In the last few days, Taiwan, India and Japan made clear they will be buying exported American LNG in the months and years ahead. Why? Entirely in an effort to hold off tariffs from the Trump administration. As the Japanese prime minister put it,

“We will cooperate to strengthen energy security between the two countries including increasing exports of United States liquefied natural gas to Japan in a mutually beneficial manner.”

Here’s how Bloomberg described the Indian decision-making:

Indian importers are under pressure from the government to reach deals that could smooth relations with Trump, the people said, but they will be looking for the best possible terms before signing any agreements.

Meanwhile, as Sing Yee Ong reports from Taipei

Taiwan is preparing to buy more liquefied natural gas from the US to reduce its trade surplus and potentially avoid higher tariffs.

Oh, and more to come

South Korea, Vietnam and the European Union are among energy buyers trying to appease President Donald Trump — and reduce the threat of tariffs — by looking to increase purchases from the biggest exporter of the super-chilled fuel and largest producer of crude.

I want to highlight these shakedowns, which have mostly been lost amidst the thousand other terrible things the Trump administration has loosed upon the world, because I know that before long Big Oil will be holding them up as evidence that the world needs and wants more fossil fuel. In fact, the world wants to move in entirely the opposite direction: 85% of new electric generation in 2023 came from renewables, and the numbers for 2024 will almost certainly be higher. That, of course, terrifies the fossil fuel industry—which is why they spent record amounts on November’s election. As fracking baron Harold Hamm explained, “We’ve got to do this because it’s the most important election in our lifetime.”

And now they’re getting the payoff: Trump threatens tariffs, and offers to make them go away if they buy some LNG. It’s akin to a protection racket. Pay up, or your windows get broken. It’s not criminal—it’s all entirely legal. It’s just wrong.

This particular protection racket makes no sense for America at large. Forget, for a moment, that LNG is a huge driver of the climate change driving fire and flood (by the time you’ve shipped it overseas it’s far worse even than coal); exporting it in huge quantities also obviously drives up the price for Americans still reliant on fracked gas for heating and cooking. The Energy Information Administration just predicted that natural gas prices will rise 21 percent in the year ahead. Politico did the math

Paul Cicio, president of the Industrial Energy Consumers of America trade association, said U.S. LNG exports are pushing natural gas and electricity prices higher.
Every “dollar increase in natural gas costs consumers $34 billion plus about $20 billion in higher electricity cost,” Cicio said in a statement Tuesday. It's “only going to get worse from here as LNG exports increase.”t of the Industrial Energy Consumers of America trade association, said U.S. LNG exports are pushing natural gas and electricity prices higher.

As the Sierra Club points out, Trump’s strategy “makes no sense.” And they’re right—as long as we’re talking about the future of the planet or the cost to American consumers. But that’s not who Trump is thinking about. He’s got one constituency and one only: the Big Oil execs who bankrolled his campaign. For them, this is sweet payback, a 100-1 return on their investment.

And it’s a stark reminder that we have to fight back on the only turf we have: the fact that the sun and wind can deliver the same product as LNG, only more cheaply and much more cleanly. We can’t threaten tariffs to get our way; we can only make the case in such persuasive terms that we start to change the zeitgeist. That’s the point of SunDay project I described last week and that you are going to hear a lot more about. Many thanks to those who went to sunday.earth to help us draw some suns as we prepare for the official launch of this big effort. So many of you took part already. Here’s a beautiful example from the effervescent Ayana Johnson (whose book What If We Get It Right is a document for this tough moment):

And here’s one from Billy Parish, whose Solar Mosaic has financed something like ten percent of the rooftop solar in America

It may seem like a mug’s game to take on Trump’s thuggish power with economics, physics, music, art, and justice. But perhaps they still hold some force in this world—we shall see.

Madmen Trump and Musk are moving with warp speed to illegally and dictatorially wreck America and enrich themselves in the process.

Forget the use of the terms "autocracy" and "constitutional crisis." This is a savage dictatorship, getting worse by the day. Trump is attacking the courts, ignoring Congress run by a cowardly GOP, pushing to cut off critical assistance for tens of millions of Americans, devastating health, safety, food (Meals on Wheels), education (Head Start), and Medicaid insurance protections.

The rabid, ravaging, unstable Musk and his Chief Musketeer Trump are shutting down whole agencies, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Agency for International Development (only Congress can do this). The CFPB is the federal cop enforcing laws against corporate crooks stealing your money in myriad ways, and returning many billions of dollars back to you.

As for shuttering illegally the U.S. Agency for International Development, consider what is happening in these direly poor countries, as reported in the New York Times: "Funds from the world’s richest nation once flowed from the largest global aid agency to an intricate network of small, medium and large organizations that delivered aid: H.I.V. medication for more than 20 million people; nutrition supplements for starving children; support for refugees, orphaned children, and women battered by violence." ("Chaos and Confusion Reign as U.S. Cuts Off Aid to Millions Globally" by Apoorva Mandavilli, February 12, 2025). Trump is also cutting monitoring for the emergence of deadly epidemics such as Ebola, drug-resistant Tuberculosis, Malaria, and other lethal viruses and bacteria, which could come to the U.S. like Covid-19 did.

The cost of all these vital protections is less than one percent of the federal budget. These safeguards have been supported by both Republican and Democratic Presidents—until Trump's brutal reign of terror.

Children, women (maternal health assistance), and men are dying now in places like Africa. Americans are just starting to suffer with the unlawful cutoff of funds (only Congress can do this) and the firing of thousands of dedicated civil servants ministering to their fellow Americans in need.

USAID is the humanitarian face of America, and Republicans like Marco Rubio once called it necessary for our country’s national security.

American businesses are starting to feel Musk's poisonous tusks. Just with closing USAID, this South African racist ordered the sign on its headquarters taken down. 100,000 positions have been cut overseas, and an estimated 52,000 Americans in 42 states have lost their jobs. Agricultural food supplies ready for export are starting to rot in warehouses and ports, according to the Times.

"Street demonstrations are spreading from Washington to California, from Oregon to Florida. Government employees and their unions are filing lawsuits in federal courts. Half of the country's state attorneys general are filing numerous court challenges."

The Trump/Musk machetes are swinging wildly striking beyond bullying the poor, defenseless, and powerless, and also upending the business community. Much of our government is contracted out to millions of businesses—small and large. Their contracts are being ripped up by this lying, corrupt President who many business leaders helped elect last November.

However, voters electing Trump didn't mean that they elected a fascist dictator betraying his campaign boasts and "Day One" promises with the first flurry of executive orders or dictates violating our Constitution, statutes, and international laws.

There is a systemic cunning behind the wild rioting that Trump and Musk are causing. First, their actions are not about efficiency. Here is their broad scheme. First fire the cops, the law enforcers against corporate violators of worker, consumer, environmental, and small investor protections. Many federal agencies have current investigations into Musk’s companies (SEC, NHTSA, EPA, FAA, etc.).

Second, establish a kleptocracy to enrich both Musk and Trump personally. (See the February 13, 2025, New York Times article by Eric Lipton titled "Under Trump Shake-Up, Benefits for Musk Empire").

Third, smash programs assisting people, while protecting huge waste, fraud, and abuse from corporate crime harming taxpayers (e.g., fraud on Medicare/Medicaid) and vast outlays of corporate welfare – giveaways, subsidies, bailouts, and endless tax escapes by big business. After all, Trump and Musk are both corporatists.

The military/industrial complex’s unauditable Pentagon budget is untouchable. Far from squeezing the enormous waste, redundancy, and corporate fraud, Trump gives every sign of supporting an additional $150 billion, which should go for domestic necessities, to this year's Defense Department's swollen taxpayer appropriations. After all, Trump and Musk are militarists.

What of the resistance, presently mounting, but still outrun and over-run by the Trumpster gangsters? Americans don't like to be told to shut up; they don't like to have things rightfully theirs taken from their families; they don't like to be fired en masse without cause; they don't like government contracts for vital services being arbitrarily broken. They also don't like their government being overthrown by fascistic gangsters.

Street demonstrations are spreading from Washington to California, from Oregon to Florida. Government employees and their unions are filing lawsuits in federal courts. Half of the country's state attorneys general are filing numerous court challenges. The mainstream media, under direct attack by Trump, and being frivolously sued by Trump, is still reporting and investigating.

The campuses will start rumbling as Trump/Musk cuts to medical research and other aids to education corrode these institutions. Retired military personnel are voicing their objections to the devastation of the kind of America and the freedom they fought to defend. (See veteransforpeace.org.) Veteran benefits are on draft-dodger Trump's cutting table.

The American Bar Association (ABA) has finally spoken out. On February 11, 2025, the ABA assailed the disregard of the judiciary and threats to judges by Trump/Musk/Vance, which "threaten the very foundation of our constitutional system." The ABA calls for "every lawyer and legal organization to speak with one voice and to condemn the efforts of any administration that suggests its actions are beyond the reach of judicial review."

Soon the business community, unable to tolerate the chaos, inflation, instability, and recklessness of Trump's regime's contracting violations, will speak out as economic indices fall, including stock markets.

It will take a few weeks or months, with heightened inflation, for this disruptive pipeline to reach critical mass as it will everywhere, including the red states where Trump supporters are concentrated. As one example, one of Biden's enacted laws "is projected to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into low-carbon energy technologies." Most of these benefits are in Republican-voting communities in red states "where they are creating a once-in-a-generation manufacturing boom." (The New York Times).

Recall, Trump's "drill, baby, drill" mantra of climate violence was linked with downgrading efficient solar energy and shutting down wind power projects under construction, along with the EPA’s work.

Once Trump's voters and his business base start turning against him, with wide media coverage and dropping polls, the stage will be set for surging demands for his resignation and impeachment that starts with "impossible," then "possible," then "probable," then conviction. If the GOP sees either its political skin at risk in 2026 versus Trump's destructive, daily delusions and dangerous daily damage, politicians will put their political fortunes first.

That is what Congressional Republicans did when they told Nixon to resign in 1974 over the Watergate scandal – a peapod by comparison with Trump’s wholesale subversions of our government to one man rule who has said “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President.”

Call the White House switchboard 202-456-1414 and tell Trump to stop the destruction of America and go back to Mar-a-Lago.

In bad times—and these are bad times—I call up the spirit of Willie.

Willie has seen me through cancer, divorce, and deaths in the family. His memory has given me the courage and strength to push on when I wanted to give up and hide. Willie reminds me that, even at 87, I can take it, get back up, survive, sometimes even win.

Willie was my bully. When I was 12, he beat me up or at least threatened to do so almost every day.

U.S. President Donald Trump is my bully now. Even though I share the misery he spreads with millions of others, it somehow seems personal because he makes me feel so vulnerable, so hopeless, so at the end of my version of the American dream. And, of course, everything he does evokes Willie.

We are the guerillas in this war, the Yankee doodle irregulars who scandalized the British redcoats in 1776 by firing at them from behind trees.

I recognized each of them as bullies the first time we met. I was a journalist in my early 40s, in the late 1970s, when I initially interviewed Donald Trump for CBS Sunday Morning. I took him for an amusing buffoon. He was around 35 then. Obviously lying to me, it was clear that he had a certain oily allure. People considered him harmless, a loser supported by his dad. He didn’t scare me. After Willie, few ever did. But even then the swagger was unmistakable, the flat-voiced, dead-eyed affect, the lack of humane connection. From that first moment, I knew he was a predator.

Enter Willie

At 12, I was terrified by Willie, who spotted me early in seventh grade as an after-school target. There I was, fat, meek, and lugging a heavy leather bookbag. In my junior high school’s permissive climate, some roughhousing was tolerated to let the bullies drain off energy and ease the teachers’ day. I was in a class for the “gifted,” identified by those bags full of books we carried from class to class (that were all too easily kicked out of our hands).

Maybe the principal, a growly old-school bully himself, thought we needed to be toughened up, since he allowed the harassment—as long as his own authority wasn’t challenged.

Willie never seriously hurt me. Once a week or so, there would be a little blood, a few bruises, maybe a pocket torn off my shirt. But the humiliation in front of my classmates especially the girls, proved crushing. I still remember it viscerally.

Of course, I was hardly the only victim in that school, but I seemed to be the only one with a designated bully on a regular schedule. I never complained or reported it because that seemed to me a form of giving in, surrender, letting Willie and the other bullies know that the torment had gotten to me. I always told myself: You can take it.

And then, one day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I have no idea why. It seemed like any other bully afternoon outside the school’s front doors. At 3:00 pm, Willie swaggered up and gave me a preliminary shove. I stood my ground and talked back, trying not to sound whiney. Some of my classmates, relieved they weren’t involved, gathered to watch.

The Battle

Willie kicked my bookbag out of my hand. That hurt. He grabbed for my pocket. I tried to push his hand away and then, for the first time, I suddenly launched myself at him, a rotund rocket of repressed rage. We both went down on the gray sidewalk. Incredibly, I was on top.

I began beating his head. Writing this even now, some 75 years later, I smile, sit up, and feel stronger.

I jammed my pudgy knees into his chest until he gasped, grabbed handfuls of his greasy hair, and yanked until he started to scream. I screamed back, “I’m gonna kill you!” Then I began trying to bash his brains out.

My classmates cheered discreetly, the bullies clapped, and my teacher shouted, “Robert! You’ll hurt him!” What a thrill that was! It didn’t last long. A burly shop teacher peeled me off and laughed as he put a steel-tipped toe in my rear. The principal himself came over to get a better look. I could tell he was trying not to smile.

I didn’t become a school hero, the girls didn’t flock to me, and the bullies didn’t try to recruit me. Still, Willie avoided me after that, and no one ever bullied me again. There were moments in the years to come in school, on the street, even in newsrooms, when I sensed someone was about to symbolically kick me, but I like to think that my response—even if only a sharp word or my body language—left that fight in the world of my fantasies. I was always ready for Willie redux, and I think it showed.

Another Kind of Bully

So here we are so many years later, surrounded by bullies (think, Elon Musk) so consumed by their psychoses, greed, cowardice, and outright madness for domination that they seem capable of becoming the ultimate bullies and destroying our world. No wonder so many of us feel vulnerable, hopeless, marooned at the butt end of this experiment in what once was but no longer is a liberal democracy.

The tale of Willie and me wasn’t simply a metaphor, of course; it was once my reality. Still, I cherish its metaphoric lessons in this moment. They keep me going. After all, the Trump era has felt all too much like a fever dream, a slow-motion train wreck leading us into a future that once seemed inconceivable. But we let it happen, didn’t we?

Who could have foreseen the rise of the new oligarchs, including Elon Musk and all those other billionaires? Well, don’t you remember the first time around—the robber barons of the 19th century?

The time has passed to empathize, play shrink, understand an unhappy boy.

The question is: How did everyday Americans become so ready for such a nightmarish change? How could they be seduced by a clown like Trump? Of course, American history offers its warnings. Remember how many were ready to follow Father Coughlin in the 1930s or Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Still, neither of them ever became president.

Back in Willie’s day, the conventional wisdom was that bullies were basically cowards who would back down if you stood up to them. Even then, that wasn’t necessarily true, but as an explanation it served a purpose. In standing up to the bully and taking your lumps, you would learn that survival itself was a small victory that could lead to bigger ones. Perhaps even a full-scale victory someday.

A few years later, when bullies started packing guns, knives, and computers, the conventional wisdom became dangerous as well as wrong. By then, bullied kids returned with an automatic weapon and wiped out the cafeteria. A cycle of violence had been created.

And now we have this ur-bully in the White House again, who showed up and began suing people, firing them, arresting them. Some of the same pundits who never really believed in his staying power are now suggesting that we simply roll ourselves up and wait it out. You know, just keep your head down. It’s only four years, after all.

Well, consider that the worst advice possible. Donald Trump has loosed too many demons, already out of his control—from unhinged individuals just waiting for a voice to send them out into the night to vigilante militias awaiting a cause to give them purpose. They now think Trump has their backs (although he’s capable of turning on anyone). In his all-(un-)American world, there are no safe havens and no certainties. Those who think the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is Trump’s Mein Kampf had better be guarding against his version of the Reichstag fire that gave Adolph Hitler his critical boost. If you think chaos is assured, the next step may be to build a bunker or hop on a Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk interstellar rocket to Mars.

A New Mindset

My own feeling, though, is that the next step is to develop a new mindset.

Something like this: We are the guerillas in this war, the Yankee doodle irregulars who scandalized the British redcoats in 1776 by firing at them from behind trees. We’re the Viet Cong who planted poisoned bamboo spikes. Sound ugly? Perhaps you’d rather echo Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high,” which certainly didn’t lead to victory in the 2016 presidential election. Get real. Going lower is merely a tactical decision. It doesn’t mean you’re giving up your principles, no less joining the other side.

Resistance begins with “embracing the suck” (old military slang for acknowledging the morass we’re in). Part of such an approach is understanding that, in opposing Trumpworld, you could get a torn pocket here, a lost job there, maybe even risky confrontations in the street. But without resistance, count on one thing: It will only get worse.

Old Bullies Beget New Ones

The bullies who clapped when I beat Willie are the progenitors of the unruly mob of blue-collar losers and white-collar wonks, proud thugs and Heritage Foundation nerds who, 60 years later, showed up at Trump rallies. By the time Donald sprung from jail those of them convicted of trashing the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it was clear that they had always been the enemy. In Willie’s time, while we were afraid of them, we also considered ourselves superior to them and that smug, elitist view only grew.

Now, we find ourselves the asymmetrical warriors, the underdogs.

What about those classmates who watched Willie and me? They never tried to rescue me. I never found out what went through their minds when the worm finally turned. Did it make them ashamed or make them fight back against their own bullies?

The equivalent of those classmates, the bystanders of our moment, are the lost souls in this battle. They grew up to be the Democrats who fought among themselves for ideological bragging rights, or the Republicans who gave in, followed the money and power, voted the bastards in, and now hide behind them. They have functionally become bullies, too.

And Willie? The time has passed to empathize, play shrink, understand an unhappy boy. To hell with him and Donald Trump, too. We’ve certainly read enough about his troubled childhood, nasty dad, cold family. The question now is: What do we do before he does us all in?

Three Things to Do

First, shut up and listen.

In retrospect, it’s easy enough to see how the shrewd, disciplined plotters, before and during the Trump years, stocked the judiciary and the state legislatures, the school boards and town councils with radical right-wingers. And it’s no less easy to point out that the rising prices that disrupted the lives of the working and middle classes made Trump seem like an all too viable option for so many of us. All that should have been as clear as after-school bullying. But it didn’t seem to alarm enough of the media and so many of the political bystanders who looked down on the bullies and the bullied and thought they were safe.

If you want to keep ahead of the nightmare to come, you better pay attention now. Better follow Truth Social and not just MSNBC. Better listen to Steve Bannon and not just Rachel Maddow. Bannon’s term “muzzle velocity” explains why we’re having a hard time keeping up with the firehose of grim ideas, lies, deceptions, and mad directives the Trumpists are heaving out right now to overwhelm and confuse us all.

The bullies have a public list of whom they’re coming after and if you’re not on it yet, you’re likely to be in some fashion sooner or later—unless you become one of them.

If we knock off the whining and chattering among ourselves and listen carefully to our enemies, we might be able to figure out just what they’re doing and prioritize just how we need to respond.

Second, never shut up.

Don’t mistake that as a cancellation of the first point. It means that this is the time to report the bullies and complain—to do, in other words, exactly what I didn’t do back in junior high school. We need to keep calling and writing our legislators, showing up at the local town council and school board meetings, while making our opinions clear in voicemails, e-mails, and letters to the editor. We need to keep up the pressure. Most people serving Trump just want to hold onto their gigs. Let them know that they could lose them when the resistance steps up if they don’t start responding to us now.

Don’t ever pass up voting again. How many of the bullied in the Trumpian era were among the misguided whose unused ballots provided him with his heartbreakingly narrow victory?

Support local media outlets and create new ones. The weakening of major newspaper and broadcasting sites has been a shocking development of these years and an indicator of how oligarchic media entities have been co-opted. When the Times pushed columnist Paul Krugman out the door, they lost some trust. Jim Acosta’s parting words as he walked the plank at CNN (“Don’t give into the lies. Don’t give into the fear. Hold onto the truth and to hope.”) sounded brave but sadly desperate.

Never shut up on environmental issues. It’s a priority to rally around the Earth in the “drill, baby, drill” era of Donald Trump. Many issues are local and coverage is accessible.

Third, above all else support the bullied.

I sometimes still fantasize about my classmates rushing forward, knocking Willie down with their book bags, and saving me. I wonder if that’s our only hope now.

The bullies have a public list of whom they’re coming after and if you’re not on it yet, you’re likely to be in some fashion sooner or later—unless you become one of them. Even then, don’t count on that lasting forever.

Some “sanctuary cities” have already stepped up and declared that they won’t allow their police forces to support ICE in the deportation of undocumented workers. There are major corporations that have refused to disband their Diversity-Equity-Inclusion units and the rights of their gay, trans, ethnic, and racial minority workers. Universities are cranking up to defend against a renewed assault on academic freedom. Obviously, we need to support them and new movements of every sort.

We also need the kind of awakening that right-wing pundit Peggy Noonan seemed to doubt could happen in a recent Wall Street Journal column when she wrote, “With luck this battle will last no more than four years, but we can’t count on the return of shame and decency, the resurrection of the Democratic party, and the emergence of the kind of leadership we need.”

Not on its own we can’t. The return of shame and decency to people who seem historically to have them in short supply sounds improbable. It’s a nice notion. Better we concentrate on growing the grit and smarts to fight back from the hedgerows to the dark net. We can beat Willie and Donald, but only if we do it together.

In a recent article published by NPR titled, “New to the Senate, Gallego Challenges Democrats’ Views on 'Working-Class Latinos’,” the newly elected Senator from Arizona, Ruben Gallego, defends his co-sponsoring of the Laken Riley Act.

Responding to his critics, Gallego stated, “They’re welcome to give me advice and everything else like that… but don’t come and try to lie to me and say that that’s where the Latino voter is… because that’s not the case.”

Gallego’s statement is very telling. It gives us critical insight into the way Democrats think, why they keep shifting to the right, and why they are doomed to keep losing in the face of a Republican Party that is becoming increasingly authoritarian and detached from reality.

When Democrats Follow the Narrative Instead of Driving the Narrative, They Are Sowing the Seeds of Their Own Defeat

In the quote above, Gallego is saying that Latino voters, like other voters, are also “concerned” about new immigrant arrivals at the border. He therefore reasons he has to speak to that concern by supporting militarized right-wing immigration policies, many of which are actually causing the crisis at the border. The Laken Riley Act is not only a due-process nightmare, allowing for detention of noncitizens who have merely been accused of minor crimes like shoplifting, but it will also allow red state attorneys general to sue future Democratic administrations for their immigration policies, effectively kneecapping any immigration policy change they may want to enact and thwarting the exclusive federal authority over immigration law. Gallego’s logic is that it’s OK to sponsor unconstitutional laws because the voters he has spoken to want “tougher” immigration laws.

This thinking perfectly encapsulates what is wrong with the Democratic Party. It is a failed political calculus that has led to decades of bad immigration policy outcomes and repeated electoral defeat. Democratic politicians look to where the polls are, look to the narratives in the public discourse (often planted there by bad faith right-wing propaganda outlets like Fox News), and then try to move their policy prescriptions toward what they perceive to be public sentiment. They should do the exact opposite, i.e. they should hold a core of strong policy beliefs and use those to drive a narrative on issues that addresses people’s concerns. Democratic, consultant-filtered thinking is completely backward because it fails to take into consideration that public sentiment is fluid and can be shifted with a compelling narrative. Instead, Democrats take the narratives blasted out by the right-wing propaganda machine and try to adjust their policies to fit them.

The “immigrants are dangerous” narrative is not only demonstrably false (immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit crime at a lower rate than citizens do), but when Democrats concede this narrative, they are setting the stage for their own defeat. Instead of implicitly endorsing the “dangerous immigrant” framework, Democrats should counter it with a narrative about how immigration is good for the country, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than citizens are, and that right-wing policy is the cause of illegal immigration. If the public buys into the “dangerous immigrant” narrative, they are always going to be more receptive to the Republican Party because the Republicans are always going to push further and further to the right. If you think immigrants are dangerous criminals, you are going to support the guy who is talking about walls and tough policies, instead of the party that is constantly giving mixed messages about how immigrants are good but also that they are the ones who are really “tough” on the border.

Instead of giving the Republicans the strength and uphill advantage of conceding their narratives, the Democrats need to flip the script by embracing immigration so that they are the ones attacking from an uphill position of strength.

The effectiveness of the Republican narrative on immigration, even though it is completely false, is reflected in several data points, such as the fact that immigration is a bigger priority to more Americans now than it was a year ago, as well as the reports showing that many Latinos have bought into the right-wing narrative and voted for Trump under the impression that he would only deport the “bad” undocumented immigrants. Of course, this has turned out to be completely false, as Donald Trump’s press secretary recently confirmed that they view all undocumented immigrants as criminals, even if they don’t have a criminal record.

In the NPR article cited at the beginning of my piece, Gallego says, “It’s usually white liberals that are talking to liberal Latinos, and they are essentially saying that’s what working-class Latinos feel and think about immigration… when in reality, they don’t.” I think Gallego is pointing to something that is true, but he’s got the wrong takeaway. For too long, the Democratic Party has assumed that barbaric right-wing immigration policy will inherently drive Latinos to vote for the Democrats. Gallego is essentially saying, “Working class Latinos are concerned about illegal immigration, so Democrats should move to the right on this issue.” I think the more accurate takeaway is that Latinos, just like anyone else, can be susceptible to the right-wing “dangerous immigrant” narrative. Even though right-wing immigration policy will disproportionately impact the Latino community, if the Democrats allow the “dangerous immigrant” narrative to take hold, more and more Latinos will vote Republican. I think the takeaway that Gallego is missing is that, instead of endorsing the right-wing immigration narrative, it is essential for the Democrats to offer a framing of the immigration issue that counters the one pushed by the Republicans.

When Republicans fearmonger about immigrant crime, Democrats need to push back with a factual narrative like this: “Immigration is good for the country and good for the economy. Study after study shows that immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than U.S. citizens. Republicans love to complain about illegal immigration, but their policies are actually the main cause of illegal immigration. The best way to reduce illegal immigration is to give people more legal pathways to come to the U.S. and stop the conservative policies that cause them to flee their home countries. Instead, Republicans want to cut off pathways for legal immigration, and pursue disruptive policies that make conditions worse in Latin America and the Caribbean.” If Democrats can convince the public that immigration is good, immigrants are not dangerous, and that Republicans are the cause of illegal immigration, it will lead the public to move away from the Republican party.

As long as Democrats keep putting their finger to the wind and trying to follow the right-wing narrative instead of reshaping the narrative to one that is better for the country, better for immigrants, and better for their political prospects, they are going to keep losing and the nation is going to experience increasingly worse immigration policy outcomes. In The Art of War, Sun-Tzu wrote, “So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak,” as well as, “It is a military axiom not to advance uphill against the enemy, nor to oppose him when he comes downhill.” Instead of giving the Republicans the strength and uphill advantage of conceding their narratives, the Democrats need to flip the script by embracing immigration so that they are the ones attacking from an uphill position of strength. This is not limited to immigration. Indeed, it is applicable to all issues. The Democrats need to steer the carriage of public discourse and opinion in the direction they want it to go, instead of being tied to the back of it and getting dragged along.

Days after November’s Trump-MAGA election victory, a senior Russian diplomat asked his American interlocutors how great a historical transformation it signaled. Was it the equivalent of the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal, or the South deserting the Democratic Party in response to the 1965 Civil Rights Act?

Within days of his inauguration it was clear, Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times, that U.S. President Donald Trump and his cronies were “waging war on the American system of government.” Billionaire plutocrats captured Washington to increase their immense fortunes, to eviscerate our limited social safety net, to eliminate corporate regulations, and to turn the clock back on 70 years of civil and human rights gains. A month on we find ourselves in the midst of what is politely described as a “constitutional crisis,” as Trump and his co-conspirators signal they will refuse to respect court orders that overrule their illegal and unconstitutional actions.

The chaos and calamity the Trump regime is wreaking within the United States extends beyond our borders, near and far. Counter-productively Trump and company are swinging their recking ball at the foundations of the United States’ liberal and sometimes democratic empire which has subsidized the U.S. economy for more than a century. The murder of as many as 3 million Vietnamese; NATO’s generation-long Afghanistan War; and continuing supply of billions of dollars’ worth of advanced weapons, as well as diplomatic support, for Israel’s genocidal second Palestinian Nakba, give lie to a benign U.S. led “international rules-based order.” Reinforcing the image of the Ugly American, the Trump-Musk assault on the U.S. Agency for International Development is killing innocent aid recipients around the world by denying them food and medicines. Trump’s 25% tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, targeted primarily against China, provide an unexpected opening to the Middle Kingdom. They violate the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement and a trade agreement with Australia, signaling to the world that, like Hitler before him, Trump operates as if treaties are not worth the paper they are written on, and that the U.S.’ word is not to be trusted. This spells international chaos and economic pain for many U.S. Americans.

Trump’s needs and insistence on dominating anyone or any nation that refuses to kowtow to his demands will inevitably result in the alienation of valued and essential partners and painful isolation.

That era of liberal imperialism is over. It has been coming since the end of the Cold War, as China’s rise and that of the most influential nations of the Global South have created the still uncertain and fluid multipolar disorder. Trump and company’s “peace through strength” is a response to the United States’ relative decline and is being pursued in a nationally self-defeating sovereigntist imperial tradition.

A New York Times article explained that the early sovereigntist movement sought “not only America’s formal sovereignty… but also the traditional forms of rule to which its white, native-born leaders were accustomed… they understood international cooperation as a threat to their personal sovereignty as well that of their nations.” Sovereigntists played leading roles in the 1930s’ fascist “America First” movement and opposed creation of the United Nations, the International Court, NATO, and the World Trade Organization as infringements on U.S. sovereignty. Sovereigntists supported racist Rhodesia as a “brave little country” and defended apartheid South Africa against U.N. sanctions. The Trumpist Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proclaimed that “international organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed. They should be abandoned.”

The conservative Trump critic Bret Stephens describes the sovereigntist ideology serving as a means for “a country doing what it wants to do… an indifference to the behavior of other states, however cruel or dangerous, so long as it doesn’t impinge on us.” It means that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” In Trump’s case, we know that he despised the “rules-based order.” His former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien reported that he ”adheres not to dogma but to his own instincts.” That is to say his personal narcissistic sovereignty.

Thus, we have threats to seize Greenland and to annex Canada for minerals in order to outpace China in the technological and economic races for dominance. Panama is threatened in order to restore U.S. control over the strategically vital canal. And while the U.S. spends 3.4% of its GDP, nearly a trillion dollars, Trump has raised his demand that NATO nations increase their military spending to a staggering 5% of their GDP so that the Pentagon can concentrate its military and economic power on containing and dominating China. A fool’s errand.

Some governments, for example Poland, Japan, and Colombia, are kowtowing to Trump’s crude demands. Others—including Denmark, France, and even Germany, at least in the face of Trump’s Greenland demands—are insisting on respect for their national sovereignty. We can expect linkages as Trump goes beyond his threat to encourage Russia to invade nations that don’t meet his exorbitant military spending demands with tariff threats and other demands for those who fail to kowtow to the new lord’s orders.

Trump has yet to fully reveal his military and diplomatic approaches to Europe and Russia. In his return to power, Trump seems less smitten by Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that the Russian autocrat is “destroying Russia.” Trump has threatened further and useless sanctions against Moscow and increases in military support for Kyiv if Moscow refuses to come to the negotiating table on Trump’s terms. He has also offered continued military support for Ukraine in exchange for significant quantities of rare earth minerals needed for the industrial and the technological arms race with China. The Ukraine War, of course, is not only for control of that long-tormented borderland. On all sides, it is being fought to shape and define the Post-Post-Cold War’s European order and strategic architecture.

At the same time, Trump, who believe it or not is driven in part by his Nobel Peace Prize ambitions, as well as his transactional way of being, could attempt to negotiate a comprehensive grand bargain with Putin over the heads Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ukraine, and European leaders. It could include everything from the future of Ukraine to conventional and nuclear weapons in Europe, and to whatever follows the expiration of the New START nuclear treaty in February 2026.

On the other hand, if Putin is not willing to accommodate Trump’s demands we could see renewed commitments to the Biden administration’s goal of dealing Moscow a “strategic defeat,” and to the new Cold War.

On the international economic front, Trump’s tariff threats are more than temper tantrums. Rejection of the 70-year-old liberal imperial disorder includes the ambition of replacing the Bretton Woods-WTO systems with what Trump’s former Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer terms a “new American trade system.”

Lighthizer, who ignited the economic warfare with China during Trump’s first term, recently wrote that “countries with democratic governments [as of this now applies to the U.S. -jg!] and mostly free economies should come together to create a new trade regime. This system could enforce balance by having two tiers of tariffs.” Punitive tariffs would target “nondemocratic countries as well as those that insist on beggar-thy-neighbor aggressive industrial policies to run large surpluses.” Those within his new regime “would pay lower tariffs and they could be adjusted over time to ensure balance.”

The imperial naivety and ambition of this strategy brings to mind the disastrous Bush-Cheney-Abrams belief that with “shock and awe” that they could simultaneously export democracy to Iraq and seize control of the “sea of oil” on which that nation floats.

By definition, the narcissism of admiring one’s reflection in the mirror and insisting on personal or national sovereignty at the expense of others means ignoring the needs and agency of others. Trump’s needs and insistence on dominating anyone or any nation that refuses to kowtow to his demands will inevitably result in the alienation of valued and essential partners and painful isolation. Just as no man is an island, neither is a nation. As Trump transforms the United States into pariah nation, he will be accelerating the nation’s decline, generating increasingly dangerous domestic and international turmoil and insecurity.

We saw that with the end of the Cold War, based on common security and win-win diplomacy, there are alternatives that will enhance our personal and national security. In the words of the Jewish sage Hillel, “If not now, when? If not me [us] who?” We and the world’s nations are not powerless. U.S. and international strategies that target Trump’s stock market Achilles heel or ultimately a general strike could discipline this most undisciplined and dangerous despot.

Dedication: to the Declaration of Independence; it is worth re-reading.

What do we have to show for more than 20 years of war and trillions of dollars spent, since that prophetic day, February 15, 2003, when the world said no to the impending war on Iraq?

It may be useful to reflect on the past decades of never-ending wars and peer at the near future to assess where we might be headed.

The fact that there has been no accountability for U.S. war crimes now holds crucial consequences for our society, as we are faced with renegade rule in all branches of government.

The Middle East is destabilized and war-ravaged and with 4.7 million people killed. This number includes indirect deaths from food insecurity, demolished infrastructure, environmental damage, and the chaos that ensues when people are bombed, in addition to those killed outright in military strikes. Women and children continue to suffer the deepest and most brutal consequences of the wars. More than 7.6 million children in post 9/11 war zones are suffering from acute malnutrition.

Over 38 million people have been displaced across Asia. A global refugee crisis due to violence and climate change continues unabated as internecine armed conflicts rage and weapons flow across every continent.

In the Afghan and Iraq wars, 53,533 U.S. service members were wounded, over 7,000 killed, and over 30,000 committed suicide. At this point, 22 veterans a day commit suicide; this number has been doubled in the past.

Over $21 trillion were blown on wars. Think what alternative uses for those trillions might have been, and weep for the hungry, unhoused, those lacking healthcare or going bankrupt during a health crisis that insurance refuses to cover, our always under-funded schools, the lack of public transit systems, and the intentional failure to transition from fossil fuels to mitigate the climate crisis that now has us firmly in its grip. Weep for what did not happen that could have benefited everyone and might have transformed our society in positive ways. Instead, trillions went to a few military contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrup Grumman.

Political accountability for the lies told prior to the shock and awe attack on Iraq and all the subsequent war crimes has been zero. The fact that there has been no accountability for U.S. war crimes now holds crucial consequences for our society, as we are faced with renegade rule in all branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—with each branch imposing a reactionary political will on all of us, with impunity, respecting no protocols, laws, or even the battered Constitution they swear to uphold. The wars always come home.

The horror visited on Gaza cannot be overlooked. The U.S. supplies lethal arms to Israel’s vengeful, genocidal rampage that has destroyed Gaza and unmercifully persecutes the West Bank. U.S. military support to Israel stands at over $22 billion since October 7, 2023 with additional billions of military aid in the pipeline. Gaza is a ruin of rubble, homes destroyed, no hospitals, no schools, tens (likely hundreds) of thousands killed, at least a hundred thousand wounded (thousands of children with arms and legs blown off), more than 95% of the population is starving. Governments and institutions failed to call for an end to the massacre, yet punished those speaking out for a cease-fire and arms embargo. What can and will be done to mitigate the ordeal the people of Gaza and the West Bank endure, living under murderous occupation?

The devastation from the wildfires in Los Angeles and Israel’s military destruction in Gaza bear an eerie resemblance to each other, one landscape caused by blowback from nature for our failure to care for our planet, the other by intentional military destruction. How painfully similar these landscapes are, as stunning symbols of the harm human beings do to their environment and to each other.

During these decades, the Pentagon budget has risen to astronomical heights despite the fact that the Pentagon has never passed an audit (those wishing to focus on waste in government might start there). The Department of Defense is the single largest fossil fuel consumer in the world and the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, yet environmental organizations and putative leaders carefully avoid implicating wars and militarism as part of the environmental crisis we face.

U.S. popular culture is driven by a saccharine romance with militarism in which the devastating realities of war are obscured, minimized, sanitized. “Enemies” are manufactured to resemble peoples who have governments the U.S. does not like, so that current politics and policies justify wars waged by the Pentagon. The enemy is familiar to all, no questions asked. The wars are so “vast and … absentee” (apologies to Thomas Pynchon) that the wretched, inflicted suffering endured by human beings goes on for years without notice by mainstream society.

The U.S. has only one political party: the War Party. Everyone in the established status quo agrees on policies to develop and build any and all weapons, to foment and continue to wage wars, abrogating international law and treaties that stand in the way. Those of us who rightly object to such destructive folly (defined by Barbara Tuchman as policies pursued that are counter to the true interest of a society) are treated with withering scorn at best and dismissed out of hand by a venal, corrupt establishment that literally coins money for itself by investing in merchants of death.

Environmental consequences loom, military destruction around the world is a significant contributor that includes elevated carbon dioxide released by bombing and the highly polluting jet fuel used for bombing missions. Scarce resources should be used to lessen suffering in our society and across the world, not employed for destructive purposes. Like it or not, we live on an interdependent, ecologically fragile planet. Humans, as Russell Means used to say, are “cursed with rationality,” which enables the crude justification of policies that are detrimental to life on Earth. The stark, evident fact is that Planet Earth itself, and all living things, cannot take any more war.

Do we face an imminent endgame in which nuclear weapons are used? All nuclear nations are busily upgrading their arsenals, flouting the international ban treaty. The Doomsday Clock now stands at 89 seconds to midnight, although moving it to midnight and saying there will be no more changes unless humanity finds a way to save itself might be more apropos for the historical moment we are living in.

Is it at all possible for people to rise up in large enough numbers, out of love for Planet Earth and all living things, across the globe to prevent such a catastrophe, as it is clear that there is no governmental or institutional entity willing or able to call a halt to military madness?

In three days, Amsterdam organized the only general strike in Europe to protest the first roundup of Jews. People poured into the streets on February 25, 1941—an estimated 300,000 of the 800,000 total who lived in the city.

The first to march were the tram and dock workers. The civil servants followed and word spread through the whole city, even to the small sewing workshop where a woman named Mientje Meijer worked. She and her husband had talked about it, and he came to the window to let her know it was really happening. She stopped her treadle, rose to her feet, and said, “Ladies, all of Amsterdam has come to a standstill because they’ve been rounding up Jews and taking them away. We’ve got to join in.”

The ladies poured out, even the boss, and joined the multitudes: teachers, metal workers, factory employees, shop clerks, people from across the political spectrum. Some were furious that their fellow citizens’ rights had been violated, some wanted to protest the Nazi occupation, and some just hated the Germans. Whatever their motives, they stopped the city in its tracks.

How did they organize so fast? A road builder and a street sweeper who belonged to the banned but well-organized Communist Party decided to call a meeting and take action. They had heard that hundreds of Jewish men had been rounded up on the square between the immense Portuguese Synagogue and the four smaller Ashkenazi ones. The communists gathered with trade union representatives and others at the Noorderkerk in the workers’ part of the city. They enlisted political and moral allies. Soon, a mimeographed leaflet urged everyone to “Strike! Strike! Strike! Shut down all of Amsterdam for a day!” And they did. The Strike even reached a few other cities before the German occupiers reacted with force.

Only limited public protest was heard the year before, at the time when Jews were fired from the civil service, including professors from the universities. Therefore, the Germans were dumbfounded in February 1941 when the Dutch, their Aryan brothers and sisters, took to the streets en masse. But the Nazis recovered fast and ordered the use of rifles and hand grenades to stop the strike.

By the time it was over a few days later, about 200 people had been arrested, nine had been killed, and 50 injured. For the rest of the war, the February Strike remained the only general strike in Europe to protest the roundups. Tragically, it was futile: about 75% of the Dutch Jewish population was mass murdered. Yet the strike remains in our memories as one of the few times ordinary people stood together against the deportation of their Jewish neighbors. It meant something to many Dutch survivors as long as they lived.

I learned about the Strike at the time of its 60th commemoration in 2001. Every year, people gather to remember, right where the first roundups took place. They stand around the statue of the Dockworker who is the symbolic figure of the Strike. Sculpted by a resistance worker who survived, the hefty figure wears a worker’s cap, looking not at us but beyond us, his hands at his sides, open but ready to form fists.

In 2001, the square was crammed with people, some old enough to have been alive at the time, others young families, others men of all ages with yarmulkes, and individuals formally dressed in black who proved to be diplomats. Everyone was quiet, even little children. The commemoration began with a few short speeches and a poem, but the main event was this: people were invited, a few at a time, to approach the Dockworker, stand for a moment, and lay flowers.

The elders approached first, those who might have been present at the Strike. Next the Jewish organizations placed their big wreaths, often laid by children. Similar offerings came from the European Trade Union Federation, from the people of Sweden and the United States, and others. But the vast majority of the flowers were small bouquets tied with ribbons, like a dozen red tulips bound by aluminum foil with a bit of wet paper inside. Some were accompanied by a personal note written in ink in a scrawly hand.

It took an hour and a half on that frigid afternoon to lay all the flowers, and they stayed there unmolested for days. The flowers remained until they were all dead and had to be carried away.

By Ralph Nader February 14, 2025 Madmen Trump and Musk are moving with warp speed to illegally and dictatorially wreck America and enrich themselves in the process. Forget the use of the terms “autocracy” and “constitutional crisis.” This is a savage dictatorship, getting worse by the day. Trump is attacking the courts, ignoring Congress run…

I want to talk today about the media’s coverage of the Trump-Vance-Musk coup.

I’m not referring to coverage by the bonkers right-wing media of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and its imitators.

I’m referring to the U.S. mainstream media — The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, National Public Radio — and the mainstream media abroad, such as the BBC and The Guardian.

By not calling it a coup, the mainstream media is failing to communicate the gravity of what is occurring.

Yesterday’s opinion by The New York Times’ editorial board offers a pathetic example. It concedes that Trump and his top associates “are stress-testing the Constitution, and the nation, to a degree not seen since the Civil War” but then asks: “Are we in a constitutional crisis yet?” and answers that what Trump is doing “should be taken as a flashing warning sign.”

Warning sign?

Elon Musk’s meddling into the machinery of government is a part of the coup. Musk and his muskrats have no legal right to break into the federal payments system or any of the other sensitive data systems they’re invading, for which they continue to gather computer code.

This data is the lifeblood of our government. It is used to pay Social Security and Medicare. It measures inflation and jobs. Americans have entrusted our private information to professional civil servants who are bound by law to use it only for the purposes to which it is intended. In the wrong hands, without legal authority, it could be used to control or mislead Americans.

By not calling it a coup, the media have also permitted Americans to view the regime’s refusal to follow the orders of the federal courts as a political response, albeit an extreme one, to judicial rulings that are at odds with what a president wants.

By failing to use the term “coup,” the media have also underplayed the Trump-Vance-Musk regime’s freeze on practically all federal funding — suggesting this is a normal part of the pull-and-tug of politics. It is not. Congress has the sole authority to appropriate money. The freeze is illegal and unconstitutional.

By not calling it a coup, the media have also permitted Americans to view the regime’s refusal to follow the orders of the federal courts as a political response, albeit an extreme one, to judicial rulings that are at odds with what a president wants.

There is nothing about the regime’s refusal to be bound by the courts that places it within the boundaries of acceptable politics. Our system of government gives the federal judiciary final say about whether actions of the executive are legal and constitutional. Refusal to be bound by federal court rulings shows how rogue this regime truly is.

Earlier this week, a federal judge excoriated the regime for failing to comply with “the plain text” of an edict the judge issued last month to release billions of dollars in federal grants. Vice President JD Vance, presumably in response, declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Vance graduated from the same law school I did. He knows he’s speaking out of his derriere.

In sum, the regime’s disregard for laws and constitutional provisions surrounding access to private data, impoundment of funds appropriated by Congress, and refusal to be bound by judicial orders amount to a takeover of our democracy by a handful of men who have no legal authority to do so.

If this is not a coup d’etat, I don’t know what is.

The mainstream media must call this what it is. In doing so, they would not be “taking sides” in a political dispute. They would be accurately describing the dire emergency America now faces.

Unless Americans see it and understand the whole of it for what it is rather than piecemeal stories that “flood the zone,” Americans cannot possibly respond to the whole of it. The regime is undertaking so many outrageous initiatives that the big picture cannot be seen without it being described clearly and simply.

Unless Americans understand that this is indeed a coup that’s wildly illegal and fundamentally unconstitutional — not just because that happens to be the opinion of constitutional scholars or professors of law, or the views of Trump’s political opponents, but because it is objectively and in reality a coup — Americans cannot rise up as the clear majority we are, and demand that democracy be restored.

The politics of the former American colony of the Philippines is devolving into a Hatfields versus McCoys style blood feud. Sara Duterte, daughter of the last president Rodrigo, was the vice president until she just got impeached. Now she’s being charged with sedition too.

At the heart of the clash is a power struggle between two families, the pretty much pro-China Dutertes, against the pro-American Marcoses, whose Bongbong is the current president.

Lucio Blanco Pitlo III, president of the Philippines Association for Chinese Studies and research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Pathways to Progress Foundation, joins “The TMI Show” with Ted Rall and Manila Chan to analyze the future of this linchpin to the Western Pacific and the Pacific Rim.

The post TMI Show Ep 79: Feuding Filipino First Families! first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 79: Feuding Filipino First Families! appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

As we approach the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a monumental shift is taking place that might just lead to the end of this calamitous war. This is not a breakthrough on the battlefield, but a stark reversal of the U.S. position from being the major supplier of weapons and funding to prolong the war to one of peacemaker.

Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine if he was re-elected as president. On February 12th, he started to make good on that promise by holding a 90-minute call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Biden had refused to talk to since the war began. They agreed that they were ready to begin peace negotiations “immediately,” and Trump then called President Zelenskyy and spent an hour discussing the conditions for what Zelenskyy called a “lasting and reliable peace.”

At the same time, the new U.S. Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, unveiled Trump’s new policy in more detail at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, saying, “The bloodshed must stop. And this war must end.”

There are two parts to the new policy that Hegseth announced. First, he said that Trump “intends to end this war by diplomacy and bringing both Russia and Ukraine to the table.” Secondly, he said that the United States is handing off the prime responsibility for arming Ukraine and guaranteeing its future security to the European members of NATO.

Assigning Europe the role of security guarantor is a transparent move to shield the U.S. from ongoing responsibility for a war that it played a major role in provoking and prolonging by scuttling previous negotiations. If the Europeans will not accept their assigned role in Trump’s plan, or President Zelenskyy or Putin reject it, the United States may yet have to play a larger role in security guarantees for Ukraine than Trump or many Americans would like. Zelenskyy told the Guardian on February 11th that, for Ukraine, “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees.”

This is not a breakthrough on the battlefield, but a stark reversal of the U.S. position from being the major supplier of weapons and funding to prolong the war to one of peacemaker.

After blocking peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, the Biden administration rejected peace negotiations over Ukraine for nearly three years. Biden insisted that Ukraine must recover all of its internationally recognized territory, including the Crimea and Donbas regions that separated from Ukraine after the U.S.-backed coup in Kyiv in 2014.

Hegseth opened the door to peace by clearly and honestly telling America’s European allies, “…we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”

Spelling out the U.S. plan in more detail, Hegseth went on by saying that a "durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again. This must not be Minsk 3.0. That said, the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. Instead any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.”

NATO membership for Ukraine has always been totally unacceptable to the Russians. Trump and Hegseth’s forthrightness in finally pulling the plug, after the U.S. has dangled NATO membership in front of successive Ukrainian governments since 2008, marks a critical recognition that neutrality offers the best chance for Ukraine to coexist with Russia and the West without being a battleground between them.

Trump and Hegseth expect Europe to assume prime responsibility for Ukraine, while the Pentagon will instead focus on Trump’s two main priorities: on the domestic front, deporting immigrants, and on the international front, confronting China. Hegseth justified this as “a division of labor that maximizes our comparative advantages in Europe and the Pacific respectively.”

Elaborating on the role the U.S. plan demands of its European allies, Hegseth explained,

If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. And they should not be covered under Article 5. There also must be robust international oversight of the line of contact. To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine… Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.

To say that U.S. forces will never fight alongside European forces in Ukraine, and that Article 5, the mutual defense commitment in the NATO Charter, will not apply to European forces in Ukraine, is to go a step farther than simply denying NATO membership to Ukraine, by carving out Ukraine as an exclusion zone where the NATO Charter no longer applies, even to NATO members.

While Trump plans to negotiate directly with Russia and Ukraine, the vulnerable position in which his plan would place European NATO members means that they, too, will want a significant say in the peace negotiations and probably demand a U.S. role in Ukraine’s security guarantees. So Trump’s effort to insulate the U.S. from the consequences of its actions in Ukraine may be a dead letter before he even sits down to negotiate with Russia and Ukraine.

Hegseth’s reference to the Minsk Accords highlights the similarities between Trump’s plans and those agreements in 2014 and 2015, which largely kept the peace in Eastern Ukraine from then until 2022. Western leaders have since admitted that they always intended to use the relative peace created by the Minsk Accords to build up Ukraine militarily, so that it could eventually recover Donetsk and Luhansk by force, instead of granting them the autonomous status agreed to in the Accords.

Why is Trump committed to stopping the killing in Ukraine but not in Gaza?

Russia will surely insist on provisions that prevent the West from using a new peace accord in the same way, and would be highly unlikely to agree to substantial Western military forces or bases in Ukraine as part of Ukraine’s security guarantees. President Putin has always insisted that a neutral Ukraine is essential to lasting peace.

There is, predictably, an element of “having their cake and eating it too” in Trump and Hegseth’s proposals. Even if the Europeans take over most of the responsibility for guaranteeing Ukraine's future security, and the U.S. has no Article 5 obligation to support them, the United States would retain its substantial command and control position over Europe’s armed forces through NATO. Trump is still demanding that its European members increase their military spending to 5% of GDP, far more than the U.S. spends on its bloated, wasteful, and defeated war machine.

Biden was ready to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian,” as retired U.S. diplomat Chas Freeman said in March 2022, and to enrich U.S. weapons companies with rivers of Ukrainian blood. Is Trump now preparing to fight Russia to the last British, French, German or Polish soldier too if his peace plan fails?

Trump’s call with Putin and Hegseth’s concessions on NATO and Ukraine’s territorial integrity left many European leaders reeling. They complained that the U.S. was making concessions behind their backs, that these issues should have been left to the negotiating table, and that Ukraine should not be forced to give up on NATO membership.

European NATO members have legitimate concerns to work out with the new U.S. administration, but Trump and Hegseth are right to finally and honestly tell Ukraine that it will not become a NATO member, to dispel this tragic mirage and let it move on into a neutral and more peaceful future.

There has also been a backlash from Republican war hawks, while the Democrats, who have been united as the party of war when it comes to Ukraine, will likely try to sabotage Trump’s efforts. On the other hand, maybe a few brave Democrats will recognize this as a chance to reclaim their party’s lost heritage as the more dovish of America’s two legacy parties, and to provide desperately needed new progressive foreign policy leadership in Congress.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Trump’s peace initiative is a gamechanger and a new chance for peace that the United States and its allies should embrace, even as they work out their respective responsibilities to provide security guarantees for Ukraine. It is also a time for Europe to realize that it can’t just mimic U.S. foreign policy and expect U.S. protection in return. Europe’s difficult relationship with Trump’s America may lead to a new modus operandi and a re-evaluation (or maybe even the end?) of NATO.

Meanwhile, those of us anxious to see peace in Ukraine should applaud President Trump’s initiative but we should also highlight the glaring contradictions of a president who finds the killing in Ukraine unacceptable but fully supports the genocide in Palestine.

Given that most of the casualties in Ukraine are soldiers, while most of the maimed and killed in Palestine are civilians, including thousands of children, the compassionate, humanitarian case for peace is even stronger in Palestine than in Ukraine. So why is Trump committed to stopping the killing in Ukraine but not in Gaza? Is it because Trump is so wedded to Israel that he refuses to rein in its slaughter? Or is it just that Ukrainians and Russians are white and European, while Palestinians are not?

If Trump can reject the political arguments that have fueled three years of war in Ukraine and apply compassion and common sense to end that war, then he can surely do the same in the Middle East.

            When I was young, I knew a lot about old people. Especially about old people I knew personally: members of my family, my mother’s contemporaneous older friends, teachers, clients on my paper route.

            It wasn’t a choice. When I was young, no one asked whether I was interested about events that significantly preceded my birth. They just talked. My mom told me countless detailed stories about her childhood growing up during the Nazi occupation of France; many if not most of these tales of woe were repeated despite my reminders that I was already familiar with them. I was expected to listen as the schoolteacher got shot, the cat was abandoned and the Allied tanks rolled in.

            Children, teenagers and young adults were expected less to be seen and not heard than to listen politely nodding their heads as their elders described watching the Beatles arrive at Idlewild (on black-and-white TV with rabbit ears, natch), where they were when they heard that Kennedy had been shot and, in the case of my seventh-grade homeroom teacher, what it was like to be in the convention hall when FDR accepted the Democratic nomination.

            Pop culture, politics and personal histories from decades prior persisted in a way that doesn’t seem possible today, when youth culture and the Internet have delivered a clear message to older generations like mine (I’m an old Gen Xer) that our stories are neither wanted nor sought out.

            And sought out they would have to be. Unlike my Baby Boomer babysitter who taught my nine-year-old self hippie slang, how to curse and how much fun she’d had at a free-love commune, and also unlike my Silent Generation father who schooled me on Jack Benny and Benny Goodman, we members of Generation X survived our histories of childhood neglect and adulthood underappreciation only to graduate into our later years assuming that no one cares about us and no one ever will. So yeah, there was that time I stood three feet away from Johnny Thunders when he gave his last concert and the hilarious lunch I had with Johnny Ramone and the time Ed Koch gave me the finger after I bounced a bottle off the roof of his limousine, but I’m pretty sure nobody under age 45 cares.

            As the author and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says: “In the old days young people went to university to learn from people who were perhaps three times their age and had read an enormous amount. But nowadays they go in order to tell those older people what they should be thinking and what they should be saying.”

Or maybe younger people would care. But they’d have to ask. And I’d have to be convinced that they weren’t just being polite. Probably not going to happen.

Whatever the cause is, and what I’ve written so far is no doubt only part of the reason, there is probably less familial, cultural and popular history being transferred from older generations to younger ones than ever before. Changes in technology and education are contributing to our failure to pass on knowledge and wisdom.

If you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know who you are.

Generation Z, for example, never learned to write in cursive. Which means they can’t read it. In the same way that Ataturk’s decision to abolish Arabic script in favor of a Latinate alphabet suddenly made hundreds of years of incredible literature inaccessible to Turks after 1928 and Mao’s simplified Chinese characters meant that only scholars can read older texts, newer generations of Americans won’t be able to read an original copy of the Declaration of Independence or a letter from their grandmother.

Similarly, the dark ages of photography are well upon us. Though it has never been cheaper or easier to take or store or transmit a high-resolution photo, the number that are likely to pass from one generation to the next has never been smaller. When mom dies, her smartphone password usually dies with her. Even when obtaining a court order is not required, how likely is a grieving child to sort through an overwhelming volume of photos, few of them worth preserving, and have the presence of mind to carefully store the keepers somewhere where their own children will be easily be able to access them someday? And let’s not mention the digital disasters that can instantly wipe out entire photo archives.

For all their shortcomings—fading, development costs—film-based photos survived precisely because they were more expensive, which made them precious, which prompted people to store them in albums. We’ve all read stories about how victims of a flood or fire sometimes only escaped with one possession, the family photo album.

I’m grateful for all the old stuff old people told me whether or not I wanted to hear it. Some stuff was pretty enlightening, like the couple on my paper route where the husband had fought in World War I and still had his gas mask on which he had written the names of each little French village through which he and his squadron had passed. They invited me in for tea when I came to collect my money. It’s one thing to read about the horrors of mustard gas. Holding that contraption in my hands made it feel real.

Other things I picked up probably didn’t teach me much of anything at all. Still, it was pretty interesting to learn how to use an old-fashioned adding machine, Victrola record player and self-playing piano one of my neighbors had in her garage. My mom taught me how to use carbon paper; recalling the fact that businesses and government agencies routinely made numerous copies to be distributed to different files proved useful when I researched my senior thesis at the National Archives.

When I complain about a problem, I like to offer a solution. But I’m not entirely sure that the fact that billions of yottabytes worth of human knowledge is getting memory-holed, mostly because Millennials and Gen Zers aren’t particularly interested is necessarily a problem. Maybe they don’t need that stuff to try to save themselves from climate change or killer asteroids.

What I do know, if indeed it is a problem, is that it is one without a possible solution. In the same way that streets would be clean if nobody littered but people always do so they never are, there is no way to convince today’s 30-year-olds that they should take an interest in what today’s 60-year-olds have to say.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner wrote. But he’s so old, he’s dead.

Nowadays, even the present is past.

(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 Resistance to Memory first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Resistance to Memory appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Gitmo, of course!! It’s the freest place “we” have—by which I mean the American government, aka President Donald Trump. No rules apply there, be they international humanitarian law or the U.S. Constitution. It’s a dumping ground, a black hole.

It’s the most secure place for America to hold, as Trump put it a few weeks ago, “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust their countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back.”

His plan is to expand the infamous Guantánamo Bay Detention Center, part of the U.S. naval base in Cuba, which George W, Bush began using as he waged his horrific “war on terror” in the Middle East. He began imprisoning alleged terrorists, often arbitrarily arrested, in a hellhole where they had zero rights. Some are still there, several decades later. Trump’s plan is to expand the detention center to hold 30,000 people, which would be, oh, more than double the size of two unforgettable Nazi concentration camps combined: Dachau and Treblinka.

What’s different about the Trump plan, according to PolifiFact, quoted at Al Jazeera, is that the U.S. has never sent people who were detained in the United States to Guantánamo.

And these migrants would be stuck there entirely under the control of an American government that has declared them to be the country’s biggest enemy of the moment: the biggest threat to our national safety. No rights for them!

If you want to be a great national leader, this is step one: Create an enemy. Stir fear and hatred, then demonstrate that only you can protect us, by doing what’s necessary: dehumanize, dehumanize, dehumanize. That is to say, keep things simple: us vs. them. This is what the masses understand, apparently.

Oh God, I don’t believe this at all, but the reality of it seems unshakable—with Trump in the White House, more so than ever. There was a time when I believed we were moving beyond the militaristic simplism of Superpower America, with political hope bubbling all the way up to former U.S. President Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Yeah, the Bush era’s dead! But then... wars continued, not much changed. Obama had promised to close the Gitmo prison in his first year. That didn’t happen—and that’s when I started to realize that the progressive movement in this country had no real political traction.

What we have instead is ongoing outrage, fueled by truth and introspection. Trump wants to “make America great again” and keeps ironically raging about the migrant invasion. The days of American greatness for which he’s reaching go well past the civil rights (the “political correctness”) era, past the women’s rights era, past the Great Depression. America’s greatness began with the European invasion of what came to be called the Americas—several hundred years of obliterating native cultures and dehumanizing them as “savages.” Our “greatness” preceded the American Revolution and continued well after it.

Trump’s intention to expand the Gitmo prison is symbolic as well as practical: It revitalizes the Bush-era war on terror; it brings the war home. Today’s terrorist equivalents are the migrant invaders. If you’re interested in reclaiming the actual history of that period, I recommend the book Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantánamo, written by two Algerian men randomly arrested in Bosnia in 2001: Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir. They were falsely accused of being terrorists and spent seven years imprisoned for no reason at Gitmo—pulled away from their wives, their children... witnessing, and enduring, horrendous treatment, trapped in the American black hole with zero rights. The book contains fragments of our national history: what we can do in the wake of creating and dehumanizing an enemy.

Some years ago, I wrote about the book, about the hell they endured: “stuffed into cages, interrogated endlessly and pointlessly, humiliated, force-fed (in Lakhdar’s case)... and finally, finally, ordered by a U.S. judge to be freed, when their case was at long last heard in a real court and the lack of evidence against them became appallingly clear.” This happened thanks to the unending aid they received from a U.S. law firm that spent more than 35,000 pro bono hours litigating the case.

“The book is the story of the courage it takes to survive.”

As well as alleged terrorists, Gitmo has also long been used to detain immigrants intercepted at sea. At Gitmo, they lacked “access to basic human necessities, appropriate medical care, education, and potable water,” according to the International Refugee Assistance Project. And they had no option to seek asylum in the U.S.

What’s different about the Trump plan, according to PolifiFact, quoted at Al Jazeera, is that the U.S. has never sent people who were detained in the United States to Guantánamo. Those arrested here actually had certain rights and protections—which could essentially disappear at Gitmo. Somehow that seems like the point of it all: Americans first. Americans only!

Progressive sanity will re-emerge politically, or so I believe, but how this will happen is anything but clear. The Republican right has certain serious political advantages, even if their basic agenda has only minority support. The prime advantage is billionaire dollars backing their cause. And, of course, creating an “us vs. them” governing mentality has a lot more immediate impact than addressing the world—even one’s enemies—with empathy, understanding, and a sense of connection.

Another difficulty the progressive movement faces is the Democrats, who have drifted ever more centrist-right since the Reagan era, refusing to challenge the Republican agenda head-on and gently cradling the nation’s expanding militarism.

It almost seems like we need to start over: Rosa Parks must refuse to give up her seat on the bus again. What might this mean? If nothing else, the truth about American history must continue to flow and efforts to ban it from libraries and classrooms, to burn it in book fires, must be endlessly challenged. And truth still speaks to us from the mountaintop:

“So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Stevie Wonder was one of more than two dozen superstars who performed at FireAid, a six-hour benefit concert held late last month to raise money for Los Angeles wildfire victims and, according to event organizers, support “long-term initiatives to prevent future fire disasters throughout Southern California.” Viewed by more than 50 million people around the world, the benefit raised more than $100 million.

Before launching into “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” “Superstition,” and “Higher Ground,” Wonder called for unity in the face of the disaster. “In this world today, we have no time for blaming. We have no time for shaming,” he said. “We need to have prayer and come together as a united people of the world.”

Wonder was likely alluding to the thoroughly debunked lies uttered by then-President-elect Donald Trump, who falsely accused then-President Joe Biden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass of mismanaging resources.

If someone on the FireAid stage had remarked how ironic it was that JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs sponsored the event, 50 million people would have heard about the destructive role they are playing, probably for the first time.

Neither Biden, Newsom, nor Bass were at fault, but with all due respect to Mr. Wonder, it is long past time to blame and shame those who are truly responsible for fueling the climate crisis.

One could of course start with Trump, whose first administration rolled back or dismantled nearly 100 environmental safeguards and who—on day one of his new term—ordered federal agencies to begin gutting protections for the air, water, public lands, and the climate. Republican members of Congress, who have amassed 82% of oil and gas companies’ campaign contributions over the last two decades, are also to blame. And then there’s the fossil fuel industry itself, which was aware of the threat its products pose as early as 1954 but publicly denied the science for decades and funded disinformation campaigns to obstruct and delay government climate action.

Other responsible parties, notably banks and insurance companies, are less obvious. Paradoxically, a handful of them were among FireAid’s corporate sponsors, all of which presumably underwrote the concert to demonstrate their bona fides as caring, public-spirited companies. Joining American Express, Kaiser Permanente, and 20 other corporations were four banks—JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, UBS, and U.S. Bancorp—and a financial services company—Capital Group—whose investments undermine the concert’s goal of preventing future fire disasters. In fact, the tens of billions of dollars they collectively invest in fossil fuel-related companies annually will make fire disasters in Southern California—and everywhere else—more likely to happen.

Climate Change the ‘Main Driver’ of Wildfires

The science is clear, regardless of what Donald Trump may claim. Primarily caused by burning fossil fuels, climate change is the “main driver” of an alarming increase in wildfires in the Western United States over the last four decades, according to the findings of a 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“During 1984 to 2000, 1.69 million acres burned over 11 states,” NOAA’s PNAS study press release pointed out. “It doubled in size to [approximately] 3.35 million acres during 2001 to 2018. In 2020, the total annual burned area jumped to 8.8 million acres, more than five times of that in 1984 to 2000.”

“Even though wetter and cooler conditions could offer brief respites,” the press release added, “more intense and frequent wildfires and aridification in the Western states will continue with rising temperatures.”

A study published last November in Science Advances found that temperatures out West have indeed continued to rise since NOAA’s 2021 study, causing drought even when the region experienced normal precipitation due to moisture loss from “evaporative demand,” or atmospheric thirst. Once again, researchers predicted more severe, longer-lasting droughts covering wider areas as temperatures increase.

Just two months after the Science Advances study came out, Los Angeles County was engulfed in flames, prompting a multinational team of scientists at World Weather Attribution to produce a quick analysis. They found that, without a doubt, climate change “increased the likelihood of wildfire disaster in highly exposed Los Angeles area.”

The cost of that disaster was astronomical. A preliminary estimate of damages from the LA wildfires by AccuWeather ranged from $250 billion to $275 billion—more than the losses from the entire 2020 U.S. wildfire season. Other analysts estimate that the wildfires will cost insurers anywhere from $10 billion to $40 billion.

Burning Through Billions

The four banks that sponsored FireAid were among the world’s largest fossil fuel industry financiers from 2016—when the Paris climate accord went into effect—through 2023, according to the most recent “Banking on Climate Chaos” annual report, published by a handful of environmental groups in May 2024.

JPMorgan Chase: Although JPMorgan’s investment of $40.8 billion in fossil fuel, utility, and pipeline companies in 2023 was roughly half (in inflation-adjusted dollars) of what it invested in 2016, it is still the largest underwriter of fossil fuel deals. From 2016 through 2023, the bank—the largest in the United States—invested $430.9 billion (in unadjusted dollars), more than any other bank worldwide. Its top client was ExxonMobil, which received $15 billion, more than twice the $6.48 billion the bank poured into TransCanada Pipelines, its second largest investee.

Besides its relatively paltry donation for LA fire victims, JPMorgan is retreating from international efforts addressing the climate crisis.

Goldman Sachs: Goldman Sachs, which invested $184.9 billion from 2016 through 2023, was the 14th largest investor over that eight-year span. Its two biggest clients were the Saudi Arabian Oil Company ($4.38 billion) and Royal Dutch Shell ($3.2 billion). In 2023, Goldman Sachs invested $8.8 billion and was the fourth largest financier of fracking companies.

UBS: The Swiss-based UBS’s investments in fossil fuel-related companies dropped precipitously in 2023 to $8.8 billion, likely due to the bank’s dramatic profit swings, but between 2016 and 2023, it was the world’s 10th largest funder. Over those eight years, it invested $210.7 billion and was the biggest financier of metallurgic coal companies. UBS’s leading investee was Calpine Corporation, the largest U.S. natural gas and geothermal electricity provider, which received nearly $4 billion. Other top clients included Duke Energy ($3.25 billion); Parsley Energy, a natural gas developer ($3.4 billion); and Buckeye Partners, an oil pipeline company ($3 billion).

U.S. Bancorp: U.S. Bancorp—the fifth-largest U.S. bank—was the 28th largest financier, investing $97.27 billion over the eight years covered by the “Banking on Climate Chaos” report. Among its top investees were Occidental Petroleum ($2.2 billion) and Devon Energy ($1.9 billion). In 2023, U.S. Bancorp invested $12.77 billion and was the ninth biggest financier of fracking companies. (Besides sponsoring FireAid for an undisclosed sum, the company—which has about 200 branches and 4,000 employees in the Los Angeles area—donated a meager $100,000 to the United Way of Greater Los Angeles to help fire victims.)

Capital Group: The fifth financial institution that sponsored FireAid, Capital Group, is one of the world’s largest asset managers. As of May 2024, it held more than $173 billion in shares and bonds in 162 fossil fuel-related companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Conoco Phillips, according to the 2024 report “Investing in Climate Chaos,” which did not document investments on an annual basis.

The Energy Transition Could Take ‘Generations’

JPMorgan, by far the worst of the five financial titans sponsoring FireAid, posed as a good corporate citizen by offering LA fire victims mortgage payment relief and donating $2 million to the American Red Cross, California Community Foundation, and United Way of Greater Los Angeles. But that’s chump change for a bank that posted a record $56.8 billion profit last year, a 19% increase from 2023.

Besides its relatively paltry donation for LA fire victims, JPMorgan is retreating from international efforts addressing the climate crisis. Just days before the bank announced its donation, it announced it was leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a United Nations-sponsored organization of more than 140 banks from 44 countries that have pledged to align their investments and loans with the goal of attaining net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. A year before, in February 2024, JPMorgan quit Climate Action 100+, a $68-trillion investor organization that advocates for reining in world’s largest corporate carbon emitters to reduce financial risk.

JPMorgan says it left CA 100+ because it hired its own climate risk analysts, but it walked away shortly after the investor group began requiring members to broaden their corporate disclosure and implement climate transition plans, according to ESG Dive, a trade journal. The bank did not cite a reason for leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, but news outlets reported that Republican politicians had been pressuring banks to quit even before Trump, a notorious climate science denier, won the election last November.

A JPMorgan spokesperson promised that the bank would “continue to support the banking and investment needs of our clients who are engaged in energy transition and in decarbonizing different sectors of the economy.” And, to its credit, JPMorgan had already pledged to “finance and facilitate more than $2.5 trillion”—including $1 trillion for renewable energy and other “green initiatives”—by 2030 to “help advance long-term climate solutions and contribute to sustainable development.” In 2023 alone, the company invested $300 billion.

But the company remains the top fossil fuel industry financier and will continue to invest, regardless of the consequences. At a September 2022 congressional hearing, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who made $34.5 million that year, was unequivocal. When asked if his company has a policy against funding oil and gas projects, he responded: “Absolutely not. That would be the road to hell for America.” More recently, in April 2024, the company issued a report warning that it will take “decades, or generations, not years” to phase out fossil fuels and hit net-zero targets.

Fossil Energy Companies Are ‘Hugely Important’

Goldman Sachs, the sixth largest U.S. bank, announced in December 2019 that it would no longer invest in oil development in the Arctic or in thermal coal mines worldwide, a first for a U.S. bank. It also said it would invest $750 billion in sustainability financing, which includes green energy, by 2030.

Environmental groups cheered, but stressed that the bank had a long way to go to align its investments to meet net-zero goals. It still does.

Like his counterpart at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon rejects calls to sever his bank’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. “Traditional energy companies are hugely important to the global economy they are hugely important to Goldman Sachs,” he said in 2023, when he made $31 million, a 24% jump from the previous year. “We are all going to continue to finance traditional companies for a long time.”

Likewise, Goldman Sachs quit CA100+ (last August) and the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (last December). “We have made significant progress in recent years on the firm’s net-zero goals and we look forward to making further progress, including by expanding to additional sectors in the coming months,” the bank said when it departed the alliance. “Our priorities remain to help our clients achieve their sustainability goals and to measure and report on our progress.”

Name, Blame, and Shame

Last year was the hottest on record, beating out the next warmest year—2023. Meanwhile, the 10 warmest years since 1850 have all occurred over the last 10 years. In 2024, global temperatures exceeded the pre-industrial (1850 to 1900) average by 2.63°F (1.46°C), only slightly less than the Paris climate agreement’s ambitious goal of limiting the worldwide temperature increase to less than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

The hotter it gets, the more likely such devastating events as the Los Angeles wildfires and Hurricane Helene will be decidedly worse. More neighborhoods will be wiped out. More people will lose their homes. More will die.

Regardless, the world’s largest banks have failed to keep their pledge to support the central aim of the Paris accord, according to a new report by research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance. BNEF analysts calculated that the ratio of financing green energy and infrastructure relative to financing fossil fuel-related ventures must reach 4 to 1 by 2030 to keep any temperature rise below 1.5°C. Since 2016, BNEF found, banks have invested nearly $6 trillion in fossil fuels but only $3.8 trillion in green energy. That’s a trifling 0.63 to 1 ratio. For every dollar invested in fossil fuels, only 63 cents went to clean energy.

The banking ratio is only slightly better now. In 2023, it was 0.89 to 1, according to BNEF, a minor improvement over 2022, when it was 0.74 to 1. And for all that JPMorgan crows it invests in “green initiatives,” its energy-supply banking ratio in 2023 was a measly 0.80 to 1, and it is doubtful that the bank will start investing four times more in green enterprises than in fossil fuel companies anytime soon.

Regardless, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and the other financial firms that sponsored FireAid and donated to local nonprofits aiding fire victims want to be seen as good guys. They correctly assume that the general public has no idea that their investments are ruining the planet. After all, the mainstream news media rarely, if ever, report on this topic, and the trade press that does is mainly read by industry insiders.

So no matter how heartfelt, Stevie Wonder—a celebrated humanitarian in his own right—was wrong. We should call out the people and corporations responsible for the climate crisis. If someone on the FireAid stage had remarked how ironic it was that JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs sponsored the event, 50 million people would have heard about the destructive role they are playing, probably for the first time. A column like this one, unfortunately, does not have that kind of reach.

This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.

New financial reports indicate five of America’s biggest corporations—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Tesla—could win $75 billion in tax breaks if U.S. Congress and the president satisfy demands from corporate lobbyists to reinstate a provision repealed under the 2017 Trump tax law.

The CEOs of these companies may have hoped to gain any number of benefits from attending the second inauguration of President Donald Trump in January, and this tax break is just one possible example.

The tax break allowed companies to immediately deduct the expenses characterized as research and development in the year they are incurred rather than deducting those expenses over several years like other investments. Repeal of this tax break was one of the few revenue-raising provisions in the Trump tax law, and it was supposed to slightly offset the costs of the law’s corporate tax cuts.

Restoring the R&D provision would reduce the collective effective tax rate paid by these five companies for this three-year period by almost two-thirds, from 20% to 7%.

The Trump tax law repealed the R&D expensing break starting in 2022, replacing it with a less generous rule requiring R&D expenses to be deducted over five years. In the previous Congress, the House of Representatives passed a bill reinstating the break retroactive to 2022. That bill did not advance in the Senate, but now that Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House, there is every reason to believe the proposal will be considered again.

Proponents of the tax break make a very questionable argument that it encourages companies to engage in research that benefits society. But reinstating this tax break retroactively obviously cannot accomplish this because it would merely reward companies for research and development investments they already made. The $75 billion saved by these companies would be a pure windfall that does not require them to do anything going forward.

The 2024 House-passed bill that would have reinstated this tax break was controversial, but that legislation at least offset the costs by shutting down a different tax break that was being fraudulently claimed by unscrupulous accountants on behalf of businesses that were not actually eligible for it. That legislation also included a badly needed expansion in the Child Tax Credit. Republicans in the Senate blocked that bill because they hoped they could later enact tax legislation that would be even more generous to corporations—as they are now trying to do.

The five tech companies profiled here have disclosed that in the three years the R&D tax increase has been in place, their federal income tax bills increased by at least $75 billion as a result of this provision.

These companies have reaped huge windfalls from Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law, which included a reduction in the statutory corporate tax rate from 35 to 21%. They also benefit from special breaks and loopholes allowing them to pay effective tax rates that are even lower than the statutory rate of 21%. And they will pay even lower effective tax rates if President Trump and Congress reinstate the R&D tax break.

For example, the federal corporate income taxes that Apple reports it paid over the past three years come to 18% of its reported income during that period. That is another way of saying Apple paid an effective tax rate of 18% during the previous three years. If Congress retroactively repeals the R&D tax change, the company’s three-year tax rate would be cut in half, to 9%.

Meta’s three-year tax rate on $133 billion of U.S. income would drop from 15% to just 4%. And the three-year tax rate of Elon Musk’s Tesla would drop from the 0% the company currently reports to negative 22%.

Restoring the R&D provision would reduce the collective effective tax rate paid by these five companies for this three-year period by almost two-thirds, from 20% to 7%.

The research and development provision at stake in this year’s tax debate was one of the few revenue-raisers embedded in the 2017 law and served to make the plan overall appear somewhat less costly. Repealing this tax change is a stealthy way to make the corporate tax cuts even bigger than they were when enacted in 2017, and it would allow the five companies profiled here to shelter two-thirds of their U.S. income from federal income tax.

“They are coming to replace us.”

It sounds like the tagline of a horror movie. And indeed, what the far right whispers into ears, chants at hate-filled rallies, and translates into odious legislation in white-majority countries is very much a horror movie in that it is both scary and untrue.

In country after country, the far right has been promoting its horror movie premise that a horde of faceless immigrants is flooding across the border, aided by liberals, and displacing the native-born population. This campaign built around the Great Replacement conspiracy has mobilized White people of different socioeconomic backgrounds to amplify their pride, their power, and their privilege in the face of a vast, inchoate fear.

Fear wins elections, unfortunately. But let’s be clear, the Great Replacement is one of the greatest hoaxes of recent memory, right up there with the notion that COVID vaccines kill people rather than save them. Immigrants, after all, are saving countries throughout the Global North, which otherwise would be not-so-slowly erasing themselves. The EU’s fertility rate, at 1.46 in 2022, is well below the replacement rate of 2.1. The U.S. rate, which dropped to 1.62 in 2023, is not substantially different.

The Great Replacement, once whispered in the corners of bars and Internet chatrooms, is now being shouted in public places, as the far-right campaign has gone mainstream. Donald Trump is probably more responsible for this dismal state of affairs than anyone else.

The Great Replacement, once whispered in the corners of bars and Internet chatrooms, is now being shouted in public places, as the far-right campaign has gone mainstream.

The once-and-again president hasn’t just translated the Great Replacement theory into domestic policy by closing the border with Mexico and deporting as many people as possible. He has weaponized the theory as part of U.S. foreign policy. It’s no longer a matter of stopping people from leaving “shithole” countries to come to the United States.

To the people of Gaza, Trump has essentially proclaimed, “We are coming to replace you.”

Out of the Blue?

Trump has long flirted with the Great Replacement theory. During the 2024 election, he asserted that Democrats were encouraging an inflow of the undocumented so that they could vote against Trump (they couldn’t, by law, so they didn’t). Before the 2016 election, Trump claimed that it would be the last U.S. election that Republicans had a chance of winning (for the same erroneous reason).

Being wrong has never stopped Trump. He doubles down, which means he’s even wronger the next time around.

Trump’s hostility toward Palestine and Palestinians is also nothing new. During his first term, charging “chronic bias against Israel,” Trump withdrew the United States from the UN Human Rights Council. He closed the PLO’s office in Washington, D.C. and deleted funding for UNRWA, the agency that supports Palestinian refugees. In a boon to the Israeli right, Trump broke a global convention by moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

All that time, he was trying to negotiate a megadeal to facilitate the diplomatic recognition of Israel by all major regional actors. As I wrote in 2020,

Where does this leave Palestinians? Up a creek without a state. The Trump administration has used its much-vaunted “deal of the century” to make any future deal well-nigh impossible. In collaboration with Netanyahu, Trump has strangled the two-state solution in favor of a single Israeli state with a permanent Palestinian underclass.

But what Trump is proposing now with respect to Gaza is hubris beyond anything he has ever publicly considered. The president has proposed to expel all 2 million citizens of Gaza to nearby countries, none of which has even the slightest interest in accepting them. The Gazans would have no right of refusal and no right of return. Trump has threatened both Jordan and Egypt with economic penalties if they don’t welcome the expelled. Given domestic considerations, neither country is likely to bow to that kind of pressure.

Imperialism Repackaged

The United States was late to the nineteenth-century game of colonialism. Even though there wasn’t as much land to grab by the 1890s, the United States jumped right in: Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Panama Canal.

Donald Trump must feel as if the United States is late to the game this time around, too. Russia has grabbed a chunk of Ukraine. Israel is reasserting control over Gaza. Turkey sliced off a piece of Syria. China effectively absorbed Hong Kong.

Nothing betokens a healthy empire like a steady diet of territory. Thus, Trump has talked of reasserting control over the Panama Canal. He is eyeing the vastness of Greenland like Secretary of State William Seward once coveted Alaska. Even good neighbor Canada isn’t excluded from Trump’s greedy gaze.

Like most fabulizing colonialists, Trump has promised the Gazans that “We’ll build beautiful communities for the 1.9 million people. We’ll build beautiful communities, safe communities — could be five, six, could be two, but we’ll build safe communities a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is.”

The Gazans know that this is nonsense. Overcrowded refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon have existed for over 70 years, and no one has managed to turn those into “beautiful” or “safe” communities. Like a slumlord eager to get rid of tenants so that he can raze the property and build a new skyscraper, Trump doesn’t care about the current inhabitants. The focus instead is on building an oligarchs’ retreat that’s a short flight from Israeli, Gulf, and Egyptian elites.

The Great Replacement is a clear case of psychological projection, like an inveterate liar who is always calling his opponents liars or a serial rapist who constantly complains about rapists coming from over the border. “They” are not the problem; we the wealthy countries are the problem. Waves of immigrants are escaping wars that rich countries supported or economic conditions that rich nations helped to create through neoliberal reforms or climate conditions that rich industrialized powers have largely produced and subsequently ignored.

All these conditions have converged to push Gazans off the land. Yet, despite this adversity, they want to stay on their land and achieve some measure of political sovereignty. Finally, there’s a people who want to stay, and now Trump wants them to go.

The irony would be laughable—if it weren’t a war crime.

As the DNC met to elect a new chairman, attendees admitted that the Democratic Party doesn’t have a message. If they had a message, they don’t know what it would say or to whom it would be delivered. Nor do they have a charismatic leader in the wings who might be able to articulate that message.

The post Democrats’ Work Is Done first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Democrats’ Work Is Done appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In less than three weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump secured a cease-fire in Gaza, spoke directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, and kickstarted diplomacy to end the Ukraine war. At the same time, he has also put forward some idiotic ideas, such as pushing Palestinians out of Gaza and making Canada the 51st state.

But it raises important questions: Why didn't the Biden administration choose to push for an end to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine? Why didn't the majority of the Democrats demand it? Instead, they went down the path of putting Liz Cheney on a pedestal and having former Vice President Kamala Harris brag about having the most lethal military in the world while Trump positioned himself as a peace candidate—justifiably or not.

A profound reckoning is needed within the Democratic Party to save it from slipping into becoming neocon by default.

Undoubtedly, Trump's plans in Gaza may make matters worse and his diplomacy with Putin may fail. But that isn't the point.

The point is: Why did Trump choose to pursue diplomacy and seek an end to the wars, and why did the Democrats under former President Joe Biden choose to transform the party into one that embraced war and glorified warmongers like Cheney, while protecting and enabling a genocide?

What happened that caused the party to vilify its own voices for peace—such as Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—while embracing some of the architects of the Iraq war?

And all of this, of course, in complete defiance of where the party base was (throughout the Gaza war, the base supported a cease-fire with 70% majority, for instance).

A profound reckoning is needed within the Democratic Party to save it from slipping into becoming neocon by default.

And with the pace at which Trump is moving, that reckoning needs to come fast. It will, for instance, be a severe mistake if the party positions itself to the right of Trump and reflexively opposes him on every foreign policy issue instead of basing the party's positions on solid principles, such as centering diplomacy, military restraint, and peace. Trump currently speaks more about peace than the Democrats do.

A senior Democratic lawmaker asked me rhetorically last week if I knew anyone who was happy with the foreign policy of Biden and voted for Harris on that basis.

I was happy to hear that the question was being asked. That's a good first step.

The House Republican budget released Wednesday by Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington is an extreme giveaway to the wealthy at the expense of families who already have a hard time making ends meet. It would raise families’ healthcare, food, and college costs; increase the nation’s economic risks; and worsen poverty and hardship for tens of millions of people, while doubling down on huge tax giveaways for wealthy households and businesses. This budget plan reflects a stark betrayal of U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign promises to protect families who struggle financially.

The proposed budget’s reconciliation instructions—the directives to the tax-writing and other committees that set up a special fast-track process for passing budget and tax legislation—make the Republican agenda clear: costly tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses, paired with deeply harmful cuts in programs and services for families and communities. This is an upside-down plan that prioritizes the wealthy and well-connected over families for whom the cost of healthcare, college, and food is a serious concern. A reconciliation bill that meets the reconciliation directives to each committee would add trillions to the debt over the decade.

For weeks, House Republicans have been circulating proposals that would take health coverage and food assistance away from millions of people and raise the cost of student loans to offset part of the cost of extending the expiring 2017 tax cuts. Based on various proposals, 36 million people or more could be at risk of losing their health coverage through Medicaid, and more than 40 million people could receive less help from SNAP to buy groceries, millions of them potentially losing their food assistance altogether. About 5 million undergraduate students a year use federal student loans to pay for college, and many are at risk of higher costs to go to college given the cuts assigned to the Education and Workforce Committee. Millions of borrowers no longer in school could also be at risk for higher loan costs.

Extending the tax cuts for the top 1% costs $1.1 trillion through 2034, roughly the same amount they are proposing in cuts for millions who rely on Medicaid for health coverage and who use SNAP to buy groceries.

These aren’t just numbers. The loss of Medicaid means, for example, a parent can’t get cancer treatment, and a young adult can’t get insulin to control their diabetes. Cuts to food assistance mean a parent skips meals so their children can eat or an older person who lost their job has no way to buy groceries. These cuts will affect people in every state and of all races and ethnicities, but the impacts will often be especially severe in poorer states and among Black, Latino, and Indigenous people and people in rural communities, who have higher poverty rates and thus are more likely to qualify for food assistance and health coverage. Rather than expanding opportunity, the budget would make it harder for people to afford the healthcare and food they need to survive and succeed.

In addition to taking food assistance and health coverage away from people who need it, the budget plan could result in enormous cost shifts to state, local, territorial, and tribal governments, which are already facing tougher fiscal conditions than in recent years. And when they can’t meet those higher costs, the impacts on people and families will be severe.

All of this for what? To give tax cuts to high-income people for whom the cost of eggs or prescription drugs is at most an afterthought. The spending cuts required by the reconciliation instructions total $1.5 trillion, which is about the cost of extending the expiring tax cuts through 2034 just for those with incomes above roughly $400,000. Extending those tax cuts would give households with incomes in the top 1%, who make roughly $743,000 a year or more, a tax cut averaging $62,000 a year—significantly more than the total income of most households at risk of losing Medicaid or SNAP.

Even as Republicans promise to extend tax cuts skewed to the top, they are noticeably silent about extending one tax cut that is well targeted to people who need it: the improved premium tax credits that since 2021 have made Affordable Care Act marketplace health coverage far more affordable. Failure to extend this tax cut would raise premiums for more than 20 million people, including at least 3 million small business owners and self-employed workers, and render an estimated 4 million people uninsured.

Outside of the reconciliation instructions, the budget blueprint calls for significant additional, unspecified cuts, including cuts to the part of the budget that funds K-12 education, Pell Grants for college students, medical research, transportation and flight safety, clean air and water projects, and customer service at the Social Security Administration and the IRS.

The Numbers

The budget resolution directs the House Energy and Commerce Committee to reduce the deficit by $880 billion over 10 years, a target Republicans have indicated they will hit primarily by cutting Medicaid. Similarly, it directs the House Agriculture Committee to reduce the deficit by $230 billion over 10 years, which the committee would achieve primarily by cutting SNAP benefits, restricting eligibility, or both. And it directs the Education and Workforce Committee to reduce the deficit by $330 billion, the bulk of which is likely to come from making student loans more expensive.

These cut numbers are a “floor”; committees could cut even more as the legislative process advances. The budget resolution even includes a non-binding policy statement indicating a desire to make deeper cuts. (The directive to the House Ways and Means Committee may also assume cuts to energy tax credits, which would increase utility bills, imperil energy reliability, and threaten jobs and investment nationwide.)

This budget also cuts myriad investments in the budget area that covers everything from schools to roads, medical research, assistance with rents, and administering Social Security, known as non-defense discretionary (NDD) spending. In 2024, total NDD funding outside of veterans’ medical care was 14% below the 2010 level, after taking into account inflation and population growth, and it will likely fall further in 2025, when appropriations are finalized. The House Republican budget would continue this disinvestment in the future.

The House Republican budget’s path of less opportunity, higher poverty, and more inequality is the wrong direction for our nation.

As noted above, the budget plan could result in enormous cost shifts to state, local, territorial, and tribal governments. Some of the proposed cuts in Medicaid and SNAP would force them to pick up a much larger share of the programs’ costs or leave people without needed help. Cuts in funding for education, childcare, transportation, and other services would also leave states and localities to fill in the holes or see serious degradation in basic public services. If some states are better able than others to fill in those holes, the already large differences among states in areas such as education funding and quality will grow.

The budget would cut Medicaid, SNAP, and a broad set of public services and make college more costly, but not to reduce deficits or respond to a national emergency; instead to offset a portion of Republicans’ profligate tax agenda. The reconciliation instructions allow for the Ways and Means Committee to increase the deficit by $4.5 trillion through 2034. This is $900 billion more than is needed to extend the expiring 2017 tax provisions over that time period, signaling that more tax cuts will be added on top of the already expensive 2017 tax cuts and could include additional regressive corporate tax cuts. (Note that the reconciliation directives only go through 2034, so include nine years of new tax policy because the 2017 tax cuts are already in effect through 2025.)

Underscoring the House Republicans’ upside-down priorities: extending the tax cuts for the top 1% costs $1.1 trillion through 2034, roughly the same amount they are proposing in cuts for millions who rely on Medicaid for health coverage and who use SNAP to buy groceries. This is the same old trickle-down nonsense that has dramatically worsened inequality in income and wealth.

As large as the tax cuts are, the Budget Committee claims that the budget plan, if followed, would achieve deficit reduction by using unreasonable estimates of economic growth and its resulting impact on government revenues and spending. Their claimed macroeconomic “bonus” of $2.6 trillion over 10 years is far larger than independent estimates of macroeconomic effects of extending the tax cuts done by diverse entities like the Tax Foundation, Tax Policy Center, Yale Budget Lab, Joint Committee on Taxation, Congressional Budget Office, and Penn-Wharton Budget Model. While these were not estimates of this precise budget plan, it’s extremely unlikely that they would show a bonus anywhere near this size. And it should be noted that the Trump administration’s planned mass deportations (supported by the increased spending in the budget plan) as well as restrictions on new immigration and tariffs are all projected to reduce economic growth.

When you strip away the budget’s “bonus,” the budget would increase the debt by $1.6 trillion over the next decade—driven by expensive tax cuts—while increasing poverty, increasing the cost of a college education, raising families’ costs for food and healthcare, and leaving more people without health coverage. Coupled with the potential for tariffs to raise consumers’ prices for many goods, this agenda is a stark betrayal from the -resident’s promises during the campaign to look out for people who face financial struggles.

The House Republican budget’s path of less opportunity, higher poverty, and more inequality is the wrong direction for our nation. Unfortunately, Senate Republicans appear poised to head in a similar direction, only through two reconciliation bills rather than one. Congress should return to the drawing board and craft a budget that broadens opportunity, lowers costs, and invests in people and families, while responsibly raising the revenues needed to make those investments and reduce economic risks associated with high debt.

The world is in danger, mind-numbingly so, from a combination of crises: disease, hunger, mass displacement, racial and economic inequality, war and the threat of more war, a rampaging climate crisis, and an accelerating nuclear arms race (and that’s just for starters)—all occurring in a climate of massive mis- and disinformation that makes it ever harder to build a consensus toward solutions to the multiple problems we face.

Words can’t fully express our current predicament. We need other tools and other ways of making sense of the situation we now find ourselves in.

This should be a time for action and activism on behalf of our species and our planet. While there’s certainly a fair amount of that already, the combined weight of the risks we face makes all too many of us turn inward toward family and friends, or outward to find scapegoats for our problems. And yes, there are still moments of joy, optimism, and constructive action. Unfortunately, they are increasingly hard to sustain amid relentless daily attacks on people’s lives, livelihoods, and basic dignity.

One of the best ways to find a place of balance and light amid all the chaos is by creating and appreciating art, which can get to the heart of the matter by tapping not just the intellect but the emotions, putting us in touch with a deeper sense of meaning too often ignored in our rush to deal with the crises of the moment.

Sending Out an SOS

It’s in this context that I read and viewed Promemoria—Reminder (Sending Out an SOS) by EMA (Enrico Muratore Aprosio), a Geneva-based human rights advocate, humanitarian, and artist. The words in the book, which addresses Covid-19, the climate, and the prospects of nuclear war through poetry, prose, and storytelling, are compelling. But the artworks that punctuate the text are truly stunning, using bright colors and complex designs that incorporate pictures of both historical and imaginary figures—its images ranging from Karl Marx to Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan to the Mona Lisa (wearing a Covid-19 protective mask).

The book honors the spirit of altruism and courage, most notably in a section dedicated to Mbaye Diagne, a Senegalese peacekeeper who saved up to 1,000 lives amid the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, only to be killed in a mortar attack 12 days before he was set to return home.

Melissa Parke, director general of the Nobel Prize-winning International Coalition to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, captures the sense of the book well, suggesting that Aprosio’s “use of beautiful animals, striking colors, and magical happenings communicates both the urgency of the situation we face and reminds us of what we stand to lose if we don’t change course.”

Not only will the book have its own impact, but it will hopefully inspire others to produce projects that address our most urgent problems in new ways, moving people to take action grounded in our common humanity.

Appreciating what we still stand to lose couldn’t be more crucial in the world we now face. Savoring everything from the signal achievements of humanity (writ large) to the pleasures and accomplishments of our everyday lives matters deeply, both as a motivation to continue working for change in an ever-messier world and as fuel for sustaining us in a struggle of unknown duration.

Yes, EMA’s book is grimly grounded in reality, even as it (literally) paints a picture of a world that could be so much better. One of my favorite panels in the book is entitled “Every Day More Bullshit,” just because, well, it seems all too sadly appropriate to the moment we’re in.

There’s also a chapter called “Radioactive Beasts,” inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel Animal Farm. The animals Aprosio writes about are worried by the state of the world and concerned that humans aren’t taking the risks posed by current conflicts seriously enough.

In April 2023, some of Aprosio’s fictional beasts were projected onto buildings in New York City’s Times Square with support from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Other portions of the book could be displayed across this embattled planet of ours in a similar fashion to good effect.

There’s more to EMA’s book than can be taken in at a sitting, or even many sittings, or certainly summarized in an essay like this. Still, get your hands on it if you can. It can serve as an inspirational reference work you can dip into at any time to reenergize yourself or contemplate what a different world might indeed look like. In that way, it reminds me of the effects of Afrofuturist art and literature, not because the forms necessarily resemble each other, but because both approaches underscore the desperate need for a bold vision of what a new world might look like—a vision of what anyone trying to change things might dream of.

Artists for Peace

Promemoria is anything but the only current art project that takes on nuclear weapons and related dangers. One of the most interesting current networks is Artists Against the Bomb, a global organization of creators who have produced an amazing array of antinuclear posters, among other works.

Another vital project in a world where nuclear weapons are proliferating and the U.S. is planning to invest up to $2 trillion dollars in the (yes, this is indeed the term!) “modernization” of its nuclear force in the coming decades is Bombshelltoe. It’s a policy and arts collective that defines itself as “a creative organization pushing for an active exploration of arts, culture, and history to promote nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, and disarmament for the next generation.” One of its prominent efforts is the Atomic Terrain Project, which highlights how nuclear weapons have “seeped into our waters and tapped into our soil” and “continue to harm all life, human and non-human alike.”

I was fortunate enough to see an exhibition that the project mounted at the 2024 New York Art Book Fair entitled “How to Make a Bomb”—a book with the same title was also released then—organized and presented by Gabriella Hirst, Warren Harper, Tammy Nguyen, and Lovely Umayam (the founder of Bombshelltoe). The exhibit was built around a flower, the Rosa Floribunda, or—yes!—“Atom Bomb,” which Hirst describes as “a garden rose that was cultivated and named in 1953 during the Cold War arms race to commemorate Britain’s newfound status as a nuclear power.” Hirst has taken the lead in cultivating (and you might say pacifying) that rose, while getting it planted in gardens throughout the United Kingdom and beyond as an antinuclear gesture of beauty.

At the book fair, attendees could learn how to plant and maintain just such a rose while engaging in conversations about the history and devastating impact of nuclear weapons or checking out basic documents and books about the nuclear age. Such an indirect (even flowery!) route into truly grim subject matter drew interest from people who might not normally pick up a book on, or read an article about, the dangers of nuclear weapons but were fascinated by the physical process of grafting a rose and then willing to stay for open-ended conversations about the growing nuclear dangers in our world.

When asked why the project chose to use a rose as an entry point into discussions of such ominous and grim subject matter, Lovely Umayam noted that “nuclear issues alone can feel abstract and alarmist” and eerily unapproachable. As Gabriella Hirst put it, the project “is about taking the sublime into your own hands and working through that in small ways… to reduce fear among non-experts.”

At the same book fair where I encountered the Rose Project, I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Rejali, an organizer of the art and political website Khabar Keslan. Recent essays there include an interview with Palestinian filmmaker Khaled Jarrar, but I was first drawn to the project’s printed works, including reproductions of stamps from Iran and South Asia going back to the 1950s. There were, of course, numerous stamps portraying the once-dreaded Shah of Iran. There was also one of the CIA’s logo with blood running down it, a reference to the agency’s role in the 1953 coup that installed the Shah as Iran’s autocratic ruler. Perhaps the most emotionally powerful product of Khabar Keslan, however, may have been a collection of poems entitled “Salute to Olives” by the late Omar al-Bargouthi, many of which were written while he was being held in Israeli prisons.

On a planet where nuclear dangers are only growing, both Promemoria and the Atomic Terrain project underscore the importance of finding new ways to communicate about this increasingly fragile and endangered planet of ours that inspire creativity and action rather than fear, paralysis, and denial. At a time when challenges to fundamental rights are hurtling toward us at warp speed, taking the time to experience artworks of any kind can seem like a distinct luxury, but don’t believe that for a second. Such art is a key to reclaiming our humanity and getting in touch with the creative, collaborative impulses that could help save our planet. A pause, artistic in nature, to reflect and recharge our psychic batteries can go a long way toward helping us to cope with this all too strange present moment and build for the future. Promemoria provides us with that precious opportunity.

A Brief History of Culture and Resistance

Music, theater, painting, and other forms of artistic expression have, in fact, been part of every major movement for change in recent memory. The Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s, funded as part of the Works Progress Administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the era of the Great Depression, hired unemployed performers and writers who produced more than 800 plays and dance events. In the process, they highlighted work by under-represented groups, including African Americans via the Negro Theatre Project and the African-American Dance Unit. It also funded foreign language plays in Spanish, Yiddish, and German until Congressman Martin Dies, Jr., head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, led a successful charge to defund the program because of its advocacy of racial equality and other progressive themes.

Theater, however, continued to play a central role in progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s, from Teatro Campesino, born during the United Farm Workers Union’s organizing drives in California; to the Bread and Puppet Theater, a staple of anti-war efforts; and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, whose plays captured a whole range of progressive themes, often in hilarious fashion. And don’t forget the freedom songs that were at the core of the civil rights movement, sung by demonstrators at mass rallies and activists detained in local jails in the South.

The anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s was also sustained and amplified by works of art. Its best-known cultural product was undoubtedly the TV movie The Day After, a fictionalized treatment of the impacts of a nuclear war viewed by more than 100 million people when it aired on ABC in November 1983. But there was also a steady drumbeat of anti-nuclear cartoons, some of which were assembled in a widely distributed collection entitled Warheads. Joel Andreas’s 77-page graphic comic book, Addicted to War: Why America Can’t Kick Militarism, proved to be a primer on the roots of the American war system from the 19th-century vision of “manifest destiny” to (in an updated edition) the Global War on Terror, taking on war profiteers and the role of the media along the way.

More recently, groups like the Yes Men and Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir have lampooned corporations and their executives through street theater and by posing as participants in corporate gatherings (and so underscoring the absurdity of their activities and world views). The Yes Men describe their work as using “humor and trickery to highlight the corporate takeover of society, the neoliberal delusion that allows it, [and] the corporate Democrats’ responsibility for our current situation.” Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir ridicule materialism in all its forms from Starbucks displacing local coffee shops to the excesses of the Disney Store in New York’s Times Square.

Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, has similarly engaged in a wide range of politically focused art projects, ranging from a Peace Symphony performed in Hiroshima to The Book of Ice, which addresses climate change, to a wide array of films, articles, and concerts. Robin Bell Visuals has produced films and art installations, including projecting the words “Pay Bribes Here” on the side of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. And there have been scores of anti-war anthems produced in virtually every genre of modern music from folk to jazz to rock to hip hop to heavy metal.

My colleague Khody Akhavi makes short compelling videos on topics ranging from the dangerous rise of AI-driven weaponry to the impact of the funding of think tanks by weapons contractors, the Pentagon, and foreign governments. And the Center for Artistic Activism partners with advocacy groups on specific projects, schools them in artistic techniques, and helps them build art into their campaigns and public education efforts. Their slogan: “we make social and environmental change more effective—and more creative.”

Better yet, the artists and projects cited above are just a sampling of the many forms of political art that have attracted audiences and encouraged activism at the local, national, and global levels. Promemoria is a worthy addition to this tradition. Not only will the book have its own impact, but it will hopefully inspire others to produce projects that address our most urgent problems in new ways, moving people to take action grounded in our common humanity. Given the world we’re now in, it can’t happen soon enough.