Jimmy Carter was the last president to actively open the government for engagement by citizen groups. Right after his November 1976 election, he agreed to address a huge hotel ballroom in D.C. full of local and national citizen advocates. It was a great success never again repeated by succeeding president-elects.

Mr. Carter then chose civic leaders and other solid progressives to head regulatory agencies such as National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Federal Trade Commission, and for other high positions in government. He chose the formidable longtime consumer-labor advocate Esther Peterson to be his consumer protection special assistant in the White House. He also supported an independent consumer protection agency which Congress, after a fierce struggle between corporate lobbies and consumer groups, narrowly defeated in 1978. Starting in 1981, Ronald Reagan undermined many Carter Administration health and safety initiatives.

Compare Jimmy Carter’s life with the rancid, corrupt, cowardly politicians spoiling today’s Washington landscapes.

Mr. Carter was also the last president to authentically recognize Palestinian rights and charge the Israeli government with imposing a system of apartheid (“worse than in South Africa,” he said) over Palestine. However, he failed to get Israel to agree to a comprehensive peace settlement, including the creation of a Palestinian state, and had to settle for a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

Citizen Carter was easily our greatest former president. For over 40 years his indefatigable work ethic was applied to advancing peace efforts, initiating health programs in developing countries, supervising fair elections overseas and, with Rosalynn, joining Habitat for Humanity as a manual laborer (he was an expert woodworker, among his many skills) to build houses around the country for needy families.

The range of interests expressed through his 32 books and conferences revealed a practical, results-oriented, humble Renaissance man. His compassion and honesty infuse the Carter Center to this day.

He nourished the norms of personal and civic decency, dialogue, truth-telling, and working for a just society, expressing his Christian faith in action.

Compare Jimmy Carter’s life with the rancid, corrupt, cowardly politicians spoiling today’s Washington landscapes.

There are legitimate criticisms of Carter’s foreign and domestic policies that others will examine. But overall, his legacy will live on to inspire future generations of Americans to elevate their expectations and strive toward them with civic dedication and commitment.

I was always in awe of how efficiently he used his time every day—and truly amazed by his relentless productivity. This alone would have been a worthy book by Mr. Carter were it not for his genuine humility.

How should we react when a man is shot to death on the street on his way to work? Our humanity tells us that we should be shocked and horrified—and feel that something is deeply wrong with such a brazen act of murder. Ideally, we would do what we could to help sooth the survivors, condemn the violence, and bring the perpetrator to justice.

So why did hundreds of thousands of people have the exact opposite reaction when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was executed in New York City last month? Because Americans are furious with health insurance corporations—and they have every right to be.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, many Americans took to social media not to mourn, but to celebrate. Caustic posts about prior authorization and denied medical claims were common. Sympathetic statements were met with rancor—and in the case of UnitedHealth Group’s own statement, over 70,000 “laugh reactions” before the company made that tally private. Even verbose political figures like Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump declined to comment for days. This shooting touched a raw nerve.

The health insurance industry doesn’t have a communications problem, it has a profiteering problem—and no amount of marketing will convince people who have already been burned.

As a physician who’s treated countless victims of gun violence, and who’s life’s work is to care for all of my patients, I found this response to be deeply unnerving. But I also can’t waive it away with simple explanations like online radicalization or trolling. Something much deeper is at play.

For decades, health insurance corporations like United have been growing more powerful and more profitable. How do they generate these profits? By taking in as much money as possible in premiums and paying out as little as possible in medical claims. Over time, they have tried everything from requiring “prior authorization” of care, to excluding high-quality providers from their networks, to imposing a Byzantine series of charges including ever-growing copays, coinsurance, and deductibles. When all else fails, many insurers simply deny claims.

Behind each of these practices are millions of Americans who are made to suffer. I hear these stories routinely in my practice, and they never become easier to stomach. I have seen patients with aggressive cancer who avoided seeing a doctor for months because they feared bankruptcy; patients with chronic conditions like diabetes who are denied treatments that would improve their quality of life; and gunshot victims whose fight to recover and gain a semblance of normalcy is complicated by their health plans saying no, no, and no again.

I have seen patients suffer and die in order to pad the bottom lines of corporate health insurers—and in recent years I have seen this problem getting much worse.

These are the stories that Americans are sharing in this fraught moment. We have to ask ourselves: Are we listening? And what are we going to do about it?

Insurers like UnitedHealthcare will have their own responses. Their PR teams will no doubt work overtime to marginalize aggrieved voices and to highlight what they consider to be the “value” of their health plans. Expect to see glossy commercials and towering billboards touting the “peace of mind” that Americans should enjoy knowing that their medical needs are “covered.” But the health insurance industry doesn’t have a communications problem, it has a profiteering problem—and no amount of marketing will convince people who have already been burned.

Behind the scenes, corporate insurers will no doubt lobby for the preferential treatment they have come to expect. Our newly elected Congress may acquiesce, or they may decide that the industry needs to be regulated—a strategy that has failed to live up to its promise.

Republicans and Democrats have made separate attempts to combine federal requirements with federal largesse in order to make corporate health insurers play nice. But both the Affordable Care Act and the Medicare Advantage program have only succeeded in ballooning the profits of firms like United—without improving Americans’ health or sparing their wallets.

It’s also clear that violence is not the answer, both on a purely human level and because corporate insurers will simply not be moved. UnitedHealthcare will have a new CEO in short order, and it will be that person’s responsibility to boost profits and make shareholders wealthier. Responding to patients’ cries will not serve these ends, so it is not in the cards.

What would help is a proven reform proposal that is long overdue: a single-payer national health program. Such a system would provide universal coverage and comprehensive benefits—with zero out-of-pocket costs. It could be easily implemented given the gargantuan sums we spend on healthcare in this country, and it would be a boon for those who are suffering, and for those who are fearful.

Americans are crying out in pain—and are recognizing that they are not alone in their pain. We should listen to these cries and we should finally, after decades of delay, do something about it.

Thomas Friedman probably thought he was being clever when he titled his most recent article How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve U.S.-China Relations. It’s a headline meant to catch your attention– appealing to the Swifties, who think Taylor can save the world, the Musketeers, who are certain Elon can save the world, and, of course, their anti-fans who follow their every move with just as much zeal, and perhaps even more. It was the New York Times version of clickbait, because why bother with solid journalism when you can piggyback off the success of billionaires?

It was clickable, but it was hardly readable.

Friedman starts his piece off with a kernel of truth, just enough to shock the regular NYT’s readers who are very rarely fed a positive bit of news about China:

“I just spent a week in Beijing and Shanghai, meeting with Chinese officials, economists and entrepreneurs, and let me get right to the point: While we were sleeping China took a great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing of everything.”

Nobody that knows anything about China can argue with that, though a majority of Americans certainly still view the far-away country through the lens of Soviet communism and rural backwardness. The correlation is that the majority of Americans know nothing about China, have never been, and will never go.

He then goes on to express how Donald Trump’s tariffs and anti-China rhetoric jump-started China’s manufacturing prowess, mentioning how Trump’s name on Chinese social media is “Chuan Jiaguo” meaning “Nation Builder.”

Friedman’s general lack of understanding about China was a let down. But mostly I was disappointed because the title had me anticipating a much different read—something with a bit of creativity, and maybe even an original thought.

No. It was not Donald Trump that ushered in China’s “Sputnik moment,” as quoted by business consultant Jim McGregor. Trump is merely an amusement to China’s general public—a strange American enigma whose hard lines are overshadowed by unexpected candor and comical behavior. For China, the last 40 years has been a continuous Sputnik moment—from the elimination of extreme poverty to unprecedented shift to renewable energy, China has been on the rise, and Donald Trump has never been the yeast making that happen.

And then comes the meat of Friedman’s theory, what he calls the “Elon Musk-Taylor Swift paradigm.” Instead of suddenly raising US tariffs against China, which will lead us into a kind of supply-chain warfare that benefits nobody, Friedman suggest a gradual rise in tariffs, that would allow the US to “buy time to lift up more Elon Musks” which he describes as “more homegrown manufacturers who can make big stuff so we can export more to the world and import less,” as well as give China more time to “let in more Taylor Swifts” which are “more opportunities for its youth to spend money on entertainment and consumer goods made abroad.”

Friedman isn’t wrong about the idiocy of a US-China trade war, but his prognosis is tone-deaf, and very clearly the result of a Western capitalist tormented by the concept of zero-sum competition:

“It’s important to the world that China continues to be able to give its 1.4 billion people a better life — but it cannot be at the expense of everyone else.”

He does, unsurprisingly, make the Soviet comparison:

But if we don’t use this time to respond to China the way we did to the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, with our own comprehensive scientific, innovative and industrial push, we will be toast.”

Toast! Don’t we all collectively like toast?

He talks of the dangers of China’s rising economic dominance. How China “owns the future” because it is the main producer of Electric Vehicles. How China is domestically self-sufficient. How China will soon account for nearly half of all global manufacturing. How all of China’s gains will be everyone else’s loss. How China is going to export robot-run factories to other countries, and thereby steal labor opportunities— as if the West hasn’t exported their own factories and exploited impoverished communities for cheap labor over decades.

“But here’s what’s scary: We no longer make that many things China wants to buy. It can do almost everything at least cheaper and often better.”

That must be incredibly scary to the average American who would rather pay a few bucks for a Temu version of an item rather than shell out tens of dollars for anything made by local businesses. It’s not their fault. The U.S. is incredibly unaffordable and the government does not seem to care.

At the same time, Friedman criticizes the lack of consumption within China:

“If I were drawing a picture of China’s economy today as a person, it would have an awesome manufacturing upper body — like Popeye, still eating spinach — with consuming legs resembling thin little sticks.”

It is the fate of a capitalist to view nonconsumption as a societal malady rather than a sign of good health. The truth is those that consume less have other more nourishing and sustainable ways to fill their souls. At a time when consumerism and overspending are contributing to the destruction of the planet, this is a rather thoughtless point to make. Imagine if society applauded community-building rather than the pointless expenditure of money to temporarily fill a gaping emptiness left by a lack of community and an overemphasis on hyperindividualism? It is very American to look for quick solutions rather than address the root cause.

To his credit, Friedman does state the importance of China providing for its 1.4 billion population, but it is a mere drop of humility that does little to balance the western self-righteousness. He does not comment on the fact that China’s population is greater than the US and Europe combined. Neither does he comment on the West’s own role in exporting labor for cheaper prices— because a capitalist system is run on greed, and wherever a buck can be saved, you bet it will be. Even at the expense of the people.

Friedman suggests that China should “let their people have more of the supply.” Apparently, they want to buy more stuff from us. Stuff that Friedman claims they are being starved of under the rule of the Communist Party of China. Things like art and entertainment. Majors in gender studies and sociology.

“Its youth need more outlets for creative expression — without having to worry that a song lyric they write could land them in prison.”

I have doubts that Friedman ever ventured out to a concert in Shanghai, let alone listened to some of China’s latest indie music. Culture is something that China definitely does not lack, and to make that claim is so wildly misguided that I question whether he has any understanding of China at all. One merely has to take a walk along the riverside in literally any city, and they will be bombarded by musicians, performers, and an impressive amount of outdoor public karaoke. There are as many artists as there are consumers of art, and indeed, a fair share of students pursuing the humanities.

He concludes:

“In sum, America needs to tighten up, but China needs to loosen up. Which is why my hat is off to Secretary of State Antony Blinken for showing China the way forward.”

What did Antony Blinken do that was so impressive? He stopped at a record store in China and bought a Taylor Swift album.

Maybe, just maybe, Friedman is just one giant Swiftie. But more likely, he threw the article together with a preschool level understanding of the WTO, and an opinion that almost sounds like an opinion, but doesn’t really say much of anything when you give it a thought.

I would have been more impressed if Friedman suggested sticking Elon Musk and his federal spending chopping block DOGE on the over-bloated Department of Defense, and booking Taylor Swift a highly-publicized multi-city tour around China.

The only difference between sudden tariffs and gradual tariffs is time—and what will time do? In our 4-year system, time is as fickle as our word. Either way, China will still be pioneering the green energy revolution, selling affordable EVs and renewable energy equipment around the globe while the United States, as the NYT Beijing bureau chief Keith Bradsher says, will “become the new Cuba—the place where you visit to see old gas-guzzling cars that you drive yourself.”

And if the US continues its threatened posture around anything coming from China—including green energy tech—the world will continue to heat up, and we will all face the consequences.

Friedman’s general lack of understanding about China was a let down. But mostly I was disappointed because the title had me anticipating a much different read—something with a bit of creativity, and maybe even an original thought.

I would have been more impressed if Friedman suggested sticking Elon Musk and his federal spending chopping block DOGE on the over-bloated Department of Defense, and booking Taylor Swift a highly-publicized multi-city tour around China. Send Blinken along with her, if he’s such a big fan, and have him venture outside of his strict China perimeter to meet, talk with locals, and experience a version of China that he never would in his fancy hotel rooms and secure government buildings. Maybe then he would form an opinion based on his own experiences rather than the lines he memorized over the course of his typical Ivy League education, and the subsequent falling-in-place that one must do to become the Secretary of State of the United States. A selling out of the soul, if you will.

And maybe the well being of the people—of all people—would be considered for once, rather than the flimsy monetary aspirations of the already-wealthy.

Civil discourse is preferable to the alternatives of coerced silence and violence. Coerced silence means that one side has exercised power to end conversation—to say, in effect, there is no point in further discussion; be quiet and accept that our desires will prevail. Violence means that reason has failed and we are reduced to the condition of resolving disputes by means of fang and claw, rock and club, bullet and bomb.

Despite the dismal historical record of our species, as a professor I have held out hope that humans are capable of doing better. Ordinarily this would imply support for any effort, in universities or elsewhere, to promote civil discourse. But the efforts we see now—the selling of civil discourse as the solution to problems of polarization and rancor on our campuses and in society more generally—are a problem, because their main effect is to block change.

In recent years we’ve seen a proliferation of university-based programs ostensibly intended to promote civil discourse. There is the Civil Discourse Project at Duke; the Dialogue Project at Dartmouth; the Dialogues Initiative at Georgetown; the Civil Discourse Lab at Vanderbilt; ePluribus at Stanford; the Project on Civic Dialogue at American University; and School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC-Chapel Hill. This is to name but a few.

If there is to be a peaceful transition to a more just and equal world, it will not come through a polite exchange of views between the powerful and powerless.

The claim most often made to justify these programs is that students today don’t know how to carry on mutually respectful dialogue or debate, and thus end up yelling at each other or, worse, yelling at administrators and members of university governing boards. An adjacent claim is that faculty—usually meaning leftist or liberal professors—have failed to impart these skills. And so it has been necessary, the argument goes, to create new programs and curricula devoted to teaching the arts of listening and of rationally exchanging views, especially about emotionally fraught topics.

Advocates of these programs have pointed to the campus anti-genocide protests last spring as evidence that special tutelage in civil discourse is needed now more than ever. The problem with those protests, civil discoursers allege, is that they were sometimes loud, got in the way of people moving about campus, made Zionist supporters of Israel feel unsafe, and were thus by definition uncivil. If students had only mastered the skills of polite civic engagement, no disruptions would have occurred, fewer feathers would have been ruffled, and more views would have been productively shared.

These appeals to make dialogue civil again are seductive. Of course we should strive to listen to each other carefully and speak to each other calmly and rationally. Of course we should try to hone our abilities to do these things, because these abilities in turn enable us to find the common good, identify what is just and unjust, and pursue change peacefully. Of course higher education should nurture these abilities. And yet, in the context of entrenched inequality, calls for civil discourse—and the university programs that sacralize it—are often conservative ploys to impede the pursuit of justice.

This is evident if we consider who is in a position to demand civility of whom, and who has the power to define what is civil. Historically, it has been those in power who demand civility from those who seek redress of grievances. “Speak politely, in soothing tones,” the subtext goes, “or we won’t listen to you at all.” The further message is that an inability to remain calm when trying to be heard, when trying to end an abusive state of affairs, will be taken as a sign of the irrationality of the demand. Today, we would call this gaslighting.

In the case of Israel’s assault on Palestinians, the call for civil discourse is cynical and galling, as if mere misunderstanding is what’s wrong.

Consider, for example, a request made by student protesters to discuss a university’s complicity in genocide. This would seem like an eminently civil first step. What is uncivil is the refusal on the part of administrators and governing bodies to engage in good-faith discussion of such matters. Which is exactly what we saw in last spring’s protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Protesters’ requests for dialogue were typically ignored, leading to escalation: louder voices, encampments, rallies, unauthorized postering, spray painting, etc. Administrators defined these actions as disruptive, calling in police to make arrests. That isn’t civility; it’s a reassertion of domination.

But what we are supposed to believe now, according to those who celebrate civil discourse, is that anti-genocide protesters—those who sought dialogue and a peaceful path to change—are at fault and in need of remedial instruction. Administrators who violently quash the expressive activity of protesters are lauded as voices of reason. Protesters who raise their voices in an attempt to be heard are dismissed as troublemakers undeserving of an audience. This smear tactic works because of differences in power between the groups confronting each other—ordinary people of conscience on one side, agents of the U.S. imperialist state on the other.

Another problem with most current calls for civil discourse is that the goal of discerning the truth is shunted aside. Instead, the goals are said to be a sharing of views, an exchange of stories, a chance to see things from the perspective of the other. Discourse itself, it seems, is sometimes the only goal. All this might be fine if the issues at hand concerned aesthetic judgments or quirks of personal experience. But what if we need to determine and agree upon the facts of the matter in a case of genocide? For this, sharing views is not enough.

I suspect that it is well understood, if seldom admitted by advocates of civil discourse, that sharing stories and views is not enough—that is, not enough to alter the behavior of political elites, the capitalist class, or the U.S. government. A feckless expenditure of energy is perhaps the real goal of the tactic: transform protest into well-contained talk so that business as usual can go on, leaving nothing changed at a larger level. Vent among yourselves if you like, share your views, but don’t get disruptive, or else the velvet gloves will come off.

In the case of Israel’s assault on Palestinians, the call for civil discourse is cynical and galling, as if mere misunderstanding is what’s wrong. Do the many anti-Zionist Jews who belong to Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and B’Tselem not understand the Zionist view? By now, does any adult who has read the news in the past year not understand the Zionist narrative about Israel? It offends reason to claim that the problems of land dispossession, apartheid, daily humiliation, and genocide will be solved by politely sharing views in university seminar rooms. These problems can be solved only by changing the behavior of the U.S. government and the behavior of the Israeli state in Palestine.

Vent among yourselves if you like, share your views, but don’t get disruptive, or else the velvet gloves will come off.

What’s required—what Frederick Douglass reminded us is always required when confronting power—are demands that will inevitably be defined as uncivil. That’s why protest movements tend to escalate from petitions to marches, from marches to boycotts, and from boycotts to strikes and other forms of civil disobedience. Only when the costs of carrying on business as usual become greater than the costs of making concessions will concessions be made. In the face of vast inequality, that’s how change occurs. Only among equals who cannot coerce each other is civil discourse alone likely to be enough.

None of this is to say that civil discourse is not to be strived for. I still hold out hope that we can do better than beat each over the head as we try to end oppressive social arrangements—in Palestine, in the U.S., and around the planet. But the reality is that those who benefit from inequality will not be rationally argued into relinquishing power and privilege. History leads us to expect no such thing. In the world today, the powerful will first respond rhetorically—calling insistent demands for change uncivil; demanding in turn endless debate about complexities and nuances and impossibilities—as a prelude to responding violently.

If there is to be a peaceful transition to a more just and equal world, it will not come through a polite exchange of views between the powerful and powerless. Nor will it come from sharing views in forums of the powerless, unless those forums are also aimed at discerning the truth, making plans for change, and putting those plans into action. Our best hope then is for collective action that disrupts the status quo not by violently confronting the powerful, but by withholding co-operation until the once powerful are left with no one to wield their guns, drop their bombs, or tell their lies. That is the kind of civility worth fighting for.

Following Donald Trump’s election, some Democratic political elites have retreated to a familiar fallacy to explain why they lost in November. Instead of engaging in the necessary introspection, these elites have taken to blaming social justice movements and immigrant justice advocates for their defeat. Their prescription for the future, however, is as misguided as their core argument.

They contend that in order to win on immigration, Democrats must continue to tack to the right, turn their backs on advocates, and revert to the elusive pursuit of “comprehensive immigration reform”—a phrase lacking meaning to most voters and a strategy that insulated them for decades from political attacks, but failed to advance any meaningful policy that serves the interests of immigrants or the nation.

With their scolding and posturing, these self-described “pragmatists” are—perhaps unwittingly—mimicking the far-right’s well-worn playbook of scapegoating marginalized people to evade responsibility for doing the difficult work of charting a courageous and visionary path forward—one that serves and wins back the support of working families and other constituents that have abandoned the party.

What would the world look like now if abolitionists listened to so-called “pragmatists” of the time and compromised on their vision by working toward slavery “reforms” or better conditions for those who were enslaved?

In the lead up to the 2024 election, the Republican Party—led by Trump and propped up by conservative media—filled the airwaves with dangerous lies and misinformation. Voters consistently heard that immigrants, trans kids, and “woke-[insert any noun here]” were to blame for all of society’s ills and their economic hardships, and that Trump would lower the price of their groceries (a promise that he has already started to walk back before he even takes office).

For their part, Democratic Party leadership shifted rightward on immigration and failed to articulate how they would address the needs of working families. Rather than counter Trump’s scapegoating and present a bold alternative vision for a system that is hopelessly broken and outdated, candidates echoed right-wing talking points and focused on promoting cruel border policies.

Embracing and advancing an anti-immigrant narrative also meant that voters didn’t hear from either party about the outsized role that immigrants, including newly arrived immigrants, play in solving some of the very problems they are unfairly blamed for—whether it is challenges with housing supply, the overall economy, or their vital role in the workforce.

A recent report by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shows that refugees and asylees contributed an estimated $581 billion in revenue to federal, state, and local governments over a 15-year period, including an estimated $363 billion to the federal government through payroll, income, and other taxes.

Building new housing is also nearly impossible without immigrants, as one-third of homebuilders are foreign-born. And conservative estimates have found that a 10% reduction in asylum seekers in one year would result in an $8.9 billion loss to the U.S. economy and over $1.5 billion in lost tax revenue over five years.

While it is clear that Democrats’ failure to effectively counter Republicans’ attacks on immigrants hurt them in this election, it is also true that immigration ultimately was not the reason they lost. Exit polls show that in the lead-up to election day, the economy was the top priority for voters. And despite the extremely toxic anti-immigrant sentiment that prevailed over the elections, exit polls also show that voters still prefer that undocumented immigrants get the chance to apply for legal status (56% of voters), rather than be deported (only 40% supported this option).

The critics who have stepped up their attacks also fail to understand the role of social movements, which is to engage in the tireless pursuit of justice and bring about fundamental change. Wins that we now take for granted—including women’s right to vote, the abolishment of slavery, and basic worker protections, among many others—were all radical ideas at the time that were fueled by movements.

What would the world look like now if abolitionists listened to so-called “pragmatists” of the time and compromised on their vision by working toward slavery “reforms” or better conditions for those who were enslaved? Or if the civil rights movement had acquiesced to the demands of moderate Southerners urging them to both be patient and to tone down their demands to end segregation?

No social justice movement has ever won because they agreed to abandon their north star.

People in this country are hungry for courageous solutions that can materially improve all of our lives. It is up to all of us to work together to make progress feel not only possible, but inevitable.

And those of us who believe in the power of movements to bring about the cause of justice must never walk away from a vision for the future.

Bummed out by the election results, liberals are turning off the news and tuning out politics. This will only help Trump in his mass deportations and other actions liberals claim to deplore.

The post Democrats Tuning Out first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Democrats Tuning Out appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Civil war has broken out in the Republican Party just weeks after its triumphant election victory. Generally speaking, the issue is immigration, one of the top issues in the campaign. The populist MAGA base wants it limited or eliminated. But Trump’s billionaire allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are pushing hard for H1B visas that allow tech companies and other employers to import foreign workers. So far, Trump seems to be siding with Team DOGE. Will this controversy tear apart his fragile coalition?

“TMI Show” hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan are joined by conservative political analyst and fundraiser Angie Wong to handicap and analyze the rupture within the GOP.

The post TMI Show Ep 47: “MAGA Civil War” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 47: “MAGA Civil War” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In 1917, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin wrote, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Scaling that up, 2024 was a year where a century happened.

The Sykes-Picot Accords that laid out the contours of the modern Middle East were signed in 1916. This year, 2024, they were overturned as the nation state of Syria was destroyed by a wolf pack of at least a dozen terrorist militias supported by Turkey, Israel, Qatar, and the United States. That is the definition of an epochal event.

It also reveals the U.S.’ preferred modus operandi in the world: its people won’t tolerate dead soldiers coming home in body bags, so it hires terrorist mercenaries to do its dirty work. Think of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Contras in Nicaragua, ISIS after Iraq, Boko Haram in North Africa. But back to 2024 as the year that was a century…

In 1917, Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, penned the infamous Balfour Declaration, stating that the British Government viewed favorably the establishment of a homeland in Palestine for Jews. That endowment was actualized in 1948, when Zionist Jews seized 79% of Palestine and declared the establishment of Israel. But their ambition was always for more.

The century-old Zionist vision of Greater Israel will require taking Lebanon (underway), Syria (underway), most of Iraq (underway), Egypt east of the Nile, Jordan, and a large swath of Saudi Arabia. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotich, publicly calls for taking this “little by little.” As of 2024, there is no doubt that the process is well underway.

This follows as Israel revealed itself in 2024 to be a murderous, genocidal state, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent, defenseless Palestinians, most of them women and children, in order to steal their land. That is not even a judgement. It’s a clinical statement of fact.

In July, the British medical journal, Lancet, stated that “186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” By now, more than six months on, that number is much, much higher. It is the most conspicuous, public genocide since the Holocaust during World War II. That makes 2024 an all-the-more remarkable year.

The U.S.’ breathless, unrestrained support for the genocide marked a huge turning point for its reputation in the world. No more can it credibly claim to be a champion of human rights, a defender of Democracy, a supporter of international law. In 2024, the U.S. destroyed untold reputational capital it has spent centuries accumulating. It will never be recovered.

The year 2024 can also credibly be considered the start of World War III. Consider the eerie parallels to World War I, begun in 1914.

World War I occurred because Germany was overtaking Britain as the world’s leading industrial state. If Britain did not do something about it, it would be eclipsed as the global hegemon. Today, China plays Germany, blowing by the U.S.’ Britain.

In the lead-up to that first World War, the sides sorted themselves into blocs, the British, French, and Russians (joined, later, by the U.S.) forming one bloc, the Triple Entente. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy formed the other bloc, the Triple Alliance. Today, NATO and the West form one bloc; the Global South-based BRICS alliance, led by China and Russia, form the opposing bloc.

Finally, both wars were/are about who will control the oil-rich Middle East.

The Germans had befriended the Ottoman Empire which controlled most of what, at the time, was called “West Asia.” They had begun building the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railroad, which would have given them control of most of the world’s then-known oil. That posed a mortal threat to the British, who had just finished converting their global navy from running on coal to running on oil.

So, besides being the year that Sykes-Picot was undone, and in which Israel and the U.S. revealed their genocidal natures, 2024 will be remembered as the year in which World War III began. There was one more, important international matter in all of this.

Russia quit its former ally, Syria, leaving it to the mercies (such as they are) of the terrorist cabal that had beset it, in 2011. But, there was a quid pro quo: the U.S. could have Syria but it would close down its decades-long menacing of Russia through its U.S.-allied proxy, Ukraine. It is a good deal for both sides.

For the U.S., Ukraine has long been lost. It has long been out of money, weapons, and men. Now, the U.S. gets to cut those losses and refocus its sights on what it perceives as its real adversary, China. For Russia, it stops the bleed on its southern border. This, too, goes back over a century.

It was in 1919 that the U.S. invaded Russia to try to overturn the Russian Revolution. That White Counter-Revolution failed, and the U.S. and Russia remained bitter rivals for the next century. This current predation on Russia was carried out by Ukraine, with the U.S. as its puppeteer.

It was Bill Clinton who began moving NATO and its nuclear-tipped missiles right up to Russia’s borders. The U.S. knows very well the panic that results from such menacing, having lived through and survived the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So, not only has Russia defeated the U.S. militarily in Ukraine. It has defeated it economically, diplomatically, politically, and strategically as well. These are astonishing, highly damaging setbacks for the U.S. The U.S. public hasn’t gotten the memo, yet.

Economically? Remember when Joe Biden declared that “the strongest sanctions regime in the history of the world” would “reduce the ruble to rubble”? In fact, Russia’s economy has proven much stronger than the U.S. economy, growing faster, with lower inflation, and lower debt.

It has won diplomatically, as well. Most of the world’s nations refused to join the sanctions on Russia demanded by the U.S. government. And, the U.S. shot itself in the foot by stealing $300 billion of Russian assets held in Western banks. More nations will avoid dollars to prevent such banditry being carried out against them when they don’t bow to U.S. dictates.

Russia won politically, too. A major impetus of the U.S. aggression was to effect regime change in Russia, dealing it a “strategic defeat,” as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called it. Vladimir Putin was to be replaced with a more pliable leader. In fact, it was the U.S.’ leader, Joe Biden, who was replaced in the November elections. Do you suppose he appreciates the irony?

Finally, strategically. Only in Democratic Party circles, fronting as it always does for the weapons makers, does it make strategic sense to drive your two greatest adversaries into each other’s arms. Those would be China and Russia and that is exactly what Ukraine has done. That’s part of why the Democrats were handed their heads in the 2024 presidential election. Speaking of which…

It was 95 years ago that the Great Depression began. Capitalism on its own could not generate enough activity to employ all of the economy’s resources. So, Franklin Roosevelt modified capitalism to work with stabilizers from the state: federal work programs, unemployment insurance; tighter banking regulation; and more.

That fix served pretty well until 1980, when capitalists decided (as capitalists are wont to do) that they wanted more of the economy’s output for themselves. So, we began the regime of Neoliberalism with Ronald Reagan. That meant fewer regulations, lower taxes on the wealthy, jobs shipped abroad, the government helping to structure the economy with monopolies.

As much as anything else, the election of 2024 was a referendum on four decades of neoliberalism. And neoliberalism lost. A plurality of people would rather burn it all down than endure the assured, steady degradation of their life prospects that they’ve come to suffer for the last generation.

Unfortunately, the Democrats were the party in power when the referendum was held, in November, so they got stuck holding the turd. And it’s not like they didn’t deserve it.

Bill Clinton, the original Democratic Neoliberal, passed NAFTA, helping ship millions of good paying, Midwest metal-bending jobs to Mexico. He deregulated the banks, setting the economy up for the Great Recession. He helped the media industry become the fetid oligopoly that it is.

Barrack Obama enlisted Clinton’s economic team, en masse. When that Great Recession hit, Obama bailed out the banks that had caused it while letting 10 million families lose their homes to foreclosure. People remember.

The Democratic presidential campaign itself was a catastrophe, a debacle, a master class in narrative inanity, focal fluidity, and bumbling amateurism.

The Democrats couldn’t defeat the most notorious, noxious dirtbag ever to beslime American culture. A 34-time convicted felon. A man the Washington Post said was a rapist. Someone who carried out the most grievous assault on the State and the Constitution since the Civil War. A catastrophically failed former president whose signature ineptness caused more than a million excess deaths in the COVID pandemic. The Democrats couldn’t lay a glove on him.

Consider just one set of facts.

Donald Trump was the first president since the Great Depression to leave office with fewer people employed in the nation than when he entered. Joe Biden oversaw the creation of more than 16 million jobs, the greatest job creation record in history. And the Democrats couldn’t put together a coherent sentence about the economy. Can you remember one?

There’s a lot of hemming and hawing and navel-gazing and retrospective rationalizing about the election, especially in elite Democratic party circles. The most salient fact is this: more than 7 million fewer people voted for the Democratic candidate in 2024 than voted for the one in 2020. And that’s with the huge headwind of Dobbs at their back. Not even their own people believed in them.

Simply put, 2024 was the year we realized that the Democratic party is a spent force, not a competent, reliable party to represent the interests of the working and middle classes. It is the party that gave us Donald Trump and all of the leprous, anti-democratic, plutocratic agendas that he represents. Without being hysterical, it may be the end of democracy in America. Thank you, Democrats.

The party has no message, no messenger, no mechanism, not even an agenda that says anything to the working people of this county who are abandoning it in droves, and with good cause. It has allowed Republicans to brand it the party of inflation, elitism, transgenderism, and genocide. Can you see why it didn’t sell, even with the nose-bleeding $2 billion they spent trying to peddle it?

One last word on an important innovation that emerged in 2024. It has to do with the intersection of technology and culture and how that plays out in politics.

The first television broadcast was 97 years ago, in 1927. It allowed the top-down dissemination of received narratives about what was going on in the world. It allowed elites to control what the nation knew, and thought.

In some important measure, 2024 saw the overthrow of that thought control regime. Yes, television is still broadcast, but it is less and less influential in setting the national dialogue on almost all issues.

Instead, we see the rise, even the pre-eminence, of social media, much of which emerges from the bottom up, or at least without the editing filters that allowed elites to manage national perceptions.

More than anything else, it was Trump’s mastery of social media, and his use of it to propagate his lies, fear, conspiracies, and rage that accounted for his win in the 2024 election. It’s important to understand why that worked.

Social media monetizes the very worst elements of our individual and social psyches. It titillates our amygdala, our lizard brain. More money is made through more clicks, and more clicks are generated by delivery of more outrageous content.

But, the process satiates, so it demands ever more outrageous content, and then, still more, yet, until all that is being vended out is garbage, lies, conspiracy, indignation, and innuendo. And the more that is vended out, the more money is made.

It is impossible to contrive a more culturally auto-destructive techno-social dynamic than one that makes more money by vending more garbage into the culture. But that is what we have become.

Two centuries ago, the Enlightenment gave us the idea that Truth could be discerned through a process of Reason. No more. Indeed, there is no such thing as Truth, and no need for such a bothersome path through Reason. There is only a preponderance of clicks and the outrage or docility that such preponderance endows, like turning out pissed off voters.

We have constructed a Golden Calf of the demons of our baser nature and it is that Calf which we now idolize, because it makes the most money. The proof is that tens of millions of people worship at the feet of the most degenerate pathological liar the country has ever known, and fancy him some kind of Messiah.

They are going to follow his carnival barker hawkings until they are shorn of all of their dignity, all of their money, and all of their freedoms. And we, of ours. They’ll still imagine it a patriotic sacrifice and congratulate themselves for their courage in sticking it to the man.

Indeed, 2024 was a year for the ages.

           You can’t understand the presidency of Jimmy Earl Carter, Jr. unless you contextualize it within the framework of the hysterical aftermath of the 1972 election. While the Republican Party brand suffered tremendous damage due to Watergate, President Richard Nixon’s decision to prolong the Vietnam War and his resignation, the GOP proved improbably resilient. Despite a deep recession and an energy crisis, to say nothing of fallout from the Nixon pardon, Gerald Ford came within two points of defeating Carter a mere two years after Nixon resigned in disgrace; the decisive counterrevolutionary fervor of the Reagan Revolution followed four years after that.

With the spotlight on these earth-shattering events, it was easy to miss the civil war within the Democratic Party, between its liberal and centrist wings, that was prompted by the landslide defeat of Senator George McGovern in 1972. (“Centrist” is used here for simplicity—that’s what they call themselves. By objective global standards, the centrist faction of the Democratic Party is corporatist and militarist, and therefore was and remains right-wing.)

In an exercise that would feel familiar to anyone observing the current struggle between progressive and corporate Democrats in the wake of the Kamala Harris debacle, party leaders and activists spent 1973 through 1976 blaming one another in ferocious fights over what went wrong and which wing of the party ought to be trusted to control the organization going forward.

            Ultimately, centrists won the power struggle and sidelined the liberals. Though he entered the race as an outsider, Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia cemented the centrists’ victory and locked in the ideological template honed by another centrist Southern governor, Bill Clinton, and that still dominates today’s Democratic Party leadership. Old-fashioned liberals tried to stage a comeback under Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988; instead, their losses strengthened the centrists’ argument that Democrats needed to chase the Republicans as they migrated further right.

            It is easy to see why many Americans put Carter in the liberal box. More than any other modern president, he talked about human rights in the context of U.S. foreign policy. He was the only president who didn’t wage any wars. His manner was affable and soft-spoken.

            Whether or not they are ever successfully enacted, however, a president is defined by policies. Any objective analysis of his record must lead to a clear conclusion: Carter was a right-wing Democrat. And it mattered a lot. While his one term is typically dismissed by historians as lackluster or ineffectual, it had a dramatic impact on our politics.

Carter was our first post-liberal Democratic president. Half a century later, as Joe Biden packs his bags, the Carter model still holds. (Recognizing an ideological fellow, Biden was the first Democratic senator to endorse Carter in 1976.) There is no sign that a traditional mid-20th-century-style liberal like Hubert Humphrey, LBJ or Adlai Stevenson, who championed the poor and working class and were generally skeptical of foreign military adventurism, will have a serious shot at capturing a Democratic presidential nomination any time soon.

Inheriting a wobbly economy from Gerald Ford, Carter decided to prioritize the fight against inflation over what a liberal would have cared about more: keeping as many Americans employed as possible. He appointed Nixon’s former undersecretary of the Treasury Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. Volker hiked interest rates to 20%, triggering huge back-to-back recessions that lingered into the 1980s. A liberal president would have turned to Congress to try to mitigate the misery. But Carter became the first Democratic president not to propose a federal anti-poverty program.

Carter’s conservatism expressed itself most fully through his cynical Cold War foreign policy. Although most Democratic voters would have been enraged had they known at the time, discredited figures on the Republican right like David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger were on speed dial in the oval office and frequently had the president’s ear whenever there was a crisis overseas. The most pernicious influence inside the administration was national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who fell to the right of Republicans when it came to the Soviet Union.

Carter’s team of foreign policy hawks convinced him to set aside his better judgment and reluctantly admit the dictatorial Shah of Iran to the United States to receive medical treatment, an unforced disaster that triggered the Iran hostage crisis and contributed to his defeat in 1980.  

Never one to stay quiet despite repeatedly being proven wrong, Brzezinski notoriously pushed for Carter to fund and arm the radical Muslim Afghan mujahedin, many of whom eventually morphed into Al Qaeda and the Taliban. There is a strong chance that 9/11 would never have happened if not for Carter’s backing of jihadi fanatics. Does anyone doubt that the world would be better off today with an Afghanistan where women wore miniskirts, as they did under the Soviet-backed socialist secular government in the 1970s, than burqas?

Brzezinski argued that Afghanistan would become the USSR’s Vietnam, a quagmire that would destroy the country morally and economically. No one knows whether the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan had the desired effect. The world clearly became more dangerous after 1991, when the United States began to enjoy the lone superpower status that it exploited to run roughshod over Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and countless other victims of American imperialism. Without its socialist Cold War adversary offering an alternative if flawed economic model, America’s capitalists declared themselves victors at the End of History, with no need to share profits with workers or exhibit deference to other nations.

Carter needlessly politicized the Olympics by boycotting the 1980 Summer games in Moscow. The following year, one of my classmates in college was to have been on Team USA in fencing; I never forgave Carter for dashing her and her teammates’ hopes.

Carter is lionized as a pacifist. It wasn’t so when he was president. Most people think that we have Reagan to thank for the out-of-control military spending that began with his massive U.S. defense buildup in the 1980s. But the current cult of militarism really started under Carter, a fact that Reagan himself later acknowledged.

Worst of all, Carter was a liar and a hypocrite. Even while he claimed to prioritize human rights, his White House propped up vicious dictatorships. “Inaugurated 13 months after Indonesia’s December 1975 invasion of East Timor, Carter stepped up U.S. military aid to the Jakarta regime as it continued to murder Timorese civilians. By the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s (FAIR) Jeff Cohen recalled. “Elsewhere, despotic allies—from Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to the Shah of Iran—received support from President Carter. In El Salvador, the Carter administration provided key military aid to a brutal regime. In Nicaragua, contrary to myth, Carter backed dictator Anastasio Somoza almost until the end of his reign. In Guatemala—again contrary to enduring myth—major U.S. military shipments to bloody tyrants never ended.”

Carter pardoned the Vietnam-era draft dodgers only to turn around and restore draft registration the very next year. If you are a male assigned at birth, you face five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and losing your college financial aid unless you register for the next military draft in America’s next unpopular war with the Selective Service System. That was Carter. And it wasn’t liberal.

Nor was he.

(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 Jimmy Carter, Right-Wing Democrat first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Jimmy Carter, Right-Wing Democrat appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Dear changemakers, thank you for all that you’ve done this year.

Reflecting on 2024, we endured yet another year filled with climate catastrophes, political unrest, and international inequality. But even through these challenging times we can find hope in our collective actions and victories, no matter how big or small. Together, we can pave the way forward towards a better future.

Dear Earth, thank you for continuing to show up every day for us.

Across the globe, people took bold steps to care for the planet. 2024 showed us the strength of coming together with purpose and passion. These efforts may not solve every challenge overnight, but they are the building blocks of creating lasting change.

Dear Earth citizens, we invite you to take moments to appreciate living on this planet.

The journey that we are on is a long one, so friends, take care of yourself as we heal the world together. What lies ahead may not be easy, but as we continue to show up, make our voices heard, and hold polluters accountable we must not forget to take care of ourselves, our peers and our communities.

Dear all, we hope that you’ll join us on this journey towards a better future, taking care of our planet, ourselves, and each other.

With courage as our compass and optimism as our fuel, here are some of the top victories of 2024 for people and the planet to inspire us to keep taking action.

United Kingdom: Shell Backs Down in Lawsuit Against Greenpeace

In February 2023, Shell launched a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Greenpeace U.K. and Greenpeace International over a peaceful protest. But with our supporters behind us, we showed Shell their bullying tactics won’t intimidate us—and now they’ve backed down and agreed to settle out of court. People power works—this campaign was fought with the support of thousands of ordinary people against one of the richest companies in the world.

This legal battle might be over, but Big Oil’s dirty tricks aren’t going away. With Greenpeace facing further lawsuits around the world, we won’t stop campaigning until the fossil fuel industry stops drilling and starts paying for the damage it is causing to people and the planet.

Norway: Arctic Deep-sea Mining Plans Stopped

Huge win for the ocean as Arctic deep-sea mining plans are stopped in Norway! After more than a year of decisive campaign work and massive pressure from activists, scientists, and the international community, the Norwegian government has agreed to stop the first licensing round for deep-sea mining in Arctic waters for at least the rest of their term in office, until the next election.

This is a major and important environmental victory which shows that mobilization and people power works.

Indonesia: Measures to Regulate Labor Standards for Fishing Vessels Adopted

After years of discussions, rejections, objections, and negotiations involving governments, civil society organizations including Greenpeace Indonesia, and unions representing migrant fishers, the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) finally adopted the Conservation and Management Measures (CMM) for Crew Labor Standards on December 3, 2024.

The WCPFC oversees fish population management, promotes sustainable fishing practices, and implements conservation measures. This decision underscores their commitment to ensure the well-being of crew in an industry that suffers from serious labour abuses.

Oceans: Deep-Sea Miners’ Efforts to Limit the Right to Protest at Sea Rejected

Over the last year, The Metals Company and its enablers have repeatedly tried to silence the global wave of resistance. After failing to get an injunction that stopped the action at sea, and unsuccessfully lobbying governments to limit protests around deep-sea mining vessels at the International Seabed Authority in March, the company pursued an appeal at the Amsterdam Court of Appeal to try and secure immunity against future Greenpeace protests at sea. But thanks to the incredible work of Greenpeace International’s legal unit, on November 12, 2024, the court ruled once more in our favor, reaffirming our right to peaceful protest at sea.

Brazil: Sawré Muybu Territory Officially Demarcated

On September 25, 2024, the Sawré Muybu territory in the Tapajós River Basin in the heart of the Amazon rainforest was officially demarcated. The Munduruku People have been fighting for the rights to a land that has always belonged to them but is threatened by mining, illegal logging, and infrastructure projects. This is a historic and profoundly symbolic victory not only for the Munduruku, but for all Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon and Brazil.

South Korea: Top Court Ruled the Country’s Carbon Neutrality Law as Unconstitutional

On 29 August 2024, South Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled the country’s carbon neutrality law as unconstitutional for violating citizen’s rights—making it the first ruling of its kind in Asia! The petition was filed in 2020 by over 200 plaintiffs, including young activists and even infants, and is Asia’s first climate court case targeting a country’s carbon neutrality commitments. This is a major climate win for future generations, and could potentially set a precedent in the region for other climate cases.

Australia: Woolworths and McDonald’s Commit to Going Deforestation-Free

Woolworths and McDonald’s in Australia announced their commitments to source deforestation-free beef. Woolworths will do so by the end of 2025 but McDonald’s will implement theirs by 2030 (Greenpeace Australia Pacific will continue to engage with McDonald’s to ensure they commit to taking deforestation off the menu—by 2025!). These two giant corporations are some of Australia’s biggest retailers and major buyers of Australian beef.

This is a major example of people power as Greenpeace Australia Pacific supporters had sent the big corporations thousands of emails, demanding they go deforestation-free.

Global: Breakthrough for Global Tax Justice

In a big win for global tax justice, a favourable blueprint for a UN Tax Convention that will pave the way for a fair and efficient global tax system was laid out in August. An inclusive tax cooperation system will shift power from a few rich OECD countries to the UN where every country has a vote and help governments around the world recover the billions lost to tax dodging by multinational corporations and the ultra-rich. There is still much to do to keep up the pressure as negotiations will continue until 2027.

South Africa: Shell Loses Appeal in Case Halting Plans for Oil and Gas Exploration

Big win against Shell in South Africa! After protests by the community and fishers, Shell loses its appeal against the landmark decision in 2022 which ruled against their plans to conduct oil and gas exploration off the Wild Coast of South Africa. The court says Shell failed to properly inform and consult affected communities, taking into account community rights and environmental harm. Unfortunately, the fight is not yet over as the court has left the door open for Shell’s application to renew its exploration right. Together with allies and the community, Greenpeace Africa is resolute in continuing to fight to stop Big Oil from exploiting the planet for its own profit.

Papua: Major Land Rights Win for Indigenous Peoples

On June 6, 4,000 Indigenous Papuans finally received legal recognition of customary rights over 97,411 hectares of tropical rainforests in South Sorong Regency. The newly recognised Indigenous lands of the Knasaimos Peoples spans an area almost the size of Hong Kong.

As with many Indigenous communities across Tanah Papua (the western half of New Guinea, also known internationally as West Papua), the Knasaimos Peoples have been fighting for decades to protect their customary lands from exploitation by external interests such as logging and plantation companies. This ruling finally provides legal recognition of their rights to the land, forests, water, and other natural resources that are their ancestral heritage.

Oceans: World’s Highest Oceans Court Ruling to Protect Our Oceans

In a historic Advisory Opinion, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), the world’s highest oceans court, found that greenhouse gas emissions are a form of marine pollution and countries are obligated to reduce emissions for the sake of our oceans. The ruling is a huge victory in the protection and preservation of the marine environment.

Europe: European Nature Restoration Law Passed

The European Nature Restoration Law was passed and has come into effect! This law is the most important piece of environmental legislation in Europe in decades, aiming to restore and protect European biodiversity hotspots. It imposes unprecedented legally binding obligations onto E.U. Member States to restore protected nature reserves, peatlands, and dwindling bird and pollinator populations, and protect urban nature amongst others. This is a huge win for the nature movement in Europe!

Switzerland: Historic Court Win Confirms That Climate Protection Is a Human Right

The Association of Senior Women for Climate Protection Switzerland, also known as the KlimaSeniorinnen, took action against their country, Switzerland, for violating the seniors’ human rights by failing to set sufficient climate targets. On April 9, they received the landmark decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), achieving a historic victory for all generations. The ruling is an iconic moment for climate justice globally, confirming that climate protection is a human right.

As we enter this new year, it’s important to reflect upon the reality that we are living in a pivotal and volatile moment in American history. Within that context our job is not only to understand what’s happening all around us, but to determine the best way forward to create a nation and world that benefits all people, not just the wealthy and powerful few.

And right now, the defining issue of our time is that we are moving rapidly toward an oligarchic and authoritarian society in which billionaires not only dominate our economic life, but the information we consume and our politics as well.

Today, we have more income and wealth inequality than we’ve ever had.

Today, we have more concentration of ownership than we’ve ever had.

Today, we have more corporate control of the media than we’ve ever had.

Today, we have more billionaire money buying elections than ever before.

Today, we have a president-elect who is a pathological liar, who has little regard for the rule of law, who is suing media outlets that criticize him and threatening to jail his political opponents.

A manifestation of the current moment is the rise of Elon Musk, and all that he stands for.

Within the last two years alone Mr. Musk, the richest man in the world, has used his wealth to purchase the largest media platform on the internet, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect a president and give Republicans control of the House and Senate, was nominated to fill an unelected, non-confirmable position in charge of making huge budget cuts, succeeded in getting Congress to abandon a bill he didn't like, and then threatened to unseat elected officials if they did not follow his orders to shut down the government during the holidays. He is also forging alliances with autocrats throughout the world, and supporting a far-right party in the coming German elections.

But it’s not just Musk. Billionaire owners of two major newspapers overrode their editorial boards' decisions to endorse Kamala Harris, while many others are kissing Trump’s ring by making large donations to his inauguration committee slush fund.

In the midst of all this, a simple question must be asked. What do Musk, Bezos and the other billionaires want? What is motivating them? What kind of nation and world are they trying to create? While it would take a book to answer that question, let me jot down a few obvious observations.

They do not believe in democracy—the right of ordinary people to control their own futures. They firmly believe that the rich and powerful should determine the future. Left alone, they will dominate both major political parties and, through their media ownership, control the flow of information.

They do not accept what most major religions, in one form or another, have historically taught us to be ethical behavior: to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. They believe that greed, and the accumulation of wealth and power is a virtue, and that the strong should dominate the weak.

Their vision is one where the government serves the rich at the expense of working families and the poor. It is a vision where breaking unions and exploiting workers is good, making huge profits off human illness is good, monopolization of the economy and the media is good, racism, sexism and xenophobia is good, producing carbon emissions and destroying our planet is good, providing tax cuts for the richest Americans is good, making money by putting poor people into prisons is good, and on and on it goes...

That is what the oligarchs want.

We, as progressives, have a vision that is radically different.

Can we create an economic system based on the principles of justice, not greed? Yes, we can.

Can we transform a rigged and corrupt political system and create a vibrant democracy based on one person, one vote? Yes, we can.

Can we make health care a human right as we establish a system designed to keep us healthy and extend our life expectancy, not one based on the profit needs of insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry? Yes, we can.

Can we, in the wealthiest country on earth, provide free quality public education and job training for all from child care to graduate school? Yes, we can.

Can we combat climate change and protect the very habitability of our planet for future generations, and create millions of jobs in the process? Yes, we can.

Can we make certain that artificial intelligence and other exploding technologies are used to improve the quality of life for working people, and not just make the billionaire class even richer. Yes, we can.

And even though we are not going to succeed in achieving that vision in the immediate future with Trump as president and Republicans controlling Congress, it is important that vision be maintained and we continue to fight for it.

As part of that effort, we’ve got a lot of strategizing and work in front of us. For example, how do we effectively communicate our ideas to the vast majority of Americans who are with us, even while the billionaire class of this country controls so much of the media.

How do we leverage our collective power to elect progressives to local, state and federal positions while a small number of billionaires and their super-PACs are buying elections.

How do we mobilize the working class around the day to day issues which impact their lives: building the trade union movement, health care, housing, education, family based agriculture and so much more.

How do we fight back, on a day to day basis, against the reactionary policies of the Trump administration?

Will this effort be easy? No, of course it will not.

Can it be done? We have no choice.

If there was ever a moment when progressives needed to communicate our vision to the people of our country, this is that time. Despair is not an option. We are fighting not only for ourselves. We are fighting for our kids and future generations, and for the well-being of the planet.

Thank you for standing with me in that fight. Let’s go forward together.

Last afternoon, I went for a walk and noticed that a homeowner had recently placed a sign on their front lawn. It simply read, “I stand with Israel.” If this had been 400 or so days ago, I would have thought nothing of it. Back then, supporters of Israel were still reeling from the shock of the October 7 attack and felt a need to express themselves.

But it’s not December 2023. It’s 14 months into this nightmare. The decision to now place this sign on their front lawn raises a troubling question—exactly what, in the current context, does “stand with Israel” mean?

In just the past week, U.S. media have featured a number of well-researched reports on Israel’s efforts to secure their hold on Gaza through: the mass demolitions of homes, hospitals, schools, and infrastructure; the forced transfer of the remaining Palestinians in the north of Gaza; the fact that Israeli snipers have made a “sport” of killing Palestinians who are fleeing and keeping score of their “hits”; and the construction of military occupation bases in the far north of Gaza and the Nezarim corridor, including a “resort-like” facility to provide war-weary troops with rest and relaxation. There have also been stories on the continuing lack of medical services, food, water, sanitation, and shelter for the 2 million Palestinians crammed into Gaza’s south.

What reaction would result from a neighbor placing a “I stand with Palestine” sign on their lawn?

Added to this are developments in Israel. After a long hiatus, protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have continued. Some are objecting to his callous disregard for and manipulation of the fate of the remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Others are protesting his ongoing effort to escape prosecution for the multiple charges of corruption for which he is currently on trial.

And then there are courageous Israeli journalists and commentators who are challenging their fellow citizens to see what they have ignored for more than a year: namely, that genocide is being committed in their name just across the border.

One of these is by the brilliant commentator B. Michael. Writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, he walks his readers through the legal definition of the term “genocide.” Michael notes that the convention against this crime lists five actions, any one of which is sufficient to consider a state or people perpetrators of genocide. Michael goes on to demonstrate that Israel can be shown guilty of four of the five. He concludes, “Feigning innocence isn't admissible as a defense.” Nor will claiming that it was done “in good faith, or purely for reasons of self-defense.”

And so, at this point, what exactly does “stand with Israel” mean?

That said, those who recently posted this sign in front of their home have the right to express their views, however insensitive or repugnant others might feel them to be. Defacing their sign or inciting violence against them in response is clearly wrong. If we truly believe in democracy and the need for civil discourse, then insults, threats, or vandalism must be rejected.

But this raises another question: What reaction would result from a neighbor placing a “I stand with Palestine” sign on their lawn?

There can be no doubt that public opinion on Israel-Palestine has dramatically shifted in recent years. There is, today, greater sympathy for Palestinians than ever before and even among those who continue to support Israel, the policies of that state are increasingly being rejected. Recognizing this sea-change in opinion, pro-Israel groups and their allies in government and parts of the media have gone on the offensive in an effort to silence pro-Palestinian sentiment and even ban legitimate expressions of support for Palestinians and opposition to Israeli policies that are in violation of international and U.S. laws. As things stand, these efforts to stifle pro-Palestinian speech still appear to have the upper hand.

A review of the reactions to recent events on campuses and the debates in Congress and state legislatures makes clear that a sign as simple as “I stand with Palestine” could be denounced as inflammatory, insensitive, and even antisemitic.

It must be acknowledged that speech on both sides has in some instances veered in unacceptable directions. Pro-Israel demonstrators have taunted Palestinians with “We will rape you,” or pro-Palestinians have chanted “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” These must be condemned.

But what is worrisome are the all-too-frequent reports that relatively benign expressions of support for Palestinian rights are censored because they have made supporters of Israel “uncomfortable.” This kind of dangerous overreach is precisely what is happening.

The bottom line is that if someone wants to declare that they “stand with Israel” they should be free to do so, and accept that, given what is unfolding in Palestine, it will cause some to ask: “What exactly do you mean by that?” And their neighbors should be able to declare that they “stand with Palestine,” to answer questions they may be asked, and to do so without fear of retribution.

Sadly, we’re not there yet.

In dark times like these, shining a light on successful efforts to reverse our country’s extreme inequality is more important than ever. As we looked back on 2024, we actually found plenty to celebrate. Here are 10 inspiring wins that deserve more attention.

1. Labor Breakthrough in the South

Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted overwhelmingly in April to join the United Auto Workers (UAW), a landmark win for labor organizing in the South. The region has suffered deeply because of its low-road, anti-union economic model. Seven out of ten states with the highest levels of poverty are in the South, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Whatever happens on the national political stage over the next four years, local communities can still win important fights for a more just society.

Another UAW election, at a Mercedes-Benz facility in Vance, Alabama, where management was more aggressively anti-union, went the other way in May. But the union has vowed to continue organizing in the region. “This is a David and Goliath fight,” UAW President Shawn Fain said after the Mercedes loss. “Sometimes Goliath wins a battle. But David wins the war.”

2. Union Momentum at Amazon

Organizing workers at Amazon—now the nation’s second largest private employer—has been a white whale of the labor movement for years. Aside from a breakthrough union election win in Staten Island, puncturing the e-commerce giant’s anti-labor strategy has been challenging. That is, until this year, when the Teamsters made sizable gains.

The National Labor Relations Board ruled this summer that Amazon should be considered a joint employer of the delivery drivers it subcontracts, opening up that class of workers to organize. And organize they did—according to the Teamsters, over 5,000 drivers have joined the union at nine Amazon locations. Warehouse workers have made advances as well. In California, Amazon employees in San Francisco and at the company’s air hub in San Bernardino are now demanding union recognition.

3. Grocery Mega-Merger Blocked

For the past two years, the United Food and Commercial Workers union has led a coalition of more than 100 organizations against the proposed merger of grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons. The union predicted the mega-merger would result in “lost jobs, closed stores, food deserts, and higher prices.”

By contrast, corporate executives stood to make a killing. At Albertsons alone, the proposed merger agreement would’ve delivered as much as $146 million to the firm’s top 10 officials.

On December 10, one federal court judge and another in Washington state sided with the Federal Trade Commission and issued temporary injunctions against the deal. The following day, Albertsons threw in the towel on what would’ve been the biggest grocery store merger in U.S. history. “This is the first time the FTC has ever sought to block a merger not just because it’s gonna be bad for consumers, but also for workers,” FTC chair Lina Khan said shortly after the decision.

4. Ballot Wins on Taxes, Wages, Paid Leave

Despite the red wave on November 5, voters in several states passed ballot initiatives to adopt inequality-fighting policies that most Republican politicians oppose.

In the red states of Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska, voters approved guaranteed paid leave, while Missouri and Alaska also passed state minimum wage hikes.

Washington state voters rejected a hedge fund-financed ballot proposal to repeal the state’s path-breaking capital gains tax on the rich. They also beat back an effort to gut a state-operated long-term care insurance program. In Illinois, voters adopted a nonbinding measure expressing support for an extra 3% tax on income of over $1 million.

5. TurboTax Got Turbo-Trounced

In 2024, for the first time ever, over 100,000 Americans filed their tax returns digitally directly to the IRS. The agency’s Direct File system went live in 12 pilot states, breaking the dominance that for-profit tax preparation companies have enjoyed for years.

“This is an important fight to ensure greedy tax prep companies don’t continue to rake in money from filers who are simply doing their civic duty,” wrote Public Citizen’s Susan Harley for Inequality.org.

Direct file also advances racial justice. Color of Change and the Groundwork Collaborative exposed how Intuit’s TurboTax and H&R Block target Black and low-income communities for costly and unnecessary services.

Unfortunately, this fight is not over. House Republicans are urging President-elect Donald Trump to kill the IRS’s free direct file service on day one of his second administration.

6. Biden’s Worker Protection Spree

President Joe Biden adopted a range of pathbreaking executive actions to protect U.S. workers—including safeguards against toiling in extreme heat, broader overtime pay coverage, and new measures protecting organizing rights. He also authorized rules to crack down on bosses who misclassify employees as independent contractors or force them to sign noncompete agreements.

The beauty of executive actions: no need for Congressional approval. The downside: The next president has the power to roll them back.

Will that happen under Trump, a self-declared but dubious champion of the working class? We shall see. In the meantime, the National Employment Law Project and several other organizations have put together a guide on how state policymakers could enact similar standards at the subfederal level.

7. Grounding Private Jets

Did you know that private jets pollute 10 to 20 times more per passenger than commercial airplanes? And the typical private jet owner, with a net worth of nearly $200 million, actually pays a far smaller share of air safety fees than commercial coach passengers, according to Institute for Policy Studies research.

In 2024, Stop Private Jet Expansion, a 100-organization coalition, won two major victories in their campaign to block the expansion of New England’s largest private jet airport, Hanscom Field outside Boston. Massachusetts state rejected the developer’s environmental impact submission, demanding supplemental information. As part of a comprehensive climate bill, the state legislature also updated the charter of Massport, the agency that will decide the future of the airport, to require them to consider carbon emissions and climate change in their decision-making.

8. Arming Millions of Davids Against Wall Street Goliaths

Elon Musk has called for “deleting” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. What’s his problem with this federal agency? For Musk and his finance bro buddies, it appears the CFPB has been overly effective in helping ordinary Americans stand up to big money interests.

Recently the agency announced it’s forcing shady “credit repair” companies to return $1.8 billion in illegal junk fees to 4.3 million Americans. The agency also just issued new limits on overdraft fees that will save consumers billions more. During its nearly 14-year history, the CFPB has won nearly $21 billion in compensation for victims of fraud, racial discrimination in lending, and other financial abuse.

“Weakening the CFPB, slowing its work, or steering it to favor industry over the public interest,” explains the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform, “would give bad actors a green light to do their worst and further deepen this country’s racial wealth gap.”

9. Public Money for the Public Good

For four decades, procurement rules made it difficult for local and state policymakers to ensure that federally funded projects create good jobs. With megabillions in new public investment about to flow into infrastructure and clean energy projects, a labor-community alliance known as the Local Opportunities Coalition led the charge to get rid of these anti-worker vestiges of the conservative Reagan era.

Finally, in 2024, the Biden administration got the job done. Now state and local governments can give companies a leg up in bidding competitions if they commit to creating specific numbers of jobs with minimum levels of pay and benefits. They can also require hiring preferences for local workers and disadvantaged communities, ban the use of contract funds for union-busting, and prohibit employers from misclassifying workers as “independent contractors” to skirt labor laws.

10. Communities Standing up for Quality Care

Whatever happens on the national political stage over the next four years, local communities can still win important fights for a more just society.

One particularly inspiring example from 2024: the battles to protect county-owned nursing homes in rural Wisconsin against privatization. Study after study has shown that private equity-owned facilities have lower-quality care and higher mortality rates. And yet many Republican lawmakers are backing for-profit corporations’ efforts to take over this critical service.

As veteran community organizer George Goehl has reported, Wisconsin seniors put up a strong fight this year. They succeeded in ousting pro-privatization members of at least three county boards and are continuing to organize to protect their healthcare from corporate greed.

Champions in the fight against inequality face formidable challenges. But by working together at all levels—from the shop floor to state houses to the halls of Congress—we can still find ways to build power and move our country towards a just economy that works for everyone.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at the age of 100, is a man whose legacy will forever be inextricably linked to Israel and Palestine. Yet that legacy will be built as much on myth as on reality, as with so many other aspects of the history and politics of the “Holy Land.”

Carter is remembered fondly by many on the left, and for good reason. In many areas, he tried to govern with humanity, decency, and with regard to people’s rights. Whether due to his own shortcomings or the limitations of the system, he was not always successful, as citizens of Cambodia and East Timor can attest. Still, if he was far from perfect, Carter did still bring principles of human rights into his policy thinking more than any other U.S. president in living memory, and quite possibly in all of American history.

There can be little doubt that Carter’s heart was in the right place when it came to his ambition to resolve what he referred to as the “Israel-Palestine conflict.” Carter spoke often about the need for Palestinian rights to be recognized, but he also repeatedly noted that he was motivated by his affection for Israel and his desire to see it survive, something he did not believe it could do if it continued to oppress the Palestinians.

The most striking thing I recall about Carter—aside from the oppressive feeling his Secret Service guards projected—was the depth of his feeling when he talked about both Jewish history and the Palestinian present, at that time.

Carter had, and often expressed, boundless sympathy for the Jewish people and what they had endured throughout history. But he recognized both that this history did not justify the oppression of another people and that establishing an ethnocentric apartheid state would not end the scourge of antisemitism or the harm that caused to Jews. This was the ethos he expressed in his book, even while it was less visible in his policies as president.

Carter’s view of the issue was, inevitably, shaped by his evangelical Christian background and his thorough immersion in the view of Israel that dominated the United States throughout the Cold War years after World War II. It was a view of Israel that few Palestinians would recognize, but it was also a view that, in the 1970s and 1980s, was still more critical of Israeli actions than the overwhelming majority of Americans.

Carter’s view evolved over the years, as we can see from the two major points of Carter’s engagement with the issue: the Camp David agreement and Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1978 and 1979, respectively; and the publication of his controversial book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in 2006.

Meeting Carter

I had the privilege of meeting President Carter a few years before his book was published. The meeting was attended by about half a dozen progressive leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area, on the UC Berkeley campus.

The most striking thing I recall about Carter—aside from the oppressive feeling his Secret Service guards projected—was the depth of his feeling when he talked about both Jewish history and the Palestinian present, at that time. I’ve met many political leaders, and I’m used to the air of phoniness they project. There was none of that with Carter. If he wasn’t genuinely affected by the suffering he was talking about, he was a much better actor than he ever was a politician.

Carter spoke with pride of the work he put in to get Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to an agreement at Camp David, and with immense regret that he didn’t do more to secure a better future for the Palestinian people. One can debate the politics and strategy of his actions, and even find considerable fault with them, but it is clear that his intentions toward both peoples were positive.

Carter is seen by much of the Jewish community and many other supporters of Israel as an enemy, the man who forced then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to accept compromises that he and the pro-Israel community wished to reject. But as it played out, Carter did more for Israel’s security than any other U.S. president, while unwittingly setting the stage for the steady erosion of Palestinian rights that the Oslo process represented.

Camp David

The result of the Camp David summit and the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement that emerged from it was that Israel has not faced a credible military threat since the agreement was put in place. Carter understood, as any observer would, that if Israel made peace with Egypt, it would remove the single biggest military challenger in the region and the remaining Arab states would no longer be able to mount a credible threat against Israel. He understood as well that by bringing Egypt firmly into the United States’ sphere of influence, the Cold War balance of power in the Middle East shifted significantly.

Carter, in that case, acted not only in the interests of Israel, but also had a clear American interest in the outcome. The regime of annual aid that has flowed ever since to both Israel and Egypt locked both countries into an alliance, and into a certain degree of dependence on the U.S., a factor that was of great importance in Cold War strategy.

All of this was lost on Israel’s supporters in the United States. In his book, We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, historian Eric Alterman described the reaction to Carter mentioning the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,” citing Carter’s Press Secretary Jody Powell describing the reaction as “bonkers.” Alterman elaborated:

Democratic fundraising events were cancelled. Representatives of the administration to Jewish groups were shunned. Hyman Bookbinder, the outspokenly liberal Washington representative of the American Jewish Committee, lectured the Carter people, “Obviously you apparently do not really understand what these words mean…‘Palestinian rights’ means the destruction of Israel.” A Harris poll taken at the time found 60% of Jews agreeing with the statement that “the president and his people have abandoned Israel.”

Alterman further noted that the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations at the time, Alexander Schindler, leaked the contents of a private meeting with Carter to the press, a highly unusual betrayal of trust. That generated even more intense controversy and American Jewish anger at Carter, as it was intended to do.

All of this, it must be noted, was in response to Carter’s vision of Palestine being a sort of autonomous adjunct of Jordan, a position not far removed from that of most of the Israeli political spectrum. He was not advocating an independent Palestinian state, an idea which was completely out of bounds in American political discourse of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Indeed, Carter, in March 1977, said that “the first prerequisite of a lasting peace is the recognition of Israel by her neighbors, Israel’s right to exist, Israel’s right to exist permanently.” Carter never wavered from that position, despite the invective hurled at him by Israelis and Israel’s American boosters for the rest of his life.

When the historic agreement emerged from Camp David, parts of the Jewish community saw Carter in a better light, but this soon faded amid controversy over the sale of fighter jets to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Jewish leadership got even more enraged when, due to a miscommunication, the U.S. voted in favor of a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemned Israeli settlement in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Though Carter said that the U.S. was supposed to abstain and only voted “yes” by mistake, the Jewish leadership, already hostile to him, was not mollified. It’s worth noting, however, that at that time, opposition to settlements was a much stronger U.S. policy, so much so that even the staunchest pro-Israel advocates didn’t expect the U.S. to vote “no” on the resolution. Times have certainly changed.

While the Jewish community was nowhere near large or powerful enough to cause the defeat of an incumbent president, it was a factor in Edward Kennedy’s strong, if ultimately unsuccessful, challenge for the Democratic nomination in 1980 which weakened Carter. Carter had the poorest showing among Jews of any Democratic presidential candidate since 1920, although he still won a plurality of the vote (John Anderson, who ran as an Independent, got 15% of the Jewish vote to Carter’s 45% and Ronald Reagan’s 39%).

Yet, after all of that, and with some continued grumbling and foot-stomping, Israel did manage to make a peace with Egypt; withdraw its settlements from the Sinai Peninsula; secure the annual funding that has stabilized and grown its economy and helped it become the dominant military power in the region; and kept Egypt as a cold ally ever since. Israel has Jimmy Carter to thank for all of that.

Reagan did little but press forward on Carter’s actions until the end of his second term. Ironically, Reagan would, only a few months after taking office, have his own run-ins with Israel’s domestic U.S. lobby, over the sale of the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) to Saudi Arabia.

Yet Reagan remained beloved among the pro-Israel forces, despite selling a state-of-the-art military system to the Saudis, whom Israel was still extremely unfriendly with at that point; despite his frequent criticism of Israel’s behavior in Lebanon; and despite rebuking Israel for its dangerous attack on the Osirak nuclear site in Iraq in 1981. The difference was that Reagan rarely mentioned the Palestinians and often said nice things about Israel.

Apartheid

“And the word ‘apartheid’ is exactly accurate,” Carter told journalist Amy Goodman in 2007. “Within Palestinian territory, they are absolutely and totally separated, much worse than they were in South Africa, by the way. And the other thing is, the other definition of ‘apartheid’ is, one side dominates the other. And the Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people.”

Carter was responding to the resounding criticism of his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book itself was far less remarkable than the title, which drew an avalanche of criticism to Carter, including accusations of antisemitism. Then-ADL leader Abraham Foxman said, “The title is to de-legitimize Israel, because if Israel is like South Africa, it doesn’t really deserve to be a democratic state. He’s provoking, he’s outrageous, and he’s bigoted.”

Foxman’s statement is bizarre. States, of course, do not “deserve” to be democratic, it is something they either are to a significant degree or they are not. Foxman could not even utter the possibility that Israel was not a democratic state, which, interestingly, was certainly not what Carter was saying either in his book or his subsequent statements and writing.

Jimmy Carter, for all of his missteps, was, at heart, the decent man that Joe Biden liked to claim to be and couldn’t be farther away from actually being.

Carter was trying to warn Israel that it would become an apartheid state if it didn’t change course. This stood in sharp contrast to the claims of Palestinians, who, by 2007, had already been accusing Israel of apartheid for many years. Worse for Foxman was that Carter made the argument that legitimate Palestinian views were rarely heard in the media. Although Carter neither stated, nor even implied, that this demonstrable statement of fact had anything to do with a nefarious conspiracy of Jewish control, Foxman said, “The reason he gives for why he wrote this book is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media.”

Carter knew he was going to get hit for the title of his book. The substance, however, made it clear that he was trying to steer Israel away from its own self-immolation on the altar of its occupation. At the end of his book, he wrote, “The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law... It will be a tragedy—for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world—if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid, and sustained violence is permitted to prevail.”

The woman in Joe Biden’s administration who currently, and undeservedly, holds the position of Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, said Carter’s book “ignores a legacy of mistreatment, expulsion, and murder committed against Jews. It trivializes the murder of Israelis. Now, facing a storm of criticism, he has relied on antisemitic stereotypes in defense.” The scurrilous accusation is backed up with the same sleight of hand Foxman used.

Carter continued to advocate for Palestinian rights while also, contrary to the assertion of Lipstadt and Foxman, repeatedly asserting that Israel must be afforded a secure existence within recognized and clear borders.

In November 2016, as Barack Obama was preparing to leave office, Carter urged the outgoing president to recognize a Palestinian state, arguing, “The combined weight of United States recognition, United Nations membership, and a Security Council resolution solidly grounded in international law would lay the foundation for future diplomacy. These steps would bolster moderate Palestinian leadership, while sending a clear assurance to the Israeli public of the worldwide recognition of Israel and its security.” It was not the first time he had promoted such recognition.

This was the theme of Carter’s efforts from the 1970s to the end of his days. He was willing to take risks to see that vision come true. Over the years, he and the Carter Center he started made many efforts to heal the breach between Fatah and Hamas, ignoring criticism over talking with Hamas.

Carter’s legacy should be scrutinized carefully and honestly, with the same critical eye as any other president. He made his mistakes, and, as with any president, innocent people suffered as a result. But more than any other U.S. president, Jimmy Carter tried to create a better future for Palestinians and for Israeli Jews. No president before or since has tried as hard or has placed peace ahead of political concerns to the extent he did.

Jimmy Carter, for all of his missteps, was, at heart, the decent man that Joe Biden liked to claim to be and couldn’t be farther away from actually being. The hateful comments that came his way for many years, mostly from the Jewish community but also from the Christian Zionists who share his evangelical beliefs but not his understanding of what those beliefs mean, were horribly misplaced. He cared deeply and tried to do what he could to create a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike. For that, he’s been called an antisemite. Every person who ever uttered that slur against him owes him an apology. Now would be a good time to send it.

December 30, 2024 Jimmy Carter was the last president to actively open the government for engagement by citizen groups. Right after his November 1976 election, he agreed to address a huge hotel ballroom in D.C. full of local and national citizen advocates. It was a great success never again repeated by succeeding president-elects. Mr. Carter…

It looks and feels like the Russo-Ukraine War is entering its final phase. President-elect Donald Trump has signaled that he will reduce or eliminate military and economic aid to the Zelensky government. Even before that happens, Russia has improved its position on the battlefield. Now Zelensky is saying he would consider acknowledging the loss of Crimea and the Donbas. What happens next?

The post TMI Show Ep 46: “Great Power Politics: The Winner Gets Ukraine” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 46: “Great Power Politics: The Winner Gets Ukraine” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On the occasion of former President Jimmy Carter’s death, I am reprinting this column with some updates.

The guinea worm may be the second major human disease after smallpox to be completely eradicated. It is a parasite that you get from drinking water with small fleas in it. The larvae of the worm are in the fleas, and they migrate into your muscles. After growing there for a year, as a long thread gathered in a bump, the worm works its way out over two or three days, which is extremely painful and potentially debilitating. The disease mainly existed in Central Africa, and especially in South Sudan. At its height it afflicted 3.5 million people in 21 countries. The technical name for the disease is dracunculiasis.

The Carter Center is reporting that in 2024, only seven human cases were reported worldwide! Carter had wanted to outlive the disease and he came very close.

He brought a debilitating disease’s toll down from 3.5 million people over nearly two dozen countries to almost zero.

After he left the White House, Jimmy Carter did a lot of traveling for his foundation. In Africa, he saw those suffering from the guinea worm, and asked what could be done about it. He was told that the flea that carries the larvae is big enough so that even just filtering water through cloth would get rid of it.

From 1986, Carter put together a coalition of the World Health Organization and health ministries in the afflicted countries (which then included Pakistan) to get the word out to people about the need for water filtration.

He even at one point in the mid-1990s helped negotiate a cease-fire between the north and the south in Sudan so that his activists could reach affected villagers and teach them how to filter the water!

The Garter Center thus spearheaded this effort, though it became an international movement with many participants.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, “Since 1986, WHO has certified 200 countries, areas, and territories as dracunculiasis-free. Five countries with ongoing endemic dracunculiasis (Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, and South Sudan), plus Sudan, which has not yet completed its dossier and follow-up visit, have not been certified by WHO.”

Carter showed what a determined person can accomplish through single-minded purpose driven by compassion, and the pursuit of strategic partnerships and cooperation. He brought a debilitating disease’s toll down from 3.5 million people over nearly two dozen countries to almost zero. The former president has given the world a model that should be deployed to solve other pressing problems. He was one of the world’s few true heroes.

With President Jimmy Carter’s passing and Donald Trump about to return to the White House, it’s a good time to recall a phone conversation that Carter had with Trump during his first term. Carter’s advice would serve Trump well if he really wants to fulfill his campaign promise to Put America First–something he failed to do in his first term.

In April 2019, Jimmy Carter told his church congregation in Georgia that President Trump had called him for advice about China. Carter said he told Trump that China was economically overtaking the United States as the world’s largest and most dynamic economy because the United States had spent decades wasting trillions of dollars to fight endless wars, while China had instead focused on economic development and lifted hundreds of millions of its people out of extreme poverty. “China has not wasted a single penny on war,” Carter said, “and that’s why they’re ahead of us, in almost every way.”

The next day, the White House confirmed that the two presidents “had a very good telephone conversation about President Trump’s stance on trade with China and numerous other topics.”

Some of Trump’s statements during the election campaign suggest that he hasn’t forgotten Carter’s advice. At the very least, he got the message that peace would be good for America, and that a lot of Americans understand that. Majorities of Americans have long supported a ceasefire in Gaza, and a plurality now support a negotiated peace in Ukraine, too. Trump promised to deliver on both. He even said that he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, based on his good relations with leaders in Russia and Ukraine.

Maybe now Trump can understand that normalizing war crimes only leads to more war crimes, not to peace or stability.

Americans may be more worried about problems closer to home than the Middle East or Ukraine, but President Carter connected the dots between U.S. war-making and our quality of life in America.

“And I think the difference is, if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure, you’d probably have $2 trillion leftover,” Carter explained to his congregation. “We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing, we’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong.”

What Carter described to Trump is the classic choice between “guns and butter” that faces every society. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the United States was a rising economic power, like China today. Europe’s imperial powers destroyed each other in the First World War, leaving even the victors, Britain and France, with multibillion dollar debts to J.P. Morgan and the U.S. Treasury. The United States’ economic success made it the world’s banker and industrial leader and gave it a decisive role in the history of the 20th century.

Today, it is the United States that has an unprecedented national debt of $36 trillion, and our military budget consumes 56% of federal discretionary spending, putting the squeeze on all our other needs. But we can still enjoy shared prosperity and a brighter future if Trump can do as Carter advised him and wean our government off its addiction to war.

So why are we not reassured by Trump’s promises to make peace and put America first? There are three things that worry us: his first-term track record; his second-term cabinet picks; and his aggressive rhetoric since the election (as opposed to what he said on the campaign trail).

Let’s start with his track record. Despite loud promises to tackle the entrenched interests of the “Deep State” and to “Drain the Swamp,” Trump’s first term was four years of Christmas Days for billionaires and corporate interests, starting with the military-industrial complex. In FY2025 inflation-adjusted dollars, Trump spent an average of $292 billion per year on Pentagon “investment” accounts, or payments to weapons makers and other military suppliers. That was a 24% increase over Obama’s second term.

Trump’s record tax giveaway to his billionaire buddies was not balanced by any cuts in military spending, which was as much of a sacred cow to him as to Bush, Obama, and Biden. This toxic combination blew up the national debt, leaving nothing in the kitty for improving education, healthcare, public transportation or any of our society’s other critical needs. That tax cut will expire in a year’s time, but Trump has made it clear that he intends to give even greater tax breaks to his billionaire buddies.

Trump deserves credit for not starting any new wars during his first term, but his escalations of Bush’s and Obama’s wars made his first year in office in 2017 the heaviest year of U.S. and allied bombing since the First Gulf War in 1991, dropping more than 60,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia.

As Jimmy Carter told Trump, by making peace and renouncing war and militarism he can actually put America First, save trillions of dollars and invest in America.

Many Americans remember Trump’s shocking statement that “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” What the U.S. corporate media swept under the rug was that the Iraqi forces who captured the bombed out ruins of Islamic State’s stronghold in Mosul’s Old City took Trump at his word and killed all the survivors, including women and children, just as Israel is doing in parts of Gaza today. Maybe now Trump can understand that normalizing war crimes only leads to more war crimes, not to peace or stability.

When it comes to Trump’s new cabinet picks, he might have jettisoned some of the worst hawks in his last coterie, such as John Bolton, but some of his nominees for top foreign policy jobs are awful, including Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor nominee Mike Waltz and Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth.

Tulsi Gabbard is a more encouraging choice as National Intelligence Director, but as a House member, she voted for two thirds of Obama’s and Trump’s military spending bills, and was always a pushover for expensive new weapon systems. As we asked when she ran for president in 2020, which Tulsi Gabbard will we see in her new job? The one who opposes regime change wars and the new Cold War with Russia, or the one who couldn’t say no to nuclear-armed cruise missiles in 2014, 2015 or 2016? And who will Trump listen to? Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance, who is more non-interventionist, or warmongers Rubio and Waltz?

We don’t want to place too much stock in Trump’s often contradictory public statements, but he has sounded very hawkish lately. If you believe everything Trump says, he wants to buy Greenland, invade Mexico to fight immigrants and drug gangs, annex Canada as the 51st state, put 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and seize the Panama Canal and close it to China. In Trump’s last term he badgered NATO countries to increase their military spending to 2 percent of GDP, but now he is calling on them to spend a staggering 5 percent, far more than the 3.1 percent of GDP that the U.S. spent in 2024.

This is a test for the American people. Do we want a showman, tough guy president, playing ringmaster of the corporate media circus? Do we want a leader who threatens to invade Canada, Mexico, Panama (again) and Greenland, like an American Netanyahu dreaming of a Western Greater Israel? Or should we demand a president who really puts America First? A president who makes peace in Ukraine and the Middle East? A president who finally starts bringing our troops home from those 800 foreign military bases all over the world? A president who can look at a map and see that Guantanamo is in Cuba and the Golan Heights are in Syria?

As Jimmy Carter told Trump, by making peace and renouncing war and militarism he can actually put America First, save trillions of dollars and invest in America. The Democrats have had their chances to do right by the American people and they’ve blown it so many times we’ve lost count. So the ball’s in Trump’s court. Will he follow Carter’s sage advice?

In January 1977 the nuns where we used to attend church in Lebanon gifted me the only dog I ever owned, a mutt they’d called Jimmy, after the newly elected American president. American politics was the world’s most accessible entertainment even then, so Jimmy Carter was big news in Lebanon. To those Antonine nuns Carter was something of a sex symbol. He wore his Christianity on his sleeve with a leer worthy of Mary Magdalene, allowing them to lust for him in their heart. In consequence they delivered me a Jimmy more frisky than pious.

Not being a registered Democrat I promptly renamed my new dog to something more presidential (King). Little did I know that I’d end up having more affection for Jimmy Carter than for any president before or since in my lifetime, which began a year to the day after JFK’s assassination. Maybe it’s because Carter was still president when I landed in the United States as a permanent resident in 1979. Inflation meant nothing to me. Gas lines were way shorter than they’d been in Lebanon. No one was shooting at me even in New York City, where we lived at what was to be the height of its post-Prohibition crime wave. It was a great time.

I’d come to admire Carter from another memory in 1978. This was the president who’d managed what no other president before or since has managed. He’d gotten Egypt and Israel to sign a peace treaty and Israel to give up the Sinai, the biggest and last real achievement in Middle East peacemaking since France and Britain turned that region into a hellhole on time-release after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.

Egypt’s Anwar Sadat thought he was a latter-day pharaoh, but he’d started the impossible by going to Jerusalem and daring the Israelis to the peace table. Israel’s Menahem Begin was (and remained) a terrorist, his hatred for Arabs overmatching in weaponry and violence Arabs’ berserk hatred for Jews. Carter’s skill and smarts, and a self-righteousness almost as distressing as Woodrow Wilson’s, looked past all that in those famous 13 days at Camp David.

Opinion polls told Carter he was nuts. He looked past them. He ignored the imperious convention that presidents should not personally engage in negotiations. Mostly, he looked past the bigoted Kissinger doctrine–that Israel is always right, that nothing in Middle East initiatives ought to be done without Israel’s approval first. The approach had prevailed since Kennedy (Eisenhower, the last president to stand up to Israel, had no use for it) and would prevail again after Carter, as it does to Biden-bloodied day.

Camp David was the exception.

Of course neither Begin nor Sadat gave a shit about Palestinians. No Arabs and no Israelis ever have. They just wanted to remove their militaries from each other’s faces so Sadat could go back to repressing his people and Begin could go back to repressing Palestinians in the rest of the occupied territories. Peace with Egypt was to be the recalibration of repression in the West bank and Gaza. Carter, so often naive, looked past that, too, thinking Camp David was a start, not an end. (Clinton repeated the mistake with the deservedly doomed Oslo accords a decade and a half later.) He took at face value both men’s promises that they’d turn to the Palestinian problem some other time. Maybe Sadat meant it. It’s doubtful. It’s certain Begin, who called Palestinians “beasts walking on two legs” while Rafael Eitan, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, called them “drugged roaches in a bottle,” didn’t mean it.

Sadat was assassinated for signing the Camp David accords. Reagan was elected. The Middle East bored him once he vaguely learned it wasn’t to the right of the Midwest. He cleared the way for more unlawful Israeli colonization of the West Bank.

Begin took advantage, going on an orgy of “settlements”–a sanitizing euphemism that reduces land theft to something like summer camp and that the servile American press uses still. The orgy accelerated under Sharon and Netanyahu, with American money. Begin and Sharon in 1982 invaded Lebanon (with American weaponry) in the deadliest of all Israeli invasions until then, kicking off a 20-year occupation. Begin thought he was getting rid of the PLO. The invasion inseminated the more brutal and indigenous Hezbollah, provoking yet more wars–1996, 2006, 2024–with America turning a blind eye and thousands of Lebanese civilians paying the price, as always.

The 1994 peace between Israel and Jordan gave Israel still freer rein in the West Bank, once the brief hopes of the Oslo accords–which were supposed to lead to an autonomous Palestinian state–were discarded with Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by an Israeli terrorist a year later–a Jewish ultra-nationalist, but really the twin of Sadat’s assassins. The so-called two-state solution to which every American president paid lip service and Israel never took seriously died about then, reinforcing what Carter called, with unfortunate restraint, Israeli apartheid.

At home, Carter’s presidency is remembered as a failure. Carter biographer Kai Bird has discredited the myth, documenting too many accomplishments to count. Not that this amnesiac country is interested in fact. The two crises that overwhelmed Carter’s legacy were the oil shock of 1979 and its subsequent inflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis, when 53 Americans were held hostage for 444 days in Tehran after the fall of the Shah. The oil shock was not Carter’s doing. The hostage crisis was.

The Shah was one of the most vain and mass-murdering leaders of the 20th century, a sort of dandy Idi Amin. He was the mutant child of an abominable union between Winston Churchill and the CIA in 1953. He’d been flattered, financed and fellated by every American president since Eisenhower on the cynical calculation that tyrannizing over 40 million Iranians in exchange for blocking Soviet control of the Persian Gulf was ok with them. We finally paid the price. The Shah was ousted by the identically reprehensible but also vengeful Khomeini.

Carter despised the Shah and initially resisted for most of a year letting him into the United States. The Shah was now himself battling what he’d been to his country: cancer. Carter’s aides and Henry Kissinger (as always) kept up the pressure. Kissinger threatened to undermine Carter’s arms control treaty with the Soviets by condemning SALT II before the Senate.

Just as Carter was building what seemed like constructive relations with the new Iranian regime, he gave in and let the Shah check into New York Hospital, despite warnings from the American embassy in Tehran that it would endanger the staff there. It was the single worst decision of Carter’s presidency. Nine days after the Shah entered the United States, Iranian militants took the Americans hostage.

But for one more error–again giving in to hawks with an attempted rescue that ended in disaster in the Iranian desert, with the death of eight Americans–Carter handled the crisis with admirable diplomacy, refusing escalations to safeguard the life of the hostages even at the cost of his plummeting poll numbers.

He might have won their release but for the Reagan campaign repeating the Nixon campaign’s treachery against Johnson in 1968. Nixon go-betweens carried out secret negotiations with the enemy for electoral gain. So did Reagan’s with Iran. It was a preview of Oliver North’s secret negotiations and illegal arms deals with the regime a few years later as Reagan secretly siphoned millions of dollars and weapons to Nicaraguan terrorists he called “freedom fighters.”

As Kai Bird wrote, “now we have good evidence that Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager Bill Casey made a secret trip to Madrid in the summer of 1980, where he may have met with a representative of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and thus prolonged the hostage crisis. If this is true, such interference in the hostage negotiations sought to deny the Carter administration an October surprise, a release of the hostages late in the campaign, and it was dirty politics and a raw deal for the American hostages.”

Of course it’s true: Khomeini released the hostages minutes after Reagan was inaugurated, the day the most scandal-free administration of the 20th century gave way to the most scandal-ridden. It was Fantasyland again in (white) America.

Americans like their country to be run as a theme park. Annoyances like reality, responsibility and malaise have no place. Neither did Carter. The fantasists have been taking their revenge on him ever since, even as Carter’s legend grew in the 43 years since his presidency. He became the busiest ex-president in history, if still the least celebrated and the most shunned. The great conciliator out-hustled some of his predecessors’ actual presidencies (notably the senescent Reagan, Trump and all those zeros between Wilson and FDR), and of course out-living two of those who followed him. I thought he had a good chance of outliving Biden and Trump II. He’s decided otherwise. His one hundred years of solitude are over.

As for King, my dog, I’m glad I renamed him. A year after I left Lebanon he, too, was assassinated. I wouldn’t have wanted to have Jimmy’s death on my conscience. My poor dog was running after a neighbor’s chickens. The neighbor, Khalil, shot him dead. The same neighbor who not long afterward shot his own son, Munir–who had been one of my closest friends–dead. Khalil was finally imprisoned.

Lebanon, like the rest of the Middle East, could have used a few dozen Carter Centers: “Waging peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope.” So could the United States, a nation proudly and vindictively becoming more Begin than Sadat, more Khalil than Carter, by the day.

Among President Biden’s many laudable environmental accomplishments, one of his historic failures is that he declined to protect America’s ocean ecosystems. Despite the president’s professed goal to protect 30 percent of America’s oceans by 2030, he did virtually none of this. Perhaps he was planning on a second term (obviously a bad gamble), or perhaps he never really intended to do any of this.

Regardless, the hope and optimism for ocean protection at the beginning of the Biden administration has, in the end, turned to profound disappointment. On this issue, the administration prioritized local politics over science, need, and national interest.

At the start of his term, a group of marine scientists from across the nation submitted a joint Scientists’ Letter on Ocean Protection to President Biden, urging him to strongly protect 30% of America’s ocean ecosystems by 2030. The scientists’ ocean letter — signed by more than 90 university deans, department chairs, distinguished marine professors, agency and independent scientists (including legendary Dr. Jane Goodall) — told the president that America’s ocean ecosystems are in significant decline due to decades of over exploitation, climate change, acidification, and pollution.

History will not be kind to those government officials with the responsibility to address our ocean crisis, but stood by and did nothing.

Scientists warned the president that ocean ecosystems will have difficulty retaining functional integrity throughout the climate crisis this century, and that these ecosystems need the strongest protections the government can provide. As virtually all of America’s strongly protected federal waters to date are in the remote central Pacific, and none are on productive, intensively exploited continental shelves, the scientists urged President Biden to use executive authority under the Antiquities Act to establish Marine National Monuments in the Arctic Ocean, Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, Gulf of Alaska, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Maine, Caribbean, and Pacific and Atlantic coasts. This isn’t rocket science, but simply adaptive, precautionary ecosystem management.

President Biden ignored the scientists’ plea.

Although he has so far designated seven cultural/historic monuments on land, Biden has still established no Marine National Monuments. While it is possible he may enact marine monuments in the final weeks of his term, indications are that this is unlikely.

Further, the Biden administration has designated only three small National Marine Sanctuaries: two in the Great Lakes and one small one off California. In early January, the administration is expected to announce, with great fanfare no doubt, its designation of a Marine Sanctuary overlaying the already strongly protected Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (northwestern Hawaiian Islands), Coral Reef Reserve, and National Wildlife Refuge. To be clear, this sanctuary designation will not protect any new ocean area, but will simply further insulate existing protections from future administrative and legal challenges (e.g. at the Supreme Court). While this additional layer of protection is appropriate, it does not substitute for the critical need to strongly protect other more threatened marine ecosystems. And on this, the Biden administration simply failed.

The U.S. presently has seventeen National Marine Sanctuaries, five of those in just one state (California); and five Marine National Monuments, four in the remote central Pacific, and one small one in the northwest Atlantic. But other productive, and troubled marine ecosystems on continental shelves continue to be ignored, largely due to politics.

Alaska for instance—with more shoreline, continental shelf, marine mammals, seabirds, and fish than the rest of the U.S. combined, and one of the most over-exploited and climate stressed marine ecosystems in the world ocean—still has no national marine sanctuary or marine national monument, due to federal timidity in face of industry and political opposition. The federal government has essentially ceded ownership of Alaska’s vast federal offshore waters—over twice the size of the land area of the state—to parochial politics in Alaska.

Astonishingly, the U.S. is the only Arctic coastal nation that still has no permanently protected Arctic Ocean waters. Russia, Canada, Norway, and Greenland all have established permanent Arctic marine protected areas. But while presenting itself as an international leader in Arctic and ocean conservation, the U.S. has only established temporary administrative restrictions in its Arctic waters (oil & gas withdrawals and commercial fishery closures) that will almost certainly be rescinded in the Trump II administration, as most were in Trump I.

To remedy this, a group of Arctic Indigenous Peoples, conservationists, and marine scientists in Alaska proposed to President Biden that he designate an Arctic Ocean Marine National Monument, to protect the U.S. Arctic Ocean now in severe decline due to global warming and sea ice loss.

The Arctic Ocean Monument would encompass all U.S. federal waters (3-200 miles offshore) from the Northern Bering Sea north along the U.S./Russia maritime boundary, and east to the U.S./Canada maritime boundary (approx. 219,000 square miles), and would also include the Extended Continental Shelf seabed claims recently made by the U.S. in international Arctic waters north of the 200-mile limit (approx. 200,000 square miles). The Monument would permanently prohibit offshore oil & gas development, commercial fishing, and seabed mining; protect subsistence; enhance science; and would establish a co-management relationship between the federal government and Arctic coastal Tribes to manage this vast offshore ecosystem. As the region is the now-submerged ancient homeland for all Indigenous Peoples in the western hemisphere—Beringia—it is an inarguable candidate for monument designation under the Antiquities Act.

President Biden could have helped save our oceans with the simple stroke of his pen, but he refused.

Even though President Biden stated that: “What I really want to do... is conserve significant amounts of Alaskan sea and land forever,” he ignored the Arctic Ocean monument proposal.

This decade is likely our last best chance to secure strong protections for America’s offshore ecosystems, but now as the Biden administration has failed to do so, and Trump II will do none of this, we may have lost that last best chance.

Whenever faced with industry push-back or political pressure to ocean conservation measures, every federal administration, Democratic or Republican, simply refuses to act. This is a recipe for a disastrous future for our oceans. History will not be kind to those government officials with the responsibility to address our ocean crisis, but stood by and did nothing.

President Biden could have helped save our oceans with the simple stroke of his pen, but he refused.

The blame for further industrial damage and decline in America’s ocean ecosystems in the Trump II presidency will be shared by President Biden, as he had the authority, science, public support, and national interest obligation to prevent such, yet did nothing—an historic betrayal of the public trust.