“Africa is Rising!”—or so the narrative goes. But the sun of economic growth does not shine on everyone. African youth face record-high unemployment, political underrepresentation, and limited access to resources. In 2024 alone, 19 African countries have held elections, yet young people—one-third of the continent’s population—remain largely excluded from leadership. So, it isn’t surprising that in this same year, African youth, mobilizing on digital platforms, have come out loud and clear against economic hardship and government inaction.

The first time we felt digital and social media mobilization in Kenya was in 2019 in the weeks leading up to the 2019 International Women’s Day. Feminists in Kenya planned and digitally mobilized nationwide protests against femicide to draw attention to the rising cases of femicide and Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in the country that went with no arrests of the perpetrators or the government addressing the issue. The protests were mobilized on social media under the hashtag #EndFemicideKE/#TotalShutdownKE.

As seen in the #RejectFinanceBill protests in Kenya, the #FearlessOctober protests in Nigeria, and youth-led movements in Uganda and Mozambique, today’s youth are not merely reacting to the rising cost of living but are pushing for profound systemic change.

Between August and October, the Kenya National Police Service reported 97 cases of femicide. The real numbers must be higher since some of the cases don’t get reported to authorities. During the 16 Days of Activism 2024, Kenyans across the country held forums to highlight the femicide issue. This culminated in nationwide protests held across the country on the International Human Rights Day 2024, calling on the president to declare femicide a national disaster. As usual the peaceful protests were met by police brutality, with the police teargassing innocent protestors.

This social youth-led movement, started by Gen Z protesters in Kenya in June, has now spread to Uganda, Nigeria, and Mozambique. Waves of young people are rising to challenge electoral malpractices, bad governance, corruption, and tax hikes. African youth, leveraging social media and operating without funding, have thus emerged as a powerful force for change, echoing the historical independence movements of the mid-20th century. With the majority of the protests driven by men and women under 30, there’s significant potential to create long-lasting momentum for good governance, economic justice, an end to corruption, and better electoral management.

#RejectFinanceBill2024 in Kenya

The weeks leading up to the first physical #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests in Kenya on June 18 and 19 were dominated by general discontent with proposed taxes on basic commodities like sanitary products, cooking oil, and bread. Social media platforms were abuzz with calls of “enough is enough” as platform users explained how much the bill would drive up the cost of living for most average citizens. The general feeling was “we need to do something” about this bill before life got much more difficult than it already was.

Within days, users had circulated a date, venue, and dress code on social media and were downloading the Zello walkie-talkie app en masse. What followed next was historic as young Kenyans in all parts of the country took to the streets to protest the Finance Bill in what became known as the #RejectFinanceBill2024 and #OccupyParliament protests.

Uganda, Nigeria, and Mozambique: Social Media and Youth

Following Kenya’s example, anti-corruption protests erupted in Uganda in July. Then August and October saw Nigeria’s #EndBadGovernance protests and #FearlessOctober protests against the cost-of-living crisis and bad governance. In Mozambique, citizens took massively to the streets to protest against electoral malpractices following the October 9 elections.

As in Kenya, all these protests have more in common than how violently they were dealt with: excessive police force, extra-judicial killings, abductions, torture, and hundreds of injuries.

The vast majority of protesters are young people, and social media played a pivotal role in getting them out on the street. It helped them facilitate real-time updates, coordinate demonstrations, counter misinformation, and obtain legal aid by crowdfunding for arrested activists. By circumventing traditional media, young activists exposed abuses and united communities, forcing authorities to confront this digitally-savvy and highly organized force.

Leaderless, Tribeless, Classless and Fearless

Historically, Kenyan politics has been divided along ethnic and tribal lines, with voting blocs often rallying behind leaders from their communities. The Gen Z movement, however, has broken this mold. Young activists have shifted the focus from ethnic loyalty to broader issues like equality, social justice, and government accountability.

Under the “tribeless, leaderless, party-less” tagline, the #RejectFinanceBill protests shunned traditional political affiliations and adopted a spontaneous, decentralized model. This approach gave the movement flexibility to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, such as evading police by frequently shifting protest sites. Without a clear hierarchy, the protests continued despite arrests, as authorities struggled to suppress an ever-evolving, leaderless movement.

The Kenyan protests took the government by surprise. Previously, youth complaints were confined to social media. Now, they were on the streets nationwide, transcending tribal and party lines. The government’s response was violent, resulting in dozens of deaths and abductions. Even today, police isolate and kidnap perceived protest leaders, many of whom end up dead or traumatized from their experiences. The Kenya Police Service has however denied this.

Rejecting Savior Politics

Africa’s political history is marked by leaders who position themselves as “saviors” promising utopia while failing to build sustainable systems. This narrative has bred disillusionment as youth recognize the need for systemic change, not just individual leaders. Gen Z activists across Africa are increasingly demanding transparency and accountability, emphasizing structures that outlast personalities and prevent corruption.

This year’s protests also signal another shift: African youth are questioning whether their leaders’ personal politics align with the principles of justice, equality, and inclusion. This younger generation is looking beyond mere representation to evaluate leaders on their stance against patriarchy, homophobia, and tribalism. Are they committed to redressing historical injustices and fighting systemic oppression? Activists believe these questions should determine the support any leader receives.

The Future of Youth-Led Activism in Africa

With the majority of activists under 30, Africa’s Gen Z is set to reshape the political landscape. Supporting these young Africans, rather than depending on traditional “savior” figures, is essential. Leaderless, decentralized movements have proven to be effective at disrupting the status quo.

As seen in the #RejectFinanceBill protests in Kenya, the #FearlessOctober protests in Nigeria, and youth-led movements in Uganda and Mozambique, today’s youth are not merely reacting to the rising cost of living but are pushing for profound systemic change. By combining digital activism with physical presence on the streets, African youth are demonstrating their commitment to a transformed and empowered continent and broader systemic change.

Dear President Biden,

Rumor has it that you’re considering blanket pardons for certain persons whom you have reason to believe the incoming, self-proclaimed vindictive Donald Trump administration may prosecute for alleged crimes, when they in fact did nothing other than carry out the duties of their government positions. Your inclination to save these people from the burden of potential future politically motivated prosecution is admirable. But there are a far greater number of innocent people that you might be able to spare from fates far worse than the aggravation and expense of defending themselves from political and legal retribution — the 2.2 million inhabitants of Gaza.

Some people—potential recipients included—think preemptive pardons would be a bad idea, because it might be seen to imply guilt in cases where the people in question are in fact innocent of any crime. Whether they are correct in that assessment we don’t know, but there would be no such potential downside in “pardoning” Gazans, the vast majority of whom are not only not guilty of any crime but are the victims of one—a war crime that is massive and ongoing.

As you’ve no doubt heard, Amnesty International has recently concluded that in its ongoing Gaza assault, Israel is committing “prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.”

I do understand that you might consider using the word “genocide” in connection with Israel to be simply beyond the pale—even if both the U.S. and Israel have ratified the Genocide Convention that defined it—in that it was the extermination campaign waged against the Jewish people that caused the crime to be defined in the first place—and is generally cited as the justification for the creation of Israel.

However, you also probably know that although he did not use the word “genocide,” Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s defense minister during the 2014 Gaza War, has declared “on behalf of commanders who serve in northern Gaza,” that “War crimes are being committed here.” And we know that the Administration is quite aware of the “conquering, annexing, ethnic cleansing” Yaalon cites as Israeli policy ever since the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre. After all, on October 13, 2024, your Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin signed a letter to the Israeli Ministers of Defense and Strategic Affairs calling for improved humanitarian conditions in regard to increasing access to food aid, ending forced evacuation, and opening border crossings in Gaza. They even went so far as to suggest that should the Israelis not improve conditions within 30 days your Administration might enforce U.S. laws prohibiting transmission of weapons to nations blocking humanitarian aid. Unfortunately, however, Israel didn’t—and you didn’t.

I don’t expect you to have the statistics at your finger tips—and numbers in war will seldom be exact—but the German online data gathering platform Statista puts the number of Israelis killed in the initial Hamas onslaught at 1,200 and records 380 additional Israeli military deaths since that time. During the same period it counts 44,502 Gazan deaths resulting from the Israeli military response. That’s a 28–1 death ratio. This in addition to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimate of more than 62,000 additional deaths from starvation as of October 7, 2024, as well as something in excess of 5,000 more due to the destruction of medical facilities.

We realize that you can’t actually issue a “pardon” to the people of Gaza, in that you can’t simply order the slaughter and starvation to cease. But—given that the Watson Institute also calculated that America’s military contribution to Israel’s Gaza campaign cost “at least $22.76 billion and counting” up to that point—you could obviously make a big difference by cutting the cash flow. And, as the Blinken/Austin letter indicated, you would clearly have the force of American law on your side. Perhaps then Israel—and the world—might no longer think that it could continue to act with impunity in regard to Palestinians; that there might be consequences.

If nothing else, perhaps you will consider the children involved. I suspect you’ve heard that as far back as November 6, 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” You may not, however, have heard the rather harsher way some Israeli fans put it a year later, following a recent soccer match in Amsterdam. As NBC News reported it, they actually sang the words: “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there.”

Were you to issue that metaphorical pardon—whose impact would be far from metaphorical—we might certainly ask if Donald Trump couldn’t just immediately reinstate it. Yes he could, and probably would. But if his re-ascendancy to the White House should require making the case for resuming the shipment of 2000-pound American bombs for Israel to drop on the already devastated enclave—rather than simply involving a seamless continuity of policy—well, I think even you might have trouble buying that argument.

Mr. President, I do not claim to be of your political stripe; I was a Bernie Sanders supporter. Yet your administration has exceeded my expectations in many ways. For one, I didn’t really ever expect to see a U.S. president on a labor picket line—unless Bernie got elected. (And I’ll never forget you for telling Donald Trump to “shut up” during your 2020 debate.) A significant factor in this, it seems, was that, unlike Hillary Clinton, you took him and us—his supporters—seriously, even going so far as to establish joint Biden/Sanders-campaign issues committees before your nominating convention. I think that to a degree Sanders steered your administration toward the better angels of our nature at its outset. You should let him do it again on your way out. His motion to cut off military support for Israel’s barbarism failed badly in the Senate, but you could make it happen.

Lyndon Johnson presided over the introduction of a slew of programs collectively known as the “Great Society” which changed life for the better for a lot of Americans. But what is he most remembered for? His pursuit of the Vietnam War. Imagine how differently he’d be regarded had he the courage to end that disaster before he left office. You face a similar choice. Will the programs you championed be submerged in the memory of a president who served as Benjamin Netanyahu’s enabler? Or will you be remembered as the one who finally had the nerve to say, “Enough is enough!”

Sincerely,

Tom Gallagher
Oakland, California

You may not have noticed this. The world “celebrated” International Human Rights Day the other day, even as wars across the planet continued, bombs fell, children died. What if “freedom from war” were a human right?

I don’t ask this to be cynical, but rather to expand the reach of what should be a global day of connection and collective inner reflection. International Human Rights Day is December 10. It’s an annual honoring of the day in 1948 when the newly formed United Nations, in the wake of World War II, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which publicly recognizes “the inherent dignity and... equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.”

All members of the human family! Every last one of us must be valued. This is not simply a hidden, personal wish, but a public—legal—document, posted globally in 577 languages (from Abhkaz to Zulu), declaring that all humans are equal at the cores of their being and deserve the chance to live full lives, free from... a whole slew of hellish possibilities, including: slavery, torture, arbitrary arrest, and much, much more. And we deserve, my God, freedom of thought. Hey, book banners! Did you know your cowardly insistence on limiting human awareness is against world law?

We’re all born helpless and needing love. We’re all vulnerable. And we all have the same spiritual connection to the universe itself.

This past Tuesday I was informed that it was International Human Rights Day in an email from Musicians Without Borders, an extraordinary nonprofit, publicly funded organization, formed in 1999 (during the war in Kosovo), that I’ve written about in the past. Indeed, the recognition of this day by Musicians Without Borders is what brought it to life for me, instantly pushing me beyond my own cynicism and impulse to ask “So what?”

I mean, the U.N. doesn’t have any global enforcement power—and, as is utterly and horribly obvious, millions or maybe billions of human beings remain trapped today in various forms of hell on Earth, from war to starvation to poverty to slavery. And the Universal Declaration itself, with its preamble and 30 articles of declared rights, is written in legal, bureaucratic language that obscures the deep truths it’s attempting to define and essentially turns them into abstractions. In a way, the declaration separates us from our own rights.

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” the declaration states. “They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Yes, absolutely, but how does this impact the actual state of the world? To begin with, I would cry beyond the legalese of the declaration: Come on! What you’re saying is that we’re all the same! We’re all born helpless and needing love. We’re all vulnerable. And we all have the same spiritual connection to the universe itself. Please, oh world, let us live this truth. Let us organize ourselves around it.

But how, oh how, does a truth this deep manifest itself in the real world? It can’t be simplistically “enforced.” And here’s where Musicians Without Borders comes in. The spiritual depth of the Declaration of Human Rights comes to life when we construct reality around it—and that’s what this organization does. Its raison d’etre is to counter the effects of war around the world through music, and give those who are trapped in war and occupation and apartheid the power to be their deepest selves.

Laura Hassler, the organization’s director, puts it this way in a recent essay, in which she calls the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “a framework of guiding principles, a collective conscience for our organization and our programs around the world.”

“Why? Because music creates connection and empathy, builds community, brings people together.”

But be careful! “...just as any powerful human potential,” she adds, “music can also be used to unite one group against another, as it has been many times. So, it is crucial for social changemakers to have guidelines, and the declaration provides these.”

She also notes: “If human rights only apply when politically convenient to the most powerful, they are not really rights—they are arbitrarily applied privileges.”

Musicians Without Borders, which is headquartered in the Netherlands, works in conflict zones around the world: Jordan, El Salvador, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kosovo, Rwanda and, yes, Palestine.

Since 2021, it has run a program in Bethlehem that provides children, including those in refugee camps, with weekly music sessions, where they can sing together and learn traditional Arabic music—that is to say, enjoy life for a while despite the instability of their lives in the West Bank.

Laura put it to me thus: Their work in Palestine “is aimed at supporting marginalized Palestinian children who suffer the impacts of occupation and apartheid. It is about strengthening resilience, building community, giving children access to creativity and a feeling of safety in an extremely unsafe environment.”

Giving children access to their own creativity! As I read her words in an email she sent me, I felt a gush of spiritual joy and could only cry: Wow! This is the deeper meaning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: our right to have access to our own creative spirit. To put it another way: our right to help create the collective, human future.

We’re not just listeners. We’re not just consumers. In the column I wrote about Musicians Without Borders five years ago, I quoted Laura thus: “Every person has music in them!”

Trump has spent the month since the election firing off a rapid torrent of Cabinet picks. His nominees generally fall into two types: obviously whacko (see Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, RFK Jr.) and superficially normal (think Marco Rubio, Doug Burgum, Pam Bondi). While the headline-grabbing scandals and general trumpery of the first group easily draw scorn, it’s important that we not grade the second group on a credulous curve, overlooking the economic interests behind their soothingly conventional manner.

That’s a lesson we should remember from the last Trump administration, when scandal-plagued appointees like Scott Pruitt at EPA and Ryan Zinke at Interior were replaced by more circumspect villains like Andrew Wheeler at EPA and David Bernhardt at Interior. Wheeler and Bernhardt wreaked havoc on environmental, public health, and public lands protection while evading the mockery invited by their predecessors.

Even a wannabe-authoritarian like Trump wants his administration to have a veneer of power and legitimacy, and the scandals of Pruitt and Zinke compromised that illusion. As I recapped for our series of Trump retrospectives, Pruitt “misspent millions in public funds on 24/7 private security, first-class plane tickets, chartered jets, and renovations, while misusing EPA staffers to find his wife a job and do his personal errands,” while Zinke “resigned amid over a dozen ongoing ethics investigations.” Mockery can be politically useful, insofar as it deflates authoritarian egos. But corruption doesn’t have to be sensational to be consequential—and those are the harder stories to tell.

Billionaire Burgum and His Billionaire Buddies

Trump’s pick for Interior Secretary and energy czar, the billionaire former software executive and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, appears to be more in the mold of Bernhardt than Zinke: staunchly anti-regulation, pro-corporate, pro-oil.

Backing false climate solutions is hardly less corrosive than outright climate denial when it comes to the goal of mitigating climate change. It just makes Burgum a more slippery villain.

Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist, had so many potential conflicts of interest at Interior that he walked around with a card listing them all. Burgum leases his family land for oil and gas drilling to Continental Resources, which is owned by his billionaire friend and collaborator Harold Hamm. Hamm’s name might be familiar to you, as he is the billionaire with whom Burgum is orchestrating Trump’s energy policies. Burgum also leases land to oil company Hess, whose billionaire CEO John Hess gave Burgum $25,000 for his 2016 gubernatorial campaign. Burgum’s spouse also owns over $100,000 of stock in fossil fuel companies, according to Burgum’s 2023 financial disclosure.

Harold Hamm organized the dinner between Trump and oil executives last spring where Trump asked for $1 billion in donations in order to demolish Biden’s climate agenda; Burgum attended it. (Eighteen days after that dinner, Hamm’s Continental Resources donated $1 million to Trump.) Hamm and other Big Oil executives present at that dinner have defied congressional Democrats’ requests for information about this meeting. John Hess, meanwhile, was scrutinized by the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission for colluding with OPEC and Saudi Arabia on oil pricing, and as a result of their preliminary investigation he was banned from joining Chevron’s board. Hess has said he may appeal this ban once Trump takes office. If confirmed, Burgum will have personal ties to these “drill-ionaires” in the crosshairs of federal oversight while helming the federal agency that leases the land and issues the permits to drillers.

Burgum told wealthy Trump donors that the “the No. 1 thing that President Trump could do on Day 1” would be to “stop the hostile attack against all American energy, and I mean all. Whether it’s baseload electricity, whether it’s oil, whether it’s gas, whether it’s ethanol, there is an attack on liquid fuels.” In reality, every single year of the Biden presidency, the U.S. produced more crude oil than any other nation at any other time, and remained the world’s largest methane gas producer, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Burgum is Bullish on Carbon Capture Bullsh*t

As governor of North Dakota, Burgum has been a vocal supporter of the controversial Summit Carbon Capture Pipeline, which would transport carbon captured from ethanol production facilities across state lines and sequester it underground in North Dakota. As Molly Taft brilliantly documented in “Unrest in Carbon Country,” opposition to Summit’s carbon pipeline and the use of eminent domain to seize land for it has united people across parties and walks of life in the rural Midwest.

Burgum’s support for the massive carbon pipeline project is unsurprising when you consider that Harold Hamm’s Continental Resources is one of the project’s main investors. But more broadly, Burgum’s support for carbon capture should not be understood as an admission of the need to mitigate climate change, but rather as an extension of a shrewd maneuver from the oil and gas industry to secure federal climate funding for a technology that helps them extract more oil and gas.

Capturing the carbon created as a byproduct of industrial processes in order to pump it back underground and recover more oil and gas from a well—also known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR)—has become increasingly important to the fossil fuel industry as oil reserves and the productivity of existing wells diminish. As the great Amy Westervelt explained last week:

“The carbon capture and storage (CCS) boom is neither a greenwashing campaign nor a genuine attempt to tackle carbon emissions, it has been driven almost entirely by the industry’s increasing reliance on EOR to deal with oil fields in decline. Compressed carbon turns out to be the best way to get dwindling oil reserves out of the ground, but it’s also one of the more expensive methods. Solution? Re-brand the process as a climate solution and get taxpayers to fund it. That is what the 45Q tax credit, passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, is all about.”

And that is definitely what carbon capture is about for the oil industry in North Dakota. The state’s primary drilling region, the Bakken formation, contains a massive amount of hard-to-get oil. The Bakken has a low “recovery factor” of less than 10 percent of oil in place being extracted. The fracking boom in the Bakken basin, which made Harold Hamm’s Continental Resources a fortune, unlocked more productivity for oil extraction. But enhanced oil recovery could potentially extend production further, prolonging the polluting lifespan of fossil fuel extraction even as major producers in the Bakken can foresee the time when production dwindles.

As Molly Taft reported for Drilled, “In April, North Dakota’s top oil and gas regulator warned that without importing CO2 from outside states, production in the Bakken could go into ‘terminal decline.’ Governor Burgum…called enhanced oil recovery carbon capture’s ‘biggest prize.’”

Earlier this year, Reuters reported that while Summit Carbon Solutions “has repeatedly pledged its project will not be used by drillers to boost output from oil fields,” its message to prospective clients from North Dakota’s oil industry is decidedly different: “if you want to use our project for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), where gas is pumped into oil fields to increase production, just write a check.”

Burgum’s support for carbon capture is among the factors that led some to view him as a less extreme pick than climate change deniers Chris Wright and Lee Zeldin, who Trump has tapped to head the Energy Department and the EPA. When he ran for president in 2023, USA Today reported that “Burgum believes human activity has caused climate change, and as governor he made it a goal to get the Roughrider State carbon-neutral by 2030. But he rejects the Democratic worldview of using regulation to curtail fossil fuel use and instead emphasizes innovative technology to capture carbon emissions.” After Burgum was tapped by Trump for Interior, Politico deemed Burgum to be “maybe the best hope for policymakers who favor an ‘abundance agenda.’”

Burgum’s selection has indeed gathered praise from pro-development voices on the center and right, including Alec Stapp of Institute for Progress, who called Burgum a “YIMBY abundance guy.” Joe Pitts of American Enterprise Institute called his selection “really, really good news.” Matt Yglesias called him “a totally solid pick who’ll do good things.” In what a telling glimpse into what the abundance agenda may be gunning for—cheap energy for AI data centers—Thomas Hochman of the Foundation for American Innovation tweeted that Burgum would help the U.S. “win the AI arms race.” Christopher Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition tweeted that he was “excited to see how [Burgum] drains the permitting swamp over the next 4 years.”

Backing false climate solutions is hardly less corrosive than outright climate denial when it comes to the goal of mitigating climate change. It just makes Burgum a more slippery villain. His gubernatorial track record gives us a sense of what we might expect from him at Interior. As governor, Burgum opposed a federal rule requiring gas companies to cut down on methane leaks when drilling on federal and tribal lands, while his state sued the Biden administration’s Interior Department for establishing conservation as a valid use of federal lands. Burgum opposed a federal rule reducing mercury emissions from coal plants that cause cancer, heart attacks, and developmental delays in children, while exempting the coal industry from $100 million in taxes over five years. Burgum applauded federal funding going to corporations pushing false climate solutions like carbon capture from coal production and gas-powered hydrogen production, but wants to repeal federal subsidies for consumers purchasing electric vehicles.

Unfortunately for the climate left, there will be little solace in “I told you so” when Burgum reveals himself to be just as irredeemably oily as the rest of Trump’s pollution promoters.

In Richard Connell’s popular short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” hunter Sanger Rainsford goes overboard while sailing to the Amazon, washing up on an island owned by deceivingly charismatic General Zaroff. Rainsford expects Zaroff to help him off the island, but instead, Zaroff invites him to participate in a hunt.

A hunt, to Rainsford’s utter disbelief, in which he is the prey.

Our reckless pursuit of economic growth has become society’s “most dangerous game.” It keeps us trapped on an island of inequality, environmental degradation, and corporate power, all while convincing us there’s still a chance we can win if we continue to play.

To win this game, we can’t keep playing by the rules, but rewrite them entirely. We can start by challenging one of the most dominant rules of the growth model: Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

But there is no “winning” in a game dependent on the exploitation of people and nature. As long as “growth” is defined by profits and production, people and the planet will always lose.

That is, unless you are one of the few Zaroffs of the world: According to an Oxfam report, the world’s top 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity, and over the past 30 years, income inequality has steadily risen to the point where many economists believe wealth is more stratified today than any time since the Gilded Age.

If economic growth doesn’t deliver its promised benefits, then why do we continue to play? Because those who preach economic growth as a path to prosperity—usually the same people who bag the most benefit—have engineered a game of forced “choice:” Hunt, or be hunted. As Zaroff explains to Rainsford, “I give him his option, of course.” But if they decline, he hands them over to his servant for torture. “Invariably,” Zaroff muses, “they choose the hunt.”

The same logic is used to silo economic and environmental objectives, perpetuating the false premise that reducing poverty and raising living standards must come at the cost of climate action. Such “choice” is equally manufactured—if economic growth is truly a means of improving societal well-being, shouldn’t actions that secure and sustain access to basic necessities be a vital part of our economy?

Even Americans seem to agree that economic growth is an incomplete measure of prosperity. In a nationally-representative survey of 3,000 participants, conducted by survey organization Verasight between October 21 and November 5, only 12.8% (with a 2.3% margin of error) responded that economic growth is a “mostly accurate” way of assessing societal well-being. The rest were skeptical, with 50.8% calling it “somewhat accurate” and 36.5% deeming it inaccurate altogether.

And yet, despite the dissatisfaction, dissonance, and destruction that our economic model begets, pundits and policymakers “invariably” brandish growth as the hallmark of prosperity. Meanwhile, the Zaroffs of the world continue to indulge their unchecked appetite for profit, capitalizing off the preservation of the status quo.

To win this game, we can’t keep playing by the rules, but rewrite them entirely. We can start by challenging one of the most dominant rules of the growth model: Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

GDP is a measure of aggregate production, not a reflection of progress and well-being. It excludes the costs of pollution and exploitation and ignores 16.4 billion hours of unpaid labor, much of which is performed by women. It also omits many non-materialistic goods (health, family, and equality) that define happiness and quality of life. In fact, economists have always warned against conflating GDP with societal well-being—even one of its founders, Simon Kuznets, told Congress that GDP was a poor tool for policymaking.

As Robert Kennedy put it in his 1968 election speech, GDP “measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” By adopting more inclusive measures of progress that consider health, equality, and environmental well-being, we can move beyond the flawed metric of GDP as a measure of prosperity. In doing so, we build economies that prioritize people and the planet instead of outrageous profits.

Such measures are already gaining traction in the U.S. and across the globe. For example, India’s Ease of Living Index assesses the well-being of 114 Indian cities, using a total of 50 indicators that fall under three pillars: Quality of Life, economic ability, and sustainability. At the international scale, the United Nations is working to advance a “Human Rights Economy” that anchors all economic decisions in human rights. In the U.S., Vermont became the first state to adopt an alternative to GDP called the “Genuine Progress Indicator” in 2012, shortly followed by Maryland and 19 other states.

These measures aren’t perfect, nor should they be the only way we address a system that continues to inflict irreparable damage on global ecosystems and communities. However, they play a crucial role in disrupting our current growth paradigm, establishing an economic model where well-being isn’t exclusive to the wealthy, and where societal and environmental objectives are aligned.

It’s time we expose the injustices of our economic system, rewrite the rules, and beat the Zaroffs of the world at their own game.

The killing of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson was wrong. Vigilante justice is wrong. Dangerous. Bad. Scary. Let the record show, I was not among the people who celebrated the killing of Brian Thompson in any way whatsoever. But I have a few ideas about why some folks did celebrate it. And I have no desire to shame them for it. I want to listen. To understand. Just as I did years ago, working with the violent offenders who were court-mandated to see me.

Violence can be the language of the unheard or oppressed, a statement so “loud” it can no longer be ignored. It can be a way to try to bring balance to an imbalanced power dynamic when one feels powerless. I’d argue the gleeful memes and the posts, celebrating the horrible murder of a health insurance company CEO, come from the same place, albeit vicariously.

Many people have been horrified at the celebration: “My God, have we lost our humanity?!” But those same people don’t seem to also clutch their pearls when an unknown medical reviewer in a health insurance company keeps us or our loved ones or our friends or neighbors or co-workers from getting the care we need because it doesn’t fit their treatment algorithm, despite what the licensed medical doctor who knows us says. Some reviewers have admitted they don’t even look at a doctor’s clinical notes, solely making approval decisions based on that algorithm.

You can deeply listen in an effort to understand something and effect change without excusing it or condoning or glorifying it, and also without shaming it.

Health insurance companies market themselves as being there to help us when we need it most—when we’re sick, injured, dying, at our most vulnerable, or when we’re trying to stay healthy. But at the same time, the fact that lives are ruined or lost or our savings are drained because of denials or delays is seen as the “cost of doing business.” A private health insurance company’s reason to exist is to make money for itself. It doesn’t expand coverage, it most certainly doesn’t expedite care, and ultimately it doesn’t appear to give two shits about us. We, the collateral damage, know this. We live this.

Preventing access to timely healthcare because you’re more focused on making money for shareholders and CEOs is inhumane. Profits at the expense of people, especially in a care-based industry, are inhumane. Having to spend untold hours and days and weeks and months navigating health insurance obstacles, literally begging for care, especially when one is ill or taking care of someone who is ill, is inhumane. And when one feels so totally devalued, it’s easier to not be our best selves—or to be our shittiest selves—and devalue others in one way or another. When this human devaluation is couched in business, it’s okay, but when it’s a meme or a post, it’s not. And that double standard, that inequity, is more evident by the day, and has pushed some to their breaking point.

People are hungry for accountability. Desperate for it. Aching for it. We see what’s all around us and we know what’s coming. We want someone to fight for us.

It’s crazy-making, watching the old guard Democratic leadership not meet the moment as they work to maintain the status quo with platitudes and calls for playing nice when mere weeks ago they were calling U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his Project 2025 fascist. We’re seeing corporate media completely fail us, continuing to describe the horrifying things Trump and his minions are saying and doing with vague euphemisms, if they cover these things at all. We’ve watched Trump’s slam-dunk court cases go away one by one. Sure, he’s an adjudicated rapist, but as I wrote here, what does it say that an adjudicated rapist can win an election to become the most powerful person on Earth after he was found liable for rape? Not exactly accountability. Corporations and their CEOs are making huge profits, often by price gouging the masses. They’re using that money to enrich themselves with staggering salaries and bonuses, and they’re buying elections in hopes of further enriching themselves. All the while they can’t seem to find the money to pay their workers a livable wage.

And so, the violent, horrible murder of a man whose company represents the literal pain and suffering and sometimes death of countless thousands, as he allegedly participated in insider trading, living the millionaire good life, represented a form of accountability for some. As perverse and skewed as it may seem, it was David defeating the bully, Goliath. It’s decidedly not how I want accountability, but as a psychotherapist I totally get where the sentiment comes from.

If we’re not going to be heel-dragging Democrats, liberals, or progressives who keep us forever stuck in a status quo that clearly isn’t working, if we truly want to help people, if we want to win elections, we need to take the energy we’re spending clutching those pearls and actually listen to the folks who are gleeful because of Brian Thompson’s death.

We need to hear the decades-in-the-making frustration, the unmet needs, the longing for a decent life, the pain, the fear, the stories of untreated illness, the loss, the profound feeling of powerlessness, the anger at the breathtaking inequality, and, most importantly, the seeming unwillingness of our leaders to do anything meaningful about it, that is bubbling just below the surface of all the gleeful memes and posts about a rich health insurance company CEOs murder.

You can deeply listen in an effort to understand something and effect change without excusing it or condoning or glorifying it, and also without shaming it. I’ve done it for decades in my psychotherapy practice.

Let’s give it a try.

Now is the time to prepare anticipatory strategies against what the vengeful, avaricious, lawless Trump and his Trumpsters have boasted out loud about daily. Don’t wait until Trump’s inauguration. A short list of suggestions follows:

1. The civil servants and their unions better organize a personal presentation to their new bosses, most of whom are ignorant about the agencies they head other than to want to dismantle or enfeeble them. Be proactive or you will be always playing defense.
2. Daring peaceful resisters in marches and rallies, beware of infiltrating provocateurs promoting violence. If you’re engaging in non-violent, civil disobedience, beware that Trump can’t wait to call you “terrorists” and use unbridled police power for arrests and prosecutions demanding long sentences.
3. Trump and the Trumpsters, with his militias in waiting, as on the border, will contrive a phony threat from what they will label domestic “terrorists” to pulverize or intimidate their opponents. Trump thrived on the MAGA extremists and will give them “red meat,” if only to keep them occupied and loyal. They will demand action based on Trump’s wild campaign rhetoric.
4. Being a convicted criminal himself, Trump will take federal cops off the corporate crime beat, reduce taxes on the wealthy and giant companies, ignore climate violence, add more bloat to the wasteful military budget, and increase pandemic threats with fake dismissals of looming perils. Don’t count on the business guys. They don’t like daily chaos, disruption and uncertainty that goes with Trump’s insatiable daily ego that must be fed constantly, but most CEOs won’t criticize Trump.
5. Trump fears the Israeli lobby and their genocidal leader Netanyahu. His first term proved that in spades. Now he’ll back whatever Netanyahu, the Israeli war criminal, does. Annexing the West Bank, demanding more billions from American taxpayers to continuing the bombing, killing and pillaging in the Middle East region is just the tip of the iceberg.
6. Lastly, Trump will drive a level of White House dictatorial lawlessness never before seen. His rhetoric and record strengthen this prediction. Remember his July 2019 declaration “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President.” He acted on that all the time. (See prior columns at nader.org and also read “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All” by Mark Green and Ralph Nader).

The anticipatory strategies here must be diverse, covering all three branches of government, and vectored toward the GOP. The citizen groups may have to work weekends, alongside the labor unions hated by Trump.

Trumpy Dumpty is thin on the facts, policies and programs, but he is as cunning as a hungry shark in detecting weakness in his opponents, especially the Democratic Party. Attached is a fable I wrote in 2022 that portrays how he might think about the Party of the Donkey. Given what happened up to and on November 5, 2024, it’s still useful to read today.

What Could Donald Trump Be Thinking About the Democratic Party?
October 21, 2022

Imagine Donald Trump dining with two of his supposed political advisers. Being an advisor to Donald means you soak up Donald’s political comments and feed them back to him. At this dinner, Donald was spouting off about the Democratic Party.

“Hey guys, know why the GOP is ahead in the polls?” “Why?” the two advisors replied in unison. Donald responded, “Because the Democrats are busy losing all by themselves, backtracking out of fear. Fearing a Party they are supposed to be fighting is what I call ‘beating themselves.’”

“Tell us more,” urged the two advisers.

“The Democrats are beyond stupido. They’ve contracted out their campaigns to consultants who, with their loyalties to their other corporate clients, have sold the Dems a strategy of caution – otherwise known as cutting off your cajones. Candidates without balls can’t think for themselves and just follow the script. Lots of Dems don’t want to appear with Bernie Sanders – the one guy I didn’t want to debate – who gets huge votes in conservative Vermont. What chickens!”

“This is all so beautiful, so gorgeous for us. Dems without balls means they campaign every day with their political antennae flailing, afraid they’ll say the politically incorrect phrase and upset the word police or deviate from their consultant’s finger-waving “no-no’s” if they want to rake in big money.”

“Imagine me contracting out my run to a consultant. ‘Donald, say this, don’t do that, do this, don’t say that.’ And paying them big bucks. Never! My people want the unfiltered Donald. That’s why they turn out in standing-room-only droves compared to the empty-seat Dems.”

Adviser #1 pipes up: “And the NY Times reports that the Dems are so afraid of our blaming them for inflation that they’ve shut up on their most popular ‘bread and butter’ positions, like freedom for women, health and safety for kids, good jobs and pay for more workers, increasing Social Security benefits. You know ‘bleeding heart stuff.’”

“Stupido Fabuloso!” Trump sneered, almost choking on his sirloin steak. “They don’t know who they are or worse who they WERE! FDR clobbered the Republicans with Social Security, minimum wage, and unemployment compensation, and he pushed for unions, taxed the rich and went after business crooks. He taunted the GOP. They called him a ‘traitor to his class,’ and he said he welcomed their hatred.”

“These issues are still very popular today, but the Dems aren’t pulling their base. The idiots even let me take the word ‘populist’ from their shaky hands – me the very core of Big Business.”

“They’ve mostly gagged themselves, leaving poor little Joe Biden alone talking about his infrastructure/jobs projects. Some Dems are so cowardly they don’t want to be seen campaigning with Delaware Joe.”

Adviser #2: “The Dems don’t learn from The Trumper. In politics, you got to boast. Politics is fatal for wimps.”

Trump cupped his mouth adding – “Jeez, I boast about things that aren’t even true, just like my casino ads. The Dems aren’t puffing about what is true. On paper, they support FDR’s New Deal updated to give everyone health insurance and voting rights for everyone, even felons. But where it counts – on the road, they’re in a driverless car. Ha, ha, ha – see? They’re beating themselves.”

“Because we are with the Winners, we’re against all the ‘communist’ things the masses drool over. And we are still winning. Why? Because we are masters at controlling what the media wants to cover – outrageous charges, flagrant behavior and all kinds of red meat the profit-obsessed media barons can’t resist. I told them as much in 2016. Still, they bit. Hilarious.”

“The GOP has got the offensive down to a science. Driving Dems nuts with ‘critical race theory’ (what’s that anyway?), ‘defunding the police’ (hah, we’ve defunded the federal regulator cops big time), ‘open borders,’ ‘radical judges,’ ‘over-regulation,’ ‘high taxes,’ ‘socialism’ – these are short enraging words that stick with our people. Like deer in the headlights, the Dems freeze, mumble and fret. Remember our old mentor Lee Atwater who said ‘When you’re explaining, you’re losing.’”

Adviser #1: “The big hole the Dems dug came long ago when they wrote off half the country as being too conservative and stopped spending money on their candidates in red districts. They don’t have the energy we have – look at how we’ve beaten them in the gerrymandering fights. It’s the energy gap. Remember 2009-2010?”

Trump broke in: “David, don’t get carried away. The biggest thing was their stupidity. Dems would spend more on a single Pennsylvania Senate seat than on six Senate seats combined in the Mountain states. Those states used to have Democratic Senators. Now GOP dominates there. Year after year, they don’t listen. I don’t listen either, to be frank. But I’m a very stable genius, while they are, as New Yorkers say, ‘Tone deaf.’”

Adviser #2: “Also the Republicans listen to their outside allies. Like Heritage, Cato, and Norquist. The Dems lean on their control-freak consultants and give progressive groups the cold shoulder. I have a progressive friend who tells me horror stories. She just gave me a copy of a blockbuster collection of very practical ways – down to the rebuttals and slogans – the Dems can use to landslide us in November. I started sweating until she told me most of the Dems are not rushing to use it. Most don’t even know about the two dozen citizen leaders who put it together, edited down to fiercely powerful persuasions by wordsmith Mark Green – a long-time Dem from New York City. It’s available to the world on winningamerica.net, but Green is confident that we will never pick it up.”

Trump: “Hmm, Winning America? – Nice ring to it. This fellow Green. I remember meeting him at a fundraiser when he was running for Mayor twenty years ago. He was all business, no small talk. He scared me then.”

It is easy to lose sight of humanity in numbers, particularly large numbers, but we can also gain moral clarity using the exactness of numbers and mathematical calculations.

Here is a self-test:

Question #1: The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have bombed apartment buildings, hospitals, and schools in Gaza almost daily for more than a year. Hypothetically, if sounds could travel worldwide, how long would it take for victims’ cries to reach Washington. The speed of sound is 770 miles per hour. The distance between Gaza and Washington D.C is 5,878 miles.

Question #2: Would your answer be the same if Joe Biden, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris were president?

Question #3: In the year following October 7, 2023, the U.S. has sent more than $20 billion worth of military aid to Israel. In this period the IDF killed more than 44,000 Gazans. In other words, it roughly costs U.S. taxpayers $454,545 for each Gazan killed by the IDF in a year. How was this number calculated?

Question #4: A terrorist group is defined as one that “may be motivated by political, religious, racial, or other ideological goals and threatens or commits violent acts against civilian targets.”

4a: In addition to killing more than 44,000 people, mostly civilians, the IDF has injured more than 100,000, largely women and children. Many are amputees or with other lifelong challenges. Based on the definition above, is the IDF a terrorist organization?

4b: If so, would it be correct to say that U.S. companies manufacturing weapons sent to the IDF profit from terrorism? Are our governmental leaders by supplying planes, bombs, weapons, and munitions guilty of supporting terrorism? If so, is this a violation of U.S. and international law?

Question #5: How many defenseless people must be injured or killed before a force becomes a terrorist organization? Does your answer depend on who is carrying out the violence or the identity of the victims? Does your answer differ based on the numbers of children killed or losing limbs?

Question # 6: On October 7, 2023, Hamas and related groups committed terrible acts of terrorism including the murder and kidnapping of civilians: 1,200 were killed and more than 250 taken hostage. They included children, women, and the elderly. After prisoner exchanges, deaths, and a handful of rescues, it is estimated 60 survivors remain in captivity languishing under cruel and abusive conditions. Many Israelis believe their release should be the paramount goal of negotiations. Since October 7 Israel has locked up more than 9,400 “security detainees” including men, women, and children without access to lawyers or respect for legal rights. They are held in appallingly crowded cells. According to a United Nations report, in addition to beatings, many have been subjected to “waterboarding, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, dogs set on them, and other forms of torture.”

If “x” = Israelis and “y” = Palestinians, calculate the value of “y” for a given “x” based on widely available data. Convert your answer into plain English—that is, how many times greater is the value of Israelis and the hostages compared to Palestinians and security detainees?

Question #7: There were 10 commandments. The sixth commandment was abolished. How many commandments remain?

I worked hard my whole career and retired feeling secure. Then I lost every last dime in a scam. I was left with $1,300 a month in Social Security benefits to live on in an area where monthly expenses run about $3,700.

I’m a smart woman, but scams against older Americans are increasing in number and sophistication. Whether through scams, strained savings, or costs of living going up, half of older Americans—that’s 27 million households—can’t afford their basic needs.

And suddenly I became one of them. The experience has taught me a lot about the value of a strong social safety net—and why we’ll need to protect it from the coming administration.

We have the tax dollars—the question is whether we have the political will to invest in seniors, workers, and families, or only for tax cuts for the very rich.

I was ashamed and frightened after what happened, but I scraped myself up off the floor and tried to make the best of it.

I’d worked with aging people earlier in my career, so I was familiar with at least some of the groups who could help. I reached out to a local nonprofit and they came through with flying colors, connecting me to life-saving federal assistance programs.

I was assigned a caseworker, who guided me through applying for public programs like the Medical Savings Plan (MSP), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), subsidized housing, Medicare Part D, and Medicaid.

It’s hard to describe my relief at getting this help.

Before receiving the MSP, I’d been paying for medications and health insurance—which cost about $200—out of my monthly Social Security check. With MSP, that cost is covered. I also found an apartment I liked through subsidized housing, and I have more money for groceries through SNAP. Now it’s easier to afford other necessities, like hearing-aid batteries and my asthma inhaler.

But I’m worried about the incoming administration’s plans to cut programs like these, which have helped me so much. They’re proposing slashing funding and imposing overly burdensome work and reporting requirements. Studies show that requirements like these can cause millions of otherwise eligible people to lose critical assistance.

President-elect Donald Trump has also indicated that he favors increased privatization of Medicare, which would result in higher costs and less care. And his tax promises are projected to move up the insolvency date of Social Security.

All told, the federal budget cuts the incoming Republican majority in Congress has put forward would slash healthcare, food, and housing by trillions over the next 10 years, resulting in at least a 50% reduction in these services. And they plan to divert those investments in us into more tax cuts for the nation’s very wealthiest.

I want lawmakers of each party to know how important these social investments are for seniors and families. Older Americans—who’ve worked hard all our lives—shouldn’t be pushed out onto the streets, forced to go without sufficient food or healthcare due to unfortunate circumstances.

We have the tax dollars—the question is whether we have the political will to invest in seniors, workers, and families, or only for tax cuts for the very rich. If we do the latter, that’s the real scam.

The U.S. national debt just passed $36 trillion, only four months after it passed $35 trillion and up $2 trillion for the year. Third quarter data is not yet available, but interest payments as a percent of tax receipts rose to 37.8% in the third quarter of 2024, the highest since 1996. That means interest is eating up over one-third of our tax revenues.

Total interest for the fiscal year hit $1.16 trillion, topping $1 trillion for the first time ever. That breaks down to $3 billion per day. For comparative purposes, an estimated $11 billion, or less than four days’ federal interest, would pay the median rent for all the homeless people in America for a year. The damage from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina alone is estimated at $53.6 billion, for which the state is expected to receive only $13.6 billion in federal support. The $40 billion funding gap is a sum we pay in less than two weeks in interest on the federal debt.

The current debt trajectory is clearly unsustainable, but what can be done about it? Raising taxes and trimming the budget can slow future growth of the debt, but they are unable to fix the underlying problem—a debt grown so massive that just the interest on it is crowding out expenditures on the public goods that are the primary purpose of government.

Borrowing Is Actually More Inflationary Than Printing

Several financial commentators have suggested that we would be better off if the Treasury issued the money for the budget outright, debt-free. Martin Armstrong, an economic forecaster with a background in computer science and commodities trading, contends that if we had just done that in the first place, the national debt would be only 40% of what it is today. In fact, he argues, debt today is the same as money, except that it comes with interest. Federal securities can be posted in the repo market as collateral for an equivalent in loans, and the collateral can be “rehypothecated” (re-used) several times over, creating new money that augments the money supply just as would happen if it were issued directly.

Chris Martenson, another economic researcher and trend forecaster, asked in a November 21 podcast, “What great harm would happen if the Treasury just issued its own money directly and didn’t borrow it?… You’re still overspending, you still probably have inflation, but now you’re not paying interest on it.”

The argument for borrowing rather than printing is that the government is borrowing existing money, so it will not expand the money supply. That was true when money consisted of gold and silver coins, but it is not true today. In fact borrowing the money is now more inflationary, increasing the money supply more, than if it were just issued directly, due to the way the government borrows. It issues securities (bills, bonds, and notes) that are bid on at auction by selected “primary dealers” (mostly very large banks). Quoting from Investopedia:

Because most modern economies rely on fractional reserve banking, when primary dealers purchase government debt in the form of Treasury securities, they are able to increase their reserves and expand the money supply by lending it out. This is known as the money multiplier effect.

Thus, “the government increases cash reserves in the banking system,” and “the increase in reserves raises the money supply in the economy.” Principal and interest on the securities are paid when due, but they are paid with borrowed money. In effect, the debt is never repaid but just gets rolled over from year to year along with the interest due on it. The interest compounds, an increasing amount of debt-at-interest is generated, and the money supply and inflation go up.

U.S. Currency Should Be Issued by the U.S. Government

Well over 90% of the U.S. money supply today is issued not by the government but by private banks when they make loans. As Thomas Edison argued in 1921, “It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other helps the people.”

The government could avoid increasing the debt by printing the money for its budget as President Abraham Lincoln did, as U.S. Notes or “Greenbacks.” Donald Trump acknowledged in 2016 that the government never has to default “because you print the money,” echoing Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffett, and others. So writes Prof. Stephanie Kelton in a Dec. 2, 2024 blog. Alternatively, the Treasury could mint some trillion dollar coins. The Constitution gives Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value, and no limit is put on the value of the coins it creates. In legislation initiated in 1982, Congress chose to impose limits on the amounts and denominations of most coins, but a special provision allowed the platinum coin to be minted in any amount for commemorative purposes. Philip Diehl, former head of the U.S. Mint and co-author of the platinum coin law, confirmed that the coin would be legal tender:

In minting the $1 trillion platinum coin, the Treasury Secretary would be exercising authority which Congress has granted routinely for more than 220 years… under power expressly granted to Congress in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8).

To prevent congressional overspending, a budget ceiling could be imposed— as it is now, although the terms would probably need to be revised.

Eliminating the Debt

Those maneuvers would prevent the federal debt from growing, but it still would not eliminate the trillion-dollar interest tab on the existing $36 trillion debt. The only permanent solution is to eliminate the debt itself. In ancient Mesopotamia, when the king was the creditor, this was done with periodic debt jubilees—just cancel the debt. (See Michael Hudson, And Forgive Them Their Debts.) But that is not possible today because the creditors are private banks and private investors who have a contractual right to be paid, and the U.S. Constitution requires that the government pay its debts as and when due.

Another possibility is a financial transaction tax, which could replace both income and sales taxes while still generating enough to fund the government and pay off the debt. See Scott Smith, A Tale of Two Economies: A New Financial Operating System for the American Economy (2023) and my earlier article here. But that solution has been discussed for years without gaining traction in Congress.

Another alternative is to have the Federal Reserve buy the debt as it comes due. For the last few years, the Treasury has been issuing an estimated 30% of its debt as short-term bills rather than 10-year or 30-year bonds. As a result, in 2023 approximately 31% of the outstanding debt came due for renewal. As usual, it was just rolled over into new debt. But the nearly one-third coming due in FY2025 could be bought in the open market by the Federal Reserve, which is required to return its profits to the government after deducting its costs, making the debt virtually interest-free. Interest-free debt carried on the books and rolled over does not raise the federal deficit. If a third of the outstanding debt is too much to monetize in one year to avoid inflation, this maneuver could be spread out over a number of years.

Mandating that action by an “independent” Fed would require an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, but Congress has the power to amend it and has done so several times over the years. The incoming administration is proposing more radical moves than that, including eliminating the income tax, ending the Fed, auditing the Fed, or merging it with the Treasury. The federal interest tab nearly doubled after April 2022, when the Fed initiated “Quantitative Tightening.” It reduced its balance sheet by selling over $2 trillion in federal securities into the economy, reducing the money supply, and by hiking the federal funds rate to as high as 5.5%. Arguably the Fed has overtightened and needs to reverse that trend by buying federal securities, injecting new money into the economy.

Alarmed economists contend that a Weimar-style hyperinflation is the inevitable outcome of government-issued money. But as Michael Hudson points out, “Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending.”

Issuing the money directly will not inflate prices if the funds are used to increase the domestic supply of goods and services. Supply and demand will then go up together, keeping prices stable. This has been illustrated historically, perhaps most dramatically in China. The People’s Bank of China manages the money supply by a variety of means including just printing currency. In 28 years, from 1996 to 2024, China’s money supply (M2) grew by 52 times or 5,200%, yet hyperinflation did not result. Prices remained stable because the funds went into increasing GDP, which went up along with the money supply.

Price inflation during the Covid-19 crisis has been blamed on the Fed monetizing congressional fiscal payments to consumers and businesses, increasing demand (the circulating money supply) without increasing supply (goods and services). But the San Francisco Fed concluded that the surge in global shipping and transportation costs due to Covid-19 along with delivery delays and backlogs, were a greater contributor than this fiscal stimulus to the run-up of headline inflation in 2021 and 2022. The supply of goods could have been increased—producers could have increased production to respond to the increase in demand—were it not for the shutdown of more than 700,000 productive businesses labeled “non-essential,” resulting in the loss of 3 million jobs.

Swapping Debt for Productive Equity

Money printing is not inflationary if the money is issued for productive purposes, raising GDP in lockstep; but how can we be sure that the new money will be used productively? Today the banks and other large institutions that first receive any newly-issued money are more likely to invest it speculatively, driving up the price of existing assets (homes, stocks, etc.) without creating new goods and services.

Economic blogger Martin Armstrong observes that one solution pursued by debt-ridden countries is to swap the debt for equity in productive assets. This has been done by Mexico, Poland, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the United States itself. It was the solution of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in dealing with the overwhelming debt of the First U.S. Congress. State and federal debt was swapped along with gold for shares in the First U.S. Bank, paying a 6% dividend. The Bank then issued U.S. currency at up to 10 times this capital base, on the fractional reserve model still used by banks today. Both the First and the Second U.S. Banks were designed to support manufacturing and production, according to Hamilton’s Report on Public Credit.

Following the Hamiltonian model is H.R. 4052, the National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2023 (NIB) now pending in Congress. The NIB proposal is to swap privately-held federal securities (Treasury bonds) for non-voting preferred stock in the bank. Interest on the bonds would continue to go to the investors, along with a 2% stock dividend. That would not eliminate the debt or the interest, but if the Federal Reserve were to buy federal securities on the open market and swap them for NIB stock, the securities would essentially remain interest-free, since again the Fed is required to return its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs.

Lending Directly to Productive Businesses

Another possibility for using newly issued money to increase the supply of goods and services is for the Federal Reserve to make loans directly to productive businesses. That was actually the intent of the original Federal Reserve Act. Section 13 of the Act allows Federal Reserve Banks to discount notes, drafts, and bills of exchange arising out of actual commercial transactions, such as those issued for agricultural, industrial, or commercial purposes—in other words, lending directly for production and development. “Discounting commercial paper” is a process by which short-term loans are provided to financial institutions using commercial paper as collateral. (Commercial paper is unsecured short-term debt, usually issued at a discount, used to cover payroll, inventory, and other short-term liabilities. The “discount” represents the interest to the lender.) According to Prof. Carl Walsh, writing of the Federal Reserve Act in The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Newsletter in 1991:

The preamble sets out very clearly that one purpose of the Federal Reserve Act was to afford a means of discounting commercial loans. In its report on the proposed bill, the House Banking and Currency Committee viewed a fundamental objective of the bill to be the “creation of a joint mechanism for the extension of credit to banks which possess sound assets and which desire to liquidate them for the purpose of meeting legitimate commercial, agricultural, and industrial demands on the part of their clientele.”

Cornell Law School Professor Robert Hockett expanded on this design in an article in Forbes in March 2021:

[T]he founders of the Federal Reserve System in 1913… designed something akin to a network of regional development finance institutions… Each of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks was to provide short-term funding directly or indirectly (through local banks) to developing businesses that needed it. This they did by ‘discounting’—in effect, purchasing—commercial paper from those businesses that needed it… [I]n determining what kinds of commercial paper to discount, the Federal Reserve Act both was—and ironically remains—quite explicit about this: Fed discount lending is solely for “productive,” not “speculative” purposes.

Today discounting commercial paper is big business, but the lenders are private and the borrowers are large institutions issuing commercial paper in denominations of $100,000 or more. Except for its emergency Commercial Paper Funding Facility operated from 2020 to 2021 and from 2008 to 2010, the Fed no longer engages in the commercial loan business. Meanwhile, small businesses are having trouble finding affordable financing.

In a sequel to his March 2021 article, Hockett explained that the drafters of the Federal Reserve Act, notably Carter Glass and Paul Warburg, were essentially following the Real Bills Doctrine (RBD). Previously known as the “commercial loan theory of banking,” it held that banks could create credit-money deposits on their balance sheets without triggering inflation if the money were issued against loans backed by commercial paper. When the borrowing companies repaid their loans from their sales receipts, the newly created money would just void out the debt and be extinguished. Their intent was that banks could sell their commercial loans at a discount at the Fed’s Discount Window, freeing up their balance sheets for more loans. Hockett wrote:

The RBD in its crude formulation held that so long as the lending of endogenous [bank-created] credit-money was kept productive, not speculative, inflation and deflation would be not only less likely, but effectively impossible. And the experience of German banks during Germany’s late 19th century Hamiltonian ‘growth miracle,’ with which the German immigrant Warburg, himself a banker, was intimately familiar, appeared to verify this. So did Glass’ experience with agricultural lending in the American South.

Prof. Hockett suggested regionalizing the Fed, expanding it from the current 12 Federal Reserve banks to many banks. He wrote in August 2021:

In time, we might even imagine a proliferation of public banks, patterned more or less after the highly successful Bank of North Dakota model, spreading across multiple states. These banks could then both afford nonprofit banking services to all, and assist the Fed Regional Banks in identifying appropriate recipients of Fed liquidity assistance.

The result, he said, will be “a Fed restored to its original purpose, a Fed responsive to varying local conditions in a sprawling continental republic, a Fed no longer over-involved with banks whose principal if not sole activities are in gambling on price movements in secondary and tertiary markets rather than investing in the primary markets that constitute our ‘real’ economy. It will mean, in short, something approaching a true people’s bank, not just a banks’ bank.”

By Ralph Nader December 13, 2024 Now is the time to prepare anticipatory strategies against what the vengeful, avaricious, lawless Trump and his Trumpsters have boasted out loud about daily. Don’t wait until Trump’s inauguration. A short list of suggestions follows: The civil servants and their unions better organize a personal presentation to their new…

Donald J. Trump is about to become the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve one term, lose a reelection bid and then run a third time successfully for a second term. What has Trump and his team learned from his first term? How will he govern differently? This time he has added progressives like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to his team, drawing from the left of the Democratic Party in a way that he didn’t do the first time around; how will they impact his policies? As a lame duck with no possibility of running for reelection, his only real concern for the future is for passing the torch of the MAGA movement, potentially to JD Vance. Is Trump now more free to do what he wants, and if so, what does he want?

TMI Show co-hosts Ted Rall and Robby West (filling in for Manila Chan) are joined by Angie Wong for an inside view into the new administration by an old president.

The post TMI Show Ep 37: “Trump 45 vs. Trump 47” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 37: “Trump 45 vs. Trump 47” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

When global soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo this week tweeted, “Congratulations to all my friends in Saudi, I know how proud you all are today and I am sure @Saudi2034 will be historic” it was hard not to wince.

The Portuguese icon’s celebration of the announcement that Saudi Arabia would host the 2034 men’s World Cup was hardly a surprise. In 2023 he signed a whopping $200 million-per-year deal with Saudi club Al Nassr FC. At the time, Amnesty International implored Ronaldo to take a stand on human rights, but to no avail. Instead, he soaked up Saudi cash and even enjoyed the opening of a “CR7 Signature Museum” at the garish Boulevard World tourist development in Riyadh.

Fast forward to Wednesday when FIFA, the world governing body for soccer, handed Saudi Arabia its crown-jewel tournament, the men’s World Cup. FIFA President Gianni Infantino declared, “The 2034 FIFA World Cup…will be a spectacular event. What Saudi Arabia has put forward in their bid is absolutely incredible.”

If by “incredible” Infantino meant lacking credibility, he was right. Ahead of the vote, FIFA changed its rules to make voting on the 2030 and 2034 men’s World Cups a package deal where vote-splitting was not allowed. There was no debate ahead of the vote, which was held over Zoom. Voting members made their preference known via a simple raising of their hands; their images could be seen on a panel of tiny Zoom boxes behind Infantino as he opened up an envelope with a card bearing Saudi Arabia’s name. It was a sham vote brazenly sprayed around the world.

Not only does sport create a space where [the Saudi crown prince] can plunge surplus capital derived from oil revenues, but it is a tremendous vehicle for pro-Saudi propaganda, even capable of drowning out the sound of a bone-saw.

Moreover, handing the tournament to Saudi Arabia cues up a torrent of terrible tidings that clash mightily with FIFA’s stated commitment to human rights. According to Minky Worden, the director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, “FIFA is willfully blind to the country’s human rights record, setting up a decade of potentially horrific human rights abuses preparing for the 2034 World Cup.” This view is co-signed by a slew of human-rights organizations. Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s head of labor rights and sport, noted, “FIFA’s evaluation of Saudi Arabia’s World Cup bid is an astonishing whitewash of the country’s atrocious human rights record.” He added, “Fundamental human rights reforms are urgently required in Saudi Arabia, or the 2034 World Cup will be inevitably tarnished by exploitation, discrimination and repression.”

FIFA’s move to choose Saudi Arabia to host the 2034 World Cup is an apex moment for sportswashing: when political leaders use sports to legitimize themselves on the global stage while stoking nationalism and diverting attention from human rights woes at home. This was a brash sportwash executed out in the open for all to see. But the announcement also helps advance authoritarianism at a moment of rising autocracy across the globe. In fact, FIFA itself is sliding deeper into an autocracy, regularly ignoring its own guiding principles and increasingly resembling the very authoritarian governments with whom it collaborates.

Let’s be clear: sportwashing is an equal opportunity exploiter. The United States is just as capable of carrying out sportswashing as Saudi Arabia. For instance, to secure the 2028 Summer Olympics, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti vowed to Seth Meyers on late-night television, “I’m confident by the time the Olympics come, we can end homelessness on the streets of L.A.” Meanwhile, homelessness continues to ravage human lives in LA, a humanitarian crisis in plain sight.

In fact, we can expect an onslaught of sportswashing in the US in the coming years. After all, FIFA President Gianni Infantino openly adores recently re-elected President Donald Trump. Infantino wasted no time congratulating Trump on his electoral victory, even before the Electoral College votes were in, posting on Instagram, “We will have a great FIFA World Cup and a great FIFA Club World Cup in the United States of America!” Infantino shared six photos of himself and Trump, a montage of sycophancy. More recently he cozied up to Trump and Elon Musk at the reopening of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.

Let’s be clear: sportwashing is an equal opportunity exploiter. The United States is just as capable of carrying out sportswashing as Saudi Arabia.

Infantino caused a media kerfuffle in 2022 when, at the opening match of the Qatar World Cup, he was nabbed on camera chuckling it up with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Crown Prince has placed sport at the center of his global charm offensive. Not only does sport create a space where he can plunge surplus capital derived from oil revenues, but it is a tremendous vehicle for pro-Saudi propaganda, even capable of drowning out the sound of a bone-saw.

Research carried out by investigative journalist Karim Zidan and Stanis Elsborg of the Danish group Play the Game documented Saudi Arabia’s enormous—and ever-growing—sport footprint. Their exhaustive research report, “Saudi Arabia’s Grip on World Sports,” catalogs more than 900 sponsorships and 1,400 strategic positions that comprise the juggernaut of influence that Saudi Arabia has conjured to sportswash its global image. MBS is a man with a plan, and that plan involves sport.

And Mohammed bin Salman has made it clear that he has no qualms about sportswashing, stating directly on Fox News that he will “continue doing sport washing” regardless of public pushback. He “doesn’t care” about accusations of sportswashing. What other countries deign to deny, he openly welcomes. President Joe Biden’s notorious “bloody fist bump see around the world” only greased the path.

But not everyone is standing idly by. In October, a group of more than 100 prominent women’s soccer players wrote a letter to FIFA, denouncing the group for its sponsorship deal with Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil firm. Describing the agreement as a “middle finger to women’s soccer,” the athletes raised concerns over gross human-rights violations, singling out anti-LGBTQ and anti-women practices in the country. CBC columnist Shireen Ahmed wrote, “There is no doubt that FIFA's connection deserves to be challenged and it is no surprise that women are leading the way.”

Now it’s time for the biggest stars of men’s soccer to follow their lead. Cristiano Ronaldo might be a lost cause, but it’s not too late to take a stand for what’s right. It’s not an exaggeration to say that lives are on the line.

Liberals hate U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, no question about it. He’s the definition of illiberal: authoritarian, racist, sexist, and downright nasty. Not only that, he’s a living repudiation of the liberal delusion that America runs on meritocracy.

But you want to know a dirty, little secret? In back alleys, encrypted group chats, and off-the-record conversations, liberals will still support Trump on a case-by-case basis. Of course, they’d never vote for the guy, but they’ll give two cheers for some of his policies.

I discovered this ugly truth during Trump’s last term while writing an article on the shift in U.S. policy toward China from lukewarm engagement to hostile decoupling. The general consensus among the foreign policy elite was that, at least in terms of relations with Beijing, Trump was a useful idiot for slowing China’s roll with harsh rhetoric and tariffs.

Trump 2.0 is going to be the same but worse, like a strong cheese voted out of the refrigerator only to grow ever more pungent as it moldered in a dark corner of Florida.

“Trump is a madman, but I want to give him and his administration their due,” one prominent liberal intellectual told me. “We can’t keep playing on an unlevel playing field and take promises that are never delivered on. It’s really China’s turn to respond, and it’s long overdue.”

It wasn’t just China. For years, liberals and conservatives alike were, for instance, pushing the concept of burden-sharing: getting U.S. allies to cover more of the bill for their security needs. But it was only Trump who really made it happen by blackmailing NATO members and other U.S. partners into doing so.

Sure, few warmed to the idea of the United States actually pulling out of NATO, but even many of our European allies, though they publicly grumbled, were secretly happy about The Donald’s gaiatsu. That’s the Japanese word for outside pressure that enables a leader to force through unpopular changes by blaming it all on foreigners. The self-described liberal leader of NATO, Dutch politician Mark Rutte, even came out in the open after Trump’s reelection to praise the American president for making European countries more militarily self-sufficient.

It wasn’t just liberals who thrilled to Trump’s unorthodox foreign policy during his first term either. Some of those further to the left also embraced Trump the engager (with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un), Trump the isolationist (and his threats to close U.S. military bases globally), and Trump the putative peacemaker (for concluding a deal with the Taliban to end the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan).

Trump, in other words, was not just an unanticipated crisis; he was also an opportunity. Deep in their hearts, anyone unhappy with the status quo will support a disrupter. Quite a few Democrats disgusted with this country’s border policies, inflation, and its coastal elites even crossed over to vote for Trump in November because they wanted change, regardless of the consequences.

Trump 2.0 is going to be the same but worse, like a strong cheese voted out of the refrigerator only to grow ever more pungent as it moldered in a dark corner of Florida. The latest version of Trump has promised more violence and destruction the second time around, from mass deportations to mass tariffs. And he’s planning to avoid appointing anyone to his administration who might have a contrary thought, a backbone to resist him, or the least qualification to enact sensible policy.

In the face of such a vengeful and truculent force returning to the White House, surely, you might think, it will be impossible to find any liberals embracing such anarchy the second time around.

Think again. This is how American politics works, if only for liberals. The modern Republican Party routinely boycotts Democratic administrations: blocking Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, working overtime to shut down the federal government, voting en masse against legislation it would have supported if introduced by a Republican administration. The MAGA crowd has, in fact, turned noncooperation into something of an art form.

Liberals, on the other hand, pride themselves on bipartisanship, on getting things done no matter who’s in power. So, inevitably, there will be cooperation with the Trump team as it sets about the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (as Trump cheerleader Steve Bannon once put it). Worse, there will even be some silver-lining liberals (and a few leftists) who pull up a seat to applaud the wrecking ball—not perhaps for its wholesale destruction of neighborhoods but at least for its demolition of a select number of buildings that they deem irreparable.

Each time such destruction takes place, the self-exculpatory comment from such silver-liners will be: “Well, somebody had to come along and do something!” If Trump is the only tool in the governing toolbox, some liberals will indeed try to use him to pound in a few nails they think need hammering.

Burning Bridges with China

In his 2024 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden argued that he did a better job than Donald Trump of standing up to China. He certainly devoted more Pentagon dollars to containing China. And not only did he not roll back Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, but he added some of his own, including a 100% tax on Chinese electric vehicles. Biden also made concrete moves to decouple the U.S. economy from China’s, especially when it came to the supply chains for critical raw materials that Beijing has sought to control. “I’ve made sure that the most advanced American technologies can’t be used in China,” he insisted, adding, “Frankly for all his tough talk on China, it never occurred to my predecessor to do any of that.”

Biden’s moves on China, from export controls and subsidies for chip manufacturers to closer military relationships with Pacific partners like Australia and India, received the enthusiastic support of his party. No surprise there: It’s hard to find anyone in Washington these days who has a good word to say about engaging more with China.

So, when Trump takes office in January, he won’t actually be reversing course. He’ll simply be taking the baton-like stick from Biden while leaving all the carrots in the ground.

That said, Trump’s proposed further spike in tariffs against China (and Canada and Mexico and potentially the rest of the world) does give many liberals pause, since it threatens to unleash an economically devastating global trade war while boosting prices radically at home. But trade unions backed by such liberals support such measures as a way to protect jobs, while the European Union only recently imposed stiff tariffs of their own on Chinese electrical vehicles.

So, yes, neoliberals who embrace free trade are going to push back against Trump’s economic policies, but more traditional liberals who backed protectionist measures in the past will secretly (or not so secretly) applaud Trump’s moves.

Back to the Wall

On taking office, Joe Biden rolled back his predecessor’s harsh immigration policies. The rate of border-crossings then spiked for a variety of reasons (not just the repeal of those Trump-era laws) from an average of half a million to about 2 million annually. However, in 2024, those numbers plummeted, despite Trump’s campaign claims—but no matter. By then, many Democrats had already been reborn as border hawks.

That new, tougher attitude was on display in executive actions President Biden took in 2024 as well as the border security bill that Democrats tried to push through Congress earlier this year. Forget about finding a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants who keep the American economy humming, Biden’s immigration policy focused on limiting asylum petitions, increasing detention facilities, and even allocating more money to build Trump’s infamous wall.

As Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, pointed out on the eve of the November election, “What we are seeing is that the center of the Democratic Party is now adopting the same policies, the same postures, that MAGA Republicans were fighting for about six years ago.”

When things go disastrously south, laws are broken, and the government begins to truly come apart at the seams, it’s vitally important that no left-of-center fingerprints be found at the scene of the crime.

And yet such punitive policies still weren’t harsh enough for MAGA Republicans and their America First followers. The bottom line was that immigration-averse voters didn’t want to support Democrats pretending to be MAGA Republicans. When it came to the White House, they wanted the real thing.

As politics change hands in Washington next January, it’s going to be difficult to find any Democrats who will support the mass detentions and deportations Trump is promising. Yet many liberals, like the unprecedented number of Latinos who pulled the lever for Trump in 2024, do want major changes at the border with Mexico. In Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego won a squeaker of a Senate election by emphasizing border security and even backing a border wall (in certain areas). Such liberal border hawks will be happy when the Republican president does the dirty work so that Democrats don’t suffer the political fallout that is sure to follow.

Remapping the Middle East

On the face of it, the Abrahamic Accords were a liberal nightmare. The brainchild of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, they promised to repair relations between Israel and the major authoritarian regimes in the region: Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Morocco, and Sudan. The deal was a reward for illiberal leaders, particularly Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. The primary losers would, of course, be the Palestinians, who would have to give up their hopes for a separate state in exchange for some Saudi handouts, and the Sahrawi people who lost their claim to the Western Sahara when the United States and Israel recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the entire region.

Instead of shelving the Accords, however, the Biden administration pushed ahead with them. After roundly criticizing Saudi autocrat Mohammed bin Salman for, among other things, ordering the murder of a U.S.-based Saudi journalist, Biden mended ties, fist-bumping that rogue leader, and continuing to discuss how and when the Kingdom would normalize relations with Israel. Nor did his administration restrict Washington’s staggering weapons deliveries to Israel after its invasion and utter devastation of Gaza. Yes, Biden and crew made some statements about Palestinian suffering and tried to push more humanitarian aid into the conflict zone, but they did next to nothing to pressure Israel to stop its killing machine (nor would they reverse the Trump administration’s decision on the Western Sahara).

The liberals who support Israel (come what may) like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, New York Congressman Ritchie Torres, and the New Democrat Coalition in the House of Representatives are, of course, going to be enthusiastic about Trump’s ever tighter embrace of Netanyahu next year. But there are also likely to be quiet cheers from other corners of the liberal-left about the harder line Trump is likely to take against Tehran. (Remember Kamala Harris’s assertion during her presidential run that Iran was the main adversary of the United States?) The Arab Spring is long gone, and a strong man in the White House needs to both schmooze with and go toe to toe with the strong men of the Middle East—or so many liberals will believe, even as they rationalize away their relief over Trump’s handling of a thoroughly illiberal region.

Looking Ahead (Or Do I Mean Behind?)

Anyone to the left of Tucker Carlson will certainly think twice about showing public enthusiasm for whatever Trump does. Indeed, most liberals will be appalled by the new administration’s likely suspension of aid to Ukraine and withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, not to mention other possible hare-brained maneuvers like sending U.S. troops to battle narcotraffickers in Mexico.

Trump will attract liberal support, however quietly or even secretively, not because of his bridge-building genius—in reality, he couldn’t even get a bridge-building infrastructure bill through Congress in his first term—but because all too many liberals have already moved inexorably rightward on issues ranging from China and the Middle East to immigration. The MAGA minority has seized the machinery of power by weaponizing mendacity and ruthlessly breaking rules, in the process transforming politics much the way the Bolshevik minority did in Russia more than a century ago. In the pot that those Republicans put on the stove, the water has been boiling for more than a decade and yet the left-of-center frogs barely seem to recognize just how altered our circumstances have become.

“Fascism can be defeated,” historian Timothy Snyder wrote immediately after the November elections, “but not when we are on its side.”

In normal times, finding overlapping interests with your political adversaries makes sense. Such bedrock bipartisanship stabilizes fractious countries that swing politically from center left to center right every few years.

These are, however, anything but normal times and the second-term Trump team anything but center-rightists. They are extremists bent on dismantling the federal government, unstitching the fabric of international law, and turning up the heat drastically on an already dangerously overcooking planet.

In 2020, I raised the possibility of a boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) movement against the United States if Trump won the elections that year. “People of the world, you’d better build your BDS box, paint ‘Break Glass in Case of Emergency’ on the front, and stand next to it on November 3,” I wrote then. “If Trump wins on Election Day, it will be mourning in America. But let’s hope that the world doesn’t mourn: it organizes.”

Four years later, Trump has won again. Do I hear the sound of breaking glass?

Here, in the United States, a stance of strict non-engagement with Trump 2.0, even where interests overlap, would not only be a good moral policy but even make political sense. When things go disastrously south, laws are broken, and the government begins to truly come apart at the seams, it’s vitally important that no left-of-center fingerprints be found at the scene of the crime.

Let’s be clear: The Trump administration will not be playing by the rules of normal politics. So, forget about bipartisanship. Forget about preserving access to power by visiting Mar-a-Lago, hat in hand, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “Fascism can be defeated,” historian Timothy Snyder wrote immediately after the November elections, “but not when we are on its side.”

So, my dear liberal-left, which side are you on?

It’s been a bad year for advocates of ranked-choice voting reforms.

Legislatures in five states banned the reform outright, as did voters in Missouri. And voters in four states—Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon—rejected referendums on adopting the new system. Only in the District of Columbia did a majority vote in favor of adopting the reform, and Alaskans chose to keep ranked-choice voting by a remarkably close 0.25% margin.

However, Democratic strategists and funders behind this year’s push for RCV may be able to learn from the losses. In three of the four ballot measure states, RCV initiatives were combined with a proposal for open primaries, flipping typical supporters to opponents. In Colorado and Nevada, where RCV was combined with open primaries, progressive groups joined the opposition, and business interests flooded the coffers of the PACs supporting the measures.

Despite recent setbacks, the coalition advocating in favor of ranked-choice voting appears to be changing.

The pushback against ranked-choice voting (RCV)—which allows voters to rank candidates according to their preference instead of choosing just one—is typically part of a larger Republican-aligned effort to restrict voting rights by limiting voting by mail, banning ballot drop boxes, and raising the threshold for passage of popular ballot initiatives.

MAGA groups oppose the practice as likely to favor Democrats and moderate Republicans over their candidates. Indeed, “election integrity” groups associated with Leonard Leo and Cleta Mitchell have been attacking ranked-choice voting options in their larger sweep to restrict voting rights, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the right-wing bill mill, has developed and circulated model legislation to prohibit it.

“Special interests are pushing a novel and complicated election process called ranked-choice voting,” ALEC’s model bill states. The group contends that the alternative voting system creates “a conflict between local and state election processes,” a claim legal scholars rebut. ALEC also highlights ranked-choice voting as systematically undermining the nation’s election systems in its annual “essential policy solutions” report for 2025.

At ALEC’s annual meeting in 2023, the custom hotel room keys featured anti-RCV branding. Key card sponsors gain access to lawmakers and VIP events at the conference, according to sponsorship materials obtained and reviewed by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).

Red State Legislatures Ban RCV

Republicans, with some exceptions, have historically opposed ranked-choice voting. After former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) lost a special House election in 2022—which was decided through ranked-choice voting—Republicans railed against it, with party leaders denouncing it as a “scam.” The Republican National Committee called for banning RCV “in every locality and level of government.”

Since then there has been a surge of interest in banning RCV for local, state, and federal elections. This year alone, bans passed in Louisiana (SB 101), Alabama (SB 186), Mississippi (SB 2144), Oklahoma (HB 3156), and Kentucky (HB 44), where the legislature overrode the governor’s veto of the bill. Previously, bans have been passed in Florida (SB 524, 2022), Idaho (HB 179, 2023), Montana (HB 598, 2023), South Dakota (SB 55, 2023), and Tennessee (SB 1820, 2022). Anti-RCV bills were introduced but never made it out of committee in Ohio and South Carolina.

In Missouri, the legislature paired RCV with a redundant measure to outlaw voting by noncitizens—which is already illegal in all federal elections—and sent it out to voters in what critics dismissed as partisan “ballot candy.”

In South Carolina (HB 4591, 2024), one of the bill’s two primary sponsors, Bill Taylor, is an ALEC member, as was the primary sponsor of the South Dakota bill (SB 55, 2023) that banned RCV.

Colorado

In Colorado, the failed effort to adopt ranked-choice voting—Proposition 131, which also would have eliminated single-party primaries—was primarily backed by Colorado Voters First, which received significant funding from industry and business interests.

Colorado Voters First received $2 million from Ben Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune; $600,000 from the Colorado Chamber of Commerce; $500,000 from Chevron; $100,000 from Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk’s brother; $496,000 from Voters for the American Center; and nearly $550,000 from private equity executives.

The largest donations came from Kent Thiry, a former healthcare executive who is board co-chair of Unite America, a large nonprofit that has spent significantly on ranked-choice voting ballot measures across the country. He donated a total of nearly $6 million to Colorado Voters First, while Unite America donated a total of $5.8 million.

Thiry has become a major player in Colorado politics, and has successfully fought for election reform ballot measures since 2016.

The main group opposing the proposition, Voters Rights Colorado, raised approximately $380,000, with its largest contributions coming from labor groups such as AFSCME and the National Education Association (NEA), as well as civic groups.

The coalition behind the no vote argued that the measure would disproportionately hurt progressive and pro-labor candidates, and most opposing groups were primarily concerned with the implementation of “jungle” primaries, not RCV.

The Colorado Working Families Party called the proposition “snake oil of the highest order” and expressed concern that it would “increase the role of big money in Colorado politics.”

The proposition risks “giving an even greater advantage to wealthy candidates and a bigger voice to special interests,” said Aly Belknap, Executive Director of Colorado Common Cause.

Some, however, worry about RCV more generally.

“There’s this feeling among progressives that ranked-choice voting is good for us, but here in Colorado, we fundamentally disagreed that Proposition 131 would help progressives, at least at the state level,” said Sean Hinga, deputy director of AFSCME Colorado. He believes the measure would “harm our ability to get labor candidates elected.”

AFSCME and Common Cause supported the RCV measure in Oregon.

Colorado voters rejected the RCV proposition 53.5% to 46.5%.

Idaho

Idaho’s Proposition 1 would have both instituted ranked-choice voting and ended closed primaries. The GOP-controlled legislature had tried to preemptively ban the measure from ever coming up for a vote, and the legislature had banned RCV the previous year. If it had passed, the ballot measure would have repealed the state law.

The initiative was supported by the Idaho Education Association and Idahoans for Open Primaries, which received $3 million from national PACs such as Unite America and a related group ($1.8 million), Article IV ($2.2 million), and Way Back PAC ($250,000), according to campaign finance disclosures.

Article IV, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit based in Virginia, is led by George Wellde III, a former Goldman Sachs investor. Working alongside Democratic operatives is the group’s treasurer, Cabell Hobbs, who has been the subject of a Federal Elections Commission complaint for helping a pro-Trump super PAC make illegal campaign contributions. Article IV is not required to publicly disclose its donors.

Way Back PAC, a hybrid PAC (also known as a Carey Committee), is based in Wyoming and mostly focuses on supporting independent and Democratic candidates in Western states.

The state GOP and many Republican representatives opposed the measure. Idaho Rising, the main opposition group, spent $321,000 on media advertising against the measure, according to its disclosures, and a constellation of smaller groups, including Secure Idaho Elections and Idaho Fair Elections, also worked to oppose it. One Person One Vote—a PAC that raised $250,000 in the four months it existed before the election—raised half of its funds from local Idahoan Larry Williams, the subject of a campaign finance complaint.

Nearly 70% of voters in Idaho voted against the measure.

Nevada

This year Nevada voters reversed their position on ranked-choice voting. In 2022, a majority of voters supported RCV, whereas this year, 53% voted against the proposition, known as Question 3, which was paired with a proposal for open primaries. Since the Nevada constitution requires voters to approve a ballot question twice before it is enacted, its failure to pass this year prevents it from becoming law.

Both state parties opposed the measure. The Nevada ACLU took no position on it.

Vote Yes on 3, the main group supporting the measure, received $13 million from Article IV, $6.4 million from Unite America, and $250,000 from Wynn Resorts, according to the group’s financial disclosures.

The opposition campaign, spearheaded by Protect Your Vote Nevada, raised approximately $2 million from a single group called Nevada Alliance, a progressive-leaning organization that is not required to disclose its donors.

Oregon

Nearly 57% of Oregon voters rejected Measure 117, which would have established statewide ranked-choice voting.

Yes on 117 PAC, the main group supporting the measure, spent nearly $9.4 million on the campaign, and received over $5.8 million from the 501(c)(4) nonprofit Oregon Ranked Choice Voting, by far the largest contributor to the PAC. It also received $2.8 million from Article IV, as well as funding from labor organizations and the Sierra Club.

The major group opposing the measure—Concerned Election Officials—raised a total of $1,380.

Alaska

Alaskans voted to retain ranked-choice voting—voting no on Ballot Measure 2—by only 743 votes.

Yes On 2, the primary PAC advocating for repeal of RCV, raised approximately $117,000 between July and October, with the largest donations being $10,000.

The anti-repeal effort, led by No On 2, raised nearly $14 million between June and late October, including $5.5 million from Unite America PAC, $4.4 million from Article IV, and $2 million from Action Now Initiative, the action arm of the philanthropic organization Arnold Ventures.

Despite recent setbacks, the coalition advocating in favor of ranked-choice voting appears to be changing. Even where efforts to implement RCV failed, the donors backing various ballot measures illustrate just how varied the groups interested in pushing for this election reform are.

Randall Irvin has been waiting for public housing in Chicago for six years, and his situation is not that unusual. For example, there are over 100,000 families on San Antonio’s waitlist for public housing. In Chicago, there were more than 200,000 families on the waitlist in 2023. Public housing waiting lists are extremely long because there is an inadequate supply—and a 1998 amendment to federal housing law is a significant barrier to building new housing.

Table 1 lists the average number of months households waited before they were able to receive public housing in selected metropolitan areas according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It ranges from a low of 11 months in San Antonio to a high of 84 months (seven years) in Miami. These numbers hide the wide range of variation around the average. In the city of Chicago, families can wait for as few as six months or as long as 25 years depending on the specifics of their situation and their family size. Households that are still waiting for housing or that never receive housing are not included in the calculation of the averages, so these average wait times do not fully capture the difficulty of obtaining public housing.

The families remaining on public housing waitlists for housing for years are in desperate situations. They are people who are homeless, who are living in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and who are struggling to afford their housing. In Washington, D.C., Rosalynn Talley, who waited 14 years for public housing, described her overcrowded housing situation as being “smashed up like sardines.” Her neighborhood was also unsafe, and there was mold in the house.

Congress is to blame for the low supply of public housing. In 1998, Congress passed the Faircloth Amendment which put a cap on the number of public housing units. The cap and the consistent underfunding of public housing has caused the number of public housing units to decline 40% from 1.4 million in 1994 to 835,000 in 2022 while the need for affordable housing has steadily increased.

Public housing is one of the most affordable forms of housing, but affordable housing policy has shifted to relying on the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). LIHTC goes to private developers and investors and creates “affordable” housing that is often more expensive to renters than public housing. The Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that “LIHTC [housing] does not necessarily protect a renter from [housing] cost burdens.” While the Faircloth Amendment has been a benefit to the for-profit real estate industry, it has hurt low-income renters.

Thankfully, there are some in Congress working to undo this bad law. The Homes Act, introduced by Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), if passed, would repeal the Faircloth Amendment and provide the funding needed to address the maintenance and repair backlog in public housing. Currently, the bill has 40 supporters in the House of Representatives and two supporters in the Senate. Repealing the Faircloth Amendment would open another channel to address the affordable housing crisis.

The recent COP29 climate finance deal is a stark example of how wealthy historical emitters continue to evade their responsibilities to pay for climate action and remedy climate harm. But they cannot escape rising demands for accountability. In the historic hearings on states' climate obligations at the International Court of Justice, which are drawing to a close, developing nations are forcing them to face the law.

The timing of these ICJ hearings, on the heels of yet another failure of the United Nations climate talks, underscores what's at stake.

The headlines have called COP29's climate finance deal a triumph of diplomacy, but this could not be farther from the truth. Wealthy nations responsible for the majority of cumulative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have carefully engineered an escape from their climate obligations through a deal the terms of which are too loose, and that offers too little, too late.

We know rich countries can deliver the grants they owe to the Global South. They can raise well over $5 trillion a year by ending fossil fuel handouts, taxing the rich, and changing unfair global financial rules.

It's too loose: Despite the deal's reference to two finance figures, $1.3 trillion and $300 billion, both constitute a hollow promise. The text fails to hold developed countries to their legal duty to provide climate finance to the Global South. Actors are merely "called upon" to work toward scaling funding to $1.3 trillion per year by 2035, without any binding commitments. Even the $300 billion annual goal has been carefully worded to avoid any concrete obligations. Developed countries are only required to "take the lead" in "mobilizing" these funds, which can come from private finance, multilateral development banks, and other "alternative" sources.

As multiple states including Colombia, Sierra Leone, and Seychelles emphasized during the ICJ hearings, this vagueness disproportionately impacts debt-stressed nations already struggling to fund climate action. If rich countries can pass the buck to the private sector and Global South, the most climate-vulnerable nations may be forced to take on more loans and private investment schemes rather than grants, deepening the historic debt crisis already affecting 93% of them.

Private finance cannot cover the costs of climate action in the Global South. That approach has been tested and failed. Nor can carbon markets fill the gap. Yet, the deal leaves the door open to carbon finance being wrongly counted as climate finance, allowing polluters to claim other countries' climate action as their own through carbon offsets rather than requiring them to pay up and phase out fossil fuels at home. With under 16% of carbon credits currently achieving actual emission reductions, this doesn't underwrite climate ambition, it undermines it.

It's too little: Contrary to what UNFCCC lead Simon Stiell has suggested, what was agreed at COP29 is not a tripling of climate finance. When adjusted for inflation, the $300 billion target is no meaningful increase compared to the $100 billion annually promised by 2020—which rich countries failed to meet. As the decision's own preamble acknowledges, the scale of need in developing countries is on the order of trillions, not billions, annually for climate action between now and 2030. And that figure is neither unreasonable nor out of reach. For context, rich nations currently spend $378 billion yearly on fossil fuel subsidies alone, and fossil fuel companies raked in an average of over $1 trillion in annual profits over the last 10 years. The money exists—it's just being invested in climate destruction rather than climate action.

It's too late: Waiting until 2035 for full implementation of climate finance goals essentially writes off this critical decade for climate action.

The inadequacy of this climate finance deal means planning for failure when it comes to fossil fuel phaseout, and therefore locking in climate catastrophe. The necessary global transition away from fossil fuels can't happen at the speed and scale required unless the biggest polluters pay. The ink has barely dried on the agreement, and wealthy nations are already on the offense. E.U. Climate Commissioner Woebke Hoekstra suggested in De Telegraaf that the E.U. could reduce its share of climate finance contributions since "other country contributions count too." Meanwhile, U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband reframed the entire deal as an "investment opportunity," suggesting that private sector funding could cover the bill—precisely the kind of responsibility-shifting the agreement's language enables. Hoekstra celebrates the deal as 'the start of a new era for climate finance'. Sadly, this is true. A new era where the E.U., U.K., and other rich nations dodge their responsibility to pay—one where everyone is responsible and thus no one is.

But we know rich countries can deliver the grants they owe to the Global South. They can raise well over $5 trillion a year by ending fossil fuel handouts, taxing the rich, and changing unfair global financial rules.

We also know failing to provide needed climate finance doesn't just condemn Global South countries suffering most acutely from a crisis they didn't create. It undermines our collective future.

As the International Court of Justice deliberates on states' climate obligations, this inadequate finance deal illustrates exactly why judicial scrutiny and legal clarity is needed. The world cannot afford another decade of wealthy nations dodging their responsibilities while climate disasters mount.

We reject this deal for what it is—a carefully constructed escape hatch for wealthy nations. It's high time for the biggest polluters to stop hiding behind voluntary pledges and using the climate regime to protect themselves from climate accountability, rather than to protect people and the planet from climate destruction. Rich countries must pay up for the climate action needed to halt the climate crisis they have created and remedy the climate harms that they have inflicted. Doing so is not just a moral imperative, it's a legal obligation.

Syria, known throughout history as the “crossroads of civilization,” now finds itself at a crossroads of its own. After 54 years, the Assad family’s brutal dictatorship in Syria has finally ended.

“I never thought I’d live to see this day,” said my dad, who left Aleppo as a teenager. My parents grew up there.

After Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, elated Syrians rejoiced in the streets. Moving videos emerged of political prisoners being freed after enduring decades of torture in the regime’s notorious prisons. The whereabouts of many still remain unknown.

In addition to respecting Syria’s territorial integrity and the aspirations of its people in a future government, the U.S. should immediately lift all sanctions on Syria to help with reconstruction and economic recovery.

Assad’s fall is undeniably worth celebrating—it’s a rare unifying force for a deeply fractured country. But after decades of oppression and 14 years of war, it will take much more to heal these wounds and guarantee a new era of freedom, justice, prosperity, and reconciliation.

The popular uprising for Syrian dignity that ignited in March 2011 was violently crushed by Assad and morphed into several proxy wars involving Russia, Iran, Israel, the U.S., Turkey, and numerous armed groups, including al Qaeda-linked terrorists.

Heinous war crimes and other human rights violations were committed by all parties throughout the war, which has killed over 350,000 people. In the world’s largest forced displacement crisis, over 13 million Syrians have either fled their country or have been displaced within its borders.

The war has damaged Syria’s infrastructure while Western sanctions have further shattered Syria’s economy. Poverty is widespread, and more than half of the population currently grapples with food insecurity.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), once allied with al Qaeda in Syria, was largely responsible for Assad’s overthrow on December 8. Designated by the U.S as a terrorist organization, HTS has its own track record of brutality in Syria. The rebel group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, founded the Al Nusra Front, once had ties to ISIS, and still has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head.

Jolani has since renounced his ties with al Qaeda and recently said he supports religious pluralism in Syria. But it’s reasonable to be skeptical that HTS and its allies are now truly committed to freedom, justice, and human rights for all long-suffering Syrians.

Still, foreign occupation and intervention are antithetical to a sovereign and “free” Syria.

Following Assad’s fall, Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes and unlawfully seized more territory beyond its illegal, 57-year occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights. Whether Turkey gives up occupied land in northern Syria also remains to be seen, especially if Syrian Kurds end up forming an autonomous region within the country.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military still occupies part of Syria, including the oil fields in the northeast, and it’s unclear when the U.S. will withdraw its remaining 900 soldiers. In addition to respecting Syria’s territorial integrity and the aspirations of its people in a future government, the U.S. should immediately lift all sanctions on Syria to help with reconstruction and economic recovery.

As a Syrian American, I try to remain hopeful as I think about my relatives in Aleppo, friends in Damascus, and the generous strangers who’ve taken care of me as their own when I’ve visited. I look forward to returning to a Syria where people can finally breathe, rebuild, and live in dignity. But I also fear for the future.

Syrians have always taken pride in their rich ethnic and religious diversity. An inclusive and democratic government that guarantees the equal rights of all Syrians is essential to ensuring that the country stays unified and doesn’t plunge into sectarian chaos. It would be tragic if one authoritarian ruler is replaced by another or the country becomes balkanized into armed factions.

While much remains uncertain and immense challenges are ahead, prioritizing the immediate needs of Syrians is a logical first step. And, more than anything else, we must ensure that the Syrian people are the ones who steer the destiny of a peaceful, post-war Syria that reflects their remarkable resilience, courage, hopes, and dreams.

Corporate executives worried about becoming the targets of the next Brian Thompson-style killing of those who run an evil company have to choose between a chance of losing their lives versus the certainty of making more profits.

The post Greed Has Good Odds first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Greed Has Good Odds appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has sparked a national conversation about the state of healthcare in the United States. The accused shooter, Luigi Mangione, allegedly wrote a manifesto in which he pointed out that the U.S. has low life expectancy despite paying the highest costs for healthcare in the world. And he appears to have lit a fuse as “Wanted” posters have gone up on the city streets depicting other health insurance company executives accused of putting profits before their clients’ health at the same time Thompson’s bereaved family laid one of the most despised dead people in America to rest.

“The TMI Show”’s resident leftist Ted Rall, guest co-host Robby West and guest Steve Gill, a conservative talk host, discuss Health Insurance Horror Stories, the future of for-profit healthcare under Trump and what, if anything, could be done to reduce Americans’ anger at a system that ought to be helping them.

The post TMI Show Ep 36: “Health Insurance Horror Stories” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 36: “Health Insurance Horror Stories” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.