President-Elect Donald Trump has threatened to use military force to invade and annex Greenland, which is currently a Danish colony, because he says the US needs it for vague national security reasons. It’s like the US never invades nice places anymore.

The post Operation Greenlander Freedom first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Operation Greenlander Freedom appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Donald Trump was hardly a steward of responsible global governance in his first term. His withdrawal from multilateral agreements, including the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords, showcased an unusual disdain for international institutions and cooperation. He has little evident regard for the “rules-based international order” favored by the Biden administration. However, therein lies an opportunity.

The idea that the United States upholds global stability by leading a “rules-based” order tends to generate more ill will than goodwill in many parts of the world. Rather than offering a positive American vision, it has come to symbolize American hypocrisy and double standards. Trump would be wise to drop the phrase from the U.S. lexicon.

The concept of a rules-based order gained popularity in the D.C. foreign policy establishment, known as the “blob,” in recent years because it encapsulated how experts — liberals and neoconservatives alike, many blindsided by Trump and thrown out of power — viewed what they, and America, stood for.

The Biden administration made the rules-based formulation an organizing principle of its foreign policy. The idea played a key role in shoring up like-minded states to counter China and Russia, which Washington accuses of seeking to overturn the current world order. Yet the order’s fallacies have been laid bare by Washington’s weaponization of this concept against its geopolitical foes even as, for example, the U.S. provides arms to Israel despite its repeated violations of international law.

More important, the rules-based concept has masked revisionist motivations of its own. Aiming to sustain America’s dominance of the international system has precluded a functional global legal framework. That risks inciting the formation of numerous competing orders rather than a more collaborative system following a single set of laws.

China has indicted rules-based talk for masking one-power rule of the globe. Its response so far, however, has been to operate within the existing system while seeking to reform it to its own liking. But if Biden had succeeded in turning the rules-based international order into a bloc, China might have responded by teaming up with Russia and Global South states to form a rival bloc with its own sets of laws.

Though nations in the Global South have disagreements with Russia and China, many are united in their opposition to the rules-based conceit, which they see as largely designed to prolong American unipolarity at the expense of rising powers such as Brazil and India. “I am struck by how much we have lost the trust of the Global South,” French President Emanuel Macron admitted at the 2023 Munich Security Conference.

A world in which states no longer differ over competing interpretations of one legal regime but instead proffer competing sets of rules is more frightening than anything Trump has done so far.

The more America and its allies fracture the global and legal order in the name of their rules, the less anyone follows them. We can’t forge an international order by imposing rules on states that have been excluded from their formulation. No wonder many international law experts view the rules-based order concept not as complementary to international law, but as a threat to it.

A multi-order world lacking a working framework for engagement, collaboration and de-escalation would fuel conflict and great-power competition at a fragile moment. It would be less capable of containing military aggression, preventing nuclear proliferation or managing shared crises such as climate change. If great-power competition is already happening, the key question is whether it proceeds under some common framework or becomes a matter of every great power for itself.

That makes Trump’s choices essential. He appears to be open to a multipolar world, though his investment in rules and laws is a different matter. But if he is serious about reducing America’s global military footprint, bringing our troops home and ceasing to play the increasingly unwanted role of world police, then avoiding anarchy and promoting peace by sustaining a multilateral system will serve U.S. interests and thus Trump’s.

Trump is a keen advocate for his own interests. His first-term foreign policy was marked by a transactionalism that occasionally enabled him to transcend Washington’s typical moralizing in favor of advancing U.S. interests through engagement, such as negotiating the withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban. This “what’s-in-it-for-me” approach to world affairs may enable Trump to jettison Washington’s mythmaking about its coalition-of-the-willing international order.

A working world order is an important condition for Trump’s apparent foreign policy goals — including winning the economic competition with China and forging peace in Ukraine. Those goals can’t be achieved without a healthy, predictable security framework that prevents disagreements and conflicts from spiraling into mutually destructive wars.

Some existing norms, laws and institutions encourage a range of good outcomes and deserve to stay in place, among them United Nations Charter rules that constrain force and the United Nations itself. As for ending the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, that will depend on the art of the deal. But everything depends on whether the bargaining occurs in the shadow of some belief that it is better to have fair, common standards.

The rules-based international order has betrayed that possibility. Over the next four years, America needs to do better.

Free speech is in the news! Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) discuss the high-profile departure of their colleague, Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes, from The Washington Post. Meta and Facebook are getting rid of their fact checkers. And TikTok is begging the Supreme Court for its life.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 188: Ann Telnaes Quits Washington Post first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 188: Ann Telnaes Quits Washington Post appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Watching, on the one hand, the Israeli soldiers’ video confessions of their genocidal intent and acts and, on the other hand, the Palestinians’ livestreaming of their own deaths and devastation, it is ever so easy to throw one’s hands up in the air, to despair, to want to shut the cruelty out, to find solace in oblivion and disengagement. But, it is not only ethically wrong to surrender to despair – it is also factually wrong that nothing good can be expected. Things change every day and, yes, the seeds of hope are already planted on the blood-soaked soil of the ancient land of Palestine. They may be only seeds, but that’s how new life is born.

So, let’s take a look at the seeds of hope that are taking root underneath the rubble.

1. Israel is not winning on the battlefield

Gaza has been destroyed. Its population is on death row. And yet the smart people in the Israeli military know full well that the destruction they wreaked does not translate into a victory. Fifteen months after they re-invaded the open prison that has been the Gaza strip since 1948, they still cannot control more than a small portion of it at a time. Armed resistance, including the regular blowing up of Israel’s mighty tanks, is continuing. Israeli military officers also know that their political leaders’ stated aim, of eradicating Hamas, can never be demonstrably achieved, however many Hamas fighters they kill. As a former Israeli general put it to me: “Even if we kill most the Gazans before we declare victory, a single teenager raising the Hamas flag over a pile of rubble will prove that we failed.”

Similarly in Lebanon. Yes, Israel has killed much of the Hezbollah leadership and, yes, the ceasefire it imposed on Hezbollah succeeded in stopping the Hezbollah missile launches in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance further south. However, the ceasefire was also forced upon Israel by its army’s inability to venture without massive losses by more than a few kilometres into Lebanese territory. And, lest we forget, it is simply not true that Hezbollah had to accept the ceasefire because its missile arsenal was destroyed: Israel signed the ceasefire hours after missiles hit Haifa, and indeed Tel Aviv.

The past year, in other words, will be remembered as a cruel paradox: Israel destroyed Gaza and much of South Lebanon, mainly from the air, but failed abysmally to control the ground. The time is fast approaching when Israeli society will realize that the thousands of Israeli soldiers who died or were seriously injured were the victims of a leadership that, ultimately, placed the Israeli people’s interests very low in their own list of priorities. This is also confirmed by the readiness of Israel’s government to lie through its teeth about its own casualties on the battlefield: compare the low number of casualties officially admitted with the more than twenty thousand soldiers that Israel’s health authorities say have been admitted to veteran rehabilitation centers.

2. Israel’s economy has entered a ‘spiral of collapse’

Turning now to the medium and long term impact of the war on Israel’s economy (which is of great importance from the perspective of the apartheid state’s capacity to reproduce itself through war and devastation financially), it is instructive to read a letter signed by Israeli economists, including Dan Ben-David who explain how Israel’s economic miracle hinges on a hi-tech sector that numbers at most 300 thousand people (including doctors, scientists, academics etc.) His point? If only 10% of these people leave the country, say thirty thousand, Israel’s already hugely indebted economy will fade. In Ben-David’s even starker words,

“We won’t become a third world country, we just won’t be anymore. Only 0.6% of the population are doctors, but who trains them? The senior staff in research universities are 0.1% of the people. High-Tech workers are 6% of the population. Altogether it’s 300,000 people. It’s enough that a critical mass of this group chooses not to be here tomorrow morning, and the State of Israel leaves the developed world.”

Are they leaving? You bet they are – leaving behind them more influential, more dominant than ever before the low-productivity bigots who are driving the fascist settler movement. And, the more dominant these low-productivity bigots are in government and in society, the greater the exodus of the high-tech, secular more liberally minded Israelis. This is the definition of a spiral of collapse.

Israel has lost in the court of public opinion – the illusion of a liberal democratic state is gone

Meanwhile, the genocide of Palestinians, and in particular the manner in which so many Israeli soldiers and politicians celebrate it in videos, speeches and posts, has claimed what is left of the illusion of Israel as a European liberal democracy embedded in a hostile Middle East. That illusion has been a central underpinning of the propaganda that helped Israeli lobbyists succeed in Washington and Europe. Now it is gone. It has drowned in the sea of flesh and blood the Israeli military has strewn all over Gaza – and the trail of destruction, hatred and viciousness that the settlers have unleashed in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Once Israel’s cleverly constructed reputation was gone, sullied, it cannot be reclaimed. And that is good news in the sense that the first step toward a just peace is the ethical fall from grace of the aggressor.

The situation in the Occupied Territories

Turning now to the situation in the West Bank, it is heart-wrenching to watch the non-stop violence against the Palestinians living under brutal apartheid conditions there. The violence against them comes from three quarters: From the Israeli military. From Israeli settlers. And, most tragically, from the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) own security forces who are, in the midst of the genocide of their people by the apartheid state, are cooperating fully with the security forces of that apartheid state. Why the army is doing this, we know. Why the settlers are doing it, we also know. But why is the leadership of the PA doing it?

This is not the first time the PA has cooperated fully with the Israeli occupiers who steadfastly reject any prospect of a Palestinian state – the stated objective of the PA. Sure enough, the PA’s leadership have been doing this for years. But, now, in the face of the fully-fledged genocidal campaign by Israel, the PA’s excuses are becoming transparent. The unelected, unrepresentative, patently corrupt leadership of the PA is behaving as if to impress Netanyahu and Trump that they can do their dirty work for them, with a veneer of legitimacy courtesy of being Palestinians themselves. That they have a role to play. It is a pathetic plea to the genocidal US-Israeli establishment to give them a job to do against the Palestinian Resistance now that the Palestinian people has seen through them. Nothing else explains why they are turning even against Fatah members who continue to resist in Jenin and elsewhere.

This is the saddest, most depressing, aspect of the Palestinian tragedy. So I shall not dwell on it further except to reiterate the urgent need for the election of a representative and thus legitimate leadership of the Palestinian people. No peace can be imagined, let alone negotiated, otherwise. I hope and trust that the Palestinians will find a way to speak with one non-sectarian voice. Nothing short of succeeding in this will curb the genocide they face. As for the rest of us, we must stand by to help give this voice, their voice, a chance to be heard.

Summary

To sum up, days before Donald Trump enters the White House – a man who has never not liked any war crime aimed at eradicating the Palestinian resistance, the Palestinians as a people native to Palestine – we are at a crossroads. Mega Death and uber destruction on the ground wreaked by a US-armed and EU-supported Israel. A spiral of collapse within Israel’s social economy. Arab countries split between complicit regimes and enraged citizens. A Global South that is becoming increasingly powerful and intolerant of the Western-Israeli self-awarded right ethnically to cleanse the non-Jewish native population. And a Western public opinion that can no longer pretend to not know. What is the upshot of these ingredients?

If I were to issue an educated guess, it would be this: Things will get even worse for the Palestinians in the short run. But, in the longer run, the possibility of liberation, of a just peace for both Palestinians, who refuse to go gently into the good night, and for Israelis, who understand the trap into which Netanyahu has ensnared them, seems stronger than it has been for 30 years.

Everyone's talking about mass deportations: how much they'll cost; how they'll tank the economy; how they'll tear communities apart, even if the Trump regime can’t realistically corral and expel the millions of people living and working and raising families without status in the US. Even if their promise was only ever meant to stoke terror and drive the MAGA base to the polls.

What's missing from discussions—what’s always missing from the immigration discussion—is the human impact: what such missions look, feel, sound, and smell like as well as the trauma endured by all involved, including the federal agents made to carry out such actions.

The truth is, few people know. And those who do know aren’t telling. Or can’t.

Well, I know. And we should all be horrified.

I interviewed over four dozen people deported en masse under Trump 1.0 by ICE Air and Department of Defense contractor, Omni Air International. I describe their revelations in my book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, one of only two public accounts that details what happens to an estimated average of 11,500 individuals on roughly one hundred ICE Air flights every month.

As I am not someone who’s been forced to endure the horrors of an ICE Enforcement and Removals Operation expulsion campaign, I can only imagine the terror and humiliation my sources felt based on the testimonies they shared with me. I, therefore, must ask you to imagine, too…

If you've ever been on a long-distance, economy-class flight, you will know that the body fatigues from sitting in the same position for too long. The joints swell, both from inaction as well as from the cabin's lower-than-normal humidity, which sucks moisture from the tissues and cells, causing dehydration. Shoes become uncomfortably tight; hands lose their grip. Even a six-hour journey across the continental US can be taxing to the lower back, hips, knees.

Now imagine being forced to fly across half the US as well as the Atlantic Ocean with your ankles in manacles, your hands cuffed, and tied tightly to a waist chain. Or your body locked in a torturous “stress position” because ICE ERO agents immobilized you in The WRAP. Imagine the links of the waist chain planting themselves into your spine and back muscles. Imagine not being able to shift or adjust them because you are bound for sixteen, twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six, even forty-eight hours in the case of a botched Omni Air International flight to Somalia documented by Rebecca Sharpless in Shackled (2024).

Imagine sitting for sixteen hours to Douala, Cameroon, your ankles and hands swelling, causing the metal hardware to pierce your skin and eat into your nerves. Imagine your panic at a moment of turbulence when you realize that in the event of an emergency, you will not be able to place over your nose and mouth the oxygen mask that drops from above; you will not be able to open the hatch if the aircraft lands on water; you will not be able to grab a life buoy or to tread water in the event you must deplane in a hurry. You will not be able to hurry. You will be helpless.

Imagine being fed nothing but stale white bread and potato chips. Imagine having to bend over, like a dog, to eat the tasteless, salty fare because your chains are so tight, that you cannot bring your hands to your mouth to feed yourself. Imagine not wishing to eat like a dog and going without, for sixteen hours, maybe more.

Imagine your mouth and nose so parched, the natural, human act of breathing causes you pain. Imagine hours passing before anyone offers you water. Now imagine being physically unable to raise the plastic bottle up to your bone-dry lips and throat.

"To get a drink," recounts Oscar (not his real name), "you had to squeeze both your hands around the container to push the water out the top and try to catch a little on your tongue."

Imagine not being allowed to go to the bathroom without the escort of an armed guard. Imagine having to shuffle your way down the aircraft aisle in manacles and chains with a bladder full to bursting only to find, when you reach the cabin restroom, that the guard refuses to close the door. It is impossible, of course, to lower zipper and trousers with your hands enchained. Imagine missing and soiling yourself. Imagine your escort erupting in laughter, shaming you. Imagine returning to your seat, made to sit in your own urine and feces.

Imagine being a menstruating woman denied a fresh pad; or given one but unable to apply it to soiled panties with bound hands. Imagine even wanting to try with the toilet door left open, and a male guard peering in. Laughing. Imagine.

Imagine that no one has cleaned the toilets and being overpowered by the stench of human excrement. Imagine trying desperately to hold it, but finally giving into the call of nature and the stench being so bad your body takes over. You pee in your pants as you retch, adding to the unholy mess.

I'm told it wasn't just the raw essence of human waste that infused Omni Air International N207AX. There was the constant sobbing of passengers; the ceaseless yelling of guards dressed for war and toting guns; and the odor of nervous, panicked sweat. Again quoting Oscar: "It was torture. You could smell the trauma."

Oscar wasn't the only one to say so. The four-dozen-plus accounts I collected from those forced into this ICE Air torture chamber collectively describe a flying Abu Ghraib. “There are laws preventing even terrorists being treated this way,” states Oscar.

He and the others were not terrorists. They were asylum seekers, fleeing a dictator’s war in which they had become human targets.

In the waning months of the first Trump administration, Omni Air International’s Boeing 767 wide bodies took off multiple times from Alliance Field in Fort Worth, Texas, a hub for defense contractors and cargo operators like Amazon, which is also the majority shareholder in Omni’s parent company, Air Transport Services Group (ATSG). Omni Air charged US taxpayers an estimated $1 million per mission.

How many such flights will it take to exile millions? And how many crimes against humanity will be committed by the so-called “leader of the free world” in the process? You do the math.

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take America back (again!) to greatness, there’s been much talk of Elon Musk’s new DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, and whether it will dare tackle Pentagon spending in useful ways. Could it curb rampant fraud, waste, and abuse within military contracting? Will the Pentagon finally pass a financial audit after seven consecutive failed attempts? Might the war in Ukraine finally sputter to an end, along with U.S. taxpayer support for that country of roughly $175 billion over the last three years?

“Efficiency” may be the word of the hour, but a more “efficient” imperial military, with a looser leash to attack Iran, bottle up China, and threaten Russia would likely bring yet more unrest to a world that’s already experiencing war-making chaos. When military “lethality” becomes the byword of even the Democrats, as was true with Kamala Harris’s campaign — her vice-presidential running mate’s main criticism of the Trump record on Iran was that his leadership was too “fickle” when it came to that country’s possible acquisition of a nuclear weapon — one wonders if any move toward restraint, let alone sanity and peace, is possible within the Washington beltway.

If Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to lead a useful DOGE when it comes to the U.S. military, they should focus on effectiveness, not efficiency. Remind me, after all, of the last major war America effectively won. Yes, of course, it was World War II, 80 years ago, with a lot of help from allies like Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.

On the other hand, remind me of just how “effective” the U.S. military was in replacing the Taliban with… yes, the Taliban in Afghanistan after 20 years of effort and roughly $2 trillion in expenditures; or how “effective” it was in finding Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction while bringing democracy to Iraq; or how “effective” it’s been in decreasing the risk of a world-altering nuclear war (while building a whole new generation of nuclear weaponry), as the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists creeps ever closer to a thermonuclear midnight.

Color this retired Air Force officer red, as in angry and scared. Still, a new administration should represent somewhat of a fresh start, another opportunity for this country to alter its militaristic course. Perhaps you’ll indulge me for a moment as I dream of 10 ways the Trump administration could (but, of course, won’t) bring a form of “greatness” back to America. (An aside: Explain to me Donald Trump’s eternal focus on making America “great again” when any president should instead be focused on making America good, as in morally just and decent, again.)

1. It’s said that Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, will “end wokeness” in the military. No more DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) generals, whatever that may mean. Apparently, the next administration wants to return to a military world of white men wearing stars (and losing wars) — the twenty-first-century equivalent of the heroes who “triumphed” in places like Korea and Vietnam in the previous century. Perhaps the new Trump administration should reanimate former Air Force Strategic Air Commander General Curtis LeMay to “win” a nuclear war against China or Russia. Whatever else you can say about LeMay, he wasn’t “woke.” Nor were generals like Douglas MacArthur in Korea and William Westmoreland in Vietnam. Nor, of course, were they victorious or even that effective, as was no less true of more recent “savior” generals like David Petraeus in Iraq and Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan.

America, we don’t need a secretary of defense to “end wokeness” in the military. What we need is one to end warness, the pursuit of perpetual conflict across the globe. Instead of channeling his inner Darth Vader and choking the careers of the “woke,” Hegseth — assuming he makes it to the Pentagon — should act to rein in all its “warriors” and civilian neocons who keep boasting of putting on their big-boy pants as they clamor for yet more war.

2. Speaking of Darth Vader and Star Wars (and recalling its planet-destroying weaponry), the $2 trillion or so planned for the “modernization” of this country’s nuclear arsenal, including new Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, a new stealth bomber (the B-21 Raider), and new Columbia-class nuclear submarines, could easily be curtailed, even cut completely, without faintly impacting national security. Instead, the U.S. could pursue nuclear reduction talks with Russia and China that would enhance world security so much more than building a whole new genocidal set of nukes and their delivery systems. If the Trump administration wants to show “greatness,” it should do what President Ronald Reagan once did: work to put an end to nuclear madness through diplomacy.

3. Speaking of diplomacy and disarmament, isn’t it time for this country to stop being the world’s foremost merchant of death? The United States is, in fact, an uncontested number one in international arms sales, accounting for 40% of the marketplace. For a start, Trump and his minions could regain a smidgen of moral authority by halting the endless flow of (nearly) free bombs, missiles, and shells to Israel, thereby slowing its genocidal efforts to murder yet more Palestinians in Gaza. (Good luck on that one, of course.)

4. If Trump is so keen to put “America First,” shouldn’t that mean sending money to Main Street, USA, rather than to Wall Street, K Street arms lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and giant military contractors in Crystal City, Virginia, and elsewhere? Euphemistically called the “defense” budget, the money that flows into the U.S. military is now officially set at nearly $900 billion, but its future ceiling seems unlimited and the total “national security budget” is already closer to an astounding $1.4 trillion. Why are Americans letting the Pentagon and the National (In)Security State gobble up roughly 60% of the federal discretionary budget, year in, year out, no matter which political party gains the presidency? In truth, America’s real political party is a warbird with two right wings.

5. Given those two right wings, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising how often it spins, flails, and fails. Only recently, for example, the Pentagon failed its seventh audit in a row. Had it been a Trump casino, it would have declared bankruptcy and gone belly up 30 years ago. Even then, you couldn’t have dissolved and distributed its assets, since roughly $2 trillion of them are “missing.” (America, your money is MIA, or missing in action, while the American dream has been KIA, or killed in action, by wanton, wasteful, and wrongheaded Pentagon spending.) Want that institution to pass an audit? Cut its budget in half until it produces a credible and accurate accounting. Something tells me that the bureaucracy would finally “win” its war on the numbers if faced with the equivalent of a budgetary guillotine.

6. Isn’t it finally time for the Pentagon to abandon its global fever dream of “full-spectrum dominance”? An American military deployed everywhere is also one that is vulnerable everywhere. What sense is there in having U.S. Special Forces in 80+ countries? What sense is there in having roughly 800 military bases around the globe? Harkening back to my sci-fi youth, America today most closely resembles the power-driven empire in Star Wars (with the belligerence of the Klingons in Star Trek thrown in for good measure). If Elon Musk truly believes that less can be more (as in more efficient), why not start with far fewer bases and foreign entanglements?

7. Speaking of Star Trek, this country could use a new “prime directive” where we don’t go in search of monsters to destroy everywhere. Isn’t it high time we turned inward and focused on healing ourselves? As presidential candidate and Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II bomber pilot, said so powerfully in 1972, “Come home, America.” Leave the world to settle its own affairs.

8. Speaking of new approaches, why not try rapprochement? Stop attempting to dominate Russia and China, countries that could conceivably destroy the U.S. (as we could destroy them), and start finding smart ways to cooperate. Echoing the business-speak that might appeal to Musk and Trump, isn’t it time to seek win-win scenarios rather than war-war ones?

9. They say fascism will come to America only if it’s wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross, but maybe some version of that is, in fact, the only way to neutralize future fascism — with critical patriotism (rather than jingoistic nationalism) that stresses fidelity to America’s highest ideals. Stop hugging the flag and start living up to the vision of a United (rather than increasingly dis-united) States, a true land of the free and home of the brave that refuses to be frightened by drones in the sky or an expanding China. Stop promoting a vision of a crusading America and start living a vision of a country in which peacemakers are honored, even revered.

10. The names of American drones — “Predator” and “Reaper” — reveal much about this country’s direction over the last half-century. What this country needs to be “great again” are military and government establishments that are far less predatory and reap far fewer bodies overseas or, even better, none. (Keep in mind the millions of people killed, wounded, or displaced in countries ranging from Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to Afghanistan, Iraq, and all too many other lands across this planet in this century.)

There you have it, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, my 10 thoughts on your all too dodgy (rather than DOGE) quest for “efficiency” and “greatness” (again). In a nutshell, efficiency, as in doing things right, is far less important than effectiveness, or doing the right things, as management guru Peter Drucker put it. So, for example, a more efficient military might have fought in a somewhat smarter fashion in Iraq, but an effective military (and government) would have recognized that such a war should never have been pursued to begin with. Let me be clear: I don’t want an “efficient” war with Iran or China or any other country. I want an effective American foreign (and military) policy where, to cite Abraham Lincoln, right makes might.

Put bluntly, you can’t do a wrong thing the right way, a simple maxim I fear will be lost on that potential future trillionaire Musk and his DOGE. Therefore, the U.S. military and government will continue to do all too many wrong things, perhaps in a few cases slightly more efficiently, only making U.S. “defense” policy ever more predatory and so reaping yet more innocent lives across this globe of ours.

When it comes to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, let me say the obvious: the U.S. needs a smaller military establishment capable of defending this country by upholding the ideals and freedoms delineated in the Constitution. Fighting endless wars in distant lands is not the solution here, it’s the problem. As a result, America has an ineffective military (inefficient as hell to boot) that essentially launders trillions in taxpayer dollars to merchants of death like Lockheed Martin and Boeing while filling far too many body bags with dead foreigners. Your DOGE, Mr. Musk, won’t change this, nor will your predilection for spoiling the Pentagon with ever-higher budgets, President Trump.

So, what is to be done, America? As the prophet Michael Jackson once sang, we must start with the man in the mirror. Collectively, we need to ask ourselves and by extension “our” government to change its ways. Or, more effectively, we need to demand radical and extensive changes, since power of the sort wielded by this country’s national security state will concede nothing without a demand.

The forms those demands take are up to you, America.

In my darker hours, I wonder if, in our latest Trumpian moment, this country will be the national equivalent of the Titanic, post-iceberg — meaning that our fate is sealed. If that’s the case, maybe we can play sweeter music and be kinder to each other as we slip toward an ice-cold watery grave. But there are other moments when I imagine the iceberg still looming before the ship of state and a course correction still possible.

I hope that’s the case, even if our ship’s captain (Donald Trump) and his senior officers appear asleep at the wheel, while a few nutcases seem to be seeking that iceberg as a national death wish of sorts or, if you prefer, as an “end times” quest. As Howard Zinn once said, you can’t be neutral on a moving train — or for that matter on a ship of state already deep in perilous waters.

To use a different nautical reference, a more hopeful (if fictional) one, before the USS Caine goes down with all hands in high winds and heavy seas under the blundering and blustering Commander Queeg, maybe it’s time for us, the crew, to take matters into our own hands, as difficult as that may be to contemplate.

Come hard about, America! Seek the fair winds and following seas of peace. If we have the courage to do that, we will truly save our ship, ourselves, and much of the rest of the world from looming disaster.

On January 15, 2025, five days before the inauguration of a U.S. president who threatens to rain down hell on the Palestinian people, and more war to the world, the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal will release its final report on how Lockheed Martin, Boeing, RTX/Raytheon and drone-maker General Atomics have delivered hell to millions across the globe since 9/11.

The Tribunal’s 35 evidentiary episodes explain how these four defendant corporations have been essential enablers of the U.S. colonial campaign of murder, extortion and thievery since 9/11, epitomized in the horrific crescendo of violence that is already being rained down on the Palestinian people. This grossly illegal war campaign—without equal in U.S. history in its geographic scope and length—is largely dependent on the products of the tribunal’s four defendant corporations.

The tribunal episodes explain how the U.S. campaign since 9/11 flows directly from the post-World War II decisions by U.S. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. businessmen and their congressional allies to try to pick up the reins of colonial control around the world that were being dropped by war-ruined European nations.

The U.S. leaders were, of course, acting from their racist cultural and business roots, extending back deep into slavery and the genocide against the first inhabitants of the continent, atrocities on which the U.S. was founded. They set us on the bloody path on which we find ourselves today.

For these industrialists and their political enablers, siding with liberation movements anywhere in the world meant less profits for U.S. corporations. Thus, colonial liberation must be officially described as a “communist” threat to be dealt with through direct and proxy killing, repression, torture, and terror.

We hope that we are effective representatives of those calling for justice and repair from the hideous war work of the Merchants of Death and the United States government since 9/11.

A permanent military industry was needed to enable this mafia-style scheme of international exploitation. Tribunal video episodes describe ways in which the U.S. public has been manipulated to support this military industrial system, to their great economic, spiritual and intellectual disadvantage as the U.S. economy and the wealth of its oligarchs, like Elon Musk, has become more and more dependent on war and intimidation.

After World War I, even the Senate and Congress condemned gross war profiteering. Challenges to weapon manufacturers profiteering continued during World War II, though greatly diminished by war propaganda. Congressional support for weapons makers surged in the post-World War II years, so much so that “defense” stocks have become sacred elements of college and university endowment funds, pension funds and private portfolios.

The immensity of this dependency on war stocks breached the surface of public awareness in the spring of 2024 as students in support of Palestinian life and liberation demanded that their schools disclose and divest their stock in weapons makers.

Students at Smith College occupied the school’s administration building for 14 days, calling on an institution that had divested from apartheid South Africa-connected stock to drop its holdings in L3 Harris and other war stock. The school’s board of trustees refused, calling the school’s holdings ”negligible”. Then in the fall, Smith administrators, and their colleagues nationwide moved, deplorably, to suppress students’ free speech.

Wealth-driven weapons makers who must be protected by the so-called educators, and are revered in the business world, are the successors to those weapons makers in early 20th Century war-grieving America, who were often depicted as overconsumptive, sleezy, money-grubbing vultures, feeding on the corpses and misery of the war dead and afflicted.

Now, we have reached a point in which James Taiclet, the president, chair and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation, the largest weapons maker in the world, whose F-35s, F-16s and Hellfire missiles have been slaughtering Palestinians wholesale, can be a valued member of the board of directors of MassGeneral Brigham, the largest hospital system in Massachusetts, serving 2.6 million patients a year.

Intervening in this surging, greed-driven, incredibly lethal mess, the Tribunal rapporteurs and an international panel of 10 jurors, offer 13 recommendations for action by the public and by government officials to pull the profit out from under war and to provide reparations for the vast harm visited on millions of people by the Merchants of Death and the U.S. government since 9/11.

More specifically, we tribunal coordinators want to work with prosecutors around the world to bring the CEOs of the defendant corporations to justice for having enabled, since the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

We want to work with student and other movements to end private and public investment in weapons production.

We must note that in our investigation, we repeatedly called on the defendant corporations to respond, in one instance getting arrested in the process. The four defendant corporations ignored us. We repeatedly asked members of Congress to answer our questions about their involvement with weapons makers. They ignored us.

The work of the Tribunal was made possible by the volunteer and the extremely low paid work of more than 40 people—students, filmmakers, artists, journalists, and others who joined us at various times over nearly three years to complete our video evidentiary episodes and report.

Those involved represent millions of people who mean to stop the depravity of invasion, occupation, killing and repression, everywhere, so that we can properly get about the work of human survival and the restoration of our planet.

In this, we hope that the Tribunal recommendations will be among the guide stars that will help us chart our course, shining above the hurricane of greed and viciousness now ravaging the U.S and the world.

We hope that we are effective representatives of those calling for justice and repair from the hideous war work of the Merchants of Death and the United States government since 9/11, of those calling to the world from their graves, from their hospital beds, from their poverty and dislocation and their relentless battles against racism in their places of refuge.

Note: You may register here for the January 15, 2025, (9 a.m. Eastern time), tribunal report release press conference. The 35 evidentiary video episodes appear on the Rumble platform and can be easily accessed at MerchantsofDeath.org, as can our Tribunal Study Guide and our podcast – Merchants of Death Radio.

            For journalists, this is the first of two occasions to discuss and evaluate the presidency of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. The second will arrive sooner rather than later, when the president dies. Long after we follow him to the grave, historians with the benefit of declassified archives and looser-lipped eyewitnesses will take their own measures of the man and his political career. So away we go with a look at…

            The Good…

            At the end of Trump’s first term, the country’s infrastructure was in woeful condition. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ annual report on the roads, water, waste treatment and schools we rely on gave it a grade “D.” 43% of roads were in miserable condition. We ranked at the bottom of the G20 most-developed economies in terms of infrastructure spending.

            The 2021 ASCE report said the U.S. needed to spend $5.9 trillion on infrastructure, $3.4 trillion of which was funded. The remaining funding gap was $2.5 trillion.

            Biden’s 2021infrastructure spending bill was the biggest and most ambitious attempt in decades to redress neglect by both Democratic and Republican presidents in the form of “deferred maintenance” and to maybe even build more. Republicans had long signaled that they were open to a bipartisan spending package. But when Biden asked for $4 trillion, they chopped it to bits. By the time he signed it into law in November 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided for just $1.2 trillion.

            Still, it was impressive. Monies authorized by this legislation will replace out-of-date infrastructure, fund new projects and renovate airports and freight rail and the electrical grid and countless other categories for years to come. Ten and fifteen and twenty years from now, you’ll charge your vehicle at a facility that otherwise might not have existed and drive across a bridge that doesn’t collapse because Biden spent his political capital on pushing this bill, the outgoing president’s signature achievement, through Congress.

            …The Bad…

            Throughout Biden’s first year in office, President Vladimir Putin repeatedly warned that Russia would not tolerate Ukraine joining NATO, the anti-Russian military alliance whose members pledge to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. Putin’s warning was hardly surprising; how would the U.S. have responded to Mexico or Canada joining an anti-U.S. military alliance like the Cold War-era Warsaw Pact, creating a tense border for hundreds of miles? The U.S. invaded tiny Grenada over far less. And Russia had history to consider: when Nazi Germany invaded Russia during World War II, leaving 27 million Soviet citizens dead in their wake, they came in via Ukraine—and the Ukrainians greeted the Nazis as liberators and eagerly participated in the Holocaust.

            Gambling that Putin was bluffing, Ukraine and its Western allies told Putin to go to hell. Months later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

            Three years later, despite spending a quarter of a billion dollars on advanced weapons, many of which vanished into the country’s bottomless pit of corruption, Ukraine is losing.

            Ukraine’s ex-actor president, Volodymyr Zelensky, played Biden for a fool. Biden assured Americans that our support for Ukraine was in defense of democracy. Ukraine then banned opposition parties, arrested political opponents, censored the media, banned cable news channels that didn’t toe the line and canceled presidential and parliamentary elections indefinitely. We’ve gone to the mat for the dictator of an authoritarian kleptocracy with a serious neo-Nazi problem, and lost.

            As if one poor choice of foreign bedmates wasn’t enough, Biden pulled the extreme-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even closer following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 raid from Gaza. Like Zelensky, Bibi cashed the blank check from Biden like a drunk gambler on a bender, gleefully engaging in a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder that has killed at least 200,000 innocent Gazans and been officially declared genocide by international bodies and revered human-rights organizations.

            Before he dropped out of the presidential race, Biden’s immoral stance in favor of Israel’s bloodthirsty leaders had already hobbled his chances and alienated his party’s progressive base, which was disgusted by the carnage. Kamala Harris, his anointed successor and who echoed his unconditional support for the IDF, inherited this liability. Still worse from a historical vantagepoint, Biden’s branding as a good, decent man, wound up in the toilet.  

            Oh, and Biden didn’t try to increase the minimum wage or create the socialized healthcare system we need and want.

…and The Ugly

You probably know what I’m going to say, but here goes anyway.

Following his disastrous LBJ-style withdrawal from the race, some Democrats now allow that the 82-year-old Biden ought to have kept his implicit promise to serve a single term, to be “a bridge, not as anything else.”

They’re half-right.

As has now been undeniably established from the testimony of the staff who knew him best and as ordinary Americans experienced with dementia could plainly see from the beginning, Biden’s mental deficiencies did not begin with his catastrophic debate performance in 2024. He had “good days and bad days” back in 2020. He ought not have run in the first place.

Vain and self-deluded, and clearly not as sharp as he needed to be to make such a decision, Biden and his DNC handler-allies somehow convinced themselves that he was the only Democrat who could defeat Trump in 2020. That was almost certainly untrue. There are credible cases to be made that any number of other of his primary rivals, beginning with Bernie Sanders, could have taken out The Donald.

Even if Biden’s only-I-can-beat-him calculus could be proven to have been accurate, however, the nation, the Democratic Party and Biden himself have paid an awful price for his hubris.

There is now no denying that all the “Weekend at Bernie’s” jokes were true. White House officials and staffers, and the Washington press corps, were “hidin’ Biden” for four years in one of the most breathtaking and long-running scams ever undertaken in U.S. politics. They ran a stuffed corpse for president, got it elected, pretended it was running the government, and then, incredibly, tried to pull it off a second time. The Democratic Party, which branded itself the anti-Trump party of democracy and fair elections, pulled off a coup d’état; after they relentlessly attacked Trump for serial lying, it turns out that they were even worse. They stand exposed and ridiculous.

And what was the point? Despite all their efforts, including weaponizing the judicial system against him, Trump won anyway. Now the Democrats are weak and discredited, setting up Trump to be more dangerous than he would otherwise have been.

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

The post Joe Biden: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Joe Biden: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Earlier on Wednesday, January 8th, I saw a prominent Zionist commentator and Twitter/X User post, “Has Greta Thunberg taken her keffiyeh off to address the fires in LA yet or are there too many Jews living here for her to be concerned?” The weird implications about a mythical antisemitic malice that climate activist Greta Thunberg has to supposedly fuel her anti-genocide and ecocide beliefs aside, the post is equally embarrassing in its lack of understanding about the exacerbators of Los Angeles’ most destructive fires in the metropolitan area’s history.

Sadly, the disconnect that this post showcases is representative of many people and institutions, not only in explicitly pro-Israel spaces but also in the environmental movement. The US military is the #1 institutional polluter in the world. Cities across the country have been sacrificed by the local and federal prioritization of militarism and policing. Our endless wars have pushed forward the climate crisis, and now its catastrophic results are once again terrifyingly visible inside the belly of the beast.

For decades, the military-industrial complex has been destroying ecosystems, cities, and nations across the SWANA region for the sake of dominance in the oil industry. For 15 months, the US-Israeli bombing unleashed on Gaza has released insane amounts of fossil fuel into the atmosphere while poisoning the soil with each shell. Israel recently detonated an “earthquake bomb,” which some reports have suggested could have been possibly nuclear. The genocide in Gaza has devastated the ecosystem and will make agricultural survival in any eventual rebuilding effort extremely difficult. The war in Ukraine has resulted in explosions of the Nordstream pipeline. Bases around the world, expanded for meaningless escalation with China, have resulted in soil contaminated with toxic PFAS chemicals, harming the soil. Biodiversity is at risk globally.

Forest fires are a natural part of California’s ecosystem. They are needed to survive. The long-time development in inevitable natural burn zones, combined with the suppression of these natural cycles for the sake of billionaire Malibu homes, has not helped this situation at all. This disregard for a balanced ecosystem has historically and continuously come at the expense of middle and working-class neighborhoods in LA vulnerable to preventable fires. The threat to LA is only further magnified by the extra dry air and almost 100mph wind speeds created by the war economy’s climate crisis.

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg attends a solidarity with Palestine event on December 06, 2024 in Mannheim, Germany. Thunberg, who was a central figure in the global movement calling for action on climate change, has been outspoken in her support for Palestine ever since the Israeli invasion of Gaza in October of 2023. (Photo by Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images)

This local neglect of the natural environment comes from a similar place as the Jewish National Fund’s planting of non-native pine trees across Palestine, often above bulldozed Palestinian villages, at the expense of crucial biodiversity. In both instances, the interests of the war economy that prioritizes those in power are what remain above respect for Indigenous caretaking practices and life. And the results in both cases are catastrophic. Amidst a world that has gone through imperialist ecocidal war for decades, the world’s biodiversity, much of which is in sovereign Indigenous land, has been decimated.

This climate-sacrificial militarism isn’t just on the international stage either. In Atlanta, the proposed “Cop City” police training facility is supposed to be built on the Weelaunee Forest: sacred indigenous land also described as the “lungs” of the city. Not only does the forest provide crucial air quality, but it also acts as flooding protection. Recently, Appalachia and Atlanta suffered extreme flooding. Cop City will only make this worse as the forest is destroyed. Those prioritizing these military training facilities and exchange programs with Israeli Occupation Forces are doing so at the expense of the city itself. LA’s Mayor, Karen Bass, recently proposed allocating an extra $123 million to the police while cutting the budget of the fire department by $23 million. Now, the city is burning uncontrollably, and the fire department can only attempt to save residents.

This was avoidable. The flooding in Appalachia is avoidable. Future devastating flooding in a post-cop city Atlanta, NYC, and the entire coastal region is avoidable. Did anyone really think that we could continue to wage ecocide across the world without it coming back to us? Or prioritize militarism at home that trains with our genocidal proxy above human services? The fires in Gaza are the fires in LA. They are brought about by the same institutions and are fixable through overlapping measures. The former was intentional, and the latter is a ricochet. Both are devastating, heartbreaking, terrifying, and infuriating.

Climate organizations are warning about what the fires in LA represent. Some amount of federal funding left over from our shiny new nearly $1 trillion military budget will be allocated to helping the people of L.A. But the same organizations releasing these statements and the same politicians allocating emergency funds are the ones fanning the flames. Either by the silence that deliberately or neglectfully hides the crisis or warmongering that actively drives it further.

So no, Greta Thunberg should not “take off her keffiyeh” to talk about the fires. The only way to fight the fires is through the understanding that should come with wearing one.

Over the past months, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken has given several interviews in which he repeatedly claims that Hamas, rather than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been the key obstacle to achieving a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza. This messaging has been echoed by other Biden administration officials and surrogates.

At a workshop in Geneva in November, a recently retired US ambassador, who had just returned from meeting White House officials, claimed, “There are currently three ceasefire deals on the table and Hamas isn’t responding to any of them.” The veteran diplomat acknowledged the suffering in Gaza but blamed it on Hamas’ “rejection” of an agreement to end the war.

To my surprise, a former senior Israeli security official in the room rushed to challenge this claim, which he described as a “shameful attempt to rewrite history and blame Hamas rather than Netanyahu for the obstruction of ceasefire talks.”

A few weeks later in Doha, I met a senior Arab official who emphasized to me one of the most crucial things Biden can do in his “lame duck” period is name and shame Netanyahu for systematically foiling ceasefire talks. But the official quickly added the White House is “instead rewriting history.”

Since July, all of the sources I have spoken to confirmed that Hamas had accepted Biden’s ceasefire proposal that was endorsed by the UN Security Council, which is premised on an 18-weeks long ceasefire divided into three phases, at the end of which there would be a permanent end to the Gaza war after all hostages have been released. The same sources, as well as Israeli media, and the Egyptian mediators have consistently blamed Netanyahu for obstructing the talks and refusing to end the war.

Even in the latest ongoing round of negotiations, senior Israeli security officials are sounding the alarm that their Prime Minister is still sabotaging the talks. Yet, the White House keeps insisting that Hamas is “the obstacle.”

The reality is that since July, US president Joe Biden has completely stopped pressuring Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire-hostage deal. Rather than tell the truth about Netanyahu repeatedly foiling the talks, the outgoing president and his administration are choosing instead to try and rewrite the history of what has really unfolded over 15 months of negotiations.

The Full Story

For the first four months of the Gaza war, the Biden administration opposed a full ceasefire, instead opting at best for a temporary “pause” to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid, which was briefly achieved in late November 2023. Biden said earlier that month: “a cease-fire is not peace… every cease-fire is time [Hamas members] exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing.”

However, growing US domestic pressure, as well as Israel’s failure to locate and rescue the hostages combined with the sense that Israel had accomplished what it could militarily in Gaza eventually lifted Biden’s ban on using the word “ceasefire” by March 2024.

Talks began to mature with Qatari and Egyptian mediation throughout the spring, as the US exerted significant yet clearly inadequate pressure on Netanyahu, who had foiled two summits in Paris in January and February by procrastinating, severely limiting the mandate of Israeli negotiators, instructing ministers to attack any deal taking shape and publicly vowing to continue the war.

In early April, a concrete proposal was put on the table by the Qatari and Egyptian mediators and the US envisaging a ceasefire of three phases, six weeks each, in which hostages (including those deceased) would be gradually released in return for incremental withdrawal of Israeli forces from all of Gaza, an end to the war, and increased humanitarian and reconstruction aid. The first phase would have seen the release of 33 Israeli hostages.

Serious negotiations then took place in Cairo and Doha, with American officials making a genuine effort to narrow the gaps between the two sides. One senior Arab government source told me CIA director Bill Burns was at some point sitting literally in the room next door to where the Hamas delegation was negotiating in Cairo, and repeatedly amended the proposal with his own handwriting to get a deal done.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu sought to undermine those negotiations throughout April by consistently insisting on an imminent full invasion of Rafah and a continuation of the war after a pause. He also leaked sensitive classified information to extremist ministers in his government to derail the talks and restricted the mandate of Israeli negotiators.

A senior member of Israel’s negotiating team said in April that “Since January, it’s clear to everyone that we’re not conducting negotiations. It happens again and again: You get a mandate during the day, then the prime minister makes phone calls at night, instructs ‘don’t say that’ and ‘I’m not approving this,’ thus bypassing both the team leaders and the war cabinet.”

Throughout this period, Biden refrained completely from publicly calling out Netanyahu for explicitly sabotaging the talks.

On May 5, Hamas accepted the April proposal with reservations and amendments, but before the Israeli negotiating team got to formulate a response, Israel’s prime minister rushed to denounce Hamas’ position as “delusional” and ordered the immediate invasion of Rafah on May 7.

Biden, who had promised to halt arm supplies to Israel if it violated his “red line” of invading Rafah, decided to instead suspend one shipment of MK-84 2,000-pound bombs to Israel and nothing more.

The Only Realistic Deal

On May 31, Biden gave a televised speech presenting what he described as the outline of an Israeli ceasefire proposal submitted four days before. A senior Arab official confirmed to me in August that Biden’s proposal was in fact articulated by the Israeli team who turned to the White House after Netanyahu’s immediate answer was negative. That proposal had incorporated significant principles from Hamas’ May 5 response that Netanyahu had described as “delusional.”

Biden’s speech was designed to give Israel a victory narrative, stating that “At this point, Hamas no longer is capable of carrying out another October 7th.” He warned “Indefinite war in pursuit of an unidentified notion of ‘total victory’… will only bog down Israel in Gaza, draining the economic, military, and human resources, and furthering Israel’s isolation in the world.”

11 days later, the proposal was formally endorsed by the UN Security Council Resolution 2735. However, Netanyahu rejected Biden’s speech as “not [an] accurate” reflection of Israeli positions, and repeatedly asserted his insistence on the continuation of the war. The White House chose again to blame Hamas for the deadlock instead of pressing Netanyahu.

After lengthy negotiations, on July 2 Hamas accepted an updated Biden proposal with minor amendments, particularly relating to assurances that the ceasefire would lead to ending the war instead of a mere pause, according to multiple senior Arab and Palestinian officials involved in the talks.Hamas were informed that the US and Israeli negotiating team were both on board. However, a few days later, Netanyahu issued four new “non-negotiable” conditions that mediators and even Israeli security officials saw as intentionally sabotaging the deal. The conditions were: resuming the war after a pause “until [Israel’s] war aims are achieved”; no IDF withdrawal from the Philadelphia corridor between Rafah and Egypt; Israel would restrict the return of over one million displaced Gazans to the Northern half of the enclave; maximizing the number of living hostages to be released in the first phase.

Israel then quickly escalated its attacks in Gaza. On July 13 it killed Hamas’ chief military commander Mohammed al-Deif in a strike that killed over 100 civilians. On July 31, Netanyahu ordered the assassination of Hamas’ top negotiator, Ismael Haniya in Tehran. The day before, he ordered the assassination of Hezbollah’s top commander Fuad Shukur.

Multiple sources told me Hamas informed mediators that it still endorsed the July 2 ceasefire formula and UNSC resolution 2735. Biden called the Haniya assassination “not helpful” but that was it. Senior White House officials would then leak to Israeli media that Biden “realized Netanyahu lied to him” about the ceasefire-hostage deal, but the president himself never publicly called out Netanyahu.

Buying Time and Gaslighting

In August, ahead of the Democratic National Convention, the US opened a renewed round of negotiations, having received Iranian and Hezbollah promises of refraining from retaliation if a deal was reached.

Instead of building upon Biden’s proposal and pressing Israel to compromise, the Americans simply incorporated Netanyahu’s four impossible conditions as “a bridging proposal.” They attempted to entice Hamas to the table by getting Israel to reduce its veto on which Palestinian detainees it would release in a deal (Hamas presented a list of 300 heavily sentenced individuals, “the VIPs.” Netanyahu vetoed 100 names, including Marwan Barghouti, and insisted on only releasing prisoners with less than 22 years left in their sentence. The Americans lowered this veto to 75 names then 65 in August, per a senior Arab mediator).

Since then, the White House has attempted to re-write history and promote an official narrative blaming Hamas for Netanyahu’s systematic foiling of the talks.

A Palestinian source directly involved in the negotiations told me then that Hamas’ leader Yahia Sinwar sent them clear instructions to stick to the July 2 Biden proposal instead of getting stuck in a limbo of endless negotiations. Hamas refused to show up for the August round of talks as long as Israel rejected the most important two stipulations of Biden’s proposal: gradual IDF withdrawal from Gaza and ending the war.

Remarkably, the Americans pressed Egypt and Qatar to issue a false statement on August 16 that emphasized “talks were serious and constructive and were conducted in a positive atmosphere,” although there were no talks to begin with.

A senior Arab official involved in the negotiations told me both Israel, Qatar and Egypt objected to the idea of issuing this statement, but the Americans argued it was necessary to create domestic pressure on Netanyahu to narrow the gaps. The actual goal, according to this official, was likely to make it harder for Iran and Hezbollah to retaliate and to allow Kamala’s Democratic National Convention to pass peacefully without disruptions.

The official added that Netanyahu had been sending his advisor, Ophir Falk, to the talks to undermine Israel’s negotiating team, and that the US asked mediators on multiple occasions to prevent him from attending the meetings.

As soon as the DNC ended, Biden blamed Hamas again for the failure of the talks, and effectively stopped trying to get a deal, with US officials declaring in September that a ceasefire deal has become unlikely during Biden’s term. Since then, the White House has attempted to re-write history and promote an official narrative blaming Hamas for Netanyahu’s systematic foiling of the talks.

Amid the deadlock, Qatar declared in early November that it was suspending its mediation role, which a senior Arab official told me was intended to create domestic pressure on Netanyahu. The Qataris also suspended Hamas’ office in Doha and Hamas leaders left the country by mid-November.

A New Round, Little Hope

In early December, Hamas’ entire leadership were suddenly invited to Cairo then Doha for renewed negotiations. Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz quickly expressed unusual hope and optimism about a “real chance” for a deal this time.

However, multiple sources directly involved in these talks told me by then there was no real possibility of a breakthrough. The Hamas delegation kept waiting in Cairo until the last minute, with senior Hamas negotiator Bassem Naim being the last official departing from Egypt to Doha late at night on December 5, hoping for a positive change of position from the Israeli team, who still only offered a temporary pause.

A senior Arab official told me president-elect Donald Trump had asked the Qataris and Egyptians to get a deal done before he takes office. The official, however, added that Israel’s Prime Minister is not budging while at the same time issuing false positive statements of a breakthrough and progress to buy time and pretend to seek a deal until Trump is in office, where Netanyahu can trade the Gaza war for something big in the West Bank.

Between Doha and Cairo, a senior Palestinian official directly involved in the negotiations told me in December that “there are serious talks, there’s progress and discussions of details, but until today no one presented a final proposal to sign.” He added “Unless Netanyahu does something that takes us back to square one, there is great optimism that we can reach something within a short period.”

Israeli officials asserted the same night that a deal could be reached within two weeks, but warned that Netanyahu is still not “granting a sufficient mandate to the negotiating team,” adding “It will not be possible to return everyone without an end to the war.”

More than a month later, no deal is yet in sight, as Israeli security officials say Netanyahu still insists on delaying the withdrawal from the Philadelphia and Netzarim corridors, restricting the return of displaced Gazans to the north, continuing the war after a partial deal, and demanding a higher number of hostages in the first phase. This led the mother of Israeli hostage Matan Zangauker to lead a demonstration in front of Israel’s Knesset on Monday to protest “a partial deal with a return to fighting,” which she said would be “a death sentence for Matan and everyone left behind”.

Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said the same day “Our presence in Gaza today, which means that we are not making a comprehensive hostage deal, is contrary to the political and security interests of the State of Israel.”

The real history of these negotiations reveals a troubling truth: while President Biden has consistently blamed Hamas for the failure of ceasefire talks, his own failure to hold Netanyahu accountable has allowed the conflict to drag on. Biden is now trying to hide this failure by absolving Netanyahu of any blame, despite a mountain of evidence showing how he repeatedly sabotaged peace efforts. Recognizing this distortion is crucial, to inform the public in order to mount greater pressure where it’s needed the most to return all hostages and end Gaza’s apocalyptic suffering, and to prevent further manipulation from future administrations.

With NFL playoffs about to begin, State Farm Insurance will be constantly running commercials in which multimillionaire Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid and his multimillionaire star player Patrick Mahomes belittle themselves by using their fame to personally cash in instead of using it like, say, Colin Kaepernick did, to address an issue of social significance. True to form, the NFL blackballed Kaepernick but at least he maintained his dignity.

In one commercial Reid acts goofy as he repeatedly says “Bundle-rooski” to describe Star Farm’s plan for bundling home and auto insurance. State Farm does some other bundling that hasn’t gotten the media attention it deserves, especially given the devastation in Los Angeles that the whole country has been watching on TV.

This other bundling couples State Farm’s refusal to insure tens of thousands of homes in fire prone areas with State Farm’s doubling down on investing in the fossil fuel industry. Not insuring properties that seem guaranteed to cost the company lots of money seems like good business sense. But it becomes shameful if coupled with also propping up the fossil fuel industry.

The Los Angeles Rams are hosting an NFL playoff game this weekend but because of the fossil fuel driven wildfires the game has been moved from LA to Arizona and, of all places, State Farm Stadium.

The fires in LA are called natural disasters but that’s not an apt description by itself. We are all witnessing the increasing number and magnitude of droughts, floods, heatwaves and storms that climate scientists have been warning us about for decades. Much of the discussion now is about how we need to adapt to the new climate reality, which is true. But the first rule for getting out of a hole is to stop digging and the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results.

We need to quickly and greatly cut back on our burning of fossil fuels. State Farm needs to stop investing in fossil fuels before much more of the country becomes uninsurable.

State Farm ad on YouTube

The country said goodbye this week to Jimmy Carter, a most decent man who tried to set us on a path to renewable energy almost 50 years ago. Now we’re about to reinstall his direct opposite. We must resist. We must stand with each other and for the common good.

The Los Angeles Rams are hosting an NFL playoff game this weekend but because of the fossil fuel driven wildfires the game has been moved from LA to Arizona and, of all places, State Farm Stadium. If you watch be on the lookout for the “Bundlerooski” commercials, then spare a thought for Colin Kaepernick, Jimmy Carter, all the uninsured people in LA who lost everything…and State Farm’s scandalrooski.

Public Citizen would like you to know that there are killers among us.

They wear $2,000 suits and travel in private jets, unbothered by the TSA or the teeming masses. Their children attend the finest universities in the world, and they vacation on private islands and yachts. Many “earn” more in a day than most Americans take home in a year; their positions ensure their heirs will never have to work a day in their lives.

Their fortunes are the result of poisoning you, me, our children and grandchildren, every other living thing on Earth, and destroying the temperature stability of our atmosphere. This week they’re arguably responsible, in part, for billions of dollars in losses, numerous deaths, and thousands of shattered lives in Southern California.

Illegitimate president-elect Trump is trying his best to cover for them, claiming that the fires ripping through the Los Angeles area are the fault of California’s Democratic governor, calling Gavin Newsome by a childish name to draw more attention to Trump’s efforts on behalf of the Republican Party’s most generous donors.

Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in southern California.

Mainstream media is largely going along with Trump’s charade, choosing not to even mention — in the vast majority of their reports on the crisis — the role of climate change in the fires. And never, G-d forbid, mentioning the role of the fossil fuel industry in the climate change that has turned these fires from an annual nuisance into a hellscape.

It’s as frankly absurd as a TV news person reporting on a plane crash and, instead of asking aviation experts what caused it, simply lifting their collective shoulders with a helpless “shit happens” shrug.

But these fires — and the droughts and changing weather patterns that made them so severe — aren’t something that just happens by random happenstance, any more than an airliner crash.

And the oil industry has known for decades this day was coming.

In November, 1959, the famous scientist Edward Teller — the “Father of the H-Bomb” — was the keynote speaker at a conference on “The Energy of the Future” in New York, organized by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business. The news he conveyed to the assembled oil industry executives was stark:

“Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. ... The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it? Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect ...
“It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”

This shocking news apparently provoked a scramble in the oil industry, probably similar to when the asbestos industry learned in the 1930s that their product caused lung cancer (the mesothelioma that killed my father), or in 1939 when the tobacco industry learned that smoking also killed people.

They set out to determine if Teller’s prediction was true. He’d predicted that CO2 levels would reach the point where they’d begin to seriously melt the polar and Greenland ice caps and alter weather patterns within a few decades, telling the oil executives at that 1959 meeting:

“At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the [heat] radiation leaving the earth.”

For the next decade, industry scientists went to work along with studies commissioned by major universities. One of the most well-known was a 1968 report the American Petroleum Institute hired the Stanford Research Institute to conduct. Its findings corroborated Teller’s prediction:

“Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. ... there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. ... pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.”

It was the first of dozens of studies the industry paid for or knew about, all predicting pretty much exactly what’s happening right now in Los Angeles, including major reports in 1979, 1982, and 1991.

And then the “climate denial” began.

Fossil fuel billionaires and their oil companies funded think tanks to promote skepticism, pushed frontmen onto radio and TV to claim that climate scientists and people like Al Gore were “in it for the money,” and began funding the campaigns of politicians willing to exchange the future habitability of the planet for a few decades of power and wealth.

In 2015, the Union of Concerned Scientists documented decades of internal industry memos and strategy sessions that were organizing, funding, and detailing roughly three decades of lies foisted on the American Public. The industry and its executives’ efforts were all, apparently, in the service of preserving their income stream and avoiding any liability for the deaths they knew would one day come as a result of their product poisoning our atmosphere.

And now that day is here. Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in southern California.

Two-thirds of voters, according to a 2024 poll, believe the fossil fuel industry and its pampered executives should be held civilly responsible for the damage climate change is causing, and a plurality want them to face criminal charges.

Public Citizen published a 2023 report titled “Charging Big Oil with Climate Homicide,” including legal rationales and possible strategies for holding the killers in suits accountable by state and local prosecutors.

Will Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman or California Attorney General Rob Bonta have the courage to hold these companies and/or their executives accountable for the lies and deceptions they’ve funded that this week are killing Angelinos?

Will enough people call their members of Congress at 202-224-3121 to provoke investigations that could lead to congressional action?

Will our media ever begin to call out Trump and the alleged climate lies and deceptions of the industry that owns him?

President-elect Donald Trump says that, on the same day that he is inaugurated for his 2.0 presidency, he will pardon people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “It’s going to start in the first hour,” he told Time magazine when they interviewed him for their cover story after naming him man of the year, “Maybe the first nine minutes.”

On the campaign trail, Trump described the January 6 rioters as “political prisoners,” conveniently forgetting the fact that those progressing through the criminal justice system were charged by grand juries and convicted by either juries or federal judges. He calls them “great patriots,” even opening his first campaign rally in Waco, Texas, with “Justice for All,” a song recorded over the phone by imprisoned insurrectionists, set to the tune of the “Star Spangled Banner.”

Pardoning them would be, as Brennan Center President Michael Waldman has said, a misuse of the president’s clemency power. And indeed, two-thirds of Americans oppose it, according to a recent Washington Post poll.

Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution gives broad power to presidents to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States,” excepting only “Cases of Impeachment.” The power to both pardon crimes and commute sentences is unrestricted in any other way, except, perhaps, by the still-untested-in-the-courts limitation that a president may not pardon himself.

In other words, Trump can pardon the January 6 defendants. He would not violate the law or exceed the power extended to him by the Constitution if he did so. But while it would not technically be an abuse of his power to do so, it would be an appalling, unprecedented violation of the trust the American people place in their leaders.

In mid-December, President Biden pardoned 39 individuals convicted of nonviolent crimes and commuted the sentences of some 1,500 additional people who had qualified for early release from prison during the Covid-19 pandemic and succeeded in reentering their communities. He reflected on the exercise of the pardon power when he took that action, saying, “I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities.” The group includes “parents, veterans, health care professionals, teachers, advocates, and engaged members of their communities.”

By contrast, according to reporting compiled by NBC’s Ryan Reilly, the January 6 defendants were captured on video brandishing and using firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive Trump billboard, Trump flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches, and even an explosive device during the attack on the Capitol. More than 140 police officers were injured and members of Congress fled the building in fear for their lives. (Biden’s commutation of sentences for 37 people on death row should not be conflated with Trump’s proposed action. Commutation means they will serve the rest of their lives in prison instead of being executed, a far cry from the immediate release Trump has discussed for January 6 defendants.)

It’s even worse if Trump intends to pardon members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys organizations convicted of seditious conspiracy, something that he has not ruled out. Judge Amit Mehta, who sentenced the Oath Keepers’ leader, Yale Law School graduate Stewart Rhodes, to 18-years in prison for seditious conspiracy said, “The notion that Stewart Rhodes could be absolved is frightening — and ought to be frightening to anyone who cares about democracy.”

If Trump pardons January 6 rioters, he would be using the pardon power to erase an attack on Constitution and country. The purpose of that attack was his personal benefit — if it had succeeded, it could have permitted him to stay in power after losing the election, contrary to every principle of American democracy. An exercise of the pardon power along those lines would have no resemblance to what the Founding Fathers intended. The pardon power, which was only included after extensive debate, was based on the English “prerogative of mercy” that resided in kings and queens to undo punishment that was deemed too harsh. It was not about rewarding political loyalists.

Pardoning people convicted of plotting to interfere with the lawful and peaceful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election isn’t a righteous grant of mercy. Few of these defendants have shown remorse and some have shown outright defiance, like Ryan Grillo, who said, “Trump’s gonna pardon me anyways” after Judge Royce Lamberth sentenced him in December. The January 6 offenders Trump has committed to pardoning aren’t people who committed nonviolent crimes in their late teens and early twenties and, having served significant portions of their sentence, are now prepared to return to their communities as rehabilitated individuals deserving of a second chance. If anything, the January 6 defendants’ return would give a boost to the white supremacist and domestic terror groups many of them participated in before they overran the Capitol, and it would severely dampen the deterrent effect of our laws against future aggression.

It has been the practice in most recent administrations to use the Office of the Pardon Attorney in the Department of Justice to review requests for pardons and commutations before they are handed up to the White House counsel and the president for a decision. That process includes an extensive evaluation of each individual applicant’s request, including consultation with prosecutors, lawyers, judges, victims, probation officers, prison staff and others to determine whether the requested clemency would serve the interests of justice without endangering the community. Pardons have often been used in the interests of equal justice when people are serving lengthy sentences that would no longer be handed down or in cases of extraordinary rehabilitation when people have demonstrated a commitment to the future of their communities. None of those considerations will be in play if Trump pardons January 6 offenders.

The key to Trump’s pardons is that they are not about people and their communities. They are about personal loyalty to him. Trump summoned these individuals to the Capitol to support him and now he will pardon them to complete that transaction. Trump will use the pardon power to make it clear that violence and violation of the law can be forgiven in service to himself.

Pardoning the rioters is a grotesque misuse of the pardon power because, cloaked in the appearance of lawful authority, it would put the presidential seal on crimes that go to the heart of an attack on our democracy, an effort to undo the will of the voters and seat a man who lost an election as the country’s leader. By advertising his willingness to pardon the people who supported him rather than the Constitution, Trump is sending a message to the people he is counting on to support him this go-round: If they protect him, he will take care of them. It’s a message fit for a would-be authoritarian.

The clean energy transition is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build momentum for environmental justice.

As the transition accelerates, we face a choice: Will it reproduce the harms of the past fossil fuel-based energy system, or will it create a fairer, more just future where more people can access and benefit from accessible and affordable clean energy? For far too long, historically marginalized communities have been excluded from decisions about the challenges they face, and energy infrastructure is no exception.

Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) are a tool for ensuring frontline communities receive real, tangible benefits from renewable energy projects.

States that embrace policies like CBAs are showing what’s possible: a future where energy solutions uplift communities rather than burden them.

CBAs are legally binding agreements between developers and communities that outline commitments such as local job creation, workforce training, or investments in public infrastructure. In states that are leading the way, CBAs ensure that energy projects provide clean power and bring economic and social benefits to the communities most impacted. From Michigan to California, states are showing what’s possible:

• In Michigan, developers pay host communities $2,000 per megawatt of energy capacity.
• In California, enforceable agreements with grassroots organizations ensure benefits flow directly to local people.
• In Maine, wind projects deliver long-term financial contributions to communities hosting the turbines.

These policies are not just about energy infrastructure; they represent a shift in power, creating systemic change for equity, accountability, and justice, giving those communities most affected by energy development a voice along with a share of benefits. These state successes show what's possible, but to scale these benefits nationwide, we need stronger federal and state policies working in tandem—like the Justice40 Initiative.

The federal Justice40 Initiative aims to allocate 40% of federal climate and energy investment benefits to communities that have long been overburdened by pollution and underinvestment. State policies require CBAs to build on this foundation, ensuring that energy projects are designed with and for communities that have historically been excluded from decision-making.

By centering racial justice in the clean energy transition, CBAs can:

• Deliver good-paying local jobs.
• Fund schools, public health, and infrastructure.
• Empower communities to shape the projects in their backyards.

Yet CBAs are only as strong as the policies that back them. Some developers will inevitably try to exploit loopholes, sidestep accountability, or push vague agreements that deliver little. In California, legally enforceable agreements with grassroots organizations ensure that the benefits of renewable energy projects flow directly to the local communities hosting them. To advance energy justice, CBAs must be enforceable (legally binding), transparent, and community-driven, and not just another box for developers to check.

We are at a turning point. State governments have a chance to lead by mandating strong, enforceable CBAs and ensuring communities are part of the decision-making process. This isn’t just about clean energy—it’s about repairing harm, investing in people, and building a just energy future.

The clean energy transition can be more than reducing emissions—it can be a powerful pathway to justice, equity, and community empowerment. States that embrace policies like CBAs are showing what’s possible: a future where energy solutions uplift communities rather than burden them.

By centering racial justice in the clean energy transition, CBAs can deliver tangible benefits that create lasting change:

• Good-paying local jobs that boost economic opportunity.
• Funding for schools, public health, and infrastructure to address long-standing inequities.
• Empowered communities that have a say in shaping projects in their own backyards.

CBAs ensure that historically excluded communities move from being merely hosts of energy infrastructure to being active partners and beneficiaries of the clean energy revolution.

To Joe Biden: You have just decided that grizzly bears can remain on the endangered species list. Yet, week after week, you have watched Netanyahu target with U.S. F-16s innocent defenseless Palestinian families, killing 50-100 a day, and blocking humanitarian aid trucks with food, medicine and water for the dying and sick people in this…

Like many Americans, TMI Show co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan have deep ties to Los Angeles. Manila grew up in metro LA and still considers herself a Californian. Ted was a talk show host at KFI AM 640 Los Angeles and the staff cartoonist at the Los Angeles Times. Join Manila and Ted as they discuss the long-term repercussions of the wildfires that continue to scorch the nation’s biggest city.

As the drought continues and the climate continues to change in a place that never had many water resources to begin with, can we adapt, or is it time to consider forcible population shifts away from California? Should the federal government assist Californians who lose multi-million dollar homes but can’t get insurance? How do we define a tipping point after which a place is no longer suitable for human habitation?

We are joined by Dr. Reese Halter, a conservation biologist and the author, most recently, of the book “Generation Z Emergency.”

The post TMI Show Ep 54: “City of Angels or Hell on Earth?” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 54: “City of Angels or Hell on Earth?” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Jimmy Carter was my last president. I believe that is true for progressive civic groups, too. He actively opened up the federal government to engagement and participation from long politically excluded American activists. When he was campaigning in 1976, he would say that he wanted to be more of a consumer advocate than I am, that he would take seriously…

In addition to seeking to expand Social Security, those fighting for greater economic security must always continue to play defense. There have always been those who want to end Social Security. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower once described them as “a tiny splinter group” that seeks “to abolish Social Security.” He explained, “Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” Unfortunately, that tiny group now controls the Republican party.

Most of the time, they hide their true feelings, knowing how popular and important Social Security is, even with the Republican base. Sometimes, though, the veil drops and their true feelings are revealed. That happened most recently last month when Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) decided to share his true feelings about Social Security in a lengthy Twitter thread. Elon Musk, the soon-to-be shadow President of the United States, amplified the thread, calling it “interesting.”

That “interesting” thread was simply a rehash of lies first uttered by Alf Landon, the 1936 Republican nominee for President, who lost in a landslide. These lies are not just falsehoods but zombie lies, which are used to try to undermine support for Social Security, over and over again.

Every time, Americans have recognized that they were being told lies, and the opponents of Social Security failed. We must be vigilant and make sure that these current efforts fail, too.

Enemies of Social Security willfully refuse to see it as what it actually is: insurance against the loss of wages due to retirement, disability, or death of a family breadwinner.

Let’s review just a few of those zombie lies told by Alf Landon in 1936, Senator Lee last month, and numerous other opponents in the decades in between. They mischaracterize Social Security as individual savings and then claim people would be better off saving on their own. Indeed, they claim, in the words of Lee, that “the government routinely raids” our money. Some even slander our Social Security system by calling it a criminal Ponzi scheme.

These enemies of Social Security willfully refuse to see it as what it actually is: insurance against the loss of wages due to retirement, disability, or death of a family breadwinner. They ignore that Social Security is most working families’ only disability insurance, largest life insurance policy, and most secure, effective and efficient retirement income.

While you can outlive savings, you can never outlive Social Security. The liars refuse to acknowledge that Social Security is strikingly superior to its private sector counterparts—more efficient, secure, universal, and fair. Its one shortcoming is that benefits are too low.

President Franklin Roosevelt responded to Alf Landon’s lies eloquently, in words that are as true today as when he spoke them:

Never before in all our history have [the wealthy] been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred…[They] are not happy. Some of them are desperate. […]

They tell the worker his wage will be reduced by a contribution to some vague form of old-age insurance. They carefully conceal from him the fact that for every dollar of premium he pays for that insurance, the employer pays another dollar. That omission is deceit…

They do not tell him that the insurance policy that is bought for him is far more favorable to him than any policy that any private insurance company could afford to issue. That omission is deceit…

But they are guilty of more than deceit. When they imply that the reserves thus created against both these policies will be stolen by some future Congress, diverted to some wholly foreign purpose, they attack the integrity and honor of American Government itself. Those who suggest that, are already aliens to the spirit of American democracy.

Everyone should save, if they possibly can. Everyone should also have adequate insurance. Savings are necessary for short-term emergencies and expenses; insurance, for large losses that are predictable for groups, but not individuals.

The liars refuse to acknowledge that Social Security is strikingly superior to its private sector counterparts—more efficient, secure, universal, and fair. Its one shortcoming is that benefits are too low.

To manage the risk of the financial loss associated with the loss of a home as the result of fire, homeowners purchase fire insurance; they do not simply save for the contingency. Similarly, car owners have car insurance, not car-accident savings accounts. And to manage the risk of lost income as the result of disability, death, old age, or unemployment, everyone who works for wages needs wage insurance in the form of Social Security and unemployment insurance.

In addition to the disinformation and the lies, Alf Landon, Mike Lee, and many other Social Security opponents claim that Social Security, in the words of Mike Lee, “is government dependency at its worst.” In truth, rather than undermining freedom, Social Security unlocks the freedom to change jobs, change careers, and change life circumstances while providing some measure of peace of mind that your earned Social Security benefits are there if misfortune strikes in the form of disability or death leaving dependents. They are also there if you have good fortune in the form of a very long life.

Perhaps Republican President Eisenhower said it best:

Retirement systems, by which individuals contribute to their own security…have become an essential part of our economic and social life. These systems are but a reflection of the American heritage of sturdy self-reliance which has made our country strong and kept it free; the self-reliance without which we would have had no Pilgrim Fathers, no hardship-defying pioneers, and no eagerness today to push to ever widening horizons in every aspect of our national life. The Social Security program furnishes, on a national scale, the opportunity for our citizens, through that same self-reliance, to build the foundation for their security.

Senator Lee’s zombie lies about Social Security may be appealing to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who will do whatever he can to avoid paying his fair share. But these lies will never convince the American people to abandon their overwhelming support for our Social Security system.

Lies about Social Security may be appealing to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who will do whatever he can to avoid paying his fair share. But these lies will never convince the American people to abandon their overwhelming support for our Social Security system.

Those lies have failed to change the narrative for 90 years, and they’re not going to work now.

It’s no surprise that Musk wants to undermine support for Social Security and is eager to amplify Mike Lee’s lies to do so. Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” is designed to target our earned benefits, with Republicans already admitting that “there will be some cuts” to Social Security and Medicare.

We must not let that happen.

The key to peace in the Middle East is the security of all states and peoples in the region. The arrival of a new presidency in the United States brings the opportunity for a comprehensive peace deal.

The security of all states and peoples would mean the disarming of the militant non-state forces. It would mean the normalization of diplomatic relations among all nations in the region. It would mean that the people of Palestine have their own sovereign state alongside Israel. It would mean the protection of the territorial integrity and stability of neighboring countries Lebanon and Syria. It would mean the commitment of all countries to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region. And it would mean that all economic sanctions would be lifted as part of the normalization of diplomatic relations, and as a great stimulus to economic development.

Many millions of people are simply terrified, believing that the other side is an implacable foe out to kill them. False narratives of hatred feed these fears.

Such a comprehensive deal would be in the national security interest of every nation. It would enable all parties to achieve their legitimate aims. Importantly, it would also be line with international law, therefore supported by the United Nations and all its member states.

The sheer majority of people in the Middle East, and in the world, yearn for peace. Yet a violent extremist minority, in Israel and the Arab world, opposes peace. Mercenary armies fight for the spoils of war, and some arms-makers stoke the conflicts. Some opponents of peace dream of restoring ancient empires in flagrant violation of today’s realities.

Many millions of people are simply terrified, believing that the other side is an implacable foe out to kill them. False narratives of hatred feed these fears. To those in great fear, let us recall the wisdom of President John F. Kennedy, who declared sixty years ago:

Indeed, across the gulfs and barriers that now divide us, we must remember that there are no permanent enemies. Hostility today is a fact, but it is not a ruling law. The supreme reality of our time is our indivisibility as children of God and our common vulnerability on this planet.

Kennedy’s confidence in peace enabled the U.S. and the Soviet Union to sign and implement the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Today, the “art of the deal” could avert a world war.

The Middle East is known as the cradle of civilization because of its vast and unique history and its gifts to world civilization. The three monotheistic faiths are all born in this region; and they all preach and yearn for peace. With the Middle East today at real risk of nuclear conflagration, the moment has arrived for a comprehensive peace deal. The world’s political leaders and religious leaders have peace within their reach.

A comprehensive peace deal in 2025 should include seven measures:

1. An immediate UN-mandated ceasefire across all fronts of the conflict, including Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran, and the immediate release of hostages and prisoners of war across all entities;
   
2. The admission of a sovereign State of Palestine as 194th UN Member State on the June 4, 1967 borders with its capital in East Jerusalem; the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in 1967, with the simultaneous introduction of UN-mandated international forces and security guarantees to protect all populations;
   
3. The protection of the territorial integrity and stability of Lebanon and Syria, and the full demilitarization of all non-state forces, and withdrawal of all foreign armies from the respective countries;
   
4. The adoption of an updated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, and the end of all economic and other sanctions on Iran;
   
5. The termination, including defunding and disarmament of belligerent non-state entities, of all claims or states of belligerency, and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area, (without excluding the possibility of subsequent territorial adjustments, security arrangements, and cooperative forms of governance agreed by the sovereign parties);
   
6. The establishment of regional peace and normalization of diplomatic relations by all Arab and Islamic states with Israel;
   
7. The establishment of an Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East Sustainable Development Fund to support the reconstruction, economic recovery and sustainable development of the region.

Let us imagine the happiness and prosperity that will reverberate across this ancient, proud, and magnificent region, if the leaders and peoples rise to the challenge of peace.

Sybil Fares, Senior Advisor on the Middle East for UNSDSN, assisted centrally on this article.

I’ve guided trips to Alaska’s North Slope and Brooks Range Mountains for 31 years, and I always start out with the same speech: “You are headed to some real wild country.” Alaska’s Arctic is home to some of our most iconic landscapes. This is probably the wildest place left in the United States and some of the most remote country in North America. What you see there—and what you won’t see–are things you’ll never forget.

I had guided rafting trips for a number of years across the western U.S., but I was unprepared for the sheer scale of this country. At all points of the compass, nothing but tundra for days and a river filled with exotically beautiful aufeis–layer upon frozen layer of ice. I’ve seen caribou, wolves, bears–a muskox nearly trampled my tent. I’ve had the good fortune to return to this landscape every year and it still is as wild and free from development as ever–for now. But with the return of Donald Trump to the White House, that could soon change.

To stem the tide of species loss and to give our environment a fighting chance, we need to protect more lands and waters by the end of the decade than we did in the last century.

The Arctic as we currently know it is thanks to Jimmy Carter, who passed away last week at the age of 100. Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act created 16 wildlife refuges, 13 national parks, two national monuments, two national forests, two conservation areas, and 26 wild and scenic rivers, and designated 57 million acres of wilderness. Ironically, Carter’s funeral will happen the same day the Biden administration holds its final lease sale in the Arctic Refuge—the smallest version they could legally offer. It’s a fitting move from an administration that, unlike Carter, had a complicated approach to the Arctic.

The Western Arctic was the setting for one of President Biden’s worst climate decisions—the March 2023 approval of the Willow project. Instead of preserving these landscapes from extraction, the president seemed to extend a new and dark era for the Arctic that began with Trump’s approval of oil drilling in the Arctic Refuge in 2017.

But a lot can change in a few months, and the Biden administration seemingly shifted strategies in the Western Arctic from extraction to preservation. Beginning last summer, the White House advanced a slate of new protections to safeguard millions of acres of public lands from oil and gas drilling. This summer was my 31st leading people into the Brooks Range mountains and the tundra beyond to the north in those little planes, and as we flew over wild Alaskan landscapes, we saw no signs of human development—in part due to Biden’s actions. But oil and gas companies will soon have a new ally to turn to.

With Trump’s return to the Oval Office, those same companies will get another chance to turn this pristine wilderness into the country’s largest gas station. On the campaign trail, Trump made it clear he would “drill, baby, drill” and give those Big Oil CEOs free rein to drill wherever and whenever they could. Opening up the Arctic Refuge to drilling was one of the first actions the Republican trifecta took in 2017, and extending that law is one of their top priorities this time around. For Arctic communities, wildlife, and ecosystems, it’s the biggest threat in a generation.

We’re currently witnessing an extinction crisis driven by habitat destruction, and the key driver of habitat destruction is development. At the same time, the effects of the climate crisis are being exacerbated by development that destabilizes ecosystems and natural carbon absorption. To stem the tide of species loss and to give our environment a fighting chance, we need to protect more lands and waters by the end of the decade than we did in the last century. The Arctic survived four years of Trump, but it’s up to us to ensure it survives another four.