgoing president and his administration are choosing instead to try and rewrite the history of what has really unfolded over 15 months of negotiations.

The Full Story

For the first four months of the Gaza war, the Biden administration opposed a full ceasefire, instead opting at best for a temporary “pause” to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid, which was briefly achieved in late November 2023. Biden said earlier that month: “a cease-fire is not peace… every cease-fire is time [Hamas members] exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing.”

However, growing US domestic pressure, as well as Israel’s failure to locate and rescue the hostages combined with the sense that Israel had accomplished what it could militarily in Gaza eventually lifted Biden’s ban on using the word “ceasefire” by March 2024.

Talks began to mature with Qatari and Egyptian mediation throughout the spring, as the US exerted significant yet clearly inadequate pressure on Netanyahu, who had foiled two summits in Paris in January and February by procrastinating, severely limiting the mandate of Israeli negotiators, instructing ministers to attack any deal taking shape and publicly vowing to continue the war.

In early April, a concrete proposal was put on the table by the Qatari and Egyptian mediators and the US envisaging a ceasefire of three phases, six weeks each, in which hostages (including those deceased) would be gradually released in return for incremental withdrawal of Israeli forces from all of Gaza, an end to the war, and increased humanitarian and reconstruction aid. The first phase would have seen the release of 33 Israeli hostages.

Serious negotiations then took place in Cairo and Doha, with American officials making a genuine effort to narrow the gaps between the two sides. One senior Arab government source told me CIA director Bill Burns was at some point sitting literally in the room next door to where the Hamas delegation was negotiating in Cairo, and repeatedly amended the proposal with his own handwriting to get a deal done.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu sought to undermine those negotiations throughout April by consistently insisting on an imminent full invasion of Rafah and a continuation of the war after a pause. He also leaked sensitive classified information to extremist ministers in his government to derail the talks and restricted the mandate of Israeli negotiators.

A senior member of Israel’s negotiating team said in April that “Since January, it’s clear to everyone that we’re not conducting negotiations. It happens again and again: You get a mandate during the day, then the prime minister makes phone calls at night, instructs ‘don’t say that’ and ‘I’m not approving this,’ thus bypassing both the team leaders and the war cabinet.”

Throughout this period, Biden refrained completely from publicly calling out Netanyahu for explicitly sabotaging the talks.

On May 5, Hamas accepted the April proposal with reservations and amendments, but before the Israeli negotiating team got to formulate a response, Israel’s prime minister rushed to denounce Hamas’ position as “delusional” and ordered the immediate invasion of Rafah on May 7.

Biden, who had promised to halt arm supplies to Israel if it violated his “red line” of invading Rafah, decided to instead suspend one shipment of MK-84 2,000-pound bombs to Israel and nothing more.

The Only Realistic Deal

On May 31, Biden gave a televised speech presenting what he described as the outline of an Israeli ceasefire proposal submitted four days before. A senior Arab official confirmed to me in August that Biden’s proposal was in fact articulated by the Israeli team who turned to the White House after Netanyahu’s immediate answer was negative. That proposal had incorporated significant principles from Hamas’ May 5 response that Netanyahu had described as “delusional.”

Biden’s speech was designed to give Israel a victory narrative, stating that “At this point, Hamas no longer is capable of carrying out another October 7th.” He warned “Indefinite war in pursuit of an unidentified notion of ‘total victory’… will only bog down Israel in Gaza, draining the economic, military, and human resources, and furthering Israel’s isolation in the world.”

11 days later, the proposal was formally endorsed by the UN Security Council Resolution 2735. However, Netanyahu rejected Biden’s speech as “not [an] accurate” reflection of Israeli positions, and repeatedly asserted his insistence on the continuation of the war. The White House chose again to blame Hamas for the deadlock instead of pressing Netanyahu.

After lengthy negotiations, on July 2 Hamas accepted an updated Biden proposal with minor amendments, particularly relating to assurances that the ceasefire would lead to ending the war instead of a mere pause, according to multiple senior Arab and Palestinian officials involved in the talks.Hamas were informed that the US and Israeli negotiating team were both on board. However, a few days later, Netanyahu issued four new “non-negotiable” conditions that mediators and even Israeli security officials saw as intentionally sabotaging the deal. The conditions were: resuming the war after a pause “until [Israel’s] war aims are achieved”; no IDF withdrawal from the Philadelphia corridor between Rafah and Egypt; Israel would restrict the return of over one million displaced Gazans to the Northern half of the enclave; maximizing the number of living hostages to be released in the first phase.

Israel then quickly escalated its attacks in Gaza. On July 13 it killed Hamas’ chief military commander Mohammed al-Deif in a strike that killed over 100 civilians. On July 31, Netanyahu ordered the assassination of Hamas’ top negotiator, Ismael Haniya in Tehran. The day before, he ordered the assassination of Hezbollah’s top commander Fuad Shukur.

Multiple sources told me Hamas informed mediators that it still endorsed the July 2 ceasefire formula and UNSC resolution 2735. Biden called the Haniya assassination “not helpful” but that was it. Senior White House officials would then leak to Israeli media that Biden “realized Netanyahu lied to him” about the ceasefire-hostage deal, but the president himself never publicly called out Netanyahu.

Buying Time and Gaslighting

In August, ahead of the Democratic National Convention, the US opened a renewed round of negotiations, having received Iranian and Hezbollah promises of refraining from retaliation if a deal was reached.

Instead of building upon Biden’s proposal and pressing Israel to compromise, the Americans simply incorporated Netanyahu’s four impossible conditions as “a bridging proposal.” They attempted to entice Hamas to the table by getting Israel to reduce its veto on which Palestinian detainees it would release in a deal (Hamas presented a list of 300 heavily sentenced individuals, “the VIPs.” Netanyahu vetoed 100 names, including Marwan Barghouti, and insisted on only releasing prisoners with less than 22 years left in their sentence. The Americans lowered this veto to 75 names then 65 in August, per a senior Arab mediator).

Since then, the White House has attempted to re-write history and promote an official narrative blaming Hamas for Netanyahu’s systematic foiling of the talks.

A Palestinian source directly involved in the negotiations told me then that Hamas’ leader Yahia Sinwar sent them clear instructions to stick to the July 2 Biden proposal instead of getting stuck in a limbo of endless negotiations. Hamas refused to show up for the August round of talks as long as Israel rejected the most important two stipulations of Biden’s proposal: gradual IDF withdrawal from Gaza and ending the war.

Remarkably, the Americans pressed Egypt and Qatar to issue a false statement on August 16 that emphasized “talks were serious and constructive and were conducted in a positive atmosphere,” although there were no talks to begin with.

A senior Arab official involved in the negotiations told me both Israel, Qatar and Egypt objected to the idea of issuing this statement, but the Americans argued it was necessary to create domestic pressure on Netanyahu to narrow the gaps. The actual goal, according to this official, was likely to make it harder for Iran and Hezbollah to retaliate and to allow Kamala’s Democratic National Convention to pass peacefully without disruptions.

The official added that Netanyahu had been sending his advisor, Ophir Falk, to the talks to undermine Israel’s negotiating team, and that the US asked mediators on multiple occasions to prevent him from attending the meetings.

As soon as the DNC ended, Biden blamed Hamas again for the failure of the talks, and effectively stopped trying to get a deal, with US officials declaring in September that a ceasefire deal has become unlikely during Biden’s term. Since then, the White House has attempted to re-write history and promote an official narrative blaming Hamas for Netanyahu’s systematic foiling of the talks.

Amid the deadlock, Qatar declared in early November that it was suspending its mediation role, which a senior Arab official told me was intended to create domestic pressure on Netanyahu. The Qataris also suspended Hamas’ office in Doha and Hamas leaders left the country by mid-November.

A New Round, Little Hope

In early December, Hamas’ entire leadership were suddenly invited to Cairo then Doha for renewed negotiations. Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz quickly expressed unusual hope and optimism about a “real chance” for a deal this time.

However, multiple sources directly involved in these talks told me by then there was no real possibility of a breakthrough. The Hamas delegation kept waiting in Cairo until the last minute, with senior Hamas negotiator Bassem Naim being the last official departing from Egypt to Doha late at night on December 5, hoping for a positive change of position from the Israeli team, who still only offered a temporary pause.

A senior Arab official told me president-elect Donald Trump had asked the Qataris and Egyptians to get a deal done before he takes office. The official, however, added that Israel’s Prime Minister is not budging while at the same time issuing false positive statements of a breakthrough and progress to buy time and pretend to seek a deal until Trump is in office, where Netanyahu can trade the Gaza war for something big in the West Bank.

Between Doha and Cairo, a senior Palestinian official directly involved in the negotiations told me in December that “there are serious talks, there’s progress and discussions of details, but until today no one presented a final proposal to sign.” He added “Unless Netanyahu does something that takes us back to square one, there is great optimism that we can reach something within a short period.”

Israeli officials asserted the same night that a deal could be reached within two weeks, but warned that Netanyahu is still not “granting a sufficient mandate to the negotiating team,” adding “It will not be possible to return everyone without an end to the war.”

More than a month later, no deal is yet in sight, as Israeli security officials say Netanyahu still insists on delaying the withdrawal from the Philadelphia and Netzarim corridors, restricting the return of displaced Gazans to the north, continuing the war after a partial deal, and demanding a higher number of hostages in the first phase. This led the mother of Israeli hostage Matan Zangauker to lead a demonstration in front of Israel’s Knesset on Monday to protest “a partial deal with a return to fighting,” which she said would be “a death sentence for Matan and everyone left behind”.

Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said the same day “Our presence in Gaza today, which means that we are not making a comprehensive hostage deal, is contrary to the political and security interests of the State of Israel.”

The real history of these negotiations reveals a troubling truth: while President Biden has consistently blamed Hamas for the failure of ceasefire talks, his own failure to hold Netanyahu accountable has allowed the conflict to drag on. Biden is now trying to hide this failure by absolving Netanyahu of any blame, despite a mountain of evidence showing how he repeatedly sabotaged peace efforts. Recognizing this distortion is crucial, to inform the public in order to mount greater pressure where it’s needed the most to return all hostages and end Gaza’s apocalyptic suffering, and to prevent further manipulation from future administrations.

With NFL playoffs about to begin, State Farm Insurance will be constantly running commercials in which multimillionaire Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid and his multimillionaire star player Patrick Mahomes belittle themselves by using their fame to personally cash in instead of using it like, say, Colin Kaepernick did, to address an issue of social significance. True to form, the NFL blackballed Kaepernick but at least he maintained his dignity.

In one commercial Reid acts goofy as he repeatedly says “Bundle-rooski” to describe Star Farm’s plan for bundling home and auto insurance. State Farm does some other bundling that hasn’t gotten the media attention it deserves, especially given the devastation in Los Angeles that the whole country has been watching on TV.

This other bundling couples State Farm’s refusal to insure tens of thousands of homes in fire prone areas with State Farm’s doubling down on investing in the fossil fuel industry. Not insuring properties that seem guaranteed to cost the company lots of money seems like good business sense. But it becomes shameful if coupled with also propping up the fossil fuel industry.

The Los Angeles Rams are hosting an NFL playoff game this weekend but because of the fossil fuel driven wildfires the game has been moved from LA to Arizona and, of all places, State Farm Stadium.

The fires in LA are called natural disasters but that’s not an apt description by itself. We are all witnessing the increasing number and magnitude of droughts, floods, heatwaves and storms that climate scientists have been warning us about for decades. Much of the discussion now is about how we need to adapt to the new climate reality, which is true. But the first rule for getting out of a hole is to stop digging and the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results.

We need to quickly and greatly cut back on our burning of fossil fuels. State Farm needs to stop investing in fossil fuels before much more of the country becomes uninsurable.

State Farm ad on YouTube

The country said goodbye this week to Jimmy Carter, a most decent man who tried to set us on a path to renewable energy almost 50 years ago. Now we’re about to reinstall his direct opposite. We must resist. We must stand with each other and for the common good.

The Los Angeles Rams are hosting an NFL playoff game this weekend but because of the fossil fuel driven wildfires the game has been moved from LA to Arizona and, of all places, State Farm Stadium. If you watch be on the lookout for the “Bundlerooski” commercials, then spare a thought for Colin Kaepernick, Jimmy Carter, all the uninsured people in LA who lost everything…and State Farm’s scandalrooski.

Public Citizen would like you to know that there are killers among us.

They wear $2,000 suits and travel in private jets, unbothered by the TSA or the teeming masses. Their children attend the finest universities in the world, and they vacation on private islands and yachts. Many “earn” more in a day than most Americans take home in a year; their positions ensure their heirs will never have to work a day in their lives.

Their fortunes are the result of poisoning you, me, our children and grandchildren, every other living thing on Earth, and destroying the temperature stability of our atmosphere. This week they’re arguably responsible, in part, for billions of dollars in losses, numerous deaths, and thousands of shattered lives in Southern California.

Illegitimate president-elect Trump is trying his best to cover for them, claiming that the fires ripping through the Los Angeles area are the fault of California’s Democratic governor, calling Gavin Newsome by a childish name to draw more attention to Trump’s efforts on behalf of the Republican Party’s most generous donors.

Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in southern California.

Mainstream media is largely going along with Trump’s charade, choosing not to even mention — in the vast majority of their reports on the crisis — the role of climate change in the fires. And never, G-d forbid, mentioning the role of the fossil fuel industry in the climate change that has turned these fires from an annual nuisance into a hellscape.

It’s as frankly absurd as a TV news person reporting on a plane crash and, instead of asking aviation experts what caused it, simply lifting their collective shoulders with a helpless “shit happens” shrug.

But these fires — and the droughts and changing weather patterns that made them so severe — aren’t something that just happens by random happenstance, any more than an airliner crash.

And the oil industry has known for decades this day was coming.

In November, 1959, the famous scientist Edward Teller — the “Father of the H-Bomb” — was the keynote speaker at a conference on “The Energy of the Future” in New York, organized by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business. The news he conveyed to the assembled oil industry executives was stark:

“Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. ... The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it? Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect ...
“It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”

This shocking news apparently provoked a scramble in the oil industry, probably similar to when the asbestos industry learned in the 1930s that their product caused lung cancer (the mesothelioma that killed my father), or in 1939 when the tobacco industry learned that smoking also killed people.

They set out to determine if Teller’s prediction was true. He’d predicted that CO2 levels would reach the point where they’d begin to seriously melt the polar and Greenland ice caps and alter weather patterns within a few decades, telling the oil executives at that 1959 meeting:

“At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the [heat] radiation leaving the earth.”

For the next decade, industry scientists went to work along with studies commissioned by major universities. One of the most well-known was a 1968 report the American Petroleum Institute hired the Stanford Research Institute to conduct. Its findings corroborated Teller’s prediction:

“Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. ... there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. ... pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.”

It was the first of dozens of studies the industry paid for or knew about, all predicting pretty much exactly what’s happening right now in Los Angeles, including major reports in 1979, 1982, and 1991.

And then the “climate denial” began.

Fossil fuel billionaires and their oil companies funded think tanks to promote skepticism, pushed frontmen onto radio and TV to claim that climate scientists and people like Al Gore were “in it for the money,” and began funding the campaigns of politicians willing to exchange the future habitability of the planet for a few decades of power and wealth.

In 2015, the Union of Concerned Scientists documented decades of internal industry memos and strategy sessions that were organizing, funding, and detailing roughly three decades of lies foisted on the American Public. The industry and its executives’ efforts were all, apparently, in the service of preserving their income stream and avoiding any liability for the deaths they knew would one day come as a result of their product poisoning our atmosphere.

And now that day is here. Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in southern California.

Two-thirds of voters, according to a 2024 poll, believe the fossil fuel industry and its pampered executives should be held civilly responsible for the damage climate change is causing, and a plurality want them to face criminal charges.

Public Citizen published a 2023 report titled “Charging Big Oil with Climate Homicide,” including legal rationales and possible strategies for holding the killers in suits accountable by state and local prosecutors.

Will Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman or California Attorney General Rob Bonta have the courage to hold these companies and/or their executives accountable for the lies and deceptions they’ve funded that this week are killing Angelinos?

Will enough people call their members of Congress at 202-224-3121 to provoke investigations that could lead to congressional action?

Will our media ever begin to call out Trump and the alleged climate lies and deceptions of the industry that owns him?