A self-radicalized member of the Islamic State drove into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing at least 15 people on New Year’s Day. Once again, we’re pondering how to deploy counterterrorism against opponents of US policy in the Middle East.

The post You Can’t Kill an Idea. Can You Spy On It? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post You Can’t Kill an Idea. Can You Spy On It? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The late President Jimmy Carter was not a particularly progressive president, but his exemplary service as a peacemaker and humanitarian since leaving office has resulted in an outpouring of heartfelt tributes following his death at the age of 100 on December 28. During his final years, however, the Nobel Peace Laureate was met with intense criticism for insisting that standards of peace, human rights, and international law should apply not just to countries hostile to U.S. interests, but to U.S. allies like Israel as well.

Particularly controversial was Carter’s 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which went on to be a New York Times bestseller, in which he argued against Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank, the Palestinian territory seized in 1967 during a war that the international community had hoped would form the basis for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Carter was a liberal Christian Zionist who believed passionately in Israel’s right to exist as a secure homeland for the Jewish people. Like many left and liberal Jewish Zionists, however, he argued that the continued occupation and colonization of the West Bank would make a viable two-state solution impossible, and that Israel would be forced to choose between allowing for democratic governance in all the areas they controlled—meaning Jews would thereby be a minority, and Israel would no longer be a Jewish state—or imposing an apartheid system akin to the one instituted in South Africa prior to its democratic transition in 1994.

Carter was falsely accused of referring to Israel as an apartheid state, when he had explicitly stated otherwise. He was referring only to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the establishment of Jewish-only roads, Jewish-only settlements, and other strict segregation policies do resemble the old South African system.

Since Carter wrote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid 18 years ago, the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories has more than doubled, most of them surrounding Palestinian cities and towns in a manner that would make the establishment of a viable contiguous Palestinian state impossible.

In reality, the main objection of Carter’s critics was that he dared criticize the Israeli government, a recipient of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of unconditional taxpayer-funded military equipment from U.S. arms manufacturers.

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid received overwhelmingly negative media coverage following its release. The Washington Post accused Carter of harboring a “hostility to Israel” in part for allegedly failing to note, according to reviewer Jeffrey Goldberg, that the Israeli government “dearly wants to give up the bulk of its West Bank settlements.” In reality, the illegal settlements have continued to expand since 2006, and the Israeli government has reiterated that they are there to stay.

An article in The New York Times about the reaction to the book included a number of quotes from pro-Israel organizations attacking it, while failing to quote a single Palestinian or Palestinian-American source.

The Democratic Party leadership was also hostile to the book. In a rare rebuke by another former president of the same party, Bill Clinton, ignoring Carter’s frequent trips to and extensive knowledge of Israel and Palestine, wrote, “I don’t know where his information (or conclusions) came from” and insisted, “It’s not factually correct, and it’s not fair.”

Howard Dean, then chair of the Democratic National Committee, also voiced his disagreement with Carter’s analysis. Representative Nancy Pelosi, who was about to become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, declared, “It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression, and Democrats reject that allegation vigorously.” She added, “We stand with Israel now and we stand with Israel forever.”

Former presidents have almost always been granted an opportunity to speak at their party’s subsequent conventions, but in apparent reaction to the book, Carter’s appearance at the 2008 Democratic National Convention was limited to a video clip speaking in praise of nominee Barack Obama and interviewing survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Carter also only appeared in short video clips at the 2012 and 2016 conventions.

In 2022, Joe Biden named Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt to be the U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism. Lipstadt had previously accused Carter of engaging in “traditional antisemitic canards” and compared him to the notorious antisemite and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

But while the Democratic Party has mostly maintained its pro-Israel stance since the publication of the book, Carter’s words now appear quite prescient and reflect a growing international consensus. In 2022, Amnesty International published a 281-page report making a compelling case that Israel practices a form of apartheid toward the Palestinians. Human Rights Watch published a similarly detailed study the previous year reaching the same conclusion. B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, also released an extensive report documenting the Israeli government’s imposition of apartheid. Similar conclusions have been reached by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories. This past July, the International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion, also found that Israel’s ongoing and multiple violations of international humanitarian law constitute apartheid.

A number of Carter’s former critics, including a board member of the Carter Center who resigned in protest following the publication of the book, have since apologized and acknowledged that the former president was correct. No one in the Democratic Party leadership has yet done so.

Indeed, very few of Carter’s critics have been willing to demand an end to Israel’s settlements and segregation policies in the West Bank or acknowledge that these colonial outposts in the occupied territories constitute a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a series of unanimous U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Since Carter wrote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid 18 years ago, the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories has more than doubled, most of them surrounding Palestinian cities and towns in a manner that would make the establishment of a viable contiguous Palestinian state impossible.

As a result, many Palestinians and others who once supported a two-state solution have concluded it is too late and are now demanding a single democratic state with equal rights for both peoples between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Similarly, increasing numbers of Jewish people in the United States and elsewhere now believe that the Zionist movement has become hopelessly dominated by overt racists, and have renounced Zionism altogether.

Carter warned that the choice before Israel was “peace or apartheid.” The Israeli government and its backers in Washington have chosen apartheid—but people across the world have not given up on the peace Carter envisioned.

Along with many of my generation (that ridiculous word “boomers”) I both looked forward to and thoroughly enjoyed James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. The writing was crisp, the scenery was great, the acting was tremendous, and with a couple of exceptions (I’ll get into that) the scenes were all right on target. He even threw in several Easter Eggs for those of us with a bit too much obsessive knowledge of Bob Dylan’s history–like seeing Al Kooper, who had never played keyboards, sit down at the organ in the studio and pick out what became an iconic riff in “Like a Rolling Stone.” A pleasing, exciting romp through an incredible, unequaled moment when, as Dylan so succinctly put it, the times were most definitely changing.

So why, as the credits rolled to a blast of “Like a Rolling Stone” that I swore was Dylan’s version—Timothée Chalamet really was that good–was I not fulfilled? Why did it feel akin to eating a pastrami sandwich on white bread? And my wife Maryann, who at a decade younger than me didn’t experience those years as I had, left with the same feeling. What was missing?

And then it hit. Context.

As the dawn of a new fascism looms, one that will potentially render the repression of the 1950s the good old days, the need to break free of the stifling “way things are” and create a new, liberating path full of both promise and danger is more urgent than ever.

Where did those early songs come from? Did they just pop into Dylan’s head from nowhere? What was happening, both in Greenwich Village and more significantly around the country, that led him to write startling songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” that became overnight anthems? When, as depicted in the film, Dylan sang “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for the very first time, his young audience instantly latched on to it and went nuts, loudly and joyously singing along. Why? Was he telling them something they didn’t already know? Or was he giving voice to their lives as they were living them at that moment?

Okay, this may seem obvious. After all, everyone “knows” that the 60s were a time of youthful rebellion and upheaval. So what else is new? Does a film about Dylan really need to spell that out? And as far as the politics so many of his songs were infused with, isn’t it enough that the film depicted him singing at the 1963 March on Washington?

I would contend that it’s not nearly enough, because it doesn’t get close to what drove Dylan to write songs like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and “The Death of Emmet Till,” to name just a few. No, I’m not arguing that the film should have been a history lesson about the 60s, but I believe it would have better served both Dylan and the audience had it set the stage more clearly with what was explosively emerging in the dawn of that decade, because in fact this is not so obvious, especially to younger audiences.

To get that sense, I went back to Suze Rotolo’s wonderful memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time. Rotolo, was Dylan’s girlfriend from shortly after he arrived in New York. In the film she is given the name Sylvie Russo (interestingly at Dylan’s insistence, to protect her privacy. She died in 2011). Their relationship, which lasted four years, is beautifully depicted in the film, including the fact that, despite his growing relationship with Joan Baez, he never stopped loving her. And the film does briefly allude to her political influence on his writing. But there are two key points in her memoir that are sorely missing in the film, I think to its detriment.

The first is the nature of the Greenwich Village that Dylan walked into in that winter of 1961. Rotolo goes into vivid detail about the cultural and political cauldron bubbling up there. Here is her description of a typical Sunday in Washington Square Park:

The atmosphere… was lively. Groups of musicians would play and sing anything from old folk songs to bluegrass. Old Italian men from the neighborhood played their folk music on mandolins. Everyone played around the fountain, and people would wander from group to group, listening and maybe singing along. There were poets reading their poems and political types handing out fliers for Trotskyist, Communist, or anarchist meetings and hawking their newspapers… Everything overlapped nicely.

Just a 30 second walk in the park through Dylan’s eyes would have added an element that was missing.

And that was just the start. Along with the folk clubs that were depicted in the film, there was the burgeoning avant garde theater and film scenes. Clubs featured jazz and the beat poets. Musicians, not just folk, were drawn there from all across the country. Every night, folks would gather in various apartments to share songs and debate philosophy and politics. All of this, Rotolo makes clear, Dylan dove into and hungrily absorbed everything around him. He was not alone. He was being influenced by others, and he in turn influenced them. As he himself wrote, revolution was in the air.

A vivid example of this is one of his most political songs, “When the Ship Comes In.” He wrote it after attending a particularly striking and powerful version of the song “Pirate Jenny” from Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. In that song, the maid Jenny sings about her fantasy of leading a pirate ship into harbor to wreak revenge on the bourgeoise “gentlemen” who treat her like a piece of dirt. Dylan turned that concept into a truly uplifting depiction of revolution:

Oh, the foes will rise with the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real
The hour that the ship comes in.

Then they’ll raise their hands,
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered
And like Pharoah’s tribe they’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath they’ll be conquered.

This does bring up one particular objection I have to the film. In it, the only time we hear that song is when he is singing it under duress at a fundraising party. It’s clear that by now he hates having to perform it and all of his songs up to that point, and the scene marks his break with the past and headlong dive into the future. The scene itself is an accurate depiction of Dylan’s growing rebellion against both the rigid strictures of the folk music world and the political messages they now expected him to include in every song. But without a strong sense of why he wrote it in the first place, we’re left with an incomplete picture of what was driving him all along.

And that brings up the question of how well, or weakly, the film depicts the times he was in the midst of and responding to. Rotolo paints a vivid picture of the fear that dominated every aspect of American life in the 1950s—the ubiquitous shadows of an impending nuclear war, combined with the grinding repression of the “Red scare” witch hunts, were everywhere. Hundreds were persecuted and jailed, with Pete Seeger on the top of the list. That the film opens with Seeger’s sentencing is to its credit. The intensity and ubiquity of that repression was a huge part of what those who flocked to Greenwich Village were rebelling against, often at great cost. Dylan nailed the paranoia permeating society hilariously with his “Talkin’ World War III Blues” on the Freewheelin’ album.

But what was increasingly taking center stage in the early 1960s, and deeply influencing Dylan, was the civil rights movement. All too often, and unfortunately in this film as well, that movement is squashed down to the March on Washington and maybe one or two other big events. But none of that gives a sense of how dramatic, dangerous, and explosive events from 1960 to 1964 were in a South where lynchings were still commonplace.

Take a look at just a few of those events:

• February 1, 1960–Four African American college students sit down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and are viciously beaten while the cameras rolled;
• 1961–Black and white students, known as “Freedom Riders,” are brutally beaten and their busses burned as they attempt to ride integrated busses through the South;
• May 2, 1963–1,000 Black school children are attacked with fire hoses and police dogs as they attempt to march for school integration in Birmingham, Alabama;
• June 12, 1963–Civil rights leader Medgar Evers is gunned down outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi;
• September 15, 1963–A bomb kills four children and injures dozens at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; and
• June 21, 1964–Three Civil Rights Movement workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—are kidnapped and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi.

Imagine how all of those things hit young people straining against the heavy 50s repression still hanging over their heads, and you get a sense of how wildly liberating Dylan’s songs were.

My point here is not that this film is in any way required to “educate” the audience about all this, but the problem is this—it’s one thing to know the facts, and it’s something altogether different to feel their impact at the time and in the historical context they happened. It’s that feeling that is crucial for really understanding (getting a feel for, so to speak) what was driving young people, and especially Dylan, to reach with all their hearts and souls for a new society.

That is why he wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and that is why it became an anthem. How much stronger A Complete Unknown would have been had the filmmakers found the ways to channel that feeling.

To get why this matters you only have to take a cursory look at our world today. As the dawn of a new fascism looms, one that will potentially render the repression of the 1950s the good old days, the need to break free of the stifling “way things are” and create a new, liberating path full of both promise and danger is more urgent than ever. There is and will only ever be one Bob Dylan, but to quote Joe Strummer, the future is unwritten.

The upshot? Go see A Complete Unknown, then take a deep dive into the decade that created Dylan. Lots to learn there.

PS: The film perpetuates the myth that Pete Seeger was furious at Dylan for insisting on doing his electrified set at the 1965 Newport Film Festival and looked for an axe to chop of the electrified sound. As Seeger himself has said multiple times, he had no problem with what Dylan was doing, and loved the songs he played, especially “Maggie’s Farm.” But the quality of the sound system he was using was so terrible that it created distortion and made it virtually impossible to hear the music, and that was what he was furious about. Quite a difference.

For the last 48 hours, one of the most horrifying quotes I have read during the past decade—and the Trump boys have provided a lot of material—is one from the pastor of one of the worst people on the planet: Pete Hegseth. This quote is haunting me. Hegseth is a strong supporter of an unordained pastor from the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, Doug Wilson—Hegseth’s whole family is heavily involved in this far-right outfit, his kids being brainwashed daily, as they are taught this nonsense in their “school.”

Here are the words of this “man of God.”

“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasure party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” The alleged failure of women to submit leads men to the “dream of being rapists” deprived of the “erotic necessity” found in women’s submission. Wilson also believes God created women “to make the sandwiches” and thinks giving women the right to vote has led to a long, sustained war on the family.

These men are trying to do the impossible: create 1950s stay-at-home wives when the super-rich have made it impossible for the working class, and even the middle class, to survive on one income as they could in 1952.

We need to worry here. A lot. This ideology must be nipped in the bud! Anyone can see what this guy, and Hegseth, and any of the other rapists attending his church believe: that God loves them for committing rape. The implications of this toxic talk is pretty obvious: If you, like U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz, and a number of the other good ol’ boys have raped a woman, you can now pat yourself on the back because you are doing God’s work. If we allow it, these men will be weakening the already poorly enforced laws protecting women from sexual violence, destroying rape kits in police stations, and attempting to force women to have the babies from the rapes. In some legal cases, rapists have demanded rights to raise the child—and judges have sometimes sided with violent rapists.

Women have fought long and hard for the few rights we thought were safe. The Trumpers overturned the big one—the right to reproductive care—and are bullying large companies into eliminating “DEI,” much of which was helpful for women in career options. More Trumpers than the creepy Doug Wilson have questioned women’s right to vote. In some of the most egregious cases of women’s oppression in Texas and a few other states, the right of child-bearing-age women to cross state lines is being stolen from them, as well as the most basic right to healthcare as more women bleed out in hospital parking lots—and we will hear less and less about these cases as the states responsible are trying to keep the state-sponsored murders of young women quiet.

Women got together in the late 1960’s and rose up, because many of us grew up in a moment of great change: Women were out in the streets protesting the Vietnam War and were an integral part of the civil rights movement. We were not going to be secretaries in polyester suits making coffee for the boss. The book Our Bodies, Ourselves taught many of us a tremendous amount about our own selves that we never had access to before: what is healthy in a cycle, a pregnancy, a miscarriage, a relationship, a woman’s life. We created safe spaces for women to gather. Women were not able to access credit without a male cosigner as recently as 1974. This includes a mortgage—so as recently as 50 years ago, a woman could not purchase a home without a male cosigner. With a seriously few exceptions, all the doctors were male, so women really were on their own unless they lived in one of the very few families where sex talk was acceptable.

The best aspect, by far, of the Harris campaign was the focus on women’s rights. Too bad Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t care about the rights of the women in Gaza—she might have won the election. The slogan “We won’t go back” is even more essential right now. These men are trying to do the impossible: create 1950s stay-at-home wives when the super-rich have made it impossible for the working class, and even the middle class, to survive on one income as they could in 1952. The Trump-Musk economic plan is basically to impoverish anyone who is not already struggling or who is not in the highest earning class. The Musk dream of every white woman producing a plethora of babies is never going to happen unless they are able to create a Handmaid’s Tale-type situation: compulsory breeding. And Elon Musk has implied that is exactly what he is shooting for.

Women: no capitulation! Rape is a crime. Rape destroys lives, rape creates unwanted and unloved babies. Rapists are violent criminals—their wealth, class, race, ethnicity are irrelevant. Men who violently rape women are all guilty of a major sin. Rape is not a sacrament.

2025 offers an intriguing mix of the certain and the uncertain.

Here’s what is certain: Democratic institutions will continue to crumble, witness the erosion of the rule of law in the U.S. and elsewhere; long-standing norms governing public affairs, such as a bar to prosecuting political opponents, will loosen their grip on behavior; countless species, especially among birds and insects, will go extinct; a host of “unnatural” disasters attributable to climate change, like wild fires and floods, will devastate wondrous landscapes and settled communities; politically or environmentally-induced mass migration, as experienced now in the various parts of the world, will become more pervasive; income inequality between the top 0.01% and the lowest 50% will increase; economic stability, as in the world-wide acceptance of the U.S. Dollar, will wane.

While not a certainty there’s reason to give added credibility to the risks of nuclear warfare, catastrophic climate tipping points, metastatic ethnic cleansing, and a world-wide pandemic, with mass extinction the result.

Within our own narrower, national context, certainties include the highest ever figures for extraction of natural gas and oil, continued increases in chronic diseases such as Type-2 diabetes and cancer, ballooning healthcare costs per capita, upward swings in gun sales and school shootings, dramatically increased levels of homelessness, and more intrusion of microplastics into the oceans and into our bodies.

An unfettered grasp of our situation can offer up considerable light, hope, even optimism; and it can strengthen our resolve and solidify our resilience.

Uncertain are the targets, timing, locales, extent of severity, and designation of victims related to these eminently predicable developments in the world and in our country. Unclear is what will constitute right and effective action in the face of this inevitable political, social, and environmental unravelling. Finally, the grounding for individual and collective action—spiritual moorings, moral anchors, forms of mutual aid—remains inchoate.

To be human is to know we are going to die. This is certain. With each passing day of 2025, my physical being will be undergoing its own forms of unravelling, making death more proximate. What I don’t know is when and under what circumstances it will occur. Nor do I know for sure what my attitude and affect will be should I be conscious at the time.

With increasing disintegration worldwide and the social fabric in this country fraying, what can one do, how should one approach and contend with encroaching forms of “death” in the world and in this country? What are citizens’ essential responsibilities? For me what are mine as a mate, a father, grandfather, and friend?

You, the reader, might conclude, as you absorb all this, “How pessimistic, how fatalistic!” It will likely surprise you that that is not my mind set at all. Rather I am of the mind that the truth indeed sets one free. An unfettered grasp of our situation can offer up considerable light, hope, even optimism; and it can strengthen our resolve and solidify our resilience. Take a hard look at the obverse: that burying unvarnished realities has improved our prospects. Hardly! Denial, obfuscation, euphemism, soft- pedaling, and distraction have not improved things. In fact, a strong case can be made that they have produced exactly the opposite, a deepening of our plight.

So I beckon my fellow citizens to adopt a different strategy, one that willfully accepts our dire circumstances, without wallowing in them, thus offering the chance of achieving more positive outcomes than our current predicament presages. The basis of hope for a better future, I believe, is the courage to accept reality. A change of collective consciousness is our best shot at not only surviving but thriving.

That I will die soon is certain. That 2025 heralds negative trend lines on multiple fronts is certain. But this is where the parallel can end. With a willingness on all our parts to accept our dire lot we can begin to veer away from what now seems a foregone conclusion.

Based on an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of data from the Forbes Real-Time billionaire list from December 31, 2024, the last day of market activity, there are 813 billionaires with combined wealth totaling $6.72 trillion.

The total number of billionaires has remained constant at 813 when Forbes published their 38th annual World’s Billionaire List on April 2, 2024. But the combined wealth of U.S. billionaires increased over the last 9 months by $1 trillion, from $5.7 trillion at the beginning of April 2024 rising to $6.72 trillion at the end of 2024.

The top five billionaires and their individual wealth are:

1. Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $428 billion (up from $252.5 billion in September 2024).
2. Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $235.2 billion.
3. Larry Ellison of Oracle fame moving into number three spot with $210.5 billion, surpassing Marc Zuckerberg.
4. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $204.4 billion.
5. Larry Page of Google, with $157.6 billion.

There are now 15 U.S. billionaires with more than $100 billion each and combined wealth totaling $2.4 trillion.

Among the wealthiest dynastic families on the Forbes list, these dynastic families closed 2024 with huge pools of wealth:

• Walton. Seven members of the Walton Family with combined wealth of $404.3 billion
• Mars. Six members of Mars family with combined wealth of $130.4 billion
• Koch. Two members of Koch family have a combined wealth of $121.1 billion

Many top billionaires have seen their wealth surge during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.

On March 18, 2020, Elon Musk had wealth valued just under $25 billion. By 2024 year’s end, his wealth was $428 billion.

Jeff Bezos saw his wealth rise from $113 billion on March 18, 2020 to $235.2 billion in the Dec 31, 2024 analysis survey.

Three Walton family members—Jim, Alice and Rob—saw their combined assets increase from $161.1 billion on March 18, 2020 to $317 billion in the September 13, 2024 survey.

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, this September, I was arrested with a long time activist friend, Cliff Kindy, for blocking the entrance to a Raytheon Corp. facility. We both requested jury trials, and the dates were set for mid-December and early January. Prosecutors dropped the charges in each case, and the trials did not happen.

For my defense, I planned to bring Gaza home to jurors from Allen County, home to Fort Wayne, with wire service photos and by extrapolating the effects of the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Palestine to their own county.

That same approach can be used for any city or county in the U.S. Simply find your population and area, then do the math based on Gaza’s population and area. The genocide statistics were published by Al Jazeera for its summary report on one year of Israel’s U.S.-funded genocide.

U.S. census figures show that Allen County’s population is 395,000—or 18% of Gaza's 2.2 million people—and its area is 660 square miles, roughly 4.5 times that of Gaza’s 144 square miles.

Here, then, is how to bring Gaza home for your city or county.

✴ Tons of Bombs Dropped

As of October 2024, Israel’s military has dropped nearly 85,000 tons of bombs—591 tons per square mile—on Gaza, far exceeding that dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined in World War II.

For Allen County the comparable number is 390,000 tons of bombs at 591 tons per square mile.

✴ Casualties

More than 43,000 Palestinian bodies, mostly of women and children, were recovered last year. Many thousands more remain buried under the rubble—reliable reports say up to 200,000. Over 97,000 have been wounded. Anesthesia is rarely available.

For Allen County the comparable numbers (18% of the above) are:

• 7,740 bodies recovered.
• 17,460 wounded.
• Up to 36,000 buried under the rubble.
• Over half are women and children.

✴ Healthcare Infrastructure and Personnel

According to the Gaza Media Office, 34 hospitals and 80 health centers have been put out of service, 162 health institutions were hit by Israeli forces, and at least 131 ambulances were hit and damaged. Israeli attacks on hospitals and the continual bombardment of Gaza have killed at least 986 medical workers including 165 doctors, 260 nurses, 184 health associates, 76 pharmacists, and 300 management and support staff.

For Allen County the comparable numbers are:

• 20 hospitals and health centers destroyed.
• 30 doctors, 47 nurses, 14 pharmacists, and 54 support staff killed.
• 24 ambulances damaged.

✴ Disease

In the past year, 75% of Gaza’s population have been infected with contagious diseases from lack of sanitation, open sewage, and inadequate hygiene. At least 10,000 cancer patients can no longer receive the necessary treatment

For Allen County the comparable numbers are:

• 296,250 people (75% of pop.) infected with diseases from lack of sanitation and open sewage.
• 379,000 people (96% of pop.) endure severe lack of food and have not had access to clean water for months.
• 79,000 face outright starvation.
• 1,800 cancer patients do not receive necessary treatment.

✴ Imprisoned

More than 10,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons under grave conditions with at least 250 children and 80 women among them.

For Allen County the comparable numbers are:

• 1,800 residents held in prison, 599 of them without charges.

✴ Buildings damaged and destroyed

According to the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as of January 2024, 60% of Gaza’s residential homes and 80% of all commercial facilities have been damaged or destroyed.

For Allen County the comparable numbers are:

• 100,800 houses damaged or destroyed
• 7,668 businesses damaged or destroyed

✴ After the war

When the bombing finally stops, whoever attempts to rebuild Gaza—for luxury Israeli condos or refugee housing—will be exposed to unexploded ordnance (UXO), asbestos, PCBs, and carcinogenic ingredients from the toxic soup left by exploded bombs and artillery shells.

For example, in a heavily bombed area of Vietnam, Quang Tri Province (1,832 square miles), an intensive campaign to find and destroy UXOs has eliminated over 815,000 of them—everything from 1,000-pound bombs to cluster bombs and grenades. Given the area of Gaza and the tons of bombs dropped on it, some 64,100 UXOs may lie in wait.

For Allen County the number of UXOs would be 293,7000

On December 15, many people in Syria felt the earthquake. Seismic scales registered above 3.0 on the Richter scale and could be felt at least 500 miles away. Natural disasters usually have the attention of people around the world. When earthquakes happen, humanitarian workers and supplies are sent to help out. After hurricanes, organizations release statements responding to the urgency of the climate crisis and hypothetical transitions away from fossil fuels.

In Syria, what happened on December 15 wasn’t an earthquake—it was a massive airstrike that Israel carried out in Syria. This ongoing bombardment is reciprocally destructive to daily life and the environment as it continues to push the climate crisis further through jarring fossil fuel consumption.

But where are the environmental organizations? Many organizations that would typically release these statements after “natural” disasters have been silent. Except this was not a natural disaster—and the countries that would typically send “humanitarian aid” are the ones that caused this quake to happen. This deliberate mass destruction came shortly after the U.S. dropped dozens of bombs in just a few hours after the fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The U.S. has carried out this disastrous project through the extraction of oil in the ground for the sake of extracting more oil from the ground.

The bewildering longtime silence of environmental organizations when it comes to U.S. militarism is not representative of any genuine commitment to climate justice. The most heavily weighted factors in their silence may be a blissful ignorance from the normalization of a whitewashed “environmentalism,” or the fear of repression and financial repercussions of taking popular anti-war stances. Regardless, the murderous result is antithetical to everything they profess.

A June 2024 United Nations report on the environmental impact of the genocide in Gaza highlighted the catastrophic impacts of Israel’s incessant bombing on the ecosystem, water quality, air quality, and soil in Gaza. Genocide doesn’t just cause ecocide, isn’t just parallel to ecocide, but is also a result of ecocide. Ecocide is a tactic of genocide. The long-term damage to every ecological foundation in Gaza makes it harder and harder to sustain life. Life can’t be sustained without agriculture or without clean drinking water. And now, the U.S. and Israel are attempting to repeat this cycle of destruction in Syria, just as they have started to in Lebanon.

Regardless of how hard the imperialism and war economy of Western powers try to create a lavish life for its beneficiaries at the expense of everyone else, it is fundamentally impossible to sustain life for anyone when war-making tools continue to devastate the planet. The grim irony is that the war economy eats its own makers.

The first 120 days of the genocide in Gaza alone produced more emissions than 26 countries combined. Every new base that is established across the globe contaminates the soil that it occupies, harming the ecosystem and the valuable biodiversity that is critical for sustaining life. As it builds bases over occupied land globally, the military literally steamrolls over survival.

Now, the U.S. and Israel are taking advantage of a destabilized Syria to eat away at the nation’s territory to gain more standing in a dangerous escalation against Iran. This is the newest development in a decades-long conquest for dominance in the oil industry that environmental organizations have long campaigned shifts away from. The U.S. has carried out this disastrous project through the extraction of oil in the ground for the sake of extracting more oil from the ground, destroying homes, families, and nations in the process, all while stumbling into the possibility of planetary destruction via climate collapse, nuclear winter, or both.

U.S.-made Israeli bombs have killed multiple civilians in Yemen in the past weeks. Meanwhile, the “cease-fire” reached in Lebanon continues to be breached as toxic bombs rain down on the people of the country daily, while fossil fuels are unleashed in the sky, which has already led to island nations that toxic U.S. bases occupy becoming inhabitable.

Since Assad’s fall, Israel has claimed more land in Syria than all of Gaza. The more that Israel and its allies encroach on this land, the more emboldened the U.S.-Israeli regime becomes in its terrorism throughout the region and the more it risks our global future. The short- and long-term survival of the people of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen are increasingly threatened due to ecological devastation while they fight to prevent U.S.-made bombs from continuing to destroy their homes every single day. Is their disposability so blinding that these NGOs sacrifice themselves? The longer we escalate, the more emissions will be released from this catastrophe and the longer that crucial biodiversity and Indigenous caretaking will be destroyed.

So, amid this war that is causing complete ecological and planetary devastation, where is the mainstream climate movement? When the U.S. military is the largest institutional polluter in the world, consuming 4.6 billion gallons of fuel annually (77-80% of all U.S. government energy consumption), how can its deadliest campaign in years be ignored by those who seek to protect the planet? When the bombs the U.S. manufactures register on the Richter scale, how is that not a threat to the environment? How is nuclear winter not a threat to agricultural global survival? How can the groups that claim to care about our well-being not stand against a deadly bombing campaign in Syria and possible war with Iran or Russia?

The anti-war movement from within the U.S. is at its strongest in decades. The majority of Americans want a cease-fire in Gaza. The environmental movement from within the belly of the beast must recognize that it needs to be part of this anti-war movement and push for the U.S. to take its hands off Syria. It must raise the public’s consciousness of the dangers of war with Iran. When we think about existential threats to the planet, environmental organizations should be looking at the ecological devastation that Israel and the U.S. are causing and ask themselves why they haven’t done or said a damn thing about the elephant in the room.

One development for 2025 that can be seen clearly in the crystal ball is improving trade ties between China and Europe. The reason this is a virtual certainty is Donald Trump is doing everything he can to convince the world that, under his leadership, the United States is an unreliable trading partner.

He already worked hard to establish this point in his first term when he arbitrarily slapped tariffs on various imports from Canada and the European Union. His ostensible rationale was national defense, but no one outside of Mar-a-Lago could take that one seriously. We worried that we may not be able to get steel from Canada if the US is engaged in a war with another country? Or maybe we’re worried we will be at war with Canada, and they will cut us off.

But Trump is showing that the craziness will get even worse in his second term. Before even taking office Trump made strong demands that Canada and Mexico essentially do things they are already doing (block drug shipments and restrict the flow of immigrants) or he will slap 25 percent taxes on all the goods we import from them.

This is the way Trump has always done business.

This is bizarre from many angles, but most notably because Trump’s proposed import taxes would be a flagrant violation of the trade agreement he negotiated with Mexico and Canada just four and a half years ago. If Trump can just toss into the garbage a trade deal with two of our closest allies — one that he widely trumpeted at the time — then what would be the value of any deal he would strike with European countries? Clearly Trump does not feel bound by his commitments and there is no one in the US political structure who can force Trump to adhere to agreements made by the government, even when it was Trump himself who made the deal.

This is the way Trump has always done business. He routinely reneged on his commitments and often refused to pay contractors after they had done work on his projects. Many contractors would insist on payment in advance from Trump because they knew they would have a tough time collecting after the fact.

If the US is not going to be a reliable trading partner for at least the next four years, and possibly many more years into the future, Europe would be wise to look elsewhere. And there is one obvious elsewhere: China.

China’s economy is in fact already considerably larger than the US economy and growing far more rapidly. This fact is obscured by the tendency in the US media to use exchange rate measures of GDP, rather than purchasing power parity (PPP) measures.

An exchange rate measure simply takes a country’s GDP, measured in its own currency, and then converts it into dollars at the current exchange rate. By contrast, a PPP measure uses a common set of prices to assess the value of all the goods and services produced in each country. This would mean that we apply the same price for a car, a computer, and a haircut, in both the US and China. Economists would usually argue that for most purposes the PPP measure is more useful.

By this measure, China’s economy grew larger than the US economy roughly a decade ago. It is now almost 30 percent larger, and according to I.M.F. projections will be more than 40 percent larger by the end of the decade. It’s not clear why the U.S. media insists on using the exchange rate measure of GDP in reporting that routinely refers to China as the world’s second-largest economy, perhaps it’s just nationalistic chauvinism. In any case, that call reflects political biases not realities in the world.

The larger size of China’s economy makes it a more attractive trading partner in any case, but it is also more likely to stick to its commitments than the United States as long as Donald Trump is in charge. For this reason, we can be fairly certain that Europe will be looking to shore up its trade relations with China as Donald Trump puts on his clown show in Washington and Mar-a-Lago.

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by David Fitzsimmons, Cartoonist and Columnist for the Arizona Daily Star, to discuss David’s role as a Democratic activist and the future of the Democratic Party following Biden’s dropping out of the race and the defeat of Kamala Harris.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 187: Interview with Cartoonist David Fitzsimmons first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 187: Interview with Cartoonist David Fitzsimmons appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Happy New Year to everyone but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.

On Thursday, this federal court in Cincinnati threw out the Federal Communication Commission’s Net Neutrality rules, rejecting the agency’s authority to protect broadband consumers and handing phone and cable companies a major victory just weeks before the Trump administration returns to power.

The ruling against the FCC by three Republican judges isn’t shocking, but their reasoning is shoddy, a mish-mash of tired industry claims paired with a willful misrepresentation of how the internet actually works.

As Matt Wood, an experienced telecommunications attorney and my colleague at Free Press, explains: “Beyond being a disappointing outcome, the 6th Circuit’s opinion is just plainly wrong at every level of analysis. The decision missed the point on everything from its granular textual analysis and understanding of the broader statutory context, to the court’s view of the legislative and agency history, all the way to its conception of Congress’s overarching policy concerns.”

Our job now is to channel the growing outrage over this appalling decision into the long-term changes we need to keep the internet safe, reliable, accessible, affordable and free from unlawful discrimination.

Under the leadership of Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC moved in April 2024 to restore Net Neutrality and the essential consumer protections that rest under Title II of the Communications Act, which had been gutted under the first Trump administration. This was an all-too-rare example in Washington of a government agency doing what it’s supposed to do: Listening to the public and taking their side against the powerful companies that for far too long have captured and called the shots in D.C.

And the phone and cable industry did what they always do when the FCC does anything good or important: They sued to overturn the rules.

This time, however, the lawyers for the biggest phone and cable companies had two things working in their favor. First, they got lucky: They won the forum-shopping lottery and got their case moved outside of Washington, D.C., where previous rounds of the Net Neutrality fight had been decided.

Second, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in June in the Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo case that overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine that gave deference to expert agencies in complex matters like environmental and telecommunications regulations.

Unfortunately, the lawyers representing massive companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon found an eager audience in Cincinnati for their debunked arguments.

Despite extensive legal and economic analysis provided by Free Press and our allies in the case and at oral arguments in October, the court ruled against the FCC and deemed internet access to be an “information service” largely free from FCC oversight.

In a post-Chevron world where courts no longer have to defer to expert agencies, we’ve replaced years of evidence and argument with revelations like this from Judge Griffin: “The existence of a fact or thought in one’s mind is not ‘information’ like 0s and 1s used by computers.”

In the short term, this decision will let the incoming Trump FCC abdicate its responsibility to protect internet users so it can focus on its new priority of threatening TV broadcasters and social-media sites to carry more pro-Trump views.

I’ll spare you the rest. This court’s warped decision scraps the common-sense rules the FCC restored in April. The result is that throughout most of the country, the most essential communications service of this century will be operating without any real government oversight, with no one to step in when companies rip you off or slow down your service.

This ruling is far out of step with the views of the American public, who overwhelmingly support real Net Neutrality and despise the cable companies. They’re tired of paying too much, and they hate being spied on when they surf (or talk, thanks Siri). Now they’ll have even less recourse to deal with unscrupulous and abusive business practices.

Incoming FCC Chair Brendan Carr and his old boss Ajit Pai, who’s part of the Trump transition team, are crowing everywhere about the decision and cheering this strike against “regulatory overreach.” Of course, Carr and his ilk have never been interested in protecting the public interest, only private profits.

In the short term, this decision will let the incoming Trump FCC abdicate its responsibility to protect internet users so it can focus on its new priority of threatening TV broadcasters and social-media sites to carry more pro-Trump views. The hypocrisy of crushing light-touch regulations while aggressively pursuing government censorship is something to behold.

In the weeks ahead, the FCC, as well as Free Press and the other parties who intervened in the case, will consider our legal options and decide whether to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. In Congress, we’ll start laying the groundwork for a future bill that restores Net Neutrality and FCC authority. Meanwhile, we’ll look to the states to hold the line, with laws like California’s strong Net Neutrality regulations thankfully still on the books.

Our job now is to channel the growing outrage over this appalling decision into the long-term changes we need to keep the internet safe, reliable, accessible, affordable and free from unlawful discrimination.

It may have gotten harder, but the fight for the free and open internet is far from over.

By Ralph Nader January 3, 2025 Three years ago, I wrote an article titled, “Eight New Year’s Resolutions for NPR to Consider Now.” Since NPR has done little with these suggestions, I’m reissuing the 2022 column for listeners to review and react accordingly. After all, NPR is using the public’s airwaves. Last year we released…

I love New Orleans, and have been known to hit the jazz clubs on Bourbon Street into the wee hours myself. So what happened there is a gut punch, and I want to express my condolences to the families of the victims and to the community there for its trauma.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump jumped to the conclusion that the New Orleans attacker, who killed 15 people and wounded three dozen more was a career criminal and recent immigrant. In fact, he was an African-American veteran, born and bred in Beaumont, Texas. His conversion to Islam must have happened before 2004, when he tried to enlist in the Navy under that name. Instead, he ended up in the army, and deployed for a year to Afghanistan (2009-2010), as well as getting the training to become an IT specialist. He remained a reservist after his honorable discharge.

He was, in short, a patriotic American who did his part in fighting the war on terror. He was not an immigrant or a member of a foreign criminal gang.

I do know that if a white guy lost his family and his business, went tens of thousands of dollars into debt, and ended up living in a trailer home with livestock in his yard, and then went postal, sympathetic white reporters would be eliciting regrets from his white parents that he was suffering from mental problems.

That Mr. Trump persists in deploying the politics of hate and bigotry is a bad sign for the U.S. Even if Jabbar had been a immigrant, his actions would have said nothing about immigrants, who have low rates of criminality compared to the native-born population and whose productivity has been one key to American economic success. They don’t take jobs from the native-born on the whole, but do jobs that the latter typically won’t do.

Nor is Jabbar’s religion a reason to engage in Muslim-hatred. The NY Post‘s insidious and Islamophobic reporting ominously says that one of his neighbors in the trailer park in which he ended up only spoke Urdu. If that were true it would be because poor people live in trailer parks, including immigrants with limited English. However, it sounds fishy to me, since even poor Pakistanis of the sort who come to the United States tend to know English. It was the colonial language and still an essential language, like French in Tunisia. Then they say ominously that there was a mosque in the area. So what? Mosques are houses of worship where people go for solace when facing rough times.

The Post says ominously that Jabbar referenced the Qur’an, the Muslim scripture. D’oh. He was a Muslim. He also referenced the Qur’an when he was in Afghanistan as part of the U.S. army’s fight against the Taliban.

The Qur’an forbids murder and urges believers to forgive and do good to their enemies. See my study of these peace themes in the Muslim holy book at academia.edu.

If this guy had been a white Proud Boy found with guns and explosives, would the newspapers imply that it is suspicious that he quoted the Bible and that there is a Baptist church near his house? It is 2024, New York Post. Islamophobia is a disgusting form of racism. (Yes, Muslims are racialized in this country.)

I admire the hell out of veterans. I grew up in an army family, just as Jabbar’s children did. Most veterans are admirable citizens who come back and contribute to their communities, building businesses and providing key services. But the job undeniably can lead to trauma and stresses that a small minority deal with in dysfunctional ways. The suicide rate is tragically high. I’ve lost people I knew that way. Some end up homeless. Some are radicalized. It is not an accident that the leadership of the Proud Boys, convicted of sedition, were disproportionately veterans.

Jacqueline Sweet was able to screenshot some of Jabbar’s postings at Twitter / X.

In the first posting, from 2021, he says that a “scarcity mindset” is unhealthy in an environment of abundance, and that if you can’t turn off that scarcity mindset it becomes a kind of trauma. In the second, from the same year, he complains about the lack of Black protagonists in films after Marvel’s The Black Panther (2018) who are not “submissive, immoral or immature/ silly.”

— (@)

Then in 2022, everything went to hell. His wife divorced him, he went deeply into debt, and the Post says he ended up living in a trailer home with chickens and sheep in the lawn.

Everybody goes postal in their own way. White nationalists try to invade the capitol and hang the vice president. Kahanaist Jews in Israel shoot up mosques and commit atrocities in the Occupied Territories. A handful of Muslim Americans have declared themselves ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), even though that organization barely exists and has no command and control. It is like a white supremacist declaring that he is acting in the name of Adolf Hitler even though the Nazi army was long ago defeated and Adolf died in his bunker.

It should go without saying that the fact that a tiny number of disturbed individuals act this way does not reflect on the 4 or 5 million Muslim Americans, who are our physicians, accountants, and local business people. Tarring a whole group with the actions of a few is the definition of prejudice. Likewise, the Proud Boys don’t reflect on all white people.

I’m not a psychiatrist and don’t play one on television. I therefore cannot pronounce on Jabbar’s state of mind. But I do know that if a white guy lost his family and his business, went tens of thousands of dollars into debt, and ended up living in a trailer home with livestock in his yard, and then went postal, sympathetic white reporters would be eliciting regrets from his white parents that he was suffering from mental problems. As I pointed out over a decade ago, however, the U.S. media treat white terrorists differently.

As a reminder, here are my Top 10 Differences between White Terrorists and Others:

1. White terrorists are called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun? Wouldn’t that be, like, everyone in the U.S.? Other terrorists are called, like, “terrorists.”
2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are obviously troubled loners.
3. Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white Congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of terrorists is a guaranteed promotion.
4. The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost never interviewed.
5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.
6. White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies.
7. White terrorists are never called “white.” But other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.
8. Nobody thinks white terrorists are typical of white people. But other terrorists are considered paragons of their societies.
9. White terrorists are alcoholics, addicts, or mentally ill. Other terrorists are apparently clean-living and perfectly sane.
10. There is nothing you can do about white terrorists. Gun control won’t stop them. No policy you could make, no government program, could possibly have an impact on them. But hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent on police and on the Department of Defense, and on TSA, which must virtually strip search 60 million people a year, to deal with other terrorists.

The last time the United States acquired new territory in the western hemisphere was 1917, when it purchased the Virgin Islands from Denmark. Now Trump wants to take us back to the 19th century and major acquisitions like Alaska, which we bought from Russia in 1867. He has his eye on Greenland and Canada, which would more than double the size of our country. He’s also threatening to take back the Panama Canal. What do all of these places have in common? Trade between the world’s major oceans, facilitated by a new northwest passage created by the disappearance of the polar ice cap.

“The TMI Show” delves into the politics and realities of Making America Bigger Again with co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan and guest Scott Stantis, editorial cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune. 

The post TMI Show Ep 49: “Make America Bigger Again” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 49: “Make America Bigger Again” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Ultra-wealthy elites. Political corruption. Corporate monopolies. Anti-immigrant nativism. Vast inequality.

These problems aren’t new. In the late 1800s, they dominated the country during America’s first Gilded Age. We overcame these abuses then, and we can do so again.

Mark Twain coined the moniker “The Gilded Age” in his 1873 novel to describe the era in American history characterized by corruption and inequality that was masked by a thin layer of prosperity for a select few.

The end of the 19th century and start of the 20th marked a time of great invention — bustling railroads, telephones, motion pictures, electricity, automobiles — that changed American life forever.

But it was also an era of giant monopolies — oil, railroad, steel, finance — run by a small group of men who had grown rich beyond anything America had ever seen.

It seemed as if American capitalism was out of control, and American democracy couldn’t do anything about it because it was bought and paid for by the rich.

They were known as “robber barons” because they ran competitors out of business, exploited workers, charged customers exorbitant prices, and lived like royalty as a result.

Money consumed politics. Robber barons and their lackeys donated bundles of cash to any lawmaker willing to do bidding on their behalf. When lobbying wasn’t enough, the powerful moneyed interests turned to bribery — resulting in some of the most infamous political scandals in American history.

The gap between rich and poor in America reached record levels. Large numbers of Americans lived in squalor.

Anti-immigrant sentiment raged, leading to the enactment of racist laws to restrict immigration. It was also a time of voter suppression, largely aimed at Black men who had recently won the right to vote.

The era was also marked by dangerous working conditions. Children often as young as 10, but sometimes younger, worked brutal hours in sweatshops. Workers trying to organize labor unions were attacked and killed.

It seemed as if American capitalism was out of control, and American democracy couldn’t do anything about it because it was bought and paid for by the rich.

But America reached a tipping point. The nation was fed up. The public demanded reform. Many took to the streets in protest. Investigative journalists, often called “muckrakers” then, helped amplify their cries by exposing what was occurring throughout the country.

A new generation of political leaders rose to end the abuses.

Teddy Roosevelt warned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” could destroy American democracy.

After becoming president in 1901, Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up dozens of powerful corporations, including the giant Northern Securities Company, which had come to dominate railroad transportation through a series of mergers.

Seeking to limit the vast fortunes that were creating a new American aristocracy, Congress enacted a progressive income tax through the 16th Amendment, as well as two wealth taxes.

The first wealth tax, in 1916, was the estate tax — on the wealth someone accumulated during their lifetime, paid by the heirs who inherited it. The second tax on wealth, enacted in 1922, was a capital gains tax — on the increased value of assets, paid when those assets were sold.

The reformers of the Gilded Age also stopped corporations from giving money directly to politicians or political candidates.

Then Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin (you may have heard of him) continued the work through his New Deal programs, creating Social Security, unemployment insurance, and a 40-hour workweek and requiring that employers bargain in good faith with labor unions.

But following the death of FDR and the end of World War II, and after America had built the largest middle class the world had ever seen, we seemed to forget about the abuses of the Gilded Age.

The reforms that followed the first Gilded Age withered.

Starting with Reagan, taxes on the wealthy were lowered. Campaign finance laws were weakened. Social safety nets became frayed. Corporations stopped bargaining in good faith with labor unions.

Now, more than a century later, America has entered a second Gilded Age.

Monopolies are once again taking over vast swaths of the economy. So we must strengthen antitrust enforcement to bust up powerful companies.

Now another generation of robber barons, exemplified by Elon Musk, is accumulating unprecedented money and power. So, once again, we must tax these exorbitant fortunes.

Wealthy individuals and big corporations are once again paying off lawmakers, sending them billions to conduct their political campaigns, even giving luxurious gifts to Supreme Court justices. So we must protect our democracy from Big Money, just as we did before.

As it was during the first Gilded Age, voter suppression is too often making it harder for people of color to participate in our democracy. So it’s once again critical to defend and expand voting rights.

Working people are once again being exploited and abused, child labor is returning, unions are being busted, the poor are again living in unhealthy conditions, homelessness is on the rise, and the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else is nearly as large as in the first Gilded Age.

So once again we need to protect the rights of workers to organize, invest in social safety nets, and revive guardrails to protect against the abuses of great wealth and power.

Seeking these goals may seem quixotic right now, just weeks before Trump and his regime take power with a bilious bunch of billionaires.

But if history is any guide, they will mark the last gasp of America’s second Gilded Age. We will reach the tipping point where Americans demand restraints on robber-baron greed.

The challenge is the same as it was at the start of the 20th century: To fight for an economy and a democracy that works for all rather than the few.

I realize how frightening and depressing the future may look right now. But we have succeeded before, when we fought against the abuses of the first Gilded Age. We can — and must — do so again now, in America’s second Gilded Age.

"The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of 50 years of neoliberalism,” Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy wrote days after the election. “We cannot be afraid of fights, especially with the economic elites who have profited off neoliberalism.”

Indeed, the results of the 2024 election left many Democrats reeling. Once again, the very real frustrations many American voters have with their place in an increasingly complex and unequal global economy were exploited by a billionaire con man with a horrendous, hate-fueled agenda full of sweeping corporate giveaways.

Voters Wanted Economic Change

With the smoke cleared, we can see that there were a number of factors working against the Harris campaign and numerous pathways to victory that fell short. But it is undeniable that economic policy and messaging played a major role. Countless exit polls showed that dissatisfaction with the economy was the number one deciding issue for voters.

Take the three Rust Belt swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, for instance, where an average of 31% of voters said the economy was the most important factor in determining their decisions. Of these, 76% voted for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. Sixty-six percent felt the economy was in bad shape, and of this group, 70% voted for Donald Trump.

It would be preposterous for Democrats—in the name of fighting Trumpism—to revert back to the corporate-dominated rules of free trade agreements that contributed to the economic damage felt by working people and drove them toward right-wing populism.

And then there’s Trumbull County, Ohio, home of the Lordstown GM plant where Trump had promised thousands of autoworkers he would save their jobs. And though all of those jobs went to Mexico during his presidency and he did nothing to stop it, Trump overperformed his 2020 numbers there by nearly four percentage points, while Vice President Kamala Harris underperformed President Joe Biden’s. Trump also overperformed his 2020 numbers to beat Harris in Racine County, Wisconsin, where he had promised 13,000 manufacturing jobs back in 2017 that never arrived. Worse, Harris underperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 total vote percentages in every Rust Belt state except Indiana.

The Rust Belt got its name because of bad trade deals. It’s where a lot of good manufacturing jobs used to be before the era of neoliberal corporate-trade policies arrived in the late 80s. Back then, Republican and Democratic leaders alike pushed the myth of free trade onto a working class that had just endured a wave of skyrocketing income inequality and attacks on unions by Ronald Reagan.

U.S. trade policy plays a central role in these voters’ dissatisfaction. Deep feelings of betrayal left behind by the era of free trade fueled all three of Donald Trump’s campaigns and allowed his litany of lies and false promises about protecting manufacturing jobs to win over many working-class voters.

Recognition of “Free Trade” Harms

President Biden, previously a supporter of traditional free trade deals, learned some important political lessons from 2016, and the 2020 Democratic primary pushed him to incorporate parts of the economic populist platform endorsed by the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren campaigns. Many of the same swing-state voters who went to Trump in 2016 responded to that message and delivered the White House to Biden in 2020.

During Biden’s presidency, thanks to key personnel like U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, the U.S. began moving away from the corporate-dominated deals of the past and made significant progress toward enacting a new “worker-centered” trade policy. And Biden matched this new approach with historic investments in new U.S. manufacturing to counteract job loss caused by past trade deals.

Instead of concluding free trade agreements, the administration promised that U.S. trade policy would serve, rather than undermine, these massive spending programs. There was more investment in new manufacturing facilities in the U.S. under Biden-Harris than at any point in more than three decades.

Trade Progress Uncelebrated

The Harris campaign could have told a powerful story about turning the tables and standing up for workers against corporate greed. They could have built a campaign, like Biden did in 2020, that took seriously the demands of the progressive wing of the party and the voters they inspired. They could have leaned into and promised to expand these progressive economic and trade policies. But the consultants and party strategists who helped guide them chose not to.

Instead, the campaign failed to credibly speak to the economic pain communities have been suffering and missed many opportunities to emphasize the very real progress the Biden administration made on that front. In speech after speech, Harris fell into Trump’s trap, arguing against tariffs that are supported by 56% of all voters, not just those in factory towns.

The campaign repeatedly attacked these popular tariffs, even disingenuously calling them a “sales tax,” despite the fact that the Biden-Harris administration had also strategically used tariffs to protect U.S. industries and manufacturing jobs.

With the Harris campaign not consistently communicating a populist economic agenda, Trump was once again able to sell his hateful brand of right-wing populism, falsely claiming that he alone was looking out for American manufacturing workers.

The Way Forward

It would be preposterous for Democrats—in the name of fighting Trumpism—to revert back to the corporate-dominated rules of free trade agreements that contributed to the economic damage felt by working people and drove them toward right-wing populism.

Instead, they should clearly and passionately outline a progressive, populist vision for trade that they will boldly implement when they retake power. They should demand large-scale changes that transform how our country works for working people.

I remember being filled with excitement when the Paris agreement to limit global warming to 1.5°C was adopted by nearly 200 countries at COP21. But after the curtains closed on COP29 last month—almost a decade later—my disenchantment with the event reached a new high.

As early as the 2010s, scientists from academia and the United Nations Environment Program warned that the U.S. and Europe must cut meat consumption by 50% to avoid climate disaster. Earlier COPs had mainly focused on fossil fuels, but meat and dairy corporations undoubtedly saw the writing on the wall that they too would soon come under fire.

Our food system needs to be sustainable for all—people, animals, and our planet.

Animal agriculture accounts for at least 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, over quadruple the amount from global aviation. Global meat and dairy production have increased almost fivefold since the 1960s with the advent of industrialized agriculture. These factory-like systems are characterized by cramming thousands of animals into buildings or feedlots and feeding them unnatural grain diets from crops grown offsite. Even if all fossil fuel use was halted immediately, we would still exceed 1.5°C temperature rise without changing our food system, particularly our production and consumption of animal-sourced foods.

But climate change is just one of the threats we face. We have also breached five other planetary boundaries—biodiversity; land-use change; phosphorus and nitrogen cycling; freshwater use; and pollution from man-made substances such as plastics, antibiotics, and pesticides—all of which are also driven mainly by animal-sourced food production.

The 2023 update is shown to the Planetary boundaries. (Graphic: Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023/ CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

By the time world leaders were ready to consider our food system's impact on climate and the environment, the industrialized meat and dairy sector had already prepared its playbook to maintain the status quo. The Conference of Parties is meant to bring together the world's nations and thought leaders to address climate change. However, the event has become increasingly infiltrated by corporate interests. There were 52 delegates from the meat and dairy sector at COP29, many with country badges that gave them privileged access to diplomatic negotiations.

In this forum and others, the industry has peddled bombastic "solutions" under the guise of technology and innovation. Corporate-backed university research has lauded adding seaweed to cattle feed and turning manure lagoons the size of football fields into energy sources to reduce methane production. In Asia, companies are putting pigs in buildings over 20 stories tall, claiming the skyscrapers cut down on space and disease risks. And more recently, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos started bankrolling research and development into vaccines that reduce the methane-causing bacteria found naturally in cows' stomachs. The industry hopes that the novelty and allure of new technologies will woo lawmakers and investors, but these "solutions" create more problems than they solve, exacerbating net greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution, wildlife loss, and freshwater depletion.

Emissions from animal-sourced foods can be broadly divided into four categories: ruminant fermentation (cow burps); manure; logistics (transport, packaging, processing, etc.); and land-use change, i.e., the conversion of wild spaces into pasture, feedlots, and cropland for feed. In the U.S., ruminant fermentation and manure emit more methane than natural gas and petroleum systems combined.

A new report found that beef consumption must decline by over a quarter globally by 2035 to curb methane emissions from cattle, which the industry's solutions claim to solve without needing to reduce consumption. But the direct emissions from cattle aren't the only problem—beef and dairy production is also the leading driver of deforestation, which must decline by 72% by 2035, and reforestation must rise by 115%. About 35% of habitable land is used to raise animals for food or to grow their feed (mostly corn and soy), about the size of North and South America combined.

Thousands of cattle mill about or huddle under shade structures at a large cattle ranch where they spend the last few months of their lives before going to slaughter in Coalinga, California, USA, 2022. (Photo: Vince Penn / We Animals)

Put simply, the inadequate solutions put forth by Big Ag cannot outpace industrialized farming's negative impacts on the planet. While seaweed and methane vaccines may address cow burps, they don't address carbon emissions from deforestation or manure emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas over 270 times more powerful than CO2. They also don't address the nitrate water pollution from manure, which can sicken people and cause massive fish kills and harmful algal blooms; biodiversity decline from habitat loss, which has dropped 73% since the rise of industrialized animal agriculture; freshwater use, drying up rivers and accounting for over a quarter of humanity's water footprint; or pesticide use on corn and soy feed, which kills soil microorganisms that are vital to life on Earth.

Skyscrapers, while solving some land-use change, do not consider the resources and the land used to grow animal feed, which is globally about equivalent to the size of Europe. They also don't address the inherent inefficiencies with feeding grain to animals raised for food. If fed directly to people, those grains could feed almost half the world's population. And while the companies using pig skyscrapers claim they enhance biosecurity by keeping potential viruses locked inside, a system failure could spell disaster, posing a bigger threat to wildlife and even humans.

We need both a monumental shift from industrialized agriculture to regenerative systems and a dramatic shift from animal-heavy diets to diets rich in legumes, beans, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, with meat and dairy as a specialty rather than a staple.

One solution that is gaining traction as an alternative to Big Ag's proposals is regenerative grazing. When done right, regenerative grazing eliminates the need for pesticides and leans into the natural local ecology, putting farm animals onto rotated pastures and facilitating carbon uptake into the soil. Regenerative animal agriculture is arguably the only solution put forward that addresses all six breached planetary boundaries as well as animal welfare and disease risk, and studies suggest it can improve the nutritional quality of animal-sourced foods. While it is imperative to transition from industrialized to regenerative systems, regenerative grazing comes with major caveats. This type of farming is only beneficial in small doses—cutting down centuries-old forests or filling in carbon-rich wetlands to make way for regenerative pastures would do much more climate and ecological harm than good. Soil carbon sequestration takes time and increases with vegetation and undisturbed soil, meaning that any regenerative pastures made today will never be able to capture as much carbon as the original natural landscape, especially in forests, mangroves, wetlands, and tundra. And while regenerative farmlands create better wildlife habitats than feedlots and monocultures, they still don't function like a fully natural ecosystem and food web. Also, cattle emit more methane than their native ruminant counterparts such as bison and deer.

Most notably, however, we simply don't have enough land to produce regeneratively raised animal products at the current consumption rate. Regenerative grazing requires more land than industrialized systems, sometimes two to three times more, and as mentioned the livestock industry already occupies over one-third of the world's habitable land. In all, we have much more to gain from rewilding crop- and rangeland than from turning the world into one big regenerative pasture.

A horned Pineywoods bull watches a white and black spotted Kune Kune pig at a regenerative farm in North Carolina, USA. (Photo: Mike Hansen / Getty Images)

All this brings us to one conclusion—the one that was made by scientists over a decade ago: We need to eat less meat. As Action Aid's Teresa Anderson noted at this year's COP, "The real answers to the climate crisis aren’t being heard over the corporate cacophony."

Scientific climate analyses over the last few years have been grim at best, and apocalyptic at worst. According to one of the latest U.N. reports, limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C (2.7°F) requires cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 57% by 2035, relative to 2023 emissions. However, current national policies—none of which currently include diet shifts—will achieve less than a 1% reduction by 2035. If the 54 wealthiest nations adopted sustainable healthy diets with modest amounts of animal products, they could slash their total emissions by 61%. If we also allowed the leftover land to rewild, we could sequester 30% of our global carbon budget in these nations and nearly 100% if adopted globally.

Our food system needs to be sustainable for all—people, animals, and our planet. Quick fixes and bandages will not save our planet from climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. We need both a monumental shift from industrialized agriculture to regenerative systems and a dramatic shift from animal-heavy diets to diets rich in legumes, beans, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, with meat and dairy as a specialty rather than a staple. As nations draft their policies for COP30, due early this year, we need leaders to adopt real food system solutions instead of buying into the corporate cacophony.

I welcome in the new year with a sense of abstract helplessness, as the headlines continue to bring us dead children, bombed hospitals, torture, rape and, of course, ever more “self-defense” (sometimes known as genocide).

From my safe, secure office space I absorb the daily news—from Gaza, from all across the planet–with a whiplash of guilt and naivete. What the hell do I know what it feels like to have my house, or my tent, bombed, to see my children die, to have no access to water, let alone healthcare? Is it enough to comfortably empathize with the collateral damage of this world at war?

No, no, no, it’s not.

This is just the way things are. It’s OK to kill—you just have to do so within certain rules.

But I empathize nonetheless, and shake to my depths with an incredulity that never goes away: “As if the relentless bombing and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza were not enough, the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe in fact became a death trap.”

The words are those of Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, quoted in a recent U.N. report about Israel’s ongoing devastation of Palestinian hospitals and its virtually total destruction of the occupied territory’s healthcare system, including the arrest—the abduction—of hundreds of doctors and other medical professionals, who often wind up being tortured and sometimes murdered.

The U.N. report was released “just days after the last functioning major healthcare facility in northern Gaza, Kama Adwan Hospital, was taken out of service after a raid by Israeli military forces, leaving the population of North Gaza with almost no access to adequate health care,” according to U.N. News:

Staff and patients were forced to flee or were taken into custody, with many reports of torture and ill-treatment. The director of the hospital was taken into custody, and his fate and whereabouts are unknown.

During the period covered by the report, there were at least 136 strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities, claiming significant casualties among doctors, nurses, medics, and other civilians, and causing significant damage, if not complete destruction of civilian infrastructure.

It’s virtually impossible to absorb news like this without first reducing it to an abstraction. This is something that’s happening “over there” somewhere, to people I don’t know. And soon enough the world itself—the world in which we all live—is mostly an abstraction... an entity separated by borders. I can read about terrible things going on in distant places, but my sense of actual connection to them is missing.

The U.N. News story proceeded to point out, “The protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times.”

And here’s where my internal alarm went off. I have no disagreement with the point of the above sentence, but there’s something missing. Something crucial. Its basic point is this: When you’re waging war, hey, you still have to obey certain rules, e.g., don’t bomb hospitals without a really, really good reason. If you do, you’ve done something bad. You’ve committed a war crime.

It’s not simply that acts of war are wrapped snugly in legalese, but that war itself—in the context that births the term “war crime”—is not questioned or morally challenged. War simply exists. It’s a transcultural moral certainty. It’s part and parcel of civilization itself. Various social entities across the planet are bound to disagree or get annoyed with one another from time to time, and when they do—what choice do they have?—they go to war. This is just the way things are. It’s OK to kill—you just have to do so within certain rules. And mostly those rules apply to the loser, not the winner. Certainly this is true in retrospect.

And suddenly the sense of abstraction I was feeling begins to shatter. The concept of war instantly turns life itself into an abstraction. No matter that religions (see Genesis 1:27) all seem to acknowledge the preciousness of human life... of life itself. Most religions are also the first to send their troops—or, nowadays, their tanks and bombers—into battle.

A year ago I wrote:

We—by which I mean most of humanity—are still playing with the so-called ‘just war theory,’ the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era.

You know, violence is morally neutral—and thus, when the cause is just and sacred, go for it! Kill the non-believers... The neutrality of violence can be used by anyone in a position of power.

And, oh yeah, before you open fire, before you start killing, you have to take a spiritual step directly into the process: You have to define, and then dehumanize, the enemy. Once that happens, let her rip! The only thing stopping you now are the so-called rules of war, which allegedly protect innocent civilians and keep the whole thing reasonable. What a joke. Violence is poisonously addictive and easily expands—anywhere and everywhere.

War, as I have noted, is humanity’s cancer. Its seeming inevitability is ensconced in the global military budget. We have a few thousand nukes ready to go (“if necessary”) and thus the power to destroy all life on Planet Earth, aka, ourselves. Isn’t it time to start rethinking this potential Armageddon?

We are capable of creating peace! Most of us want it, at least for ourselves, our loved ones, our community, and country. We just don’t know what it is—and no, it’s not some cliché of perfect harmony. But it begins with the only rule of war that is necessary: It must never be waged again.

When U.S. President Joe Biden announced last July that he would not seek a second term, left-leaning pundits, politicians, and late-night comics waxed lyrical in elevating Biden to near-mythic status, framing his big choice as proof of sacrificing personal ambition for the salvation of American democracy.

After the presidential elections and as his presidency unceremoniously fades, serious talk about Joe’s legacy has fallen sloppy dead (channeling Grace Slick) and been replaced by disorganized clamor over Vice President Kamala Harris’ decisive defeat.

Still, it remains odd that Biden’s decision to pass the electoral torch to his vice president was ever cast as a salvific moment in modern American politics. Long before the election results, the legacy pillow talk showed an embarrassing blind spot in the internal discourse of the country.

In this moment of horrific violence, veils have been lifted, and, as a result, what America and Americans think about the Middle East has lost its luster internationally.

As the Biden redemption arc threaded through the media logic of the mainstream public sphere, global discourses about Biden’s legacy had pursued a different path. The Biden-Harris-Blinken team, for the most part, has been viewed in much of the world for presiding over what scholars, jurists, courts, members of Congress, and respected human rights groups have called or made adjacent references to being genocide or genocidal violence in Gaza—an “Industrial scale slaughterhouse.”

Despite the populist narratology justifying the American diplomatic shield for Israeli bellicosity and an unending supply of war kits, the legacy curation of the Biden administration in the greater elsewhere of our world will focus on a succession of war crimes and strategic privations in Gaza sponsored by the United States, executed by the Israelis, and underwritten by the epistemic violence of dehumanizing a resolute people who have been killed, displaced, occupied, and politically and economically hamstrung for more than 75 years, if not a century, as historian Rashid Khalidi argues.

The “October 7” signifier, in other words, received little purchase beyond Western milieus.

As for real legacy stakes, they exist and are high. The unchecked violence in Gaza has been described as the “graveyard of liberal values” and “Western ideals.” And “many of the most important principles of humanitarian law,” have also been laid to rest without the dignity of any exequies.

As a consequence, the hegemonic influence of American media narratives on a global scale has unraveled, with the credibility of major Western news organizations tanking and “irreparably damaged.” Even from within, major Western outlets face allegations of journalistic malpractice, by staff from CNN and BBC, for example, protesting editorial impositions on reporters to take an Israel-biased slant in their Gaza coverage.

Such failings have managed to quicken concepts typically locked in academia. For example, New York University professor Miranda Fricker’s theoretical works on “epistemic injustice” hold more active meaning now. The structures of mediation spotlight one perspective, while entire groups are denied credibility as knowers of their own contexts and denied meaningful space in the media ecology.

Likewise, Northwestern’s José Medina’s “epistemic responsibility” is now heard as a call for the dismantling of media structures that amplify one-sided narratives while deliberately silencing others. This unchecked dynamic aligns with what I term the “epistemology of repetition,” where context-stripped narratives gain the veneer of truth for no higher reason than sheer repetition, with any attempt at rigor and fact-checking labeled as antisemitic.

At stake is the fundamental right of Palestinians to be recognized as legitimate sources of their own lived experiences and claims. Denying these rights or covering them with performative both-side-ism silences their histories, aspirations, and love for their land—a love expressed through resistance to occupation and a firm commitment to family, education, and spirituality. Such epistemic violence not only mirrors physical destruction but enables it by erasing the cultural and historical claims of those affected and makes up the narrative scaffolding that typecast Palestinians as forever aggressors and Israelis as perpetual victims, as anthropologist Julie Peteet writes.

From my perch as a media and religious studies academic and a Chicago native teaching in the Middle East for nearly 17 years, I have little hope that American journalism will embrace greater epistemic responsibility toward Palestine. Answering this call would require radical transformations of journalistic premises and praxis. This epistemic responsibility would be considered nothing less than storytelling apostasy.

In this moment of horrific violence, veils have been lifted, and, as a result, what America and Americans think about the Middle East has lost its luster internationally. The distributive imbalances of reportage and the suppression of meaningful counter-narratives have never been so stark. The corporate media giants took a huge gamble with their coverage of Gaza (especially in the early months of the violence), but they lost the bet and injured their credibility abroad, leaving a damning evidentiary trail of blatant bias in news coverage that is “rife with deadly double standards.”

As a result, the American brand has been tarnished, which ultimately is Joe’s legacy.

For years, the U.S. and the West undermined and sabotaged the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Now they’ve succeeded and radical jihadis have taken over. You just know what’s going to happen next.

The post Regime Change a Go Go first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Regime Change a Go Go appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.