A driver runs down and kills 15 pedestrians on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. A man pushes a commuter in front of a New York subway train days after a migrant sets a homeless woman on fire, killing her, on a train in Brooklyn. The FBI says crime is down in every category, especially violent offenses. But urban areas feel lawless and out of control and the latest Gallup poll finds that a majority of Americans believe crime is extremely or very serious.

Are Americans paranoid? What effects are the migrant and homeless crises having? What can the authorities do at the local and national levels to make people feel safe?

“TMI Show” hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan are joined by Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense to discuss the state of a scared nation.

The post TMI Show Ep 48: “Mean Streets: Can Anyone Clean Them Up?” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 48: “Mean Streets: Can Anyone Clean Them Up?” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Elvis Presley hardly seems a likely candidate for the pantheon of public health heroes. But in October 1956 the ascending rock idol lent his considerable stardom to helping save lives.

His little remembered role is a cautionary tale as incoming President Trump advances a series of farright and unqualified appointees to major public agencies. The most dangerous is likely to be conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, augmented by like-minded, perilous public health heads of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Federal Drug Administration (FDA), and his choice for Surgeon General.

For a century, polio epidemics made it one of the world’s most terrifying diseases. A 1916 outbreak in New York City killed over 2,000 people; another in the U.S. in 1952 claimed over 3,000. Children were especially targeted, over 60,000 infected yearly, facing lifelong severe spinal injuries requiring braces, crutches, and wheelchairs, and the dreaded iron lung, an artificial respirator, or premature death.

Wealth and status proved no barrier, as evidenced by President Franklin Roosevelt who was diagnosed at age 39 in 1921 with polio and endured it the rest of his life. What was a safeguard was the first vaccine, developed by virologist/medical researcher Jonas Salk. The announcement on April 12, 1955 by University of Michigan School of Public Health scientist Thomas Francis, Jr., who declared it “safe, effective, and potent,” was greeted as a national celebration, spread rapidly over radio, television, and wire services.

Parents lined up to vaccinate their young children, plenty did not. Teen immunization levels stagnated at just 0.6 percent. Enter Elvis. He agreed to go on the popular Ed Sullivan TV show, not to sing, but to get publicly vaccinated, viewed by millions. Vaccination rates among American youth soared to 80 percent in just six months. Overall annual cases of polio plummeted within a year from 58,000 to 5,600. By 1961, only 161 cases remained. After an oral vaccine followed, polio disappeared in the U.S. completely.

Yet polio never vanished globally, especially in underdeveloped nations, as in Africa, and in war zones, including in Gaza today—driven by Israel’s decimation of public health protections during its catastrophic and ongoing assault. In 2022, the first U.S. case in decades was reported by the New York State Department of Health.

Defense against dangerous epidemic outbreaks requires constant vigilance, and public support for full embrace of public health safety measures, including vaccinations. The experience of Trump’s first tenure is far from reassuring, especially his abominable failure in the face of Covid-19, the worst global pandemic in a century which ultimately cost the lives of over 1.2 million Americans.

Initial skepticism over the polio vaccine has a long antecedent in the U.S., described early in the Covid pandemic by what Los Angeles Times writer Carolina Miranda aptly termed “toxic individualism” and rugged individualism. It is traceable to a virulent brew of misguided notions of individual liberty that undermine and sabotage the public good, or a commons of national and community interest. Much of its roots are linked to structural racism, as in the resistance to Civil Rights Movement measures, and continuing today in white opposition to reforms such as expansion of health care and other public programs, immigration rights, and other societal benefits.

That history provides context for the eruption of the anti-vax, anti-public health measures that exacerbated and prolonged Covid suffering and death and seeded the ground for opposition to other essential vaccines. It’s true, as medical ethicist Arthur Caplan writes, that much of “the damage to getting Americans to vaccinate has already been done… There are almost no serious state mandates for childhood vaccines. Parents who want to opt out are easily doing so, as can be seen by the resurgence in measles and whooping cough. Nearly 40% of teenagers are not up to date on the HPV vaccine even as Australia and Scotland are on the verge of eliminating cervical cancer thanks to serious immunization campaigns.”

Further, he adds “Democrats avoided vaccination as an issue this election year because they knew that, post Covid, vaccination has become something of a political third rail. Could Kennedy and [CMS nominee Dr. Mehmet] Oz make things worse—absolutely. But are matters already bad—sadly, yes.”

The Kennedy-Trump threat

Yet Kennedy and his coterie of other department heads can make matters much worse. With the imprimatur of a President-elect already lionized by an often-fawning base will likely discourage more resistance to vaccines that can turn schools into major disease vectors and hasten the spread of new epidemics sure to come.

Even in the wake of Covid, Kennedy, with his power as HHS Secretary has said he would pause NIH’s drug development and infectious disease research and shift its focus to chronic diseases that do need attention but not at the expense of combating global epidemics.

Kennedy has also indicated a desire to shutter “entire” FDA departments, which oversee safety and effectiveness of prescription drugs and vaccines. And he has threatened to purge FDA staff for “aggressive suppression” of unsafe products and therapies, such as raw milk, and discredited COVID treatments, including hydroxychloroquine.

There’s his lurid, scientifically refuted linkage of vaccines to autism and other conspiracies, such as his claim that Covid was bioengineered to exempt Chinese people, already targeted by Trump rhetoric that fueled hate crimes, and Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe origin, reinforcing right-wing antisemitic bigotry.

And that’s not including his attack on fluoride in drinking water which promotes oral health, as cited in a letter by 77 Nobel Prize winners opposing Kennedy, or his speculated doubt that HIV causes AIDS and the effectiveness of AZT therapy.

Anti-vax consequences

Still, it is his fanaticism on vaccines that prompts the most alarm.

During the COVID-19 epidemic, Children’s Health Defense, a group Kennedy founded and led, petitioned the FDA to halt the use of all COVID vaccines. In a 2023 podcast, Kennedy proclaimed there is “no vaccine that is safe and effective,” and disputed CDC’s guidelines about if and when kids should get vaccinated.

The implications are alone enough for a mass movement to escalate pressure to block confirmation of Kennedy, and Trump’s nominees to lead the CDC, CMS, FDA, NIH and Surgeon General who mostly share his chilling views on vaccine safety. Multiple studies document what is at stake.

The World Health Organization estimates vaccines have protected 150 million lives over the past 50 years, and that 100 million were infants. About 4 million deaths worldwide are prevented by childhood vaccination every year. More than 50 million deaths can be prevented through immunization between 2021 and 2030. By 2030, it is estimated that measles vaccination alone can save nearly 19 million lives.

In November 2013, University of Pittsburgh researchers issued a similar study. It documented that about 103 million cases of disease had been prevented by vaccination since 1924. The disease with the most cases prevented was diphtheria, 40 million cases. Second was measles, 35 million cases.

Globally, reported Scientific American, measles vaccines, preserved 94 million lives over the past 50 years. It cited a 2024 Lancet study published in October that vaccines against 14 common pathogens protected 154 million people over the past five decades—that's a rate of six lives every minute. They have cut infant mortality by 40 percent globally and by more than 50 percent in Africa. Throughout history vaccines secured more lives than almost any other intervention.

Lancet found that each life defended through immunization contributed to 66 years of full health, without long-term linked to disease. Vaccines impact nearly every measurement of health equity, from improving access to care, to reducing disability and long-term morbidity, to preventing loss of labor and the death of caretakers.

Writing in Forbes, hardly a left-wing Trump critic, earlier this year, ER doctor/health researcher Arthur Kellerman also cited the Pittsburgh study, as well as Johns Hopkins data of nearly 88 million cases of illness. In 1900, he wrote, 30 percent of deaths in the U.S. occurred in children under 5 years of age. In 1999, they accounted for only 1.4 percent. "Vaccines," he concluded, "played a vital role in this progress.”

Measles, a highly contagious childhood disease that can lead to pneumonia and fatal brain swelling, declined rapidly after the first measles vaccine was introduced in 1963. But, the CDC cites 16 measles outbreaks in 2024. Kennedy’s alleged role in promoting vaccine misinformation during a deadly measles outbreak in American Samoa in 2019, which he denies, has also been widely reported. Unvaccinated families, writes Kellerman, “tend to cluster in communities defined by faith, culture or political ideology. When a highly contagious disease gets into such a community, an outbreak can occur. We’ve already seen localized outbreaks of measles, rubella, mumps, and pertussis.”

In 2022, Kennedy’s attorney and close advisor Aaron Siri petitioned the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine for further study despite its long history of success.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who endured polio as a child, has denounced the push “to undermine public confidence in proven cures” like the polio vaccine. Only a “miraculous combination of modern medicine and a mother’s love” saved him from paralysis he said in a statement. “The polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease. Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed—they’re dangerous,” McConnell said.

Yet McConnell, and similar Republican critics have yet to publicly oppose Kennedy and his similar malefactors of health (to borrow FDR’s “malefactors of wealth” frame).

We can no longer count on Elvis to protect our children, families and communities. It is up to the rest of us.

If climate overheating is the biggest threat to life on Earth, one might expect that progressive platforms would be all over this issue. Of all the great crimes of capitalism—war, imperial conquest, siphoning pocket change from workers into bloated coffers of corporate wealth, shaking down ordinary people for a false promise of healthcare, buying up housing with private equity to spike rents, etc.—the baking of the biosphere stands out as an act of unprecedented, monstrous proportions.

Corporate greed, in its bureaucratic, industrial ability to divorce sentiment from institutional momentum, has entered a realm unique in the half billion year evolutionary history of multicellular life. Corporate humanity, armed with technology, has the ability to fast-track mass extinction. The oligarchs of our species have gained admittance to a dimension formerly restricted to geological processes. If implosion of the biosphere had always been a consequence of rare acts of volcanism—the caprice of plate tectonics unfolding across eons—we now can completely obliterate living systems on a dime.

Climate overheating is an epic story, and we have yet to figure out how to tell it.

Progressive media, thus, has every reason to be utterly riveted and obsessed with the climate—climate extinction is worse than war, worse than racism, worse than colonial expansion, worse than arbitrary police power, worse than union busting, worse than any corporate crimes short of nuclear war. Indeed, climate destruction might be thought of as the pure tincture of capitalism, the compressed essence of all forms of injustice. Climate, however, requires that people grasp a different order of magnitude to seriously address its lethal certainty. While police brutality, war, housing shortages, human rights abuses, and racism can possibly be addressed with reform, there is no wiggle room for climate's destructive trajectory. No series of incremental policy adjustments can placate Mother Nature and her planned revenge.

Climate remediation demands revolutionary change—there is no path forward to, as Jeremy Corbin words it, "turn the Titanic around," under our current political and economic systems. Climate overheating, unlike all the smaller threats plaguing our (and all other) species, requires an almost unimaginable shift in our institutions and ways of thinking—the transitions that might give the planet a hint of optimism have to take place globally within an international community hopelessly addicted to nationalism. A recent piece by Mark Wilson posted at the World Socialist Website (WSWS) encapsulates the gargantuan task—Wilson, referencing the suit by impoverished countries to access climate reparations via The World Court, states:

Whatever the verdict of this case, the major capitalist powers responsible for the climate crisis will continue to base their policies not on science, human rights, or environmental protection. Instead, the ruling elites and big business will make their calculations based on profit and on enriching themselves.

What is required by the working class globally is instead a break from the institutions that defend the capitalist system as it plunges the world into ecological devastation. The conscious political fight to abolish capitalism is the necessary strategic task to which all workers and young people must orient, as the only path to safeguard Earth and its living inhabitants.

As a regular reader of the WSWS, I generally find perspectives that are more pointedly directed toward revolution than incrementalism, but oddly, one has to look hard at WSWS offerings to find climate related analysis. I had to scroll through at least 30 pieces to find the above quote. That is not to begrudge the focus on international labor struggles, worker's rights, Gaza, and Marxist cultural perspectives, but the paucity of climate related reporting is not so much a failure of WSWS as it is a universal problem characteristic of progressive platforms in general.

A quick personal and anecdotal survey of five different online, leftist platforms reveals that fewer than 10% of pieces deal with climate, and only a tiny handful go into detail regarding the more nuanced debates around climate overheating mitigation. For example, the exploration of Degrowth—ubiquitous on niche environmental sites like Resilience—almost never receives detailed unpacking on more general online sites that promote leftist journalism. Unfortunately, we have a poorly informed public with a below threshold investment in civil disobedience, and little familiarity with the prevailing positions—largely emerging from academia—regarding the strategies that will be urgent and essential to transition from a political culture of runaway ecocide. Many have complained that the climate movement does not resonate with poor and working people. The massive mobilization needed to confront the sixth extinction depends on a well-informed public armed with the requisite narrative tools.

The problems confronting climate activism may be uniquely psychological. We don't see the same sort of immediate nexus that binds perpetrators and victims in the manner that a bloodied Gazan child can be traced to a conscious act of colonial expansion. The sort of violence manifest in the gratuitous burning of fossil fuels rather evades the scope of public understanding. We simply don't see the Central American refugee as a victim of corporate designs in the same way that we recognize a murdered Gazan child as a target of Israeli and U.S. military intent. Yet that connection is real and urgently needed to be framed for those who struggle to grasp the storyline. The cause and effect linking industry to extinction ought to be the greatest horror story ever told. Our hands should be sweating as we shakily turn the pages.

The murder of George Floyd pulled at our collective heartstrings. Tens of millions of people cringed at the specific, personal, intimate revelation of police violence. We oddly respond emotionally to a single act of injustice, yet numbly fail to resonate with the onrushing death of billions. Perhaps it is our job as writers to make climate crimes personal and immediate. Climate overheating is an epic story, and we have yet to figure out how to tell it. The enormous bridge linking the planet's greatest global catastrophe to the private suffering of real people may be nearly impossible for writers to span.

At the very least we can picture the suffering of Roger Hallam—sentenced to five years in prison for climate civil disobedience. Perhaps we can also appreciate that John Mark Rozendaal has been threatened with a seven-year sentence for playing a Bach Cello Suite outside of Citibank in NYC as part of the Summer of Heat protest. A man holding an umbrella above the cellist also risked Draconian retribution. Civil disobedience has often been energized by collective outrage toward state violence directed against those who stand up for human rights—think of Rosa Parks who became the iconic symbol of the civil rights movement.

All of the things that make journalism vivid and anxiously relevant ought to drive the climate narrative. The corporate world and their political puppets want nothing more than to see readers on leftist platforms bored with climate coverage.

On the last day of 2024, the deputy general counsel for the House of Representatives formally accepted delivery of a civil summons for two congressmembers from Northern California. More than 600 constituents of Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson have signed on as plaintiffs in a class action accusing them of helping to arm the Israeli military in violation of “international and federal law that prohibits complicity in genocide.”

Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, it conveys widespread anger and anguish about the ongoing civilian carnage in Gaza that taxpayers have continued to bankroll.

By a wide margin, most Americans favor an arms embargo on Israel while the Gaza war persists. But Huffman and Thompson voted to approve $26.38 billion in military aid for Israel last April, long after the nonstop horrors for civilians in Gaza were evident.

Back in February -- two months before passage of the enormous military aid package -- both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found that, in the words of the lawsuit, “the Israeli government was systematically starving the people of Gaza through cutting off aid, water, and electricity, by bombing and military occupation, all underwritten by the provision of U.S. military aid and weapons.”

When the known death toll passed 40,000 last summer, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights said: “Most of the dead are women and children. This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war.” He described as “deeply shocking” the “scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship.”

No one should put any trust in the court system to stop the U.S. government from using tax dollars for war. But suing congressmembers who are complicit in genocide is a good step.

On Dec. 4, Amnesty International released a 296-page report concluding that Israel has been committing genocide “brazenly, continuously and with total impunity” -- with the “specific intent to destroy Palestinians,” engaging in “prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention.”

Two weeks later, on the same day the lawsuit was filed in federal district court in San Francisco, Human Rights Watch released new findings that “Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide.”

Responding to the lawsuit, a spokesperson for Thompson said that “achieving peace and securing the safety of civilians won’t be accomplished by filing a lawsuit.” But for well over a year, to no avail, the plaintiffs and many other constituents have been urging him and Huffman to help protect civilians by ending their support for the U.S. pipeline of weapons and ammunition to Israel.

Enabled by that pipeline, the slaughter has continued in Gaza while the appropriators on Capitol Hill work in a kind of bubble. Letters, emails, phone calls, office visits, protests and more have not pierced that bubble. The lawsuit is an effort to break through the routine of indifference.

Like many other congressional Democrats, Huffman and Thompson have prided themselves on standing up against the contempt for facts that Donald Trump and his cohorts flaunt. Yet refusal to acknowledge the facts of civilian decimation in Gaza, with a direct U.S. role, is an extreme form of denial.

“Over the last 14 months I have watched elected officials remain completely unresponsive despite the public’s demands to end the genocide,” said Laurel Krause, a Mendocino County resident who is one of the lawsuit plaintiffs.

Another plaintiff, Leslie Angeline, a Marin County resident who ended a 31-day hunger strike when the lawsuit was filed, said: “I wake each morning worrying about the genocide that is happening in Gaza, knowing that if it wasn’t for my government’s partnership with the Israeli government, this couldn’t continue.”

Such passionate outlooks are a far cry from the words offered by members of Congress who routinely appear to take pride in seeming calm as they discuss government policies. But if their own children’s lives were at stake rather than the lives of Palestinian children in Gaza, they would hardly be so calm. A huge empathy gap is glaring.

In the words of plaintiff Judy Talaugon, a Native American activist in Sonoma County, “Palestinian children are all our children, deserving of our advocacy and support. And their liberation is the catalyst for systemic change for the betterment of us all.”

As a plaintiff, I certainly don’t expect the courts to halt the U.S. policies that have been enabling the horrors in Gaza to go on. But our lawsuit makes a clear case for the moral revulsion that so many Americans feel about the culpability of the U.S. government.

To hardboiled political pros, the heartfelt goal of putting a stop to the arming of the Israeli military for genocide is apt to seem quixotic and dreamy. But it’s easy for politicians to underestimate feelings of moral outrage. As James Baldwin wrote, “Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.”

Organizing together under the name Taxpayers Against Genocide, constituents served notice that no amount of rhetoric could make funding of genocide anything other than repugnant. Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson are the first members of Congress to face such a lawsuit. They won’t be the last.

In recent days, people from many parts of the United States have contacted Taxpayers Against Genocide (via classactionagainstgenocide@proton.me) to see the full lawsuit and learn about how they can file one against their own member of Congress.

No one should put any trust in the court system to stop the U.S. government from using tax dollars for war. But suing congressmembers who are complicit in genocide is a good step for exposing -- and organizing against -- the power of the warfare state.

Call him a misguided hero or villain, but the man who killed the United Healthcare CEO struck a nerve, exposing a deep rage shared by many Americans across the political spectrum—anger at an industry that earns obscene profits from the suffering of others. His chilling act shifted the national conversation from immigration to corporate greed. Finally.

For too long, Americans have hesitated to criticize the super-rich. Chalk it up to our tribalist nature that has so many convinced that our financial struggles are caused not by wealth hoarding but by those we view as outside our clan.

History offers many examples. In Nazi Germany, Jews were blamed for a financial depression triggered by the American stock market crash. My parents and grandmother barely escaped; many in my family did not.

Decades later, Ronald Reagan handed the wealthy the largest tax cuts in U.S. history while vilifying the “Welfare Queen” who leached from the feeding trough of “Big Government.”

This racist caricature was meant to distract from policies that began a 40-year transfer of wealth from the 90 percent to the one percent, producing the largest wealth gap in a century. It’s a story about the undeserving poor vs. the deserving rich.

Today, we face a similar narrative. Immigrants are blamed both for stealing jobs and freeloading despite their essential role in propping up our economy given our shrinking workforce. After being fed a steady anti-immigration media diet, it’s not surprising that nearly four out of five Republicans support placing undocumented immigrants in internment camps.

The greater the wealth imbalance, the more the wealthy need to distort the truth. They peddle the long-discredited Trickle-Down theory, claiming that what benefits them benefits us all. But rising tides don’t lift all boats when some people have no boat at all, or when their boats are sinking because the superyachts are capsizing small craft in their massive wake.

We have to stop believing that billionaires have working people’s interests at heart. In fact, they’re mutually exclusive. A gangbuster stock market depends on keeping wages low and unions banished. Outsized campaign contributions ensure that corporate taxes are slashed and regulations meant to keep us healthy, safe, and not impoverished are gutted.

It makes complete sense that the wealth lobby exploits fears of “socialism” to keep people voting against their own interests. It’s no coincidence the U.S. remains the only developed nation without universal healthcare. This is where our anger should be directed.

But redirecting anger is not easy. Six of the richest US corporations control 90 percent of our media and their profits depend on algorithms and news coverage designed to keep us divided, misinformed, and distracted from this billionaire plunder. “You know the media has failed,” says essayist Rebecca Solnit, “when people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis will destroy our planet.”

During the next four years it will be critical to get people to see through this deception. When we start feeling the fallout from a second Trump term, the scapegoating will intensify. Tariffs, more tax cuts for the rich, and the loss of immigrant labor will send prices soaring and balloon the deficit. Many may lose healthcare, Social Security, and worker protections. The wealth lobby will no doubt point fingers elsewhere.

Change is possible though. As a grant writer for 30 years, I’ve seen campaigns shift public opinion on issues like marriage equality, net neutrality, and climate change. Recently, several states won historic economic reforms after decades of trying. In Massachusetts, RiseUpMass won the nation’s sixth millionaire’s tax by debunking claims it would harm retirees.

In Washington state, the Balance Our Tax Code, a coalition of over 80 diverse groups, from home health aide workers to members of the Yakima Nation, was able pass a capital gains tax, calling out Amazon and Microsoft for avoiding their share of taxes. “The biggest lesson we learned,” said campaign communications manager Reiny Cohen “was that when we come together and tell the same story, lawmakers have no choice but to listen.”

In other words, changing minds requires a coordinated echo chamber. The #MeToo movement showed how the right framing, amplified through the media, can shift perspectives and galvanize action. Imagine if we could help more people connect the dots between stagnant wages, failing schools, a burning planet, unaffordable housing, and the greed of the one percent.

But the message must go beyond bashing billionaires. It must present a compelling vision of what is possible if we stand up against the ultra rich. The We Make Minnesota coalition was able to pass a tax increase on the wealthiest one percent by countering anti-Somali rhetoric with a “We’re Better Off Together” message. Instead of using a “Stop the Cuts” framework, the campaign emphasized the subsidized health care, free preschool, and tuition-free college programs the state is now able to offer.

This isn’t about destroying capitalism. A healthy balance between a free market and protective government is essential. But when the richest among us prioritize profit over the well-being of the majority, it’s no longer about politics—it’s about survival.

The murder of the United Healthcare CEO, as horrendous as it was, forced us to confront the injustices we’ve been taught to tolerate. This moment must unite us against the true enemies of the American dream: unchecked greed and exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few. We can either remain manipulated by scapegoating and fear or see the truth and demand change. Only then can we build a society where no one feels driven to such desperate measures again.

The recent Israeli raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital, or KAH, the only partially operating hospital in northern Gaza, is the latest phase of Israel’s egregious disregard for international humanitarian law and the sanctity of medical facilities. This audacious act highlights the alarming impunity with which Israel conducts its war of genocide in Gaza, and further aggravate the suffering in Gaza.

In attacking KAH, Israel resorted to the same discredited lies used to justify its assault on al-Shifa Hospital in November 2023, falsely alleging that Hamas operated a command center beneath the facility. This fabricated story has long been employed as a pretext to target medical facilities across Gaza. During its raid on al-Shifa Hospital in November 2023, Israeli forces found no evidence of a military presence yet proceeded to arbitrarily destroy the hospital without justification.

Eyewitness accounts report that Israeli forces stormed KAH under the pretext of searching for individuals allegedly connected to militant groups. Hospital staff were forcibly removed from their posts, and several patients, including children, were left unattended during the raid. Patients and medical staff faced severe intimidation and arrest, critical care was forcibly disrupted as soldiers combed through wards and operating rooms, ultimately setting the hospital on fire after failing to uncover the alleged military infrastructure.

Western media, in particular, frequently report on Israeli atrocities as though they are inevitable natural disasters, devoid of human accountability or compassion.

Two days after setting KAH ablaze, Israel escalated its attacks on Gaza's medical infrastructure, killing seven civilians in a strike on al-Wafaa Hospital in Gaza City and shelling the nearby Ahli Baptist Hospital. Despite mounting evidence disproving its claims, Israel, unchallenged, repeated the same fabricated justification: that fighters were allegedly operating within the hospitals. This unsubstantiated template has become a routine pretext for targeting healthcare facilities, disregarding international laws designed to protect civilians and medical institutions during conflict.

Israel's disinformation regarding the presence of military targets within Gaza’s medical facilities continues to be reported unquestionably by Western media, despite a well-documented track record of inaccuracies and history of falsehoods. This uncritical reporting not only undermines journalistic integrity but also perpetuates misleading narratives, often downplaying or outright ignoring Israeli crimes. By omitting the broader context of occupation, two-decade blockade, and systemic oppression, these media platforms contribute to a distorted representation of the reality on the ground. Western media, in particular, frequently report on Israeli atrocities as though they are inevitable natural disasters, devoid of human accountability or compassion. This approach not only erases the agency behind these tragedies but also dehumanizes Palestinian lives, reducing them to mere statistics.

The failure to keenly examine and challenge Israel's repeated falsehoods reflects a blatant bias in Western journalism. By granting disproportionate weight to Israeli perspectives while sidelining Palestinian voices, these outlets perpetuate stereotypes and reinforce systemic racism. This one-sided, remote reporting on Gaza undermines the principles of journalistic integrity and fuels global indifference to the plight of the civilians. The lack of accountability for such biased coverage underscores the need for a more equitable and truthful approach by reporting directly from inside the war zone.

The targeting and subsequent destruction of hospitals is not random but part of a broader, systematic pattern of military violence against all aspects of civilian life in Gaza.

The raid on KAH is not an isolated incident but a manifestation of a broader military policy aimed at inflicting maximum pain on the people of Gaza. Already deprived of food, water, power, and adequate medical supplies due to Israel’s blockade, the timing of the raid on the only partially functioning hospital in northern Gaza, is emblematic of a systematic strategy to render the region uninhabitable.

The international community’s tepid response to such blatant violations has emboldened Israel to act with impunity. Despite clear evidence of war crimes, accountability remains elusive. The lack of meaningful action from global powers and institutions undermines the credibility of international law and signals to Israel that it can evade consequences.

Hospitals, including military hospitals, are recognized as neutral spaces under international law, protected from military aggression to ensure the uninterrupted provision of critical care during times of war. The United Nations has both a moral and legal obligation to uphold and enforce Article 18 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which explicitly prohibits attacks on medical facilities. Anything less would be a betrayal of the principles that underpin international humanitarian law and a failure to stop war crimes.

The genocidal war on Gaza is not merely a regional issue; it is a moral litmus test for the global community. Every bomb dropped, every home destroyed, and every life lost in Gaza is a stain on humanity’s conscience. The international community must confront this genocide with the urgency and resolve it demands. Failing to act not only condemns Gaza’s population to further suffering but also erodes the very foundations of international law and human decency.

The international community’s response for the Israeli genocide in Gaza has been woefully inadequate. While some countries issue lukewarm condemnations, others, like the United States, provide unwavering support for Israel to “finish the job.” This double standard exposes the hypocrisy of the U.S. and Western powers that, ostensibly, champion human rights and international law in other contexts while turning a blind eye to the injustice in Palestine.

The Israeli attacks on medical facilities reveal a deliberate intent to coerce the population into forced “voluntary” ethnic cleansing. The targeting and subsequent destruction of hospitals is not random but part of a broader, systematic pattern of military violence against all aspects of civilian life in Gaza. This includes hospitals, schools, shelters, religious centers, agricultural infrastructure, water wells, bakeries, and aid distribution networks. These calculated assaults are designed to dismantle the foundations of daily life, exacerbate the humanitarian crisis, and strip the population of even the most basic means of survival.

The international community’s conspicuous silence and failure to hold Israel accountable have emboldened such actions, creating an environment where impunity reigns. By targeting hospitals—essential lifelines in a besieged region—Israel not only deepens the humanitarian crisis but also sends a chilling message: no space, not even those dedicated to saving lives, is off-limits.

Israeli war crimes in Gaza cannot be ignored. The world must respond—not with platitudes or empty gestures, but with concrete actions to ensure that those responsible for this ongoing genocide are held accountable.

Launched in 1913 to counter antisemitism and discrimination, the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, now resembles a mythological shapeshifter that presents alternately as a civil rights organization and a pro-Israel propagandist.

In its “No Place for Hate” program that caters to both elementary and secondary schools, the ADL’s stated mission is to empower students, teachers, and parents to “stand against bias and bullying... ” with school-wide pledges, projects, and games aimed at celebrating diversity and stamping out hate in the halls, in the cafeteria, in the reading circle, anywhere that hate may manifest.

In Norse mythology, the jealous god Loki is a shapeshifter who appears alternately as a salmon or an old woman. Disguised as the old woman, Loki—the god of darkness—carves an arrow out of mistletoe to trick the blind god Hodr into hurling an arrow at his exalted twin brother, Baldr—the god of light.

The ADL is not a salmon or a singular old woman, but a cunning policy advocate that despite allegations of spying on social justice movements and targeting Arab-led organizations has popularized its “No Place for Hate” lessons in 2,000 schools, reaching 190,000 educators and 1.8 million students—according to the ADL website.

Sure, the program offers banners draped across hallways, pledges and to-do lists, even sage advice now and then, but the pretty package turns ugly once fully opened and scrutinized for its pro-Israel indoctrination.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) of over 500,000 students, No Place for Hate schools either currently or previously included Roosevelt High School, Amelia Earhart Middle School, Benjamin Franklin Elementary School, Mark Twain Elementary School, and others. The LAUSD Office of Student Civil Rights links to the ADL under “Tools for Educators,” which in turn links to an article attacking American Muslims for Palestine for “being at the core of the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist movement in the United States.” In 2022, LAUSD board member Scott Schmerelson, now board president and often a champion of public education, authored a resolution instructing the superintendent to invite the ADL to update and revise curriculum.

While selling schools on activities to bolster respect and community, the ADL—analogous to the shapeshifter in mythology—engineers the death of debate over Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nationalist state in historic Palestine.

In a No Place for Hate lesson on scapegoating, the ADL writes, “Debates about the legitimacy of Israel’s existence or demonization of Israelis create an unsafe climate for Jewish students and interrupt opportunities for critical thinking for all students.” Notice how the ADL wrongly mixes debate over a nation state’s political ideology with demonization of individuals in that state—all in the same sentence to discourage critical analysis and evaluation.

Schools that subscribe to this sort of speech suppression, ruling out debate over an ethnostate colonizing, annihilating, and terrorizing Palestinians, are like the blind brother who hurls a lethal dart—only this time the weapon of propaganda pierces the institution of education to silence inquiring minds wrestling with the devastation live-streamed on their cell phones.

In Japanese mythology, the nine-tailed kitsune-yako fox can take human form to infiltrate high society, where the yako appears as a seductive woman to level a lethal curse—a scar, a burn—on an unsuspecting yet powerful man.

If only the man had been more observant, he might have noticed a few furry fox tails sticking out of the back of the yako’s dress. Yes, the shapeshifter can be unmasked provided those it targets are willing to look behind the facade.

The Lure of a Packaged Curriculum

The ADL lures schools with its anti-bias No Place for Hate program by claiming to help administrators, teachers, and parents build “inclusive and safe communities in which respect and equity are the goals and where all students can thrive.” It’s hard to resist such a pitch, particularly when it comes with banners, buttons, balloons, and bracelets as part of a polished package that outlines a step-by-step approach to creating community through “I Am” poems; peer-to-peer interviews; school surveys; and collages of diverse, smiling students.

The program, however, warrants deeper analysis, so best to begin with the basics.

How a School Qualifies—Registration

Schools that want to become a “No Place for Hate” school first must register with the ADL, which could be a problem for anyone concerned about allegations of ADL surveillance. The Guardian reports an internal 2020 ADL memo reveals the ADL tracked a Black Indianapolis activist who worked on the Deadly Exchange campaign to expose U.S. police training with the Israeli military.

“It scared the shit out of me,” the activist told the press, adding, “It stopped me from moving forward because I don’t want to put people in my life at risk—I work with youth, so it stopped me in my tracks.”

Decades earlier, The Washington Post reported that police in the 1990s investigated the ADL for allegedly “monitoring the activities of thousands of activists”—allegations the ADL denied. According to the newspaper, San Francisco police confiscated from ADL offices “leaked copies of confidential law enforcement reports, fingerprint cards, driver’s license photographs, and individual criminal histories drawn from police records.”

Next: Committee and Pledge

After registering with the ADL, schools then form a steering committee of faculty and students to guide the work of building community and challenging bias at every turn. No mention is made of centering students victimized by bullying and racism to spearhead the committee, which is charged with encouraging students, staff, and guardians to sign a school-wide pledge. For elementary schools, the pledge reads, “I promise my best to be kind to everyone—even if they are not like me.” For secondary, the pledge is more proactive, “I will reach out to support those who are targets of hate.”

The entire school is expected to sign the pledge which features a logo with the words, “No Place for Hate—An ADL Education Program.” While the words are innocuous enough, the platforming of the ADL raises concerns about elevating an organization with a history of surveillance, complaints against public schools, and unconditional support for Israel. This patronage continues in the wake of the International Court of Justice’s preliminary ruling (1/26/24) that South Africa’s genocide case against Israel was plausibly brought, and Amnesty International’s (12/5/24) scathing report, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,

There’s another issue, too. While there’s nothing in the wording of the pledge that’s problematic, the fact that virtually everyone is expected to sign it in order for the school to participate can create a coercive environment.

Only ADL-Approved Activities

After students and staff sign the ADL pledge, they then move on to the next criteria required for ADL designation as an official “No Place for Hate” school. Each school must implement three of the ADL’s approved activities, such as discussions around identity, listening journals, and walks against hate.

For middle and high school, one of the recommended activities to lead to school-wide action involves a lesson plan entitled, “Antisemitic Incidents: Being an Ally, Advocate, and Activist,” in which students are to understand and recognize antisemitism based on a troubling definition that includes the marginalization of Jewish people based on myths about Israel.

Among the “materials needed” for the lesson is a link to the ADL’s “Audit of Antisemtic Incidents 2022,” which says, “References to Israel or Zionism were part of 19% of the 219 campus incidents.” The audit includes a section “Anti-Zionism/Israel-Related” in which the ADL smears the organizations Witness for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, charging antisemitic incidents were perpetrated by individuals associated with these groups. The ADL writes, “ Public statements of opposition to Zionism, which are often antisemitic, are included in the audit when it can be determined that they had a negative impact on one or more Jewish individuals or identifiable, localized groups of Jews.”

In No Place for Hate, students are rightfully encouraged to object to racist jokes, yet no one is encouraged to protest Israel’s killing and wounding of hundreds of thousands of Gazans, tens of thousands of whom are children

Does this mean the ADL considers antisemitic any criticism of Israel that offends a Jewish person? What about the thousands of Jews marching in cities, conducting sit-ins in the Capitol, and occupying subway stations with t-shirts that scream, “Cease-fire” or “Stop Arming Israel” or “Not in Our Name”? These Jews are more than offended by Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine; they are outraged.

Jewish Voice for Peace, a fast-growing anti-Zionist national organization, charges the ADL “is not a credible source on antisemitism and racism” because it conflates antisemitism with criticism of a state, adding, “The ADL has consistently targeted advocates for Palestinian human rights in a concerted and coordinated campaign to repress any speech that criticizes Israel’s current war on Gaza or its policy of oppression of Palestinians.”

The ADL has filed civil rights complaints with the Department of Education against Occidental and Pomona colleges, as well school districts in Philadelphia, Santa Ana, and Berkeley. In the complaint against Berkeley, the ADL objects to student protesters of U.S.-Israel genocide walking out of class to shout, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The chant does not call for the elimination of Jews from Palestine but the right of Palestinians expelled from their homeland to return.

Additionally, the ADL, which tells students to be kind and compassionate—never bullying—writes a threatening letter to nearly 200 college presidents, demanding investigations of the nonviolent Students for Justice in Palestine, the campus organization leading protests against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.

The Kicker

If a school wants to implement its own activity for challenging bias and bullying, it must first appeal to the ADL for approval. Absent ADL approval, the activity cannot count toward achieving official “No Place for Hate” status. One need not be a champion of public education to cringe at the outsourcing of anti-bias education to a private political advocacy organization, particularly one that, according to the website Open Secrets, spent over a million dollars in 2024 to lobby lawmakers to vote for a pro-Israel agenda.

The ADL is, after all, an enthusiastic proponent of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, with examples that conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism to open the door for more legal complaints against schools and colleges, even when the speech in question is constitutionally protected free political speech, not hatred of Jews.

School-to-Prison Pipeline via the ADL

The ADL’s No Place for Hate program includes a section on social justice, as opposed to simple acts of kindness, such as offering to help a teacher distribute papers or hold down a fountain faucet for another student. The ADL aptly defines a social justice action as one that involves a group of people who organize to bring about “institutional change” that might solve the problems of gun violence, homelessness, or school-to-prison pipeline.

How contradictory then that the ADL encourages students and teachers to both report incidents of bias and hate to the ADL by completing an incident report form, as well as—in cases of extreme injustice—calling the police, rather than referring those involved to a student-faculty council on restorative justice process that emphasizes making amends, performing school service, or developing empathy through role-plays. Under the subheading, “Best Practices for School Administrators—Act Quickly and Respond,”the curriculum advises principals to “clarify what the role and duties of school resource officers (SRO’s) and (whether) police should and should not be in the process. Contact law enforcement as necessary.”

Given the ADL’s close working relationship with police, it is worth considering whether involving the ADL increases the likelihood of police involvement and a punitive rather than educational approach, potentially creating something akin to the school-to-prison pipeline that the ADL critiques.

Never mind the police for a minute. Reporting incidents—some of which may relate to criticism of Israel—to the ADL could spell legal trouble down the road, should the school’s administration not follow the ADL’s prescription for addressing the situation.

Moreover, despite the No Place for Hate social justice verbiage, it’s hard to imagine the ADL ever approving a school-wide letter-writing campaign to Congress to block weapons to Israel during its genocide in Gaza or testimony before school boards to divest from companies building segregated roads in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Note, the No Place for Hate glossary defines antisemitism as “The marginalization and/or oppression of people who are Jewish, based on the belief in stereotypes and myths about Jewish people, Judaism, and Israel.”

Antisemitism is real—white supremacy at Charlottesville, murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue, Nazi symbols at January 6—but to redefine antisemitism to include criticism of Israel only confuses people while allowing a nation state to act with impunity.

Pyramid of Hate

The ADL’s No Place for Hate program introduces students to the Pyramid of Hate to encourage discussion and analysis of escalating acts of bias and bigotry. At the pyramid’s base is Biased Attitudes of stereotyping; one level higher is Acts of Bias, such as bullying; even higher on the pyramid is Discrimination; and at the top of the pyramid is Genocide, the act or intention to systematically annihilate a people.

Even though the curriculum has been updated since October 7, 2023 there is no mention of Israel’s bombardment and starvation of over 2 million imprisoned Gazans, nor the multitude of experts around the world who have named Israel’s actions genocide.

In No Place for Hate, students are rightfully encouraged to object to racist jokes, yet no one is encouraged to protest Israel’s killing and wounding of hundreds of thousands of Gazans, tens of thousands of whom are children. A 2024 study by the Community Training Center for Crisis Management in Gaza found “96% of children surveyed feel their death is imminent, while 49% have expressed a desire to die.”

In its open letter to educators, the Drop The ADL From Schools campaign—endorsed by 90 organization—writes the ADL “attacks schools, educators, and students with bad-faith accusations of antisemitism in order to silence and punish constitutionally protected criticism of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.” The organization asks educators to cut ties with the ADL, including use of its No Place for Hate curriculum. Meanwhile, CODEPINK activists are testifying in front of school boards on California’s Central Coast, urging board members to expel the ADL.

Bottom Line

For all its political correctness—the curriculum’s emphasis on pronouns and respect for non-binary identities—at the end of the school day No Place for Hate personifies the mythical character of the shapeshifter as it lures school districts into checking off the anti-bias box while surrendering authority to the controversial Anti-Defamation League. Sure, the program offers banners draped across hallways, pledges and to-do lists, even sage advice now and then, but the pretty package turns ugly once fully opened and scrutinized for its pro-Israel indoctrination.

The Alternative–the Power Within

While it’s tempting for administrators to subscribe to a free, pre-packaged curriculum, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to addressing racism or bullying and bias that seeps into our schools as a result of society’s structural racism: segregation, caste, economic inequality, voter suppression. But this work must be done bottom up, by creating a school community of critical thinkers, principled actors, and life-long learners.

From the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) in Creating a School Community:

Students in schools with a strong sense of community are more likely to be academically motivated (Solomon, Battistich, Watson, Schaps, & Lewis, 2000); to act ethically and altruistically (Schaps, Battistich, & Solomon, 1997); to develop social and emotional competencies (Solomon et al., 2000); and to avoid a number of problem behaviors, including drug use and violence (Resnick et al., 1997).

Rather than ceding control to the Anti-Defamation League for a top-down prescription, schools can exercise their own agency to build community through schoolwide public service projects, murals that reflect students’ ethnic diversity, and cultural events that celebrate acts of resistance to oppression and colonization. Inside the classroom, teachers can address issues of race, bias, and bullying with books and short stories that lend themselves to rich discussion.

In the Final Analysis...

Educators must consider the actual cost of a free program like “No Place for Hate,” whose sponsor conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism, files civil rights complaints against schools, and promotes Israel propaganda in the classroom. The answer to creating a positive school climate is not “out there”—in the hands of an organization with a distinct political agenda—but in here, in the school and in the school-to-community relationship.

I just had a chat with an ATT office manager, a young Black man who is very attentive to his customers. After he learned that I worked with labor unions, he said, “I’ve always wanted to be in a union. My dad was a bus driver, and his earnings and benefits really took care of us. Our healthcare was amazing, $5 co-pay and that was it, no matter what the medical procedure.”

His comments both made me sad and angry. He took me back a few decades, when working people still earned a decent living. That’s the period before runaway inequality and job destruction basically wiped out the American Dream for the working class.

It’s not like we can’t afford to pay people decently. The money is there and then some. In 1980, there were 13 billionaires in the U.S. In 2023 there were 801. The top one-tenth of 1% saw their collective wealth jump from $1.8 trillion in 1990, to $22.1 trillion in 2024. For some context, the U.S. federal budget in 2024 was $6.8 trillion. Or consider that there are 197,500 bus drivers in the U.S. One trillion dollars could pay them $100,000 a year for 57 years.

Have the Democrats learned anything from Trump’s ascendency? The jury is out. Will they actually take on the financial barons? Or will they continue to take in the money that flows so strongly from Wall Street and Silicon Valley?

Meanwhile the average income after inflation of the average worker did not rise at all from 1980 to 2024. And as we all know, during that time healthcare costs have gone through the roof for nearly all of us.

To add to working-class misery there is never ending job insecurity. One in four employed workers fear they will lose their jobs within the next year, according to polling done by Colorado State University.

And there’s a very powerful connection between job loss and enriching the super-rich. In many, if not most, cases, mass layoffs are used to free up cash for companies to pour into stock buybacks—buying back the corporation’s own shares to artificially boost its price. This moves money into the pockets of the largest Wall Street stock-sellers and the companies’ CEOs, who are mostly paid with stock incentives. In a very real way workers are sacrificing their jobs to enrich the richest of the rich. (To see why mass layoffs have little or nothing to do with AI and other new technologies please see my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers.)

In our capitalist economy there has always been a fierce struggle between corporate power and worker power. But when unions represented 25-35% of the private sector, during the post-WWII era, working people had sufficient clout, like that bus driver dad, to provide a good standard of living for their families. Today, with only 6% of the private sector workforce represented by labor unions, the balance has shifted strongly toward corporate power, and wages, benefits, and job security have gone backward.

The power imbalance is so great that our conventional wisdom has changed. Our minds have been warped by corporate power. When unions were strong, runaway inequality was viewed as out and out greed. Today, we are told it’s just the result of entrepreneurial brilliance, that we all benefit from the creation of more and more billionaires, that those left behind simply lack the skills to succeed in our modern economy.

But that bus driver still drives a bus, taking people to work and the doctor or shopping, using much the same skills as generations ago. The difference today is that instead of earning a living wage, as the bus driver once did, workers don’t have sufficient power to gain a decent standard of living. Relegated to gig work or jobs under threat of layoffs, the system is rigged against them.

Historically, working people saw the Democratic Party as the defender of the working-class. Not so today. Instead, they see politicians of both parties as just another group of elites feathering their own nests and protecting the establishment. Very few representatives are seen as willing to take on Wall Street and stop needless mass layoffs, because apart from some occasional rhetoric we don’t see politicians fighting for workers.

The frustration, the resentment, the anger about the rigged system was building long before Donald Trump came on the scene. But there he is, a giant wrecking ball, slamming away at the established order. For those left behind, smashing the establishment feels long overdue.

Have the Democrats learned anything from Trump’s ascendency? The jury is out. Will they actually take on the financial barons? Or will they continue to take in the money that flows so strongly from Wall Street and Silicon Valley?

Looking at the Democrats’ post-election discussions, it could be a long wait until our ATT union-supporter gets a chance to join a union.

Let’s try to have a happy new year, but it is likely to be a tough one for the working class.

Jimmy Carter was the last president to actively open the government for engagement by citizen groups. Right after his November 1976 election, he agreed to address a huge hotel ballroom in D.C. full of local and national citizen advocates. It was a great success never again repeated by succeeding president-elects.

Mr. Carter then chose civic leaders and other solid progressives to head regulatory agencies such as National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Federal Trade Commission, and for other high positions in government. He chose the formidable longtime consumer-labor advocate Esther Peterson to be his consumer protection special assistant in the White House. He also supported an independent consumer protection agency which Congress, after a fierce struggle between corporate lobbies and consumer groups, narrowly defeated in 1978. Starting in 1981, Ronald Reagan undermined many Carter Administration health and safety initiatives.

Compare Jimmy Carter’s life with the rancid, corrupt, cowardly politicians spoiling today’s Washington landscapes.

Mr. Carter was also the last president to authentically recognize Palestinian rights and charge the Israeli government with imposing a system of apartheid (“worse than in South Africa,” he said) over Palestine. However, he failed to get Israel to agree to a comprehensive peace settlement, including the creation of a Palestinian state, and had to settle for a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

Citizen Carter was easily our greatest former president. For over 40 years his indefatigable work ethic was applied to advancing peace efforts, initiating health programs in developing countries, supervising fair elections overseas and, with Rosalynn, joining Habitat for Humanity as a manual laborer (he was an expert woodworker, among his many skills) to build houses around the country for needy families.

The range of interests expressed through his 32 books and conferences revealed a practical, results-oriented, humble Renaissance man. His compassion and honesty infuse the Carter Center to this day.

He nourished the norms of personal and civic decency, dialogue, truth-telling, and working for a just society, expressing his Christian faith in action.

Compare Jimmy Carter’s life with the rancid, corrupt, cowardly politicians spoiling today’s Washington landscapes.

There are legitimate criticisms of Carter’s foreign and domestic policies that others will examine. But overall, his legacy will live on to inspire future generations of Americans to elevate their expectations and strive toward them with civic dedication and commitment.

I was always in awe of how efficiently he used his time every day—and truly amazed by his relentless productivity. This alone would have been a worthy book by Mr. Carter were it not for his genuine humility.

How should we react when a man is shot to death on the street on his way to work? Our humanity tells us that we should be shocked and horrified—and feel that something is deeply wrong with such a brazen act of murder. Ideally, we would do what we could to help sooth the survivors, condemn the violence, and bring the perpetrator to justice.

So why did hundreds of thousands of people have the exact opposite reaction when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was executed in New York City last month? Because Americans are furious with health insurance corporations—and they have every right to be.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, many Americans took to social media not to mourn, but to celebrate. Caustic posts about prior authorization and denied medical claims were common. Sympathetic statements were met with rancor—and in the case of UnitedHealth Group’s own statement, over 70,000 “laugh reactions” before the company made that tally private. Even verbose political figures like Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump declined to comment for days. This shooting touched a raw nerve.

The health insurance industry doesn’t have a communications problem, it has a profiteering problem—and no amount of marketing will convince people who have already been burned.

As a physician who’s treated countless victims of gun violence, and who’s life’s work is to care for all of my patients, I found this response to be deeply unnerving. But I also can’t waive it away with simple explanations like online radicalization or trolling. Something much deeper is at play.

For decades, health insurance corporations like United have been growing more powerful and more profitable. How do they generate these profits? By taking in as much money as possible in premiums and paying out as little as possible in medical claims. Over time, they have tried everything from requiring “prior authorization” of care, to excluding high-quality providers from their networks, to imposing a Byzantine series of charges including ever-growing copays, coinsurance, and deductibles. When all else fails, many insurers simply deny claims.

Behind each of these practices are millions of Americans who are made to suffer. I hear these stories routinely in my practice, and they never become easier to stomach. I have seen patients with aggressive cancer who avoided seeing a doctor for months because they feared bankruptcy; patients with chronic conditions like diabetes who are denied treatments that would improve their quality of life; and gunshot victims whose fight to recover and gain a semblance of normalcy is complicated by their health plans saying no, no, and no again.

I have seen patients suffer and die in order to pad the bottom lines of corporate health insurers—and in recent years I have seen this problem getting much worse.

These are the stories that Americans are sharing in this fraught moment. We have to ask ourselves: Are we listening? And what are we going to do about it?

Insurers like UnitedHealthcare will have their own responses. Their PR teams will no doubt work overtime to marginalize aggrieved voices and to highlight what they consider to be the “value” of their health plans. Expect to see glossy commercials and towering billboards touting the “peace of mind” that Americans should enjoy knowing that their medical needs are “covered.” But the health insurance industry doesn’t have a communications problem, it has a profiteering problem—and no amount of marketing will convince people who have already been burned.

Behind the scenes, corporate insurers will no doubt lobby for the preferential treatment they have come to expect. Our newly elected Congress may acquiesce, or they may decide that the industry needs to be regulated—a strategy that has failed to live up to its promise.

Republicans and Democrats have made separate attempts to combine federal requirements with federal largesse in order to make corporate health insurers play nice. But both the Affordable Care Act and the Medicare Advantage program have only succeeded in ballooning the profits of firms like United—without improving Americans’ health or sparing their wallets.

It’s also clear that violence is not the answer, both on a purely human level and because corporate insurers will simply not be moved. UnitedHealthcare will have a new CEO in short order, and it will be that person’s responsibility to boost profits and make shareholders wealthier. Responding to patients’ cries will not serve these ends, so it is not in the cards.

What would help is a proven reform proposal that is long overdue: a single-payer national health program. Such a system would provide universal coverage and comprehensive benefits—with zero out-of-pocket costs. It could be easily implemented given the gargantuan sums we spend on healthcare in this country, and it would be a boon for those who are suffering, and for those who are fearful.

Americans are crying out in pain—and are recognizing that they are not alone in their pain. We should listen to these cries and we should finally, after decades of delay, do something about it.

Thomas Friedman probably thought he was being clever when he titled his most recent article How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve U.S.-China Relations. It’s a headline meant to catch your attention– appealing to the Swifties, who think Taylor can save the world, the Musketeers, who are certain Elon can save the world, and, of course, their anti-fans who follow their every move with just as much zeal, and perhaps even more. It was the New York Times version of clickbait, because why bother with solid journalism when you can piggyback off the success of billionaires?

It was clickable, but it was hardly readable.

Friedman starts his piece off with a kernel of truth, just enough to shock the regular NYT’s readers who are very rarely fed a positive bit of news about China:

“I just spent a week in Beijing and Shanghai, meeting with Chinese officials, economists and entrepreneurs, and let me get right to the point: While we were sleeping China took a great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing of everything.”

Nobody that knows anything about China can argue with that, though a majority of Americans certainly still view the far-away country through the lens of Soviet communism and rural backwardness. The correlation is that the majority of Americans know nothing about China, have never been, and will never go.

He then goes on to express how Donald Trump’s tariffs and anti-China rhetoric jump-started China’s manufacturing prowess, mentioning how Trump’s name on Chinese social media is “Chuan Jiaguo” meaning “Nation Builder.”

Friedman’s general lack of understanding about China was a let down. But mostly I was disappointed because the title had me anticipating a much different read—something with a bit of creativity, and maybe even an original thought.

No. It was not Donald Trump that ushered in China’s “Sputnik moment,” as quoted by business consultant Jim McGregor. Trump is merely an amusement to China’s general public—a strange American enigma whose hard lines are overshadowed by unexpected candor and comical behavior. For China, the last 40 years has been a continuous Sputnik moment—from the elimination of extreme poverty to unprecedented shift to renewable energy, China has been on the rise, and Donald Trump has never been the yeast making that happen.

And then comes the meat of Friedman’s theory, what he calls the “Elon Musk-Taylor Swift paradigm.” Instead of suddenly raising US tariffs against China, which will lead us into a kind of supply-chain warfare that benefits nobody, Friedman suggest a gradual rise in tariffs, that would allow the US to “buy time to lift up more Elon Musks” which he describes as “more homegrown manufacturers who can make big stuff so we can export more to the world and import less,” as well as give China more time to “let in more Taylor Swifts” which are “more opportunities for its youth to spend money on entertainment and consumer goods made abroad.”

Friedman isn’t wrong about the idiocy of a US-China trade war, but his prognosis is tone-deaf, and very clearly the result of a Western capitalist tormented by the concept of zero-sum competition:

“It’s important to the world that China continues to be able to give its 1.4 billion people a better life — but it cannot be at the expense of everyone else.”

He does, unsurprisingly, make the Soviet comparison:

But if we don’t use this time to respond to China the way we did to the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, with our own comprehensive scientific, innovative and industrial push, we will be toast.”

Toast! Don’t we all collectively like toast?

He talks of the dangers of China’s rising economic dominance. How China “owns the future” because it is the main producer of Electric Vehicles. How China is domestically self-sufficient. How China will soon account for nearly half of all global manufacturing. How all of China’s gains will be everyone else’s loss. How China is going to export robot-run factories to other countries, and thereby steal labor opportunities— as if the West hasn’t exported their own factories and exploited impoverished communities for cheap labor over decades.

“But here’s what’s scary: We no longer make that many things China wants to buy. It can do almost everything at least cheaper and often better.”

That must be incredibly scary to the average American who would rather pay a few bucks for a Temu version of an item rather than shell out tens of dollars for anything made by local businesses. It’s not their fault. The U.S. is incredibly unaffordable and the government does not seem to care.

At the same time, Friedman criticizes the lack of consumption within China:

“If I were drawing a picture of China’s economy today as a person, it would have an awesome manufacturing upper body — like Popeye, still eating spinach — with consuming legs resembling thin little sticks.”

It is the fate of a capitalist to view nonconsumption as a societal malady rather than a sign of good health. The truth is those that consume less have other more nourishing and sustainable ways to fill their souls. At a time when consumerism and overspending are contributing to the destruction of the planet, this is a rather thoughtless point to make. Imagine if society applauded community-building rather than the pointless expenditure of money to temporarily fill a gaping emptiness left by a lack of community and an overemphasis on hyperindividualism? It is very American to look for quick solutions rather than address the root cause.

To his credit, Friedman does state the importance of China providing for its 1.4 billion population, but it is a mere drop of humility that does little to balance the western self-righteousness. He does not comment on the fact that China’s population is greater than the US and Europe combined. Neither does he comment on the West’s own role in exporting labor for cheaper prices— because a capitalist system is run on greed, and wherever a buck can be saved, you bet it will be. Even at the expense of the people.

Friedman suggests that China should “let their people have more of the supply.” Apparently, they want to buy more stuff from us. Stuff that Friedman claims they are being starved of under the rule of the Communist Party of China. Things like art and entertainment. Majors in gender studies and sociology.

“Its youth need more outlets for creative expression — without having to worry that a song lyric they write could land them in prison.”

I have doubts that Friedman ever ventured out to a concert in Shanghai, let alone listened to some of China’s latest indie music. Culture is something that China definitely does not lack, and to make that claim is so wildly misguided that I question whether he has any understanding of China at all. One merely has to take a walk along the riverside in literally any city, and they will be bombarded by musicians, performers, and an impressive amount of outdoor public karaoke. There are as many artists as there are consumers of art, and indeed, a fair share of students pursuing the humanities.

He concludes:

“In sum, America needs to tighten up, but China needs to loosen up. Which is why my hat is off to Secretary of State Antony Blinken for showing China the way forward.”

What did Antony Blinken do that was so impressive? He stopped at a record store in China and bought a Taylor Swift album.

Maybe, just maybe, Friedman is just one giant Swiftie. But more likely, he threw the article together with a preschool level understanding of the WTO, and an opinion that almost sounds like an opinion, but doesn’t really say much of anything when you give it a thought.

I would have been more impressed if Friedman suggested sticking Elon Musk and his federal spending chopping block DOGE on the over-bloated Department of Defense, and booking Taylor Swift a highly-publicized multi-city tour around China.

The only difference between sudden tariffs and gradual tariffs is time—and what will time do? In our 4-year system, time is as fickle as our word. Either way, China will still be pioneering the green energy revolution, selling affordable EVs and renewable energy equipment around the globe while the United States, as the NYT Beijing bureau chief Keith Bradsher says, will “become the new Cuba—the place where you visit to see old gas-guzzling cars that you drive yourself.”

And if the US continues its threatened posture around anything coming from China—including green energy tech—the world will continue to heat up, and we will all face the consequences.

Friedman’s general lack of understanding about China was a let down. But mostly I was disappointed because the title had me anticipating a much different read—something with a bit of creativity, and maybe even an original thought.

I would have been more impressed if Friedman suggested sticking Elon Musk and his federal spending chopping block DOGE on the over-bloated Department of Defense, and booking Taylor Swift a highly-publicized multi-city tour around China. Send Blinken along with her, if he’s such a big fan, and have him venture outside of his strict China perimeter to meet, talk with locals, and experience a version of China that he never would in his fancy hotel rooms and secure government buildings. Maybe then he would form an opinion based on his own experiences rather than the lines he memorized over the course of his typical Ivy League education, and the subsequent falling-in-place that one must do to become the Secretary of State of the United States. A selling out of the soul, if you will.

And maybe the well being of the people—of all people—would be considered for once, rather than the flimsy monetary aspirations of the already-wealthy.

Civil discourse is preferable to the alternatives of coerced silence and violence. Coerced silence means that one side has exercised power to end conversation—to say, in effect, there is no point in further discussion; be quiet and accept that our desires will prevail. Violence means that reason has failed and we are reduced to the condition of resolving disputes by means of fang and claw, rock and club, bullet and bomb.

Despite the dismal historical record of our species, as a professor I have held out hope that humans are capable of doing better. Ordinarily this would imply support for any effort, in universities or elsewhere, to promote civil discourse. But the efforts we see now—the selling of civil discourse as the solution to problems of polarization and rancor on our campuses and in society more generally—are a problem, because their main effect is to block change.

In recent years we’ve seen a proliferation of university-based programs ostensibly intended to promote civil discourse. There is the Civil Discourse Project at Duke; the Dialogue Project at Dartmouth; the Dialogues Initiative at Georgetown; the Civil Discourse Lab at Vanderbilt; ePluribus at Stanford; the Project on Civic Dialogue at American University; and School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC-Chapel Hill. This is to name but a few.

If there is to be a peaceful transition to a more just and equal world, it will not come through a polite exchange of views between the powerful and powerless.

The claim most often made to justify these programs is that students today don’t know how to carry on mutually respectful dialogue or debate, and thus end up yelling at each other or, worse, yelling at administrators and members of university governing boards. An adjacent claim is that faculty—usually meaning leftist or liberal professors—have failed to impart these skills. And so it has been necessary, the argument goes, to create new programs and curricula devoted to teaching the arts of listening and of rationally exchanging views, especially about emotionally fraught topics.

Advocates of these programs have pointed to the campus anti-genocide protests last spring as evidence that special tutelage in civil discourse is needed now more than ever. The problem with those protests, civil discoursers allege, is that they were sometimes loud, got in the way of people moving about campus, made Zionist supporters of Israel feel unsafe, and were thus by definition uncivil. If students had only mastered the skills of polite civic engagement, no disruptions would have occurred, fewer feathers would have been ruffled, and more views would have been productively shared.

These appeals to make dialogue civil again are seductive. Of course we should strive to listen to each other carefully and speak to each other calmly and rationally. Of course we should try to hone our abilities to do these things, because these abilities in turn enable us to find the common good, identify what is just and unjust, and pursue change peacefully. Of course higher education should nurture these abilities. And yet, in the context of entrenched inequality, calls for civil discourse—and the university programs that sacralize it—are often conservative ploys to impede the pursuit of justice.

This is evident if we consider who is in a position to demand civility of whom, and who has the power to define what is civil. Historically, it has been those in power who demand civility from those who seek redress of grievances. “Speak politely, in soothing tones,” the subtext goes, “or we won’t listen to you at all.” The further message is that an inability to remain calm when trying to be heard, when trying to end an abusive state of affairs, will be taken as a sign of the irrationality of the demand. Today, we would call this gaslighting.

In the case of Israel’s assault on Palestinians, the call for civil discourse is cynical and galling, as if mere misunderstanding is what’s wrong.

Consider, for example, a request made by student protesters to discuss a university’s complicity in genocide. This would seem like an eminently civil first step. What is uncivil is the refusal on the part of administrators and governing bodies to engage in good-faith discussion of such matters. Which is exactly what we saw in last spring’s protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Protesters’ requests for dialogue were typically ignored, leading to escalation: louder voices, encampments, rallies, unauthorized postering, spray painting, etc. Administrators defined these actions as disruptive, calling in police to make arrests. That isn’t civility; it’s a reassertion of domination.

But what we are supposed to believe now, according to those who celebrate civil discourse, is that anti-genocide protesters—those who sought dialogue and a peaceful path to change—are at fault and in need of remedial instruction. Administrators who violently quash the expressive activity of protesters are lauded as voices of reason. Protesters who raise their voices in an attempt to be heard are dismissed as troublemakers undeserving of an audience. This smear tactic works because of differences in power between the groups confronting each other—ordinary people of conscience on one side, agents of the U.S. imperialist state on the other.

Another problem with most current calls for civil discourse is that the goal of discerning the truth is shunted aside. Instead, the goals are said to be a sharing of views, an exchange of stories, a chance to see things from the perspective of the other. Discourse itself, it seems, is sometimes the only goal. All this might be fine if the issues at hand concerned aesthetic judgments or quirks of personal experience. But what if we need to determine and agree upon the facts of the matter in a case of genocide? For this, sharing views is not enough.

I suspect that it is well understood, if seldom admitted by advocates of civil discourse, that sharing stories and views is not enough—that is, not enough to alter the behavior of political elites, the capitalist class, or the U.S. government. A feckless expenditure of energy is perhaps the real goal of the tactic: transform protest into well-contained talk so that business as usual can go on, leaving nothing changed at a larger level. Vent among yourselves if you like, share your views, but don’t get disruptive, or else the velvet gloves will come off.

In the case of Israel’s assault on Palestinians, the call for civil discourse is cynical and galling, as if mere misunderstanding is what’s wrong. Do the many anti-Zionist Jews who belong to Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and B’Tselem not understand the Zionist view? By now, does any adult who has read the news in the past year not understand the Zionist narrative about Israel? It offends reason to claim that the problems of land dispossession, apartheid, daily humiliation, and genocide will be solved by politely sharing views in university seminar rooms. These problems can be solved only by changing the behavior of the U.S. government and the behavior of the Israeli state in Palestine.

Vent among yourselves if you like, share your views, but don’t get disruptive, or else the velvet gloves will come off.

What’s required—what Frederick Douglass reminded us is always required when confronting power—are demands that will inevitably be defined as uncivil. That’s why protest movements tend to escalate from petitions to marches, from marches to boycotts, and from boycotts to strikes and other forms of civil disobedience. Only when the costs of carrying on business as usual become greater than the costs of making concessions will concessions be made. In the face of vast inequality, that’s how change occurs. Only among equals who cannot coerce each other is civil discourse alone likely to be enough.

None of this is to say that civil discourse is not to be strived for. I still hold out hope that we can do better than beat each over the head as we try to end oppressive social arrangements—in Palestine, in the U.S., and around the planet. But the reality is that those who benefit from inequality will not be rationally argued into relinquishing power and privilege. History leads us to expect no such thing. In the world today, the powerful will first respond rhetorically—calling insistent demands for change uncivil; demanding in turn endless debate about complexities and nuances and impossibilities—as a prelude to responding violently.

If there is to be a peaceful transition to a more just and equal world, it will not come through a polite exchange of views between the powerful and powerless. Nor will it come from sharing views in forums of the powerless, unless those forums are also aimed at discerning the truth, making plans for change, and putting those plans into action. Our best hope then is for collective action that disrupts the status quo not by violently confronting the powerful, but by withholding co-operation until the once powerful are left with no one to wield their guns, drop their bombs, or tell their lies. That is the kind of civility worth fighting for.

Following Donald Trump’s election, some Democratic political elites have retreated to a familiar fallacy to explain why they lost in November. Instead of engaging in the necessary introspection, these elites have taken to blaming social justice movements and immigrant justice advocates for their defeat. Their prescription for the future, however, is as misguided as their core argument.

They contend that in order to win on immigration, Democrats must continue to tack to the right, turn their backs on advocates, and revert to the elusive pursuit of “comprehensive immigration reform”—a phrase lacking meaning to most voters and a strategy that insulated them for decades from political attacks, but failed to advance any meaningful policy that serves the interests of immigrants or the nation.

With their scolding and posturing, these self-described “pragmatists” are—perhaps unwittingly—mimicking the far-right’s well-worn playbook of scapegoating marginalized people to evade responsibility for doing the difficult work of charting a courageous and visionary path forward—one that serves and wins back the support of working families and other constituents that have abandoned the party.

What would the world look like now if abolitionists listened to so-called “pragmatists” of the time and compromised on their vision by working toward slavery “reforms” or better conditions for those who were enslaved?

In the lead up to the 2024 election, the Republican Party—led by Trump and propped up by conservative media—filled the airwaves with dangerous lies and misinformation. Voters consistently heard that immigrants, trans kids, and “woke-[insert any noun here]” were to blame for all of society’s ills and their economic hardships, and that Trump would lower the price of their groceries (a promise that he has already started to walk back before he even takes office).

For their part, Democratic Party leadership shifted rightward on immigration and failed to articulate how they would address the needs of working families. Rather than counter Trump’s scapegoating and present a bold alternative vision for a system that is hopelessly broken and outdated, candidates echoed right-wing talking points and focused on promoting cruel border policies.

Embracing and advancing an anti-immigrant narrative also meant that voters didn’t hear from either party about the outsized role that immigrants, including newly arrived immigrants, play in solving some of the very problems they are unfairly blamed for—whether it is challenges with housing supply, the overall economy, or their vital role in the workforce.

A recent report by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shows that refugees and asylees contributed an estimated $581 billion in revenue to federal, state, and local governments over a 15-year period, including an estimated $363 billion to the federal government through payroll, income, and other taxes.

Building new housing is also nearly impossible without immigrants, as one-third of homebuilders are foreign-born. And conservative estimates have found that a 10% reduction in asylum seekers in one year would result in an $8.9 billion loss to the U.S. economy and over $1.5 billion in lost tax revenue over five years.

While it is clear that Democrats’ failure to effectively counter Republicans’ attacks on immigrants hurt them in this election, it is also true that immigration ultimately was not the reason they lost. Exit polls show that in the lead-up to election day, the economy was the top priority for voters. And despite the extremely toxic anti-immigrant sentiment that prevailed over the elections, exit polls also show that voters still prefer that undocumented immigrants get the chance to apply for legal status (56% of voters), rather than be deported (only 40% supported this option).

The critics who have stepped up their attacks also fail to understand the role of social movements, which is to engage in the tireless pursuit of justice and bring about fundamental change. Wins that we now take for granted—including women’s right to vote, the abolishment of slavery, and basic worker protections, among many others—were all radical ideas at the time that were fueled by movements.

What would the world look like now if abolitionists listened to so-called “pragmatists” of the time and compromised on their vision by working toward slavery “reforms” or better conditions for those who were enslaved? Or if the civil rights movement had acquiesced to the demands of moderate Southerners urging them to both be patient and to tone down their demands to end segregation?

No social justice movement has ever won because they agreed to abandon their north star.

People in this country are hungry for courageous solutions that can materially improve all of our lives. It is up to all of us to work together to make progress feel not only possible, but inevitable.

And those of us who believe in the power of movements to bring about the cause of justice must never walk away from a vision for the future.

Bummed out by the election results, liberals are turning off the news and tuning out politics. This will only help Trump in his mass deportations and other actions liberals claim to deplore.

The post Democrats Tuning Out first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Democrats Tuning Out appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Civil war has broken out in the Republican Party just weeks after its triumphant election victory. Generally speaking, the issue is immigration, one of the top issues in the campaign. The populist MAGA base wants it limited or eliminated. But Trump’s billionaire allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are pushing hard for H1B visas that allow tech companies and other employers to import foreign workers. So far, Trump seems to be siding with Team DOGE. Will this controversy tear apart his fragile coalition?

“TMI Show” hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan are joined by conservative political analyst and fundraiser Angie Wong to handicap and analyze the rupture within the GOP.

The post TMI Show Ep 47: “MAGA Civil War” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 47: “MAGA Civil War” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In 1917, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin wrote, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Scaling that up, 2024 was a year where a century happened.

The Sykes-Picot Accords that laid out the contours of the modern Middle East were signed in 1916. This year, 2024, they were overturned as the nation state of Syria was destroyed by a wolf pack of at least a dozen terrorist militias supported by Turkey, Israel, Qatar, and the United States. That is the definition of an epochal event.

It also reveals the U.S.’ preferred modus operandi in the world: its people won’t tolerate dead soldiers coming home in body bags, so it hires terrorist mercenaries to do its dirty work. Think of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Contras in Nicaragua, ISIS after Iraq, Boko Haram in North Africa. But back to 2024 as the year that was a century…

In 1917, Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, penned the infamous Balfour Declaration, stating that the British Government viewed favorably the establishment of a homeland in Palestine for Jews. That endowment was actualized in 1948, when Zionist Jews seized 79% of Palestine and declared the establishment of Israel. But their ambition was always for more.

The century-old Zionist vision of Greater Israel will require taking Lebanon (underway), Syria (underway), most of Iraq (underway), Egypt east of the Nile, Jordan, and a large swath of Saudi Arabia. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotich, publicly calls for taking this “little by little.” As of 2024, there is no doubt that the process is well underway.

This follows as Israel revealed itself in 2024 to be a murderous, genocidal state, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent, defenseless Palestinians, most of them women and children, in order to steal their land. That is not even a judgement. It’s a clinical statement of fact.

In July, the British medical journal, Lancet, stated that “186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” By now, more than six months on, that number is much, much higher. It is the most conspicuous, public genocide since the Holocaust during World War II. That makes 2024 an all-the-more remarkable year.

The U.S.’ breathless, unrestrained support for the genocide marked a huge turning point for its reputation in the world. No more can it credibly claim to be a champion of human rights, a defender of Democracy, a supporter of international law. In 2024, the U.S. destroyed untold reputational capital it has spent centuries accumulating. It will never be recovered.

The year 2024 can also credibly be considered the start of World War III. Consider the eerie parallels to World War I, begun in 1914.

World War I occurred because Germany was overtaking Britain as the world’s leading industrial state. If Britain did not do something about it, it would be eclipsed as the global hegemon. Today, China plays Germany, blowing by the U.S.’ Britain.

In the lead-up to that first World War, the sides sorted themselves into blocs, the British, French, and Russians (joined, later, by the U.S.) forming one bloc, the Triple Entente. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy formed the other bloc, the Triple Alliance. Today, NATO and the West form one bloc; the Global South-based BRICS alliance, led by China and Russia, form the opposing bloc.

Finally, both wars were/are about who will control the oil-rich Middle East.

The Germans had befriended the Ottoman Empire which controlled most of what, at the time, was called “West Asia.” They had begun building the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railroad, which would have given them control of most of the world’s then-known oil. That posed a mortal threat to the British, who had just finished converting their global navy from running on coal to running on oil.

So, besides being the year that Sykes-Picot was undone, and in which Israel and the U.S. revealed their genocidal natures, 2024 will be remembered as the year in which World War III began. There was one more, important international matter in all of this.

Russia quit its former ally, Syria, leaving it to the mercies (such as they are) of the terrorist cabal that had beset it, in 2011. But, there was a quid pro quo: the U.S. could have Syria but it would close down its decades-long menacing of Russia through its U.S.-allied proxy, Ukraine. It is a good deal for both sides.

For the U.S., Ukraine has long been lost. It has long been out of money, weapons, and men. Now, the U.S. gets to cut those losses and refocus its sights on what it perceives as its real adversary, China. For Russia, it stops the bleed on its southern border. This, too, goes back over a century.

It was in 1919 that the U.S. invaded Russia to try to overturn the Russian Revolution. That White Counter-Revolution failed, and the U.S. and Russia remained bitter rivals for the next century. This current predation on Russia was carried out by Ukraine, with the U.S. as its puppeteer.

It was Bill Clinton who began moving NATO and its nuclear-tipped missiles right up to Russia’s borders. The U.S. knows very well the panic that results from such menacing, having lived through and survived the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So, not only has Russia defeated the U.S. militarily in Ukraine. It has defeated it economically, diplomatically, politically, and strategically as well. These are astonishing, highly damaging setbacks for the U.S. The U.S. public hasn’t gotten the memo, yet.

Economically? Remember when Joe Biden declared that “the strongest sanctions regime in the history of the world” would “reduce the ruble to rubble”? In fact, Russia’s economy has proven much stronger than the U.S. economy, growing faster, with lower inflation, and lower debt.

It has won diplomatically, as well. Most of the world’s nations refused to join the sanctions on Russia demanded by the U.S. government. And, the U.S. shot itself in the foot by stealing $300 billion of Russian assets held in Western banks. More nations will avoid dollars to prevent such banditry being carried out against them when they don’t bow to U.S. dictates.

Russia won politically, too. A major impetus of the U.S. aggression was to effect regime change in Russia, dealing it a “strategic defeat,” as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called it. Vladimir Putin was to be replaced with a more pliable leader. In fact, it was the U.S.’ leader, Joe Biden, who was replaced in the November elections. Do you suppose he appreciates the irony?

Finally, strategically. Only in Democratic Party circles, fronting as it always does for the weapons makers, does it make strategic sense to drive your two greatest adversaries into each other’s arms. Those would be China and Russia and that is exactly what Ukraine has done. That’s part of why the Democrats were handed their heads in the 2024 presidential election. Speaking of which…

It was 95 years ago that the Great Depression began. Capitalism on its own could not generate enough activity to employ all of the economy’s resources. So, Franklin Roosevelt modified capitalism to work with stabilizers from the state: federal work programs, unemployment insurance; tighter banking regulation; and more.

That fix served pretty well until 1980, when capitalists decided (as capitalists are wont to do) that they wanted more of the economy’s output for themselves. So, we began the regime of Neoliberalism with Ronald Reagan. That meant fewer regulations, lower taxes on the wealthy, jobs shipped abroad, the government helping to structure the economy with monopolies.

As much as anything else, the election of 2024 was a referendum on four decades of neoliberalism. And neoliberalism lost. A plurality of people would rather burn it all down than endure the assured, steady degradation of their life prospects that they’ve come to suffer for the last generation.

Unfortunately, the Democrats were the party in power when the referendum was held, in November, so they got stuck holding the turd. And it’s not like they didn’t deserve it.

Bill Clinton, the original Democratic Neoliberal, passed NAFTA, helping ship millions of good paying, Midwest metal-bending jobs to Mexico. He deregulated the banks, setting the economy up for the Great Recession. He helped the media industry become the fetid oligopoly that it is.

Barrack Obama enlisted Clinton’s economic team, en masse. When that Great Recession hit, Obama bailed out the banks that had caused it while letting 10 million families lose their homes to foreclosure. People remember.

The Democratic presidential campaign itself was a catastrophe, a debacle, a master class in narrative inanity, focal fluidity, and bumbling amateurism.

The Democrats couldn’t defeat the most notorious, noxious dirtbag ever to beslime American culture. A 34-time convicted felon. A man the Washington Post said was a rapist. Someone who carried out the most grievous assault on the State and the Constitution since the Civil War. A catastrophically failed former president whose signature ineptness caused more than a million excess deaths in the COVID pandemic. The Democrats couldn’t lay a glove on him.

Consider just one set of facts.

Donald Trump was the first president since the Great Depression to leave office with fewer people employed in the nation than when he entered. Joe Biden oversaw the creation of more than 16 million jobs, the greatest job creation record in history. And the Democrats couldn’t put together a coherent sentence about the economy. Can you remember one?

There’s a lot of hemming and hawing and navel-gazing and retrospective rationalizing about the election, especially in elite Democratic party circles. The most salient fact is this: more than 7 million fewer people voted for the Democratic candidate in 2024 than voted for the one in 2020. And that’s with the huge headwind of Dobbs at their back. Not even their own people believed in them.

Simply put, 2024 was the year we realized that the Democratic party is a spent force, not a competent, reliable party to represent the interests of the working and middle classes. It is the party that gave us Donald Trump and all of the leprous, anti-democratic, plutocratic agendas that he represents. Without being hysterical, it may be the end of democracy in America. Thank you, Democrats.

The party has no message, no messenger, no mechanism, not even an agenda that says anything to the working people of this county who are abandoning it in droves, and with good cause. It has allowed Republicans to brand it the party of inflation, elitism, transgenderism, and genocide. Can you see why it didn’t sell, even with the nose-bleeding $2 billion they spent trying to peddle it?

One last word on an important innovation that emerged in 2024. It has to do with the intersection of technology and culture and how that plays out in politics.

The first television broadcast was 97 years ago, in 1927. It allowed the top-down dissemination of received narratives about what was going on in the world. It allowed elites to control what the nation knew, and thought.

In some important measure, 2024 saw the overthrow of that thought control regime. Yes, television is still broadcast, but it is less and less influential in setting the national dialogue on almost all issues.

Instead, we see the rise, even the pre-eminence, of social media, much of which emerges from the bottom up, or at least without the editing filters that allowed elites to manage national perceptions.

More than anything else, it was Trump’s mastery of social media, and his use of it to propagate his lies, fear, conspiracies, and rage that accounted for his win in the 2024 election. It’s important to understand why that worked.

Social media monetizes the very worst elements of our individual and social psyches. It titillates our amygdala, our lizard brain. More money is made through more clicks, and more clicks are generated by delivery of more outrageous content.

But, the process satiates, so it demands ever more outrageous content, and then, still more, yet, until all that is being vended out is garbage, lies, conspiracy, indignation, and innuendo. And the more that is vended out, the more money is made.

It is impossible to contrive a more culturally auto-destructive techno-social dynamic than one that makes more money by vending more garbage into the culture. But that is what we have become.

Two centuries ago, the Enlightenment gave us the idea that Truth could be discerned through a process of Reason. No more. Indeed, there is no such thing as Truth, and no need for such a bothersome path through Reason. There is only a preponderance of clicks and the outrage or docility that such preponderance endows, like turning out pissed off voters.

We have constructed a Golden Calf of the demons of our baser nature and it is that Calf which we now idolize, because it makes the most money. The proof is that tens of millions of people worship at the feet of the most degenerate pathological liar the country has ever known, and fancy him some kind of Messiah.

They are going to follow his carnival barker hawkings until they are shorn of all of their dignity, all of their money, and all of their freedoms. And we, of ours. They’ll still imagine it a patriotic sacrifice and congratulate themselves for their courage in sticking it to the man.

Indeed, 2024 was a year for the ages.

           You can’t understand the presidency of Jimmy Earl Carter, Jr. unless you contextualize it within the framework of the hysterical aftermath of the 1972 election. While the Republican Party brand suffered tremendous damage due to Watergate, President Richard Nixon’s decision to prolong the Vietnam War and his resignation, the GOP proved improbably resilient. Despite a deep recession and an energy crisis, to say nothing of fallout from the Nixon pardon, Gerald Ford came within two points of defeating Carter a mere two years after Nixon resigned in disgrace; the decisive counterrevolutionary fervor of the Reagan Revolution followed four years after that.

With the spotlight on these earth-shattering events, it was easy to miss the civil war within the Democratic Party, between its liberal and centrist wings, that was prompted by the landslide defeat of Senator George McGovern in 1972. (“Centrist” is used here for simplicity—that’s what they call themselves. By objective global standards, the centrist faction of the Democratic Party is corporatist and militarist, and therefore was and remains right-wing.)

In an exercise that would feel familiar to anyone observing the current struggle between progressive and corporate Democrats in the wake of the Kamala Harris debacle, party leaders and activists spent 1973 through 1976 blaming one another in ferocious fights over what went wrong and which wing of the party ought to be trusted to control the organization going forward.

            Ultimately, centrists won the power struggle and sidelined the liberals. Though he entered the race as an outsider, Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia cemented the centrists’ victory and locked in the ideological template honed by another centrist Southern governor, Bill Clinton, and that still dominates today’s Democratic Party leadership. Old-fashioned liberals tried to stage a comeback under Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988; instead, their losses strengthened the centrists’ argument that Democrats needed to chase the Republicans as they migrated further right.

            It is easy to see why many Americans put Carter in the liberal box. More than any other modern president, he talked about human rights in the context of U.S. foreign policy. He was the only president who didn’t wage any wars. His manner was affable and soft-spoken.

            Whether or not they are ever successfully enacted, however, a president is defined by policies. Any objective analysis of his record must lead to a clear conclusion: Carter was a right-wing Democrat. And it mattered a lot. While his one term is typically dismissed by historians as lackluster or ineffectual, it had a dramatic impact on our politics.

Carter was our first post-liberal Democratic president. Half a century later, as Joe Biden packs his bags, the Carter model still holds. (Recognizing an ideological fellow, Biden was the first Democratic senator to endorse Carter in 1976.) There is no sign that a traditional mid-20th-century-style liberal like Hubert Humphrey, LBJ or Adlai Stevenson, who championed the poor and working class and were generally skeptical of foreign military adventurism, will have a serious shot at capturing a Democratic presidential nomination any time soon.

Inheriting a wobbly economy from Gerald Ford, Carter decided to prioritize the fight against inflation over what a liberal would have cared about more: keeping as many Americans employed as possible. He appointed Nixon’s former undersecretary of the Treasury Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. Volker hiked interest rates to 20%, triggering huge back-to-back recessions that lingered into the 1980s. A liberal president would have turned to Congress to try to mitigate the misery. But Carter became the first Democratic president not to propose a federal anti-poverty program.

Carter’s conservatism expressed itself most fully through his cynical Cold War foreign policy. Although most Democratic voters would have been enraged had they known at the time, discredited figures on the Republican right like David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger were on speed dial in the oval office and frequently had the president’s ear whenever there was a crisis overseas. The most pernicious influence inside the administration was national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who fell to the right of Republicans when it came to the Soviet Union.

Carter’s team of foreign policy hawks convinced him to set aside his better judgment and reluctantly admit the dictatorial Shah of Iran to the United States to receive medical treatment, an unforced disaster that triggered the Iran hostage crisis and contributed to his defeat in 1980.  

Never one to stay quiet despite repeatedly being proven wrong, Brzezinski notoriously pushed for Carter to fund and arm the radical Muslim Afghan mujahedin, many of whom eventually morphed into Al Qaeda and the Taliban. There is a strong chance that 9/11 would never have happened if not for Carter’s backing of jihadi fanatics. Does anyone doubt that the world would be better off today with an Afghanistan where women wore miniskirts, as they did under the Soviet-backed socialist secular government in the 1970s, than burqas?

Brzezinski argued that Afghanistan would become the USSR’s Vietnam, a quagmire that would destroy the country morally and economically. No one knows whether the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan had the desired effect. The world clearly became more dangerous after 1991, when the United States began to enjoy the lone superpower status that it exploited to run roughshod over Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and countless other victims of American imperialism. Without its socialist Cold War adversary offering an alternative if flawed economic model, America’s capitalists declared themselves victors at the End of History, with no need to share profits with workers or exhibit deference to other nations.

Carter needlessly politicized the Olympics by boycotting the 1980 Summer games in Moscow. The following year, one of my classmates in college was to have been on Team USA in fencing; I never forgave Carter for dashing her and her teammates’ hopes.

Carter is lionized as a pacifist. It wasn’t so when he was president. Most people think that we have Reagan to thank for the out-of-control military spending that began with his massive U.S. defense buildup in the 1980s. But the current cult of militarism really started under Carter, a fact that Reagan himself later acknowledged.

Worst of all, Carter was a liar and a hypocrite. Even while he claimed to prioritize human rights, his White House propped up vicious dictatorships. “Inaugurated 13 months after Indonesia’s December 1975 invasion of East Timor, Carter stepped up U.S. military aid to the Jakarta regime as it continued to murder Timorese civilians. By the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s (FAIR) Jeff Cohen recalled. “Elsewhere, despotic allies—from Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to the Shah of Iran—received support from President Carter. In El Salvador, the Carter administration provided key military aid to a brutal regime. In Nicaragua, contrary to myth, Carter backed dictator Anastasio Somoza almost until the end of his reign. In Guatemala—again contrary to enduring myth—major U.S. military shipments to bloody tyrants never ended.”

Carter pardoned the Vietnam-era draft dodgers only to turn around and restore draft registration the very next year. If you are a male assigned at birth, you face five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and losing your college financial aid unless you register for the next military draft in America’s next unpopular war with the Selective Service System. That was Carter. And it wasn’t liberal.

Nor was he.

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

The post Jimmy Carter, Right-Wing Democrat first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Jimmy Carter, Right-Wing Democrat appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Dear changemakers, thank you for all that you’ve done this year.

Reflecting on 2024, we endured yet another year filled with climate catastrophes, political unrest, and international inequality. But even through these challenging times we can find hope in our collective actions and victories, no matter how big or small. Together, we can pave the way forward towards a better future.

Dear Earth, thank you for continuing to show up every day for us.

Across the globe, people took bold steps to care for the planet. 2024 showed us the strength of coming together with purpose and passion. These efforts may not solve every challenge overnight, but they are the building blocks of creating lasting change.

Dear Earth citizens, we invite you to take moments to appreciate living on this planet.

The journey that we are on is a long one, so friends, take care of yourself as we heal the world together. What lies ahead may not be easy, but as we continue to show up, make our voices heard, and hold polluters accountable we must not forget to take care of ourselves, our peers and our communities.

Dear all, we hope that you’ll join us on this journey towards a better future, taking care of our planet, ourselves, and each other.

With courage as our compass and optimism as our fuel, here are some of the top victories of 2024 for people and the planet to inspire us to keep taking action.

United Kingdom: Shell Backs Down in Lawsuit Against Greenpeace

In February 2023, Shell launched a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Greenpeace U.K. and Greenpeace International over a peaceful protest. But with our supporters behind us, we showed Shell their bullying tactics won’t intimidate us—and now they’ve backed down and agreed to settle out of court. People power works—this campaign was fought with the support of thousands of ordinary people against one of the richest companies in the world.

This legal battle might be over, but Big Oil’s dirty tricks aren’t going away. With Greenpeace facing further lawsuits around the world, we won’t stop campaigning until the fossil fuel industry stops drilling and starts paying for the damage it is causing to people and the planet.

Norway: Arctic Deep-sea Mining Plans Stopped

Huge win for the ocean as Arctic deep-sea mining plans are stopped in Norway! After more than a year of decisive campaign work and massive pressure from activists, scientists, and the international community, the Norwegian government has agreed to stop the first licensing round for deep-sea mining in Arctic waters for at least the rest of their term in office, until the next election.

This is a major and important environmental victory which shows that mobilization and people power works.

Indonesia: Measures to Regulate Labor Standards for Fishing Vessels Adopted

After years of discussions, rejections, objections, and negotiations involving governments, civil society organizations including Greenpeace Indonesia, and unions representing migrant fishers, the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) finally adopted the Conservation and Management Measures (CMM) for Crew Labor Standards on December 3, 2024.

The WCPFC oversees fish population management, promotes sustainable fishing practices, and implements conservation measures. This decision underscores their commitment to ensure the well-being of crew in an industry that suffers from serious labour abuses.

Oceans: Deep-Sea Miners’ Efforts to Limit the Right to Protest at Sea Rejected

Over the last year, The Metals Company and its enablers have repeatedly tried to silence the global wave of resistance. After failing to get an injunction that stopped the action at sea, and unsuccessfully lobbying governments to limit protests around deep-sea mining vessels at the International Seabed Authority in March, the company pursued an appeal at the Amsterdam Court of Appeal to try and secure immunity against future Greenpeace protests at sea. But thanks to the incredible work of Greenpeace International’s legal unit, on November 12, 2024, the court ruled once more in our favor, reaffirming our right to peaceful protest at sea.

Brazil: Sawré Muybu Territory Officially Demarcated

On September 25, 2024, the Sawré Muybu territory in the Tapajós River Basin in the heart of the Amazon rainforest was officially demarcated. The Munduruku People have been fighting for the rights to a land that has always belonged to them but is threatened by mining, illegal logging, and infrastructure projects. This is a historic and profoundly symbolic victory not only for the Munduruku, but for all Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon and Brazil.

South Korea: Top Court Ruled the Country’s Carbon Neutrality Law as Unconstitutional

On 29 August 2024, South Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled the country’s carbon neutrality law as unconstitutional for violating citizen’s rights—making it the first ruling of its kind in Asia! The petition was filed in 2020 by over 200 plaintiffs, including young activists and even infants, and is Asia’s first climate court case targeting a country’s carbon neutrality commitments. This is a major climate win for future generations, and could potentially set a precedent in the region for other climate cases.

Australia: Woolworths and McDonald’s Commit to Going Deforestation-Free

Woolworths and McDonald’s in Australia announced their commitments to source deforestation-free beef. Woolworths will do so by the end of 2025 but McDonald’s will implement theirs by 2030 (Greenpeace Australia Pacific will continue to engage with McDonald’s to ensure they commit to taking deforestation off the menu—by 2025!). These two giant corporations are some of Australia’s biggest retailers and major buyers of Australian beef.

This is a major example of people power as Greenpeace Australia Pacific supporters had sent the big corporations thousands of emails, demanding they go deforestation-free.

Global: Breakthrough for Global Tax Justice

In a big win for global tax justice, a favourable blueprint for a UN Tax Convention that will pave the way for a fair and efficient global tax system was laid out in August. An inclusive tax cooperation system will shift power from a few rich OECD countries to the UN where every country has a vote and help governments around the world recover the billions lost to tax dodging by multinational corporations and the ultra-rich. There is still much to do to keep up the pressure as negotiations will continue until 2027.

South Africa: Shell Loses Appeal in Case Halting Plans for Oil and Gas Exploration

Big win against Shell in South Africa! After protests by the community and fishers, Shell loses its appeal against the landmark decision in 2022 which ruled against their plans to conduct oil and gas exploration off the Wild Coast of South Africa. The court says Shell failed to properly inform and consult affected communities, taking into account community rights and environmental harm. Unfortunately, the fight is not yet over as the court has left the door open for Shell’s application to renew its exploration right. Together with allies and the community, Greenpeace Africa is resolute in continuing to fight to stop Big Oil from exploiting the planet for its own profit.

Papua: Major Land Rights Win for Indigenous Peoples

On June 6, 4,000 Indigenous Papuans finally received legal recognition of customary rights over 97,411 hectares of tropical rainforests in South Sorong Regency. The newly recognised Indigenous lands of the Knasaimos Peoples spans an area almost the size of Hong Kong.

As with many Indigenous communities across Tanah Papua (the western half of New Guinea, also known internationally as West Papua), the Knasaimos Peoples have been fighting for decades to protect their customary lands from exploitation by external interests such as logging and plantation companies. This ruling finally provides legal recognition of their rights to the land, forests, water, and other natural resources that are their ancestral heritage.

Oceans: World’s Highest Oceans Court Ruling to Protect Our Oceans

In a historic Advisory Opinion, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), the world’s highest oceans court, found that greenhouse gas emissions are a form of marine pollution and countries are obligated to reduce emissions for the sake of our oceans. The ruling is a huge victory in the protection and preservation of the marine environment.

Europe: European Nature Restoration Law Passed

The European Nature Restoration Law was passed and has come into effect! This law is the most important piece of environmental legislation in Europe in decades, aiming to restore and protect European biodiversity hotspots. It imposes unprecedented legally binding obligations onto E.U. Member States to restore protected nature reserves, peatlands, and dwindling bird and pollinator populations, and protect urban nature amongst others. This is a huge win for the nature movement in Europe!

Switzerland: Historic Court Win Confirms That Climate Protection Is a Human Right

The Association of Senior Women for Climate Protection Switzerland, also known as the KlimaSeniorinnen, took action against their country, Switzerland, for violating the seniors’ human rights by failing to set sufficient climate targets. On April 9, they received the landmark decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), achieving a historic victory for all generations. The ruling is an iconic moment for climate justice globally, confirming that climate protection is a human right.

As we enter this new year, it’s important to reflect upon the reality that we are living in a pivotal and volatile moment in American history. Within that context our job is not only to understand what’s happening all around us, but to determine the best way forward to create a nation and world that benefits all people, not just the wealthy and powerful few.

And right now, the defining issue of our time is that we are moving rapidly toward an oligarchic and authoritarian society in which billionaires not only dominate our economic life, but the information we consume and our politics as well.

Today, we have more income and wealth inequality than we’ve ever had.

Today, we have more concentration of ownership than we’ve ever had.

Today, we have more corporate control of the media than we’ve ever had.

Today, we have more billionaire money buying elections than ever before.

Today, we have a president-elect who is a pathological liar, who has little regard for the rule of law, who is suing media outlets that criticize him and threatening to jail his political opponents.

A manifestation of the current moment is the rise of Elon Musk, and all that he stands for.

Within the last two years alone Mr. Musk, the richest man in the world, has used his wealth to purchase the largest media platform on the internet, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect a president and give Republicans control of the House and Senate, was nominated to fill an unelected, non-confirmable position in charge of making huge budget cuts, succeeded in getting Congress to abandon a bill he didn't like, and then threatened to unseat elected officials if they did not follow his orders to shut down the government during the holidays. He is also forging alliances with autocrats throughout the world, and supporting a far-right party in the coming German elections.

But it’s not just Musk. Billionaire owners of two major newspapers overrode their editorial boards' decisions to endorse Kamala Harris, while many others are kissing Trump’s ring by making large donations to his inauguration committee slush fund.

In the midst of all this, a simple question must be asked. What do Musk, Bezos and the other billionaires want? What is motivating them? What kind of nation and world are they trying to create? While it would take a book to answer that question, let me jot down a few obvious observations.

They do not believe in democracy—the right of ordinary people to control their own futures. They firmly believe that the rich and powerful should determine the future. Left alone, they will dominate both major political parties and, through their media ownership, control the flow of information.

They do not accept what most major religions, in one form or another, have historically taught us to be ethical behavior: to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. They believe that greed, and the accumulation of wealth and power is a virtue, and that the strong should dominate the weak.

Their vision is one where the government serves the rich at the expense of working families and the poor. It is a vision where breaking unions and exploiting workers is good, making huge profits off human illness is good, monopolization of the economy and the media is good, racism, sexism and xenophobia is good, producing carbon emissions and destroying our planet is good, providing tax cuts for the richest Americans is good, making money by putting poor people into prisons is good, and on and on it goes...

That is what the oligarchs want.

We, as progressives, have a vision that is radically different.

Can we create an economic system based on the principles of justice, not greed? Yes, we can.

Can we transform a rigged and corrupt political system and create a vibrant democracy based on one person, one vote? Yes, we can.

Can we make health care a human right as we establish a system designed to keep us healthy and extend our life expectancy, not one based on the profit needs of insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry? Yes, we can.

Can we, in the wealthiest country on earth, provide free quality public education and job training for all from child care to graduate school? Yes, we can.

Can we combat climate change and protect the very habitability of our planet for future generations, and create millions of jobs in the process? Yes, we can.

Can we make certain that artificial intelligence and other exploding technologies are used to improve the quality of life for working people, and not just make the billionaire class even richer. Yes, we can.

And even though we are not going to succeed in achieving that vision in the immediate future with Trump as president and Republicans controlling Congress, it is important that vision be maintained and we continue to fight for it.

As part of that effort, we’ve got a lot of strategizing and work in front of us. For example, how do we effectively communicate our ideas to the vast majority of Americans who are with us, even while the billionaire class of this country controls so much of the media.

How do we leverage our collective power to elect progressives to local, state and federal positions while a small number of billionaires and their super-PACs are buying elections.

How do we mobilize the working class around the day to day issues which impact their lives: building the trade union movement, health care, housing, education, family based agriculture and so much more.

How do we fight back, on a day to day basis, against the reactionary policies of the Trump administration?

Will this effort be easy? No, of course it will not.

Can it be done? We have no choice.

If there was ever a moment when progressives needed to communicate our vision to the people of our country, this is that time. Despair is not an option. We are fighting not only for ourselves. We are fighting for our kids and future generations, and for the well-being of the planet.

Thank you for standing with me in that fight. Let’s go forward together.

Last afternoon, I went for a walk and noticed that a homeowner had recently placed a sign on their front lawn. It simply read, “I stand with Israel.” If this had been 400 or so days ago, I would have thought nothing of it. Back then, supporters of Israel were still reeling from the shock of the October 7 attack and felt a need to express themselves.

But it’s not December 2023. It’s 14 months into this nightmare. The decision to now place this sign on their front lawn raises a troubling question—exactly what, in the current context, does “stand with Israel” mean?

In just the past week, U.S. media have featured a number of well-researched reports on Israel’s efforts to secure their hold on Gaza through: the mass demolitions of homes, hospitals, schools, and infrastructure; the forced transfer of the remaining Palestinians in the north of Gaza; the fact that Israeli snipers have made a “sport” of killing Palestinians who are fleeing and keeping score of their “hits”; and the construction of military occupation bases in the far north of Gaza and the Nezarim corridor, including a “resort-like” facility to provide war-weary troops with rest and relaxation. There have also been stories on the continuing lack of medical services, food, water, sanitation, and shelter for the 2 million Palestinians crammed into Gaza’s south.

What reaction would result from a neighbor placing a “I stand with Palestine” sign on their lawn?

Added to this are developments in Israel. After a long hiatus, protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have continued. Some are objecting to his callous disregard for and manipulation of the fate of the remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Others are protesting his ongoing effort to escape prosecution for the multiple charges of corruption for which he is currently on trial.

And then there are courageous Israeli journalists and commentators who are challenging their fellow citizens to see what they have ignored for more than a year: namely, that genocide is being committed in their name just across the border.

One of these is by the brilliant commentator B. Michael. Writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, he walks his readers through the legal definition of the term “genocide.” Michael notes that the convention against this crime lists five actions, any one of which is sufficient to consider a state or people perpetrators of genocide. Michael goes on to demonstrate that Israel can be shown guilty of four of the five. He concludes, “Feigning innocence isn't admissible as a defense.” Nor will claiming that it was done “in good faith, or purely for reasons of self-defense.”

And so, at this point, what exactly does “stand with Israel” mean?

That said, those who recently posted this sign in front of their home have the right to express their views, however insensitive or repugnant others might feel them to be. Defacing their sign or inciting violence against them in response is clearly wrong. If we truly believe in democracy and the need for civil discourse, then insults, threats, or vandalism must be rejected.

But this raises another question: What reaction would result from a neighbor placing a “I stand with Palestine” sign on their lawn?

There can be no doubt that public opinion on Israel-Palestine has dramatically shifted in recent years. There is, today, greater sympathy for Palestinians than ever before and even among those who continue to support Israel, the policies of that state are increasingly being rejected. Recognizing this sea-change in opinion, pro-Israel groups and their allies in government and parts of the media have gone on the offensive in an effort to silence pro-Palestinian sentiment and even ban legitimate expressions of support for Palestinians and opposition to Israeli policies that are in violation of international and U.S. laws. As things stand, these efforts to stifle pro-Palestinian speech still appear to have the upper hand.

A review of the reactions to recent events on campuses and the debates in Congress and state legislatures makes clear that a sign as simple as “I stand with Palestine” could be denounced as inflammatory, insensitive, and even antisemitic.

It must be acknowledged that speech on both sides has in some instances veered in unacceptable directions. Pro-Israel demonstrators have taunted Palestinians with “We will rape you,” or pro-Palestinians have chanted “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” These must be condemned.

But what is worrisome are the all-too-frequent reports that relatively benign expressions of support for Palestinian rights are censored because they have made supporters of Israel “uncomfortable.” This kind of dangerous overreach is precisely what is happening.

The bottom line is that if someone wants to declare that they “stand with Israel” they should be free to do so, and accept that, given what is unfolding in Palestine, it will cause some to ask: “What exactly do you mean by that?” And their neighbors should be able to declare that they “stand with Palestine,” to answer questions they may be asked, and to do so without fear of retribution.

Sadly, we’re not there yet.