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

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

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

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

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

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

Warning sign?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nowadays, even the present is past.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Change the ‘Main Driver’ of Wildfires

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burning Through Billions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Energy Transition Could Take ‘Generations’

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

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

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

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

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

Fossil Energy Companies Are ‘Hugely Important’

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

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

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

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

Name, Blame, and Shame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They are coming to replace us.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out of the Blue?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imperialism Repackaged

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending Out an SOS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artists for Peace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Brief History of Culture and Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On February 4, in a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States “will take over the Gaza Strip,” “level the site,” have all Palestinians removed, and enable people “from all over the world [to] be there” to enjoy what he appears to envision as an international resort area.

While many observers are dismissing Trump’s statement as a bizarre and spontaneous scheme on which he will likely not follow through, the announcement appeared to be the result of at least some degree of planning, as he read from prepared notes from a proposal assembled well ahead of Netanyahu’s visit.

While this may be among the most extreme anti-Palestinian initiatives to have ever come out of Washington, it is the logical extension of decades of bipartisan U.S. policy in support of Israel’s occupation and colonization of the West Bank, as well as recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights, a recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s exclusive capital, and support for Israel’s decades-long siege of and successive devastating wars on the Gaza Strip. In denying Palestinians equal rights, either through a viable two-state solution or a binational state with guaranteed rights for all, the United States has contributed to the emergence of violent extremists on both sides, and has given the far more powerful Israelis license to escalate their imposition of a kind of apartheid system.

The one cause for hope is that the U.S. government’s now open, on-record support for such a flagrant settler-colonial project—as opposed to its prior platitudes about a two-state solution it never had any intention of forcing Israel to accept—might enable the emergence of a stronger movement in support of human rights and international law in Israel and Palestine.

Trump has rationalized expelling Palestinians in order to rebuild Gaza on the terms of the United States and Israel by noting that much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble, and can no longer sustain the population. While he referred to the Palestinians’ plight as a result of “bad luck,” it is in fact the result of deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure by U.S.-backed Israeli forces. A growing international legal consensus hasdescribed this ongoing siege as genocide, made possible through bipartisan support for unconditional military aid, five U.S. vetoes of otherwise-unanimous U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for a cease-fire, and attacks on human rights groups and international legal institutions that have sought accountability for the actions of the Israeli government.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared earlier this week on X that the United States would “Make Gaza Beautiful Again.” While members of Congress from both parties expressed skepticism, others were supportive. U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said the proposal was a “good idea,” and asked a reporter, “Do you want to be part of it?” U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) also appeared to be open to the idea, calling it “provocative” but saying that it is “part of the conversation.”

Arab states, including such Trump-backed autocratic regimes as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, roundly rejected Trump’s plan, which would require them to absorb a new round of Palestinian refugees. Germany, Russia, China, Spain, Turkey, Brazil, and other nations, as well as various United Nations agencies, condemned the proposal as illegal. The proposal was reportedly influenced by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who said publicly last year that “Gaza’s waterfront property... could be very valuable” and that “from Israel’s perspective, [he] would do [his] best to move the people out and then clean it up.”

The Israeli Intelligence Ministry had already prepared a plan in October 2023 to physically remove all Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai desert, as ministers in Netanyahu’s government have repeatedly called for the expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza and colonization of the region. That same fall, the Biden administration proposed to the Egyptians that they accept an exodus of Palestinians into the territory. Although the State Department later claimed the administration’s proposal was only meant as a short-term measure, the Egyptians doubted that Israel would allow the refugees back, in light of Israel’s historic refusal to honor the right of return of previous waves of Palestinian refugees.

Now such plans are coming to fruition. Netanyahu has ordered the Israeli army to prepare plans to organize the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. Although Jordan and Egypt, whom Trump suggested could take the bulk of refugees, have made it clear that they will not accept Palestinians forced out of Palestine, they cannot stop Israel, with the backing of the United States, from expelling them.

Compounding the horror of Trump’s proposal is that, while many Palestinian families have lived in Gaza for centuries, the majority of current residents are themselves refugees or descendants of refugees forced out of other parts of Palestine between 1947 and 1950. When asked about what would happen if the Palestinians wanted to return to Gaza, Trump—after describing how he planned to turn the territory into a new Riviera—dismissed the question by saying, “Why would they want to return? That place has been hell.”

That no one in the Democratic Party leadership in Congress or elsewhere has called for Netanyahu’s arrest in keeping with the International Criminal Court, or even objected to his being invited, has likely emboldened Trump and Netanyahu to announce their support for this ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. With the majority of congressional Democrats continuing their support for unconditional military aid to Israel despite its slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and the threatened expulsion of 2 million more, these two right-wing leaders appear to believe there is little stopping them.

The one cause for hope is that the U.S. government’s now open, on-record support for such a flagrant settler-colonial project—as opposed to its prior platitudes about a two-state solution it never had any intention of forcing Israel to accept—might enable the emergence of a stronger movement in support of human rights and international law in Israel and Palestine. Supporting unconditional military aid to a government committed to ethnic cleansing may prove even more difficult for members of Congress to justify than providing such assistance to a government in its terror bombing of crowded urban areas and then restricting relief supplies.

What is at stake here is not just a new threat to the rights of the Palestinians, but a threat to the entire international legal order. With Trump’s plans to colonize Gaza, congressional Democrats may finally be forced to choose which side they are on.

Trump and Musk are stirring up a resistance movement among liberals and the left. The protests are a righteous struggle against the authoritarian usurpation of lawful power, the reckless, illegal attacks on government agencies, the stripping of DEI programs and language, and the trampling over the rights of immigrants and transgender people.

But what are the goals of this resistance? And do voters outside the liberal bubble support them?

It's time to face up to the harsh reality: Trump’s flurry of activity, at least so far, has made him more popular, not less so, with the American public. Here’s the latest CBS poll:

• How would you describe Trump? 69 percent said “tough,” 63 percent said “energetic,” 60 percent said “focused,” and 58 percent said “effective.”
• Is Trump living up to his campaign promises? 70 percent said “yes.”
• Trump’s overall job rating is 53 percent. At this point in his first term it was only 40 percent.
• A hefty 59 percent approve of his program to “deport immigrants illegally in the U.S,” while 64 percent approve of sending troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. A smaller majority, 52 percent, oppose setting up large detention centers.
• How about Gaza? 54 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the conflict, though only 13 percent think it would be a good idea to for the U.S. to take over Gaza.
• Trump’s major vulnerability seems to be inflation. Two-thirds believe he is not focusing enough on lowering prices.

Progressives emphatically believe that Trump is destroying democracy, but doesn’t democracy have something to do with the will of the people? And what does it mean for democracy if Trump’s actions are broadening his base even beyond those who voted for him? It likely means that a majority of the public does not view Trump as the destroyer of democracy.

Rather than simply coming to the defense of USAID, progressives should organize protests aimed at stopping pharmaceutical price gouging and for promoting price controls on the food cartels.

Trump is broadening his base by doing what he said he would do and thinks he was elected to do. His support is growing because there is a hunger for action that is, at least symbolically, in the people’s interest. Will Trump’s approach improve the outcomes for the working class? That’s doubtful, but there is a desire for defiant action, and they are getting it.

Breaking Out of the Bubble

There’s a lesson there. Broadening the base is precisely what progressives must do.

That starts with a recognition that protests alone don’t signal action on behalf of working people. And such displays may be helping Trump increase, not undermine, his support. He may even want to provoke them, because he understands what liberals don’t—that most of the protests will be seen as resistance to change, as support for established elite institutions, and as obstacles to creating a better life for voters.

Think for a second about USAID. Most Americans are not strong supporters of spending billions to aid other countries while needs at home go unmet. As David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief advisor, put it:

“My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’ When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: ‘Cut foreign aid.’”

What then are the tests to evaluate resistance tactics?

• Do protests and resistance expand the progressive base?
• Do they engage with working people who have drifted away from the Democratic Party over the last generation?
• Do they win over those who support Trump’s efforts to dramatically change the federal government?

So far, probably not. That’s because progressive protests mostly, if not entirely, involve mobilizing and appealing to those who already agree with liberal positions. There are plenty of people who support these efforts, but not enough.

It will take real effort and imagination to figure out how to promote dialogue that expands the progressive base.

This is not to say that protests to protect the vulnerable are not important. Saving an immigrant child from being ripped out of the classroom and deported is both courageous and humanitarian. But by themselves, most protests only give Trump more ways expand his base.

Mobilizing for 2026?

If progressives want to halt Trump’s authoritarian actions, they will want the Democrats recapture at least one of the Congressional chambers. To do that the progressive base must expand in swing districts.

How should those battles be waged?

We know from the polling done by the Center for Working Class Politics that a strong populist economic message is far more effective than attacking Trump on democracy issues. We also know from the CBS poll that Trump is vulnerable on the high cost of living.

Saving an immigrant child from being ripped out of the classroom and deported is both courageous and humanitarian. But by themselves, most protests only give Trump more ways expand his base.

Rather than simply coming to the defense of USAID, progressives should organize protests aimed at stopping pharmaceutical price gouging and for promoting price controls on the food cartels. As I recently wrote, the Democrats also could put Trump on the defensive by demanding he implement an executive order that prevents government contractors (like Musk) from laying off workers involuntarily.

Progressive activists have the creativity to mobilize protests around price hikes and needless layoffs. But the move from defense to offense will only be possible if they are engaged in dialogue with Trump supporters about an economic platform that protects the livelihoods and economic well-being of working people.

In a fragmented society, this is a heavy lift. More affluent progressives and Trump working-class supporters do not often live in the same areas or share the same spaces. Inflation and job insecurity may not feel as pressing to them as they do to working people. It will take real effort and imagination to figure out how to promote dialogue that expands the progressive base.

The move from defense to offense will only be possible if they are engaged in dialogue with Trump supporters about an economic platform that protects the livelihoods and economic well-being of working people.

In our own small way, the Labor Institute has figured out how to build educational bridges between MAGA workers and others in our Reversing Runaway Inequality training for union members. The participants bring with them a wide range of political preferences, but after an 8-hour workshop they come together to design a common vision for what a society without runaway inequality should look like. It turns out workers from all across the red-blue spectrum have similar ideas about the key elements of a fair and just society.

Then what? That openness won’t translate into Democratic votes unless candidates are willing to put forth a powerful populist economic message that supports workers’ jobs and wages.

It turns out workers from all across the red-blue spectrum have similar ideas about the key elements of a fair and just society.

And there’s the rub: those candidates not only have to mouth the words, but also, they need to believe in the message. To build a bigger base, they must be willing to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class instead of trying to raise money from them.

The alternative? More marches, more chanting, and... more defeats.

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The deep freeze in U.S.-Russian relations is about to thaw out bigly.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump talked for about an hour and a half yesterday, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. The call was “lengthy and highly productive,” Trump said on Truth Social. “We discussed Ukraine, the Middle East, Energy, Artificial Intelligence, the power of the Dollar, and various other subjects.” They agreed that they “want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine,” Trump added, announcing an “immediate” start of negotiations to resolve the Ukraine conflict.

The two men discussed the Middle East and Iran’s nuclear program and agreed to visit one another in person.

What’s next for Russia, the U.S. and Ukraine? Political and international relations expert Mark Sleboda joins Ted Rall and Manila Chan on “The TMI Show” to figure that out.

The post TMI Show Ep 78: Putin and Trump’s Perfect Phone Call first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 78: Putin and Trump’s Perfect Phone Call appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In his book, The Present Age, the late sociologist Robert Nisbet applied a pithy descriptor to a phenomenon we have seen all too often in public life: the “no-fault” theory of political action, particularly in foreign affairs. “Presidents, secretaries, and generals and admirals in America seemingly subscribe to the doctrine that no fault ever attaches to policy and operations,” he wrote. “This No Fault conviction prevents them from taking too seriously such notorious foul-ups as Desert One, Grenada, Lebanon, and now the Persian Gulf.”

Nisbet did not live to see a spectacular example of his theory. George W. Bush, having failed to prevent the 9/11 disaster his own intelligence agencies foresaw, proceeded to initiate a years-long disaster in Iraq, a catastrophe of his own making. Yet what were the consequences? The American people rewarded him with a second term in the face of abundant evidence of his incompetence and bad faith.

It would appear that Nisbet’s thesis needs revision. What he said was blatantly obvious: of course politicians rarely blame themselves for their own egregious policy failures, for it characterizes the typical behavior of ambitious, self-confident, and often corner-cutting people.

We frequently hear calls for “accountability:” for politicians, tech moguls, and the like... How telling then, that there are no such calls for accountability when it comes to the American people.

What is more significant, and troubling, is the reaction of the people who elect them: why do they more often than not reward leaders who inveigle them into national calamity? Isn’t there also a no-fault doctrine that applies to the American voter, a doctrine that is for the most part rigidly observed by journalists, pundits, and the self-proclaimed wise men who monopolize the op-ed pages of the prestige newspapers?

From the platforms of the chattering classes, we frequently hear calls for “accountability:” for politicians, tech moguls, and the like. Holding someone accountable implies that the person in question is a functioning adult who can be considered responsible for his actions. How telling then, that there are no such calls for accountability when it comes to the American people.

Turning back to Bush, his reelection did not end his reign of error. His policy of radical financial deregulation, about which he and his underlings bragged incessantly, and about which the public had to know if it were remotely paying attention, led in his second term to the greatest financial meltdown in 80 years.

Temporarily chastened, voters latched on to Barack Obama as the savior du jour. It turned out that Obama was no Moses leading the people to the promised land. A nominal Democrat, he was more an old-school Rockefeller Republican whose two terms were mostly an uneventful placeholder in history—not that such administrations are necessarily bad, as the current all-enveloping chaos demonstrates.

But placid, play-it-safe presidencies are boring, particularly for an increasingly infantilized public that needs 24/7 entertainment to stave off that worst of mental states: honest self-reflection. So they grew tired of Perry Como’s crooning, hankering instead after Ozzy Osbourne smashing his guitar and biting the head off a bat. That explains a good deal about how we got Trump 1.0 and 2.0.

Placid, play-it-safe presidencies are boring, particularly for an increasingly infantilized public that needs 24/7 entertainment to stave off that worst of mental states: honest self-reflection.

Wait, say the pundits, weren’t great swathes of the American people in 2016 victimized by the system, suffering from “economic anxiety?” But exit polling data from 2016 showed that Hillary Clinton won by 12 points among voters making less than $30,000 a year and by nine points among those making between $30,000 and $49,999. Trump, on the other hand, won every demographic making $50,000 or more

In 2024, the U.S. economy was the best in almost 60 years, with October unemployment at 4.1 percent. This is not to argue that everything was ideal, but the economy was better than recent U.S. experience, and unemployment and GDP growth were far better than most developed countries.

Accordingly, pundits dropped the economic anxiety excuse. Instead, we have been inundated with think pieces about how Democrats in some unexplained way “lost the working class,” a demographic conveniently left undefined. This claim contradicts continued polling evidence that Trump consistently did better among more affluent voters. The notion that Trump has magnetic appeal among Americans living a precarious economic existence is largely myth.

Otherwise, the media has treated Trump’s election like an asteroid falling from the sky, a natural disaster seemingly without input from the electorate. Why? It may be that the press still refuses to violate the last moral taboo in American public life: the essential innocence and virtue of this country’s citizens.

Denouncing the rascality of politicians is a revered American tradition, from Artemus Ward to Mark Twain, to Will Rogers, right down to the late-night TV hosts of today. Even the ultra-refined Henry Adams, scion of the Adams's of presidential fame, approvingly quoted the line, “A congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and beat him on the snout!”

Perhaps the only well-known American literary figure to take a dim view of the people who actually elect the politicians was H.L. Mencken. He denounced vigilantism during World War I, Prohibition, the 1920s resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the revival of religious fundamentalism that same decade, not as some plague that befell the country from nowhere, but as an expression of Americans’ mob mentality, anti-intellectualism, and search for easy solutions.

Otherwise, American literary tradition gives us Walt Whitman singing the praises of his fellow citizens, Carl Sandberg (“the people, yes . . .”), Thorton Wilder and his sentimental tale of small-town folks, and Frank Capra’s maudlin cinematic paeans to the fundamental goodness of the common clay. Thousands of lesser lights have engaged in similar rhetorical puffery to the present day. The tragic, grown-up sense of social life in Victor Hugo or the great Russian novelists is absent from the American tradition.

Mystification merely being academic slang for bamboozlement, the theory never answers the question: why are the people so easily conned by the most childish lies and distortions...?

Editorial departments still hew to this convention. A journalist friend recently submitted a piece to a well-known center-left magazine arguing that some responsibility must attach to the voters for the 2024 election. The response: “We can’t say the American people are stupid,” even though the editor agreed with the author.

Political theorists from the center to the far left are also prone to this delusion. They have built an edifice of psychological denial on the idea that even if there is a pervasive system of illegitimate corporate or governmental control, it is miraculously unconnected with the character of the people the system administers. Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent is typical of the species, a late-20th century adaptation of Karl Marx’s theory of mystification: that the common people do not recognize their genuine interest because they have been mystified by the powers-that-be.

Mystification merely being academic slang for bamboozlement, the theory never answers the question: why are the people so easily conned by the most childish lies and distortions when accurate information is easily accessible, and never more so than today? (This is quite apart from the fact that Trump told voters very explicitly about the horrors he would inflict, meaning that something other than gullibility is also at work).

It wasn’t always thus: farmers in the 1890s, the core support for the old People’s Party, knew very well who was screwing them: the railroads, the banks, the grain traders. So did 1930s production-line workers in steel, autos, and rubber, struggling for union recognition: they knew it was their own employers, not foreign competition or some culture-wars chimera that was responsible for their miserable conditions.

But now, farmers vote overwhelmingly for Trump, despite their suffering under foreign retaliatory tariffs resulting from his ill-considered economic policy during his first term and likely further damage in his second. And unionization is at record post-World War II lows, despite the material benefits of union membership.

What changed? Historian Rick Perlstein, writing in The Invisible Bridge, said that in the 1970s, as the crises of Vietnam, racial unrest, and Watergate abated, the American people had a chance to learn from these events: in other words, to grow up and be responsible citizens.

They didn’t. Ronald Reagan’s soothing fairy tale of innocent virtue, of a country sinned against but never sinning, became America’s secular religion. I would extend Perlstein’s thesis by suggesting that this bogus innocence has become embedded in the American psyche and individualized into a personalized martyr complex. Every vicissitude of life is now the fault of some detested minority, or the elites, or the system generally.

The vanguard of this personality type, the people who actually generate the atrocious ideas the Trump regime is now implementing, is what substacker John Ganz calls the “creep-loser.” You know the type from high school: awkward, asocial, and full of resentment against the world for failing to recognize his genius.

Many of them become brooding, failed intellectuals, the sort that were the idea engine of authoritarian movements throughout the 20th century, and who now infest places like the Claremont Institute and Heritage Foundation. They are to MAGA what the Old Bolsheviks were to the Communist movement. It is no coincidence that Steve Bannon described himself as a Leninist. Their goal is simply destruction as revenge.

It is true that all of these resentful fantasists together would barely fill a stadium: hardly a key national voting bloc. But their nihilistic attitude is surprisingly prevalent among “real Americans” who never read Ayn Rand or attended Hillsdale College. Beginning in 2015, pollsters have been rather surprised at the frequency that respondents claim they just want to “burn it all down,” not troubling themselves with what will happen to the social infrastructure that supports their very existence.

If it reaches the point where Americans are sent to Guantanamo for their political opinions, what will be the reaction of the unserious?

Add to them the rapturist Christians, the hard core of the Christian fundamentalist voting bloc (the largest single constituency of the Republican Party). The belief that a millennial holocaust wiping out earth is something to look forward to is in its basic psychology no different from Hitler’s Götterdämmerung in the Berlin bunker or suicide cults like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple. Even the wider fundamentalist belief system is prone to rigidly separate human beings into the blessed and the damned, a mindset hardly consistent with pluralist democracy.

A final demographic is the most diffuse and least attached to any ideology: the tens of millions of unserious Americans who refuse to take anything seriously, for whom the smallest exercise of civic responsibility is either uncool, or boring, or a violation of their freedom to be irresponsible. Some of them voted for Trump because “he’s funny;” you may know the type. No doubt they think even now that plundering Greenland or sending combat troops to Gaza is comedy gold. Others will apply a sort of degenerate folk wisdom that they think is clever, saying they “always vote those in office out, and those out of office in,” or some similar nonsense.

Other unserious people feign a righteous anger over the price of eggs on the assumption that the White House controls the cost of consumer goods regardless of circumstances like bird flu. The price of eggs or broiler chickens is much more important to them than living under the rule of law or handing down a decent and humane society to their children.

Maybe we were always deceived by popular culture, or misread it.

If it reaches the point where Americans are sent to Guantanamo for their political opinions, what will be the reaction of the unserious? No doubt indifference, because it won’t affect them, just as arrests of Jews or Social Democrats didn’t affect “good Germans” in the 1930s. As for the true believers, whether religious fundamentalist or secular neoreactionary tech-nerd, they’ll be cheering it on: they never believed in any nonsense about democracy or human rights in any case.

How can America’s purported thought-leaders seriously maintain that a working majority of Americans (those who voted for Trump and those who didn’t bother to vote because they didn’t care) didn’t consciously will what is now unfolding? As Steve Bannon’s role model Lenin was reputed to have remarked, “who says A must say B:” people are intellectually and morally responsible for the consequences of their actions. To argue otherwise is the equivalent of saying that tens of millions of Americans are legally incapable of signing contracts, marrying, driving cars, or exercising the franchise.

Maybe we were always deceived by popular culture, or misread it. It’s a Wonderful Life is conventionally viewed as a heart-warming Christmas movie, with a depressing second act making the finale all the more sentimentally fulfilling, like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Yet, but for the contingency of George Bailey’s having been born and lived, Bedford Falls inevitably would have defaulted to Potterville, hardly an affirmation of the goodness and civic-mindedness of the majority, who might have been expected to resist the designs of the grasping Mr. Potter.

Contingencies work that way in real life, too. But for the pandemic and the resulting inflation, we might be living in a different world. Alas, given the recent price of eggs, most Americans preferred to ditch safe, staid old Bedford Falls for the vulgar excitement of Potterville. The town’s owner, whether Mr. Potter or Donald Trump, will cheerfully ensure that while he might fleece you for every cent and jail you if you defy him, you’ll never be bored.

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House Leader Jeffries sounds like a Vichy Democrat who has given up. “What leverage do we have?” he asked reporters at his weekly news conference on Friday. “They control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government.”

Yet Republicans had a very different attitude when they found themselves in the same position Democrats are in now. They threatened to shut down the federal government and sometimes did so. They extracted concessions in order to raise the debt ceiling. They blocked judicial and other nominations.

What parliamentary and other tools could Democrats deploy to block or slow down Trump and his initiatives? Do they want to use them? If not, why not?

That’s what editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) are talking about on today’s DMZ America Podcast.

 

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 193: Democrats Say Resistance Is Futile first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 193: Democrats Say Resistance Is Futile appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

As President Donald Trump tests the limits of manufactured crisis and chaos, he claims a mandate from the American people. But his razor-thin electoral victory tells a different story. Voters didn’t ask for an illegal takeover of government offices, a freezing of funds for needed services, sending our immigrant neighbors to camps at Guantanamo, or aggression against our allies. Yes, we wanted change. But as multiple polls show, a clear majority were seeking relief from unaffordable prices, real economic hardship, and inequality, not an authoritarian takeover.

The Trump administration’s initial barrage of orders will make life worse for the most vulnerable — especially immigrants and transgender people — but soon enough for everyone else in the non-billionaire community. The rapid roll out of these policies is right out of the fascist playbook, designed to overwhelm and demobilize the public.

How can we regain our footing and our strength? We need to not only stop the roll out of policies that threaten to make life worse for ordinary people, but we need to keep focusing on the changes we the people are actually looking for. We need to demand the changes we voted for. If we do that, we can stay grounded during the turmoil, resist the chaos, and build the power to create an authentically populist future.

Does Trump have a mandate?

First, did the American people actually vote for the Trump/Musk actions? Clearly the answer is no. Trump won the vote of less than 1 in 3 eligible voters. 31 percent voted for Kamala Harris. This margin of victory was significantly lower than President Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020.

It was “none-of-the-above” that won a landslide in the 2024 election; 38 percent of eligible voters either cast a vote for a third-party candidate or they didn’t vote for president.

What Americans really want

Economic wellbeing, not chaos and threats, were the top of the list for Americans, including those who voted for Trump. Ninety percent of voters told Gallup the economy was a top influence in their 2024 vote. The rising cost of housing and everyday expenses was cited as the most critical issue by both Trump voters (79 percent) and the broader electorate (56 percent). Trump won four out of five voters who said they were worse off financially than four years ago.

The hardships are real. According to Federal Reserve data, more than one-third of American adults lack the resources to handle a $400 emergency. Families face crushing costs—median childcare runs $1,100 monthly, matching typical rent payments. Twenty-five percent of households with children carry medical debt. Nearly one in five adults has been financially impacted by natural disasters.

Democrats often tout improvements in inflation and unemployment under the Biden Administration. Yet the ALICE metric (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) reveals a hidden crisis: 42 percent of American households — often working multiple jobs — struggle to cover basic needs, a 23 percent increase since 2010.

Meanwhile, America's billionaire class has accumulated unprecedented wealth—$6.72 trillion among 813 individuals, growing by $1 trillion in just that last nine months of 2024, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. Seventy-two percent are dissatisfied with the size and influence of major corporations (and that number has grown by 14 points since the beginning of Trump’s first term).

It’s no surprise, then, that the economy remains the concern most noted by Americans in a Jan. 24-26, 2025 Reuters/Ipsos poll (21 percent), just behind is “political extremism or threats to democracy (20 percent). Immigration is third at 14 percent. Another poll shows 80 percent of Americans dissatisfied with the nation’s efforts to deal with poverty and homelessness, 69 percent dissatisfied with the availability of affordable healthcare, and 69 percent dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed.

Trump focuses on tax cuts for the wealthy and safeguards

President Trump used populist talking points when he was running. Sure corporate CEOs are happy to have fewer environmental and health regulations, and yes, that would boost their profits. But he has done nothing to further the economic wellbeing of ordinary Americans. Tariffs will make prices climb for consumers. And increased drilling will make the climate crisis worse while accomplishing little in a nation already awash with fossil fuels.

Trump is a genius at distraction, especially when his policies are mostly aimed at improving the prospects of himself and other billionaires. He does that by channelling MAGA anger at the least powerful members of our society, beginning by bullying undocumented families and transgender people.

It is true that Americans of both parties are dissatisfied with the level of immigration into the country. Migration is a global challenge—war, climate-caused displacement, and economic dislocation have sent millions of people on desperate searches for safety and opportunities. Some of them have come to the United States.

But many Americans value the neighbors, family members, business owners, and workers who are part of our communities. Few want to see forced family separations, the deportations of hard-working neighbors, and federal agents stalking our communities. And those with a long view recognize that they, too, could be displaced by natural disasters and climate change, and might wish to be treated well in their new homes.

Mobilizing for real populism

Early signs are that Americans are not on board with many of the Trump administration’s barrage of executive orders. According to an early February Reuters/ Ipsos poll, 62 percent opposed the temporary freezing of domestic spending.

Other executive orders supported by MAGA are also unpopular. Abolishing DEI programs in the military was supported by 46 percent of respondents, but opposed by 49 percent. And 55 percent opposed Trump’s order barring transgender people from the military.

How can ordinary people build sufficient power to protect democratic principles and the wellbeing of our families?

We should reject bogus claims of a mandate and recognize that Trump’s policies are unpopular and his approval ratings are low, already underwater with 46 percent disapproval compared to 45 percent approval.

That should embolden us to speak out!

But public opinion won’t save us. We have to act. And Americans are mobilizing, shaking off the shock and overwhelm of the initial onslaught of Trump orders:

Elected officials in Washington, D.C., report thousands of phone calls and emails coming in from constituents, and Democrats are beginning to push back. Even Republicans might find the backbone to stand up for ordinary people if their constituents let them know.

State and local officials are taking steps to protect residents from the worst damage from Trump administration action.
Thousands of people came together in hastily organized protests at state capitols around the country under the hashtag 'Build the Resistance.' Plans are underway for more mobilization and grassroots organizing.

Public officials and civil society groups are mounting successful lawsuits to rein in the worst abuses—the legal challenges are already demonstrating that the co-equal judicial branch of government is still functioning, and that many independent judges are prepared to stand up to administration bullying.

The next few years will be difficult for all who value freedom and equity. And, like the hardships the Trump administration is inflicting on Americans, citizens of other countries will feel the pain.

Our best hope is to organize, mobilize, and create common ground around the demands for economic relief, not authoritarianism. Instead of being distracted, divided, and overwhelmed, we can set our own agenda for positive change and insist that our elected leaders act on our behalf, not for the billionaires.

We will need many, many leaders—no one will save us. But if we step up and work together on the issues that affect ordinary people, we may come through this difficult time with renewed clarity about America’s strengths and values, and with the collective power to create a better future and a more durable democracy.

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“I’m not a cheap date,” Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts said yesterday. “[Republicans] want to run and tell everybody that they have this huge mandate — that they can do whatever the hell they want to do. Well, if that’s the case then they should put their mandate-pants on and do whatever the hell they want to do. But if you want us to be helpful, then you have to engage us. And we’re not going to just be there to bail you out.”

Democratic votes will be needed to get a federal spending bill through Congress. That might mean holding the line to save Medicaid, US-AID and education. They might try to fire Musk and DOGE. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warns that Democrats won’t support efforts to reduce the mortgage interest deduction or slash food subsidies for low-income children.

Does the Democratic #Resistance (finally) start here? Or will they cave like a cheap date? “The TMI Show”’s Ted Rall and Manila Chan preview the budget fight.

The post TMI Show Ep 77: Dems Threaten a Shutdown first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 77: Dems Threaten a Shutdown appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.