The United States, Turkey, and Israel all responded to the fall of the Assad government in Damascus by launching bombing campaigns on Syria. Israel also attacked and destroyed most of the Syrian Navy in port at Latakia, and invaded Syria from the long-occupied Golan Heights, advancing to within 16 miles of the capital, Damascus.

The United States said that its bombing campaign targeted remnants of Islamic State in the east of the country, hitting 75 targets with 140 bombs and missiles, according to Air Force Times.

A long-standing force of 900 U.S. troops illegally occupies that part of Syria, partly to divert Syria’s meager oil revenues to the U.S.’s Kurdish allies and prevent the Syrian government from regaining that source of revenue. U.S. bombing badly damaged Syria’s oil infrastructure during the war with the Islamic State, but Russia has been ready to help Syria restore full output whenever it recovers control of that area. U.S. forces in Syria have been under attack by various Syrian militia forces, not just the Islamic State, with at least 127 attacks since October 2023.

Meanwhile, Turkiyë is conducting airstrikes, drone strikes, and artillery fire as part of a new offensive by a militia it formed in 2017 under the Orwellian guise of the “Syrian National Army” to invade and occupy parts of Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish enclave in northeast Syria.

Israel, however, launched a much broader bombing campaign than Turkey or the U.S., with about 600 airstrikes on post-Assad Syria in the first eight days of its existence. Without waiting to see what form of government the political transition in Syria leads to, Israel set about methodically destroying its entire military infrastructure, to ensure that whatever government comes to power will be as defenseless as possible.

Israel claims its new occupation of Syrian territory is a temporary move to ensure its own security. But while Israel bombed Syria 220 times over the past year, killing about 300 people, Syria showed restraint and did not retaliate for those attacks.

The pattern of Israeli history has been that land grabs like this usually turn into long-term illegal Israeli annexations, as in the Golan Heights and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. That will surely be the case with Israel’s new strategic base on top of Mount Hermon, overlooking Damascus and the surrounding area, unless a new Syrian government or international diplomacy can force Israel to withdraw.

Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Russia, and the U.N. have all joined the global condemnation of the new Israeli assault on Syria. Geir Pedersen, the U.N. Special Envoy to Syria, called Israel’s military actions “highly irresponsible,” and U.N. peacekeepers have removed Israeli flags from newly-occupied Syrian territory.

The Qatari Foreign Ministry called Israel’s actions “a dangerous development and a blatant attack on Syria’s sovereignty and unity as well as a flagrant violation of international law… that will lead the region to further violence and tension.”

The Saudi Foreign Ministry reiterated that the Golan Heights is an occupied Arab territory, and said that Israel’s actions confirmed “Israel’s continued violation of the rules of international law and its determination to sabotage Syria’s chances of restoring its security, stability and territorial integrity.”

The only country in the world that has ever recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights is the United States, under the first Trump administration, and it is part of Biden’s disastrous legacy in the Middle East that he failed to stand up for international law and reverse Trump’s recognition of that illegal Israeli annexation.

As people all over the world watch Israel ignore the rules of international law that every country in the world is committed to live by, we are confronted by the age-old question of how to respond to a country that systematically ignores and violates these rules. The foundation of the UN Charter is the agreement by all countries to settle their differences diplomatically and peacefully, instead of by the threat or use of military force.

As Americans, we should start by admitting that our own country has led the way down this path of war and militarism, perpetuating the scourge of war that the UN Charter was intended to provide a peaceful alternative to.

"While the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for this crisis, U.S. officials remain in collective denial over the criminal nature of Israel's actions and their instrumental role in Israel’s crimes."

As the United States became the leading economic power in the world in the 20th century, it also built up dominant military power. Despite its leading role in creating the United Nations and the rules of the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions, it came to see strict compliance with those rules as an obstacle to its own ambitions, from the U.N. Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of military force to the Geneva Conventions’ universal protections for prisoners of war and civilians.

In its “war on terror,” including its wars on Iraq and other countries, the United States flagrantly and systematically violated these bedrock foundations of world order. It is a fundamental principle of all legal systems that the powerful must be held accountable as well as the weak and the vulnerable. A system of laws that the wealthy and powerful can ignore cannot claim to be universal or just, and is unlikely to stand the test of time.

Today, our system of international law faces exactly this problem. The U.S. presumption that its overwhelming military power permits it to violate international law with impunity has led other countries, especially U.S. allies but also Russia, to apply the same opportunistic standards to their own behavior.

In 2010, an Amnesty International report on European countries that hosted CIA “black site” torture chambers called on U.S. allies in Europe not to join the United States as another “accountability-free zone” for war crimes. But now the world is confronting a U.S. ally that has not just embraced, but doubled down on, the U.S. presumption that dominant military power can trump the rule of law.

The Israeli government refuses to comply with international legal prohibitions against deliberately killing women and children, by military force and by deprivation; seizing foreign territory; and bombing other countries. Shielded from international accountability behind the U.S. Security Council veto, Israel thumbs its nose at the world’s impotence to enforce international law, confident that nobody will stop it from using its deadly and destructive war machine wherever and however it pleases.

So the world’s failure to hold the United States accountable for its war crimes has led Israel to believe that it too can escape accountability, and U.S. complicity in Israeli war crimes, especially the genocide in Gaza, has inevitably reinforced that belief.

U.S. responsibility for Israel’s lawlessness is compounded by the conflict of interest in its dual role as both Israel’s military superpower ally and weapons supplier and the supposed mediator of the lopsided “peace process” between Israel and Palestine, whose inherent flaws led to Hamas’s election victory in 2006 and now to the current crisis.

Instead of recognizing its own conflict of interest and deferring to intervention by the UN or other neutral parties, the U.S. has jealously guarded its monopoly as the sole mediator between Israel and Palestine, using this position to grant Israel total freedom of action to commit systematic war crimes. If this crisis is ever to end, the world cannot allow the U.S. to continue in this role.

While the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for this crisis, U.S. officials remain in collective denial over the criminal nature of Israel’s actions and their instrumental role in Israel’s crimes. The systemic corruption of U.S. politics severely limits the influence of the majority of Americans who support a ceasefire in Gaza, as pro-Israel lobbying groups buy the unconditional support of American politicians and attack the few who stand up to them.

Despite America’s undemocratic political system, its people have a responsibility to end U.S. complicity in genocide, which is arguably the worst crime in the world, and people are finding ways to bring pressure to bear on the U.S. government:

Members of CODEPINK, Jewish Voice For Peace and Palestinian-, Arab-American and other activist groups are in Congressional offices and hearings every day; constituents in California are suing two members of Congress for funding genocide; students are calling on their universities to divest from Israel and U.S. arms makers; activists and union members are identifying and picketing companies and blocking ports to stop weapons shipments to Israel; journalists are rebelling against censorship; U.S. officials are resigning; people are on hunger strike; others have committed suicide.

It is also up to the U.N. and other governments around the world to intervene, and to hold Israel and the United States accountable for their actions. A growing international movement for an end to the genocide and decades of illegal occupation is making progress. But it is excruciatingly slow given the appalling human cost and the millions of Palestinian lives at stake.

Israel’s international propaganda campaign to equate criticism of its war crimes with antisemitism poisons political discussion of Israeli war crimes in the United States and some other countries.

But many countries are making significant changes in their relations with Israel, and are increasingly willing to resist political pressures and propaganda tropes that have successfully muted international calls for justice in the past. A good example is Ireland, whose growing trade relations with Israel, mainly in the high-tech sector, formerly made it the fourth largest importer of Israeli products in the world in 2022.

Ireland is now one of 14 countries who have officially intervened to support South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) - the others are Belgium, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, Libya, the Maldives, Mexico, Nicaragua, Palestine, Spain and Turkiyë. Israel reacted to Ireland’s intervention in the case by closing its embassy in Dublin, and now Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has smeared Ireland’s Taoiseach (prime minister) Simon Harris as “antisemitic.”

The Taoiseach’s spokesperson replied that Harris “will not be responding to personalized and false attacks, and remains focused on the horrific war crimes being perpetrated in Gaza, standing up for human rights and international law and reflecting the views of so many people across Ireland who are so concerned at the loss of innocent, civilian lives.”

If the people of Palestine can stand up to bombs, missiles, and bullets day after day for over a year, the very least that political leaders around the world can do is stand up to Israeli name-calling, as Simon Harris is doing.

Spain is setting an example on international efforts to halt the supply of weapons to Israel, with an arms embargo and a ban on weapons shipments transiting Spanish ports, including the U.S. naval base at Rota, which the U.S. has leased since it formed a military alliance with Spain’s Franco dictatorship in 1953.

Spain has already refused entry to two Maersk-owned ships transporting weapons from North Carolina to Israel, while dockworkers in Spain, Belgium, Greece, India, and other countries have refused to load weapons and ammunition onto ships bound for Israel.

The U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) has passed resolutions for a ceasefire in Gaza; an end to the post-1967 Israeli occupation; and for Palestinian statehood. The General Assembly’s 10th Emergency Special Session on the Israel-Palestine conflict under the Uniting for Peace process has been ongoing since 1997.

The General Assembly should urgently use these Uniting For Peace powers to turn up the pressure on Israel and the United States. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has provided the legal basis for stronger action, ruling that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories Israel invaded in 1967 is illegal and must be ended, and that the massacre in Gaza appears to violate the Genocide Convention.

Inaction is inexcusable. By the time the ICJ issues a final verdict on its genocide case, millions may be dead. The Genocide Convention is an international commitment to prevent genocide, not just to pass judgment after the fact. The U.N. General Assembly has the power to impose an arms embargo, a trade boycott, economic sanctions, a peacekeeping force, or to do whatever it takes to end the genocide.

When the U.N. General Assembly first launched its boycott campaign against apartheid South Africa in 1962, not a single Western country took part. Many of those same countries will be the last to do so against Israel today. But the world cannot wait to act for the blessing of complacent wealthy countries who are themselves complicit in genocide.

It’s a crisis. America is now among 11 nations deemed most threatened by both mis-and disinformation.

Little wonder that almost 90% of us fear our country is on the “wrong track.” And, President-elect Trump has led the way with 492 suspect claims in just the first hundred days of his first presidency. Then, before the 2020 vote, in a single day he made 503 false or misleading claims. By term’s end he’d uttered 30,573 lies, reports The Washington Post.

Now, he is joined by his promoter Elon Musk who is flooding his own platform X with disinformation—for example, about the bipartisan end-of-year funding deal.

The stakes are high as “post-truth is pre-fascism,” warns Yale history professor Timothy Synder in On Tyranny. Pretty grim.

Some play down our current “mis-and-disinformation” crisis as nothing new. Referring to the Vietnam War era, the Heritage Foundation says “Trump is not guilty of any lie, falsehood, fabrication, false claim, or toxic exaggeration that equals the lies of one past president [Lyndon Johnson] whose Alamo-sized ego caused the deaths of thousands of Americans.” In 2018, Heritage dismissed Trump’s lies as insignificant embellishment about “his wealth, his girlfriends of decades ago, or the size of his inaugural crowd.”

Yet, his more recent lies have had deadly consequences. Playing down the severity of Covid-19, Trump described it as “like the flu,” “under control,” and “already disappearing.” His casting doubt about protective measures likely contributed to “tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths,” reported health scientists.

After losing the presidential race in 2020, he repeatedly reinforced unsubstantiated questioning of electoral integrity. “Trump’s big lie”—sparking a violent insurrection on January 6—caused multiple deaths and helped trigger stricter voter-registration laws.

Trump’s actions may have taken us into a new era some call “post-truth” politics. So, what might this mean? And how might we learn from democracies standing up against mis- and disinformation?

Lies are about a particular event—as in former President Bill Clinton’s denial of an extramarital affair; whereas “post -truth” refers to a “shift to another reality” in which facts don’t matter anymore, observes Irish philosopher Vittorio Bufacchi.

The stakes are high as “post-truth is pre-fascism,” warns Yale history professor Timothy Synder in On Tyranny. Pretty grim.

But to step up most of us need to sense the possibility of success, or at least movement in the direction of well-being. So, where might we find grounds for honest hope? Let’s look at what courageous peer nations are doing.

Between 2011 and 2022, 78 countries passed misinformation and disinformation laws covering social media, including Germany’s “anti-hate-speech law.” Yes, some measures have been criticized for unintended consequences. In authoritarian states and those with weak guardrails against misuse, they can cause harm. As in the monarchy Bahrain. It used fake news laws to control content and threaten journalists with arrest. Some critics note that Germany’s anti-hate-speech risks “over-blocking” content.

But we cannot afford to give up.

Fact-checking news websites such as PolitiFact and Snopes—flagging content on social media—are valiant efforts. So far they’ve been only moderately helpful, but we can learn from their experience to create a holistic, long-term approach to countering mis-and-disinformation.

One key will be more independent and public journalism, including PBS and NPR, driven not by narrow profit or partisan agendas. As local journalism—perhaps easiest to hold accountable—has suffered a sharp decline in the past decades, state and local governments can step up with financial support and incentives. Here, many peer nations can inspire us.

Several have much to teach us about addressing disinformation with public news media. One exemplar is New Zealand with a unique approach. Since 1989, its Broadcast Standards Authority has offered an easily accessible, transparent online platform for any citizen to call out disinformation. The authority is tasked with investigating and requiring removal of what is both false and harmful material.

The BSA seems to have been both cautious and effective.

In the early years, complaints were upheld in 30% of cases. But by 2021-22, those upheld had shrunk to just under 5%. That’s a big change. And, a possible implication? Knowing one can be exposed for harmful lies can discourage perpetrators.

“BSA has, over more than three decades, overseen a standards system that has been a game changer in delivering on a vision of freedom in broadcasting without harm,” says its chief executive Stacey Wood.

Want to know more?

See our exploration in Crisis of Trust: How Can Democracies Protect Against Dangerous Lies?

Another key?

Strengthening media literacy. Sadly, as of 2023 only three states required media literacy classes. So let us quickly spread this opportunity to strengthen our ability not only to critically assess information but also identify motives behind the lies. The News Literacy Project provides helpful resources and programs.

Finally, we can encourage public debate and action to transform social media platforms into fact-based public discourse, functioning without harm. “At the end of the day,” observes Cornell psychologist Gordon Pennycook, “you cannot use psychological interventions to resolve this problem. There are structural, systematic, underlying problems that need to be dealt with.” Platforms such as X systemically spread disinformation.

So, what can we do?

Initiatives around the world are calling for public-or-user-owned platforms, such as the Platform Cooperativism Consortium. We can strengthen emerging alternatives like Bluesky or Mastodon, as we simultaneously urge for public regulation, such as the European Union’s Digital Services Act.

There’s no “silver bullet,” of course. But the good news is that many Americans are awakening to the disinformation crisis after experiencing tragically unnecessary Covid-19 deaths and facing today’s unprecedented lies from our president-elect.

For sure, deep change requires courage. So, with pounding hearts let us jump into this contentious arena. We can spark discussion-and-action commitments within our own families, friendship circles, schools at all levels, and workplaces. We can fortify our determination by exploring and sharing the innovations of others.

Together, we can make history as we help save our democracy from today’s deadly disinformation plague.

Once again, the holiday season is upon us. Whether we choose to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa—or simply participate in ongoing festivities—we can all agree that it’s a special time of the year, graced by extended time with family and friends, good food, and merrymaking. For obvious reasons already enumerated in countless media outlets, it can also be a stressful time, a lonely time, and a sad time. This year, but a few weeks after the 2024 Presidential Elections, the stakes are even higher. The probability of uncomfortable dinners has grown, perhaps exponentially, as we take stock of how deeply divided our nation truly is.

2025 will bring us Trump Show 2.0, with the president-elect promising mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, many from Latin America. Indeed, immigration was THE issue of the 2024 presidential election, so conditions should be ideal for Christmas dinners, family get-togethers, and champagne toasts to be riven by divergent opinions on the influx of newcomers to the U.S., whose growth over the past years was significant enough to be labelled, at least by some news outlets, a “surge.”

How can we talk productively about our historical moment and ourselves as we sip eggnog beside the yule log and under the mistletoe? How can we gift our interlocutors with arguments wrapped not in vitriol but rather, history? How can we look beyond the ill-willed gaslighting particular to once-a-year family reunions? For some of us talking more cogently about these delicate topics may lessen the pressures of the holiday season. For others, a more humane and reasoned public discourse may be a matter of life and death. After all, nothing less than the weight of history itself has brought them here.

Migrants and residents, undocumented and documented individuals, are living the same neoliberal moment, in which wages are pushed down, the informal economy grows, and workers experience a new flexibility as precariousness.

While I teach Spanish and Latin American culture at the collegiate level during the day, I teach both ESL and a Spanish-language version of the GED during the evening hours. These two roles inform how I think through our present moment. Let’s give ourselves the gift of both history and experience for Christmas—headlines and heartbeats, doubt and decisions.

First is the formidable list of number ones we enjoy in the United States. We are both number one in terms of consumption and, less joyfully, prisons. We are simultaneously the biggest mall and the biggest jail the world has ever known. We are a nation defined by emphatic commerce on one hand and, on the other hand, consequences for those who don’t follow along.

Our bounties are especially notable in terms of foodstuffs and, perhaps even more notable in terms of who produces our food. Latinos make up roughly one-third of those employed in the poultry industry—a major economic force for documented and undocumented workers alike in places like rural Missouri, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, and Mississippi. Slaughtering chickens is no easy task, but catching chickens may be even more difficult. Latinos also have a foothold in the dairy industry; cows can, in fact, be milked three times a day, so those working will have to be available during the early morning hours. Gardening, construction, and drywall are also significant employers of Latino labor in the United States.

Beyond what newspapers and anthropologists tell us, I know that my ESL and GED students—some of them documented, some of them not—often work in these sectors. They also work in places that are closer to home for most of us: restaurants, hotels, and even Walmart. Indeed, the behemoth retailer Walmart was sued once some 20 years for abusing undocumented workers. If I am listening to my students correctly, it may be time again to examine the chain’s labor practices. Staffing agencies seem to be crucial in allowing the continued employment of undocumented labor: They provide a means to muddle up paperwork, intake non-English speakers, and forge employer-employee connections.

In both of my evening classes, my Latino students come and go. Their enthusiasm is palpable, but so is their exhaustion. Almost no one enjoys perfect attendance given the heinous flexibility of their jobs. Roofers can’t lay shingles in the rain. Housekeepers don’t clean rooms where guests haven’t slept. But when they are called in, they seemingly can’t afford to say no. Their education, naturally, is pushed on the proverbial backburner. It’s no fun being fungible.

In my GED class, we have studied how to develop arguments for the expository essay section. When asked to justify their claims in writing, my Latino students inevitably signal financial concerns as paramount. No matter the prompt and no matter what issue students are asked to weigh in on—junk food in high schools, obligatory military service, the humaneness of zoos, etc.—students consistently turn to personal finances to back their arguments. Maybe junk food is a low-cost alternative to cooking? Does the army pay well? Can zoos be self-funded? For my students, personal financial matters are preternaturally totalizing and give me a glimpse as to what they are really thinking about on a daily basis.

But again: the specter of deportation and possibility of changing hearts at the dinner table.

What the current debate misses is the deep history of these contemporary phenomena. Few Americans are aware of the Bracero Program or Operation Bootstrap, two accords (one between the U.S. and Mexico, another between the U.S. and Puerto Rico) that first brought thousands of workers to the lower 48. As American servicemen and women fought in two theaters overseas during World War II, workers were still needed to operate wood lathes, pull weeds, and lay railroad tracks. The briefest survey of amazing photographs culled from this mid-century moment make plain how we should think about that time. For Latino workers, it was a story of both commerce and control, opportunity and degradation, pride and poverty. Above all, what we should remember at the dinner table was that it was an invitation—an offer to enter the world’s largest mall and its biggest prison. During downturns—or, after soldiers returned to the U.S.—these actions were reversed.

The next bit of history that helps to explain our present moment takes us to 1994.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a pivotal time in the southwestern United States borderlands. The passage of NAFTA in 1994 marked a new era of trade between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, aimed at boosting the flow of goods by loosening trade restrictions. This shift allowed the U.S. economy to dominate the Mexican market, leading to instability in Mexico’s labor force and driving many to seek opportunities in the U.S., resulting in a surge in undocumented crossings at the Southern border.

While NAFTA was intended to open borders for trade and close them for people, the increased migration highlighted the human impact of market policies. These changes coincided with a shift in U.S. border policy under President Bill Clinton, focusing on prevention through deterrence. This strategy involved concentrating surveillance forces in urban areas like El Paso and San Diego, pushing undocumented migrants into the harsh terrain of Arizona.

As immigration from Latin America has risen, anti-immigrant sentiment has also grown. You may see some of this at Christmas dinner. It has also led to stricter laws, a more controlled border, and U.S. pressure on Mexico to militarize. Discussion of building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border may arise during your merrymaking, too. Most of us don’t realize that even in places with the roughest terrain, where building a fence would be amazingly difficult, individuals find ways to cross. Conversation may then turn to ideas about the “sovereignty” of a nation. But defining what a nation is has—and continues to be—a rather difficult task. Others gathered for the festivities may put forth that immigrants sap social services. The fact is, however, a great many undocumented workers pay taxes. Finally, others that are present at your Christmas gatherings may claim that migrants are stealing away jobs from other Americans. The truth may be, however, that migrants and residents, undocumented and documented individuals, are living the same neoliberal moment, in which wages are pushed down, the informal economy grows, and workers experience a new flexibility as precariousness.

Perhaps around the time that dessert comes out, you may introduce a bit of theory to your guests—the Foucauldian notion that workers, within capital, whether documented or undocumented, have been increasingly rendered “docile bodies” over the past 50 or so years: powerless, susceptible, and constantly in movement. This is not to say we should forever characterize migrants as passive agents, thrown to the wind, capable of little more than provoking liberal guilt. Rather, we should interrogate what about our present moment created the most flexible, most fungible, most vulnerable—and perhaps, most usable—population in the history of humanity.

I, for one, will raise a glass at the end of my Christmas meal, toasting my students, their work ethic, and their hopes for a better life. I hope they can return to my classroom in the New Year, not dragged off by the promise of another siding job, another garden gig, another chicken coop in the next state over.

By Ralph Nader December 23, 2024 Have you heard of the Capitol Hill Citizen newspaper – a quarterly 40-page print newspaper? We have been publishing it since the spring of 2022. It goes beyond “official source journalism” about Congress – the 535 Senators and Representatives – to whom “we the people” have delegated far too…

In the wake of the Democrats' devastating loss last month, there has been no shortage of arguments and analyses about what went wrong and how the party should move forward. It has been deeply concerning to see some of these arguments taking Republican fearmongering and propaganda as a basis, particularly on the subject of transgender rights. Falling for Republican propaganda will not only bring terrible harm to the most vulnerable members of society; I believe it is also a losing political strategy for Democrats. Instead, the Democratic Party must be vigilant against Republican propaganda, and must proactively counter it.

The Democrats' failures in messaging on transgender rights were evident throughout the campaign. Despite the Biden-Harris administration's progress - such as signing executive orders aimed at curbing discrimination, expanding health care access, and raising awareness of the societal barriers and violence that transgender people regularly experience - the Harris campaign appeared to studiously avoid discussing transgender people at all.

Democrats must make clear to the public that while Republicans cynically claim to be "protecting children," they are in fact doing the opposite.

One of the few exceptions, and thus the most visible mention of trans people by Kamala Harris during the campaign, was in her October 16 interview on Fox News. When the host, Bret Baier, challenged the Biden-Harris administration's policy supporting gender-affirming medical care for prisoners, Harris had an opportunity to make a defense on moral grounds. Instead, she counterattacked by pointing out that the Trump administration followed the same laws, and thus the argument was "throwing...stones when you're living in a glass house." By doing so, she implicitly condoned the narrative that gender-affirming care is a luxury rather than a necessity, or, worse, somehow wrong or shameful, rather than a fundamental human right that should be afforded to all, including incarcerated people.

Setting aside for a moment the moral aspect, try to coldly consider the political message this phrasing sent to voters. After the provision of gender-affirming care was presented as though it were a problem, the Democrats seemed to be saying, 'it is a problem that both we and the Trump administration failed to deal with.' Meanwhile, the Republicans were promising to 'solve' it in the next administration. So why would an uninformed voter, after hearing both parties apparently acknowledge a 'problem' but only one party offer to 'solve' it, be expected to support the Democrats?

If Democrats want to be seen as competent, then they must stop catering to the Republicans' fearmongering and dehumanizing narrative and instead proactively counter it. Democrats must stand up and say yes, our policy is to support the provision of gender-affirming care, and we are proud of this policy. It is not a problem, but a protection of our citizens' basic human rights. The Democrats already campaigned on messages of freedom, self-determination, and bodily autonomy; these are precisely the values that must be applied not only to cis Americans, but to trans Americans as well. It is indeed somewhat astonishing that the Democrats failed to consistently articulate as simple a concept as: our platform of freedom and bodily autonomy also applies to trans people.

Of course, Harris was not the only high-ranking Democrat to weaken their own political position by failing to stand up for trans rights. Senate candidates Colin Allred and Sherrod Brown both ran television ads legitimizing Republican fearmongering about trans kids playing in school sports. After the election, Representative Seth Moulton went farther, portraying trans children as a physical danger to cis children, saying he didn't want his daughters to be "run over on a playing field" by trans students. Trans kids already suffer from bullying, abuse, and depression at significantly higher rates than their cis counterparts, and it's not hard to see why, when even Democratic lawmakers are demonizing them.

Democrats... appear to implicitly accept the premise of the supposed 'problem,' but do not offer a solution. Again, how is a rational but uninformed voter supposed to respond?

Again, let us try to dispassionately consider the potential political effect of such messaging (absurd as it is to set aside the ethical aspects of politicians attacking already marginalized children). The Republicans claim that trans kids are some sort of malign threat, and advertise policies to neutralize this 'threat' by denying them legal protections, further isolating them, and trying to erase the very existence of their identities. In other words, Republicans have presented a (manufactured) 'problem' and a (monstrous) 'solution.' Democrats, meanwhile, appear to implicitly accept the premise of the supposed 'problem,' but do not offer a solution. Again, how is a rational but uninformed voter supposed to respond?

The only logical path forward is for Democrats to explicitly renounce the Republicans' false premises. Trans children are not a threat to cis children, whether on the playground or in the bathroom, and bullying of trans kids not only by other students but by adult politicians is an outrage. Democrats must make clear to the public that while Republicans cynically claim to be "protecting children," they are in fact doing the opposite.

Unfortunately, there is no time to lose. Trump has announced a stream of extremist anti-trans appointees to key administration roles, including Secretary of Education (Linda McMahon), Secretary of Health and Human Services (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), Secretary of Defense (Pete Hegseth), and Secretary of State (Marco Rubio), among many others, who will enable the Republicans to make good on their promises to destroy protections for trans students, prevent access to healthcare and housing, purge transgender servicepeople from the military, promote anti-trans bigotry abroad, and deny transgender people the ability to openly exist in society. Not to mention the possibility of using the military to go after Trump's "enemy from within," which presumably includes trans people and their allies, whom Trump described as representing "a great evil."

The Democrats must unify to counter the Republicans' anti-trans propaganda and impending anti-trans agenda, not only to prevent the further oppression of millions of transgender Americans, but also to maintain credibility as a political movement.

Global expectations for sustainable development took another hit in 2024. Carbon emissions reacheda new high, world leaders settled on an underwhelming climate finance goal, and countries failed to sign the global plastic treaty.

There was, however, one major accomplishment. In September, at the United Nations (UN) Summit of the Future, Member States adopted the Pact for the Future reconfirming their commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Pact underscores the critical role of science, technology, and innovation (STI) and outlines several key action items — from increasing the use of science in policy making, to promoting interdisciplinary collaboration to tackle complex global challenges, to supporting developing countries in harnessing STI for sustainable development.

If implemented, these measures will transform the global scientific community and science systems worldwide, requiring fundamental shifts in the organization, practice, and funding of science.

As the landscape of actors working towards the SDGs continues to grow, complexity and fragmentation are likely, which could undermine the effectiveness of individual SDG-related efforts. As such, global research efforts and research funding require strategic coordination and prioritization. In recent years, the scientific community has developed a number of research priority frameworks, including the Six Transformations, Unleashing Science, and Towards Sustainable Transformation, that can help steer global collective efforts and accelerate progress towards SDGs.

The Pact also emphasizes the need to increase the use of science in policy making. Although there is significant research on the SDGs, it is often ignored in public debates on societal transformations and rarely used in policy processes. While resolving this challenge is a complex matter, creating practical interfaces between science and policy could certainly help.

A recent initiative of the World Bank, the Coalition for Capacity on Climate Action (C3A), seeks to bridge the gap between science and Ministries of Finance. It is a prime example of how to better integrate climate science considerations in economic and financial decision-making processes. The SDSN SDG Transformation Center is also working directly with governments, including in Benin and Uzbekistan, to support efforts in developing science-based pathways for SDG implementation, identifying SDG priorities and context-specific solutions, and aligning policies and financial flows with such priorities. Initiatives like these hold great potential to be scaled and replicated across countries.

As the Pact stresses, responding effectively to current and future challenges requires the engagement of all relevant stakeholders. At the recent Annual C3A Symposium, participating Ministries of Finance emphasized the critical importance of engaging diverse dimensions of expertise to better understand the complexity and dynamic processes of global challenges and changes. Transdisciplinary research can be an effective tool, as it embraces diverse scientific and societal views and helps to identify common context-specific solutions. By providing space for dialogue, learning, and trust building, transdisciplinary research also helps break down the silo mentality that still persists across many institutional structures. But, for this approach to become common practice, both funders and research institutions must introduce incentives and innovative funding models to reduce the structural barriers to transdisciplinarity.

As it stands, engaging in transdisciplinarity can be risky for scientists, especially for early-career researchers. Stakeholder engagement efforts are rarely recognized, and opportunities for transdisciplinary career development within disciplinary institutions are limited and not oftenrewarded. For several years, the International Science Council (ISC) has promoted the creation of environments and reward systems conducive to transdisciplinary research. While transdisciplinarity has become a more frequent requirement in research calls, much remains to be done to fully harness the benefits of knowledge co-production across disciplines and societal actors.

The design of research funding programmes also plays a critical role. Beyond basic research-linked activities, funding mechanisms should support public engagement, science–policy interfaces, capacity development, community-building, and peer learning. Research funding needs to also enable the accumulation, application, and deployment of knowledge. Longer-term funding is especially needed for international research collaboration on societal transformations towards sustainability.

While no single country can address complex sustainability challenges, the scale of current support for global multilateral scientific collaboration on pressing global challenges still remains marginal. Despite a few examples of global sustainability research collaborative funding efforts, including the ISC Science Missions for Sustainability and the Belmont Forum, research funding mostly prioritizes national scientific efforts over international research collaboration, with only 5% of research projects dedicated to multilateral collaboration.

Ongoing public science funding cuts and rising geopolitical tensions — which have become particularly apparent over the past years — are not conducive to cross-border scientific initiatives. But in times of insecurity and conflicts, it is important to remember that international research collaboration on global sustainability challenges provides a common language and critical mechanism that helps bridge the divide between nations. Strengthening international research collaboration and implementing the STI actions outlined in the Pact for the Future is, therefore, a necessity for ensuring a more peaceful, sustainable, and resilient future for all.

Before he allegedly killed United healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione was considered intelligent, thoughtful, kind, funny, and well-adjusted in every way. Now, because he killed someone, probably for political reasons, he’s considered insane. But what does that say about all the other people who kill for political reasons, like the President? Or Thompson himself?

The post Capitalism At a Glance first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Capitalism At a Glance appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Earlier this month, the company that brings us ChatGPT announced its partnership with California-based weapons company, Anduril, to produce AI weapons. The OpenAI-Anduril system, which was tested in California at the end of November, permits the sharing of data between external parties for decision making on the battlefield. This fits squarely within the US military and OpenAI’s plans to normalize the use of AI on the battlefield.

Anduril, based in Costa Mesa, makes AI-powered drones, missiles, and radar systems, including surveillance towers, Sentry systems, currently used at US military bases worldwide as well as the US-Mexico border and on the British coastline to detect migrants on boats. On December 3rd, they received a three-year contract with the Pentagon for a system that gives soldiers AI solutions during attacks.

In January, OpenAI deleted a direct ban in their usage policy on “activity that has high risk of physical harm” which specifically included “military and warfare” and “weapons development.” Less than one week after doing so, the company announced a partnership with the Pentagon in cybersecurity.

While they might have removed a ban on making weapons, OpenAI’s lurch into the war industry is in total antithesis to its own charter. Their own proclamation to build “safe and beneficial AGI [Artificial Generative Intelligence]” that does not “harm humanity” is laughable when they are using technology to kill. ChatGPT could feasibly, and probably soon will, write code for an automated weapon, analyze information for bombings, or assist invasions and occupations.

OpenAI’s lurch into the war industry is in total antithesis to its own charter.

We should all be frightened by this use of AI for death and destruction. But this is not new. Israel and the US have been testing and using AI in Palestine for years. In fact, Hebron has been dubbed a “smart city” as the occupation enforces its tyranny through a perforation of motion and heat sensors, facial recognition technologies, and CCTV surveillance. At the center of this oppressive surveillance is the Blue Wolf System, an AI tool that scans the faces of Palestinians, when they are photographed by Israeli occupation soldiers, and refers to a biometric database in which information about them is stored. Upon inputting the photo into the system, each person is classified by a color-coded rating based on their perceived ‘threat level’ to dictate whether the soldier should allow them to pass or arrest them. The IOF soldiers are rewarded with prizes for taking the most photographs, which they have termed “Facebook for Palestinians”, according to revelations from the Washington Post in 2021.

OpenAI’s war technology comes as the Biden administration is pushing for the US to use the technology to “fulfill national security objectives.” This was in fact part of the title of a White House memorandum released in October this year calling for rapid development of artificial intelligence “especially in the context of national security systems.” While not explicitly naming China, it is clear that a perceived ‘AI arms race’ with China is also a central motivation of the Biden administration for such a call. Not solely is this for weapons for war, but also racing for the development of technology writ large. Earlier this month, the US banned the export of HBM chips to China, a critical component of AI and high-level graphics processing units (GPU). Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned that China is two to three years ahead of the US when it comes to AI, a major change from his statements earlier this year where he remarked that the US is ahead of China. When he says there is a “threat escalation matrix” when there are developments in AI, he reveals that the US sees the technology only as a tool of war and a way to assert hegemony. AI is the latest in the US’ unrelenting - and dangerous - provocation and fear mongering with China, who they cannot bear to see advance them.In response to the White House memorandum, OpenAI released a statement of its own where it re-asserted many of the White House’s lines about “democratic values” and “national security.” But what is democratic about a company developing technology to better target and bomb people? Who is made secure by the collection of information to better determine war technology? This surely reveals the alignment of the company with the Biden administration’s anti-China rhetoric and imperialist justifications. As the company that has surely pushed AGI systems within general society, it is deeply alarming that they have ditched all codes and jumped right in with the Pentagon. While it’s not surprising that companies like Palantir or even Anduril itself are using AI for war, from companies like OpenAI - a supposedly mission-driven nonprofit - we should expect better.

AI is being used to streamline killing. At the US-Mexico border, in Palestine, and in US imperial outposts across the globe. While AI systems seem innocently embedded within our daily lives, from search engines to music streaming sites, we must forget these same companies are using the same technology lethally. While ChatGPT might give you ten ways to protest, it is likely being trained to kill, better and faster.

From the war machine to our planet, AI in the hands of US imperialists means only more profits for them and more devastation and destruction for us all.

Nature is loud. Unknown animal sounds resound from the darkness as I work on the veranda in the evening. Everything seems so peaceful while the Comunidad de Paz reports the presence of armed people near their private properties La Roncona and La Holandecita. This is exactly where our small women's delegation from Europe is staying—Sabine Lichtenfels, Andrea Phoebe Regelmann, Katharina Müller and I—in the first house after the entrance gate.

Outside our terrace, the lavish abundance of nature. Lush greenery, with the occasional free-roaming horse or chicken on the lawn. There is a latent threat in the air, but not to our lives. The threatened people of the community have learned to live with the daily danger. They occasionally come to visit us, still have a sense of humor, and radiate from within. They have been friends with my fellow travelers from the partner community Tamera in southern Portugal for 19 years. Our presence and reporting on them gives them protection, because the murderers cover up their crimes and attack when no international witness is looking.

Colombia is in utter chaos. The more I hear and read about what is happening here, the more I immerse myself in books about the country, the more perplexed, confused, and disillusioned I remain. According to The System of the Bird: Colombia, a Laboratory of Barbarity by Guido Piccoli, "Violence has not left Colombia since the war of independence against the Spanish." In Colombia, "there is always room for everyone, but equally the possibility of killing each other to no end."

Piccoli writes:

Don Gonzalo was not only a good person, he was also a hard worker. He got up at dawn and went to the mountains of Norcasia to cut down trees. One morning, his sister did not bring him his lunch, as she did every day. When Gonzalo came home, he found her dead, tied to a post. They had raped her. In the courtyard lay the decapitated bodies of his two brothers, while the bodies of their parents were lying in the hallway of the house. The only one still alive was the youngest brother. Before he died in his arms, he was able to tell him that the bandits were responsible for the massacre. From that day on, Don Gonzales decided to cut off the heads of bandits.

I can't say who the bandits are here. Paramilitaries, military, guerrillas. The state, the police, the public prosecutor's office. According to the law and the Constitution, the country is a democracy. In practice, hardly anyone understands how it works, and criminals enjoy complete impunity. During a riot in 1948 in the capital Bogotá, after the socialist politician and lawyer Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was murdered, "in one neighborhood in the center of the city, police distributed weapons to the demonstrators. In other neighbourhoods, they shot at them with rifles"

Initially, both the Colombians and American diplomats believed that Gaitán was assassinated by the Conservative Party, but after a few years, the opinion emerged that this was the first plot organized by the CIA, which had only been founded seven months earlier, to curb the spread of communism in the U.S. sphere of influence. Even the world-famous author Gabriel García Márquez supported this theory, because he was in the area on the day of the assassination and saw a conspicuous, unusual man, but no authority investigated this murder further and the FBI refused to open its archives "for security reasons."

Violence in Colombia only got worse from there. People were being sawed in half, had their eyes gouged out, had body parts cut off—all while they were still alive. Then the bodies were dumped in some villages. The terror was intended to force entire communities to leave their land.

The beneficiaries were the country's oligarchs, large landowners, and North American corporations:

The paramilitaries in Colombia are the armed wing of the elites, supported by or interwoven with all state authorities, at all levels of government and in all social classes. They were formed with the help of the Colombian army, several Colombian and U.S. intelligence services, and mercenaries. Paramilitarism is a strategic project and an integral part of the state. The paramilitaries play a central role in enforcing a capitalist neoliberal economic and social model with enormous profit margins.

All of this happened a long time ago. A peace agreement was signed in 2016, and a truth commission was set up as a result. The current left-wing government of Gustavo Petro is working to implement these milestones in Colombian history and is committed to the vision of "total peace." And here I am, surrounded by tropical abundance, struggling against a feeling of hopelessness as I realize how deeply violence and murder have shaped the lives of every person I talk to, and especially how murder and torture are still widespread. Most of the guerrillas have been demobilised, while the paramilitaries are stronger than before.

On March 18, 2024, President Petro visited the nearby town of "Apartadó and spoke—for the first time for a president—words of recognition and reparation for the Comunidad de Paz. The next day, the paramilitary responded—at least that is how the Comunidad De Paz understands it: 30-year-old Nalleley, mother of three, and 14-year-old Edinson were brutally murdered." The Urabá region, where the peace community is located, is under the control of the Gulf Clan, the most powerful criminal syndicate in Colombia. It emerged from right-wing paramilitaries and now, perfidiously, has renamed itself the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia after Gaitán in order to give itself a political coloring.

On our porch, over coffee and buñuelos, various members of the Peace Village describe how it felt when they lost family members in massacres by paramilitaries. They take an empty bowl in their hands to illustrate the inner emptiness that this leaves in them. And now comes the part that makes this place so special: They do not react like Don Gonzales and want revenge, and they no longer allow themselves to be driven out, uprooted in dignity, to beg for work in the cities. Since 1997, they have declared their neutrality, practiced organic farming for their own sustenance, exemplified nonviolence, and thus practiced the only possible form of resistance, namely collective resistance against war, expulsion, and exploitation. The integrity of these people is incredible.

"Their profound and courageous stance of nonviolence, ethical integrity, reconciliation, and community building, despite suffering unending attacks and massacres, has turned them into an important reference and role model for many other resisting grassroots communities in Colombia," writes Martin Winiecki from Tamera, who has also visited them several times.

I am learning a lot here. Above all, about the great fight against the system of exploitation, which always takes place on a small scale, especially in our minds. And the people here, with all the threats and the very simple life on the brink of poverty, seem more alive and, paradoxically, more radiant than my European friends. An excess of prosperity and the lack of a purpose in life seem to me more and more like enemies of vitality. On the outside, neoliberalism is destroying the Earth and on the inside, it is destroying our souls.

Amid the huge plants, the free-roaming animals, the women, men, and children who move around on foot or by horse and mule to reach their lands up in the mountains, where there is still no civilization, I feel closer to life than ever. My soul, buried by our consumer world, suddenly breathes life here, as if a layer of dust has been blown away. And it is precisely from this "civilization" that the Comunidad de Paz protects its land, protecting it and itself from the grip of the mega-machine.

"What's happening in Colombia of course isn't an isolated phenomenon," Winiecki writes. "It's part of an intensifying global clash: empire versus communities, capitalism versus Earth, patriarchy versus Life. This clash plays out in the ever more heartbreaking genocide in Gaza, the accelerating climate breakdown, the rise of far-right authoritarianism and fascism, and more. For life to succeed, we need unbreakable solidarity, recognizing that all struggles are connected, and we also need the power of vision that enables us to create living alternatives."

Throughout his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump promised mass deportations of the more than 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. Those of us on the ground who work with immigrants are apprehensive about what that will look like and how we can respond.

During the first Trump administration, I was part of local organizations working on issues of migrant detention and deportation defense in Washington state and writing my dissertation on interior immigration enforcement. I was also active with migrant justice efforts during the Obama presidency.

Some of what happened during these periods involved large-scale raids that made national news. Such operations are expensive to plan and orchestrate, are highly disruptive to the communities where they occur, and provoke opposition. This can happen again. However, much more immigration enforcement took place quietly, through the intensive targeting of specific locations such as workplaces, highway stretches, bus stations, and apartment complexes where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents believed there may be undocumented people.

Most sanctuary ordinances remain in place, but locals need to organize to make sure these ordinances have popular support and are upheld.

At any point, ICE could round up those immigrants under remote surveillance, through GPS devices and mobile phone apps, who now number 181,000 people. ICE agents also capture people as they are being transferred from police custody, jail, or prison. Traffic stops, domestic disputes, and altercations with neighbors lead to deportation. This kind of enforcement is the most efficient for ICE; it has made up more than 90% of ICE arrests under President Joe Biden and will likely happen even more aggressively under Trump.

The Trump campaign drummed up support through scapegoating “migrant crime.” This is a pretext for mass deportations. There is no evidence of a crime wave related to immigration, but tying together the criminal justice system and immigration system becomes a way to ensnare people in the deportation dragnet.

The best way to resist these kinds of enforcement activities, we learned under the first Trump administration, is for citizens and noncitizens to claim one another as fellow community members, and then work together. Much of this work happens at the local level.

For example, Pacific County Immigrant Support was formed in 2018 in a rural county in Washington state that has voted for Trump for the past three election cycles. Citizen and noncitizen community members tracked ICE arrests and organized community protection.

Group members accompanied immigrants to ICE appointments and court dates, raised funds for immigration attorneys and bonds, and provided know-your-rights training to immigrants and employers of immigrants. They also sat down with the local sheriff to ensure that he wasn’t collaborating with ICE.

What is needed now is a blossoming of local-level efforts to defend immigrants. In Washington state this includes the Washington Immigration Solidarity Network hotline for reporting deportation events and connecting people who are facing enforcement with resources. The Fair Fight Bond Fund provides bonds to immigrants in detention while going through their proceedings in Washington, as does the National Detention Bond Fund at the national level.

Washington’s Shut Down the NWDC (Northwest Detention Center) campaign in Tacoma, and other campaigns nationwide coordinated through the Detention Watch Network, have exposed deadly and inhumane conditions in migrant detention centers, gathered support for people to survive detention, and strategized to shut down the detention infrastructure.

There is evidence that shutting down detention centers is an effective strategy for restraining immigration enforcement. There is also evidence that ICE enforcement was not able to function as smoothly in jurisdictions regulated by sanctuary ordinances. Most sanctuary ordinances remain in place, but locals need to organize to make sure these ordinances have popular support and are upheld.

The first Trump administration was vengeful towards those who thwarted its restrictionist agenda. Trump revoked some federal funding to sanctuary cities. As I have documented in my scholarship, ICE agents also targeted activists, community organizers, journalists, and artists who spoke out against them.

The Biden administration refused to place restraints on ICE’s capacity to repress activist immigrants. Also during the Biden administration, the revanchist mantle was passed to state governments, like Texas, which bused asylum seekers to sanctuary cities, prosecuted immigrants for trespassing, and punished border humanitarian organizations. We can expect more of this kind of thing.

That is why it is crucial that we build solidarity within our local communities and get ready to defend against the coming attacks.

Post-election America finds itself in a panic. Voices from across a wide political spectrum warn that the country stands on the precipice of a potentially unprecedented and chaotic disregard for the laws, norms, and policies upon which its stability and security have traditionally relied. Some fear that the “new” president, Donald Trump, is likely to declare a national emergency and invoke the Insurrection Act, unleashing the U.S. military for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and for “retribution against” the “enemy from within” as well as “radical left lunatics.” As the New Republic‘s editor Michael Tomasky notes, writing about the nomination of Kash Patel for the post of director of the FBI, “We’re entering a world where the rule of law is turned inside out.”

The blame game for such doomsday fears ranges far and wide. Many pinpoint the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to grant immunity to presidents for their core official acts, essentially removing any restraints on Trump’s agenda of retribution and revenge. Some, like Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, see loopholes in the law as the basis for their concern about the future and are urging Congress to pass legislation that will place additional constraints on the deployment of the military on American soil. Others argue that the Constitution itself is the problem. In his new book, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky even suggests that it may be time for a new constitution.

If only, as a nation, we could look beyond the tumultuous context of the current moment and imagine how to make our way to a safer, more sustainable future.

But those involved in the fear and blame game might do well to take a step back and reflect for a moment on how we got here. Today’s crisis has been evolving for so many years now. In fact, much (though admittedly, not all) of what we’re witnessing today might simply be considered an escalation of the dire turn that this country took after the attacks of September 11, 2001, nearly a quarter of a century ago.

“Quaint” and “Obsolete”

It was January 2002 when White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales used the two words “quaint and obsolete,” whose echoes remain eerily with us to this very day (and seemingly beyond). The occasion was a debate taking place at the highest levels of the administration of President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. By then, this country had invaded Afghanistan and authorized the opening of a new detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, ominously offshore of American justice, for captives of what already was being called the Global War on Terror. Two weeks after the first prisoners arrived at that prison camp on January 11, administration officials were already wondering which, if any, laws should apply when it came to the treatment of such prisoners.

Gonzales, who was to become the attorney general in Bush’s second term, laid out the options for the president. At issue was whether the Geneva Conventions—a set of treaties established in the wake of the atrocities of the Second World War—applied to the United States in its treatment of any prisoners from its war on terror.

In a memo to President Bush, Gonzales noted that Department of Justice lawyers had already concluded, when it came to al Qaeda and Taliban (Afghan insurgents in 2001, now in charge of the country) captives, the answer was no. Gonzales agreed, stating that “the war against terrorism is a new kind of war.” The laws of war, he told the president, were “obsolete” in the current context, and the laws and norms requiring humane treatment for enemy prisoners had been “render[ed] quaint,” given this new kind of war. Accordingly, the Bush administration took the position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the prisoners they had already captured. As a result, in the years to come, the indefinite and arbitrary detention of about 780 men would be institutionalized and disregard for the law would become a regular, if secret, part of the war on terror—an approach that would lead to the practice of torture at what came to be known as CIA “black sites” globally.

Nor would that be the only situation in which old laws were deemed outdated on national security grounds.

The Wider Framework

At the heart of such a rejection of the law was the determination that the president had primary, if not ultimate, authority when it came to national security. As Princeton historian Julian Zelizer has put it, top Bush administration officials “claimed that executive power was essential to fighting the war.” Members of Congress generally agreed and facilitated the shift to ever more solitary executive power in the name of war, setting a template for yielding some of its constitutional and statutory powers in matters of war to the president. One week after 9/11, Congress passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that granted the president the power “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

Subsequently, other laws were bent, bypassed, or even broken in the name of keeping the nation safe. Congress also further enhanced the powers of the executive by passing the USA Patriot Act which, among other things, weakened the Fourth Amendment’s protections against the surveillance of American citizens. Prior to 9/11, such protections had remained strong. After 9/11, as Brown’s Costs of War Project reports, “These mass surveillance programs allow[ed] the U.S. government to warrantlessly and ‘incidentally’ vacuum up Americans’ communications, metadata and content, and store their information in data centers and repositories,” sacrificing standing protections in the name of greater security.

Nor would that be the end of the matter. In the name of national security, the country’s law enforcement entities would also turn their backs on prohibitions against discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin as laid out, for example, in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As a Costs of War Project report summed it up, the “Special Registration” requirement “announced in 2002 required all males from a list of Arab and Muslim countries [to] report to the government to register and be fingerprinted.” According to the ACLU, that program (known as NSEERS) would end up affecting foreign nationals from 25 countries.

While the war on terror has receded into the background of our lives, its premises and tactics remain all too readily available.

Worse yet, such deviations from constitutional protections and the law did not come to an end with the Bush administration. Although President Barack Obama would issue an executive order restoring adherence to the laws banning torture and end the NSEERS program (which, the ACLU noted, “did not achieve a single terrorism-related conviction” despite “tens of thousands of people having been forced to register”), there were other key areas in which his administration did not reverse past policy—anything but, in fact. “Early in [President Obama’s] administration,” as historian Kathryn Olmstead notes, “the new president signaled his intention to continue Bush’s surveillance policies.” Though “surprised by the extent of the spying” in the domestic intelligence program, Obama’s team nonetheless “quickly agreed to continue Bush’s mass surveillance program.”

In addition, by escalating a global drone program of “targeted killings,” the Obama administration would forge its own path toward weakening legal protections in the name of national security. During the Obama years, on what came to be known as “Terror Tuesdays,” national security officials presented the president with a list of names, all potential targets to be captured or killed. (It would come to be known in the media as “the kill list.”) As NPR summed it up, Obama, “wishing to be seen as a restraining influence,” would weigh in on the final list of names. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “A total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush.”

Leaving those programs on the table for the next president would be—and remains—a prescription for disaster.

Trump and the Tactics of the War on Terror

Trump’s first presidency combined the strategies of Bush and Obama when it came to the war on terror. Though it was little noted then, he launched an unprecedented number of drone strikes, tripling Obama’s numbers by 2022, including the targeted assassination of a high-ranking Iranian official, Revolutionary Guard leader Qassim Soleimani. Political scientist Micah Zenko noted that, despite his claims of being non-interventionist, Trump proved to be “more interventionist than Obama: in authorizing drone strikes and special operations raids in non-battlefield settings (namely, in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia).”

The 45th president’s disregard for legal restraints took other war-on-terror policies to a new level. Within a week of his inauguration, President Trump had issued an executive order that came to be known as “the Muslim Ban,” forbidding citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries entry to the United States. And like his predecessor, he showed little interest in sunsetting the expansive surveillance authority he had inherited.

In fact, Trump brought the tools and tactics designed for the war on terror to the “home front,” notably in his approach to dissent. He attacked Black Lives Matter protesters as enemies, labeling them “terrorists.” He made discrimination against foreigners a national policy at the onset of his first presidency, announcing his plans to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants and promising to institute policies that intentionally separated migrant children from their families. He even threatened to widen the uses of Guantánamo: “…[W]e are keeping [Guantanamo] open… and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.” Wondering who those “bad dudes” would be, NPR noted that captives in the war on terror were mostly a thing of the past and reminded listeners of an interview in which Trump had said such suspects should be tried by military commissions, the fraught trial system already in place there.

When Joe Biden became president, he curtailed a number of the excesses of the war on terror from the Trump years, even issuing a proclamation revoking the Muslim ban. When it came to drone strikes, he lessened them substantially, leaving them “far from their peaks under the Obama and Trump administrations.” In addition, he put new limits on their use going forward. In a striking gesture, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines pledged to “promote transparency” in place of the excessive secrecy that had underpinned the torture program, surveillance abuses, and the targeted-killing program. Still, all too much remained ongoing or fully capable of being revived in the new Trump years.

Bringing It All Back Home

Which brings us to expectations—or fears—of what will happen in a second Trump presidency. When it comes to the use of force, detention, discrimination, and the erasure of constitutional protections, Trump has already promised to bring the broad counterterrorism authority of earlier in this century to bear on the home front.

Let’s begin with his promises to institute discriminatory policies based on race and national origin. As of today, the incoming administration has pledged to round up, put in camps, and oversee the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants from Latin America in particular, potentially combining a detention nightmare (lacking due process and underpinned by massive discrimination) with suspicion often based on national origin rather than specific evidence of criminal behavior—an echo of the war on terror’s early years.

In place of national security, Trump has promised to substitute, in the words of the 2024 Republican platform, the “threat to our very way of life,” a term that expands the vagueness encapsulated in “terror” and “terrorism” to a new level. Notably, in the run-up to the 2024 election he had already made it crystal clear that the path from the war on terror abroad to his internal policy plans would be important to his administration. When candidate Trump promised to use the military to counter “the enemy from within,” a spokesperson clarified the meaning for the press. As The Washington Post reported at the time, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung acknowledged the way the candidate was linking his political enemies to terrorists. Trump, he explained, was “equat[ing] the prospect of unspecified efforts by the left during the elections with the recent arrest of an Afghan man in Oklahoma, who is accused of plotting an Election Day attack in the United States in the name of the Islamic State group.” Cheung then furthered the analogy by adding, “President Trump is 100% correct—those who seek to undermine democracy by sowing chaos in our elections are a direct threat, just like the terrorist from Afghanistan that was arrested for plotting multiple attacks on Election Day within the United States.”

Where Are We Today?

While the war on terror has receded into the background of our lives, its premises and tactics remain all too readily available. Its expansion of presidential powers, coupled with the Supreme Court’s recent immunity decision when it comes to more or less anything a president does in office, leaves the country in a state of imminent peril. Surveillance powers remain remarkably broad. Drone-strike authorities remain in place, even if, in the wake of the Biden years, curtailed for now. And the prospect of indefinite detention as a codified element of American policy remains possible not only at Guantanamo but for migrants across the United States. And to top it all off, Congress continues to be unwilling to restrict a president’s war powers in any significant way, having repeatedly refused to repeal or replace that original 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force in which neither time, nor geographical limits, nor even precise limits on the definition of the enemy exist.

If only, as a nation, we could look beyond the tumultuous context of the current moment and imagine how to make our way to a safer, more sustainable future. Sadly, despite the dangers that may lie ahead, it’s not just partisan politics, or economic disarray, or the fragile state of the world that has brought us to this point. It’s our own negligence in accepting the dismantling of the laws and norms that had guided us prior to 9/11 and refusing ever since to restore our once-upon-a-time respect for the rule of law and for one another.

Forty years ago this month, a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India sprung a toxic gas leak, exposing half a million people to toxic fumes. Thousands of people lost their lives in the immediate aftermath, with the death toll climbing to more than 20,000 over the next two decades. Countless others, including children of survivors, continue to endure chronic health issues.

In the United States, the events in Bhopal ignited a grassroots movement to expose and address the toxic chemicals in our water, air, and neighborhoods. In 1986, just two years after the disaster, this growing awareness led Congress to pass the first National Right to Know Act, which requires companies to publicly disclose their use of many toxic chemicals.

In India, Bhopal victims have had a long struggle for justice. In 1989, survivors flew to a Union Carbide shareholders meeting in Houston to protest the inadequate compensation for the trauma they’d suffered. The settlement awarded each Bhopal victim was a mere $500—which a spokesperson for Dow Chemical, Union Carbide’s parent company, called “plenty good for an Indian.”

We can take inspiration from the people of Bhopal, whose fierce commitment to health and justice sparked a global movement.

Union Carbide had the survivors arrested before they could enter the meeting. Meanwhile, their abandoned chemical factory was still leaking toxic chemicals into the surrounding neighborhoods and drinking water.

Nevertheless, Bhopal survivors never stopped fighting. They opened a free clinic to treat the intergenerational health effects caused by the disaster. They marched 500 miles between Bhopal and New Delhi. They staged hunger strikes. They created memorials to the disaster and established a museum to ensure that the horrors of their collective past are not forgotten.

The survivors even obtained an extradition order for Union Carbide’s former CEO, Warren Anderson, but the U.S. government never acted on that request. Forty years later, the factory in Bhopal has never been properly cleaned and is still leaking poison.

Unfortunately, the kinds of chemicals that flow through the veins of Bhopal survivors also flow through ours. The petrochemical industry has brought us together in a perverse solidarity, having chemically trespassed into places all over the world.

According to one figure, Americans are exposed to dangerous chemical fires, leaks, and explosions about once every two days. In one dramatic example in early 2023, a rail tanker filled with vinyl chloride derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, forcing the evacuation of 2,000 residents.

Nearly all Americans now carry toxic substances known as PFAS in our bodies. These have been linked to cancer, liver and kidney disease, and immune dysfunction. And the continued burning of fossil fuels is killing millions of people each year around the world through air pollution.

Petrochemical and fossil fuel companies know they can only survive if they avoid liability for the damage they are doing to our health and the planet’s ecosystems. That’s why they are heavily invested in lobbying to prevent any such accountability.

Polluting industries are certain to have strong allies in the coming Trump administration, which plans to open even more land to fossil fuel production and, under the blueprint for conservative governance known as Project 2025, to slash environmental and public health regulations. But we can take inspiration from the people of Bhopal, whose fierce commitment to health and justice sparked a global movement.

Earlier this month, on the 40th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, congressional allies of this movement including U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), introduced a resolution designating December 3 as National Chemical Disaster Awareness Day.

“Chemical disasters are often the result of corporations cutting corners and prioritizing profits over safety,” said Merkley, who chairs the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee. “These catastrophes cloud communities with toxic fumes, upending lives and threatening the health and property of those living and working close by.” He called for “stronger laws to prevent chemical disasters and keep our communities and workers safe.”

This growing global alliance, which has been called the largest movement for environmental health and justice in history, is fighting for a future in which everyone has the right to live in a healthy environment. It’s a movement that unites us all. Because in many ways, we all live in Bhopal now.

No one can predict which team will win the Men’s World Cup soccer championship in 2034. But based on current conditions, we know the biggest losers will be the millions of migrant workers subject to egregious abuses while building stadiums, transit, infrastructure, and other facilities for host country Saudi Arabia over the next decade.

On December 11, the 211 national members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) will hold a vote in an “Extraordinary Congress” to decide who will host the 2034 tournament. The conclusion is already known because Saudi Arabia is the only bidder and has received a glowing score from FIFA in the evaluation of its bid.

FIFA doesn’t disclose how much it profits from granting its flagship tournament to countries with dismal human rights records. Those most affected by this decision— Saudi Arabia’s 13.4 million migrant workers, Saudi citizens, players, fans and journalists—have no vote.

FIFA and its Saudi government partners boasted recently that Saudi Arabia’s evaluation score of 419.8 out of 500 is “the highest ever score in FIFA World Cup history.” The deeply flawed FIFA evaluation process further downplayed systemic human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia with a “medium risk” rating.

FIFA gave this “highest ever score” to a country with no labor unions, no press freedom, and a government that is deeply repressive and punishes any dissent.

“We cannot say that Saudi Arabia is a ‘medium risk’ country, given that it has become a pure police state,” said Lina al-Hathloul, Head of Monitoring and Advocacy at ALQST For Human Rights, whose sister Loujain was jailed and tortured for advocating for women’s right to drive.

This month FIFA leaders also rejected the organization’s own independent report that confirms FIFA “has a responsibility” to compensate families of thousands of migrant workers who died building FIFA’s last World Cup, in Qatar in 2022.

Like Qatar, Saudi Arabia operates under the abusive labor sponsorship system known as kafala, where migrant workers pay large recruitment fees, often have passports taken and wages stolen by employers, and cannot change jobs or leave the country freely. Labor unions, strikes and protests are banned. Saudi authorities do not adequately protect migrant workers from dangerous conditions such as extreme heat.

The unprecedented scale of Saudi World Cup plans makes the potential for labor rights catastrophes greater even than for the Qatar World Cup. The Saudi hosting documents promise to construct—in the deadly desert heat, as in Qatar—11 new and 4 refurbished stadiums,185,000 new hotel rooms, and to carry out airport, road and rail construction. This infrastructure deficit will rest entirely on the backs of migrant workers to build. Many of these World Cup projects will be accomplished with funding from the Saudi state-run $925 billion Public Investment Fund and from oil and gas behemoth Aramco, FIFA’s new major worldwide partner.

The hundreds of billions of dollars in construction come with a high human cost. A new Human Rights Watch report found that 884 migrant workers from Bangladesh died in Saudi Arabia between January and July 2024—a six month period. Eighty percent of these deaths were un-investigated, attributed to “natural causes,” and not eligible for compensation. Human Rights Watch wrote to FIFA President Gianni Infantino on November 4, 2024, documenting widespread labor abuses on giga-projects in Saudi Arabia that will be part of the World Cup infrastructure. FIFA has not responded.

Winning the right to host is an effort championed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has made clear that the FIFA World Cup is a centerpiece of the Saudi national sportswashing strategy to project a reformist image of the country, while covering up its human rights abuses. “If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by 1 percent, then we will continue doing sportswashing,” the de-facto Saudi leader said in an interview with Fox News last year. “I don’t care.”

But FIFA should care. Awarding Saudi Arabia the World Cup violates FIFA’s own human rights rules. In 2016, facing a corruption crisis, FIFA put in place specific human rights standards for itself and countries hosting the games—including protections against forced labor. These reforms were supposed to keep the tournament away from the worst human-rights violators. FIFA also pledged “an ongoing due diligence process to identify, address, evaluate and communicate the risks of involvement with adverse human rights impacts,” promising to “make every effort to uphold its international human rights responsibilities.”

Yet not a single migrant worker, victim of human rights crimes, torture survivor, jailed women’s rights defender, or Saudi civil society member was consulted for FIFA’s supposedly independent human rights assessment. FIFA’s “Bid Evaluation Report” doesn’t even mention the historic forced labor complaint against the Saudi government filed by the trade union BWI at the International Labour Organization (ILO) in June of this year. A similar complaint about Qatar in 2014 spurred labor reforms in the country, although too late to help thousands of migrant workers who died.

In 2023, FIFA was forced to cancel the sponsorship it sold to the Saudi state-run tourism company “Visit Saudi,” after protests by women players. In October, more than 100 top women players published an open letter protesting FIFA’s lucrative sponsorship deal with the Saudi state oil giant Aramco. Already, two United States senators have called for FIFA to pick a different host for the 2034 World Cup.

FIFA needs to cancel the vote and back athletes and human rights over profiteering from Saudi sportswashing. Every sponsor, business, broadcaster, and national team associated with the Saudi World Cup will be tainted by widespread labor and other abuses unless wholesale, urgent human rights reforms are implemented. FIFA’s decision to award Saudi Arabia the 2034 World Cup is an unforgivable betrayal of basic human rights that risks migrant workers’ lives. It deserves a red card.

While analyzing the tailspin of the Biden presidency and the failed campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, few pundits have questioned that militarism is a political necessity as well as a vital tool of U.S. foreign policy.

Harris checked a standard box at the Democratic National Convention when she pledged to maintain “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Yet the erosion of the Democratic Party’s base is partly due to the alienation of voters who don’t want to cast their ballot for what they see as a war party.

That perception is especially acute among the young, and notable among African Americans. Many have viewed President Joe Biden’s resolute support for the Israeli war in Gaza as a moral collapse. When Harris remained loyal to it during the fall campaign, her credibility sank.

Conditions may soon shift for the Democratic Party to start moving beyond its war culture.

Events in recent weeks have done nothing to reassure those repelled by the Democratic administration’s approach. Biden’s purported 30-day deadline for Israel to start allowing adequate food into Gaza expired shortly after the election—without Israeli compliance—while the humanitarian disaster in Gaza actually became worse than ever. Biden’s White House pretended otherwise.

The ongoing hellish realities for Palestinian civilians in Gaza caused 40% of Senate Democrats to vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) post-election resolution to block $20 billion worth of military aid to Israel. But near the end of November, Biden followed up by greenlighting an additional $680 million in arms sales to Israel. While Republicans remained in lockstep for arming Israel, the budding dissent from congressional Democrats remained ineffectual.

On Ukraine war policy, dissent has been rare from Democratic lawmakers. Two years ago, 30 progressive House Democrats sent a letter to Biden that suggested “a proactive diplomatic push” could be useful for achieving a cease-fire—but they quickly withdrew the letter after an angry backlash from hawkish leaders in their own party. (Republican lawmakers are split on Ukraine policy—many want the U.S. to recklessly confront China instead of Russia.)

Few Democrats have mustered more than feeble caveats about open-ended military aid to the Kyiv government, merely watching as the Biden administration repeatedly crosses its own red lines on such matters as approval of longer-range Ukrainian missile strikes into Russia. For the Ukraine war, in the lexicon of high-ranking Democrats, “diplomacy” has been a dirty word.

Overall, the president has accelerated the war train (sometimes hailing more war production as good for the U.S. economy), with party leaders providing fuel and Democratic constituents confined to the caboose. The opinions of the party faithful count for little.

Polling has made clear that an overwhelming majority of Democrats want a U.S. arms embargo against Israel. On Ukraine, a poll early this year found that while less than one-fifth of Democrats wanted to end all military aid to Ukraine, upwards of half wanted to make it conditional on diplomatic talks, a stance firmly rejected by the administration.

Fond of telling the world about the imperative of a “rules-based order” to stop cross-border aggression, Biden and his secretary of State, Antony Blinken, rationalize breaking the rules at will. This year, in the Middle East, the U.S. launched bombing attacks on Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. Objections from leaders of the president’s party have not been audible.

The Democratic Party deserves its image as a party of war. To explore possibilities for how that might change will require a candid assessment of how that image came into focus in the 21st century.

Soon after Barack Obama became president in 2009, he made the “war on terror” explicitly bipartisan. With the Democratic Party in tow, he tripled the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, peaking at 100,000 in 2010—swiftly escalating a war inflicting widespread carnage in rural areas out of media sight.

In Iraq, the war effort persisted as the number of U.S. boots on the ground slowly declined. Meanwhile, Obama stepped up drone attacks in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. And with disastrous consequences for Libya, Obama had the United States lead NATO’s seven-month bombing onslaught of that country in 2011, incubating terrorism that expanded far beyond its borders.

Today, the most powerful Democrats are well attuned to the dominant media messaging and the agendas of megadonors, establishment “think tanks,” Pentagon contractors, and their lobbyists swarming Capitol Hill. With the military budget approaching $1 trillion, along with multibillion-dollar weapons shipments to allied nations, corporations of varied sizes make huge profits from war. And revolving doors between arms sellers and government arms buyers never stop spinning.

Conditions may soon shift for the Democratic Party to start moving beyond its war culture. But that will require a willingness to challenge the assumptions of elected Democrats who are in sync with what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.”

Virtually everyone, except Elon Musk, agrees that the rich have too much political power these days. When a single individual can put tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars behind their favored candidate, it seriously distorts democracy. Unfortunately, there are few serious strategies for addressing this problem.

Given the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, as well as prior rulings saying effectively that money is speech, there is little prospect for any sort of limits on campaign spending, at least until we have a very different Supreme Court. While this is bad news for fans of democracy, the problem is even worse.

People have generally viewed the media and political campaigns as two distinct buckets. Most attention has been focused on the second bucket. But the first bucket (including social media), is at least as important in determining political attitudes.

If progressives are going to have the ability to challenge the political power of the billionaire MAGA gang, we need another mechanism for supporting media.

While this should be obvious in the age of Fox News, for some reason many people seem to be under the impression that we will have limited the political power of the rich if we restrict their campaign spending. This is a bizarre view when the rich would still have the option to buy every major media outlet and social media platform and turn them all into Fox News. Given Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and Donald Trump’s very explicit threats against critical media, this story should not seem far-fetched.

To be clear, there is still much useful reporting done by leading media outlets like the New York Times and CNN. But these outlets will likely take threats of major lawsuits and other reprisals seriously. And recalcitrant outlets can always be taken over by Elon Musk.

If progressives are going to have the ability to challenge the political power of the billionaire MAGA gang, we need another mechanism for supporting media. And this has to go well beyond urging people to support progressive outlets and their local newspapers. Such individual efforts are great, but we need a public channel of funding to supplement current sources.

Public Funding Through Individual Tax Credits

To my mind, the best way to set up a new channel to support the media is with public funding through a modest-sized individual tax credit of say $100. This tax credit would be fully refundable and available to every adult to support the news outlet of their choice.

There are two reasons for making it an individual tax credit, rather than just a direct subsidy of existing newspapers and other media. The first is that traditional media is viewed with enormous suspicion by much of the public. It would likely be far more difficult to gain political support for subsidies designated for the media that currently exists.

The second and more important reason is that people should be able to decide what newspapers or news outlets they want to support. If they make this choice themselves, they will be more invested in it and will be more likely to appreciate the outlets they choose to support.

Also, it is likely that many new outlets will spring up to take advantage of this new source of support. Some of these will undoubtedly be low quality and provide little real news, but this is true of many news outlets currently. If people choose to use their tax credit on them, that would be their choice, as it now when they opt to buy a supermarket tabloid or to watch Fox News. But there would also be a substantial pot of money available to support serious news outlets that provide real information about what is going on in the city, state, or country.

Another benefit of going this route is that it can be done at the state or even local level. There is little prospect that a MAGA Congress would pass legislation that could challenge billionaire power, but there are a number of states — including large states like California, New York, and Illinois — where Democrats have a trifecta. It would be possible in principle to pass a journalism or media tax credit in these states. And if it proved successful, the idea would likely spread.

The Charitable Contribution Tax Deduction: A Model for the Journalism Tax Credit

The tax deduction for charitable contributions provides a good model for how a journalism tax credit could work. With the charitable contribution tax deduction, organizations file with the I.R.S. to be eligible for tax-exempt status. To get eligibility an organization just has to tell the I.R.S. what it does — for example, it’s an educational institution or a church. The I.R.S. doesn’t try to determine whether the organization does a good job as an educational institution or a church, that’s for individual donors to do. The I.R.S. just ensures that the organization does what it claims to do.

It would be the same story with an organization applying to be eligible to get a journalism tax credit. They just have to say what type of reporting they are doing and where their work is available. The oversight agency will not try to determine the quality of the journalism, that decision is for the individual contributors.

Also, a requirement of getting the funding is that all the supported work be freely available on the web with no paywall. The logic is that the public paid for the work, it should be able to benefit from it. This would not prevent a newspaper from having some material behind a paywall, if it supported the work from other sources, such as subscriptions or advertising.

A major difference with the tax deduction is that it would be equally available to everyone. Only around 10 percent of the public takes the charitable deduction tax credit. The vast majority of taxpayers take the standard deduction, which means they can’t write off charitable deductions against their taxable income. Also, the deduction is worth much more to a high-income person in the 35 percent bracket than to a middle-income person in the 12 percent tax bracket. This credit would be $100 for everyone, or whatever sum is agreed upon.

Will This Tax Credit Challenge Elon Musk’s Money?

The short answer to that is not right away. Even if we could get one or two progressive cities or states to create this sort of tax credit in the near future, it will take some years to get it up and running. And even then, the size of the credits in a small number of states or cities will be a drop in the bucket compared to the money at the disposal of Musk and his billionaire buddies.

But if a journalism tax credit proves popular, it can expand over time with more states and cities adopting it. If we got to the point where most of the blue states had this sort of credit in place, we could perhaps see 60 or 70 million people kicking in $100 a head to support media they liked. That would come to $6-$7 billion a year.

While much of this journalism would not be especially political (papers report on sports, weather, and civic events) if just a third went to progressive reporting, or just solid investigative reporting, it could make a huge difference in the public’s awareness. And remember, even if the news outlets are only in blue states, everything is going up on the web, where everyone in the country and world can see it. If a newspaper in Minnesota reports that Donald Trump Jr. is selling off the Grand Canyon to buy himself another mansion, even people in Florida and Texas will be able to read the stories.

It is still not fair that the Elon Musks of the world have such an outsize voice in political debates, but as a practical matter we have no way to limit their political spending in the foreseeable future. The best we can hope to do is to build up alternative voices so we don’t just hear from the billionaires and their lackeys.

We also should do something to downsize the huge social media platforms that give their owners so much power. This was a noticeable problem to anyone paying attention even before Elon Musk bought Twitter.

This story may not be satisfying to people seeing billionaires openly flaunting their money to make politicians grant their wishes, but we don’t have a better alternative. It’s great to say that we shouldn’t have billionaires or that we need a big wealth tax, but those statements have as much political impact as watching kids cartoons. We have to start building an institutional structure that can support long-term progressive opposition, and a big part of that is having media outlets that the billionaires can’t buy or intimidate into acquiescence.

More than 15 years after the “kids for cash” scandal shocked the nation, it’s back, stirring not just public incredulity but, for some, soul-slicing memories of hell on Earth.

This is thanks to U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to grant clemency to Michel Conahan, one of two juvenile-court judges in Luzerne County. Pennsylvania, convicted of accepting cash from private detention centers—as much as $2.8 million over a period of about six years—in exchange for sending them children (my God, as young as eight years-old) convicted of petty offenses, such as fighting, shoplifting, underage drinking, to serve prolonged sentences in prison.

Conahan, along with Mark Ciavarella, had collected cash for sending more than 2,300 children to prison. Many of them were scarred for life by this experience. Some committed suicide.

This is the us-vs.-them mentality, a quick-grab governing concept that has given us both the military-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex: two looming cash cows that define far too much of who we are as a nation.

“My son did nothing more than anything that most of us as kids did, you know, experimenting and living his life and making mistakes, that we usually all get to just learn and evolve and grow from. He did nothing more than be at an underaged drinking party with tons of other kids, but he was caught.”

This is Sandy Fonzo, speaking recently with Amy Goodman in a highly emotional interview on Democracy Now!, in the wake of the news of Conahan’s clemency. Her son, a senior in high school, a star wrestler, spent a month in the juvenile detention center just as his senior year was beginning. He came out lost, emotionally shattered, wound up getting into a fight and had to stand before Judge Ciavarella again. This time he was walloped with an eight-month sentence.

“He lost his senior year.” Sandy said. “He never had the chance to wrestle again, any chance that he had for a scholarship. He came out of there very bitter, very angry, pent up with anger. He couldn’t look you in the eye. I don’t know what happened in that facility. My son was a very big, strong, proud boy, and he came out broken.”

“ ...It changed him. It broke him. It stole his youth, his childhood. He would never, ever recover. And it just became too much, and he shot himself in the heart.”

Kids for cash! Her son wound up killing himself—and that’s just one story out of, presumably, thousands. A kid does a “bad” thing and, whoops, off to prison with you! At the time, I wrote in a column:

Many of these kids had never been in trouble before, and many of the offenses that netted jail time were trivial in the extreme. Sixteen-year-old Hillary T., for instance, who lampooned her assistant principal on MySpace, was given a three-month sentence. (With a lawyer’s help, she got out after one.) Kurt K. was in the company of someone who was caught shoplifting at Wal-Mart; accused of being a “lookout,” he wound up doing almost a year of jail time. Jamie Q. exchanged slaps with a friend during an argument; she also was sent away for almost a year. She was 14.

While the judicial corruption of “kids for cash” is glaring, that’s hardly the entirety of the issue. As I read and remember the details, I see something far larger quietly looming in the background, behind the judges’ criminality—behind what I called at the time “the blurring of the line between profit and state.” It’s the system itself: structured on the value and, indeed, the necessity, of punishment, of “war” on all that is evil, from a kid stealing a candy bar to terrorists attacking America.

Here’s how Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put it the other day, addressing his congressional colleagues as they were considering the passage of 2025’s National Defense Authorization, which allots $895 billion—two-thirds of the federal budget, for defense spending.

“When we talk about increasing Social Security benefits,” Sanders said, “well, ‘we just can’t afford to do that. We just can’t afford to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, or vision. We just cannot afford to make higher education in America affordable.’ That’s what I hear every single day. When there’s an effort to improve life for the working class of this country, I hear, ‘No, no, no, we can’t afford it.’ But when it comes to the military-industrial complex and their needs, what we hear is ‘yes, yes, yes’ with almost no debate.”

Understanding and transcending our troubles, our conflicts, is complex—way too complex, apparently, for so many of those in power to have the patience to try to comprehend, especially when they also have the far simpler option available of simply eliminating those troubles (no matter that it never works).

In a justice system immersed in such complexity—focused on understanding a lawbreaker rather than simply, and coldly, enforcing rules—corruption of various sorts would no doubt still be possible, but not at the simplistic, easily justified level of “kids for cash.”

This is the us-vs.-them mentality, a quick-grab governing concept that has given us both the military-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex: two looming cash cows that define far too much of who we are as a nation. As the National Priorities Project noted in a 2023 report:

In (fiscal year) 2023, out of a $1.8 trillion federal discretionary budget, $1.1 trillion—or 62%—was for militarized programs. That includes war and weapons, law enforcement and mass incarceration, and detention and deportation.

I can only hope that the reawakened “kids for cash” outrage shines a light on more than just two convicted judges, one of whom received clemency after a dozen years of imprisonment. I certainly can understand the anguish and anger this could cause for anyone—parent or child—wounded by their corrupt actions. But maybe it’s also time for a collective reassessment of our criminal-“justice” system as a whole and, indeed, our moral certainty that punishment and war keep us safe.

The United Nations Climate Summit (COP29), held in Baku, Azerbaijan last month, apparently lived up to its moniker: “The Finance COP.” Two weeks of semantic quibbling finally yielded an agreement that would triple climate finance to $300 billion a year by 2035. Developing countries were calling for $1.3 trillion instead, which would have been more than four times the amount agreed. Many pooh-poohed the promised $300 billion as “too little, too distant.” Even if one ignores “the too little part,” it is hard to overlook the redeeming of the pledge way off into the future, a fact that was obscured due to the linguistic jumble of U.N.-speak, legalese, and bureaucratese in the document.

Given that it won’t be realized for 11 years, the agreement raises a number of rhetorical questions. Will nature and its fury be put on pause till 2035? Will climate action (emissions reduction) and adaptation (to climate change) continue at no cost or on the cheap? Will the climate stop changing? Despite its appearance to the contrary, the tripling of climate finance was a pretend effort to leave Baku with a semblance of seriousness. Yet the U.N. Executive Secretary for Climate Change was unsure if the agreed finance would be delivered as promised. He grandly hailed the agreement as an “insurance policy for humanity,” but equally skeptically cautioned that an “insurance policy only works if premiums are paid in full and on time.”

In reality, agreements like climate finance or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are no different than New Year Resolutions that are only honored in intended or unintended breaches. What make the climate finance agreement even less resolute are three aspects.

The world’s largest and wealthiest nations seem to have concluded that they don’t need the rest of the world or their NDCs to reduce emissions.

First, it is neither obligatory nor enforceable. Pledges have been made on the part of developed countries like the European Union, the United States, and Japan—whose respective leaders ironically chose to abstain from the summit—that “agreed to help raise $300 billion a year by 2035.” They didn’t take it upon themselves to pay the promised amount but rather pledged to “help raise $300 billion,” which is akin to crowdfunding the whole effort.

Second, COP29 cast its central objective as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), i.e., each developed country will pledge a specific amount of contribution to climate finance. No such quantification was agreed. All that was agreed was that developed countries would “help raise $300 billion a year by 2035.” Fundraising is not a quantified financial commitment.

Third, and above all, there was no agreement on what will count as climate finance: public finance, private finance, bank loans, philanthropy, investment, or all of it? These lacunae leave so big a hole in the climate finance agreement that it can let through even a Category-5 storm. Some delegates call the agreement a bad deal. Others cry foul that the only deal worse than no deal is a bad deal.

All parties to the agreement, thus, returned home unhappy. Developed countries were sticking together to keep their current commitment of $100 billion unchanged. Developing countries insisted on raising it to $1.3 trillion effective now. Hosts of COP29 were overrunning the conference schedule to get a deal acceptable to both developed and developing countries. Civil society organizations were dismissing the agreement as “a bad deal,” even a “joke.” As a result, everyone left the conference dejected.

Developed countries intentionally or unintentionally let this dejection work its way through the conference for several reasons, the most obvious being that their home constituencies are turning against climate and environmental justice. Western societies’ rightward lurch has left their governments unwilling and unable to make any commitment to finance climate action. It is no coincidence that leaders of major European nations such as Germany and France and even that of the European Union chose to sit out the Conference.

The leaders of the five-member BRICS were also no shows. Leaders of five of the G7 countries opted out of the Conference. Canada’s leader flew instead to Florida to spend a day with the U.S. president-elect to discuss reviving suspended oil and gas pipeline projects. Leaders of 13 of the G20 countries, a cluster of the world’s largest and wealthiest economies, too, voted with feet. The abstaining leaders’ nations represent “the World’s 13 Top Polluters.” For these reasons, the prime minister of Papua New Guinea called COP29 a “total waste of time” and pulled out of the conference. The president of Argentina, who called the climate crisis a “socialist lie,” pulled his country out of the conference altogether, a move that many fear threatens the viability of the Paris climate pact. The science-denying Argentine leader might have withdrawn from the summit in what historian Timothy Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience” to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. Trump stands by his commitment to pull the United States out of the Paris climate pact and stop contributing to climate finance, just as he did during his first term.

The Paris climate pact is even more threatened by the G20 nations’ aversion to the U.N. process on climate change. The G20 held a pow-wow of its own in Brazil at the same time as the U.N. climate summit. The Brazilian leader, who is an ardent champion of climate justice, skipped COP29 “due to head injury,” but he happily made himself available to host and fete leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies at exactly the same time as the Baku summit was underway. The agenda at the G20 summit was dominated by economic growth that to most scientists and environmentalists is at the heart of climate change. In fact, the G20 summit stole the march on COP29. Even the U.N. secretary general, who was the official host of the Baku summit, left in the middle of the proceedings to fly to Brazil to attend the G20 summit instead.

The world’s largest and wealthiest nations seem to have concluded that they don’t need the rest of the world or their NDCs to reduce emissions. G20 countries account for 80% of the world’s emissions, while the least developed countries just 4% of them. If G20 nations decide to transition away from fossil fuel energy, it will dramatically reduce atmospheric carbon’s impact on soaring temperatures. In this picture, the rest of the 180 countries and their emissions hardly matter. It’s what environmental sociologist William Freudenburg called disproportionality: A handful of powerful actors account for the disproportionate amount of industrial pollution. The world’s largest and wealthiest economies have the financial means, technological resources, and alternative paths away from fossilized fuels.

The Club of Rome, a business group that jolted the world with its classic report on Limits to Growth in 1972, wrote an open letter expressing its dismay at what it calls the failed process of COPs and voiced a call for urgent reforms. Among the signatories were such luminaries as the former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, and former U.N. Executive Secretary for Climate Change Christiana Figueres. This lack of confidence in U.N. processes is another bad omen for future U.N. climate summits and more importantly the Paris climate pact, especially once the Trump administration is seated in Washington early next year.

This summer, the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass ruling made it much easier for local governments to criminalize homelessness. Since then, cities and states across the country have stepped up their harassment of people for the “crime” of not having a place to live.

Penalizing homelessness has increasingly taken the form of crackdowns on encampments — also known as “sweeps,” which have received bipartisan support. California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered state agencies to ramp up encampment sweeps, while President-elect Donald Trump has also pledged to ban encampments and move people to “tent cities” far from public view.

Evidence shows that these sweeps are harmful and unproductive — and not to mention dehumanizing.

Housing justice advocates caution that sweeps disrupt peoples’ lives by severing their ties to case workers, medical care, and other vital services. Many unhoused people also have their personal documents and other critical belongings seized or tossed, which makes it even harder to find housing and work.

Sweeps, like punitive fines and arrests, don’t address the root of the problem — they just trap people in cycles of poverty and homelessness.

According to a ProPublica investigation, authorities in multiple cities have confiscated basic survival items like tents and blankets, as well as medical supplies like CPAP machines and insulin. Other people lost items like phones and tools that impacted their ability to work.

Teresa Stratton from Portland told ProPublica that her husband’s ashes were even taken in a sweep. “I wonder where he is,” she said. “I hope he’s not in the dump.”

Over the summer, the city of Sacramento, California forcefully evicted 48 residents — mostly women over 55 with disabilities — from a self-governed encampment known as Camp Resolution. The camp was located at a vacant lot and had been authorized by the city, which also owned the trailers where residents lived.

One of the residents who’d been at the hospital during the sweep was assured that her belongings would be kept safe. However, she told me she lost everything she’d worked so hard to acquire, including her car.

The loss of her home and community of two years, along with her possessions, was already traumatizing. But now, like most of the camp residents, she was forced back onto the streets — even though the city had promised not to sweep the lot until every resident had been placed in permanent housing.

Aside from being inhumane, the seizure of personal belongings raises serious constitutional questions — especially since sweeps often take place with little to no warning and authorities often fail to properly store belongings. Six unhoused New Yorkers recently sued the city on Fourth Amendment grounds, citing these practices.

Sweeps, like punitive fines and arrests, don’t address the root of the problem — they just trap people in cycles of poverty and homelessness. Encampments can pose challenges to local communities, but their prevalence stems from our nation’s failure to ensure the fundamental human right to housing.

People experiencing homelessness are often derided as an “eyesore” and blamed for their plight. However, government policies have allowed housing, a basic necessity for survival, to become commodified and controlled by corporations and billionaire investors for profit.

Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 since 2009 and rent is now unaffordable for half of all tenants. Alongside eroding social safety nets, these policies have resulted in a housing affordability crisis that’s left at least 653,000 people without housing nationwide.

While shelters can help some people move indoors temporarily, they aren’t a real housing solution, either.

Human rights groups report that shelters often don’t meet adequate standards of housing or accommodate people with disabilities. Many treat people like they’re incarcerated by imposing curfews and other restrictions, such as not allowing pets. Safety and privacy at shelters are also growing concerns.

Officials justify sweeps for safety and sanitation reasons, but in the end they harm and displace people who have nowhere else to go. Instead, governments should prioritize safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent housing for all, coupled with supportive services.

Anything else is sweeping the problem under the rug.

As Republicans at the federal level prepare to take over majorities in both the House and Senate, some have proposed deeply damaging cuts to Medicaid, including taking health coverage away from people who don’t meet unnecessary and burdensome work requirements. Some state policymakers are interested in pursuing Medicaid work requirements as well. But a Georgia Medicaid program provides the latest evidence that work requirements are the worst sort of red tape — blocking health coverage for working people, people with serious health conditions, and people with disabilities.

Georgia is one of ten states that has not adopted the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion provision, instead applying for a waiver to provide Medicaid to certain low-income adults, conditioned on meeting work requirements. This waiver program, called Pathways to Coverage, requires adults with low incomes to report at least 80 hours of work or volunteer activities each month as a condition of getting and keeping their coverage. It is available to adults up to 100 percent of poverty, or $15,060 annually for an individual.

The results from over one year of Pathways to Coverage are in:

• About 5,500 people were covered as of November 2024, far less than the 110,000 who initially expressed interest, and well under the about 240,000 uninsured people estimated to potentially be eligible for Pathways.
• Application backlogs, excessive paperwork, and complex rules have left people waiting for coverage after they’ve applied and kept many other people from even applying for the program.
• Spending on administrative changes, such as systems updates, eclipsed spending on health care services and offered little return on investment in facilitating enrollment.

Work requirements prevent people from accessing health care for reasons that are outside their control. For example, many people working low-paying jobs are at the mercy of employers who can reduce their hours without notice. Family emergencies, inconsistent childcare, or sudden illnesses can also disrupt a person’s ability to work. Furthermore, people with disabilities and chronic illnesses are not exempt from the Pathways reporting requirements. They could face challenges finding enough hours to work because employers will not provide reasonable accommodations or their health conditions restrict the amount of time they can work. As a result, people are at risk of not receiving often life-saving health coverage.

Previous work requirement proposals conditioned continuing Medicaid coverage on reporting enough eligible work, or other qualifying activity, hours. Georgia’s Pathways program adds an additional hurdle: requiring work reporting at the time of application, which creates a complex process that deters eligible people from even applying. In June 2024, 42 percent of the people who expressed interest in applying for Pathways were not considered to have a complete application because they did not complete a report showing any number of qualifying activity hours. And among those who did have complete applications, 19 percent were denied due to reporting fewer than the required 80 hours per month or insufficient verification of hours.

Focus groups conducted by Georgia Budget and Policy Institute and Creative Research Solutions back up this data. Pathways applicants pointed to challenges getting support during the enrollment process, technology issues with the enrollment system, or frustrations with getting denied due to paperwork issues and having to wait to have the application checked again.

Georgia is among the slowest states to process Medicaid applications due to excessive bureaucratic strain. Others didn’t feel comfortable applying because they were concerned they would not get approved, likely due to the complex process and the high denial rate in the first year. The frustration with paperwork issues and the stress from not having health coverage are similar to findings from focus groups in Arkansas, the first state to implement a Medicaid work requirement temporarily in 2018.

And although only a small fraction of eligible people have enrolled, the program has cost about $13,360 per enrollee in combined state and federal Medicaid spending through the end of the first year. That’s significantly more than the about $2,490 per enrollee Pathways was initially estimated to cost in the first year. About 35 percent of spending went toward covering care, but most went to systems modifications to implement work reporting. And in August 2024, the state separately spent $10.7 million on an outreach campaign, directing millions to consultants while hundreds of thousands of people are still without insurance.

From the standpoint of ensuring access to health care and improving efficiency, it is clear from Georgia that work requirements do neither. Once again, the Pathways program shows us that work requirements are simply a way to keep people from getting health care by requiring them to navigate a complicated system to report work hours or claim exemptions. This is especially cruel because the few people who made it through the process and secured Medicaid coverage through Pathways reported being able to get lifesaving care, medications, and other health tools to manage or prevent long-term illnesses.

Even though Georgia sought to use this program as an alternative to expanding Medicaid, the same lessons would apply in states that already expanded coverage. Policymakers should reject work requirements, which leave people with higher health care costs and state agencies with increased burden.

Holiday greetings. Time for special generosity. These are the very worthy, effective, honest groups–all 501(c)(3)s–that I have contributed to over the years. You may wish to do the same to those that you think are of particular interest for your sense of justice, health and safety.  You can check out their websites. Alternative Radio: alternativeradio.org…