President Donald Trump's executive order prohibiting any hospital that receives federal funds from practicing gender-affirming care callously disregards the needs of children who are both gender and neurodiverse, putting them and their families at risk. If anyone celebrating this order were to spend time with the parents, children, and doctors affected, their feelings might change. They should meet Pearl who before receiving treatment was failing out of high school, contemplating suicide, and rarely left the house, and is now attending community college, teaching herself another language, and has developed deep friendships. Or the mathematically-gifted Ellen who after two deep depressive episodes in the last three years, finds safety, companionship, and stability in her gender support group. Or Jacob, a role model to all that meet him, who is attending college out of state and just performed in a concert on campus.

For three years my husband and I have been part of a support group with the parents of these children, who range in age from 14 to 25. Many are now scrambling for information to determine how far the order extends; where one can continue to receive care; what care, if any, the doctors they’ve trusted, relied on, and put faith in for years can still provide. Parents are counting prescription refills, checking if pharmacies will still honor them, searching for providers not impacted by the order, and compiling a list of states they could afford to travel to if other options don’t materialize. Some fear the order will destroy their children’s delicate mental health. Others fear it is a death sentence.

Our “community” includes some of the most thoughtful and loving caregivers I have ever known. Our children, who all have autism spectrum disorder (ASD), see and experience the world through a different yet remarkable lens. While some focus on their deficits, we see their creativity, honesty, strong sense of justice, loyalty, and enhanced focus as superpowers. But none of us deny that what makes them unique also presents challenges, including struggling with social interactions, poor executive functioning skills, or developmental delays. One challenge they all share is dealing with their gender diversity.

These are parents not boogeymen. These children are lovingly cared for and listened to, not abused.

Those with ASD are three to six times more likely than the general population to be gender diverse1—the umbrella term that includes non-binary and transgender. On top of their social, developmental, or communication issues, the added stress of feeling uncomfortable in their own bodies deeply impacts their well-being. We often talk about their “dark periods” when they’ve experienced debilitating depression, suicidal ideation, and elevated anxiety. Like any good parent, we sought advice from trusted medical professionals who provide the standard of care supported by leading medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Our children see a multidisciplinary team of fully licensed, board-certified, highly trained pediatric specialists at a world-renowned hospital. These neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, gynecologists, and social workers coordinate care plans tailored to each child, considering their unique developmental, mental, and emotional health needs. Every child is evaluated regularly over extended periods of time. The medical care they receive may include mental health treatment, executive functioning courses, and in-person or online groups where they play games like D&D and socialize with like-minded youth. Some children who are past puberty receive hormone therapy after an extensive evaluation process. No child under the age of 18 is provided with gender-affirming surgery.

Parents in our group run the gamut. Some struggled to accept their child’s gender diversity or ASD diagnosis. Some oppose using hormone therapy, despite their child’s repeated demands, because they believe their child couldn’t handle the responsibility. Some have once needed to hospitalize their suicidal children, but have watched them flourish since starting them on hormone therapy. All struggling and questioning. But no care decisions are made without extensive consultation with their doctors, whose paramount concern is that our children are happy, healthy, productive, and thriving.

My child does not receive hormone therapy or other treatments outlined in the order. I do not, cannot, fully understand the magnitude of their pain. All I can do is stand witness to this action’s cruelty. These are parents not boogeymen. These children are lovingly cared for and listened to, not abused. These doctors have dedicated their lives to improving the mental and physical health of some of the most vulnerable among us. They are saving them, not experimenting on them. We are all good, intelligent, informed, and, now, scared people, whose greatest concern is the welfare of our children.

Editor's Note: To protect privacy all names and identifying details of those mentioned in this piece have been changed.

Donald Trump and the Republicans are unleashing a tsunami of extremist executive orders and policy changes. But the Democrats who one would normally expect to lead the resistance are not reacting, explaining that they are in “wait and see mode” because they are still despondent about the election results.

The post First Meeting of the Resistance first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post First Meeting of the Resistance appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

This year’s Doomsday Clock Statement landed like a damp squib in a Trump-swamped corporate news cycle on January 28th. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists only moved the hands of the Clock forward by one second, from 90 seconds up to 89 seconds to midnight, which must have come as a relief to the few members of the public who heard about it.

But this minimal advance in the hands of the Clock was a strange and misleading top-line for the Bulletin’s actual Doomsday Clock Statement, which was brimming with extremely dire warnings that deserve far greater official and public attention.

This disconnect between the movements of the hands of the Doomsday Clock and Bulletin’s underlying threat assessments is deeply troubling. If the positioning of the hands of the Clock does not accurately reflect the seriousness of the dangers it represents, then the powerful symbolism of the Doomsday Clock is lost, undermining the very purpose for which Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and their colleagues invented it.

The new Clock Statement began, “In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends that have deeply concerned (us) continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course.”

The original atomic scientists created the Doomsday Clock to symbolize humanity’s suicidal march toward annihilation by nuclear war, and that is still the greatest danger that midnight on the Clock represents, even as it now incorporates the added dangers of climate change, biological threats and disruptive technologies.

The threat assessments in the 2025 Clock statement begin with the warning that the war in Ukraine “still looms over the world,” and that it “could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation.”

It was this danger of escalation to nuclear war over Ukraine that led the Bulletin to move the hands of the Clock forward by 10 seconds in January 2023, from 100 to 90 seconds to midnight.

Since then, despite President Biden’s warning in 2022 that war between Russia and the United States would be the suicidal Third World War that we must avoid at all costs, the U.S. and NATO have blasted through every self-imposed “red line” designed to prevent that, providing Ukraine with tanks, F-16 warplanes, long-range missiles, and approval to use them inside Russia as well as in Ukraine.

The roles of U.S. and NATO personnel in targeting, planning, surveillance, intelligence and secret “special operations” involving Western weapons have escalated into the very war between the United States and Russia that Biden promised to avoid.

So we cannot understand the Bulletin’s decision to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock only one second closer to the global mass suicide it symbolizes, as if these developments in the war between NATO and Russia have not brought us significantly closer to self-destruction than we were two years ago.

The Clock Statement then addresses the crisis in the Middle East. In January 2023, when the Bulletin last moved the hands of the clock forward, the U.S. and Israel were enjoying a false sense of security and normalcy in that region, believing that they had suppressed and tamed armed resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.

Now, since the Palestinian breakout in October 2023 and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the new Doomsday Clock statement warns that, “Conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral out of control into a wider war without warning.”

With nuclear-armed Israel threatening to launch a major war on Iran and ready to use its nuclear weapons before it would accept an existential defeat in such a war, and with no real limits to U.S. support for Israeli war-making and genocide, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is right to warn that this could spiral out of control at any moment. Yet it seems to have ignored this danger too in its one-second tick forward of the Doomsday Clock.

While these raging conflicts involving nuclear weapons states may be the most dangerous current flashpoints for a nuclear war, nothing reflects the relentless nature of our accelerating march toward Armageddon more clearly than the determination with which the nuclear weapons powers, led by the United States, are expanding and “modernizing” their nuclear arsenals, even as they complete the dismantling of all Cold War-era arms control treaties and nuclear safeguards.

The 2025 Doomsday Clock Statement makes it clear that the Bulletin’s analysts understand this only too well:

“The countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilization. The nuclear arms control process is collapsing, and high-level contacts among nuclear powers are totally inadequate given the danger at hand.”

And yet they insist that the inexorable advance of these Doomsday plans over the past two years has only brought us one second closer to Doomsday. How can that be?

The next and final sentence in the paragraph on nuclear weapons addresses the dangers of nuclear proliferation, which is the widely predicted result of the failure of the nuclear powers to pursue genuine nuclear disarmament:

“Alarmingly, it is no longer unusual for countries without nuclear weapons to consider developing arsenals of their own—actions that would undermine long-standing nonproliferation efforts and increase the ways in which nuclear war could start.”

The next paragraph in the Doomsday Clock Statement addresses the dangers of the Climate Crisis. It explains that global greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing and global temperatures are still rising, causing extreme weather, floods, tropical cyclones, heat waves, droughts and wildfires on every continent.

“The long-term prognosis for the world’s attempts to deal with climate change remains poor,” it reads, “as most governments fail to enact the financing and policy initiatives necessary to halt global warming.”

But this is just one more dire warning that is not reflected in the hands of the Doomsday Clock.

On biological threats, the Clock statement warns, “Supposedly high-containment biological laboratories continue to be built throughout the world, but oversight regimes for them are not keeping pace, increasing the possibility that pathogens with pandemic potential may escape. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have increased the risk that terrorists or countries may attain the capability of designing biological weapons for which countermeasures do not exist.”

On disruptive technologies, it warns that, “Systems that incorporate artificial intelligence in military targeting have been used in Ukraine and the Middle East, and several countries are moving to integrate artificial intelligence into their militaries. Such efforts raise questions about the extent to which machines will be allowed to make military decisions—even decisions that could kill on a vast scale, including those related to the use of nuclear weapons.”

The strange decision to only advance the Doomsday Clock by one second appears to be a hedge against the possibility that all these current trends will continue, but that, by some miracle, none of them will actually succeed in destroying us all in the next few decades. This could leave BAS in the embarrassing position of a Chicken Little predicting a calamity that has not come to pass, even as the hands of the Doomsday Clock advance to within a few seconds of midnight.

But this way of thinking defeats the very purpose of the Doomsday Clock, which is to raise the alarm with policy-makers and the public about the dangerous course we are on. The existential dangers we face are only too real, and the failure of our public and private institutions to address and resolve them is the most egregious and potentially suicidal failure in the history of our species.

In abdicating its responsibility to warn us of the gravity of these dangers, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists risks turning Einstein and Oppenheimer’s call for sanity into yet another mechanism to normalize the suicidal insanity of our 21st century rulers.

The Bulletin appears to have joined all the other mainstream institutions of American society - the White House, Congress, the military-industrial complex, the Republican and Democratic Parties, the corporate media, Wall Street, academia - in normalizing the collective denial by which our corrupt ruling class lulls the public into sleepwalking toward mass extinction.

Remarkably, while the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists seems to have abandoned its founders’ commitment to the urgency of nuclear disarmament, President Trump apparently recognizes that ending the nuclear arms race would be the crowning diplomatic achievement of his, or any, U.S. presidency.

In off-the-cuff remarks in a video call to the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 23rd, Trump suddenly raised the tantalizing prospect of nuclear disarmament negotiations with Russia and China. Talking about a phone call with President Xi of China, Trump elaborated,

“We’d [Trump and Xi?] like to see denuclearization. In fact, with President Putin, prior to an election result, which was, frankly, ridiculous, we were talking about denuclearization of our two countries, and China would have come along. China has a much smaller, right now, nuclear armament than us or field than us, but they’re going to be catching up at some point over the next four or five years.”

“And I will tell you that President Putin really liked the idea of cutting way back on nuclear. And I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow. And China would have come along too. China also liked it. Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it. It’s too depressing.”

“So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible. And I can tell you that President Putin wanted to do it. He and I wanted to do it. We had a good conversation with China. They would have been involved, and that would have been an unbelievable thing for the planet. And I hope it can be started up again.”

What Trump says in these unscripted, off-the-cuff remarks is encouraging. It seems that President Xi reminded Trump of their discussions during his first term, and, at least for a moment, turned his attention to the ultimate “elephant in the room” hanging over all our heads.

As the fate of the world teeters in the hands of an unpredictable U.S. president and the enfeebled Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists muffles the powerful symbolism of its Doomsday Clock, CODEPINK has created an alternative for the precarious times we live in: the Peace Clock. Instead of counting down the minutes and seconds to our extinction, the Peace Clock calls on the U.S. government to take a series of specific, concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament.

That starts with agreeing to Russian and Chinese proposals for a ban on weapons in space and reinstating the 1972 ABM Treaty with Russia, including the removal of formerly prohibited U.S. anti-ballistic-missile installations in Poland and Romania. By such concrete, practical steps, the Peace Clock would, step by step, make the world safer and safer, leading sooner rather than later to its sixth and final step: the complete nuclear disarmament of all the nuclear weapons powers.

You can learn more about the Peace Clock and sign the Peace Clock Manifesto here.

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Chief Trump consultant Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have hit the ground running, shocking Washington’s Inside-the-Beltway bureaucratic infrastructure by following the Silicon Valley approach of “move fast and break things.”

Musk is moving to shut down US-AID. He offered bullying buyout offers to 2.3 million federal employees. He and his team of very-young assistants has been granted access to confidential government data, including those of the Treasury Department payment systems, NOAA, Medicare and Medicaid, and more.

Musk says DOGE is thoughtful and deliberate. But the speed with which he is moving worries critics who think he’s endangering essential government services and might have nefarious designs on Americans’ personal data. What’s next for DOGE?

On today’s “The TMI Show,” Manila Chan and Ted Rall speak with financial expert and political analyst Mitch Roschelle.

The post TMI Show Ep 73: What’s Next for DOGE? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 73: What’s Next for DOGE? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America" isn't just another absurd stunt or another example of his outlandish behavior. It signals a much deeper, more troubling agenda that seeks to erase historical identity and assert imperial domination over a region already suffering under a long history of interventionist policies. At its core, this is a move to expand the U.S. empire by erasing Mexico's presence from a geographical feature recognized for centuries.

The name "Gulf of Mexico" has existed since the 16th century. Its recognition is supported by international organizations such as the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN). These organizations ensure that place names remain neutral and historically accurate, preventing nations from distorting or erasing cultural and historical ties to specific regions. Mexico has formally rejected this renaming, emphasizing that no country has the right to unilaterally change the identity of a shared natural resource that spans multiple borders. This is a matter of respect for international law and sovereignty, which the Trump administration has ignored in favor of pursuing nationalistic expansionism.

Erasing "Mexico" from our maps isn't an aberration. It's part of a long pattern of anti-Mexican racism in the U.S., ranging from political scapegoating and border militarization to violent rhetoric that fuels hate crimes. But this move goes beyond that. It fits into a much larger U.S. strategy of controlling the Western Hemisphere, which dates back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which claimed the U.S. had the right to dictate who influences Latin America. Over time, this ideology has come to justify U.S.-backed military interventions, coups, and economic manipulations in the region aimed at securing U.S. interests and ensuring that Latin America remains in a subordinate position.

While Trump's attempt to erase "Mexico" from the Gulf of Mexico may appear symbolic, it could have devastating consequences.

Not only is the Gulf of Mexico a site of historical importance, but it is also rich in oil and natural resources. This fact is no coincidence. The United States has a long history of trying to control these resources including backing oil company boycotts against Mexico’s nationalized industry in the 1930s and signing trade agreements that favor U.S. companies over Mexican sovereignty. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico signals a territorial and economic claim over these waters and their resources, further cementing U.S. imperial ambitions in the region.

Companies like Google Maps, which has announced plans to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America after Trump's executive order, are just playing into the billionaire-fueled power grab that advances a racist, nationalist agenda of domination and imperialism. Even if Google only applies this change in the U.S., it still normalizes the idea that facts can be rewritten to serve a political agenda. At a time when diplomacy and mutual respect should be prioritized, honoring the internationally recognized name would send a clear message that Google values historical accuracy, global cooperation, and good neighborly relations.

The Gulf of Mexico is more than just a body of water; it is a shared resource of immense ecological, economic, and cultural significance for Mexico, the United States, and the world. It plays a critical role in regional trade, fisheries, and energy production, hosting some of North America's most important offshore oil reserves. The United States has long considered Latin America its "backyard," and this is another proof that its imperial ambitions are still alive.

The environmental devastation already occurring in the Gulf region is evidenced by devastating oil spills and the degradation of marine ecosystems. This destruction is further compounded as U.S. and foreign companies continue to exploit the region's resources with no regard for the long-term damage.

The movement to rename the Gulf of Mexico fits into a broader pattern of anti-Mexican sentiment in the United States that has often manifested in political scapegoating, hateful rhetoric, and border militarization. Such rhetoric fuels violence and hate crimes against Mexican and Latino communities. While Trump's attempt to erase "Mexico" from the Gulf of Mexico may appear symbolic, it could have devastating consequences. It reflects a disregard for historical truth, an aggressive assertion of U.S. superiority, and the continuation of exploitative colonialist practices that harm both the environment and Latin American people.

The first two weeks of Trump 2.0 have been a whirling swirl of venomous prejudice, but one neon throughline of the discombobulating frenzy is an attack on the transgender community. The Trump administration is brazenly attempting to drive trans people out of existence through the denial of education, the ability to get medical care, to travel on a passport, to serve in the military. Trump even cooked up an executive order denying federal funds to schools that allow trans athletes to participate in girls’ and women’s sports. This is nothing short of an attempt to evict trans people from civic life. This is what banishment looks like.

Sport has played a pivotal role in this grim persecution. Howls of alleged unfairness in the sphere of sport swiftly transmogrified into the unabashed hate that simmers just beneath the legalese in Trump’s executive order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The executive order drips with fear and hyperbole. “The erasure of sex in language and policy,” it claims, “has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.” (If only it were that easy!) The order narrowly defines sex in a way that nixes trans and nonbinary people out of existence.

U.S.-based trans journalist Sydney Bauer told us, “For these political leaders, the goal is to create a segment of society where our civil rights are not needed to be protected so they can advance it to all other areas, despite court rulings increasingly affirming all aspects of trans people’s lives are protected by the 14th Amendment.” She added, “If my gender identity is challenged when I step on a sports field, the goal is for it to be challenged—and forcibly detransitioned—in public life.”

Just as sport was a space for test-driving and spreading anti-trans messaging and policies, it doubles as a platform for fightback against the ongoing horror show.

Athletes and sports administrators set the stage for this confected moral panic. Long before Trump’s executive orders, they engaged in blatant fearmongering, painting trans women athletes as cheaters and even predators. NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines has made transphobia an integral part of her brand. Even tennis icon Martina Navratilova has long viewed trans women athletes as “cheats.” The anodyne-sounding “Protect Women’s Sports” has become the right-wing dog whistle for trans exclusion. The haters’ transphobia even extended to athletes who were not in fact trans. During the Paris 2024 Olympics, a slew of celebrities—from JK Rowling to Elon Musk—mislabeled the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif as trans, ginning up malicious attacks against her.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued a seemingly inclusive framework for trans athletes in 2021. But the IOC punted ultimate responsibility to international sports federations, many of which chose to exclude athletes, despite a lack of scientific evidence. Next month, the IOC will select a new president. One frontrunner, Lord Sebastian Coe, has openly opined that trans athletes threaten sport. Other candidates have adopted equally, if not more draconian stances.

Taken together, this steady flow of anti-trans bigotry in sport was the gateway to full-throttle demonization under Trump.

Let’s be clear: The endgame of trans demonization is death. Not only social death, but actual death. The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed legislation banning transgender girls and women from participating in sports. If this bill becomes a law, it will cost human lives. Recent research found that state-level anti-transgender laws increased the rates of suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth.

Sport was the Trojan Horse used to attack trans people in all walks of life. But the machine is still revving, scanning for targets. Just as the right-wing hate machine didn’t stop with “Protecting Women’s Sports,” transphobia will hurt cisgender women who don’t conform to a narrow, Eurocentric version of womanhood. The Trump administration’s attempt to distill the meaning of “woman” into chromosomes or hormone levels echoes the sexism of the past. Sports have long used sex to control, steamrolling the diversity among women deemed “too masculine.” Ultimately, attacks on transgender people harm all women, especially women of color. Just ask Caster Semenya. Or Dutee Chand. Now the Trump administration is widening the onslaught.

Sadie Shreiner, a trans athlete currently competing in the NCAA, pointed out to us that the Trump administration’s decision to squelch research about transgender individuals is meant “to eradicate our historical and scientific existence.” She added, “This was never about trans athletics, science, or ‘fairness’, it has always been about oppression. They’ll attack me all the same whether I’m on or off the track.”

Across the world, hate mongers are reading Trump’s anti-trans cue card. Travers, a sociologist specializing in trans inclusion at Simon Fraser University, told us, “The anti-trans moral panic that has been fostered in the United States and the United Kingdom has definitely breathed life into anti-trans initiatives in Canada.” Anti-trans groups purporting to “protect women” have also emerged in recent years in Japan. They not only deny trans people their rights, but also their very existence through a discourse directly imported from U.S. politics.

Sports are never just sports. The ongoing moral panic around trans people explodes the erroneous notion that sports and politics are separate endeavors. Just as sport was a space for test-driving and spreading anti-trans messaging and policies, it doubles as a platform for fightback against the ongoing horror show.

Chris Mosier, the first trans athlete to represent Team USA (in duathlon and triathlon), posted on Bluesky: “We will fight. We will take care of each other. We will continue to exist, long after this administration is done.” Harrison Browne, the first transgender professional hockey player, appearing on Dave Zirin’s Edge of Sports podcast, urged for “debunking these myths of trans women and their participation.” Trans-rights advocacy groups are kicking into gear. Travers, the sociologist, said that the moment demands “Immediate resistance, legal resistance, public resistance, refusal to go along. But I also think it’s really important to play the long game,” building bona fide solidarity in the nooks and crannies of society.

There’s no question that when it comes to the possibility of trans banishment, we’re experiencing a five-alarm-fire, all-hands-on-deck moment. We have a fight on our hands. It’s time to link elbows and stand together on the right side of history.

Chris Wright, who was recently confirmed as the new secretary of energy, has been famous for years as one of the more unapologetic proponents of fossil fuels. In 1992, Wright founded Pinnacle Technologies, an early leader in the hydraulic fracking business, and later made his fortune as the CEO of Liberty Energy, one of the largest oilfield service firms in North America. In 2023, he made headlines for a series of inflammatory statements disputing the science of climate change.

Now Wright has taken a different tack on climate—less outrageous, but no less dangerous. At his Senate confirmation hearing last week, Wright claimed that he didn’t deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change; he only denied that climate change warranted any reductions in fossil fuel production. To make his case, Wright spoke in abstractions about “tradeoffs” and “complicated dialogue.”

Then came the doozy: Poor countries like Kenya suffered from sparse access to propane fuel, Wright said, and only fracking could deliver the low prices to make up for those shortfalls.

Wright claims to be working on behalf of the global poor, but if he were, he might heed their repeated calls for emission reductions in the United States and other wealthy countries.

Wright has been quietly developing this specious argument for years: that addressing energy poverty, especially in the Global South, requires untrammeled fossil fuel production, no matter the damage to the planet. In Liberty Energy’s 2024 annual report, Bettering Human Lives, Wright laid out his case for hydrocarbon extraction. “Only a billion people today enjoy the full benefits of a highly energized lifestyle,” Wright wrote, while “7 billion striv[e] to achieve the lifestyles of the more fortunate 1 billion.” Without access to reliable natural gas, “over 2 billion people still cook their daily meals and heat their homes with traditional fuels, [including] wood, dung, agricultural waste, or charcoal,” putting them at risk of acute respiratory disease from air pollution. The only remedy, according to Wright, is more fossil fuels like gas.

This weaponization of global energy poverty is so insidious because it takes a legitimate issue—inadequate access to reliable energy for billions of people around the world—and turns it into a neat talking point for the destruction of the planet. Energy insecurity is a real challenge for the Global South, with over 3 billion people estimated to suffer from energy poverty of some kind. But so is climate change, which the World Bank projects will push up to 135 million people into poverty by 2030, and which is already fueling extreme weather, conflict, and migration, from Micronesia to the Sahel.

Wright would like you to believe that “Zero Energy Poverty” and Net Zero emissions by 2050 are incompatible goals. According to Wright, “solar, wind, and batteries… will not, and cannot replace most of the energy services and raw materials provided by hydrocarbons.”

But this could not be further from the truth.

In a 2021 report, the Rockefeller Foundation report found that renewable energy could end energy poverty worldwide at a cost of just $130 billion a year, less than a sixth of what the United States currently spends on defense each year. Moreover, the report found that such a transformation would create 25 million jobs across Africa and Asia, more than 30 times the number of jobs created by a comparable investment in fossil fuels.

Wright’s case for hydrocarbons is based on a bad faith conflation of existing realities with possible futures. In Bettering Human Lives, Wright claims that electricity currently “delivers only 20% of total primary energy consumption” in order to challenge clean energy’s viability as a substitute for hydrocarbons. But as Wright himself knows, a central feature of the green transition will be the electrification of everything, from transportation to home heating to heavy industry. Present shares of energy usage for electricity do not provide an accurate picture of future consumption patterns .

In the case of the Global South, where energy poverty is most acute, the key will be the implementation and scaling of distributed renewable energy (DRE) systems. Unlike traditional grids, which often carry power over vast distances, DREs generate electricity from clean energy sources close to home. With the cost of batteries and solar PV both falling over 90% in the past decade, these systems are more affordable than ever. The Roosevelt Foundation sees DREs driving the clean energy transition across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with mini-grids providing power for a dizzying array of technologies: “solar lanterns, ice-making factories used by fishing communities, milk chillers and irrigation pumps for farmers, refrigerators and life-saving medical equipment in clinics and hospitals, and more.”

Some elements of the climate movement have pushed a degrowth agenda that fails to reckon with the energy needs of many countries in the Global South. Calls for developing nations to abruptly cut off coal consumption, for example, ring hollow if they are not accompanied by meaningful assistance to pay for more expensive alternatives. But for the most part, the climate movement has recognized the inequities in historical development and emissions patterns, and placed the burden squarely on the Global North to drive the decarbonization process.

Wright claims to be working on behalf of the global poor, but if he were, he might heed their repeated calls for emission reductions in the United States and other wealthy countries. For years now, developing countries have been asking the nations most responsible for the climate crisis to decarbonize fastest, in order to buy time for poorer countries to catch up. They have also called for additional climate finance to assist with mitigation and adaptation efforts. At COP29 in November, rich countries pledged $300 billion a year in climate finance by 2035, but research suggests developing nations need closer to $1 trillion a year to protect their most vulnerable populations. If Wright were sincere in his concern for the plight of the global energy poor, he would support these initiatives.

Of course, he will do no such thing. Wright’s patron in the White House has already made the new administration’s policy clear. On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords—and froze all foreign aid for 100 days. Now Trump appears to have shuttered USAID entirely. To those observing from abroad, Wright’s bad faith appeals to global poverty must appear as one more indignity from an administration inclined to offer little else.

Befitting a presidency inaugurated by a parade of tech billionaires, U.S. President Donald Trump has taken Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous “move fast and break things” approach to the opening weeks of his second term—and break things he has.

Trump quickly handed over the federal government’s keys and wallet to unelected billionaire Elon Musk, who has treated Congress, federal law, and regulators with the same brazen disregard he displays in his business ventures.

Under the guise of the Orwellian Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk—the richest man in the world—has bought de facto control of the U.S. government for a cool $288 million in political donations. That’s a bargain compared to the nearly $7 trillion in taxpayer dollars currently at his fingertips.

With Musk serving as judge, jury, and executioner for what constitutes “wasteful” government spending, there’s nothing to stop him from, say, killing investigations into Tesla’s workplace harassment in his California plant.

After sparking confusion, outrage, and temporary restraining orders with their hasty attempt to halt federal spending—imperiling vital programs like Head Start, Meals on Wheels, and Medicaid—Trump and Musk continue to rampage through government.

In a few short weeks, they’ve shuttered federal agencies, fired civil servants, and handed over access to Americans’ sensitive personal and classified information to a group of 20-somethings—all illegally.

According to reporting, Musk’s minions have seized control of the Treasury Department’s payments system. That’s the plumbing that ensures that tax refunds, Social Security payments, and other democratically authorized spending reaches its destination, leaving experts and long-time employees fearful of what comes next.

With Musk serving as judge, jury, and executioner for what constitutes “wasteful” government spending, there’s nothing to stop him from, say, killing investigations into Tesla’s workplace harassment in his California plant or self-driving systems after a fatal pedestrian crash in Arizona.

There’s nothing to stop him from cutting off rivals and securing even more in federal funding and contracts for his company SpaceX, which has taken in more than $15 billion in taxpayer dollars to date.

More concerning, there’s nothing to stop him from using the vast reams of sensitive and personal information he’s now stolen from millions of Americans to train his artificial intelligence systems, hone his X (formerly Twitter) algorithms, or even go after specific individuals and nonprofits that criticize him on social media.

This isn’t a government efficiency program—it’s a hostile corporate takeover of American democracy.

While the ultra-rich and large corporations have long used their political influence to secure power and advance their own interests, never before has one billionaire so thoroughly infiltrated the federal government and bent it to their will for personal gain.

In a way, this is the logical endgame for a political system that’s long rewarded those with pockets deep enough to pay for access and drowned out the needs of working people. Musk has gone directly to the source, raiding the public coffers for his own benefit and interests. This way, he can keep the spigots flowing to himself and his companies, while he champions cuts to vital programs that serve workers and families but not billionaires.

Musk rails against the career federal workers who serve under both Democratic and Republican administrations as “unelected bureaucrats,” but you know them as your mail carrier, your social worker, and your Veterans Administration nurse.

New polling for our organization, Groundwork Collaborative, shows that nearly 60% of voters already believe this unelected tech billionaire has too much influence over Trump and the federal government.

The more they learn, the less they like. Musk’s audacious $2 trillion target for spending reductions is infeasible without deep, painful cuts to veterans benefits, Social Security, Medicare, and food assistance, all of which voters find unacceptable by stunning 50-point margins.

Already, scores of lawsuits have been launched against Musk and DOGE’s blitzkrieg through the federal government. Whether they will stop his reckless behavior is one question. Whether he and Trump will listen if they do is another.

Congress must step in and thoroughly investigate DOGE and check Elon’s unbridled power, before he breaks our government and our democracy beyond repair.

It didn’t take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to U.S. President Donald Trump’s reelection. On November 6, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement,” explained the GEO Group’s executive chair, George Zoley, “and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” In other words, the “largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history” was going to be a moneymaker.

As it happens, that Bloomberg piece was a rarity, offering a glimpse of immigration enforcement that doesn’t normally get the attention it deserves by focusing on the border-industrial complex. The article’s tone, however, suggested that there will be a sharp break between the border policies of Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden. Its essential assumption: that Biden adored open borders, while Trump, the demagogue, is on his way to executing a profitable clampdown on them.

In a recent article, “The Progressive Case against Immigration,” journalist Lee Fang caricatured just such a spectrum, ranging from people with “Refugees Welcome” yard signs to staunch supporters of mass deportation. He argued that Democrats should embrace border enforcement and “make a case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking.” This, he suggested, would allow the party to “reconnect with its blue-collar roots.” Fang’s was one of many post-election articles making similar points—namely, that the Democrats’ stance on free movement across the border cost them the election.

Biden left office as the king of border contracts, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, since he received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from top border-industry companies during the 2020 election campaign.

But what if the Biden administration, instead of opposing mass deportation, had proactively helped construct its very infrastructure? What if, in reality, there weren’t two distinctly opposed and bickering visions of border security, but two allied versions of it? What if we started paying attention to the budgets where the money is spent on the border-industrial complex, which tell quite a different story than the one we’ve come to expect?

In fact, during President Biden’s four years in office, he gave 40 contracts worth more than $2 billion to the same GEO Group (and its associated companies) whose stocks spiked with Trump’s election. Under those contracts, the company was to maintain and expand the U.S. immigrant detention system, while providing ankle bracelets for monitoring people on house arrest.

And that, in fact, offers but a glimpse of Biden’s tenure as—yes!—the biggest contractor (so far) for border and immigration enforcement in U.S. history. During his four years in office, Biden’s administration issued and administered 21,713 border enforcement contracts, worth $32.3 billion, far more than any previous president, including his predecessor Donald Trump, who had spent a mere—and that, of course, is a joke—$20.9 billion from 2017 to 2020 on the same issue.

In other words, Biden left office as the king of border contracts, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, since he received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from top border-industry companies during the 2020 election campaign. And in addition to such contributions, the companies of that complex wield power by lobbying for ever bigger border budgets, while maintaining perennial public-private revolving doors.

In other words, Joe Biden helped build up Trump’s border-and-deportation arsenal. His administration’s top contract, worth $1.2 billion, went to Deployed Resources, a company based in Rome, New York. It’s constructing processing and detention centers in the borderlands from California to Texas. Those included “soft-sided facilities,” or tent detention camps, where unauthorized foreigners might be incarcerated when Trump conducts his promised roundups.

The second company on the list, with a more than $800 million contract (issued under Trump in 2018, but maintained in the Biden years), was Classic Air Charter, an outfit that facilitates deportation flights for the human-rights-violating ICE Air. Now that Trump has declared a national emergency on the border and has called for military deployment to establish, as he puts it, “operational control of the border,” his people will discover that there are already many tools in his proverbial enforcement box. Far from a stark cutoff and change, the present power transition will undoubtedly prove to be more of a handoff—and to put that in context, just note that such a bipartisan relay race at the border has been going on for decades.

The Bipartisan Border Consensus

In early 2024, I was waiting in a car at the DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona, when a white, nondescript bus pulled up in the lane next to me. We were at the beginning of the fourth year of Biden’s presidency. Even though he had come into office promising more humane border policies, the enforcement apparatus hadn’t changed much, if at all. On either side of that port of entry were rust-colored, 20-foot-high border walls made of bollards and draped with coiling razor wire, which stretched to the horizon in both directions, about 700 miles in total along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In Nogales, the wall itself was a distinctly bipartisan effort, built during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Here, Trump’s legacy was adding concertina wire that, in 2021, the city’s mayor pleaded with Biden to take down (to no avail).

There were also sturdy surveillance posts along the border, courtesy of a contract with military monolith General Dynamics. In them, cameras stared over the border wall into Mexico like dozens of voyeurs. Border Patrol agents in green-striped trucks were also stationed at various points along the wall, constantly eyeing Mexico. And mind you, this represented just the first layer of a surveillance infrastructure that extended up to 100 miles into the U.S. interior and included yet more towers with sophisticated camera systems (like the 50 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona constructed by the Israeli company Elbit Systems), underground motion sensors, immigration checkpoints with license-plate readers, and sometimes even facial recognition cameras. And don’t forget the regular inspection overflights by drones, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft.

Since 2008, ICE and CBP have issued 118,457 contracts, or about 14 a day.

The command-and-control centers, which follow the feeds of that digital, virtual, expansive border wall in a room full of monitors, gave the appropriate Hollywood war-movie feel to the scene, one that makes the Trump “invasion” rhetoric seem almost real.

From my idling car, I watched several disheveled families get off that bus. Clearly disoriented, they lined up in front of a large steel gate with thick bars, where two blue-uniformed Mexican officials waited. The children looked especially scared. A young one—maybe three years old—jumped into her mother’s arms and hugged her tightly. The scene was emotional. Just because I happened to be there at that moment, I witnessed one of many deportations that would happen that day. Those families were among the more than 4 million deported and expelled during the Biden years, a mass expulsion that has largely gone undiscussed.

About a year later, on January 20, Donald Trump stood in the U.S. Capitol building giving his inaugural speech and assuring that crowded room full of officials, politicians, and billionaires that he had a “mandate” and that “America’s decline” was over. He received a standing ovation for saying that he would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” adding, “All illegal entry will be halted. And we’ll begin the process of sending millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” He would, he insisted, “repel the disastrous invasion of our country.”

Implied, as in 2016 when he declared that he was going to build a border wall that already existed, was that Trump would take charge of a supposedly “open border” and finally deal with it. Of course, he gave no credence to the massive border infrastructure he was inheriting.

Back in Nogales, a year earlier, I watched Mexican officials open up that heavy gate and formally finish the deportation process on those families. I was already surrounded by decades of infrastructure, part of more than $400 billion of investment since 1994, when border deterrence began under the Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper. Those 30 years had seen the most massive expansion of the border and immigration apparatus the United States had ever experienced.

The border budget, $1.5 billion in 1994 under the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has risen incrementally every year since then. It was turbocharged after 9/11 by the creation of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), whose combined budget in 2024 exceeded $30 billion for the first time. Not only were the Biden administration’s contracts larger than those of its predecessors, but its budget power grew, too. The 2024 budget was more than $5 billion higher than the 2020 budget, the last year of Trump’s first term in office. Since 2008, ICE and CBP have issued 118,457 contracts, or about 14 a day.

As I watched that family somberly walk back into Mexico, the child still in her mother’s embrace, it was yet another reminder of just how farcical the open-borders narrative has been. In reality, Donald Trump is inheriting the most fortified border in American history, increasingly run by private corporations, and he’s about to use all the power at his disposal to make it more so.

“Is He Going to Be Like Obama?”

Fisherman Gerardo Delgado’s blue boat is rocking as we talk on a drying-up, possibly dying lake in central Chihuahua, Mexico. He shows me his meager catch that day in a single orange, plastic container. He shelled out far more money for gas than those fish would ever earn him at the market.

“You’re losing money?” I ask.

“Every day,” he replies.

It wasn’t always like this. He points to his community, El Toro, that’s now on a hill overlooking the lake—except that hill wasn’t supposed to be there. Once upon a time, El Toro had been right on the lakeshore. Now, the lake has receded so much that the shore is remarkably far away.

According to forecasts for the homeland and border-control markets, climate change is a factor spurring the industry’s rapid growth.

Two years earlier, Delgado told me, his town ran out of water and his sisters, experiencing the beginning of what was about to be a full-on catastrophe, left for the United States. Now, more than half of the families in El Toro have departed as well.

Another fisherman, Alonso Montañes tells me they are witnessing an “ecocide.” As we travel along the lake, you can see how far the water has receded. It hasn’t rained for months, not even during the summer rainy season. And no rain is forecast again until July or August, if at all.

On shore, the farmers are in crisis and I realize I’m in the middle of a climate disaster, a moment in which—for me—climate change went from the abstract and futuristic to something raw, real, and now. There hasn’t been a megadrought of this intensity for decades. While I’m there, the sun continues to burn, scorchingly, and it’s far hotter than it should be in December.

The lake is also a reservoir from which farmers would normally receive irrigation water. I asked every farmer I met what he or she was going to do. Their responses, though different, were tinged with fear. Many were clearly considering migrating north.

“But what about Trump?” asked a farmer named Miguel under the drying up pecan trees in the orchard where he worked. At the inauguration, Trump said, “As commander and chief I have no other choice but to protect our country from threats and invasions, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. We are going to do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

What came to mind when I saw that inauguration was a 2003 Pentagon climate assessment in which the authors claimed that the United States would have to build “defensive fortresses” to stop “unwanted, starving migrants” from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. The Pentagon begins planning for future battlefields 25 years in advance, and its assessments now invariably include the worst scenarios for climate change (even if Donald Trump doesn’t admit that the phenomenon exists). One non-Pentagon assessment states that the lack of water in places like Chihuahua in northern Mexico is a potential “threat multiplier.” The threat to the United States, however, is not the drought but what people will do because of it.

“Is he going to be like Obama?” Miguel asked about Trump. Indeed, Barack Obama was president when Miguel was in the United States, working in agriculture in northern New Mexico. Though he wasn’t deported, he remembers living in fear of a ramping-up deportation machine under the 44th president. As I listened to Miguel talk about the drought and the border, that 2003 Pentagon assessment seemed far less hyperbolic and far more like a prophecy.

Now, according to forecasts for the homeland and border-control markets, climate change is a factor spurring the industry’s rapid growth. After all, future projections for people on the move, thanks to an increasingly overheating planet, are quite astronomical and the homeland security market, whoever may be president, is now poised to reach nearly $1 trillion by the 2030s.

It’s now an open secret that Trump’s invasion and deportation spiels, as well as his plans to move thousands of U.S. military personnel to the border, have not only proved popular with his large constituency but also with private prison companies like GEO Group and others building the present and future nightmarish infrastructure for a world of deportation. They have proven no less popular with the Democrats themselves.

Standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at joint press conference on February 4, U.S. President Donald Trump laid bare a subtext in his rhetoric about Gaza. According to Trump, the U.S. will “own” Gaza, Palestinians will be forcibly resettled in Arab states, and there never will be an independent Palestinian state. While the American state under Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden provided necessary material and rhetorical support for a slow genocide of the people of Gaza, Biden and his underlings never openly expressed a desire to colonize Gaza. The logical conclusion had been that Israel would complete its own colonization of Gaza, with the U.S. running diplomatic interference.

Now, the U.S. will not only violate the sovereignty of the Palestinian people, but Israel won’t even have a seat at the table: “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too… and get rid of the destroyed buildings [and] create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing,” Trump told reporters as Netanyahu stood by. As a consolation to Bibi, Trump seemed to indicate that the U.S. would soon be backing Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Trump now has outdone Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton as the most brazen recent president to conceal an imperialist project rejecting self-determination in the language of a foreign policy averse to intervention and informed by popular antiwar sentiments.

Human rights activists already had been seething with outrage over newly-inaugurated Trump’s comments about Gaza upon commencement of the cumbersome, drawn-out supposed cease-fire. Trump suggested that Palestinians in Gaza could be relocated to Egypt and Jordan, echoing the rhetoric of dispossession long uttered by the Israeli fascist right. According to Trump, Gaza was had already become a “demolition site” through the genocidal bombardment that he and his MAGA allies staunchly cheered on. Why not move the people out, and rebuild the area free from the democratic desires of the people?

Trump, the real estate developer president, understands better than the ethno-nationalist zealot Netanyahu that the real basis for colonization is dispossession and the creation of new property for the colonizers.

Trump’s statements are far from the ideological provocations that they seem. And Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has taken real steps toward being poised to make a fortune “rebuilding” Gaza with Saudi capital in his pocket. This is the art of the deal, not an Itamar Ben-Gvir racist fever dream.

Unfortunately, for Palestinians, there is no real operational difference between the Trumpian and Israeli far-right visions of Gaza’s future. Both amount to forced dispossession and relocation—which some human rights scholars call “ethnic cleansing” but others deem genocide. Both are fully colonial in the domination and subjugation of a people with the express aim of stealing their land. Perhaps both come back together as a closed circle when it comes to generating profits for the possessors, but Trump’s is the vision based wholly in naked real estate capitalism.

Consider Trump’s expressed idea of forcible relocation after the inauguration: “I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.” This is a developer’s callous materialism openly stated: Identify crisis that creates an opportunity to generate capital, offer an attention-grabbing promise (“peace”), find development partners (who will supply the capital), and collaborate with the racialized genocide in order to have a project. Palestinian agency, like the agency of American residents of neighborhoods that Trump and other developers have bulldozed or gentrified, is neither addressed nor acknowledged.

Unfortunately, Trump’s words don’t seem to be abstract ramblings but a cryptic disclosure of actual developments. (A majority of Trump’s critics mistake his overblown rhetoric for deliberate ideological bravado, when in fact it is garrulous self-disclosure of venal actions and desires.) Just before the “cease-fire” began, Israeli authorities permitted Jared Kushner’s private equity firm Affinity Partners’ purchase of a nearly 10% ownership stake in Israeli company Phoenix Financial and Insurance.

Phoenix is the major funder of illegal West Bank and Golan Heights settlements, and the locus of how the racism of the religious extremists creates opportunities for capitalists whose financial motives lead them into consort with the far-right. Kushner has never been a rabid MAGA ideologue, and even is attributed as the lead influence on Trump to sign into law the criminal justice reforms of the First Step Act. His work on the Abraham Accords resonates well with Israeli and American Zionists but also with Arab elites who lately espouse support for the Palestinians. He epitomizes the sorts of capitalists who gladly collaborate with far-right regimes but whose ideological bearings are often unarticulated or even avowedly contradictory to the far-right.

Kushner’s firm is now loaded with $2 billion in equity from the Saudi sovereign investment fund. Thus Trump’s statement about development of new housing with an Arab nation partner has a bearing in potential reality—his own family already has the relationship to make such a project reality. Furthermore, Israeli Channel 12 chief political correspondent Amit Segal reported in late January that Trump’s expressed vision for colonial Gaza may have significant support within Netanyahu’s government. Perhaps Netanyahu’s appearance in the U.S. on February 4 shows an endorsement, with a quid pro quo on the West Bank.

The real estate vision of Gaza—in which its inhabitants are first punished by isolation, then killed through conditions designed to eliminate them, and then lastly relocated away from their land after their have dare to survive—essentially is the modern Western colonial project. Clearly colonization builds its constituency through an invocation of racial superiority than dehumanizes occupants, but what it ultimately does is create land where the colonizers can generate worth capable of creating surplus value. There are many deplorable people who will rejoice if Gaza is cleared of every last Palestinian, but then there are the people who want the clearance in order to reap the profit from the new private property of the land.

As scholar Brenna Bhandar writes in the Colonial Lives of Property (2018): “The ways in which we understand, practice, and perform modes of subjectivity that are rooted in possession and domination are intimately bound to the juridical apparatus of private property. One cannot be undone without dismantling the other.” Trump, the real estate developer president, understands better than the ethno-nationalist zealot Netanyahu that the real basis for colonization is dispossession and the creation of new property for the colonizers.

The colonial creation of private property from stolen land is the American way, from the theft of Indigenous people’s lands to the urban renewal clearance projects that built the modern New York City in which Donald Trump was able to thrive and build wealth. There can be no shock that the developer president’s first public words on Gaza would celebrate the old method of generating “demolition sites” (terra nullius, or empty land). In a way, Trump actually is daring those of us who support Palestinian sovereignty to understand the interdependence of capitalism and genocidal colonialism. There must be a people, and there must be a land. One without the other presents a windfall to the developers.

Since assuming office, US President Donald Trump has relentlessly urged Egypt, Jordan, and other Muslim-majority countries to resettle Palestinians from Gaza.

Although Palestinians have firmly rejected Trump's proposal, it has continued to dominate the front pages of almost every Israeli newspaper.

Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who last year argued that it was "justified and moral" to starve Palestinians in Gaza, has been outspoken in his support of the idea, stating: "After 76 years in which most of Gaza's population was forcibly held in harsh conditions to preserve the aspiration to destroy the State of Israel, the idea of helping them find other places to start a new and better life is a great one."

Yedioth Ahronoth's senior military correspondent, Yossi Yehoshua, has also been a staunch supporter, suggesting: "Perhaps the time has come to adopt Trump's proposal and discuss voluntary exile from Gaza."

On Tuesday, at a joint press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump went a step further and announced the US will be taking over and running Gaza, potentially for the foreseeable future.

Shortly after Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023, fears quickly emerged that Israel would execute its undeclared plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the enclave.

Given the high level of support Israel was receiving from its western backers, many of us feared that a similar fate would await Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and, eventually, even those of us living in the lands of historic Palestine seized by Israel in 1948.

There is now a genuine belief that, no matter how dire the situation becomes, the Palestinian people will not disappear

This concern stemmed from a 10-page document issued in October 2023 by Israeli Minister Gila Gamliel's Intelligence Ministry, which proposed forcibly transferring Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.

Gamliel's document outlined three alternatives for post-war Gaza, with the option "that will yield positive, long-term strategic results" involving the expulsion of Palestinians to Sinai.

On Saturday, foreign ministers and officials from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, the Palestinian Authority, and the Arab League dismissed Trump's proposal, saying that it would threaten regional stability, spread conflict, and undermine prospects for peace.

"We affirm our rejection of [any attempts] to compromise Palestinians' unalienable rights, whether through settlement activities, or evictions or annexation of land or through vacating the land from its owners," they said in a joint statement.

Even Trump's "favorite dictator," Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has voiced dissent, warning that Egyptians would take to the streets to express their disapproval.

Palestinian defiance

Amid all the talk of ethnic cleansing, Palestinians have remained resolute, with extraordinary scenes unfolding in northern Gaza.

Despite the Israeli army flattening entire neighborhoods—destroying residential buildings, health and educational facilities, and critical infrastructure - hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have continued to stream north.

The image of an 80-year-old man walking back to his home in northern Gaza after being displaced in the south evokes memories of the Nakba, when hundreds of thousands were forced to flee their homes due to Zionist militias and armed gangs.

But this time, the scene and mood are not ones of despair. There is now a genuine belief that, no matter how dire the situation becomes, the Palestinian people will not disappear.

As a result, Israeli media has gone into a complete meltdown, with many lamenting the scenes of Palestinian defiance.

Channel 13's political correspondent, Moriah Asraf, recently expressed: "These images make me shiver all over my body…Something about the Gazans returning to their homes, albeit destroyed, but to their homes - it drives me crazy."

Matan Zuri, a security correspondent for Ynet, wrote: "Thousands of Palestinians have returned to the devastated northern Gaza Strip. The dream of renewed Jewish settlement has faded for the time being…This is the price of ending the war and returning the hostages. We knew it would happen, we saw it coming, and there was no choice but to accept it with submission and stick to the goodness of the deal."

Whatever happens next is anyone's guess, but the image of Palestinians returning to what remains of their bombed-out homes has been the most powerful response yet to Trump's racist and dehumanzing plan.

Live at 10 am Eastern/9 am Central time, and Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

A shocking (but not surprising) turn of events prompts a special edition of the show today.

First: As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu smiled next to him like the cat who ate the canary, President Trump brazenly endorsed the forcible expulsion of at least 1.7 million Palestinians from Gaza so that the bombed and bulldozed site of Israeli genocide can be occupied either by U.S. real estate interests or by Israel. Manila Chan and Ted Rall break down the implications for the Middle East.

Second: Trump said that Canada and Mexico couldn’t do anything to stop his 25% tariffs on goods. “We’re not looking for a concession,” he said. Three days later, Trump paused the tariffs on both countries for 30 days, citing concessions they had made.

Trump’s tariffs threatened to increase inflation and spooked the stock market. Did Trump’s pullback have more to do with that looming economic pain than with the concessions? What happens in a month?

On today’s “The TMI Show,” Manila Chan and Ted Rall discuss the future of tariffs under Trump with wealth management and finance expert Aquiles Larrea.

The post TMI Show Ep 72: Trump Endorses Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza + Did Trump Choke on Tariffs? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 72: Trump Endorses Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza + Did Trump Choke on Tariffs? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

There is no question that the Democratic Party, once the party of the working class, is now the party of the professional managerial class.

Workers have been voting with their feet, while the Democrats have been marching in the other direction:

• Trump won 56 percent to 43 percent voters without college degrees, a proxy for the working class, according to exit polls.
• Trump won 52 percent to 46 percent those with total family income of $30,000 to $100,000, another proxy for the working class.
• Of those who felt that their family’s financial situation was worse today than four years ago, 82 percent voted for Trump. Of those who felt it was better, 83 percent voted for Harris, as the Democratic brand moved up the income ladder.
• Of those who said the economy is not so good or poor, 70 percent voted for Trump. Of those who thought the economy was excellent or good, a proxy for the managerial professional class, 92 percent voted for Harris.
• There is a very strong statistical correlation between the counties with the highest layoff rates and the decline of the Democratic vote. During the last four years approximately 80 million workers suffered through involuntary layoffs. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)

These trends have been a long time in the making. In 1976 Jimmy Carter received 52.3 percent of the white working-class vote. Biden received only 36.2 percent in 2020, and Harris 33.0 percent in 2024. Racism can’t be the major cause of recent declines, since Barack Obama did better with 40.6 percent in 2012.

Given the political chaos all around us, now is the time to experiment with new ways to rekindle a working-class movement.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are trying to attract workers to a class-befuddled MAGA movement dominated by millionaires and billionaires. Trump’s plutocratic cabinet makes clear that the working class does not have a political home in either party. The question is, how can a new one be constructed?

Turn the Democrats Into Progressive Populists?

It would be suicidal, some argue, for the working class to abandon the Democrats. Better that they exert pressure so that the Democrats become genuine economic populists. For that to happen, realistically, it must be proven that Democrats can win elections on a populist platform in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.

But Sherrod Brown, a very strong economic populist, lost his Senate seat in Ohio in 2024. Did populism drag him down? Brown, who lost by 3.6 percent, certainly ran better than Harris, who lost Ohio by 11.2 percent. Brown believes, however, that he was done in by NAFTA, the free trade bill pushed for and signed by Bill Clinton in 1993. He believes the Democrats are still being blamed for how that trade bill decimated industrial areas:

“But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign about NAFTA.

I’ve seen that erosion of American jobs and I’ve seen the middle class shrink. People have to blame someone. And it’s been Democrats. We are more to blame for it because we have historically been the party of [workers].”

The power of NAFTA, not the working-class racism, is also what delivered the South to the Republicans, according to Nelson Lichtenstein in his new book on the Clinton years, A Fabulous Failure. Even after Nixon used his racist Southern Strategy to lure the South away from the Democrats, Lichtenstein notes that congressional representation in the southern states was still evenly split between the two parties. After NAFTA demolished the southern textile industry, however, most of the South abandoned the Democrats.

NAFTA = Job loss = Democrats

That’s the formula Brown could not overcome. But how could NAFTA still have so much punch three decades after it was passed?

For most working people, free trade deals are a proxy for mass layoffs. NAFTA, and then deals allowing China into the World Trade Organization, led to millions of lost jobs, especially in manufacturing areas. The pain lingers because corporations learned that moving jobs, or threatening to move them, can make them more in profits, and so involuntary layoffs continue unabated, upending the lives of approximately 20 million workers per year.

The Democratic Party has refused to stop Wall Street and corporate America from using layoffs to raise cash for the richest of the rich. The Democrats also have failed to redevelop decimated areas by directly creating jobs, as the New Deal did during the Depression. Job stability is not something either political party cares about, because corporate interests come first, but the issue hurts the Democrats more because of its historical claim as the party of working people.

The Democratic Party has refused to stop Wall Street and corporate America from using layoffs to raise cash for the richest of the rich.

Sherrod Brown’s populism didn’t cost him the election. The Democratic Party’s lack of economic populism, including their advocacy for trade deals and their overall failure to protect the livelihoods of working people, eroded Brown’s base.

Run as an Independent?

Dan Osborn, a steamfitter and former local union president, tried another path by running as an independent Senate candidate representing Nebraska. (The Democrats did not field a candidate.) He did even better than Sherrod Brown, losing by 6.7 percent while Harris finished a whopping 20.4 percent behind Trump, but clearly more needs to be done.

Osborn is now setting up the Working-Class Heroes Fund, a political action committee to recruit and support working-class candidates. As he put it:

Whether they’re leaving their party or it’s young people registering to vote, I think there’s certainly an appetite for people who are just frustrated with the parties…. We just see things not getting done. The reason why they’re not getting done is because they’re all bought and sold, and they’re owned by corporations. That is truly the divider in the country. So, I think that’s where the appetite stems from.

To win Osborn needed about 20 percent of Trump voters, which in turn meant he needed to find areas of agreement with Trump while struggling to find a working-class position on immigration. On the one hand, he said that something had to be done to secure the southern border. “Our border’s broken,” he said. “Our immigration system is broken.” He also argued that hard-working immigrants who were in the country, paid their taxes, and didn’t commit crimes should have a pathway to citizenship.

A Movement, Not Just a Candidate

Running candidates independent of the two parties, but without playing the role of a spoiler, is a strategy worth trying. But the history of working-class movements suggests that significant political change requires the mobilization of large numbers of working people into organized political movements of their own making.

• It was the rise of the 19th populists, the Farmers Alliance, that eventually forced the political system to regulate the robber barons.
• It was the rapid rise of the labor movement during the Depression that mobilized mass support for the New Deal.
• It was the upsurge of the Civil Rights movement that led to the historic anti-discriminatory reforms passed during the Johnson administration in the 1960s.

These movements reshaped the political landscape and put working-class issues on the national agenda. They gave working people a home, a collective expression, a sense of belonging, and empowerment. My guess is that for some, MAGA has done the same.

The Democrats became the party of the working-class because the labor movement, after WWII, represented more than 30 percent of the workforce. If you count family members it represented a large majority of working people. Its agenda could not be ignored.

Today, however, with only six percent of private sector workers in labor unions, that voice is greatly diminished.

Can labor unions again grow rapidly? Not without major labor law reforms to level the playing field with corporate power. But those reforms will not pass without a mobilized working class that demands it. Even when Democrats have controlled all three branches of government, they have failed to pass such reforms. If we’re waiting for labor unions to again represent 20 percent of the workforce, we’ve got a long wait.

The political void needs to be filled with concrete activities that bring workers together and give them a sense of collective power.

Working people, union and non-union alike, can still be mobilized through civic engagement to express their hopes and desires. Workers could join something new, like a new Workers Populist Alliance, to develop and put forth a working-class agenda.

But such a formation can only get off the ground if it is sponsored and resourced by a group of progressive labor unions. If unions really backed it, workers just might come. We need them to step up and try a pilot in one state, like Michigan.

What should a Workers Populist Alliance stand for? Here’s a simple platform that surveys suggest would have wide working-class appeal:

• Increase the minimum wage to at least $20 per hour, provide paid family leave, and four weeks paid vacation a year.
• Save jobs by prohibiting large corporations that receive taxpayer money and tax breaks from laying off taxpayers involuntarily.
• Guarantee the right to a job at a living wage. If the private sector can't create those jobs, the public sector must.
• Stop drug company price gouging, and end health insurance rip-offs by replacing them with Medicare for All.

The political void needs to be filled with concrete activities that bring workers together and give them a sense of collective power. One activity would be to shove this agenda in the face of every candidate, from city council to President, asking them to publicly endorse it. The platform could be used to fight against millions of unnecessary layoffs caused by unmitigated corporate greed and provide a progressive alternative to MAGA. This could be done very systematically in town after town, county after county. The ask of politicians is simple: Which side are you on?

Are labor unions willing to build a new political movement outside of the Democratic Party? It would be an uphill battle because their shared roots run deep. But expecting the Democrats to change their stripes has been a recipe for failure the last 40 years. And so is believing that MAGA billionaires will have anything to offer working people other than more tax cuts for the rich, plus mass layoffs.

Given the political chaos all around us, now is the time to experiment with new ways to rekindle a working-class movement. Could this develop into a viable third party of working people? No one knows. But there is no doubt that working people need a new home of their making.

The billionaire class has two political parties. Working people need one of our own.

After meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump repeated his assertion that “the Palestinians have no choice but to leave Gaza.” The utter destruction of buildings and infrastructure is almost incalculable.

Trump’s solution is to depopulate Gaza of Palestinians by sending them to Egypt and Jordan. This would be a continuation of the war crimes in the furtherance of the Israeli agenda of ethnic cleansing. Furthermore, the displacement of so many refugees would result in political instability in both countries and the festering of future conflicts with Israel.

Trump’s insights should be applied to a better, more just and longer lasting solution. If Gazans were to go anywhere during the reconstruction, it should be to the United States. We are the country most responsible for suppling the IDF with the means of blowing up Gaza. We should invite up to 2 million Palestinians giving them Green Cards and a road to citizenship or dual citizenship as is common among Israeli Americans.

We cannot ignore the human costs. We must be deeply committed to supporting the rebuilding of Gaza but also to the rebuilding of human infrastructure by enabling Gazans to live and reconstruct their lives.

Gazans should be welcomed to this country and provided free medical care, and education to make up for the loss of schools, universities and hospitals as a direct result of explosive armaments sent from the United States. They should receive access to employment, and credit to establish businesses given the destruction of Gaza’s commerce. Of course, the people of Gaza would be able to return to their homeland at any time of their choosing.

We must squarely face up to two issues. The first is the obligation by the United States and Israel to pay for the bulk of the cleanup and for the physical reconstruction of Gaza. The U.S. has spent nearly $20 billion on blowing up Gaza at an estimated cost of more than $400,000 for every Gazan killed.

We cannot ignore the human costs. We must be deeply committed to supporting the rebuilding of Gaza but also to the rebuilding of human infrastructure by enabling Gazans to live and reconstruct their lives.

I am certain the American President will lead the country to endorse this plan given his pragmatic insights regarding the scale of destruction and the required relocation of Palestinians. Furthermore, we will have ample human space to welcome Palestinians as the result of Trump’s vigorous program of ethnic cleansing of people currently residing within our borders.

Misattributed quotes and next-level gaslighting aside, we find ourselves yet again at a crossroads in time—a moment demanding serious reflection on the foundational principles that shaped our republic. This is not hyperbole.

For far too many years, most of what we have been willing to believe contradicts the ideals of the figures said to be revered by those we have entrusted with our government.

As to misattributed quotes, we could jump right in with Thomas Jefferson's actual words regarding our shared principles, but let's first reflect on the insights of his revolutionary compatriot turned bitter political rival, John Adams. In a letter dated April 16, 1776—less than three months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence—Adams shared this wisdom:

Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.

Now, recognizing that those working to recreate our nation—in their own oh-so-very perfect image—may not favor the Federalist Adams, our indispensable second president, let us fast forward some 140 years to Theodore Roosevelt. "Teddy" Roosevelt, a man well-versed in the ideas of our Founding Fathers and our foundational principles, had this to say in a letter dated January 1917:

Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

The focus on virtue as the foundation of national character contrasts sharply with the narrative we have been fed by those who, in reality, promote "the things that will destroy America." God only knows why we, the people, have been so accepting of their manipulative tactics instead of insisting upon promoting "the virtues that made America." Regardless, we have once again set ourselves up to watch as policies that overwhelmingly benefit a growing cadre of super-rich are implemented.

Yes, they will fuel their economic fire sufficiently so that some of us will enjoy a few crumbs. But regardless of their justifications, the harsh realities facing the shrinking middle class and the most vulnerable will be disregarded. They'll tell us that our best way forward is to be dragged down some technological path by today's Monied Interests, feeding us an amped-up version of the same greed-driven trickle-down bullshit that we've willfully consumed for nearly half a century. And for good measure, they will, this time, destroy as many ballasts of good governance as they possibly can. Then, their blaze will exhaust itself—leaving behind a stunning path of destruction. Never mind the damage done.

We the People should by now recognize their ways.

Let's now acknowledge that many of our antagonists today would prefer that we conclude this essay with the Anti-Federalist Jefferson's 1801 Inaugural Address, wherein he listed his governing principles and said, "These principles form the bright constellation, which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages, and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment..." However, it seems anything but likely that those currently at the helm of government are willing to acknowledge this in context.

For example, we are far removed from Jefferson's agrarian society, our need for a standing army is without question, and the Monied Interests have evolved beyond anything Jefferson could have imagined. So, we'll conclude, in a moment, with another example of Jeffersonian wisdom. Nonetheless, here's an abbreviated look at Thomas Jefferson's "bright constellation":

• "Equal and exact justice to all…
• Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations…
• The support of the state governments in all their rights…
• The preservation of the General government in its whole constitutional vigor…
• Absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority…
• A well-disciplined militia…
• The supremacy of the civil over the military authority…
• Economy in the public expence…
• The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith…
• Encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid…
• The diffusion of information, and arraignment of all abuses…
• Freedom of religion; freedom of the press; and freedom of person…
• and trial by juries impartially selected."

To close, let's turn to the wisdom of an aging Jefferson, as he penned in an 1819 letter:

Of Liberty then I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will: but rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law"; because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.

We may not yet fully realize it, but we are literally in the process of deliberating (for lack of a better term) our foundational principles, and the chaos to come is going to test our commitment to Jefferson's Rightful Liberty—our foremost foundational principle of liberty and justice for all. We will soon know if we, as a nation, will continue our pursuit of a more perfect union.

The good news is that we, individually and collectively, get to decide which path we will pursue. The choice is ours.

Are we ready to defend our ideals, or have we lost interest in distinguishing virtue from vice and public good from private greed? Are we really to be remembered as the ones who abandoned America's Foundational Principles?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should not be confirmed as U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services. because he is ideologically committed to falsehoods and positions that threaten people’s health and health equity. He is the lethal broken clock who tells the right time for two seconds a day—in his case, about how corporate profiteering can harm health—while poised to wreak havoc and harm the other 23.999999 hours.

As a critical scientist and advocate for health justice, I know that systematically asking who gains from or is harmed by the status quo is one thing, but treating scientific knowledge as a matter of mere opinion and ideology, as if facts and hidden conflicts of interest don’t matter, is another. As aptly stated in a public letter from the new coalition Defend Public Health, signed by over 700 health professionals and scientists, RFK Jr.’s “unfounded, fringe beliefs could significantly undermine public health practices across the country and around the world.”

RFK Jr.’s notoriously false, conspiracy-ridden anti-vaccination campaigns, including against school vaccination mandates, threaten efforts to keep all Americans healthy.

Kennedy’s confirmation hearing January 29 didn’t ease those concerns. Confronted with the wilder conspiracy theories he’s embraced—like the claim that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain groups—he mostly soft-peddled or danced around them, rarely giving direct answers. He dodged questions about the Trump administration’s freeze on federal health funding and seemed to have no idea what Federally Qualified Health Centers are (they’re community health centers that provide care to underserved populations, regardless of ability to pay). He made vaguely reassuring statements like, “I am supportive of vaccines,” but waffled when, for example, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) confronted him with a child’s onesie sold by Children’s Health Defense, the group Kennedy founded, that reads, “No Vax, No Problem.”

RFK Jr.’s opposition to profiteering companies is highly selective. In his own words, he’s rooting for “psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals, and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.” His statement, however, ignores the myriad companies and investors aggressively trying to cash in on this list—which includes products repeatedly shown to be either harmful or ineffective, like ivermectin. The key study advocating its use was retracted in December. RFK Jr. also has invited the U.S.’ largest producer of raw milk to be in charge of raw milk policy, despite multiple recalls of this company’s products, most recently because of contamination by bird flu virus. For RFK Jr., opportunistic profiting off of unsafe products is apparently fine, as is having plutocrat supporters keen to slash environmental protections, the social safety net, and of course their own income tax.

RFK Jr.’s notoriously false, conspiracy-ridden anti-vaccination campaigns, including against school vaccination mandates, threaten efforts to keep all Americans healthy. One rare success in reducing unfair differences in rates of disease across social groups—by income, by race or ethnicity, by rural or urban location—has been for vaccine-preventable childhood illness thanks to school vaccination mandates plus such federal programs as Vaccines for Children. Weakening these programs won’t “Make America Healthy Again.”

RFK Jr. falsely pits “infectious” disease against “chronic” diseases without understanding many diseases are both infectious and chronic, including numerous types of cancer (e.g., cervical cancer, liver cancer) and ulcers—and many infectious diseases lead to chronic disease (e.g., HIV/AIDS, long Covid). Yet, Kennedy famously declared that the National Institutes of Health should “take a break” from “infectious diseases,” and pivot to “chronic diseases.” He apparently is unaware that 85% of the current NIH budget already goes to research on cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, drug addiction, mental health, aging, child health, and the like.

RFK Jr. should never be given power to implement his fallacious health-harming agendas.

The following is a lightly-edited version of remarks given by Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the Senate floor on February 4, 2025.

We find ourselves in a pivotal moment in American history, and millions of Americans, by their actions or lack of action, will determine the future of this country for decades.

In my view, the Trump administration is moving this country very aggressively into an oligarchic form of society where extraordinary power rests in the hands of a small number of unelected multi-billionaires.

These three multibillionaires are working with Trump because they understand one very important reality. Trump’s policies are designed to make the very richest people in this country even richer.

The Trump administration is moving this country very aggressively into an authoritarian society where the rule of law, and our Constitution, are being ignored and undermined in order to give more power to the White House and the billionaires who now control our government.

In my view, the Trump administration is moving this country very rapidly toward a kleptocracy—where the function of government is not to serve the people of America, but to enrich those who are in power.

I think that today is a good day to recall what one of our great presidents said at Gettysburg in November of 1863. Looking out at a battlefield where thousands of Union soldiers had just sacrificed their lives in the defense of freedom, former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln famously stated:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

Under President Donald Trump we are not seeing a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Quite the contrary.

We are seeing a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class. And it’s not being done secretly. It’s right out there for all to see.

Several weeks ago, Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States. Standing right behind him were the three richest men in the country—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—worth a combined $920 billion. These three men have more wealth than the bottom half of America—170 million people. And I should point out, and this should tell you exactly where we are going as a nation, these three men have become some $232 billion richer since Trump was elected. In just two weeks under Trump their wealth has exploded by $232 billion dollars.

This is how an oligarchic system works. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, and now a key part of the administration, spent over $277 million to get Trump elected. In other words, within a corrupt campaign finance system he helped buy the election for Donald Trump.

Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the second and third wealthiest people in our country, both kicked a million each into Trump’s inauguration fund.

And let’s remember that Mr. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, rescinded the endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris of The Washington Post’s editorial board. Mr. Bezos was showing early on that he was willing to bend the knee for Donald Trump.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, agreed to settle a lawsuit with Trump for $25 million.

These three multibillionaires are working with Trump because they understand one very important reality. Trump’s policies are designed to make the very richest people in this country even richer.

Since Trump’s election, Mr. Musk has become $154 billion richer, Mr. Bezos has become $35 billion richer, and Mr. Zuckerberg has become $43 billion richer.

I am growing increasingly concerned that in our country, under the leadership of President Trump, we are moving rapidly towards authoritarianism.

And all over this country people are alarmed and shocked by what they are seeing.

Just a few examples.

Last week, Trump attempted to suspend all federal grants and loans in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution and federal law. As every third grader knows, the power of the purse belongs to Congress, not the president.

Let’s be clear. The president can recommend legislation, he can veto legislation, but he does not have the power to unilaterally terminate funding and legislation passed by the U.S. Congress. That is a dangerous and blatantly unconstitutional act.

And I should add that Trump’s blocking of federal funding would have had an horrific impact on millions of Americans who utilize programs like Medicaid, Head Start, community health centers, Meals on Wheels, homeless veterans’ programs, and many, many other initiatives.

Tens of millions of Americans, including some of the most vulnerable people in our country, were impacted by that decision.

But that’s not all.

A few days ago, Trump fired 17 inspectors general—independent government watchdogs that were created by Congress, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, to prevent the abuse of power by the executive branch.

Last week, President Trump fired a member of the National Labor Relations Board, and in so doing, effectively neutered the only federal agency in America with the authority to hold corporations accountable for illegal union busting and to protect the constitutional right of workers to form a union and to collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.

Not only is this move blatantly illegal, it is exactly what Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, and Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, have been fighting for for months. This is a huge gift to the two wealthiest people in our country who are both strongly anti-union.

The president also illegally fired members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—the only independent commission in our country that protects workers against discrimination in the workplace.

Further, and this should upset every American regardless of political view, in direct violation of the Constitution and federal law, Trump is intimidating the media with lawsuits against ABC, CBS, Meta, and the Des Moines Register. His FCC is now threatening to investigate PBS and NPR. Take a deep breath my fellow Americans.

What Trump is essentially saying to every media outlet in America: If you say or do anything that is critical of me, that displeases me, you may be subject to a lawsuit or a federal investigation.

If this is not a direct attack on the First Amendment, the U.S. Constitution, and Freedom of Speech, I don’t know what is.

But that’s not all.

Elon Musk and his unelected minions at DOGE have forced out officials at the Treasury Department and illegally shut down USAID—a program which, among other things, helps feed and provide medical help to starving and desperate children all over the world. Presidents, much less unelected billionaires, do not have the unilateral right to shut down federal agencies established by Congress.

When we talk about the dangerous movement towards authoritarianism let us not forget Trump’s pardoning of the January 6 insurrectionists who injured 174 police officers at the Capitol.

Even worse, Trump is undermining the FBI by investigating the agents there who helped bring these violent criminals to justice.

In other words, what Trump is saying is that violence against police officers, when done in his name is OK, but when law enforcement officers try to hold criminals accountable that is not OK.

Under Trump, we are rapidly moving toward a kleptocracy as well.

Just before Trump was inaugurated, he and his wife Melania launched their own cryptocurrency coins giving them the potential to earn tens of billions of dollars.

If Wall Street CEOs tried to bribe the president with a bag full of money that would be against the law.

But now, they don’t have to do that.

Today, if a multi-billionaire or the head of a foreign country wants to curry favor with the president, all they have to do is buy his cryptocurrency coins and, when they do that, they are directly enriching Donald Trump and the first lady.

That is unacceptable and cannot stand.

So, the question then becomes, where do we go from here?

Instead of moving toward an economy which is designed to benefit the very richest people in our society, we have got to fight hard to create a government that works for all of us, not just Mr. Musk or Mr. Bezos or Mr. Zuckerberg and other multi-billionaires.

At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, we must not provide more tax breaks to billionaires paid for by huge cuts in Medicaid and other programs that working families and low-income people desperately need.

But let me tell you what we should be doing.

At a time when 85 million Americans are uninsured or under-insured, we have got to do what every major country on Earth does and that is to guarantee healthcare as a human right to every man, woman, and child in this country.

At a time when 1 out of 4 Americans cannot afford the medicine that their doctors prescribe, we have got to end the absurdity of Americans paying by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

We have got to cut the cost of prescription drugs in half.

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage. While 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck, we must raise that minimum wage to a living wage, at least $17 an hour. If you work 40 hours a week, you should not be living in poverty.

Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos want to make it harder for workers to join unions. Well, we have got to do exactly the opposite. We must pass the PRO Act so that anti-union CEOs cannot act unconstitutionally to deny workers the right to join a union.

At a time when we need the best educated workforce in the world, we need to have the best public schools in the world. And, among other things, that means we need to substantially raise teacher salaries. If we want the best and the brightest to become educators, no teacher in America should earn less than $60,000 a year.

All over this country, we have a major housing crisis. And it’s not just the 800,000 who are homeless. It is millions of working families who are spending 40, 50, or 60% of their limited incomes on housing. Instead of spending almost a trillion dollars a year on a wasteful and bloated Pentagon budget, we have got to build millions of units of low-income and affordable housing. And when we do that, we put large numbers of people to work at good-paying union jobs.

I hear from Trump supporters that the president won the election and he has been given this huge mandate to do whatever he wants. Well, no president has the right to move us to oligarchy, authoritarianism, and kleptocracy. But more importantly, let us not forget that while Trump did win this election, he actually received 4 million fewer votes in 2024 than Biden did in 2020 when Biden won the election.

Donald Trump offered a bullying buyout offer to 2.3 million federal workers that strongly implied that they might lose their jobs unless they take it. On the other hand, he also announced that he is expanding the Guantánamo concentration camp to house 30,000 migrants.

The post Not-So-Civil Service first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Not-So-Civil Service appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.