Shortly before midnight on December 2, 1984, a terrible cloud, consisting of tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate (MIC), along with other chemicals, began to leak into the atmosphere from the storage tank of the U.S. multinational corporation Union Carbide Corporation (UCC)’s pesticide plant on the outskirts of Bhopal in central India.

The immediate consequences of the mass poisoning were catastrophic. As many as 10,000 people are believed to have died within three days of the leak.

As the world marks the 40th anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, what lessons should we take from what happened on that awful night? I think perhaps there are at least three important ones. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, is that a single tragic event can have consequences that last generations.

As well as those who succumbed to the gas in the first few hours, many thousands more people were exposed to it, and they continue to suffer from a range of chronic and debilitating illnesses. It is now estimated that more than 22,000 people have died as a direct result of exposure to the leak, while more than half a million people continue to suffer some degree of permanent injury.

Shockingly, it is not only people exposed to the gas directly who have been affected. Over the years that followed, a large number of children born to gas-exposed parents have been affected by growth retardation, birth defects and other medical conditions.

As well as those who succumbed to the gas in the first few hours, many thousands more people were exposed to it, and they continue to suffer from a range of chronic and debilitating illnesses.

Meanwhile, to this day, thousands of tons of toxic waste remain buried in and around the abandoned plant. This has contaminated residents’ water supplies and harmed their health, adding to the already dismal health status of gas-exposed residents.

As well as the health impacts, the tragedy has pushed already impoverished communities into further destitution. In many families, the main wage earner died or became too ill to work. Women and children suffered disproportionately.

An unfortunate second lesson of the Bhopal tragedy is how easy it has been for UCC to escape accountability. Pitted against the largely poor victims of the gas disaster was the hugely powerful and enormously rich multinational corporation, which escaped providing the survivors, their children and grandchildren with adequate compensation and medical care.

The catastrophic gas leak was the foreseeable result of innumerable operational failures at the plant, but from the start, UCC’s response to the disaster was inadequate and callous. For example, although thousands of people were dying from gas exposure, or suffering agonizing injuries, UCC withheld critical information regarding MIC’s toxicological properties, undermining the effectiveness of the medical response. To this day, UCC has failed to name any of the chemicals and reaction products that leaked along with MIC on that fateful night.

In 1989, without consulting Bhopal Gas Tragedy survivors, the Indian government and UCC reached an out-of-court compensation settlement for $470 million. This amount was less than 15 percent of the initial amount sought by the government, and far less than most estimates of the damage at the time. Thousands of claims were not registered at all, including those of gas-exposed children under the age of 18, and children born to gas-affected parents who, time later showed, were also severely affected.

There have been numerous attempts to hold UCC and individuals to account, either through criminal or civil claim proceedings launched in India and the U.S. But these have had no or very limited results.

One challenge has been created by the restructuring of the business entities involved in the tragedy. UCC sold off the India-registered subsidiary that operated the plant. It was then, in turn, bought by another giant U.S. corporation, the Dow Chemical Company (Dow). To this day, Dow shamefully claims it bears no responsibility since it “never owned or operated the plant” and that UCC only became a subsidiary of Dow 16 years after the accident.

In 2010, the Chief Judicial Magistrate’s Court in Bhopal found seven Indian nationals, as well as UCC’s India-based subsidiary guilty of causing death by negligence. By contrast, U.S. individuals and companies have escaped punishment, and there is significant evidence that the U.S. authorities have helped protect them.

Companies have a responsibility to respect human rights wherever they operate. Dow may not have caused the gas leak, but it became directly linked to the tragedy after it bought UCC. The company boasts of following the highest human rights standards, but its continued failure to respond to the urgent needs of the survivors is utterly disgraceful.

But there is a third lesson to draw from the Bhopal Gas Tragedy and its aftermath. It can be found in the inspiring story of the survivor groups and their supporters, who over 40 years have refused to give up their fight for justice. They have initiated or intervened in many legal actions; conducted scientific research into the contamination and health impacts; and they have launched practical initiatives in the absence of sufficient state and corporate support. For example, in 1994, survivor groups fundraised for the Sambhavna Trust Clinic and they later opened the Chingari Rehabilitation Centre. Thousands of gas- and contamination-affected adults and children have benefitted from the highly specialized and professional medical care and rehabilitation provided by these institutions – unparalleled by any of the government-run facilities.

Their campaigning has also meant that Dow has never been able to disassociate itself from the Bhopal disaster. Until it finally addresses the needs of the survivors, their campaign will continue.

President Joe Biden and his press secretary and other surrogates have repeatedly told the media that he would not pardon his son Hunter Biden on federal tax evasion and gun charges under any circumstance whatsoever. Nothing has substantially changed, yet the president has gone ahead and issued the most controversial presidential pardon since Gerald Ford let Richard Nixon off the hook. Moreover, he has used language familiar to those who follow President-elect Donald Trump to excuse his brazen self dealing and lying, justifying his actions by accusing the Department of Justice of having been politicized.

What does it mean when the standard bearer of the Democrats, who claim that they differ from Trump because they are truth tellers, is so willing to make a mockery of the truth? What message are we to take from the fact that both political parties say that the DOJ is politically compromised? What if anything does this do to the Democratic Party brand? What should go Biden have done differently?

Attorney and historian Tyler Nixon joins the TMI Show’s Ted Rall and Manila Chan to discuss the political and cultural implications of the Hunter Biden pardon.

The post The TMI Show Ep 29: “Hunter Biden Pardoned Despite President’s Repeated Promises” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post The TMI Show Ep 29: “Hunter Biden Pardoned Despite President’s Repeated Promises” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Sixty-two years ago President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had the wisdom to peacefully resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kennedy understood that Soviet missiles in Cuba were a response, in part, to US missiles near the USSR, in Türkiye. Kennedy wisely removed the missiles from Türkiye in a secret negotiated settlement, in exchange for the Soviets removing their missiles from Cuba. Kennedy and Khrushchev thereby stepped away from the brink of nuclear war.

Kennedy had to keep the peace settlement secret, because he knew that anti-Communist crusaders in Congress and the security state would regard his actions as treasonous. He was in open conflict with the CIA, whose head, Allen Dulles, he had fired over the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Today the U.S. and Russia are, again, dangerously close to being at total war. In many ways, the crisis in Ukraine is the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse, given that Russia, rightly or wrongly, views NATO expansion up to its borders as an unacceptable infringement on its sphere of influence.

NATO and Russia continue to climb the escalatory ladder over the war in Ukraine.The recent launching of ATACM and Storm Shadow missiles into Russian territory crosses a red line for President Putin, whose expected reprisal (e.g., with Oreshnik ballistic missiles) may provoke NATO to climb another rung up the ladder.

These tit-for-tat escalations can all too easily spiral out of control, resulting in open warfare between NATO and Russia, as well as the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.

These tit-for-tat escalations can all too easily spiral out of control, resulting in open warfare between NATO and Russia, as well as the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. It is doubtful that a limited nuclear exchange can occur without it escalating to all-out nuclear warfare and the end of human civilization.

Even a one percent chance of such an outcome is an unacceptable risk.

Kennedy and Khrushchev had the wisdom, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, to pull back from the brink. Will American, British and Russian leaders have the wisdom now to peacefully resolve the war in Ukraine? The question is urgent.

For perspective and inspiration, we highly recommend that everyone read President Kennedy’s commencement address (also known as Kennnedy’s “peace speech”), delivered at American University on June 10, 1963. In that speech, Kennedy urged that we “conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists’ interests to agree to a genuine peace. And above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world."

Today it is vital that people understand the relevance and urgency of Kennedy’s point about making sure that our actions do not provoke a nuclear war.

It is also vital that lines of communication between the U.S. and Russia be kept open. In the speech, Kennedy announced the establishment of a hotline with Moscow to prevent future misunderstandings and the accidental launching of a nuclear exchange. Kennedy proposed to start negotiations towards a comprehensive test ban treaty. And he announced an end to above ground nuclear weapons testing. Lastly, Kennedy wrote in the speech, “We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded.”

The speech was given at a critical point in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the time, the speech so impressed Khrushchev that he had it reprinted in newspapers throughout the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately nothing like those things is happening now. Rather, in recent years, nearly all high-level contacts between Moscow and D.C. have been shunned, based on the notion that we must not negotiate with a Hitler. Furthermore, the U.S. withdrew from multiple arms deals with Russia: the ABM treaty during the second Bush Administration, and the INF Treaty and Open Skies Treaty during the Trump Administration. The New Start Treaty is now at risk, too, of being abrogated. Lastly, the U.S. government has, effectively, blocked Americans from viewing Russian media outlets such as RT.com.

Kennedy called for Americans to see the Soviet point of view. He warned “the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”

Likewise, today Americans need to see the Russian point of view with respect to NATO expansion towards their borders. However, this is not the place to go into detail about the history of NATO expansion (e.g., U.S. involvement in the 2014 Maidan coup and the arming by the CIA of far-right militias) or about the hypocrisy of the U.S. position, given its many interventions far from U.S. borders (e.g., the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Syria, where the U.S. currently occupies one third of the territory, the parts with oil). The details are voluminous, and we would be accused of repeating Putin’s talking points. When the house is on fire, the urgent need is to save lives.

Therefore, even if you naively believe that the United States is innocent in the crisis in Ukraine, you should still strongly support negotiations, to save Ukraine and Russia from further destruction, and to prevent the very real risk of World War III.

We need Kennedy’s wisdom now, because of the looming threat of nuclear war. Kennedy regarded world peace as "the most important topic on earth.... What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war -- not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace -- the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living."

We believe it is urgent that a peaceful resolution to the war in Ukraine be reached immediately.

I never realized before that men hate us so much.” That was the lesson drawn by one of my fellow organizers in Reno, Nevada, the morning after the 2024 general election. She’d turned 21 during the campaign, a three-month marathon she approached as a daily opportunity to learn as much as she could about everything she encountered. “Of course, they hate immigrants, too,” she added, “and I’m both.”

That morning of November 6th, I sat down with her and four other women to face the election results. The six of us had spent almost every day together over the previous three months, recruiting, training, and deploying volunteers in northern Nevada in the campaign to elect Kamala Harris president and return Jacky Rosen to the Senate. We didn’t yet know that we had indeed managed the latter, but it was already clear that the next president would not be Kamala Harris but Donald Trump. This was my fourth electoral outing with UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union. It was, however, my first time working directly with the union’s partner in Reno, Seed the Vote (STV), a campaign organization whose mission is to “win elections and build our movements.”

I’d initially been skeptical that STV, a progressive nonprofit outfit based in the San Francisco Bay Area, would be able to adapt to the union’s model: waging effective electoral campaigns while simultaneously training cooks, bartenders, hotel room attendants, and casino staff in the skills they need to build and sustain a fighting union. Would short-term volunteers show the same discipline and dedication I’d admired in union canvassers over the years? Would they go out again the day after they’d rung a doorbell and a voter carrying a shotgun had screamed at them, or sicced dogs on them, or called the police, or shouted racist curses at them, or even later followed them slowly in a pickup truck? As it turned out, most of them would.

Nor, by the way, was it lost on us that morning that all six of us were women. So are most of UNITE-HERE’s members and its two top officials, as was the director of the union’s campaign in Reno, along with the folks running the data department (something I had done in 2022). A wide variety of concerns brought us to this battle, but all of us knew that as women, along with struggles for a living wage, affordable housing, and access to health care, we were fighting for our lives.

Welcome to Gilead. Enjoy Your Stay.

In Donald Trump we confronted a candidate who’d promised to “protect” women — “whether the women like it or not.” He’d bragged about appointing the Supreme Court justices who’d overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively ending bodily autonomy for millions of women. He’d claimed that handing control of women’s bodies over to 50-odd state and territorial governments was what “everybody wanted.” I doubt it was the kind of “protection” Jessica Barnica wanted when Texas doctors refused her abortion care in the midst of a miscarriage, causing her to die of sepsis three days later. And it probably wasn’t what any of the other women wanted whose horror stories about suffering — and death — after the end of Roe were recently recounted in a New York magazine article, “Life after Roe.” No, we did not “like” the kind of protection that Donald Trump was offering us at all.

Here was a man whose earlier boasts about sexual assault hadn’t kept him out of the White House in 2016. Here was one who claimed that his female opponent in 2024 was born “mentally disabled.… There’s something wrong with Kamala and I just don’t know what it is, but there’s something missing and you know what? Everybody knows it.” It’s hard not to conclude that, to Trump, the “something missing” was a penis.

Penises were certainly on Trump’s mind when he reposted a photo of Harris with Hillary Clinton over the caption: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” That was, in part, an allusion to the right-wing trope that Harris had slept her way to the top, getting her start in politics through a brief relationship with California powerbroker Willie Brown. And Trump was a candidate whose sprint to the electoral finish line was fueled by attacks on some of the most vulnerable women of all — transgender teenagers.

He’d chosen as his running mate one J.D. Vance, a man who had complained that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” In his view, women exist, indeed were created by God, to be little more than vessels and caregivers for children. He cloaked his disdain for women’s actual desires or aspirations in a supposed concern for our happiness, warning that pursuing fulfilling work outside the home, “instead of starting a family and having children” was “actually a path to misery.” He added that the misery of the woman who is not a mother is a danger to the rest of us, because such women “get in positions of power and then they project that misery and [un]happiness on the rest of society.”

Welcome to the Republic of Gilead, where they really do hate us that much and they’re not afraid to say so.

Your Body, My Choice, Forever

Before readers go all “#notallmen” on me, let me stipulate that my brother doesn’t hate me. Nor does his son, my much-loved nephew. Nor did my father, nor my high school or college boyfriends for that matter. None of them hated me then or hate me now. A few of them have, however, held — largely unexamined — beliefs about women’s essential inferiority in one realm or another. And curled within such beliefs like a secret infection lurks a bacillus of contempt.

When that contempt festers, it can poison the blood of a nation, provoking a fever of women hatred like the one that has emerged in this country since Donald Trump’s recent election. Perhaps the first drop of sweat appeared in white supremacist (and erstwhile Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes’s election-night post on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Although even the liberal press has treated this dictum as if it referred primarily to reproductive rights, it’s clear that Fuentes and men like him are celebrating Trump’s victory as a referendum on rape.

Within a day, that post had 90 million views. Between Thursday and Friday of that week, as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported, online repetitions rose by 4,600%. Nor was Fuentes’s post unique. The Institute also observed that “Manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate, in a post on X on November 7th, stated: “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights.”

It seems as if it’s just a short step from thoughts of rape to thoughts of murder in Gilead. And a popular step, too. Tate’s post garnered almost 700,000 views within a couple of hours. A day earlier another Xer, Jon Miller, wrote, “Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say.” (And in case you don’t know, LMAO is “laughing my ass off” in text-speak.) Like Fuentes’s post, this one has received almost 90 million views.

Nor does what happens in the Manosphere stay in the Manosphere. As Vox reports, “Girls and young women are also hearing the line in schools, according to family members, with one mom posting on Facebook that her daughter had heard it three times on campus, and that boys told her to ‘sleep with one eye open tonight.’”

#yesmostmen

Exit polls show that 55% of male voters went for Donald Trump. That figure includes 49% of men aged 18 to 29 and over half of all other men, including 60% of men aged 45 to 64. Had only women voted in this election, Kamala Harris would have won handily. Is it any wonder then that, in addition to invitations to rape, calls for the repeal of the 19th amendment (which in 1920 gave people like me the right to vote) are also trending on social media?

One such call came from John McEntee, who served as Trump’s personal aide and later as the White House director of personnel during his first term. He also worked in personnel in the 2024 Trump campaign and, according to Newsweek, is “reportedly a senior adviser for the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a political initiative more commonly known as Project 2025.” In late October he posted a video on X, in which he explained, “So I guess they misunderstood. When we said we wanted mail-only voting, we meant male — ‘M-A-L-E.’” In the video’s caption, McEntee wrote, “The 19th might have to go.”

Yes, a majority of men voted for the candidate who has bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, who has been found liable in a civil suit for the rape and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, who happily allowed vendors at his rallies to sell “Say No to the Hoe” tee shirts, implying — in case you didn’t catch the “joke” — that Kamala Harris is a prostitute. A Google search on the phrase brings up pages of offers for that item, including this one from Etsy.com: “Just Say No to the Ho Campaign Style Shirt [from] Etsy. Magical, Meaningful Items You Can’t Find Anywhere Else. Handmade, Handpicked, and Designed By Humans.” Humans indeed.

The Four Bs

Like my young co-campaigner (for whom it took a second Trump electoral victory to fully grasp the depths of misogyny in this country), I was also in my early twenties when I first allowed myself to face just how much some men hate women. Until then I think I believed that men’s contempt for us was at least partly deserved. I did believe that we really were weaker, less intelligent, less courageous — in general, lesser. Perhaps history recorded the acts of a few exceptional women who excelled in some field or other, but the point was that they were indeed exceptions. The classic British writer Samuel Johnson had expressed this pithily some centuries earlier, when he told his biographer James Boswell, “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

I attended a small liberal arts college that employed only two female professors. I had a friend whose history professor failed her because, as he explained to her, a woman shouldn’t be occupying a place in college that could have gone to one of her intellectual superiors (i.e., a man). Another friend succumbed to a professor’s sexual demands in return for a passing grade in his course. Others reluctantly slept with the male student gatekeeper at the college library — the price of snagging one of the most coveted work-study jobs on campus. I accepted these as unfortunate, but unremarkable realities. Such things might not be right, but neither could they be changed.

Then came the international explosion of thought and action that was the second wave of feminism. Suddenly, the world flew apart. As Muriel Rukeyser asked in her poem about the German lithographer Käthe Kollwitz,

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about
her life?
The world would split open”

The answer to Rukeyser’s question came in the form of a global movement for women’s liberation and a world — this one — did split open. For me, that movement was as unexpected as a flash flood filling a dry arroyo. Suddenly, so much seemed possible that not long before had been unimaginable. Perhaps most of the world’s women were not, after all, made just to be the bearers of burdens, or indeed of children, but also of hope.

Recognizing women’s full humanity came at a cost, however. It meant also recognizing who wanted to deny us that very humanity.

About a year ago, the Washington Post’s editorial board published an essay lamenting “the collapse of American marriage.”

“A growing number of young women,” its authors wrote, “are discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners.” Why not? They continued:

“As a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, higher unemployment, lower rates of educational attainment, more drug addiction and deaths of despair, and generally less purpose and direction in their lives. But it’s not just that. There’s a growing ideological divide, too. Since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, the percentage of single women ages 18-30 who identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over 20 percent to 32 percent. Young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.”

The Post’s prescription: “This mismatch means that someone will need to compromise.” And that “someone” was, of course, young women. I could, in fact, imagine young women compromising if it were differences of taste in music or in food that were dividing them from the men they might otherwise want to marry. However, the problem, according to the Post, is that politics is “becoming more central to people’s identity.” Well yes, when “conservative” views include explicit misogyny, then opposition to those views is indeed central to my identity. What the Post blithely referred to as “ideological” differences are, in fact, differences over the fundamental question of women’s humanity.

So, tell me this: Why should women be asked to compromise over that?

I’ve written elsewhere about the situation of young American men, including the ones missing from the college classrooms where I taught for almost 20 years. I don’t doubt that half a century or more of neoliberal economic policies (embraced by both major parties) have greatly reduced the life chances of many young men. And I don’t doubt that, in blaming women for their misery, men are deceived into looking away from the actual powers that constrain their lives. But that doesn’t make it okay to mistreat, rape, or kill us.

So, in November 2024, I’m not surprised to read that many young, heterosexual American women are embracing a movement that started in South Korea: they are rejecting the 4Bs, four actions which, in the Korean language, begin with the letter B: marrying, having children, dating, and having sex with men. “In the hours and days since it became clear that Donald Trump would be re-elected president of the United States, there’s been a surge of interest in the U.S. for 4B,” according to a CNN report. Ashli Pollard, a 36-year-old in St. Louis, sums it up this way:

“We have pandered and begged for men’s safety and done all the things that we were supposed to, and they still hate us. So if you’re going to hate us, then we’re going to do what we want.”

Reading this reminded me of a saying popular in the heady days of the early women’s liberation movement: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”

Just as fish don’t need bicycles, there are some things women don’t need. And men who hate women are one.

The arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are a diplomatic disaster for Israel, reported The Economist, a ‘hard stigma’ for the Israeli leader, wrote The Guardian, and a ‘major blow’, said others.

But a term that many seem to agree on is that the warrants represent an earthquake, though many are doubtful that Netanyahu would actually see his day in court.

The pro-Palestine camp, which as of late represents the majority of humankind, is torn between disbelief, skepticism, and optimism. It turned out that the international system has a pulse, after all, though faint, but is enough to rekindle hope that legal and moral accountability are still possible.

This mixture of feelings and strong language is a reflection of several important and interconnected experiences: one, the unprecedented extermination of a whole population which is currently being carried out by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza; two, the utter failure of the international community to stop the grisly genocide in the Strip; and, finally, the fact that the international legal system has historically failed to hold Israel, or any of the West’s allies anywhere, accountable to international law.

It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the ICC’s indictment of Netanyahu, as a representative of the political establishment in Israel, and Gallant, as the leader of the military class, is also an indictment of the United States.

The real earthquake is the fact that this is the first time in the history of the ICC that a pro-western leader is held accountable for war crimes. Indeed, historically, the vast majority of arrest warrants, and actual detention of accused war criminals seemed to target the Global South, and Africa, in particular.

Israel, however, is not an ordinary ‘western’ state. Zionism was a western-colonial invention, and the creation of Israel was only possible because of unhindered, die-hard western support.

Since its inception on the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948, Israel has served the role of the western-colonial citadel in the Middle East. The entire Israeli political discourse has been tailored and situated within western priorities and supposed values: civilization, democracy, enlightenment, human rights and the like.

With time, Israel became largely an American project, embraced by American liberals and religious conservatives alike.

America’s religious crowds were motivated by the biblical notion that “whoever blesses Israel will be blessed, And whoever curses Israel will be cursed”. The liberals, too, held Israel within a spiritual discourse, although disproportionately favored the classification of Israel as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, constantly emphasizing the ‘special relationship’, the ‘unbreakable bond’ and the rest.

Thus, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that the ICC’s indictment of Netanyahu, as a representative of the political establishment in Israel, and Gallant, as the leader of the military class, is also an indictment of the United States.

It is often reported that Israel would not have been able to carry on with its war, thus genocide, on Gaza without American military and political support. According to the investigative news website ProPublica, in the first year of the war, the US shipped over 50,000 tons of weaponry to Israel.

Mainstream American media and journalists are also culpable in that genocide. They elevated the now war criminals Netanyahu and Gallant, along with other Israeli political and military leaders, as if they were the defenders of a ‘civilized world’ against the ‘barbarians’. Those in the conservative media circles portrayed them as if prophets doing God’s work against the supposed heathens of the South.

They, too, have been indicted by the ICC, the kind of moral indictment, and ‘hard stigma’, that can never be eradicated.

When Karim Khan, the ICC’s Chief Prosecutor, originally filed for arrest warrants in May, many were in doubt, and justifiably so. The Israelis felt that their country commanded the needed support to disallow such warrants in the first place. They cited previous attempts, including a Belgian court case where victims of Israeli brutality in Lebanon attempted to hold former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accountable for the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Not only was the case dropped in 2003, but Belgium was pressured by the US to change its own laws so that they do not include universal jurisdiction in the case of genocide.

The Americans, too, were not terribly worried, as they were ready to punish ICC judges, defame Khan himself, and, according to a recent social media post by US Senator Tom Cotton, ready to ‘invade the Hague’.

In fact, this is not the first time that Americans, who are not signatories of the Rome Statute, thus not members of the ICC, flexed their muscles against those who merely attempted to enforce international law. In September 2020, the US government imposed sanctions on then-Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and another senior official, Phakiso Mochochoko.

Even those who wanted to see accountability for the Israeli genocide were in doubt, especially as pro-Israeli western governments, like that of Germany, stepped forward to prevent the warrants from being issued. Unreasonable delays in the proceedings contributed to the skepticism, especially as Khan himself was suddenly being paraded for supposed ‘sexual misconduct’.

Yet, after all of this, on November 21 the arrest warrants were issued, charging Netanyahu and Gallant with alleged ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ - the other punishable offenses within the ICC jurisdiction being genocide and aggression.

Considering that the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, has already found that it is plausible that Israel’s acts could amount to genocide and is currently investigating the case, Israel, as a state, and top Israeli leaders have suddenly, and deservingly so, become the enemies of humanity.

While it is right and legitimate to argue that what matters most is the tangible outcome of these cases - ending the genocide while holding the Israeli war criminals accountable - we must not miss the greater meaning of these earth-shattering events.

The ICJ and the ICC are essentially two western institutions created to police the world by reinforcing the double standards resulting from the post-World War II western-dominated international system.

They are the legal equivalent of the Bretton Woods agreement, which regulated the international monetary system to serve US western interests. Though, in theory, they championed universally commendable values, in practice they merely served as tools of control and dominance for the western order.

For years, the world has been in a state of obvious and irreversible change. New powers were rising and others were shrinking. Political turmoil in the US, Britain and France were only reflections of the internal struggle in the west’s ruling classes. The incredible rise of China, the war in Europe and the growing resistance in the Middle East were outcomes and accelerators of that change.

The emphasis on credibility here is a culmination of the obvious loss of credibility on all fronts.

Thus the constant call for reforms in the post-WWII international system to reflect in a more equitable way the new global realities. Despite American-western resistance to change, new geopolitical formations continued to take place, regardless.

The Gaza genocide represents a watershed moment in these global dynamics. This was reflected in Karim Khan’s language when he requested the arrest warrants, stressing on the credibility of the court. “This is why we have a court,” he said in an exclusive interview with CNN on May 20. “It's about the equal application of the law. No people are better than another. No people anywhere are saints.”

The emphasis on credibility here is a culmination of the obvious loss of credibility on all fronts. This should hardly be a surprise as it was the west, the self-proclaimed champion of human rights, the very political entity that championed, defended and sustained the Israeli genocide.

While one would like to believe that the ICC’s arrest warrants were made exclusively for the sake of the victims of the Israeli genocide, plenty of evidence suggests that the unexpected move was a desperate western attempt at salvaging whatever little credibility it had maintained up to that moment.

The US government, an unrepentant violator of human rights, has maintained its strong position in defense of Israel, shaming the ICC for the warrants, not the Israeli war criminals for committing the genocide.

The conflict in Europe has been much more palpable, however, reflected in the position of Germany, which said it would “carefully examine” the arrest warrants but that it is “hard to imagine that we would make arrests on this basis”.

One remains hopeful that the shifts of global powers will eventually save international law from the hypocrisy and opportunism of the west. But what is clear for now is that the west’s own conflict will only gain momentum. Will those who created the Zionist Israeli menace be the very powers that demolish it? One is doubtful.

Much media coverage of Pete Hegseth’s nomination as Secretary of Defense has focused, understandably, on controversial things he has said or done, along with his complete lack of administrative experience relevant to running a federal government department with a $920 billion budget and a workforce of three million.

But anyone in charge of the Pentagon also gets to oversee the Military Health System (MHS), which provides either private health insurance coverage or direct care for over 9.5 million service members, military retirees, and their families. As Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin noted in a recent DOD National Defense Strategy report, the MHS mission is to ensure that active duty personnel and their dependents are well-served by a skilled cadre of “medical personnel in uniform,” who number nearly 170,000.

Hegseth served as an ROTC-trained Army officer deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay and is a longtime critic of “government healthcare,” claiming that it “doesn’t work.” So if Hegseth succeeds Austin, Pentagon officials trying to end a failed experiment with MHA privatization may find themselves ordered to march backward.

Rather than being upgraded and improved, the DOD’s network of military hospitals and clinics would remain under-resourced. And more of the MHA’s $61 billion annual budget would be spent on private insurance coverage that has failed to meet the needs of many service members and their dependents, particularly in rural areas.

A White House Advisor

During the first Trump Administration, Hegseth was a White House advisor who pushed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to expand care outsourcing for nine million former service members. Trump’s first VA Secretary, a hold-over from Barack Obama’s administration, dragged his feet on implementing this ill-advised policy.

As a result, Dr. David Shulkin, an experienced hospital system administrator in the private and public sectors, was fired by Trump in 2018 after keeping him around for over a year. In his memoir, It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Serve Your Country, Shulkin blames his downfall on Hegseth, who “never worked at the VA, knew nothing about managing a healthcare system, and had little understanding of the clinical and financial impact of the policies he was advocating.”

Hegseth does have a background as “a capable midgrade officer” who earned two Ivy League degrees and Bronze Stars, plus media experience ranging from writing for the Princeton Tory, a conservative undergraduate publication, to opining about military and veterans’ affairs on Fox & Friends Weekend where he’s a host. In any other Republican administration, this resume would qualify him as a Pentagon press secretary.

That Hegseth has instead risen to a cabinet pick is a testament to the continuing impact of the Koch Brothers-backed Concerned Veterans for America (CVA). After a failed bid to become the GOP nominee in a 2002 Republican primary race for a U.S. Senate seat in his native Minnesota, Hegseth became CVA’s first CEO and a leading advocate for turning veterans care over to private doctors and hospitals.

CVA was an astroturf upstart in veterans’ affairs and an outlier in pushing VA privatization. Traditional Veterans Services Organizations (VSOs)—like Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, or Vietnam Veterans of America—represent millions of veterans. Their members pay dues and elect their leaders. They have local chapters and national conventions. They have roots in the community and provide valuable services to individual veterans who need help filing disability claims for service-related conditions, which qualifies them for VA care.

VSO lobbying victories include the passage of the PACT Act of 2022. This legislation made VA benefits and related medical coverage easier to obtain for nearly a million veterans, including many whose health was damaged due to burn pit exposure during post-9/11 wars in the Middle East. (Hegseth initially applauded and then criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a flip-flop characteristic of his career. As Iraq war veteran and VoteVets co-founder Jon Soltz says about him, “I have been debating Pete Hegseth for years, and I can’t tell you what he stands for other than himself and his own ambition.”

An Astro-Turf Group

With few actual dues-payers, no VSO-style membership service programs, and a political agenda bankrolled by libertarian billionaires, CVA helped pass few bills that benefited the nation’s 19 million veterans. Instead, during the Obama era, the media-savvy group became a battering ram against tax-payer-funded healthcare in any form, a longtime bête noir of the Kochs.

Hegseth became their most visible and effective mouthpiece in a wide-ranging campaign to discredit VA care and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In 2013, CVA ran video ads warning, in Hegseth’s words, that all Americans would soon “face long wait times, endless bureaucracy, and poor service” if Congress expanded health care access by subsidizing private insurance coverage. The result, he claimed, would be billions of dollars wasted on “a nationalized health care plan that will bring the same bureaucratic dysfunction to the larger U.S. healthcare market”–as if the VA were a model for “Obamacare,” which it certainly wasn’t.

A year later, this propaganda offensive, closely coordinated with right-wing Republicans on Capitol Hill, claimed the scalp of retired four-star General Eric Shinseki, the Vietnam veteran who was Barack Obama’s first VA Secretary. Shinseki became the fall guy for a localized scandal involving misconduct by a few VA hospital managers in Phoenix. Their doctoring of data on medical appointment wait times—to earn bonus payments—led to CVA-amplified false claims that 40 Phoenix area vets had died due to delayed care. The result was that mainstream media packed journalism at its worst, and there was growing pressure for more out-sourcing of VA care despite its higher quality, lower cost, and greater accessibility than private alternatives.

On Capitol Hill, bi-partisan majorities passed the VA Choice Act of 2014 and, four years later, the VA MISSION Act. Both opened the floodgates for increasingly costly and disastrous privatization of the nation’s most extensive public healthcare system. CVA helped engineer the passage of each measure. After stepping down as CEO of Concerned Veterans of America ten years ago and becoming a Fox News commentator, Hegseth continued to advise President Trump on veterans’ affairs; other CVA alums served in official positions at the White House or VA headquarters in Washington.

Hegseth’s return to the conservative media eco-system of his college years has paid handsome rewards; he has become a multi-millionaire (despite two divorces) as a Fox & Friends talking head, paid speaker, and bestselling author of The War on Warriors, a critique of what he calls a "woke military." Like other high-paid former military officers, his benefit package in the private sector leaves Hegseth unlikely ever to need the VA, federally subsidized insurance coverage obtained through the ACA, or, when he retires, Medicare coverage. If confirmed, his pay as DOD Secretary will be a mere $246,000 per year, but with lucrative “revolving door” opportunities in the future, when and if he transitions back to the private sector from the Pentagon.

Pentagon Cost Savings?

Meanwhile, enlisted personnel and veterans from poor and working-class backgrounds bear the brunt of failed CVA-backed experiments with the privatization of the Military Health System and the VA. Under Trump and Biden, the DOD was flush with money for military aid, expensive new weapons systems, and base maintenance worldwide. Nevertheless, the Pentagon cut healthcare delivery costs for its workforce, retirees, and dependents.

Military hospitals were closed, staff positions cut, and several hundred thousand more patients were shifted to TRICARE, a federally funded form of private insurance. Newcomers to the private sector soon reported having greater difficulty getting timely medical appointments or accessing care in areas of the country with a shortage of primary care providers and specialists.

The Pentagon found that contracting out left its hospitals and clinics “chronically understaffed” and less able to “deliver timely care to beneficiaries or ensure sufficient workload to maintain and sustain critical skills. After reassessing the situation, the DOD launched an effort to “re-attract” patients back to the MHS. As studies have shown, in-house care produces better outcomes at lower cost, with fewer racial disparities—an essential advantage for a patient population of nearly 40 percent non-white.

If Hegseth becomes DOD Secretary by recess appointment or Senate confirmation, he will undoubtedly stop bringing TRICARE beneficiaries back into the MHS. He will also halt efforts to rebuild the DOD’s in-house healthcare delivery capacity.

And Hegseth will not be the only ideological foe of “government healthcare” in a high-level Trump Administration position. His fellow cabinet nominee, former Congressman Doug Collins, an Iraq War veteran from Georgia, will be eager to pick up where Robert Wilkie, Trump’s second VA secretary, left off with his privatization efforts in 2021. And, with the biggest impact, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV celebrity picked by Trump to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, will further undermine traditional Medicare by replacing it with for-profit Medicare Advantage plans, on a more universal basis.

On all three fronts, these Trump appointees will weaken the public provision of healthcare that currently benefits more than 80 million people, making expanding such programs even more difficult.

You won’t hear it discussed in corporate media (for obvious reasons), or on the floor of Congress (for obvious reasons), but the most important issue facing facing the American people and the global community is the rapid rise of oligarchy.

Never before in modern history have so few had so much wealth and power. Never before has a ruling class been able to exercise that power not only in the United States but in every corner of the planet.

Today in America we have more income in wealth inequality than we have ever had. While 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 3 individuals own more wealth than the bottom 50%.

Today in America we have more concentration of ownership than we have ever had. In sector after sector - financial services, health care, agriculture, transportation, energy, food, housing, etc. - fewer and fewer giant corporations control what is produced and the prices we pay.

Today in America we have more media consolidation than we have ever had. Some estimates claim as much as 90% of U.S. media is controlled by just six huge global conglomerates that have a defining impact on our culture and the information we receive.

Today in America we have a political system that is increasingly controlled by the billionaire class. In the recent elections, just 150 billionaire families spent nearly $2 billion to get their candidates elected.

And let’s be clear. This massive level of inequality is only going to get worse under the Trump administration - with Elon Musk, the wealthiest person on earth, playing an active role. If Trump gets his way the very rich will get richer and have more power, while ordinary Americans will get poorer and have less power.

Under Trump there will be more tax breaks for the very wealthy and large corporations while, at the same time, reductions in desperately needed programs for the poor and working class.

Under Trump there will be efforts to privatize Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the Veterans Administration and public education while, at the same time, making it easier for large corporations to destroy the environment, engage in bigotry and undermine workers’ rights.

We cannot allow this to happen. We have got to take on Trump and the oligarchs. And the best way to do that is to educate and organize, educate and organize. We have got to expand our social media reach to counter the enormous influence of corporate and right-wing media We’ve got to increase our presence in working class communities. We’ve got to find grassroots leaders who are prepared to take on the powerful special interests and run for office at the local, state and federal levels.

These are tough times, but despair is not an option. The stakes are too high, not just for us but for our kids and future generations.

We’re all in this together.

The country recently advanced to a pivotal time in its political history. A small group of profanely wealthy individuals that comprise the dominant economic class and their political sycophants forged ahead to protect their entrenched economic power. It is outlined in a document titled Project 2025. It is a supercharged blueprint for a neofascist government model with a nod to the religious fundamentalist Taliban.

Progressives might recognize that our dominant economic class has two elements. The corporatists represent economic interests that depend on trade, and domestic and foreign investment. The other group are oligarchs representing mainly private equity firms who support economic breakdowns and erasing regulations.

The Democrats represented the corporatist model and the Republicans represented the oligarchs. The oligarchs were led by Mr. Trump, a charismatic, convicted criminal cult leader whose paracosm of lies resonated with working people.

The campaign featured a relentless barrage by the corporate media peddling misinformation on a regular basis. The daily din of personal, often laughably tragic opinions on social media was the rule; recognizing fact from fiction was an exhausting task.

Real Economy

Both political parties claimed to represent working people.

However, we are in a time when our inherent economic components are rarely discussed. The Republicans never discussed it. They were too busy conning the public with distractions and the Democrats were busy dithering about the distractions.

That rarely discussed taboo is the structural ossification of our economic model that benefits the U.S. dominant economic class. Unfortunately, it leaves the masses of middle working class and working-class people in a near permanent condition of economic adversity or anxiety.

Economic Model Distractions

The dominant economic class funded an array of media, think tanks, and politicians to ensure the dissemination of misrepresentations, oversimplifications, and fabrications about the economy. It divided working people primarily with issues of racial identity and ethnicity.

Other issues were the successful ploy denying reasonable gun control, women’s right to choose medical care, climate change, LBGT issues, and a nutty array of irrational notions of non-existent government conspiracies from their dystopian medley of scapegoats.

That distraction reached a new level of malarkey thanks to the toxic presence of Mr. Trump—projectile lying became the new norm.

A considerable number of liberal pundits and politicians were ensconced in corporate media bubbles. They rarely identified the actual economic struggles that working people have been subjected since the Democratic Party abandoned them with the Clinton administration.

Working People’s Issues

Working people deserve economic opportunities; they do the work that creates the profits. From a spiritual perspective-think economic security for their families including retirement and the branches of healthcare and housing. Education, nutrition, transportation, and safety round out their basic concerns. “Democracy” fits in there somewhere, but a hungry child’s deprivation takes precedence over a largely irrelevant political model manipulated by an avaricious dominant class.

Mr. Trump’s Appeal

Yet political experts were still bewildered by the large demographic of working people who supported the toxicity of Mr. Trump against their economic interests. Decades of crumbs and empty promises from the corporate Democratic Party created a political backlash that Mr. Trump appeared to remedy.

The actual economic numbers partially explain why large numbers of working people were attracted to the bombastic style of Mr. Trump. The torrent of scabrous lies did not matter; It was Mr. Trump’s tone that resonated with many working people.

Unemployment

The Ludwig Institute for Shared Prosperity (LISEP) calculates a True Rate of Unemployment.

Using data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35 plus hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.

This presents a troubling reality of why many working people gravitated toward Mr. Trump. Economic issues transcended character, and personality defects.

The BLS reported in November that the unemployment rate in October 2024 was 4.1 percent.

LISEP reported in November that the True Rate of Unemployment for October 2024 was 24.0 percent.

Shadow Government Statistics (SGS) uses current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for the significant portion of "discouraged workers" defined away in 1994 during the Clinton Administration. The SGS estimate includes the longer-term discouraged or displaced workers for more than one year.

The BLS reported in October that the unemployment rate for September 2024 was 4.1 percent.

SGS reported in October that the unemployment rate for September 2024 was 26.7 percent.

Numerous liberal pundits asserted the Biden administration rescued the economy with those official low unemployment rates from the BLS; perhaps they might explain the numbers from LISEP and SGS. The election of Mr. Trump did that for them.

Underemployment

Underemployment is an element that keeps wages and salaries low to bloat the profits of the U.S. dominant class. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York defines underemployment as "working in a job that typically does not require a bachelor’s degree.” The demographic are college graduates age 22-27 who earned a bachelor’s degree or advanced degree.

Statista reported in August that in June 2024, 41 percent of recent college graduates were underemployed.

Cost of Living

Cost of living measures the requirements to maintain an overall lifestyle. The Economic Policy Institute’s incisive model in 2024 is based on specific costs of living for families defined as two parents and two children in different regional areas. The costs are minimal excluding purchases that many take for granted for a basic lifestyle.

For example, in Suffolk County, Massachusetts the income required is $148,155. The median income was $93,360 in 2023.

A review of “Red States” that supported Mr. Trump showed how effective the indoctrination hoodwinked working people. The following examples represented the economic reality that blanketed much of the country in 2024:

Gordon County Georgia, required $79,681; the median income was $57,555.

McMillen County Texas, required $91,075; the median income was $60,313.

Duchesne County, required Utah $94,382; the median income was $70, 821.

Montgomery County, North Carolina required $86,804; the median income was $55, 523.

Across the US the difficulty for working people to provide the basics for their families is the rule, not the exception.

Inflation

Inflation rates reported by the BLS measures the general increase in price for goods and services by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) with two indexes:

The CPI-U measures prices for goods and services for urban consumers and is released as a headline monthly to the public. It is used by business, labor, consumers, and to determine federal tax brackets.

The CPI-W is a subset of the CPI-U and measures minimum wage rates, government programs particularly Social Security for urban wage earners and clerical workers.

The BLS report in January 2024 stated that the Consumer Price Index for 2023 was 3.4 percent.

SGS reported the Consumer Price Index in 2023 was 11.9 percent.

According to SGS, the real CPI no longer measures the cost of maintaining “a constant standard of living” or “out of pocket” expenditures for Americans. In the 1990’s conservative academics and politicians devised the idea that the CPI should account for a “substitution” and “quality new goods bias.”

To accomplish this, the Chained Consumer Price Index (C-CPI-U) was introduced in 2002.

In reality, it was a hoax to lower benefits primarily from older recipients with reduced Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA). It is updated monthly.

Resistance

Progressives require strategies and tactics to impede the tsunami of dehumanization by Project 2025.

Masses of working people voted for Mr. Trump, a morally and ethically impaired candidate. The primary reason again, was not complicated. Mr. Trump appealed to significant numbers of working class and working middle-class Americans because our economic model has not benefitted them for decades.

A structural remedy tends to freeze mainstream pundits and politicians. Our elections are habitual distractions from the underlying forces of our economic model. The two corporate parties largely representing the economic interests of the dominant class failed to generate much energy or motivation for an increasing number of Americans.

Labor unions must lead the way

Organized labor has the organizing experience and structures to run campaigns for progressive candidates. However, it is not clear whether private or public sector unions can run robust, effective campaigns in alliances with other unions without territorial issues becoming fractious.

Regrettably and understandably, some unions tend to settle into silos focusing exclusively on their members’ interests rather than the community of unions representing other working people. This obstacle must be obviated as Project 2025 seeks the utter destruction of the labor union movement.

Moreover, unions must form alliances with progressive spiritual and secular organizations to reach all demographics of working people. Only a diverse alliance can create potential political power to debunk the relentless churning of lies by the architects of Project 2025.

Another tactic that progressives might consider is acceptance of cultural issues without necessarily agreeing with them. The prevailing issue that we can agree is the results of our economic model. Emphasizing cultural issues with “woke” identity politics over economic class politics has contributed to the recent defeat and the grotesque policies of Mr. Trump and his Republican Party.

Progressive Paths Forward

There are generally two paths progressives can take.

They can wrest control of the Democratic Party from the corporatist class by electing progressive candidates at the municipal, state and federal level, particularly the U.S. Congress.

The experience of Senator Bernie Sanders being squashed twice by the corporate Democratic Party leaders is instructive. Sanders drew from the same working peoples’ demographic as Mr. Trump. Polls showed he would have defeated Mr. Trump.

The other path is to form an authentic labor party.

Consider that polls show most Americans favor progressive policies. Those sentiments must be connected to a political party that working people trust. However, the chance of this being successful, if at all within a reasonable period of time is problematic.

These appear to be the choices or hideout and let Project 2025 waft over the country until our democratic impulses are grounded into pulp.

The inescapable result is that working people will continue to suffer as Mr. Trump’s policies largely benefit the one percent of Americans in the dominant economic class as the cancerous Project 2025 spreads.

The form a resistance in 2025 takes to oppose the Trump neofascist model is unclear. What is clear is that if the MAGA Republicans are not defeated, the American experiment will be no more.

My wife and I have lived in North Morris Estates, a manufactured housing community in Genesee County, Michigan, for 15 years. I love my home. I love my community. But since 2021, it feels like my community doesn’t love me back.

That year Homes of America, an affiliate of hedge fund Alden Global Capital, bought North Morris Estates. Since then our home has felt more like a battleground than a refuge.

We, like most residents, can’t move our home. The choices are fight back or give up. Anyone who knows us knows we aren’t giving up.

For too long Michiganders living in manufactured housing parks have been subject to the profit-driven whims of predatory, absentee corporate landlords like Homes of America and Alden Global Capital.

When Homes of America took over, they increased our rent by $100 a month over two years. We had proof our rent was always timely and our checks cashed, but they tried to evict us for unpaid rent and 19 late charges going back two years. We quickly learned to send our rent via certified mail and demand receipts.

They left dozens of homes empty and rotting, creating dangerous conditions and blight. When we, like others, requested repairs to make our community safer, we were either told to pay for the work ourselves or faced retaliation. They ignored requests for basic infrastructure repairs, and our community pool and clubhouse have been closed since 2022 due to lack of maintenance.

To get a sense of the retaliation we face, consider our butterfly garden. With permission from the previous owner, we established a nationally registered Monarch Waystation on vacant lots. It was a small victory for residents and a source of pride. After we reported Homes of America’s unpermitted construction, they bulldozed our beloved Monarch Waystation and left a pile of dirt and uprooted flowers. They even took photos, as if it were a trophy. These people prefer blight to beauty!

They often shut off water without notice, leaving us unable to finish a shower, wash dishes, or clean. We’ve resorted to keeping a full bucket in the tub to flush during shutoffs. Even when it’s on, it’s not uncommon for brown, putrid water to come out of our taps.

In November the state denied the renewal of North Morris Estates’ operating license due to violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act. In January the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) issued a violation notice, and Thetford Township took the unprecedented step of obtaining a court injunction to halt park operations. This led to the first-ever criminal charges in Michigan against the owners of a mobile home park for operating without a license, an alleged violation of the Michigan Mobile Home Commission Act.

I’m glad the law is finally beginning to hold Homes of America accountable. But the current law didn’t prevent any of this—the blighted homes, the dirty water, the junk fees. It took hundreds of hours of research, calls, emails, meetings, documentation, and police investigations to get the wheels of justice just starting to turn for residents.

That’s why it’s critical that the Michigan legislature passes SB 486-492/HB 5157-5163. They would create basic protections for residents. They would prevent park owners from renewing their licenses if they have a history of unjustified rent hikes, require more frequent and stringent inspections, create a searchable public database of park owners, and prevent overcharging on utilities. The bills would also update outdated tax incentives that encourage landlords to keep landlord-owned homes off the market.

For too long Michiganders living in manufactured housing parks have been subject to the profit-driven whims of predatory, absentee corporate landlords like Homes of America and Alden Global Capital. In the midst of an affordable housing crisis, the protections in SB486-492 and HB 5157-5163 would interrupt the cycle of corporate greed that leaves hundreds of thousands of Michigan manufactured home residents like me and my wife struggling.

These bills are essential to protect people like us—because no one should feel like a prisoner in their own home.

As the nation prepares for another holiday shopping season and we buy gifts for our loved ones, it’s more important than ever that retailers support efforts to reduce toxic chemicals and plastics in everyday products so that shoppers can choose safer products.

A new Mind the Store Retailer Report Card that scores many of the biggest retailers in the U.S. and Canada provides new insights into which retailers are leading and which are lagging in efforts to better protect consumers and communities from toxics and plastics. The report reveals that while some retailers are making progress, most of the biggest retailers in the U.S. and Canada need to do more to protect consumer health.

The newly unveiled 2024 Retailer Report Card is a comprehensive analysis of the efforts, or lack thereof, of 50 of the largest retailers to provide customers with products free of dangerous chemicals and harmful plastics. The retailers run the gamut from grocery stores to beauty supply retailers and include familiar names like McDonald’s, Best Buy, and Sally Beauty. This newest report is the sixth such analysis published since 2016. While there’s been movement in the right direction overall, this year, the average grade was a pitiful D+, and 17 of the ranked retailers failed, landing in the Toxic Hall of Shame.

The business community will never solve all of our problems, but if retailers want to keep their customers and investors happy, they will need to do more to protect our health.

Plastics are considered in the report alongside dangerous chemicals because most plastics are made with hazardous chemicals. Because 99% of plastics are made from oil and gas and contain countless chemical additives and processing aids, many are harmful to our health and are increasingly recognized as inherently toxic. Some types of plastic, such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC), are especially harmful to human health.

PVC is made from vinyl chloride, a known human carcinogen associated with liver cancer, brain and lung cancers, and cancers of the blood. The report findings show that companies are taking steps to reduce or eliminate the use of PVC—10 of the ranked retailers have set goals to eliminate PVC in specific products and packaging. For instance, Dollar Tree plans to eliminate it in children’s products. Yet retailers are not taking the steps necessary to ensure that replacements are safer. This gap in progress necessary to detoxify supply chains is mirrored in the tepid shift away from PVC by the corporate-led U.S. Plastics Pact group. On the one hand, the pact signatories have promised to ditch PVC by next year, but they have not supported proposed policies in states nationwide that would enshrine that goal.

It’s not only harmful plastics that major retailers fail to find safer replacements for. Dangerous chemicals like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known as the forever chemicals because they are nearly impossible to destroy and don’t break down in the environment, are getting increasing scrutiny by retailers. Thirty percent of the retailers featured have set goals to eliminate PFAS in several product types, including beauty products, cookware, electronics, food packaging, pet food products, and more. However, these same companies are far behind in finding truly safer replacements. PFAS in the environment has reached crisis levels, with the substances found in the blood of nearly everyone in the U.S. and beyond. Still, petrochemical companies continue to make new versions of the chemicals even as numerous states like Washington and Maine enact new restrictions on these forever chemicals.

The top-scoring retailers in this new report show safer solutions can be found. Ten retailers, including Apple, Best Buy, IKEA, Sephora, and others, have adopted criteria for safer chemicals rooted in the definition of the state of Washington. Eight of the retailers have made investments in finding or developing safer solutions. Overall, however, the report card highlights a significant gap in ambition when all the steps required to find and use safer solutions are analyzed. Eighty percent of retailers still need to ensure safer solutions to toxic chemicals and plastics. Business is supposed to be known for its creativity, innovation, and flexibility. So why have business solutions to difficult chemical and materials problems been to throw new potentially dangerous chemicals into the market and skirt needed reductions of petrochemical plastics by focusing on recycled content pledges instead of overall reductions? This is an area where the corporate world could shine.

Customers are desperate for safer products that don’t expose our families to cancer-causing chemicals, such as flame retardants in sushi trays and spatulas. The business community will never solve all of our problems, but if retailers want to keep their customers and investors happy, they will need to do more to protect our health.

It’s time for the biggest retailers to “mind the store this holiday season.”

During his campaign, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump publicly promised to reward oil and gas executives handsomely in exchange for funding his campaign.

Within weeks of winning the election, he’s making good on his promise by tapping oil and gas executive Chris Wright to lead the Department of Energy. Wright has zero experience in running a federal agency. And as The Associated Press reports, he’s “been one of the industry’s loudest voices against efforts to fight climate change.”

To lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump has picked another crusader against the climate: former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, who voted in lockstep with fossil fuel interests during his time in Congress.

If Trump wants to “drill baby, drill,” he could thank Biden for paving the way.

Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans believe climate change is real, human-caused, and needs to be urgently addressed. Trump’s billionaire oil buddies—who will shape national energy policy for the next four years—offer precisely the opposite.

Trump has promised to make fuel and energy more affordable for consumers by steering massive profits to energy producers—but those profits will come at our expense. He’s pledged to end federal subsidies for electric vehicles, even though many Americans want zero-emission vehicles but can’t afford them yet. And he’s vowed to bring gas prices under $2 a gallon—a wild claim that economists don’t buy.

Oil profits and production are already sky-high under President Joe Biden and haven’t led to lower gas prices.

Indeed, Biden has been more of a friend to oil and gas than to climate justice groups. In spite of the White House’s boasts about historic climate policies, Biden’s actions have been relatively toothless. Among them are setting goals posts to reduce emissions years from now—anywhere between 2030 and 2050—well after he leaves office.

He’s touted his signature legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, as a historic victory for the climate. The law did make significant climate investments, but the majority of it tinkered around the edges of what’s truly needed. And it ended up giving away billions to the fossil fuel industry for unproven technologies such as “carbon capture.”

Indeed, if Trump wants to “drill baby, drill,” he could thank Biden for paving the way.

Biden has overseen the transformation of the U.S. into one of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers, both during his presidency and during the Obama years, when he was vice president. According to the Energy Department, the U.S. has “produced more crude oil than any nation at any time… for the past six years in a row.”

So the last thing the fossil fuel industry needs is more favors.

Consumers will pay the price if Trump makes EVs and renewable energy more expensive, lets oil companies dismantle regulations, and accelerates the climate crisis. But he’s relying on ordinary Americans not noticing he’s throwing them and their planet under the bus because of the chaos he’ll bring with mass deportations, anti-LGBT bigotry, and other madness.

With the time he has left, Biden could still declare climate change a national emergency—a step many environmental groups are begging him to take, but which he’s resisted throughout his presidency. They’re also calling on him to stop the expansion of export infrastructure for liquefied natural gas.

If Biden wants to make any sort of claim to be a climate champion, he’ll take those steps. But ultimately, it will be up to the rest of us to watch what Trump is doing and fight for better climate policies in our own states and communities.

The Biden administration’s insistence to continue arming Israel despite it carrying out what a growing consensus of scholars and human rights organizations are calling a genocide in Gaza has been one of the greatest moral failures in modern American history. While the Biden administration’s approach to the situation has been disastrous, there are legitimate fears that Donald Trump’s second term in office may prove even worse for Palestinian survival, much less liberation.

In the wake of these traumatizing times, it is worth looking back at the South African anti-apartheid movement during a similar moment in American history for some hope and guidance.

Ronald Reagan was elected to a second presidential term in 1984 by a landslide. With a platform focused on economic austerity, hawkish cold war politics, and repressive domestic policies important to the religious right, Reagan won every state but Minnesota and nearly 60% of the popular vote. Reagan’s position on South African apartheid was steeped in racism and an approach called “constructive engagement,” by which the American government worked with instead of against the apartheid regime to slowly reform its policies. As the president’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs throughout his two terms in office, Chester Crocker, put it, “all Reagan knows about Southern Africa is that he is on the side of the whites.” Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, who more often focused on the positive qualities of even his bitterest enemies, was blunter: “[Ronald Reagan] is a racist, pure and simple.”

And yet it was during Reagan’s second term in office that the anti-apartheid movement in America made its most significant gains. For more than three decades, a loose, multi-racial coalition of faith-based, labor, student, and peace organizations worked in solidarity with their South African brethren to try to help end the country’s legally sanctioned system of white supremacy. After the African National Congress in 1958 called upon the world to put economic pressure on the apartheid regime, many in this American coalition used boycotts, shareholder resolutions, direct action, divestment, and advocacy for sanctions to force US corporations to leave South Africa. By the early 1980s, the movement had successfully pushed a few religious institutions, labor unions, universities, and local and state governments to divest from some companies operating in South Africa. Kodak stopped doing business with the South African government after a years-long boycott campaign. And the United Nations had issued an arms embargo. But the United States was finding all sorts of ways around the arms embargo, and most major institutions in America were still thoroughly invested in banks and other companies that were directly or indirectly supporting the apartheid regime.

Despite Reagan’s renewed presidency, the anti-apartheid movement set its eyes during his second term on more divestment and the biggest prize of all: U.S. sanctions on South Africa. Congress passed a sanctions bill in 1985, but Reagan vetoed it. Feeling the pressure from the movement and from many in the Democratic-controlled Congress to do something, Reagan responded by issuing a set of limited sanctions by executive order. But as Tutu described them, they were “not even a flea bite” on the monstrous apartheid regime. The anti-apartheid movement pressed on, as clergy, labor leaders, students, and other activists engaged with each member of Congress, urging them to pass a more comprehensive sanctions bill. Meanwhile, thanks to equally dogged campaigns, many of the biggest institutional investors were beginning to divest. The Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Harvard University, Columbia University, TIAA-CREF, and the New York City Pension fund, among other institutions, all divested, in 1985, from at least some companies involved in South Africa. Responding to the threat of divestment, fifty multinational corporations ended their business activity in South Africa that year, including PepsiCo, General Electric, American Express, Motorola, and Boeing. When Chase Manhattan Bank, long a target of the anti-apartheid campaign, suddenly froze the apartheid regime’s line of credit and demanded it repay its outstanding loans, the South African economy began to collapse.

By September 1985, the South African government announced that it was freezing its repayment of foreign debt until the following year as a means of slowing down foreign withdrawal from the country.

Momentum was building in 1986, ahead of midterm Congressional elections, for a more comprehensive sanctions bill. Congress, again, passed sweeping sanctions against South Africa, and Reagan, again, vetoed the bill. But this time, with deeper relationships between activists and Congresspeople, and elections looming in a matter of weeks, a bipartisan Senate and House garnered the necessary supermajority to override the president’s veto. The sanctions bill, while still a compromised version of what many opponents of apartheid were calling for, significantly curtailed US trade with South Africa. Other industrialized nations had their own sanctions in place. Beset by this foreign economic pressure and increasing agitation from Black South African freedom fighters within and just outside its borders, the apartheid government could see the writing on the wall.

A little over a year after Reagan left office, amidst the one and only term of his former vice president, George H.W. Bush, South African President F.W. de Klerk announced that all political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, would be released, anti-apartheid political parties would be unbanned, and free democratic elections would soon take place.

Somehow, an international coalition of activists, working in solidarity with the African National Congress, managed to help end apartheid, despite the best efforts of one of its most powerful foreign enablers to stop them.

For those of us engaged in solidarity with Palestinian struggles for liberation and return, or in any movement for peace and justice, we should take note that an all-powerful conservative president is not all that powerful after all. We must press on, waging struggles with the power that we have, as workers, consumers, members of institutions with sizable investments, and as voting citizens, who can remove a person from office as quickly as we can put them in if they do not earn our votes.

Indeed, drawing explicitly upon the South African example, Palestinian civil society is still calling upon us to use this power to employ boycotts, divestment, and sanctions until Palestinians have a full slate of human rights. In the shadow of tens of thousands of dead Palestinians and millions struggling to live on, the urgency to force the American and Israeli governments, and the businesses that support them, to end this bloodshed couldn’t be greater. And while the context is different, and the struggle may be more difficult, one of the lessons that the South African anti-apartheid movement gives us is that we can do this, regardless of who might be in the White House.

I fell and broke my wrist in two places. My urgent care place was wonderful, but referred me to a specialist they claimed carried my insurance. In fact, they did not. This is a common problem. Lists of covered providers are years out of date. Nothing is more maddening, especially when you are hurting and sick, to repeatedly be given the runaround about something as simple as whether a doctor accepts your insurance. If an insurance company claims that a doctor is in network, they should be liable if their list is wrong.

The post How Long before I Can Carry a Pitchfork? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post How Long before I Can Carry a Pitchfork? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

When Adolph Hitler was handed the German chancellorship in 1933 after bullying a broken and dying Weimer Republic, he had won just 32 percent of the vote. Though his Nazi party was in political regression and nearly bankrupt, within a few months Hitler smashed the old order and built a monstrous dictatorship that would last 12 blood-drenched years.

With Trump 2.0, we too face the advent of an administration seeking to destroy the existing system and build its own scaffolding of a new order Trump and his most fervent MAGA strategists hope will rule for 50 years to come, as confidant Steve Bannon predicts. With most of the old guard Republicans who were reputed to provide guard rails during his first four years discarded, it is important to learn from means employed by other dictators.

From past tyrants like Mussolini, Pinochet, Franco, and Hitler to their descendants today who Trump admires, like Putin and Orban, there are common tactics that paved their way. Those steps to absolute power, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes in Strongmen, include the use of political violence, scapegoating, vilification, and persecution of targeted groups, with ample use of racism, misogyny, xenophobia and other bigotry alongside the fabrication of domestic crises requiring emergency action.

Two strongmen strategies warrant particular focus. First, securing support of national political parties and elites and acceptance by most of the population, the latter partly achieved through control of information sources. Trump has made inroads in both realms.

After being gifted the chancellorship by a failing democracy and business class who mistakenly thought they could control him, Hitler’s immediate priority was to establish a national consensus

Trump has muscled unquestioned loyalty of the Republican Party, and weak resistance by a Democratic Party establishment that appears to detest the left more than it does the far right. As to the oligarchy, the 2024 election cycle’s top seven donors funded the Republican Party with gifts as high as $200 million. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has become a virtual co-president. The second wealthiest, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg just paid a post-election kiss the ring visit to Mar-a-Lago after recently passing now third on the list, Jeff Bezos, who notoriously blocked a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Wall Street is “already making big bets” as “investors have sent prices zooming for stocks of banks, fossil-fuel producers and other companies expected to benefit from Trump’s preference for lower tax rates and lighter regulation.” Despite Trump’s phony anti-Wall Street rhetoric, a very different message was sent by his pick of billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, described by Robert Reich as “the opposite of a bomb-thrower” for the key financial post of Treasury Secretary. And, the stock market closed November with its biggest monthly gains in a year.

Crafting a national convergence

After being gifted the chancellorship by a failing democracy and business class who mistakenly thought they could control him, Hitler’s immediate priority was to establish a national consensus writes Peter Fritzsche in Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, as described in a review by Christopher Browning.

The Nazis “benefited enormously from the yearning of millions of Germans for a ‘new start’ after years of crisis and deadlock,” writes Browning. “Transformation of the German mood” was fueled initially by a desire to end political violence, mostly driven by Hitler’s Brownshirt militia, and Hitler’s promise “to preserve law and order.” Though the U.S. hardly faces the same Depression era conditions, the deadlock, mostly produced by Republican obstructionism, and Trump’s demagogy about immigration “invasions” and lies about rising violent crime, are a parallel. “The framing of crisis is most particular to authoritarian rule,” notes Ben-Ghiat. “Crisis justifies states of emergency and the scapegoating of enemies who endanger the country from inside the nation or across the border.”

Hitler manufactured a “restored Volksgemeinschaft,” or people’s community, to produce “willing identification and consent from a significant majority of Germans” and “necessity of compliance,” wrote Fritzche. It is “now understood as defined by racial exclusion rather than political, social, and religious inclusion.” The goal was “ideological congruence” that led to the “great achievement of the Third Reich”—getting Germans “to see themselves as the Nazis did” with a “new lease on collective life… to make Germany great” again.

For Trump and his MAGA movement, the first signs of a similar goal are evident from an election in which Trump achieved electoral gains over his 2020 defeat. A mid-November CBS poll found that 52 percent of Americans believe “fundamental changes are needed in our political system,” 54 percent are “happy” or “satisfied” Trump won, 53 percent are “excited” or “optimistic” about “what Trump will do as president,” 37 percent want him to “have more presidential power” than he did in his first term, 42 percent think he will “protect your rights and freedoms,” 59 percent approve of how he is handling his transition, and 57 percent support his most prominent pledge for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. As Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer warned on Bluesky, “the imprimatur of significant public support is dangerous. It emboldens Trump and his allies and could zap the courage of Democrats.”

Dominating information sources

Information control is crucial to building wide national acceptance that all tyrants seek. “Propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated ideas,” pointed out Robert Paxton in his book The Anatomy of Fascism. “Fascism offered defenders of a cultural canon new propaganda skills along with a new shamelessness about using them.”

Ben-Ghiat describes how in 1933, Germany had more newspapers than Britain, France, and Italy combined. Hitler rapidly closed newspapers, fired and imprisoned thousands of journalists, and made editors and publishers police their own publications. Putin “early in his presidency presided over hostile takeovers of TV networks to gain control of news and political broadcasting and put resources into his preferred network.”

Former White House Counsel Ian Bassin emphasizes that “a key Orbán tactic” in Hungary to dismantle their democracy was “that his allies bought media outlets that were critical of the regime and turned them into loyal cheerleaders for the regime.”

Trump has long branded major U.S. media as an “enemy of the people,” and not subtly encouraged violence by his most rabid supporters against media outlets and journalists.

The increasingly autocratic Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another Trump ally, has censored Israeli media to block internal coverage of the horror of his war crimes in Gaza, and “raided and shut down Al Jazeera offices in Israel and the West Bank.” On November 24, the Israeli Cabinet that Netanyahu controls sanctioned the leading independent news outlet Haaretz by cutting government advertising and subscriptions for employees of state owned companies, and barred communication with Haaretz by government-funded entities.

“The decision to boycott Haaretz …is not a stand-alone event. It is part of a well-crafted master plan to weaken and then destroy the free press and independent media in Israel… and to shut down any news outlet that doesn't totally align with the government,” said Israeli journalist Anat Saragusti on Pod Save the World.

Trump has long branded major U.S. media as an “enemy of the people,” and not subtly encouraged violence by his most rabid supporters against media outlets and journalists. During the 2024 campaign he mostly boycotted mainstream media, focusing instead on rightwing broadcast, social media and podcasts for communicating with voters. Exit polls found a high percentage of Trump voters obtained most of their news from those sources. Fox News further cemented its hold as the overwhelmingly dominant cable TV news channel by as much as 73 percent of watchers, notes streamer Hasan Piker.

Robust civil society responses are the essential ingredient to assaults on information sources, and the efforts to build public complicity with Trumpism.

Looking ahead, former Obama deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, observes, “you intimidate media, you try to force them (to) bend them to your will, you use state funds, state sanctions.” Trump is “following the playbook of Orban. How far will Trump go?”

Interviewed on The Daily Blast podcast, former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan warned that Trump can “threaten to yank broadcast licenses” (as Trump has already threatened CBS and others). He can “pull back funding or leadership of organizations that come under control of the federal government.”

He “could go after journalists that have used information from a source that is classified making an example of them,” Sullivan says. Trump could also invoke the infamous 1917 Espionage Act “which has in the past been used to punish government officials who have taken classified information and given it to the press,” most notably against former National Security Advisor translator Reality Winner for leaking classified information reports about Russian interference in the 2016 election, but not yet against journalists themselves.

“I would expect to see Trump and his people looking for good examples that can be made of someone to do just that to, and therefor throw journalists in jail under the aegis of the Espionage Act.” One clear danger, she observes is “self-censorship on the part of journalists and news organizations because they are afraid of this kind of retribution.”

Robust civil society responses are the essential ingredient to assaults on information sources, and the efforts to build public complicity with Trumpism. To balance media complicity with Trump, Sullivan cites the 250,000 people who canceled their subscriptions to the Washington Post in anger at Bezos, and how MSNBC’s Morning Joe program saw its ratings plummet in its “coveted demographic by as much as 40 percent” after its hosts paid their fealty visit to Mar-a-Lago. “That has to send a message, and it sends a message where it can be heard… most when it cuts into profits or the possibility of profits.”

That, and so much more, will be the test for us all.

This is neither plan nor polemic. I am as lost as anyone in the face of Trump 2.0. I fluctuate between deep grief, existential fear, anger, privilege guilt, and Go mode.

I’m living on a tiny blue island in the middle of a sea of white nationalism in the Pacific Northwest. In just the last few years, synagogues have been attacked, a predominantly Black women’s NCAA basketball team was verbally harassed, books are being banned, trans athletes are being benched, and a militia rolled up on a Pride parade. There are real enemies living right around the corner, and they are emboldened.

We don’t have to decide whether Trump 2.0 is same ole, same ole or apocalypse now. We can recognize both can be true.

So, I am less interested in the election blame game than in figuring out how to prepare for what’s coming. Still, I’m compelled to reject the way the left, ”identity politics,” and ”woke agendas” are being scapegoated yet again as the reason the Democrat lost. That plays into the hatemongering on the right that is causing real harm. As Debt Collective organizer Astra Taylor wrote: “The fate of democracy is too precious to leave in the hands of the Democratic Party.”

I’ve been casting out a line hoping to reel in The Answer to meeting this moment. That’s where I think I get it wrong. I am trying to find solid ground, a correct position, a strategy. After an initial beat of stillness in the morning after, many answers are now on offer. Often, they are presented in contrast to what they are not. Two dominant themes keep reemerging.

Continuity Versus Rupture

Some are stressing that the U.S. has always been an “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” They counter liberal surprise with “you are awakening to the same country you fell asleep to. The very same country. Pull yourself together.” I’m reminded that after Donald Trump’s 2016 win, Native scholar-activists offered, “Welcome to the Empire. Where did you think you were living?” A week after this election, Mishuana Goeman told those of us gathered at the American Studies Association (ASA) conference in Baltimore, “The empire is meant to crumble.” She and other scholars reminded us of Indigenous survivance, generative imagination, kinship, and generational time.

Others are underscoring this moment as new, as a rupture, as a sharp right turn into authoritarianism. While not denying the history and on-going structures of U.S. state violence, they are encouraging us to recognize the difference of this moment. At a post-election event in Oakland, Angela Davis offered, “This is terribly new. It’s new with a terror.”

Step Back and Rest Versus Strategize and Fight

Many people are talking about resting in this post-election period, with various commitments to rejoining the fight. They are stepping back, disengaging from organizing, turning off the news, unplugging from social media (I’m not talking here about those who are overwhelmed, paralyzed, or permanently checking out). I hear this from liberal white colleagues. And from mainstream media stories about Black women stepping back.

Exhaustion seems to be the biggest motivation for stepping back, but a few others are circulating. Some question whether Trump really wants, or will be able, to follow through on his campaign promises. Others worry that believing the autocrat and focusing on what he says he’ll do could add to a sense of despair or panic. Still others are cynically signaling that voters deserve what’s coming.

Some are counseling, as they did in the pandemic, that we don’t know what light might emerge from the darkness—that the only constant is change.

At the other end of the spectrum, many are urging us to dig in, to (re)build networks, to strategize, to provide resources to those already under direct attack (e.g. Palestinian solidarity activists, DEI practitioners and educators, immigrant and trans communities). They note that the shock and awe campaign has already begun, the chaos is calculated and lying is the point. We are meant to feel overwhelmed—it’s literally part of the plan.

Some are focusing on things the Biden administration, Democratic governors, and local governments could be doing in this window before Trump takes office. There’s also the caution that, in an authoritarian context, institutions will not save us and so we need to organize to save ourselves. As one organizer put it, “We have everything we need. The fight is long, but winnable.”

Beyond Binaries

I’ve been examining the arguments, trying to determine which I should commit to, but they all have merit. I am remembering to be skeptical of binaries, to think beyond either/or, to cultivate humility, generosity, and imagination. This is particularly critical considering the vicious attacks on nonbinary and trans folx, and the way Democrats have thrown them under the bus.

We don’t have to decide whether Trump 2.0 is same ole, same ole or apocalypse now. We can recognize both can be true. We don’t need to choose between resting or fighting. We can remember we are part of larger intergenerational collectivities that can hold us while we do both.

Like the pandemic, this is a moment of radical uncertainty. No one knows. For many of us, that’s terrifying. Simply acknowledging this, rather than insisting on forced optimism or self-righteous action, feels necessary. It’s also a more humble, generous stance. If we learned nothing else, the pandemic absolutely showed us we need to build systems of care, networks grounded in revolutionary love. Barbara Ransby encourages us to remember that “most importantly, we have each other.”

Some are counseling, as they did in the pandemic, that we don’t know what light might emerge from the darkness—that the only constant is change. At the ASA conference Roderick Ferguson offered: “What we believe to be the nadir may also be the emergence. Plant seeds, walk away, don’t hover, trust your planting... Teach others to plant seeds.”

The northern parts of South Sudan, particularly Aweil in Northern Bahr el Ghazal State, has been hit hard by relentless flooding, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. The floods have had a particularly devastating impact on returnees, many of whom had recently resettled in Aweil after months of displacement due to the ongoing crisis in neighboring Sudan. These returnees, who had begun the slow process of rebuilding their lives, now find themselves displaced once more, their hopes for stability washed away with the floodwaters.

As the water levels rose, entire villages were submerged, and families were forced to flee their homes, taking only what they could carry. Makeshift camps have sprung up in higher areas that remain above water, but these temporary shelters are overcrowded, with inadequate access to clean water, food, and sanitation facilities. The conditions in these areas are dire, and diseases such as malaria and cholera may be easy to spread, exacerbated by stagnant floodwaters and a lack of medical supplies. Many children and elderly are falling ill, compounding the community’s sense of despair.

For the returnees, this disaster is particularly heartbreaking. Having already endured years of displacement and conflict, they had returned to Aweil in search of peace and the chance to rebuild their homes and livelihoods. Many had invested their savings into small farms, hoping to cultivate crops that would sustain them. Now, their fields are underwater, and the crops they were counting on for food and income have been destroyed. Families who had started to find their footing are once again plunged into uncertainty, unsure of where they will sleep or how they will feed their children in the days to come as they continually depend on fish from the flood waters.

For the returnees in particular, the flooding represents a tragic reversal of the fragile progress they had made since returning home. Their resilience and determination, however, remain a source of hope.

Beyond the direct impact on homes and farms, the flooding has also severely damaged infrastructure. Roads, which are critical for accessing essential services, have become impassable, isolating entire communities. Health centers, already under-resourced, are now cut off from those who need them most. Expectant mothers, children suffering from malnutrition, and the elderly are particularly vulnerable, as they can no longer reach health facilities for vital care. In some cases, patients have had to be transported by boat or carried on makeshift stretchers over long distances just to receive basic medical attention.

The road between Malualkon and the rural communities, which serves as the lifeline for delivering food, medical supplies, and other essential goods, is completely submerged in many areas. Vehicles attempting to navigate these roads are frequently stuck or washed away by the strong currents, making it impossible for humanitarian organizations to deliver aid to those in need. This has further compounded the crisis, as displaced families in remote areas are left without access to the relief supplies that could provide some measure of comfort.

The community’s resilience is being tested like never before. Local leaders have been appealing for assistance, but the scale of the disaster is overwhelming. In response, humanitarian organizations have ramped up efforts to provide emergency relief, setting up temporary shelters and delivering food aid. However, the needs far exceed the resources available. Many families remain without adequate shelter, exposed to the elements as they wait for aid to reach them. The long-term impacts of this flooding disaster are likely to be severe. With much of the farmland destroyed, food insecurity looms large over the region. Even as the rains begin to subside, the floodwaters are expected to take months to recede, delaying any attempts at recovery. As a result, displaced families will likely remain in temporary camps for an extended period, facing an uncertain future.

For the returnees in particular, the flooding represents a tragic reversal of the fragile progress they had made since returning home. Their resilience and determination, however, remain a source of hope. With the right support, they may yet find a way to rebuild once more, but the road to recovery will be long and challenging. As the humanitarian response continues, it is clear that sustained assistance will be needed to help the people of Aweil recover from this latest disaster, rebuild their lives, and prepare for the next challenge, as climate-related events like these floods become an ever-more frequent threat to their survival.

The Presidential election was a disaster for Democrats. There’s been no shortage of think pieces, posts, and punditry seeking to explain why U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris was trounced while down ballot candidates significantly outran the top of the ticket. Aside from the usual blame game, in this case centrists mostly accusing the left of being too accepting of trans people, another explanation quickly became adopted as a given: Harris was virtually destined to lose as voters across the globe punished incumbents for Covid-19 related inflation.

This theory has spread its tentacles across the ideological spectrum. Spearheaded initially by Matt Yglesias both pre (2023) and post election, it has since gained steam—though with varying boundaries, implications, and suggested remedies—namely via Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky in Public Notice, John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times, and David Dayen at The American Prospect.

On the surface, it’s rather convincing. Burn-Murdoch’s piece included a chart, which has been widely circulated, displaying research from ParlGov stating that all incumbent parties in developed countries (though the text of his piece says “major countries”) have lost vote share in 2024 national elections, a previously unseen phenomenon.

That’s pretty damning. But wait, what’s a major country? And why is 2024 the relevant data set while 2023 is omitted? If an incumbent party had a slightly lower vote share but remained in power, doesn’t that indicate something other than voters wanting to kick out the incumbents?

In other words, is the theory of inevitability that holds that Harris was destined to lose, rather than win, narrowly due to inflation really true in any meaningful sense? To the extent it bears out, does it even provide useful lessons? When incumbents lose seats in a parliamentary system, is that always the same as the American two-party elections? We would argue no. The reality is much more complex, as this piece lays out. Arbitrary decisions with respect to what elections count, whether 2023 elections were as inevitable, and whether it matters that Democrats were not wholly the incumbent party (the House of Representatives exists, even if none of the people who articulate this theory really acknowledge it).

To start with, Burn-Murdoch’s chart does not include Mexico in its 2024 data set, either because he does see Mexico as a major or developed country—rather offensive, a $1.79 trillion GDP says otherwise—or because it runs contrary to the other examples. In June, Mexico’s incumbent party won a landslide reelection victory, with now-President Claudia Sheinbaum winning 59.4% of the vote, improving significantly upon her predecessor’s 53.2% in 2018. To their credit, Dayen and Yglesias (in one of his several pieces touching on the matter) do acknowledge Mexico as an exception to the rule, but say that high-inflation prior to Covid-19 likely accounts for why the incumbents were not punished. It’s true that Mexico is historically prone to bouts of inflation, but their inflation rate had fallen to 3.64% in 2019 and 3.4% in 2020 before spiking to 5.69% in 2021 and 7.9% in 2022. Even if Mexican voters take some inflation as a given, this is still a substantial increase that one would expect to see reflected in the next election according to the supposed globally intertwined and inevitable relationship between incumbent vote share and inflation. It just doesn’t seem correct to say that inflation is so priced-in to Mexican politics that a 4% increase that more than doubles the rate doesn’t phase the population. Indeed, Mexico’s 2018 election came after a spike of inflation, jumping from 2.8% in 2016 to 6% in 2017, and in that case the incumbents were soundly defeated.

Political parties and their campaigns have agency. They can craft narratives and deliver compelling messages that convince voters to show up for them on election day.

While we’re far from experts on Mexican politics, it certainly seems as if the fact that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was an entertaining populist who inveighed against the rich helped him—and might have been a useful example for Democrats. Yes, Harris was a potential bundle of firsts—but any more so than a Jewish woman in Mexico? Sheinbaum’s landslide win seems improbable enough to merit more curiosity than it has received from Democratic strategists.

Mexico is the most glaring counterexample, given the dramatic improvement from the prior election and its deep cultural connections to the United States, but it’s not the only place where incumbent parties retained power in 2024. Taiwan’s ruling DPP won the presidential election but came in second place of the legislature by one seat, although they had the higher raw vote total and improved their vote share from 34% in 2020 to 36% in 2024. Taiwan is a highly developed economy, so its results seem highly applicable to the United States. The Dominican Republic’s PRM party won reelection and increased its vote share from 52.5% in 2020 to 57.4% in 2024 after inflation peaked at 8.8%; not a wealthy country, but a fellow North American state that is culturally intertwined with the United States.

Bulgaria, an upper middle income country per the World Bank, held elections in June and October, with the GERB-SDS coalition retaining its plurality in both elections and increasing its vote share by 1.7% in October. (There were allegations of voting irregularities, but these appear to have been vote buying efforts by the fourth place party rather than the winners.) In high income Croatia, the HDZ won a plurality and remains the governing party with 34.4%, a 3% decrease from 2020 but not a bad showing in the face of a peak inflation rate of 10.67%.

Perhaps these examples don’t fit into the arbitrary limits of countries discussed in this theory. And we’re aware that they’re not the most commonly cited counterparts to the United States (although Mexico really ought to be).

But that points to a bigger issue—proponents of the theory have differing parameters of who qualifies. Burn-Murdoch limits it to 2024 and “major countries.” Yglesias in his New York Times op-ed says there are no examples of incumbents in a “rich country securing a strong reelection.” He includes 2023 elections and, in prior pieces, said incumbent losses were occurring in the English-speaking world and called it a dominant global trend. Dayen said “virtually every party that was the incumbent at the time that inflation started to heat up around the world.” Berlasky, citing Yglesias, says it’s “a brutal time for all incumbent parties across the world,” but only touches on Japan, Austria, the U.K., and France. Thompson says it’s a “nightmare for incumbent parties around the world” with parties in “major countries” suffering defeats. We’re not saying each iteration of this take is wrong, but the variance of which countries and years are included suggests there is not a consensus on how and why inflation played a role in recent elections, which is the crux of the theory’s relevance.

Limiting such a phenomenon to a vague, undefined category of “major countries” is unhelpful, but it’s understandable why much of the discussion is centered on the 2024 elections. They are more recent and therefore feel more related to Harris’ performance. But, given that Covid-19-induced inflation rose through 2021 and peaked in 2022, one would expect that elections in 2023 would be particularly disastrous for incumbents while inflation was fresh on minds and felt in pocketbooks. 2024 elections could still be impacted, but surely 2023 would see voters forefronting inflation at least as much as in 2024. So what happened in 2023?

Well, in Greece, the ruling ND party won elections in May and June of 2023, brushing off the 9.3% inflation rate by garnering a greater vote share compared with 2019. In Spain, the ruling PSOE failed to win the most seats, but they increased their vote share by 3.7%, gained two seats, and successfully formed another coalition government. In Estonia, the Reform Party won reelection with a 2% increase in vote share from 2019 when it won the most votes, eventually resulting in a Reform Party-led coalition government in 2021. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won reelection with 52% of the vote, down just half a percentage point from 2018. In Luxembourg, the three party coalition government made up of the LSAP, DP, and the Green party dissolved after the Greens vote share diminished. However, LSAP and DP were the larger coalition parties, and they increased their vote shares from 2018 with DP joining the top performing CSV party to form a new coalition. These are not all resounding victories, but they are largely continuations of incumbent governments.

There were also, of course, some incumbent losses in the Netherlands, Finland, and Slovakia, but it is a mixed bag rather than a global backlash. I mean, incumbent parties in democracies should sometimes lose—it would be suspicious if they did not! Furthermore, Spain, Estonia, and Luxembourg illustrate the difficulty in drawing black and white conclusions about parliamentary elections. Governing coalitions were altered, but the top parties improved their vote share in a way that does not at all suggest a punishment for presiding over a period of inflation. In other words, it’s complicated.

So what does this tell us about the election here in the U.S.? For one, it tells us that inflation was not the be-all and end-all of what happened in our presidential election. Political parties and their campaigns have agency. They can craft narratives and deliver compelling messages that convince voters to show up for them on election day. Contrary to the now-conventional wisdom, many incumbent parties successfully did so, regardless of inflation.

Center-left proponents of inflations’ preeminence use the theory to claim that Covid-19-era stimulus spending from President Joe Biden and Harris was too strong and the administration was too slow to pivot toward budget hawkery. Inflation was still on the minds of voters, but Harris and Trump were neck and neck on the question of who voters trust on the economy. We also saw down ballot Democrats, who were still incumbents, outperform Harris in a way that puts the inflation-induced predetermination into further question.

There is also a key difference between American elections and parliamentary elections in other countries—Biden-Harris was not in nearly as powerful a position as most ruling parties because they faced an obstructionist House majority. In 1948 Harry Truman ran as the successor to an old president for whom he had served as VP. Truman’s approach could and should have been instructive. Biden and Harris should have presented a series of responses to inflation, fought for them despite the uphill chances in the House, and then run against radical (comically so!) Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his weirdo corporate lackey caucus. For instance, one of us wrote a piece in July urging the administration to establish “an Anti-Price-Fixing Division within the DOJ, equipped with substantial new appropriations to enable the government to hire world-class experts and attorneys who can effectively uncover and prosecute corporate criminality.”

If Speaker Johnson’s caucus passed the bill, it would have been a tangible accomplishment on a germane issue, and offered Biden and Harris an opportunity to promise a better future on prices. And, more likely, when it failed, Biden and then Harris could blame Johnson for ongoing high prices. Such a political gambit is not available to parties leading parliamentary systems, yet another reason why claiming that Democrats lack the ability to overcome inflation based on election results in some parliamentary systems in 2024 but not 2023 is misguided.

Despite all the fuss about polling errors and fingers-on-scales, polls of the presidential election were more accurate than in previous years, though Trump still outperformed polls by roughly 2 points nationally. Polls were more or less tied in the final days, suggesting that Harris could have done better by sticking with the campaign identity that resulted in a big polling lead after the debate. While inflation and the economy were relevant throughout the campaign, Harris was still, at times, able to spin a narrative and draw a contrast with Trump that brought voters to her side. Of course, Trump declined a second debate, but the campaign did not make him pay a political price for playing chicken. Instead, Harris’ campaign focused the final months on courting Republicans through appearances with Liz Cheney while failing to get endorsements from actually high profile Republicans like George Bush or Mitt Romney. We wouldn’t have loved any Republican-first strategy, but if you’re considering that route, you have to know that a handful of former members of the House and Dick Cheney is really not enough.

Democrats knew, or at least should have known, that this would be an uphill battle given the administration’s unpopularity and the late candidate switch. But the campaign did not pursue a bold, antagonistic, shoot-for-the-stars approach that you would expect from a party with their backs against the wall and a purported global trend in Trump’s corner. None of this is to say that inflation didn’t play any role—of course it did. But pundits, and more importantly the party, should not spread the incorrect assessment that all incumbents everywhere were doomed because of it. It only serves as an excuse for the people responsible for the campaign’s failure to shrug their shoulders and say, “Oh well, nothing we could have done.” That is nonsense.

In June 1924, Benito Mussolini—the Prime Minister of a tottering Liberal Italy—ordered the assassination of a left-wing Member of Parliament, Giacomo Matteotti. When Matteotti’s body was discovered two months later in a wooded area north of Rome, political rumors and controversies exploded into a full-fledged political crisis for the National Fascist Party. Facing the potential collapse of his coalition government, and with it the loss of his prime ministry, Mussolini resolved to confront his party’s political crisis headlong.

On January 3, 1925, Mussolini delivered a contentious speech in the Chamber of Deputies, intending to bring about a resolution, one way or another, to the so-called “Matteotti Crisis.”

“Gentlemen! The speech that I am about to deliver to you should not, strictly speaking, be considered a parliamentary address,” he arrogantly explained, since a “speech of this type could lead to a vote on policy.” “Let it be known,” the Prime Minister continued, “that I do not seek such a vote” as “I have had too many of those.”

Having established his decidedly anti-democratic intentions, Mussolini explained to his colleagues that Article 47 of the Italian Constitution allowed for the members of the Chamber to “impeach the King’s Ministers” and “bring them before the High Court of Justice” for any high crimes and/or misdemeanors committed. “I formally ask you,” the Duce-in-waiting boldly proclaimed, “is there, in this Chamber or outside of it, someone who would like to apply Article 47 [to me]?”

Mussolini’s cynical invitation, of course, was imbued with the not-so-subtle suggestion of reprisals for anyone who dared speak out against the National Fascist Party, its political violence during the previous six or so years, and no less important, its authoritarian Leader.

Unsurprisingly, nobody stood up to apply Article 47 to Mussolini. And in the absence of any political or judicial consequences for his involvement in the political violence leading up to and including Matteotti’s assassination, Mussolini demonstrated himself to be above law and order in Italy. In short, Mussolini was no longer a Prime Minister—he was a dictator.

During the subsequent two years, a now unleashed National Fascist Party utilized its position to pass a series of laws—known as the “Extremely Fascist Laws”—which brought about an end to multi-party democracy and civil liberties in Italy and, in their place, the legal foundations for a single-party Fascist State.

One century later, Mussolini’s declaration of dictatorship, which inaugurated twenty or so years of democratic backsliding and authoritarianism in Europe, continues to haunt the halls of power in liberal democracies throughout the Western world.

The recent re-election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States of America serves as a chilling reminder of the appeal of anti-democratic strongmen in times of social, political, and economic flux. Similar to Mussolini one hundred years ago, Trump has demonstrated a contempt for the Constitution and the universal application of law and order.

In a December 2023 exchange with Fox News personality Sean Hannity, for instance, Trump pompously proclaimed his intentions to serve as a dictator on “day one” of his presidency. Many of his followers, too, have glibly embraced this unconstitutional and anti-democratic political rhetoric, going so far as to produce celebratory campaign t-shirts bearing the slogan: “Dictator on Day One.”

In July 2024, moreover, Trump informed the attendees of the Turning Point Believers' Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida that, were evangelical conservatives to help him win the general election in November, “you won’t have to vote any more.”

Perhaps equally as concerning, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement has resonated with American neo-fascist groups, including Patriot Front, which frequently holds public marches and rallies bearing MAGA-adjacent slogans, and neo-Nazi groups, one of which recently marched through Columbus, Ohio wearing blackshirts and flying swastika flags, ostensibly in celebration of Trump’s re-election.

Stemming from his roles in the January 2021 MAGA-led insurrection at the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. and the subsequent standoff with the FBI over his illegal possession of classified documents, Trump was, leading up to November 5th, facing 91 felony charges, which, if convicted, would have almost certainly resulted in substantial legal consequences for the twice-impeached POTUS. With his re-election, however, these charges will almost certainly be dropped, due to a longstanding Department of Justice policy of applying legal immunity to serving POTUSes. Like Mussolini before him, Trump is now effectively above law and order in the United States.

In addition to winning the presidency, the now MAGA-dominated Republican Party won majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, providing Trump with what could very well turn out to be a “rubber stamp” legislator for his far-right objectives.

Thus, when Trump is inaugurated as the United States’ 47th president on January 20, 2025—merely three weeks following the centennial of Mussolini’s declaration of dictatorship in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies—he will be in the position to strong arm political, judicial, and military power without any meaningful checks and balances. He will be immune from prosecution while in office, which will motivate him to fulfill the promise he made to the Turning Point Believers’ Summit: to gerrymander our political system in a way that precludes any electoral opposition to the MAGA movement moving forward. Trump will be, as he promised in December 2023, a dictator on “day one.”

And with these, and many more, authoritarian promises fulfilled, Americans will be faced with a significant, and rather urgent, question: If the comparisons between Mussolini’s declaration of dictatorship and Trump’s re-election are so striking, as I have insisted, we may well be witnessing the twilight of American democracy, and the beginning of the long night of authoritarianism in the United States.

And, in a related vein, with authoritarian movements popping up everywhere across the Western world, and the steady erosion of support for international law and order and human rights, are we building a global order based around the liberal democratic values of the United Nations Charter? Or are we increasingly living—like the Europeans of the 1920s and 1930s—in another interwar crisis?

Over thirty years ago, Republican historian and political analyst, Kevin Phillips, remarked that the “Republicans go for the jugular while the Democrats go for the capillaries.” This serious disparity in political energy levels is rarely taken into account to explain election turnouts. The voluntary enfeebling of the Democratic Party started long ago. In 1970, writing in Harper’s Magazine, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a co-founder of Americans for Democratic Action, wrote an article “Who Needs Democrats? And What It Takes to be Needed?” He argued that if the Democratic Party does not take on the corporate and political establishment, it has no purpose at all.

In 2001, long after the 1980 Reagan landslide of Jimmy Carter, Labor Secretary under Clinton, Robert Reich, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post which declared, “…The Democratic Party. It’s Dead.”

In the following years, while the Democrats were accelerating their abandonment of half the country as “red states,” and became more out of touch with blue-collar workers and unions, whom they took for granted, the Republicans were becoming more energized by the year. Their mouthpieces dominating talk radio – e.g., Rush Limbaugh – were directly sowing unrebutted discord, day after day, among blue-collar workers against the Democrats. Why? It’s because the Democrats essentially gave up on Talk Radio and didn’t bother listening to how these corporatist radio bloviators were turning hard working listeners into Reagan Democrats.

While the GOP was eroding the core base of the Democratic Party and taking total control of red state legislatures, governorships, and courts, the Democrats, starting in 1979, were plunging into enticing and taking corporate PAC money, as urged by then Rep. Tony Coelho (D-CA). This reliance on corporate campaign money weakened the Party’s positions and actions on behalf of workers, consumers, the environment, and the need for an expanded social safety net for the populace. Western nations have provided their citizens superior health care, family support and education programs for decades.

The comparative energy levels were exhibited in the 2010 state gerrymandering drive. While the Democrats were snoozing, a laser beam effort in several states, like Pennsylvania, took the Dems to the cleaners. The result: majority GOP Congressional delegations for a decade even though the Democrats won the popular vote there. (See: Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy by David Daley.)

"The Dems had the popular New Deal agenda update in their grasp, but let it slip through their fingers."

Recall, in 2009 Obama had a large majority Democratic advantage in the House and Senate as a result of his win over John McCain in November 2008. Instead of going forward full throttle with this mandate, Obama chose extreme caution. He focused on Obamacare, after giving up right at the beginning the crucial “public option” allowing people to opt out of the corporate health insurance grip. He gave it up unilaterally before negotiations began with the obstructive GOP.

For the rest of his term, Obama appeared to be resting. He promised a $9.50 federal minimum wage in his 2008 campaign but didn’t lift a finger for it during his first term. It is still at a poverty wage of $7.25 per hour to this day. He didn’t really put up a grassroots fight for his stimulus bill following the Wall Street collapse and the great recession starting under George W. Bush, (the war criminal against the Iraqi people.) Obama even declined to prosecute the Wall Street crooks.

In the meantime, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, managed to lose the House to a reactionary GOP in the 2010 elections, the 2012 elections, the 2014 elections and the 2016 elections, straightjacketing any possible Obama agenda in the Congress. The Dems had the popular New Deal agenda update in their grasp, but let it slip through their fingers while the GOP had a corporatist anti-worker, consumer, and women’s agenda and with ferocious energy blocked improvements supported by a majority of people in the US.

Even more inexplicable was the Democratic Party’s refusal to strongly support the galvanizing political civic movement to cancel the Electoral College (see NationalPopularVote.com). This organizing effort has led so far to the passage of state laws (California, New York, Illinois, etc.) handing the Electoral College vote to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. The Democrats won the popular vote in 2000 (Al Gore) and 2016 (Hillary Clinton) but lost the Electoral College vote to G.W. Bush and the surprised Donald Trump. Still, the Democrats stay on the sidelines though this movement already has enabled state laws totaling 215 Electoral College votes, needing only to get to 270 to neutralize this anti-democratic vestige from the historic era of slavery.

Almost everywhere you look you see this huge disparity in energy levels. Compare the smaller Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives with the Pelosi-toady Progressive Caucus. The difference is that between thunder and slumber over the years.

Compare the Tea Party’s slamming impact on the established GOP in Congress with the tepid attitude of most labor unions and the AFL-CIO deferring to the Democratic Party.

Compare the over-the-top corporate judges to the so-called liberal judges, as relating to federal cases against Trump.

Compare the comprehensive ghastly Heritage Foundation’s 900-page 2025 blueprint directed toward the GOP expansion of the corporate state and the stripping away of services to the people and their rights with the agenda advanced by the progressive citizen groups. No comparison. The media notices this difference in energy levels which is one reason it gives more coverage to the right-wing messianic bulldozers who show in every way that they are hungrier for taking power as they take no prisoners.

Partisan energy disparities even extend to the right-wing vs. left-wing media. The former has the brazen Fox News network. The left has nothing like that. Bill Moyers told me he urged mega-rich George Soros and allies to start a competing progressive network after Fox became quickly formidable. No way.

The right-wing magazines cover the actions of their right-wing allies, plus those gatherings and books. While the progressive media mostly ignores reviewing progressive books and what citizen groups are driving for against corporate power in Washington, DC, and at the state level. The Progressive media prefers publishing their opinions and exposé pieces. That’s one reason why there are more non-fiction right-wing corporatist books which become best sellers, while progressive tomes gather dust.

Further weakening the energy gap in favor of the GOP are the Democrats who look for scapegoats like the Greens to account for their disgraceful losses. They rarely look at themselves in the mirror. Democrats like Norman Solomon (See, Roots Action) issue “autopsy reports” following Party defeats. The 2017 report documented the Democratic Party’s arrogant, entrenched leadership which ignores the progressive base.

After the November 5th debacle, have you heard about mass resignations by Democrats responsible for this victory by the convicted felon, chronic liar, bigot, corrupt, phony promisor Trump? Well, the DNC chair, Jamie Harrison is resigning but that is pro forma. Other Democratic leaders are still on board at the state and federal level, in addition to, astonishingly enough, the failed corporate political/media consultants who enriched themselves while wasting away the biggest flood of campaign money in American history on the Kamala Harris campaign.

Younger Democrats who raise the need to displace the failed Democratic apparatchiks, and who want popular vigorous progressive agendas, as espoused by the naturally popular Senator Bernie Sanders, get ignored or worse pushed out of contention, visibility and, importantly, respect.

The Party’s losing elders have assured the absence of farm teams, of successors. Speaker Pelosi and her deputy Rep. Steny Hoyer are experts at this geriatric supremacy despite their track record of losing to the aggressive Republican plutocrats. Energy counts, matters and wins the political battles. There isn’t even any adrenaline around the Dems' capillaries.

As a professor of rhetoric who studies Nazism, fascism, and demagoguery, I've watched Trump’s cabinet picks with mounting unease. The majority of them are so egregiously unfit for the offices they're nominated to run, it seems like a perverse joke.

A wrestling CEO and the subject of a lawsuit accusing her of sheltering pedophiles for Secretary of Education? A celebrity doctor with a history of multi-level medical and insurance marketing schemes for Medicare and Medicaid administrator? A cable news personality whose called for purging “woke” generals from the military for Secretary of Defense? An anti-vaxxer with a history of drug abuse for Secretary of Health and Human Services? A dog murdering governor whose been banned from all the Tribal lands in her state for Secretary of Homeland Security? The list goes on.

But Trump’s cabinet nominees aren’t a joke. They’re a fascism-inspired dare.

In the last months of the campaign, not one but two of Trump’s former cabinet members, plus the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—all four-star generals—openly called him a fascist. Several other people, including his opponent, did as well. Whether or not the specific term “fascist” is accurate, there are reasons it keeps coming up.

Trump has repeatedly echoed fascist rhetoric, staging multiple fascism-inspired rallies, threating to be a dictator “on day one” if re-elected, and calling journalists and his political opponents “enemies from within.” He’s even threatened to deploy the military against U.S. citizens who oppose him. After General Mark Milley, criticized Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection, Trump suggested he should be executed. Milley’s execution is not the only one Trump has fantasized about.

But even in his less provocative moments, Trump exhibits tendencies that align with fascist politics. He has consistently resisted or rejected the norms and institutions of democracy, including accepting election results, respecting non-partisan civil services, and upholding the separation of powers at the heart of American democracy.

Open opposition to democracy has been at the center of fascist politics since fascist politics have existed. Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Spain’s José Antonio Primo de Rivera, among others, rejected democracy as decadent, unnatural, and weak. In many cases—Italy and Germany, chief among them—fascist parties participated in democratic politics in order to rise to power, and even after they were in power, they often retained the trappings of democracy, including parliaments and elections.

But they also eviscerated the norms and institutions designed to keep them in check. Mussolini, for example, helped push through the Acerbo Law in 1923, which said that whichever party earned the highest number of votes in parliamentary elections automatically got two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. In 1933, Hitler and the Nazis took their proposal to suspend Germany’s constitution to the Reichstag for approval, which they got through coercion and changing voting rules on the spot.

Destroying democratic institutions, and other efforts like it, were of course intended to consolidate fascist power, but they were also explicit challenges to democratic lawmakers. They were so egregious that lawmakers were forced to unambiguously declare their allegiances—would they defiantly confront the fascists, or would they fall in line? Needless to say, defiant confrontation had predictable consequences and falling in line had obvious advantages.

Whether or not Trump intends to usurp two-thirds of Congress or suspend the Constitution, he’s leaning into the fascist tradition of issuing egregious demands, which require lawmakers to unambiguously declare their allegiances. In nominating a Director of National Intelligence who has no experience in national intelligence, Trump is forcing Senators—Republicans, in particular—to say publicly whether they’re with him or against him.

No one should imagine, even for a second, that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing with his Cabinet picks. He knows his nominees need Senate confirmation. During his first term, his Cabinet nominees were “conventional” Republicans, which is to say anti-tax, anti-regulation, and pro-national security. Still, they faced considerable scrutiny, even among Senate Republicans. As several of his initial appointments resigned or found themselves caught up in ethics scandals, Trump resorted to “acting” appointments to circumvent the Senate.

This time, Trump isn’t bothering with conventional nominees. He’s challenging the Senate by compiling a list of nominees that are more than just partisans. They’re more than just extreme. They are ultimatums. The question is not, “Is Nominee A or B qualified?” It’s “Are you going to try to stop me or not?”

The individual nominees Trump has put forward forward are concerning on their own terms, but the implications of their nominations are even more chilling when taken as a whole. How the Senate responds will tell us a lot about just what kind of threat to democracy Trump will be in the coming years. If history is any guide, we’d do well to pay careful attention.